House Hearing On NASA FY 2020 Budget Request
A Review of the NASA FY 2020 Budget Request
Live video
10:00 am EDT
Witness: Jim Bridenstine
– Statement of James Bridenstine before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology U.S. House of Representatives
– Chairwoman Johnson Opening Statement for NASA FY20 Budget Request Hearing
– Opening Statement Chair Kendra Horn (D-OK) Full Committee Hearing: A Review of the NASA Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Request
– Ranking Member Frank Lucas Opening Statement at Full Committee Hearing – A Review of the NASA FY2020 Budget Request
There is so much talk of “boots on the moon” (which by the way is a military based phrase implying war), but not one single word said about what will happen after the first landing. There is no explicit 10 year, 50 year or longer plan on what to do. What exactly will humans be doing on the Moon? Geology? Given expected flight rates, even if a small proportion of crew remained on the surface every rotation, building up a base of people, it will take well over 150 years to get a working population the size of the McMurdo Antarctic summer working population (~1200 people) living on the moon continuously. And, what will happen to Earth orbiting space infrastructure? Will it simply disappear. With the current plans, no common (non-super rich) person will be able to go off Earth for hundreds of years if at all. I would sure like to see the plan and money that would prove me wrong here.
I noticed the same thing, although in fairness the so called ‘Gateway’ represents something of a ‘permanent’ presence. The Administrator mentioned stockpiling supplies for use on the surface.
I also noticed that that the hearing was something of a love-fest with few tough questions, at least the 45 minutes I could watch. Not much oversight. And truthfully some uninformed questions- has anyone died in space, for instance.
Considering the “plan” could change every 4 or 8 years. You gotta keep it loosey goosey.
Then the whole concept of “sustainable” is not valid and the word needs to stop being used and pitched as a attainable thing. Additionally, the concept of “sustainability” is multifaceted and NO ONE ever explains their precise definition of it either – just used as a catch phrase and sales point.
I’ve tried to explain what _I_ mean by sustainable, although my opinions don’t actually matter much… I’d say sustainable means the cost (net cost, if it’s a private company running in the red) is sufficiently small that continued funding is not debated. I don’t know what that is in dollars, but the US Antarctic program is sustainable. It’s expensive, but not so expensive that anyone talks about canceling it.
Sounds right to me.
Your forgetting the factors of sustainable such as logistics and resource availability, hardware designed for sustainability, operations, and political factors (which cover costs). There are many aspects to it and it is a continuum from completely dependent to completely self-sufficiency. If all of these are not considered then there is no true headway towards real sustainability and its just a catch phrase at that point.
If someone is willing to pay the bills indefinitely, it’s sustainable. At least by my definition. And you asked for people to state their definitions, not convince you their definition was correct.
But all those things like hardware design, operations and reusability flow into a sustainable cost. It’s hard for me to see how you could do any sort of ongoing, human lunar program, at a cost people would be able to pay indefinitely, without things like reusable hardware and in situ resources. If someone found a way to do without them and still keep the cost under $250 million per year, I’d call that sustainable. I have to see it to believe it, but if it happened, I wouldn’t object.
Wikipedia cites the annual US Antartica budget in 2012 at $350 Million. I believe this is what is called, in NASA parlance, “walking around money.”
OK, snarky. Still, quite modest. And it got me thinking: where is the flinch point? This is hard to talk about because NASA costs aren’t regularly inclusive or exclusive of development and other costs (ie STS), but what if the annual number to maintain a lunar presence were $4B, after development?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Actually, I’d call $350 million per year quite a bit. The planetary science community would be happy if the Discovery program got that much. It would support a new mission every other year, which is what we’ve been asking for, for a long time, and never quite getting. Of course, that’s comparing human and robotic spaceflight, so it’s not quite fair.
As far as where that magic, sustainable line is? I don’t know. The Antarctic program shows that $350 million and apolitical is below the line. (Note that some, much lower cost programs have gotten in trouble for being too close to a hot political topic.) I think operating ISS is close to the line. It has continued to get funding, and there are no real prospects of that ending. But that’s debated in congressional committees every year. Counting hidden costs, that’s probably around $2 billion a year.
Public interest is also a factor. The Antarctic program has, essentially, none. ISS, at least when it comes to the research done there, is also hovering around zero public interest. (By zero, I mean take the fraction of the people who think about it on a weekly basis and round anything below one percent down.) If people walking around on, or driving across, the Moon were more exciting than that, I suppose $4 billion would be conceivable.
Your right, it’s a buzzword. It shouldn’t be used for anything that could be axed on a moments notice at the whim of politicians.
Does anyone believe that SLS is sustainable? It’s 3 years behind schedule and billions over budget. The program manager should be fired and the entire project investigated for fraud. I’m not sure who came up with this plan of an Apollo on steroids, if it was that Gerstenmaier fellow, he should be fired.
When the Administrator makes the kinds of remarks that he has recently one can be sure that if SLS survives it will be dramatically altered.
Never looked into it, but always thought Apollo on steroids was Griffin’s idea… I thought I saw that he proposed a similar approach in an earlier Planetary Society study. Can’t find the reference now.
Design for reuse with minimal embodied energy input after system initiation would be one general definition (then lost in translation to specifics, unfortunately). SLS to Gateway: nope, SpX to ?: half-credit, BO: ? to ?
Moreover, the very notion of a long-term presence is deeply inhibited by the ‘hurry up’ attitude. And while I do want progress made, I also want major decisions examined under the light of longer term sustainability.