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Can Rep. John Culberson Save NASA's Space Exploration Program?
MarkWhittington writes The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger has published the seventh in his series of articles about the American space program and what ails it. The piece focuses on Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who has two fascinating aspects. The first is that he is taking over the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA funding. The second is that he has a keen appreciation for the benefits of space exploration for its own sake and not just for his Houston area district.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
As a government institution, they are doomed to be plague by inefficiencies that do not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system.
I wish my tax money went to SpaceX!
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Send a probe to Europa, but instead of sending more men to the Moon, do a sample return mission to Mars.
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Or glory?
What's the real mission here? Space exploration is such a loaded term, what does it mean? Do you need to send test pilots in the upper atmosphere? For what? What can they do that can't be done on the ground? Is getting 400 kilometers closer to Andromeda somehow changing anything?
And glory? That's nationalistic flag-waving nonsense. Let's all grow up and set aside the fantasies here.
First, a single person is not supposed to be able to do anything within our Senate or Congress. It takes votes, and a majority must agree with anything this person puts forward for legislation.
Second, nothing is getting done in our Government due to massive cronyism and corruption. Until that is fixed, we will continue to see nothing but garbage come out of our Politicians. Start petitions to put people on ballots and vote _them_ into office. People with high moral character, not career politicians. Outside of an outright revolt or military coup, that is the only hope we have to fix things.
Ballot information is here, and more information is here.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Sending boots to the Moon is mostly engineering, a lot of money, and very little science.
NASA did all the really hard work (the basic design of space rockets). You know, the Basic Science that costs billions and doesn't pay off for decades. You see, private companies are too focused on short term profit generation to basic science. That's why it's done on the public dime.
As for gov't inefficiency: it's a myth brought on by a few high profile pork projects (the US Military comes to mind) and underfunded DMVs. Go to a modern well funded post office some time. They're incredibly efficient. Also, go work in management for a large (private) corporation sometime and tell me again how amazingly efficient they are compared to government.
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2500 hundred years...
yeah....i know i know....
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.
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You have it backwards. There's nothing more useless than putting humans on cold, dead rocks. At least the telescope makes beautiful pictures, and the rovers do a ton of cool science.
NASA also does a bunch of good stuff with Earth observing satellites.
I wonder sometimes.
NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.
NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.
NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.
The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.
All of this in less than fifty years.
You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.
Really, has NASA done that badly?
It's too bad that NASA never invents anything that can be used outside of space travel.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The NSF is the appropriate place to fund science that we hope leads to cool inventions. We don't need NASA for that. That is a nice side benefit. It could never make up for the complete failure in its primary mission.
The human body is a fragile bag of water, not well suited to radiation exposure, temperature extremes,changes in air pressure, high acceleration forces, or long periods of isolation from a sustaining biosphere. Almost anything that can be done in space is better done by robots. The ONLY reason for people to venture into space is to get to the surface of another habitable planet for which we are evolved. And there is only one such place in reach: MARS!
Yes there are good reasons for going to Mars. Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us. We have the technology to colonize Mars now. To make it economical, colonization should be a one-way pioneering trip. Nobody comes back, ever. (I made this suggestion to NASA 17 years ago and was told that NASA does not do suicide missions. Now, many folks at NASA have come around to my point of view. )
Rep. Culberson has not learned the crucial lesson from the demise of the Apollo program... that political motivations for exploring space are not sustainable in the minds of a fickle constituency that wants to be entertained by a list of new "American Firsts in Space". Colonization of Mars requires the serious dedication of the best scientists of Earth to the mission of human survival.
Forget the moon. In terms of the fuel required to reach it on a one-way mission, it is not really much closer than Mars. I has far less to offer as a base for a new sustainable human civilization. (Although I'm sure it would make a nice military base to shoot stuff at Earth). The fact the Rep. Culberson is talking about returning to the moon is the best indication that he is not a serious thinker about why NASA should be involved in human space travel.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
"Look! We built a telescope!" Yeah that's cool but I don't care, we already had telescopes.
The level of dumbassery in that statement is to high, you'd need a NASA rocket to get to the top of it.
Yes, a couple of old lenses and a cardboard tube is a telescope, as is Hubble, but to claim that they are somehow equivalent is just silly. It's like clutching your trusty Z80 and claiming the last 30 years of development are a complete waste because "we alread had computers".
"Hey, we have this permanent space station!" Who cares? Is that another world? No.
Good job that building and operating a space station in orbit tells one nothing about building and operatin one for going between two planets. It's a TOTAL waste of time to find out how things should be done rather than ploughing blindly ahead and hoping for the best.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
But NASA's problem has always been that Congress are full of cheap bastards who'd rather cut taxes $10 Billion then add $10 Billion to NASA's budget. The rest tend to be frivolous bastards who'd much rather fund early childhood education with that $10 Billion then build rockets.
