Sure, we've just got lots of experience with building the Station--and it was a nightmare.
It's worth noting that a big part of the reason that the ISS was a nightmare is because building a station was only secondary to the goal of ensuring that funds went to the Russian space agency in order to prevent their rocket engineers from going to North Korea, Iran, etc. In addition, the ISS was also a big learning experience, and we've become substantially better at in-space assembly in the process.
I agree. The claim that heavy-lift is truly necessary is somewhat hard for me to buy, although my suspicion is that suggesting otherwise would just be too big of a mindset change for NASA to handle. If they do have a heavy-lift system, I do hope they pick the EELV-derived heavy-lift, even if it'll be nigh-impossible politically -- congressmen have already started defensive maneuvers to try to protect the status quo. The main benefit of an EELV-derived system is that it minimizes the amount of specialized infrastructure you'd have to maintain, and since the EELV infrastructure is used for many medium-lift commercial launches you also wouldn't have to maintain a standing army of personnel specifically for the heavy-lift launcher. If it does indeed turn out that heavy-lift is unnecessary, you can simply scale back the number of heavy-lift launches; with the shuttle-derived heavy-lift, you have the pay the standing support army (the biggest part of the lifecycle cost) no matter how many launches you actually have.
None that wouldn't have turned up in any other new rocket design.
Actually, the nastiest safety issues with the Ares I are a direct result of the design decision by former administrator Mike Griffin to use a single gigantic solid rocket motor as the first stage. It turns out there's a really good reason (or rather, many good reasons) that nobody's used such a design for a manned rocket before. I'm sure given enough time and money ($35 billion is the latest cost estimate) the excellent engineers at NASA can create workarounds for the inherent design problems, but I'd imagine their time and effort could be much better spent.
I really, really like the "Flexible Path Towards Mars" proposed by the Augustine Committee, which is detailed on page 40 of the report. For those unfamiliar with it, it stresses near-term exploration of a variety of targets in shallow gravity wells, ranging from Lagrangian points to the moons of Mars. I also rather like the table on page 41 of the report which describes the 8 different categories of destinations for Flexible Path (Lunar orbit, Earth-Moon L1, Earth-Sun L2, Earth-Sun L1, Near-Earth Objects, Mars Flyby, Mars Orbit, Martian Moons), and describes both possible ways to engage the public about each destination and possible scientific goals at each location.
The quick summary of Flexible Path, from the report PDF (bolding inserted by me):
3.5 THE FLEXIBLE PATH TO MARS
3.5.1 Overview. In addition to Mars First and Moon First, there is a third possibility for initial exploration beyond low-Earth orbit: visiting a series of locations and objects in the inner solar system, which the Committee calls the Flexible Path. (See Figure 3.5.1-1.) The goal is to take steps toward Mars, learning to live and work in free space and near planets, under the conditions humans will meet on the way to Mars. We must learn to operate in free space for hundreds of days, beyond the protective radiation belts of the Earth, before we can confidently commit to exploring Mars. Human exploration along the Flexible Path would also support science, create new industrial opportunities, and engage the public through progressively more challenging milestone accomplishments.
On this path, sites would be visited that humans have never reached before. Astronauts would learn to service spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit, much as crews successfully serviced the Hubble Space Telescope in low-Earth orbit. Humans could visit small bodies in space, such as near-Earth objects (asteroids and spent comets that cross the Earth's path, some of which could someday collide with the Earth - Figure 3.5.1-2) and the scientifically interesting moons of Mars, return samples, and understand their structure and composition. When humans would come close to the Moon or Mars, they could deploy probes and coordinate with or control robotic assets on the surface. They could even bring home samples from Mars that were launched from the surface by robotic spacecraft. In this way we could achieve the scientific "first" of a Mars sample return.
These destinations require the smallest energy expenditure beyond low-Earth orbit, but are of increasing distance and duration from Earth. The missions could include a full dress-rehearsal for a Mars mission, consisting of traveling to Mars orbit and returning hundreds of days later. The essential concept is that humans would first visit points in space and rendezvous with small bodies and orbit larger ones, without initially descending into the deep gravity wells of Mars or the Moon.
The Flexible Path is a road toward Mars, with intermediate destinations. At several points along the way, the off-ramp from the Flexible Path to a Moon exploration program could be taken. Alternatively, if new discoveries drew us to Mars, the lunar stop could be bypassed, leading directly to a Mars landing.
Add in the fact that ARES-I is designed to lift the Orion into an orbit with a NEGATIVE PERIGEE, unless the Orion itself circularizes its orbit. Also, they've been trimming Orion left, right, and center in order to get it light enough so "the Stick" can lift it. This means cutting crew, cutting land based landing, cutting crew comforts (eg toilets) and cutting safety gear.
It's particularly ironic when you consider that in NASA's ESAS study which selected the internal Ares I design over commercial launch vehicles, the safety standards were tweaked so that the Ares I design was the only one which could satisfy the absurdly high standards. Of course, it now looks like Ares can't actually satisfy those standards, and the mass trim-backs may well result in a system considerably more dangerous than the commercial alternatives.
For some reason the link for the Augustine Report seems to be going to a download for Windows 7 (Huh?!?), so here's the actual link (mirror).
Here's the main report findings from the PDF:
Summary of Principal Findings
The Committee summarizes its principal findings below. Additional findings are included in the body of the report.
The right mission and the right size: NASA's budget should match its mission and goals. Further, NASA should be given the ability to shape its organization and infrastructure accordingly, while maintaining facilities deemed to be of national importance.
International partnerships: The U.S. can lead a bold new international effort in the human exploration of space. If international partners are actively engaged, including on the "critical path" to success, there could be substantial benefits to foreign relations and more overall resources could become available to the human spaceflight program.
Short-term Space Shuttle planning: The remaining Shuttle manifest should be flown in a safe and prudent manner without undue schedule pressure. This manifest will likely extend operation into the second quarter of FY 2011. It is important to budget for this likelihood.
The human-spaceflight gap: Under current conditions, the gap in U.S. ability to launch astronauts into space will stretch to at least seven years. The Committee did not identify any credible approach employing new capabilities that could shorten the gap to less than six years. The only way to significantly close the gap is to extend the life of the Shuttle Program.
Extending the International Space Station: The return on investment to both the United States and our international partners would be significantly enhanced by an extension of the life of the ISS. A decision not to extend its operation would significantly impair U.S. ability to develop and lead future international spaceflight partnerships.
