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NASA's Bolden Claims NASA Is 'Doomed' Unless It Stays the Course To Mars (spacenews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: According to a story in Space News, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made a speech at the Center for American Progress in which he declared that if the next president deviated from the Journey to Mars program, the space agency would be "doomed." The point he was making, that programs of that nature, have to have consistent support over several presidencies and congresses, was a valid one. The point was equally valid in 2010 when President Obama abruptly and without warning canceled the Constellation space exploration program. Bolden, however, had a ready answer for that, which may not be convincing on close examination.
It's an unfortunate byproduct of our electoral system that most government departments have trouble seeing beyond the 4 year election cycle, because a whole new group of people could be in power by then and completely reverse the direction they've been taking for this time.
This problem is amplified in the United States, it seems. Countries like Canada, Australia, most of the EU don't have this problem; the political parties are often quite similar in terms of their policies, differing usually only in name and a few minor things.
It's hard to think of a solution that might help the US situation, apart from an agreement between the two major parties that, for major undertakings like the mission to Mars, if the other assumes power then it will continue.
Of course, every politician and their dog will want conditions on that; riders, perks, kick-backs, etc. It's hard to see how it could actually work in practice.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Time for NASA to start a line of "Mars or Bust!" merchandises; anytime a federally funded agency work to pay its own way is a Good Thing (tm) I am sure the both houses of current congress agrees...
I blame most of the destination argument on the creation of the Mars underground in the 1980's. Prior to that NASA was focused on using the Shuttle for industrialization in LEO with projects like demonstrating the repair and return of satellites, building structural items in orbit, tethers, etc., all logical starting points for building a Cislunar industrial capability that would have given us the Solar System. NASA didn't even have plans to send robots to Mars. By advocating that we needed to skip the Moon and go rushing off to Mars they started this entire useless destination debate that has paralyzed space policy ever since.
Although their arguments made no rational or economic sense, falling back on outdated ideas like "manifest destiny" and painting Mars like a second Earth, they struck some cord among a very vocal hard core group that has shouted down any rational space strategy ever since. We see it now with Senators force feeding the SLS with money it doesn't need while starving commercial crew because the SLS would, in theory, be able to take astronauts to Mars. As a result the ISS is only one Soyuz failure away from being abandoned.
We need to give Mars a rest and once again spend the limited budget on building capabilities in space, space tugs, orbital refueling, lunar LOX, that would serve for going to all the interesting destinations beyond Earth, not keep wasting money on plans to go to a single one that is already well mapped and explored.
end quote
mfwright@batnet.com
Once NASA was a driven motivated organisation that excelled at achieving its goals, worked with external entities and well and achieved impressively.
Long has it lived on the reputation it earnt then, however..
Times have long since changed. It has become a bureaucratic slow moving monolith that fights for total control of everything it can get its hands on, participates happily in pork barrel politics, and appears to primarily exist to build its own empire where possible. It is permanently decrying its lack of funding, while playing silly PR games (do we really need the publics input on the best fashion design for spacesuits) and doing exactly NOTHING to address its massive internal inefficiency, bureaucracy and waste.
Of course this is not really surprising - most organisations of that size, when funded as deeply and not always given clear targets will degenerate in this way, however it is sad to see.
It is rather sad of course, because it was such a powerhouse of innovation in its heyday, and IMHO space exploration and research is very important.
I know that some people with howl and gnash their teeth and anyone daring to state the obvious, because they only want to see NASA through the glasses of times past, but that is not a way to move forward.
...of manned space exploration. It's time to get over that notion and concentrate on building scientific missions like rovers and probes and relay stations and fuel depots. All of the gains in understanding the solar system since Apollo ended have been made by unmanned missions.
Let NASA die and start a new, more focused agency.
Back in the time of the Apollo program, NASA was very popular. Today the Moon is been there, done that. Mars rovers? We currently have G3 roving around. G4 isn't going to generate tons of excitement. But going to Mars? To put, since it's NASA, good ol' American Boots on the soil of another planet? To be the first to have Real American Heroes planting the Stars and Stripes on the Red Planet broadcast "live" to a worldwide TV and streaming audience? That's going to generate a hype we haven't seen since, indeed, Apollo. Without sending Americans to Mars, NASA will only be of significance to the science community, with the associated budgets appropriate for that role.