He's going to have some money (at some point the economic growth we've been experiencing will be reflected in a much reduced-deficit, and if Congress was smart they'd use some of that money to fund things like space exploration and infrastructure repair), but with the current laser-like focus of every-goddamn-body on deficit reduction he'll have a devil of a time coming up with $10 Billion in new money without a) cvutting programs Obama Likes (which will get the bill through Congress, but then get it vetoed), or b) not using the money to pay down the deficit (which will make it virtually impossible for the bill to get out of his Subcommittee, and could provoke a veto).
I love the idea of steadily increasing NASA's budget, but how many strings are attached? Getting rid of bureaucratic red tape is a good thing, but handing over full control of NASA to congress? Congress is much of the reason why NASA is in such a bad position, forcing them to use a network of politically located/connected facilities and defense contractors that create a VAST amount of waste and pork spending. Congress should only create objectives, provide the funds and appoint the heads of NASA. Leave the fulfillment of those goals up to NASA within their budget. The Next gen launcher is a perfect example of Congresses meddling, requiring that NASA use the old shuttle contractors ballooned costs by tens of billions of dollars, before they canceled it Constellation was ballooning by closer to a hundred billion.
Frankly, engineering is what we need right now. Science is great, and should be funded, but space *needs* right now is a great big lump of engineering.
Space *needs* nothing of the kind. There's nothing out that could provide a decent return on the huge investments required.
And there is the real prize - hidden in plain sight. He wants to usurp the power of the Executive Branch and arrogate it to Congress. But it's for the children!, er, NASA! and so it slides right by most commenters here.
The hurdles are high, but there's a lot of raw materials and energy out there if we surmount them. Solar energy alone goes from a unreliable power source that's only available for half the day to a steady, ultra-reliable power source of great utility.
We don't even have supersonic passenger flight right here on Earth, and that engineering was solved 40 years ago.
Well, duh. That's because governments banned supersonic overflights of their territory, and left few financially-viable routes that could be flown at high speed.
Supersonic airliners aren't an engineering problem, they're a political problem.
NASA also does a bunch of good stuff with Earth observing satellites.
And JWST is now more than a decade late, and several hundred percent overbudget, sucking up most of the money in the unmanned spaceflight budget.
I know it it's fun to pretend that stuff. Just like some people enjoy pretending that Obama was born in Kenya. It kind of makes you look silly, though.
When a private corporation, or any state agency in any of the 50 states hires you to work THIS YEAR, while promising you'll get paid retirement from 2035-2055, they pay out that money to a 401k or other retirement fund THIS YEAR. Work done in 2014 gets paid for in 2014, with revenues generated in 2014.
Failing to set that money aside , normally in the care of a disinterested third party, is fraud and can send you to prison. That's a significant chunk of the white collar guys in prison- they didn't actually set aside funds in the appropriate accounts for various things, they only pretended to.
The matching principle is a fundamental principle of accounting that you learn in the first few weeks of Accounting 101. You have to match expenses (employee pay) with the revenues they generate (postage collected) . You don't get to collect the benefit now and just say "we'll pay the expenses in 30 or 40 years, long after the current board is gone". You have to recognize the expense in the same period as the revenue it generates. Again, disregarding Generally Accepted Accounting Principles is how suits end up in _prison_.
The US Postal Service is actually very unusual in that they had workers working in 2010, but promised to pay for that work in 2030-2050, using revenue they HOPED to generate in 2030-2050. The problem here is obvious - USPS might not be generating any significant revenue in 2040, so how are they going to pay all of those retired workers they promised to pay? With no money set aside, they won't get paid. That's fraud, and that's why private company officers who try that crap can end up in prison.
So you're basically advocating that USPS should commit felony fraud upon it's workers, by promising to pay them a handsome retirement but making no arrangements to see that they are actually paid.
We have plenty of areas on Earth that are perfect for solar panels. For instance, in the southwest of the US, there is a lot of sunny desert area that would be perfect. It is true that the solar panels in space would perform better, but how are you going to get the power from space to California ? And how much does it cost to launch the solar panels, compared to just setting them up in the desert. For the same price, putting the panels here on Earth is a clear winner. And for the rest of the raw materials in space, it just takes too much. First you have to launch a rocket to go to them, extract them, and send them to Earth. Then you have the problem how to land them safely. And for what ? If you're willing to spend that much energy, you can go after low grade ores on Earth, which we have more than enough.
Oh, sorry, is this the Anti-Space Nutter Nutter again? I didn't realize you were also the Anti-Supersonic AIrliner Nutter.
Just in case you actually believe that, here's a little information about what was actually going on, with an example.
In 2014, I did some work for the state of Texas and the state promised that they'd pay for that work 30-50 years from now, when I'm retired. Just as all public corporations are legally required too, Texas follows Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) , and therefore recognized that expense in 2014. They got the benefit in 2014, so they needed to pay the cost in 2014. That's why Texas has set aside $130 billion dollars, managed by disinterested third parties, to cover the future retirement costs it has already incurred by having us work for them. See http://www.trs.state.tx.us/inf... for details. The key point is that the state already got the benefit of my work, so they already paid it's cost, the retirement they promised I'll get later.
That's called the "matching principle " and is a basic part of GAAP. When corporations fail to follow GAAP, the executives can go to prison. You might wonder why. That's because they've acquired my services by promising that I'll get paid later; if they make no preparations to ensure that I'll actually get paid later that's fraud. Fraud in the billions is felony fraud and sends suits to prison.
What USPS was doing was having people work now, and promising to pay them 30-50 years later, but making no provision to make it possible to actually pay them. They were having employees work in 2000 and HOPING that in 2040 they'd have revenue to pay the promised retirement pay and benefits. Of course USPS might not be making any significant revenue in 2040, so there might not be any way to pay retirement in 2040 for workers who worked in 2000. The workers would be shit of luck, screwed out of the retirement they were promised. That's often considered felony fraud, but it's how the USPS was operating.
Congress figured that felony fraud on the postal workers'was a bad idea, and ordered USPS to do two things. First, they had to start setting aside _some_ money to pay the retirement benefits they had already promised to people who had already done the work. Second, they had to WRITE DOWN A PLAN for the fund to become sound within ~50 years.
They didn't have to follow generally accepted accounting principles yet, but they had to have a plan on how they'd get their shit together within the next 50 years. That's where the "not even born yet" silliness comes from - the idea that USPS has to at least come up with a written plan as to how they won't still be committing the same fraud on their employees 50 years from now, if the USPS still exists in 50 years.
No we don't. We don't anywhere on Earth where a solar panel can collect half the energy a solar panel in space can.
So are you actually claiming that governments didn't block Concorde by banning supersonic overflights, or what?
Hint: that's REALITY. Who paid for those supersonic aircraft is irrelevant, when you're claiming that we can't go into space because we don't have supersonic airline flights. We don't have supersonic airline flights because governments banned them on many of the most profitable routes.
Establishing a colony on the moon makes a great test bed for sending people on to Mars and if anything goes wrong they are three days away from Earth. If anything goes wrong on a Mars trip you are a minimum six months away. You can't even have a video chat in an emergency due to the time lag. And there is science that can be done on the moon. Chris Hadfield thinks that the moon should be our next step into the cosmos instead of Mars and I'm not going to argue with him.
The several hundred kilo 2003 Mars exploration rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) were at the ragged edge of the maximum mass that can be landed with airbags, independent of the shock loads. To go higher, you need rockets for soft landings. MSL/Curiosity is in the 1000kg range.
But the real challenge *today* isn't getting things to the surface. Probably a 50% chance of success on any given launch. It's getting them to land reasonably close to each other. The landing ellipse today is around 5-10km in radius, which greatly restricts where you can land if you want your multiple payloads all retrievable in a reasonable time frame (e.g. you land a "moon rover" type device that an astronaut can drive and fetch them with). No landing in places with too many rocks, or too steep terrain, or too much wind, etc.
The main issue was Concorde wasn't manufactured by Boeing. But the other issue was the 1970s oil crisis which made a lot of things which used a lot of oil uneconomic. Another casualty was the Wankel engine. Heck even military aircraft no longer use turbojet engines because they consume too much fuel.
NASA took "human exploration of space" out of their mission statement about twenty-five years after they abandoned human exploration of space. I think they should have saved everyone the trouble and just stopped trying on the day they closed the Apollo program. We'd have saved a medium amount of money and a metric ton of embarrassment, plus a few astronaut lives.
I have never even heard anyone suggest that the ISS was a stepping-stone to exploration of outer space, much less is there a plausible argument that such a claim could be true.
The IIS a neat toy where a tiny amount of middling science is done. Yeah, okay, I like middling science, but not so much as to have an entire federal program which spends sixty years PRETENDING that it is trying to advance human exploration of space.
NASA started with the right missing: put a living human being onto another world. Then, immediately thereafter and forever hence, it hasn't done jack shit that couldn't be done better by the Navy or the NSF. It is a 100% embarrassment.
"Look! We took these pretty photographs!" What the fuck is NASA now, fucking Instagram? I don't want to spend billions of dollars to get photos of gas clouds. If you're asking me to spend billions of dollars it is to put humans inside of space suits onto rocks other than Earth. There is no other justification for the money.
