Looking Forward, Not Backward
FWIW @NASA needs to stop acting like it is 60 years old and reliving the glories of what it did 50 years ago. Instead it needs to look forward (again) as it did in the 1960s with the eyes of a child. No limits. No preconceptions.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 22, 2018
Yes! The past the was great, but the future has the potential to be even better!
If NASA were to start setting goals and buying results, becoming the architect rather than trying to be the “doer” of the things, we could settle the Moon, put boots on Mars, and start sending interstellar science missions, all in the near term, all within the current budget.
NASA is too stuck in its ways and culture to do that. You need to create a new Space Research & Development Agency to do those things.
Yep. You have to wonder what Mr. Musk could do with $19 Billion a year.
Yes, I know, that figure includes ISS and lots of other things. And perhaps a well-focused NASA could as well be successful.
But consider this: Before SX came along all that one could do when confronting cost over runs and tumbling schedules was look at one another and shrug: “Space is hard!”
As it turns out, yes, space is hard. But that’s not the lesson here. What’s hard is recapturing the dream.
SpaceX showed what could happen when Vision is invited back to head the table: Real hardware, real dollars, a clean sheet of paper and less than 7 years: a new rocket engine, a new rocket family, a capsule…and that’s just the high points.
And those aren’t the most important thing. SpaceX gave us a point of comparison.
Now, looking at SLS, for instance, we have real, honest-to-god* apples to apples or rockets to rockets comparisons.
Now THAT is a gift.
Not to go religious or anything, but perhaps NASA needs a Council of Trent. The Reformation happened because the RC Church got stuck in some of its ways that were doing more harm than good. Trent was the launch of the Counter-Reformation when the Church took a look at itself, recognized its accreted flaws & misguided habits (while also rediscovering the primacy of its underlying truths), and relaunched its proper mission in spite of the continual imperfection of its members…as it has done numerous times over the centuries since…people are people, and organizations are organizations.
NASA has become, like the Church was by the early 1500s, a bloated bureaucracy locked in its old habits that has lost sight of its proper mission(s). As the newspace companies do their thing and make advancements, they remind me of the start-up churches begotten during the Reformation. [Not a perfect analogy given other dynamic factors, of course, but I hope you see my point.]
What mechanism might bring about an actual transformative NASA Council of Trent? Certainly not another govt commission & report…we’ve had plenty of those to no avail. How can one bring NASA itself to recognize its need to change and then effect that change? Perhaps such a thing is impossible given how everything is tied together with the changing Administrations & the Congress. A pity if so.
I agree with your premise. I think the new NASA (and congress) version of the “Council of Trent” will only happen when SpaceX (or someone else) actually demonstrates a landing on the moon, or something else just as significant. Listening to NASA presentations right now, it looks like they are in massive denial (and even fantasy land) about the possibilities that SpaceX offers. Their plans to commercialize a small robotic landing on the moon by the early 2020’s, and then ramp up to larger robotic landings by the mid-2020’s, just sound like pipe dreams, as if SpaceX did not exist! They need to seriously listen to SpaceX and start to develop the needed infrastructure for establishing a lunar base, if that is what they want.
I am not so sure that is what is in play at the moment. SpaceX are not the be all and end all though they are doing marvelous things. They do have a habit of over promising and as even Elon has stated Space is hard. NASA has a particular mandate and I think that is reflected in their conservatism and the group thinking. If I was God for a day I would break NASA up. I would reconstitute the NACA for in atmosphere activities. I would amalgamated all the Earth observation activities from the NRO,DoD,NOAA and NASA into a single entity. Reorganize the agency based on the domains rather than the disciplines. So instead of science, HSF etc. Have Transatmospheric, Cis-lunar, Planetary, Exo-solar system. Then the current disciplines simply become matrix support elements rather than project owners. It takes 3 years to turn around a com sat from order to orbit. 10 or more for science missions yet NASA is funded on an annual cycle or at least has to fight for it annually. That is plain silly. I would fund NASA on a 3-5year cycle and allow them full control of their budget within cycle and surplus control at transition. So that they can manage their own surpluses/deficits. Continuity is difficult to manage in staff terms. Career progression is a dead mans shoes deal in any agency. If the project tempo is upped then the career management aspect can be linked to projects rather than just experience accretion in post and step up-grades: “So you do this in this project then the next challenge will be this in the follow on project.” May not change the wage bill or even move people up grades but it prevents stagnation and keeps people forward focused and keeps continuity available to the agency… also get rid of contractors; staff up for the job. No second class citizens. All of this is contingent of course on getting freedom of maneuver with the budget… as I said God for a day.
It will be harder and harder to ignore SpaceX.
https://www.teslarati.com/s…
SpaceX seeks licenses for BFR spaceship prototype hop test campaign
By Eric Ralph
Posted on November 22, 2018
The video’s of Starship on these test hops, and the increasing coverage in the press it will receive, will make it harder and harder for NASA to dismiss it.
I think you’re being unfair by signalling out NASA. NASA is but a symptom of a larger malaise. I reckon “reformation” is required across our society and culture as a whole.
What is really important? What do we want from life? Wanting life to be easy is just lame but that is what the masses want.
I do not disagree with you. NASA is undeniably one element in a very broad array of interacting entities…which is a big part of the problem. But NASA itself is a large array of interacting entities all by itself and as a large organization it has its own issues.
COULD it ever reform/streamline/reinvent itself into something better? Probably not, for the reasons you cite. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t figure out better processes for its inner workings by looking inward and admitting its own artery blockages where they are and then clearing them where possible.
I look at how many unmanned test missions were done in a short amount of time for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo in the 1960s. Yes they used proven military rockets while the Saturns were built, but they built 3 new manned spacecrafts, tested them, and flew successful manned missions. All that changed after Apollo. The Shuttle took way to long and too much money to create a flawed, expensive, and dangerous spacecraft. Now NASA and it’s contractors have spent 13 years building Orion and SLS, but have only one test flight of the Orion descent module.
Totally disagree about your statements about Shuttle. From the time it was given the go ahead to the first flight of Enterprise was less than 5 years and to the first orbital mission was 10 years and it was done on exactly the budget that was asked for (and which NASA got, minus the reserves they requested for advanced engine development and advanced materials for the heat shield). And NASA did a lot of development work. Shuttle was the most advanced vehicle for its time. It was not perfect however. But the deaths of two crews was due to operations personnel operating the vehicle outside of its specifications. Once it was put into service there were essentially never any upgrades made to the system-there had been plenty discussed but NASA managers chose not to pursue them. Instead they always wanted something new and different. And they are still trying to build something new and different and so far have not succeeded.
I agree that Challenger was flown outside parameters, but Columbia wasn’t, it was just bad luck that the damage it incurred during launch was to a critical area, whereas previous flights were simply lucky enough to escape such damage. And there was no real post-Columbia fix other than giving the Shuttle a visual inspection at the ISS before it was allowed to re-entered.
I would argue that it was beyond bad luck. There actually were safety systems conceived and developed early in the program (the MMU, the caulk gun) that were intended for just this sort of situation. Remember all the worries pre-flight about the tiles falling off? It seems all of that stuff was abandoned. I assume that in the interest of saving money the delusion that “nothing bad has happened, so nothing ever will” spread to that as well.
The Orbiter was never designed to be hit by ice and shrapnel during launch. Once that started occurring either the ice and shrapnel needed to be eliminatéd or the thermal protection system needed to be hardened. Neither was done. The decision was made and asserted by incompetent management that as long as they hadn’t yet killed anyone it was “within family” meaning it was expected, and there was no reason to change anything.
Yes, that was the big risk with the use of the thermal tiles and occurred on every launch. NASA did study the problem repeatedly over the life of the Space Shuttle System but could never get the traction to replace the thermal tiles with a better heat shield, the only solution that would actually work.
All true, but you had earlier said the Columbia accident was not a result of flying “outside parameters.” The design requirements said there should be no chance of debris hitting the thermal protection system. Given that requirement, the Shuttles were always flying outside their designed flight parameters. The requirement was, obviously, impossible to satisfy, and it was constantly waived (until that was considered normal.) But that’s still flying outside the official flight environment.
True, in that sense it was, but as you noted it was a parameter ignored on every flight. Which is why is interesting watching NASA’s high handed approach to commercial crew safety, when even at the worst they will probably still be safer than either the Shuttle or Soyuz.
NASA cut corners to fly. They launched Challenger in the cold to meet a schedule. Weather delays and mechanical problems kept delaying the launch. There were fears that more delays might impact the future launch of 2 planetary probes which had time critical launch windows.
Nit: They used Redstone, Atlas, and Titan II as launch vehicles for crewed capsules. But I’d hardly say they were all “proven”. Have you seen movie clips of Atlas missiles blowing up?
The fact of the matter is that NASA was willing to take much more risk in the 1960s due to the Space Race with the Soviet Union. Now NASA seems to be so risk averse that it’s literally the certification paperwork that’s delaying both Dragon 2 and Starliner from carrying crew in a timely manner. If they slip too much, NASA will be in a very tough position because their supply of purchased Soyuz capsules is literally about to run out.
Lots of rockets blew up back then. NASA didn’t have a lot choices. They could have waited for von Braun to build later versions of the Juno rocket, but the Atlas was flying and the Atlas D version for Mercury was more reliable, but not completely perfect.
