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Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager
Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican, have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to 'examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives' to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has yet to agree to the president's proposed policy, and has inserted a clause into this year's budget legislation that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The Constellation manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by the NASA administrator and other NASA officials. But he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors."
Can you imagine if the Congress of the 1950s had, instead of funding the Apollo program, wanted to fund production of the Wright Flyer?
Senators thinking too much of their sponsors and pets in addition to the perpetual conflict over the imaginary difference in US parties(republicans/democrats) is the reason why we're not going anywhere. The congress is a fucking kindergarten full of uneducated, dishonest and selfish man-babies who feel entitled to have everything their way, and if they have to face critique they'll cry until your ears bleed or you let them have it their way.
Perhaps when India or China start their mars missions congress will sober up.
... but why is it so hard/expensive to repeat something that was done several times 40 years ago using comparatively horribly primitive technology? Somehow I expect this to all 'go away'. Not everything in the world is a conspiracy, but not everything isn't, either. Hello, NASA -- what gives?
Every day in the business world, people are "reassigned" because they are not on-board with the boss. I've seen more than a few upper level managers get "promoted" because they voiced displeasure about the direction the company was taking. This is the way the world works.
If Congress wants the US space program to be top notch and succeed, then they need to *fully* fund it. Its "put up or shut up" time. Either give them the money to go to the moon, or close down the program.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
They wouldnt have been able to put up a manned version until 2018. The Ares I was unnecessary, you can use
Delta IV or Atlas V already proven rockets plus the Falcon 9 launching next month.
The Ares V heavy lift rocket could be done faster,cheaper and more reliably by a shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle
such as the Direct 3.0 , the tooling is already in place for Directs version using the existing shuttle tooling.
Rocket engines burn fuel at high pressure, they do not propel themselves by explosion. The only explosions are explosive bolts to separate the stages.
If you want a rocket propelled by explosions look at the Orion Drive, which fires nuclear bombs behind it, which then explode and propel it forward.
You know, the kind of cutting that ends up with increased funding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Short reminder - Kay Bailey Hutchinson is the Senator from Texas. Less funding to NASA = less government funding going to Texas. Not difficult to extrapolate.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Space Exploration is a 20th century quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Get over it. Manned space flight was a 20th-century phenomenon that has been determined to be to expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars (that we don't have anymore) into space doesn't solve them. Grown-up people who have to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds and resources have decided this. Tom Swift halfwits can't accept it. Too bad. Time to get real.
20th-century Americans are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There was trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there was' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that 20th-century American space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and it's endless possiblities for the betterment of humanity doesn't exist. It's spent-- it's gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Best short summary: Norm Augustine's testimony to Congress http://legislative.nasa.gov/hearings/5-12-10%20AUGUSTINE.pdf
"...the mismatch of ends and means coupled with technical problems that were encountered on the Ares I program were such that during its first four years the program slipped between three and five years...". Read that again. After four years of development and billions of $, the objective was no closer than it was at the start of the program. I could cut NASA some slack on that if they were attempting to develop new technology, but the Ares I program was largely based on well-understood technology and an existing industrial production base.
The Program Manager does not set the budget and he was not delivered the budget that was estimated for the job. So maybe the dismissal was unfair. But the PM's job is explicitly to develop the program within the actual (not wished for) triangle of resources, schedule and performance. If the delivered resources are so inadequate that the completion date never gets closer, then something else needs to change - this is the PM's job.
The Obama administrations efforts to kill Constellation is rooted in a desire to prevent Bush from receiving credit for any future moon landing or exploration of Mars.
This is not idle speculation, and has been reported in many places. NASA finally had a "engineer" in the top position leading the program (Michael Griffin). Griffin was focused on engineering and science instead of playing politics and the Obama administration has crushed him.
Go on, Dr. Rocket Scientist, explain to us how the chemical nature of fuel burning is different from that of fuel exploding.
Deflagration is subsonic
Detonation is supersonic
This is what happens when Congress tries to become an executive power. The blurring of lines in terms of what roles are laid out of for Congress and the President is getting to be just ridiculous. Incidents like this go to prove that Congress is misinterpreting its oversight powers as a reason to run every executive decision up the flagpole to review. This doesn't do anything but allow congress to play politics, this happened under Bush, and its happening again under Obama. On the same token, the Presidency has become the leader in terms of legislation and has pushed war powers further than in the past.
Why spend all this money on getting our stupid flesh bags to mars when before we can even do that effectively, we will be able to encode human minds in vacuum survivable form?
Micromanagement by Congress and incoherent, patch-work legislation are at the root of America's problems. A politicized public service makes failure inevitable. People don't trust congress, they don't trust 'government'. Who can blame them? Who is out there with sufficient public trust to do the oversight and regulation than the economy desperately needs? Do professional, non-partisan technocrats exist in America? Where do they come from?
I don't recall that dipshit Hutchison complaining when GWB also proposed increased space mission spending. I'm not familiar with Rockefeller's record or even how long he's been in office. He's a senator, though, which means I can safely assume he's a fuckup too.