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NASA Opens New Office For Space Missions

Posted by Soulskill on from the directorate-of-hot-air-balloons dept.

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.'"

18 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Meaningless by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's no way that Congress will manage to focus on the same task for 15-20 years.

    Within five years, they'll be trying to find someplace to cut to pay for some pork somewhere, and the project that's not due to deliver anything for a decade or more then will be first on the chopping block.

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    1. Re:Meaningless by Seumas · · Score: 2

      Weren't we given a goal of hitting the moon and mars again by 2020, like, a decade ago? Whatever happened to that?

      I think our best hope is that maybe the Chinese will catch up and surpass and really start pushing space exploration and we'll all be able to watch in awe from the sidelines. I think something like that is going to happen long before we wait for commercial enterprises to build themselves up, get us into space, and then find a financially viable reason to explore the far reaches (none of that will happen in my life time - they're still trying to have successful, reliable, affordable trips to the ISS).

    2. Re:Meaningless by Cryacin · · Score: 2

      Didn't you RTFA? It's 2030. It's the same goal, just accounting for the progress made so far.

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    3. Re:Meaningless by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's why these "Get to X by Y!" plans are stupid.

      And look at what it does: "To reach those goals, the United States must develop a new heavy-lift rocket capable of traveling that far". Because that's the most direct way to meet the goal. But either the giant rocket will be canceled when the Mars mission is, or it'll sit around trying to find justifications for its existence, wasting money that could be spent on better things.

      Right now is not the time for grandiose missions with long time lines. That's a way to just repeat the Constellation debacle over and over. Instead, we should be focusing on building up capabilities. Especially the ability to assemble and refuel craft in orbit.

      Once you're in LEO, you're nearly halfway to the surface of Mars in terms of delta-v. That's why monolithic missions are stupid -- everything you plan to send to Mars, including all the fuel for doing so, has to be lifted all at once from the surface meaning either the mission itself will be tiny or the rocket will have to be fucking huge -- probably both. With proper LEO capabilities, we could have a bigger Mars mission enabled by a smaller rocket, and with a shorter time-line from conception to conclusion.

      But by all means, Congress, demand a Pork Rocket and a legacy-that-will-never-happen Apollo-style Mars mission. Shooting yourself in the foot may seem like a bad idea, but it makes such a pleasing noise that it definitely sounds like you're doing something!

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    4. Re:Meaningless by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Congress managed to focus on the F-22 program for 21 years now, the JSF/F-35 program for 15 years now, the War on Drugs for 40 years, the Shuttle Program for 39 years, so it's obvious that Congress can say on the same task for a long period.

    5. Re:Meaningless by Seumas · · Score: 2

      You mean the lack of progress made so far, don't you? We're supposed go feel energized and positive about losing an entire decade of progress and having to push the goal to reach the moon (again) back another decade? It's not exciting. It's depressing and sad. Where in the article does it suggest that it's the same goal? It says that Obama has set a goal. Not that he has changed the date on the existing goal (which was set by Bush eight years ago).

      http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/39144/bush_calls_for_return_to_moon_by_2020/

    6. Re:Meaningless by Seumas · · Score: 2

      The problem is that other than "go land on this thing", we don't have any real goals. Goals are important. And not just quiet "inside the organization" goals. But goals we can all dream about and get behind (especially if you want funding). So let's set realistic goals. Like "land on the moon again and establish a base by XYZ". We've been to the moon. That's doable. building shit on it. That's doable. Instead, we get "we'll go to the moon again in 2020". And then a decade later, we're told "uh... well go to the moon again by 2030... yeah, that's it... 30".

      The more time which passes, the greater our technological capacity. However, at some point, we have to stop and say "let's start doing things". So when is that point? It's like cryptography. A computer today could crack in a day what a computer in 1980 would take 40 years to crack. So you could spend 40 years (starting back in 1980) to crack it or you could wait 30 years, buy a new computer, then crack it.

      So at what point do we say "okay, enough has advanced -- now let's start doing something"?

      I obviously don't know the answer, either. It's just the obvious question we have to ask right now. And we also have to acknowledge how much of what we've advanced so far has come from setting the goal for space exploration in the first place. Without the space exploration to drive a lot of this advanced knowledge acquisition, will we still maintain the growth of our technical abilities to in-turn advance space exploration? Sort of doing it in reverse?

