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Commercialization

Has NASA Lost Its Mojo?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 20, 2021
Filed under , , ,
Has NASA Lost Its Mojo?

Opinion: The billionaires’ space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they’re important milestones, Miles O’Brien, Washington Post
“While NASA (and its Pasadena, Calif.-based Jet Propulsion Lab) are unmatched at unmanned space probes, the agency’s record for manned missions has lagged, to say the least. For decades, NASA has acted like that guy bragging in a bar about winning a state championship 50 years ago. You may not love them, but the billionaires behind these private-sector efforts have both the resources and the impatience with government bureaucracy to put Americans back in space – where they belong.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

31 responses to “Has NASA Lost Its Mojo?”

  1. ed2291 says:
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    Worth repeating: “For decades, NASA has acted like that guy bragging in a bar about winning a state championship 50 years ago.”

    • Sam S says:
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      I’m 41. Apollo’s engines fell silent before I was born, so crowing about the moon landings has always seemed hollow to me. ISS was a technical achievement on the scale of the pyramids, but it’s not pushing boundaries anymore.

      I will probably never get to space, and I’m 100% fine with that. But I’m hopeful and excited that I will see the first permanent space colonies.

    • jm67 says:
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      I take it that Viking, Hubble, WMAP, Voyager, Kepler, Landsat, and the Mars rovers don’t count? I think younger folks are a lot more excited by planetary missions and environmental monitoring rather than a few people being lifted 60 miles for 5 minutes.

      • ed2291 says:
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        Of course NASA has had successes, but not in crewed flight. In 1969 we landed men on the moon with computers less capable than a modern hand held calculator. That is what I am talking about, not “a few people being lifted 60 miles for 5 minutes.”

        NASA has been doing better in going with Space X instead of SLS. It is not all NASA’s fault that humans have not been out of low earth orbit since 1973, but they do bear some responsibility.

        • robert_law says:
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          Yes doing better with space x stuck in LEO going around in circle’s ! while SLS opens the door to the Moon and Planets

          • Christopher James Huff says:
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            SLS isn’t opening any doors to anywhere. Even if it were affordable, it can’t launch often enough to do so.

            SpaceX? Stuck in LEO? Hint: where’s Elon Musk’s Roadster?

          • fcrary says:
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            How, exactly does SLS open the doors to the Moons and Planets? It can’t even launch an Orion capsule all the way to lunar orbit and leave it with enough delta-v to get back to Earth. That’s why Artemis is built around using an inefficient Earth-Moon L1 halo orbit. In theory, it could get large, robotic spacecraft to other planets. But NASA officials have just told the planetary science decadal survey that that isn’t going to be possible. Given the cost, flight rate and demand for Artemis missions, the Planetary Science division would have to start negotiating for a flight opportunity right now if they want to fly anything on SLS before 2030 or so. I’m not seeing any real doors SLS is opening.

            SpaceX, on the other hand, is developing their Starship. I’m doubtful of their schedules, but it’s comparable to SLS in lift capability and designed for reuse and refueling in orbit. That actually would open up new doors for lunar and planetary exploration. If they can make it work, and it does look like the Starship first orbital flight will happen before the first SLS flight.

  2. Terry Stetler says:
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    Speaking of mojo, SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster did a static fire. 3 engines today, Musk teased a possible 9 engine firing.

    https://youtu.be/xV30bdrr1HI

    https://twitter.com/NASASpa

    https://twitter.com/elonmus

    • Winner says:
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      Also note that this was their first SF attempt on an entirely new booster. Pretty impressive that it went flawlessly first attempt with no aborts or re-trys.

  3. james w barnard says:
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    History has shown that governments, for various reasons can only lead in exploration for a relatively short period of time. After that, commercialization must be brought up as quickly as possible, or competition from other entities (countries, organizations) will happen. Suborbital tourism is only the beginning of space tourism. The costs will come down to be relatively affordable. So will the costs of exploration and space development. Right now, we are about where commercial aviation was just before the DC-2/3 came out.
    More power to Sir Richard, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al!
    Ad Astra!

