Even the USAF called it a fighter, thus the F- designation. I've always heard it was to get the best pilots (who saw bombers as boring planes little better than airliners) to fly them, even though it was clearly a small bomber.
You seem to be under the impression that we don't have any F-22's, and that we'll never remember how to make them if we need more, and that it was the congress and typical politicians who killed it.
The F-22 and F-35 are completely different beasts. The F-22 is an air-superiority fighter where even under the most budget-heavy cold war dreams 300 was thought sufficient. We have ~180 now and no where near the threat level of the cold war. Gates' original anti-22 push was to cut the planned 180 down to 120, and the latest round of cuts that shut down the lines early removed all of **8** planes from the production run. I'd consider that a victory for the pro-Lockheed pork farmers. The current fleet of F-22s should be enough to scare anyone who tried to fight us in the air scared shit-less for the next 20 or 30 years.
The F-35 is a multi-role aircraft meant to operate with a protective umbrella provided by air superiority fighters like the F-22, and for those roles you do need a lot more. And without any indication that future conflicts are not going to be asymmetric ordeals like what we're currently doing in Afghanistan, the work-horse roles that the F-35 fulfills are going to be much more necessary in the next couple of decades.
In the case where we might need more F-22s, if a strong, traditional, hostile military power starts to rise (a newly revitalized Russia seems most likely to me... China is doing too well with their economic game plan to try and screw it up with aggression), I think we'll notice it. In that case we can pull out the old F-22 plans, dust them off, improve some things if there's time, and then restart production. While it would be naive to think it would be as easy as laying out the money and flipping a switch, its not an impossibility.
And I wouldn't call Dr. Gates a pointy-haired manager. Both as president of Texas A&M, and as secretary of defense (the two roles where I've been old enough and involved enough to see his behavior) he has always pushed controversial but ultimately correct positions. At A&M he pushed for his "Vision 2020" which led to rising tuition to pay for more faculty and facilities, and he pushed strongly for "Diversity": both of these were bitterly complained about by the (largely conservative) student body and alumni, but in hindsight his plans have made the school a better place and he is probably the greatest president we've had (except possibly Earl Rudder). As Secretary of Defense, the most obvious example is the "surge" strategy* in Iraq, that he pushed. If you remember it was ridiculed (one particularly amusing fake skit on Studio 60 stands out to me), but he and his generals made it happen to the surprise of everyone and now everyone wants a new "surge" in Afghanistan despite the fact that its a totally different situation. Given his record and the logic of the decision I think that history will vindicate his decision on the F-22 as well.
*obviously this was assisted by factors on the ground, particularly the Sunni awakening, but I think the fact that they saw the way the winds were blowing and took advantage of it says a lot.
I'm going to neglect the conspiracy theorist, "old days were better" part of your post, and just debate your comment on the US educational system.
While the US education system has many flaws, a reliance on rote memorization is not one of them. In fact, I've read of a few places (Fareed Zakaria's "Post-American World" among others), those from other countries who observe our good schools are impressed by the fact that they do so much to encourage critical thinking and not rely merely on rote memorization.
This lines up with what I remember from high school as well. My programming class gave us open-ended projects to solve. My English/Literature class taught how to write papers to argue a point as well as the more typical literary analysis. My science teachers gave us both labs that demonstrated well known points, and labs that required us to create new ways of using the concepts we'd been taught. My history and Latin classes lost whole days sometimes to discussions of only tangentially related topics (and I'm certain the teachers had those kind of days budgeted in). Most people I know had similar experiences.
When US schools fail, its usually not because of a reliance on the rote learning from turn of the century one-room schoolhouses. The failures of US schools, from what I know, have two sources. The first is a sheer lack of money and societal impetus to learn: this is a result (and cause) of inequalities in society, and something that needs to be improved, but it doesn't do much to hurt our competitiveness on the world stage. The second is a movement in the direction of too much 'free-thought' learning without the backing of those fundamentals you do need to learn by rote, something I've heard from numerous friends who grew up in California where they were subjected to the latest new educational theory every year... even then the kids I know who went through it came out just fine.
Solving our educational problems is something that needs doing, but not because of a lack of global competitiveness.
Isn't that how it's supposed to work? Congress has the power to make laws, the executive is charged with carrying them out. Of course the veto is there as a check on congressional power, and the singular position of the president puts him in a position to lead a national dialog, but in the end, the legislature is supposed to be the branch in charge.
If the state tried to enact that clause, it would probably be ruled unconstitutional, since each state is to be treated the same. Once Texas joined the union, any clause of the treaty that wasn't valid was null and void, since it instead fell under the rules of the Constitution, and the nation of Texas (with whom the treaty was made) ceased to exist.
Or so my political science professor at Texas A&M taught me (so you know I'm not pulling it out of my ass).
Actually, I think the headline is perfect. It is succinct and gets the point across. 'Astrophysicists Find "Impossible" Planet' says we found something new that doesn't fit current theories and needs some very interesting work. 'Astrophysicists Find Impossible Planet' on the other hand would imply exactly what you said.
To me, the quotes make it clear everyone involved knows its not actually impossible, but rather that its something that caused a WTF (or maybe just 'thats odd...') moment when they first looked at the results. At least thats what I got when I saw the headline.
As far as the cost of the mail, I think that's mostly the drop in volume (fewer and fewer reasons for first class mail), and new post-9/11 security requirements rather than new inefficiencies. Probably my biggest complaint with the USPS is the terrible service at the post office. Then again my latest trip to FedEx wasn't a whole lot better.
And as far as roads... yeah. I think thats more a matter of specific government practices than a flaw with the idea itself. Granted a competitive process would improve it significantly, but I hate to think what a set of competing roadways would look like. It seems like the best solution wouldn't be privatization but pushing for things like fixed-price contracts and fighting corruption.
I apologize if you're being sarcastic and I'm missing it... but...
With the USPS I can send a letter anywhere in the country for $0.42 in three days in anything short of a nuclear holocaust. Thats not too bad in my book. It may be less important with the internet, but still, not a bad return, especially since its all self-funded and doesn't rely on tax dollars.
And the interstate highway system??? I can go get in my car and get to LA, or NYC, or Boise, ID from my house in College Station, TX in a couple of days, only paying for gas, snacks, and hotels. Thats hardly less amazing than the fact that I can buy a robot to clean my house or go online and find satellite pictures of my house, in terms of which crazy things that are now commonplace. I don't have to worry if the roads are going to be passable or anything like that. In the years before Eisenhower, from what I hear, this was an iffy proposition, as he learned on his attempt at a cross-country road tour. When we get frustrated with construction on the highways I think at a certain level we've gotten quite spoiled (not that that makes it any more pleasant).
Further is a fuzzy concept here. In many ways its only twice as "far", in that the Delta-V required from LEO to to the surface of the other body is 10 km/s for Mars vs. 5 km/s for the moon. Of course in other ways, particularly time-of-flight, its about 2 orders of magnitude difference. A Mars transfer orbit is going to take between a few months and a year, while the Moon is a short three days away. This makes a great difference in the amount of human support equipment (food, atmospheres, living space) required, and also takes radiation from an acceptable risk to something that absolutely must be dealt with. The distance itself (which varies drastically anyway) is only really important when considering communication delays.
Not that that negates your point. Even if it doesn't cost that much more, we can't expect Apollo level budgets from the US anymore, so cost sharing is probably the only way to get it done.
I think you overestimate two things here: the possibility and value of a second space race. First off, the possibility. The reason it was so important in the 60s was because of the similarity between missile technology and space technology. We were scared to death of a Soviet nuclear tipped ICBMs from, and proving we could build better ones was important for impressing other countries (we wanted them on our side, not the Soviets), and for national pride. Currently Russia has a lot of potential but is too caught up in war drum-beating in the local neighborhood and trying to get its old prestige back to make us feel threatened over here. The rise of China and India is likely to be a much bigger motivator, but even then, space is not the new defining technology of the age. New energy, "green" technologies, and computer development are more likely to be the technological "battleground" in the coming decades.
Second, in my opinion, its better for long-term frontier development to have a 20 year program at the current budget than a 10 year program at 4 times the budget (the relative funding at the height of Apollo). Apollo was done as soon as Neil Armstrong made his bootprint -- we had done it, spent a lot of money, it was time to move on to the next challenge. Given the budget of NASA since then, its pretty clear that the current budget is what we as a nation are willing to pay for a space program. Any plan for long term development has to plan to stay within that budget in order to be feasible. 5-10 years of much higher budgets can be helpful in theory, but the long-term plans tend to shift to expect that level of budget, and when the rug gets pulled out from underneath, all momentum is lost.
Imagine if Eisenhower had gone on to a third term and kept his policy of not getting dragged into a "space race". We certainly would not have gotten to the moon in 1969. However, we would have gotten there eventually, and when we got there it would have been in a way that we could keep doing it for decades, building up bases and real science, and slowly pushing out further.* Maybe NASA could take better advantage of a temporary funding increase now, having a better understanding that it couldn't last forever -- but my personal opinion is that NASA would over extend itself again and we'd get more flags and footprints.
*Of course, the value of turning nationalistic intentions to science and exploration over making more weapons was valuable in its own right.
I think one thing that is a concern is the vibration load. In the discussion of a previous article, one poster (who was rather rude, by the way), made an argument that made sense to me, although I don't have the knowledge to say for sure myself.
Basically, with the heaviest Atlas V you rely on a lot of attached SRBs, which tend to vibrate a lot... I can believe the argument that they would shake a human being past a tolerable (or at least comfortable) level, something a properly designed satellite could handle. Not a game-ender, but something that requires some work. Of course a Delta IV is in better shape in that regard.
And of course when/if Falcon 9 gets off the ground, its been designed with human cargo in mind from the start. Though it remains to be seen if Musk has too much hubris, he sure has got the vision.
