Reaction To Eileen Collins' Speech at the Republican Convention
Sorry, Eileen Collins: Here’s why America is already great in space, Ars Technica
“But the public needs to recognize this as well, which is why I was disappointed by Collins and her pining for the Apollo era on such a big stage. The reality is that the best way to “lead on the frontier” in the 21st century is not through flags and footprints, but rather by sending people into space to stay, in a sustainable way, with the eventual aim of making space profitable. One would hope that Donald J. Trump, if he is elected president, would recognize such capitalism when he sees it.”
Retired astronaut Eileen Collins endorses Donald Trump in all but name, Mashable
“In a speech before the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, retired astronaut Eileen Collins delivered a sharp rebuke of NASA’s recent leadership, endorsing controversial Republican nominee Donald Trump in all but name. Collins, who was the first woman to command a NASA space shuttle mission, had been expected to deliver a nonpartisan speech, and stopped just shy of issuing a more explicit endorsement. However, the speech will be viewed as a clear critique of NASA’s leadership under the Obama administration.”
I’m not sure making cheap access to space will make America great again. That’s a start but it takes leadership. Studies and talk of how to get to Mars don’t quite do it. Perhaps SpaceX’s Dragon to Mars will be great, but government didn’t have a lot to do with it.
It had been reported that Collins blamed Obama for cancelling the shuttle program, but that’s not correct. Rather she lamented the lull in manned launches from the US which were compounded by Obama cancelling the shuttle replacement program Constellation leaving no US crewed launch programs.
Constellation would likely have been delayed and was expensive, but it was in place when the shuttle program was shut down. Not until recently were contracts let for actual crewed missions that will hopefully occur in the next year or two.
In response to John Thomas, affordable transportation, an entrepreneurial spirit, and Trump casinos in orbit would all make spaceflight a part of the economic sphere for the common person. Once the US shows the way, others no doubt will try to compete. But the leadership is in doing it first. If its like the airline industry, the government can help make the industry achievable-seed funding, new more capable less expensive systems, conducive laws and taxation, and then get out of the way.
While NASA prematurely began shutting Shuttle down in 2005, in the expectation that Orion would be in orbit in 2010, there were a lot of gates and a lot of perturbations between.2005 and when Obama came into office or when Augustine finished his analyses a couple years later. While it would have been expensive-though probably no more expensive than the path we are on today- the Administration could have decided to look into upgrading and modifying Shuttle, whether to make it safer, or to develop a Shuttle C using more of the existing Shuttle capabilities. They could have decided to do something different than Orion. Today the actual usefulness of Orion, given the expense of launching it, makes it seriously questionable whether and how much it will ever be used. Obama had at least a year or two during which he could have gotten involved and made some decisions and shown some leadership. The Administration, and that includes Obama all the way down and including NASA, chose to do just about nothing; Congress stepped in and decided NASA would continue to spend money. The system they were buying was and is suspect, but that was due as much to Administration dereliction. as anything else. And even sticking with Orion, you have to seriously question why the simple, safe and soon alternative is now ten years into a 20 year development program. At similar costs, Mercury, Gemini and even far more sophisticated, Shuttle, were all done in a shorter time.
I don’t think Collins blamed anyone. Her message was that the US no longer has the capability to do what we were doing 47 years ago, or even what we were doing 5 years ago. At present we don’t even have the capability to do what we were doing 54 years ago when we placed John Glenn in orbit.
Constellation continues in a slightly simpler form today; Constellation’s first launch vehicle was not going to work. Orion was designed from the outset to be too large because its requirements were never appropriately developed. Orion weighed too much and Ares-1 did not have the needed launch capacity. They went with a shrunken and supposedly cheaper version of an Ares V, which is SLS today. It was simplified, and a lot of the R&D burden was taken off the US plate by giving the Service Module responsibility to ESA and yet costs are ridiculous and schedules have never been met.
Leadership means more than just doing it first. It also means owning the knowledgebase that causes others to come to you for partnerships. Mostly though, leadership means setting the path of innovation and expansion. NASA never stopped doing either for most aspects of space exploration. Yes, Russia launches humans into orbit and we currently don’t. We need to fix that, no argument, but is NASA’s overall leadership in human space launch actually lost? For a while, Russia led (in all three of the ways I mentioned above) human space longevity science. Is that still the case?
Also, one more time, again, “Human Space Launch Program” and “Human Space Flight Program” are too different things. ISS flies in space and thus is “Human Space Flight” and last time I checked NASA still had folks working there.
With Constellation, Obama tried to pull a fast one and Congress slapped his hands. I recall criticizing him for it in my blog at the time, but since Constellation wasn’t unanimously the best solution among the real experts, my biggest gripes were his cancelling the Mars goal and wanting only the “Been there done that” T-shirt for the Moon. Commercial Crew was already in the works. Obama didn’t start that, he just shined a spotlight on it.
I do hope that the new Administration “gets it” with regards to the current direction of Commercial Space. Even if he/she doesn’t though, they just need to wait a year…maybe two…before messing with it then it’ll be too late to stop it. At least with respect to LEO. Congress may have already lost control of the momentum of any human space flight outside of LEO. In it all, NASA still “leads”, even if from the sidelines as coach.
“With Constellation, Obama tried to pull a fast one and Congress slapped his hands.”
Total B.S. The President presents a NON BINDING budget PROPOSAL to congress. THIS congress have routinely stated his budget proposals are dead on arrival. A BI-PARTISAN congress voted to not authorize funding for constellation because it was over budget and behind schedule. Congress also refused to appropriate any funds for Constellation. What DID congress send the President? A funding bill that provide no funding for an over budget boondoggle. That is what the President signed.
Wow, your memory of it is really different from mine.
I remember Obama directing NASA to stop working on it and Congress coming unhinged that he’d violated a law they’d passed the year before that said that NASA could not cancel a program passed by Congress without Congressional approval. The Internet was ablaze with talk about how NASA program managers found themselves torn between Bolten telling them to do one thing and funding laws requiring them to do something else. NASA struggled with this for almost a year before they and Congress came together on SLS. They wanted to call the new capsule something stupid and lame, but Orion still stuck. That’s how I remember it.
When a program is funded it also gets the programs closing costs included in the budget, so if a program does get shut down, Congress will not be asked to come up with more money to close the program down. NASA has historically always used the close out funding as regular funding and spent it up front to try and keep schedules. President Obama put a halt to that and said you can not use close out funding for regular program funding.
“U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) is urging top White House officials to stop NASA from forcing contractors to slow or halt work on the agency’s Moon-bound Constellation program in order to preserve enough money to cover the cost of shutting down the project as soon as this fall.
“I am advised that NASA has undertaken a series of steps to direct industry to retain certain funds made available in fiscal year 2010 to cover prospective termination costs so as not to potentially violate the terms of the Antideficiency Act,” Mikulski wrote in a May 10 letter to White House budget chief Peter Orszag”
“President Barack Obama’s plan to pull the plug on NASA’s Constellation program after five years and more than $9 billion worth of investment in the space shuttle replacement and lunar exploration effort has drawn bipartisan opposition from Congress. Lawmakers have pointedly reminded NASA that a 2010 appropriations bill enacted late last year prohibits the agency from using current-year funds to shut down any part of Constellation without congressional approval.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has repeatedly told lawmakers the agency is complying with the 2010 law, but must also abide by the much older Antideficiency Act, which requires NASA to ensure that its contractors do not overspend the $3.5 billion Congress appropriated for Constellation in 2010.”
http://spacenews.com/mikuls…
This was led by Senator Shelby.. they wanted work to continue to try and stave off cancellation but congress was not going to pass funding for the program any longer.
Commercial crew wasn’t funded until 2010. Obama pushed it as part of the post-GFC American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, which was originally meant to be $150m for the first phase, but $100m was diverted to Constellation under influence by Shelby.
It amazes me to see people still butt-hurt over a single throw-away line in a speech that announced:
– A restoration of the 25% science funding that had been cut by Griffin to feed Constellation. (**)
– A restoration of the 80% of life-science funding that had been cut by Griffin to feed Constellation.
– Fully funding mutliple vendors to develop independent human launch vehicles capable of reaching ISS, aiming for a 2015 first launch, under an extension of the radical COTS fixed cost program.
– An increase in funding to NASA to develop a next-generation large rocket engine (the first major engine development since the Shuttle engine. And the first new large hydrocarbon engine since Apollo’a F1.) Given the dates thrown around for similar proposals before and since, this would have been in testing about 2014. (***)
** (Possibly restoring funding for such programs as the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, the long-baseline Space Interferometer Mission, and the Prometheus nuclear reactor program. All killed to try to make up the $3 billion shortfall in Constellation.)
*** (Which might have been handy when people are getting twitchy about the reliance on Russian engines.)
Eileen was not involved in this and has her facts wrong. Cancelling Constellation did not compound the “lull in manned launches”. According to the program office in 2009, Ares I would have first launched in 2017. That would have presumed full funding and would hwve been the first time a NASA human Spaceflight program ever stayed on schedule. I’ll take my chances in two competitors getting there sooner than Ares I would have – at a tenth of the cost. Also, Constellation didn’t start funding the heavy launch vehicle until ISS was deorbited (scheduled for 2016), so there would have been nowhere for any of these launchers to take people.
Had we actually followed Obama’s plan, commercial crew would have had the resources to be flying crew by now. It was the Bush/Griffen plan and Republican Congress responsible for extending the “lull in manned launches”.
SpaceX and Boeing will provide rides that are far less expensive than riding on the Russian Soyuz – but their systems will be far more flexible as well. We will have a lot more room, we will have a lot more insight into the flight.
We will have Americans preparing the crew and the crew equipment – not Russians who are bombarded with pro-Russian news on a daily basis. The Russian news is filled with stories about how “everyone” is conspiring against Russia, is plotting against Russia.
The cost will be one great feature but these two systems (Crewed Dragon and CST-100) will be far more than “cheaper” access methods. The leadership will come not from the government but from the innovative commercial operators.
Ok now let’s see what the Dems say next week if anything about space…
It has very little to do, technically, with whether we can or cannot launch people into space today. That is a symptom; its a byproduct. Even once SpaceX, Starliner or Dreamchaser are flying, the real question is where are they going to be going.
Again it has little to do, technically with flights to ISS. The HSF part of NASA has lost its way. They don’t know where they are going or what they ought to be doing.
ISS is in orbit! Great! Its been in orbit for 17 years, completely assembled for the last five, but thanks to NASA leadership, once they got it up there they had little science to keep it useful. The ISS leadership had turned that part off years earlier. ‘Not their job’, they said.Their job was to build the thing, not to use it. It was not the attitude I experienced a generation ago on Shuttle nor the attitude I experienced 2 generations ago on Skylab. The great leaders of those programs knew they had to show application, usefulness. Now, in the last year, they are trying to figure out how to get payload customers on-board-not going about it too smartly, as the R&D conference showed, as NASA waits for potential users to come to them to show interest.
In 2004 the Bush Administration and the Administrator put in place a plan to develop the Vision. Then the next Administrator decide he had enough vision for everyone and he was going to reinvent Apollo. Apollo didn’t survive the first time and there is absolutely no reason to think it will restart anew; certainly not with the costs NASA is already incurring to produce nothing. That is what is missing-the vision, the strategy, the plan for where we are going. You can hype a mission to Mars all you want but you are not on a track that will get us there.
Nicely put.
I agree with what you’re saying in part, but I believe that you’re wrong about what the administration is capable of. No matter how great or wonderful a vision the administration has, if the purse-string holders in Washington do not agree with that vision, than it is not going to happen.
Certainly it requires the support and funding of the purse string holders. However they are not leaders nor experts. NASA is supposed to be the leader and expert; that is NASA’s job. NASA needs to define and describe and sell the plan. If NASA doesn’t do it, no one else will. As we have been seeing, this current Administration, which includes the NASA Administrator and his key support people, don’t have a plan, Neither did the previous NASA Administrator. The Griffin approach was, we will build a rocket and capsule and then everyone will support; he never laid out what they’d be supporting, where NASA was going, beyond flying big capsules and rockets (by the way that plan is still the one that is being worked on). The Bolden approach has been to hype to everyone that we are going to Mars, but no plan for how we will get there. Two men in a capsule for an 800 day mission?
The Obama administration did have a plan; cancel Constellation and put the money into Space Technology and Commercial Crew. That plan was blocked by Congress.
The idea of going to Mars was only a response to Congress, which first demanded that NASA build the Ares V/SLS and then demanded that NASA find a mission for it. Obviously the Mars and ARM missions are impractical, but so is the SLS, so the designated mission is really moot. You cannot blame NASA fo this one, it is the rocket scientists in Congress that created it.
As to Collins’ speech, at least it mentioned NASA, but I was unable to understand her point or goal in making the speech.
The point of her brief speech was that NASA was once mighty in terms of manned spaceflight (Apollo & Shuttle) and now can’t even place our own astronauts into space with paying Russia. NASA needs real leadership and vision to make NASA great again.
But whose leadership and vision is she talking about? A gap of many years in US human launch capability was already inevitable when Bush left office. According to the VSE Orion was supposed to fly in 2008, before Obama was even elected.
The only certainty regarding the leadership issue is that she doesn’t think the current leadership’s plans are on the right track. We can then read the tea leaves and use that to imply she favors the Republican version since she spoke at the RNC and not the DNC. However, she didn’t specify so maybe she just wanted the soap box to make NASA a more visible issue.
Actually the VSE stated: “NASA will initiate Project Constellation to develop a new Crew Exploration Vehicle for future crew transport. This vehicle will be developed in stages, with the first automated test flight in 2008, more advanced test flights soon thereafter, and a fully operational capability no later than 2014.”
So that gap you speak of would have been less than 4 years, since there would have been manned test flights before the CEV became operational in 2014.
Just my point. By the time Bush left office in January 2009 the program was at least five years from its first unmanned test flight, not to mention that the Orion had grown too heavy for the Ares I. So how do you come up with a four year gap? And speaking of political capital, when the program started to slip, did George W. Bush appear before Congress and the nation to ask for additional taxes to be appropriated to increase the NASA budget, as JFK did?
Not True. You fail to understand what was lost by the back to back cancellation of the Shuttle (announced for 7 years before), and the thoughtless abrupt cancellation of Constellation.
Once again the entire NASA agency is seen through HSF glasses, ignoring the exploration portfolio (among others).
Thankfully, Congress stopped the complete annihilation of American leadership in Human space travel by this administration.
I’m reading mixed things on this subject.
You wrote, “NASA is supposed to be the leader and expert; that is NASA’s job. NASA needs to define and describe and sell the plan.”
Other people have written, in this forum, that the NASA administrator and everyone at NASA are supposed to support and pursue the policies of their boss, the President.
There is no ‘what next’ until Congress allows NASA to step up to 10X reduction in launch costs, the #1 Space Grand Challenge. Multiple technologies are required ‘to mars’, but if you want to build and operate old stuff at 6B/yr, one cancels all R&D and heads to the moon. Oops 12 yrs later, nothing, unlike Apollo.
The vision is quite clear. Consolidate SLS/Atlas/Delta and shift excess expendable LV capacity and capsules to missions and technology development. NASA adopts a LV independent architecture based on in space refueling which allows significant IP participation to reduce costs taking risks launching dirt cheap, class D payload with the goal of reuse. A NASA demand for a stable mass to orbit reduces costs for DOD and other commercial payloads likely enabling new markets.
Not a bad speech. Not sure that it actually says what needs to be done. Pretty much 4 minutes of “Go NASA”.
Although, I will disagree with her implications that there is no space program without an operating human launch system. New Horizons, Dawn, Twins, Cassini, on…I could go on and on. These are all unprecedented and deeply valuable programs. The U.S. is great on space, in spite of a missing human launch program. We need one…true…but Russia’s last Mars attempt is at the bottom of the Pacific.
It really depends on what side of the aisle you are coming from. When Kelly shows up at the DNC next week, even if he were to say nothing, literally nothing, democrat supporters would hail it as the greatest speech since Kennedy.
I’m thinking is there really a need to put people into space (from a political position)? In 1950s there was lot of discussion and presentations (think Colliers magazine series and Disney film with Von Braun and other notable people). But there was no compelling reason and only manned space vehicle that was an actual program of hardware was X15 (I read some discussion visionaries like Hugh Dryden had to push to get that program started). After Sputnik and Gagarin there was a huge compelling reason to put people into space, and Von Braun was able to charm lots of congressmen and senators. After Apollo 11, Von Braun was not able to charm these congressmen and senators. I think it comes down to if elected officials don’t feel a compelling need then not much will happen. We have seen that for nearly 50 years. Only time they get involved if there is a major tragedy (Challenger, Columbia, major political upsets (collapse of USSR), or simply keeping a major Center occupied. I’m not sure what will happen if Chinese land someone on the Moon, I don’t expect US to respond like they did with Sputnik. Many people accept that China is #1 in growth and manufacturing.
“Many people accept that China is #1 in growth and manufacturing”
We see it but doesn’t mean we like it; and at the risk of testing our host, I’d point out that this realization is one of the things driving the resurgence of candidates like Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again”.
It’s simply an historical perspective: I lived through Mercury/Gemini/ Apollo. More importantly, I lived in a country where taxes funded the necessary infrastructure that actually allowed private industry to ‘make America great’: airports, the interstates, libraries, maintenance for national parks… the list goes on. Add kids graduating with huge debts from college.
But we live in a tax-cutting days; funds are no longer available (the devastation of the Florida tourist industry from releases from Lake Okeechobee, for instance, while our Governor asks for another $1 Billion in tax cuts). The ‘small government’ folks are getting what they want, but maybe not what they expected.
As a result, the country will go in one of two ways: either back to taxing citizens to effectively run a national government; OR, on the other hand, perhaps this is simply a period of adjustment; perhaps we look forward to private enterprise ‘set free’ of governmental taxes (and regulations).
It’s a terrible test that failed in Kansas but nationally, who knows? Perhaps there will be an entire industry ready to take over the NASA mandate entirely!