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US Space Policy Update Urges International Cooperation
eldavojohn writes "The recent shift in NASA's spaceflight goals has caused great stress in the space community and those related to efforts in space. A White House update to the policy is said to emphasize cooperation with the international community and looks to be a move away from individual nations competing in space. Instead, the document urges intense competition (PDF) in the commercial sector and reasons that 'The United States considers the sustainability, stability, and free access to, and use of, space vital to its national interests. It is the shared interest of all nations to act responsibly in ways that emphasize openness and transparency, and help prevent mishaps, misperceptions, and mistrust.' Space.com also notes that you can submit your comments and thoughts to the task force Obama appointed to determine new directions. No doubt this avoidance or departure from another Space Race will have a lot of people concerned that the US is out of the game."
Hate to break it to you, but NASA hasn't been "in the game" in almost 40 years now. You want a perfect illustration of the last time they were fielding a real team? Just look at their historical budget. Notice a pattern after 1970? Yeah, that's when they stopped being the Yankees and started becoming the Mets.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
One more step towards the "global government" is not a step in the right direction. We need individual organizations held accountable for completing missions (getting to Mars, more probes to the outer planets, etc). Global "cooperation" leads to eternal delays, blame shifting, and inflated budgets. Let's not even get into the fact that everyone wants their approach to be everyone's approach.
Competition got us Apollo. Cooperation got us ISS. You sure you don't want to rethink that?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Until somebody figures out what the ????? is supposed to be between "1) Space Travel" and "3) PROFIT!", we aren't going anywhere.
Competition got us Apollo.
It was also a cooperation. With Germans.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Man I miss that game.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Apollo got 12 people on the moon, each for a few days, at the expense of three more lives, and only at the very end did anybody think to send up a lone geologist.
The ISS has had over six times as many people on orbit, for weeks and months at a time, doing actual science.
Spectacle != progress
OR...
Global cooperation provides more hands, funds, and experience to work toward a common goal.
Your paranoia about a 'global government' is completely unfounded and the type of nonsense that only someone with no knowledge of the way the world works would shovel.
Anything to inspire cooperation, explore new areas, improve technology, and deteriorate war and its causes is a good step for our world.
If you think otherwise kindly get the fuck off of my planet and go pollute another.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
This document is not a " This is what NASA is going to do" sort of thing; It is a top-level, national guideline towards spacerelated ( and by related, I mean everything even vaguely connected ) business. Even school teaching programs. And if the USA can get data from satellites for climate change. This is a set of soft guidelines, without any realistic impact. For that impact, we need way, way more technical and financial reports.
For such a thing we will have to wait till congress looks at budget proposals, and some real life testing. constellation is still doing some tests, but everyone knows that the Ares 1 will never launch a single human to orbit. Officially - and even this document changes nothing about that - it is still going on.
And please, dont attach too much meaning to rumors of a new "space race". The chinese have a launch rate of one mission every 2 years. They are currrently way below 1965 level of experience from the USA. Instead, look at the slow but significant progress:
ESA getting Soyuz acces: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Launchers_Home/SEMXN619Y8G_0.html
Russia upgrading its production facilities to build a 5th soyuz ( notably the upgrading of its thermal room so that 2 soyuz heatshields at the same time can be fitted to the spacecrafts: http://www.federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=9719&lang=en
While its nothing flashy and I think there should be more money into spaceflight, spaceX and orbital and the likes are really going for it. Talk in the article about "losing the space race" is overly simplistic, certainly with an ISS that'll be around till atleast 2020, and very possibly 2030. It is international, dont forget that.
also, a rumor; ATK ( they manufacture the shuttle srbms) have finally caved in it seems, and are willing to build the old 4 segment boosters instead of continueing to lobby for a 5 segment version. Great news; they finally might get something moving now...
