Calls For Funding NASA Commercial Crew Grow

MarkWhittington writes: As summer starts to give way to fall and the end of the current fiscal year draws nigh, demands that NASA's commercial crew program be fully funded are being heard with greater frequency and urgency. Astronaut Scott Kelly took time off from his year-long sojourn on the International Space Station to entreat Congress to pony up. IO9 was a little more caustic, stating "Dammit, Congress: Just Buy NASA its Own Space Taxi, Already." Monday, Slate became the latest media outlet to take up the cause

The situation is depressingly familiar to those who have followed the fortunes of the space program since the Apollo moon landings. When President Obama started the commercial crew program in 2010, NASA estimated that it would take a certain amount of money to get government funded and commercially operated spacecraft running by 2015. Then the space agency would no longer be dependent on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.

Congress has decided to allocate less money than NASA feels it needed for commercial crew. This situation is not unusual, as Congress often does this to space projects. However, the politics surrounding the creation of the commercial crew program, which featured the abrupt cancellation of the Constellation space exploration program, has exacerbated the conflict between NASA's will and Congress' won't. President Obama did not consult Congress when he cancelled President Bush's return to the moon program. Congress has displeased ever since.

Comments

Sell NASA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just sell NASA to private investors and rename it Weyland-Yutani Corp.

The Moon program

[khallow]

President Obama did not consult Congress when he cancelled President Bush's return to the moon program. Congress has displeased ever since.

There are three things to observe about the above remark. First, there was no return to the moon program to cancel. Second, Congress cares far more about campaign contributions from Alliant Techsystems, the makers of the Shuttle Rocket Boosters or SRB, who collect considerable revenue from NASA for making an obsolete product. The whole funding cut for NASA's commercial crew program is just an attempt to eliminate competition to the Space Launch System (SLS), a costly boondoggle which is the latest incarnation of the big rocket program.

Third, the article submitter is finally coming around to supporting commercial space. I told you so.

Re:The Moon program

[Required Snark]

Right. It's the Congress critters owned by the United Launch Alliance that are holding up the funding. They would rather give nearly a billion dollars to prop up the Russian space program then let SpaceX get a lead on the current Boeing/Lockheed-Martin (ULA) monopoly.

NASA gave Boeing $4.2 billion for it's CTS-100 crew system, and $2.6 billion to SpaceX for the Dragon. Add in $900 million to the Russians to send US astronauts to the ISS and it's $3 billion extra to make sure that Boeing will remain the incumbent. And don't forget the the CTS-100 has never been launched, while the Dragon has been to the ISS multiple times.

So even though ULA sat on their ass for decades and used Russian motors for their Atlas V they are still the preferred vendor. So if you have enough clout in Congress and every manager in NASA and the Air Force knows they can spend their post-government career in a well paid civilian job at Boeing, you can sleep easy because the government will spend whatever it takes to keep you fat and happy.

No capitalism in sight. It's the insiders giving each other hands jobs. Business as usual.

Re:The Moon program

[Anonymous Coward]

Psssst : SRB == Solid Rocket Booster

Re:The Moon program

[khallow]

Hence, why I mentioned the full name first and then the acronym. It's like saying For What It's Worth or FWIW.

Re:The Moon program

[jez9999]

First, there was no return to the moon program to cancel.

Wait, what? And the Constellation program sounds like a much better idea than pissing away money on a manned mission to Mars, anyway - a permanent Lunar colony? Much cooler idea and when expanded could even lead (ultimately) to tourism of the moon.

Re:The Moon program

[khallow]

Sorry, I see now. Brain wasn't working.

Re:The Moon program

[khallow]

Sorry, I wasn't thinking.

Re:The Moon program

[khallow]

Constellation didn't allocate money for any sort of lunar activities. It never got to the point where that would matter. It was only words then and only words now.

We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[sethstorm]

Perhaps it might have been a bit too hasty to kill off the Shuttle & friends since it means we have to hitch a ride with the Russians.