What NASA can learn from the Mars One project is their idea to use tv coverage for funding. Set up a consortium of broadcast partners from around the world and negotiate. No need to give everything away for free.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Do you think IASA will let me hitchhike with them?
Bolden has a point that NASA needs a high-profile, long-term goal.
Whether Mars is the best option for that goal (probably not) is a completely different issue.
Race and IQ, perhaps?
Well, your post does make me start to think there might be a link...
The Germans say: "Totgesagte leben länger", in English there's life in the old dog yet (or, to misquote Twain: "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"). Are there things wrong at NASA? Of course, you can read that on /. at least once every month and range from being a giant bureaucracy to being politicized (rotten) to the bone.
Maybe you are right. Maybe NASA it its current form should die, so a New NASA can rise like a phoenix from its own ashes. Leaner, meaner, and a-political. But that's just a dream. Senator X from Y needs to make sure the industry in Y gets part of the pie, so does Congressman M from N for N's industry.
But the main point is: NASA needs to find something the American people can rally behind. That's Mars. Whether that takes us to the Moon first, and Phobos second, and Mars third doesn't matter. Whether it takes us until 2050 to set up all the infrastructure, digging the underground habitats, having the drones/rovers collect and move enough ice/water doesn't matter as long as there are defined waypoints with successes, a new Moon landing, a Phobos landing, etc. But you can't get the big budget if you're not with the popular crowd in the average American's mind.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Sorry, but we need 100 new state-of-the-art stealth bombers. Victory is Life!
I'm not against human presence in space : it would be good to create a space economy beyond LEO, even just for species survival.
However, I see hardly any work being done in this direction : the first step would be understanding and building closed systems (aka Biosphere) that would allow us to stay in space. We do not know how to do that and the ISS is far from a closed system as it completely depends on Earth for supplies.
Once that step is perfected, you could literally go anywhere in the solar system.
Instead we have these stunts like putting people on Mars : they might go there, take a few photos,get a few rocks, get back and that's all.
Consider this :
1) Robots can do this already and by 2030-40s when we might send people they will be MUCH better than now at the same cost.
2) If you are interested in the science of Mars, sending people is VERY inefficient. The greatest part of the money spent is actually to get people there, keeping them alive and returning them, only a small fraction for science. With a cost of $100-450B, just imagine, if Mars science was your objective, what could be achieved with the same money: sample returns ($6B each), rovers everywhere ($2B each), robots digging , experiments, etc. etc. Not to mention exploring other interesting location in the solar system like Europa, Enceladus and Titan.
Instead of a few people in ONE small location, limited to the little science possible after most of the money has been spent to send them there.
All to satisfy some romantic feeling and not advancing humans in space either.
Lots of brilliant scientists and engineers there wasting their time planning projects that will never be funded.
Unlike NASA's mission to the moon, there are non-government entities that are now funding missions to Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.space.com/28215-elo...
NASA could focus on actual Science, like sending unmanned missions into space and collecting data, as opposed to manned missions. This seems like a much more cost-benefit way to spend taxpayer money. Let the private companies fund the projects with questionable value.
Head of Major Organization declares that current strategy is of Cosmic Import and No Other Path to Success is Possible!
The usual outcome to this situation is that the head of the major organization is replaced. Suddenly all sorts of other possibilities, including multiple alternative strategies, are discovered and enthusiastically promoted.
Eventually the head of the Major Organization selects one of those strategies is the One And Only strategy...
There are higher priorities like restoring the Constitution as the centrepiece of the law of the land. Until there is a massive purge of the government we are slaves in the cotton fields of the master's plantations.
We are not in a "Dark Age" (typical Space Nutter melodrama) of anything. Vannevar Bush knew manned "space exploration" is a stunt at best, and he knew that before Sputnik.
It makes no sense, Star Trek is fiction, and all that Space Age garbage was just so much fantasy.
We are in a Dark Age of manned space travel
And nothing of value was lost.
scored it all the way down to -1 probably hoping that will keep most people from reading it - yet was utterly unable to refute the content.
Bolden is saying "Don't do what we did".
I'm all for Freedom... what I don't like is lack of responsibility.
In my country this guy would be already charged with a crime; in the USA, apparently, you can be free to slander anyone.
Great place.
That's certainly true. Mars isn't in the top three priorities for NASA under the current administration. Mr. Bolden (the head of NASA), said these are the three things Obama asked him to do with NASA:
When I became the Nasa administrator, he [Obama] charged me with three things.
One, he wanted me to help reinspire children to want to get into science and math;
he wanted me to expand our international relationships;
and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good
Ooooohh, that's heresy around here. Prepare for flames, and heart-felt nerd outrage.
What would be doomed is his vision of what NASA should be doing ten to twenty years out. At present manned exploration of Mars is not even big enough to warrant a line item in NASA's 2016 budget request, which means it's not a big part of what NASA is doing now. Mars exploration *is*, though, with 412 million requested to do serious and productive science.
You know what *would* doom NASA? Gutting its Earth and planetary research to fund an astronomically expensive manned mission to Mars in twenty years. I think an excuse for gutting NASA's Earth science program is part of the political imperative for a manned Mars mission.
I'm not against a manned mission to Mars per se; I'm against the opportunity cost. For the price of keeping a human crew alive and healthy for six years in bathed in deep space radiation and setting them down on the surface of Mars with an acceptable safety margin (very hard to do), we could get so much more done with robots. Extrapolating from Apollo to a manned Mars mission is very risky; Mars is immensely harder than the Moon in almost every respect. I don't think America is ready to spend Apollo program dollars every year for two or three decades, so what we'll get is a half-assed program that starves everything else NASA ought to be doing with very dubious prospects of success.
Eventually the time will come when the marginal value of a human mission will exceed the marginal value of the additional robotic missions the same funding would secure. That will be the time to start planning a manned Mars mission. I expect we might even get humans there faster that way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The point was equally valid in 2010 when President Obama abruptly and without warning canceled the Constellation space exploration program.
"Without warning"? You mean that the Augustine commission was secret? Nobody saw it coming that a lousy program that had delivered too little by that time for too much money got scrapped?
Ezekiel 23:20
Maybe it's just me, and my casual layman's reading is inadequate, but, a looong time ago I read about how cosmic rays would be a serious problem, but you could protect astronauts against them by either having a very strong magnetic field around the spacecraft, or by having a jacket of water (I think it was 3 feet deep, which would be a lot of mass to take along I know.) Then, in all the stuff I've ever read about space travel since, that never comes up. What gives?
Unless we get off this world, we're all doomed.
Expensive science NASA wasted it's slim credibility on the CAGW scam. We need a different funding and reward model for ***successful*** science talent. More prizes, fewer sinecures. Let industry tackle Mars, asteroids and / or the Moon for profits, we already have the basic technologies. A smaller NASA should focus on science beyond Jupiter or inside Venus orbits, and the stars.
NASA is actually doomed if it doesn't embrace small to medium newspace companies and 3rd gen nukes. We need real breakthroughs not boondoggle welfare jobs programs. GFL.
JJ
Jesus...
Fine, fine, say you're going to Mars if that will keep the dollars flowing from the idiots on the hill. Just make sure that you tell them that going to Mars requires a permanent presence on the Moon. The sooner we can set up an independent engineering and manufacturing facility which isn't reliant on US government dollars (which seems to be permanently reserved for the military industrial complex) the better.
Once we have that we can go anywhere.
Anywhere.
We (humans) need to get our nassa back to the moon first, and build a full-time moon base (like the ISS but on the moon). We can do alot of problem solving (and a whole lot of science) before having to solve life-or-death issues when the astronaut is 6 months away, and communications take several minutes as opposed to seconds.
This push for Mars is premature. We need a moon base first! (actually we need to solve a whole lot of problems here on earth before blowing all that money into space, but just try to have a rational conversation about that...)
