This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
TrumpSpace

National Space Council's Next Meeting

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 9, 2019
Filed under

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

36 responses to “National Space Council's Next Meeting”

  1. DJE51 says:
    0
    0

    “America is leading again in space”… Uh, OK, I think that happened back in about the Gemini program…

    • Vladislaw says:
      0
      0

      I was wondering about that myself.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      I’m not sure I’d say that when it comes to human spaceflight. If the US has to buy seats on a Russian spacecraft, just to get astronauts to the space station, can we honestly say we are “leading”? Sure, when it comes to robotic exploration of the solar system, I don’t think there is any doubt the US is ahead. But for human spaceflight? Arguably, we haven’t been in front since 2011.

      • Bill Housley says:
        0
        0

        NASA has had humans flying in space full time for, what, 20 years?
        The ISS flies in space. So NASA’s human space FLIGHT program is doing great.
        It’s ONLY that 1 day up and 1 day back…human space LAUNCH where they fall short, and they are in good company there.They lead everywhere else. If you count launch capability development they have three separate projects going.

        • ed2291 says:
          0
          0

          Humans have not been out of low earth orbit since 1972. It is hardly a great record that advances in space flight have been stolen from an entire generation.

        • fcrary says:
          0
          0

          I don’t count capabilities in development until they are out of development and in regular use. That’s the difference between _being_ in the lead and _will_shortly_be_ in the lead.

          I’m also not sure about the way you’re using “flying in space”. It implies doing something. ISS would continue to fly in space, more or less regardless of what the American astronauts on board did. System maintenance to keep the place habitable is fine, but I don’t think that’s the impression people get when they hear “flying in space.” The active, powered flight all happens on that one day going up and one day returning to Earth. The United States is not currently responsible for that.

          • Vladislaw says:
            0
            0

            Total up planetary wide totals of each country’s history of human spaceflight, Where it has been, total launches, total astronauts, total hours in space, etc and then what each country is currently doing, total launches, total astronauts in space, total hours in space, and then where is each country going in the near future…

            To say any country is leading us .. in any metric .. is just silly.

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            If you want to use historical totals, does that mean ULA is the leading US launch service provider? They’ve made 117 successful flights (Delta IV and Atlas V), compared with 75 successful flights for SpaceX (Falcon 9 and Heavy)?

      • Vladislaw says:
        0
        0

        “I’m not sure I’d say that when it comes to human spaceflight. If the US has to buy seats on a Russian spacecraft, just to get astronauts to the space station, can we honestly say we are “leading”?”

        The Nation has multiple commercial cargo services with more coming online to service humans in space. We have funded multiple commercial passenger services which are about to become operational and putting funding in to commercial facilities for commercial destinations.. So yes.. name another country and that will be even close to what The United States will be offering in 2020?

        • ThomasLMatula says:
          0
          0

          But what about now?

          • tutiger87 says:
            0
            0

            Um…Space is so much more than manned spaceflight. We are the undisputed leader.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
            0
            0

            Not in the eyes of the public. Remember, President Kennedy didn’t challenge the Russians to a Moon Race by advocating that before the decade is out we would put a rover on the Moon…

            Until American astronauts are flying from American soil on an American rocket we have fallen behind both the Russians and Chinese which are able to launch their nationals into space. Until then we are no better than ESA who always has to barter for to rides to space.

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            That’s probably going too far. In terms of current access to space (by astronauts), we’re no better off than ESA or Japan. But we do own and operate a much larger part of the space station. ISS is, in effect, a Russo-American station with a few European and Japanese modules. We could argue about how important that is, but it’s more than nothing.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
            0
            0

            True, but in terms of the ISS agreements each of the members are seen as being equal. And all will need to agree on extending it.

          • Vladislaw says:
            0
            0

            What about now? Americans are still in orbit MORE than the chinese who have the capability and never use it.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
            0
            0

            As I noted below, like ESA we are dependent on Russia to get there.

          • Steve Pemberton says:
            0
            0

            The big difference is that ESA is not in final preparations for launching astronauts into space, and likely won’t be for many years to come even if they decide to do so.

            Yes at the moment the U.S. and ESA are equal if the only criteria is right now at this moment who is launching humans into space. I’m not saying that isn’t a valid viewpoint or perspective, after all we have no guarantee that both SpaceX and Boeing won’t have some type of catastrophic failure either technically or financially that delays regular U.S. astronaut launches by several more years.

            But that seems unlikely and so I don’t think it’s overly presumptuous to see the U.S. as leading at least ESA in human spaceflight. Even comparing with Russia and China, who both are ahead of the U.S. using the “now” criteria,
            I think there is quite a bit of evidence that once the U.S. resumes human spaceflight that there will be some innovations and technical achievements that will indeed put the U.S. back into a leadership role for human spaceflight.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
            0
            0

            True ESA is really at the bottom of the list, tied with Japan for last place in terms of space leadership, since even India is working on developing the ability to launch humans into space. What is really sad is that it’s intentional as the cumulative GDP of the ESA members is greater than the U.S. GDP. But they simply don’t see space as being as important as the rest of the major nations of the world.

          • Michael Spencer says:
            0
            0

            That’s a quite broad statement for a scientist like yourself, Professor 🙂

            I readily admit that my sense of exception is based on what I hear from BBC and other non-US news sources.

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            I had to check… It looks like that’s correct, at least for selected ESA members. NASA accounts for about a thousandth of the US GDP. The ESA commitments from France, Germans, the United Kingdom and Luxembourg are 0.4, 0.2, 0.1 and 0.4 thousandths of their GDPs, respectively.

          • Bill Housley says:
            0
            0

            Astroid Lander. Just saying.

            If all a space agency is doing is helping to support a space station, and taking people there and back again, using 30 (40?) year-old technology, and crashing their Phobos Sample Return Mission in the South Pacific, then can they really be called “leaders” either?

            Look, all I’m saying is that having and maintaining a human space flight program involves lots of different things…of which a seat under an astronaut and a rocket under that seat are two. Also, those two things should not be the last word in a space agency’s leadership…but they are. They are the most visible and I think are tremendously important, but the public emphasis on it is unbalanced.

            When next NASA launches humans again, it won’t be on SLS/Orion, so it won’t be NASA doing it. It will be NASASpaceXBoeing doing it…and that is a better, more sustainable, and more leadershipy way of doing it, and no other space agency in the world is doing it, and it is not a maybe, most of the leadershipy things about it are done.

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            Is that so bad? NASA has been criticized for underutilization of ISS, and of more-or-less just sending up astronauts so they can say we have astronauts in space. Maybe the Chinese are only sending up people when they have something important for them to do.

        • fcrary says:
          0
          0

          I did specify human spaceflight, so commercial cargo services aren’t relevant to my comment. In terms of human spaceflight, the country in the lead can change over time. I’d say the United States was ahead from Apollo to the mid-1990, behind since the Shuttle was retired, and will shortly be back in the lead.

          • Bob Mahoney says:
            0
            0

            How is cargo delivery to humans in space not relevant to human spaceflight?

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            Well, despite its anchor tenant, Falcon 9/Dragon has flown 20 ISS cargo missions out of 74 Falcon 9 launches. I’d call cargo delivery to ISS one of several uses, and not as significant as other applications.

            The 13 Cygnus missions are all ISS resupply, but they have flown on either a launch vehicle with major involvement from Russian and Ukraine (Antares) or using the Russian RD-180 for the first stage engines (Atlas V). That’s not what I’d call a slam dunk for American leadership in human spaceflight.

            More to the point, Russia also makes ISS supply runs using Progress/Soyuz and the Japanese have done so with the HTV/H-II. The only unique capability the US has is returning cargo from ISS using Dragon, if you neglect the small amount which can be returned with astronauts on a Soyuz.

            I guess I shouldn’t have neglected cargo runs to ISS. But I also can’t see them as a field where the US is clearly in the lead.

          • Vladislaw says:
            0
            0

            Yes it is .. without cargo services that have human rated carriers you can not maintain humans prolonged stays in orbit. Lets see how well china does maintaining their human station without human rated carriers to dock with their station.