At least it would make sense instead of waiting for a dressed up Apollo II craft.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[Michael Woodhams]

For the cost of one shuttle launch you could more than pay for SpaceX's entire development program so far. For two launches you could pay for their development so far plus the extra they'll need to finish the Dragon capsule and "man-rate" the system, and still have some money left over for a couple of launches (each of which can carry as many crew as the shuttle.)

(I'm taking the cost of a shuttle launch as about $1.5B. Lower values can be argued for, adjust the above as needed for your preferred cost.)

For a few more shuttle launches and a several year wait, Blue Origins would likely be able to field a man-rated rocket, if you want multiple space taxi companies to chose from. ULA could do it too, but that would probably cost you ten shuttle launches.

The shuttle was hideously expensive and needed to go.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[khallow]

They have a current budget of over $18 billion. They're currently paying SpaceX around $133 million a launch. That comes to somewhere around 130-140 launches a year that NASA could buy from SpaceX. So they "can't launch"? They're just not paying the right people to launch.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[khallow]

No, a really good time to kill the Shuttle would have been in 1990 when it was well determined that the Shuttle couldn't ever achieve its design goals and had lost most of its customers (DOD, commercial). $100 billion is a lot of money for some people.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with co-operation? The Russians are also equally dependent on Western tech in many of their systems and will be for as long as there is anything even remotely resembling a space program. When big economies are intertwined and dependent on each others, I see this as a calming factor in todays turbulent political atmosphere.

The problem is Tzar Putin bub! You are essentially dealing with a criminal element that runs Russia now and eventually it will bight the US in the ass. We would not have this problem if the Russian people did not love dictators and if the criminal elements had not put a dictator in power. The truth is in Russia you either say you support Putin or you are a traitor in the eyes of the criminals that run the place. It is getting scary and we need to cool off out relationship with them for the time being until they wake up again and boot out the current group of upper class Pridvorni! "the rich aristocrats that run things"!!!! The self proclaimed aristocracy that also dictates public policies and the electoral choices.

What is a really spooky fact about Russian history is that Rasputin predicted that if the aristocrats killed him then the Tzar and his family would not survive! The guy was spooky as hell in regards to his foresight he even stated that Russia would again return to a Tzar and that Tzar again would kill those who did not agree with him and that this cycle would continue on for many centuries! Rasputin was strange but his predictions were spot on! Tzar Putin gives me the willies because he is supper popular and acts very much the same way Nicholas the Second did!

No aligning Nasa, a democratically run program with the Russian space program will have to wait until Russia goes through another set of reforms that make it so a corrupt dictator and government comes to an end in Russia. Nasa got us to the moon because it was democratic by and large and the people approved of it and we need to desperately get this trust and pride back in the Good ol' US and even in Canada and everywhere that democracy and the meaningful progress that Nasa represented is cherished!

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What's wrong with co-operation?

Proton explosions? Fobos-Grunt not even leaving LEO? Nauka being ten years late to the game? It's like in school, if you have to be paired up with someone for some activity, there will always be people who perhaps wouldn't be your first choice unless your teacher or circumstances forced you.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Technically, they're paying "around $133 million" for a spacecraft in orbit plus services, not for a launch.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[Rei]

Yep, the safety records of Russian systems are not very pretty, particularly in recent years where the whole program keeps going downhill. They've not killed anyone onboard recently, but that's pure luck - they've had plenty of accidents with unmanned Soyuz that could easily have killed the crew, many onboard near-incidents which could have killed the crew, plenty of crew injuries, and the death of ground crew. And the sort of faults they're getting are just humiliating - forget things like "didn't realize that we lost O-ring redundancy at temperatures below 40F", the sort of errors the Russians have been making are along the lines of "installed a sensor upside down and repeatedly whacked it with a big hammer to make it fit" (actual failure cause). And their management is just absurd. After one accident that could have killed the crew on return, they responded by superstitiously banning two women from being on the same spacecraft. "This isn't discrimination. I'm just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behaviour or something else occurs, that's what I'm talking about.'' (the article incorrectly states that the crew was "unharmed", the initial Russian statement, but one of the astronauts had to be hospitalized due to a compressed spinal column)

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

forget things like "didn't realize that we lost O-ring redundancy at temperatures below 40F",

Well, the engineers did realize that, this was just MBAs (or their cousins) killing people as usual. Meanwhile Proton has been flying for decades with a design flaw.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[Rei]

The problem was that the wrong people realized it. There was a report at Thiokol on the tests that had been suggestive that at such low temperatures the O-rings provided no failure redundancy like they did at warmer temperatures due to the slow "extrusion" time, but the Thiokol people arguing with NASA to delay the launch were unaware of it, and so all they could express was "concerns" that a double O-ring failure might be a risk in those conditions.

