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This chart by Marshall Smith resoundingly proves one sad fact about @NASA & human exploration: #NASA is far better at generating studies & reports than it is at creating exploration hardware & conducting actual missions. This is unlikely to change any time soon #Artemis #Moon2024 pic.twitter.com/E7ocRZ8ZPT
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) October 30, 2019
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
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The chart is interesting for what it omits: the original “Vision for Space Exploration” vanishes in this version of history… why?
Lots of things are missing. I guess the point is that this is a useful guide to those piles of reports that you and I have been saving for all these decades. 😉
I think I still have many of those reports. But I did toss out lots of hardcopy papers and reports, and shifted to electronic versions, the last time I moved. (If you’re in a similar position, Guy Fawkes night is November 5th.)
I guess my question is what Mr. Smith’s point was? It’s an interesting viewgraph, but did he really mean to imply NASA has been studying this forever without actually getting anywhere? If I were in his position, that’s not a message I’d want to convey. I assume he had some other point.
It’s not omitted, just not highlighted. President Bush’s speech announcing it is listed.
And after fifty years of studies about how to do it, what was needed, which hardware to build..they went off half-cocked to design an Orion that does not do the job that is needed, a ‘Gateway’ that was never in anyone’s plans, and an Artemis lander that cannot carry moon rocks. Now they have hardware and plans that don’t meet any of the study requirements.
The problem is not NASA the problem is Congress. It takes money.
A good strategist looks at all the variables involved, including resources available like funding.
When you have too little money but want to send people beyond LEO you end up with things like gateway. The alternative was to work on a piece or two of the whole (i.e. what was done under Obama). Both are quite reasonable given the lack of money.
“Beyond LEO Studies” ? pretty sure Apollo had studies. I know there were human Mars studies in the 60’s. This seems pretty incomplete to me.
A NASA history specifically of the DPT/NEXT efforts has been published. It outlines clearly the true source of the Gateway lineage and the major foundation which served as a framework for the VSE formulation.
https://www.nasa.gov/connec…