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Policy

Stealth Future In-Space Operations (FISO) Working Group Telecons

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 29, 2013
Filed under , , ,

NASA’s Strategic Direction and the Need for a National Consensus, Briefing to FISO Telecon Jan. 30, 2013 Marcia Smith, SpacePolicyOnline.com, NRC Committee Member (link fixed)
“- NASA does not and cannot set its own strategic direction.
— A national consensus is required
— There is no national consensus at this time
– The administration should lead in developing that consensus, working with Congress, and holding technical consultations with potential international partners
– President Obama’s proposal that an asteroid be the next destination for human spaceflight has not won broad support within or outside NASA, undermining the ability to establish a strategic direction.
– There is a mismatch between the programs Congress and the White House have directed NASA to pursue and the resources provided to accomplish them.”

Keith’s note: NASA’s Future In-Space Operations (FISO) Working Group Telecons are held on a regular basis. But NASA doesn’t really want to share the information with the public until after the fact (try and find links to this on NASA.gov). To further obscure access, they post presentations on a webserver at the University of Texas at Austin (not NASA.gov). This caveat is posted “Note: This is NOT a public telecon. You may share this link only with qualified participants. Feel free to share publicly our archive site, which is at http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/archivelist.htm.
Here is how to listen in (until they change it): Future In-Space Operations (FISO) Working Group Telecon Wednesdays, 3pm EST Dial in: 877 921 5751 Passcode: 623679″ Next week’s topic is “CST-100 Program Status” Keith Reiley, Boeing”. But you are not supposed to know that since most of us are not “qualified participants”.
What is especially odd is this statement: “The content of these FISOWG telecon presentations are considered the intellectual property of the person who gave that presentation.” Since when are NASA employee presentations not in the public domain when they pertain to the person’s official responsibilities? Oh yes, then there is this: “Presentations, papers, visualizations, and graphics produces by the FISOWG and collaborators are archived here — http://www.futureinspaceoperations.com/. Click on the link. It goes to “Future In-Space Operations Hints on dealing with aging difficulty related to physical attractiveness. Wow. The future of space has to do with physical attractiveness. Who knew?
Oh yes, I almost forgot. All of these FISO presentations are very cool. Too bad NASA has no idea how to make all of this more widely available and accessible.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

41 responses to “Stealth Future In-Space Operations (FISO) Working Group Telecons”

  1. Littrow says:
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    Yesterday’s
    Lost In Space policy discussion was pretty interesting though very
    discouraging. This was the one hosted by George Abbey with Albrecht, Chiao, Johnson-Freese, Lane, Levy,
    and Logsdon. 

     

    IF  I recall the discussion accurately, basically different people said:

    -that
    NASA could get a big boost to its annual budget if there were some rationale
    and if they got one or two Congressional voices behind such an increase. They
    gave the example of the NIH which had its budget doubled 
    and there was just one
    Congressman and just a little rationale
    -NIH has had its problems even with the bigger budget.

    -NASA
    hasn’t really provided much rationale,

    -NASA
    has not done too well educating the public so there is not a lot of the public
    who is up in arms about doing something significant,

    -more significant than anything else there is no Congressional voice to be heard pushing on NASA’s
    behalf.

     

    They said they had Obama’s
    attention briefly back when Augustine reported their results and there were a
    number of options identified including

    -$3
    billion more to go with Constellation,

    -keeping
    Shuttle going, or

    -something
    like an asteroid mission that was far enough off and did not require as much
    new hardware as other missions.

    No
    one at the table had a strategy or long term plan
    and there was certainly a dearth of leadership and so Obama said “asteroid”.

    No
    one asked for anything more or different. There was no strategy.

    NASA
    has apparently done little or nothing to follow up on the asteroid plan. They
    asked where are the telescopes that ought to be looking for a suitable target? NASA may not be too successful at keeping even the asteroid mission if they keep up this
    lack of interest. 

     

    They
    said ISS and international is good for a lot of reasons and everyone supported
    bringing in the Chinese. International may be the biggest point of rationale in
    the plan today.

     

    The Cold War was over long ago. A few people
    keep trying to frighten people about the Chinese moving ahead, but they said
    the Chinese are still in the very early stages of development, no one is
    racing the U.S. And whether we think the Chinese are friendly or not its still
    a good idea to have them working with us and they gave the example of the
    Russians and the US 20 years ago. Better to work with them and know what they are
    up to than to not be talking to them and not know what they are doing.

