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NASA Ends Plan To Put Man Back On Moon
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Times Online: "NASA has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon — effectively dismantling the US human spaceflight programme despite a congressional ban on its doing so. Legislators have accused President Obama's administration of contriving to slip the termination of the Constellation programme through the back door to avoid a battle on Capitol Hill."
The article and the information within don't add up. If you want a screaming article about the end of the Constellation program, direct your anger at NASA's budget, fewer then 1% ( about half of that, actually ) of the federal budget. Don't go insulting NASA. All the voices against it in this article are biased. Why do they want to keep it? Not because they support the system. They want the jobs in their district. Really, they dont care about the program at all. At a time like this, you have to ask yourself- what is NASA? A job programme, or an exploration agency? Constellation is a waste. It had to be cancelled. It was unsustainable. Even if NASA got one rocket right now ( from santa ) with all the research done - THEY COULD NOT SUSTAIN IT. It is too expensive, way more expensive then even the shuttle. Compare this: After 9 nine billion spend on the Constellation program. How much is there in orbit? After half a billion spend on a new family, SpaceX falcon have had succesfull launches, into orbit - And faster! There is something wrong with constellation and / or Nasa management. You HAVE to scrap or fix it. This cancellation could be seen by industry insiders from years away. It ended right after the beginning, when the funding was slashed by congress
Veto overrides are rare things in the United States Congress. They require two big super-majorities, and with most everything in the Senate going 59-41 on technical votes to block straight majority votes right now, the idea of getting 67 of them to agree on anything seems out of the realm of reality. Try again when there's 67 of a kind there.
Good thing most people in power haven't historically shared your worldview, or we'd still be debating whether it's worthwhile to move out of the caves.
Spend the next 10 years using robots for science (the area NASA/JPL does very well with) and develop new propulsion, energy, life support etc for a new manned directive in the future. In the meantime let commercial ventures work out some new low cost delivery systems.
As an astronaut has said recently (I think it was Armstrong himself), you cannot say "develop technology for next 10 years". Technology doesn't appear out of nowhere. Any technology developed is to get to some goal, be it digging a well or landing on the Moon or Mars. If there is no goal to land a man on Mars or to have long term presence on the Moon, then such technology will not be developed. It's as simple as that.
We currently have our multi-core, 64-bit processors and 8+GB of RAM in our computers at affordable prices only because of AMD and Intel rivalry for the almighty dollar. If AMD never existed, Intel would never needed to develop the technology they currently use. We would have our Pentium Pros and we would have to be happy with them, as a step up in performance would be the Itanics. Goals and an attempt to reach such goals is what drives technology and development, not mere attempt to "we want technology".
But then who needed that useless Apollo program anyway, eh? NASA was one of the only major purchasers of early silicon chip technology. Without that money for that "special interest" of silicon chips lasting 10-15 years, well, modern CPUs would have been a pipe dream. Definitely no PCs today and everything that they encompass.. Apollo program payed for itself 1000x over just through their funding of the early silicon technology.
The poor still pay taxes, dick wad.
No they don't.. Bottom 50% earners pay less than 3% of total taxes collected. Bottom 47% pay nothing. Top 5% pay 60%.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Only if they are defensive wars against other nation states who attacked you. The problem with the US policy is that it attacks others "preemptively" (the very same official reason given by Hitler when he attacked Poland and by Japan when it struck at Pearl Harbor) or attacks nations in pursuit of amorphous non-state entities and on other, flimsiest of excuses all the while pursuing a thinly-veiled strategy of global domination.
In this context "gotta" apparently is a result of a supremacist attitude and total disregard for anything but greed and thirst for power, very like that of a typical citizen of Ancient Rome who too would believe that the Empire just "gotta" expand into those "barbarian" lands to bring "civilization" in exchange for a slight payment of loot and slaves.
In modern times the US exacts a different kind of payment for exporting of its "civilization" but on the altar of its self-declared superiority, the dead just keep piling up all the same.
