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Senate Bill Adds Shuttle Flight, New Shuttle-Derived Vehicle
simonbp writes "The Senate Commerce Committee this morning marked up a compromise NASA Authorization Act that rolls back some of Obama's plans for NASA, while keeping others. The bill adds at least one more shuttle flight, keeps Obama's technology demonstrators and commercial access to ISS (albeit at reduced funding), restores the Orion crew capsule, and replaces the Ares rockets with a Shuttle-Derived 'Space Launch System' for going to the ISS and Beyond, which could be ready as soon as 2015."
needs to be refined and kept. Why spend billions debugging new stuff? N
Preface: I'm firmly in the camp that believes that Bush wasn't as bad as we were all told and that Obama is nowhere as great as we've been all told but, Obama got the idea of privatizing LEO work 100% right. I'm getting tired of the rest of the weasels (in both parties) trying to shove even more pork into NASA instead of letting it do its job..
Hell I think the whole "foremost mission of NASA is to make Muslims feel like they are smart" is something that proves that the characters in Atlas Shrugged actually do exist in the real world, but if it means that NASA actually stops actually sabotaging private companies getting into orbit faster & better, I'm all for it! It would be a bonus if NASA actually kept doing the really out-there stuff that's way beyond Earth, but right now I'm not asking for much.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
A bill that kills NASA entirely would be a better direction for space research and the United States. Unfortunately the department is too big a political pork football between various state representatives for it to ever be effective. Until we can structure a space organization that won't be a political football - and that's going to take a really radical change - we're only shooting ourselves in the foot.
Bruce Perens.
They should just mandate that NASA builds a space elevator by 2020 and be done with it...
*insert pithy sig here*
What we've got here is the worst of both worlds, reducing the effectiveness of both robotic and manned spaceflight, with no meaningful budget to pay for either. Adding one more Shuttle flight won't bridge any gap whatsoever, but to get an alternative launch vehicle any time soon is going to require ploughing in ten times the resources that had been allocated to the task. The new capsule plus the extra shuttle launch will, however, bleed cash away from other projects, making them far less likely to yield useful results. Thus, what you get is a lot of money wasted with no possibility of return, all for the sake of helping out some poor rocket provider who is running out of death merchants to sell to.
This is worse than bailing out the banks. At least the government was honest enough to say that it was the banks they were giving the money to. It was dishonest about everything else, sure, but at least there was at least one bullet point you could claim was sincere. In this case, there is a clearly defined effort to obscure who is getting the money and why. Perhaps because nobody is going to believe that this rocket vendor is too big to fail.
NASA gets nothing from this compromise. Let us understand that right from the start. NASA will lose. The only way NASA can win is if they get sane objectives AND the backing to make those objectives possible. Almost anything could be made "sane", if it were clearly stated and adequately funded and was likely to remain adequately funded from start to finish and was not going to be tortured into oblivion for political reasons. (The Space Shuttle should have been twice as good as it was, and even the Russians had a better space shuttle, but it was crippled in order to serve the selfish desires of politicians who put their popularity over not only the space program itself but also over the lives of those who would put that program into action.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Porklauncher.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
???: Ares; Constellation; Phase out shuttle
Obama: Privatize LEO; No moon; Heavy lift rocket for Mars & asteroids
Armstrong: Denounces Obama's space plans
NASA: Scales back Constellation program (against a congressional ban)
Senate: Heavy Lifter using old tech(Atlas)
NASA: 5 Million for robot prizes
Senate: Add 1+ shuttle flight(s?); Ares rocket replaced by shuttle rocket + Orion capsule
Accurate?
The phrase "baby with the bathwater" comes to mind here. NASA does some things that no other US entity currently does.
We're about to rely on a foreign country as our sole source supplier for manned access to the ISS for at least several years. We don't have a backup. Just as you say NASA is a political football, international relations can be just as unpredictable. Right now we have a shortage of Pu-238 for RTGs in part because we felt we could buy what we needed from the Russians. That's fine. It's a good source for it. But, we didn't move ahead with funding for getting DOE ready to produce more. There's a contract dispute with the Russians that no one anticipated, and that's left us looking for other alternatives.
I prefer to keep a couple of shuttles around and launching at a low rate rather than just relying on Soyuz. Expensive, and hopefully unneeded, but most insurance is like that.
It gives us a backup that won't take years to be ready. Ultimately, a man rated Falcon 9 or some other private launcher would be a good solution. But, we don't have it yet.
time to spend our money on teleportation a much faster way of transfering things and transport any size thing any weight think about how much resources could be saved if we just built the space station on the ground then teleported it to space.
we could travel to the end of the universe in seconds
we wouldn't run out of room on the planet we could just teleport to the moon or mars or anyother part of the universe and live there.
I was told by people who work on the Shuttle that a decision to run another shuttle flight should have been made 1-2 years ago, that there are not enough spare parts to do this, and that this is basically throwing good money after bad.
It's too late now to go back to the Shuttle. It should have been retired over a decade ago, and its only utility at this point is as a man-rated LEO transporter and (uneconomic) heavy lift booster The die is cast, so just pay Russia for the manned spaceflight services. It will be much cheaper, and no more dangerous.
But discontinuing Aries/Constellation is a mistake. Any accommodation for a Mars mission for those craft should be dropped as premature and uneconomic. Orion should be limited in scope to earth/moon shuttle visits and no more - and the timeline appropriately accelerated. With just sliderules and pencils we went from Mercury to Apollo in fewer years than the Constellation program has taken to do next to nothing. We're stuck in a cycle of increasing the capabilities of the program in order to make it "sexy", and by the time it's approved it's much more costly to build and will take much longer to develop.
So task Aries/Constellation with a moon mission, and leave LEO to private industry or contracting with the Russians. Instead of spending $2 billion on another shuttle flight, give 10 space start-ups $200 million each, and a free hand - I guarantee that in the end we will have much more to show from it.
I think perhaps your dislike of congressional bumbling has spread a bit too far in your anti-establishment bashing of NASA. Bathwater analogies are very appropriate in this case. You rightly criticize the stupid directions NASA has been forced down, but your criticism goes a bit overboard here.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Well, regardless of the scientific merits, continuing access to ISS is one of the main points that can sell putting money into SpaceX and other private ventures in the near term. Once again, it may not be what we wanted, but it's what we've got.
Virgin Galactic and some others are gearing up for non-orbital tourist work on their own dime at the moment, but there aren't a whole lot of other manned projects I'd consider advanced contenders at the moment that don't in part rely on providing services to the government. The push for a man rated Falcon 9 certainly does.
I'd go more along with your ideas of doing away with NASA if I thought they had a lot of chance of working. The money saved likely wouldn't be spent on space at all if you didn't have an existing (and politically workable) space related entity to put it toward. That won't change without massive change of the whole government budget process which is, to say the least, a pretty ambitious goal. I'll settle for smaller ones.
Right now the political process is, again, not what we want, but what we've got. And I advise using it shamelessly to get something more to our liking.
(Odd how the discussions never change at some level. This is pretty much the same discussion that was happening in the 1980s on usenet. It's now SpaceX rather than AmRoc/Conestoga, etc.)
The big caveat here is that there are enough parts sitting around for at least another 3 flights of shuttle hardware. We already paid for it to be built, so we should try to find a way to use it, and as cheaply as possible. Doing it cheaply means bolting on a payload with an engine instead of a shuttle.
The same budgetary things happened with Apollo. We had the hardware for Apollo 18, 19, and 20 ready to go, but funding got cut for them and that was that.
I've got a dumb question. Why do they return the shuttle back to Earth? Or, why not build a part of the space station out of shuttles; you design the vehicle to serve as the body of the launch vehicle, and as part of the ISS. You could leave off a lot of those tiles if you weren't planning to return.
The crew returns to Earth via a reentry vehicle. Fill the vehicle with supplies, send it up there, and the crew comes back on a specialized reentry bus.
Best regards.
Why on earth dosent the US just put the up half the money as a prize for the first global business that can provide them a safe launch vehicle for, i dont know, a tenth of the cost of the space shuttle for a similar lift capacity...
NASA just seems to have the goal of continuing its current level of employment for the next 20 years, from my australian perspective anyway, not like my country has done anything space related...
unless one plans to colonize space, human in outer space is a waste of money.
I'm fucking sick of this stupid technology. Both astronauticides were the result of stupid shuttle technology.
Side-by-side. Bah. Rockets were meant to be cock-like. Erect. Vertical. Long necked, if you will.
The shuttle broke twice because of the side-by-side architecture. It's time to make rockets that looked like cocks, I mean rockets. Long, tall, and long.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The soviets used to do manned spaceflight in five year plans. It seems to me that NASA needs to do theirs in 4 year plans. That way they can get projects completed before the next administration nixes them .
Whether a launch or not. Significant layoffs were to start in October for the final Feb 2011 launch.
Since you clearly did not understand what I wrote, I will rephrase. Free choice requires that there be an ability to choose between non-identical options at both the initial point and at the first level beyond. The number of choices is immaterial so long as it remains above 1 after eliminating false options, duplicates and synonymous choices, and irrational choices. (An irrational choice would be one that no reasonable/rational person would consider a valid option in the context of whatever the situation is. Thus, jumping off a bridge is not a rational way of getting Internet access although it is arguably a choice of sorts. A monopolist could not offer that as proof of choice.) The first level matters because a choice of middlemen for the same product doesn't mean you have a useful choice. And that is where we probably differ. To me, if the choice has no impact on what happens, if you can point to no non-transient difference, then you have done nothing. If all roads lead to Rome then you have chosen nothing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well to be fair, they weren't just thrown away...some were used to launch Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz missions, others were either shifted to earlier Apollo missions or not finished in the first place. Or are on display
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
A chance to avoid a major international incident? I'd hardly expect the US government to take that one lying down regardless of the actual value.
Space exploration doesn't exist in isolation. And right now, few politicians are going to seriously propose abandoning the ISS or just handing our part over to the international partners. I can just see the fun an opposing nominee would have with that. "We built a 100gigabuck or more station and my opponent wants to just give it up." I remember the reaction when Bush et al was wanting to de-orbit it in 2015 (my own included). Further, the other partners would need to come up with substitutes for our contributions both monetary and technical if they kept it going.
Up until recently, the lack of power, the restrictions on crew size, the ongoing construction meant that little could be done with the ISS. I wish that some of the facilities hadn't been cancelled (the centrifuge module for a biggie). Just because we were foolish about its uses in the past doesn't mean we have to continue to be so. Again, I think just shutting it down would invoke the baby and bathwater comparison.
The one area that really can't be duplicated without building something else like the ISS is the ability to study long term effects of microgravity on the human body. The Vomit Comet is great for some things, but the time duration is limited. If Bigelow Aerospace or some other gets their commercial station running, then that's a different story. But, again, it's not there yet.