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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."
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.
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)
Because the 'old stuff' is very expensive to maintain, is inherently dangerous and the only thing it's good for is barking around in LEO.
If you want NASA to push out of LEO, you need some better systems. If you had enough money, then sure, you could keep the Shuttle and start on the Shiny New Thing but we don't have enough money, so it was felt that it is better to cut your losses and start over. Keeping the Shuttle pieces parts going is mostly a make work project for a couple of Senators and their constituents. It has no scientific or engineering value.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
Obama says, "Screw the moon, I'm setting up a 20 year project to go to Mars."
But that's not what he said. He said "I'm creating projects to develop technology that could enable a mission to Mars in 20 years", and that's a huge difference. He's talking about developing general technologies and capabilities that would be useful for a wide variety of missions outside of Mars, and if nobody wants to pull the trigger on the Mars mission in 20 years, we still have all the technology and capabilities. Mars was only mentioned to make the people who think we must have a specific mission happy (and it's not a bad policy to at least have a practical application in mind).
Whereas a definite "Mars in 20 years" would mean lots of development of tech designed for that mission and only that mission. 20 years to have enough technology in place that a Mars mission doesn't require that much specific development is a much more sensible, useful, and future-proof plan.
But hey, I guess having a giant expensive rocket that can't do anything rockets of 30 years ago couldn't do is nice too. :/
The enemies of Democracy are
Not to mention the ONLY reason the congress keeps kicking that dead horse is a little word called PORK. That is why on every single suggestion NASA has come up with for a new vehicle they have been hamstringed by the demand that X% of the craft be made of "Shuttle Derived parts" even though the shuttle was an absolute failure (look up the original statement: It was to be a "space truck" with about 1/3rd more carrying capacity and MUCH quicker turnaround for a lower cost per pound. It failed every goal it was designed for) so that they can keep parceling out cash to their districts.
Hell congress has turned NASA into such a fucked over pork generating clusterfuck we need to set up a WPA style "please fuck off" fund so when some congressman demands a stupid waste of cash like "shuttle derived parts" we can say "Here is a work project for your district. Please fuck off now" and get NASA back on track. Although personally I think NASA will be deader than Dixie in 5 years and it'll be other nations and commerical ventures that will take over. With two Viet Nam style clusterfucks on our hands and an economy that is starting to develop reigor mortis we just ain't got the funds for much of anything anymore. Doubt that will stop congress from writing checks as long as they can though.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
True enough, but using the Shuttle (or parts thereof) doesn't appear to be the way to go. Nothing about the Shuttle is cheap or easy. Sure, take your lessons learned, improve on the technology that we've developed (the Shuttle engine is pretty impressive and seem to have the bugs worked out of it).
But as we've flogged to death on many a post here, the entire premise of the Space Shuttle was falsified from the beginning. Personally, I would be in favor of keeping it going as a servicer for the ISS until the next generation of craft is actually up and running. However, since (as has been pointed out), the production lines are dead AND the money isn't there, we have to scramble a bit for a decade or two. IMHO, for the foreseeable future, I'd stay in LEO and work out the nuts and bolts engineering of keeping people alive in space for extended periods of time. When you take six months to plan each space walk, you're not quite ready to venture out of the Van Allen belts.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Let me try, using your timeline as a base (feel free to modify/copy/reuse):
2003: Space Shuttle Columbia accident
2004: Bush announces Vision for Space Exploration for sustainable human presence on the Moon starting in 2020 as testbed for Mars exploration and expansion into the solar system, calls for shuttle retirement in 2010 and replacement crew capability in operation by 2014, calls for commercial cargo/crew to ISS and no new launch vehicles developed unless absolutely necessary, NASA solicits plans from industry for best ways to achieve these goals
2005: Sean O'Keefe resigns as NASA administrator, Bush appoints Michael Griffin and gives him free reign with NASA, Michael Griffin throws out industry studies and NASA releases ESAS study which has NASA design two rockets in-house instead of utilizing commercial rockets (The Ares I and V, coincidentally based on old designs Michael Griffin came up with), ostensibly because they're "safe, simple, and soon" compared to alternatives
2005-present: Ares I development slips in schedule a year for every year that it exists, costs balloon from a few billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars, 2020 lunar date becomes increasingly unachievable
2009: NASA and White House appoint Augustine Committee, consisting of best and brightest from aerospace and astronaut community, to evaluate Constellation's progress and come up with options for future of
human spaceflight at NASA; they release a report presenting a number of viable options for NASA's beyond-Earth exploration plans
February 2010: White House calls for boost to NASA's budget (but not as large as Augustine Committee presented) releases plan similar to Augustine Report's option 5B, calling for investments in commercial crew and long-neglected space technology and cancellation of Ares I, delays building of heavy-lift launcher until 2015 since it won't be needed until then; a lot of congressmen in space states freak out
March-July 2010: lots of back and forth discussion and congressional hearings, Armstrong and Cernan come out against White House Plans, Buzz Aldrin comes out in favor; NASA scales back Ares/Constellation program without congressional approval, ostensibly to comply with termination liability laws
June-July 2010: NASA announces a bunch of new space technology initiatives (contingent on White House funding plans coming through), including new Centennial Challenge prize competitions (Nanosatellite launch, night rover, and sample return robot challenge) , revived NIAC to research experimental concepts, in-space technology demonstrations/missions utilizing in-space refueling, inflatable modules, electric propulsion, and inflatable reentry shields, all launched on existing commercial rockets
Today (July 15): Senate comes out with compromise bill, adding 1+ shuttle flight using existing equipment (no backup rescue shuttle if there's a problem, though); immediate development of 75mt shuttle-derived rocket quite similar to the one proposed by the DIRECT project, more commercial crew, robotic precursor mission, and space technology funding than 2010 but much less than Obama requested (over three years $1.6B vs. $3.3B for commercial crew, $244M vs. $1.33B exploration robotic precursor missions, $2.1B vs. $8B space technology development/missions); White House and Congress potentially both support the compromise, though
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.
Personally, I would be in favor of keeping it going as a servicer for the ISS until the next generation of craft is actually up and running.
Soyuz is cheaper and safer. There's no scientific or engineering reason not to use it.
They've had a few close calls, but unlike the shuttle, the Soyuz capsule has modes of failure in which the cosmo/astronauts aboard do not die. Hell, a Soyuz rocket once exploded on the pad, and the astronauts aboard walked away from the incident with nothing more than minor injuries.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Atlas and Delta could be, with relatively minor changes.
United Launch Alliance evaluation (pdf)