TrumpSpace Landing Team: Round Two Begins
GOP Rep. Jim Bridenstine Seen as Top Choice for NASA Chief, Wall Street Journal
“Boeing and other legacy contractors have rallied behind Doug Cooke, a former senior NASA official under President George W. Bush, people with knowledge of the situation say. Mr. Cooke is known as a critic of some commercial initiatives. Many of those serving on the formal NASA transition team share those views, while favoring greater emphasis on manned exploration missions to the moon and deeper into the solar system. The plans are largely built around NASA’s proposed heavy lift rocket, dubbed the Space Launch System, and companion Orion capsule. By contrast, champions of commercial space interests, including supporters of billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, a closely held rocket-making company run by Amazon.com Inc.’s founder and chairman Jeff Bezos, favor less federal direction and more public-private partnerships, people with knowledge of the situation say. They have pushed hard for Mr. Bridenstine as a likely change agent, and at this point seem to have the upper hand, the people added.”
Why the Moon Matters, Rep. Bridenstine
“While most satellites are not currently powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, next generation satellite architectures could utilize the lunar propellant if low-cost in-orbit servicing were available. Commercial operators will follow if the United States leads with its own constellations. Such leadership would require a whole-of-government approach with the interagency support of the newly reconstituted National Space Council. The objective is a self-sustaining, cis-lunar economy, whereby government and commercial operators save money and maximize the utilization of space through lunar resources.”
Keith’s note: The NASA Landing Team resumes work tomorrow. Charles Millier should be joining the festivities. No word yet as to whether Alan Lindenmoyer and Alan Stern’s conflict of interest background checks have been completed. These three were added at the direction of Trump Tower in response to concerns that commercial space was not getting an equal seat at the table. As such there is a lot of nuancing going on with this Landing Team. Indeed, the commercial space faction sees this this as an “away team” opportunity while the status quo factions sees it as a “boarding party”.
Meanwhile, anyone who claims to have an idea what is going on in the confusing world behind the scenes of the still-embryonic TrumpSpace policy effort has an equal chance of being wrong – or right – or both. Andy Pasztor has had a tendency to get things confused on this story, so … that said, were I to venture a guess as to where the selection might be headed I would agree that the commercial faction within Team TrumpSpace has the edge, and, unless he decides to go for USAF, the job is probably Bridenstine’s to decline. There is no obvious second choice from the commercial faction should Bridenstine not be named NASA Administrator – so do not count out the Status Quo/SLS/Alabama crowd just yet.
A personal opinion, if I may: Doug Cooke and the other members of the Griffin Clan on the Trump Landing Team and NASA represent the past – old fashioned ways of thinking that requires decades, eschews innovation, is addicted to political favoritism, and needs ever-larger buckets of money to keep going. That is the last thing that NASA needs right now – more of the same – especially when discretionary spending has a big bullseye painted on it. Bridenstine himself may be short on management skills, but he has managed to attract an impressively large amount of support from across the commercial space sector – where innovation and cost effectiveness are pre-requisites – and good management is the key to profitability. Going with the old way of doing things will inevitably doom NASA to increasing irrelevance. Alas, there is no guarantee that moving U.S. space efforts in more of a commercial direction will solve all of NASA’s problems – but it does at least offer a chance to try things that have worked elsewhere.
Earlier TrumpSpace and Transition Team postings
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I believe only governments should control nuclear reactors especially flying ones. If we shift to nuclear, commercial new space is toast.
And your plan for the 99 privately owned and currently operating US power reactors, each one larger than any flight reactor?
Newsflash: commercial nuclear reactors have been operating for more than 50 years.
>>>”flying ones”.
How will you make the nuclear reactors fly? Whose launch vehicle with a long, proven flight record? Gee, thank goodness
we have the nuclear-certified Atlas V, developed using Other Transactions Authority by Lockheed Martin with over $2.5B in private funding to pursue commercial + government markets.
Or do you think the NERVA folks were wimps and you want to go back to Orion and use nuclear bombs to launch from sea level.
Of course we’d have to withdraw from the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
Good luck with your environmental impact statement.
Thank you for replying to the only relevant part of my comment unlike others.
I didn’t say nuclear **Rockets**. Nuclear reactors are by themselves clean and environment friendly. It is nuclear rockets that are dirty.
>>> How will you make the nuclear reactors fly?
That is the major roadblock. If we overcome that, commercial spaceflight is dead. Do you agree?
I don’t agree because on one hand you are saying “I didn’t say nuclear rockets”, but on the other hand you’re saying overcoming the roadblock of flying nuclear reactors would mean commercial spaceflight is dead. This makes zero sense to me. Just because a launch vehicle is built and launched by the government doesn’t necessarily make it safer than commercial alternatives.
Case in point, the current projected flight rate for SLS looks to be about once per year starting in 2023. With a flight rate that low, how do you insure that workers are proficient at a job they might be doing only once per year? Low flight rate is not at all conducive to high reliability.
I’m not aware that nuclear-thermal rockets have ever been proposed for ground launch. The advantage of nuclear-thermal over chemical is in exhaust velocity (Isp), not in thrust, and the mass of the reactor would increase with thrust. So its primary application is for planetary probes departing from LEO or arriving at another planet or moon. In contrast, the primary role of commercial is for transport from surface to LEO or GEO. They do not seem competitive.
In nuclear-electric propulsion the reactor is used only to generate electricity, so its hazards are not substantially different from any flight reactor.
Commercial space is doing just fine with chemical rockets here in the U.S. Please stop making the same comment again and again.
If you mean nuclear reactors to generate power for electric propulsion, yes they’re clean but we don’t launch them on anything but the most reliable rockets. As I pointed out the current nuclear-certified rocket IS a commercial rocket. In the future Falcon 9R will be reliable enough as well. The last thing you would want to launch a reactor on is a rocket that only flies once per year, at best.
If your point is that nuclear reactors get rid of chemical propulsion for in-space transportation, and therefore take away the potential market of propellant delivery to orbit (or propellant from the Moon) to fund in-space crew/cargo to/from the Moon and Mars, I’d say that it’s great for replacing chemical to Mars and beyond (and back). Moon may be iffier. But still, there’s no reason why a regulated commercial nuclear tug can’t be the long-haul carrier in the solar system.
And if you have solved the cost and speed issues of in-space transportation, the market for launch to LEO will explode because you’ve answered the other half of Heinlein’s aphorism… the halfway from LEO to anywhere.
Hold on, guys, before jumping on this post. In truth the government does control nukes, the ones here on earth, through very rigorous inspection and review through DOE (and others).
And isn’t this the way we want it? Let private enterprise do what they will, with the government assuring safety? and isn’t that in some sense ‘control’?
Regulations and inspections are one thing, and I certainly don’t object. But I have trouble seeing how this means the DoE controls commercial reactors. By the same logic, does the FAA control commercial aircraft?
Well, yes, to the same extent that I was thinking, but in the sense of ‘running’ a company.
I’m on team Bridenstine
Supports the fallacy of a cis-lunar econony (all the resources came from asteroids!), ‘gov operators’ of decades old expendable LVs and is a climate change denier which leads to the conclusion: not even qualified for an entry level position.
“Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago. Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles. During the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D.—long before cars, power plants, or the Industrial Revolution—temperatures were warmer than today. During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1900 A.D., temperatures were cooler. Neither of these periods were caused by any human activity.” — Rep. Jim Bridenstine
http://climate.nasa.gov/evi…
“The Earth’s climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.”
http://climate.nasa.gov/vit…
“Models predict that Earth will warm between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius in the next century. When global warming has happened at various times in the past two million years, it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 5 degrees. The predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster. This rate of change is extremely unusual.
http://earthobservatory.nas…
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
This https://yellowdragonblog.co… is for Dr Stern in reguards to SMD planning.Revive the Marinar Mark II idea from the 1980’s, serialy produce planetary probes with plug in science instroments
The cost of Moon derived rocket fuel cost too much. Much cheaper to make on Earth. Launch costs not much different. Only a few trips to Mars a long way off. If he wants to put a station on the Moon, go ahead,
but just to have a station or settlers. I hope they don’t have to live in a lava tube the way the Mars show people did. Not much of a view out the windows. An ice home proposed for Mars sounds like a good idea. Might work on the Moon.
Having a great window view is nice, but not as nice as thorough protection against solar flares and GCR’s.
In any case, going fully underground is surely going to be a later phase development in any lunar station.
Several ideas discussed here :
https://sites.google.com/a/…
Commercial lunar tourism may well be the solution for self sustaining human spaceflight that evolves from ISS stakeholders and includes many more global partners. MOBIUS could be such an architecture : http://nasawatch.com/archiv……
Going to the Moon can accelerate Mars missions by retiring risks and filling many strategic knowledge gaps that NASA knows exist.
See USC Fall 2016 Project program here :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7……
Bridenstine seems like a consensus candidate – he’s going to support the legacy P.O.R., but he’s also open to an expanded commercial role.
For those of us who think the P.O.R. is a futile money sink, this is disappointing. But at this juncture, it is probably the most you can reasonably hope for. SLS will in any case be more vulnerable after the next presidential election, at which point it will only have managed a single unmanned test flight, whereas Falcon Heavy and Vulcan will have multiple launches presumably under their belts, even if there’s been no progress whatsoever on New Glenn; likewise, both Starliner and Dragon V2 will have at least a handful of successful crew flights to LEO under their belts by that point, while Orion will still be three years away from its first crewed mission.