Politics and NASA
For NASA, there’s no liftoff from politics, USA Today
“The glass is either half-full or half-empty at NASA,” says space policy expert John Logsdon, author of John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. The agency won approval to proceed with building the SLS last year but faces doubts in Congress over the lack of a long-term vision. “NASA’s budget only supports a program that is fragile and doesn’t make long-term sense,” Logsdon says. As an example, he points to the SLS, which will launch in 2017 and carry astronauts only in 2021, with a less-defined schedule thereafter.”
There’s still hope for NASA, editorial, Houston Chronicle
“But the going gets tougher in the political arena, where NASA and JSC have taken some serious hits in their budgets and faced even more serious questioning of their mission over the past few years. The results are obvious and troubling. It galls Mike Coats that “we’re not a space-faring nation right now” because of the retirement of the space shuttle. Instead, he laments, “we’re paying the Russians a lot of money to fly our people up there.” He’s galled because we’re paying a lot of Russian engineers when he’d like to be hiring American engineers.”
Highly recommend “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon”.
Let’s face it: NASA is a state space agency dependent on the drifting winds and tides of politics for its very existance. Unless a new oversight and funding model can be found that gives it momentum independent of year-to-year political whims, nothing much is going to change barring a new and near-universally accepted national space priority emerging.
Mr. Bolden told the Congress last week that he knew exactly where NASA was going. I wish he would tell the rest of us. ~NASA does not seem to have a plan laid out. If they have a plan, they have not clearly communicated it.
You should read the books on the Space Shuttle Decision by Heppenheimer and the Space Station Decision by McCurdy.
Fact is in both of these cases, as in the case of Apollo, NASA senior level people identified the goals and options, were given a budget, and fit their highest priority goals to the budget. I get a bit of a kick out of all those people who say that the Shuttle or Station designs were dictated by Congress, military, or others. No, they weren’t. They were design decisions made by experienced NASA managers and engineers. NASA decided the next big step after Apollo was Shuttle, and NASA decided the design as built. Station was basically decided at the same time though put on the back burner until Shuttle was developed, and then the Station design was basically as conceived for a modular station to be launched and assembled by Shuttle.
Ben Russell Gough’s stated that: “NASA is…dependent on…politics….and a funding
model…that gives it independence.” The budget, as laid out after Apollo, was basically sized to give NASA reasonable independence. And the budget has been reasonably constant. And NASA has basically decided what it wanted to do and how to go about doing it (both Shuttle and Station).
In 1982 and 83 I heard James Beggs espouse why Station was the next logical step. NASA and the contractorshad a camapign “Staqtion the Next Logical Step” and told why station was needed and why it was the next step.
Starting in 1968 the AA for Manned Space, George Mueller, started talking about need for a Space Shuttle. Lots of publications were printed by NASA and contractors about why Shuttle was needed and what it could do.
NASA did not get 100% of the budget it wanted to do Shuttle, but it was pretty close. And the budget did not go down significantly when Shuttle development finished and design of station began. Yet, aerodynamicists and propulsion engineers and others will tell you that a station was a far simpler job and should have cost far less particularly if large hunks of station were being designed and developed by other nations
For several years what I’ve been waiting for is the top echelon of NASA to tell us the next series of logical steps and whats required in order to implement them, step-by-step. Griffin was counting on throwing everything we had away in order to reassign the total budgets to an unrealistic program that in the end was nothing more than Apollo part 2. It was not even on steroids any longer because of a series of poor design decisions. It wasn’t logical and it wasn’t realistic. I do not know why a new Apollo capsule is the answer; no one has adequately explained that to my satisfaction-in fact if we wanted an Apollo capsule we should have just revived the one we had. I have not heard how the next steps should be an adaptation of hardware already developed for station. I have not heard why a budget level that was adequate for developing a Shuttle is no longer adequate for developing anything on a schedule similar to what Shuttle required. Shuttle went from program start to flight in less than a decade. We are eight years into the remnants of Constellation now and still a decade from manned missions. For some reason commercial new space projects are on schedules much more similar to what has been achieved in the past.
If you look at other areas of the government, such as the military, or such as polar bases, the military and other participants put forward what they want, the rationale why it ought to be supported, and they identify the costs of implementation. Sometimes they get it all. Usually they have to fit their implementation into a competitive budget environment.
Personally, I think the vacuum of having no plan was the reason that Congress insisted on continuing MPCV and starting on SLS. If someone had given and lobbied for sensible alternatives choices, still at similar budget levels, then they would have been accepting of it.
So to answer your question, based on my reading of history, NASA is today not being led in the same manner as the NASA of the past.
I am actually in the process of submitting various FOIA requests for alot of the meeting minutes/notes and other information that is near impossible to find published. More specifically the meetings involving CASIS. I will hopefully get some sort of reply sooner than later.