The Obama administration killed Constellation when it rolled-out its 2010 NASA budget proposal in Feb 2009, then faced bi-partisan outrage in congress and THEN came up with a committee in May 2009 to justify what it had done. Like all such committees created to justify pre-selected outcomes, the members were handpicked by the administration, thereby guaranteeing the results that were desired. No honest commenter will cite the results of any such hand-picked political committee on any subject. Had the committee been assembled by persons outside the admin, like a bipartisan congressional committee, or perhaps appointed by a judge as part of a legal case (i.e. somebody other than a President demanding a particular outcome) it would have credibility as unbiased.
That committee (formed 3+ months AFTER the decision to kill Constellation was made within the admin) was named "Augustine" after the former LockMart boss (the company best-known for over-promising, over-charging and under-performing on many defense projects) Norm Augustine who was expected to lend political gravitas and credibility to the pre-determined outcome.
Seriously. Here's why:
All military and space programs in the US are budgeted with completely phony accounting that is never applied to the rest of the government. When One of these programs is created, it is priced according to the following sort of equation:
ProgramCost = R&D costs + Setup costs + personnel training costs + operating costs + costs of facilities used during operation
and then:
UnitCost = ProgramCost / number of units.
This LOOKS rational, but it's not. Here's why:
1. The R&D of any program actually informs many other later programs. Apollo, for example, was "billed" for all the R&D to put a man on the moon, but most of the long-term benefits of that R&D cost actually went into the general economy over the past 50 years. The moon flights needed that R&D, but got less benefit from it ultimately than the rest of the economy did. This is proper bookkeeping, but not honest accounting.
2. Setup costs are often higher in big high-tech systems than for any other field because they are cutting-edge and not pre-existing from other projects. Custom jigs and molds and manufacturing tools are often required (for something like the B-2 bomber that included massive new autoclaves for the composites and tools made of special materials to not damage the stealth coatings, etc). There is no way to bill other parts of the economy later for the benefits provided by these tools when they are first created so the whole cost goes to the program. Again, proper amd honest bookkeeping, but not really honest accounting.
3. Operating costs are always false in government accounting. Federal government employees are nearly impossible to fire and Federal government facilities are almost never sold-off but all must be accounted for (in a book-keeping sense). Therefore, employees (and all their costs) and facilities (with all maintenance costs) get billed to whatever related programs the accountants can use whether they are actually involved.
This all becomes worse when congress or an administration panics over total program cost and then cuts back on the number of units...usually slightly cutting total cost while ballooning the per-unit price since the full setup and R&D costs must be covered by the number of units.
The shuttle program suffered terribly from this accounting. It was forced to bear the costs of all the KSC facilities and people, and nearly all the facilites and personnel costs of places like JSC and Stennis (since it was THE high-profile program of NASA) so shuttles appeared hugely expensive to fly. Depending on the year, NASA priced the program at 3 to 5 Billion annually. The actual cost per flight will never be known but was estimated inside the agency at approx $500 million, but there was an annual $3 or 4 Billion "overhead cost" even if no flights were made. A year with 2 flights might cost $4 billion and a year with 6 flights 5.5 billion. This is terrible accounting. It lead people to think that it the shuttle was cancelled, huge piles of cash would be freed-up to go into Constellation or commercial crew or whatever else people dreamed-up. That was false however, because the overhead costs never go away, they just shift to whatever new program comes-along (currently SLS) suddenly making the new program "too expensive". SLS is now going to be "too expensive" and "$1 Billion per flight!!" and other nonsense (as long as people talk about only flying it once or twice per year so all the overhead gets assigned to one or two flights per year). The actual flight per yer of SLS (less overhead) will be cheaper than Shuttle was (less overhead). All the hardware is cheaper to build, the "standing army" of contractors is far smaller, and no orbiter refurb between flights will be needed. The ISS currently bears the costs of all the ground facilities and people who support it and missions that supply its crews and experiments for its entire projected life (that's why it's labelled as costing $100+).
Remember: no matter WHAT program NASA
In Canada our high profile issue is how to equip the military but that wouldn't make headlines in any other country.
