Such a tactic probably would encourage recklessness and the cutting of corners.
Because, you know, the last thing we want to have when exploring the unknown is risk.
(It's also worth noting that most of the companies developing new rockets and spacecraft have at least some astronauts running the company. I'm sure they have at least some idea about how to manage risk.)
Moving the ISS to a Lagrange Point would require an enormous amount of fuel, and getting that fuel to orbit. You would need to attach engines, and the station structure cannot handle the force.
If you read the commenters original comment, he mentioned "an" ISS, not "the" ISS. There's absolutely no reason that you couldn't just launch some Bigelow space station modules to a Lagrange point and set up a new space station there.
There is also currently no way of getting supplies and people there.
I suspect that's largely what the point of "Flexible Path" largely is -- to create an infrastructure for ferrying supplies and people between points in space. You can get things/people to a Lagrange point (or a NEO, or Phobos) if you have a dedicated "true" spacecraft which doesn't also have to lug around the mass necessary for launching people into orbit and performing reentry.
For a good idea of what the "Flexible Path" might involve, I suggest reading through this 2004 study led by Wes Huntress for the International Academy of Astronautics, "The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space." It describes how an incremental architecture can be used to progressive expand exploration outwards from LEO, to Lagrange points, to NEOs, to the Lunar surface, to the Martian moons, and finally to Mars itself.
Without the usage of something other than chemical rockets, there will be no meaningful human space flight.
What do you mean by "meaningful space flight"? There's still quite a lot of room for cost-efficiency with chemical rockets -- Elon Musk of SpaceX figures there's at least room for an order of magnitude of a price drop. IMHO, NASA should focus on getting the prices of chemical rockets to drop with things with things like commercial space transport procurement, while using the money it saves to resume its efforts into developing new space technologies. Unfortunately, when the Ares I going overbudget, instead of canceling the Ares I they just canceled almost all of their (already sparse) technology development efforts.
Ok, not to be whiny, but I didn't like this particular summary, as it mentions the panel's conclusion that NASA's current path is unworkable, but doesn't make any mention of the alternative paths forwarded presented by the Committee (and discussed in the article). Here's an alternative summary, with some links to the actual report summary (which I suspect none of the commenters so far have actually read):
A summary of the Augustine Committee's upcoming report on the future of US spaceflight has been submitted to the White House and NASA, and made available to the public. The committee's analysis found that NASA's current plans for a human lunar return by 2020 are unworkable, with NASA's status quo not likely to place them on the moon 'until well into the 2030s, if ever'. Raising NASA's budget by $3B/year opens two primary options: 'Moon First' with a lunar return and possible base-building starting in the mid-2020s, or 'Flexible Path,' which would initially focus on building an in-space architecture for supporting progressive exploration, starting with Lagrange points and Near-Earth Objects (asteroids and comets) in the early 2020s, and exploring the moons of Mars or Earth in the mid-2020s. Options for a heavy-lift launcher were also outlined: NASA's current plans for an Ares V, a less costly 'directly Shuttle-derived' vehicle, or the least costly (but politically most difficult) 'new way of doing business' of purchasing launches on an upgraded EELV. Other key findings are that the ISS should be extended to 2020, that developing in-space refueling would benefit all of NASA's options, that NASA should make use of commercial crew transportation, that NASA should revive its space technology development program (which had largely stagnated in past decades), and that while Mars should be the ultimate destination for human exploration, it is not the best first destination. The White House and NASA will review the report and announce NASA's forward path in early October.
spending any more tax payer money to send humans into space, to the moon or mars, is a ridiculous waste considering the catastrophic infrastructure breakdowns we are now facing in real time.
Oh, come off it. NASA's human exploration budget is less than $10 billion, which is about 0.156% (or 1/640th) of US government spending. Because of how prevalent it is in the public mindset, people are under this mistaken illusion that its funding is much higher than it actually is.
From the link you posted, I swear these folks in a cabin near the fire seem to be begging for a Darwin Award. I'm actually kind of pissed that the Fire Department has to waste some of their limited resources on these people:
Some residents in the fire's path continued to ignore orders to evacuate.
Five people at a cabin near Big Tujunga Road and Gold Creek were reportedly safe for the moment, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Whitmore said.
Sheriff's deputies ordered the four men and one woman to evacuate Sunday, according to Whitmore. They refused. The fire advanced on their cabin and they later asked for help, Whitmore said.
Flames were too dangerous to allow sheriff's crews to go in to rescue the group. Luckily, flames shifted and missed the cabin. Since then the people have been visited as many as six times and refused to leave.
They have signed releases provided to them by the sheriff's department acknowledging the danger they still face.
The LA Times has been maintaining a Google Map showing the fire perimeter, location of landmarks like Mt. Wilson (it's the volcano shape on the lower-right side of the fire perimeter), and the direction the fire's been spreading. It's the best way I've found to quickly get an idea of what's going on:
I've been living in Pasadena for a while, and this has been quite an interesting experience. My brother just moved out here from Florida, and he arrived at our house the other night telling me how huge the fires on the mountain looked. I thought to myself, "Oh, he's just impressed because he's never seen this sort of thing before" -- I've seen wildfires on the mountains north of here in the past, and even if they cover a huge amount of area they still look fairly small from ~13 miles away. I then walked to the middle of our street where I could get a view of the mountains, and then exclaimed, "Holy crap, the mountain's on fire!" That was shit was insane.
Friends of mine have had to evacuate already, the air perpetually smells like smoke, and a lot of people are wearing breathing masks. This is crazy. I really hope the historic Mt. Wilson observatory can be saved, and that the loss of life/property can be minimized.
If you haven't seen it yet, I'd suggest the wikipedia article for the fire, which has things like satellite photos of the fire and more information:
From the article you linked: "However, this was no surprise to those working on the program, with new information now showing that engineers and designers had protested at the very moment they were informed of a management decision to build a composite LH2 tank."
Do you have any idea if (X-33 manager) Scott Cook was the one who made that poor management decision, was merely a supporter of it, or if he fought it?
If its publicly funded, is it still private space travel?
IMHO, what's important is that it's commercial and competitive. For example, as great as they are, if you just handed Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, or Burt Rutan a huge pile of money and gave them a monopoly over spaceflight, you'd eventually have many of the same problems. What's key is to have many companies competing against each other to provide the best spaceflight product, with NASA, academic researchers, "tourists," and private industry as the customers.
Before making my submission I honestly tried to find examples of things which were even marginally successful, but could only find examples of management failures (X-33, X-34, Delta Clipper, ISS Propulsion Module).
I should add that this can potentially be attributed to big launch/propulsion projects in general at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (or at least those from the past 30 years). It's kind of tricky to separate the two though, since Steve Cook seems to have been manager for most of those projects. There were some failed launch projects though at MSFC which Steve Cook didn't manage, such as the ASRM, National Launch System, and Orbital Space Plane. No MSFC successes I've been able to find, though.
So... it's an open question if the management failures were due to Steve Cook, NASA MSFC, or NASA in general.
Flea, normally, we see eye to eye and agree on most everything, but you are dead wrong here. The X-33, 34, and Delta Clipper deaths can be blamed on Congress and Bush.
Do you have any references for your claims? I'm not suggesting you're wrong of course, I'd just like to read up more on it. From what I've read, the X-33 seems to have failed largely due to the requirement of having to test many high-risk technologies in a single prototype, instead of validating the technologies individually. With the X-34, Wikipedia sez, "when the first flight vehicle was near completion, the programme died after NASA demanded sizable design changes without providing any new funding, and the contractor, Orbital Sciences, refused." The Delta Clipper I thought was progressing along nicely, although its minuscule budget was cancelled in favor of the X-33.
To blame Mr. Cook for having been on these projects is dead wrong. He did excellent work, but was in the wrong place at the wrong times.
This is actually something I've been trying to get better clarification on, without much luck: How much of the blame for NASA's failed attempts at developing new launch vehicles should be placed on Steve Cook, versus NASA MSFC, NASA in general, the executive branch, or Congress. If anybody has additional insights regarding this question, I'd love to hear.
So, has he done anything good lately? Either the summary is very unfair to the guy or this Dynetics thing is doomed.
Before making my submission I honestly tried to find examples of things which were even marginally successful, but could only find examples of management failures (X-33, X-34, Delta Clipper, ISS Propulsion Module). The only positive result I can find is that he had some pretty cool CGI videos made of his project designs, which apparently helped a lot with making sure that they got money for as long as they did.
Seriously, if anybody has examples of anything good Steve Cook did during his 19 years at NASA, please post them.
This wasn't in the summary, but it's also worth noting that in his 19 years at NASA, Steve Cook was also manager of the failed X-33, X-34, and Delta Clipper (after it was transferred to NASA). I'm trying to find validation, but I think he was also manager for the failed ISS Propulsion Module project as well.
In fact, I've been earnestly looking, and I can't find a single example of a project he managed which didn't end overbudget and in utter failure. The only possible exception I can think of is the Delta Clipper, which actually started under somebody else's management, experienced some success, and was killed off so NASA could focus on the X-33 (also managed by Steve Cook).
The following post by a (now-former) NASA engineer does a great job of summarizing what Steve Cook was like as a manager, although Deger blames it more on NASA management culture than Steve Cook himself:
My cut is: the story was "The stick is safe in every way". This made the program not look at problems with the stick that could have been taken care of with some careful engineering design work. Thrust Oscillation, Vibro-acoustics, and SRB disposal all have engineering design solutions, but the party line up front was "none of these are a problem". Any engineer that attempted to fix these problems was removed from the program and made into what the Japanese call a window watcher. I was one of them for trying to get the program to realize the stack was going to be not healthy after an abort and this fact needed to taken care of. I even had a simple design solution to the problem, to take care of it.
I have heard many people that tried to fix TO [thrust oscillation] were removed. I bet the same happened to the first people that recognize vibro-acoustic were an issue that need to be dealt with.
I am in the process of doing my best to design solutions to these problems. It may not be possible because there is no performance margin left.
And to this day, the requirements have not still not been defined.
Danny Deger
Edit: And none of this was caused by Mr. Cook. He did his job exactly as he was trained to do by NASA.
Before this thread fills up completely with cynical wisecracking Americans, let me be the first to say, as a cynical wisecracking American, go India!
Seriously. You guys have a very solid set of rockets, a good broad focus (China's too focused on manned missions), and the technical skills to make it happen.
Also, I found it a little strange that the BBC article didn't mention this, but the Chandrayaan-1 had already been in successful operation for 312 days and had completed all of its primary mission goals. It had already collected plenty of scientific data, distributed to not just Indian scientists but also collaborators in Europe and the US. Of course, another year would be nice, but I'd consider the project a stunning success by just about any reasonable definition, especially since it was India's first ever lunar probe.
I look forward to India's Chandrayaan-2, which is planned to land a robotic rover on the Moon in 2012.
Traffic fatalities rates have actually been steadily going down in the recent years [dot.gov] and are lowest they ever were. I think this is mostly due to better cars (for example, stability control reduces accidents by about 30%, we have better tires, fewer old cars on the road that can't make a good evasive maneuver).
I think a bigger factor would be the increased price in gasoline over that time period. The general decrease in overall miles spent on the road has been well-documented, and I imagine that another factor is that driving at the speed limit is more fuel-efficient than speeding.
Before everybody gets all crazy and excited about this, there doesn't seem to be any details about Marc Bowman's comments anywhere (not even NASA's site) except for a 5-sentence blurb from RIA Novosti (the Russian state-owned news agency). There was a cool article in IEEE Spectrum recently about Russia's Mars dreams, but they were along the lines of "here's some neat ideas, we need money."
My suspicion is that Marc Bowman said something generic like "it would be nice for Russia and NASA to work together more in the future on things like Mars missions," and RIA Novosti just decided to run with it.
NASA (Government) should be developing the technology (this part is expensive) so private industry can offer services. It is probably non-realistic to expect a private company to expend a billion or so dollars for an unproven (and possibly non-viable) technology.
I totally agree. My hope is that by purchasing services based on mature technologies from commercial sources, NASA can use the money it saved for researching things like scramjets, space elevators, VASIMR, etc. As it is, NASA got rid of most of their "pie-in-the-sky" projects when the Ares I started going overbudget.
Only if that vendor provides jobs to the voters of the senator on the "steering" committee.
You should look into how NASA contracting is currently done. The aim is that COTS/commercial contracting will be much less prone to those sorts of problems than the NASA status quo.
Re:What have they been doing until now?
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NASA May Outsource
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· Score: 1
None of which are rated for manned space flight.
NASA has shown pretty well with the Ares I that the notion of "human-rated vehicles" is pretty much meaningless.
The point is - that's *not* how government contracting works.
Isn't it how the (pre-ULA, at least) EELV program worked, and the Joint Strike Fighter (X-32 vs X-35) program worked? I see no reason why NASA can't do something similar, particularly since commercial off-the-shelf rockets already exist which are perfectly capable of delivering payloads to LEO.
I'm as pro-competition and free market as anybody, but contracts just don't work that way. Much of the work is so specialized that only one company is able to fulfill the contract. For example, Northrop Grumman is the ONLY company that is able to overhaul aircraft carriers, so they get every contract. The barrier to entry is impossibly high for potential competitors. The contract is so large that it essentially grants a monopoly to the winner. The losers can't stay in business long enough to compete.
You may want to read up more on COTS and CCDev. These are fixed-price competitive contracts for delivering payloads to orbit, rather than the development-focused contracts you're describing.
Re:Job #1 should be tracking asteroids
on
NASA May Outsource
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· Score: 1
Ok, they find the asteroid... and then what? I hate to break this to you, but Armageddeon was a work of fiction. (Shocking, I know.) We don't have anything that can land on an asteroid and do anything about it-- and we probably wouldn't have time to build one after we detected the sucker.
Sure, if you detected an earth-impacting asteroid a few days beforehand you'd be screwed, but if you detect one several years beforehand you have quite a few options, ranging from splashing some paint on one side of the asteroid (so sunlight has an asymmetric effect on the trajectory) to using nuclear rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Such a tactic probably would encourage recklessness and the cutting of corners.
Because, you know, the last thing we want to have when exploring the unknown is risk.
(It's also worth noting that most of the companies developing new rockets and spacecraft have at least some astronauts running the company. I'm sure they have at least some idea about how to manage risk.)
Moving the ISS to a Lagrange Point would require an enormous amount of fuel, and getting that fuel to orbit. You would need to attach engines, and the station structure cannot handle the force.
If you read the commenters original comment, he mentioned "an" ISS, not "the" ISS. There's absolutely no reason that you couldn't just launch some Bigelow space station modules to a Lagrange point and set up a new space station there.
There is also currently no way of getting supplies and people there.
I suspect that's largely what the point of "Flexible Path" largely is -- to create an infrastructure for ferrying supplies and people between points in space. You can get things/people to a Lagrange point (or a NEO, or Phobos) if you have a dedicated "true" spacecraft which doesn't also have to lug around the mass necessary for launching people into orbit and performing reentry.
For a good idea of what the "Flexible Path" might involve, I suggest reading through this 2004 study led by Wes Huntress for the International Academy of Astronautics, "The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space." It describes how an incremental architecture can be used to progressive expand exploration outwards from LEO, to Lagrange points, to NEOs, to the Lunar surface, to the Martian moons, and finally to Mars itself.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/strategies/AdvisoryGroupReports/iaa_report.pdf
Without the usage of something other than chemical rockets, there will be no meaningful human space flight.
What do you mean by "meaningful space flight"? There's still quite a lot of room for cost-efficiency with chemical rockets -- Elon Musk of SpaceX figures there's at least room for an order of magnitude of a price drop. IMHO, NASA should focus on getting the prices of chemical rockets to drop with things with things like commercial space transport procurement, while using the money it saves to resume its efforts into developing new space technologies. Unfortunately, when the Ares I going overbudget, instead of canceling the Ares I they just canceled almost all of their (already sparse) technology development efforts.
Ok, not to be whiny, but I didn't like this particular summary, as it mentions the panel's conclusion that NASA's current path is unworkable, but doesn't make any mention of the alternative paths forwarded presented by the Committee (and discussed in the article). Here's an alternative summary, with some links to the actual report summary (which I suspect none of the commenters so far have actually read):
A summary of the Augustine Committee's upcoming report on the future of US spaceflight has been submitted to the White House and NASA, and made available to the public. The committee's analysis found that NASA's current plans for a human lunar return by 2020 are unworkable, with NASA's status quo not likely to place them on the moon 'until well into the 2030s, if ever'. Raising NASA's budget by $3B/year opens two primary options: 'Moon First' with a lunar return and possible base-building starting in the mid-2020s, or 'Flexible Path,' which would initially focus on building an in-space architecture for supporting progressive exploration, starting with Lagrange points and Near-Earth Objects (asteroids and comets) in the early 2020s, and exploring the moons of Mars or Earth in the mid-2020s. Options for a heavy-lift launcher were also outlined: NASA's current plans for an Ares V, a less costly 'directly Shuttle-derived' vehicle, or the least costly (but politically most difficult) 'new way of doing business' of purchasing launches on an upgraded EELV. Other key findings are that the ISS should be extended to 2020, that developing in-space refueling would benefit all of NASA's options, that NASA should make use of commercial crew transportation, that NASA should revive its space technology development program (which had largely stagnated in past decades), and that while Mars should be the ultimate destination for human exploration, it is not the best first destination. The White House and NASA will review the report and announce NASA's forward path in early October.
spending any more tax payer money to send humans into space, to the moon or mars, is a ridiculous waste considering the catastrophic infrastructure breakdowns we are now facing in real time.
Oh, come off it. NASA's human exploration budget is less than $10 billion, which is about 0.156% (or 1/640th) of US government spending. Because of how prevalent it is in the public mindset, people are under this mistaken illusion that its funding is much higher than it actually is.
From the link you posted, I swear these folks in a cabin near the fire seem to be begging for a Darwin Award. I'm actually kind of pissed that the Fire Department has to waste some of their limited resources on these people:
Some residents in the fire's path continued to ignore orders to evacuate.
Five people at a cabin near Big Tujunga Road and Gold Creek were reportedly safe for the moment, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Whitmore said.
Sheriff's deputies ordered the four men and one woman to evacuate Sunday, according to Whitmore. They refused. The fire advanced on their cabin and they later asked for help, Whitmore said.
Flames were too dangerous to allow sheriff's crews to go in to rescue the group. Luckily, flames shifted and missed the cabin. Since then the people have been visited as many as six times and refused to leave.
They have signed releases provided to them by the sheriff's department acknowledging the danger they still face.
The LA Times has been maintaining a Google Map showing the fire perimeter, location of landmarks like Mt. Wilson (it's the volcano shape on the lower-right side of the fire perimeter), and the direction the fire's been spreading. It's the best way I've found to quickly get an idea of what's going on:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=us&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=117631292961056724014.0004720e21d9cded17ce4
I've been living in Pasadena for a while, and this has been quite an interesting experience. My brother just moved out here from Florida, and he arrived at our house the other night telling me how huge the fires on the mountain looked. I thought to myself, "Oh, he's just impressed because he's never seen this sort of thing before" -- I've seen wildfires on the mountains north of here in the past, and even if they cover a huge amount of area they still look fairly small from ~13 miles away. I then walked to the middle of our street where I could get a view of the mountains, and then exclaimed, "Holy crap, the mountain's on fire!" That was shit was insane.
Friends of mine have had to evacuate already, the air perpetually smells like smoke, and a lot of people are wearing breathing masks. This is crazy. I really hope the historic Mt. Wilson observatory can be saved, and that the loss of life/property can be minimized.
If you haven't seen it yet, I'd suggest the wikipedia article for the fire, which has things like satellite photos of the fire and more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2009_California_wildfires
If there was a good way for contact orientation to be maintained, bifocal contact lenses would be a reality already.
This isn't something I know much about, but googling seems to indicate that bifocal contact lenses do in fact exist:
http://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/bifocals.htm
http://www.contactlenses.org/bifocal_contact_lenses.htm
From the article you linked: "However, this was no surprise to those working on the program, with new information now showing that engineers and designers had protested at the very moment they were informed of a management decision to build a composite LH2 tank."
Do you have any idea if (X-33 manager) Scott Cook was the one who made that poor management decision, was merely a supporter of it, or if he fought it?
If its publicly funded, is it still private space travel?
IMHO, what's important is that it's commercial and competitive. For example, as great as they are, if you just handed Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, or Burt Rutan a huge pile of money and gave them a monopoly over spaceflight, you'd eventually have many of the same problems. What's key is to have many companies competing against each other to provide the best spaceflight product, with NASA, academic researchers, "tourists," and private industry as the customers.
Before making my submission I honestly tried to find examples of things which were even marginally successful, but could only find examples of management failures (X-33, X-34, Delta Clipper, ISS Propulsion Module).
I should add that this can potentially be attributed to big launch/propulsion projects in general at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (or at least those from the past 30 years). It's kind of tricky to separate the two though, since Steve Cook seems to have been manager for most of those projects. There were some failed launch projects though at MSFC which Steve Cook didn't manage, such as the ASRM, National Launch System, and Orbital Space Plane. No MSFC successes I've been able to find, though.
So... it's an open question if the management failures were due to Steve Cook, NASA MSFC, or NASA in general.
Flea, normally, we see eye to eye and agree on most everything, but you are dead wrong here. The X-33, 34, and Delta Clipper deaths can be blamed on Congress and Bush.
Do you have any references for your claims? I'm not suggesting you're wrong of course, I'd just like to read up more on it. From what I've read, the X-33 seems to have failed largely due to the requirement of having to test many high-risk technologies in a single prototype, instead of validating the technologies individually. With the X-34, Wikipedia sez, "when the first flight vehicle was near completion, the programme died after NASA demanded sizable design changes without providing any new funding, and the contractor, Orbital Sciences, refused." The Delta Clipper I thought was progressing along nicely, although its minuscule budget was cancelled in favor of the X-33.
To blame Mr. Cook for having been on these projects is dead wrong. He did excellent work, but was in the wrong place at the wrong times.
This is actually something I've been trying to get better clarification on, without much luck: How much of the blame for NASA's failed attempts at developing new launch vehicles should be placed on Steve Cook, versus NASA MSFC, NASA in general, the executive branch, or Congress. If anybody has additional insights regarding this question, I'd love to hear.
So, has he done anything good lately? Either the summary is very unfair to the guy or this Dynetics thing is doomed.
Before making my submission I honestly tried to find examples of things which were even marginally successful, but could only find examples of management failures (X-33, X-34, Delta Clipper, ISS Propulsion Module). The only positive result I can find is that he had some pretty cool CGI videos made of his project designs, which apparently helped a lot with making sure that they got money for as long as they did.
Seriously, if anybody has examples of anything good Steve Cook did during his 19 years at NASA, please post them.
This wasn't in the summary, but it's also worth noting that in his 19 years at NASA, Steve Cook was also manager of the failed X-33, X-34, and Delta Clipper (after it was transferred to NASA). I'm trying to find validation, but I think he was also manager for the failed ISS Propulsion Module project as well.
In fact, I've been earnestly looking, and I can't find a single example of a project he managed which didn't end overbudget and in utter failure. The only possible exception I can think of is the Delta Clipper, which actually started under somebody else's management, experienced some success, and was killed off so NASA could focus on the X-33 (also managed by Steve Cook).
The following post by a (now-former) NASA engineer does a great job of summarizing what Steve Cook was like as a manager, although Deger blames it more on NASA management culture than Steve Cook himself:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=18523.msg467693#msg467693
My cut is: the story was "The stick is safe in every way". This made the program not look at problems with the stick that could have been taken care of with some careful engineering design work. Thrust Oscillation, Vibro-acoustics, and SRB disposal all have engineering design solutions, but the party line up front was "none of these are a problem". Any engineer that attempted to fix these problems was removed from the program and made into what the Japanese call a window watcher. I was one of them for trying to get the program to realize the stack was going to be not healthy after an abort and this fact needed to taken care of. I even had a simple design solution to the problem, to take care of it.
I have heard many people that tried to fix TO [thrust oscillation] were removed. I bet the same happened to the first people that recognize vibro-acoustic were an issue that need to be dealt with.
I am in the process of doing my best to design solutions to these problems. It may not be possible because there is no performance margin left.
And to this day, the requirements have not still not been defined.
Danny Deger
Edit: And none of this was caused by Mr. Cook. He did his job exactly as he was trained to do by NASA.
Before this thread fills up completely with cynical wisecracking Americans, let me be the first to say, as a cynical wisecracking American, go India!
Seriously. You guys have a very solid set of rockets, a good broad focus (China's too focused on manned missions), and the technical skills to make it happen.
Also, I found it a little strange that the BBC article didn't mention this, but the Chandrayaan-1 had already been in successful operation for 312 days and had completed all of its primary mission goals. It had already collected plenty of scientific data, distributed to not just Indian scientists but also collaborators in Europe and the US. Of course, another year would be nice, but I'd consider the project a stunning success by just about any reasonable definition, especially since it was India's first ever lunar probe.
I look forward to India's Chandrayaan-2, which is planned to land a robotic rover on the Moon in 2012.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1#Completion_of_primary_objectives
Traffic fatalities rates have actually been steadily going down in the recent years [dot.gov] and are lowest they ever were. I think this is mostly due to better cars (for example, stability control reduces accidents by about 30%, we have better tires, fewer old cars on the road that can't make a good evasive maneuver).
I think a bigger factor would be the increased price in gasoline over that time period. The general decrease in overall miles spent on the road has been well-documented, and I imagine that another factor is that driving at the speed limit is more fuel-efficient than speeding.
Before everybody gets all crazy and excited about this, there doesn't seem to be any details about Marc Bowman's comments anywhere (not even NASA's site) except for a 5-sentence blurb from RIA Novosti (the Russian state-owned news agency). There was a cool article in IEEE Spectrum recently about Russia's Mars dreams, but they were along the lines of "here's some neat ideas, we need money."
My suspicion is that Marc Bowman said something generic like "it would be nice for Russia and NASA to work together more in the future on things like Mars missions," and RIA Novosti just decided to run with it.
NASA (Government) should be developing the technology (this part is expensive) so private industry can offer services. It is probably non-realistic to expect a private company to expend a billion or so dollars for an unproven (and possibly non-viable) technology.
I totally agree. My hope is that by purchasing services based on mature technologies from commercial sources, NASA can use the money it saved for researching things like scramjets, space elevators, VASIMR, etc. As it is, NASA got rid of most of their "pie-in-the-sky" projects when the Ares I started going overbudget.
Since when were the construction tolerances of commercial airliners and spacecraft anywhere near comparable?
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that COTS construction tolerances would be lower than NASA's?
Only if that vendor provides jobs to the voters of the senator on the "steering" committee.
You should look into how NASA contracting is currently done. The aim is that COTS/commercial contracting will be much less prone to those sorts of problems than the NASA status quo.
None of which are rated for manned space flight.
NASA has shown pretty well with the Ares I that the notion of "human-rated vehicles" is pretty much meaningless.
The point is - that's *not* how government contracting works.
Isn't it how the (pre-ULA, at least) EELV program worked, and the Joint Strike Fighter (X-32 vs X-35) program worked? I see no reason why NASA can't do something similar, particularly since commercial off-the-shelf rockets already exist which are perfectly capable of delivering payloads to LEO.
In both cases it hands out *one* contract to *one* vendor or contractor - who then has the government by the balls. Exceptions to this are rare.
Yes, if NASA hands out a single monopolistic contract again, they're screwed. The point is for them to hand out multiple competitive contracts.
I'm as pro-competition and free market as anybody, but contracts just don't work that way. Much of the work is so specialized that only one company is able to fulfill the contract. For example, Northrop Grumman is the ONLY company that is able to overhaul aircraft carriers, so they get every contract. The barrier to entry is impossibly high for potential competitors. The contract is so large that it essentially grants a monopoly to the winner. The losers can't stay in business long enough to compete.
You may want to read up more on COTS and CCDev. These are fixed-price competitive contracts for delivering payloads to orbit, rather than the development-focused contracts you're describing.
Ok, they find the asteroid... and then what? I hate to break this to you, but Armageddeon was a work of fiction. (Shocking, I know.) We don't have anything that can land on an asteroid and do anything about it-- and we probably wouldn't have time to build one after we detected the sucker.
Sure, if you detected an earth-impacting asteroid a few days beforehand you'd be screwed, but if you detect one several years beforehand you have quite a few options, ranging from splashing some paint on one side of the asteroid (so sunlight has an asymmetric effect on the trajectory) to using nuclear rockets.