Estimations are that USA has spent about 25 billions in the ISS so far, Europe about 10 billions, Japan 3 billions. The Russian part seems difficult to estimate, because the costs of a soyouz mission seems to be a bit opaque but it is probably comparable to USA's part. This IS an international effort, but USA is probably the biggest spender in this. If it was to retire from the program, it would certainly jeopardize its continuation.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
To attempt to head off common misconceptions about NASA's new plans (like those in the article summary), I'll go ahead and post the contents of an FAQ straight from the source. Also, it's important to note that the new budget -increases- the amount of money for NASA.
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/new_space_enterprise/home/faq.html
This section contains answers to frequently asked questions about NASA's exploration mission and its associated programs and projects following the 2011 Budget Rollout.
Why is the Administration proposing a new direction for Human Space Exploration?
In May of last year, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) tasked an independent committee with reviewing U.S. human space flight plans and activities, with the goal of ensuring that our nation is pursuing the best trajectory in this arena - one that is safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable. While the committee did determine that the Constellation Program was technically sound, they found it to be "be on an unsustainable trajectory" because it NASA was "perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." In other words, the budget did not support the Constellation architecture.
What is better about the new approach?
The new approach proposed by the Administration focuses long term investments on the fundamental capabilities required for human space flight beyond Low Earth Orbit, but that we currently lack. The plan calls for technology development in areas like propulsion, in-orbit propellant storage, automated and autonomous rendezvous and docking, advanced closed-loop life support, and tele-robotic operations. It also increases funding in NASA's human research program, allowing us to better understand the potentially harmful effects the space environment might have on people and how we can best mitigate them. Most importantly, this approach is financially sustainable.
Does this mean that NASA has given up on returning to the moon?
Absolutely not. In fact, recent discoveries of water on the moon have made it more scientifically interesting that ever before. Our focus in the near term will be discovery through robotic missions, such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, followed by robotic precursor missions, to scout the terrain for the eventual return of humans.
Why is turning over a portion of human spaceflight to commercial industry a good idea?
NASA has already committed a significant investment to commercially provided space flight services. Almost all of our satellites and many science missions are launched commercially. In addition, we recently contracted with commercial companies to carry cargo to the International Space Station commercially. The next natural step is for NASA to buy commercial flights for our astronauts to the ISS. This will free up NASA to pursue the greater challenges in the way of a trip to Mars.
Exploration Systems was the directorate that managed the Constellation program. What will its role be under the new plan?
Under the new plan the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) will be responsible for many research and development programs including exploration technology and demonstrations, heavy lift and propulsion technology, exploration precursor robotic missions, and human research. In addition, ESMD will manage the commercial crew and cargo spaceflight programs.
Can but won't. Saying a heavy lifter will be chosen in 2015 is doublespeak for never. If NASA was really meant to send somebody somewhere it would have most likely only meant Ares-I gets canceled and serious Ares-V development begins.
(allow me to recycle a comment of mine from a few days ago)
You don't need a heavy lifter for space exploration. In fact, it just eats up the funds you'd need for actual exploration. There's a reason that each of the times that a country has developed a heavy lift rocket in the past it's been canceled after a handful of launches due to being far too expensive. Heck, the US's and world's current heaviest launcher, the Delta IV Heavy, has only been launched 3 times in the 6 years it's existed, and it's much smaller than the 160mt Ares V design. Unlike the Ares V, the Delta IV infrastructure is also useful for medium-lift launches; with the Ares V you'd have to spend billions of dollars a year paying the standing support army and maintaining infrastructure even when you're not launching anything.
A better alternative is propellant depots, allowing you to use smaller, pre-existing launchers and refuel in space to get to where you want. Propellant depots play an important role in NASA's new plans:
http://selenianboondocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Depot-Centric_Human_Spaceflight.pdf
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=230949/Section4.pdf
The issue is not space to inhabit, perse.
1. It is, partly, space for the animals to inhabit. Without animals, we cannot have our current Eco-system. we are not the only animal on the planet, and if we squeeze out all other animals to serve our own needs, many other animals might die off, leading to cascading effects.
