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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!
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".
Lacks nuance.
There's no business case for Mars sample return, for instance.
The private sector certainly produces services that could be useful running such a mission. And by this, I mean rather than designing a massive white elephant in-house, contracting out the manufacturing, and operating it in-house -- instead, line up multiple bidders for a contract to get "x" amount of payload into "y" orbit. That's effectively what's already happening with access to LEO, and I'm sure this approach will be vindicated.
The government provides the mission and funding, the private sector does what it does best.
The ONLY exception to this, is where the private sector is completely incapable of doing something economically, like super-heavy lift and expensive deep-space vehicles.
Like it or not, NASA are broadly on the right track. Unfortunately, with sequestration and what not, the money isn't going to be around to build and operate SLS.
The choice is very simple -- if the private sector can't "cut it" (as is the case with the missions the SLS is meant for), NASA needs the cash to do the work itself.
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 government provides the mission and funding, the private sector does what it does best.
Bribe senators & congressmen for contracts, inflate the costs to double or triple original estimates, deliver 20 years after spec while milking every dollar they can from the government? So, you want to turn NASA into the Defense Industry II?
We can burn DT which is 100x easier, so its not useful as a fuel. Its also very rare, at between 1ppb to 50ppb, so even if you could burn it you need a mining operation bigger than anything on earth just for a power station. Oh and if you can burn 3He then you can burn DD, which produces 3He.
3He is not a reason to go to the moon. Its proof that even proponents can't come up with a good reason to go there at all.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The government provides the mission and funding, the private sector does what it does best.
Bribe senators & congressmen for contracts, inflate the costs to double or triple original estimates, deliver 20 years after spec while milking every dollar they can from the government? So, you want to turn NASA into the Defense Industry II?
At least the defense industry gets a workable budget.
2013 Estimated NASA budget : $17,000,000,000 - http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/632697main_NASA_FY13_Budget_Summary-508.pdf
Estimated cost of one year of the afghan war: $109,500,000,000 - http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gNQ3JbWwd6t-PzkuECkRJvsAlNkA
FY 2013 Intelligence Budget: $52,000,000,000 - http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/inside-the-2013-us-intelligence-black-budget/420/
DHS 2013 Budget: $54,807,277,000 - http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/mgmt/dhs-budget-in-brief-fy2013.pdf
We spend about 3 times as much on intel and spying on our own citizens than space research and capability
When you add in DHS it is 6 times.
A year of one war is almost 9 times the NASA budget.
This does not include all the other crazy defense spending. Even if NASA were completely axed today, it would not take even a tiny dent out of our national deficit. Cutting 'unnecessary' NASA spending is just a way to please ill-informed constituents, and make it look like our elected legislators are working to reign in spending. They are NOT.
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
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
That is kind of how it works now for every government project but the bribes are jobs. If you look at any big project like the Shuttle, Apollo, or just about anything they will all have a map showing all the places that will get jobs from the project. Why do you think the big aerospace companies build things in California? About the only Aerospace company that is not located in a big state was Boeing but they are moving their headquarters to Chicago.
Take the top five states by population and look at the companies that are located there or the NASA presence there.
California
Texas
New York
Florida
Illinois
Votes are are power and you need to spread around the jobs. Even SpaceX is in both California and Texas.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"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.
You realize that the rockets and the moon landers were built with government, i.e., NASA, money, don't you? Do you think Rockwell, Boeing, North American, Grumman, or the myriad other contractors would have built the things they did without the fire hose of money coming from Kennedy's space program? There certainly were things built that had other, commercial use that might have been funded and built anyway, maybe, but most of that technology had a single purpose and probably would never have be funded internally.