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Astronaut Careers May Stall Without the Shuttle
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that former shuttle commander Chris Ferguson now moonlights as a drummer for MAX Q, a classic rock band comprised solely of astronauts. 'Perhaps we'll have some more time to practice here once the shuttle program comes to a slow end,' says Ferguson, raising the question — what does the future hold for NASA's elite astronaut corps after the agency mothballs its aging space shuttles in the coming months? NASA currently has about 80 active astronauts, as well as nine new astronaut candidates hired last year. But there will be fewer missions after the shuttle program ends, and those will be long-duration stays at the space station. When the Apollo program ended, astronauts had to wait years before the space shuttles were ready to fly, but the situation was different back then. Space historian Roger Launius says, 'Even before the end of the Apollo program, NASA had an approved, follow-on program — the space shuttle — and a firm schedule for getting it completed.' These days, no one knows what NASA will be doing next. Meanwhile, private companies are moving forward with their efforts, raising the possibility of astronauts for hire. NASA administrator and former astronaut Charlie Bolden talked about that prospect earlier this year, saying it would be a different approach for NASA to rent not just the space vehicle, but also a private crew of astronauts to go with it. 'When we talk about going to distant places like Mars, the moon, [or] an asteroid, we will not be able to take someone off the street, train them for a few weeks and expect them to go off and do the types of missions we will demand of them,' said Bolden."
The shuttle pilots, yes, but pilots are a minority of astronauts these days; more are mission specialists with science or engineering backgrounds and no military experience.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I thought so too, so I looked into it. Apparently this was the case in the early days of the program, and is still mostly the case for pilot astronauts. "At least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time in jet aircraft. Flight test experience is highly desirable." [1] (In practice, they all seem to be test pilots). This is not a requirement for Mission Specialist Astronauts.
I also suggest browsing some of the astronaut bios from the last couple batches. Of the last five pilot astronauts candidates, all five are former military test pilots. Among the twelve Mission Specialists selected during the same period, there is only one that I can confirm as a test pilot. At least four have a military background, and at least three were pilots before entering the program. At least two others were flight surgeons; this may well mean that they qualified as pilots
Really, though, they're all very well qualified in their respective fields. They may lose their jobs, sure, but I doubt they'll have trouble finding others.
If there's any sense left in them, they'll be flying to beyond low earth orbit.
The problem is a lack of mission, and a lack of budget, and they need to sell both to Congress and the general public.
People seem to think NASA has a huge budget, in some ways they do, but the budget doesn't really allow for manned space exploration beyond LEO. In real dollars, it's down a lot from the Apollo-era budget and that was just what was needed to cover a few jaunts to the moon. In order for NASA to do something beyond Apollo, they need to have a plan and a stable long-term budget to carry out the plan.
When you're in low earth orbit you're half way to anywhere. NASA could do a beyond earth orbit mission right now if they'd just swallow their pride and plan it around using the Soyuz to take astronauts to their deep space vehicle on orbit that they launch there using existing boosters. Instead they've poured $9 billion down the money pit of Ares to develop yet more costly launch capability. But, for some reason, having international partners on the critical path of an international mission is just too ego shaking for NASA.. the next best thing is to pay 3 to 4 times as much as Soyuz for taxi services from US commercial suppliers (and that's assuming the Soyuz flights couldn't be gotten for free with suitable recognition of Russia as an international partner). In fact, it's starting to look like the commercial suppliers that NASA is trying to engage to provide them with flights on a cheap per-seat basis will actually be demanding large upfront development costs.. in the $billions range.. all of them except SpaceX, who are happy to develop crew carrying capability under the COTS-D option for about a third of that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
By more than I would've thought, too, although in retrospect I suppose it's obvious Apollo was really, really expensive.
Numbers: the peak Apollo-era budget was around $6 billion in 1966, which according to the government's CPI calculator, is about $40 billion in 2010 dollars. NASA's actual current-year budget is less than half that, a bit under $19 billion.
In terms of money that can be devoted to a particular program, it's an even bigger decrease. The vast majority of that $40b-equivalent in the late 1960s was being devoted to the single program of sending people to the moon. But today NASA has a ton of other things it has to spend money on, like operating the Hubble telescope and a whole bunch of scientific satellites, which also come with increasingly absurd amounts of data to process, store, and make available.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I see the same old heavy client programmers who couldn't adapt to web programming.
This is partially true due to the fact that over the past 15 years the functionality available through the web platform has increased greatly and is approaching the level of traditional client applications. It's close, just not quite there. That said, while the web platform is usually excellent there are some mitigating factors hindering it's growth like the slow adoption and vendor lock-in. Considering the enormous improvements to the web platform there still is a substantial need for client applications even though most business applications could be implemented without it.
Security is a huge issue, a lot of shops simply don't want their applications exposed remotely, therein increasing the potential for an outside attack.
Performance is another. Until internet bandwidth reaches a point where it can support concurrency with enormous datasets and practically no latency then client applications will proliferate unabated.
Additionally, there are vast swathes of the population without broadband, or internet at all. Even if the bandwidth capacity increased and performance isn't an issue(server-side), we still need to establish a lot more very expensive infrastructure to plug people in.
Finally, there is the plain old issue of control. Many people don't wish to be beholden to hosting brokers and their ISP's since both are prone to draconian government meddling(namely traffic shaping or the enforcement of archaic IP laws).
While I agree the web platform is growing exponentially and it is very likely that overall adoption will exceed native applications in the near future, native applications aren't going away anytime soon. Additionally, since the fundamental concepts between both platforms tend to be more similar than different, a lot of native environments will and do support the stateless web where possible. IMO, eliminating the need for RAM and native processing is currently insurmountable.
So far, missiles are the best launch vehicles by far. This will remain so until we can build engines which don't require air with a specific impulse greater than 800.
The shuttle's failure comes from sticking a plane on top of a missile, that alone increased launcher size by a factor of 4 at least (for the same payload).