Mixed Messages From A Less Than Perfect Rollout

NASA's Administrator, Charles Bolden, accepted part of the blame. "I could have done a better job of communicating" with Congress, he said. "I will take the hit for that."

Ooooh that's really showing leadership. What else could he have told them? "Exciting, Bold and New" without a plan is hardly newsworthy. Failure to communicate with Congress is the least of his problems.

I have to agree; Congress is the problem, not the solution. They've known that the problem was coming; they've been told about it for years. But the political fire-fights have just made congress so completely disfunctional that it's a miracle every year when they finally pass a budget at all, although months late and filled with pork-barrel give-aways as it always is.

I support the new plan, but I think the lame roll-out and blind-siding of Congress may actually undo it in a way that other O Administration policy proposals have been undone.

imho, the rest of the Senators & Reps will just want to use NASA's budget increase to take away from when they start the PayGo rules to fund their pet projects. It'll be a miracle if the proposed increase stays intact.

with all of the fussing about deficits & overspending etc. etc., NASA will be doing good to end up with any increase after Congress gets through with it.

Weinberg is so self-centered. If you read his op-eds (the WSJ today was not his first on this subject), he's essentially saying that "my pet-projects are more important then HSF, so cut HSF and give the $$$ to me."

What he assumes is that any cut in HSF will automatically result in an increase for robotic & scientific missions. This may not be so, and may in fact be the opposite. HSF generates a lot of interest in science from the general public. Loss of HSF could result in people taking much less interest in missions related to astrophyics, planetary science, etc. HSF allows the general public to relate to space science in an in-direct way, take that away and people may begin to ask why we even need robots on Mars, etc.

Remember, we don't bury robots in Arlington National Cemetery.

We have a new drinking game at JSC. Everytime Bolden says "Bold", "Interesting", or "Exciting" you have to take a shot.

If he starts to cry, then you have to do a double.

"The reaction portends an uphill fight for the Obama Administration, partly due to sentiment on Capitol Hill that it failed to consult members before unveiling such a dramatic shift in direction"

I warned everyone congress has teeth and it was going to get bloody.

Thank God.

Obama's policy plans must be stopped and redone from the bottom up.

Mark my words, Orion will survive this madness.

I am happy for COTS to achieve it's goals, but you don't overly privatize a national asset like NASA's ambitious human spaceflight goals anymore then you privatize the US Marines!

And Obama has some serious problems with how our government works that is for sure.
Makes you wonder how well the entire thing was thought out huh?

I've noticed that all official statements about the budget treat encouraging private industry and continued US exploration of space as the same thing, but they are not. Does anyone actually believe that private industry has no future in space? But the real point of contention is what will will actually DO in space. The arguments need to be separated and defined. What has all the so called "Constellation Huggers" upset is NOT that private industry get some money, but that NASA no longer has any real goals, no defined objectives, nothing challenging beyond paying some "taxi" companies to ferry two to four "baggagenuats" into low Earth orbit every year. It is said Nature abhors a vacuum, and without something to replace the goals of Constellation, we have a giant vacuum in the center of NASA.

Wasn't Bolden saying all along, since the Augustine Committee finished their assessment, that he essentially knew nothing?

I suspect there are going to be some funeral day hysterics.
Few people understand that shuttle operations are in their last year and wont come to realize it until the last mission ends and the lights start going out. At which point they'll likely start wailing and jumping on the coffin.

I think Bush understood this better. He padded the end of the shuttle with the promise for near future moon missions. Didn't matter that the budget wasn't whole or that the dates kept slipping, it was something to look forward to. It took NASA from its wandering path under the shuttle to having goals the public could understand.

Unfortunately the new plan isn't quite as clear. Maybe its necessary in a post-America world for NASA to take a back seat to other space programs... but you can't expect to put that in words and not draw fire for it.

I think it is safe to say the switch to private crew rockets was inevitable, but probably premature at this point, and accelerated by the financial crisis and budget pressure.

Some people just want to blame it all on Obama because he has to decide, and he did. He's just a politician. If the economy was booming, I doubt the pressure to switch would be there and CxP would just get more billions.

Obama took his time and let Augustine and Co kick it around first. It's not like Obama just made a rash decision he pulled out of his back end.

