Looming Cuts – But A Mostly Silent Space Community
Sheep In Space — Grok via NASAWatch.com
NASAWatch
Keith’s note: After 6 weeks of chaos most of the space advocacy and industry lobbying community are going along with whatever happens to the NASA and its contractor community. No approval or disapproval. Just BAAAH like sheep. Yes, I am talking about you: Aerospace Industries Association, American Astronautical Society, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, Commercial Spaceflight Federation, National Space Club, Space For Humanity, Club for the Future, Space Foundation, Space Frontier Foundation, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, Space Force Association, Women in Aerospace, etc.
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Probably no idea what to say.
By comparison with the other Federal agencies, and other sources of funding, NASAs budget is small.
When it comes to human spaceflight, Musk says ditch ISS. Much of space industry talks longingly about “commercial” space stations. And who is going to pay for those? And what kind of purpose are they going to be use for?
There has not been a lot of “new” research conducted on ISS. Most of the ‘experiments’ on ISS are repeats of things flown on Mir, Shuttle, Spacelab, and even earlier missions. There have been few significant discoveries. The NASA ISS management succeeded 25 years ago in cutting off most researchers from the manned space budget, so there is not a lot of new money in the research program. In fact by the manner in which NASA cut off the researchers they alienated many of them. The NASA manager’s hope or expectation (as unrealistic as it was) was to have other government agencies like NIH pay for research on ISS. They should have looked into why NASA joined forces with the researchers in the first place, back during Skylab and Apollo.
As far as the ISS itself, most of it, certainly the “US segment” which includes Japan and ESA, were designed at the outset to be modular and maintainable. After spending 200 billion over 40 years does it really make sense to ditch the facility when there is no other facility to replace it? Maybe a smarter approach would be to find a commercial ISS operator. If there are modules that need replacing, like some of the Russian modules, maybe NASA ought to find a way to replace them?
Elon Musk says he will be sending Starships to Mars in 2 years. Maybe he will send people in 4 years. Why pursue an alternate unmanned Mars program? Can Starship be used for Martian sample return? Why pursue a separate unmanned program that will be tens of billions $$ and take ten years or longer? Starships will have returned from Mars long before then. We just hope and pray the Starships will ultimately work. The existing rovers will probably keep going for awhile.
Access to space is being provided by a commercial entity, Space X, like never before. Costs are seriously reduced. NASA has had little or nothing to do with it, under than giving relatively small contracts that are probably minuscule compared to what Musk has been spending to develop the new capabilities. We just hope Elon stays alive, healthy, and engaged.
NASA needs to figure out its continuing role. Does it conduct basic research? Does it provide some seed funding to establish new projects? Do they have a continuing role in operations? Should they if the vehicle are designed an operated by independent commercial entities?