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Chris Kraft Talks About The Decline of NASA
schwit1 writes in with a link to a recent interview with Chris Kraft, founder of Mission Control, discussing the impracticality of the SLS, and why the best and brightest are slowing leaving NASA. From the article: "The problem with the SLS is that it's so big that makes it very expensive. It's very expensive to design, it's very expensive to develop. When they actually begin to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire. They're going to have all kinds of technical and development issues crop up, which will drive the development costs up. Then there are the operating costs of that beast, which will eat NASA alive if they get there. ... You go talk to the guys who were doing Constellation (NASA's now-scuttled plan to return to the moon), and the reason they came to NASA was to go back to the moon. They're all leaving now. The leaders are leaving for a lot of other reasons also, but they're leaving because there's no future that they want to be involved in. And that's unfortunate."
Didn't you hear? There are brown people on the other side of the world!
We need to invest in killing them before they kill each other, because if they kill each other and we don't save them from killing each other by killing them then
And we've also got to invest in storing everyone's email, because
And, you know, the IRS needs to buy more ammo so they're ready to
Did I mention they're Muslim? The brown people!
Neil deGrasse Tyson says only the government can do Space.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
In fact, I'm surprised this didn't happen a lot sooner. The way the politicos screw around with NASA's budget and direction year after year, how is NASA supposed to get anything done? One can only take so much before you throw your hands up in the air and say "screw this".
Must Come Down.
Back to the moon, without help. *snicker*
Space Elevator !!
Going Dooownnnn !!
Hippies and their expensive toys in the attic !!
Article mentions it's nicknamed the Senate Launch System, and in any case, they can cut it and lose fewer votes, not to mention later politicians love to cancel earlier one's big projects.
Few remember the previous big launch system was cancelled by Obama when he came into office. It's all a cynical game.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
NASA ... drop the Aeronautics from the acronym what you have... EXACTLY!!!
I did a bit of work for NASA and can confirm that the politics can be insanely frustrating. I busted my ass for 12, 14 hours a day for a year and a half and do not regret it; I quit when it became apparent that the guy making the powerpoint slides describing my work was making more than me.
I recommend to work there for a bit as it's a cool experience, but couldn't imagine it as a career.
I hear that as a cost-cutting measure, all flight training, simulations and tests will be instead now be performed using Kerbal Space Program.
So if the SLS is the one thing killing NASA, don't do it. I wouldn't have the slightest idea what the SLS is (redaction?) but it sounds like a no-brainer to me.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
the problem with nasa is its inception was intended to combat the USSR on a number of fronts. It advanced technologies like ICBM which were used to further the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. It also worked to advance american scientific achievements and progress in the face of a scientific juggarnaut that invented magnetic resonance imaging, staged rocket launches, the luna 1 space probe, the satellite, and had launched the first man into space. Space as it was tasked to NASA was in many respects propaganda. this definition is validated today when considering almost every commercial satellite, from Iridium to XM, has been launched by a former soviet launch site (Baikonur) and on a proton or similar Soviet/Russian vehicle. We just needed to prove to ourselves and the world that "Murica is still number one"
It wasnt until 2010 that an american corporation was successful in delivering the same level of satellite delivery service as its russian counterparts (SpaceX) but my point remains: NASA kept engineers and physicists busy because it didnt try to commercialize its endeavors. NASA has it been proposed this year would be lambasted as a clandestine socialist program to waste federal money in the pursuit of junk science that does nothing to validate jesus. NASA as it was 50 years ago was the dream on the heart and mind of every school child, whereas today its mostly a clearinghouse for different politically motivated, nearly schitzophrenic technological endeavors that occasionally backfire hillariously and produce scandalous outcomes like validating climate change or evolution.
its not a happy conclusion, but 50 years ago russia 'did science' while america chest-thumped and grand-standed until people conceeded.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think you're painting things a little dishonestly on the Soviet side there. Nobody at NASA ever got sent to Siberia because their project failed, you know.
The politics of Soviet space launches were just as convoluted as ours, and created problems of it's own. They were "doing science" to prove their own political and military points. Sure, NASA was a counterpoint to that, but don't act like both sides weren't playing a game against each other with their space programs and captured Nazi scientists.
I worked at JSC from 2006 until 2010 when I volunteered for a layoff and left. The real drain that NASA causes is not the ~$18,000,000,000/year it spends, but tens of thousands of talented engineers who are wasting away their careers there waiting for something exciting to happen. Those engineers could be somewhere else doing something valuable.
Working in private industry now, everything is better: the pay, the management, an executive leadership team with vision and drive to make it happen. NASA is a mess, and no amount of motivational speakers, presidential mandates, or pie-in-the-sky dreams is going to fix it.