There was also a problem with the inadvertent misuse of statistics. One of the elements used to argue for the launch was a graph of O-ring failures vs. temperature which showed no strong trend. However, the graph had only failures on it, not successes. When you add the successes into the chart you can see that the overwhelming majority of launches at warm temperatures had no O-ring failures, while every last low-temperature launch had at least one failure - and STS-51-L was off the chart even colder.

More to the point, the launch also wasn't stupid just from the point of the SRB O-rings, but also because of the risk of ice strike on the orbiter... it was a really awful decision in general, opposed by an awful lot of people. But a lot of it came down to whole chains of people not asserting themselves enough with a good enough case to cause the momentum to stop. Engineers at Rockwell and Thiokol tried to get their managers to stop things, the managers tried to get their representatives at NASA to stop things, the representatives tried to stop the launch... but each time the level of urgency got watered down, and so the people at the top really never got a sense of how strongly the lower-down people felt that the launch should not go on as planned. There never was a manager who was told by a bunch of his people, "You have to stop, it's too dangerous!" responded "Screw you guys, I'm going ahead with it anyway". It was just a lot of people being told "Well, we're rather uncomfortable with this..." but not being given a persuasive enough argument to take to the higher-ups. NASA knows that there is always an element of risk with each launch, and that if they don't accept any risk, they'll never launch anything. But the people making the call never did get same sense of how high the risk was that the engineers had.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[deadweight]

I was there near the launch site that morning. I was freezing my balls off! My Florida adapted body was not ready for below freezing temps and it didn't get much warmer after the sun was up.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[Anonymous Coward]

The shuttle itself wasn't all that expensive to launch, I think some estimates put it at somewhere in the $200 million area for the ET, SRBs, fuel & labor. The $1.5 billion per launch was with all of the garbage that was attached to the shuttle because it was seen as a "can't fail" program. Things like grounds/building maintenance of most of Cape Canaveral , extensive wildlife programs, R&D of anything that got within a mile of the shuttle complex & a litany of research facilities spread throughout the country (see influential congressional districts). Not saying that some of the extra costs shouldn't have been attached to the program (some grounds, some R&D, etc) but the amount that was attached was beyond ridiculous. Sadly its becoming quite apparent that the same is happening with SLS, I have a feeling that by the time they slip the various line items into its budget and factor in the R&D its going to be more than $3.75 Billion per launch or more for SLS. And under most plans the only thing we'll get back from each of those launches is a closet, at least with the shuttle program we got back an orbiter and whatever they could bring down in its bay.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[R3d M3rcury]

Not really.

The Space Shuttle was awesome, but it was 10x more than we need and 10x more expensive to operate. If all we're doing is supplying crew, it's probably better to have a less expensive way to do it.

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[R3d M3rcury]

That's an important note, also, and had to do with the structure of the contracts.

One of the ideas with the Space Shuttle was that there would always be a shuttle launch going on and contracts were designed accordingly. In 1985, there were 9 shuttle launches and during the height of the program there were 6-8 launches a year. So the costs of the staff to handle the shuttle from landing to loading to launch was a fixed cost. The fewer number of launches, the more each launch cost.

You know what time it is Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

KICKSTARTER TIME!

NASA should spend its money wisely

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the space programs on Planet Earth today, India's space program is the cheapest. For example, India's MARS mission carries a price tag of $74 million

NASA should spend its money very wisely

In other words, by outsource everything to India NASA will get the loudest " BANG!! " for every single of its freaking buck

Re:NASA should spend its money wisely

[K. S. Kyosuke]

...and you get what you pay for, a small technological experiment with little useful payload. Also, with about eight times cheaper aerospace engineers, many things are possible, so pointing to India and saying "do it for the same money" is ridiculous.

