Alabama's Anti-Commercial Space Whisper Campaign Begins
Could Donald Trump be better for NASA in Alabama than Obama?, Huntsville Times
“Huntsville attorney Mark McDaniel was on the NASA Advisory Council when George W. Bush was president. He says Bush’s old plan might make a good new plan. “I personally think deep space is something the government should do,” McDaniel said, noting that the moon is deep space. “We talked about that when I was on the Advisory Council. The key word (in Bush’s plan) was ‘beyond.’ We were going to the moon, Mars and beyond. “If you go back and it’s in preparation for going to Mars, an asteroid or beyond Mars, that’s great,” McDaniel said. “We as a nation have to do things that have never been done before.”If you say we’re just going back to the moon,” McDaniel said, “been there, done that.”
More False Memories About the Origin (and Cost) of SLS, earlier posts
“Then there’s this other whopper from Mike: “And, contrary to some suggestions, SLS launches will cost no more than existing commercial U.S. systems – which are currently advertised at about $4.5 million per ton of payload.” How can you possibly make such a statement when the number of launches is unknown – and a lot of SLS development was paid for by Ares V and not included in Mike’s secret math. But who cares, right? No one inside or outside of NASA has ever grasped what it really costs for the agency to develop and launch things.”
Keith’s note: Typical anti-commercial space bashing from one of the usual Huntsville mouthpieces who can’t think of anything new to say.
– OIG Reality Check on Orion Cost and Planning
– NASA Still Has No Idea What a SLS Launch Will Cost
– Double GAO Reports: SLS and Orion Cost and Risk Estimates Are Still Unreliable
– earlier SLS/Oriopn osts
I can see it now, a hotel in LEO… but the name on the pressure shell is in big gold letters, and it’s not “Bigelow”…
And it would be the most luxurious hotel in LEO, with amazing things going on. And the food would be fantastic, cooked by astronauts trained at some of the finest space culinary schools this side of Mars. Believe me.
Rehydrate the food paste with lunar polar water! I have a bottle of Fiji Water (TM) that I disparage in my energy class, but this would trump it.
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The name wouldn’t be “Bigelow” but the place would have a quality of “bigliness.” 😉
In Republican circles, “privatization” is the new panacea, the cure for everything bad. They want to privatize prisons, schools, the Veterans Administration, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, everything — except space. Hands off space, can’t privatize that. Maybe because Obama was privatizing it? (Although admittedly only partially) Have to undue everything he did.
It’s not new: when Rick Scott became Governor of Florida (he’s in his last term) the first thing he did was try to sell some highways to Chinese investors on a leaseback arrangement.
The howling was so loud he gave up.
But you can’t blame him: it is entirely consistent with the way the right thinks; they do tend to be predictable, and as I’ve pointed out before the policy was articulated with Reagan’s “The government IS the problem”.
There’s an innate hatred of all things government, and a sense that taxation is in fact ‘stealing’, among many intellectuals on the right. And this attitude is very American, too, a natural outgrowth of our frontier mentality from as late as the 19th century. Our country requires another hundred years or so to mature.
The colonists who rebelled against “taxation without representation” quickly discovered they didn’t like taxation with representation either.
Reagan said government was the problem even when he was the government. But he said it entertainingly. Americans prefer an entertaining president to one who considers issues carefully and speaks honestly.
Republicans do love “big government” when it comes to things like military spending and NASA. Huge programs spreading pork throughout dozens upon dozens of congressional districts.
1) Military – well at least it’s one of the few things the government is truly tasked with (protect citizenry).
2) NASA – well at least they’re not “anti-science” many here accuse them of. Some of that “pork” is high tech jobs.
The US spends more on its military than the next 7 or 8 highest spending countries combined. One could easily argue, based on that metric, that the US absolutely has a “big government” mentality when it comes to military (over-)spending.
While some of the NASA pork is “high tech jobs”, I’d argue that many of those jobs are obsolete. NASA doesn’t operate its own airline for moving people, so why does it need to build and fly its own launch vehicle (i.e. SLS)? I’d argue the SLS program could be replaced with a “commercial HLV” program comprised of two winning designs and still spend less per year than NASA is spending on SLS.
Agree military is huge, but after the World Wars, then the Cold War, America’s military became more than our own self-protection. Agree with that role, or not, neither Dems nor Reps have tried very hard to extract ourselves from the world stage (especially protection of Europe).
I do not disagree with you that there are areas NASA should not be involved with. The expense of a super heavy lift may be best for government at this time as commercial industry gets its footing right now (maybe). I do think there is a place for NASA to do the advanced research that is not commercial sensible to industry; also maintaining infrastructure like wind tunnels and other specialty laboratory that are not economically viable. NASA also has plenty to pass on for human rated spaceflight. We shouldn’t just subsidize all commercial space; eventually NASA will probably become obsolete, just not yet (IMHO).
TMK virtually all NASA wind tunnels have been mothballed.
TMK there was pushback on that by the DoD, especially with the hypersonic tunnels.
I can understand that, but someone has to foot the bill. NASA is always ready to accept external funding, but it is hard to get.
Really editor! What did I state that was objectionable?
While it went horribly off the rails under Griffin, “Moon, Mars, & Beyond” is still a remarkably elegant label/slogan for both a program and a guiding principle. I do hope that part of it comes back.
The moon has nothing to do with deep space long duration travel. It was 1 of 4 flaws added at the last minute to the VSE by the 2000s Congress. The moon does not prepare NASA for Mars–it just costs $Bs for decades old technology.
So it matters how you go, otherwise, using the slogan is unethical at best. 2010 Act Deadline was Dec 31, 2016. The gap deadline was 2009 for a LV that could not loft Orion.
Americas did not ask what it would take to make America Great and no fine print was given. To infinity and beyond. Duh… Infinity is the time scale. Zero ambition rewarded.
Don’t go to a dusted off 5 decades old, logical stepping stone mission of visiting an asteroid prior to Mars and create new technology. Instead, head to the moon with ‘rotary phone’ technology providing loyalty awards, and make sure you lower the ethical bar to do it all legally by changing the rules.
“Priority should be placed on the core elements with
the goal for operational capability for the core elements not
later than December 31, 2016.”
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/64…
not gutting ethics oversight….
https://www.msn.com/en-us/n…
Until trips to the moon are routine and sustainable with a robust supporting infrastructure, no trip to Mars will be anything but a one-off stunt, kind of like Apollo ended up.
The trip to Mars is ~ 6 months on free return while the moon is 4-5 days, hence routine and sustainable trips “to the moon” will *not * demonstrate robustness, its a fallacy.
Apollo 13 demonstrated that a simple LM engine could return a capsule a bit faster given that the crew could fly washing machines–no infrastructure required in direct contrast to Mars.