The way I sum up my time as NASA when I talk to people about it is this: "I'm very glad I got to work at NASA, and I'm even happier that I don't work there anymore."
The capability to venture outer space and eventually terraform and colonize other planets is far more important than other crap we care about everyday - Iran, Syrian war, AIDS in africa etc etc. It's the future of all humans (assume you're not living in Syria, but who cares?)
Privatization is NOT the solution. No private company can or can be allowed to have so many resource to wield to do space projects.
You can not expect to make a career out of NASA. The best you can hope for is a temporary alignment on a particular project. If you want a long term career you must go private and work for SpaceX or start your own company. It is all about adjusting your expectations...
NASA is only a train wreck because of the meddling hands of Government that, in addition to being the sole source of funds, insists on micro-managing every aspect of the development process.
For example, let's say I have to sit down and develop a computer module to monitor some system on the vehicle. I can't just design something that works using commodity parts. I have to choose parts from preferred contractors, which are determined not by the quality of their product, but by the gender or race of the company's owner, and of course how much money that company gave to some Congressman's re-election campaign during the prior election cycle. It has nothing to do with the product.
Then, I have to adhere to certain rules regarding cultural sensitivity, meaning that for example I can't use parts from an Israeli company if we are developing a replacement part for a space vehicle we sold to, say, a Muslim country.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of such rules in NASA that necessarily lead to an unnecessarily complex design.
THAT'S why I got out. I was sick and tired of dangling from political puppet strings.
NASA is, to be honest, mired in congressional directives. They have very little actual control over their programs and budgets primarily because Congress sees it as a way to funnel money to their own state/district as pork. There's no logical reason why you would spread their mission development out over such a huge geographic area.
The other problem: starting (mostly) with Reagan, NASA ceased to be a research institution and transitioned to a contract management organization which directed commercial contractors to do work for them. The contractors then get patents on everything and NASA just kept paying them by the hour. The idea was that you coulc fire contractors with impunity but you had to keep civil servants for life. The former is not as true as the theory since the government essentially had to guarantee performance of a contract to a minimum basis (pay whether you need them or not), and the latter is sadly true in the case of deadbeat employees thanks to the byzantine HR system in the government. The few *actual* engineers and scientists at NASA are still very good, but if you have to fight management and congress all the time then, yeah, you're going to look for more exciting work elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I used to work for NASA, and we did cool stuff - earth sensing, expendable rocket sats, secondary shuttle science payloads. That whole division has since been dissolved, afaik. I left for non-work reasons; I never had to butt heads with top brass.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I like where this guy's going, less focus on big n' bad new launch systems and more focus on our current ones. I think more than a few studies have suggested that his concept of a "Cape Canaveral in the sky" fuel & spacecraft depot in orbit has merit. That said our current choices on LV's need some work. None of them are even partially reusable and a few of them I don't think anyone in their right mind would want to use for human spaceflight. I watched the footage from the recent Delta IV launch, I know its got a good launch record (only one failure out of 24 launches) but the thing spends half of its accent with its engine covers on fire after cooking its its lower bits on the launchpad.
A microcosm of the country.
Editors, it's never a bad idea to define less-than-ubiquitous acronyms.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Nor did they in the Soviet Union. The Russian space expansion took place after the death of Stalin, when people were no longer sent to gulags for professional failures. (Repression certainly continued in the USSR, but it was of a different stripe.)
Ironic that this spin-authored piece claims that NASA was "just about propaganda".
Each of the points made here could have been written by a TASS staff writer. Not sure if tendentious, or just ignorant?
"...Nasa (was to) advance american scientific achievements and progress in the face of a scientific juggarnaut (sic) (the Soviets)..." Yes, the Soviets had the lead in space in just about every category one could imagine...in the 1960s. And since then (really, even then) Russia has turned into a barely-first-world country?
"... almost every commercial satellite, from Iridium to XM, has been launched by a former soviet launch site...(and/or on Soviet/Russian hardware)" This would be because NASA has been nearly SHUT DOWN since the Columbia crash in 2003.
To compare US (private) space business to Russia's is laughable. Why does Russia even have a allegedly-commercial launch system? Because the Russian government imploded and some opportunist pretty much found it sitting there with the keys in it. This wasn't a "policy choice" any more than a car crash is. The reason the Russian system is commercialized is because IT HAD TO BE to continue functioning.
Arguably, such would be a healthier future for NASA as well (privatization). But it's one thing to completely inherit a space program cost-free, and another thing to build one from scratch.
