I’m sorry to say this makes me wonder about how the time was spent. Progress hasn’t been uniform, with different parts of NASA’s work progressing in different ways. But I’m tempted to say 20 years of incredible progress and 40 years of spinning the wheels.
In retrospect the Shuttle was the key factor that stalled NASA with HSF, being beyond the required technology to make it work effectively with the limited funding they received for it. And then NASA made the mistake thanks to Dr. Griffin to double down by using the outdated technology for the Constellation Program leaving NASA with the twin White Elephants of SLS and Orion that derived from it. Hundreds of billions wasted with little to show for it.
I don’t think the 20 years of progress and 40 years of spinning wheels is correct. While the human spaceflight program has certainly suffered from changing direction every time a new administration has come into office, I think the unmanned exploration missions have kept NASA making incredible progress.
Hopefully at some point in the not too distant future, the country will figure out how to do human exploration into deep space. I think there are technical challenges as well as determining what we want to do and how we should proceed.
I’ve believed for a long time that had President Kennedy not been assassinated, the Apollo program would not have found the funding it did between 1964 and 1969. Opposition from the other side of the aisle would have built, the Vietnam war and Civil Rights tumult would have built and unless Johnson was elected in his own right in 1968, the program might well have succumbed to the current flip flops of human mission direction. Even had Johnson been elected, I think he would have found it difficult to fund the program to keep to the timeline.
So we’ll have to see. I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of exploration in my lifetime (I’m 61, just a year older then NASA). On the whole I think it’s been an exciting time. We’ve learned an extraordinary amount about the universe we live in.
Here’s to the next 60 years, with hope that it will be at least as productive as the last 60!
20 years of progress and 40 years of wheel-spinning was obviously an oversimplification on my part. But I think it is fair to say NASA could have, with different practices and priorities, accomplished two or three times as much as it has. As I’ve said before, when it comes to robotic exploration, taking risks and accepting failures (and emphasizing fault tolerance rather than risk reduction) could triple flight rates. It would come at the expense of more failed missions, but the overall success rate could easily double. And the synergy of one mission following up and building on a past one’s success would significantly enhance the results. Going to Saturn is great. Not returning for twenty three years was not so great. And now, how long will it be until we go back? Similar things could be said for every planet in the solar system. (Even Mars; it was sixteen years between the end of Viking and Mars Global Surveyor entering orbit.)
Yes I definitely agree there, I do think they tend to overengineer/re-engineer too much. I agree it would probably be better to send more units up rather than one all encompassing system. You get some built in fault tolerance just from having multiple spacecraft flying. Some of this is probably due to the rapid change in the technology (computer power) that is a background to all of this. When it takes several years to develop hardware, by the time it launches it’s basically obsolete. Perhaps a better approach would be to come up with a standard carrier or ‘bus’, mount experiments to it and then launch. Sort of a Soyuz for robotic exploration. Science instruments would mount to it and could be used by multiple generations of missions. You could along the way upgrade standard systems on the bus to improve performance and reduce mass, but it wouldn’t impact schedules so much.
I’m sorry to say this makes me wonder about how the time was spent. Progress hasn’t been uniform, with different parts of NASA’s work progressing in different ways. But I’m tempted to say 20 years of incredible progress and 40 years of spinning the wheels.
In retrospect the Shuttle was the key factor that stalled NASA with HSF, being beyond the required technology to make it work effectively with the limited funding they received for it. And then NASA made the mistake thanks to Dr. Griffin to double down by using the outdated technology for the Constellation Program leaving NASA with the twin White Elephants of SLS and Orion that derived from it. Hundreds of billions wasted with little to show for it.
Not sure I see this, except perhaps through the lens of HSF? Planetary exploration has been and continues to be quite strong.
I don’t think the 20 years of progress and 40 years of spinning wheels is correct. While the human spaceflight program has certainly suffered from changing direction every time a new administration has come into office, I think the unmanned exploration missions have kept NASA making incredible progress.
Hopefully at some point in the not too distant future, the country will figure out how to do human exploration into deep space. I think there are technical challenges as well as determining what we want to do and how we should proceed.
I’ve believed for a long time that had President Kennedy not been assassinated, the Apollo program would not have found the funding it did between 1964 and 1969. Opposition from the other side of the aisle would have built, the Vietnam war and Civil Rights tumult would have built and unless Johnson was elected in his own right in 1968, the program might well have succumbed to the current flip flops of human mission direction. Even had Johnson been elected, I think he would have found it difficult to fund the program to keep to the timeline.
So we’ll have to see. I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of exploration in my lifetime (I’m 61, just a year older then NASA). On the whole I think it’s been an exciting time. We’ve learned an extraordinary amount about the universe we live in.
Here’s to the next 60 years, with hope that it will be at least as productive as the last 60!
20 years of progress and 40 years of wheel-spinning was obviously an oversimplification on my part. But I think it is fair to say NASA could have, with different practices and priorities, accomplished two or three times as much as it has. As I’ve said before, when it comes to robotic exploration, taking risks and accepting failures (and emphasizing fault tolerance rather than risk reduction) could triple flight rates. It would come at the expense of more failed missions, but the overall success rate could easily double. And the synergy of one mission following up and building on a past one’s success would significantly enhance the results. Going to Saturn is great. Not returning for twenty three years was not so great. And now, how long will it be until we go back? Similar things could be said for every planet in the solar system. (Even Mars; it was sixteen years between the end of Viking and Mars Global Surveyor entering orbit.)
Yes I definitely agree there, I do think they tend to overengineer/re-engineer too much. I agree it would probably be better to send more units up rather than one all encompassing system. You get some built in fault tolerance just from having multiple spacecraft flying.
Some of this is probably due to the rapid change in the technology (computer power) that is a background to all of this. When it takes several years to develop hardware, by the time it launches it’s basically obsolete.
Perhaps a better approach would be to come up with a standard carrier or ‘bus’, mount experiments to it and then launch. Sort of a Soyuz for robotic exploration. Science instruments would mount to it and could be used by multiple generations of missions. You could along the way upgrade standard systems on the bus to improve performance and reduce mass, but it wouldn’t impact schedules so much.