Re:Job #1 should be tracking asteroids
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NASA May Outsource
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If the idea isn't about exploration and expanding the frontier, as a soon to graduate spacecraft engineering student, I would rather do something else. There are so many things that need to be done that aren't involved in creating new ways to kill each other. Developing new energy technology, more efficient cars and aircraft, and better agricultural methods are a few of the other modern important engineering tasks that need doing.
Exploration, scientific study, and frontier development are what it is all about. Keeping people who would otherwise be best at making missiles employed is a side benefit... the money is good on the weapons side, so you'll always find more people for it if you need them.
Re:How is this different than now?
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NASA May Outsource
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The difference is the method of procurement. Under current methods of operations, the goverenment comes up with a design, says "Here's what we want, who wants to build it for us?". Then the big guys (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, USA, etc.) make arguments about who can do it the cheapest and fastest, and the one that makes the best argument gets the contract (and all the others get to be subcontractors and get a piece of the pie). These are termed 'cost-plus' contracts because NASA is actually funding the development directly, and taking on the responsibility to pay however much it ends up costing, even if its more than the original bid.
When they're talking about "outsourcing" and "using commercial options," what they mean is that they want to use whatever is commercially available, if it exists. The COTS and CCDev programs are designed to encourage this kind of market for the big HSF programs (JPL/Ames-style probes have been using straightforward EELV contracts for quite a while). The market is still not mature for human-capable launch vehicles (Atlas and Delta aren't man-rated), so its still in NASA's interest to actively foster the development of vehicles - but they're doing it with fixed amounts of money and relying on fixed milestones, resembling the way the eventual market would work.
I doubt we'll ever get away from cost-plus contracts completely. They make sense for single-use items and specialized development: things like probes and rovers and moon landers. However, just about everything needs to get to orbit, and there aren't that many different kinds of requirements for it: whether or not its pressurized, man-rated, and how much mass it can carry. For this reason many people believe that NASA should no longer be designing launch vehicles to do rather routine things like getting to LEO, and instead focus on truly expanding the frontier, doing new things.
The reason this faces resistance is that NASA has a habit of sacrificing the good for the sake of the perfect (along with the concerns about risk in doing new things and losing jobs in congressmen's districts). The space-pen/pencil story may be apocryphal, but it is emblematic of the problem*. In this case, you could argue that an EELV-based solution wouldn't be as good as a working Ares I, but EELVs are going to be cheaper and faster to man-rate, and with the limited budget they shouldn't waste money re-inventing the wheel.
*Interestingly, its actually a great example of the COTS contract type, where a private company saw a problem, came up with a solution, and sold it to NASA (and the Russians) after developing it. They made money off of it and NASA got it much cheaper than it could have developing it on its own, probably.
It's not about being exciting, its about doing things the most cost effective way. After 50 years, getting to orbit should not be the exciting part. You're correct, in my opinion, the SpaceX/Bigelow "NewSpace" market is still quite nascent, and it would be far too high risk for NASA to depend on those. However, I never claimed that should be the current goal -- although I know plenty of people who do.
Delta IV and Atlas V, in their heaviest configurations, are in fact more capable than Ares I (25,800 kg and 29,420 kg vs. 25,000 kg), and have the particular advantage of existing and working. Granted they are not man rated, but the cost to man-rate and mount an Orion capsule on board would still be cheaper and faster than designing a new vehicle that many feel is underpowered and fundamentally flawed. Doing this through reformed contracting methods that encourage contractors to finish on-time and on-budget is the probably the fastest and least expensive way to close the gap.
The Ares I/V architecture is shuttle derived only insomuch as it's designed to make it look to congress like they're trying to save money. The acoustics, the hardest part of a solid booster, are completely changed by stacking 5 segments instead of 4, a decision that was made for both the Ares I and V. The tankage changes the radius from the shuttle external tank, making it so that everything has to be retooled and redesigned. The Michoud plant in New Orleans is having to shut down for years to accomplish this leading to some very unnecessary "brain-drain". When I say shuttle derived, what I mean is something like the Jupiter/DIRECT launcher that does its best to minimize costs and maximize vehicle utility, making minimal modifications to the shuttle stack.
And believe me, I do know what I'm talking about, please don't talk to me like a child -- grammatical errors don't help your condescension. Correcting errors are one thing, but unnecessarily implying a person is an imbecile is unnecessary and rude.
Treaties aren't natural law, they can be changed. I'd imagine you could get it amended to allow nuclear tests beyond a given distance (say GEO), particularly if you made it an international mission with Russia as a partner.
And you're absolutely correct, a fission powered spacecraft would have no trouble with the atmospheric test ban treaty, since you're not detonating weapons above ground. The similarity between a fission reactor and a fusion bomb is about the same as the comparison between a gasoline engine and napalm.
Mission planning-wise, I wouldn't say that the two are very comparable either. An ion drive has a specific impulse of around 4000s, and something like VASMIR will give you 15000s (if I remember correctly, haven't looked in a long time). However, something like Orion, where you're detonating explosives against a big plate, has an estimated specific impulse around a millions seconds, again if I remember correctly. The scales are so different you're talking about the difference between 10-person missions and 1,000-person colonies.
I don't think you can count on corporations to do pure scientific exploration, as there is little profit in it initially. I think you'll always need the government there to perform the "Lewis and Clark" role.
NASA's problem is that it isn't trying to just do the exploration, they're trying to do every single part of it. Space launch is well-enough developed at this point that they should be using commercial offerings at fixed contract prices to get to orbit, and then doing the high-risk exploration thing from there. Anything else is like asking Lewis and Clark to design their own canoe before heading off down the river.
The inefficient cost-plus contracts made sense in Apollo: it was a high-risk, low-reward game at the time. But now that we now its possible to get to orbit, and that there are many profitable reasons to do so, it makes no sense for NASA to develop its own LV... especially after its proven that its so inept at it without much larger budgets.
Its a little more complicated than that. The reason you use a lot more fuel to get out of the atmosphere than you use once you make orbit, even on interplanetary missions, is that you've got to carry all that fuel with you out of the atmosphere.
Spacecraft sizing is like a Russian nesting doll. If you required a 4:1 ratio of propellant to spacecraft mass to get to the moon, and you were able to reduce it to 2:1 propellant ratio, you could get away with about half the launch vehicle because you don't need to launch all that propellant. The equations defining this (Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation) are all exponential with Delta-V.
Now as you can imagine, doing a return trip is even harder... imagine a Mars sample return mission. You have to have enough fuel in Martian orbit to get your sample and re-entry vehicle from there back to Earth. You have to have enough fuel on the surface to get that fuel and the sample into orbit. This means you have to send all of that fuel to the surface in the first place (requiring more for the entry burns), and of course this defines the amount of fuel required to leave Earth and get to Mars, which in turn defines the size of the initial launch vehicle. Minimizing one of the steps is enough to fit the mission onto a much smaller LV. This is why concepts like using ion engines, leaving return vehicles in orbit (like in Apollo), and extracting fuel from the target (ISRU) are so important, even though the amounts of propellant are small compared to the initial LV.
If NASA requires additional funding to achieve its goals, there are going to be problems. The current level of funding is even with what its been historically since the end of Apollo. It seems to me that the current level of funding is the level thats politically sustainable.
Since space projects take years and often decades, any plan that depends on extra funding that is politically advantageous at the time is destined to either fail or be a flags-and-footprints dead end. Programs like Apollo are finished as soon as the symbolic goal is achieved... those who extrapolated from Apollo were sorely disappointed. Programs like every post-shuttle spacecraft design haven't gotten off the ground because after the Cold War there's no way to fund it politically.
If NASA is going to achieve its goals in human exploration, its going to have to take a new approach, learning to live within its means and not saying "well, we could do this if we had $3B more a year," because its not going to happen (at least it won't stay that high for over a decade). To me that means that they need to consider EELV's or truly shuttle-derived systems, limited-but-new goals such as Mars orbit or asteroids, and new contracting methods that involve purchasing services, not funding development.
* Plus I wouldn't say 'cash for clunkers' was setting the money alight. It improved the fuel economy of the average car in the US (not by much, but its something), it helped tide a domestic industry through a hard time in a much more reasonable way than handing the money directly to GM and Chrysler, and it multiplied itself in the amount of money input into the economy since people still had to spend their own money in purchasing the vehicles. Overall a good and creative bit of legislation in my book.
While I'm all for expanding the frontier and moving more people into orbit (I'm heavily involved in a couple of advocacy groups, pursuing a master's degree in aerospace engineering, and job hunting specifically in the space industry), I don't think that space colonies could ever provide that kind of overpopulation escape valve.
Even with a working space elevator, you would be limited to thousands of persons to orbit per day. That's far fewer than the hundred-thousand new persons we have on Earth every day ((birth rate - death rate)/365 days, numbers from wikipedia). Without something beyond my wildest imagination (which granted isn't impossible), space colonies cannot be an escape valve like the America's and Australia were for Europe in the past. If we're going to save our civilization on Earth from ourselves, we have to do it here. (Note this is a central theme of the Red Mars trilogy... a theme which I've shamelessly restated since it makes sense to me.)
Of course, there's a big difference between saving humanity on Earth and saving humanity.
I even remember talking about Saddam in day-care ('91 I was about 6 I guess). Of course the fact that it was really the first 24-hour news covered war made it stand out more to kids.
Unfortunately I can't say I was that in tune at age 6. For some reason I had it in my mind that it was part of WWII... strangely enough, even now I still consider WWII the turning point between fairly modern and old...
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Even the USAF called it a fighter, thus the F- designation. I've always heard it was to get the best pilots (who saw bombers as boring planes little better than airliners) to fly them, even though it was clearly a small bomber.