To point out the health of the Soviet/Russian launch organizations today vs NASA is as shallow (and misleading) as asking "why are all the German factories and infrastructure so much newer than the US's?". I'm not sure a lot of people would argue that what Germany went through in 1945 was worth it to have a more advanced industrial infrastructure today?
I wouldn't even disagree with some of your criticisms that NASA is overpolitical, schizoid, and overexpensive (although the "Jesus" comment is...bizarre?). Then again, I'd ask how many Russian programs have gone past Earth orbit lately? Meanwhile a massive, magnificent orbiter continues to generate terrific data from Saturn, probes are all over, and NASA rovers are trundling all over and above Mars. Heck, a US-private launched satellite is leaving an entirely new launch site in Virginia headed for the moon this week.
50 years ago THE SOVIETS 'did science'. 40-30-20-10 they were busy trying not to become a 3rd world country. Congrats? Your mom certainly used to be the prettiest decades ago, but now she just invites strange men to stay overnight so she can pay the electrical bill.
-Styopa
NASA is just another government handout program for well-connected contractors and campaign supporters. Kill it with fire already and let the private industry that has far surpassed its technical ability take over space exploration and utilization.
I think it's time to accept the harsh reality that the era of manned space travel is pretty much over. It was a nice, brief blip in modern history--fueled by the politics of the Cold War. But it's been in decline since the early 70's, and with the end of the Cold War in the early 90's, the writing was on the wall. A few more countries will send men up as a point of national pride (like China), and the ISS and Russian manned program will limp along for a little while longer. But we're never going back to the way it was.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Um ... guys ... who do you think built the parts of the Saturn V for NASA? There's a thing called wikipedia now which makes it much easier to read about the cool stuff in science and technology than it used to be.
Give NASA all the money that gets wasted at the Casino the day after the Social Security checks arrive.
Conservative, mod down for violating
NASA has been mostly privatized for a while now:
"Many federal departments and offices Energy and NASA to name just two, have become defacto contract management agencies devoting upwards of 80% of their budgets to contractors"
-Biobbit "Terror and Consent" page 90.
which has had the counter-intended effect of driving up costs while removing any focused purpose from the projects:
from http://joelhousman.com/2012/10/08/how-privatization-of-nasas-the-learning-channel-tlc-devolved-into-a-for-profit-child-exploitation-channel-pushing-honey-boo-boo/
"People forget or did not know that once upon a time The Learning Channel was founded in 1972 by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and NASA as an informative/instructional network focused on providing real education through the medium of TV; it was distributed at no cost by NASA satellite.
Then it was privatized in 1980 (Reaganism) and was then named the Appalachian Community Service Network. In November 1980 this name was changed to âoeThe Learning Channelâ, which was subsequently shortened to âoeTLC.â From then on we have a sad decline to the abomination of child and poverty exploitation of the TLCâ(TM)s current hit freak show âoeHere Comes Honey Boo Booâ.
So it's no wonder that people who grew up with dreams of finding some way for space exploration to benefit humanity are exiting.
Close down NASA. Close down all space science. The liberal social engineers have other priorities.
We have infinite time to explore space, we need perfected robots to interact with the utterly and permanently hostile space environment, and we need robots to serve us on Earth.
Scrap all these silly manned programs for a few hundred years and instead of slow-development-cycle meat tourist carriers, build and deploy rapid-development-cycle machines so we can learn about and explore space much more efficiently.
The manned space program was a Cold War dickwaving contest, that is all. When robots can do everything man needs done in space, our successors can move into turnkey facilities.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
They blew the holy shit out of a butt load of cosmonauts though, didn't they? Their space program makes our shuttle explosion look like a tire leak.
"its not a happy conclusion, but 50 years ago russia 'did science'"
They did so much science that they never figured out how to get to the moon, one of their objectives. Their "science" was also much more closely related to an M80 than ours was. I'd say we did it better.
NASA does more than manned space flight. There's all kinds of satellites and other unmanned missions and projects that NASA is exceedingly good at. Missions like Hubble, COBE, TRMM, and even instruments like SWIFT/BAT or cheap Earth-centric projects that come out of Wallops. Lot of good, exciting work still goes on at NASA, but it doesn't get a lot of coverage in the media.
Hell, NASA is even launching a satellite going to the moon on Friday (LADEE), but no one even knows about it.
It was worth going there a few times, but it is just a pretty boring piece of static rock hovering far above our heads?
Why not actually go to a planet or moon where we might actually make new discoveries and expand the limits of human space travel?