Re:NASA should spend its money wisely

[Thing 1]

Outsourcing it to Hollywood would get even more bang for the buck. And would at least be more truthful.

NASA never made it to the moon. The moon is a semi-transparent disc; at times, one can see stars through the dark portion of the moon (e.g., when it's half, or when new). This would not be possible if the moon were a globe; hence, the moon is not a globe that we can visit.

In addition, moonlight has different properties than sunlight, proving that it's not "reflected sunlight". In sunlight, things are warmer than they are in the shade. In moonlight, it's actually warmer in the shade! You can test this in a couple days, the moon will be full. I did last full moon, and intent to again with this one, taking a video this time.

Re:NASA should spend its money wisely

[werepants]

I can't tell if you are a brilliant and committed troll or if you really believe this stuff. How do you explain a solar eclipse? If the moon is transparent enough to allow very weak starlight through, there's no way it could eclipse the sun.

Re:NASA should spend its money wisely

[werepants]

I appreciate your apparent sincerity, but why doesn't Occam's razor immediately cause you to dismiss all this? What is easier to believe: that there's an incredibly well organized collusion between otherwise non-cooperative government entities in order to propagate an extensive disinformation campaign for no good reason, OR, that all the scientists, aerospace engineers, and travelers are just being honest about the earth and space?

Space isn't easy, but the technical challenges it presents are much easier to pull off than the kind of conspiracy you suggest. And, for what it's worth, I've personally worked on a sounding rocket experiment that went to space and took pictures in which the curvature of the Earth is very prominent, and I'm good friends with a guy who spent quite a while doing research in Antarctica.

Re:NASA should spend its money wisely

[Thing 1]

Antarctica is the clincher, for me. Admiral Byrd reported in the late 50s that there were a ton of resources there -- coal, oil, uranium, in vast expanses of mountain ranges.

So, why was the Antarctica Treaty then signed a few years later, barring any non-military expeditions? And at the same time, the US and Russian began throwing nuclear bombs into the sky -- to test the strength of the firmament?

You would think, in the intervening 60 years, that Shell, Exxon, BP, et al would have rigs down there, pumping resources out in order to enrich themselves.

That they're not there, is telling.

Whenever something is "classified", one can know that a conspiracy is happening. The definition of conspiracy is two or more people acting, with one or more people not knowing. Surprise parties, and the mafia, are evidence of conspiracies. (They don't always have to be negative, e.g., surprise party.)

I don't have all the answers, but I am learning about the proper shape of the world and my place in it.

The recent Red Bull dive, from 120,000 feet, briefly showed a flat horizon in the quick image from inside the capsule. Then all the images from outside the capsule were with GoPro cameras with wide angle lenses; the horizon is sometimes concave, sometimes flat, and sometimes convex, so can't be used to determine the shape (unless run through a filter which fixed the wide angle).

The horizon always rises to eye (or camera) level, even from that brief shot inside the Red Bull capsule. If the Earth were a globe, one should need to look down at the Earth as one rises.

One can see Chicago from 50 miles across Lake Michigan. At 50 miles, based on the astronomers' calculations for the curvature, it should be 50 * 50 * 8 inches below the horizon, or 20,000 inches, which is 1,666 feet (the Mason astronomers love to put 666 in their calculations [1]), and the tallest building in Chicago is the Sears Tower, rising 1,451 feet, so even that building shouldn't be visible. But the entire skyline was, and was not hazy/wavy like a mirage would have been (that weatherman couldn't keep a straight face, he knew he was fibbing).

[1] -- The tilt of the Earth is 23.4 degrees, they said. Sounds innocuous, yes, until one subtracts the angle from 90 degrees -- then, one gets 66.6 degrees.

Re:NASA should spend its money wisely

[Thing 1]

I realized I didn't answer your question. We can see things in the distance that should be obscured, if the curvature is accurate.