    7. Re:Meaningless by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Congress managed to focus on the F-22 program for 21 years now, the JSF/F-35 program for 15 years now...

      The F-22, the JSF, and the Shuttle all enjoyed wide popular support and provided jobs to powerful districts. The stupid drug war is also quite popular - I'm constantly arguing with people about it and I don't think I've ever gotten anyone to agree with me other than on marijuana. Congress is pretty agonizingly frustrating, but I can't fault them for doing what they were elected to do.

      By the way, despite its warts, the JSF will save money overall. Of course, when it is grounded we will have no air force, no naval air protection, and no marine corp jet. Just some old national guard A-10s, a bunch of old bombers, and whatever the UAV fleet looks like at the time. There's some saying about putting all of your eggs somewhere or something... :)

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    8. Re:Meaningless by ravenspear · · Score: 2

      That's not really a valid comparison though.

      While computer technology has increased dramatically since the space missions of the 1960s, rocket technology hasn't.

      We still use the same basic equipment/principles/fuel/structures to get into space. Sure it might have a better computer/guidance system, but that doesn't really decrease the cost or complexity of getting into space.

      So if we wanted to go to the moon again today, it would be a long and difficult undertaking just as it was in the 60s.

    9. Re:Meaningless by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 2

      I'm not a fan of the drug war, and I'm a Republican.

      The F-35 program is a goddamned boondoggle to put it politely, it is one of the worst design by committee aviation programs since WW2. The costs are skyrocketing, the schedule is slipping.

      On paper it's less effective than late block F-16s in the light fighter role. It's never going to be an effective replacement for the A-10 in that role, in the AV-8B role it's at least 300% more per plane, and in the F/A-18C/D role its at least 200% more per plane. Those prices are today, who knows what they will be when the plane actually enters service in large numbers.

      No supercruise, so it's slower the F-22, less stealthy than the F-22, one engine so the things will be falling into the sea like A-4s, A-7s and F-8s did.

      I guess it's a program to make the TFX look like a good idea in program management.

    10. Re:Meaningless by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's why these "Get to X by Y!" plans are stupid.

      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.

      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.

      If we had this thinking today, there's no telling where we'd be: moon bases, space stations with artificial gravity, tourist trips to Titan, who knows. Sure, all this development requires lots of money, but if we hadn't wasted trillions on some stupid wars (plus a stupid drug war), we'd have that money.

      Right now is not the time for grandiose missions with long time lines.

      Grandiose missions require long time lines out of necessity. Not necessarily ridiculously long (Apollo got to the moon in less than a decade, though they continued with more missions for longer than that), but longer than a single President's term, and certainly longer than it takes for the House of Representatives to swing from one side to the other (2 years).

      There's no way around this. Asking for anything meaningful to be finished within 2 years is fantasy, so if you're going to make that constraint, then you might as well just give up on doing anything great.

      Instead, we should be focusing on building up capabilities. Especially the ability to assemble and refuel craft in orbit.

      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? This is precisely why you need an over-arching goal, like "build a base on the moon", or "send a manned craft to an asteroid to land on it and collect samples". Remember, these "capabilities" you talk of cost a lot of money to develop, so you need a reason to develop them in the first place.

      Once you're in LEO, you're nearly halfway to the surface of Mars in terms of delta-v. That's why monolithic missions are stupid -- everything you plan to send to Mars, including all the fuel for doing so, has to be lifted all at once from the surface meaning either the mission itself will be tiny or the rocket will have to be fucking huge -- probably both. With proper LEO capabilities, we could have a bigger Mars mission enabled by a smaller rocket, and with a shorter time-line from conception to conclusion.

      Wrong (sorta). Yes, doing a Mars shot all-in-one is pretty stupid for the reasons you state. However, you still need "landing humans on Mars" as the overall goal of the mission, though the mission should include many smaller steps as you describe.

      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.

      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 hashed out later. Of course, with the way the American public is these days, wanting to cut all public spending that doesn't benefit billionaires and wanting to establish a fundamentalist theocracy, I don't have much hope that Americans would back anything that NASA might dream up. Heck, if astronomers found a planet-killer asteroid on a collision course with Earth, but determined that it's 75 years away and if we act now we can safely divert it, even then I don't think Americans would want to spend any money on that program.

    11. Re:Meaningless by MightyYar · · Score: 2

      On paper it's less effective than late block F-16s in the light fighter role.