NASA does what (in order) the congress, the president, the bureaucracy, and the science community tell it to. It is a government agency and responsive to it’s charter and political forces. Despite what we might wish it’s not an agency independent of these forces. It’s budget and direction is dictated to it and it’s discretion is limited. It can argue for and recommend directions, but it has to get somebody to give it the money to do those things. Example, without the Commercial Space Act it wouldn’t even be able to use private launch vehicles no matter how much cheaper they were. It’s the Politicians we need to lean on and I can’t remember the last time somebody accused them (collectively) of having vision. And as the Atlantic Magazine noted, there are fewer of them after this last election then there are now. https://www.theatlantic.com…
Say it again for the people in the back.
That was also true in the 1960’s, but somehow NASA seem to work with them better in determining what to do. Maybe it was because the young workforce was not afraid to “rock the boat” while the current workforce has, like all entrenched bureacracies, become risk adverse, and the includes making waves with Congress and the Executive Branch.
As for the new Democratic leadership in the House, none of of the individuals leading the science committees are from NASA Districts and it remains to be seen if their committees will view NASA with the same level of importance or focus as other agencies under the committee’s control like the NIH and NSF.
Keith I will say it until I’m blue in the face: Stop blaming the Agency and blame Congress.
And exactly who in the Congress came up with this crazy idea for a Gateway to avoid landing on the Moon?
Who in Congress supports, or supported, SLS/Orion in spite of onrushing reality? Shelby remains, but Nelson, Culberson etc. did too. The reports that Shelby blew a gasket over the Business Insider story about SpaceX and Blue developing more affordable vehicles which could replace SLS rings very true IMO.
Can’t help but think the old fart will take a chair to his TV when Starship testflight videos show on the news.
True, but who proposed the SLS to Congress? Remember it was the result of a five year NASA study to replace the Ares V, a study President Obama called for in his infamous speech at Kennedy Spaceflight Center in 2010. In others words it didn’t emerge just because a Congressional staffer gave NASA a drawing and said – Build this!
I really doubt a congressional staffer handed drawings to NASA. You’re right about that. But did congressional staffers have private conversations with people at NASA headquarters? Almost certainly. Did those conversations involve anything about what would or would not be acceptable to Congress? We have no way of know way of knowing, but I think we’d both agree that’s likely. So it’s likely that Congress, without actually handing blueprints for SLS to NASA, did influence the studies in that direction.
Yes, that is likely, and its also likely those staffers were briefed somewhere along the way by lobbyists. And so we end up with a dead end rocket and space policy.
Congress mandated SLS be built of certain parts using certain contractors.
Somehow, somewhere someone changed idea of a “shuttle-derived” HLV from either the side mounted Shuttle-C type or truly shuttle derived inline launcher that was DIRECT Jupiter to what SLS is now. It kept all the things Congress said to keep, but went with expensive redesigns on top of it.
Without consistent leadership from administrations every eight years NASA is not going anywhere. During Bush NASA was going to land on the moon with Constellation. Then Obama took two years to cancel the ‘Bush’ program and decide to go to an asteroid, which was infeasible, so they soon settled on developing technology to go to Mars. With Congress keeping SLS and Orion, there wasn’t much $ left, so NASA decided to build Gateway as a testbed for deep space operations. Now Trump wants to go to the Moon, and Gateway doesn’t support can’t very well. Meanwhile, billions have been ill spent on architectures that are ever changing. Stop the madness already! Execute an architecture to the end. Going someplace poorly is better than going nowhere.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin recommending to Congress that NASA develop Ares I, Ares V, and CEV is what got us to the current situation where SLS/Orion costs too much and has yet to fly a single time.
The NASA that landed people on the Moon was “first-generation NASA.” It was a new agency dedicated to civilian space exploration (plus some aeronautics). As a new agency it was free of all the bureaucratic bloat that eventually takes over every bureaucracy and entombs it through sclerosis. (See Mancur Olson’s writings.)
Also, first-generation NASA had a clear political directive and bipartisan support because national prestige was involved. It could do Great Things because the winds were at its back, and the goal was visible almost every clear night.
I have often thought that part of NASA’s success also came from the influx of veterans it had. That cohort of veterans was familiar with using initiative within an overall command environment to get important things done.
The astronauts were all military — combat military — veterans, and the management of NASA was in the hands of the people who had helped create and run FDR’s the “arsenal of democracy” in WW 2 and earlier New Deal projects.
What I’m getting at is that the recent personal experience of the 20-to-60-year-old people in 1955 was totally different from what people in that same age group have today.