     

    They
    said hopefully commercial will get the US a manned launch capability in the
    next 7 years. It will not be much before that. Orion is not flying with people until 2021 and some said that
    date is unlikely given the recent record.

     

    Everyone
    said that because of the political atmosphere in DC it is tough to get people
    to agree on anything, and for some time no one in NASA has been trying to lead
    or push for anything.

    Really long distance spaceflight is way off in the far future. No one has given good rationale for the moon. We are in LEO today and we ought to further develop Cislunar space.

     

    They
    said that US space flight may be in crisis in multiple sectors. NASA; DOD has
    bought into big satellites and big rockets and its time to move in a different
    direction, NOAA weather satellites are in trouble; maybe its time for a
    different US strategy or approach. Consolidate similar functions across organizations. More cooperation would be better.

    Nothing seems to be changing.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      I think your last line basically says it all.  The last 8-12 years have been filled to the brim with non-accomplishments.

    • Littrow says:
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      http://www.youtube.com/watc… 
      Here it is in full.

    • Littrow says:
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      The most significant thing I left out of my summary that was repeatedly brought up by several members of the panel is how the people of the US starting in grade school need to be educated about space and what it does for them and how it can be important. Several said it is something that is not being done well today and some introspection is needed about how to do it better.

      • Mark_Flagler says:
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        They are right about that. But then the whole education system is in trouble; when a state body in Texas dictates equal text book space to creationism and a 6000-year-old Earth, superstition wins and science loses. And space flight is based on engineering and rational education in science.

    • Denniswingo says:
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      NASA could get a big boost to its annual budget if there were some rationale and if they got one or two Congressional voices behind such an increase.
      This is nothing different than what John Marburger said at the Goddard Symposium in 2005.  Nothing has changed in that time.  All the while the U.N. NGO’s are demanding $700 billion A YEAR to combat climate change.If that was invested in space we would populate the solar system in short order and fix the CO2 thing as a side benefit.

      • Helen Simpson says:
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        At the risk of underscoring a highly OT remark, I’ll just say that this prioritization makes a lot of sense for those people who would rather live on Mars than on the Earth. How many of those people do you suppose there are?

  2. npng says:
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    For any of the times I could have shredded NRC reviews into bits smaller than hanging chads, I have to say, I like much of what the NRC NASA Strategic Direction report says, this time around. 

    NRC is spot-on with their statement that the plan’s vision is too generic.  There is a lack of plan outcome accountability and in both the plan and the review. There is a nearly total absence of any financial closure, meaning, for a billion $$$ spent on X, what is the $$$ value of the end result.  One would think that highly educated planners and reviewers would, smartly, bring powerful financial and cost/benefit skills and tools into their analysis.  Why you ask?  Because if They don’t, Others will, by necessity.   Note the phrase above “…why it [NASA] is worthy of taxpayer investment.”   Ask yourself:  Would you rather provide the quantified prove of what have determined your real value is or would you rather have some stranger analyze what you are worth?

    One might protest and declare that financial cost/benefit analyses have no place in technical reviews, in plans and analyses of this type and at these stages.  And I’d say fine, skip the dollars.  Let others decide and they can cast your fate.  Leave the assignment of worth to the non-technical others and they will determine your budget future or lack thereof.

    The Strategic Plan and the Roadmaps are robust, even impressive, scientifically and technically.  Bravo NASA. Surely the plans and reviews were bounded in scope to address only the scientific and technical aspects of NASA’s pursuits.  But in doing so, they are profoundly incomplete.  They address only a segment of the overall lifecycle, the overall business of space and technology.

    They move from (a) give me lots of federal money $ to (b) here is what I think is important to do to (c) hopefully pursue and create some outcome or system or thing to (d) fly it, make it work, so everyone can declare it a success and cheer, and then (e) go back and get billions more!  But wait.  Back on (d), what quantified ‘worth’ did the results provide?  Quantified means dollarized value, to be exact.  What worth did it provide to the taxpayers?  Did anyone bother to compute that?  No. 