If you want science, fund NSF.
I personally can list many amazing NASA accomplishments, but only ONE OF THEM couldn't have been done better by the military or by the NSF.
Let's play your game. Tell me the best thing NASA has done, other than put humans on the moon. Pick one example, your best example. Then, before you click "Submit" re-read your comment and ask yourself "so why the heck do we need NASA to do this instead of some other special-purpose government agency such as the Navy or the NSF?"
If you have such an example, and that example sustains that question, then let's talk about it.
The GOP has worked hard to destroy NASA and keep it as a jobs program. They are the ones that screw it up constantly. Even now, they are the bastards that have gutted private space while trying to increase funding for SLS.
And this bastard things that he will SAVE NASA????
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Had he REALLY supported science and NASA, then he would be focused on getting funding out of CONgress's hand. they are the ones that continue to destroy NASA.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
One of the big drivers for MSL and the skycrane landing system was the ability to put more mass in a precise location on the surface of Mars, which is something you kind of need for sample return.
No, you don't need that level of precision. And you could have always worked on getting that precision with the MERs. Six more vehicles gives you plenty of opportunity to improve landing precision.
And the quest for more capability is a common NASA failure mode. What is the point of obtaining costly capabilities you don't use?
I have never even heard anyone suggest that the ISS was a stepping-stone to exploration of outer space, much less is there a plausible argument that such a claim could be true.
I have: operating some kind of habitat in space is deeply non trivial. The ISS has allowed them to learn a lot about that aspect of it.
What the fuck is NASA now, fucking Instagram?
Yes, because a close up photograph of the rings of Saturn is totally equivalent to an iphone photo of a bunch of bearded hipsters, rendered in sepia print.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
And the extra money saved could go to such worthy causes as hiring more lawyers or programs that stimulate banker bonuses?
To many people here the only important thing that we do, apart from keeping things going, is to explore and understand more than we did before. None of this really costs that much compared to other things budget-wise (e.g. about a quarter of NASA's yearly budget is what the Walton's who own Walmart get for sitting on their asses ~$4B USD).
Space is the next frontier. Compare this to the times when sail ships were used to travel vast distances to map far away land masses. You could image people asking why would anyone sail for long times on perilous voyages only to map the southern skies or survey animal & plant populations. Now we enjoy the benefits of this in the Western world and surely we should venture forward again with our surplus prosperity, lest we become lazy and ignorant.
My point is that if we shoved off large ships onto the sea staffed by scarecrows instead of humans, that would have been stupid. The King of Spain didn't pay for large ships to sail the sea; he paid for HUMANS on large ships to sail the sea. I desperately support NASA when it puts human beings into outer space -- something that it has either never done (depending on how far out "outer space" is for you) or hasn't done for fifty years.
NASA doesn't "do" human exploration of space, and human exploration of space is the ONLY mission I support for them. Robots, telescopes, LEO? No, I don't care enough about those things to have NASA as a separate agency. Do those things with the Air Force and the NSF.
operating some kind of habitat in space is deeply non trivial. The ISS has allowed them to learn a lot about that aspect of it.
Yeah, okay, they learned all about that, and then George W. Bush was elected. And then fourteen MORE years went by. We went to the moon in nine years. How long are we going to spend floating around just above the atmosphere pooping into ever-more-expensive toilets? If ISS were a stepping stone to (say) Mars, then we would have been on Mars in 2002. If that is the justification for the ISS, then the ISS is a complete failure.
I have an idea -- add a small excise (sales) tax on electronics and other high-tech good, with that money dedicated to NASA and a few similar agencies, such as NOAA and NIST. Then there would be a guaranteed source of funding for the very important research these agencies do.
Yeah, okay, they learned all about that,
No, they learned a bunch: not everything. There's much more still to learn..
If that is the justification for the ISS
No one claimed it was a stepping stone to mars. It has given vast amounts of research into what it takes to run a long term habitation in space. Given the transit time to mars, that is rather important.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Concorde was a government project, and that is relevant, since it's unlikely that it would have been produced by private industry. The ban on supersonic overflights was because the sonic booms would do a lot of damage, considered more than would be gained by such overflights. However, supersonic travel is only worth it on long routes, since it won't save much time on short ones. The transatlantic business was pretty much ideal for that (I don't think it had the range for transpacific, which would be an even better use), and it couldn't support itself with that.
Which routes do you think would be more profitable?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No amount of ignorant atheist propaganda can change history.
That's funny, that's just what I was going to say about the revisionism rampant in religion. You Christians can't even manage to accurately copy your holy book, while other more competent faiths have been doing it for centuries.
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