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The Upside of the NASA Budget
teeks99 writes "There are a lot of articles circulating about the new changes to the NASA budget, but this one goes into some of the details. From what I'm seeing, it looks great — cutting off the big, expensive, over-budget stuff and allowing a whole bunch of important and revolutionary programs to get going: commercial space transportation; keeping the ISS going (now that we've finally got it up and running); working on orbital propellant storage (so someday we can go off to the far flung places); automated rendezvous and docking (allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit). Quoting: 'NASA is out of the business of putting people into low-earth orbit, and doesn't see getting back in to it. The Agency now sees its role as doing interesting things with people once they get there, hence its emphasis on in-orbit construction, heavy lift capabilities, and resource harvesting hardware. Given budgetary constraints and the real issues with the Constellation program, none of that is necessarily unreasonable.'"
This new program is far better than the old one. It is so very heartening to see in a NASA program a stated goal to reduce the cost of human spaceflight, along with R&D of enabling technologies (orbital refueling, etc). NASA is finally shifting its human spaceflight focus in the right direction. As I've heard said before, it's not NASA's job to put a man on Mars (or the moon). It's NASA's job to make it possible for National Geographic to put a man on Mars.
Now congress just has to not be a bunch of idiots and ruin it (possibly the greatest challenge to human spaceflight yet).
Getting to LEO isn't rocket science, any more. We've been doing that for over 50 years, now.
By now it's rocket engineering, and appropriate for the private sector.
Keep NASA in the rocket science business - deep space, new technologies, etc. The goal here is for the private sector to do it faster and cheaper, enabling other things to piggyback on top - like even further out rocket science. Too much of NASA's attention is spent on that first 100-200 miles.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's just an observation. It's not intended to be criticism of the plan. I have plenty of criticism of the old plan, but I don't yet know enough about the new one.
Depends on the type of license. The manned reusable license is actually pretty well thought out. (Scaled was easily able to get such a license). The FAA is more than reasonable about that. You might want to actually research that.
Mexico is not really an option as American companies - or companies with primary American ownership/staff - are still subject to US laws. Space and associated technologies are too close to arms proliferation and the laws are written with that in mind.
The reality is that US companies can, and do, get all the necessary licenses.
What is difficult is the reverse engineering of existing technologies. Almost everything NASA paid for in X programs the last 30 years is still owned exclusively by the company whom they contracted the work. The Linear Aerospike engines that were tested for X-33 has been sitting on shelf at LockMart for almost 10 years, so other companies wanting to explore the concept have to rebuild the design. The only real design in the last decade to come out of NASA itself without outside contracts has been TransHab. (Which they promptly signed a sole-source distribution contract with Bigelow to handle).
And therein lies the problem with NASA. Their R&D programs are not like the old NACA development programs. The technology is not moving to off-the-shelf. They are on-the-shelf technologies because that is primarily where they stay. Any company that wants to build a small orbital vehicle will have to do that from scratch or with whatever they can leverage.
The biggest spending areas are Medicare, Social Security, and Defense. Fiddling with any of these is a sure way to lose the next election, not only for yourself but for your party. So, no one will touch them except to add more to them and make the problem worse. Meanwhile, trying to even get taxes back up to where they were 10 years ago is political suicide. So, we're stuck with politicians doing the will of the people to stay in office, and the will of the people is more benefits, more defense, less taxes. This is obviously unsustainable, but no one seems to care. Oh sure, people go on TV screaming about it, and people grumble about it amongst themselves, but then what? Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, we had a budget surplus. At that time, the few people suggesting we use it to pay down the debt were drowned out by those demanding it be "given back" in the form of a tax cut. Bush came into office and gave the people what they want, and we ended up back in the red again.
We need to raise taxes, cut benefits, and slash defense spending. We now spend more than every other country in the world combined on defense, at some point we have to say we're spending too much on it. Of course, if anyone even suggests cutting defense spending they're labeled as an unpatriotic terrorist sympathizer, and their political career goes down the toilet. Similarly, if anyone suggests cutting social security or Medicare, they're accused of wanting to kill old people, and old people vote more than anyone else. Talk about raising taxes, and you're a big government socialist. The whole system has gone off the rails, and everyone is too busy trying to tear everyone else down and look good for the voters to actually fix any of it. All we can accomplish is bickering about discretionary spending, which is such a small part of the budget that even taking it all the way down to zero wouldn't solve the problem.
End of rant.
The fact of the matter is, you can do a lot more with robots than with people. One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job, consuming huge amounts of resources and money that could have been spent actually accomplishing things rather than making "Buck Rogers" PR out of serious business.
Every time I see this kind of sentiment, I just cringe. On multiple levels, I think this is simple flat out wrong. There is a role for both manned and unmanned exploration of the Solar System and space in general. The two kinds of exploration fill complimentary roles, not competitive roles.
Frankly, it really annoys me that Dr. Sagan brought up this idea in the first place and popularized the notion that we could kill the Astronaut Corps and somehow have more money left over for the Jet Propulsion Lab. He is the origin of the notion, together with highly jealous oceanographers who thought their pet science projects should get priority on science funding as well.
Yes, there is a kernel of truth to the notion that some forms of exploration are better left to robots. Certainly the initial reconnaissance should be done remotely, and the use of robotic probes can certainly leverage a manpower shortage that is always going to be the case in space exploration anyway for the next couple thousand years or more.
Still, there is nothing like having somebody actually there, feeling the dirt, smelling the dust, responding to the physical environment and doing something that no other human has ever done before in the history of mankind. The benefits of a manned space exploration program have already paid off many, many times in terms of opening up horizons that never existed before, and introduced new ways of thinking and even whole new concepts and memes that are still going through society today.
If it wasn't for manned spaceflight, the modern environmental movement simply wouldn't exist. Seriously, prove me wrong here. And it took people, real folks doing stuff up there, to really kick those ideas into mainstream culture. Previously, environmental concern was for very fringe activists that were mostly ignored.
I use environmentalism just as but one of many examples of ideas and concepts that came from space and the experiences of people. No, I don't think that would have ever been developed from robotic exploration where every view is managed by committee.