Depends on how many F35s you buy from us.
As a Canadian, I wouldn't mind the F-35s if (a) the criteria for choosing it was made public, (b) the criteria was sane, and (c) there was a competition that showed it was the best candidate.
As it stands, none of those were met (even after five years), and right now I say sole-source the Super Hornet, which is about 20-30% cheaper on a per unit basis. Either get the same number of planned planes (~65) and use the money else where in the military, or spend the same amount of money and get 2-3 squadrons of Growlers in addition to the fighters.
As it stands, the Tories have really screwed the pooch on procurement (like the Libs before them). The Navy ship program is a disaster: they should have just announced it was jobs program first, and a military needs thing as a secondary priority. We're pay 2-3 times more for what's basically a Svalbard-class ship than the Norwegians did. Ditto with redesigning the Huitfeldt-class versus just buying from the Danes (or going with the FREMMs).
So what Bolden is really saying is that they have nothing to fall back on if the Mars thing doesn't work out. If the rocket fails. If there's some biological problem that comes up. or even if some other mission of importance comes up. It's Mars and only Mars and if it's not Mars it's nothing. Goddamn NASA how fucking stupid are you rocket scientists anyway? WTF?
This is like my four-year-old cousin who throws a fit if he can't have the exact candy bar he wants. He proclaims he'd rather starve than eat something else. Fine. Do it, I say, much to the horror of his mom and dad.
If my toddler cousin starves to death because he could not have candy, and NASA ceases to exist without Mars, then I say neither of them deserve to exist. Let them both die. But I really think my cousin will eventually eat something else and I feel NASA will find something else to do.
Sig for hire.
The problem with NASA and indeed all human efforts at anything is that we can't see beyond 4-year cycles in the West and somewhat longer cycles in China, negated by the lack of most of the space program needed to make the plans happen, if they had the plans.
Getting to other planets takes a lot of money over a long time scale. Apparently Mars will take a couple decades or so. And we may not make it.
Getting to anything farther away, or long development projects like the warp drive and so on, threaten to take tens of decades. It may take a century or two to get to a warp drive. Humanity has no history of supporting goals like that. We don't even have words to describe making that kind of commitment that transcends the time lines of nations. But even for a Mars missing taking decades, we cannot do it. We lack the ability to support anything like that.
Inheriting the stars will take huge amounts of time and effort. We won't be able to do it. I welcome humanity proving me wrong.
Sig for hire.
When putting humans on Mars finally approaches inevitability, historians will attempt to define the starting place for the journey. "...and it all began back in the year ???? with President [NAME]". Bolden's statement is simply posturing the Obama administration as the Kennedy-like launching point to Mars. It is just political bullshit, nothing more.
NASA can wipe the slate clean in 2017, and as long it provides a new plan to keep an experienced work-force from fleeing, the start-over will not doom NASA. In fact, with the pace of technological changes continuing to accelerate, a couple of start-overs should be expected between now and 2039.
This is just Bolden's latest lame attempt to get more pork for the Manned Spaceflight Directorate. He hates that the robotic missions such as the rovers have stolen all the limelight and that he was forced to fund a Europa missions (yes he was FORCED, kicking and screaming).
gas, grass or ass, nobody rides for free
?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No one is going to Mars without a real commitment to space. Putting men in High Earth orbit is beyond the capabilities of our space program at the moment. Going to Mars would be both the dead albatross and the boat anchor of the US space program. There is no scientific reason to go to Mars with anything but robots. Putting the money into robots and AI would cover anything scientific that humans would ever do there and it would cost a lot less.
A real commitment to space would look like moon bases plural, space stations plural, and a strong effort to commercialize space. Right now there is no good reason to go to the moon much less Mars, and the moon takes 100 times less effort and so is 100 times easier to justify. Colonize the moon and the Lagrange points then talk to me about sending men to Mars. In the end you would get to Mars sooner, and with less risk.
Doing anything else would be to squander NASA's potential with nothing to show for it.
Considering that the Liberal party won the election, and one of the platform promises was to cancel the F35 order immediately and go with something less expansive and more reasonable, I think the answer to that question is going to be zero...
