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Commercial Space Crew Supporters Posit a Conspiracy Theory Involving Funding Shortages
MarkWhittington writes: The Space Access Society, a group that advocates for government funded, commercially operated spacecraft, examined the annual fight between supporters of the heavy lift Space Launch System and supporters of the commercial crew program in a recent communique. In the view of the SAS and other commercial crew supporters, Congress, on the behalf of the big rocket supporters, has been shorting funding for the commercial crew spacecraft in favor of the SLS. On the surface there seems to be no reason for this, as the two undertake different missions. The Space Access Society posits a conspiracy theory so immense that at first glance would seem to be in the same class as the Apollo moonlanding hoax, The SAS accuses Space Launch System supporters of trying to arrange the premature end of the International Space Station to free up funding for the big rocket and related projects.
I suppose you could call it a 'conspiracy' since there are people clearly conspiring to get the priorities they feel important funded. Most people would call it 'politics as usual'. And yes, the recipe calls for pork, lots and lots of it. Not very healthy, but very tasty. Humans will typically go for what tastes good, not what is good for you.
Whatever the hell that is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The SLS exists to give pork to established NASA contractors. SpaceX is trying to get stuff into space cheaply.
SpaceX is centralized in a few districts so it gets relatively little support. On the other hand, the SLS has pork divided up over the whole country. Thus, if you are a politician, and want pork, you want to support the SLS. The fact that the SLS makes no scientific or financial sense whatsoever, does not factor into the decision to vote against SpaceX. To bring pork to your district, SLS is the correct program.
Unfortunately, SLS has went the way of many of the more recent military purchase programs. Yes, the F-35 can be built, but why? Yes the SLS can be built, but is this really the best way? do we really need it? Given SpaceX's development trajectory, will the SLS ever be needed? Really needed?
Its not a conspiracy, its fact. More than a few congress critters don't like ISS and would like to see it die. The whole touchy feely aspect of nations cooperating instead of constantly stabbing each other in the backs is probably point one. There are also more reasonable cost aspects, ISS has been extremely expensive, far more expensive than it had to be to accommodate so may disparate nations designs. Still others probably think SLS is some big, sexy spaceship that will take us to far more interesting places, ignoring the fact that it will probably only do so for a short time because of the massive costs and little if any returns. Only then do you get into the fraud/pork drives from congress members in districts that will see money & prestige from building parts for the "new rocket ship".
"It's the public republican stance/platform that all science and technology should be defunded in favor of creationism and weapon-capable vehicles like the heavy rockets"
No, it's the Democrat position that all science and technology should be defunded because man's hubris white privilege respect for the Hawaiian volcano gods.
President Obama is the one who created this fight and has been using it politically.
In every single year since his 2010 NASA budget proposal advocated killing-off the bi-partisan Constellation program with no planned replacement, the President has fought a money game with congress over NASA. Each year he simultaneously claims he has too much money for the project congress wants to fund (SLS) and he tries all sorts of bureaucratic slight-of-hand to shift money from SLS/Orion to Commercial Crew. In each year he also slowly slips the SLS schedule and blames the slippage on Orion's service module (which he farmed-out to Europe because he said we could not afford to build it in the US) or slow progress on required infrastructure (which he also blames on funding). This REALLY angers a bunch of people in congress. When Obama has been offered the option of fully-funding both programs, which would bust a budget cap, he refuses to do this unless congress lets him bust the caps across the entire budget (something he knows will never happen).
Obama's supporters then use this fight to attack congress and some even claim congress is opposing him on this because he is black. This fight benefits him politically and he is the one who created it (by unilaterally cancelling Constellation and, after many months of congressional anger, producing a non-plan as his NASA plan) and he's the one driving the fight with a seemingly unending list of attempt to shift money congress mandated BY LAW for SLS into Commercial Crew without the legal authority to do it.
Who cares (in the US) is exactly right, the space program or rather what is left of it is in the condition it is for two reasons.
1. The Federal Reserve System. The mob getting taken by better crooks than they were in 1944, the banksters.
2. Loss of the JFK space program in 1964 with CIA SR/OXCART being breached and development being subsequently cancelled over an underground river plug under Virginia City, NV and the theft of around 5 million which was for the prototype SR-71 imaging sensors. Could have had mach 20 space capable fighter jets by now, international colony, helium 3 mining operation, In-and-Out Burger and a Radisson complete with hookers on the moon and no doubt set foot on Mars by now.
The only thing still running is the X-37b which is based on the Space Shuttle technology so we already know where that will end up. A space program in the US is a lost cause...
I shared this exact same view just a few years ago. But as I've been watching the International Space Station crews and their broadcasts, I took more of an interest in the latest space exploration developments.
As it turns out, many companies have come to believe that it is going to be relatively easy to reach out and grab asteroids and mine them, and to mine resources from other bodies such as moons and planets in our solar system.
There is actually a lot of matter in space. Perhaps not relative to the vast emptiness of space itself, no, but compared to the resources we are constrained to here on Earth there is a lot more waiting for us "out there". And many scientists and corporate leaders are now convinced that those resources represent a significant return on investment.
Which is actually great news for the rest of us who are stuck on Earth. If one of our greatest concerns for the future of humanity is the potential for sudden escalation of consumption and therefore scarcity of resources (spoiler: it is), then one of the best things we can do is spent x*y*z of those resources and get ax*by*cz back (where x, y, z are resources and a, b, c are scalars greater than 1), where "back" means "back here on Earth where they can be used".
I spent a number of years telling people we should defund NASA and that the last thing we should attempt is some expensive, far-out journey to putting astronauts uselessness and senselessly on the surface of Mars. I've since changed my mind and if anything is obvious it's that space mining operations are going to be an inevitable part of our relatively near future.
I think our concerns and bickering, now, and the energy we put behind those, should be directed at concern for our welfare and well-being in our imminent space-mining future. Already, we're seeing trends where whomever can achieve some progress on the corporate mission to mine space is congratulated, no matter what the invisible costs. Case in point, India being congratulated on very cheaply getting a satellite into orbit -- in American newspapers. How many Americans reading those newspapers recalled having their jobs outsourced to India? How many reading those newspapers laughed because it's easy to keep things cheap in a country where most people don't have clean water and 3/5 of the country don't enjoy what are considered basic human rights?
If we don't watch closely what's happening and get with the program, we'll just get squashed, all but manacled and forced into "one-way-ticket" space programs where we spend months stranded on drifting asteroids waiting for the cargo pick-up to arrive.
If you don't think it's a grim future think again. Everything about space travel has its closest analog in seafaring. And seafaring is a horrible occupation under any but the most disciplined forms of organization. And corporate bottom lines are not very good examples by which to discipline an organization.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee