Space and the Upcoming Election
NASA no priority for most presidential candidates, Orlando Sentinel
“Of all the presidential candidates, the election of Newt Gingrich likely would have the greatest effect on NASA for one simple reason. He would pay attention to it. The beleaguered space agency, despite its frequent mention in lofty speeches about “reaching for the stars,” rarely gets put on the front burner of domestic policy — if it’s on the stove at all. It took former President George W. Bush more than three years after his election in 2000 to unveil any significant plan for the agency. President Barack Obama’s biggest impact has been following through on a campaign promise to downgrade NASA’s troubled moon program — the one set up by Bush.”
NASA is in BIG TROUBLE, The Democrats (OBama) doesn’t love the agency – and Newt and the GOP hate the agency. The first debate where Newt said NASA was an example of an over bloated Agency that can manage a program and keep it on budget , blah, blah…. Not one of the GOP participants came to NASA’s rescue in that debate. NOT Good news
The first debate where Newt said NASA was an example of an over bloated Agency that can manage a program and keep it on budget , blah, blah…. Not one of the GOP participants came to NASA’s rescue in that debate. NOT Good news
Uh, the above is a true statement. Please show me the number of programs in either SMD or EOMD that have been managed well and stayed on budget (small programs yes, large ones not so much).
The agency followed the former administrator off a cliff due to sugar plumb dreams of a heavy lift rocket that is still headed off a cliff due to lack of supporting infrastructure.
If you are on the inside and are seriously worried about NASA, then this is where to start.
> NASA is in BIG TROUBLE
I agree. Both for the lack of enthusiasm for NASA by anyone who might be elected next year and also because it is a discretionary budget item in an ever tightening federal budget.
Actually, Obama proposed new funding of $850M for Commercial Crew, only to be blocked by the Constellation Bloc in Congress, which is enraged by the possibility that SpaceX may get ahead of Constellation/SLS/Orion.
Unfortunately the bulk of the NASA civil service (at least at JSC) still believes Constellation is a noble enterprise vital to American leadership and that it is failing only because the Obama administration is intentionally sabotaging it. They believe that as soon as a Republican is elected they will be on their way to Mars, and also have their taxes cut.
I hope they will reconsider; they are supporting, a gargantuan, micromanaged government program with no useful product and opposing a simpler and less expensive strategy based on competition and free enterprse.
I agree with your hope. But the issue is that it is slowly dawning on many is that they are in trouble. Long way round the barn. They might not get there in time.
It is galling to be in that position. At the risk of making things worse, they might not be happy with needing to rely on those they consider rivals for HSF – commercial space. They especially might not like to know that a reset to arsenal system “cost plus” is the fastest way for them to get back into the game.
Too much needs to be different quickly coherently. While many are still fighting battles from past years.
dogstar:
Trust me, the bulk of the civil servant workforce does not think that way. Th e bulk of the management does, if only to serve their own careers and interests. That point has been presented by many on this forum.
What the bulk of all of us are very tired of, is the inability to stick with a plan. Constellation has its shortcomings, but there were a lot of hardworking folks who did good work and would have made it work. So, you kill Constellation, and replace it with something that will takje even longer and will prove to be more expensive.
What Obama did was throw the baby (a highly skilled workforce ready to work) out with the bath water. There didn’t have to be a gap. You could’ve flown Shuttle at min flight rate and workforce until a commercial vehicle came along. That too, has been presented and debated on this forum.
Again, what is lost in all the sturm und drang, is the loss of contractor workforce, who paid dearly for the lack of leadership in the agency, Congress, and the White House. Not to mention the loss of morale and direction of those who remain.
Like Mr. Kraft just said, we have the workforce and resources now. Let’s get to it.
It’s pretty simplistic to say that there were lots of hardworking folks
who could have made Constellation work. No one argued with that. It’s
just that the money wasn’t available to pay those hardworking folks. But
who knows, maybe they would have worked pro bono?
Yes, we could have flown shuttle at the minimum flight rate until a
commercial vehicle “came along”, but flying the shuttle would have
accomplished nothing. ISS was complete. It would have been an expensive
way to send people to ISS. Going out to the grocery store to pick up
dinner in a semi truck. More expensive than Soyuz/Progress even.
We have the workforce and resources now. We just don’t have the cash.
It’s not completely clear we have a goal. But we sure do have
hardworking folks who are willing to pocket the taxpayer money!
It may be the case that many believe that any plan, even Constellation, would work. That they’d ignore many who have critically analyzed said “plan”, including certain notable committee’s, who I guess were all bunk to some.
From multiple decades of experience with NASA, think they were all sugar coating it. Having seen many near misses during Shuttle development (and substantial delays/overruns), I can tell you where management “plan”s aren’t appropriate – that is where political issues intercede with reality. What should be realized, is that certain choices are irrevocable, and do not allow for “going forward” on a near miss to a possible program. This is how politico’s think they’ll get what they want – by allowing only one outcome. Doesn’t have to be sane.
I would not myself want to work on a terminal program that was just a fatal tease. Nor would I wish to risk terminating HSF by betting the farm on it.
Chris Kraft is a late arrival to an issue many of us have long studied. Perhaps the next evolution in his thinking may be more workable – e.g. not Constellation/SLS but something else that pragmatically uses what we have, who we have … incrementally and not with an absurd plan that cannot economically work for America.
By the way, we lost over the past four years many of the people we needed. Scope, process, and method issues. You can’t make things work arbitrarily – they don’t work as some attempted to force.
I question whether Constellation has actually been cancelled or simply changed its name to SLS/Orion. I worked on Constellation (as a contractor) and busted my tail on it, because I was asked to, but every day I knew it was going to fail because human spaceflght using ELVs produces nothing even distantly worth its cost. We knew that in 1974, which is why we started the Shuttle program. Yet I run into civil servants who say “We tried reusablibilty with the Shuttle, and it didn’t work.”
From my perspective at KSC it was Bush that threw out the experienced Shuttle contractor workforce; the only workforce in the world that maintained a reusable launch system. The abandonment of the entire RLV technology demonstrator program, under Bush, from 2001 to 2004, was inexplicable; the vtovl concept explored by the DC-X is now the subject of multiple development programs, the X-34’s air-lauch concept is again being proposed by Paul Allen, and the X-37 was actually launched by the DOD and performed excellently, but NASA has abandoned it. SpaceX is well aware that only reusable systems have any prospect of being sustainable.
The failure of Constellation is a failure to confront the most fundamental obstacle to human spaceflight, which is cost. Keeping the SLS and Orion workforce in place won’t accomplish anything, because they are working on a dead end and the program is not maintainung useful skills; it is absorbing all the resources that NASA has that could be used to get us back on track.
Listen to John Logston very carefully. He understands what can/can’t be done here (and why). My only addition is he’s too much the starry eyed optimist about things. NASA budgetary politics is ugly in the extreme, closest to it are the major defense procurements in similarity.
There is greater chances for any HSF with the success of smaller HSF projects. Just as in defense appropriations.
“But if he goes on to say he doesn’t support [space] exploration, I think that would be a disaster,” said Marshall Heard, chairman of the Florida Aviation Aerospace Alliance.”
What does space exploration mean???
From what I understand it means spending big public bucks on projects like SLS ORION or big bucks on the moon, astriods or mars before commercial is ready to go there at an affordable price.
I’m for Space settlement starting with cheaper rockets not wasteful [space]exporation.
If you had a Dragon drill on the moon with a Biglow hab next to it. Wouldn’t that be a lean mean moon base/outpost?
Critical path to mars exploration is Spacex s next flight reguardless of who gets elected next.
Both Newt and Obama are smart enough to know that public rockets should be a thing of the past reguardless of what the SYSTEM forces them to do.
PS NASA leadership should make a mean lean plan using exsiting LVs SOON!
Enjoy the SLS porkchops while you can NASA.
NASA Elon Musk Says the plan in all his little make man a multi planet species speeches.
What would Elon do???
Would NASA allow Spacex to put a draco on their booster to flip it to try and recover it on this next flight??
I have mentioned this issue many times in previous posts.
I am not at all surprised to hear this news. The candidates are simply reacting to what they perceive the people wants to get votes. The vast majority of the public think human spaceflight is “cool” but not “cool” enough to spend tens (or hundreds) of billions on it.
The question shouldn’t even be whether or not Constellation would have worked; the question really is why didn’t the money come? Why is the budget getting ever tighter for HSF? Because the majority of the public and government thinks that any large scaled manned spaceflight effort is just a waste of money and resources with little prospect of economic return.
We were never more ready to go to Mars as we were in the early 1970s but the public and scientific community as well as the government rejected the plan. It was then that everyone should have been excited by our new ability to put people on the Moon and to go ahead and try to do it on Mars.
