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Journalist: NASA Administrator Has Short Memory on Changing Space Policy (spacenews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Recently, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden stated that NASA would be "doomed" if the next president were to deviate in any way from the current Journey to Mars program. Space journalist and founder of the America Space website Jim Hillhouse took exception to Bolden's assertion in a letter to the aerospace newspaper Space News. In the process, Hillhouse provides a good summary of how space policy has evolved during the past five years under the Obama administration.
I always thought that option existed because the developer kept losing his node fault library.
Given Boldenâ(TM)s desire to pursue the âoeJourney to Mars,â it would seem only natural that the Orion and SLS programs, the only means currently in development for taking us beyond low Earth orbit, would be doing well since 2010. They are, but not for lack of effort by the Obama administration to underfund them â" proposals that congressional appropriators each year reverse. Since 2012, annual White House proposed budgets for NASA have fallen short of authorized levels by 78 percent and 70 percent respectively for the Orion or SLS programs.
Funny, how, once again, dead end, expensive rocketry projects are hyped as being the "only" way. I'll point to the Falcon Heavy as an obvious alternative platform for NASA to go to Mars. Or if you want competition and can't be bothered to fund other big rocket development, you can fall back to the 20-25 ton range and use more than half a dozen or more different rocket systems throughout the world (Falcon 9, Atlas V Heavy, Delta IV Heavy, Soyuz, Angara, Ariane V, and Chang Zheng 5).
If at the ending of Constellation, Congress had funded deep space projects for NASA rather than the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA could be doing deep space projects now, rather than hypothetical ones some point after 2023.
First, Falcon Heavy doesn't exist as a production product yet.
It's much further along than SLS. SpaceX claims they'll launch it next year. SLS isn't even to the point of starting to build something that can be launched.
Second, until we have a robust and competitive group of commercial rocket vendors it will remain necessary for NASA to make sure we have at least one option available, even if that option is economically non-optimal.
No, that isn't NASA's job. Once again, we have the ridiculous assertion that NASA is doing something so vital that it needs to secure its own ridiculously expensive launch systems in case something bad happens to an existing launch system.
And we still have the problem of the money. NASA funding has been almost flat for about 40 years. Where's the money for both an expensive launch system and payloads to launch on that system coming from? "economically non-optimal" turns out to be equivalent to "do nothing else".
If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts then every day would be Christmas. If you don't have a launch system then you don't have deep space projects. You have to walk before you can run.
Back at you. NASA had three decade to come up with this new launch system and strong incentive to develop it after the Challenger accident. Where is it?
SpaceX has demonstrated actual experience at developing and flying new launch systems and the Falcon Heavy is close to first launch. The complete development cost of Falcon Heavy is probably well under a billion dollars, none of which was paid for by NASA. Meanwhile NASA squanders around $3 billion a year on SLS.
It's not "candy and nuts" to make the obvious observation that NASA could be using that $3 billion per year for deep space rather than purposes completely irrelevant to NASA's stated missions (and yes, I'm aware of the real reasons for throwing money without accountability at the usual military-industrial complex suspects).
Bolden's an ass and a political hack. And, absent a fundamental change, Congress is never going to give NASA enough money to establish a meaningful human presence in space. In the meantime, we flush billions down the toilet with monkeys in a can in LEO, starve real space science nearly to death, and pretend we're going to Mars.
The different presidents have certainly had very different priorities for NASA. Mr. Bolden (the head of NASA), said these are the three things Obama asked him to do with NASA (quoting):
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
Heh I really didn't know what you meant. I am not American.
Look on wikipedia, there is a long and not even complete list of meanings for WIC.
Besides changing course of NASA is just wasting money, it does not gain money for other projects. And the NASA budget is just 17.5 Billion. It is irrelevant for other state projects. WIC budget is 4.7 Trillion (that's what I just found).
TFA leaves out one important change to NASA policy brought by Obama early in his administration. This is not a joke or a smear -- it really happened.
Please tell me how NASA is going to use the $3B that is allotted for SLS by Congress
Have Congress allot the money for something else.
If you're not happy with the direction NASA is going, tell your elected Congressional representative. And do it in writing, because emails are very easy to ignore.
I'll need a few million of my favorite friends to do that too.
I don't know about that, but the Paris attacks did demonstrate that Obama's point of view that gun control will stop these attacks is so wrong it isn't even funny.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Apollo as we all know was cancelled it in its 8th year, going massively over budget and producing nothing but non-functioning ICBMs.
What NASA produced was functional but not reusable and expensive but did work, Clinton gave NASA the predecessor to what they should have had in 1997 which they promptly mothballed in 1999 and they probably should have given one to place at the corporate office of Children's Hospital for display because the development of it was made possible through their fund raisers. Everyone is touchy on that subject because the program was cancelled in 1964 over something that happened that was thought to be related to the hit on JFK and it was not. You can thank the banksters for using Mafia on JFK, and I honestly believe there isn't anything Mafia can't fuck up. In short, NASA was doomed in 1964 by Mafia for repeating a crime that originally happened around the turn of last century as all of the development that should have been prompted post 1964 never happened. So you never got the flying cars, alternatively you got a remodeled hotel casino in 1964 to go lose your money in, and aerospace got a shiny new short bus.
So what you're saying is that the lunar landing didn't actually happen, right?
Not correct, the site and equipment used is still present on the moon and viewable even under missions that are run today.