The Upside of the NASA Budget 283
teeks99 writes "There are a lot of articles circulating about the new changes to the NASA budget, but this one goes into some of the details. From what I'm seeing, it looks great — cutting off the big, expensive, over-budget stuff and allowing a whole bunch of important and revolutionary programs to get going: commercial space transportation; keeping the ISS going (now that we've finally got it up and running); working on orbital propellant storage (so someday we can go off to the far flung places); automated rendezvous and docking (allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit). Quoting: 'NASA is out of the business of putting people into low-earth orbit, and doesn't see getting back in to it. The Agency now sees its role as doing interesting things with people once they get there, hence its emphasis on in-orbit construction, heavy lift capabilities, and resource harvesting hardware. Given budgetary constraints and the real issues with the Constellation program, none of that is necessarily unreasonable.'"
Economy of Scale (Score:5, Interesting)
There's also a pretty good article [space.com] from space.com that talks about a couple of the different points
They go into some more detail about the commercial space transportation part paving the way for more "space tourist" like stuff. Obviously this will still be extremely expensive, but I hope that it could increase the total number of launches, and help bring some economies of scale.
This is also the reason I'm excited about the orbital propellant storage and automated rendezvous technology. These items will allow us to launch big (weight wise) missions by using a bunch of smaller launch vehicles, instead of one really huge (and really expensive) one.
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:5, Interesting)
This is also the reason I'm excited about the orbital propellant storage and automated rendezvous technology.
We are never going to get out of sight with our current propellant technology. The money spent on this is a waste, like building yet another pony express station. Its time to focus in another direction.
As for automated rendezvous, the Russians have been doing this for years. Just buy it from them.
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:5, Interesting)
We are never going to get out of sight with our current propellant technology. The money spent on this is a waste, like building yet another pony express station. Its time to focus in another direction.
Ack, not this again. When it comes to getting out of LEO, prices can still easily drop one or two orders of magnitude with propellant-based rockets. After all, fuel is just 1% of the cost of launching a rocket. By decreasing costs you'll grow the market, which will provide the future demand necessary for the various non-propellant technologies (space elevators, beam propulsion, whatever) to be successful.
Also, it's worth noting that when Constellation started going overbudget NASA ended up finding money by canceling most of its technology development efforts, including things like non-propellant propulsion. The idea is to bring research into those technologies back with the expanded funding of R&D.
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how you look at this issue, it's really just putting rosed-colored glasses on a tough situation. Sure, scientists and such are clever and will try to figure out how to continue to expand the sciences, even without financial support systems of the past, but the demand in aeronautics will continue to diminish, fewer experts will get involved, and any incentives to stay will simply go away.
Of course I might be wrong, but honestly, if this philosophy really worked in governing bodies (the idea that you slash the budget to marginally operating ability, and suddenly you get better "products") then you should not expect record spending, but instead we should expect to see record budget slashing.
The truth is, there's no great plan, instead these cuts are politically motivated due to the demographics of states affected by this change. Of course that's a president's prerogative and presidents do political things. I just won't pretend it's good news for NASA or US space tech.
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody is claiming the new prioritization is better because the budget was reduced, only that the good done by the new prioritization offsets the damage from the reduction. Letting the Shuttle die certainly saved a boatload of money for other things.
Could you clarify your point about demographics? Do you mean Medicare is crowding out NASA? Certainly there's truth to that; medical expenses are approaching 18% of US GDP. That means for every work week, almost one full day is spent paying the healthcare system (either through taxes, premiums, reduced wages to employers who pay premiums, or copays - it's all just different means of feeding the same hungry beast). After witnessing the failure of healthcare reform (starting with the public's receptiveness to scaremongering about unplugging granny) I've realized that's just an albatross we'll have to carry. Americans do not want fundamental reforms.
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA's constellation program was ill-conceived waste of taxpayer money. Florida's been a "purple" state for the past three elections, and NASA has a tremendous presence down here. To argue that cutting NASA's budget is politically motivated is to say that Obama's administrations *wants to lose votes* in the state of Florida, which is patently absurd.
What's happening to NASA is like an alcoholic stopping the sauce. Not only do they save a bunch of money, but they also free up a bunch of time and brainpower to pursue better things.
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Sure, scientists and such are clever and will try to figure out how to continue to expand the sciences, even without financial support systems of the past, but the demand in aeronautics will continue to diminish, fewer experts will get involved, and any incentives to stay will simply go away.
