Obama Campaign Issues Space Policy Fact Sheet
FACT SHEET: President Obamas Accomplishments for NASA and Floridas Space Coast
“On the heels of the first successful launch of a private spacecraft to the International Space Station ushering in a new era of space exploration, Obama for America-Florida released the following fact sheet on President Obama’s space policy and accomplishments: “I am 100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future. Because broadening our capabilities in space will continue to serve our society in ways that we can scarcely imagine. Because exploration will once more inspire wonder in a new generation sparking passions and launching careers. And because, ultimately, if we fail to press forward in the pursuit of discovery, we are ceding our future and we are ceding that essential element of the American character.” -President Barack Obama”
Keith’s note:Of course, we’ll be more than happy to post space policy statements from the Romney campaign – as soon as they issue them.
I hope Romney identifies the Moon as the first target, then Mars. This Velcro-ing an astronaut to an asteroid is sheer nonsense.
—John
While campaigning in Florida Romney called sending people to the moon a complete waste of money and ridiculed Gingrich for even considering it. Romney plans deep cuts in the discretionary budget, which includes NASA. He was honest about his opinion and plans.
Which makes it so strange that about half the county believes that Obama wants to destroy the space program and that “a change in leadership” will get them a blank check to go to Mars tomorrow. And slash their taxes. These are the same people that say Obama cancelled the Space Shuttle.
To go to the moon, we need people that can think objectively.
Logic gets in the way of a good rant.
The funniest thing I’ve seen this morning. And true.
Of course, Romney was also for the Constellation program which was also a lunar outpost program. Romney’s objection to the Moon was simply a way of ridiculing Newt. And politicians have had a long history of ridiculing important advancements in science and technology.
Marcel F. Williams
Marcel, you say:
“
Of course, Romney was also for the Constellation program which was also a lunar outpost program.”and also:
“I think Space X needs to actually put someone in orbit and bring them back safely before bragging about going to the Moon and Mars.”
So which is it?
How can constellation be a “lunar outpost program” if all they ever did was blow over $10B on a glorified solid booster and never even put a pound in orbit?
Ask Romney, he was for it!
Marcel F. Williams
And don’t forget Obama was for Constellation as well. Four years ago, one of his promises was to “Support human mission to moon by 2020”.
If you have a link to an actual statement by Mr. Obama saying that he ever supported Constellation or ever believed it was essential to reach the moon by a specific date, i.e. 2020, please provide it.
Mr. Obama has been a strong supporter of NASA from the beginning, and advocated going on the the moon and Mars, but he advocated early in his campaign that Constellation be canceled, but was forced to continue to support it by powerful members of Congress. He has never suggested we were in a race to get there, believing that it is essential to develop technology that makes human spaceflight more practical.
dogstar3,
Riddle me this: Why is that the only place Obama favours a free-market solution is with the space program? Everywhere else, free-markets are demonized.
—John
It’s pretty understandable with the crap the banks have been pulling. In the space program, free market (with stimulus from gov’t) solution helps the companies involved, the people, and the country. In financial sector, free market solution helps some rich people get much richer, lots of other people get poorer, the companies go spectacularly bankrupt, and is part of what pushed the country into recession.
Oh and if you were thinking healthcare instead – my (now) wife, my sister, and my dad were unable to get health insurance on their own due to pre-existing conditions… (thanks free market insurance companies) and I believe Americans have gotten worse healthcare and it’s more expensive than other countries. However one consolation is that the conditions here do foster skilled specialists and researchers since we pay so much of our income to healthcare.
Technology industries and space program seem to by nature not lead to screwing over everyone.
Riddle me this – why, when he favors a free market solution, does it not matter and he still gets demonized, possibly even worse?
Perhaps when you don’t have rational dialog … trying to be rational yields more irrational demonization. Makes one look bad the more rational they are.
That’s kind of a fascinating question jski. To hazard a guess, that I’m sure everyone here will hate:
The space program, think NASA, is purely government funded, social-istic. In Obama’s view it may be experienced largely as an $18B a year money sink. Obama’s got U.S. economic problems. How does the $18B he gives NASA solve his U.S. economic erosion dilemma (don’t confuse how it actually can or does, think only instead of the likely perception).
People might counter and say “a money sink?!”, oh it does stuff and, importantly, creates jobs. But the mere expenditure of money to pay someone, ‘to make a job’, does not mean there is a productive result. You could pay a million people a $ million a year each and spend a trillion dollars, just to see them sit and watch paint dry. And then all could rejoice and say they created a million jobs for the Nation. As we know, job-creation does not necessarily mean productivity or economic growth or the generation and creation of value. Example: I’ll bet every reader here can name at least one person they’ve seen that is very highly paid and yet does or creates or produces pretty much – nothing. So what this Nation needs is not so much “job creation” as it does “value creation”.
Am I suggesting that NASA pays people to sit and watch paint dry? Of course not. A problem NASA has is that much of the work it does results in the creation of potential value, not kinetic value (my terms). So NASA is significantly a “potential value” creator – this links to its research thrusts. It produces a multiplicity of results at the TRL1 to TRL5 level and not as much at the TRL9 level. Or, it produces outcomes that are very intangible – hard to quantify or from the dictionary – hard to grasp. (And yes, there are numerous areas where there are pragmatic outputs that have kinetic value such as NASA’s role in weather satellites, engineering technologies and so on.)
In contrast, when Obama looks at something like healthcare, that is a very large multi- multi-billion dollar existing infrastructure that is heavily capitalistic and commoditized. It’s value is very tangible (life or death) and it’s unsurprising that the government would want to ‘get in to the game’ to regulate and control those very large cash flows and money funds. Not just healthcare, but energy, agriculture, real estate, name your free-market sector, all of those capitalistic markets that create real and tangible value are ripe for gov’t and regulatory picking, with tax and revenue and control outcomes government could gain from.
So, as you posit, the free-markets (capitalistic) are demonized – they are those nasty rotten greedy gangs that create tangible value and produce things and profit (shame on them) and because they are demons, they of course must be controlled by our parental government.
Whereas NASA and this space program stuff is fully paid for by government and it has become a burden that government would like, for now, to push off on to the private sector. Of course, in the private sector’s hands, once a grand economic and value outcome occurs that involves billions (say the capture and mining of a trillion dollar asteroid), then government will revert and want back in to the control game, at least for taxation if not far more.
In the U.S., the role of the private sector is to create value and the role of government winds up being to control and regulate that value and the exchanges of value and to bleed off a fraction (30%) of that value, to own and redirect that value (money) for its own interests and aimed at its own purposes.
The U.S. is considered to have a “mixed economic system” where the government is socialistic and the private sector is capitalistic” (duh), so Obama’s shoving space programs at the free-market at this point (in their TRL level) makes sense and the converse desire to suck-in the large healthcare markets and other huge commodity markets (at their so-called TRL level) makes sense too. It’s pretty clever of them, actually. A fatal flaw in all of this is, no one wants to handle the realm that exists from TRL4 to TRL8, which leaves a gaping hole in the value stream. And if we don’t eventually figure out how to fill that gap, it will be our collective doom.
Very thoughtful.
Having been involved in a few NASA technology efforts I agree with what you say. NASA technology efforts tend to be either one-time-only grants (you can apply next year, but not for the same thing) which just end up with a series of preliminary reports that never go anywhere, or development efforts made up to look like solicitations, i.e. “do X, using method Y and facility Z, and by the way, if you aren’t Dr. X you probably won’t win since by coincidence he suggested this solicitation.”
The problem is that NASA has no idea what its relationship to industry should be. In the early days it was clear; NASA was supposed to help industry develop commercial products. Nowadays some people believe any NASA help to industry at all would be a WTO violation, although China does it all the time and is beating the pants off us.
Maybe it is because we tried socailism and it didn’t work. We kept an expensive launch system despite having ELV and latter EELV that could do some of it’s tasks cheaper. We were unable to replace it in a timely manner. Sometimes competition is a good thing.
John – we won’t resolve our full-scope political differences on this space web site.
But, in the context of space exploration – is there any argument still that Shuttle was an expensive LEO-only solution, that constellation was a disaster, and that SpaceX is turning out to be a win?
Space X is a win for who? Not for the tax payers. Spending $3 billion a year to continue the unnecessary ISS program as a work-fare program for commercial crew companies is going to hurt NASA’s beyond LEO efforts severely.
The future of commercial crew efforts is not in the ISS, there’s not enough traffic to the ISS to support more than one or two companies, its in private space stations like those being developed by Bigelow Aerospace.
Marcel F. Williams
(replying to Marcel below…)
Marcel – are you saying that SpaceX is at fault for the existence of the ISS?
Or that their accomplishment in developing a rocket, a capsule, and 3 engines is somehow diminished by the CRS contract?
Or is it that you are complaining that SpaceX does not have an exploration vision?
I’m a strong supporter of NASA giving money to private companies to help them develop their own manned spaceflight capability for their own privately funded ventures. But I’m against extending the $3 billion a year ISS program as a welfare program for private companies. That $3billion a year should be used to develop a reusable extraterrestrial shuttle for transporting humans and cargo to a permanent outpost on the lunar surface so that we ca start exploiting the Moon’s water ice resources for water, air, fuel, and interplanetary mass shielding.
Marcel F. Williams
Actually, Obamacare (originally a Republican idea), forces the American people into the arms of the private health insurance companies. And there’s more oil and gas drilling under Obama than under George Bush. So I haven’t seen anything to suggest that he’s not for free markets.
Marcel F. Williams
I agree. In reality Obama did not even delay the Keystone pipeline since the first portion is already under construction and the Obama administration invited the industry to submit a new route for the final section that would avoid some sensitive ecosystems.
Actually the only way to really reach mars with humans (using today’s tech.) is to have a lunar outpost ready to fuel the spacecraft. If we tried to launch a fully fueled and manned Mars spacecraft from Earth orbit, it would take MONTHS to leave Earth orbit – likely killing the astronauts as they cleared the Van-Allen belts. If you assembled the Mars spacecraft (at the ISS) and sent it on a lunar orbit trajectory while EMPTY of all people, supplies, and fuel, THEN you can supply the craft in Lunar orbit using (majority of mass) lunar resources- water hydrogen, oxy.
Then once fueled & checked out, the astronauts would take the standard three day trip to lunar orbit to get on-board & head out.
To do a “Mars Direct” mission from Earth orbit is just foolish.
I think that Bigelow + Dragon is closer to doing this than NASA. They just need an incentive. I already know of at least one privately funded mission to “save the Earth” by Billionaires that want to make their mark in history. Lets hope there are more out there.
