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Budget

Alternative Budget Facts From The Planetary Society

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
February 9, 2017
Filed under
Alternative Budget Facts From The Planetary Society

Trump’s Advisers Want to Return Humans to the Moon in Three Years, The Atlantic
“[Planetary Society’s Casey] Dreier cautions that the latest glimpse of potential Trump space policy may be just that–a peek into the internal debate over NASA’s mission, rather than a clear roadmap for the space agency’s future. … Human spaceflight programs are expensive, and risk overshadowing such projects. “Science always tends to suffer when human spaceflight programs go over budget,” Dreier says.”
Keith’s note: Of course Casey Drier omits the flip side of this statement – when space science missions go over budget (crashing Mars probes in the 90s, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars Science Laboratory, Mars 2020 rover etc.) Space Science tends to suffer much, much more – and it is self-inflicted.

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

17 responses to “Alternative Budget Facts From The Planetary Society”

  1. Odyssey2020 says:
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    Of course NOBODY is going to the moon by 2020 but I do foresee Elon Musk getting at least a few billion more dollars in his pocket, maybe even tens of billions more.

  2. Michael Spencer says:
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    Three years?
    Another example- as if we need one- that running the country is far more nuanced than imagined by iconoclasts.

    • John Thomas says:
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      I’d rather have a challenging near term goal like that than saying we’re going to Mars in +20 years.

      I’d like to see Musk try out his Mars lander on the moon. Travel time would be quicker and gravity lower.

      • muomega0 says:
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        But this is not what is written–its intentionally stated to allow all the players to stay in the game in a fly-off.

        Based on long term benefits, it has determined that SLS/Altas/Delta would not be suitable for this mission in their LV independent architecture. NASA will only consider hardware that can meet its needs to solve the suite of Grand Challenges and is required to have short and long term goals of reuse as outlined by the VSE.

        Consequently, Vulcan will not be flying by then, and hence the competition has narrowed quite a bit. Consequently, NASA will not be following ‘the law’.

      • David_Morrison says:
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        My impression is that Musk’s Dragon is designed for landing on an planet with an atmosphere (Earth and Mars).

        • AstroInMI says:
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          Whether one believes or not, Musk’s claim is that Dragon 2 could land anywhere in the solar system.

          • fcrary says:
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            I didn’t see the model number on the picture Mr. Musk showed. Are you sure that’s a Dragon 2, not a Dragon 3 or 4?

        • fcrary says:
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          I don’t think the lack of an atmosphere is inherently a problem. I don’t think a stock Dragon has the fuel for an all-propulsive landing and takeoff. Actually, I don’t think a stock Dragon has enough to enter and leave lunar orbit (The Apollo CSM had about 2.8 km/s of delta-v and I’m fairly sure a Dragon is short of that.) But adding a drop tank or something similar wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) take three years of development work.

          But I’m more concerned about the thrust being too high. The Super Dracos are mounted around the sides of a Dragon 2, so they would have to fire a pair. Even throttled down to the tested limit (20%), that’s enough to hover 17.5 tonnes in lunar gravity. A Dragon doesn’t mass that much. I think a lunar landing would take a significant redesign.

        • kcowing says:
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          It relies heavily on propulsive systems to land and does not need an atmosphere in order to land.

          • Matthew Black says:
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            Yes, true – a crew Dragon could probably be adapted for a fully propulsive lunar landing if it carried ‘saddle bag’ or drop tanks for extra delta-v. I’m not sure of the total delta-v a Dragon 2.0 currently envisages for landing, but it could probably get down okay. But a refueling would be needed for ascension later – or probably a separate ascent vehicle.

  3. Daniel Woodard says:
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    The commercial space narrative will appeal to Trump, but not to the members of Congress who support the SLS and Orion. My best guess is the the official goal for SLS and Orion will be changed back from Mars to the Moon, but otherwise not much will change. It isn’t obvious where the administration would get the substantial funding ($2B/yr?) needed for a development program for lunar landers and other support equipment. Well, there are some obvious possibilities but I don’t even want to think about that one.

    • fcrary says:
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      Politics can be unpredictable, and our current President even more so. What if Mr. Trump needs a visible and attention-getting issue to illustrate government inefficiency (or congressional pork funding), to help him “drain the swamp”? SLS could become an issue, not because the President really cares about it, but because it could be a convenient example and tool to push a political agenda about government waste and inefficiency.

    • Salvador Nogueira says:
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      One could use SLS-Orion for a trip around the Moon by 2020, right? Maybe delaying the 2018 flight and doing it with crew the first time around — ballsy, as Apollo 8 was, but it can be done.

  4. Donald Barker says:
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    Either way… Is anyone really surprised?

    And it is so cliche now, but we have been 20 years away from Mars every year for over 45 years.

  5. fcrary says:
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    I’ve heard this claim made in both directions: That NASA science funding suffers when human spaceflight budgets go up, and that NASA science funding goes up when human spaceflight budgets go up. This should be a fairly straight-forward issue. We’re just talking about the correlation between two time series.

    Unfortunately, it looks like NASA’s organization can’t even make that easy. The current Science Mission Directorate didn’t even exist a decade or more ago; they’ve reorganized and shuffled work around enough that extracting the science budget is not trivial. Does anyone know of any published work along these lines? Someone must have been curious enough to extract the numbers.

    • taurusII says:
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      At one time even the human space flight budget had an allotment earmarked for science and it went to develop and fly payloads flown on the human space missions. Its been about 15 years or longer that JSC ‘raided’ the science budget in order to put more money on their ISS contractor (as if they weren’t getting enough already). Its one of the chief reasons there is so little useful science on ISS today.