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Congress

Today's Hearing on NASA Human Exploration Plans Or Lack Thereof

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
February 3, 2016
Filed under ,

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

24 responses to “Today's Hearing on NASA Human Exploration Plans Or Lack Thereof”

  1. Skinny_Lu says:
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    Witness, Dr Sommerer… “we can have humans on Mars in 20 to 40 years”

  2. TheBrett says:
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    Basically, Congress needs to decide on what crewed program they want to support, and then stick with it. They’ve got incumbency on their side, so if they support a program (and especially get bipartisan support on it), odds are it will survive through the next Presidential administration simply because most Presidents don’t care that much about space exploration.

    • Neil.Verea says:
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      That is true, unless of course the new administration wants to bring “Hope” and “Change we can believe in” and we all know how that worked (NOT)

      • TheBrett says:
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        It would be enough for them just to be apathetic towards crewed spaceflight, signing the budgets including funding for it. That’s what killed Constellation – it did not have strong bipartisan congressional support.

        • Neil.Verea says:
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          Of course CxP didn’t have congressional support until it did (post CxP, i.e SLS/Orion)

          • TheBrett says:
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            Indeed, and that’s why SLS/Orion are probably going to survive the end of this Presidential administration and into the next one, while Constellation did not.

          • Neil.Verea says:
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            Yes, although I would point out that the cancellation of CxP blindsided congress which drew all parties to their respective corners. This forced the resurrection of Orion and SLS (i.e. ARES V) by Congress, although it had no credible mission supported by Congress or rank and file at NASA except for the absurd ARM mission (LOL)

          • BeanCounterFromDownUnder says:
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            Congress wasn’t blindsided on the cancellation of CxP. They voted and approved it.
            Cheers

          • Neil.Verea says:
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            They were blindsided. Shortly following that they each (Human space flight supporters vs all the rest) went to their respective corners and a partial victory for supporters of HSF was gained through the forced the resurrection of SLS/Orion.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        The Administration tried to bring some fiscal responsibility to the table by killing an unaffordable program. The alternative, continuing to fund Ares I, Ares V, and CEV would likely have been even more expensive, in the long run, than SLS/Orion.

  3. Todd Martin says:
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    Having watched this testimony, I must say the Committee has no appetite for ARM and wants SLS/Orion repurposed towards a Cislunar program instead of Mars. I just wish they would have balanced the speaker list and got a representative from NASA to respond and/or an author of the ARM Keck study to comment.

  4. Monty says:
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    I wanted to watch the whole thing before I commented here, and I came away pretty impressed (surprisingly enough). Everybody seems to “get” the problem — especially the problem of getting a long-term commitment from the US government to sustain exploration plans beyond one or two Presidential Administrations. ARM is dead, de facto if not de jure; it’s clear that nobody but a few souls in NASA think it’s worth doing. It never was much more than a spitball in terms of an operational goal; Obama needed something to replace the cancelled Constellation program, and this is what his guys came up with. Everybody else hates it, and it’ll die the second Obama leaves office. (If not before.) I think it was Dr. Sommerer who pointed out that NASA can have an ISS/Commerical Crew/Commercial Cargo program *or* you can have an SLS/Orion program, but they can’t have both without a major bump in funding. How much more funding? “Significant” is as far as the panel will go, but I’d say on the order of 30% to 50% more funding than NASA now receives, and I sincerely doubt if that kind of money is going to come NASA’s way (though I’d love to be proven wrong). Mars? I’ve always been in the Spudis camp on this one. Explore and exploit cislunar space first and build the technology and human systems to a robust state before striking out further into the solar system. We could theoretically *get* to Mars with current technology, but we can’t stay there or actually colonize. So what’s the point of sending people there? Leave Mars to posterity (or Elon Musk). Concentrate on building out cislunar space and on ISRU technology. As for Orion/SLS…there is the usual agony and fallbacks to the sunk-costs fallacy. (“We’ve already spent so much! We can’t abandon it now!”) Well, economists have a retort for the sunk-costs fallacy: don’t throw good money after bad. NASA should not be in the rocket-building business; they’re better suited to the business of designing and building payloads that go on rockets. But if we’re going to have to have an SLS/Orion system (and I think the Congresscritters are united on this as they are on few other things), then they need to break loose enough funding to enable NASA to develop actual payloads for their monster rocket. A moonbase or L2/L3 space station would do nicely. But those efforts would require roughly doubling NASA’s current budget, and I don’t get the sense from the Congresscritters that they really understand that. Given the American political system and election cycles, it’s absurd to talk about any mission-profile over timelines of a decade or more. A Congress cannot bind a future Congress to a given spending plan, nor can they bind future Presidents to support their course of action. The only realistic way to prompt forward motion is with incremental, concrete, and well-engineered missions that build upon one another to expand our reach out beyond LEO.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I’m following your thinking and finding agreement. I diverge, though, when imagining the future of SLS.

      I think what’s happened here is NASA and Congress have shot themselves in the foot. We will have a magnificent rocket–no denying this will be a hell of a bird– but can’t afford to fly it, as many have said here over and over. So on the one hand we want NASA to go places but on the other hand we’ve placed the basket so high that it’s impossible to sink the ball without a lot more money (or splashing a shiny station, which creates a much bigger problem by removing a destination).

      Blah blah blah. I know.

      I’ll make a prediction: the US military will lead the march to FH. And that beautiful gigantic bird will fly maybe once a year while we will find ourselves maintaining a huge management fleet of people, just like we did for shuttle, except in this case with little to do between flights. And the cost of maintaining the management will only exacerbate the flight rate.

      I also think that once SLS is sitting on the pad, ready to go, the media will take a look. And they will start writing sidebars. One of them will be something like “SLS and FH– How Do They Compare?” or perhaps “Musk and NASA- Same Result, Different Costs”. And those are the ones from the NYT. Fox will have a field day. WaPo will be dancing in the streets.

      If you thought the brouhaha over the toilet was embarrassing you ain’t seen nothing yet. reporters will learn/guess the development, maintenance, and launch costs of SLS, and they will compare to FH. This is a very bad thing for NASA.

      And yes, I know the comparison isn’t apples/apples, but it’s close enough for horseshoes. And the media.

  5. numbers_guy101 says:
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    Well, Smith and Babin defending SLS and Orion while getting the knives out for the asteroid mission. Expected.

    Spudis talking about going to the Moon, instead of Mars. No mention of changing how we do things, or what approach we use. Just add in a defined goal, something more near term, and we have the cure for what ails us? Expected.

    Young gets the math olympics medal – and the mental gymnastics award. $180B over the next 20 years – more than enough to get to Mars he says. Except forgetting to mention that SLS and Orion and the ISS have dibs on that for the next 13 years, and that after that, launches of SLS and Orion would create a big sucking sound on whatever post-ISS funding might be around. He should know better.

    Then Sommerer with a little dose of reality at the end – finally – saying what everyone else seems afraid to say – “we may well never be able to get to Mars at current expenditure levels. It might be better to stop talking about Mars if there is no appetite in Congress and the Administration for higher human spaceflight budgets, and more disciplined execution by NASA”.

    At least Sommerer added on the part about “more disciplined execution”, a hint that all this budget drama has little to do with the level of funding, and more with it’s effective and efficient application.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I watched/ listened to most of it and heard nothing about the costs of SLS and the possibilities of alternative rockets.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      The problem is that no one in power seems to be talking about the sane alternative, which is invest in technologies to lower the costs of beyond LEO transportation. The big one in my mind is fuel depots. What better use for (potentially high flight rate, but relatively low payload) reusable launch vehicles than to deliver fuel and oxidizer to fuel depots? Reusable upper stages, like ULA’s proposed ACES, would greatly benefit from depots.

      Ultimately, the “need” to build bigger and bigger launch vehicles will be reduced since all the fuel for a beyond LEO mission (which would start from LEO) would come from the depot(s), not from the launch(es) used to put the mission hardware into LEO.

      The all expendable SLS is quite simply not the best way forward.

    • Vladislaw says:
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      I read Dr. Spudis’s blog, I am, in general, not a big defender of his work, but I did like what he had written here in his opening, didn’t see the Q&A though . If Arm is dead a new general direction is needed for infrastructure development. Not in favor of a landing yet for NASA but another station in a lagrange point and the start of depot technology.

  6. webdan says:
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    I’ve been watching on YouTube a show from 1959/1960 called Men into Space. They did it.

  7. AstroInMI says:
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    #JourneyToTheMoon. The whole argument that Obama espoused that “we’ve been there before” is like saying because I visited Heathrow I’ve seen all of Europe. It’s so obviously the natural stepping stone that I feel like there’s someone out there saying “look, I put that thing there for you just for that purpose and you’re missing it!” It’s near-term, we learn how to things nearby (like Sommerer said, it’s much safer to learn in that fashion), and we can even do quite a bit of good science.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      I agree that human flight to Mars is not currently feasible due to its cost. The “flexible path” strategy was proposed by the Obama administration because Congress demanded a plan and going to the Moon would have required immediate funding that Congress did not wish to provide.

      However the reality is that Congress directly dictates NASA HSF policy. If they wanted to go to the Moon instead they could have simply required it in the appropriations bill. Of course they might have had to fund landers, habitats, etc. or explain why they were not going to do so.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        “not currently feasible due to its cost”

        I suppose you are referring to the costs by proceeding in the “NASA way”? I’d agree. I wonder how Elon’s numbers compare. We don’t really know much but he’s always talked about a permanent presence. Will be interesting to hear his thinking later this year.

      • AstroInMI says:
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        I agree about Congressional funding, but Congress didn’t force Obama to say: “Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to
        the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have
        to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.”

      • AstroInMI says:
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        Obligatory statement: I think Obama’s a great President. I voted for him twice and would vote for him again. But he and his Administration were wrong with this direction of space policy.