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Neil Armstrong Criticizes Obama's Space Strategy
An anonymous reader writes "Former astronaut Neil Armstrong has issued a strongly worded rebuke of President Barack Obama, criticizing the president for proposed revisions to the US space program. Armstrong, along with astronauts James Lovell and Eugene Cernan, called the proposal 'devastating' in a letter obtained by NBC News."
Buzz Aldrin (the second human to walk on the moon) has a different take
Armstrong is also an engineer and served on the Challenger shuttle accident investigation board. Up till now he has stayed clear of politics and has been on the board of directors of many companies so yes he is also a business person.
Jim Lovell has fromal education includes
University of Wisconsin–Madison
United States Naval Academy (BS, 1952)
United States Naval Test Pilot School, Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland (1958)
Aviation Safety School, University of Southern California (1961)
Advanced Management Program, Harvard Business School (1978)
I think that last one means that he has a firm grasp of business as well as engineering.
Cernan only has two degrees in engineering so he may be the least qualified of the group but then President Obama has zero education or experence in business, engineering, or accounting. His degree is in law.
Frankly these man have nothing to gain at this time. They have all done what a very select few people have done. They are all pretty much set for the rest of their lives so they don't need any more money. To dismiss them I think is the height of arrogance.
And to make matter worse President Obama isn't saving money by killing the Ares he is changing it from a program with at some goals to a welfare program! We are going to keep spending money on developing the Orion but instead of using it for maned flights we are going to use it as the worlds most expensive life boat for the space station.
We are still going to depend on Russia for manned access to space.
We are going to spend money on developing a HLLV with no goal or mission for it!
Yea this is A FREAKING NIGHTMARE OF A PLAN!
What this will let President Obama do is kill them off piece by piece but only after dropping many billions of dollars on them.
Frankly this plan seems to be to be the WORST POSSIBLE plan. Frankly it sounds like something Col Hogan would talk Col Clink into doing!
So to all those that willing to dismiss these three well educated, extremely brillant, and wise men I just want you to think about it long and hard.
This is a freaking disaster.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That is a very salient point.
But I still can't agree with his arguments (yes, I read them). I think killing NASA's booster programs HAD to happen.
Let's not forget how this was supposed to work: NASA was supposed to build a manned program on the backs of the military's hardware. If there was going to be a major space program beyond that, it would be those same aerospace contractors who would be designing, building and supplying the systems.
One of those military groups was the US Army at Huntsville. They were proposing to build a new booster called the Jupiter V that used several existing boosters to build a single rocket with a total of 1 million pound thrust. Meanwhile the Air Force was starting research on a 1 million pound thrust engine, which the Army was hoping to use to replace their cluster of smaller engines if that program went well. To further differentiate the new design from the older Jupiters, they re-named it Saturn, "the one after Jupiter".
The Air Force would have nothing of it. They had already limited the Army to short range _weapons_, which is why the Saturn was a "launcher", not a "missile" (although there was TABS, look it up). As soon as Saturn was being floated the AF was all over it, trying to get it cancelled. Yet the newly-formed ARPA saw merit, and overrode their objections, causing a major hissy-fit in the Pentagon.
So when NASA came along, everyone saw a way out -- hand Saturn to NASA. Now the Army would be out of the missile game, which would make the Air Force happy. ARPA would still get the spy-sat launcher they wanted, just built from a different budget. The rest is history.
The problem is that NASA was suddenly in the launcher business, for no reason other than political expediency. And they've tried to hold onto that business since then, in spite of the major problems it's caused for everyone involved. If all went well I wouldn't say this, but it hasn't, so I think the evidence is clear that they need to get out of the launcher biz.
Maury
Between VentureStar and Constellation, exactly how many tax dollars have been wasted because some penny-pinching bureaucrat decided it would be "cheaper in the long run?"
You do understand that there was a very real possibility that Constellation *would not work*, right? Again, look to your history:
When NASA was first planning their moon shots they were looking at the Saturn C-3 as being large enough to carry the needed payload. There was a good margin of safety. Going with the C-3 would have saved them LOTS of money. But they decided to go for the more expensive C-5 because they didn't know if their capsule estimates were solid.
They weren't. As the weight of everything started going up, that margin of safety was eroded, then eliminated. If they had stayed with the C-3 they wouldn't have made it to the moon until the 1970s, if ever. The lesson here has been repeated since with practically every launcher program, ESPECIALLY the Shuttle.
So what about Constellation? In this case they calculated that the SRBs could *just* do the job. If nothing started getting heavier then it had the power to get the module into orbit with a small margin of safety on the growth side. But then things started getting heavier. So then the upper stage grew along with it, eliminating the margin. Then it kept growing. Then they had to re-engineer the SRBs to get the power back to just enough. That cycle showed no signs of ending, and history suggests that it had a couple more iterations to go.
The lesson remains clear: build much more rocket than you need, or you'll likely end up not flying.
Maury
Wow. You are so misguided, there's hardly space here to correct you, not that I would expect you to be swayed by reality, anyways.
To call the Constellation program "mostly-completed" is purest fantasy -- the paper designs are years behind schedule, simple matters of, say, building and testing the boosters, engines, capsules and control systems are left as an exercise for the reader. The fact that the concepts and designs are simply a rehash of Apollo makes the lack of performance on Constellation just that much sadder. Fact is, buying Soyuz rides to the ISS for years and years was already part of the plan, even if Constellation had stayed on schedule.
Second, the notion that ANY Administration would base the entire national space policy on who holds a single Congressional district is just delusional. Fiddling the budget between Ames, JPL, JSC, KSC, etc. sure, but axing a cornucopia of aerospace contracts like Constellation actually shows the political will to piss off a LOT of people in a lot of districts. I actually have to give the Administration points for recognizing that the project was way over-budget, way behind schedule, not very well thought out and giving it the axe. Then they turned around and increased NASA's budget for things that actually might prove to be useful (or at least more interesting than the "Hummerrrricaa!! FUCK YEAH!!" that putting men in LEO provides).
Calling someone else a "total scumbag" in a sentence where you've already mentioned Tom DeLay is grammatically incorrect. It's like saying "Sure, Stalin was bad, but Dave in Accounting is evil".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill