Commercial Crew Started Before Trump Showed Up
SpaceX’s mission: A new chapter in space exploration — and in humanity’s age-old quest, OpEd, Sean O’Keefe, The Hill
“The Obama administration modified the strategy, slowing NASA’s spacecraft development but accelerating the commercialization plan to develop new systems to competitively sustain the space station. This was the objective SpaceX has successfully pursued for the past few years, sending cargo and supplies to the space station — the biggest, most advanced laboratory in space the world has ever conceived.”
Trump Takes Credit For Space Launch That Got Its Start A Decade Ago, NPR
“Actually, it was two past presidents who put NASA on the path to this SpaceX launch, though it would be hard to know that from listening to the post-launch speeches.”
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– Commercial Crew Did Not Start With Trump. Just Sayin’, earlier post
Apollo started before Nixon.Shuttle started before Carter,Reagan,Bush41,Clinton,Bush43,and Obama.
And the Saturn family of rockets started in 1958 under President Eisenhower, before President Kennedy. Successful spaceflight programs take many years to develop and only happen if the new President chooses not to hit the reset button on the previous president’s space program.
Your guy said NASA was closed before he got there. If that wasn’t the biggest lie told. Biggest American message in 50 years? How does he believe that crap? Even more of a question: How do you who support him believe these untruths?
Saying that is an insult to everyone who works at the agency. Cassini, Parker, Juno, New Horizons, Not to mention 30 years of Shuttle and the construction of the ISS.
Only Donald Trump could take today and make it about himself.
One problem with your post and that is I didn’t vote for him. I am merely pointing out that nearly every space flight program that succeed did so because the incoming Administration didn’t kill the program because it started under the outgoing Administration.
It’s important to remember that many things claimed as ‘biggest’ actually seem so when viewed through eyes not completely familiar with history. So, when you hear “like never before”, or similar, remember the speaker may be speaking from his own personal knowledge, which can be limited.
On a related matter: those of us who lived through Watts, and Rodney King, and Detroit, and all the others have a different sensibility about current events.
Trump markets to grassroots voters by echoing their water-cooler talk. This is made possible by his willingness to spout “unresearched inaccuracies”.
While selling books after the shuttle stopped flying and Constellation was cancelled I frequently…FREQUENTLY encountered people who thought that the Shuttle and Constellation WERE NASA and that Obama had cancelled the whole organization. Human launch isn’t the end all and be all of human space flight and certainly not space exploration, but many folks think that it is.
Hey! I forgot about O’Keefe, brought in to straighten out the books after Goldin. I still wonder what if he remained Administrator instead of Griffin. Would the CEV been designed to be more sustainable and quicker development?
Hope many non-space people took time to read this for a quick history lesson of why things are the way they are. Also good for me as memories tend to get scrambled over the years.
He may not have replaced the OSP with Constellation like Dr. Griffin did, meaning there might never have been a gap.
I’m convinced Griffin was really a DoD plant to divert NASA funds to the solid rocket engine industry–with disastrous results.
Lori Garver said in an earlier post that it was Obama’s initiative and at his direction the Commercial Crew was pursued. Maybe she is correct, though I have not seen much evidence of this; from what I can tell Commercial Cargo was started under Bush in order to partially replace Shuttle and Commercial Crew was simply an extension of Cargo which some companies like Boeing sought to participate in so they could continue to be seen as competitive in human space flight. And regardless of whoever’s fault, Commercial Crew did not get a relatively huge amount of funding. Space X’s effort was very much in line with their already ongoing program and they required and got much less funding. The real shame was that Dream Chaser, which was the only vehicle that sought to replace some of Shuttle’s capabilities, got placed on a back burner. I think Space X and Mr. Musk deserves the accolades. He might be seen as the savior of US human space flight. NASA should thank their lucky stars that Falcon and Dragon are now functioning and that they required minimal government funding. They have also now given a new generation of space workers genuine space DDT&E experience, something neither NASA nor its contractors of long standing can claim.
Commercial crew and cargo started as part of the VSE after the loss of Columbia while George W. Bush was president. It gained steam under Obama when they dialed up the support and requested the funding to actually make it happen. The contracts that resulted in the SpaceX and Boeing vehicles were developed and signed during the Obama Administration.
Of course, but I think there is a larger point to be made here: it took an outsider with a (then) new company working through a novel route to build not only probably the best work horse rocket America has ever had (the Falcon 9), but the actual “successor space vehicle the shuttle”.
I’ve been reading this site nearly every day for 20 years. And even before that we can witness the failure of the X-33 program, the failure of the Space Launch Initiative, the failure of Orbital Space Plane, the failure of Project Constellation and whatever the heck the SLS is now. Good technologies came out of these programs (the TR-106 TR-107 being the direct ancestor of the Merlin-1 family). But government failed, through conventional means, to build as “space shuttle successor vehicle for twenty five years.
Not to make much of a larger political point because this site isn’t about that, but it seems clear to me that another symptom… another datapoint of our national inability to make government put our taxpayer dollars to work and produce effective, efficient outcomes in a timely manner. The inability to see through a government-space next gen vehicle is not at all different from the inability to build a modern Air Traffic Control system for the FAA, or fix healthcare, or not make all the wrong choices in the two ears, or rapidly address climate change.
There’s been a general lack of accountability by government for these failures. The protests we’re seeing, in their own way, are also about the failure of accountability of the State. Consider the countless discussions we’ve had here over the years about the JWST. Harsh words in congress, but zero accountability.
The American people got lucky with SpaceX and Elon Musk. We got lucky he was for real and made a lot of excellent decisions and adopted a bottom-up approach, and not completelyfull of it like many of his early-2000s New Space contemporaries. How many of them tried to plunder surplus US and Russian government stockpiles to take a shortcut. Who remembers “Excalibur Almaz”? Musk didn’t fall into that trap. Remember: US taxpayers paid for the TR-106 / TR-107 as part of the SLI, and the engineering staff behind it got largely laid off in the early 2000s. The only reason the Merlin 1 engine exists to facilitate all of this is that Elon Musk swoooped in and prevented good technologies from going to waste and being forgotten about. That was the extent of SpaceX’s technology adoption. How many orphaned technologies were not so lucky?
It’s was great day for America’s space program and a great day for SpaceX, and also a supreme validation of the innovative approach that got us commercial crew. But this capsule should be replacing or serving along side the Venture Star, or the Orbital Space Plane, or at the very least, the Crew Exploration Vehicle that first launched way behind schedule in the far off future of 2012 (remember that?). The 9 year gap never should have happened and stands as a monument to America’s decline in the ability to get things done. The fact Crew Dragon is, for now (until Starliner and Orion), the only ride we got, and government-space can’t make its internal programs work is extraordinarily troubling and has to be resolved. Not just for space exploration, but for validating democratic (small d) government as an effective instrument of society. Because right now, private industry that is accountable to shareholders looks a whole lot better, and it really shouldn’t be an either-or proposition. It should be a both government and private industry proposition. But that means this imbalance needs to be repaired.
So how does NASA even start to do that? Well it’s too late for Orion and SLS. I’d almost say it needs to get it right with the Lunar lander or Lunar Gateway to even start to show progress.
Probably the best and most realistic thing I’ve read on this in years. ‘There’s been a general lack of accountability by government for these failures.’ Unfortunately it goes beyond the projects listed to include others like Shuttle and Station. If Shuttle was so advanced and so capable, why did it get flushed so quickly without question? ISS took for too long, took way too much money, and yet is smaller and less capable with some major missing features. Where is the assessment that explains why this happened and how to prevent it? We see other good points made on NW, like about education and reach to the US public. Is anyone looking at these problem areas?
The advent of cost-plus contracts has really drug down NASA and the entire military really. Since the end of WW-II, the US went from about 18,188 B-24s to 21 B-2s. Three orders of magnitude less! It’s shocking to me that our leaders think that so few stealth bombers is enough to do much of anything useful in a war against a first world adversary with bleeding edge air defense systems.
Perfect.
We could and should have had OSP on a Delta flying years ago.
I agree, unfortunately the Delta IV, despite being a “clean sheet” design, has high operating costs compared to SpaceX and the Falcon. That may be a factor in the higher cost of the Boeing Commercial Crew program.
Yea…no.
I’m gonna go with Ms. Garver on this.
I like Lori Garver. I recollect that Obama appointed her Deputy Director of NASA because of her enthusiastic support of New Space. I also recall that he and Bolden didn’t get along all that well and I suspect that some of the acheivements that have been associated with Obama in this thread actually belong to her.
Having said that, Obama did much for Commercial Space, against a hostile Congress. Trump is also doing much for Commercial Space with a disfunctional Congress.
I also suspect that more folks know about Artemis than know about LOP-G. Just sayin’. The bully pulpit is a high platform indeed.
There is a lot more to it than what Administrator O’Keef is saying in his article. Thank you President Obama for signing the CCDev2 deal. Thank you President Trump for seeing it through.
This is not a left or right thing – this is an US thing.
Thank you!
To be fair, it was Obama who made this effort to commercialize space public and a threat to Congressional power and the threesome deal for spaceflight procurement between them, NASA, and the military industrial complex…prompting their ire and efforts to kill it. This also allowed Obama to take credit for what O’Keefe just clarified started under Bush.
Like I said in an earlier post…if Trump takes credit for Commercial Crew he’s just carryin’ on a Presidential tradition.
Behind the scene it was very different.
Bridenstine said Trump is the savior of NASA.
Is this training that they all go through before working for him? How to stroke his ego?!?
He works directly for the president, and this is a president who demands adulation, even if he doesn’t always follow through with making certain all of the flatterers actually toe the company line. If this is the price Mr. Bridenstine has decided he has to pay to get things going at NASA, I salute him for his selflessness (or his high nausea threshold), but I’m glad I don’t have his job (not that anyone in their right mind would ever consider me for it).
I hit mute during that.
I stopped watching and went outside to work in the yard. Much more satisfying than listening to the brown nosing and political posturing.
It’s just common sense; witness language used by many governors in March, all seeking Federal assistance, and all wanting to serve their constituents. What’s the point of biting the hand holding the PPE?
with Administrator Mike Griffin at the NASA helm
Just as a reminder. Constellation Services International run by Charles Miller had a study contract from NASA for commercial supply to the ISS in 2002. So the history does indeed go way back before the Trump Administration.
http://www.spaceref.com/new…
CSI Awarded NASA Contract for Space Station Cargo Resupply With Standardized Containers
Press Release
From: Constellation Services International
Posted: Monday, July 15, 2002
“Constellation Services International, Inc. (CSI) announced today that it has been awarded a $2.3 million prime contract to study its LEO Express(SM) Space Cargo System for launching supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The award was made by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center as part of the Alternate Access to Station (AAS) program, a multi-year effort enabling commercial ISS resupply services to supplement the Space Shuttle and other nations’ ISS delivery vehicles.”