> What else do you expect when the head of NASA says that his primary mission is to remind Muslims of all the contributions they made to science?
Oh geeze, not this again. He was talking about "foremost" in the context of the interview, not NASA as a whole. Administrator Bolden needs to learn how to speak more like a politician and choose his words more carefully, but you'd have to be retarded to believe that he honestly thinks that's the primary mission of NASA.
NASA isn't suffering from a lack of vision. It's suffering from too many visions that change too often.
That's why it's important that the "first leg" of access to LEO is decoupled from the political process as much as possible. This has already been done for unmanned launch for a couple decades now, and the new plan is to do the same for manned launches as well, so that even when political whims change NASA will still have an existing launch infrastructure it can use.
That's also why NASA should be spending its money on technological development and demonstrations rather than building new mega-rockets. If funding on your mega-rocket costing tens of billions of dollars is cancelled due to political whims when development is only 25% complete, you have nothing. If technology development is cancelled after only a few years, you've still made a bunch of short-term technological advances that increase the capabilities and sustainability of later exploration.
You do realize that your source, the SF Examiner, is a right-wing tabloid that makes Fox News look like a neutral and well-balanced news source, right?
I think the revised section on commercial space is quite promising:
Commercial Space Guidelines The term "commercial," for the purposes of this policy, refers to space goods, services, or activities provided by private sector enterprises that bear a reasonable portion of the investment risk and responsibility for the activity, operate in accordance with typical market-based incentives for controlling cost and optimizing return on investment, and have the legal capacity to offer these goods or services to existing or potential nongovernmental customers . To promote a robust domestic commercial space industry, departments and agencies shall:
Purchase and use commercial space capabilities and services to the maximum practical extent when such capabilities and services are available in the marketplace and meet United States Government requirements;
Modify commercial space capabilities and services to meet government requirements when existing commercial capabilities and services do not fully meet these requirements and the potential modification represents a more cost-effective and timely acquisition approach for the government;
Actively explore the use of inventive, nontraditional arrangements for acquiring commercial space goods and services to meet United States Government requirements, including measures such as public-private partnerships, hosting government capabilities on commercial spacecraft, and purchasing scientific or operational data products from commercial satellite operators in support of government missions;
Develop governmental space systems only when it is in the national interest and there is no suitable, cost-effective U.S . commercial or, as appropriate, foreign commercial service or system that is or will be available;
Refrain from conducting United States Government space activities that preclude, discourage, or compete with U.S . commercial space activities, unless required by national security or public safety;
Pursue potential opportunities for transferring routine, operational space functions to the commercial space sector where beneficial and cost-effective, except where the government has legal, security, or safety needs that would preclude commercialization;
Cultivate increased technological innovation and entrepreneurship in the commercial space sector through the use of incentives such as prizes and competitions;
Ensure that United States Government space technology and infrastructure are made available for commercial use on a reimbursable, noninterference, and equitable basis to the maximum practical extent;
Minimize, as much as possible, the regulatory burden for commercial space activities and ensure that the regulatory environment for licensing space activities is timely and responsive;
Foster fair and open global trade and commerce through the promotion of suitable standards and regulations that have been developed with input from U.S . industry;
Encourage the purchase and us
Actually, the Falcon 9, unlike most reusable boosters, was designed in advance to carry humans. It meets all of NASA's requirements for a human-rated vehicle except for an escape system. SpaceX has stated their intention to dot that final i within a couple of years. The Dragon spacecraft they're designing for the Falcon 9 will support a crew of 7.
A few additional points:
* As you allude to, Falcon 9 is designed and built to NASA's human-rating standards. With Ares I on the other hand, NASA had to lower the human-rating standards when it turned out Ares was unable to adequately meet them.
* Falcon 9 is an all-liquid rocket, meaning it isn't prone to catastrophic solid propellant explosions like the Ares I is. The Ares I design uses a gigantic solid rocket as its first stage, and a USAF analysis showed that an explosion of that stage would create a giant cloud of solid propellant debris which would melt parachutes on the escaping capsule, with 100% chance of killing the crew.
* The sort of PRA analysis used to show that Ares I was the "safest rocket ever" with a supposedly "1 in 3145" chance of losing crew tend to have a fairly loose correlation with how safe a rocket actually ends up being, as the types of failures accounted for in a PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) end up being only a fairly small fraction of all launch failures. Most launch failures are caused by unexpected failure modes in a design, which are completely unaccounted for in a PRA.
* The best way to determine rocket reliability is through its track record. By the time humans are first launched on the Falcon 9, it will have had at least a dozen or so unmanned flights to prove itself. The Ares I, on the other hand, plans on carrying crew on its -second- flight ever.
the thing im really excited about is if spacex can get to the point where reusing the first stage merely involves fishing it out of the atlantic after it parachutes down, putting it back on the launch pad, and fuelling it back up.
I was really impressed by this bit of the teleconference notes linked in the summary, which shows just how dedicated Elon Musk is about reusability:
I asked him if they knew yet why the first stage didn't survive entry, or if they would have to wait for another flight to get better data (because they didn't get the microwave imaging data they wanted). He said that they still didn't know, and might not figure it out until they try again. I followed up, asking if he could conceive of a time that they might just give up on it, and pull the recovery systems out to give them more payload. I was surprised at the vehemence of his answer (paraphrasing): "We will never give up! Never! Reusability is one of the most important goals. If we become the biggest launch company in the world, making money hand over fist, but we're still not reusable, I will consider us to have failed." I told him that I was very gratified to hear that, because I like reusability.
All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
I have no idea where you pulled this from, but it's completely and utterly false. Please read through the budget and exploration plans before making idiotic comments like that:
Can but won't. Saying a heavy lifter will be chosen in 2015 is doublespeak for never. If NASA was really meant to send somebody somewhere it would have most likely only meant Ares-I gets canceled and serious Ares-V development begins.
(allow me to recycle a comment of mine from a few days ago)
You don't need a heavy lifter for space exploration. In fact, it just eats up the funds you'd need for actual exploration. There's a reason that each of the times that a country has developed a heavy lift rocket in the past it's been canceled after a handful of launches due to being far too expensive. Heck, the US's and world's current heaviest launcher, the Delta IV Heavy, has only been launched 3 times in the 6 years it's existed, and it's much smaller than the 160mt Ares V design. Unlike the Ares V, the Delta IV infrastructure is also useful for medium-lift launches; with the Ares V you'd have to spend billions of dollars a year paying the standing support army and maintaining infrastructure even when you're not launching anything.
A better alternative is propellant depots, allowing you to use smaller, pre-existing launchers and refuel in space to get to where you want. Propellant depots play an important role in NASA's new plans:
At the moment, it seems that giving a couple of hundred million to Musk would be a far better use of it than frittering it away on the congressmen's bacon breakfast that is Constellation.
I'd argue that simply *giving* the money to somebody like Musk in the long term wouldn't be much better than the cost-plus contracts currently used with companies like ATK. Rather, the new and better approach is to purchase services competitively with fixed price contracts and tie payments to the completion of performance milestones.
To attempt to head off common misconceptions about NASA's new plans (like those in the article summary), I'll go ahead and post the contents of an FAQ straight from the source. Also, it's important to note that the new budget -increases- the amount of money for NASA.
This section contains answers to frequently asked questions about NASA's exploration mission and its associated programs and projects following the 2011 Budget Rollout.
Why is the Administration proposing a new direction for Human Space Exploration?
In May of last year, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) tasked an independent committee with reviewing U.S. human space flight plans and activities, with the goal of ensuring that our nation is pursuing the best trajectory in this arena - one that is safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable. While the committee did determine that the Constellation Program was technically sound, they found it to be "be on an unsustainable trajectory" because it NASA was "perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." In other words, the budget did not support the Constellation architecture.
What is better about the new approach?
The new approach proposed by the Administration focuses long term investments on the fundamental capabilities required for human space flight beyond Low Earth Orbit, but that we currently lack. The plan calls for technology development in areas like propulsion, in-orbit propellant storage, automated and autonomous rendezvous and docking, advanced closed-loop life support, and tele-robotic operations. It also increases funding in NASA's human research program, allowing us to better understand the potentially harmful effects the space environment might have on people and how we can best mitigate them. Most importantly, this approach is financially sustainable.
Does this mean that NASA has given up on returning to the moon?
Absolutely not. In fact, recent discoveries of water on the moon have made it more scientifically interesting that ever before. Our focus in the near term will be discovery through robotic missions, such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, followed by robotic precursor missions, to scout the terrain for the eventual return of humans.
Why is turning over a portion of human spaceflight to commercial industry a good idea?
NASA has already committed a significant investment to commercially provided space flight services. Almost all of our satellites and many science missions are launched commercially. In addition, we recently contracted with commercial companies to carry cargo to the International Space Station commercially. The next natural step is for NASA to buy commercial flights for our astronauts to the ISS. This will free up NASA to pursue the greater challenges in the way of a trip to Mars.
Exploration Systems was the directorate that managed the Constellation program. What will its role be under the new plan?
Under the new plan the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) will be responsible for many research and development programs including exploration technology and demonstrations, heavy lift and propulsion technology, exploration precursor robotic missions, and human research. In addition, ESMD will manage the commercial crew and cargo spaceflight programs.
Pick a heavy lifter that can get the job done, put some intelligent technial people in charge of it, give them the money and resources to get it done, and LEAVE THEM ALONE for the next decade.
You don't need a heavy lifter for space exploration. In fact, it just eats up the funds you'd need for actual exploration. There's a reason that each of the times that a country has developed a heavy lift rocket in the past it's been canceled in a few years due to being far too expensive.
A better alternative is propellant depots, allowing you to use smaller, pre-existing launchers and refuel in space to get to where you want. Propellant depots play an important role in NASA's new plans:
Would have bought us two more SpaceX's and four more new rockets, based on what SpaceX has spent in their 8 years or so of existance.
It's quite sobering when you realize that the half-billion required simply to cancel the contract for the Ares I first stage is about the same as SpaceX has spent in total to develop, build, and launch several Falcon 1's and the Falcon 9, and do most of the development on the Dragon cargo/crew capsule (all designed to NASA's human-rating specifications). Particularly so since most of the justification for when prior NASA administrator Mike Griffin went with the Ares I design was that it was supposed to be much cheaper and faster to develop than the alternatives (which ended up being complete BS).
I believe one of them was offering a trip around the Moon by Soyuz for a couple of hundred million dollars a while back. But that's about as far as current cheap Russian rockets can get.
It is unfortunate people still have to learn from their mistakes when this has already been done at least twice (CCCP and the US). A person might figure they could afford to hire a couple of engineers who already went through this trial and error.
Actually, the Naro-1 is a Korean-Russian collaboration, with a Russian-built first stage and a Korean-built second stage. It's still unclear at this point which stage (or interaction thereof) caused the problem.
As an aside, the Russian-built first stage basically a slightly modified first stage of their under-development Angara rocket.
Yesterday I came across a really neat English-sub version of a Japanese trailer, which I'm guessing is for a documentary about Hayabusa's dramatic journey. It's definitely worth a watch:
It didn't look like they even really tried to get back on the exact spot either... just to simply get the rocket onto the pad so it wouldn't sink into the mud was good enough. Still, you are correct that it landed within just a couple of feet of the original take off point.
I'm not sure, but they may have actually specifically avoided landing in the same precise spot as they took off from, in case the surface was damaged at all from the rocket flames.
Now, who's going to be the first person to put a person on one of these? I don't think that it will be approved by the authorities, and it's probably pretty stupid, but you know that someone is going to strap a lawn chair on their personal rockets, have a ballistic parachute (just in case) and go for a ride.
Actually, Armadillo Aerospace did precisely that several years ago with a much-earlier predecessor to their current vehicle. One of their engineers volunteered to put on a helmet and protective clothing, and rode in a seat on the rocket while an ambulance waited nearby in case there were problems. It didn't go very far off the ground though, as they were much less certain about the rockets they had back then than the ones they have now.
You can see a clip at around the 45 second mark in this video:
Nope, first with the same engine (hence "restart"). LM landings used two different engines and stages for landing and taking off.
Thanks for the reminder about the separate ascent and descent stages on the Apollo LM. It's also worth noting that the Apollo LM used a hydrazine mix for fuel, which is quite handy if you want easy and reliable propellant (it spontaneously ignites when you mix it with the oxidizer), but is nasty and toxic, so you don't want to use it for an Earth-based launch where you have people nearby (or are planning on carrying people).
Very impressive, but these are just jump-jets for now - sort of rocket helicopters. Going from what we saw to something that can get to orbit, deposit a payload, and return to earth undamaged is going to take a lot more work. Good luck to both teams.
I don't think either Masten or Armadillo (or Virgin, XCOR, or Blue Origin) are planning on targeting the ground-to-orbit market any time soon. I think the general target markets for them for the next several years goes something like this:
* testbeds for NASA autonomous lander tech, like autonomous hazard avoidance (NASA can just put their AI/vision equipment on existing lander to test them out) * suborbital science payloads: there's a lot of scientists who currently have to pay $1 million+ a launch to fly payloads on suborbital sounding rockets to the upper atmosphere and near-space that would love to pay the much-lower prices Masten and Armadillo charge to fly at much-higher flight rates * microgravity science payloads: getting amounts of microgravity time that can only currently be beaten by flying on the ISS * suborbital passenger payloads: both "tourists," scientists who want to be able to operate their experiments manually, and training for orbital astronauts. Armadillo just announced that they were planning on charging $102K per person, undercutting Virgin's price by half: http://www.space.com/news/space-tourism-new-deal-100430.html * robotic landers for NEOs/Moon/Mars, boosted to the location by an expendable rocket * after making tons of money on the above, then maybe they'll start thinking about orbit. Once that happens, it'll probably be with something like pop-up boosters, where a reusable VTVL craft will boost an expendable secondary stage high/fast enough that it can reach orbit.
It's unusual to hear someone praising ITAR. ITAR is the reason that non-US organisations generally don't use US launchers for their payloads -- they can't work closely with the launch provider, particularly with respect to the sort of detailed technical information that's often very important in ensuring payload-launcher compatibility. People I've spoken to in the space industry while at conferences in the US frequently bemoan the fact that ITAR heavily restricts their hiring practices, meaning that they often miss out on being able to employ top people. ITAR is what's holding the US space programme back.
Completely agreed. It's particularly silly when one notes that the US would have almost certainly lost the 1960s space race if it weren't for Von Braun and his team of rocket engineers from Germay, and the Canadian and British engineers from Avro.
It also makes it considerably more difficult when a launch provider like SpaceX wants to sell launch services, which is a large part of why Russian and European launch providers are currently creaming US launch providers on the international market. For example, the following difficulty occurred when SpaceX's Falcon 1 was launching a Malaysian satellite:
Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocket's upper stage and the payload adapter.
"The easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but that's not allowed," Musk says.
...would be to use the statistically-validated user input in a feed-forward image recognition neural network utilizing error feedback that would "learn" to identify the various features of interest. Use edge detection to identify the features of interest (for instance, by number just like a paint-by-number canvas), and have users "identify" what they see. We're talking about invariant scale here, which vastly simplifies the learning process as well as automated feature measurement.
I was doing this in the '90s using multi-band spectral imagery from LANDSAT with good success. I would imagine there have been some advances in this area since that time.
Actually, since the '90s people have largely switched from using neural nets to support vector machines (or maybe a restricted Boltzmann machine).;) I do agree that it'd be an interesting training set for a machine learning algorithm, though.
What NASA should be looking at are things that are, well, new. Unproven. Requiring further development. Tried and true not so much. Investing in development of something that's already completed its development doesn't match up with that.
In general, NASA's announcement of its new direction seems to be "we're dredging up a bunch of things that we think will be pretty easy (in one case, because it's already operational) so it looks like we're accomplishing something...."
See my other comment. This announcement is only for testing relatively mature technologies in space, while other programs (e.g. NIAC, SBIR) are for more novel technologies:
Lockheed Martin has already launched... as well as a Cal Poly team...
WTF, they launched a Cal Poly team? Where's the copy editors when you need them?
Yeah, sorry about that.:-P I tried rewording it a few different ways while still keeping it short enough for a submission, but didn't have too much luck.
The new budget revives the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), which is the part of NASA which previously studied space elevators. The NIAC was one of the parts of NASA which was cancelled to fund Constellation. Also, there have been a few Centennial Challenges related to space elevators, like the tether challenge and the beam power challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
> What else do you expect when the head of NASA says that his primary mission is to remind Muslims of all the contributions they made to science?
Oh geeze, not this again. He was talking about "foremost" in the context of the interview, not NASA as a whole. Administrator Bolden needs to learn how to speak more like a politician and choose his words more carefully, but you'd have to be retarded to believe that he honestly thinks that's the primary mission of NASA.
NASA isn't suffering from a lack of vision. It's suffering from too many visions that change too often.
That's why it's important that the "first leg" of access to LEO is decoupled from the political process as much as possible. This has already been done for unmanned launch for a couple decades now, and the new plan is to do the same for manned launches as well, so that even when political whims change NASA will still have an existing launch infrastructure it can use.
That's also why NASA should be spending its money on technological development and demonstrations rather than building new mega-rockets. If funding on your mega-rocket costing tens of billions of dollars is cancelled due to political whims when development is only 25% complete, you have nothing. If technology development is cancelled after only a few years, you've still made a bunch of short-term technological advances that increase the capabilities and sustainability of later exploration.
You do realize that your source, the SF Examiner, is a right-wing tabloid that makes Fox News look like a neutral and well-balanced news source, right?
First off, a full link to the document (instead of the short fact sheet linked in the original post) is here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/national_space_policy_6-28-10.pdf
It's useful to compare this to the 2006 National Space Policy document issued by the Bush administration:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/national-space-policy-2006.pdf
Space Politics has a pretty good comparison of the two:
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2010/06/28/the-new-national-space-policy-is-out/
I think the revised section on commercial space is quite promising:
Commercial Space Guidelines .S . commercial or, as appropriate, foreign commercial service or system .S . commercial space activities, unless required by national security or public .S . industry;
The term "commercial," for the purposes of this policy, refers to space goods, services, or activities provided by private sector enterprises that bear a reasonable portion of the investment risk and responsibility for the activity, operate in accordance with typical market-based incentives for controlling cost
and optimizing return on investment, and have the legal capacity to offer these goods or services to
existing or potential nongovernmental customers . To promote a robust domestic commercial space
industry, departments and agencies shall:
Purchase and use commercial space capabilities and services to the maximum practical extent
when such capabilities and services are available in the marketplace and meet United States
Government requirements;
Modify commercial space capabilities and services to meet government requirements when
existing commercial capabilities and services do not fully meet these requirements and the
potential modification represents a more cost-effective and timely acquisition approach for
the government;
Actively explore the use of inventive, nontraditional arrangements for acquiring commercial
space goods and services to meet United States Government requirements, including measures
such as public-private partnerships, hosting government capabilities on commercial spacecraft,
and purchasing scientific or operational data products from commercial satellite operators in
support of government missions;
Develop governmental space systems only when it is in the national interest and there is no
suitable, cost-effective U
that is or will be available;
Refrain from conducting United States Government space activities that preclude, discourage,
or compete with U
safety;
Pursue potential opportunities for transferring routine, operational space functions to the
commercial space sector where beneficial and cost-effective, except where the government
has legal, security, or safety needs that would preclude commercialization;
Cultivate increased technological innovation and entrepreneurship in the commercial space
sector through the use of incentives such as prizes and competitions;
Ensure that United States Government space technology and infrastructure are made available
for commercial use on a reimbursable, noninterference, and equitable basis to the maximum
practical extent;
Minimize, as much as possible, the regulatory burden for commercial space activities and ensure
that the regulatory environment for licensing space activities is timely and responsive;
Foster fair and open global trade and commerce through the promotion of suitable standards
and regulations that have been developed with input from U
Encourage the purchase and us
Actually, the Falcon 9, unlike most reusable boosters, was designed in advance to carry humans. It meets all of NASA's requirements for a human-rated vehicle except for an escape system. SpaceX has stated their intention to dot that final i within a couple of years. The Dragon spacecraft they're designing for the Falcon 9 will support a crew of 7.
A few additional points:
* As you allude to, Falcon 9 is designed and built to NASA's human-rating standards. With Ares I on the other hand, NASA had to lower the human-rating standards when it turned out Ares was unable to adequately meet them.
* Falcon 9 is an all-liquid rocket, meaning it isn't prone to catastrophic solid propellant explosions like the Ares I is. The Ares I design uses a gigantic solid rocket as its first stage, and a USAF analysis showed that an explosion of that stage would create a giant cloud of solid propellant debris which would melt parachutes on the escaping capsule, with 100% chance of killing the crew.
* The sort of PRA analysis used to show that Ares I was the "safest rocket ever" with a supposedly "1 in 3145" chance of losing crew tend to have a fairly loose correlation with how safe a rocket actually ends up being, as the types of failures accounted for in a PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) end up being only a fairly small fraction of all launch failures. Most launch failures are caused by unexpected failure modes in a design, which are completely unaccounted for in a PRA.
* The best way to determine rocket reliability is through its track record. By the time humans are first launched on the Falcon 9, it will have had at least a dozen or so unmanned flights to prove itself. The Ares I, on the other hand, plans on carrying crew on its -second- flight ever.
the thing im really excited about is if spacex can get to the point where reusing the first stage merely involves fishing it out of the atlantic after it parachutes down, putting it back on the launch pad, and fuelling it back up.
I was really impressed by this bit of the teleconference notes linked in the summary, which shows just how dedicated Elon Musk is about reusability:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=27574
I asked him if they knew yet why the first stage didn't survive entry, or if they would have to wait for another flight to get better data (because they didn't get the microwave imaging data they wanted). He said that they still didn't know, and might not figure it out until they try again. I followed up, asking if he could conceive of a time that they might just give up on it, and pull the recovery systems out to give them more payload. I was surprised at the vehemence of his answer (paraphrasing): "We will never give up! Never! Reusability is one of the most important goals. If we become the biggest launch company in the world, making money hand over fist, but we're still not reusable, I will consider us to have failed." I told him that I was very gratified to hear that, because I like reusability.
All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
I have no idea where you pulled this from, but it's completely and utterly false. Please read through the budget and exploration plans before making idiotic comments like that:
http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/new_space_enterprise/home/workshop_home.html
Can but won't. Saying a heavy lifter will be chosen in 2015 is doublespeak for never. If NASA was really meant to send somebody somewhere it would have most likely only meant Ares-I gets canceled and serious Ares-V development begins.
(allow me to recycle a comment of mine from a few days ago)
You don't need a heavy lifter for space exploration. In fact, it just eats up the funds you'd need for actual exploration. There's a reason that each of the times that a country has developed a heavy lift rocket in the past it's been canceled after a handful of launches due to being far too expensive. Heck, the US's and world's current heaviest launcher, the Delta IV Heavy, has only been launched 3 times in the 6 years it's existed, and it's much smaller than the 160mt Ares V design. Unlike the Ares V, the Delta IV infrastructure is also useful for medium-lift launches; with the Ares V you'd have to spend billions of dollars a year paying the standing support army and maintaining infrastructure even when you're not launching anything.
A better alternative is propellant depots, allowing you to use smaller, pre-existing launchers and refuel in space to get to where you want. Propellant depots play an important role in NASA's new plans:
http://selenianboondocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Depot-Centric_Human_Spaceflight.pdf
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=230949/Section4.pdf
At the moment, it seems that giving a couple of hundred million to Musk would be a far better use of it than frittering it away on the congressmen's bacon breakfast that is Constellation.
I'd argue that simply *giving* the money to somebody like Musk in the long term wouldn't be much better than the cost-plus contracts currently used with companies like ATK. Rather, the new and better approach is to purchase services competitively with fixed price contracts and tie payments to the completion of performance milestones.
To attempt to head off common misconceptions about NASA's new plans (like those in the article summary), I'll go ahead and post the contents of an FAQ straight from the source. Also, it's important to note that the new budget -increases- the amount of money for NASA.
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/new_space_enterprise/home/faq.html
This section contains answers to frequently asked questions about NASA's exploration mission and its associated programs and projects following the 2011 Budget Rollout.
Why is the Administration proposing a new direction for Human Space Exploration?
In May of last year, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) tasked an independent committee with reviewing U.S. human space flight plans and activities, with the goal of ensuring that our nation is pursuing the best trajectory in this arena - one that is safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable. While the committee did determine that the Constellation Program was technically sound, they found it to be "be on an unsustainable trajectory" because it NASA was "perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." In other words, the budget did not support the Constellation architecture.
What is better about the new approach?
The new approach proposed by the Administration focuses long term investments on the fundamental capabilities required for human space flight beyond Low Earth Orbit, but that we currently lack. The plan calls for technology development in areas like propulsion, in-orbit propellant storage, automated and autonomous rendezvous and docking, advanced closed-loop life support, and tele-robotic operations. It also increases funding in NASA's human research program, allowing us to better understand the potentially harmful effects the space environment might have on people and how we can best mitigate them. Most importantly, this approach is financially sustainable.
Does this mean that NASA has given up on returning to the moon?
Absolutely not. In fact, recent discoveries of water on the moon have made it more scientifically interesting that ever before. Our focus in the near term will be discovery through robotic missions, such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, followed by robotic precursor missions, to scout the terrain for the eventual return of humans.
Why is turning over a portion of human spaceflight to commercial industry a good idea?
NASA has already committed a significant investment to commercially provided space flight services. Almost all of our satellites and many science missions are launched commercially. In addition, we recently contracted with commercial companies to carry cargo to the International Space Station commercially. The next natural step is for NASA to buy commercial flights for our astronauts to the ISS. This will free up NASA to pursue the greater challenges in the way of a trip to Mars.
Exploration Systems was the directorate that managed the Constellation program. What will its role be under the new plan?
Under the new plan the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) will be responsible for many research and development programs including exploration technology and demonstrations, heavy lift and propulsion technology, exploration precursor robotic missions, and human research. In addition, ESMD will manage the commercial crew and cargo spaceflight programs.
Pick a heavy lifter that can get the job done, put some intelligent technial people in charge of it, give them the money and resources to get it done, and LEAVE THEM ALONE for the next decade.
You don't need a heavy lifter for space exploration. In fact, it just eats up the funds you'd need for actual exploration. There's a reason that each of the times that a country has developed a heavy lift rocket in the past it's been canceled in a few years due to being far too expensive.
A better alternative is propellant depots, allowing you to use smaller, pre-existing launchers and refuel in space to get to where you want. Propellant depots play an important role in NASA's new plans:
http://selenianboondocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Depot-Centric_Human_Spaceflight.pdf
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=230949/Section4.pdf
Would have bought us two more SpaceX's and four more new rockets, based on what SpaceX has spent in their 8 years or so of existance.
It's quite sobering when you realize that the half-billion required simply to cancel the contract for the Ares I first stage is about the same as SpaceX has spent in total to develop, build, and launch several Falcon 1's and the Falcon 9, and do most of the development on the Dragon cargo/crew capsule (all designed to NASA's human-rating specifications). Particularly so since most of the justification for when prior NASA administrator Mike Griffin went with the Ares I design was that it was supposed to be much cheaper and faster to develop than the alternatives (which ended up being complete BS).
I believe one of them was offering a trip around the Moon by Soyuz for a couple of hundred million dollars a while back. But that's about as far as current cheap Russian rockets can get.
Yup:
http://www.constellationservices.com/lunarexpresssmsystem.html
I believe SpaceX is designing their Dragon capsule to be eventually upgradeable to returns from lunar velocities and long-duration missions, as well.
It is unfortunate people still have to learn from their mistakes when this has already been done at least twice (CCCP and the US). A person might figure they could afford to hire a couple of engineers who already went through this trial and error.
Actually, the Naro-1 is a Korean-Russian collaboration, with a Russian-built first stage and a Korean-built second stage. It's still unclear at this point which stage (or interaction thereof) caused the problem.
As an aside, the Russian-built first stage basically a slightly modified first stage of their under-development Angara rocket.
Yesterday I came across a really neat English-sub version of a Japanese trailer, which I'm guessing is for a documentary about Hayabusa's dramatic journey. It's definitely worth a watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsQp9Zey27Y
There's also a much more surreal Japanese video depicting a cartoon version of Hayabusa as a cat with solar panel wings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Ey3dNeCeM
As I don't speak/read Japanese I'm not really sure what's happening in it though, other than that it's very strange.
It didn't look like they even really tried to get back on the exact spot either... just to simply get the rocket onto the pad so it wouldn't sink into the mud was good enough. Still, you are correct that it landed within just a couple of feet of the original take off point.
I'm not sure, but they may have actually specifically avoided landing in the same precise spot as they took off from, in case the surface was damaged at all from the rocket flames.
Now, who's going to be the first person to put a person on one of these? I don't think that it will be approved by the authorities, and it's probably pretty stupid, but you know that someone is going to strap a lawn chair on their personal rockets, have a ballistic parachute (just in case) and go for a ride.
Actually, Armadillo Aerospace did precisely that several years ago with a much-earlier predecessor to their current vehicle. One of their engineers volunteered to put on a helmet and protective clothing, and rode in a seat on the rocket while an ambulance waited nearby in case there were problems. It didn't go very far off the ground though, as they were much less certain about the rockets they had back then than the ones they have now.
You can see a clip at around the 45 second mark in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BstN0peLjI
Nope, first with the same engine (hence "restart"). LM landings used two different engines and stages for landing and taking off.
Thanks for the reminder about the separate ascent and descent stages on the Apollo LM. It's also worth noting that the Apollo LM used a hydrazine mix for fuel, which is quite handy if you want easy and reliable propellant (it spontaneously ignites when you mix it with the oxidizer), but is nasty and toxic, so you don't want to use it for an Earth-based launch where you have people nearby (or are planning on carrying people).
> Seventh and eighth, sctually.
If you're referring to the Apollo landers, that's actually a good point. I guess technically they could be considered lunar VLVT craft, though. ;)
Very impressive, but these are just jump-jets for now - sort of rocket helicopters. Going from what we saw to something that can get to orbit, deposit a payload, and return to earth undamaged is going to take a lot more work. Good luck to both teams.