For instance, if we squeeze off wolves, hawks, and other animals that eat rabbits, it's possible one day rabbits will become a significant threat to our agricultural output. If we kill off bees, then pollination will become difficult for many many plants, again killing our agricultural output. I'm willing to bet that the attrition rate of human caused traffic accidents and territory loss against mid level predators significantly outstrips
2. It is arable land. A quote from a study published by a guy Cornell and a guy in Rome.
(link: http://dieoff.org/page40.htm)
# At the present growth rate of 1.1% per year, the U.S. population will double to more than half a billion people within the next 60 years. It is estimated that approximately one acre of land is lost due to urbanization and highway construction alone for every person added to the U.S. population.
# This means that only 0.6 acres of farmland would be available to grow food for each American in 2050, as opposed to the 1.8 acres per capita available today. At least 1.2 acres per person is required in order to maintain current American dietary standards. Food prices are projected to increase 3 to 5-fold within this period.
# If present population growth, domestic food consumption and topsoil loss trends continue, the U.S. will most likely cease to be a food exporter by approximately 2025 because food grown in the U.S. will be needed for domestic purposes.
This is a BIG problem
Especially for all of the people dependent on US agricultural exports. 'Screw them, we need food' is a valid opinion. But by 2100, the birthrate will have either gone down, or the starvation rate will have gone up. Current population growth rate is unsustainable with CURRENT agricultural technology. This may change when it becomes economical to build greenhouses and desalinate water in the desert because food prices have risen above the cost of growing them in said environment.
It, in my opinion, is a foolhardy argument to say 'we have plenty of space, so we will never reach a population crisis.'
What a lot of people don't know is that even if they only live in a 2000 square foot house, their net resource footprint, put into the perspective of how much land worth of resource production is necessary to sustain them, is significantly larger than what they can immediately see. Farm land, factories, roads to bring factory goods to the people, highways to move places, land to dedicate to bio fossil fuel production once petro fossil fuels runs out (or alternatively, build new renewable or non-exhaustible fuel (nuclear) powered plants), transmission lines to get them their electricity, etc... etc..
Right now, it would appear that Cuba is actually one of the most efficient providers of standards of living per hectare of land used per capita. We might all live like Cubans one day, if our population keeps spiraling out of control. Which wouldn't be bad, but would be much different than the world you know at the moment.
Sorry, the money didn't go to welfare, it went to the banks and car companies.
The can-do attitude was replaced with the "can we make a profit on it by swapping stocks around".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The first is from those who say "ending Constellation will cost jobs in my state" (i.e. those who just want more pork thrown their way and more lobbying money from the contractors) and who wont accept any option other than the status quo.
The second argument is from those (including various astronauts etc) who say that the alternatives proposed by Obama will leave America without manned space flight capability for too long (forcing the US to buy expensive seats on a Soyuz to get to the ISS). They claim that the "commercial providers" Obama wants will not be able to deliver a manned booster/capsule fast enough (and have zero experience with manned booster/capsule production). This group is open to alternatives to the current program, just not the (currently non existent) alternatives Obama wants.
What are you talking about? Obama didn't veto the NASA budget, he redirected the focus of NASA. The parent's post is saying, correctly, that if Congress wants NASA to go back to the Moon they have an easy solution: write a line item in the budget dedicating X-billions of dollars to returning to the Moon. The US does not have line item veto and Obama isn't going to veto the general budget.
You misunderstood. Top 5% of earners (in 2007 that meant whoever earned over $160K/year) pay 60% of the total federal income tax revenue that the IRS collects. It's nothing to do with the tax rate.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
It looks like the U.S. will never get back to the space. I just wonder why they waste so much money on projects they abort soon.
Contrary to the prevailing public relations blitz that is being put on by ATK and certain entrenched interests within the D.C. beltway, The United States of America is not ceeding leadership in space to other countries. Instead, the paradigm is changing from that of a central government bureaucracy that is responsible for the financing, acquisition, and planning of such an endeavor to something that is more de-centralized, mostly privately led, and allowing freedom to ordinary individuals to try and get into space.
For commercial spaceflight companies, America simply dominates the rest of the world combined. When I hear of things happening in spaceflight and can compare stuff that is happening elsewhere, there are about two to three times as many companies formed and activities like the creation of a new spaceport than anything happening in the rest of the world. No, I'm not saying that private companies aren't being set up elsewhere and there certainly is something afoot in the European Union too in terms of private efforts for getting into space, but if you want to get into the action and see where the hot activity is taking place, it is currently in America. South-western USA to be exact if you want to know where the bulk of these companies are working at.