This NASA archive, which I have posted before, pretty much says it all:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-… (see 5th and especially the last paragraph)
Most exploration and colonization which as been done in the past revolved around resources. Columbus set out to seek a faster trading route to India, California was massively colonized with the prospect of finding gold etc. As long as we don’t find some kind of way to make human spaceflight economically profitable there will not be much impetus for HSF.
I really wish this were not the case but thats the way it is.
“We were never more ready to go to Mars as we were in the early 1970s but the public and scientific community as well as the government rejected the plan.”
Spacelab1,
As I recall, everybody and his cat got to input requirements and “necessities” into the 70’s Mars plan and the baseline plan ended up being $450 BILLION, and that was the basic reason that it was canned.
I have often wondered if Congress was attempting the same thing with SLS — make the price tag so incredibly high that everybody decides that it can’t be done because of the cost, so it gets totally forgotten.
Steve
Some efficiencies could have been achieved over the cost of the 1989 study, which was ~$450B http://www.astronautix.com/…
But the total cost was a reasonable estimate for the technology still under consideration under the Constellation program.
I agree with Sapcelab that we must make human spaceflight eonomically viable. We have been searching for a mythical mission of infinite value, to justify its nearly infinite cost. Human spaceflight is valuable, but it is worth about $1-2 million per seat to LEO, not $70 million. To make human spaceflight viable we must instead reduce its cost is less than its value.
Perhaps I was a little vague with the statement mentioned above.
What I meant to say is that we could not have been more ready to go to Mars than in the 1970s using conventional technology because we still had Von Braun as well as the rest of the people who built apollo with “fresh” knowledge of building landers and hardware etc. But as I said: “not cool enough,” its just too expensive using conventional technology.What bothers me is that no one at NASA (or political candidates) talks about reducing the price per pound to orbit anymore and this cannot be overlooked.
“The greatest affect” what does that mean? Frankly I don’t believe a word any of them utter, it’s all about spin – so why even debate it? What NASA lacks it continuity – it has become a political football, kicked between administrations – as such how could it hope to maintain a coherent and economical plan?
Overall, I thought the Orlando Sentinel article was a reasonably assessment of the current situation. There were two things, though, that I thought should have been mentioned:
First is that the 2012 Republican National Convention is not until August and the Presidential election is not until November, so an awful lot can happen to change things between now and those dates.
Second is a basic character difference between Gingrich and Romney: In the past, it seems to me, Romney has had a tendency to either withhold or change his stance on an issue so as to be in agreement with the people he wants to be aligned with, whereas Gingrich is more likely (but not 100% consistent) to stick with the stance he feels strongly, or even passionately, about, and go full steam ahead, sometimes without paying attention to the changing landscape. This difference, to my mind, makes it very difficult to predict which one the party members and the people will migrate to between now and decision time.
At the Presidential level, I suspect (for no particular reason) that whoever wins will find it a lot harder to beat President Obama than they might think. Don’t be surprised to see Obama get a second term. But like I said, it’s a long time until November and a lot can happen.
Steve
Debate this:
China will launch space laboratories, manned spaceship and
space freighters; make breakthroughs in and master space station key
technologies, including astronauts’ medium-term stay,regenerative life support
and propellant refueling; conduct space applications to a certain extent and
make technological preparations for the construction of space stations. China
will conduct studies on the preliminary plan for a human
lunar landing.
Anyway you look at it NASA’s human space program is in serious jeopardy mainly of just stagnating. Newt has said he’d fix it; his fix terminates a lot of what has been NASA. He doesn’t stand much of a chance. Others, like Romney, say they think there are a lot more serious problems needing attention than figuring out how to put outposts on the moon or power stations in orbit. Obama’s lack of leadership simply would result in another four years like the last four; there is not much more, including interest and support, that he can kill. He has already deferred any leadership or guidance to his successor, and maybe the successor after that one, so basically not much would change. The best we can hope for is that the commercial companies will get Dragon, CST and Dream Chaser all flying in the next four years and this will develop some synergistic interest whether from the public, military, commercial, or other interests. Maybe they’ll be able to support ISS, but just as likely ISS will continue to meander along supported mianly by Russians and other partners. Other than some more developmental tests along the lines of Ares-X, neither MPCV or SLS will make significant progress during the next 4-5 years. NASA is essentially directionless, and without some serious changes in personnel at the top, the directionlessness will continue. Why would it change?