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

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

You know what time it is Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

KICKSTARTER TIME!

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: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.