Because that mid-century situation was a product of the recent personal history of those who lived it (Depression, WW 2, Korea), it’s hard to replicate now. And with today’s NASA being a standard-grade bureaucracy, it’s all but impossible.
Yet some pockets exist where innovation can still run with the ball (JPL, for example). That works in those pockets because of NASA’s subject matter exerts a pull on engineering imaginations.
But I think it’s futile to beat up on NASA for what it is — by this point in its organizational life, it can’t be anything else. And as I’ve said here before, and others have said also, the initiative, direction, and continuing support for NASA to do Great Things must come from the political arena.
But if NASA has become too bureacratic to do Great Things then it doesn’t matter if they get political support. President Obama proposed that NASA replace the Ares V with a new heavy lift vehicle in 2010. It took NASA until 2015 to come up with the”new” design, which looks like a downsized Ares V. And that is one of the core problems, by the time NASA gets finished studying the new goal something, its into a new Administration and no one cares about the goal anymore.
The late, great Paul Spudis once wrote something about the timeframe for any future manned lunar program: it had be done within two presidential administrations, maximum.
I don’t know if that’s a firm and true limit, or if he was being sardonic, as he often was when discussing the political side of space exploration. But it rings right.
I think NASA today could do Great Things, but it requires a degree of urgency that is utterly missing. Such urgency will never come from within the organization, it can only come from outside, meaning politics and a world situation in which going to the Moon or Mars with people has a national imperative.
I can’t see any prospect of that happening. Maybe others do. And if you do, go run for Congress, get elected, and be extraordinarily persuasive.
We’re all stuck down here, and we can’t do it on our own….
No, but free enterprise is about to do so. Blue Origin is not dependent on NASA or Congress. And Elon Musk is close to breaking away from NASA as well. They are the real hope for the future.
Bezos is in no hurry and Musk is increasingly erratic. There is always a chance that BFR/Starship/Super Heavy won’t be all that’s hoped for and that StarLink could easily sink SpaceX.
It sounds like you are buying into the campaign to discredit Elon Musk. As for Jeff Bezos, after testing NASA, and found it wanting, he appears it is better to just steer clear of it and do space on his own.
Honestly, Mr. Musk is doing a fair job of campaigning to discredit himself. The remark that really disturbed me was when he said some of the odd tweets were the sort of thing you could expect from someone working 120 hours a week. Personally, when it comes to getting things done, I have a great deal more confidence in Ms. Shotwell. (And a great deal more sympathy, because she’s one of the first people who gets to do the damage control when something Mr. Musk does explodes in his face.)
I don’t think its a matter of him doing more as it is of more folks watching him. If you read the biography Ashlee Vance wrote you would see that he got beat up fairly regularly in High School for being bash, so its not something new, just more visible,
I first heard of him when in 2002 I was at the Churchill Club space presentation when he announced SpaceX. He made some wild statements then on how easy it would be to build a better rocket then NASA and he would have one flying within year. He learned its not that easy, but he also kept with it and has succeeded in leaving NASA in the dust. Its why I just ignore his more rash statements. But then in that regard he really isn’t that different then Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, or even Thomas Edison.
NASA was not entirely a new agency as it was crafted around the NACA. I don’t disagree with your general point but the old-timer NACA folks contributed much to the space effort and the fact that they could take on new tasks and adopt new processes & ways of working to achieve them should be kept in mind when speaking of ‘re-inventing’ the current NASA.
When 54% of your workforce is above the age of 50, with decades of bureacratic risk adversion drilled into them, and only 8% is below the age of 30, it really should not be surprising that the agency is acting old.
https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/…
By contrast during Project Apollo the average age was only 28.
https://www.popularmechanic…
Is America’s Space Administration Over the Hill? Next-Gen NASA
By Joe P. Hasler
May 25, 2009
That said, the stagnation does seem concentrated in the HSF area of NASA with the robotic missions still going boldly forward, except for Mars which seems stuck in the same decades long “do loop” of looking for “signs” that Mars could support life rather then life itself.
This is an excellent point. When I hear so called NASA supporters criticizing SpaceX as a place dominated by young people who work far too many hours a week, I can’t help but think that’s *exactly* the type of workforce that got US astronauts to the surface of the moon in 1969.
Today’s (seemingly blind) NASA supporters should re-watch their beloved 1960s NASA documentaries and keep a keen eye out for how young nearly everyone was in those films. Then they might want to read a few books written about the programs and see if they mention anything about the hard work and dedication of everyone involved (hint: that’s not how you describe a laid-back 9-5 work ethic).
Hear, Hear. NASA still has within it, in some of the old NACA centers, the DNA of the organization which did so much to revolutionize air transport. I believe it can be that change agent again, but the conflict of interest between being a “doer” and being an “enabler/customer” has proven irreconcilable in the space age. NASA achieved the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Skylab accomplishments by ‘eating its seed corn’ of talent from the aviation industry that NACA had done so much to foster.
Today, we have a developing private space industry eager to play the same role for space that Douglas, Bell, Lockheed, Boeing, North American, Martin, Ryan, and their peers played for the aviation industry. The right role for the Federal government effort could catalyze and organize that emerging industry in ways that could do amazing things. But one agency can’t be a player, the coach, and the referee all at the same time. We have players now. We have AST to be referee. We need the “coach” — to set the challenges, just out of reach, to fund the long-lead R&D that’s beyond the commercial horizon, to identify the problems that are being faced by more than one commercial player and tackle them, to build and operate test facilities that no one commercial player can justify the funding of, to fund the research fellowships to train the up and coming generation.
That agency could be named NASA, or it could be “made out of” NASA the way NASA was “made out of” NACA, or it could be altogether new. But we need it.
We needed it for a long while.
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/me…
Dr. M.: I confess that upon reviewing the aforementioned slides I wondered if there weren’t TWO Drs. Matula?
The first is the very same professor who, so fond of singing the benefits of competition, has created a “free enterprise chorus” that is inserted into nearly ever comment?
And then we have his seeming-dopplegänger, standing on a lofty hilltop, pointing to wasteful overlap as a key result of space competition and, more to the point, advising the creation of a “top down” uber-agency charged directing member states towards a common goal and in the name of efficiency.
What a world we live in! Who would have thought?! Two steps forward and one step back indeed!
Like most opponents to the capitalism system you use an extreme definition to define capitalism to argue your points, a tradition going back to Karl Marx who defined the term as being everything bad in relation to his “good” communist system.
The development corporation proposed in this model is a common tool used to stimulate the development of markets to economies. In space it was very successful used to create the modern communications satellite industry. Comsat, and later Intellisate served to demonstrate the market for satellite communications, develop an industry to serve the market, and matured the business models needed to serve it. Today, both Comsat and Intellisat are private firms, two of many that serve that market.
This proposes a similar model to similuate the Cislunar ecomony by demonstrating markets, creating the industry need to serve those markets and mature business models suited to he Cislunar economy.
First, Its not top-down centralize planning because it is not a monopoly. Nations and private ventures are free to be in competition with it, and will be as the economic potential of Cislunar space is recognized. It will start out looking at projects like a lunar telecommunications/navigation system that are necessary to stimulate lunar economic development, but it won’t seek to create a monopoly in it.
Second, unlike NASA it will activitely seek out private partners and focus on enabling their business models. This is the opposite of NASA programs like COTS and CCP where NASA only advanced its own inteestes by specifiying what they are to build and micro-managing it with no reference to possible commercial uses. This is a bottom up rather than the top down approach NASA used for COTS and CCP which made them dead end programs.
Third, it will always be seeking how to spin off and privatize successful business models once the risk is reduced. And this will be built into the planning for its projects. The reason its impossible to commercialize the ISS was because it was never designed to be commercialize and so there is no business model that will work for it.
I’m not convinced the sort of development corporation you suggest would be free of top-down centralize planning or that would not be a monopoly a monopoly. Historical examples have typically been created as a matter of government policy (making them involve, to a limited extent, central planning) and have had some continuing government involvement (e.g. the chartering government appointing members of the the board.) They have also been given monopoly rights on many occasions, and if not, tax exemptions and/or exemptions from regulations which would be considered non-competitive. To my mind that puts them in a never never land between purely private ventures (which wouldn’t be interested without some incentives) and government controlled agencies (which aren’t flexible enough to produce good results.)
It won’t be easy given the nature of organizations the government gets involved. Great care will be needed in writing it charter and creating organization structure. I have been thinking that since the core purpose would be to act like a lunar incubator perhaps that term should be included in its name instead of development – Lunar Economic Incubator Corporation (LEIC). Technically it’s what development corporations are suppose to do, but with some folks advocating a Lunar Development Authority with a strong governance role I think it would be good to make it clear it has NO governance functions.
That’s going to be tough. If such a corporation did anything at all, beyond acting as an anchor tenant, I think they would have some governance functions.
For example, managing communications infrastructure involves decisions on how to allocate finite capabilities among multiple users. That’s a “governance function.” Even as if they are solely an anchor tenant, they would still be making decisions about what infrastructure would be developed. They would decide whether they wanted to be the anchor tenant of an orbital gateway/fuel depot or a surface landing facility. That’s directing lunar development, and “governance” (at least in a sense.)
On the other hand, it might be relatively easy to limit that governance to setting policy, not managing its implementation. It isn’t always done that way (I’m currently in an airport in the process of some major renovations, and the local city council, through their oversight authority in the airport’s management, had quite a bit to say about the detailed implementation…) But I can more easily imagine a charter limiting the corporation’s management authority to policy than a charter which removed any sort of “governance.”
That would need to be the approach taken, one of investment and support. One of encouraging inclusiveness versus restricting access.
The great things NASA accomplished 50 years were done for a great reason, and even then maintaining public and congressional support was a struggle. Unless someone can figure out and articulate a similarly compelling rationale for human spaceflight today, NASA’s HSF efforts will continue to to be feckless. I’ve heard none with the potential to sufficiently motivate a focused HSF program at the public level.
And the reason was elegantly simple. Which became a part of the problem for sustainability: job done, now what?
In 1986 Pioneering the Space Frontier http://space.nss.org/pionee… produced by Paine et al., came close to elegantly articulating a bright sustainable future in space, but it was released in the wake of the Challenger accident and so lost its chance to reinvigorate things. 2003’s VSE, especially as articulated by John Marburger (http://space.nss.org/2006-g… ) reiterated the main thrust of PSF very well, but any chance of VSE paving a viable path to the future got swallowed up by the misguided “Apollo on Steroids” rocket club morass that contributed mightily to many current difficulties. [VSE itself took place in the wake of a second Shuttle accident, and it cast a longer shadow than Challenger.]
I do not know if a new voice can step forward and provide the elegant vision that most everybody would embrace for the long term. So many shackles, so many fingers in the pie. Dr. M may be right: ‘space’ may happen entirely by the whim of captains of industry. Our nation grew mightily a century ago when such captains advanced transportation, materials, and manufacturing technologies & capabilities in pursuit of the mighty dollar, sometimes in partnership with the govt, often in spite of the govt. Is such a thing possible today & tomorrow?
We shall see.
Agreed. Human spaceflight is currently a solution in search of a problem, and one that is increasingly obviated by advances in robotics and AI. The prestige and soft-power rationale is the only one that makes sense to me, and even that is rooted in values that are getting long in the tooth. I suspect HSF will ultimately be relegated to little more than an expensive hobby for the super-rich, while the real work of exploration and economic exploitation of space will be done remotely.
In terms of NASA that is probably true. But in terms of the folks that want to live in space it isn’t.
Also it should be noted that remote operated robots may be capable of science with long signal delays and no humans to repair them, but is not the case for robots involved in industrial activities. The humans may not be on site, but they need to be close enough to monitor and control the systems in real time and visit the site to fix problems quickly.
But again that just illustrates the difference between NASA and private space activities.
NASA does not decide policy. NASA executes policy. In the absence of political leadership capable of creating public and political support, there will be no direction except in the fantasies of decades from now.
While there is a lot of truth to this, I’m getting tired of hearing it because NASA does have quite a lot of influence over what it does. NASA can recommend whatever it needs to recommend to the politicians.
Unfortunately, if a NASA Administrator recommends poorly (i.e. Mike Griffin with Ares I, Ares V and CEV as the “transportation architecture”) it can set NASA down a dead end path.
That singular recommendation by then NASA Administrator Mike Griffin that I mentioned above has been proven in hindsight to be absolutely horrible. That decision led to Congress mandating SLS/Orion after Ares/CEV was cancelled because by that time, they were so addicted to the attached pork that they didn’t care if it actually had missions (it still doesn’t have much in the way of fully funded missions beyond the initial test flights).
The obvious alternative was right there in the exploration study done by NASA. Mike Griffin could have recommended the “flexible path” using existing launch vehicles instead of NASA specific launch vehicles that no one else would ever want to use. NASA could have then worked with industry on “commercial HLV” and “commercial fuel depots” much in the same way they have worked with industry on both “commercial cargo” and “commercial crew”.
And they could have just done Shuttle C instead of the Ares V for heavy lift and not have to redesign the entire system.
No, they could have done Shuttle C for HALF THE COST of Ares 1. And for the other half of Ares 1 along with the price of Ares V, Orion and SLS, they could have designed and built newer, safer shuttle orbiters and space tugs to get stuff to the Moon.
And they could have had Shuttle C together with flying an occasional Shuttle Orbiter since there was so much common hardware. They could have kept Shuttles flying and have a launch vehicle for Orion for much less expense, and kept most of the factories and workers working instead of laying them all off and then trying to hire them back 2-3 years later.
Only problem is, what would they have launched on Shuttle C? In case no one has noticed that safe, simple, soon Orion capsule which they said in 2008 was supposed to have been carrying astronauts in 2011, and in 2011, Mark Geyer, that sage, said by 2014 – to which Sally Ride responded 2018 is more likely, now in 2018 we are thinking maybe in 2021 or 2022??
What do you launch on Shuttle C? Orbital Transfer Vehicles, Propellant Depots, LEMs, etc. All things you could have afforded for the price of Constellation + SLS. All the things that could have gotten the US back to the Moon.
The fact is you probably could have afforded new shuttle orbiters as well.
Seriously, Constellation/Orion/SLS cost $25 Billion (not adjusted for inflation) BEFORE the Shuttle stopped flying.
Agreed. A side-mounted 3 SSME powered cargo pod using the SRBs and ET completely unchanged would have been the least development effort with pretty much zero changes to the vast majority of manufacturing, processing, handling, and launch facilities.
Still what we have gotten, (COTS) is probably the best outcome,
Essentially all of the problems NASA is facing today in human space flight is self imposed, not imposed by Congress or others. Shutting Shuttle down prematurely, without even an attempt at a fix, Orion, Ares, SLS, asteroid retrieval, next step Mars, Gateway; these were all foolish NASA ideas. NASA came up with them. Congress supported exactly what NASA asked for. So, no excuses about how NASA doesn’t establish policy or program plans.
Agree.
It’s going to be sad during the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 to think that Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins will be asked to endure more back-slapping, congratulatory events when at least one of those men might not want to; knowing their former Commander passed on years ago and also knowing that none of the 1969 Apollo 12 crew now live either. Also; there will be vague, weakly-defined promises that we’ll be ‘going back to stay’ on the Moon and Mars…
…When it’s neither clear nor present that any plans are concrete and that they’re subject to the fluctuating winds of politics, funding and the economy in general. Where is the technical clarity? Where is the solid Leadership? Where is the solidity of the architecture? NASA cannot ‘live off the fat’ of Apollo for much longer. Too many fools already think it never even happened. In this environment; WHO can get the ball that is the future, rolling once and for all?!
NASA human space flight has a problem: NIH, “not invented here”. The people are arrogant; they refuse to learn lessons from their predecessors or from other programs. Most of the leadership has come out of operations and they know nothing about space vehicle DDT&E, and combined with a refusal to learn, it has proven deadly and constrained their ability to do anything effectively. The focus on operátions was a mistake they do not yet recognize. The willingness to trash their predecessors’ efforts, as was done by ISS, means they try and start over in developing processes and documentation and yet the inexperience means they have little ability to get the job done. The only answer is the elimination of the existing organizational structure and non-leadership with something different. Maybe human space flight gets subsumed by the Space Force?
Development personnel should never have been separated from operations. Development should take the lead and take precedence. It is the key to operational capability. Personnel, like Flight Directors, should never be permitted to move into leadership positions unless they have a full range of DDT&E experience first. The first mistake was made by Kraft in the 1960s when he decided the Flight Director’s word always took precedence; most flight directors do not even understand the specs and design criteria, just as Kraft did not understand it during Glenn’s Mercury mission. Kraft was bent out of shape because Faget, an engineer, overruled him. But Faget was right and Kraft was wrong. Kraft caused further trouble in 1985 when he created USA and separated the development personnel from the operations personnel. This caused operations to become inefficient, ineffective, and ensured the demise of NASA human space flight development capability. It is time for NASA to overcome the ineffective organization Kraft created.
No we are not arrogant. I really wish you and other folks would stop painting the agency with a broad brush.
You are certainly right about not painting NASA employees with a broad brush (or any group of people for that matter.) But I think the criticism is justified if you limit it to “a large number of people with NASA, especially those in influential positions.” Some subset of NASA employees can be described as arrogant, prone to rejecting ideas that someone else came up with, and prone to trashing previous work to make their ideas look wondrously new and innovative. In some ways, the funding and decision making process within NASA actually rewards that sort of behavior. Although, to be far, those aren’t problems unique to NASA…
Sorry to disagree. I worked Shuttle and NASA Mir. ISS people tried to reject everything -the processes, the agreements, the documentation…eventually they had to recreate what we had already established but not before they had wasted time and hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. In some areas, like payloads, I am not sure they have recovered even today. If you go back and read about the transition from Gemini to Apollo it was just as bad. Apollo to Skylab, even worse because now you had 2 centers involved. Arrogant, chauvinistic, narrow minded, wasteful are just a few of the adjectives that come to mind. There are rivalries between the programs, between the centers, within the centers between the Directorates, from one generation to the next. The management over the last 20 years has been the worst from the Administrators on down in large measure because of incompetence. Not only do they know so little, they have no idea how much they do not know, and worst of all they make zero effort to find out before they make really stupid decisions. Orion, Gateway, SLS, prematurely shutting Shuttle down, having made absolutely zero effort to fix its problems, these are just a few of the stupid decisions they have been responsible for.
I disagree…kinda. They need to stop looking back at Apollo. Yes, it did the job, but it wasn’t even what a lot of it’s creators wanted. It was the product of the “Space Race”. A literal race to the Moon. Once they got there, there wasn’t really any reason to keep it around.
They need to look back at all the things they could have done. Not with Apollo/Saturn, but with everything developed since. There are countless half-completed, shelved and paper projects that never saw made it…because the money wasn’t there. Yet in the 13 years since Constellation was proposed, they’ve spent more than enough money on Constellation and it’s smaller, weaker, yet still failing offspring, SLS, to complete any number of projects. [deleted], they’ve spent enough money, adjusted for inflation, to completely redo the Shuttle. That’s how wasteful things have been. Surely something like the Orbital Transfer Vehicle wouldn’t have been that expensive?
The difference between NASA and NACA (the latter is well described by historian James Hansen in the book Engineer in Charge https://history.nasa.gov/SP… ) was not fundamentally the division between in-house and contracted development, but rather the central organizational goal. NACA was created as a government partner to the civil aerospace industry to perform R&D that would advance the state of the art and allow the US civil aviation industry to compete effectively in a world in which the US was already, in 1915, falling behind the European powers. Every project, whether theoretical or applied, was intended to be of practical value to aeronautics,
NASA, in contrast, was created primarily to advance national prestige in the ideological conflict with the USSR, and thus serve as a symbolic substitute for a perilous race in nuclear arms which could well have destroyed civilization. This was a critical mission at the time, but not a self-sustaining one. NASA was also assigned a major basic science mission, Earth, planetary and astronomical observations conducted from space. The aeronautics program continues to focus on technology development for civil aeronautics but has become almost a separate agency with different field centers and funding sources.
To my mind the closest approach to the NACA model was the Obama Administration attempt to transfer funding from Constellation to Space Technology, which failed in the face of determined congressional opposition, ironic in view of the revolutionary impact of the commercial spaceflight industry.
And, for all you folks who think NASA does nothing, NASA is about to put yet another spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Please stop the “NASA is doing nothing” mantra.
Well, just landed another spacecraft on Mars. But, not to sound like a gringo, the InSight science payload is largely European. The InSight mission has been criticized as having NASA pay JPL and LMA to provide free transportation and infrastructure to European scientists. Not that I’m criticizing the science, but the NASA component isn’t as Earth (or Mars) shaking as it might seem.
We launched it. We landed it. Period.
And it brings us no closer to landing humans. But I do predict it will be successful in finding evidence that life could maybe exist on Mars and that more missions will be needed for find more evidence to support the belief that life could exist on Mars. And who knows, maybe someday NASA will actually look for life on Mars like in did many many years ago when NASA was young and willing to take risks….
Call me when someone develops totally reliable closed loop ECLSS and radiation countermeasures, as well as dealing with microgravity issues, then we can talk about people on Mars.
Why does it have to be totally reliable? Wouldn’t a failure which could be repaired be acceptable? Or, to put all those issues (life support, radiation and microgravity) together, what reduction in average life expectancy would be acceptable? Note that there is a three and a half year difference between the US and Canada, so zero isn’t a realistic answer. Would 69 rather than 79 be acceptable to the astronauts involved?
Would you be as impressed if NASA landed a spacecraft on Mars with no payload? Or would you wonder why they spent most of a billion dollars to do that?
Given the failure rate of landing things on Mars, yes.
Mark, You are right in that America does need to reclaim the vision, but this time we need to leave NASA out of the critical path or it will never happen. Its time for space advocates to move beyond NASA.
This is preaching to the converted, but you don’t really mean keeping NASA out of the critical path. You mean keeping government agencies in general out of the critical path, and limiting government involvement to things like being an anchor tenant and providing incentives like tax break. I personally think the government has a role in funding scientific research, but more as a funding source and setting policy on which topics are most in need of funding, and not as a builder or operator of robotic spacecraft. With those exceptions, I think we’re basically in agreement.
Yes! Maybe more of a NSF approach. Here is the money, arrange your own transportation to the rain forest, Canadian Arctic, remote island, Mars…
But really, other than NASA which government agencies are involved with space and have a self-interest to handicap private space ventures?
Sure the FAA CST regulates launch, and DOC is pushing for the authority to regulate full missions, but both have a built in incentive to encourage more private missions so there is a greater need for their “services”.
As for the military, they are focused on Earth monitoring and protecting their access to space. The more commercial launchers to replace those assets, the better off they are. So they aren’t going to get in the way of private space ventures, other than limiting remote sensing of Earth for security reasons. If anything they are cheering them on.
So — how was Elon Musk able to do so much in a single decade from a cold start , surrounded by naysayers and cynics?