You seem to be under the impression that we don't have any F-22's, and that we'll never remember how to make them if we need more, and that it was the congress and typical politicians who killed it.
The F-22 and F-35 are completely different beasts. The F-22 is an air-superiority fighter where even under the most budget-heavy cold war dreams 300 was thought sufficient. We have ~180 now and no where near the threat level of the cold war. Gates' original anti-22 push was to cut the planned 180 down to 120, and the latest round of cuts that shut down the lines early removed all of **8** planes from the production run. I'd consider that a victory for the pro-Lockheed pork farmers. The current fleet of F-22s should be enough to scare anyone who tried to fight us in the air scared shit-less for the next 20 or 30 years.
The F-35 is a multi-role aircraft meant to operate with a protective umbrella provided by air superiority fighters like the F-22, and for those roles you do need a lot more. And without any indication that future conflicts are not going to be asymmetric ordeals like what we're currently doing in Afghanistan, the work-horse roles that the F-35 fulfills are going to be much more necessary in the next couple of decades.
In the case where we might need more F-22s, if a strong, traditional, hostile military power starts to rise (a newly revitalized Russia seems most likely to me... China is doing too well with their economic game plan to try and screw it up with aggression), I think we'll notice it. In that case we can pull out the old F-22 plans, dust them off, improve some things if there's time, and then restart production. While it would be naive to think it would be as easy as laying out the money and flipping a switch, its not an impossibility.
And I wouldn't call Dr. Gates a pointy-haired manager. Both as president of Texas A&M, and as secretary of defense (the two roles where I've been old enough and involved enough to see his behavior) he has always pushed controversial but ultimately correct positions. At A&M he pushed for his "Vision 2020" which led to rising tuition to pay for more faculty and facilities, and he pushed strongly for "Diversity": both of these were bitterly complained about by the (largely conservative) student body and alumni, but in hindsight his plans have made the school a better place and he is probably the greatest president we've had (except possibly Earl Rudder). As Secretary of Defense, the most obvious example is the "surge" strategy* in Iraq, that he pushed. If you remember it was ridiculed (one particularly amusing fake skit on Studio 60 stands out to me), but he and his generals made it happen to the surprise of everyone and now everyone wants a new "surge" in Afghanistan despite the fact that its a totally different situation. Given his record and the logic of the decision I think that history will vindicate his decision on the F-22 as well.
*obviously this was assisted by factors on the ground, particularly the Sunni awakening, but I think the fact that they saw the way the winds were blowing and took advantage of it says a lot.
I'm going to neglect the conspiracy theorist, "old days were better" part of your post, and just debate your comment on the US educational system.
While the US education system has many flaws, a reliance on rote memorization is not one of them. In fact, I've read of a few places (Fareed Zakaria's "Post-American World" among others), those from other countries who observe our good schools are impressed by the fact that they do so much to encourage critical thinking and not rely merely on rote memorization.
This lines up with what I remember from high school as well. My programming class gave us open-ended projects to solve. My English/Literature class taught how to write papers to argue a point as well as the more typical literary analysis. My science teachers gave us both labs that demonstrated well known points, and labs that required us to create new ways of using the concepts we'd been taught. My history and Latin classes lost whole days sometimes to discussions of only tangentially related topics (and I'm certain the teachers had those kind of days budgeted in). Most people I know had similar experiences.
When US schools fail, its usually not because of a reliance on the rote learning from turn of the century one-room schoolhouses. The failures of US schools, from what I know, have two sources. The first is a sheer lack of money and societal impetus to learn: this is a result (and cause) of inequalities in society, and something that needs to be improved, but it doesn't do much to hurt our competitiveness on the world stage. The second is a movement in the direction of too much 'free-thought' learning without the backing of those fundamentals you do need to learn by rote, something I've heard from numerous friends who grew up in California where they were subjected to the latest new educational theory every year... even then the kids I know who went through it came out just fine.
Solving our educational problems is something that needs doing, but not because of a lack of global competitiveness.
Isn't that how it's supposed to work? Congress has the power to make laws, the executive is charged with carrying them out. Of course the veto is there as a check on congressional power, and the singular position of the president puts him in a position to lead a national dialog, but in the end, the legislature is supposed to be the branch in charge.
If the state tried to enact that clause, it would probably be ruled unconstitutional, since each state is to be treated the same. Once Texas joined the union, any clause of the treaty that wasn't valid was null and void, since it instead fell under the rules of the Constitution, and the nation of Texas (with whom the treaty was made) ceased to exist.
Or so my political science professor at Texas A&M taught me (so you know I'm not pulling it out of my ass).
There's a difference between flag-bumper-sticker "patriots" and actual patriots, and saying one exists doesn't negate the existence of the other.
Great! As a graduate of public schools in Oklahoma who can successfully spell secede, I'm glad we're not responsible for you.
