Pioneering Space National Summit One Year Later: No Clear Direction
Space Advocates Like To Talk To Themselves (Sept 2015)
“Rick Tumlinson and his New World Institute had all the space advocates in Washington all pumped up for his “Pioneering Space National Summit” event in February 2015. No media were allowed in. If one were to believe all of the pre-game hype, discussions were to be had amongst the pillars of the space community, and momentous statements intended to break the deadlock and propel us all into space were to be issued.”
Move Along. This Is Not The Space Policy You’re Looking For. (Feb 2015)
“One theme that is circulating among the people who have been invited are window dressing for an apparent push to get everyone to throw their support behind SLS. I wonder how many in attendance know that there are efforts afoot to sculpt this get together into something other than advertised.”
Pioneering Space National Summit: So Far, Nothing But Crickets (June 2015)
“The organizers (most notably Rick Tumlinson and Mary Lynne Dittmar) spoke of all the wonderful things that would result from this event. Well, it has been 4 months. Other than a declaration that was proclaimed shortly after the meeting, nothing else seems to have been generated. Checking the website there seems to be little in the way of output. In Spring 2015 two documents that are only a couple of pages long, comprised mostly of semi-edited meeting notes/outlines emerged: Report: Deliberation #1 – Vision (Group A) and Report: Deliberation #2 – Strategy (Group A). Two other documents are apparently being edited.” That’s it.
Keith’s note: Well it has been a year. Nothing new about the Pioneering Space National Summit has emerged from Team Tumlinson that comes anywhere close to the national consensus or powerful alliance of space advocacy and industry groups that everyone thought would emerge. Something called the Alliance for Space Development (a re-tread of some other alliance) emerged with only small and fading organizations as members. It has done nothing. The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration emerged, itself a refit version of an earlier industry effort (minus the word “Deep”) emerged, led by Dittmar. This reboot is now focused solely on lobbying for SLS and Orion. The earlier incarnation, the Coalition for Space Exploration, actually did some useful things. However, it’s “Deep” version does not seem to do anything except prompt Dittmar to retweet other people’s tweets.
So here we are, a year later, with none of the coordinated space policy goodness that all of the space advocates promised one another. They – we – all sit on the cusp of yet another presidential election – yet once again no two space advocates can give you the same vision of what a good, broadly-supported space policy should be for America.
Y’all had your chance – and you blew it (again).
Keith’s update: This just in: Rick Tumlinson has written yet another op ed wherein he chastises all of the other space advocates while they all wait for the results from his space policy extravaganza last year. Note that he tweets this as a “warning to DC space”. Alas, Tumlinson has become part of the very same “smoke and mirrors” crowd that he professes such disappointment with.
A Letter to the Washington Space Establishment, Huffington Post
“While you’ve wasted a lot of our time and money on dead ends, I still have hopes for you. While anyone else might look at what you’ve done — the lies, the smoke and mirrors, the way you would sometimes dress up our future so nicely and then go out and cheat on it with someone who only wanted our money — and walk away, I want to give it another go.”
A warning to DC space: Get ahead on the space frontier cause or be left behind – if you do it right everyone wins. https://t.co/ehwjOLd9QO
— Rick Tumlinson (@RocketRick) January 26, 2016
– Pioneering Space National Summit Details Emerge, earlier post
– Alliance for Space Development: Yawn – Yet Another Space Group, earlier post
– Space Advocates Work Together By Not Working Together, earlier post
– Move Along. This Is Not The Space Policy You’re Looking For., earlier post
– Yet Another Plan For Outer Space, earlier post
Money talks…hot air sucks.
Keith, do you think the problem is that there are conflicting interests so deep that consensus cannot be achieved, or is it that advocates are simply so politically powerless that failure is the only option?
Both.
The beautiful thing is that Elon and Jeff don’t need consensus to move forward toward space settlement. It’s competition that’s driving the new space race.
And that space race includes innovation in launch vehicles like we have not seen in decades.
“National Space Program” – 50 Years Later: No Clear Direction –
See continually decreasing US total NASA budget since 1966 – the same year that Robert Gilruth, Manned Spacecraft Center Director, voiced concern that “the future of manned space flight . . . is in jeopardy because we do not have firm goals…”
This was incredibly prophetic and sad given we had not even landed on the moon yet. SNAFU
There was only one take away for me, when he stated this:
“That’s because in 2017 a new president will try to create their own Kennedy legacy by redefining space — so you will freeze until then, polishing your animations and waiting for the shift. But this time it may surprise you. Why? Because the Next Space Age already started, will not freeze, and by the time new players get into office will be so obvious as to make pitching re-worked plans to re-create our past in the future seem ridiculous. Call it disruption or what you will — by the end of this year, Washington will be facing a new space reality.”
I do agree and believe that is going to be the case.
I sure hope we see SLS in the rearview mirror (and yes I am mindful that some here are gainfully employed by the program). It is just a bloated and bad project sucking the life out of NASA (along with the station and Webb).
The only hopeful sign I see is the apparent push by Congress for a deep space habitation element based on Bigelow’s balloon and ISS systems.
Developing a sortie vehicle that could fly in formation with ISS, into other orbits and into higher deep space trajectories is how NASA should have proceeded since so much of the system can be common with ISS. It makes use of existing personnel, knowledge base and hardware. It is a natural extension. It is what was logical based on work done over the last 45 years.
Asteroid recovery missions make no sense and will die with the next Administration, I hope.