      Yes, it is. But it's hard to beat the F-16 so long as you don't need range. Most countries can't afford an interceptor fighter and an attack fighter, and it's not surprising that we are making the same compromises.

      It's never going to be an effective replacement for the A-10 in that role

      The A-10 is a complicated story, but it's clear that the Air Force hates dedicated fixed-wing ground support. We've been fighting this fight since Vietnam. The F-16 was supposed to replaces the A-10, but that's also a joke. The A-10 isn't going anywhere, and no multi-purpose plane can ever take the role of a flying cannon with a titanium armored cockpit. (I like the A-10.)

      in the AV-8B role it's at least 300% more per plane

      More like 500%. But the Harrier II is out of production, and the earliest planes are 30 years old. It is subsonic and about as stealth-less as they come. Harriers also crash a lot - time will tell if the F-35B is safer, but that's certainly a design goal. The Marine Corp pushed very, very hard for this plane. They want it.

      and in the F/A-18C/D role its at least 200% more per plane

      Closer to 300% :). The navy has no stealth aircraft. The F-22 was not designed for carrier use. The F-18C/D was a boondoggle all its own. It lost a competition with the F-16 to be the joint services fighter, but the Navy pushed for it anyway because of the single engine on the F-16. Even after a serious redesign, the thing didn't have enough range. Then they had to keep screwing around with the floppy wings. Ironically (coincidentally?), the engine on the thing has turned out to be so reliable that there probably was no need to put two in :) Anyway, the C/D is no longer in production, and it's no match for a 5th generation fighter (or even an F-16).

      No supercruise, so it's slower the F-22, less stealthy than the F-22

      Those were all cost-cutting compromises. The F-22 was deemed too expensive and too delicate.

      one engine so the things will be falling into the sea like A-4s, A-7s and F-8s did.

      Time will tell, but if the engine is as good as the one on the F-18C/D (F404?) it will not have that fate.

      The up-front cost IS staggering, and the program has been poorly run. But up-front cost is not as high as ongoing maintenance, and replacing the older planes will save money in the long run. Or, at least, that's the idea :)

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    12. Re:Meaningless by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Informative

      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

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    13. Re:Meaningless by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 2

      President Obama realized President Bush was full of shit, didn't fund anything

      Note that Congress is responsible for funding things.

      And, yes, the Republican Congress didn't fund it properly, and the replacement Democratic Congress didn't fund it properly.

      So, anyone want to bet that any of the TEN Congresses between now and 2030 will fund this properly?

      Republicans might, but I doubt it.

      Democrats haven't even done a budget for two years (yes, we're still operating under continuing resolutions since 2009), so it's pretty sure they won't....

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
  2. That's a relief by HangingChad · · Score: 3, Insightful

    we are recommitting ourselves to American leadership in space for years to come.

    That's good, because I thought for a minute there you were presiding over a crumbling infrastructure and dying agency that left its best years in the rear view mirror 20 years ago.

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  3. on heavy lift by khallow · · Score: 2

    To reach those goals, the United States must develop a new heavy-lift rocket capable of traveling that far

    Or buy rides on future commercial heavy lift rockets. Part of the problem with these grandiose space plans is all the um, "little" details that have to be in place and which in hindsight suck up all the funding rather than the intended goal of the program. We have to have the big rocket, the crew vehicle, etc. But as it turns out, the more requirements you have, the less likely it is that you do real stuff, namely, actual space development, exploration, or science.

    At some point, the US needs to decide whether it wants a space program that advances a US presence in space or a jobs program that occasionally does space stuff.

  4. Heavy lift rockets is a bad idea in the long term. by master_p · · Score: 2

    Heavy lift rockets that can only be used once is a bad idea economically. What NASA needs to build in space is a non-landing spaceship that is used for travelling between planetary bodies of our solar system. It will be more expensive than a heavy lift rocket, but once it is up there, the cost of space travel for humans will be greatly minimized.

    The spaceship could harness power from external resources like the Sun, and therefore help avoid carrying all that fuel to orbit, as with heavy lift rockets.

  5. Not going to be the US in either case by yt8znu35 · · Score: 2

    We cannot afford any of this. By 2025 the middle class will have been finished off, and thus the tax base will have been erased, and we will have openly accepted our Third World status. The first words spoken on Mars will have to be translated into English for us as we shiver in our boxes amidst burning trash in America's favelas.