Yet Another NASA Space Policy Report That Reveals No Policy
National Space Exploration Campaign Report – Pursuant to Section 432(b) of the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 (P.L. 115-10), September 2018, NASA
Keith’s note: Once again NASA is trying to tell us that all is well in space and that it is moving ahead with a plan – “The National Space Exploration Campaign aims to revitalize and add direction to NASA’s enduring purpose to carry out human and robotic exploration missions, expanding the frontiers of human experience and scientific discovery of the natural phenomena of Earth, other worlds, and the cosmos as a whole.”
Despite the lofty words including the addition of the “cosmos” among NASA’s ambitions, this plan is actually a withdrawal from earlier, more lofty exploration goals.
Of course, this report from NASA was due quite some time ago (last year) but NASA never bothers to do what Congress directs them to do – even if it is in the form of public law i.e. P.L. 115-10 which was enacted on 21 March 2017.
According to this report: “2024 – Based on results of human-class lunar lander capability demonstration missions, status of other human systems, other possible mission enhancements (e.g., retro-braking stage, launch vehicle availability) make decision on date and method of human lunar surface return and the mission objectives.” In other words we still have to wait until 2024 to decide how to land Americans on the Moon a gain. But then it will take how may years before we actually do this?
All the report says is “Post-2024 Decisions – Based on the cost of lunar surface access, viability of higher-power systems and ISRU, as revealed by exploration and science missions and technology investments, and on private-sector and international demand for lunar surface access, determine the nature of a sustainable American human presence on the lunar surface and associated infrastructure development projects.”
In other words it will be close to the 2030s before an American lunar lander reaches the Moon. During the Obama Administration we were going to be sending human crews to Mars (if you believed their Powerpoint slides) by the early 2030s. So now NASA is going to take almost as long only to land humans a quarter million miles away. Those are certainly lowered expectations. That sounds like negative progress – again, if you believe NASA’s notional Powerpoint slides and white papers.
Meanwhile, in another potential magic act. NASA will wave more Powerpoint charts and make ISS totally commercial:
“2022 – Based on status of commercial module and/or free-flyer space station development and emerging commercial activities on ISS, fine-tune plans to end direct Federal funding of ISS by 2025 to ensure continuous access to a LEO space platform. Post-2024 Decisions – Based on the status of commercial module and/or free-flyer space station development and emerging commercial human spaceflight activities in LEO, decide on appropriate NASA and overall governmental support to ensure ongoing NASA requirements and permanent U.S. presence in LEO.”
In other words NASA says that this ISS conversion to private sector operations will happen – unless it doesn’t happen.
As For Mars, well, the whole “by the mid-2030s” thing that Obama people made NASA say does not look very plausible now. Not only will NASA just be landing its first people back on the Moon again, but according to this report it won’t even have an architecture for going back to Mars for another 6 years (Apollo had one before people even flew on Apollo but who cares). One would assume, at this snail’s pace, that vehicle design and construction would drag on like Orion/SLS has for the past decade.
“2024- Based on results of investment in Mars-forward technology R&D investment portfolio, Gateway development and operations, launch vehicle and crew vehicle development and operations, decide on architecture of human Mars orbital mission and begin associated systems development. Post-2024 Decisions – Based on results of robotic roundtrip mission, cislunar operations, and progress of Mars-forward technology R&D investment portfolio, determine set of technology investments and timeline required to achieve human landing on the surface of Mars.”
In a nutshell, NASA’s words may indicate that it has lofty goals but the murky timeline it presents suggests that its ability to do the things needed to meet these goals decreases in terms of speed with every passing year. Meanwhile, American commercial companies with billions in their own funding are planning to send people back to the Moon.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Of course they don’t appear to tale into account the possibility/probability of commercial outfits (SpaceX, et al) landing crewed spacecraft on the Moon before that. Unless, NASA drags its feet in certifying such craft, thus making their own predictions a self-fulfilling prophesy! (NASA should have nothing to do with certifying spacecraft/boosters. That should be the province of the FAA!
NASA will only get to certify them if they carry NASA astronauts. The BFR proposed lunar flight is privately funded and only needs licenses from the FAA and, if the proposed new laws pass, the DOC. NASA will have no say in it, which is why it’s probably not included. Besides SpaceX is only sending tourists to the Moon, not real astronauts, so it has nothing to do with NASA. ?
NASA will be able to say, “Well, if it were up to us, we’d say no.” And, after hearing that and wondering what a fatal accident would do to their career, it might affect the decision of FAA and DoC officials.
So far SpaceX has gotten a lot of flexibility in thier non-NASA launches. The FAA requirements are mainly to assure safety of the public.
They survived the SpaceshipTwo accident without any issues. Folks understand space is dangerous.
I’m still uncomfortable about this. The FAA officials didn’t get blamed for authorizing the SpaceShipTwo work because (1) it wasn’t very high profile, as a passenger-carrying, orbital flight would be, and (2) it was a test flight and the only person killed in the accident was a test pilot. If you compare the public reaction to that from Columbia or Challenger (allegedly “operational” vehicles with a crew considered to be something different from test pilots), I’m not sure. Do folks realize that space is dangerous, to that test pilots have a dangerous job. Some of both, I’m sure, but I’m not sure about the balance.
Remember when we were hoping for a Mars orbital mission in the 2030s, and possibly a landing late in that decade? Expectations just keep on slipping – now it’s no Moon landing until the 2030s.
No, I remember when we were hoping for a manned Mars landing around 1990.
I remember when it was 2019. Kim Stanley Robinson had it in 2020 in his 1990 Red Mars book.
And Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles has the first landing in 1999. And I may be one of the youngest people born before men walked on the Moon (two and a half months old at the time.) I really don’t like thinking about how long I’ve spent watching NASA delay or destroy a dream.
When NASA was still doing Project Apollo it was in 1978 using upgraded Saturn Vs and a NERVA powered Mars craft based on modified Apollo/Saturn technology. Here is a 1968 film from NASA showing how they would do it. The baseline Mars mission starts at 18:35 in the film 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Yes, this is the future that we were promised by NASA.
And, back then, you could test fire nuclear rockets in the open air. I love the smell of uranium in the morning. It smells like victory.
Yes, and nuclear tests were a spectator event…
https://lasvegassun.com/new…
“Las Vegas capitalized on the test site’s close proximity with beauty pageants, special events and bomb-viewing vacation packages.”
Its amazing how the world has changed since the 1950’s.
Yea… When my mother was working for the IAEA around then, she helped edit a conference proceeding on the peaceful uses for atomic explosives. Fun ideas like widening the Panama Canal, or producing a hydrothermal power source for a city, good for decades, by a subsurface detonation in the water table. I’m torn between thinking some of those ideas might be cool and thinking they are completely and totally insane.
FYI here is a report on Project Plowshare. Its amazing how many test explosions they did, not just in Nevada, but also in Colorado and New Mexico. I always thought the data they gathered could have applications in asteriod defense strategies.
https://www.osti.gov/openne…
Von Braun had very aggressive ideas, supposing hundreds in orbits quickly, and Mrs very soon.
When I look back at those plans and drawings (from Life, and other places), I do wonder what exactly Dr. von Braun and cohorts missed.
What is it that we know now that he did not know then? How many months/years would have passed before he learned what we know now about difficulty?
Which 1960s assumptions were naive? Where were the knowledge “holes”?
He missed that all the funding would dry up after Apollo.
I think they were simply projecting the trends of the past years or decades. Consider the progress in aviation, from 1903 to 1953, or in spaceflight from 1957 to 1962. In the mid-1960s, it wasn’t absurd to imaging the state of the art improving by orders of magnitude in just a couple decades. Von Braun may not have had any idea how, exactly, it would improve; he may simply have assumed that it would, because there was an obvious precedent for order of magnitude improvements.
Spaceflight has always been a function of money. The good thing now is that some billionaires are accumulating enough to provide an alternative pathway beyond NASA.
And, although it isn’t exactly spaceflight, you could call the government funding of rocketry a late 20th century anomaly. Goddard’s early work and the Berlin rocket club were privately funded. A fair fraction of early science fiction was written as if the idea of massive, government funding was inconceivable and the assumption of private funding for spaceflight was a natural and obvious assumption.
From Keith’s note: “2024 – Based on results of human-class lunar lander capability demonstration missions, status of other human systems, other possible mission enhancements (e.g., retro-braking stage, launch vehicle availability) make decision on date and method of human lunar surface return and the mission objectives.”
My interpretation, this is NASAspeak for waiting on news from Hawthorne about their progress on going to, landed on and get off the Moon.
If the folks from Hawthorne manages to fly @yousuck2020 and friends around the Moon before 2024. Then it will be a easy decision to just book a flight landing on the Moon. Failure to do so will result in a mass resignation of the disgruntle Astronaut corps. Heck, even one Scott Kelly wants to come out of retirement to “volunteer” as ship’s caretaker with the @yousuck2020 project.
I think we have to face the fact that NASA as currently organized simply is not capable of conducting human spaceflight anymore.
It’s not how it is organized, but how it has become risk averse after losing two space shuttles. Why do think CCP is taking so long?
It was risk averse before the Shuttles were lost. Heck, America has become risk averse as a whole.
That may be a result of lengthening life expectancy. Doing something risky, when you’re forty and unlikely to life past sixty five? That’s what test pilots around 1950 were doing. Taking the same risks when you’re likely to live to ninety? That’s gambling on 50 rather than 25 years of life.
The only thing they are capable of is spending huge sums of money. NASA is nothing but a white collar, pc jobs program. Look at the Webb telescope. How many years wasted and dollars spent has this NASA project accomplished being behind schedule and over budget. Ares, SLS, EUS how many more wasteful programs will they sell the American public? They can make computer generated videos and real fancy posters telling everyone how great they are but what have they accomplished? What of the ISS and what real research is going on there and what exactly has been done to further the human condition? Speaking factual truth and honesty gets you labeled as a trouble maker and not a team player. NASA is completely filled with politicians who can’t get out of their own way and are afraid of upsetting somebody. If you want to talk with somebody going somewhere in space, I suggest Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They will be on the moon and going to Mars before NASA can get off the ground.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, I think the study makes it quite clear. As far as it’s concerned, NASA job is to study the problems, not to solve them or accomplish anything. Unless you consider writing reports on the studies to be an accomplishment.
Yes, the ultimate triumph of the bureaucratics since reports reduce the risk of a failure to zero. ?
The safest spaceflight is the one that never launches.
Exactly! Paralysis through analysis!
There is always a risk of submitting the report late, or of having a senior manager ask you to revise it. Let’s not ignore all the dare devil risks of moving paperwork around.
Keith seems to be reading more into the plan than I do. As far as I can tell the plan is to build the current spaceship and hope partners will contribute to help create a new deep space ship, the Gateway. Anything more than that is part of a future plan; not part of the current plan that is in work. Personally I wonder whether NASA has a future. I will have to put my faith in Mr. Musk. I expect nothing of NASA.
“I expect nothing of NASA”
Now, hold on…would it be fair to say that you mean “I expect nothing of NASA’s HSF efforts?”
Many here with far deeper knowledge of NASA and the abilities of the Agency that I have point out repeatedly that the Agency’s HSF efforts are a small part of the portfolio.
In some ways NASA would be a more effective Agency could it jettison HSF.
More effective perhaps, but far less interesting. While I think the unmanned NASA missions have been awesome, if they gave up on HSF I would see it as an epic fail.
Maybe. I don’t agree with you about the Index of Interestingness, though. Cassini and Galileo and Voyager certainly keep my interest.
More importantly we need these robots to go first.
The Gateway is just another excuse (ala ARM) to avoid building a lander for whatever reason.
Landers as a class of device are being obviated by Mr. Musk’s approach: just land the whole damn thing.
Maybe this proposal is the most realistic one they’ve done (of late) ? Maybe they’re starting to realise the budget limitations they have.
Maybe they’re hoping that this “dismal” plan will spur Congress into allocating more funds ?
It is a shame they don’t include commercial companies as an adjunct to their own projects/plans. Eg, we’ll leverage SpaceX’s FH and BFR to carry our landers; or possibly (more limited) we’ll design payloads for commercial landers to carry, and we’ll create projects (eg ISRU) for commercial landers to action.
Seems to be missing a chapter on cost estimates.
I will be surprised if anyone born in the 20th century will live long enough to see humans on Mars. And don’t give the SpaceX argument. They have lots yet unlearned, unproven, unfunded.
You know, the more I look at BFR the more it scares me — I mean the timeline.
SX’ ability to build the booster is something that is assessable; we can look at the track record of F1/F9/FH, where we see demonstrated a regular succession of lessons learned, and applied. We see a focused company learning from itself.
It’s the part above the booster — the “spaceship” — that is difficult to assess. To SpaceX, this is a huge *new* machine of awesome complexity, easily compared to STS.
If you follow Tesla/SX, like I (try) to do, photos of the booster’s pieces show up from time to time. These are stunningly huge, 9M in diameter, impressive as hell. But these are boosters, something that SX demonstrably knows how to do (though the scale is different). They are simple devices, big tanks and plumbing with proven motors fastened to the back.
Of course this description is an uneducated simplification. But thee’s this: compare the booster and the spaceship.
The spaceship is so hugely, monstrously complex, compared to the booster.
What exactly is involved in carving our 40 staterooms? Hell, here on Earth, chases for the HVAC are difficult enough! It’s a hotel, with all that implies: kitchen facilities, of course, but that is just the beginning. Even if it’s a big empty space inside meant for holding cargo, the number of specialized systems needed to fly, and land, and fly, such a thing makes booster construction seem almost trivial. (Almost). Start with supersonic propulsive re-entry — I can’t believe I typed that with such ease. Then go to life support, guidance, landing systems…
We’ve heard very little about this “Hotel”, which is a better word for it, and I think the paucity of information is for very good reasons.
I don’t know what they are, though 🙂
Kind of like building a few row-boats and then saying your next project is the “Symphony of the Seas.”
Rigt. And unless I’ve missed it, I have seen no recent hires, or company acquisitions, in an attempt to bolster in-house capabilities.
With Dragon the manned vehicle is similarly complex, but the first flying model was for cargo only. This might be the case with BFR as well, leaving a couple of years to design the life support system after the flight dynamics are verified. Despite the larger size and higher speed, some major hurdles have been overcome with the Falcon booster and the BFS can build on this, for example in the use of an entry burn to reduce velocity and thus aerodynamic heating. Musk used a similar approach with the Tesla battery gigafactory; the basic structure built in a simple and flexible design before the interior details were determined. For a spacecraft, the structure, aerodynamics, propulsion, and control are the greatest challange. Once they are clearly defined, life support can be designed around them.
Yes, and its first job will be to deploy his space based Internet service. It could also easily deliver multiple comsats straight to GEO, but I don’t think their designers will be ready for such a service.
Good points, there have been some direct-to-GEO launches and Ariane can carry double GEO payloads, but the BFR will be on a larger scale and the market may not be large enough to accomodate it. Maybe more poweful GEO satellites with antennas that can communicate directly with handsets 35,000km away? say 0 decibels for the handset and 60-80 decibels for the space antenna? Is it possible?
When you’re talking about tonnes of payload, quite a few things are possible. Your handset example would take an antenna 100 times larger than that required for a satellite in a low Earth orbit. But people are talking about using small (<100 kg) satellites in LEO for that application. A 10 tonne satellite in geostationary orbit is quite large by modern standards, but if BFR really delivers cheap, heavy lift, it isn’t a crazy idea.
But geostationary orbit is also an easier ride-share than low Earth orbit. LEO constellations depend on multiple orbital planes. For GEO, you just need the right longitude, and it’s relatively easy to drift from one longitude to another. As long as you are willing to take a few months, the propulsive requirements are small compared to station keeping over a decade or so of operating lifetime. It’s quite conceivable for BFR to launch half a dozen or a dozen communications satellites to GEO in one flight. Launching a few hundred, smaller satellites to LEO _and_ getting them into a bunch of different orbital planes could be more challenging.
Yes, it would be a good match. Also the BFR could be used to help clean up GEO by returning the older non-functioning satellites to Earth for placement in museums or disposal.
Placing thousands of birds in very low LEO orbits has always seemed like a silly response to a problem that is quickly obviated with terrestrial antennas (I’m talking about 5G).
Or going from a Mercury capsule launched a few times on an old ICBM to an Apollo Capsule on a Saturn V…
Back then, along with money, they had resources like local manufacturing of components and systems, lots of techies educated during WWII and booming 1950s (with smart German engineers and Canadians laid off from Arrow and Avrocar) and a much faster procurement process.
I’m not so sure; the Mercury/ICBM and Apollo/S5 are very similar critters but for size.
But the SX spaceship os something entirely new and different. It’s a completely new class of devices.
I’d hire a bunch of airplane cabin/interior designers as a start … deals with many of the same design problems. And as “hum-drum” as cabin interiors are we’re continually learning things about them, unfortunately mostly through accidents.
Personally, I haven’t drunk the BFR kool-aid yet.
I’m not sure if I’d go with aircraft cabin designers. Aircraft aren’t designed for trips of over a day, and the cabins are only habitable for trips over 12 hours in a technical sense. If you’re looking for an interior design which people can live in for six to nine months, on the way to Mars, the optimal (or even functional) design would be quite different.
This might take a real blast from the past. When was the last time someone designed temporary passenger accommodations with a trip time of weeks or months? Ships? Not in the last fifty or a hundred years, except for cruise liners (designed for vacations not transportation.) Trains? Not for about as long, and then for days, not months, of use. Honestly, a nuclear submarine might be the closest thing. That’s functional accommodation for months, in a limited volume and with requirements for life support. Maybe GE’s Electric Boat division could help.
Yes, the U.S.Navy has actually invested a lot of money in social psychological research to design submarine interiors to be both functional and comfortmable for long duration missions, especially on their ballastic missile submarines. There are lessons to learn there that could be applied to spacecraft. Another area might be the firns that design the offshore oil rigs, where crews are also required to spend long periods in a crowded environment.
Actually that might be a good worksop idea, to bring those experts together with the individuals working on spacecraft and space station designs
Well known for many years in the marine world is the importance of the ship’s cook, a respected position even on the NASA booster retrieval ships. In space good food remains a challange.
Some sort of architect is probably preferable; a person with one foot in the tech and another in the field of human behavior.
I worked briefly with Larry Bell at the University of Houston school of architecture in about 1980, when he was one of the first to address the concept of the space station from an architectural living-space standpoint. He introduced (to me at least) concepts like the ISS cupola (originally a hemisperical dome) to provide an opportunity for crew to immerse themselves in the external visual environment, and inflatable habitats to increase living space, and other ideas centered on going beyond pure functionality and making the station a pleasant and productive place to live and work for extended tours of duty,
SpaceX and Mr. Musk have a history of assuming something will be easier than it actually is. The Falcon Heavy is a good example. How hard could it be just to strap on two extra first stages as boosters? And cross-feed the propellent? That’s just plumbing. I think that may be a reason why their schedules are always so “aspirational.”
In this case, I suspect you are right: To do everything they want, the upper stage or spaceship will take more work than they are (apparently) investing in it. But a bad solution for the initial flights is also a viable option. That would be in keeping with their past development work, and a learn-by-doing approach.
A non-reusable, cargo-only upper stage which actually gets 150 tonnes (or even 100 tonnes) to orbit would be quite an accomplishment. Then, when that’s done, they could make it reusable. Then, turn some of that volume into room for a crew, even if it’s not a great living environment for long durations (as the third stage of a Saturn V was turned into Skylab.) Then make it some place people would pay to live in for months on the way to Mars.
“SpaceX and Mr. Musk have a history of assuming something will be easier than it actually is.”
Which is what everybody does all the time! (There’s a name for this: Dunning-Krueger).
What separates Mr. Musk isn’t so much the predilection he shares with everyone else. It’s how he deals with problems, many of which would stump anyone else.
And NASA has tried to make everyone believe that spaceflight is much more difficult than it really is. ‘Space is hard’ is their refrain. And yet Musk has already, with his landing and reuasable rockets, demonstrated he has advanced the state of the art using exactly the same physics and exactly the same technology. Something NASA has not done.
Ok, but is that really fair?
The state of the art in 2001* was largely defined by the efforts of NASA. Certainly some of these efforts were plodding, and risk adverse, as many say. Still, the body of knowledge as it existed in 2001 was a direct product of NASA’s HSF and rocket development.
* What’s special about 2001? Simple. It’s the start of the Modern Space Age — the year that Mr. Musk looked around at the existing body of knowledge for a way to get Mars Oasis to Mars (and finding it wanting, to our everlasting benefit).
Before 2001- the Year of Divergence- the state of the art had been defined and advanced, in the main, by NASA. After 2001, the story changes dramatically, but the point remains the same: NASA provided the platform used by SX and Bezos and the others making an effort to leverage existing technology into something new.
It’s fair to criticize NASA for what they have done with that incredible body of knowledge after 2001. But it’s naive not to realize exactly how we got there.
There’re also cases they got really “lucky” and hit the bullseye on first try. For example, the first time they tried to do supersonic retro-propulsion they successfully brought the Falcon 9 first stage all the way to subsonic before losing control during landing burn.
The testing on the operational missions are so successful SpaceX skipped the plan for dedicated test flights using F9R-Dev2 at Spaceport America, in the end F9R-Dev2 ends up being mothballed without a single flight.
Mr. Musk’s Falcon 9 has demonstrated the equivalent of the 707 in aviation. It uses the same physics, the same technologies, but makes spaceflight more affordable on a much larger scale. Now having demonstrated he knows how to build rockets and spacecraft, better and less expensively then anyone else, he is now moving to create the first Jumbo, the equivalent of the 747. Just like Juan Terry Trippe and Boeing took a chance in 1965, five years later they demonstrated it and changed air transportation. Musk, I hope and believe, will do the same for space transportation. NASA and the other ‘old space’ way of thinking has not yet embraced the future. If Musk is successful, they will be left in his dust.
Your point makes sense but only to a point, and that’s where the booster ends and the spaceship begins. The spaceship seems to be to be a completely different critter.
The spaceship is just an upper stage that can land and be reused, SpaceX has been studying this problem for 10 years. Take a look at the animation of Falcon 9 full reuse video, the upper stage returns and do a propulsive landing, that is not just some graphic designer’s fantasy, it’s based on real plans.
A science fiction author once said that he always knew he would see the first man walk on the Moon, but he never dreamed he would live to see the last person to walk on the Moon.
I think human space flight began to go wrong during the Goldin years. He started a trend of bringing in management who had zero experience in human space flight.Then we went into the years of putting astronauts and flight directors in charge and they had no clue how to design or build spacecraft. Now there is an entire generation and virtually every position from the Administrator level on down-Center Directors, Program Managers, Division and Branch Chiefs who have no idea what is required or how to get the job done. ‘Aiding’ them are contractors who take every advantage to make money while producing little or nothing. There is no plan. There is not current coherent program. What is operating relies solely on the fumes of an earlier generation.
Part of the difficulty is figuring out what we are doing and why. That is not such a problem for Musk and Bezos as both are relying primarily on meeting the requirement of the commercial market, which in turn meetis its customer requirements for data transmission, image aquisition and tourist transport.
Actually the commercial markers are just a means to an end for them. Elon Musk has Dr. Zubrin’s dream of Mars settlement as his guide star, while Jeff Bezos is spending his fortune on making Dr. O’Neill’s High Frontier a reality. They will move forward regardless of commercial markets to their money runs out. It’s how entrepreneurs have always created the future.
It is a surfeit of riches, and I for one am glad to see it.
Both are aggressive but disciplined, and would recognize early on if a course were not financially viable, I think we see that in Musk’s descision to scale down the MCT to the BFR, at a size that (while still gargantuan) would have potential applications for commercial launch.
You are definitely right about NASA having trouble figuring out what to do and why, but it is due in large measure to not heeding the wishes of the pioneers of the program from the 1960s. The Apollo management was fully aware that unless spaceflight was affordable and repeatable on a frequent basis then there was little sense in pursuing it. That was the reason for the Shuttle. They knew Saturn rockets and Apollo capsules were not affordable. They had been told starting in 1966 the country would not pay for anymore. Shuttle had problems but te olution was to fix them and not trow it away. Its goal was the right one. In a fit of craziness starting with Griffin and continuing to the present, the NASA leadership decided “exploration” was what it was about and a redo of Apollo was the way to go. They apparently had never heard why Apollo was terminated beginning in 66, and they forgot the goal that was set after Apollo was affordable transportation systems. They never even made an effort to improve upon Shuttle and threw that system away without a replacement just as Apollo had been discarded. Apollo was dicardéd for good reason. To have thrown away Shuttle with no effort made to learn its lessons is unforgivable. Unfortunately a lot of people directly responsible continue to serve today in charge of NASA human space flight, on the NASA Advisory council, as a Center Director, in key leadership rles. These people have led NASA and the American people astray. They should have been discarded and replaced a decade ago and instead they have been put on a pedestal and people continue to listen to them as though someone thinks they know what they are doing. It is no wonder they have no plan and no clue.
I’m thinking the old question “what does NASA do?” which ask 100 different people including those in NASA you get 100 different answers. 50 or 60 years ago nobody asked that question because everyone knows (and even if they don’t) what NASA does back then. Kind of like nobody asks what Google does because everyone knows what they do (even if they don’t).
DEAR NASA,DON’T BOTHER TRYING TO PLEASE YOUR CRITICS,THEY’RE JUST LIKE BARKING DOGS WHO JUST LIKE TO HEAR THEMSELVES BARK!
Cruz questioning why it only
7 years from statement of intent to go to the moon till actually going there compared to present plan to go back is answered in one word (bureaucracy). When I worked at JSC for Jacobs on the engineering contract it took 8 approvals to move a hammer from one lab to another. Failure at any level was not an option.