Never get into space? I suppose that this flight was a figment of my imagination. This is hardly the only company going into space, and I don't see vehicle production lines necessarily getting shut down.... except in Utah. I call that simply ATK having a singular problem trying to figure out how to make a profit in the current market rather than a national crisis. Sometimes dinosaurs go extinct too.
The US has several off-the-shelf medium/heavy lifters such as the Delta 4 Heavy that can put up to 20 tonnes into orbit similar to the Ariane V. What they don't have (and nobody else has) is a superheavy lifter capable of carrying a 70-tonnes plus payload which is needed to perform the one-shot-to-the-Moon mission envisaged for Constellation (with a separate crew flight). However there are problems man-rating an existing lifter; the flight profile needs to be configured so that the maximum acceleration at any point in the flight is tolerable to the Spam-in-a-can plus a lot of other factors such as safety and abort flight modes and hardware mods.
ESA is preparing to buy and fly Soyuz spacecraft from their Guiana spaceport, initially to carry unmanned payloads such as the Progress ISS supply capsule. The Soyuz design is already man-rated and well-proven (over 1700 flights) and it wouldn't take much upgrading to add a manned spaceflight capability to the ESA catalogue based on the Soyuz.
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Launchers_Home/SEMFFUZO0WF_0.html
There is a third, that Constellation was a failure due to engineering issues from the get-go without a huge budget-up. But that the mission can be done on the budget that we do have.
That argument is called DIRECT, as in Directly derived from the shuttle stack. It is an evolution design, which was originally proposed in 1978 and always kept on the back burner should the need arize for heavy lift, which a lunar mission all but demands. It has already passed through qualifications, all of the components exist now (unlike Constellation which was all-new) and we can have it flying within 36 months according to the engineers as well as the contractors involved. And that is the conservative estimate.
http://www.directlauncher.com/
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The fact that rich people pay sales/property taxes doesn't negate that poor people also pay those taxes. Since the original statement was that poor people don't pay taxes, your comment doesn't disprove eldepeche.
Virg
In fact, the US is the ONLY superpower in the world today.
Go grab some statistics about the nation today, and X years ago. With any measure you can come up with, you'll find the US is just as well off today as it was X years ago.
Look up some numbers, and you'll find the US has lower taxes now, than we have through much of the nation's history.
Here's just one chart, of just one : http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates-graph.php
Federal Income Taxes on 1mil USD were 77% in 1918. Earning more than $100,000 in 1950 would result in 91% tax rates. Today, taxes top-out at a mere 35%.
Yeah, get to work you blood-sucking orphans! Stop mooching off the gub'mint!
Actually, we're doomed if Medicare costs aren't brought under control. But hey, right-wing shills just want their taxes cut further, they don't want health care reform!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It is interesting, to say the least, to see non-NASA people's opinions on this issue, and moreover, to see people's opinions who are technically minded but outside of NASA. As someone working on Constellation at NASA, I am living this issue every day, and have been living it for months now. There is lots of misinformation on this thread, and lots of opinions I disagree with. I won't take the time to really respond to any of them, but in the case of the former, it's entirely understandable considering the poor communication coming out of NASA (both in general and on this specific issue) as well as the poor quality of news reporting as it relates to spaceflight (and by extension, nearly everything technical in nature). In the case of the latter, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Mine is that we need to get society off this rock as soon as possible and establish a permanent self-sustaining settlement on another one as a means of risk mitigation against the various calamities that could destroy human civilization. Second, I feel it should be us (the United States) because someone is going to do it - it will happen eventually. That point should not be up for debate. For us to sit around spending money on things like wars and bailouts instead of continuing the role as the leader in space is, in my humble opinion, short sighted. But I digress.
