NASA Opens New Office For Space Missions

An anonymous reader writes "NASA has been tasked with landing astronauts on a space rock by 2025, and on the Red Planet by the mid 2030s. To reach those goals, the United States must develop a new heavy-lift rocket capable of traveling that far, and a capsule to bring people safely there and back again. The new Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate will be responsible for overseeing all this and more. 'America is opening a bold new chapter in human space exploration,' NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. 'By combining the resources of Space Operations and Exploration Systems, and creating the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, we are recommitting ourselves to American leadership in space for years to come.'"

Comments

Re:Meaningless

[Chris Burke]

No, they aren't. If you don't have a clear goal and a clear timetable to accomplish it by, then you're not going to achieve the goal, or if you do it'll take far longer than it should.

Oh yes they are, because they cripple the goal in the name of clarity of scope and timetable. These kinds of goals by necessity require an expedient and practical solution that gets us from point A to point B, where point B is much less ambitious than it could be if you bothered to increase your capabilities.

Goals are great. "Functional LEO assembly/refueling stations" is a clear goal, and you can have clear timetables and success criterion. "Go to Mars" is great as a general goal, something you have in mind when building the LEO shipyard, but yes it is stupid to get specific with time and scope until you've developed the capabilities because those parameters will drastically change.

There's a big difference between "a goal" as in a purpose, and this kind of goal. It seems like throughout your post you aren't distinguishing between them. If this is my fault I apologize, but let me be absolutely clear that I am distinguishing.

Just look at the Apollo missions. JFK says we'll go to the moon within the decade, and sure enough, with plenty of money and effort, they got to the moon when a decade before human spaceflight was a fantasy.

Extremely impressive for its time, yet because we're still limited to launching things as a whole out of the deepest gravity well of any rocky body in the solar system, we aren't going to get much past it. Looking at Apollo is exactly what you'll think you're doing when you see astronauts leave bootprints, plant a flag, and leave because that's all the mission scope that could be launched in a monolithic rocket.

To build up capabilities, you need to have a clear mission. What's the mission for "assemble craft in orbit"? That's not a mission, there's no goal there. No non-technical person is going to see the need for that, or why it's even useful. What are these craft for? Where are they going?

But it's the technical people actually doing the work who are hamstrung by this "clear goal"! They're the ones who have to look at what they have, where they have to be, and the time they have to do it and decide what they have to do to meet the demand. Hint: It's never going to be running off and developing general-purpose capabilities even if they would eventually make the mission much easier, because to the ones watching the clock and purse strings they will always seem like an unnecessary distraction from the clear A-to-B goal.

As for everyone else, how hard is it to explain that the purpose of the orbiting shipyard is to enable a Mars mission with broader scope than would be possible otherwise? Oh wait, I just did!

A vague "We're doing it to go to Mars!" goal should be fine for the public, but having a specific goal is crippling to the people who actually have to work toward it!

Basically, to make an analogy, you're talking about building a ship before you've come up with any ideas about where to sail it. Or building a car when there's no roads to drive it on.

Noooooo, there's plenty of ideas for where to sail it, and the possibilities are vast. This mandate, on the other hand, is like suggesting that we sail to one specific island on a specific date before we've invented the ocean-worthy sailing vessel, and since there's no time to do that and meet the timetable we're going to have to use a canoe.

So yes, better LEO (or other orbital) capabilities are important, but you're not going to sell the public, or really anyone outside of NASA, on "building capabilities". "Let's go to Mars!" however, has a much better chance of getting popular support, and then the details of the mission (e.g. developing the capabilities you talk of) can be ha