I guess you will always find some attention seeking idiot, but who would even want to go to the moon simply to take 30 more samples of things we already have samples of, while receiving deadly doses of radiation that will possibly shaves decades off of your life.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
NASA, and NACA before it, was always funded for the purposes of applied science. The X-planes, the space program, the controlled impact demonstration...their projects used to be about proving sciences for application into military (and in fewer cases, but cases nonetheless, civil) aviation and systems. The reason it no longer finds ease in getting funds and approval is that it has ceased to be about scaring the living crap out of Russians.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
"the problem with nasa is its inception was intended to combat the USSR on a number of fronts. It advanced technologies like ICBM " ,spy sats, weather sats, and nav sats but not ICBMS. In fact NASA benefited more from early ICBMs than it contributed.
Ahhhh No you are wrong and don't know history.
The US ICBM programs were well on their way before there was a NASA. The Army, Navy, and Air Force all had projects that were moving along. NASA started to use those rockets for space work. Atlas, Titan, and Thor where all USAF ICBMs and MRBS that were converted to space launchers. By 1960 the needs of the military weapons and the needs NASA had completely diverged. Smaller warheads and the needs to launch in seconds meant that the next generation of missiles where small solid fueled missiles that were not very useful as space launchers. Minuteman and Polaris where lacked the payload of the older Atlas, Titans and Thor/Deltas. Even the Saturn I first stage was built out of left overs from the Army's SRBM and MRBM programs. It was made of leftover Redstone and Jupiter parts.
You could argue that NASA was to help develop other technology like comm sats
Too bad that the USGOV wasted all those Titan Is. When they were retiring the Atlas and Titan Is after only a few years in service as ICBMs the government stored that Atlases but gave away the Titans to parks and schools and other static displays. The logic was that the NASA had already converted Atlas to launcher so it was cheaper and the Titan I's payload increase over the Atlas wasn't worth the cost. Too bad since they had to re-open the Atlas production line when we ran out of them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
NASA's existence doesn't prevent private industry from doing space launches.
The fact private industry, Lockheed, Boeing, USA, and Co. haven't done it better and cheaper shows the value of NASA.
We just have a bunch of Republican A-holes who don't think our tax dollars should subsidize anything other than: private industry, God or guns.
Let's not forget about the leader of the Golden Fleece Awards - that hamstrung NASA from the 70's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire
redneck geek
Always has been, always will be.
The SLS is the Rocket to Nowhere created for Houston pork payouts. That is fine, but those flyboys have got to stop stealing funds from the highly-successful planetary missions.
All the science is done on unmanned missions (via JPL), not the manned pork such as SLS. Let SLS die and re-fund the robotic missions.
Maybe its cruel, but its the only way to advance. The projects weren't designed to fail, were designed to success, but they blew up in pieces. The cosmonauts were very concious that their job was a very dangerous one, and accepted the risks. In these endeavours, we put way too much value to human life and safety, this is about exploring and pushing frontiers, both physical and of knowledge, of course there are going to be fatalities among the way, thats why whe say "it's rocket science" for stuff that is hard to do. But as long as the people involved knows the risks involved and accept them, it's ok. Every death advances knowledge and make the next try safer for the next cosmonaut, and both the cosmonauts, and the scientist working with them, deserve my greatest respect.
And exactly what technology would that be? Tang or Velcro?
There are a huge number of spinoff technologies from NASA research which 20 seconds of time with Google would have found for you. Off the top of my head: freeze dried food, portable cordless vacuums, memory foam, de-icing systems, infrared ear thermometers, solar panels, fire fighting equipment.
Furthermore Tang was not developed by or for NASA and neither was Velcro. NASA merely popularized it. Tang was created by General Foods in the 1950s and Velcro was invented in the 1940s and later commercialized in the 1950s. If you are going to pick examples of "NASA technology" then you should actually pick examples of technology funded by NASA.
Seriously, name a single technology (useful for other than NASA purposes) which wouldn't have appeared within a few years anyway.
So we're supposed to hypothetically presume that everything created by NASA would somehow have been invented anyway despite the fact that there is no actual evidence that the technology would have appeared without NASA research? And for some reason the fact that NASA did it first is somehow not deserving of our respect? Peculiar argument you have there.
50 years ago THE SOVIETS 'did science'. 40-30-20-10 they were busy trying not to become a 3rd world country.
Rather a bizarre comment since the Soviets were by definition Second World.
Unless, you know, you actually cared about the people paying for the mission, and wanted all their communities to benefit from hosting high-tech industry and science... instead of just a few.
They claim things like freeze dried foods, which existed long before NASA. It's just self-serving, rationalizing, hype.