The Obama Administration now realizes there is a good reason why there is such thing as separation of powers into Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches. It thought this was an 'easy one' to appear playing 'tough' on the deficit but the big miscalculation has been believing that public 'apathy' for more funding equated to no support human exploration. This reasoning, as I've cautioned before, was flawed because that same public is NOT any more eager to instead fund science just for the heck of it (anyone remember the supercollider?) or, for that matter, big ticket items like the Healthcare Bill (i.e. a supposed 'safe' seat like Massachusets ... and more to come in Nov.). That's why it is time that Congress do its job and put a stop to this nonsense. We need a simple goal, which is space exploration combining human and robotic missions. For monitoring Earth, and do all kinds of wonderful things ... we already have NOAA, USGS, and commercial imagery satellites. S20B/yr is plenty once NASA refocuses on a simple/clear mission.

Let's not kid ourselves, for all that talk about 'Commercial Human Space' the only reason it even exists on paper is because of the government-supported ISS (which is expensive to operate and provides limited science return for the money). Thus, their entire business case is flawed because it is not based on doing something commercially viable once in orbit but only to ferry people and payloads up and down to a government facility. And, to add insult to injury, so far the only real 'private' astronauts have flown on the Russian-taxpayer-funded old but extremely reliable Soyuz.

There are many private ventures in space which at the time seemed a good idea and, yet, ultimately failed ... Iridium, Globalstar, Orbcomm, etc. It is not the government's job to bail everyone who makes a bad business decision.

It is not CxP what we 'cannot afford' but, rather, a hugely expensive ISS whose main purpose for even existing was to give the Shuttle a job to do after the Challenger accident, and the same applies to many good science projects that have little to do with space exploration. It is time to plan for a transition of ISS to commercial interests and pull the plug. If they can come up with venture capital to support a commercial ISS after 2016 that's great, and we can work out a phased transfer, but if not then it's clear to me there is no business case for commercial human space.

Others will disagree, of course, but the public is now finally starting to understand the contradictions of cancelling CxP while 'promising the solar system', or justifying support to ISS no matter what just because 'it's cost us so much money' (well, time time to cut the losses then) while trying to use that same argument to lynch Orion/Ares for cost overruns that pale in comparison with bailouts and ever increasing government bureaucracy.

"I've noticed that all official statements about the budget treat encouraging private industry and continued US exploration of space as the same thing, but they are not."

I think that the hope is that using commercially-sourced equipment will make it cheaper. However, I agree that there is a big point here that has been missed by the originators of this plan. Whilst I can beilive that, with time and start-up investment, there can be some commercial human space-flight to LEO, the same cannot be said of BEO.

So, you actually go back to square one on Ares-V with the only significant difference being that NASA is no longer the prime contractor. You still are asking for a BFR that will only be used a few times a year and only for government operations. Commercially-built government-only machines tend to be hideously expensive and, if technically visionary, they tend to be over-schedule too.

These issues suggest to me that not starting a extant-tech HLV now, if one intends to need one at the end of ISS is a big mistake. If competition is necessary, have a team compare Atlas-V Phase 3 against an SDLV-In-line with upper stage. Heck, compare it against ULA's EELV Phase 1 plan too! If utilising EELV heritage, or even the EELVs themselves, is better than using SDLV, then by all means use it! In any case, let's get to bending the metal.

In the meantime, let's keep Orion and find someway to ship ORUs up to the ISS once the shuttle is retired because, believe me, we'll need them, even if the commercial crew taxis come on-stream in line with the most optimistic projections in 2013/14.

> no support human exploration.

Even if you don't believe what officials say, you should still believe the billions heaped upon billions of dollars allocated to the exploration budget every year for the next five years

> We need a simple goal, which is space exploration combining human and robotic missions.

This always was the goal (of the VSE) and it continues to be part of the new plan

> It is time to plan for a transition of ISS to commercial interests

Officials say that is the plan

> the public is now finally starting to understand the contradictions of cancelling CxP while 'promising the solar system'

There is no contradiction cancelling hardware which doesn't exist to use hardware which does exist

> justifying support to ISS no matter what just because 'it's cost us so much money'

That is not the justification, the justification is that it can be used to do things of value

I thought the plan was that the commercially built machines would _not_ be government only?

If NASA buys five Dragon flights in a year, and NASA and others buy Dragon cargo flights, and private companies throw in with Dragonlab, and all those space tourists that Russia isn't supplying buy more Dragon flights, than the cost of that thing is shared.

The Falcon 9 rocket it flies on is further shared as its also used for satellite launches.

I know SpaceX is contentious but isn't Orion basically being continued as Orion Lite? Are we counting ULA and Orion Lite as these amateurs we can't trust?

Don't we need to get a handle on this situation?

The Moon is cool and all but I don't see how the Constellation program lets us do anything but land on it and "do science".

People including myself like to mention the resources the Moon has, but Constellation doesn't build the infrastructure you'd need to return lunar resources to Earth. IIRC, they specifically threw out any resource utilization even for mission purposes.

Does it even work as a jobs program if all the Shuttle people are going to be laid off regardless?

If the budget is slightly increased, where does it go if not paying people to do stuff?

What am I missing?

@Warlord of Mars

I agree fully- Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed out this problem when he spoke at ISDC '08, namely, that scientists tend to view NASA as their personal funding vehicle. NASA does do great science, but science is not it's sole objective- colonization is up there, too (eventually).

With that said, I don't think he realizes how limited robots are. For example, as someone who's heavily involved in astrobiology, I can say that if we ever really want to get serious about looking for life on Mars- not just indirect biosignatures, but finding the actual bugs- we will almost certainly humans on Mars. While we could possibly do it with robots, given the constraints of current technology, we'd need to send a fleet of highly automated combination Jeep/Drilling Platform/Excavator vehicles, which we then to precede to really hope don't break down, plus an automated gene sequencing lab (assuming that Martian life uses similar signaling molecules- if they don't, or don't even use B-type DNA entirely, then it's a total waste)*, plus a sample return mission (which presumably would have to be directed to a receiving facility in space or on the Moon, since while Mars and Earth exchange meteorites relatively frequently, I'll doubt we'll want any of this stuff getting loose on Earth in an uncontrolled manner.

Bottom line is, yeah, we could do it with robots. It'd probably be cheaper, easier, and simpler to send humans, but yeah, we could use robots.

*of course, if we had humans there, they might be able to jury-rig something. But humans are a waste, right?

> It'd probably be cheaper, easier, and simpler to send humans [rather than robots to find life on mars]

Maybe I'm just a stupid person but I can't fathom how landing and returning humans could possibly be cheaper/easier/simpler than landing a robot and returning rock

First off-I admit, I mispoke- humans would (probably) be more expensive, and certainly more complicated. But I think it'd be much more efficient use of resources.

Returning the rock isn't a problem- it's finding the right rock. If Martian life is anything like terrestrial extremophiles or archaea, it's going to have dug in deep, at least 5 meters underneath the surface (any higher than that and you have you issues with solar ionizing radiation). It will also be not particularly flamboyant or obvious, due to low metabolic rates. And we don't know exactly where it is- the methane seeps indicative of possible life are somewhat localized, but it's still dispersed over vast areas of land.

If we are able to pinpoint, with high precision, where biogenic methane is being emitted, than it might be reasonable to send a robot (it'd still have to be a massive, and very capable robot), but it'd be doable. But if we can't do that from orbit, then we'd need to send a whole lot of very, very big robots- or a human crew.

And this is all assuming we're dealing with living organisms- if we're hunting for microfossils, then you'd need to do an incredibly precise geological survey to target regions of Mars that might have been habitable at some point in it's history (including the 'Great Northern Ocean', which makes up most of the northern hemisphere). And we'd have to dig way, way deeper. Furthermore, while we've gotten relatively good at detecting the presence of microfossils in a given sample using Raman Spectrography, actually learning anything about the morphological nature of the microfossils will require sample-return to Earth, since even terrestrial microfossils, where we know what we're looking for, can be notoriously ambiguous.

Again, we could do it with robots, but I suspect it'd be more effective and efficient just to send a few highly-trained paleontologists/microbiologists/astrobiologists and a long-range vehicle than the massive fleet of robots that would be otherwise required.

(of course, in my opinion, in an ideal world we'd do both, but for this particular scenario, if I have to stick to one side, I'm going with humans)

LOL!!!!!!

I miss Mike. Without a mission NASA becomes the Small Business Administration for space startups and research grants [$$flush]. I love all the assertions that NASA can go back to human exploration beyond LEO now that it is going to let private industry handle getting to ISS. The only thing in the pipeline was Orion and Ares V. If that's gone ain't no one going no where except LEO for a very long time.

The Obama administration is handling NASA the same way it handled health care, which means they will not get their way. The ADD administration wants to push things through without thinking of the ramifications. This is what doomed the health care plan and what will also doom Obama's vision for NASA.

"I can't fathom how landing and returning humans could possibly be cheaper/easier/simpler than landing a robot and returning rock"

For that simple task, it might be cheaper for a robot mission. Keep in mind that Viking had a sophisticated laboratory to detect life but the results were not conclusive.

Either it will take numerous robot missions to accomplish what a human mission would accomplish, or the cost would be high to have a high chance of accomplishing what a human mission would. This could increase the price closer to what a single human mission would cost.

> The only thing in the pipeline was Orion and Ares V. If that's gone ain't no one going no where except LEO for a very long time.

Even with Orion and Ares V no one was going no where for a very long time. Why are people not getting this

"Even with Orion and Ares V no one was going no where for a very long time. Why are people not getting this?"

Mostly because many people do not think that they were using the right kind of Ares-V and with a far too narrow definition of 'going somewhere'. Huge delays were inevitable if you were going all the way to a big gigantic heavy launcher in one step rather than building lighter versions for less challenging missions first.

The Augustine Commission's report seems to be based on the assumption that CxP's strategic direction was the baseline, so all the alternatives were crippled by having to fit into this flawed 'one giant leap forward' concept. Incrimental, spiral paths were ignored entirely for some reason; Likely a lack of time.

You're the one not "getting this". Without the money to build Orion/Ares I/Ares V there won't be any money to build anything taking us anywhere for a long time either. You need to go back and read Augustine's report.

If the Apollo program (with its dozens of show stopping engineering problems) had been terminated in the manner of Constellation, the money that would have been freed would not have been sufficient for any other plan. To think that it will now be done faster, better and cheaper sure sounds to me like something we tried before. That really worked out well.

What killed health care and possibly will kill his new plans for NASA are opposition by those who currently profit from the status quo.

So what exactly is "commercial"? Some companies have found funds outside NASA to build hardware, run analysis and tests, etc. But the serious ones like Space X, Orbital, and even ULA (DoD money) received seed money to subsidize development. Is that commercial? There just isn't a true market for manned space flight yet for the commercial sector to make enough money on to justify developing a true "commercial" man-rated launch vehicle. Yes, monies can be made through satellite launches of these vehicles, but even ULA (a joint venture of Boeing and LM due to the lack of a business need for two separate vehicles) struggles to justify the need for both the Atlas V and Delta IV. How is the market going to support multiple vehicles from multiple companies? The answer is it won't. A few will get to market first and establish market dominance and the others will fail or just not try due to a lock on market share by the established providers. This coupled with the fact that there is no valid market for manned space flight (US governmnet and the laughable space tourist being the only customers) means a heavily subsidized industry. Let's just call Obama's policy what it is. A means to remove NASA from the tedious design process and reduce hardware time to market by eliminating much of the wasteful and expensive NASA oversight. I think he could sell that better to the public than cancelling a symbol of NASA and US ambition, "commercializing" space and taking "taxis" to the ISS.

> Mostly because many people do not think that they were using the right kind of Ares-V

DIRECT was a solution to Constellation's problems. Constellation is gone and so DIRECT is irrelevant. Moving on

> You need to go back and read Augustine's report.

Augustine's report says Constellation needs more than 20 years to land someone on the moon. It says more new money OR less fixed costs are necessary to do anything meaningful. Bolden and friends couldn't get the money, so they cut the fixed costs.

Also, NASA has not tried this plan before, contrary to your suggestion that it has. The new plan explicitly acquires rockets in a new way (buying a service, not masterminding development) and will execute missions in a new way (many smaller missions that are harder to screw up or cancel)

> ULA (DoD money) received seed money to subsidize development. Is that commercial?

Yes

> How is the market going to support multiple vehicles from multiple companies?

It already does and will continue to when NASA buys crew transportation from multiple companies

> ULA (DoD money) received seed money to subsidize development. Is that commercial?

>>Yes

So under that same logic the government bailout of the banking and financial sector was commercialism at work.

If a business can't solely (without government help) make a profit in a market, my business sense tells me that there would be no "commercial" success. A subsidized business is not a true commercial enterprise as it does not need to conform to economic principles. By subsidizing the market NASA would be creating an artificial demand to entice a commercial supply. Would it be cheaper? NO. Because not only will NASA front the money to develop the vehicles, but also pay to use them, along with the overhead costs to support facilities, staff, etc. the way they do today with the SSP. Perhaps there would be less bureaucracy, but less involvement by NASA would permit more "hidden costs" by private companies. In the end it is the difference between buying and leasing. Constellation=buying, Commercial=leasing. At the end of Constellation NASA would OWN something. At the end of commercial NASA would have NOTHING.

>> How is the market going to support multiple vehicles from multiple companies?

>It already does and will continue to when NASA buys crew transportation from multiple companies.

ULA and Orbital are about all the companies now. And looking at the launch schedule of Spaceflightnow, all upcoming missions are NASA or DoD. I wouldn't consider the US government supplying all demand and supporting only two companies and for vehicles (Delta II going away very soon) to be a diverse market.

You're trying to find some way to tear down the economic system of the free world to justify why a government owned and operated rocket system is better than a private one, and you're not succeeding, and you will never succeed. Government exists to do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves. The people can build and fly rockets. Government has no place in this any longer.