Former NASA Astronauts On Commercial Space

I applaud SpaceX and hope they achieve a manned orbital mission by 2015 but that's as far as anyone is going to go for the next 100 years. I find it amusing that every attempt to have humans leave Earth orbit is cancelled. A Republican adminstration proposes and a following Democrat administration cancels it for "budgetary" reasons. If we can afford hundreds of billions to bail out the Unions at GM and Chrysler don't any of you think we could afford a a couple billion more to see Constellation through? And now I see all these fools proclaiming how visoinary O'bama is for his new direction. Keep dreaming space cadets. O'bama just ceded any leadership in outer space to the Chinese and Russians.

No Leroy, we are NOT ready, not by a mile. Once we see a human-rated commercial spacecraft flying 2-3 times to space (are you volunteering to fly on the first one, by the way?) THEN we will be ready to reconsider. In the meantime stop bashing 'on principle' Constellation/Ares-1 which until proven otherwise is the only way we, as a nation, have to access LEO.

Ditto for the Earth Science crowd waving 'the end is near', 'global warming', Mayan Calendar / Nostradamus / whatever banners as they pursue research grants while I am sitting here under 30 inches of snow and 5-8 more expected to fall over the course of the day. (this said toungue-in-cheek, I realize it oversimplifies the issue, but the point needs to be made that some of us are interested in Earth Science, just not THAT much)

The problem many of us see, which is why we are not at all 'excited', is that by the time you walk the walk many ISS modules will be past its design life!. Then what? Are we expected to throw away tens of billions to start replacing them just so Commercial Human Space can stay in business?

ISS is up and running, fine, let's do what we reasonably can until 2020 (but not at the expense of Constellation R&D) to keep it running ... and not a penny more of our taxpayer money to start replacing older modules. By then either commecial space comes up with venture capital to take over OR ISS can follow the way of Salyut, Skylab, and MIR back into the atmosphere and to the bottom of the ocean.

So, can we all please return to our senses and stop this all-or-nothing budgetary suicidal nonsense?

The media does not really understand. In order to do truly inspiring exploration, like visiting Mars, L2 and NEOs, new technology is needed. We were simply not going there with existing technology. I think going back to the moon would hold the public's interest for a few months at best, at the cost of eating up all of NASA budget for decades.

The presidents plan takes the long view, which most people do not. New technologies and industrial capability are needed for sustainable exploration.

You have a very good point Dann48. It seems a little ironic that it was predominantly democrats that supported the creation of NASA against republican oppositions, and since the mid 1970's it has been dominantly republicans pushing for better uses and funding of NASA against a largely democratic push to kill it. More money was lost or un-trackable from the bailouts than triple the NASA budget request to return to the moon, and yet we consistently hear that we did not have the money to go to the moon. I think it is also a little unforgivable that the government reached out to kill very stable jobs requiring high levels of education so that we may have more money to create unstable jobs that will most likely not exist in 3 years, where these NASA jobs would have still existed.

Moreover the companies funded to develop private access to space are little more than toy rocket companies. Some of them have flown hardware in space, but that is like saying that I built a toy RC controlled car, so I am ready to build a ford Mustang Cobra. I frequently hear how ULA is not a toy company, but they are, they do not build or design anything, they are merely a launch operations company that launch rockets, designed and built by Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Energomesh, so they have very little experience in large scale rocket design and manufacturing processes. Not to mention most data on how to mitigate high, mid and low frequency combustion instabilities is either proprietary to the companies that our grandfathers tax dollars already funded to solve those problems or they are defense secrets. So these toy rocket companies are going to have to resolve these problems, and I might add that the companies who solved these issues in the mid 20th century required hundred man teams and nearly a billion dollars to solve these problems.

Lastly, the government seems to think that they will pay to get these companies on their feet and then leave them to their own devices. Even if these companies can build their own launch vehicles and hire their own private astronaut corps, their is no money to make in space. A company may be able to make $50 million per launch for some reason or another, but they are going to pay $200 million just to get the astronauts up their. Space flight still requires government financing of R&D as well as operations, companies will go bankrupt if they try. So at best all they can do is pay a company (hopefully an experienced company) to dot he R&D that is typically done by one of the NASA centers, and to some extent I might agree with that approach, but it still needs to be government funded at every step in the process.

I totally agree with Dann48...The vision for further ventures is great,,but keep existing systems going until then..shutting down everthing now is affecting alot of jobs nation wide. cantractors and sub-contractors..ETC...

Indeed, the track record of the self-described "New Space" companies has thus far, been marked generally with failure and arrogance.

NASA on the other hand is well known for its successful implementation of large projects and its humility. WTF?

Constellation/Ares is in not access to LEO - it is a program that has fallen further behind with every year. The US's only route to LEO right now is Shuttle, not Ares. You are being disingenuous by describing Ares as operational.

Ares is vaporware, much more so than Falcon/Dragon or even Cygnus. Witness Falcon/Dragon accelerating launch of elements while Ares kept delaying. Constellation/Ares can't even figure out how much the rocket will carry to orbit, continually throwing off development of the Orion capsule. They went about developing Constellation completely backwards by picking the (undeveloped) launcher then forcing the payload to fit.

Obama and Bolden are setting a course for long term success and growth.

Leroy Chiao's considered words highlight something implicit in President Obama's dramatic move, namely that, intended or not, a gauntlet has been thrown down for those who he says 'sling mud' at NASA. This is at heart a debate between 'big government' and 'small government', and it's perhaps surprising to see some Republicans apparently advocating the former and Democrats apparently advocating the latter, but these things are never simple, and it doesn't just apply to the US - the traditional positions of last century are getting turned on their heads by the questions of the new. Nations fly flags, companies follow expediencies, and the roles of each are being threatened/challenged, since LEO commercialisation requires companies without borders, and the big, deep space vision (human interplanetary missions) requires international cooperation between nation states on a scale not normally seen outside the military sphere, and only just touched on by the jewel that is the ISS. But one cannot have it both ways - if human rated commercial access to LEO is decades away, then that's the fault of the private sector for talking the talk but not walking the walk (one thinks of Richard Branson launching 'Virgin Galactic' when it's not even 'Virgin Suborbital' yet!). The commercial sector should be hiring now, recruiting those laid off by the cancellation of Constellation. If, on the other hand, there is no move now at inter-governmental level (via NASA, ESA, Roscosmos etc) to take on the interplanetary challenge, then that is, indeed, a failure of leadership that will leave our children's children bound to one planet.

Tom Jones is right.
He explained the entire situation and history succinctly.

Excellent editorial to point representatives to.

And I will.

> The abrupt cancellation means the U.S. no longer wishes to [...]
> We are deliberately choosing to [...]

NASA and Obama administration officials say exactly the opposite. So this is a less crazy way of saying they're all liars trying to destroy NASA. Which is still crazy.

This person has an unusually powerful crystal ball. Even more powerful than those who say americans can't build safe rockets.

PS: "the Bush administration underfunded [Constellation] by more than 35 percent since its inception in 2004." By whose abacus? Tom Jones is wrong.

Anyone who has villified Doc Horowitz and Charlie Precourt for defending Ares when they are/were working for major contractors (wrongly protraying it as a conflict of interest or somehow unfairly biased) should equally villify Ken Bowersox and other former astronauts for promoting "commercial" options while they are employed by "newspace" companies. Don't you see the hypocrisy for treating former astronauts on one side as somehow being villians while treating astronauts on the other side WHO ARE DOING THE SAME THING as somehow being heroic. It's just bold-faced hypocrisy.

Personally, I villify none of them and they are all still the best among us.

The gov needs to find a way to do this that fits with budgets and expectations. The failure is that we have only the shuttle after wasting billions and billions of dollars. If NASA and its corporate bedfellows can only offer this, they need to be cut out of the process.

> Anyone who has villified Doc Horowitz and Charlie Precourt for defending Ares when they are/were working for major contractors (wrongly protraying it as a conflict of interest or somehow unfairly biased) should equally villify Ken Bowersox and other former astronauts for promoting "commercial" options while they are employed by "newspace" companies. Don't you see the hypocrisy for treating former astronauts on one side as somehow being villians while treating astronauts on the other side WHO ARE DOING THE SAME THING as somehow being heroic. It's just bold-faced hypocrisy.

The difference is that in the first case you had former astronauts advocating a fundamentally flawed approach which would specifically give cost-plus contracts to the company they worked for. In the latter case, you have former astronauts advocating for a general approach in which their own company would be just one of many candidates for competitive fixed-price contracts.

In response to "lowly contractor" ...

we already have acceptable heavy lift vehicles for accomplishing the lunar mission .. the EELV's Atlas V and Delta IV. We just have to rethink the mission scenario ... with multiple launches and both LEO and lunar rendezvous ... I proposed this during the early stages of constellation.. but was "out voted"

An interesting study by Maggio, G., and Hall, T., "Safety & Reliability Assessment of Delta IV EELV Based Crew Launch Options,” Information Systems Laboratories, showed that there is nothing endemically "unsafe" about the EELV's and that man-rating is a matter of detail and not design.

USA Department of Defense has expended more than $20 billion on the EELV development, and this investment has resulted in a production, assembly, and launch infrastructure that has yet to be developed for the Ares I ... these facts conveniently seemed to be ignored by the "pro-Ares" side.

Once we manrate the EELV's .. with many common parts and all of the manufacturing and launch infrastructure in common .. the "economy of scale" can't help but bring overall human launch costs down to a level that is competitive with the Russian Soyuz.

I am so confident that the CCDev program will work .. that i AM leaving my cushy academic job to accept the position as principle propulsion systems engineer for the SpaceDev/SNCopr's "Dreamchaser" entry into CCDEV mix.

.. and yes .. my plan is to GLADLY ride along on the dream chaser during some of its initial development test flights!

Keith - I think the Popular Mechanics link is incorrect?

Andrew

@Keith:

The Russians??? ;) Wait until the Chinese understand how to sell seats on their Shenzhou then we'll all be crying the good old times when the US had a burgeoning commercial space industry for HSF... Oh but wait the Chinese still are in a communist nation! Does that count?