Heavy lift: A heavy-lift launch capability to low-Earth orbit, combined with the ability to inject heavy payloads away from the Earth, is beneficial to exploration. It will also be useful to the national security space and scientific communities. The Committee reviewed: the Ares family of launchers; Shuttle-derived vehicles; and launchers derived from the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle family. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, trading capability, life-cycle costs, maturity, operational complexity and the "way of doing business" within the program and NASA.
Commercial launch of crew to low-Earth orbit: Commercial services to deliver crew to low-Earth orbit are within reach. While this presents some risk, it could provide an earlier capability at lower initial and life-cycle costs than government could achieve. A new competition with adequate incentives to perform this service should be open to all U.S. aerospace companies. This would allow NASA to focus on more challenging roles, including human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit based on the continued development of the current or modified Orion spacecraft.
Technology development for exploration and commercial space: Investment in a well-designed and adequately funded space technology program is critical to enable progress in exploration. Exploration strategies can proceed more readily and economically if the requisite technology has been developed in advance. This investment will also benefit robotic exploration, the U.S. commercial space industry, the academic community and other U.S. government users.
Pathways to Mars: Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration of the inner solar system; but it is not the best first destination. Visiting the "Moon First" and following the "Flexible Path" are both viable exploration strategies. The two are not necessarily mutual
The topic of safety same up Wednesday as well in a talk by Augustine committee member Jeff Greason at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in New Mexico. In the Q&A session after his speech, he was asked why the committee didn't endorse Constellation as the "most viable" option "even though from a safety and mission assurance standpoint it's clearly the best option." Greason said that safety and mission assurance was considered by the Augustine committee, but that goes beyond simply the choice of launch vehicles.
"Launch is a relatively small contributor to the safety and mission assurance" of human missions to the Moon and beyond. "It is not negligible, it is not something you want to forget about, but it does not dominate the loss of crew probabilities." Therefore, he said, it was a mistake to focus on further increasing the reliability of a relatively small aspect of overall mission risk, particularly if those choices lead you to take out safety systems in other components that because of mass restrictions. "These are false economies in terms of safety and mission assurance."
Greason was also skeptical about the probabilistic risk assessments used to estimate the safety of various proposed systems. Most launch failures are not from random types of events, he said, but instead failures of design, testing, procedure, and the like. "If it was built wrong, it doesn't work a lot of the time, no matter what you thought the probabilistic failure was." The only way to "buy down" those failures, he said, is though flight experience, which is why "real boosters" have lower reliabilities than estimated when they were "paper boosters" still in the design phase.
"And the truth is, Ares 1 is, right now, a paper booster," Greason continued. "And the further truth is, its projected launch rate is extremely low, so it will never get out of 'infant mortality,'" that initial phase of non-probabilistic failures. "Even if Ares 1 were built exactly as planned, we would never find out whether its mature probabilistic risk assessment was or was not achievable as planned, because we would never get through the phase of life where we're supposed to work out all the teething problems."
An interesting point: This research is being done in China, not the United States. Whatever happened to basic research being done in the US?
This is cool research and all, but it's not like it happened in a vacuum. Below is a copy of the references from the PhotoSketch paper, showing the prior work the current paper was built upon, the vast majority of which are from labs in the US or Europe:
BELONGIE, S., MALIK, J., AND PUZICHA, J. 2002. Shape match-ing and object recognition using shape contexts. IEEE Trans.Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 24, 4, 509-522. BEN-HAIM, N., BABENKO, B., AND BELONGIE, S. 2006.Improvingweb-based image search via content based clustering.In Proc. of CVPR Workshop. DIAKOPOULOS, N., ESSA, I., AND JAIN, R. 2004. Content basedimage synthesis. In Proc. of International Conference on Imageand Video Retrieval (CIVR).EITZ, M., HILDEBRAND, K., BOUBEKEUR, T., AND ALEXA, M.2009. Photosketch: A sketch based image query and composit-ing system. In SIGGRAPH 2009 Talk Program. FARBMAN, Z., HOFFER, G., LIPMAN, Y., COHEN-OR, D., ANDLISCHINSKI, D. 2009. Coordinates for instant image cloning.SIGGRAPH 2009. FELZENSZWALB, P. F., AND HUTTENLOCHER, D. P. 2004. Effi-cient graph-based image segmentation. Int. J. of Comput. Vision59, 2, 167-181. FERGUS, R., FEI-FEI, L., PERONA, P., AND ZISSERMAN, A.2005. Learning object categories from google's image search.In Proc. of ICCV. GEORGESCU, B., SHIMSHONI, I., AND MEER, P. 2003. Meanshift based clustering in high dimensions: A texture classifica-tion example. In Proc. of ICCV. HAYS, J. H., AND EFROS, A. A. 2007. Scene completion usingmillions of photographs. SIGGRAPH 2007. HOU, X., AND ZHANG, L. 2007. Saliency detection: A spectralresidual approach. In Proc. of CVPR. JACOBS, C., FINKELSTEIN, A., AND SALESIN, D. 1995. Fastmultiresolution image querying. In SIGGRAPH 1995. JIA, J., SUN, J., TANG, C.-K., AND SHUM, H.-Y. 2006. Drag-and-drop pasting. SIGGRAPH 2004. JOHNSON, M., BROSTOW, G. J., SHOTTON, J., ARANDJELOVI C,O., KWATRA, V., AND CIPOLLA, R. 2006. Semantic photosynthesis. Proc. of Eurographics. LALONDE, J.-F., HOIEM, D., EFROS, A. A., ROTHER, C.,WINN, J., AND CRIMINISI, A. 2007. Photo clip art. SIG-GRAPH 2007. LEVIN, A., LISCHINSKI, D., AND WEISS, Y. 2008. A closed-form solution to natural image matting. IEEE Trans. PatternAnal. Mach. Intell. 30, 2, 228-242. LI, Y., SUN, J., TANG, C.-K., AND SHUM, H.-Y. 2004. Lazysnapping. SIGGRAPH 2004.LIU, T., SUN, J., ZHENG, N.-N., TANG, X., AND SHUM, H.-Y.2007. Learning to detect a salient object. In Proc. of CVPR. MANJUNATH, B. S., AND MA, W. Y. 1996. Texture features forbrowsing and retrieval of image data. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal.Mach. Intell. 18, 8, 837-842. PEREZ, P., GANGNET, M., AND BLAKE, A. 2003. Poisson imageediting. SIGGRAPH 2003.RAJENDRAN, R., AND CHANG, S. 2000. Image retrieval withsketches and compositions. In Proc. of International Conferenceon Multimedia & Expo (ICME). ROTHER, C., KOLMOGOROV, V., AND BLAKE, A. 2004. "grab-cut": interactive foreground extraction using iterated graph cuts.SIGGRAPH2004. SAXENA, A., CHUNG, S. H., AND NG, A. Y. 2008. 3-d depthreconstruction from a single still image. Int. J. of Comput. Vision76, 1, 53-69. SMEULDERS, A., WORRING, M., SANTINI, S., GUPTA, A., ANDJAIN, R. 2000. Content-based image retrieval at the end ofthe early years. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 22, 12,1349-1380. WANG, J., AND COHEN, M. 2007. Simultaneous matting andcompositing. In Proc. of CVPR, 1-8
Ask yourself why nobody yet chooses to live in Antarctica. Its cheaper than going to Mars, safer and more comfortable. But nobody has started a colony.