    One of NASA’s biggest problems is, it is unable to derive the tangible $ worth of its pursuits.  So in quiet back rooms, where phones are not answered, others compute their best guesses.  Nervously they choose to hold the budget the same around $18B.  Nothing is there to justify a move to $30B (where NAsA’s budget Should Be).  And of course NASA is always at risk of getting it’s $18B slashed in stressed economic times too.  Look at the NASA budget, essentially level over decades.  Mediocrity. This is what’s been going on. 

    For most in space, I’m sure money discussions are sickening. “Just give us billions and let us go explore!” most would say.  Unfortunately, economic realities don’t seem to be accommodating that exploration zeal.  If you’re allergic to the word ‘money’ being in the same paragraph as ‘space’, please don’t complain.  Just put all of this out of your mind and continue on with your own worldview.

    • Helen Simpson says:
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      While this may represent good business sense, looking for dollar value in a task, it often just doesn’t work. There are many national priorities that we frankly don’t have a clue about how to assign a dollar value. NASA is certainly not unique. What’s the dollar value of the Army? How about the NIH? (You know, if people died from their diseases faster, we’d probably save loads of money caring for them. Geez, let’s kill off NIH!!) I don’t recall that a dollar value was ever advanced to advocate the Apollo program, which was unarguably NASA’s greatest achievement. I don’t think Kennedy had any monetary allergies. Same with HST, one of the most important scientific instruments ever built.

      Dollar value is of primary importance to business, because business is about making money. NASA, as a federal agency, isn’t about making money. It’s about serving national needs, and national needs can sometimes be hard to assess in greenbacks. “Worth” is sometimes about more than dollars.

      But the reason we fall back on grousing about dollar value for space efforts is that, at least in the case of human space flight, we can’t seem to figure out any other metric for worth. If you can’t think of a good reason for doing something, then it damned well have a dollar value.

      Now, when we start making greater advances in commercial space, dollar value is going to be what it’s all about. I actually look forward to that, because rationale will be quantitative, rather than qualitative, and little thinking will be necessary. But for NASA, that’s not necessarily the case.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        A wonderful reply. It is simply not the case that everything we do is measured by dollars. Our abilities might be so measured, but goals and dreams are values decisions.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      Well said, npng.  No matter what your outlook or your priorities, like it or not, in the end it all comes down to the money.

  3. Steve Whitfield says:
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    It occurs to me that before January 2004 we never, or at least rarely, heard the word “Vision” (with or without a capital V) used with respect to NASA.  Now it seems that every second document of any kind about NASA includes the word Vision and declares a need for one (although there is much debate on who is actually responsible for defining it.)

    If you read the through “The National Aeronautics and Space Act” you will not find the word Vision used even once.  I see this as just one more unnecessary make-work task used by Congressional subcommittees as a method to generate confusion.  I suspect that the committee members don’t properly understand the issues, so they’re going to make everything so complex that nobody else can properly understand them either.  I think it’s similar to all of the relevant documents being written and amended in lawyer language instead of plain English.  No sarcasm intended.

    Why, exactly, does NASA now need a Vision?  And what/who is this Vision for?  For the public?, the politicians?, NASA itself?  The rest of the world seems to get by with a mission statement and a set of stated goals (strategic planning), without having a Vision.  Why does NASA need one after having productively existed for their first 46 years without one?

    Congress has asked more than one entity to assess and/or define NASA’s Vision.  Is there any legislation describing the need for one, who is responsible for it, how it is created and reviewed, and how often or under what circumstances it is to be reviewed?  My searching has turned up no such legislation, nor has it turned up any NASA policy document(s) describing any requirement for a “Vision.”  Aside from George Bush’s 2004 “VSE,” the word vision is used only in its generic sense (without a capital V) in any NASA or government documents I could find (except when capitalized as part of a document title).

    I think this whole Vision thing is just one more example of on-going wasted time and money.  Nail down the NASA Mission Statement properly, and a Strategic Plan that doesn’t change every six months, and actually follow them, and with the time and money no longer wasted perhaps more progress will be made.

    • Michelle Racheff Pettit says:
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      Okay, then exchange the word “vision” for “goal”.  Now try to argue why, exactly, does NASA now need a goal.