Rockets existed before NASA but that doesn't mean NASA's research contributed nothing to the technology. There was a tremendous amount of useful research that has gone into food for the space program which has had all sorts of commercial and military spin off benefits. NASA has serious problems to be sure but the value of their research is not among them. In fact from an economic perspective the value of NASA research is THE most valuable thing to come out of NASA with even conservative ROI estimates at between 3-8X money spent in economic return to the economy.
When did slashdot gain all the ignorant racist and fascist fools for readers? How did "news for nerds" turn into this mess, where some snot gets listed for "5: insightful" for babbling, satirically, about "we should help everyone here first"?
Does that fool even know what percentage of the US budget NASA gets? I mean, anyone who pays attention *knows*, and it's not 30%. (And actually, adjusted for inflation, it's about 1/6th what we were spending during the Moon race.)
How many folks here have actually sent emails, called, or even, at town halls, even *spoken* to their Congresscritter or Senator? (Oooh, cooties, talk to a politician! Eeek!)
How the mighty have fallen.
mark, who has contacted his legislators in all three ways
Poor old NASA is doing the best they can with the SLS. They are suffering the consequences of the worst government pettiness I've seen outside Prime Minister's Questions, whilst at the same time being expected to produce the most powerful rocket ever to perform groundbreaking manned exploration of the solar system.
Yes, the SLS is never going to open up the whole solar system - but you get what you pay for, and if you want leadership in space it costs money. You might even have to (gasp) get multi-millionaires to pay a little more tax!
Why was NASA created in the first place? As much as many scientific idealists would love to believe it's to push the boundaries of science, the simple reality is that NASA was designed to give the US a technological edge over the Soviet Union which was seen as an existential threat to the US's global power. Nearly every major project NASA has done historically has had some element of a Cold War slant to it:
Bell X-1 - supersonic flight for fighters, bombers, and spy planes
Project Mercury - put man in space; also put satellites in space, and rockets can be utilized in ICBMs
Project Apollo - put a man on the moon; also advance rocket technology and reassure American public that US retains a technological edge over the Soviets (who had beaten NASA on several milestones)
Probably only the Hubble telescope has purely scientific aspects and no direct Cold War application.
So now that the Cold War is over, what is NASA's mission? What is their driving force? Purely scientific research is unfortunately a luxury that will only be financed when it's politically convenient to do so and not when other political issues such as some sort of universal healthcare or military interventions elsewhere are more prominant in the public concious. The real issue here is, what can NASA, which is in effect a relic of the Cold War World (which has been gone now for 20+ years) do to transform it's image and it's mission into something that is relevant in today's post-Cold War world?
I watched on TV the Mercury capsules launch on TV as a boy, and as a young man I worked on the Galileo mission. Of all the books I have read about the space program none is better than Chris Karft's "Flight - My Life in Mission Control".
It is not an engineering book, but a book written by an engineer. For example, the description of the problems during Apollo 13 are described better here than anywhere. He never tries to make hemself or anyone else look better than they actually were. He often is quite critical of NASA's spin control.
Nuff said
They blew the holy shit out of a butt load of cosmonauts though, didn't they? Their space program makes our shuttle explosion look like a tire leak.
They did not. Their space program is marginally safer in terms of statistics then NASAs.
Or the sublimation of Congress to corporatism and short-term profits?
That's all.
Read my post above again please. "Built the stuff" does not have any secret meaning that includes "put up the money" but instead means what is written. A dictionary will help.
Frankly I find your effort to turn me into your strawman with your own script somewhat disgusting. Do you kick puppies as well?
Room temperature MASERs are less than a year old so what they may be capable of with improvement is still unknown, however even with something like that transmission for power sats is likely to be lossy and tricky.
With something of the order of 1kW per square metre divided by how good the cells are or how much you can get out of solar thermal (which scales up a lot more than photovoltaics), not really a lot of land and with high voltage DC it could be in a desert 2000km away - plus any sort of energy monoculture is insane anyway. Getting out of the atmosphere gives you more power per square metre but not enough to make it vastly better so power sats that are only out there to feed power to Earth don't sound so interesting.
Zero-G industry powered by photovoltaics in orbit on the other hand is a different story. Better castings, metal foams, there's something to pick in every field - there's plenty of stuff that is limited on Earth by things sinking instead of staying suspended.
just design a better SLS ... https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/2ZYX5
Manned missions are just stunts that used to tickle the public's fancy, but they accomplish very little scientifically. The real science is in robotic missions like the MSL/Curiosity and MER/Opportunity. The public finally realizes this... Robotic missions are orders of magnitude cheaper. Safer too.
It sounds like they were thinking more of economics & scale, and taking advantage of DOD research.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain