Where Next?

Nonsense, the AIG bailout would be enough to fund NASA for years.
When it comes to innovation Obama says NO.

American won't how.......

As one who started working for NASA in 1966, during Apollo, I really don't like the idea of the US pinning our manned access to space on the cooperation of the Russians. I remember the space race too well. I've worked hand in hand with the Russians, quite pleasantly I might add, on many occasions after the fall of the Soviet Union, but I still don't trust them and fear that our tenuous peaceful coexistence will some day come to an end.

Well articulated as always, Dr. Spudis, but how do we convince the right people, so programmed to operate with a bumper-sticker mentality, with so looonnnngggg a message? And how do we succeed in extracting the true Vision from its entanglements with its bastard step-child, the ESAS architecture, again, with a few brief slogans? I fear that the folks who can make a difference never read past the first paragraph of thoughtful essays like this one...at least it seems that way, given what they say in the media.

Excellent perspective of overall space development and NASA provided by Paul Spudis.

A Soyuz, as venerable as it is, could not have done that last Hubble fixup.
We need to be able to go up there and do really hard, unpredictable and possibly short-notice jobs. For that we need our own space trucks, not foreign taxicabs.

I think self-determination, as well as national pride, is stake.

"at stake." Grrrrrrr!

Dr. Paul Spudis hits the nail right on the head once again! NASA's first mistake was turning a Moon Base program into Apollo redux.

NASA and Bolden seem obsessed with manned 'space adventurism' when the primary purpose of humans in space should be pioneering the New Frontier so that we can eventually expand human civilization beyond our planet of evolutionary origin.

The second NASA mistake, IMO, was to return to the Moon the hard way instead of taking full advantage of our space shuttle technology with a directly shuttle derived architecture. Trying to develop a novel 'game changing' architecture by attempting to launch a human space capsule on top of a solid rocket booster was an expensive and totally unnecessary venture that had nothing to do with returning to the Moon.

I absolutely agree with the final passage in the excellent Spudis article:

"The soft power aspect is a question: how shall society be organized in space? Both issues are equally important and both are addressed by lunar return. Will space be a sanctuary for science and PR stunts or will it be a true frontier with scientists and pilots, but also miners, technicians, entrepreneurs and settlers? The decisions made now will decide the fate of space for generations. The choice is clear; we cannot afford to relinquish our foothold in space and abandon the Vision for Space Exploration."

Amen!

Marcel F. Williams

"extracting the true Vision from its entanglements with its bastard step-child, the ESAS architecture, again, with a few brief slogans"

Something like "Save the Vision: Cancel Constellation"?

Assuming Constellation == Bush VSE, the only rational response is "huh???" and there's you an opening.

Akear, what? The new space plan is far more focused on innovation than before.

It's funny, I thought Paul's article was a good justification for the New Plan. VSE was NOT SUSTAINABLE, and had the BS soft power / cold-war mindset. There is no new space race.

Establishment of robotic ISRU and a thriving private launch vehicle market will project far more real power than a lunar money drain.

Who didn't see this coming?

Something to chew on: On the bright side, $50 million per ticket for a ride to the ISS on the soyuz sounds like a good thing for the US... in the long-term. SpaceX claims they can fly the Falcon 9 to LEO on the order of $50 million a mission, and with seven seats in the Dragon capsule, they can (financially, at least) afford to be almost 700% overbudget and still be price-competitive with the Soyuz. The last private ticket to the ISS on the Soyuz was about $35 million. These and many other figures paint a picture of the LEO human spaceflight market. From a basic numbers standpoint, there appears to be amazing opportunity for the private sector, regardless of whether or not SpaceX is successful in meeting their claims.

Can these private companies perform as safely and reliably as the Orbiter or Soyuz or Ares I? Guess we'll find out. Either way, like it or not, it seems we can expect growth of invested interest in the private sector for launch services.

Now how should one factor in national pride, national security, international relations? These are rather complex, high-level topics; far be it for me right now to suggest the right answer in this regard; maybe I'll go chew on a tasty bone; ruff!

@newpapyrus

I don't disagree with your main point ("the primary purpose of humans in space should be pioneering the New Frontier"), but a few of your details left me scratching my head...

"The second NASA mistake .. was [not] .. taking full advantage of our space shuttle technology with a directly shuttle derived architecture".

A SSME on top of a couple of SRB sections wasn't enough "taking .. advantage of .. space shuttle technology"? A lot of Aries I critics seem to think it was too much shuttle technology...

Maybe by "directly shuttle derived architecture", you meant a cargo-only HLV of something like a shuttle (i.e. shuttle config, but with a one-time-use-only cargo vehicle instead of the shuttle)? Cargo-only, because with the ET, there's always going to be that foam safety issue?

I agree, that would have been something interesting to explore - but was there the budget to build that, as well as a man-rated expendable system to LEO? And potentially a man-rated HLV as well? (Although I don't know enough to know if we need a man-rated HLV, or if we could launch the people on a smaller man-rated system, to join up in LEO with a past-LEO vehicle pre-launched with a cargo-only HLV. Maybe the economics of two launches didn't/doesn't pan out, versus just one man-rated one?)

It's all in the numbers, and as a mere enthusiast (although I took Unifried at MIT, and my SO is a stuctural consultant on Aries V), I just don't know enough to say for sure.

"attempting to launch a human space capsule on top of a solid rocket booster was an expensive and totally unnecessary venture"

How is a human launch on top of a solid that bold a step? We've been doing it for decades, as part of that shuttle architecture you're so keen on.

So, what's the profit margin on a Soyuz capsule ride? When people write $50M a pop it sounds as if the Russians wouldn't be willing to reduce their price if competition arose. Or even subsidize it to minimize the impact of another player in the market.

@Noel

What I mean by taking advantage of space shuttle technology is doing what we know how to do in the most efficient manner. But we've never attempted to place humans directly on top of a solid rocket booster before. No one in the world has. And it was not necessary to do this in order to get to the Moon.

The ET foam is only a safety issue if you have a side- mounted space craft with fragile thermal tiles.

Marcel F. Williams

Great article by Dr. Spudis.

Great discussion of how ESAS created the death knell for Cx.

And, we landed with an ESAS architecture because
Griffin knew that if NASA did not show some result the VSE would be canceled; hence an attempt at NO NEW TECHNOLOGY, to keep costs down and speed getting things moving. He also knew that, while new technology might bring gamec hanging paradigms into place, it would take time and cost money.

NASA does not have time nor money to waste. It was a bet he lost.

Yes of course Russia is going to charge more for rides on its Soyuz rocket. We are soon over the barrel if not in the barrel as in shooting fish for years to come.

"At a meeting of the space agency chiefs in Tokyo, I want to discuss the maintenance of transport to the station," Roskomos head Anatoly Perminov was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

"We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this. But after that? Excuse me but the prices should be absolutely different then!"

Dr. Spudis neglected to mention the "abundant" water at those locations on the Moon are measured in parts per million. Somehow it seems more probable more water could be retrieved from Mars cheaper than mining water on the Moon for a fuel depot somewhere in cislunar space.

Sherlock, thank the previous admin for canceling our LEO capability long before we had a replacement. Fortunately the gap should be stemmed by the time the contract is up in 3 years. 3 years without USA having manned access to space ain't all that bad.

martin, I'm told that Energia can send up a Soyuz for *under* $50 million, so the implication is that the US is paying for Soyuz flights for the next 3 years. This is a reasonable number, in my opinion, if SpaceX is able to send up a Falcon 9 for $50 million and they're a startup and still figuring out the manufacturing path.

All, I agree with the sentiments about ESAS, because it truly did destroy the Vision for Space Exploration. However, here's the stickler, the Vision for Space Exploration, as stated in law (NASA Authorization Act of 2005) is extremely generalized and watered down. It basically says "Research how to get out of LEO, and implement it." Ironically it prioritized commercial space in fairly strong wording but ESAS managed to ignore it.

The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 should be far more powerful, they should be explicit about the need to develop advanced propulsion techniques, and put a strong onus on commercial space to get us to LEO, incentivize it with cost-plus so that SpaceX and other companies don't have to wrangle with NASA with regards to man rate their vehicles (if they have to do pay for that then they run in to cost overruns).

Within a decade I predict the US will have three new crew vehicles to LEO with some flight heritage. By then our EELVs (and perhaps some heavier-lift follow-ons) may be transporting supplies into LEO for assembly into an Earth-Moon L1 station.

The Russians will still be flying their fathers' Soyuz.

The Chinese will be bending their technological pick on moon flights, running out of money, and/or explaining the "heroic" deaths of astronauts.

So how are we slipping into third place?

This is an excellent piece, and reminds us of the price of underfunding the VSE. The original RLEP program, as well as the H&RT technology program were unfortunately gutted to keep the ESAS 1.5 Architecture on track. Too bad that billion NASA had to suck up for Katrina infrastructure fixes was taken out of their hide.

And it is really too bad that this bold, new plan now funds RLEP and Technology without funding a targeted exploration program other than a commercial wing-and-a-prayer.

The Original Vision, as Dr. Spudis eloquently states, was worth doing. Now there is much ado about much less.

No wonder we can't agree.

Michio Kaku is a smart guy but he doesn't seem to know much about the space program. He glosses over the delays with Constellation and claims that "We already have the Ares booster rocket... it's been tested already". He asserts that Ares 1 and Orion would be ready to replace the shuttle in 2015. He also advocates slowing down Constellation (how can you slow down something that's already years behind schedule?) which obviously makes no sense at all. In otherwords, he's clueless.

Noel, the Ares 1 was quite far from the original plan to use shuttle heritage technology to quickly and inexpensively return to flight. It was to have used a new five segment solid rocket booster and a new J-2X engine (not the SSME) for the second stage. These changes were primary drivers that increased the budget and the gap.

Going the Obama/Bolden route does not necessarily diminish our leadership in space. Getting to the moon is one thing. Having a cost effective infrastructure for access to LEO is another and it's required for any of the space exploitation and colonization plans to work. We also can't do this alone. We need the Russians, Europeans, Japanese and Canadians to make any robust solar system exploration and exploration plan possible (probably the Indians and Chinese as well). Paul has one thing right... it's not the cold war or space race anymore (not if we want any more than flags and footprints).

"Within a decade I predict the US will have three new crew vehicles to LEO with some flight heritage."

And where are they going to go and what will their flight rate be? I don't see how the market will support 3 crewed spacecraft.

You have pointed out the fatal flaw in the space tourism or even the space cargo market. Nowhere to go but the ISS, which has Soyuz, HTV and ATV already to service it. After it is fully built using shuttle for heavy lift, how much cargo, up and down science mass is there?

Only one place to go and all the competition the Obamanauts are touting means that when the smoke clears, only one service will be in business and then it will go out of business when the ISS is splashed in 2020 or is it 2025 or is it 2030? Dang stuck in LEO again.

In general I agree with Dr. Spudis' comments, but there are a few things he left out.

In the Vision, the Shuttle was supposed to have been shut down once ISS assembly was completed, about 2010.

What many, including Dr. Spudis forget to mention is that the first flight of the CEV was supposed to have been in four years, in 2008, with regular manned operations beginning in 2012. This was the primary near term definitive goal of the Vision. One of the reasons why many of us lost confidence in the NASA management over the last five years was their inability to begin to move towards this goal.

In the first year after the Vision was announced there was considerable disucssion about winged flying CEVs vs capsule type CEVs. One of the chief proponents of the winged flying vehicle was then ISS Deputy Manager, previously Chief Astronaut Charlie Precourt.

Admiral Steidle wanted to begin with simpler systems and then develop and extend them. He called these spirals. He also wanted to develop systems in a military manner, in a mode that too many NASA people thought was too commercial. He thought that working in this fashion he could meet the Vision's goals.

While the moon goal was discussed in the Vision, it was simply as a steppingstone to places further out. There was never any certainty that THE goal, even an interim goal, was a lunar base.

The first Lunar Architecture Team did actively discuss and vote on the nature of the lunar systems and functions and its use as a base was definitely identified. Keep in mind that the LAT was focused solely on the moon, as per its name.

Virtually all of the LAT deliberations went by the wayside when Mike Griffin came in as Administrator. Really much of the Vision went by the wayside because of Griffin's intent to develop what he saw as the planetary spacecraft first. His attitude was that ISS, like Shuttle, was useless and he called them mistakes, and so he really was not concerned about building the CEV in order to support ISS, which was one of the first and primary goals laid out in the Vision.

Actually the Orion was never, in and of itself, a planetary spacecraft. It might have been used as a crew module for high energy planetary returns, but it was never adequate to be used for planetary missions as the primary spacecraft. It was too limited in capacity, too limited in volume, and too limited in redundancy.

Even for lunar missions it was principally suitable for earth return, but either the lunar module or some other undefined mission modules would have had to provide redundancy capabilities.

And Orion reallhy did not do a lot for ISS support. Keep in mind that originally there were to be two versions; one was an ISS cargo carrier.

Probably the biggest thing lost under the Griffin Constellation plan, was the advancement of technology.

During the year prior to Griffin, and again with Charlie Precourt as a leading proponent, was Project Orion which had nothing to do with a crew capsule. This was the advanced power generation development program. This was one of the capstone programs announced in the first year under OKeeefe, and promptly cancelled by Griffin when he sought funds for to finance his Constellation Program.

If you look at the value and excitement of the 1960s and 70s, every program, even every mission, advanced technology and state of the art of spaceflight. This continued throughout Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Shuttle too.

Shuttle, though got turned into an operations program within its first few years of flight operations, and pretty soon, as operations people took over the program, it became solely about operating, It was actually supposed to become a more efficiently operating, cost-effective and largely 'commercial' system, which was the origins of the STSOC contract in the mid-1980s and the USA company. NASA People were supposed to have been freed up even then to go start new development work.

Two things side-tracked that effort. NASA operations refused to relinquish control. And SEI, the first Vision program announced, was killed by the NASA Administrator, Admiral Truly, who said he was more concerned with operating Shuttle than with trying to develop something new.

In order for the new Obama, Bolden plan to be succesful, what they now need to lay out is a series of goals in new systems and technologies, all of which contribute to advancement of the industry and capabilities, including reducing costs.

Constellation and especially the Orion concept as it was developed, missed these points entirely. You had a bigger Apollo vehicle and mission concept, totally a throw away, with exorbitantly high operations costs.

While sharing costs internationally might be important, it is just as crucial that the Administration keep in mind maintaining and advancing US industry and capabilities.

ISS lost sight of this when they started bartering away US design, development and industrial functions to others. Look at today's Shuttle mission carrying up the last 'US' elements of ISS, all of which were designed and built elsewhere. This was not a concern as long as NASA's primary role was operations, and as long as most of the NASA ISS management came out of the ops organizations.

ISS has been doing a great job in terms of educating the international partners in how to design, develop, construct and operate a long duration space vehicle with some advanced systems like ECLS, but most of the learning was going on in other parts of the world and not in the US. The uS and NASA made some great advancements in operations. The ops team is smaller and more efficient, so they've shown ops does not need to be the be all and end all of every project. But they forgot that the US should have been maintaining its capabilities in design and development.

That is what needs to be regained in the Vision. Sure we will learn how to live an work on other worlds, maybe even the moon, but the up front emphasis needs to be on technology: systems design and development.

For instance, if the main intent of an Orion like vehicle is as a LEO ISS support vehicle or even as a planetary return capsule, then ESA has long had plans for an ATV derivative.

The US and NASA cannot afford to be wasting its resources on redux and developing new vehicles using old technologies. Take a look at the wasted time, effort and dollars invested in Orion over the last 5 years, all to build something that offered little new technology. If industry can do it more efficiently and cost effectively, let them have at it through commercial processes.

NASA needs to refocus its people, organizations and the government role.

As far as a crew carrier, if the US is going to develop something new, it ought to be improving on our existing technology base. Likely that is a winged flying vehicle that is far more cost effective to operate than Shuttle.

A moonbase is a great goal for the longer term. But there are a lot of lessons about living and working in space that need to be learned first on ISS and a lot of tehcnologies we need to invest in the make the moon a reasonable and affordable goal.

I'm sorry... I don't believe I ever said that I was smarter than Dr. Kaku. Would you care to point out where I did?

Dr. Kaku is a particle physicist, populist and very smart (and successful) guy. He is however, as made obvious by his comments on Fox, not an expert on the space program. Either that or he has chosen to ignore and distort the facts in order to bolster his position in support of Constellation. Either way, what he asserted was incorrect and anyone familiar with the facts knows it.

Jimmy, that was an excellent, well thought out, well written and most of all spot on post.

Jimmy, you can't have it both ways:

"The US and NASA cannot afford to be wasting its resources on redux and developing new vehicles using old technologies"

"if the US is going to develop something new, it ought to be improving on our existing technology base"

We can't use old technologies, but we ought to improve on old technologies????

Physics is physics and its all about safety. You can't perform a failed control system entry in a winged vehicle. Apollo had it right, for the money the Apollo shape was the right way to go. There are reasons engineers learn from history.

Also, you cannot base your discussion of "old" technologies based on shape. Orion is cutting edge and will be the safest spacecraft ever flown.

This budget proposal has the prospect of spending $28 billion to re-learn lessons of the past. Its not what I want to spend my tax dollars on.

way too long & wordy for me, but here's a thought for the deep thinkers out there:

just happened to catch a listen on PBS radio today of an interview with Miles OBrien promoting a new show on tonight about the big airlines outsourcing to the small airlines

he used the Continental and their outsourcing to whoever that charter plane was that crashed awhile back with undertrained and sick, sleepy, pilots and something about how although Continental's logo was on the plane, they have no liability or responsibility or involvement of any kind

and it suddenly occurred to me that Mr. Miles probably has some noteworthy insight into pitfalls for Garver & co. (who seem to want to use the commercial airline industry as the basis for analogy with the better-faster-cheaper Merchant7 plan)

same goes for whoever it was on another thread touting Goldin's smaller(better)-faster-cheaper

You might be right and I might be wrong. Tell us which new technologies Orion was developing ?

NASA (in conjunction with the military) was the organization to first develop vehicles that could travel at Mach 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 25. NASA developed and flew the concept of the lifting body. NASA flew the first spacecraft, then added propulsion systems to allow the vehicles to make orbital maneuvers, and fuel cells to allow vehicles to stay in orbit for weeks.....NASA developed fly-by-wire control systems, and aircraft streamlining....

Once streamlining was developed and shown effective, NASA did not then start to develop its own aircraft to replace the Lockheed Vega.

Once the fly-by-wire control system was developed NASA did not insists that it needed to oversee production of fly-by-wire for every subsequent aircraft.

In all cases, the technology, once developed, was turned over to the private sector for refinement, production, sales, etc.

As near as I could tell (but please let us know if I am wrong), Orion offerred little new and innovative. It was bigger, fewer windows, modern digital controls, solar arrays instead of fuel cells, so in some regards simpler....carried and extra person (but fewer than the 'Rescue Apollo' prepared for use on Skylab and ASTP missions...
please do tell us where the new technology entered into it.

Mr. Kaku make multiple statements that are flat out wrong.

He is either ignorant or dishonest. I can see why Fox picked him out.

Aside from stating that Ares I has been tested, he also said in no uncertain terms that we will have "no booster".

We have the Atlas V and Delta IV. We have several smaller ones. The Falcon 9 flies next month. What the muffin!!

The difference between us and the Russians isn't that they have a "booster", its that they USE it. They use it a lot. Soyuz launches commercial sats, milsats, people, pressurized cargo, fuel for the station and more.

And that is why they've flown 1700 of the things, and why they can do it - reliably - for a lot less money than we can.

With Constellation, they ALSO get to fly all of OUR cargo for up to 6 to 8 years.

Meanwhile, our rockets - that do exist, unbeknownst to Mr. Kaku - remain expensive because they are underutilized, and after Ares I comes online, and we do 2 or 4 flights a year with it, it stays fantastically expensive too.

We _need_ to regain our competitive edge in this market. We can't just let every industry go overseas while we borrow money from China to go to the Moon in 2030.

"Wow, you must have some ego to think you are smarter than Dr. Michio Kaku."

Mr. Kaku said this rocket doesn't exist.

"What should we have in space: Kumbaya or Starship Troopers?"

Here is how it works:
If America is the clear leader in space exploration there will tend to be a lot of Kumbaya.
If America is no longer a significant presence in space, then in the end it will be Starship Troopers.

@Mike Schriber

'the Ares 1 was quite far from the original plan to use shuttle heritage technology to quickly and inexpensively return to flight. It was to have used a new five segment solid rocket booster and a new J-2X engine (not the SSME) for the second stage. These changes were primary drivers that increased the budget and the gap.'

Well, exactly - the original plan was to use an SSME, to maximize recycling of existing Shuttle technology, but guess what, when they actually started to look into the details (and the devil is in the details, something that a lot of posters here with their airy claims of 'oh, it will be easy to do {this}' don't seem to really grasp too well), that wouldn't work, and it had to be changed to the J2-X.

And take a close look at the J2-X: use of the original J-2 design wasn't possible for a number of reasons, including that it's been out of production for decades. But even with a number of improvements (such as a carbon nozzle - yet another instance of new technology in Constellation, so much for the claims of many ill-informed critics), the new engine is still almost twice as heavy as the original J-2 - although specific impulse is better. (And note that the J2-X team explicitly took on board advice/expertise from surviving J-2 engineers...) Why is that? The answer (left as an exercise for the reader)should be enlightening....

Look, I'm not trying to say Constellation didn't have problems. Of course it did. Maybe some significant changes were indicated. And not everyone in NASA is a perfect engineer - many at Marshall have a bad case of NIH.

But if you look at any large program, there are going to be problems - even big problems. (Look closely at the history of Apollo, for example...)

But if one gives up because one has hit problems, one's never going to get anywhere. If cancelling Constellation turns out, in the end, to have done much more than cost us several years of delay, I will be very surprised.

@Jimmy

'In order for the new Obama, Bolden plan to be succesful, what they now need to lay out is a series of goals in new systems and technologies, all of which contribute to advancement of the industry and capabilities'

That's not the historical NASA model in space (aero is different). Yes, NASA did introduce a lot of new technology, but always in the context of a mission to do something (go to the Moon, or robot exploration of the planets, or whatever). I don't see any realistic plan to 'do something' in the new plan: going to Mars as the main goal is just not realistic, they are never going to get the budget to do that, at least in anything less than several decades.

So we blow up the old plan, with no idea what to replace it with? That's a guarantee of several years of delay there, just to figure out what's practical, and make up everyone's mind on it. This isn't 1960, with Sputnik-paranoia to drive everyone (including Congress) to agree quickly, and a fairly obvious next step - my guess is several years to get agreement on a plan.

'As far as a crew carrier, if the US is going to develop something new, it ought to be improving on our existing technology base. Likely that is a winged flying vehicle that is far more cost effective to operate than Shuttle.'

So how exactly is a new winged vehicle going to be far more cost-effective? For going into orbit, it's not clear that a winged vehicle helps there.

And as re-entry, are you proposing a non-reusable winged vehicle? How exactly is that going to be cheaper than Orion/Dragon (well, technically, part of Orion is reusable, just not the TPS)? And if it's not re-usable, my understanding is that one of the two biggest real operating costs of the shuttle is in the refurbishment of the TPS after each flight. What's the better mouse-trap there?

If building a winged vehicle that could re-enter from orbital speeds was so easy, you'd think Scaled Composites would be onto that, as the next step after their sub-orbital thing. I talked to one of the chief technical guys at Scaled, and according to him, the re-entry energy issues are phenomenal. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of SC, and hope they keep pushing - but the fact that they aren't going past sub-orbital (SpaceShipThree is still just a dream, AFAIK) is indicative of just how hard re-entry is.

And nobody got the Bigelow Prize...

Look, some of what you say I can agree with (e.g. "there are a lot of lessons about living and working in space that need to be learned first on ISS and a lot of technologies we need to invest in the make the moon a reasonable and affordable goal."), but there is no guaranteed revolutionary magic bullet that's going to give us an order-of-magnitude improvement in launchers.

Last time we tried that, with Shuttle, we found out we'd taken a wrong turn - but that's the kind of lesson that only experience can teach you.

Maybe someone will discover a magic bullet for launching, but there are no guarantees. And in life, usually, it's 'slow and steady that wins the race'. (There's a reason that's an aphorism...) I have been part of a revolution (in another technology), but those are rare...