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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."
Absolutely right. Not only that, but politics forced NASA to behave stupidly, pushing giant missions that would be popular with the public, rather than multiple smaller missions that make more sense. The Space Shuttle practically killed NASA, but because it looks and lands like a plane, it was very popular. Congress also gave NASA a monopoly on space launches. SpaceX would have been illegal up to a few years ago, which is why American companies couldn't get a satellite into space cost effectively, and had to use services from other countries instead. American companies developed most of the technology that put men on the moon, but they were forced to scrap it, and were banned from using that technology for anything but NASA approved projects and weapon systems, which of course were screwed up by politics.
I hate to say it, but it's a good thing, IMO, that NASA is being pushed to the side. A lot of those bright people leaving NASA are joining companies like SpaceX, and they're finally getting the chance to make a difference. If NASA had gotten out of the way decades ago, I think we'd be a lot further along.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
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.
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."
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?
Elon is _not_ the kind of guy to bow to conventional wisdom. SpaceX is one giant experiment to reevaluate 'conventional wisdom' about access to space, from the ground up. They're learning that while certain corners cannot be cut, there _are_ ways to economise.
Tom Markusic has come right out and said that they can develop Merlin 2 (engine for their super-heavy lift vehicle) in three years for $1b. I don't know the odds of a company the size of SpaceX getting their hands on that kind of money any time soon.
Elon is _not_ the kind of guy to bow to conventional wisdom. SpaceX is one giant experiment to reevaluate 'conventional wisdom' about access to space, from the ground up. They're learning that while certain corners cannot be cut, there _are_ ways to economise.
Tom Markusic has come right out and said that they can develop Merlin 2 (engine for their super-heavy lift vehicle) in three years for $1b. I don't know the odds of a company the size of SpaceX getting their hands on that kind of money any time soon.
The thing about SpaceX is that it would be really great if NASA could get out of the business of getting access to low-earth orbit, and focus instead on the types of platforms that get us from LEO to the moon or other planets. The best way forward I can see for the immediate future of manned exploration is definitely going to be figuring out what can be done with SpaceX platforms - and Elon Musk at least seems super onboard with anything involving sending people to Mars.
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.
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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.
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