I don't think either Masten or Armadillo (or Virgin, XCOR, or Blue Origin) are planning on targeting the ground-to-orbit market any time soon. I think the general target markets for them for the next several years goes something like this:
* testbeds for NASA autonomous lander tech, like autonomous hazard avoidance (NASA can just put their AI/vision equipment on existing lander to test them out)
* suborbital science payloads: there's a lot of scientists who currently have to pay $1 million+ a launch to fly payloads on suborbital sounding rockets to the upper atmosphere and near-space that would love to pay the much-lower prices Masten and Armadillo charge to fly at much-higher flight rates
* microgravity science payloads: getting amounts of microgravity time that can only currently be beaten by flying on the ISS
* suborbital passenger payloads: both "tourists," scientists who want to be able to operate their experiments manually, and training for orbital astronauts. Armadillo just announced that they were planning on charging $102K per person, undercutting Virgin's price by half: http://www.space.com/news/space-tourism-new-deal-100430.html
* robotic landers for NEOs/Moon/Mars, boosted to the location by an expendable rocket
* after making tons of money on the above, then maybe they'll start thinking about orbit. Once that happens, it'll probably be with something like pop-up boosters, where a reusable VTVL craft will boost an expendable secondary stage high/fast enough that it can reach orbit.
Let me know if I forgot any. ;)
It's unusual to hear someone praising ITAR. ITAR is the reason that non-US organisations generally don't use US launchers for their payloads -- they can't work closely with the launch provider, particularly with respect to the sort of detailed technical information that's often very important in ensuring payload-launcher compatibility. People I've spoken to in the space industry while at conferences in the US frequently bemoan the fact that ITAR heavily restricts their hiring practices, meaning that they often miss out on being able to employ top people. ITAR is what's holding the US space programme back.
Completely agreed. It's particularly silly when one notes that the US would have almost certainly lost the 1960s space race if it weren't for Von Braun and his team of rocket engineers from Germay, and the Canadian and British engineers from Avro.
It also makes it considerably more difficult when a launch provider like SpaceX wants to sell launch services, which is a large part of why Russian and European launch providers are currently creaming US launch providers on the international market. For example, the following difficulty occurred when SpaceX's Falcon 1 was launching a Malaysian satellite:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/?itemid=13078
Technicians discovered the satellite and the Falcon 1 upper stage rocket share a nearly identical vibrational mode, which could set up a damaging resonance. SpaceX is bound by ITAR restrictions from assisting with any technical problems on the foreign-owned payload, so the company delayed the launch to add some vibration isolation equipment between the rocket's upper stage and the payload adapter.
"The easiest thing would actually be to make some adjustment to the satellite . . . but that's not allowed," Musk says.
...would be to use the statistically-validated user input in a feed-forward image recognition neural network utilizing error feedback that would "learn" to identify the various features of interest. Use edge detection to identify the features of interest (for instance, by number just like a paint-by-number canvas), and have users "identify" what they see. We're talking about invariant scale here, which vastly simplifies the learning process as well as automated feature measurement.
I was doing this in the '90s using multi-band spectral imagery from LANDSAT with good success. I would imagine there have been some advances in this area since that time.
Actually, since the '90s people have largely switched from using neural nets to support vector machines (or maybe a restricted Boltzmann machine). ;) I do agree that it'd be an interesting training set for a machine learning algorithm, though.
What NASA should be looking at are things that are, well, new. Unproven. Requiring further development. Tried and true not so much. Investing in development of something that's already completed its development doesn't match up with that.
In general, NASA's announcement of its new direction seems to be "we're dredging up a bunch of things that we think will be pretty easy (in one case, because it's already operational) so it looks like we're accomplishing something...."
See my other comment. This announcement is only for testing relatively mature technologies in space, while other programs (e.g. NIAC, SBIR) are for more novel technologies:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1660882&cid=32300668
Lockheed Martin has already launched ... as well as a Cal Poly team ...
WTF, they launched a Cal Poly team? Where's the copy editors when you need them?
Yeah, sorry about that. :-P I tried rewording it a few different ways while still keeping it short enough for a submission, but didn't have too much luck.
The new budget revives the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), which is the part of NASA which previously studied space elevators. The NIAC was one of the parts of NASA which was cancelled to fund Constellation. Also, there have been a few Centennial Challenges related to space elevators, like the tether challenge and the beam power challenge.