      • Paul451 says:
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        Listen to Jeff Greason’s talk about the difference between “Vision” (and he says “Goal” too), versus strategies, versus objectives, versus tactics, versus program details… http://www.youtube.com/watc… (40+minutes)

        Everything we argue about (moon vs Mars vs asteroids, SLS vs CC) are not at the level of goals, nor strategies, nor objectives. Barely about tactics, they are mostly about specific program details. Greason thinks the US already has a true, unstated, and widely agreed Goal for the space program: The permanent and expanding settlement of the solar system. What we lack then, and he blames a failure of leadership, is a strategy not a goal. He outlines a possible strategy for realising the unstated goal of settlement, which then lends itself to objectives for the future space program.

        [I disagree with his exact path, his objectives, but the strategy is perfect. He calls it “Island hopping”, I’ve called it “stepping stones” in previous rants, there was a very similar strategy created for VSE under O’Keefe called… Spiral?… which was thrown away by Griffin who wanted the detail of his big rocket design and didn’t care about goals or strategies or even objectives.

        VSE was a set of objectives (go to the moon, build a base, go to Mars), not a goal or strategy. “Spiral” (it may have been called something more interesting) was a way of shoe-horning a proper strategy over a weak Presidential objective (it should be the other way around, but you work with what you’ve got.)]

        • Steve Whitfield says:
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          An excellent post, Paul.

          Playing around with words is wasted time; it only clouds the issues.  The concepts of “goals,” “mission statement,” “strategies,” and “strategic planning” have been around forever and have fixed, unambiguous definitions, the same in both the program management and marketing contexts.  Throwing in additional terms adds nothing and creates confusion.NASA has produced endless strategies, as have other organizations on NASA’s behalf, but they generally pertain to a specific mission, instead of first defining (and having accepted) a mission statement and a set of clearly defined, unchanging agency-wide goals.  Planning strategies is a waste of time until the NASA-wide goals are nailed down (if some people insist on calling the goals a Vision, I can’t stop them, but doing so only deflects the discussion away from the issues).

          And it’s important to have consensus within NASA before worrying about what anyone else is saying.  Right now, and for a very long time, we’ve been getting statements, opinions, editorials, etc. expressing multiple different goals or sets of goals from many different places within NASA, often times even with people from the same center not on the same page.  All of this means there’s no official, real answers.

          It’s like perpetual playoffs; and we’re still waiting to see who the final player left standing will be.  But then players seem to come and go on a regular basis, so the playoffs never end.  And inevitably Congress keeps jumping in to “fix” things by forever making them more convoluted and impossible.  Since there are no NASA goals that are accepted across the agency, anything Congress does may address one NASA division, but will inevitably clash with the remaining NASA divisions, since they can’t agree among themselves as to the agency’s goals.

          Perhaps the above is what some posters are referring to when they talk about NASA needing better “leadership.”  If so, then I agree.  However, NASA, even at the very top level, is firmly under the thumb of the political powers, and therefore doesn’t have a free hand to develop an agency-wide mission statement and set of goals.  One crucial thing that’s not clear to me is, who exactly has the authority to approve or disapprove of a NASA-defined NASA mission statement and set of goals?  The Space Act says it’s the President; the common opinion seems to be that it’s OMB and Congress; the reality seems (to me) to be that there’s no agreement as to who has the final say, so again, the playoffs go on forever.

          I still insist that Congress assigning a third party the task of reviewing/developing a NASA “Vision” is, like I said earlier, just more time and money wasted.  It accomplishes nothing and only adds to the already considerable confusion.

          And as for the space advocacy community, I think we’re down in the noise range, and the signal-to-noise ratio is higher than ever, so our input is less effective than ever.  Aside from writing  letters to one’s elected representatives, there doesn’t seem to be much that advocacy groups or the general public can do to affect matters.  It has become strictly as spectator sport.

          Steve

  4. Denniswingo says:
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    Great comments all….

    There is a need for definitions…

    “vision”

    Sense of Purpose.

    That is the oldest definition of that term and it comes from the biblical sentence “Where there is no vision the people perish” (Proverbs 28:19).  To translate this into a modern form that is pertinent to this discussion it reads:

    Where there is no sense of purpose, the nation ceases to exist

    This translation is 100% allowable from the text and conveys much wisdom as to the underlying philosophical purpose for the nation.  

    What is our sense of purpose for NASA today? What is our sense of purpose for the United States of America?  The NRC report basically says that there isn’t one.

    As others have commented, when there is a rationale (which is just another word for sense of purpose which is another word for vision), the money is there such as for the doubling of the NIH budget. When George W. Bush came into office in 2001 the Department of Education budget was $28 billion dollars. When he left office it was $63 billion dollars.

    When there is a compelling vision/sense of purpose/rationale, the money is there. This is what I showed from the LBJ era when NASA was cut 40% even while other sectors of the government were more than doubled.

    I am going to expand on this in my blog.

    • Helen Simpson says:
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       Let’s be careful here. From the report …

      “Other than the long-range goal of sending humans to Mars, there is no strong, compelling national vision for the human spaceflight program, which is arguably the centerpiece of NASA’s spectrum of mission
      areas. The lack of national consensus on NASA’s most publicly visible mission, along with out-year budget uncertainty, has resulted in the lack of strategic focus necessary for national agencies operating in
      today’s budgetary reality.”

      The problem here is the human spaceflight side of NASA. NASA’s most publicly visible mission is exactly that side. As to science …

      “U.S. leadership in space science is being threatened by insufficient budgets to carry out the missions identified in the strategic plans (decadal surveys) of the science communities, rising cost of missions,
      decreasing science budgets, and the collapse of partnerships with the European Space Agency (ESA)— this at a time when others (most notably ESA and China) are mounting increasingly ambitious space programs.”

      These are very different flavors of problems, and I would be loathe to confuse them. There is no issue about science vision or purpose. That is abundantly explained in the Decadal Surveys. A real consensus. Of course, this contradicts your statement that when vision and purpose are there, money is there as well. Not quite, says the committee.

      Now, I would nevertheless agree that the vision and mission statements of NASA pertain to both sides of the house, and are deficient with regard to each.

      So, I would suggest that in expanding on the deficit of vision and purpose, you focus not on NASA, but on human spaceflight at NASA, and be careful about how money follows vision and purpose.

      • Denniswingo says:
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        “Other than the long-range goal of sending humans to Mars,

        If you talk to people around the country you will find that long range goal means nothing to most people. What, a few more government employee scientists poking around at rocks, now on another planet.  Why should they be allowed to do so when that money could have been used to feed babies here on the Earth.

        That is not a vision/purpose/rational, it is a goal, the two for the most part have little to do with each other.  At least Elon Musk has the cruet set to say that he wants to go there to start a colony, a second outpost for mankind.

        The goal is to get there, the vision/purpose/rational/ is what do they do when they get there.  Without that the trip will never be funded.

        • Helen Simpson says:
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          I agree with this, and thank you for pointing out a real failing of that report. Sending humans to Mars is a transportation goal. It’s about getting people there, and presumably getting them back. It isn’t about why they’re going there or what they hope to accomplish there, whether it’s science, colonization, or thumbing noses at the Chinese. Until we learn to talk about a human voyage to Mars in terms of what it really means to us, it’s dead meat.

          I suspect this “goal” was intended as shorthand for doing all kinds of good stuff there, but it is telling that the report never addresses why we would want to do it. Humans on Mars is somehow symbolic of good stuff, but this committee decided not to explain what that good stuff is. One has to wonder if they even know.

          • Denniswingo says:
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            One has to wonder if they even know.

            It is pretty clear, they don’t.  Or an alternate version is that they think that by making a visionary statement (there is that word again) would cause them to lose credibility.  Either way we as a nation and a species are poorer for it.  These are supposed to be the creme de la creme of our most enlightened researchers, scientists, and thinkers and if they are either too afraid or are too limited in perspective then it is time that they be replaced. 

            It may be that it was not their charter to come up with a report that did more than point out that there is no vision, no sense of purpose, no rationale for our current national space effort and I include planetary science in that as well as human spaceflight.

            At the end of the day, there should be a symbiotic relationship between NASA, the White House, and Congress to develop the vision/sense of purpose/rationale but this relationship does not exist.  It is harder to do as the NIH funding argument boils down to give us more money and we cure more diseases.  Everyone can understand that and then metrics can be developed to measure the amount of money spent vs diseases that are cured.  

            For space in my opinion we could do the same thing.  Explore space, preserve our entire human civilization.  No one at NASA, the White House or Congress outside of a few over the years has had the intestinal fortitude to make that statement. But it is true, especially when you have the friend of the president’s science advisor stating that people should not have the right to make as many babies as they want and that our future is going to be poorer, get over it.  Space is the black swan of the dystopian future, the counter to it, and a guy named Roddenberry knew that 50 years ago, so did a guy named Von Braun and a guy named O’Neil.  

            The space advocacy community just gets bogged down in stupid arguments about how to ration the poverty of financial resource for space rather than arguing that our pie should be a lot bigger for the good of all mankind.

          • Helen Simpson says:
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             “These are supposed to be the creme de la creme of our most enlightened
            researchers, scientists, and thinkers and if they are either too afraid
            or are too limited in perspective then it is time that they be replaced.”

            Replaced? Because their research was bad, or their science was bad, or their thinking was bad? Nope. That’s not what they were asked to do. They were asked to comment on NASA’s future direction. They found it wanting, and they didn’t pull any punches. They were brave enough to say it straight out.

            I’m looking forward to the creme de la creme of our other enlightened committee, who are being asked to comment on the rationale for human space flight, to be just as brave.

            But I sense that the strategic direction committee might have been a bit suspicious of the value in sending humans to Mars, which they properly identified as NASA’s prime long-term goal. On that topic, they may have punted on bravery to the second committee.

  5. chriswilson68 says:
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    ‘The committee found that the vision and mission statements “are
    generic statements that could apply to almost any government research
    and development (R&D) agency, omitting even the words ‘aeronautics’
    or ‘space.’ NASA’s current vision and mission statements do not explain
    NASA’s unique role in the government and why it is worthy of taxpayer
    investment.”‘Duh.  How is it that the people responsible at NASA didn’t immediately see this?  Is there some kind of secret competition within NASA to see who can do the most to sabotage the American space program?

  6. dogstar29 says:
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    Levy makes a good point that by neglecting artificial intelligence and related systems for robotic exploration, we are missing the best opportunity for exploring the solar system with the funds we actually have available. I agree with Lane that excluding China makes no sense.

    But I think we make a mistake by focusing only on space, and continuing to grouse that we can’t persuade the taxpayers to pay for human flight to Mars. 

    I read an article on tech transfer yesterday; it was an innovative research on out-of-autoclave bonding of metal fasteners to composite structures by heating with a high-power laser with the beam penetrating through a transparent vacuum bag into the unpolymerized adhesive. It was a development simple in concept but of significant practical value, that is likely to generate new sales, new jobs, new US exports, and safer aircraft. It was made possible because a government agency provided a modest grant for advancing practical aircraft technology.  That agency was the National Science Foundation.NACA was created in 1915 to work as a partner with industry to improve American competitiveness. Unless we can create new value-added products, new high-tech jobs, new exports we will not be able to afford the luxury of human spaceflight. We should be embarrassed by the number of critical problems in aerospace technology and many other fields with practical importance that NASA no longer pursues as a partner with industry.  NASA has not totally abandoned its traditional role as a facilitator of technology development, but it has made life very difficult for those who strive to do so by forcing them to first justify any practical advance in industrial technology by proving that it is essential to NASA’s “real” mission of sending humans to Mars, and that any benefits to the human race here on earth is a “free” spinoff that then justifies the extraordinary cost of human spaceflight. There are still people in NASA and its contractors, university and industry partners who can provide practical benefits for America. They should be given a real chance to do so.

    • hikingmike says:
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       I agree. I want to see NASA get serious about AI and robotics. Right now where is that being done? Universities, the military, and a bunch of companies using it for their own specific scopes. If NASA puts its weight behind them for space exploration and mining and such, then they’d be working toward the spirit of NASA’s purpose while enabling the economic development of those industries. We can always send people later at any point, maybe after we have a few huge piles of iron, tanks of water, and a shelter waiting for us. Working on AI/robotics for one NASA mission benefits many other NASA missions.

  7. Littrow says:
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    Vulture4:

    “Levy makes a good point that by
    neglecting artificial intelligence and related systems for robotic exploration,
    we are missing the best opportunity for exploring the solar system”

    No, I don’t think Levy’s point is a
    good one. Unmanned scientific exploration is continuing and will continue. I
    don’t think it is in the category of a manned mission. No one is doing a manned
    mission purely for the purpose of exploring another world. That certainly wasn’t
    what Apollo was about. There are a lot of reasons including technology,
    motivation of students, maintaining, further developing and demonstrating national
    capabilities, moving towards establishing outposts, then bases, then colonies…

    “NASA has not totally abandoned its
    traditional role as a facilitator of technology development…”

    I think this was the human
    spaceflight program’s BIG mistake over the last 30 years. Once Shuttle became “operational”,
    almost with its first flight, the human space people began to think of
    themselves as an “operations organization. I never ceased to hear about how KSC
    and JSC were “operations centers”. Most of the NASA people became nothing more
    than contract managers. Many of the labs, development organizations and
    engineering functions lost support and funding in order to funnel money to
    operations. This has been a disaster and I think the difficulties that Orion is
    facing, the poor decisions made in Constellation, and the lack of any follow on
    to Shuttle or even any significant improvement to the Shuttle is a direct
    result. Even today with the recent Orion decision, it takes NASA out of the
    loop for a lot of the development work in the name of international
    integration.

    NASA needs to refocus its energies on
    technology development. That ought to be a vision and primary goal. That can be
    demonstrated by increasing the distances people and travel and the places they
    can visit, including asteroids, the surface of the moon and of Mars.

    Helen
    Simpson:

    “this prioritization makes a lot of
    sense for those people who would rather live on Mars than on the Earth. How
    many of those people do you suppose there are?”

    There are a few who want to pioneer today,
    and once the infrastructure is established there will be more. I like to think
    back to the way the US looked in its frontier days of 150-200 years ago. How
    many people wanted to live beyond the Mississippi River? Most wanted to stay where there was
    infrastructure, protection…how many of the people of that time would recognize
    what has developed over a century or two in virtually any city or town today? 

    Assured,
    reasonably affordable transportation is a large aspect of what makes living or
    even just visiting some remote places worth considering. 

    Consider the Antarctic.
    Thousands of people go there routinely every year. Lots of people are living
    there full time. There are job listings for cooks, plumbers, diesel mechanics, etc.
    are all needed to keep McMurdo station or the locations the cruise ships visit running
    smoothly. Most don’t need PhDs in physics, geology, biology or
    atmospheric sciences. 

    Think about how Pan Am was set up in the 1930s.
    They had to establish pre-fab hotels on remote islands so that re-fueling
    stations with guest quarters could be emplaced. Initially a few people were stuck
    there living in tents, but once the bases were established, transportation became
    easier to do and eventually whole cities grew. Today you aren’t even that remote
    no matter where you go, since between computers and the internet you can be in
    constant contact. I think there are plenty of people, measured in the thousands
    and tens of thousands who’d be willing to sign up whether in the early years of
    establishing the bases or in the later years of permanently living there.

    Reasonable affordability (both
    dollars and time) is the other place where NASA and its contractors have done
    serious harm to themselves over the last thirty years. I think this is the greatest lesson being learned
    by watching Space-X and the other commercial developers. If they can work
    quickly and reasonably inexpensively there is absolutely no reason why NASA and
    its contractors cannot do the same.

    • Helen Simpson says:
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      Oh, so we don’t need to worry about climate change because there are a few  people who want to be pioneers and remove themselves from the Earth? Ah, thanks. Makes me feel better. Maybe possibly tens of thousands? Terrific. They’ll cheerfully wave goodbye to the remaining 6.99999 billion. This isn’t about those who want to go. It’s about those who don’t.

      The Antarctic? Let me give you a clue. Those folks don’t want to LIVE there. They really don’t. To a person, they have absolutely no desire to do so, and because they don’t, I suspect there is as much concern there about global warming as there is in more northerly latitudes.

      Long argument. Loose screws.

      • Littrow says:
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        Global warming???Where did you come up with that as far as having anything to do with living on the moon or Mars?
        Thats right no one wants to live in Antarctica, or maybe Iceland or Greenland or Alaska either or where else do they not want to live or visit? I guess you speak for all of them.
        I agree with you, there is a screw loose.

        • Helen Simpson says:
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          We should perhaps call it a lost thread, instead of a loose screw. There are several ways for things not to be tied together.

          The discussion (reference Mr. Wingo above) that addressed “this prioritization makes a lot of sense” was with regard to climate change and populating the solar system. But yeah, he could have been talking about populating Neptune instead of the Moon or Mars. I suspect rather fewer would want to go there.

          That’s where I came up with that.

          • Denniswingo says:
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            And you missed the point.  It IS a matter of priorities and the current ones have been skewed in the wrong direction since FY-1967.

      • Denniswingo says:
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        Oh, so we don’t need to worry about climate change because there are a few  people who want to be pioneers and remove themselves from the Earth? 

        There is a simple solution for climate change, which is the massive implementation of nuclear energy.  It is impossible to operate a global civilization of 9 billion people (2050 population) with solar panels and wind turbines.

        Resource depletion?  The massive importation of strategic metals and with enough nuclear energy we can disassociate bare rock if we have to for iron, silicon, aluminum, and other metals.

        Again, it is not an issue of money, it is an issue of priorities.

        Don’t like fission?  Ok, a Manhattan project level effort to finally do fusion.  We do fusion in the same manner that we do space, give it just enough money not to succeed.

        Again, that $700 billion a year that the U.N. policy wonks want for Climate Change, if applied to energy and space, would provide for a prosperous 21st century and beyond.

  8. Robert Clark says:
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    Keith many of those presentations are not by NASA employees, so it’s understandable the presentations would not be in the public domain. It may be for the NASA employees they would be.

  9. Robert Clark says:
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    One key fact that NASA needs to make note of is that following the commercial approach can cut development costs by an order of magnitude. This was proven by SpaceX both for launchers, with the Falcon 9, and for crew capsules, with the Dragon.
     This something that needs to be emphasized by NASA not played down.

       Bob Clark

  10. sch220 says:
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    Harley Thronson and Dan Lester have done an outstanding job of running the FISO telecons over the last several years. As another commenter pointed out, many of the presentations and given by people from industry and academia, and cannot be assumed to be available for open public dissemination. The NASA presentations I’ve seen have usually been given at conferences and other open forums. The topics range from the very near-term to the more far-out. But the intent is always to bring in topics of interest to the space community. Once again, I applaud the efforts of Harley and Dan.

    • kcowing says:
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      WRT “… cannot be assumed to be available for open public dissemination.”  Then why has this webserver and all of its contents been open to anyone who finds it with no security/passwords whatsoever?

      • sch220 says:
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        Because NASA is not the only player in space. And some of the other players don’t particularly care if their “information” is broadly broadcast to the American populace. They make it available, but they don’t necessarily give a whit whether people read it or not. You can criticize NASA for not actively promulgating its work, since it is supported by taxpayers. Private industry and academia are a little different story.

  11. F3Victor7 says:
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    I have had the privilege of being a member and contributor. The group is free to explore any ideas someone would want to present on relevant topics. The teleconferenced presentations are openly discussed by the membership during the authors talk; if it was open to the general community the format would be chaos; it is not intended to be a showcase for the public but rather a forum where the small FISO community can explore out of the box concepts well beyond what NASA would officially endorse. 

    To invite broader community involvement would require a change of format and likely far more effort than Harley and Dan could graciously donate, and I feel it would move away from the freewheeling back and forth and inevitable real-time brainstorming that are trademarks of the group.

    • kcowing says:
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      I love it when members of these little cliques automatically assume that chaos would ensue if the unwashed masses had access to these telecons. Materials produced by NASA civil servants are public domain, by definition. Hiding them in non obvious places and making the existence of these materials is not in the agency’s or the public’s best interests.

  12. Steve Whitfield says:
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    Mike,

    I agree with your point about cutting back on aeronautics research, and I think it’s just one example of a wider problem.  Because NASA, in the past, and NACA before them, were not constrained to working in very narrowly defined areas, there was a lot of cross pollination between disciplines from which multiple subjects and professions prospered.  Look at the example that vulture4 gives above for a new metal/composite bonding technique.  It involves several different technologies that wouldn’t normally be used together.  When NASA, or any R&D group, narrows its focus too much, this sort of cross pollination doesn’t happen.

    I wonder how many accidental and serendipity discoveries have been missed in the last few decades because people no longer think outside the budgeted box.

    Steve

  13. Steve Whitfield says:
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    With respect to the comments about robotics and AI, I respectfully suggest having another think about the AI aspect.  There are many very successful AI systems being used in industry, but functionally they’re really just highly effective database look-up systems.  I suspect that some people are crediting AI with more capability than it currently possesses, or is likely to in the near future.

    I think that NASA, since it is not constrained to showing a profit, is a logical place to be doing AI R&D for aeronautics and space.  AI development is a long and expensive process and running AI is currently very processor intensive.