Actually, I think the headline is perfect. It is succinct and gets the point across. 'Astrophysicists Find "Impossible" Planet' says we found something new that doesn't fit current theories and needs some very interesting work. 'Astrophysicists Find Impossible Planet' on the other hand would imply exactly what you said.
To me, the quotes make it clear everyone involved knows its not actually impossible, but rather that its something that caused a WTF (or maybe just 'thats odd...') moment when they first looked at the results. At least thats what I got when I saw the headline.
As far as the cost of the mail, I think that's mostly the drop in volume (fewer and fewer reasons for first class mail), and new post-9/11 security requirements rather than new inefficiencies. Probably my biggest complaint with the USPS is the terrible service at the post office. Then again my latest trip to FedEx wasn't a whole lot better.
And as far as roads... yeah. I think thats more a matter of specific government practices than a flaw with the idea itself. Granted a competitive process would improve it significantly, but I hate to think what a set of competing roadways would look like. It seems like the best solution wouldn't be privatization but pushing for things like fixed-price contracts and fighting corruption.
My mistake. Sadly, despite how ridiculous the view is, there are some people who think that it should be the basis of modern conservatism.
I apologize if you're being sarcastic and I'm missing it... but...
With the USPS I can send a letter anywhere in the country for $0.42 in three days in anything short of a nuclear holocaust. Thats not too bad in my book. It may be less important with the internet, but still, not a bad return, especially since its all self-funded and doesn't rely on tax dollars.
And the interstate highway system??? I can go get in my car and get to LA, or NYC, or Boise, ID from my house in College Station, TX in a couple of days, only paying for gas, snacks, and hotels. Thats hardly less amazing than the fact that I can buy a robot to clean my house or go online and find satellite pictures of my house, in terms of which crazy things that are now commonplace. I don't have to worry if the roads are going to be passable or anything like that. In the years before Eisenhower, from what I hear, this was an iffy proposition, as he learned on his attempt at a cross-country road tour. When we get frustrated with construction on the highways I think at a certain level we've gotten quite spoiled (not that that makes it any more pleasant).
Further is a fuzzy concept here. In many ways its only twice as "far", in that the Delta-V required from LEO to to the surface of the other body is 10 km/s for Mars vs. 5 km/s for the moon. Of course in other ways, particularly time-of-flight, its about 2 orders of magnitude difference. A Mars transfer orbit is going to take between a few months and a year, while the Moon is a short three days away. This makes a great difference in the amount of human support equipment (food, atmospheres, living space) required, and also takes radiation from an acceptable risk to something that absolutely must be dealt with. The distance itself (which varies drastically anyway) is only really important when considering communication delays.
Not that that negates your point. Even if it doesn't cost that much more, we can't expect Apollo level budgets from the US anymore, so cost sharing is probably the only way to get it done.
I think you overestimate two things here: the possibility and value of a second space race. First off, the possibility. The reason it was so important in the 60s was because of the similarity between missile technology and space technology. We were scared to death of a Soviet nuclear tipped ICBMs from, and proving we could build better ones was important for impressing other countries (we wanted them on our side, not the Soviets), and for national pride. Currently Russia has a lot of potential but is too caught up in war drum-beating in the local neighborhood and trying to get its old prestige back to make us feel threatened over here. The rise of China and India is likely to be a much bigger motivator, but even then, space is not the new defining technology of the age. New energy, "green" technologies, and computer development are more likely to be the technological "battleground" in the coming decades.
Second, in my opinion, its better for long-term frontier development to have a 20 year program at the current budget than a 10 year program at 4 times the budget (the relative funding at the height of Apollo). Apollo was done as soon as Neil Armstrong made his bootprint -- we had done it, spent a lot of money, it was time to move on to the next challenge. Given the budget of NASA since then, its pretty clear that the current budget is what we as a nation are willing to pay for a space program. Any plan for long term development has to plan to stay within that budget in order to be feasible. 5-10 years of much higher budgets can be helpful in theory, but the long-term plans tend to shift to expect that level of budget, and when the rug gets pulled out from underneath, all momentum is lost.
Imagine if Eisenhower had gone on to a third term and kept his policy of not getting dragged into a "space race". We certainly would not have gotten to the moon in 1969. However, we would have gotten there eventually, and when we got there it would have been in a way that we could keep doing it for decades, building up bases and real science, and slowly pushing out further.* Maybe NASA could take better advantage of a temporary funding increase now, having a better understanding that it couldn't last forever -- but my personal opinion is that NASA would over extend itself again and we'd get more flags and footprints.
*Of course, the value of turning nationalistic intentions to science and exploration over making more weapons was valuable in its own right.
I think one thing that is a concern is the vibration load. In the discussion of a previous article, one poster (who was rather rude, by the way), made an argument that made sense to me, although I don't have the knowledge to say for sure myself.
Basically, with the heaviest Atlas V you rely on a lot of attached SRBs, which tend to vibrate a lot... I can believe the argument that they would shake a human being past a tolerable (or at least comfortable) level, something a properly designed satellite could handle. Not a game-ender, but something that requires some work. Of course a Delta IV is in better shape in that regard.
And of course when/if Falcon 9 gets off the ground, its been designed with human cargo in mind from the start. Though it remains to be seen if Musk has too much hubris, he sure has got the vision.
If the idea isn't about exploration and expanding the frontier, as a soon to graduate spacecraft engineering student, I would rather do something else. There are so many things that need to be done that aren't involved in creating new ways to kill each other. Developing new energy technology, more efficient cars and aircraft, and better agricultural methods are a few of the other modern important engineering tasks that need doing.
Exploration, scientific study, and frontier development are what it is all about. Keeping people who would otherwise be best at making missiles employed is a side benefit... the money is good on the weapons side, so you'll always find more people for it if you need them.
The difference is the method of procurement. Under current methods of operations, the goverenment comes up with a design, says "Here's what we want, who wants to build it for us?". Then the big guys (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, USA, etc.) make arguments about who can do it the cheapest and fastest, and the one that makes the best argument gets the contract (and all the others get to be subcontractors and get a piece of the pie). These are termed 'cost-plus' contracts because NASA is actually funding the development directly, and taking on the responsibility to pay however much it ends up costing, even if its more than the original bid.
When they're talking about "outsourcing" and "using commercial options," what they mean is that they want to use whatever is commercially available, if it exists. The COTS and CCDev programs are designed to encourage this kind of market for the big HSF programs (JPL/Ames-style probes have been using straightforward EELV contracts for quite a while). The market is still not mature for human-capable launch vehicles (Atlas and Delta aren't man-rated), so its still in NASA's interest to actively foster the development of vehicles - but they're doing it with fixed amounts of money and relying on fixed milestones, resembling the way the eventual market would work.
I doubt we'll ever get away from cost-plus contracts completely. They make sense for single-use items and specialized development: things like probes and rovers and moon landers. However, just about everything needs to get to orbit, and there aren't that many different kinds of requirements for it: whether or not its pressurized, man-rated, and how much mass it can carry. For this reason many people believe that NASA should no longer be designing launch vehicles to do rather routine things like getting to LEO, and instead focus on truly expanding the frontier, doing new things.
The reason this faces resistance is that NASA has a habit of sacrificing the good for the sake of the perfect (along with the concerns about risk in doing new things and losing jobs in congressmen's districts). The space-pen/pencil story may be apocryphal, but it is emblematic of the problem*. In this case, you could argue that an EELV-based solution wouldn't be as good as a working Ares I, but EELVs are going to be cheaper and faster to man-rate, and with the limited budget they shouldn't waste money re-inventing the wheel.
*Interestingly, its actually a great example of the COTS contract type, where a private company saw a problem, came up with a solution, and sold it to NASA (and the Russians) after developing it. They made money off of it and NASA got it much cheaper than it could have developing it on its own, probably.
It's not about being exciting, its about doing things the most cost effective way. After 50 years, getting to orbit should not be the exciting part. You're correct, in my opinion, the SpaceX/Bigelow "NewSpace" market is still quite nascent, and it would be far too high risk for NASA to depend on those. However, I never claimed that should be the current goal -- although I know plenty of people who do.
Delta IV and Atlas V, in their heaviest configurations, are in fact more capable than Ares I (25,800 kg and 29,420 kg vs. 25,000 kg), and have the particular advantage of existing and working. Granted they are not man rated, but the cost to man-rate and mount an Orion capsule on board would still be cheaper and faster than designing a new vehicle that many feel is underpowered and fundamentally flawed. Doing this through reformed contracting methods that encourage contractors to finish on-time and on-budget is the probably the fastest and least expensive way to close the gap.
The Ares I/V architecture is shuttle derived only insomuch as it's designed to make it look to congress like they're trying to save money. The acoustics, the hardest part of a solid booster, are completely changed by stacking 5 segments instead of 4, a decision that was made for both the Ares I and V. The tankage changes the radius from the shuttle external tank, making it so that everything has to be retooled and redesigned. The Michoud plant in New Orleans is having to shut down for years to accomplish this leading to some very unnecessary "brain-drain". When I say shuttle derived, what I mean is something like the Jupiter/DIRECT launcher that does its best to minimize costs and maximize vehicle utility, making minimal modifications to the shuttle stack.
And believe me, I do know what I'm talking about, please don't talk to me like a child -- grammatical errors don't help your condescension. Correcting errors are one thing, but unnecessarily implying a person is an imbecile is unnecessary and rude.
Damn it... I'll have to come up with a new analogy now. Maybe something with cars...
Exactly, ISRU and electric propulsion are required to make any such mission reasonable.
Treaties aren't natural law, they can be changed. I'd imagine you could get it amended to allow nuclear tests beyond a given distance (say GEO), particularly if you made it an international mission with Russia as a partner.
And you're absolutely correct, a fission powered spacecraft would have no trouble with the atmospheric test ban treaty, since you're not detonating weapons above ground. The similarity between a fission reactor and a fusion bomb is about the same as the comparison between a gasoline engine and napalm.