Lunar or Mars fly-bys are unnecessary until you get ready to land and with anything like Orion a decade plus away and landers at least a decade beyond that, it makes for a poorly architected program.
And Orion really was never needed since there is no shortage of launch and return capsules any of which could be modified for beyond earth use far less expensively than what Orion is requiring.
What seems to be fundamental is that Congress seems to be pushing for this, as they pushed for Orion and SLS in lieu of a programmatic vacuum. At least someone is thinking about a long term space program; NASA is not.
NASA’s latest announced goal is to “get out from under ISS as soon as they can”, which makes as much sense as shutting down Shuttle with no replacement in sight. The current NASA leadership is doing a lot of damage.
Why does NASA want to ‘get out from under ISS as fast as possible’? Sounds like NASA doesn’t really know what their job is. I thought it was space research and technological research? ISS seems to be the best lab available for conducting research in space and even for researching and testing technology in space. It sounds like someone is dreaming of another Apollo flags and footprints program and that is not going to happen. Those socio-political forces died a long time ago. So are they going to build a new ship to go to Mars and as soon as they land they’ll be wanting to get out from under that too?
They want to lease space on a Bigelow hab and become a tenant instead of a landlord.
For once I agree with you. On the other hand there’s that whole ‘not invented here’ thing.
Welcome to the Dark Side, Michael.
The asteroid mission will live as long as they have the funding for it, and as long as they’re doing the EM-2 test mission for SLS. They need something for the crew to do while doing the mission, and fiddling around with a small asteroid (or piece of one) kills several birds with one stone.
I can’t really parse what the hell he is talking about.
I don’t even get why he was writing the op-ed. We may disagree on the SLS, but pro-space advocates basically agree on the vague generalities that made up most of the piece. Everyone believes in commercial space development, everyone believes in ISRU, etc.
As for advocacy, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – we should try and get an incremental increase in NASA’s funding over time by pushing an overall pro-science/technology program that would gradually increase funding for all the federal science agencies (NASA, NIH, NSF, etc). Getting that on the Democratic Party platform seems very doable, and it might be doable with the Republican side as well.
Even with #4 (and include me in the people who don’t particularly care for space settlement programs, although I’m not hostile to them), it still should be possible for us to push the things we do agree upon, like more robotic exploration and funding for commercial space.
I wonder which space advocates do it as a paid job or make steady money doing it. I can see how people may lose momentum if money isn’t there or is sporadic. You have to pay the bills. I don’t really have any concept of that realm though.
You want to start up Mike and Michael’s ‘We Love Space Brigade’? We get get a splashy web site, write some white papers, then get some members!
Whatcha think?
Ha, it sounds cool, but in reality I have to pay the bills, already do some volunteer work, and – “Ain’t nobody got time for that”. I’ll get back to you when I’m rich 🙂 Until then I can post comments and keep my friends up to date on cool stuff. My in-laws were impressed when I put the successful SpaceX landing video up on their living room TV the next day.
I wonder if NASA could have done what Mr. Musk has done.
NASA simply issues performance-based RFPs. The few companies actually able to answer do so with huge costs- costs now revealed by Mr. Musk to be larcenous. Who knew?
Example: NASA is paying Boeing more than SX for flights to the station. Why? Because that’s the price they gave us, says NASA.
Leadership at NASA has been a vacuum for decades, leading to squandering untold billions. And the beat goes on.
Given the X-33 debacle, I do not think NASA could have successfully done what Musk and Bezos have done. The culture within NASA was an “all or nothing” philosophy which chose the most technically challenging X-33 proposal which had to have every single bit of new tech work correctly for it to fly. It came as no surprise that after something like $1.5 billion spent, nothing ever flew.
Both Musk and Bezos are taking a far more incremental approach. I’ve heard this called the “build a little, test a little, fly a little” approach to development. So, when things don’t go your way, it does not cause the failure of the entire program.
An example of this is the failures of the initial first stage recovery attempts by SpaceX which resulted in the break up of the first stage during reentry. This did not end the program. Instead, SpaceX came up with a “plan B” which involved propulsive braking to reduce the reentry velocity of the stage. This worked, so the next part of flight development became propulsive vertical landing with flight hardware.
But the keystone of SpaceX’s incremental approach is that recovery failures do not mean a launch failure for the customer. Piggybacking recovery development flights on top of commercial launch flights is pure genius. The NASA that gave us X-33 quite simply would never have taken this approach. Their mantra is more along the lines of “failure is not an option”.
Michael, NASA does NOT simply issue performance-based RFPs. They create, and then continue to change, detailed design requirements that stipulate what and how to do something. Arguably, NASA typically figures out what they really want to buy *in parallel with* a contractor figuring out how to make it. How could that not cost more than you might guess starting out?
Jim,
Isn’t creating design requirements exactly the same as preparing performance-based RFPs?
Certainly working with a contractor makes sense. The design-build approach is common in many industries, particularly construction, which is my own background. However, in private industry cost control measures are not only transparent but they are universally used and well understood.
As to some things costing more, here we agree. Often they are creating new tools or devices.
On the other hand, at what point do we stand back and say “we actually know how to make a space telescope now”? Or a rover.
Or a rocket. And expect predictable prices?
Not me. I’m a ‘tax and spend’ liberal, as my friends like to say. But not a penny more for NASA until they show some actual planning. And shake off SLS. More money will not solve any problems.