“Then once fueled & checked out, the astronauts would take the standard three day trip to lunar orbit to get on-board & head out.”
The same mission profile would work for a ship fuelled in Earth orbit. It doesn’t specifically require lunar refuelling. You send the ship out crewless via an ion thruster (which I assume is what you’re referring to with “takes months to leave orbit”), once it’s past the radiation belts, the crew catch up via chemical rockets in a simple capsule.
Similar to the Mars-Cycler idea, where your main habitat, shielding, and all of the associated hardware stays in an Earth-Mars-transfer orbit, and the crew (and resupply from Earth) docks via a smaller capsule.
Mars is one tough objective. So far only NASA and its minions have been able to land an effective payload on Mars and operate it. Even that came at the cost of failure of some very expensive missions. Hardly any nation other than ours has been able to take that kind of hit and still send more missions to such an unwilling planet (please forgive the metaphor). Plus, I am not sure that the ISS is in an advantageous orbit for us to be assembling and launching missions due to the northeast launch direction from Florida going up along the eastern seaboard. To me, one of the national rewards that we would get in sending manned missions to Mars would be the obvious engineering and manufacturing leaps of technology that would be necessary to avoid a Black Swan event of improbable failure which would be ruinious to our national goals. The stochiastic approach of sending an armada space fleet with every possible supply part necessary for a successful mission would feed into the self fulfilling prophecy of improbable failure. Relying on billionaires which Elon Musk is not one of last time I checked, is in my view a Horatio Alger fantasy. Face it, Elon needs NASA and the US Congress. Anyone else who wants to try it and doesn’t think so is kidding themselves.
An interplanetary space craft to Mars is probably also going to require several hundred tonnes of water, perhaps in the form of solid ice to protect the astronauts from cosmic radiation, potential solar events, and the hazards of micrometeorites.
So transporting water from the Moon to an L1 launch port for mass shielding would also make a lot of sense.
Marcel F. Williams
It’s not that Obama wants to destroy the space program, it’s that his approach to the space program so far has been to release a vague, overarching strategy statement every year or two, then do nothing to actually push that strategy through other than leave it to Congress to sort out. I will give it to you though, that’s still probably preferable to Romney’s planned slash-and-burn approach.
It definitely could be worse. With this way, if Congress behaved then NASA would be able to control some of its own future.
It’s not that Obama wants to destroy the space program, it’s that his approach to the space program so far has been to release a vague, overarching strategy statement every year or two, then do nothing to actually push that strategy through other than leave it to Congress to
sort out.
I’ve not been much of an Obama fan from the start. His opponents though have been doing more to make me more of one than I could ever have believed possible.
My read is that Obama is skeptical of space, possibly because of how easy it is for “bad mouth” and the “old boy” network to game billions out of Congress and blame him for it.
So his strategy seems to be “damage control”.
My opinion of Obama’s view on space is on the one hand, it might help him get more votes if he supports it, at least in Florida, but on the other hand if he cuts it, he can use the money for more social programs.
I don’t think anyone’s getting much more of anything out of anything without a major rejiggering (increase taxes? reassess the military?) and NASA may well come out OK in such a discussion. Or it might come out bad while social programs suffer along with. But “hey let’s cut the rest of Hubble to start another redundant whatever program” is… I don’t see it happening.
Romney would be a disaster for space, both COTS and NASA, he has been openly hostile towards it in the past, he obviously sees no use for it. There is no standout presidential leadership that is truly space friendly that I see for the midterm.
Romney will cut Nasa’s budget and shut down the manned space program. I look forward to seeing how the Romney supporters on this site manage to blame Obama for that one.
In response to Marcel’s comment about Dragon not having the capabilities of the Space Shuttle – don’t forget that the Shuttle was so expensive that it ensured NASA did nothing but float around in low-Earth orbit for 30 years. SLS will be the same.
If you are truly serious about wanting to go back to the moon, you really need to wake up and understand that cheaper access to orbit – on the order of 10 to 100x – is required, and that won’t be achieved using NASA’s old-school procurement methods.
You can shut down the ISS, and take the $3b a year we constantly hear you complaining about, and send it straight to SLS – and in 20 years I guarantee you will have nothing to show for it apart from some cool lawn ornaments and a bunch of ops people with large retirement funds.
Apollo-level – and even Shuttle-level – funding isn’t coming back. Adapt or die. Ten will get you one that we’ve already seen more Dragon flights than we will ever see SLS flights.
What Obama needs to do now is repeat, verbatim, his plan of 2-3 years ago.
COTS to LEO (hopefully that’s beyond argument now), asteroid as stepping stone for long-duration HSF, then Mars.
NASA gets exactly the same amount of money it used to, except it doesn’t need to spend the bulk of it developing a launch system.
It got killed last time since it got sucked into the healthcare debate. Maybe it will have a chance now.
I’ll ask the same question I always ask myself whenever this comes up.
Why an asteroid, exactly? We’ve got this thing called the Moon. It’s only three days away, and has a heck of a lot more stuff than the asteroids we’re thinking about visiting (I wouldn’t be surprised if there were actually a few asteroids buried in its surface somewhere). It’s right there up in the night sky, beckoning us, almost taunting us, to visit. What’s the rationale for acting like it doesn’t exist?
