NASA Is Still Kicking The Can Down the Road to Mars
NASA finally admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars, Ars Technica
“Now, finally, the agency appears to have bended toward reality. During a propulsion meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics on Wednesday, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight acknowledged that the agency doesn’t really have the funding it needs to reach Mars with the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. These vehicles have cost too much to build, and too much to fly, and therefore NASA hasn’t been able to begin designing vehicles to land on Mars or ascend from the surface. “I can’t put a date on humans on Mars, and the reason really is the other piece is, at the budget levels we described, this roughly 2 percent increase, we don’t have the surface systems available for Mars,” said NASA’s William H. Gerstenmaier, responding to a question about when NASA will send humans to the surface of Mars. “And that entry, descent and landing is a huge challenge for us for Mars.”
Kicking The Can Down the Road to Mars, SpaceRef (earlier post)
“And of course none of these Mars missions in the 2030s are in any budget – notional, proposed, or projected – that means anything to anyone actually working at NASA today. So it is hard to blame people who can’t give you a straight answer. Just look at what their management has given them to work with – and what the agency has had to work with in terms of guidance from Congress and the White House. Just in the past 10-12 years NASA has veered away from the shuttle towards the Moon, then away from the ISS to Mars and away from the Moon and back to ISS, and now back to Mars (and maybe the Moon) and also some boulder on an asteroid.”
OMG. Really? Can anyone truely be suprised about this?
Surprised that they don’t have the money, or surprised that they actually and publicly said so?
Glad to see some honesty about SLS and the budget constraint.
I’d like to think it will bring about a reckoning at some point, but I could easily see them rehashing shuttle-style missions for years. Except now we can do some of them in lunar orbit, hooray!
Ugh. I guess that leaves building a research base on the Moon (with or without international partners), except there’s no money for that either. Aside from the obvious “keep funneling money to politically connected contractors and congressional districts”, what is the point of even having a human spaceflight program if you’re not going to adequately fund it?
Actually the dsg plan is pretty clever in terms of tackling the frustrating budget restraints. If there is anything they learned from iss its that having a target destination you are legally obligated to occupy and support creates flow and if you let international partners and commercial entities ride that flow interesting things start to happen. For the iss that meant things like nanoracks, space x, made in space, launching cube sats in mass from japan’s kibo module airlock etc… In creating the dsg they are hoping the same thing will happen again with a partner or business bridging the last leg to the surface of the moon, or an asteroid, or even Martian orbit. It’s about the best they can hope for as long as they are saddled with sls but it’s hardly bleak.
The minute NASA and the country make a serious commitment to nuclear thermal propulsion and spacecraft nuclear reactor for power/propulsion, then I will know we are serious about sending humans to Mars.
I’d argue that nuclear thermal propulsion simply isn’t needed to get to Mars. It’s a “nice to have” though.
To generate power on Mars a modular nuclear reactor does make a lot of sense.
And since a space-rated nuclear power reactor can be used for NEP, it’s a much better approach than NTR anyway.
That’s debatable. There are a number of cases, such as orbital insertion, where relatively high thrust rockets are much more efficient than low thrust ones. Whether or not that makes nuclear thermal a better approach is unclear. It would depend on the rocket, and we haven’t done any serious work on nuclear thermal rocket design in about fifty years.
AIUI, there are a few “gear shift” electric thrusters that could be developed (not just VASIMR, I believe there are other designs that can duplicate its party-trick.)
Perhaps you could expand briefly for the benefit of bystanders what is meant by “gear shift” electric thrusters?
Being able to exchange Isp for thrust.
Electric thrusters are high-Isp, but low thrust. When you’re close to a gravity well, that actually reduces your useful delta-v.
A few, such as VASIMR, can add thrust at the cost of Isp. (“Changing gears”.) That lets you crank up the thrust during injection and capture manoeuvres, while retaining high-Isp for the long cruise. But high-thrust-capable electric drives have high power requirements. Hence nukes.
Most electric propulsion thrusters can do this, but I’d call it turning a dial rather than changing gears. You can dial in the thrust level you want, not select one of three to five options. For Kaufman thrusters, it’s just a matter of setting a different voltage on the grids and adjusting the fuel flow rate.
However, there are limits. The output power is proportional to the thrust times the specific impulse. Even if you dial a NEXT thruster down to the specific impulse of a chemical rocket, you’ll only increase the thrust by a factor of ten or so. That’s not nearly enough for the sort of periapsis capture maneuver I was thinking of. Worse, the efficiency goes down for settings away from the nominal design levels. So it’s a bit worse than constant thrust times specific impulse.
I don’t think nuclear power will solve this. You can get high power, but you also have to accelerate the reactor. The key issue is specific power (power per unit mass) of the power source, not power by itself. Nuclear reactors do offer a better specific impulse than solar, but not by orders of magnitudes.
The chief advantage being, this non-rocket scientist wonders, time?
Wasn’t there recently – past decade or so – a demonstration project that used ion thrusters to place a satellite in lunar orbit from Earth orbit by judicious firings at perigee over the course of many orbits, perhaps hundreds, that eventually placed apogee close enough to the moon for lunar capture?
I suppose that, in the case of Mars and especially objects further away, a very high cruise speed to shorten transit time might place passive orbital capture out of reach?
…which is about where this discussion is taking my own grasp of orbital mechanics…out of reach… 🙂
I was thinking of something like the Oberth effect. Rockets (and the fuel required) are all about changes in velocity. But orbits are all about energy (and angular momentum.) Energy depends on the square of velocity, so a small change in velocity can make a big difference if the spacecraft is moving fast. So it pays to make short, high-acceleration maneuvers at closest approach. For example, if you were approaching Mars at 5 km/s, and wanted to stop near it but without getting close, that’s going to take 5 km/s of delta-v. If you dive in to just about the clouds, you’ll get there with a velocity of 7 km/s, and need 2 km/s of delta v to get into a minimum capture orbit. But that does require high acceleration, so this option isn’t open to electric propulsion. The low thrust spirals would probably need eight or nine km/s for the same job.
For the lunar mission you were describing. I think it was actually two. SMART-1 was a electric propulsion spacecraft which slowly worked its way to lunar orbit. But I don’t think they did anything too exotic to enter lunar orbit. The other one (well, two) I can think of are a couple of the THEMIS spacecraft, with conventional propulsion. Their extended mission (in which they were renamed ARTEMIS, in a masterstroke of convolved acronyms) involved getting themselves into lunar orbit using almost no fuel and some really complicated circling around the Earth-Moon L1 or L2 point (I forget which.)
Those orbits will also work for a capture into Martian orbit from an Earth-Mars transfer. But it would take forever. The time required scales (roughly) with the orbital period of the target. So it would be about 25 times longer for Mars than the Moon. ARTEMIS took two and a half years, so I’d suspect half a century might be required for Mars. Of course, the orbital mechanics can come up with some clever solutions. So that might “only” be a decade.
Thanks for the handy rule of thumb.
For some kinds of future supply missions one could imagine that a 5 or even 10 year transit time would be supported by the much lower cost of propulsion.
Or something like that.
Definitely. If you can live with a transfer time of a decade, there are some very efficient ways to get payload to Mars (or, more-or-less) anywhere. Even then, the costs would be high, so I suspect this will end up producing a very lucrative commodities and futures market.
killing SLS in FY18 and buying commercial rides will free up billions a year and many good people to build new vehicles that can carry people from LEO. 50 years after Apollo, NASA does not need to build its own rockets anymore. Time to start thinking outside the box. Keep Orion, but buy rides.
at this point, SLS is the embodiment of Congress’ irrational control over NASA, with respect to both the nonsensical approach of the politicians and the complete helplessness of the agency.
You mean the US government…has been lying….to the
American people??? Noooooo….. how could they.
Well, one would think, that after 10 or 15 years overseeing Shuttle (and its premature termination), ISS, and Orion and SLS that these thoughts have finally sunk in just as he espoused them. But something Gerstenmaier has also seen first hand is that EVERYONE else works far more efficiently and effectively than his NASA organization. We are talking Russians, Europeans, Japanese, commercial providers. I have heard second hand that he likes to complain that one person or another has created problems. But what I have not seen are any dramatic changes or fixes. Maybe it is time for him to fix the NASA situation? You really wonder if he and NASA knows how? They have worked so inefficiently and ineffectively for so long.
Is there any country that can free up the money to put people on Mars all by themselves right now? I think that’s a big ask right now. Wouldn’t the prudent move be to work with international partners? ESA? JAXA?
I just don’t see, given the political climate, having a Congress in the next few decades that will provide the funding necessary to put humans on Mars.
It’s my opinion that a good chunk of NASA’s manned spaceflight budget is being squandered by the SLS/Orion program. In 2017, it’s clear that NASA doesn’t need to be building its own launch vehicles or its own “space taxi”. Let’s face it, for a Mars mission, Orion won’t do much of anything except “taxi” astronauts to the Mars transfer vehicle/HAB that will take them to Mars and later take them back to earth. Orion is far too small to be anything more than a glorified taxi on a Mars mission.
Any country (or company) willing to accept high risks could reduce the price of an human Mars mission to an affordable level. Now ask if any country (or company) can afford the political costs of a 10% chance (or greater) of a fatal accident.
> Now ask if any country (or company) can afford the political costs of a 10% chance (or greater) of a fatal accident.
Yes, and yes. That never stopped Russia, and it wouldn’t stop China who has a military space program — not that they have the will to do the things with that much risk for other reasons.
And private companies? That’s comparable to the risks take on by Everest mountain guides. And that hasn’t stopped mountain tourism from being a legitimate business. I guarantee you’ll be able to find volunteers at that risk level. When there are accidents there will be shutdowns and investigations of course, but many industries deal with such issues (including mountain climbing to carry the comparison).
For private companies (and nations which don’t control the press too heavily), the actual risk is subjective. No matter what, human spaceflight is very high profile. The risk for your Everest mountain guild might be similar, but if he gets killed, it isn’t going to get very much press coverage. At least, not nearly as much coverage as an astronaut getting killed on the way to Mars. A rather infamous person once said that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths were a statistic. Private companies would have to worry about the public _perception_ of accidents, not the actually reality of how often they happen. That affects things like stockholder confidence.
I seem to recall the Everest avalanche getting quite a bit of press coverage. There was also a pretty high budget movie two years ago about the 96 climbing season disaster. The colossal disaster that was deep water horizon hasn’t stopped drilling for oil. It’s not at all obvious to me that space is any way special here.
It’s a matter of degree. In extreme, terrestrial cases (Deepwater Horizon or the VW emissions cheating software may count), you may be right. I was just saying that the rational calculations, considering the probability of success, benefits of success, costs of failure, etc. can involve more than the direct costs. If the venture (or the failure) is sufficiently high-profile, there are indirect costs from the resulting PR disaster.
China has discretionar funds but no desire for a space race. More critically, sending humans to Mars is currently too expensive to be practical. We need new technology that will reduce cost. Regretably, cost was driven to new highs in SLS/Orion, in part by the use of legacy hardware.
That’s about as succinct a summary as possible.
Well as long as NASA requires tens of billions of $$ for decades even just to recreate an Apollo command module, and with ESA providing the Service Module, I do not think that even doubling the old man’s budget would be of much help. I don’t think his prime problem is money. It must be something else, because his space program spends exorbitantly.
Look at ISS, which the AA managed before moving to DC. It was in work for 2 decades before it launched and its been another 2 decades since its first launch. It is not a particularly complex system as space systems go. A lot of it was not designed or built in the US. And despite all their whining and complaining, the budget is still huge, and I don’t think NASA ever failed to get the money they said they needed. At the outset it was supposed to cost tens of billions of dollars. Now it is apparently up to going on $200 billion. Yet, for some reason, they have few serious customers to use the facility. Paying to develop, establish or maintain the customer base was not big bucks. We are talking tens of millions of $$ compared to the $$ billions being spent; the US hardware was finished a decade ago; there is not a lot of infrastructure required on the ground any longer. So where is all the money going?
I don’t think his prime problem is money.
Seems to me the ISS could be “repurposed”, fitted with some nuke power and ion engines, and sent to Mars. Of course, I’m an EE, so a bunch of MEs would have to weigh in on the feasibility…
This means less too me than it should. I’ve already given up on NASA flying there on their own rocket. Next Step already looks ahead to a future of Space Act agreement contracts for all future space transport needs. NASA has vibed this for years.
The timing is perfect. EM-1 seems far enough along to be a done deal even if the project gets scrapped right after.
Go FH!
You mean go to Congress and tell them SLS/Orion is simply not needed in today’s world of commercial launch vehicles and commercial “space taxis”?
A long time NASA career scientist once told me when I was in grad school: If you want to know what this country values, watch the money in the budgets. Everything else is just air, moving.
Yes, and I remember graduate students in Earth sciences and planetary science making jokes about the “fundopause”. Lots of points in a planet’s atmosphere are called a something-pause, and it usually means the altitude above which something stops. E.g. the tropopause is the altitude above which turbulent convection stops (well, sort of, the technical definition is a little messier.) The fundopause is, therefore, the altitude above which funding stops.
Heh, totally get this.
In fact, I did my doctoral thesis on the plasmapause. I’ve since transitioned to a different field, partially due to the “fundopause”. 🙂
Time for NASA to signal that the Scientists and Engineers in the Rocket fields to head towards SpaceX, and Blue Origin.
SpaceX only wants people that are 25 and have 30 years experience. Blue maybe a little older. They both get piles of resumes already.
Certainly not with a ‘business as usual’ approach. Time to look outside the square. Oh, wait a moment. That means no automatic jobs programs and no or a reduced level of pork. No, can’t have that.
Hey I know. They can get the WH to fund it all. Nope that doesn’t work since they need Congress and most in there are pretty ambivalent to the whole hsf program. Nope, looks like the current program carries on its merry way and ain’t nobody at NASA going very far any time soon.
Cheers
I hear this a lot. People not wanting to choose how we get to Mars, but just want us to get to Mars. While this is understandable, it’s also quite counterproductive given today’s political realities.
Apollo/Saturn was a product of the Space Race which was sparked by the Cold War. Because of this, it enjoyed virtual “blank check” style funding coupled with a “waste anything but time” mentality. That’s how you win a Space Race that all of the politicians support. But, those times are long gone. The budget cutting started in the mid 1960’s, years before the first successful manned lunar landing.
The political reality that we live in today is that NASA’s funding will be relatively “flat” for some time to come. So, if you want NASA to go to Mars, the question becomes how to do that withing the reality of budget constraints. The fact is that SLS/Orion is not helping and is actually hurting NASA’s ability to “do big things” in space by sucking up far too much of the budget.
In many ways, Apollo was the worst thing that could have happened to NASA.
What I mean is this: the groupthink engendered by the money-is-no-object approach to space hardware has created an agency fifty years later that is unable to think outside the box. The standard NASA answer for problems encountered is: “Sure, we can do it, but space is hard – and expensive!”
Hardened by habit, inured through exposure, we accept as normal an historical, ApolloThink approach to space that is demonstrably unsustainable.
One egregious example of ApolloThink: answering the rocket equation by dumping into the ocean or atmosphere beautifully engineered and crafted hardware.
Sanity seeps in, though sadly not into the arms of NASA.
We now see that the NASA Approach is not the Only Approach. A few short years, as we have seen, are sufficient to develop an entirely new family of rockets, including new engines with sufficient lifting capacity to answer any foreseeable project. This new family of rockets was developed from scratch for less than $400 million dollars. That very same machine, lovingly crafted and maintained, is capable of a dozen launches.
We learned this while SLS was sucking money out of NASA at a rate stunning to anyone not infected by ApolloThink. SLS’ cost is pegged at $28 Billion by the GAO. And of that amount, $20 Billion has gone to overhead.
ApolloThink. This is why Gerst thinks he doesn’t have the money. The NASA that he leads can’t think outside the box. In fact, this NASA can’t see the handwriting on the wall.
I’d add the “failure is not an option” mindset. It rules out pushing state of the art as far as it can go and learning from mistakes (if you don’t make mistakes, it’s hard to learn from them.) If a sense, it’s odd that the early astronauts when from an environment (test flight at Edwards) with an appallingly high rate of accidents and fatalities. But even if fatal accidents are unacceptable, what about simply making sure accidents are survivable rather than trying to avoid them entirely? That is not the approach NASA acquired during and after the Apollo period.
I disagree that NASA is risk-adverse. They are personally risk-adverse, even if that increases risk overall. Not because of individual weaknesses of character, but because of agency culture.
Wayne Hale wrote about the aftermath of Columbia, being told, from an outside perspective (John Glenn, no less), to eliminate the tens of thousands of waivers and exemptions to requirements/procedures/standards that had grown up around the STS program.
Many of those were trivial, and simply that no-one had been allowed to formally change the requirements… it was always easier to grant a waiver. (Which should be seen as a danger sign, but were instead seen as “the way things work”, not to be questioned.)
Many, thousands, were more serious, but easily and relatively cheaply solveable en-mass if someone had the will. (Hale uses the example of electromagnatic interference testing for the orbiters. It wasn’t hard, the facilities existed, it just had to be done and no-one had previously been willing to speak up.)
But some waivers were major risks (exemptions to basic electrical safety standards, like minimum wire bend-radius, a major short and fire risk), which had been allowed during development, but then once granted, persisted for decades, no-one being willing to say “This is a bad thing”. No-one even being willing to look at whether it was an unacceptable risk.
Those thousands of waivers were not a sign of a culture of “failure is not an option”, they were a sign of a culture of “failures are not to be discussed.”
And even after a major disaster, it still took an outside voice to demand that they look at the many, many risks they’d blinded themselves to. It took both those two huge forces in order to override the entrenched cultural avoidance of taking personal risk in being willing to question program-risk.
[Hale gave another example talking about the Columbia accident, although he didn’t intend it to show the same thing. Before re-entry, the program head brought all the senior people together in a room, stood in front of them, and demanded “is there anything we haven’t done” and stared at each person in turn. No-one spoke. If you know anything about group-think, can you think of a better way of crippling discussion if you were trying? Yet, to this day, everyone in the room thinks it was a sign that they couldn’t have done more.]
Without really disagreeing, you’re describing the effects of NASA’s approach on risk. It does not, in some cases, actually reduce risk; in others, it reduces risk by less than people may think. But I think the intention is to reduce risk, and I think that there is a belief that reducing risk, regardless of the cost, is inherently a good thing. I’d call that “risk averse.”
I think people at NASA would make that statement (and I’m willing to bet that false claims of risk are used by managers to bully opponents into silence), but I don’t think it’s how the agency works. And not just that they are “reducing risk by less than people think”, they are increasing program risk in order to reduce personal political risk.
The examples of decades old waivers/exemptions Wayne Hale mentioned were not things that “didn’t reduce risk as much as expected”, they were decision that raised risk for often trivial savings. (The wiring in the ECLSS packs was a matter of a few grand. The EMI testing was a few million. Etc.) And how much did it end up costing to test RCC panels against foam-strikes after the loss of Columbia? Versus the cost of not doing so before re-entry. Spend anything, do anything, to reduce risk? Hardly.
—
However, the claim that NASA is “risk adverse” usually relates to the types of programs funded and flown.
Yet Orion is a high-risk design, both as a too-large re-entry capsule and as a crew vehicle launched on solids (both under SLS and Ares). A low risk design would have been an Apollo-scale capsule plus a small mission habitat containing the necessary BEO extras.
SLS is a high-risk, low-reward design. Even if you are recycling shuttle parts, SLS changes everything just enough to screw up the whole idea of “existing knowledge”. (Look at the problems that Boeing is having with the tanks.) Jupiter-DIRECT was probably the most conservative SDLV design that avoided side-mount. And using man-rated EELVs was even lower-risk.
Except politically.
Likewise, under Constellation, Ares was the Griffin’s personal pony, making it risky for anyone in the agency to point out the problems, or criticise the many false justifications for it (including scaling up Orion so it definitely couldn’t fit on an EELV).
Likewise, when the decision was made to avoid additional independent testing of Hubble’s main mirror, because curvature could be indirectly checked using the same algorithm that shaped the mirror, that was a high-risk decision.
Likewise, JWST is an extremely high-risk design that has cost many multiples more than expected. But the then boss, Goldin IIRC, had demanded a big scope and so it was personally riskier to criticise it than to go several times over-budget and behind schedule.
Likewise, the tendency to produce one-off robotic mission hardware, rather than develop incrementally. How is it reducing risk when every piece of hardware is a unique prototype?
IMO, NASA isn’t risk adverse. Not in the way people mean when they say that. Rather, they are infested by a dangerous tendency to group-think.
Not following your thinking. I understand your point about ‘group-think’ risk aversion. But how does, for instance, Orion’s capsule size demonstrate the point?
And on Constellation and Hubble: would it also be fair to say that these are examples of strong leadership? Leadership that was in hindsight hobbled in some way, but contemporaneously they were simply examples of *someone* at NASA making a bold decision and carrying it forward? (This being something that many here continuously hammer NASA for *not* doing)
Once you scale the capsule shape beyond the size of the Apollo capsule, the physics of re-entry change enough that it’s essentially new territory for development. You are starting from scratch, without being able to benefit from past knowledge. Ie, you are deliberately taking a high-risk approach.
Likewise the widening of the Shuttle-ET to become the SLS core stage, it pushed the weld-process into dark-arts new territory, yet the whole point of SLS was meant to be to take advantage of “existing Shuttle knowledge” (it’s written in the frickin’ legislation.)
If you were risk-adverse (in the sense that people usually mean), you would limit yourself the scale that’s come before.
However, in the case of Orion, Griffin wanted to prevent anyone from being able to argue for cancelling Ares I and instead using a man-rated Atlas V. So he rigged the game, forcing the design of Orion to become much larger than was necessary. Anyone who criticised him and his team for doing so increased their career “risk”. So you saw the same kind of group-think that you sometimes see with SLS, “Well, Congress is going to fund it anyway, so instead of endlessly complaining, shouldn’t we talk about what capabilities it gives us?”, in the case of Orion, it’s the fear of bringing Griffin’s wrath down upon yourself.
NASA is still paying for that incompetence.
“Hobbled” implies an external effect. The flaws I mentioned were entirely self-driven. And a culture of supposed “risk adversion” would have prevented that.
And that was what I was trying to respond to. The criticism of NASA, IMO, is misdirected. The problem isn’t “risk adversion”, nor is it “failing to follow through”. Quite the contrary.
Let me put it differently. All the rules, which led to things like those thousands of waivers per Shuttle flight, were put in place because someone said, “This could be a potential risk, we have to do something about it.”
The institutional attitude is that, if a risk is identified, you are expected to do something about it. Not shrug it off as unlikely or too expensive to do anything about. Even if the risk is accepted, that’s usually only after extensive study, to show that there are no practical alternatives or that the risk is low by some very conservative standard.
Now, some of the measures to “address” a risk may be counterproductive. (Creating a situation with thousands of waivers, and the real, serious risks getting lost in the shuffle, is one. Conservatism in environmental requirements for unmanned missions, and thereby forcing engineers away from proven designs and into new, custom ones, is another.) Some risks may be pointed out by people who simply don’t want to get blamed is an unlikely event goes wrong (essentially, an official, documented way of saying, “Well, you can’t blame me. I warned you.”) I’ve personally seen a couple cases where I’m fairly sure the risks were identified by people looking for money (“X could be a risk, and now that I’ve identified it, you have to pay me to study ways to mitigate it.”) But all that is put in place with the official, ostensible, purpose of avoiding rather than accepting risks.
For the really complex things you mention, SLS or the James Webb deployments (or the MSL “sky crane” landing system, I might add), that gets into some of the group think you wrote about. The philosophy is that, no matter how complex and difficult, a project can be made low risk by having enough rules to identify and mitigate all the risks. I don’t think that works, and I know it drives up costs. But that’s the sort of thing I mean by “risk adverse.”
Except they specifically didn’t “do something about it” until they lost an Orbiter and someone from outside the agency hammered them into doing something.
The personal risk in getting a waiver was vastly less than the risk of pushing for testing, design changes or rewriting requirements. Getting a waiver covers your own ass, it doesn’t reduce the risk to the program. Again, personal risk, not programmatic risk.
(I suspect that exaggerated risk (including risk to funding) is often used as an excuse to bully other people, in order to defend an actual higher risk option that the bully wants.)
That culture has probably evolved because of the tendency to adopt high risk strategies in major programs. And it persists, not because it lowers the risk of those high-risk strategies, but because it’s a high personal risk to criticise it.
>> The institutional attitude is that, if a risk is
>> identified, you are expected to do something
>> about it.
> Except they specifically didn’t “do something
> about it” until they lost an Orbiter and someone
> from outside the agency hammered them into
>doing something.
No, they didn’t do anything to actually reduce the risk. They did, however, follow procedures which, officially and in some theoretical sense, are the approved way to “do something” about the risk.
If a risk can be avoided by saying “no debris shedding during launch”, and you make that a requirement, that’s technically “doing something.” Something unrealistic, and something that will just get waived on every launch, and therefore doing something useless about the risk. Possibly something actually harmful, since it leads to accepting risks, or “normalizing” them, without really understanding them. But it’s technically “doing something” about an identified risk, something in line with official policies and “best practices”, and that’s what is expected.
It has also evolved, at least to this observer, in tandem with the behavior of civil servants across the government and at every level who are afraid to make a mistake lest every taxpayer in the country start whining about how his taxes are being ‘wasted’.
With wing nuts contending that taxation is nothing short of theft (and gaining adherents every year, by the way) there’s no wonder that folks are fearful.
Regarding that oft used quote “Failure is not an option” well it is totally made up and no one in Mission Control ever spoke these words. For the true story check this link out: http://www.spaceacts.com/no…
I know. But Gene Kranz thought it captured the attitude and feelings of the people involved. Enough so that he used it as the title of his autobiography. History is full of apocryphal quotes that are, none the less, good expressions of a particular attitude, opinion or event.
The fact that NASA is not going to Mars anytime in the next quarter century is not the news. The news is that Bill said they have been paying too much for Orion and SLS. I think everyone knew this, its just that he finally admitted it. But as the top guy responsible for spending the money, why isn’t he trying to control it?
“There” where?
Running harder in a wrong direction is not progress towards anything. Quite the contrary.
You’re not happy with the large permanent settlements on the moon that followed Apollo? Which didn’t happen. Because it turns out that “I don’t care how we go, just go” isn’t a path to anything permanent.
If you mean, “I demand you spend tens of billions to produce a one-off stunt mission that has no long term purpose and effectively cripples space development for decades, just so I have something that sort of reminds me of my childhood”, then no, screw you, you selfish prick.
The same thing that happened when Obama tried to get the same thing.
Well, sure, but then it was *Obama*, wasn’t it?
It really depends on how much political capitol the administration is willing to spend. The pro-ISS/Orion faction in Congress isn’t really all that strong. They can get what they want because there simply isn’t any significant anti-ISS/Orion faction. Mr. Obama never really had any particular reason to fight over it. Actual accomplishments in space might fit Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda (or rhetoric.) If so, he might be willing to expend some political capitol to make it happen. It might not take much.
Looks like it’s about time for a NACA model for human spaceflight at NASA. At least for launch vehicles.
On the face of it, SLS is exactly the sort of program that would draw the attention of the current administration.
There will be no “robust budget increase”. This is the #1 myth of US manned space travel and we’re not going to be going anywhere until it’s dispelled and NASA starts to focus on doing more with less. Saying “thank you sir may I have another” when Congress appropriates funding every year for the albatross of SLS around NASA’s neck is ignoring reality.
I think NASA also has a credibility problem when it comes to budgets. They could tell Congress that the budget does not support the goals Congress is setting for NASA. In fact, many reports and studies have said so.
But now we have SpaceX developing launch vehicles for four to ten times less than NASA could (according to NASA’s own statements.) We’ve got India sending a unmanned mission to Mars for $73 million, compared to half a billion for a NASA mission (which is a totally unfair comparison, given the capabilities of the spacecraft in question) and the UAE is planning to do so for a similarly low cost.
In that context, can NASA realistically say they are doing the best they can with the money Congress gives them? Or are congressmen likely to regard those statements with great skepticism?
Technology.
To cancel Constellation and shift funding to commercial launch and a major technology development push. At the time, a big part of the wishlist was for new generation large hydrocarbon engines, plus restoring the tech-dev programs killed under Griffin to feed into Ares (which included the Prometheus reactor).
If you started today, the wishlist would be different (commercial launch would be assumed capable of more), but the basic principle is the same. Kill the stupid big rocket program and switch the funding to commercial and tech-development, using a specific over-goal as a way of focusing effort.