As probably a good chunk of Slashdot is already aware, this problem is not new, has been around for a long time, and will continue to be around for a very long time. About the only difference in terms of NASA is the scale of the issue, and perhaps some enhanced interdependence.
If you work in IT and government, two of the biggest problems you will face are:
1) Generally speaking you get a yearly budget. That is all you get to spend. You need to spend all of it. You can't save it. You can't plan ahead. You will probably get a similar budget next year, but maybe not. In many cases you get large projects. Projects large enough that completing it in a year just isn't feasible. You typically break the project into phases, chunks of work that can be completed within a year, within budget. You have to "risk manage" pretty much everything. Get your budget cut, then you have to make adjustments, sometimes meaning that a project falls off the truck. If that happens, projects can get delayed, staff move on, perhaps eventual failure. I've seen enough money dumped into a project over multiple years to think there is no way this will not move forward, only to have some manager create some grand new strategy to which the project no longer fits, and it is abandoned in place for something else, then management moves on etc... Much of this can happen in the private sector as well, but I would say it is worse in government.
2) On top of yearly budgets, and fickle management, you get political change in government. Which can mean several things, many of which are not good to any project partially completed. First, just like in the first point, budgets can be massively adjusted. Change from year to year usually isn't drastic, but a new government with different priorities may just not fund you, in which cases projects just die for lack of resources. Speaking of priorities, it could be that whatever project you are working on, isn't something the new political masters agree with ideologically, in which case it is probably immediately dead no matter what. On top of that, political parties generally speaking don't want others to have success, so worst case they will torpedo projects that might make the previous party look good, best case they simply re-brand it, call it something else, and claim it as their own... Which can have some hilarious results, particularly in code and architecture when everything was called something else, then suddenly now it is change to something new, and not everything (that people can see) is changed, so you see tons of old documentation and references that don't make any sense anymore. Here is where that whole argument about having IT gray beards around and not just a bunch of kid code monkeys and no one will have the history anymore of why the application is so weirdly designed etc...
Anyway when dealing with 10's of millions it can be tough. I would imagine when dealing with amounts several magnitudes greater, developing things that need to be completed in an iterative order for success, can have some pretty dicey "risk management" going on... When you get to the end and figure out that the propulsion management system was never developed due to cuts 3 years ago, and you are months away from a launch window that won't be around again for another 20 years... Well I can see how that might be frustrating enough to say that they are "Dooooomed" if the politicos don't get their act together.
It may be hard to believe, but sending people to Mars is an even bigger boondoggle than the California High Speed Rail project. We can explore space just fine with robots, and get a lot more bang for the buck.
possibly my fault. let me clarify:
Average people, and unfortunately politicians too, think in terms of per-unit costs (the price tag on each thing in the store). No average consumer wants to think about the cost of the store itself, the cost of trucking the goods to the store, and all sorts of stuff that MUST obviously be paid for and exist in order to have that individual product on the shelf.
For the most part, average people never HAVE to think that way because the total number of units of consume goods is insanely huge and the stores where people shop have a very large collection of diverse products on the shelves (so all the fixed overhead costs are divided over a huge number and spread quite broadly). In the case of these large and very high-tech systems though, the "store" has only one or two examples of one or two products on the shelf (to which all the overhead is assigned, thereby making the price tags very large). The buyer is, thereby, encouraged to say "if I only buy one of these instead of two I will save half the money" (because of is/her experience with a typical shopping model where volume makes it so he/she never has to think about the fixed costs). As a result, the accounting fools people into thinking the actual per-unit price it what's on the tag, and not understanding how much of that price is fixed no matter how many units are bought - which in turn leads to false choices like: if we cancel the shuttle we will have TONS of available cash for moon colonies or mars missions or commercial crew or SLS rockets etc.
The accounting method, while rational from an accountant's viewpoint and academically correct is supremely misleading to anybody but an accountant or a person in the space or defense sectors of the economy. Some politicians are fooled by this accounting into making very bad policy decisions, and sadly other politicians understand it fully but know the voters will not - and therefore use it as a tool.