Bait and Switch For Mars – Hardly Inspirational
Inspiration Mars Sets Sights on Venus/Mars Flyby in 2021, Dennis Tito, opinion, SpaceNews
“Today, the IMF remains fully committed to its vision to help provide America with a viable, challenging and inspirational mission to Mars as a way to help accelerate our nation’s plans for space exploration. However, given the extensive use of NASA assets that are already funded and under development, the strategy to pursue the mission opportunity in 2021 would clearly be the purview of the Congress, the Obama administration and NASA.”
Keith’s note: Tito’s op ed is, at a minimum, disingenuous. Actually it is outright deceptive. This is bait and switch, plain and simple. As if no one would notice. Tito seems to want everyone to think that his original wholly-private funded Falcon-9 based plan for 2017 is somehow just a different flavor of his new 2021 SLS/Orion-based, NASA-funded plan. Ho hum. All that needs to be done is change the computer graphics, write some op eds, update the calendar app on your smartphones, and off we go to Mars. He says that it’s all “Inspirational” so who cares, right?
Mr. Tito is asking NASA, Congress, and the White House to find billions of dollars on top of a budget that is going to be flat for the next few years, and launch the very first SLS/Orion mission on a trip to Mars with zero chance of return should anything go wrong. ANYTHING. Even the gutsy Apollo 8 had precursor shakeout flights of its launch vehicle and main spacecraft systems. No advisory committee has called for this mission.
And unless these extra billions are found the ISS will need to be abandoned by the U.S. There is simply no money to do both under the budget that everyone in Washington seems to want NASA to have. By going from the laudable notion of a privately-funded mission to one paid for by tax dollars Inspiration Mars is now simply an advertisement for more SLS funding. No “inspiration” there.
Tito just wants us all to do it as part of his legacy and he wants the rest of us to foot the bill. Has he disclosed how much of his own millions he will commit?
No mission or project should be funded if it does not have support from the scientific community…period.
Even Administrator James Webb was aware that there were two sides to NASA: Human Spaceflight and Science. He wouldn’t let HSF eat Science’s lunch when he was administrator because he could see there would be a day after Apollo. If a professional manager like Webb could see a need for both and that both had their own peculiar needs and reasons for being, I think we should be able to acknowledge that too.
There IS overlap between their missions, but one should not be so tied to the other that one controls the other – just as Webb realized. Columbus didn’t set out to help Darwin, nor was Darwin trying to give a reason for Columbus’ voyage, but they each helped the in both science AND exploration.
A (perhaps token-I know) grapple fixture on the Webb telescope might be a good place for overlap.
“Bait and Switch” is over-the-top nasty and implies borderline criminality when a simple “Tito’s plan is unrealistic” would suffice at this point. He’s not an elected official setting policy for crying out loud.
You know –
I see countless kid’s laptops and backpacks with “NASA” logos – I’m still waiting for that first “Keith Cowing” sticker to show up.
Please try to say ONE thing positive a day or shut the hell up and get a real job.
Yeah yeah yeah – it’s your site you can say what you want.
It was pretty shameful to see Dennis Tito step up to Capitol Hill with a tin cup in hand. Inspiration Mars’ idea is fine if its done with privately raised funds. But if you have to raise funds and build it at the same time, six years to reach flight readiness review is not enough time.
Dennis would be better off investing and finding funds for Ad Astra’s Vasimir ion engine. Cut the flight time to 2 or 3 or 4 months and you will have a flight window every 25 months and even closer to once a year because you are not dependent on Hohmann transfer orbits. Eventually this is how travel will be to Mars, maybe one month trips one-way by 2100.
What’s shameful is how many people are still stumping (tin cup in hand) for Diaz’s fantasy engine with its lightweight, space qualified, gigawatt+, alpha over 50 nuclear reactor.
Between the Eddie Johnsons of the world who insist that spaceflight be 100% safe and the guys like you who want perpetual motion machines, Tito almost sounds reasonable.
I’m not promoting Ad Astra and am just in the dark about their progress. Looks like vaporware to me. Eventually, Ion drives and the power source needed will arrive, probably before 2100. Ion drives are not perpetual motion machines and there are alternatives.
Oh…so after all manned space flight is ended – we put the earth scientists vs. the mars scientists vs. the outer planet scientists vs. the lunar scientists vs. the exo-planet scientists vs. the extra galactic scientists in a ring and let them fight it out for funding? Would that make you happy…period?
Not exactly happy but certainly entertaining! I’d have to take the Earth scientists over all the others. They have a propensity to get out and meet their subject matter – climb mountains and such.
At least at SMD the scientists get to debate the scientific value of their proposals. In human spaceflight it’s not at all clear what the mission is supposed to produce or even who made the decision. Tito has the perfect right to ask the government to spend money on anything. it’s certainly no more wasteful than SLS/Orion/Constellation itself. Having told him “no” Congress will begin to realize that the program itself is unaffordable for any real objective.
Of course – can’t argue with that.
But it’s all relative. My friends in the biological sciences are bitter over the cost of ANY space science funding (including ground based telescopes). The price of a discovery class mission or a LSST would pay for many many dozens of NSF grad students and new facilities.
<sigh> So, as the rats fight over the one chunk of cheese, the entire ship is floundering and is in danger of sinking. I understand your friends plight, I really do, but don’t they realize that attacking other branches of science for additional funding is ultimately self defeating?
Its foolish to believe that if HSF were ended, all those funds would automatically be put back into the science programs. No, it would just mean that the science programs would be next in line for the budget headsman.
Amen…
All of this hating will go away overnight when China announces their Mars flyby launch…
>>All of this hating will go away overnight
You’ve got to be kidding.