The reason is that both claiming sovereignty and mining resources from Antarctica is forbidden by international law. There's actually a ban on resource extraction there until 2048:
I just wonder why is it cheaper now, compared to 10-20 years ago? Or why is it cheaper for a private company?
One of the big things to keep in mind is that as a government institution, NASA is severely limited in how it's able to restructure its workforce towards its goals. This wasn't an issue back in the Apollo days, when NASA was in a massive growth spurt and could hire the best and brightest to achieve its goals. Nowadays, an absurdly high percentage of the NASA workforce is middle management, and since they're civil servants NASA can't just let them go and hire new people. Also, NASA has the additional constraint that the people it does hire have to be distributed amongst key congressional districts.
It's interesting to note that in the congressional debates about NASA, the key item of the debate hasn't been NASA's scientific mission or technological impact, but the impact on the existing number of jobs. NASA has ~10,000 Shuttle workers (many in the electoral battleground state of Florida), and any plan which seeks to make things more efficient by cutting back on the number of workers needed is going to face a massive uphill battle in Congress.
One proposal I really like, but has faced massive congressional resistance in the past, would be to turn NASA Centers into Federally Funded Research Development Centers, the model used by JPL and the Department of Energy's national labs, which are able to do competitive hiring. Of course, see what happened to the 2004 Aldrige Report which suggested this (see page 23); it was heavily battled by Congress and pushed basically into oblivion.
It's particularly worth noting that what's been done so far science-wise is only the beginning of science results from the ISS, as most of the effort so far has been in construction. The crew size was also just doubled this year, allowing for even more time to be spent devoted to science:
After 15 years of construction, narrow congressional votes, delays and, yes, cost overruns, the $100 billion international space station finally appears ready for prime time.... In May the space station doubled its crew from three to six astronauts, and this summer two space shuttle missions delivered a new laboratory and critical scientific equipment. Then, earlier this month, a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to study the future of human spaceflight gave the station high marks, recommending its life be extended until at least 2020 and full funding to reach its potential. The station is now beginning to do just that, as astronauts use the ISS for its intended purpose as an outpost for scientific research in a weightless environment, and learning to live for long periods in space....
Until now, crew efforts have focused on assembling disparate modules built by Russia, the United States, Japan and Europe into a cohesive whole. Since habitation began in 2000, therefore, astronauts have devoted only about 12,000 hours to scientific research. Now with the crew expansion, and likely completion of the station by early 2011 allowing astronauts to swap their hard hats for test tubes, NASA estimates that total to increase by a factor of eight by 2015, to about 90,000 hours. "We're just beginning to scratch the surface," said Julie Robinson, who oversees the ISS science program.
You mean the Ares I that is being built by ATK and Boeing? Oh, wait, those are private companies too. In fact, Boeing is also responsible for two of the "private" rockets on your list.
You really need to read up on the contracting process behind the Ares I and how it's fundamentally different from things like the EELVs.
Now if we only had a rocket to get it to the moon...
Um, there's plenty of US rockets available to get it to the Moon, just none built by NASA. It's also worth noting that all of the non-NASA rockets cost less than a billion dollars to develop, compared to the >$35 billion projected development cost for NASA's competing Ares I, which will have nearly identical capabilities to its competitors:
and utterly failed to provide funding for it. Its no wonder that NASA does not have enough money to complete the project. If this results in a funding increase for NASA, it will be a start. Even if it is only a tiny baby step.
This keeps on getting repeated, but NASA had more than enough money for going to the Moon at a sustainable pace. It's just that NASA didn't have funds to return to the Moon AND also fulfill the new (now former) administrator Michael Griffin's dreams of building two entirely new rockets. This is of course in addition to all the other stuff NASA has to fund, like unmanned science, the ISS, the Shuttle, and making sure workers in key congressional districts keep on getting their paychecks.
According to a comment over at NASA Watch, this is going to be at least conceptually based on the NEBULA cloud computing platform developed by NASA Ames. It seems pretty cool and potentially quite useful. Calling it an "app store" is a really dumb analogy though, and gives absolutely no idea of what it actually entails:
I am the Project Coordinator for Nebula, the cloud computing pilot at NASA Ames. Nebula has been in R&D and under development for well over a year. There are many reasons that a large organization, such as NASA, would explore cloud. The Nebula team did an extensive trade study to see what public clouds out there could meet NASA's needs. None did. Either they were not fast and powerful enough to handle NASA's massive data sets or they did not comply with security requirements. NASA needed its own cloud. I won't go into technical specifics (you can read about them at http://nebula.nasa.gov/ but the Nebula team ended up creating something that is smart, powerful, and incredibly energy-efficient to boot.
NASA was approached by the Feds because Nebula solves some cloud problems that are common among other Government Agencies. It is wicked fast, complies with FISMA and can scale to Government-sized demands. It is also rather forward-thinking in that it is built using open-source components and is incredibly energy efficient. Again, Nebula was created with NASA - not the Feds - in mind, but when they caught wind, they were interested too.
I suggest that people spend some time reading about what is actually going on before they jump to conclusions. To my knowledge there have been no announcements that Ames will orchestrate the Fed's move to cloud computing or develop any new systems or technologies that were not already under development. NASA has been responsible for a number of innovative new technologies over the years. Memory foam, for example. NASA invented it, but are they out there selling mattresses?:) Some people seem so caught up in the politics that they have completely missed the point.
Name me one company, just one, that has provided a significant and continuous source of funding for a major project that it believed in, even when the going got tough. Just one.
Well, you missed the small text at the bottom of the page that said "*** per component" !
It's also worth noting that this sort of "component-based" risk assessment, where you determine the chance of failure based on the known probabilities of particular components failing, only predicts a tiny percentage of launch failures. The vast majority of launch failures are due to components failing in ways that weren't anticipated and/or flaws in the overall design. Rockets don't typically fail in the ways you expect them to.
Jeff Greason stated this rather elegantly during one of the Augustine Committee public meetings, but I can't find the quote for the life of me. Anybody else know where to find it?
I propose that the primary goal be to learn[1] about space colonization, and a perm moon-base is a good place to start. They would be space pioneers, and everyone knows pioneers risk arrows in their backs. This is a role Americans can relate to and would accept risk for because our ancestors faced the same situation. (Even "Native Americans" made a risky migration out of Asia. There are no true "Native Americans".)
I liked what the author of the article had to say about building an Arlington-like space cemetery to emphasize this. Here's a more elaborate version of that from the same author from this piece (which I strongly suggest reading) on making spaceflight more accessible to the rest of us:
There is no such thing as safe. Despite the fantasies of Safety and Mission Assurance (S&MA) types at NASA, âoesafeâ and âoeunsafeâ are not binary conditions. There is no ultimate safety, this side of the grave. All we can do is to make things as safe as reasonable, and that includes reasonable expense. NASA has spent untold billions in an attempt to make things âoesafeâ over the decades, and they killed seventeen astronauts. Maybe they could have spent a lot less money, and perhaps killed a few more astronauts, but made a lot more progress. Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if weâ(TM)re not killing people, weâ(TM)re not pushing hard enough. If our attitude toward the space frontier is that we must strive to never ever lose anyone, it will remain closed. If our ancestors who opened the west, or who came from Europe, had had such an attitude, we would still be over there, and there would have been no California space industry to get us to the moon forty years ago. It has never been âoesafeâ to open a frontier, and this frontier is the harshest one that weâ(TM)ve ever faced, but fortunately, we have sufficiently advanced technology to allow us to do it anyway, and probably with much less loss of life than any previous one. But people die every day doing a lot less worthwhile things than opening a frontier.
Before Mercury, the test pilots who flew in that program used to attend funerals of their colleagues, who had made smoking craters in the desert, on a frequent basis. But no one else knew about them, or cared much. They were just doing their jobâ"developing the technologies and weapons that we needed to win an existential war. When they got out of their test aircraft and climbed into a Mercury capsule, they knew it was risky, but it was a lot less so than their previous job.
A frequent commenter on my blog has suggested that to avoid future national sob parties, such as occurred after Challenger and Columbia, we should set aside a special cemetery like Arlington, in a well-publicized ceremony, and declare that this was where all those who would lose their lives in our planned opening of the solar system would be laid to rest. And to make it big, just to make the point. There is in fact an astronaut memorial mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, with the names of those lost so far, and plenty of squares for more. A visionary president would point that out with the announcement of the new policy.
SpaceX is going to fly people on its Dragon, and itâ(TM)s going to make it as safe as it can afford to and still have a market for it, but I doubt that they will âoehuman rateâ it, and I see no need for ULA to do so with its launcher, either. No one, after all, âoehuman ratesâ an airplane. What ULA needs to do is to modify the design to make them reasonably safe, and contra the recent Aerospace Corporation report Iâ(TM)m confident that they can do that for a lot less than thirty-five billion dollars and in less than seven years, which is a pretty low bar to beat Ares I. If
Of course, the Government doesn't want you to know that Alan was actually assassinated by a covert agency after he discovered the Turing-Lovecraft Theorem.
Seriously though, this was long overdue. RIP Alan Turing.
Do you know anything about the process that led to the space shuttle? Yes NASA solicited design bids--many design bids. Not just from the usual suspects (Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed, North American, etc., etc.) but also from surprising sources such as Chrysler (they had a neat SSTO design). NASA, contrary to your suppositions, does not do everything in house. In fact, even the launches are technically operated by ULA, a joint effort by Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Well yes, NASA collected a large number of competitive design proposals for the space shuttle, many of them quite innovative. It then tossed them out and picked a contractor which would build the design the folks at NASA Marshall had in mind:
Following the usual charade of competitive bidding, NASA picked the same prime contractor as for X-15 and Apollo, who could be trusted to build precisely the vehicle NASA had in mind. North American Rockwell was selected to build the orbiter, with its Rocketdyne Division making the main engines. Thiokol was selected on political grounds for the solid rocket boosters. Martin Marietta would build the External Tank, but at the government Saturn IC factory at Michoud.
It's worth noting that pretty much the exact same thing happened with the current (like to soon be past) architecture. NASA spent about a year soliciting innovative competitive proposals from a number of companies, such as t/Space, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, and then selected the most promising proposals for further study. Then the new administrator Michael Griffin came in, threw out all the competing studies, ran his own 2-month study which (surprise!) said that Griffin's own design from a couple years prior was the best one, and then essentially made NASA the prime contractor for what's now known as the Ares I rocket.
Look at the mess people create on earth. It's probably best that we keep our distance from other worlds.
Why, because we might make some rocks dirty? Seriously, I want you to explain why we "messy" humans should keep away from other worlds.
exploring the universe can wait until we've mastered being human without killing each other, the air, the seas, and the land upon which we walk.
You're going to be waiting a very, very long time. Odds are that humanity ending would be a precondition for that, but I have a suspicion that wouldn't be an undesirable outcome for you.
I have read the summary and think it seems well-thought out and positive and not at all aligned with the title of this original post.
I agree! I'm really not sure where this "the sky is falling!" mentality present in the original summary and several of the comments here is coming from. IMHO, the report itself is rather exciting, and if NASA takes it seriously (not necessarily a given, considering how it managed to ignore just about every single recommendation from the Aldridge Report), this could lead to a great new future for NASA.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, we've just got lots of experience with building the Station--and it was a nightmare.
It's worth noting that a big part of the reason that the ISS was a nightmare is because building a station was only secondary to the goal of ensuring that funds went to the Russian space agency in order to prevent their rocket engineers from going to North Korea, Iran, etc. In addition, the ISS was also a big learning experience, and we've become substantially better at in-space assembly in the process.
And if you want to do anything beyond LEO, you're going to need something much bigger than any of those.
Not if you take advantage of propellant depots.
I agree. The claim that heavy-lift is truly necessary is somewhat hard for me to buy, although my suspicion is that suggesting otherwise would just be too big of a mindset change for NASA to handle. If they do have a heavy-lift system, I do hope they pick the EELV-derived heavy-lift, even if it'll be nigh-impossible politically -- congressmen have already started defensive maneuvers to try to protect the status quo. The main benefit of an EELV-derived system is that it minimizes the amount of specialized infrastructure you'd have to maintain, and since the EELV infrastructure is used for many medium-lift commercial launches you also wouldn't have to maintain a standing army of personnel specifically for the heavy-lift launcher. If it does indeed turn out that heavy-lift is unnecessary, you can simply scale back the number of heavy-lift launches; with the shuttle-derived heavy-lift, you have the pay the standing support army (the biggest part of the lifecycle cost) no matter how many launches you actually have.
The ARES I has serious safety issues.
None that wouldn't have turned up in any other new rocket design.
Actually, the nastiest safety issues with the Ares I are a direct result of the design decision by former administrator Mike Griffin to use a single gigantic solid rocket motor as the first stage. It turns out there's a really good reason (or rather, many good reasons) that nobody's used such a design for a manned rocket before. I'm sure given enough time and money ($35 billion is the latest cost estimate) the excellent engineers at NASA can create workarounds for the inherent design problems, but I'd imagine their time and effort could be much better spent.
I really, really like the "Flexible Path Towards Mars" proposed by the Augustine Committee, which is detailed on page 40 of the report. For those unfamiliar with it, it stresses near-term exploration of a variety of targets in shallow gravity wells, ranging from Lagrangian points to the moons of Mars. I also rather like the table on page 41 of the report which describes the 8 different categories of destinations for Flexible Path (Lunar orbit, Earth-Moon L1, Earth-Sun L2, Earth-Sun L1, Near-Earth Objects, Mars Flyby, Mars Orbit, Martian Moons), and describes both possible ways to engage the public about each destination and possible scientific goals at each location.
The quick summary of Flexible Path, from the report PDF (bolding inserted by me):
3.5 THE FLEXIBLE PATH TO MARS
3.5.1 Overview. In addition to Mars First and Moon First, there is a third possibility for initial exploration beyond low-Earth orbit: visiting a series of locations and objects in the inner solar system, which the Committee calls the Flexible Path. (See Figure 3.5.1-1.) The goal is to take steps toward Mars, learning to live and work in free space and near planets, under the conditions humans will meet on the way to Mars. We must learn to operate in free space for hundreds of days, beyond the protective radiation belts of the Earth, before we can confidently commit to exploring Mars. Human exploration along the Flexible Path would also support science, create new industrial opportunities, and engage the public through progressively more challenging milestone accomplishments.
On this path, sites would be visited that humans have never reached before. Astronauts would learn to service spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit, much as crews successfully serviced the Hubble Space Telescope in low-Earth orbit. Humans could visit small bodies in space, such as near-Earth objects (asteroids and spent comets that cross the Earth's path, some of which could someday collide with the Earth - Figure 3.5.1-2) and the scientifically interesting moons of Mars, return samples, and understand their structure and composition. When humans would come close to the Moon or Mars, they could deploy probes and coordinate with or control robotic assets on the surface. They could even bring home samples from Mars that were launched from the surface by robotic spacecraft. In this way we could achieve the scientific "first" of a Mars sample return.
These destinations require the smallest energy expenditure beyond low-Earth orbit, but are of increasing distance and duration from Earth. The missions could include a full dress-rehearsal for a Mars mission, consisting of traveling to Mars orbit and returning hundreds of days later. The essential concept is that humans would first visit points in space and rendezvous with small bodies and orbit larger ones, without initially descending into the deep gravity wells of Mars or the Moon.
The Flexible Path is a road toward Mars, with intermediate destinations. At several points along the way, the off-ramp from the Flexible Path to a Moon exploration program could be taken. Alternatively, if new discoveries drew us to Mars, the lunar stop could be bypassed, leading directly to a Mars landing.
Add in the fact that ARES-I is designed to lift the Orion into an orbit with a NEGATIVE PERIGEE, unless the Orion itself circularizes its orbit. Also, they've been trimming Orion left, right, and center in order to get it light enough so "the Stick" can lift it. This means cutting crew, cutting land based landing, cutting crew comforts (eg toilets) and cutting safety gear.
It's particularly ironic when you consider that in NASA's ESAS study which selected the internal Ares I design over commercial launch vehicles, the safety standards were tweaked so that the Ares I design was the only one which could satisfy the absurdly high standards. Of course, it now looks like Ares can't actually satisfy those standards, and the mass trim-backs may well result in a system considerably more dangerous than the commercial alternatives.
Paging Buzz Aldrin, article submitter needs an ass-kicking :)
Hey, don't look at me! The report wasn't even released when I submitted, so the bizarre Windows 7 link was added by one of the editors. :)
Here's my original submission.
For some reason the link for the Augustine Report seems to be going to a download for Windows 7 (Huh?!?), so here's the actual link (mirror).
Here's the main report findings from the PDF:
Summary of Principal Findings
The Committee summarizes its principal findings below. Additional findings are included in the body of the report.
The right mission and the right size: NASA's budget should match its mission and goals. Further, NASA should be given the ability to shape its organization and infrastructure accordingly, while maintaining facilities deemed to be of national importance.
International partnerships: The U.S. can lead a bold new international effort in the human exploration of space. If international partners are actively engaged, including on the "critical path" to success, there could be substantial benefits to foreign relations and more overall resources could become available to the human spaceflight program.
Short-term Space Shuttle planning: The remaining Shuttle manifest should be flown in a safe and prudent manner without undue schedule pressure. This manifest will likely extend operation into the second quarter of FY 2011. It is important to budget for this likelihood.
The human-spaceflight gap: Under current conditions, the gap in U.S. ability to launch astronauts into space will stretch to at least seven years. The Committee did not identify any credible approach employing new capabilities that could shorten the gap to less than six years. The only way to significantly close the gap is to extend the life of the Shuttle Program.
Extending the International Space Station: The return on investment to both the United States and our international partners would be significantly enhanced by an extension of the life of the ISS. A decision not to extend its operation would significantly impair U.S. ability to develop and lead future international spaceflight partnerships.
Heavy lift: A heavy-lift launch capability to low-Earth orbit, combined with the ability to inject heavy payloads away from the Earth, is beneficial to exploration. It will also be useful to the national security space and scientific communities. The Committee reviewed: the Ares family of launchers; Shuttle-derived vehicles; and launchers derived from the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle family. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, trading capability, life-cycle costs, maturity, operational complexity and the "way of doing business" within the program and NASA.
Commercial launch of crew to low-Earth orbit: Commercial services to deliver crew to low-Earth orbit are within reach. While this presents some risk, it could provide an earlier capability at lower initial and life-cycle costs than government could achieve. A new competition with adequate incentives to perform this service should be open to all U.S. aerospace companies. This would allow NASA to focus on more challenging roles, including human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit based on the continued development of the current or modified Orion spacecraft.
Technology development for exploration and commercial space: Investment in a well-designed and adequately funded space technology program is critical to enable progress in exploration. Exploration strategies can proceed more readily and economically if the requisite technology has been developed in advance. This investment will also benefit robotic exploration, the U.S. commercial space industry, the academic community and other U.S. government users.
Pathways to Mars: Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration of the inner solar system; but it is not the best first destination. Visiting the "Moon First" and following the "Flexible Path" are both viable exploration strategies. The two are not necessarily mutual
I really like these recent comments from Jeff Greason, definitely my favorite member of the Augustine Committee, regarding launch safety:
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/10/22/a-question-of-safety/
The topic of safety same up Wednesday as well in a talk by Augustine committee member Jeff Greason at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in New Mexico. In the Q&A session after his speech, he was asked why the committee didn't endorse Constellation as the "most viable" option "even though from a safety and mission assurance standpoint it's clearly the best option." Greason said that safety and mission assurance was considered by the Augustine committee, but that goes beyond simply the choice of launch vehicles.
"Launch is a relatively small contributor to the safety and mission assurance" of human missions to the Moon and beyond. "It is not negligible, it is not something you want to forget about, but it does not dominate the loss of crew probabilities." Therefore, he said, it was a mistake to focus on further increasing the reliability of a relatively small aspect of overall mission risk, particularly if those choices lead you to take out safety systems in other components that because of mass restrictions. "These are false economies in terms of safety and mission assurance."
Greason was also skeptical about the probabilistic risk assessments used to estimate the safety of various proposed systems. Most launch failures are not from random types of events, he said, but instead failures of design, testing, procedure, and the like. "If it was built wrong, it doesn't work a lot of the time, no matter what you thought the probabilistic failure was." The only way to "buy down" those failures, he said, is though flight experience, which is why "real boosters" have lower reliabilities than estimated when they were "paper boosters" still in the design phase.
"And the truth is, Ares 1 is, right now, a paper booster," Greason continued. "And the further truth is, its projected launch rate is extremely low, so it will never get out of 'infant mortality,'" that initial phase of non-probabilistic failures. "Even if Ares 1 were built exactly as planned, we would never find out whether its mature probabilistic risk assessment was or was not achievable as planned, because we would never get through the phase of life where we're supposed to work out all the teething problems."
An interesting point: This research is being done in China, not the United States. Whatever happened to basic research being done in the US?
This is cool research and all, but it's not like it happened in a vacuum. Below is a copy of the references from the PhotoSketch paper, showing the prior work the current paper was built upon, the vast majority of which are from labs in the US or Europe:
BELONGIE, S., MALIK, J., AND PUZICHA, J. 2002. Shape match-ing and object recognition using shape contexts. IEEE Trans.Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 24, 4, 509-522.
BEN-HAIM, N., BABENKO, B., AND BELONGIE, S. 2006.Improvingweb-based image search via content based clustering.In Proc. of CVPR Workshop.
DIAKOPOULOS, N., ESSA, I., AND JAIN, R. 2004. Content basedimage synthesis. In Proc. of International Conference on Imageand Video Retrieval (CIVR).EITZ, M., HILDEBRAND, K., BOUBEKEUR, T., AND ALEXA, M.2009. Photosketch: A sketch based image query and composit-ing system. In SIGGRAPH 2009 Talk Program.
FARBMAN, Z., HOFFER, G., LIPMAN, Y., COHEN-OR, D., ANDLISCHINSKI, D. 2009. Coordinates for instant image cloning.SIGGRAPH 2009.
FELZENSZWALB, P. F., AND HUTTENLOCHER, D. P. 2004. Effi-cient graph-based image segmentation. Int. J. of Comput. Vision59, 2, 167-181.
FERGUS, R., FEI-FEI, L., PERONA, P., AND ZISSERMAN, A.2005. Learning object categories from google's image search.In Proc. of ICCV.
GEORGESCU, B., SHIMSHONI, I., AND MEER, P. 2003. Meanshift based clustering in high dimensions: A texture classifica-tion example. In Proc. of ICCV.
HAYS, J. H., AND EFROS, A. A. 2007. Scene completion usingmillions of photographs. SIGGRAPH 2007.
HOU, X., AND ZHANG, L. 2007. Saliency detection: A spectralresidual approach. In Proc. of CVPR.
JACOBS, C., FINKELSTEIN, A., AND SALESIN, D. 1995. Fastmultiresolution image querying. In SIGGRAPH 1995.
JIA, J., SUN, J., TANG, C.-K., AND SHUM, H.-Y. 2006. Drag-and-drop pasting. SIGGRAPH 2004.
JOHNSON, M., BROSTOW, G. J., SHOTTON, J., ARANDJELOVI C,O., KWATRA, V., AND CIPOLLA, R. 2006. Semantic photosynthesis. Proc. of Eurographics.
LALONDE, J.-F., HOIEM, D., EFROS, A. A., ROTHER, C.,WINN, J., AND CRIMINISI, A. 2007. Photo clip art. SIG-GRAPH 2007.
LEVIN, A., LISCHINSKI, D., AND WEISS, Y. 2008. A closed-form solution to natural image matting. IEEE Trans. PatternAnal. Mach. Intell. 30, 2, 228-242.
LI, Y., SUN, J., TANG, C.-K., AND SHUM, H.-Y. 2004. Lazysnapping. SIGGRAPH 2004.LIU, T., SUN, J., ZHENG, N.-N., TANG, X., AND SHUM, H.-Y.2007. Learning to detect a salient object. In Proc. of CVPR.
MANJUNATH, B. S., AND MA, W. Y. 1996. Texture features forbrowsing and retrieval of image data. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal.Mach. Intell. 18, 8, 837-842.
PEREZ, P., GANGNET, M., AND BLAKE, A. 2003. Poisson imageediting. SIGGRAPH 2003.RAJENDRAN, R., AND CHANG, S. 2000. Image retrieval withsketches and compositions. In Proc. of International Conferenceon Multimedia & Expo (ICME).
ROTHER, C., KOLMOGOROV, V., AND BLAKE, A. 2004. "grab-cut": interactive foreground extraction using iterated graph cuts.SIGGRAPH2004.
SAXENA, A., CHUNG, S. H., AND NG, A. Y. 2008. 3-d depthreconstruction from a single still image. Int. J. of Comput. Vision76, 1, 53-69.
SMEULDERS, A., WORRING, M., SANTINI, S., GUPTA, A., ANDJAIN, R. 2000. Content-based image retrieval at the end ofthe early years. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 22, 12,1349-1380.
WANG, J., AND COHEN, M. 2007. Simultaneous matting andcompositing. In Proc. of CVPR, 1-8
Ask yourself why nobody yet chooses to live in Antarctica. Its cheaper than going to Mars, safer and more comfortable. But nobody has started a colony.
The reason is that both claiming sovereignty and mining resources from Antarctica is forbidden by international law. There's actually a ban on resource extraction there until 2048:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
I just wonder why is it cheaper now, compared to 10-20 years ago? Or why is it cheaper for a private company?
One of the big things to keep in mind is that as a government institution, NASA is severely limited in how it's able to restructure its workforce towards its goals. This wasn't an issue back in the Apollo days, when NASA was in a massive growth spurt and could hire the best and brightest to achieve its goals. Nowadays, an absurdly high percentage of the NASA workforce is middle management, and since they're civil servants NASA can't just let them go and hire new people. Also, NASA has the additional constraint that the people it does hire have to be distributed amongst key congressional districts.
It's interesting to note that in the congressional debates about NASA, the key item of the debate hasn't been NASA's scientific mission or technological impact, but the impact on the existing number of jobs. NASA has ~10,000 Shuttle workers (many in the electoral battleground state of Florida), and any plan which seeks to make things more efficient by cutting back on the number of workers needed is going to face a massive uphill battle in Congress.
One proposal I really like, but has faced massive congressional resistance in the past, would be to turn NASA Centers into Federally Funded Research Development Centers, the model used by JPL and the Department of Energy's national labs, which are able to do competitive hiring. Of course, see what happened to the 2004 Aldrige Report which suggested this (see page 23); it was heavily battled by Congress and pushed basically into oblivion.
It's particularly worth noting that what's been done so far science-wise is only the beginning of science results from the ISS, as most of the effort so far has been in construction. The crew size was also just doubled this year, allowing for even more time to be spent devoted to science:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/6628585.html
After 15 years of construction, narrow congressional votes, delays and, yes, cost overruns, the $100 billion international space station finally appears ready for prime time. ... In May the space station doubled its crew from three to six astronauts, and this summer two space shuttle missions delivered a new laboratory and critical scientific equipment. ...
Then, earlier this month, a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to study the future of human spaceflight gave the station high marks, recommending its life be extended until at least 2020 and full funding to reach its potential.
The station is now beginning to do just that, as astronauts use the ISS for its intended purpose as an outpost for scientific research in a weightless environment, and learning to live for long periods in space.
Until now, crew efforts have focused on assembling disparate modules built by Russia, the United States, Japan and Europe into a cohesive whole. Since habitation began in 2000, therefore, astronauts have devoted only about 12,000 hours to scientific research.
Now with the crew expansion, and likely completion of the station by early 2011 allowing astronauts to swap their hard hats for test tubes, NASA estimates that total to increase by a factor of eight by 2015, to about 90,000 hours.
"We're just beginning to scratch the surface," said Julie Robinson, who oversees the ISS science program.
You mean the Ares I that is being built by ATK and Boeing? Oh, wait, those are private companies too. In fact, Boeing is also responsible for two of the "private" rockets on your list.
You really need to read up on the contracting process behind the Ares I and how it's fundamentally different from things like the EELVs.
Now if we only had a rocket to get it to the moon...
Um, there's plenty of US rockets available to get it to the Moon, just none built by NASA. It's also worth noting that all of the non-NASA rockets cost less than a billion dollars to develop, compared to the >$35 billion projected development cost for NASA's competing Ares I, which will have nearly identical capabilities to its competitors:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/deltaiv.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/atlasv.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/falcon9.htm
and utterly failed to provide funding for it. Its no wonder that NASA does not have enough money to complete the project. If this results in a funding increase for NASA, it will be a start. Even if it is only a tiny baby step.
This keeps on getting repeated, but NASA had more than enough money for going to the Moon at a sustainable pace. It's just that NASA didn't have funds to return to the Moon AND also fulfill the new (now former) administrator Michael Griffin's dreams of building two entirely new rockets. This is of course in addition to all the other stuff NASA has to fund, like unmanned science, the ISS, the Shuttle, and making sure workers in key congressional districts keep on getting their paychecks.
According to a comment over at NASA Watch, this is going to be at least conceptually based on the NEBULA cloud computing platform developed by NASA Ames. It seems pretty cool and potentially quite useful. Calling it an "app store" is a really dumb analogy though, and gives absolutely no idea of what it actually entails:
http://nebula.nasa.gov/
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/09/ames_will_help.html
I am the Project Coordinator for Nebula, the cloud computing pilot at NASA Ames. Nebula has been in R&D and under development for well over a year. There are many reasons that a large organization, such as NASA, would explore cloud. The Nebula team did an extensive trade study to see what public clouds out there could meet NASA's needs. None did. Either they were not fast and powerful enough to handle NASA's massive data sets or they did not comply with security requirements. NASA needed its own cloud. I won't go into technical specifics (you can read about them at http://nebula.nasa.gov/ but the Nebula team ended up creating something that is smart, powerful, and incredibly energy-efficient to boot.
NASA was approached by the Feds because Nebula solves some cloud problems that are common among other Government Agencies. It is wicked fast, complies with FISMA and can scale to Government-sized demands. It is also rather forward-thinking in that it is built using open-source components and is incredibly energy efficient. Again, Nebula was created with NASA - not the Feds - in mind, but when they caught wind, they were interested too.