Thus, this tells me that the curvature equations are wrong. Occam's Razor thus tells me that through simple experimentation (as opposed to "trusting experts") I can see for myself that water is flat and level. Once I know that fact, I can deduce that people who promote the global Earth theory are lying, plain and simple, whether they know it or not. (Many of us are their "useful idiots"; until 2 months ago, I would have responded as you did as well.) It's possible that it's still curved, just it's much larger than they think, which would be the reason we can see so far -- but even that is still speculation, as through observation I can prove water to be level, but I can't prove it to curve, upwards or downwards.

My investigation proceeded from there. Antarctica is really bizarre. Flights don't go over it either, although on my globe, a string placed from southern South America to southern Australia shows that it would be the shortest distance, if the globe model were correct. But instead, they make stops in northern latitudes on their way. This makes sense on a flat Earth map, as the shortest distance from southern South America to southern Australia actually goes over the center of the map (the "North pole").

I believe you when you say you worked on a rocket. But, and this is a serious question: did you ride the rocket? Or did you only receive images on a screen? (Similarly, have you watched the 1977 movie Capricorn One, about faking a mission to Mars?)

Re:Space taxis are for cows.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Me, I'm proud to be spherical. What about you?

Re:Pres Obama created this fight and wants it

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Obama killed Constellation because Sally Ride et al. told him it was a piece of shit. And a piece of shit it was indeed.

Re:And again, the Germans did it first

[prefec2]

Beside the "music", the yellow thingy looks quite nice and over engineered. Definitely a German product. ;-)

Re:Space taxis are for cows.

[Talderas]

I'm a potato. How are you?

just give them a mandate and a budget

[Thud457]

As long as NASA is seen be some in Congress as a way to funnel pork to Utah and Alabama, we're talking nothing but wasted effort.

Re:just give them a mandate and a budget

[Nethemas the Great]

They get lots of mandates from congress. Trouble is they tend change their mind faster than systems engineering development cycles. Then they get a requirement to integrate a boat trolling motor onto the first stage booster. Later a camper van must be retrofitted and attached to serve as crew quarters. After finally convincing Congress that the trolling motor requirement is making it hard to engineer the booster to meet mission objectives, Congress redirects them to swap the trolling motor for a 750HP outboard motor. Finally after protracted struggles to engineer the booster they come close to cracking the nut only to find the project shut down for lack of progress. This time its replacement will be required to have four outboard motors and two camper vans.

Re:How About We Scale Back Manned Space Program?

[Applehu Akbar]

I would be really happy to see manned space programs go private, if for no other reason that any meaningful next steps in manned spaceflight will have to involve very high personal risk to crews. No government, especially ours given current politics, is ready to assume such risk, even if it were to lavish funds on such projects.

So let Thiel, et. al. go up there with their own money and with their own motivations, and reap whatever rewards there may be. Just let us not hear any future whining from you people along the lines of "Now they're strip-mining Pallas!"

Re:Citizen's Dividend first

[Coren22]

17% dividend of what? 17% of the GDP/person? Where would the money come from?

Re:And again, the Germans did it first

[Opportunist]

Hey, show a little respect! That was from one of the most successful German movies, and the song made it to #2 of the German charts.

And yes, you're fully justified to wonder.

Re:How About We Scale Back Manned Space Program?

[Nethemas the Great]

Perhaps you forget that the exploration and trade conducted via those big dumb old boats a few centuries ago were government funded efforts. ROI on new frontier ventures often requires timelines too extended for justifiable commercial pursuit.

"displeased", indeed

[SpammersAreScum]

"Congress has displeased ever since." Yes, it certainly has, and not just on NASA funding.

CONgress was NOT displeased

[WindBourne]

The GOP, esp. the neo-con elements, are the ones working hard to kill off private space. IOW, it is a small faction of CONgress, and to be fair, it is a small CONTROLLING faction of the GOP that is really causing this.
What I find interesting is that the neo-cons like Shelby, coffman, etc would rather pay Putin MULTIPLE BILLIONS, than pay American private space, 1 Billion. It speaks volumes about the GOP.

Re:Pres Obama created this fight and wants it

[WindBourne]

LOL.
They flew a 4 segment SRB, and found many many issues with it.
In addition, it was obvious that there were so many flaws on this that it was going to require massive changes, and the NEXT flight, would not occur until 2017 (and some said, 2018).

That is why it was killed.