The one thing I will say is that Constellation is not dead - yet. It's had its head cut off by reassignment of the program manager. It's been dealt a tough blow most recently with HQ telling the prime contractors (Lockheed, ATK, Oceaneering) that they need to put money into reserve for contract termination liability - the costs associated with winding down a contract. Typically this contract clause is never enforced, and especially not at this time of the year. Our fiscal year ends on Sept 30. These contract termination liability costs now represent about 50% of the money left in the budget for this fiscal year, which essentially means that things need to be cut to the bone to get there. Many people feel that enforcing this clause is a pretty shady way of circumventing Congress and the law, because until Congress signs a new budget or specifically tells NASA to stop working on Constellation, NASA is legally obligated to continue working on it as the program of record. By enforcing this clause, it could be construed as circumventing this legal process. If a budget agreement is not found by the end of the fiscal year (and that is looking more and more likely), then NASA gets a continuing resolution - the same money allocated the same way for next year as it was this year. So hypothetically, NASA could pick back up with this "new money" and continue working on Constellation.
That being said, for months now, before this contract termination issue came up, most of the different Constellation projects (Orion, suit, etc) have been working to try to scale back design, remove Lunar content, accelerate the schedule, reduce scope, etc to try to "bridge the gap" between what Congress says they should be doing and what HQ and the executive branch says they should be doing.
Lastly, I think that most people at NASA don't necessarily have a problem with Obama's general plan for NASA - they have a problem with its lack of specificity, lack of a concrete goal, lack of a timeline. I get the feeling that if Obama came back and said he wants to cancel Constellation, come up with a new heavy lifter (both things he has said before) but also that the goal is to establish a human presence on "X" surface "Y" years from now, more people might get on board.
I'll bite. 2 km/s is a measure of escape velocity, which seems to be a reasonable way to quantify the depth of a gravity well, but I'm not qualified to say whether it's a more or less useful measurement than the gravitational acceleration.
43+% of the people in the US pay no income taxes, over 50 million of them are families that make over $50,000 a year.
If you're worried about people being sick, reform the FDA and USDA to better regulate what we put into our bodies. Pass laws to reform how much drug companies can overcharge for those antibiotics to recover research costs before they become generics. Pass laws to contain healthcare costs like they do in Canada and the UK who pay much less for the same drugs that we use.
Pass laws that forbid hospitals from charging to treat secondary infections they caused. There ARE hospitals giving patients $20 worth of topical antibiotics before surgery to prevent thousands of dollars in secondary infections after the surgery.
We have more diagnostic information available to us now, and the doctors are using it to make poorer decisions, or to protect them from lawsuits. Doctors with too much info perform surgery to remove small cysts that they would have left harmlessly in the patient using older lower resolution scans. Defensive tests cost us Billions of dollars in unnecessary costs every year.
Use of hospital protocols (continuous process imporovement) uses data to greatly increase patient outcomes, and reduce hospital costs. Lookup Intermountain Healthcare, the Cleveland clinic, or Mayo Clininc if you need examples.
Pass laws to require doctors and hospitals to declare their patient success/survival rates, secondary infection rates, etc. If we're all free marketers, maybe Doctors should be incentivised to do better if they want customers.
A better idea from the last is to let the doctors work for Hospitals, and not worry about running a small business, and spend more time being doctors. Let the Hospitals compete for business on the merits of their treatment. Certainly there is some other Entrepeneurial Practice management that can remove being an administrator (accounting/HR/payroll) from the Doctor's schedule.
None of these things costs any more than what we are doing now. The problem is the Doctors/Hospitals/Insurance companies get to bill more $$$ for doing a bad job, then taking care of you while they fix their mistakes and extend your recovery time and outside of the state of Mass, there is hardly anyone calling them out on it.
The other thing to know about Socialized Medicine is that stealing every dollar of NASA's budget will not fix even medicare, much less healthcare costs increasing many times the rate of inflation.
The only way to have socialized medicine, or just affordable healthcare with private insurers is with comprehensive healthcare reform.
More money paid into an inefficient system will not fix the problems it is having.
Yes, no threats so long as you ignore the three thousand lives we lost, the two towers and several buildings around them, and a chunk of the Pentagon. No actual threats indeed.
Perhaps if you weren't forcing your political will on other countries at gunpoint, your three thousand people and your little toy buildings would still be around today.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!