  4. Jonna31 says:
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    Has it lost its mojo? Complete nonsense. Doing things differently… and in many cases better, does not translate to losing its mojo. Do we really need to go down the list of accomplishments in just the past decade, from a flyby of Pluto to a Mars rover+drone helicopter in just the last year? Or what about the wildly successful Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew programs? It was by design NASA did not build and launch a new vehicle to the ISS. It was by design that it was done through commercial contracts. The success of that program is NASA’s success. Because that was the intent of the program. Does this need to be explained? Really?

    Let’s even look at it further out: NASA’s selection of the Starship Human landing System is inspired. it is again, a commercial program application to a challenge, but this time the implementation of that solution (which requires Starship infrastructure) ties NASA’s future lunar endeavors to the Starship program itself. That’s gigantic for NASA and sustainable exploration. It’s also a brave choice. The conservative choice would have been to ask for more money and give it to Dynetics, or rebid and let Boeing win. An agency doing things differently is not losing it’s mojo. Or heck, what about Lunar Orbital Outpost-Gateway, which is going to be manned vehicle with solar-electric propulsion. Imagine that: the first manned space vehicle that actually doesn’t use chemical rockets.

    It’s not bureaucracy that got in NASA’s way. It was a decade of indecision on the part of elected officials about what we were going to do next, and technology not catching up with the realities of funding. But that’s largely over. NASA still has the SLS Albatross around its neck. But its slate of locked in unmanned and manned missions looking from the 2020-2030 time span is impressive.

    Ten years from now we will (under current plans):
    – Landed on the moon again several times.
    – Have a manned lunar orbital outpost.
    – Have two super heavy lift launch systems in service (Starship, SLS), one of which (SLS) will be finally capable of orbital refueling.
    – Have likely at least two more classes of rockets that can land as a companion to the Falcon 9
    – Launched the next Mars Orbiter
    – Launched the next two stages of Mars Sample-Return
    – Launched DRAGONFLY
    – Launched WFRIST
    – Launched (finally) the JWST
    – Launched LUCY and visited 5 different asteroids
    – Launched Psyche
    – Launched DAVINCI+ and VERITAS
    – Not to mention having another decade of Hubble, Curiosity and Perseverance science under our belt.

    And that’s just off the top of my head. An actual list would be several times as long.

    It’s actually pretty ridiculous, really. On the one hand, with the old Constellation program and then the Orion-SLS mission as once envisioned, the criticism was “NASA is doing Apollo again, but who cares, we did that”. But now when NASA doubles down on commercial instead of building like Apollo, and launching a host of major programs across the Solar system, manned and unmanned, that often use very new technology, the criticism is “NASA has lost its mojo because it’s not like the Apollo days”. What the heck?

    No. NASA hasn’t lost its mojo. It has things that could be done better, but it’s putting major points on the board.

    And let’s not forget that the ISS is every bit the achievement Project Apollo was, and certainly more meaningful to the long term space exploration and utilization. The NASA of the present achieved it too. And it was not 50 years ago. That Space Station by the way? There is so much traffic, most of it commercial, they have to delay missions so there are free docking ports.

    Is it really going to take a Crew Dragon, a Starliner, and a Cygnus all docked at the ISS at the same time to drive home how successful NASA has been in the present? Because the success of commercial space so NASA can buy services and make its budget go further was by design. That is not losing it’s mojo. That’s a bet from a decade ago becoming wildly successful.

    But we it’s stunts Miles O’Brien is looking for, NASA will plant an American on the moon sometime in the next five years. And they’ll be there 50% on the back of a government funded old-space money pit that won’t survive the decade, and 50% on a new space commercial lunar lander whose base model will replace the money pit launcher … perhaps perfectly symbolizing this new era.

    • ed2291 says:
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      Of course NASA has had successes, but not in crewed flight. In 1969 we landed men on the moon with computers less capable than a modern hand held calculator.

      NASA has been doing better in going with Space X instead of SLS. I do really hope you are right that the “old-space money pit… won’t survive the decade.” It is not all NASA’s fault that humans have not been out of low earth orbit since 1973, but they do bear some responsibility.

      • Jonna31 says:
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        Whenever I heard “humans haven’t been out of low earth orbit since 1973”, I chuckle to myself a little, for two reasons.

        The first reason is, that a was a choice. NASA and its partners had designs for lunar mission architectures utilizing the Shuttle as a foundation since the early 1980s. Most NASA Mars mission architectures pre-Columbia disaster involved the Shuttle building Mars Transit Vehicle in orbit via repeat launchings. Everything involved in not doing lunar missions or Mars missions after 1973 was a lousy emotional decision when it came to planting flags, but absolutely the right decision when it came to learning to live in space. Mercury-Gemini-Apollo taught NASA the fundamentals of launching narrowly targeted space missions. But nothing involved in the infrastructure to do it was good beyond those missions. The Saturn V was too expensive. The Saturn IB was not a good rocket design by the mid-1970s (and certainly inferior in every way to the EELVs of 20 years later). The Apollo capsule was antiquated by 1975. I think it would be fair to say that the Space era began when the Lunar mission era ended.

        The second reason is that NASA of the 1960s and 1970s knew so little about destinations other than exactly where it was going to land on the moon in 1969, that manned missions anywhere else would have gotten people killed. Take Mars. Mars 1982, Mars Mars 1995, Mars 2000 were all floated. Because of Mariner 9 and Viking, NASA knew some things on Mars. But imagine trying to land a large manned vehicle on the Martian surface in 1982 or 2000. Before Mars Pathfinder, Global Surveyor and everything since. It would have been a disaster.

        The point is, in both respects, the whole “we haven’t been out of earth orbit since 1973” presumes that ever destination other than the Earth-facing side of the Lunar equator requires just determination and decision to get there. In truth, every destination – even other destinations on the moon – are rife full of what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the “Unknown Unknowns” that have taken decades, tens of billions of dollars, and dozens of individualized missions to upgrade at least to “Known unknowns” and often times far better than that.

        A good example is 3D printing technology. Relatively new in the way we think of it int he last 30 years… Mars reference design missions never featured this thing, but now it’s an essential part of it in order to fabricate parts for repair. Or landing rockets. Even the latest Mars Design reference NASA has requires 8-11 SLS Block II class launches in order to build the Mars Transit Vehicle in around 2 years. That was taken at face value (albeit at exorbitant expense) in over 20 years of reference designs, but now with the $2 billion SLS on hand, complete with the forthcoming $800 million EUS, that can only be built MAYBE at a rate of 3 every 26 months, it seems completely absurd. The mission now requires something like Starship to do. This wasn’t imagined not long ago, just like landing rockets in general were considered a forgotten dead end with the DC-X.

        I’m content NASA hasn’t been out of Earth Orbit since 1973 for the simple reason that what we know about those destinations now would have made the potential missions either another Apolo-esque elaborate stunt, were bereft of technologies we couldn’t imagine yet, or would have gotten people killed because of dangers we didn’t anticipate in our ignorance.

        It is better to do it right thent o do it quick. 52 years since Apollo 11 may be forever in the context of a single lifetime, but it is a blink of an eye in the context of human history of exploration and expansion, including the 500 year saga of colonizing the Americas.

        Me? I’m 38. I realistically expect by the time I’m an old man there will be a couple dozen Astronauts on Mars in a permanent base. That’s it. By the time my grandchild is an old man, it’ll probably be something akin to what the South Pole base is today. That’s the time table I imagine. Thousands of people won’t be living on Mars until will into the 22nd century. It’s our responsibility to not engage in stunts to show mojo, and instead pave the road for them to build on.

        • Terry Stetler says:
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          The first reason is, that a was a choice.

          Yes it was, a choice recommended to Nixon by White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman in order to create the most jobs in the most congressional districts. Electoral politics for 1972.

        • ed2291 says:
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          You are right in saying “…that a was a choice.”
          It was a poor choice.

          For most of the history of ISS it was manned by 1 to 3 people. What significant scientific progress was made? We landed a probe on Mars in 1976. Other probes have been better and went to different places, but there were no dramatic break throughs.

          You are 38. I am 68. We landed on the moon in 1969 when I was in high school. Since then NASA, congress, and the presidents of both parties have kicked the can down the road promising something will be done sometime after they retired. If you doubt this, read Keith Cowing writings from any year. Space flight was stolen from an entire generation.

          We could have made progress at any point. Old astronauts, apparently wanting to preserve their fading glory, meekly went along. It took Elon Musk bravely spending his own money (and in fairness NASA willing to take a chance on him) to start things moving again.

          • Jonna31 says:
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            With respect to ISS manning, you’re conflating things.

            The ISS was limited to 2-3 people for much of the mid-2000s because of the post-Columbia fall out and the shuttle’s multi-year groundings, resultant delays in construction, limitations on resupply, and then limits on Soyuzs available. The root of this was a decision – a wrong one – to cancel the Crew Return Vehicle, not develop a non-Shuttle ISS crew rotation vehicle to put on top of an EELV, and not launch the finished habitation module. This was all to save money. But it had nothing to do with NASA not having its mojo. It was a decision.

            To say there have been no dramatic breakthroughs with the other probes is simply false. Voyager itself was post-Apollo. Cassini and Galielo followed up on Voyager and revealed extraordinarily diverse and interesting systems around Saturn and Jupiter. Every single Mars lander and rover has made significant scientific advance and/or technological advance of the one before it. And being built right now is Octacopter drone to Titan. If these aren’t breakthroughs, what is?

            I reject whole heartedly the thesis that spaceflight was stolen from an entire generation. On any topic of safe, I disagree with nothing as vehemently as that. The people who wanted grew up seeing Apollo 11 wanted Mars in their lifetime. That, sadly, is unlikely to be what they achieve at this point. But they achieved something vastly more significant than another stunt or another first – they build the space station, learned to live in space, built second and third generation dedicated space vehicles, and create the commercial launch sector. They didn’t go places we haven’t gone, but they did things their predecessors couldn’t and their successors require. What could be a grander legacy? It’s all about what we leave behind in the end. The Apollo Generation left behind a lunar achievement. Their direct, successors, the Shuttle/ISS Generation are leaving behind an actual *space* program which is capable of far more than just panting a flag on the moon or planet, or landing some bare bones probe on some world.

            It’s just wild to me the incredible value of this is not self evident. We were no where prepared to go to Mars in 1982, 1992 or 2000. We didn’t know the first thing about *truly* building and living in space until the last 20 years. The technology used on space missions now is so far beyond what was deployed 40 years ago, it’s amazing how far we’ve come.

            Simply put, the next two generations of space explorers will owe everything to the Baby Boomers that made their program possible, and surprisingly little to the Apollo Generation. Robbed of Spaceflight? Baby Boomers revolutionized it in countless enduring ways.

          • Fred Willett says:
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            The thing is once you make a choice – good or bad – you’re pretty well stuck with it. Certainly in govt programs.

            Shuttle was a bad choice. It didn’t look like it initially, but bad decisions along the way, and no one having the guts to say ‘no,’ meant the end result was a way-too-expensive-pigs-breakfast of a program no one had the guts to kill. The result we were stuck in LEO for a generation. SLS has exactly the same flaws.

            Compare this to SpaceX where, if the guy in charge doesn’t like the way things are going, he just pulls the plug, (e.g. composites) and changes directions on a dime. (flying water tanks)
            But, to be fair this is being wise after the event. At the time Shuttle seemed like a good idea and it would have been impossible to predict that it was a dead end. It’s the same whenever you’re tackling something new. 2 steps forward, one step back.
            OK, it’s taken us 50+ years to get from Apollo to the next forward step (Artemis). But hey, in the bigger scheme of things that’s about par.

          • Jonna31 says:
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            I honestly don’t really know if the Shuttle was a bad choice. I think it’s more like a choice that overstayed its welcome as timelines of programs got delayed. I think it’s far too simple to say the Shuttle was a bad choice.

            Rockets of the mid 1970s were really… not very good… to put it nicely. All the major families, especially the ones most directly descended from ICBMs, were unreliable or expensive. The shuttle was supposed to replace all of them for good reason. But they worked if you accepted their high failure rate and their comparatively limited capabilities-for-cost ratio. We could have run a just fine space program with them. But should we have? No. Every Saturn rocket produced model and variant was exorbitantly expensive for what it was supposed to do. In the absence of the Shuttle program, we would still needed something very much like the EELV program. Relying on Delta II, Titan IV, Atlas II and Saturn IBs or Saturn Vs would have been likely more expensive and more failure heavy.

            But could we have done the EELV program in the late 1970s or early 1980s? Probably not. Delta IV and Atlas V benefited from electronics, computer technology and materials that weren’t availible really until the mid-1990s, and to some degree into the year 2000 for their most evolved versions.

            Construction of the ISS could have been possible without the Shuttle, but it would have been more complicated and likely required an earlier launch of the ISS’s robotic arm (or another arm) to assist. The shuttle was also essential for resupply in an era when commercial resupply was a decade away from reality. Remember: the Shuttle’s grounding forced the ISS to go down to two people to a while, largely for supply reasons.

            Howver you cut it though – whether you build the shuttle and retire it by 2000 in a world where ISS construction isn’t pushed back, or you never build the shuttle at all – you have to get through the ISS to any place else sustainably.

            There was absolutely nothing stopping NASA from continuing Apollo missions in the 1970s except political / popular interest and money. They could have kept putting people on the Moon and building Saturn Vs, if the political decision to do that had been made. But while that would have taught them things about living on the moon that we today do not know, it would not have taught them anything about living in space and building large scale space vehicles and sustaining long term space operations. Our world we live in has become proficient at that – lessons a continued Apollo never would have taught. The world where Apollo went onwards would have needed an ISS all its own to learn those lessons.

            That’s why I find this sentiment that a generation was robbed of Spaceflight so wrong. Yes, it set its eyes on a goal it will not attain – Mars – that was premature, and probably unattainable in that time frame, and for safety issues alone probably deeply unwise to pursue without knowing more. But it achieved the essential advancements of living and building in space that will open up the solar system to humanity far more than Apollo did.

            I just don’t see how it can be minimized. The ISS, never mind Hubble and the past 25 years of Mars exploration, and Cassini and Galileo and New Horizons and so forth may not all be as iconic and flashy as Neil Armstrong’s one small step moment. But that moment, while inspiring generations present and future, had no legs in sustaining that program whatsoever. But the ISS and these others programs actually built the future in a meaningful fashion. It wasn’t flash, but it was untold amounts of substance.

            The ISS stands as an achievement as big as Apollo. In my view, it is vastly more important to our medium and long term space exploration efforts. It may not have been the space legacy baby boomers wanted. But it’s the one they built and it’s the one that every space generation after them will owe an unpayable debt for.

        • mfwright says:
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          >NASA hasn’t been out of Earth Orbit since 1973 for the simple reason

          An interview with Roger Launius he answered the question why we haven’t gone back to the moon because there is no reason to do so. I think sending humans to Mars is pure fantasy based what was started by Percival Lowell (Homer Hickam wrote a article about how all goals of humans to Mars based on his Lowell’s speculation).

          We all have lots of opinions, I would love to hear those in top management positions to say what they really think. i.e. for Shuttle we have the 2005 MIT lectures by Dale Myers, Aaron Cohen, and others about how the Shuttle came to what it was. ISS I’m sure has plenty, some of which we have insight but I wonder if there is much more not well known.

          Perhaps NASA is really good at smaller research systems rather than huge programs of industrial scale. I think it was not that long ago Pluto was just a spot of light and we only speculate about planets around other stars.

          In terms of day to day such as websites, maybe with all the restrictions placed on NASA people, they don’t have flexibility. That is there are 100 different organizations in NASA with different ways of doing business (it ain’t all about human spaceflight). But it all has to act like a uniformed organization, i.e. everyone has to have exactly same format but yet there are different priorities and funding levels.

  5. tutiger87 says:
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    Really getting tired of folks blaming NASA when it’s CONGRESS that deserves the blame.

    • ed2291 says:
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      There is blame to go around for NASA, congress, and the presidents of both parties.

    • Christopher James Huff says:
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      Congress has had plenty of support from within NASA. Look at Doug Loverro’s attempts to favor Boeing’s HLS proposal for a recent example. A lot of people there are very comfortable with the status quo, and actively hostile to anyone who disrupts it.

      • tutiger87 says:
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        A lot of people like who?

        • Christopher James Huff says:
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          Come on, there’s only three sentences there. Is it that much to ask that you read all three? Did you just pick the first and the last one?

          • tutiger87 says:
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            No. I’m tired of folks blaming NASA, when the real problem are the 400+ masters on Capital Hill, and the lobbyists that feed the monster.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            Despite the fact that this POV is common, it is also difficult to understand.

            I’m not talking bout the facts. But folks, democracy is a damn messy business. There are nearly countless voices out there, all clamoring to be heard. and while it’s true that money plays a woeful role in opening doors, the fact remains that everyone gets a voice in America. This includes lobbying Congress which might often be viewed as citizens multiplying their voices through shared efforts (it must be said that there’s a nasty underbelly to lobbying).

      • Nick K says:
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        i have to agree. Generally Congress is listening to NASA and more often than not, doing what NASA asks.

  6. Bob A says:
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    I don’t think that NASA has lost their “mojo” as much as they have very poor PR efforts. We have seen Keith talk about the PR and STEM missteps on NASA’s part. One or two incidents is no big thing, but when the NASA web site is 10 years old (I don’t know the actual age, but it looks at least 10 years old) and the search functions don’t, people get discouraged. Yes, NASA has done some really wondrous things over these past years, but how many people know, much less get excited about them.

    It is this excitement that is missing. I have seen a resurgence in the hobby of model rocketry after years of decline. Many coming into the hobby talk about the excitement they feel watching SpaceX. The Crew Dragon capsule and the spacesuits are straight out of a sci-fi novel. The launch of a cargo ship is a first class media event. Their videos and mission animations are first class.

    How much excitement is there about SpaceX? LabPadre has a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/use… with a half-dozen cameras running 24-7 on the Boca Chica SpaceX site. Just looking at the site, they have about 1000 viewers watching the cranes build the tower and ground support equipment. When folks watch storage tanks being built, you have really created an excitement around your program. And LabPadre is not a SpaceX employee/affiliate. They are fanboys.

    In my mind, that is what NASA has lost. They have lost the ability to get people excited about what they do.

  7. Nick K says:
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    I don’t think NASA is leading any longer; not in human spaceflight. About 30 years ago NASA led by gathering an international consortium that designed and built the ISS. But then they stopped leading when they turned away most of their user community of the previous 25 years. 45 years ago NASA led in developing a space plane they flew for the first time. But then they stopped leading when they failed to improve upon it, make it affordable or even safe. And 10 years ago they ran away from it entirely and back to an earlier form of technology. 50 years ago NASA led with the moon landings. NASA could have led in commercial space by encouraging commercial operations, commercial transport, commercial modules, etc. NASA did not go willingly-they had to be forced into when they had no other options. I do not see Orion or Gateway or Artemis as leading-it is another attempt at an ISS, trying to form a new consortium to carry people back to a new Moon landing. Thanks to Space X, if their Star Ship is successful, maybe Artemis will succeed as a new kind of program to carry large numbers of people to live on other worlds but make no mistake, that is Space X leadership. Orion is not a new kind of spaceship and it is not even mainly built in the US. NASA had to cajole ESA into building a lot of it based on an old ESA design. SLS is not a new kind of rocket. NASA ought to have a role in leading; doing new things in new ways. I don’t see it happening.

    • Nick K says:
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      In fact in many ways NASA has become the opposite of ‘leading’.

      A good example is ‘mission control’. Over the last many years they have tried to enshrine it as an institution., as though this is the way missions and spacecraft must be operated, with signals radioed to the ground and controllers managing the operation of systems from the ground. They take great pride that ISS is flown from the ground in this way.

      This was the way things needed to be done in 1965, when bandwidth, memory and computing power were miniscule. In fact they have so institutionalized mission control that virtually all managers at JSC for many years have had to be graduate flight controllers and top managers had to be graduate flight directors. Often no one else is even considered worthy.

      But innovation and leadership over the last 35 years would have meant using AI and computing power to make flight operations more independent and crew-centric. This is what must be done for future planetary missions. What Mission Control proves is ones ability to follow a preconceived procedure. As the deputy ISS manager said just yesterday, its amazing how many things it takes to design, build and operate a spaceship and most of those are not learned in Mission Control. in fact, she said, the people in mission control are not even aware of these things and what it takes. Mission Control may be NASAs ultimate example of how not to embrace leadership in human spaceflight.