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Congress

Status Quo Reiterated At Senate Hearing Today

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 13, 2016
Filed under ,
Status Quo Reiterated At Senate Hearing Today

Hearing: NASA at a Crossroads: Reasserting American Leadership in Space Exploration
“The hearing will focus on the importance of ensuring consistency in policy to best leverage investments made in human space exploration. The hearing will also explore questions facing the agency related to the upcoming presidential transition.”
Statements by Mary Lynne Dittmar, William Gerstenmaier, Daniel Dumbacher, Mike Gold, Mark Sirangelo, Sen. Nelson:

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

13 responses to “Status Quo Reiterated At Senate Hearing Today”

  1. Eric Reynolds says:
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    Why is a career civil servant speaking on this topic? So Gerst is saying SLS/Orion is not only jobs program, but a “feel good – entitlement” jobs program. Can you imagine a career NSF/NIH/State/Energy/ Commerce/DoD/Education employee testifying that the next President needs to keep doing the same thing as the last President because the employees/researchers like doing it? And it will make them feel bad if it changes? I’m pretty sure that many of those employees also work for more than just a paycheck too. So now changing CxP to SLS/Orion affected our nations psyche and culture – huh?

    Even if a program that costs the tax payers tens of millions of dollars is duplicating something the private sector is doing for free, the government should keep doing it because it would be a “devastating blow” to the workforce? And it is a “trivial reason” to cancel a program that is found to be unsustainable by a Presidentially appointed panel of experts?

    The charade of CxP/SLS/Orion is about to come to an end – as neither Clinton or Trump Administrations are likely to accept a $3B a year entitlement program with no goals, destinations or payloads simply because the employees want to build it. Never fear, Gerst has done enough favors for industry that he’ll land on his feet. I’m guessing Orbital/ATK.

    • Nancy Hull says:
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      Touché

    • Todd Austin says:
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      If I recall correctly, SLS/Orion was actively opposed by NASA and the administration. Do you really think that a new president will suddenly have the power to stop Congress from allocating funds in ways which benefit their districts, but are not the best investment for the country as a whole? I don’t see either of these candidates having that sort of influence.

      We’re headed for a bizarre period of either inter- or intro-party squabbling and paralysis where the best outcome will be the status quo. Nothing will be getting better any time soon.

      • Eric Reynolds says:
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        Agree we are headed for a bizarre period and you are correct that the President, OMB, OSTP, Garver, Whitesides etc. opposed setting an immediate architecture for heavy lift and supported their own budget submission that would have used this money for new engine development, 21st Century launch center (KSC infrastructure investment), commercial crew and other advanced exploration technologies. But Charlie Bolden supported the NASA career bureaucrats who created SLS and worked to bring back Orion, along with the CxP contractors and Senator Nelson. We can assume the next NASA Administrator will be more supportive of their President. Once Falcon Heavy is flying, and without Senator Mikulski’s bullying tactics, this era of Congress crippling our space program for these pork programs will begin to unravel. Not immediately – but I have faith that this country won’t continue to spend $3B a year for 8 more years on a program that does nothing but stifle space development.

      • SouthwestExGOP says:
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        I also recall that many within NASA (remember that NASA is a big organization and endures a lot of inter-Center rivalry) wanted a Shuttle-C type of vehicle. The SLS was designed in a Senate cloak room, the Orion just stumbled along even after Charlie’s town hall meeting at JSC where he said it had been cancelled.

        Fairly soon we will see commercial vehicles flying, carrying crew members into space and to the ISS. When that happens it is going to be MUCH more difficult to explain money being spent on Orion. We are going to see big game of Musical Chairs and it is not clear that Orion (especially) will have a chair reserved.

        The commercial boosters will eventually replace SLS but that will take more time. The next few years will likely see many NASA programs terminated. This will be a good thing for everyone but it will cause some tough times for those working on Orion and then SLS.

        • Zed_WEASEL says:
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          Actually I think the folks from Hawthorne will field their BFR booster & BFS spaceship by about 2021. We will have more insight after Musk layout his Mars plan at the Guadalajara IAC appearance on September 27th.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      But Mars!

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Unfortunately in the big scheme of things (the overall federal budget), $3 billion a year is a drop in the bucket. The Administration just doesn’t care about that tiny little amount when there are much bigger funding issues to contend with.

      Back in the 1960s when the manned space program was all about national prestige and was a proxy war with the Soviet Union (i.e. the Space Race), presidents actually cared, a little bit, about NASA. Today, it’s a checkbox, not a national priority.

    • muomega0 says:
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      NASA Studies Show Cheaper Alternatives to SLS http://www.spaceref.com/new
      shows that Congress a) knowing ignores sound technically challenging programs for local interests b) is derelict in their duties to understand alternatives and/or c) that NASA and its community is unable to execute a challenging new plan.

      Since NASA is REQUIRED BY LAW to work on those things funded by Congress, the civil servants and others simply provide some rationale for Congress’s architecture.

      Congress of course could seek out alternatives to the system that costs 10X the alternatives; or challenges NASA to meet a 100X cost goal of DARPA rather than 6B/yr on operations.

      So one concludes that NASA is not able to step up to its Space Grand Challenges (#1 Economic Access to Space) and ability to apply reason to numerous interests. As decades go by, one realizes as Congress becomes afraid to take risks, they stop inspiring people, stop achieving things, and will not be able to solve the really big challenges. Just say ‘No’ and use one way media to ignore facts and reason. Congrats?
      https://www.youtube.com/wat

      • Paul451 says:
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        shows that Congress a) knowing ignores sound technically challenging programs for local interests b) is derelict in their duties to understand alternatives and/or c) that NASA and its community is unable to execute a challenging new plan.

        Can’t it be all three?

        (Re: Video. IMO, they regurgitating every bad (but romantically adored) model for modern spaceflight they could. The actual (Apollo) moonshot. Climbing Everest. Galileo. The Wrights. And especially Kennedy’s Challenge. Even the “lesson” they took from the Pacific Island voyages was wrong. “Moonshot thinking” is what led to SLS and #JourneyToMars, and what led Constellation before that. It’s the kind of thinking that continually cripples NASA.)

        • muomega0 says:
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          Moonshots are different IMHO. The ‘but’ (18 secs) negates all of the “wonderful, inspirational, poetic, brought world together, 70s ‘modern’ Apollo approach” Moonshot. It asks those to continue step up to new challenges, destinations, and approaches within our means, perhaps finding 1000 ways to not make a light bulb, 500 miles on a gallon of gas, or perhaps finding a way to land a rocket on water. Moonshots, IOW, can be 10X better in cost too, not just performance, but keep moving on to the next challenge.

          Going to Mars in a dug out would be cheap and risky, but at least they considered economics. 🙂 Perhaps someone will strap together 3 already used rockets together and land a rover on Mars someday to start that next journey. — “and/or” most things are grey.

          Watch the applause after the sentence ’12 years later they were walking on the moon’, about 22:50. At least some folks want to move beyond Apollo and the 2005 ESAS (+12).
          https://youtu.be/cCXSO-3mt5

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      What’s your objection to a civil servant testifying? They are the ones that actually run the government, after all, plodding along through administration shifts and likely about the only ones with any sort of deep knowledge.

  2. Neal Aldin says:
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    The real issue and question here is, with spending $3 billion per year, having shut down Shuttle to pay for it, why is there so little to see for it? Orion was reduced, as far as costs to the US, to just the command module. ESA is providing the SM.
    The first flight of a genuine vehicle is still 2-3 years away. A manned flight, probably another 5-7 years. After that ESA will have paid its debt to the ISSso there are no more spacecraft being built. And this was the safe, simple, soon approach, emulating Apollo so it could fly by 2011??? Gerst put those super Purdue grads in charge.

    So what happened?

    So, not only a feel good jobs program, but one that has, quite literally, accomplished nothing at all.