There’s a big difference between Flexible Path and Asteroid only. Flexible Path allows you to go to destinations that don’t require landers first, then once Orion & launch & in-space transp is complete, focusing your limited development dollars.
NASA is bridging the two now with L2 as a destination.
It is a better stepping stone, and has value, because:
An asteroid is further away – a 4 month mission for example – 4 month in transit, not on the surface.
An asteroid is a ‘do and move on to the next thing’ sort of mission.
An asteroid a more differentiated target – more scientific value. There are many types of asteroids, left overs from different eras in the solar system.
Learning about asteroids structure is important in case we need to deflect one
On the flip side, a moon visit has practically nothing in common with a Mars mission, so is not a good stepping stone. As for value, sure, the moon is interesting, but Mars is infinitely more so.
1. a mission to nowhere, for no reason other than that they figured out that an LSAM type lander costs too much money. And…. is an example of flags and footprints to a new destination.
2. To state that an asteroid is a more differentiated target is counterfactual (i.e. incorrect).
3. With the budgets that we have today, Mars is simply not going to happen. The last DRM was $20 billion for ONE mission.
4. The moon as a stepping stone, including its resources, is the only viable means for a sustainable Mars effort.
1 – that’s just an empty slogan. It is a very interesting mission on its own, and a stepping stone to Mars – how’s that “nowhere”?
2 – There are Asteroids/Comets/etc that are as old as the Solar System. There are ones the came off of much larger bodies, maybe even planets or planetoids. Very differentiated.
3. These dollar estimates are all over the place. ISS was $100B, so how would a moon base be cheaper? Also, a big part of it is launch. Ares I was $15B to partially develop, and close to $1B to Launch. Then suddenly you have Falcon 9 + Dragon for < 1B to develop and $100M to launch. And which mission profile are you counting? Are you transporting water and fuel or making them in Situ? Saying “it can’t happen” is equally applicable to all exploration missions. It we want to, we can do any of them. If we don’t, we won’t.
4. Using lunar resources to go to mars is technically nonsensical. Even under MM&B, it was only supposed to be a training ground.
I agree, but who will pay for the landers? Not Mr. Romney or any Republican. They want tax cuts. No Republican has suggested increasing the NASA budget by a dollar. It’s more rewarding to let it fail and blame the Democrats.
For that matter, who will pay for the boosters, the infrastructure, the launch operations? If ISS has no value, why would a much more expensive lunar base?
The point we are missing is that both ISS and BEO installations have considerable value. However that value is much less than the cost of going there with 40-year-old technology. That would be like spending the entire NACA budget trying to cross the Atlantic in a giant Wright Flyer – in 1953.
I see that people are still giving reasons for how it’s easier going to one place over another, without actually explaining why exactly they want to go to that place. To do what, exactly? We can’t spend billions on a mission to somewhere just because it was felt to be the easiest somewhere to get to.
Steve
I don’t fall into the narrow ‘been-there, done-that’ opinion, but one could expect that reaction from a sizeable section of the media/public.
From a purely entertainment/public support perspective, if the ‘next big thing’ is a
return to the moon, there will be an endless chorus of criticism/jokes
about how it took over 40 years to catch back up, or redo something we
pulled off in the 60s.
Besides the whole protecting-the-Earth-by-learning-how-to-re-direct-astroids answer to your question, I’d also say that asteroids are on the up in terms of the zeitgeist; asteroid mining making headlines, etc. And since it’s something the average person knows even less about than the Moon, this would feel like a more fresh approach.
An asteroid is something New, that we haven’t done before. Even better, it would be a mission that hollywood has already popularized. People would be many times farther away from Earth than we’ve ever been before..
It might just make for better TV.
Dont’ get me wrong, we need to go back to the Moon and everywhere else as far as I’m concerned – but you posed a question and I can imagine a few reasons why the asteroid would be cool to do first.
[Sorry for the delayed reply, but I don’t think anyone really answered your question properly.]
“Why an asteroid, exactly? We’ve got this thing called the Moon. It’s only three days away,”
“It’s only three days away.” That’s the problem. If you want NASA to do a manned Mars mission [**], which has been the ultimate (if vague) end goal of most of the grand Presidential visions since Reagan, then NASA has to solve the deep-space problem.
[** I don’t, BTW. I consider humans on Mars to be another dead-end. But that’s a topic for another time.]
The biggest hurdle to going to Mars is the travel time and everything that comes from that. Life-support/food/radiation/etc. ISS is 400km from the Earth and inside Earth’s protective magnetic field, and yet costs $3b/yr just to operate. That ain’t cutting it for a Mars program.
But a lunar program allows NASA to push that problem back and focus on the fun problems that engineers want to focus on; landers, rovers, moon bases, and of course, Big Rockets! Woof. We love our big rockets! A lunar program quickly becomes more and more narrowly focused on just being a lunar program. How much of the hardware from Constellation had any value to a Mars program?
By essentially banning NASA from day-dreaming about a) a big rocket, b) lunar landers, c) and moon bases, and passing the LEO focus to commercial players, the only thing left for NASA to do is work on The Problem: How do you keep astronauts alive for multi-month mission in deep space?
Unfortunately, Congress loved their Big Rocket too, and surprise surprise, you’ll notice that NASA doesn’t seem to be working on the deep-space problem anymore. “Just duct-tape a couple of Orions together, whatever – Look at the Big Rocket!”
BTW, imagine that Congress hadn’t cock-blocked Obama’s program, Constellation got cancelled properly, commercial got fully funded, and NASA had only the deep-space problem to work on. And they solved it and astronauts went to an asteroid.
Now suppose the next President wants to go back to the moon. The only new thing required is a lander. And with a bunch of new commercial players doing capsules and rockets and mini-shuttles (and reusable landers), you’ll have no problems doing a COTS/CCDev lander program. Bam! Apollo Redux.
Now the next-plus-one President says “On To Mars (orbit)”, ie, to the moons of Mars. That’s just a long asteroid mission. Second Gen asteroid hardware. Bam! Done.
Then the next-plus-two President says, “No, seriously, On To Mars!” You need a Mars lander. Hard problem, not far off the difficulty of the Deep-Space Problem, but now it would be the only problem left.
Four Presidents, four challenges, four destinations. One after another.
That’s why you do an asteroid mission first.
Lovely! You’ve nailed it beautifully.
Steve
This is a bit ironic…. Tiring to kill off his predecessors ill funded program and the space program all together and he acutely succeeded in restarting the space program on the right footing this time.
You do realize that this COTS program to supply cargo to the ISS was started under the Bush administration, don’t you?
There was no logical reason to have an unnecessary middle man to supply cargo to a space station that’s unnecessary for beyond LEO missions. The ISS program should be ended by 2016 as originally planned so that those $3 billion a year in ISS funds goes to beyond LEO missions.
Using the ISS as a $3 billion a year make work program for private industry doesn’t save NASA money, it cripples NASA from returning to the Moon and beyond.
Marcel F. Williams
Actually, we can go beyond LEO with Dragon / Falcon soonest. Cheapest. Most times.
And still tweak ISS. Frequent visits for more experiments and subsequent research product.
So why aren’t we?
Congress.
add:
Marcel’s comment below lacks a source about why to not trust SpaceX, given that they’ve been true to thier word in getting a LV and capsule to the pad and operating – while all others haven’t, in my world actually doing space counts for a lot more than paper/talk/wishes.
So it sounds like Shelby styled badmouthing. Which should be avoided when we are seeing success in American space.
I think Space X needs to actually put someone in orbit and bring them back safely before bragging about going to the Moon and Mars.
Marcel F. Williams
How in the world can you make any claims about Dragon/Falcon given that it has no real history of flight yet? We’ll see if the cost structure holds. We’ll see how reliable Falcon/Dragon are. You can’t be intellectually honest and make unsubstantiated claims. Maybe you are right, maybe not. But there is no actually at this point in time.
After NASA was created back in 1958, it took them only 4 years to place an American in orbit and only 11 years to place Americans on the Moon.
Space X was founded in 2002 and still hasn’t put a human in orbit. I believe that Space X will eventually achieve this goal. But for now, they’re really nothing to brag about. And they’re certainly in no position to help NASA in its beyond LEO efforts which should be NASA’s primary focus.
Marcel F. Williams
Marcel,
In all of the US program, only SpaceX has done an automated vehicle that can rendezvous with a space station.
That’s actually a lot harder – look at how much trouble it took the Russians with Progress … and its just a modified Soyuz design.
Bitterness knows no end.
“I think the Space X needs to actually put someone in orbit and bring them back safely before bragging about going to the Moon and Mars.”
But it’s okay for you to talk about launching cheap space stations on SLS?
I’m commenting here since there seems to be a depth limit (or whatever computer folk call it).
Marcel: nobody is BRAGGING about going to the Moon and Mars. Not NASA. Not Elon. (Well, the authors of Constellation are still pretending they were going to get there except for two evil Presidents.) Elon has talked about his motivating goal. You seem to think that’s OK for NASA, but not OK for free citizens.
James Muncy
NASA is actually helping private companies to develop their own manned spaceflight capability. But, according to pure capitalist doctrine, private investors should have taken some of the $2 trillion that they are currently sitting on to help develop a private space industry. But they didn’t! So once again, good government comes through:-) And Elon has thanked NASA numerous times for their help!
But having private spaceflight companies trying to make a profit out of the New Frontier doesn’t mean America shouldn’t continue to have a not for profit public space program to continue exploring and pioneering the New Frontier.
Marcel F. Williams
Let’s compare
costs. The ISS which according to you gets 3 billion a year can host a crew of
6 (3-4 are US) for 3-6 months. CXP which
was an lousy attempt to go to the moon could only support a crew of 4 for 21
days(sorry the moon may have water, but still lacks spare parts like oh rubber gaskets,
cloth for clothing, food, ect…) twice a year. If we spend our money on LEO we
can get more people in space longer. CXP had dropped the moon base goal years
before hand…and frankly put the lunar Lander on hold too. BEO spaceflight
gives much less value for the money(less time in space, fewer people in space
for the price).
As for middle
man, this middle man can do the job cheaper than NASA. It is rather like UPS. I
could drive my packages to where I need to send them or I could use UPS. UPS
can do the job cheaper than I can and frees me to work on other things.
Two important
concepts Marcel, Division of Labor and Economies of Scale. Primitive societies (hunter/gathers) don’t
have much of a division of labor. Everyone can do everyone else’s job. What civilization
does is it assigns certain task to certain people. Farmers grow crops, weavers
for instance make baskets. Soldiers defend (or make war). By doing this each
group can focus 100% of its time/resources on that task. Farmers can focus all
of their time on crops and can focus on growing more crops. Weavers can focus
all their time on weaving and can weave more items. Soldiers can focus all
their time defending a city or becoming better fighters. Space X and Orbital
can focus their time on the routine task of getting supplies into LEO and NASA
can focus on other things.
The other
concept Economies of scale (which heavy lift tends to work against). It means
that rockets the size of Falcon 9, Atlas, Antares can find other users/uses. A
monolithic heavy lift system owned by NASA cannot. This means that NASA isn’t
paying 100% of the cost to keep this rocket system running which gives savings.
A launch company like ULA, Orbital, or Space X can spread their costs out over
more products lowering the cost per unit.
If say NASA HSF buys 3 flights, DOD 2 flights, NASA unmanned spaceflight
1 flight, and 2 purely commercial flights then that company has 8 flights on
which it can spread its overhead. If the same system is NASA HSF only (like
Shuttle/SLS) then there would only be 3 flights to spread your costs over. The
latter will be much more expensive all things being equal (and sadly they are
not since the NASA rocket will be designed more too political whims than economic
ones).
Sorry but Space X and the other companies really can’t do what the shuttle could do. The Space shuttle could transport more than 8 people to the ISS plus carry 25 tonnes of payload. Plus the shuttle could return 20 tonnes back to Earth.
And there were concepts proposed by Boeing to use the space shuttle cabin to transport as many as 30 to 70 passengers in the payload bay. At $450 million per flight, passengers could have flown into orbit for less than $10 million each.
But NASA’s not a for profit business and shouldn’t be. Its focus should be on exploring and pioneering the solar system to pave the way for future privateers just as the government did for the satellite industry.
Marcel F. Williams
“Sorry but Space
X and the other companies really can’t do what the shuttle could do. The Space
shuttle could transport more than 8 people to the ISS plus carry 25 tonnes of
payload. Plus the shuttle could return 20 tonnes back to Earth.”
The ccdev
companies are designing craft that can carry 7 people to LEO(the shuttle’s
average capacity). The problem with the shuttle is carrying people and cargo at
the same time in that manner is a bad idea. It is rather like trains. There are
freight trains which are designed for horsepower and there are passenger trains
designed more for speed/comfort. Or
planes, there are passenger planes which carry little cargo but lots of people
and cargo planes that do cargo(wide doors ect.). Sometimes using one tool to do
everything at the same time is a bad idea. I mean there are amphibious vehicles,
but they usually cost far more than a car or boat.
If you need to
launch 25 tons of cargo Delta IV heavy can do it cheaper. Atlas can do it still
cheaper at up to around 20. Falcon 9 still cheaper at up to around 10.
And as for
return, well at the moment very little needs to be returned from space. Most satellites
are in orbits that are out of range of the shuttle.
To be blunt, The
ISS usually does not need 25 tons of cargo at once and if it did you would be
better off using Delta.
“And there were
concepts proposed by Boeing to use the space shuttle cabin to transport as many
as 30 to 70 passengers in the payload bay. At $450 million per flight,
passengers could have flown into orbit for less than $10 million each.”
And find 30-70 people
who all want to fly into orbit at the same time and have 10 million to give
each first. I mean the 747 may carry more passengers but the humble 737 is far
more common. Bigger isn’t always better. Look up a ship called the Great
Eastern. It was the largest ship in the world. It could carry 4,000 passengers
and tons more cargo. No ship would match it’s displacement for about 50 years. But
it also required a crew of 418, had new and unreliable technology and generally
a money loser. It was an importing ship like the shuttle, but not quite advancement
for cheaper safer travel.
“But NASA’s not
a for profit business and shouldn’t be. Its focus should be on exploring and
pioneering the solar system to pave the way for future privateers just as the
government did for the satellite industry.”
That is what
cots, commercial crew and using commercial launchers instead of government one
does. The problem of how to get
something into Orbit has been solved. Let others do that. Let NASA work on
getting from Orbit to the next destination.
You really want a Space future soonest!!!! Lol
You cancel SLS
You cancel Orion
You cancel JWST
You hire doctors to ensure ELONS health for twenty thirty years.
Have Spacex promise not to go public lol (no dam ipo profit hounds). Humm ??? I’d want to buy their stock for the kids lol
You say ELON, What’s your plan?
Make us a multi planets species!!
We NASA/NACA will support you with all the R And D you need.
Maybe NASA kids work on that spaceship.
How you want the cots milestone payments setup Elon??
ready? GOOOOOOO!!!!!!
Inner Solar system railroad Major Milstone outline
CPM schedule/payment plan lol
Major performance nods
Leo railroad
Moon railroad,
Asteroids railroad,
Mars railroad,
Cheap deep space rides
We the US taxpayer require that reaching these physical inner Solar system locations leaves in place an infrastructure or system that greatly reduces cost for travelers that follow! Outpost fuel depots, space ships, landers etc. etc.
Do it all with commercial in toe to build that Space economy.
Shame a joke like this would work better than the real thing lololol
I had to make a new ID here for feeling compelled to use the 4 letter word J$&@, when referring to the real thing once lol
Doesn’t take a rocket scientistt
Parallel lines
Spaceace
DTARS
Cancel ISS too and turn the hardware USA hardware over to Bigelow too lol
Newbie It’s about price!!!!! That simple. It’s about Not paying 10 times what you should! Koolaid lol great flavor for the price ! 🙂
I do not get the Space-X kool-aid. Yeah, they launched a rocket and capsule. This is great, everyone is saying history was made. I don’t get it. ULA had been launching EELVs with the government just paying for the service, so this is nothing new. ULA has been launching private payloads, so this is nothing new. Space-X is just doing the same thing just a different destination and a proposed different pricing structure. Would Space-X exist if NASA didn’t provide them the money to develop their s/c? No. So really, the government paid to develop a launch service with Space-X as the contractor. Haven’t there been other private companies that have successfully flown rockets – Armadillo for instance? Isn’t Orbital launching an Antares/Cygnus later this year under the COTS contract? The answer is yes. So you Space-X hacks need to realize there is a much bigger space industry out there.
Lastly, you may want to stop with your “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist”. There are plenty of rocket scientists at Space-X working their butts off right now. Also, it is both amusing and irritating to read that statement, when it is obvious from many of your posts, you do not know what you are talking about technically.
Anonymous newbie
Thanks for your remarks
What’s the kool-aid with Spacex?
First the man has a Goal
That goal is to attempt to fulfill the goal we have been promised years ago.
To live in space and travel to new worlds.
Thats what I was told while watching John Glenn climb in his Mercury capsule anyway.
We can talk about why that didn’t and doesn’t happen here forever and things will just stay the same.
I realize that we have had a commercial satellite program for years with military type RIP OFF prices that has made even attempting to achieve the promised dream impossible.
Some where along the way our space program lost the dream.
The dream is settlement! Affordable settlement!
A growing, expanding, space economy!
Mr. Musk is attempting to design into his LV HLV rockets capsules/landers, capability that proves his words are not hollow.
He is also showing the world that space travel can possibly be made inexpensive enough to be self sustaining without government one day soon,
HOPE !!!
Finally after 40 years of seeing little, I see someone finally trying to fulfill the DREAM lol Sweet Kool-aid for this old dreamer/taxpayer.
For fun I have floated ideas that have occurred to me after reading NASA Watch posts in the hopes that just one of them might prove helpful. I don’t study space so I know many of my ideas are technically flawed. And I know full well it takes hard working rocket scientists to build rockets.
The point of that name I think is that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be interested in space and realize that getting us off this rock is important. If more people were interested in what rocket scientists think about, perhaps we really could achieve ELONS multi planet dream.
Did my best to answer your concerns, I’m not a rocket scientist you know lol
Joe Q
Elon said he would make a launcher much much cheaper. I stayed up to see that bird make it’s third cheap flight.
Elon said he would build a capsule that can carry cargo to ISS much cheaper.
LOOKUP!
Elon said he will figure a way to make his rocket economically recoverable and reusable.
Grass hopper program, proof he’s working on it.
ELONS building dragon rider. Once done will be the Safest human spacecraft/launcher ever built. EVER!!!!!
The race is on for the DREAM, and Spacex is in the lead and pulling away from the pack. Will others take the challenge and catchup?
I hope soo!!!!
Mr. Bigelow is right, We need more than one launcher that can compete for PRICE!
As you said there is a much bigger space industry out there. Spacex is leading the way!!
Dare I say Mr. Musk has made himself the tip of the spear.
Spacex Hack 🙂
We do not yet have practical human spaceflight even to LEO. There is a substantial market for flight to LEO if the cost can be reduced to $1M to $2M/seat. Until and unless we can be productive in LEO it is folly to suggest we can be productive on the moon or Mars, where costs as many times greater.
Actually, there are nearly 100,000 people on the planet that could afford to pay $25 million for a ticket into orbit to a private space hotel. And that’s a lot of potential customers. Even if a tiny percentage of that number traveled into space each year, that could mean hundreds of annual space launches.
Marcel F. Williams
Dogstar3
I don’t disagree with you. But what I keep hearing is NASA needs to do expensive cost plus Exploration which will only end up wasting precious tax money on programs like SLS.
Had another idea lol as always my ideas are only half thought through but here goes lol.
Idea
You remember Robert Fulton? He challenged the whole world sailing industry to a race with his stream contraption.
We have Mr. Obamas flag race to ISS
Well don’t we need a Race to BEO too?
Paul talked about man on the moon by the end of the decade.
I suggested robot mining with 6 or 7 dragon landers by the end of the decade.
Well who like dead lines?
Why not have a race to the moon setup where you have cots performance prizes as you go.
Who ever gets to each milestone first gets the bigger prizes.
Maybe the contest is founded partly privately with matching government founding. Two or three to one.
I’m just not happy with people saying that the private sector is less capable of safe human space flight than some government porky program. It obvious they are more capable not less.
We need to some how engage the private sector to have a race. Very similar to the DARPA robot car race only it creates inner solar system railroad tech or infrastructure or both.
Ok first company or country to bring a gallon of moon water back to ISS wins!!!!!!!!
Rules to get your moon lander milestone prize, your lander must be such and such volume and be able to lift about x amount to lunar orbit etc. etc.
It obvious ELONS Spacex will be the Henry Ford of Space flight. But we need a GM too. Who will it be.
In my pubic/private funded x prize race you can have more than one winner.
Like in the tv show races. losers could team together to beat the leader to the next milestone. Lol
Maybe you get a reality network involved with reality show money helping fund the prize money too.
The AMAZING MOON MINING RACE!!!!!! Lol
Disclaimer
Any of my foolish IDEAs can never be more foolish than building a giant rocket at ten twenty a hundred times what it should cost. With MY hard earn tax money, claiming it is for EXPLORATION when in fact the money spent makes any future exploration impossible.
Senator Nelson on SLS in the PBS interview.
It’s a mars rocket!!!
Lol SAD!!! Lol
Not to name call, but that sounded very foolish.
Any dogstar3 what is not folly is to have a plan to settle travel BEO now! We could be doing so many things now if we really had a workable plan
Joe Q taxpayer
“Actually, there are nearly 100,000 people on the planet that could
afford to pay $25 million for a ticket into orbit to a private space
hotel. And that’s a lot of potential customers. Even if a tiny
percentage of that number traveled into space each year, that could mean
hundreds of annual space launches.”
Erm…sorry to burst your bubble, but we don’t have to speculate here. We already know what the demand is at this price point, and it’s low. Really low.
See, contrary to popular belief, space tourism and orbiting hotels aren’t new ideas. Space Adventures, Ltd., has been around since 1998, flying paying customers in Soyuz capsules up to the ISS. If you believe Wikipedia, Dennis Tito paid $20 mil to fly with them, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that’s roughly their going rate.
In that time, at that price point. they’ve flown precisely seven paying clients on eight missions. That’s less than one mission a year. That’s it, that’s the demand. With one supplier in the market, at that price point, the average demand is less than one seat per provider per year. Without a significant drop in price, I don’t see any reason or evidence to believe that this average is going to rise drastically all of a sudden.
Space Adventures is able to survive because it’s only a service provider – it doesn’t own any of the flight hardware. Any player coming into the market expecting to rely on orbital tourism to support the purchase of SpaceX launch vehicles and Bigelow habs is already dead-on-arrival. Apart from flooding a market that’s probably already close to saturation, there are other alternatives coming just over the horizon to suck customers out of the already tiny orbital tourism market…namely Virgin Galactic, who will provide all the positives of space travel – weightlessness, pretty views, and bragging rights – without all the negatives – space adaptation syndrome; muscle, bone, and heart wall degeneration; elevated radiation doses; and an eight-figure price tag.
Sorry, but unless you’re a pure service provider like Space Adventures, orbital tourism is still an order of magnitude or two too expensive to be a viable business strategy right now. It’ll be a small, occasional auxiliary source of income at best.
COTS was started under Bush/Griffin, true, as were Shuttle cancellation, Constellation, and Moon Mars and Beyond.
But a BEO exploration program based on COTS was definitely under Obama/Bolden/Garver, as Constellation and MM&B were self-destructing.
If we’re assigning sides, I’d say Obama/Bolden/Garver are on one side, and both Republican and Democratic “old space” congress-critters are on the other.
COTS was started under Sean O’Keefe.
I stand corrected, though whether COTS was actually started under O’Keefe or Griffin is relatively insignificant.
The important thing is that COTS is a game changer and has to be at the foundation of the space program – exactly the opposite of the Constellation/SLS world view.
If we’re keeping score, then for realizing and advocating this, the Obama/Bolden/Garver team should get the credit.
But even that is immaterial. The important thing is to generate momentum and move forward, hence my original post above. From an exploration perspective, this is the best plan we’ve ever had.
It seems as though the BEO was started by Obama as a future thing to study, presumably with less money spent. I thought he was forced by Congress to actually develop Orion and SLS for that. It is interesting that he is now claiming credit for SLS.
That’s not historically true, not even in spirit.
Bush started BEO (MM&B, Constellation), which was a good thing. I’d have preferred it to be Mars-centric, but anything was better than STS/ISS since that was a dead end.
The Griffin implementation of MM&B was so bad, however, that Obama has to clean up shop and mercy kill it. However, he offered something else – COTS, and a Mars-centric plan. (flex-path). This got buzz-sawed because of politics, basically using the “… to nowhere” and “killing HSF” battle cries.
SLS was created by congress (with democratic support too) in order to keep the pork flowing. It will die too, but not before wasting even more money.
Meanwhile, COTS is proving out to be a win. So IMO, the Mars plan needs to be brought back now.
Yes I do.
Its just ironic that he is claming credit for something he tried to kill off.
That was after Bush canceled the Space Shuttle, Orbital Space Plane and Reusable Launch Vehicle program. Since Bush Bush wanted to terminate the ISS program by 2014 there would be little use for it.
Wow…just…wow. The nerve. I guess making up a record, taking credit for others work and pulling things out of thin air is better than running on the true record of the worst president in modern times. Better to have no record or to sit back and formulate a true educated opinion than to out-and-out lie during a campaign:
August 2nd 2008, BHO promises to make sure “all those who work in the space industry in Florida do not lose their jobs when the Shuttle is retired, because we can’t afford to lose their expertise.” All I can say it those people must all be working on different shifts now because the traffic driving in and out of the Space Center every day seems like it is light about 7500 highly skilled Shuttle employees?
Wonder which side Keith will take on this issue? Hmmm. Hard to tell. (Rolling eyes.)
Leave it to the Obama Administration to lay claim to Space X’s achievement but Space X was in development long before Obama was in office and Space X has future plans beyond LEO.