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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".
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 SLS is basically a big boondoggle forced on NASA by a bunch of congressmen who have factories in their districts that used to make Space Shuttle parts. These congressmen have basically forced NASA to produce some sort of space launch vehicle in a way that requires these Space Shuttle parts and therefore keeps the factories in their districts in business.
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.
Article mentions it's nicknamed the Senate Launch System
Launching the senate seems like a great idea to me. No reentry vehicle or parachutes are necessary. If they reenter the athmosphere they will filibuster gravity while arguing whether it is communist since it affects everyone.
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."
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, 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?
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
The SLS is basically a big boondoggle forced on NASA by a bunch of congressmen who have factories in their districts that used to make Space Shuttle parts. These congressmen have basically forced NASA to produce some sort of space launch vehicle in a way that requires these Space Shuttle parts and therefore keeps the factories in their districts in business.
Its more insidious than that -- the Space Shuttle (and the ISS) largely existed to keep money pouring into defense contractors in those districts to maintain the skillset and brain trust around aerospace technologies. NASA would never be allowed to fund a lower-cost, more streamlined system to replace the STS program because the whole reason congress pumps that money into NASA is predicated on "big". Why do you think the NASA mission changed to the Moon and then Mars? As the cost and complexity of systems to get to the moon was coming down, the big project couldn't be justified. Mars had to be the target. If SpaceX actually figures out how to inexpensively get someone to Mars and back -- and starts making any progress at all towards it -- you better believe a manned mission to Jupiter or something will be the next NASA drum being beat.
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."
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.
"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.
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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.
Wrong: NASA is run by flyboys; it is all ex-astronaughts or ex-pilots in management. They have a LONG tradition of stealing money from JPL and planetary missions. That is why Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray started the planetary society--to stop the poaching. The knuckleheads that run NASA cannot seem to understand that piloted missions are obsolete. All the science and good publicity happens through robotic missions. No one cares about the flipping space station and little science is done there except to explore the human-spaceflight themes. Compare that to the publicity / science that the MSL/Curiosity garnered in spite of NASA HQ trying to claim credit. The anniversary celebration of MSL/Curiousity that NASA did was a disgrace. No one from JPL was featured.