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.'"

Comments

Economy of Scale

[teeks99]

There's also a pretty good article from space.com that talks about a couple of the different points

They go into some more detail about the commercial space transportation part paving the way for more "space tourist" like stuff. Obviously this will still be extremely expensive, but I hope that it could increase the total number of launches, and help bring some economies of scale.

This is also the reason I'm excited about the orbital propellant storage and automated rendezvous technology. These items will allow us to launch big (weight wise) missions by using a bunch of smaller launch vehicles, instead of one really huge (and really expensive) one.

Re:Economy of Scale

[icebike]

This is also the reason I'm excited about the orbital propellant storage and automated rendezvous technology.

We are never going to get out of sight with our current propellant technology. The money spent on this is a waste, like building yet another pony express station. Its time to focus in another direction.

As for automated rendezvous, the Russians have been doing this for years. Just buy it from them.

Re:Economy of Scale

[coolmoose25]

So what they are proposing is that we will do lots with relatively small rockets, and anything BIG that is needed can be built piecemeal. That is an approach - the one followed by ISS. The other approach is Skylab. We had a Saturn IVb knocking around, so we built a space station and lofted it up in one shot. Skylab was still probably bigger in total volume than the ISS is today, as it nears completion.

Maybe this new approach will work, and I hope it will. But I believe that it won't. The Mercury astronauts said it best. No Buck Rogers, No Bucks. Without manned spaceflight, we'll mostly turn our attention to unmanned spaceflight, which is cool, and cheap, and makes great discoveries. The public will tire of this too. Robots are good and they can be used successfully, but "boots on the ground" or in this case "boots in space" are also required.

The US has now essentially ceded manned spaceflight to the Russians and the Chinese... just as Spain and Portugal ceded the new world to the English and French. Unless there is a national commitment to a GOAL in manned spaceflight, not much of it will make sense, other than going back and forth to the ISS.

By all means, we should look on the bright side... but the bright side is considerably dimmer now

Re:Economy of Scale

[timeOday]

Of course I might be wrong, but honestly, if this philosophy really worked in governing bodies (the idea that you slash the budget to marginally operating ability, and suddenly you get better "products") then you should not expect record spending, but instead we should expect to see record budget slashing.

Nobody is claiming the new prioritization is better because the budget was reduced, only that the good done by the new prioritization offsets the damage from the reduction. Letting the Shuttle die certainly saved a boatload of money for other things.

Could you clarify your point about demographics? Do you mean Medicare is crowding out NASA? Certainly there's truth to that; medical expenses are approaching 18% of US GDP. That means for every work week, almost one full day is spent paying the healthcare system (either through taxes, premiums, reduced wages to employers who pay premiums, or copays - it's all just different means of feeding the same hungry beast). After witnessing the failure of healthcare reform (starting with the public's receptiveness to scaremongering about unplugging granny) I've realized that's just an albatross we'll have to carry. Americans do not want fundamental reforms.

Re:Economy of Scale

[dintlu]

NASA's constellation program was ill-conceived waste of taxpayer money. Florida's been a "purple" state for the past three elections, and NASA has a tremendous presence down here. To argue that cutting NASA's budget is politically motivated is to say that Obama's administrations *wants to lose votes* in the state of Florida, which is patently absurd.

What's happening to NASA is like an alcoholic stopping the sauce. Not only do they save a bunch of money, but they also free up a bunch of time and brainpower to pursue better things.

Re:Economy of Scale

[FleaPlus]

We are never going to get out of sight with our current propellant technology. The money spent on this is a waste, like building yet another pony express station. Its time to focus in another direction.

Ack, not this again. When it comes to getting out of LEO, prices can still easily drop one or two orders of magnitude with propellant-based rockets. After all, fuel is just 1% of the cost of launching a rocket. By decreasing costs you'll grow the market, which will provide the future demand necessary for the various non-propellant technologies (space elevators, beam propulsion, whatever) to be successful.

Also, it's worth noting that when Constellation started going overbudget NASA ended up finding money by canceling most of its technology development efforts, including things like non-propellant propulsion. The idea is to bring research into those technologies back with the expanded funding of R&D.

Re:Economy of Scale

[cmowire]

Actually, the ISS is bigger than Skylab at this point.

The problem with the shuttle building the ISS is that it's really the worst of both worlds. You spend billions of dollars a year on the shuttle and build the American part of the ISS on that set of constraints and then wonder why it cost so much. Whereas, If you were to have lofted the American part of the ISS on commercially available boosters, even after the additional hardware to make each module contain a tug, you'd have built it for a lot less.

Especially if you also consider that most everything gets cheaper in bulk and, if you were to place a guaranteed order for a hundred medium lift boosters, you'd get them at a much more reasonable price than the equivalent upmass in ten heavy lift boosters. Especially given that medium lift boosters are the right size for commercial missions and heavy lift boosters are not yet.

The problem is the sunk costs fallacy. NASA had the design and hardware for Freedom and modified it instead of taking a giant step back when they had a chance. The shuttle was there and it worked, even though we might have done much better to have sent it to the museums after the first time we lost one.

Re:A breath of fresh air

[Larson2042]

Constellation was just "Apollo on steroids", as described by Griffin. How does sending a few government employees to the moon help open access to space for everyone? That should be the point, not just going to the moon for the sake of planting flags and making footprints (or "boldly going").

And perhaps the private sector would have gone to the moon, had they been given 150 billion dollars (apollo cost) and a mandate to go there ASAP. But it was NASA that was given the money and the mandate, so they went. And where did it get us, ultimately? There hasn't been a single person past LEO since. Sounds to me like a different approach is needed. Perhaps one that builds and refines basic technologies, opening access to space and making it cheaper and easier to operate there. That way, when we do go back, we go back to stay.

Re:Heavy lift capabilities?

[MozeeToby]

There's $3 billion in the budget starting immediately to develope a heavy lift capability, considering that Ares V developement wasn't suposed to start for several years yet. Whatever solution they come up with should be delivered earlier than the Ares V would have been.