This budget restores funding to the science and technology development programs that Constellation cannibalized when it was under-funded. Aeronautics gets a 15% increase, for instance.
The truth is, there's no great plan
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe this new approach will work, and I hope it will. But I believe that it won't. The Mercury astronauts said it best. No Buck Rogers, No Bucks. Without manned spaceflight, we'll mostly turn our attention to unmanned spaceflight, which is cool, and cheap, and makes great discoveries. The public will tire of this too. Robots are good and they can be used successfully, but "boots on the ground" or in this case "boots in space" are also required.
The US has now essentially ceded manned spaceflight to the Russians and the Chinese... just as Spain and Portugal ceded the new world to the English and French. Unless there is a national commitment to a GOAL in manned spaceflight, not much of it will make sense, other than going back and forth to the ISS.
By all means, we should look on the bright side... but the bright side is considerably dimmer now
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the ISS is bigger than Skylab at this point.
The problem with the shuttle building the ISS is that it's really the worst of both worlds. You spend billions of dollars a year on the shuttle and build the American part of the ISS on that set of constraints and then wonder why it cost so much. Whereas, If you were to have lofted the American part of the ISS on commercially available boosters, even after the additional hardware to make each module contain a tug, you'd have built it for a lot less.
Especially if you also consider that most everything gets cheaper in bulk and, if you were to place a guaranteed order for a hundred medium lift boosters, you'd get them at a much more reasonable price than the equivalent upmass in ten heavy lift boosters. Especially given that medium lift boosters are the right size for commercial missions and heavy lift boosters are not yet.
The problem is the sunk costs fallacy. NASA had the design and hardware for Freedom and modified it instead of taking a giant step back when they had a chance. The shuttle was there and it worked, even though we might have done much better to have sent it to the museums after the first time we lost one.
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You spend billions of dollars a year on the shuttle and build the American part of the ISS on that set of constraints and then wonder why it cost so much.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that the whole point of the shuttle program was to bring launch costs down. Easy to overlook, since it ended up being a total money pit. But it didn't have to be that way.
If memory serves, this is how it went wrong: NASA couldn't get the startup budget that was deemed the minimum necessary to develop the thing. They decided to build it anyway, and hope that once the program was started, Congress would be afraid to kill it.
That indeed was what happened, but the result was a d
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is, you can do a lot more with robots than with people. One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job, consuming huge amounts of resources and money that could have been spent actually accomplishing things rather than making "Buck Rogers" PR out of serious business.
Every time I see this kind of sentiment, I just cringe. On multiple levels, I think this is simple flat out wrong. There is a role for both manned and unmanned exploration of the Solar System and space in general. The two kinds of exploration fill complimentary roles, not competitive roles.
Frankly, it really annoys me that Dr. Sagan brought up this idea in the first place and popularized the notion that we could kill the Astronaut Corps and somehow have more money left over for the Jet Propulsion Lab. He is the origin of the notion, together with highly jealous oceanographers who thought their pet science projects should get priority on science funding as well.
Yes, there is a kernel of truth to the notion that some forms of exploration are better left to robots. Certainly the initial reconnaissance should be done remotely, and the use of robotic probes can certainly leverage a manpower shortage that is always going to be the case in space exploration anyway for the next couple thousand years or more.
Still, there is nothing like having somebody actually there, feeling the dirt, smelling the dust, responding to the physical environment and doing something that no other human has ever done before in the history of mankind. The benefits of a manned space exploration program have already paid off many, many times in terms of opening up horizons that never existed before, and introduced new ways of thinking and even whole new concepts and memes that are still going through society today.
If it wasn't for manned spaceflight, the modern environmental movement simply wouldn't exist. Seriously, prove me wrong here. And it took people, real folks doing stuff up there, to really kick those ideas into mainstream culture. Previously, environmental concern was for very fringe activists that were mostly ignored.
I use environmentalism just as but one of many examples of ideas and concepts that came from space and the experiences of people. No, I don't think that would have ever been developed from robotic exploration where every view is managed by committee.
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One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job
Um. We're actually not sending men anywhere. That's the problem.
We're are so far less advanced now than we could be, if only we'd spent the money doing useful things instead.
Ah yes, like sending a robot to Mars to get stuck in the fucking sand. Not to discount the great work that NASA has done with the Mars rovers, but they've spent a year trying to get Spirit out of about six inches of sand. A man and
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While I agree with the notion that it was long, long overdue to cancel the Ares I rocket design and with it the Constellation program (for the most part... it is still limping along even now), it wasn't really George W. Bush's vision at all. Instead it was the vision of Michael Griffin who was the agency head and sort of his own personal vision for the future of NASA.
All Bush said was that getting back to the Moon ought to be a long term priority as should moving on to the rest of the Solar System. I thin
A breath of fresh air (Score:5, Insightful)
Now congress just has to not be a bunch of idiots and ruin it (possibly the greatest challenge to human spaceflight yet).
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As I've heard said before, it's not NASA's job to put a man on Mars (or the moon). It's NASA's job to make it possible for National Geographic to put a man on Mars.
That's insane. National Geographic's great expeditions followed in the footsteps of many gov't funded expeditions, particularly, all these expeditions were descended from the British sending out the likes of Cook, and geez, Darwin.
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Darwin has a posse [swarthmore.edu]. Just sayin'.
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It receives some funding from government grants but i think National Geographic does too. So essentially both organisations historically fill the same niche for different countries.
Re:A breath of fresh air (Score:5, Interesting)
And perhaps the private sector would have gone to the moon, had they been given 150 billion dollars (apollo cost) [wikipedia.org] and a mandate to go there ASAP. But it was NASA that was given the money and the mandate, so they went. And where did it get us, ultimately? There hasn't been a single person past LEO since. Sounds to me like a different approach is needed. Perhaps one that builds and refines basic technologies, opening access to space and making it cheaper and easier to operate there. That way, when we do go back, we go back to stay.
Re:A breath of fresh air (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree. Let me rephrase what I said earlier. What is the private sector's motivation for going into space? Rich people's tourism.
Wrong answer. The correct answer is: To make money.
Now, space tourism will likely make them the most money, and therefore they'll probably focus on that part. But then, as soon as they have a reliable space vehicle, they will just bring up anyone who pays for it, be it some tourist who just wants to experience weightlessness and view our planet from space, or a scientist who wants to perform some experiment. The only question will be: "What do you pay?"
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Now, space tourism will likely make them the most money, and therefore they'll probably focus on that part.
You're kidding right? You think a company can make more money on a handful of very rich vacationers than it can on government contracts? Manned commercial space (orbital) transport will likely have one kind of customer....rich governments. They are the only ones who can afford it.
Re:A breath of fresh air (Score:5, Informative)
You simply can't make the arguement that's NASA's fault we havn't been back to the moon since the early 70s and have never been to Mars. NASA had plans for a third round of Apollo missions and had mission plans to bel anding us on Mars by 1985. 1985! Thats 25 years ago!
Why didn't they do it? Not for any lack of know-how, willingness, or determination. It was for lack of funds. Congress cut the hell out of NASA's budget. Perhaps it was NASA's fault for expecting that Apollo era funding would continue, but you can't say they didn't WANT to do all the things you're saying they didn't accomplish.
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I couldn't disagree more. The private sector has yet to put a man on the moon after 40 years of the government having done so, and they also have shown no interest for mars.
The private sector will be quite happy to put you on the Moon if you're willing to give them $100,000,000,000 to do so.
Otherwise, what exactly would be the point of a company spending all that money just to send someone there to plant a flag and bring back some rocks?
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But, then that's beside the point either of you are trying to make...
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Prestige. If you had a choice of LEO capable companies, wouldn't you be more apt to choose one that's gone to the moon? Sure, LEO and the moon are wildly different, but that's the point: To stick out and say "Hey, look what we can do!" There's no way that wouldn't impress potential clients.
Impress them enough to cover the cost ? Doubtful.
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If you had a choice of LEO capable companies, wouldn't you be more apt to choose one that's gone to the moon?
That's a pretty big if. There are no LEO capable companies.
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Survival of mankind (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I feel NASA's ongoing mission should be the distribution of people into outer space for permanent relocation. We should focus on saving humanity from the off chance we kill each other with nukes or get hit by an asteroid.
Who the hell modded this comment 'Troll'? (Score:2)
I generally don't touch posts by A/C, but in this case . . . WTF? The man has a valid point, he put it succinctly and clearly. Whoever modded the post 'troll' needs to re-read the moderator guidelines.
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Personally I feel NASA's ongoing mission should be the distribution of people into outer space for permanent relocation.
There, fixed that for you. There was some humorous nonsense about *saving* humanity obviously tacked on by a hacker.
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Personally, I feel that if we're going to colonize the moon (or Mars), that responsibility should not be put in the hands of NASA, the USA, or any other hypercapitalist nation for that matter. What these bean counters love to ignore is that, once we hit space, money/wealth will quickly become irrelevant. I don't know about you, but I can't picture debt collectors chasing me through the galaxy so some dirty banker can buy a diamond-encrusted iPad.
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I think this illustrates one of NASA's biggest problems. Different people have different and incompatible ideas of what its mission should be. They work on projects that take more than a decade, so changing missions with changing administrations can result in nothing getting done. Should they do manned space? Environmental monitoring? Aerospace R+D? Deep space science? These all require very different infrastructure.
My personal vote is for manned space and deep space science because I don't think any other
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Should they do manned space? Environmental monitoring? Aerospace R+D? Deep space science? These all require very different infrastructure.
However, lowering launch costs, one of the main goals of the new R&D program, facilitates all of those things.
So (Score:5, Funny)
From the article:
allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit
So NASA's building a version of Voltron?
Re:So (Score:5, Funny)
From the article:
allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit
So NASA's building a version of Voltron?
They don't say so explicitly ... you have to read between the lions.
NASA's budget is nothing more than a (Score:2, Interesting)
rounding error with what the President proposed for FY2010. Considering they are spending an unheard of 40% over their income I guess we should feel damn lucky NASA got anything.
Being a geek I want NASA to receive funding an put people into space and on the moon. The space station comes off to me as a camper, someone looking for excitement and adventure but not wanting to commit to the log cabin in the mountains.
Being a cynic, this unabashed spending has got to stop. If it means shutting down the manned
Spending (Score:3, Interesting)
Being a cynic, this unabashed spending has got to stop
The spending is going crazy because entitlements are out of control. The feds promise that everyone who is this or that is entitled to a federal zennie, and now there's more of them as baby boomers get old. What was supposed to happen was that entitlements would be pretty cheap and there would be lots of kids to share the costs of the old people. Now, neither has happened.
Bottom line is, if you want the spending to stop, you have to withhold care for
Re:Spending (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to raise taxes, cut benefits, and slash defense spending. We now spend more than every other country in the world combined on defense, at some point we have to say we're spending too much on it. Of course, if anyone even suggests cutting defense spending they're labeled as an unpatriotic terrorist sympathizer, and their political career goes down the toilet. Similarly, if anyone suggests cutting social security or Medicare, they're accused of wanting to kill old people, and old people vote more than anyone else. Talk about raising taxes, and you're a big government socialist. The whole system has gone off the rails, and everyone is too busy trying to tear everyone else down and look good for the voters to actually fix any of it. All we can accomplish is bickering about discretionary spending, which is such a small part of the budget that even taking it all the way down to zero wouldn't solve the problem.
End of rant.
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We need to raise taxes, cut benefits, and slash defense spending
I agree completely.
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But carefully. Get to where you want to be overnight, and a lot of people are out of work and the panic starts all over again.
The best time to tighten your budgetary belt, unfortunately, is the time it is least likely to be done: when times are good. When times are good every dollar taxed is coming out of smoothly operating machine for turning dollars into wealth.
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What do they do with all that money I give them?
Invade Afghanistan and Iraq and make a lot of new terrorists.
Some of us complained a bit at the time. Probably didn't make the news.
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I don't think elderly people even want to go to nursing homes. I'm planning to take my mother in once she is too old to live on her own.
There's some bills in that scenario still, and they are all related by not having enough children. First, and most obvious, the elderly person might have outlived their kid. Granted, it was this sort of scenario that social security was originally for, but now everyone claims it. No matter where your mother lives, she'll be getting a social security check and really, it
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I agree. Siphoning off just 20B from the Military Budget would take care of this.....
It's not rocket science (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting to LEO isn't rocket science, any more. We've been doing that for over 50 years, now.
By now it's rocket engineering, and appropriate for the private sector.
Keep NASA in the rocket science business - deep space, new technologies, etc. The goal here is for the private sector to do it faster and cheaper, enabling other things to piggyback on top - like even further out rocket science. Too much of NASA's attention is spent on that first 100-200 miles.
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You're right, but I'm sensing a contradiction in the article:
So what, an automated ISS?
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Considering it involves rockets and some scientific method, it most certainly IS rocket science.
Nope. At this point, it's rocket engineering. It's less experimentation than issues of design, operation, and maintenance.
Small difference, perhaps, but it's there.
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Guess when the most problems occur ... first 100 miles.
Keep in mind that NASA hasn't left LEO in 35 years. If they send people beyond Earth orbit, then the launch will no longer bear the lion's share of problems. For example, the risk of losing a crew [selenianboondocks.com] in a Constellation-style lunar mission was thought to be 1 in 60 (according to the Exploration Space Architectures Study). That's far larger than than the 1 in 600 to 1 in 2000 risk of loss of crew from the assorted launch options studied by the ESAS.
All that remaining risk isn't bundled into reentry (which inc
NASA-National Aeronautic and Space Administration. (Score:2)
Science? That sounds like a job for some other organization. NASA should strictly be in the business of managing air/spacecraft (although with the FAA existing to handle atmospheric flight, I suppose we could change the acronym to NSA - National Space Admi
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Shouldn't their whole mission be getting people and stuff into the air and/or into space?
No, that's the job of NAPSA, the National Aeronautic and People in Space Administration. I can see how you would get confused, though.
NASA's job is to look out for the USA's space-based interests. It's not clear what having people in space does for us at this point. Putting people in space was useful once, because it was the alternative to cold war: a space race is much better for development of technology than throwing the nation's money at arms manufacturers. Right now we would be better off developing be
Re:NASA-National Aeronautic and Space Administrati (Score:2)
You realize that NASA works with lots of people to do what it does. It works with lots of universities and contractors at private companies ...
They basically do what you say they should do already. They manage things for the most part, and do some stuff in house because they are the center point to it all and farming it out wouldn't be nearly as cost effective.
The current NASA is a government organization, not military. They work closely with the military, sure, but they do more civilian work than milit
Socialist! (Score:2)
Turning over a government-run system to private business? How socialist can you get!
Interesting split... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just an observation. It's not intended to be criticism of the plan. I have plenty of criticism of the old plan, but I don't yet know enough about the new one.
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Still a lot of exploration to do in our solar system - probes and robots are the best way to go about it right now.
I don't see what incentive private enterprise would have in landing rovers on Mars, whereas this is something that NASA is very good at doing, and is able to conduct experiments for the sake of science and discovery.
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Actually that was the old paradigm. Since the Space Shuttle Challenger's last ill-fated flight, all government payloads, except manned missions, are required by law to procure launch services from commercial providers.
This new approach proposed by President Obama would remove NASA even from the manned launch business, and outsource all vehicle design, development, and operations to the private sector.
I'm a child of the sixties and grew up with Apollo, and have followed the Space Shuttle program avidly sinc
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But those will be for the enrichment of the their stockholders, not the advancement of American technology and interests.
What an odd thing to say since US commercial space flight is more fully the advancement of American technology and interests than a NASA-only rocket. Keep in mind that the US more than anything else is an economic power, based on trade, industry, and the sweat of its citizens. I think going to commercial space flight is more in keeping with the traditions and strengths of the US.
Heavy lift capabilities? (Score:2)
No private firm is going to build a rocket of that capability anytime in the near future.
Sounds like Aries V may still happen. (Score:2)
Re:Heavy lift capabilities? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's $3 billion in the budget starting immediately to develope a heavy lift capability, considering that Ares V developement wasn't suposed to start for several years yet. Whatever solution they come up with should be delivered earlier than the Ares V would have been.
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The reports I've seen say it'll probably be similar to the Jupiter Direct proposal that a number of NASA engineers had been proposing as an alternative to the problem-plagued Ares rocket development. So still based on shuttle hardware, but probably a better design.
Why not the logical? (Score:2)
Not a retreat, attacking in different direction (Score:2, Insightful)
Much needed overhaul of a partially moribund manned program.
Putting science first will create a much more meaningful space
program in the long run, one in which a manned presence is
essential.
So... (Score:2)
This won't end well. (Score:2)
The obvious fraud... (Score:2)
Is that this whole space privatization thing is anything more than a kill NASA move. Like, come on, we're supposed to believe that a political party that seems to think people should not be allowed to own rifles should be allowed to develop ICBMs? Would Democrats really ever let me own my own rocketship, when, the mere possession of the energy required to get into myself orbit makes for a hugely powerful weapon?
Come on, Democrats banned mercury and lead, and they are going to let us have our own rockets?
W
Ok...But... (Score:2)
I understand why it was done (Cancellation of Constellation) but I have some concerns about not having ANY capability to get people into space until some commercial contractor has the equipment to do so. Also, saying "TBD" when it comes to when we will be back exploring space is the equivalent to "never" in terms of washington priorities.
Also, what is to inspire the youth of tomorrow?
Outsourcing manned space flight? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, NASA's jumping on the same bandwagon as private companies now - outsourcing everything they can get away with. I'm not totally anti-outsourcing, but I do think it goes way too far. Executives love the idea of having as few things in-house as possible, especially when a business partner can do it cheaper. The problem is that they don't care how the partner manages to do it cheaper! This happens in every field. Outsource manufacturing, and you get poor product quality. Outsource software development, and you get crappy code that has to be rewritten anyway. Outsource IT, and satisfaction levels go down as the people who knew what was happening get replaced by the cheapest people they can find. How would this apply to space travel?
Also, here's another thought. In not too many years, China, India or one of the other developing economies is going to be the dominant country on Earth. It's just a fact - they have governments who pursue growth at all costs, and we've decided to stop trying to stay ahead. One of the things that kept the US and the Soviet Union on their toes during the Cold War was the run-up in their space programs. The US push to be first on the moon was basically a government mandate, along with the massive amount of funding that it took. Let's say we wanted to do something like that again - maybe to prove a point to China or something. Now, instead of using unlimited money and power to make things happen, NASA has to go beg/bribe 500 subcontractors to do the job instead of hiring the scientists and engineering staff themselves.
Um, yeah... (Score:2)
"NASA is out of the business of putting people into low-earth orbit, and doesn't see getting back in to it."
That's like GM saying "You know what? We've been producing cars for a long time now. People should have a pretty good idea of how to figure it out. We are getting out of the car business, let people build their own cars from scratch now." (All GM sucks at building cars aside)
Only building a shuttle capable of carrying humans to LEO and docking with a space station MIGHT be a bit more complicated.
Perha
Why do those who like capitalism... (Score:2)
Many (not all, of course) of the posters here are in favor of capitalism. Just a guess.
So, why is it that there are so many her in favor of socialized space exploration? What happened to "The free market can do it better?"
Notes from press conference on commercial crew (Score:5, Informative)
This morning NASA Administrator Charles Bolden had a press conference where he gave more details on NASA's plans and announced the initial contracts for the $50 million commercial crew development contracts (was supposed to be $200 million, but most funding was diverted by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Al) towards Constellation). Mind that this is just for the first year, as the budget hasn't passed yet -- once the budget passes, future contracts will award a total of a few billion spread over a number of years. The video link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9YvIESqDUk [youtube.com]
Here's my notes on the press conference:
(sorry about the heinous formatting)
Charles Bolden takes a moment to thank the Constellation team for their years of dedicated service
"We want to explore new worlds, we want to develop more innovative technologies, we want to foster new industries, and we want to increase our understanding of Earth, the solar system, and the universe."
"each awardee also proposed significant investment from other sources to leverage taxpayer investment"
Blue Origin
o $3.7 million award to fund "risk mitigation activities related to its development of pusher launch escape system, and to develop a composite crew module for structural testing."
Boeing
o $18 million for space transportation system which includes a 7-person capsule to launch on medium-lift expendable launch systems
Paragon
o small business
o has directly supported more than 70 spaceflight missions
o $1.4 million for a development unit of environmental control and lift support air revitalization system
Sierra Nevada
o $20 million for Dream Chaser, 7-person spacecraft to be launched on Atlas V-402 vehicle
ULA
o $6.7 million for emergency detection system to monitor vehicle health of Atlas V and Delta IV rockets
they are the vanguard; certainly adding to this group in the near future
comments from presidents/reps
o ULA
EDS work for commercial crew and making sure products are more reliable for all customers
o Blue Origin
pusher escape system, at back of capsule to avoid jettison event, not consumed on nominal launch so it lowers operating costs
composite capsule will improve durability over conventional technology and lower weight
o Boeing
principal teammate Bigelow Aerospace
Bigelow represents most probable near-term market for crew transportation to LEO other than NASA
want to satisfy both Bigelow's needs and NASA's
parallel with Bill Boeing's young company and airmail to delivering cargo and crew to ISS
o Paragon
developing air revitalization system
first of its kind: a turn-key system, usable on pretty much any spacecraft
had very first commercial experiment on ISS
o Sierra Nevada
developed under unfunded Space Act agreement for past two years
based on NASA's HL-20 from 20 years ago
o Orbital Sciences (ongoing COTS contract)
um, talked for quite a while
o SpaceX (ongoing COTS contract)
spoke about collaborations with NASA
Q&A
o Do you have a destination and timetable?
tiger teams working on destinations and putting together timetables now
o in-orbit refueling?
Yet another industry to bailout (Score:3, Insightful)
The US government is putting its manned access to space in the hands of private entities. When those entities go broke, will they be deemed "to important to fail"?
Re:Stupid, really (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Mexico did once send a killer whale to the moon for $200.
FUD (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Stupid, really (Score:5, Funny)
OMG brilliant!
Build a cylindrical wall surrounding the launch complex and the outbound trajectory. Put a hefty airlock at the bottom, at ground level. Make the wall tall enough to poke out of the atmosphere. Install really big vacuum pumps.
Move the spacecraft into the wall through the airlock. Get everyone out of the walled area. Close the airlock and evacuate all the atmosphere from the walled region. (Pump it into the surrounding open air.)
When the walled in area is a hard vacuum, from ground to space, launch! The FAA has no say, because there's no atmosphere! The EPA has no say because there's no air!
The spacecraft never undergoes aerodynamic stress during launch and can be any dang shape you want! Spherical ship? No problem!
Note to all slashbots: I am joking. Maybe.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Better yet: Not any shape. Place it on a disk, that fits semi-loosely in your cylinder. (Tighter will get more wear, but be more efficient. There'll be a range of 'good' values here.)
Then you let the air back in from vents under the disk. It'll launch most of the way from air pressure alone.
Re:Stupid, really (Score:4, Funny)
Even more brilliant... collect atmospheric C02 and use it to pump the platform up. When the platform clears, keep pumping that evil C02 into space.
It's the pneumatic space elevator of global warming stopping!
Re: (Score:2)
Umm, the maximum air pressure you could get (at sea level would be 14.7 psi, so you can only lift 14.7 pounds for every square inch of cylinder. The amount of weight that the space shuttle can lift to LEO is 53,600lbs, so you'd need an area of 3650 square inches to lift it. Which is less than 6' in diameter. Unfortunately, the amount of air pressure rapidly drops as you ascend, and getting a vacuum seal around that payload slug will be hard as hell. Not to mention making a 6' diameter pipe that is air-t
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For the mentally-challenged: Instead of blasting your ship into space, bring space down to your ship :)
Re:Stupid, really (Score:4, Insightful)
...but the major impediments to commercial space launches are still the FAA and the EPA.
Perhaps the most attractive point of the commercial swing is that it makes the FAA/EPA factor moot. A launch provider is a launch provider...if the payload sports an American flag on the delivery vehicle, so be it. If it is economically more feasible to hitch a ride into orbit on a Cold War R-7 out of Kazakhstan, that will be the commercial solution.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That's weird, looks like SpaceX easily obtained permission to launch from Cape Canaveral. http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=spacex+canaveral+launch+falcon+9 [google.com]
Re:Stupid, really (Score:5, Informative)
Please stop the FUD. Approximately nothing of what you have said is true, cdrguru.
The FAA's office of Space Transportation (AST) has a mandate written in its authorizing law to both regulate and promote commercial space activities. They take both parts of that quite seriously.
Please do not spread FUD.
I am not aware of any commercial space activity which was denied an AST license or permit. There have been a few "Can't fly from this airport" snafu's from the aviation side, who are alternately happy and sad about rockets, but the AST crew are doing the "promote" thing quite seriously.
Is it always a completely smooth relationship? No. Is any of the startup companies spending most of their time (more than 10-20%) on paperwork? No. People are getting licenses and permits, they're flying.
From a reasonable standpoint, someone does need to be an external review to make sure we don't kill someone on the ground. If the industry neglected that, we'd eventually *really* get shut down when we did something neglegent. The reviews and regulation are appropriate to avoid dropping rockets on some poor family some day, which would be a tragedy both for the victims and for the industry.
EPA has no authority, the FAA has a standing environmental finding that there's no significant impact from the reusable rocket industry.
Am I personally flying rockets? No. Have I had to talk to AST about some proposed activities? Some. Do I know the people flying stuff now (Xcor, Armadillo, Masten, Unreasonable)? Yes, in most cases for decade-plus and personally. When we all get together, most of the griping is about operational lessons, and learning new things about rocket design, and high-fives for new successes. Only a small fraction of it is regulatory. It's there, but we know how to deal with it.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup. New Mexico's building a space port [spaceportamerica.com] just for this sorta' thing.
Re:Stupid, really (Score:5, Informative)
And between the FAA and EPA it is almost impossible to get a license in the US.
Don't forget OSHA. And that's a GOOD thing IMO. Note that it didn't stop Space Ship One from reaching space. What it will stop is unscrupulous corporations from using a poisonous propellant because it's cheaper than a nontoxic one, and having pieces of the blown-up rocket land on somebody's house. Let alone shortcuts that endanger workers.
When they made the Blues Brothers movie they had to do tests to get FAA approval to drop the Nazi's Pinto from a helicopter in Chicago in that one scene; they wanted to make sure it would drop straight down instead of sailing into a residential neighborhood. After dropping three pintos in the Salt Flats in Utah, the FAA granted permission.
The EPA, FAA, and OSHA protects YOU from corporations who don't care whether you live or die, whether you realize it or not. They're not protecting you from yourself, they're protecting you from ME. Any corporation rich enough to put people in space are rich enough to get EPA, FAA and OSHA approval.
If government went away tomorrow, you'd be wishing it was back the day after.
Re: (Score:2)
When they made the Blues Brothers movie they had to do tests to get FAA approval to drop the Nazi's Pinto from a helicopter in Chicago in that one scene; they wanted to make sure it would drop straight down instead of sailing into a residential neighborhood. After dropping three pintos in the Salt Flats in Utah, the FAA granted permission.
Your assumption appears to be that the Blues Brothers fx team never thought about wind or aerodynamic effects, rather than they were competent and confident and the FAA ju
Re: (Score:2)
Well, Toyota's design team didn't find anything wrong with the accelerator. Surely they don't need to actually test things in the real world?! I mean, we install all our code immediately into production! I can only assume our local hospital does likewise...
-l
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Stupid, really (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on the type of license. The manned reusable license is actually pretty well thought out. (Scaled was easily able to get such a license). The FAA is more than reasonable about that. You might want to actually research that.
Mexico is not really an option as American companies - or companies with primary American ownership/staff - are still subject to US laws. Space and associated technologies are too close to arms proliferation and the laws are written with that in mind.
The reality is that US companies can, and do, get all the necessary licenses.
What is difficult is the reverse engineering of existing technologies. Almost everything NASA paid for in X programs the last 30 years is still owned exclusively by the company whom they contracted the work. The Linear Aerospike engines that were tested for X-33 has been sitting on shelf at LockMart for almost 10 years, so other companies wanting to explore the concept have to rebuild the design. The only real design in the last decade to come out of NASA itself without outside contracts has been TransHab. (Which they promptly signed a sole-source distribution contract with Bigelow to handle).
And therein lies the problem with NASA. Their R&D programs are not like the old NACA development programs. The technology is not moving to off-the-shelf. They are on-the-shelf technologies because that is primarily where they stay. Any company that wants to build a small orbital vehicle will have to do that from scratch or with whatever they can leverage.
FAA and the EPA stopping commercial launches (Score:2)
FAA and the EPA stopping commercial launches
You can change the NASA budget all you want, but the major impediments to commercial space launches are still the FAA and the EPA. If you can't get a license for a launch, you aren't going anywhere.
Fine.
After I launch, they can come up and arrest me.
-- Terry
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Wrong. There is plenty of money for black budget projects and the militarization of space that'll be launched out of Air Force Space Command, just not enough for peaceful purposes.
Re: (Score:2)
Hanson owns NASA now.
Has he been appointed Grand Poobah of the Illuminati yet? What is he going to have the Trilateral Commission do next?
Re:Just wanted to say (Score:5, Informative)
You really have no sense of where government money goes, do you? TANF (federally-funded welfare) is $16.5B. By contrast, the latest Pentagon budget request is $768.2B.
Welfare is a really tiny portion of our total expenses.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The current budget is a far cry from a "little for space research." The United States of America leads the world in raw spending for space exploration. I would argue that we are spending about as much as the rest of the world combined. I am in NO way saying we are the best, or we haven't had our fair share of failures, but to say that NASA's budget is a "little" amount is simply wrong.
$17.2 billion - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (United States of America GDP: $14.25 trillion (2009 est.)
$5.4
Re: (Score:2)
Space budgets world wide: [wikipedia.org]
United States NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) $17,600 million[42]
EU ESA (European Space Agency) $5,350 million [43]
France CNES (French Space Agency) $2,590 million [44]
Russia RKA (Russian Federal Space Agency) $2,400 million
Japan JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) $2,100 million
Germany DLR (German Aerospace Center) $1,821 million
Italy ASI (I
Re: (Score:2)
Doomed is country that is paying a lot for unemployment benefits and welfare and little for space research.
You do realize that the new budget has an additional $6 billion for NASA than it previously had, much of it dedicated to reviving research & development at NASA, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Then they charge more. Any more questions?