NASA Moon Town Hall: Everyone Needs To Get On Board For This
Questions submitted to NASA Town Hall Meeting With Administrator Jim Bridenstine
“These are the questions submitted online at http://www.nasa.gov/townhall before and during today’s NASA Town Hall with Jim Bridenstine. The number to the left is the number of votes the question got.”
“Will the administration and congress back up this audacious goal with an appropriate influx of funding?
Isn’t this the first step in the return to “schedule over safety”? Been there, done that – with catastrophic results.
Accelerating our return to the moon is an unfunded mandate. How will we do it without gutting our other important missions?
Please explain in detail what “We’ll change the Agency, not the mission” entails.
NASA peaked at 34,000 engineers during Apollo, today we have half that. Are we going to receive more resources?
Over the past fifteen years, the Agency has been directed to go to Mars, then the Moon, then an Asteroid, then an Asteroid around the Moon, then Mars, then a space station around the Moon, and now the Moon again. What steps do you plan to take to reduce the programmatic whiplash that keeps us from actually accomplishing any of these grand plans?
VP Pence directed us to land a crew on the moon within the next 5 yrs “by any means necessary”, what means will you be using?
What assurance can be given that this plan for lunar return will survive a change in administrations after the 2020 election?”
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If they really wanted to lock this goal in they should cut a deal with ESA to deliver the lander. This would prevent the Democrats from abandoning it if they win the next election. It would also solve the money problem as it would ESA’s problem to fund it.
If ESA wants a Moon Village they should be willing to put their money into the pot. Building a lander would show they are serious about building the Moon Village. It would also show they are interested in moving beyond the ISS.
Good idea on locking future Presidents into the policy. The only problem with the suggestion is, it guarantees failure to meet the 2024 deadline.
The experience of ISS proves that including international partners in the critical path delays progress.
To go to the Moon with a program that will not provide practical value greater than its cost will be nonsustainable. Only the astonishing reduction on cost provided by SX and soon BO with reusable launch vehicles has made ISS sustainable.
Plenty of good questions there. However, it is hard for me to believe these people are talking about the “accelerated schedule” when in fact it is currently 3 years behind schedule.
There is also talk about inadequate funding when the NASA IG report indicates that SLS funding has been adequate.
To put it optimistically they are given a goal to do something in 5 years that was done 50 years ago in 7 years and they are given at least a 50% head start with tools and capabilities that were only dreamed of back then.
50 years ago we had 4% of the Federal budget.
I have heard that Rockedyne was getting so many shipments of fuel they had nowhere to store it and had to run tests just to burn it off.
April Fools?
Its important to note that not every question had the same residency time on the site throughout the talk as people could post questions throughout, so the “popular” measure is not completely accurate or able to be used as a quantitative measure of support.
Those of us who work there-and some of us have been there through several programs and multiple decades, know that NASA cannot get the job done. I doubt they could get it done on any schedule and with a considerably larger budget. There are several prime examples: ISS, Orion, SLS. Look at ISS; almost none of it has been built in the US in this century. NASA has hired out much of its work to international partners. Even in utilization NASA has come up short, wasting a lot of the considerable investment. Orion, “safe simple, soon”, 15 years so far and probably another 5-10 years from a human rated flight. SLS, maybe not even that close. I have no doubt that the US has the capability in the form of at least one company which has considerable recent experience, but NASA and its long term contractors have demonstrated in the last couple programs that they cannot do the job.
BS. NASA could get it done, if the folks in DC ever got out of the way.
How have the folks in DC gotten in the way of SLS? In fact, Congress has given SLS more money every year than the Administration was asking for. So, if anything, Congress has been helping, not hurting SLS. Yet the SLS schedule still seems to slip about a year every year. Why is that?
Because it is an abysmal design resulting from congressional mandate to use old Shuttle hardware, or more specifically, old Shuttle contractors? Who’s idea was it? In contrast everybody and his brother want to take credit for Commercial Crew.
I agree on those points, but NASA/Boeing has really botched the implementation as well. Coming off Constellation (Ares I and Ares V), where they discovered all the “big” issues (like the RS-68 with its ablative nozzle simply could not be used) and found solutions, it shouldn’t have been that hard to implement. Unfortunately, it’s just a big money pit at this point.
“an abysmal design resulting from congressional mandate to use old Shuttle hardware”
Something else that goes on my “Seems like…” list. In this case, using already available parts and facilities “seems like” it made a lot of sense.
Similarly, initiating a super heavy booster “seems like” a great idea even if there’s no mission because for sure there will be future missions.
SLS maintains the Solid Rocket Motors production line open. Otherwise, the folks in Utah will be out of work and many of those factories around Salt Lake City would be decimated. This is the other side of the SLS support in Congress. Of course, the eastern side of that coin is well know in this forum. Sen. Shelby protecting the Marshall folks, who would be sunk without SLS. Sorry state of affairs, but that is what we’ve got. I do believe that SLS may fly once… eventually…. after that…
Hopefully, Blue Origin & SpaceX will take over the meaningful work…. and sell rides to NASA astronauts and cargo.
Just liking your comment did not seem sufficient…
You are exactly correct, Doc.
The folks in DC is how we got SLS
Were the questions submitted by NASA personnel only or do they include questions from the general public? Some of the questions seem rather amateurish, for example this one: “18 With the recent discoveries of many Habitable Zone planets through the Kepler and TESS missions, shouldn’t NASA be preparing deep-space missions in the Vein of Voyager and New Horizons, to explore these new-found planets?”
What a mess.
Question:
“Will the administration and congress back up this audacious goal with an appropriate influx of funding?”
Hypothetical answer:
Yes, the check has already been sent to SpaceX.
Question:
Accelerating our return to the moon is an unfunded mandate. How will we do it without gutting our other important missions?
Hypothetical answer:
Your missions have already been gutted and the money saved has been sent to SpaceX
Question:
Please explain in detail what “We’ll change the Agency, not the mission” entails.
Hypothetical answer:
Change the agency by cutting funding to NASA and sending the missions to SpaceX.
Question:
NASA peaked at 34,000 engineers during Apollo, today we have half that. Are we going to receive more resources?
Hypothetical answer:
No more resources. NASA’s budget will be cut and the money sent to SpaceX.
SpaceX has done a lot of incredible things, and deserves much credit. Schedule and cost management for system development are not among those things. Cargo Dragon was promised in three years; it took six. A crewed Dragon has been promised for the better part of a decade; the first CCDev funding they received was back in 2011.
Not criticizing them here, or suggesting they shouldn’t have a significant role – but I am suggesting that crewed systems are a lot harder and costlier than most people realize.
I find myself dithering over the Boy Administrator (when you are 70, the appellation ‘Boy” can be widely used).
Why? Because if you look at NASA through wide lenses the thing that sticks out is this: lack of consistent leadership. Oh, sure, thee are lots of reasons, especially changing administrations.
Still. How do recent comments add to the leadership vacuum?
So you are saying we need older administrators not younger ones? What a crock. A giant problem is that all the chair warmers at the various Space Conferences and Committees that meet monthly are an echo chamber of principally 60+ year olds who havent worked in direct engineering or science jobs in 3 decades, and convince each other that everything must take 10 years and 1 billion dollars, all while the new space youngsters in half a dozen companies prove them wrong daily..
Not at all. My generation got us 410 PPM, among other monumental screw ups. What I said was that we need new ideas and consistent leadership.
I would also add that with age comes, not wisdom, in most cases, but surely a longer point of view.
New space youngsters who don’t have to answer to Congress when things blow up.