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            I’m not sure what human rating has to do with it. Dragon (not Dragon 2) is not human rated. Progress isn’t (no matter what NKK Energia claims.) Both lack things like life support systems and launch escape systems. The same is true of HTV and was true of ATV. I think, except for limited cargo going up on a Soyuz, the Shuttle was the only human rated vehicle which ever supplied a space station.

            As far as China is concerned, they’ve already tested something called Tianzhou. It’s a cargo craft based on their Tiangong-1 space station. It’s flown once, but as a test not a real cargo run, to Tiangong-2 after the crew left. I’m not sure if Tianzhou would be considered human rated. If they ripped out the life support systems to save mass, I don’t think it could be.

          • Vladislaw says:
            0
            0

            It is my understanding if you send a vehicle to be docked or berthed to the ISS you must have life support capability. Not to provide it but capable of supporting life support. Also for NASA, it was my understanding they can send live specimens in the cargo vehicles. Again the standard looks to be human capable standards.

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            No, they have to have a pressurized compartment. Life support gets into oxygen supply, carbon dioxide removal, humidity and temperature control, etc. And to be human rated, a vehicle has to provide those things for the planned crew for the planned mission duration. Dragon, Progress, etc. don’t do that. The station is supplying all (or almost all) of that once they dock.

            I’m not sure about the mice. I think they have sent up a few. But a dozen mice don’t breath much air in single a day, or produce much metabolic heat. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could just send them up breathing the air in the pressurized compartment. Let’s see…

            Yes, the internet is a easy, if slightly weird, source of information. The basal metabolic rate of a mouse is about 30 kJ/day, compared to 6500 for a person. (0.35 and 75 W, respectively.) Activity can increase that substantially, but let’s say, on average, a mouse consumes oxygen at 0.5% the rate of a person. I’m not sure if that would get a dozen of them to ISS before the air went bad, but they certainly wouldn’t need much more than an oxygen bottle with a slow bleed.

          • Michael Spencer says:
            0
            0

            It’s quite difficult – though admittedly your effort is heroic – to make generalized comparison of hugely disparate efforts based on observable bits and pieces. The gestalt doesn’t clearly rise to the top, I suppose I am saying.

            Perhaps it’s more useful to compare stated national goals with degree of success? And indeed that’s where so much criticism is based, at least on this web site; without a clear goal, one withstanding the test of either time or more than one election cycle, any sense of leadership is just lost.

          • fcrary says:
            0
            0

            I’m not sure it’s even a good idea to try to compare different countries space programs. They are too different and specialize in too many things. That’s probably about as hopeless as talking about which place on Earth has the “best” climate. I think my point was more than the quite, that the US is “leading again” (implying it wasn’t in the recent past) isn’t nonsense. By some not unreasonable standards, we weren’t and won’t be until we regain the ability to launch astronauts.

            But goals, and how well they are achieved, is also a murky criteria. It’s important, but a 100% success rate achieving very unambitious goals isn’t impressive. And a 50% success rate achieving extremely ambitious goals might be very impressive. Worse, some countries such as China, tend to be vague about their goals until they are achieved. The Soviet Union used to do that as well. As a result, we can’t really say if they achieve their goals. We just never hear about so many of the things they tried and failed to do.

  2. mfwright says:
    0
    0

    Can someone of authority tell NASA and others to stop using Mars in discussions about the moon? We need to put a stop to the Mars myth as Homer Hickam explains in his blogs.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
      0
      0

      Sadly Mars is hard wired into the culture of NASA. Even in the 1960’s when Project Apollo was going at full speed they were looking at ways to send humans to Mars and developing the nuclear engine to do so.

      • tutiger87 says:
        0
        0

        And what’s wrong with that? Eventually, that’s where we want to go.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
          0
          0

          Eventually we want humans to go everywhere in the Solar System, not merely Mars. But to do that we need to industrialize the Moon. NASA fixation on Mars has delayed that for decades.

          • Michael Spencer says:
            0
            0

            We are messy, fractious, bellicose and disagreeable bunch, aren’t we?

            It’s lovely being human.