I suggest that people spend some time reading about what is actually going on before they jump to conclusions. To my knowledge there have been no announcements that Ames will orchestrate the Fed's move to cloud computing or develop any new systems or technologies that were not already under development. NASA has been responsible for a number of innovative new technologies over the years. Memory foam, for example. NASA invented it, but are they out there selling mattresses? :) Some people seem so caught up in the politics that they have completely missed the point.
Posted by: Gretchen at September 16, 2009 8:42 PM
I'm just against the idea of assigning monetary value to life.
Wow, you must really hate life insurance.
Name me one company, just one, that has provided a significant and continuous source of funding for a major project that it believed in, even when the going got tough. Just one.
SpaceX
Armadillo Aerospace
Well, you missed the small text at the bottom of the page that said "*** per component" !
It's also worth noting that this sort of "component-based" risk assessment, where you determine the chance of failure based on the known probabilities of particular components failing, only predicts a tiny percentage of launch failures. The vast majority of launch failures are due to components failing in ways that weren't anticipated and/or flaws in the overall design. Rockets don't typically fail in the ways you expect them to.
Jeff Greason stated this rather elegantly during one of the Augustine Committee public meetings, but I can't find the quote for the life of me. Anybody else know where to find it?
I propose that the primary goal be to learn[1] about space colonization, and a perm moon-base is a good place to start. They would be space pioneers, and everyone knows pioneers risk arrows in their backs. This is a role Americans can relate to and would accept risk for because our ancestors faced the same situation. (Even "Native Americans" made a risky migration out of Asia. There are no true "Native Americans".)
I liked what the author of the article had to say about building an Arlington-like space cemetery to emphasize this. Here's a more elaborate version of that from the same author from this piece (which I strongly suggest reading) on making spaceflight more accessible to the rest of us:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=21248
There is no such thing as safe. Despite the fantasies of Safety and Mission Assurance (S&MA) types at NASA, âoesafeâ and âoeunsafeâ are not binary conditions. There is no ultimate safety, this side of the grave. All we can do is to make things as safe as reasonable, and that includes reasonable expense. NASA has spent untold billions in an attempt to make things âoesafeâ over the decades, and they killed seventeen astronauts. Maybe they could have spent a lot less money, and perhaps killed a few more astronauts, but made a lot more progress. Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if weâ(TM)re not killing people, weâ(TM)re not pushing hard enough. If our attitude toward the space frontier is that we must strive to never ever lose anyone, it will remain closed. If our ancestors who opened the west, or who came from Europe, had had such an attitude, we would still be over there, and there would have been no California space industry to get us to the moon forty years ago. It has never been âoesafeâ to open a frontier, and this frontier is the harshest one that weâ(TM)ve ever faced, but fortunately, we have sufficiently advanced technology to allow us to do it anyway, and probably with much less loss of life than any previous one. But people die every day doing a lot less worthwhile things than opening a frontier.
Before Mercury, the test pilots who flew in that program used to attend funerals of their colleagues, who had made smoking craters in the desert, on a frequent basis. But no one else knew about them, or cared much. They were just doing their jobâ"developing the technologies and weapons that we needed to win an existential war. When they got out of their test aircraft and climbed into a Mercury capsule, they knew it was risky, but it was a lot less so than their previous job.
A frequent commenter on my blog has suggested that to avoid future national sob parties, such as occurred after Challenger and Columbia, we should set aside a special cemetery like Arlington, in a well-publicized ceremony, and declare that this was where all those who would lose their lives in our planned opening of the solar system would be laid to rest. And to make it big, just to make the point. There is in fact an astronaut memorial mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, with the names of those lost so far, and plenty of squares for more. A visionary president would point that out with the announcement of the new policy.
SpaceX is going to fly people on its Dragon, and itâ(TM)s going to make it as safe as it can afford to and still have a market for it, but I doubt that they will âoehuman rateâ it, and I see no need for ULA to do so with its launcher, either. No one, after all, âoehuman ratesâ an airplane. What ULA needs to do is to modify the design to make them reasonably safe, and contra the recent Aerospace Corporation report Iâ(TM)m confident that they can do that for a lot less than thirty-five billion dollars and in less than seven years, which is a pretty low bar to beat Ares I. If
Of course, the Government doesn't want you to know that Alan was actually assassinated by a covert agency after he discovered the Turing-Lovecraft Theorem.
Seriously though, this was long overdue. RIP Alan Turing.
Do you know anything about the process that led to the space shuttle? Yes NASA solicited design bids--many design bids. Not just from the usual suspects (Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed, North American, etc., etc.) but also from surprising sources such as Chrysler (they had a neat SSTO design). NASA, contrary to your suppositions, does not do everything in house. In fact, even the launches are technically operated by ULA, a joint effort by Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Well yes, NASA collected a large number of competitive design proposals for the space shuttle, many of them quite innovative. It then tossed them out and picked a contractor which would build the design the folks at NASA Marshall had in mind:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm
Following the usual charade of competitive bidding, NASA picked the same prime contractor as for X-15 and Apollo, who could be trusted to build precisely the vehicle NASA had in mind. North American Rockwell was selected to build the orbiter, with its Rocketdyne Division making the main engines. Thiokol was selected on political grounds for the solid rocket boosters. Martin Marietta would build the External Tank, but at the government Saturn IC factory at Michoud.
It's worth noting that pretty much the exact same thing happened with the current (like to soon be past) architecture. NASA spent about a year soliciting innovative competitive proposals from a number of companies, such as t/Space, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, and then selected the most promising proposals for further study. Then the new administrator Michael Griffin came in, threw out all the competing studies, ran his own 2-month study which (surprise!) said that Griffin's own design from a couple years prior was the best one, and then essentially made NASA the prime contractor for what's now known as the Ares I rocket.
Look at the mess people create on earth. It's probably best that we keep our distance from other worlds.
Why, because we might make some rocks dirty? Seriously, I want you to explain why we "messy" humans should keep away from other worlds.
exploring the universe can wait until we've mastered being human without killing each other, the air, the seas, and the land upon which we walk.
You're going to be waiting a very, very long time. Odds are that humanity ending would be a precondition for that, but I have a suspicion that wouldn't be an undesirable outcome for you.
I have read the summary and think it seems well-thought out and positive and not at all aligned with the title of this original post.
I agree! I'm really not sure where this "the sky is falling!" mentality present in the original summary and several of the comments here is coming from. IMHO, the report itself is rather exciting, and if NASA takes it seriously (not necessarily a given, considering how it managed to ignore just about every single recommendation from the Aldridge Report), this could lead to a great new future for NASA.