First off, a full link to the document (instead of the short fact sheet linked in the original post) is here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/national_space_policy_6-28-10.pdf
It's useful to compare this to the 2006 National Space Policy document issued by the Bush administration:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/national-space-policy-2006.pdf
Space Politics has a pretty good comparison of the two:
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2010/06/28/the-new-national-space-policy-is-out/
I think the revised section on commercial space is quite promising:
Commercial Space Guidelines .S . commercial or, as appropriate, foreign commercial service or system .S . commercial space activities, unless required by national security or public .S . industry;
The term "commercial," for the purposes of this policy, refers to space goods, services, or activities provided by private sector enterprises that bear a reasonable portion of the investment risk and responsibility for the activity, operate in accordance with typical market-based incentives for controlling cost
and optimizing return on investment, and have the legal capacity to offer these goods or services to
existing or potential nongovernmental customers . To promote a robust domestic commercial space
industry, departments and agencies shall:
Purchase and use commercial space capabilities and services to the maximum practical extent
when such capabilities and services are available in the marketplace and meet United States
Government requirements;
Modify commercial space capabilities and services to meet government requirements when
existing commercial capabilities and services do not fully meet these requirements and the
potential modification represents a more cost-effective and timely acquisition approach for
the government;
Actively explore the use of inventive, nontraditional arrangements for acquiring commercial
space goods and services to meet United States Government requirements, including measures
such as public-private partnerships, hosting government capabilities on commercial spacecraft,
and purchasing scientific or operational data products from commercial satellite operators in
support of government missions;
Develop governmental space systems only when it is in the national interest and there is no
suitable, cost-effective U
that is or will be available;
Refrain from conducting United States Government space activities that preclude, discourage,
or compete with U
safety;
Pursue potential opportunities for transferring routine, operational space functions to the
commercial space sector where beneficial and cost-effective, except where the government
has legal, security, or safety needs that would preclude commercialization;
Cultivate increased technological innovation and entrepreneurship in the commercial space
sector through the use of incentives such as prizes and competitions;
Ensure that United States Government space technology and infrastructure are made available
for commercial use on a reimbursable, noninterference, and equitable basis to the maximum
practical extent;
Minimize, as much as possible, the regulatory burden for commercial space activities and ensure
that the regulatory environment for licensing space activities is timely and responsive;
Foster fair and open global trade and commerce through the promotion of suitable standards
and regulations that have been developed with input from U
Encourage the purchase and us
China steals 5 pieces of tech for every 1 they build
This kind of thinking is why the US and other western countries are going to fail in the long term.
Just like Japan in the 50's, China right now is largely perceived as being a country that makes cheap knock offs of products that are invented in the US or Europe, with no real innovation of their own.
The reality of course, is that we mostly only see the cheap crappy products that importers are willing to import - China actually has some pretty good tech of their own that does not get exported.
They are already the main producers of our favorite tech toys - iPads, iPhones, etc etc.
When I lived in Japan I was always surprised to see how far behind the "latest and greatest" consumer goods were back in my own country (eg. video cameras) compared to what was available in Japan. I would be very surprised if this is not already the case with stuff coming out of China too - we only see the goods here that importers are willing to import, which seems to be mostly the cheap knockoff stuff.
China is now greatly out-pacing the rest of the world in terms of growth in scientific research, and it already massively exceeds Japan - 125,000 in 2009 vs 72,000 from Japan) it will only be 6 or 7 years before it passes the US too.
The we keep believing the myth that the only the US or Europe is capable of producing innovative products, the further behind we will slide in science and technology, until we wake up one day and wonder why it is that the only thing that we are producing is the very goods that we used to ascribe to third world countries - ie. agricultural and primary products like ore ore and coal, with perhaps a few Britney CDs thrown in too.
The amount of money that was spent to reach the moon during the space race was astronomical - and justifiable at the time due the the cold war. To really get back in the space business properly, there has to be a good commercial reason to get there, and it has to be private companies that do it. What we should really be doing is encouraging more private enterprises to get into the field by having more schemes like the X prizes, which has so far been very successful at helping drive private industry into the field. The problem with large publicly funded NASA driven projects is it just generates way too much pork barrel inefficiencies, with relatively little return for all that public spending compared to what can be achieved by private companies for the same money.
I would like to see someone actually start trying to do something like actually capture an asteroid (or use some of the existing hunks of rock) at one of the Lagrange points as the basis for industrial mining, processing and fabrication of stuff in space - as ultimately this is probably going to be the most affordable way to build substantial structures up there, as opposed to pushing up every single component on rockets at thousands of dollars per Kg. Perhaps it is time for an X prize type competition for the first company who can actually make something from stuff that is already out there in space, so we can finally start building real space based industries.
You might want to check again with the Germans to see how well that went. German engineers are pretty good at building rockets, but American politicians killed off (economically) an entire generation of German rocket developers that is only beginning to recover. It is a real pity too as this was a rather ambitious program that could have made a huge difference.
It's a mistake to depend too heavily on international ventures. Countries have different political and economic cycles - you tend to find yourself halfway through something ambitious when your partners decide they don't want to fund it any more. The ISS was a classic case of this kind of thing - we ended up bailing out the Russians as they went through problems after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Europeans were slow with their supply ships. The US stayed in the project when it would have made sense to cancel it, then we kept the shuttle fleet flying longer than we should have to service the ISS.
You may save money up front by penciling in partners, but you pay a big price in flexibility.