Mission planning-wise, I wouldn't say that the two are very comparable either. An ion drive has a specific impulse of around 4000s, and something like VASMIR will give you 15000s (if I remember correctly, haven't looked in a long time). However, something like Orion, where you're detonating explosives against a big plate, has an estimated specific impulse around a millions seconds, again if I remember correctly. The scales are so different you're talking about the difference between 10-person missions and 1,000-person colonies.
I don't think you can count on corporations to do pure scientific exploration, as there is little profit in it initially. I think you'll always need the government there to perform the "Lewis and Clark" role.
NASA's problem is that it isn't trying to just do the exploration, they're trying to do every single part of it. Space launch is well-enough developed at this point that they should be using commercial offerings at fixed contract prices to get to orbit, and then doing the high-risk exploration thing from there. Anything else is like asking Lewis and Clark to design their own canoe before heading off down the river.
The inefficient cost-plus contracts made sense in Apollo: it was a high-risk, low-reward game at the time. But now that we now its possible to get to orbit, and that there are many profitable reasons to do so, it makes no sense for NASA to develop its own LV... especially after its proven that its so inept at it without much larger budgets.
Its a little more complicated than that. The reason you use a lot more fuel to get out of the atmosphere than you use once you make orbit, even on interplanetary missions, is that you've got to carry all that fuel with you out of the atmosphere.
Spacecraft sizing is like a Russian nesting doll. If you required a 4:1 ratio of propellant to spacecraft mass to get to the moon, and you were able to reduce it to 2:1 propellant ratio, you could get away with about half the launch vehicle because you don't need to launch all that propellant. The equations defining this (Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation) are all exponential with Delta-V.
Now as you can imagine, doing a return trip is even harder... imagine a Mars sample return mission. You have to have enough fuel in Martian orbit to get your sample and re-entry vehicle from there back to Earth. You have to have enough fuel on the surface to get that fuel and the sample into orbit. This means you have to send all of that fuel to the surface in the first place (requiring more for the entry burns), and of course this defines the amount of fuel required to leave Earth and get to Mars, which in turn defines the size of the initial launch vehicle. Minimizing one of the steps is enough to fit the mission onto a much smaller LV. This is why concepts like using ion engines, leaving return vehicles in orbit (like in Apollo), and extracting fuel from the target (ISRU) are so important, even though the amounts of propellant are small compared to the initial LV.
If NASA requires additional funding to achieve its goals, there are going to be problems. The current level of funding is even with what its been historically since the end of Apollo. It seems to me that the current level of funding is the level thats politically sustainable.
Since space projects take years and often decades, any plan that depends on extra funding that is politically advantageous at the time is destined to either fail or be a flags-and-footprints dead end. Programs like Apollo are finished as soon as the symbolic goal is achieved... those who extrapolated from Apollo were sorely disappointed. Programs like every post-shuttle spacecraft design haven't gotten off the ground because after the Cold War there's no way to fund it politically.
If NASA is going to achieve its goals in human exploration, its going to have to take a new approach, learning to live within its means and not saying "well, we could do this if we had $3B more a year," because its not going to happen (at least it won't stay that high for over a decade). To me that means that they need to consider EELV's or truly shuttle-derived systems, limited-but-new goals such as Mars orbit or asteroids, and new contracting methods that involve purchasing services, not funding development.
* Plus I wouldn't say 'cash for clunkers' was setting the money alight. It improved the fuel economy of the average car in the US (not by much, but its something), it helped tide a domestic industry through a hard time in a much more reasonable way than handing the money directly to GM and Chrysler, and it multiplied itself in the amount of money input into the economy since people still had to spend their own money in purchasing the vehicles. Overall a good and creative bit of legislation in my book.
While I'm all for expanding the frontier and moving more people into orbit (I'm heavily involved in a couple of advocacy groups, pursuing a master's degree in aerospace engineering, and job hunting specifically in the space industry), I don't think that space colonies could ever provide that kind of overpopulation escape valve.
Even with a working space elevator, you would be limited to thousands of persons to orbit per day. That's far fewer than the hundred-thousand new persons we have on Earth every day ((birth rate - death rate)/365 days, numbers from wikipedia). Without something beyond my wildest imagination (which granted isn't impossible), space colonies cannot be an escape valve like the America's and Australia were for Europe in the past. If we're going to save our civilization on Earth from ourselves, we have to do it here. (Note this is a central theme of the Red Mars trilogy... a theme which I've shamelessly restated since it makes sense to me.)
Of course, there's a big difference between saving humanity on Earth and saving humanity.
I even remember talking about Saddam in day-care ('91 I was about 6 I guess). Of course the fact that it was really the first 24-hour news covered war made it stand out more to kids.
Unfortunately I can't say I was that in tune at age 6. For some reason I had it in my mind that it was part of WWII... strangely enough, even now I still consider WWII the turning point between fairly modern and old...