Space Policy: No One Knows What Is Going On
Keith’s note: If you look at our calendar for the coming week you will see an unusual number of advisory meetings, policy briefings, seminars, etc. here in Washington, DC. Everyone will be talking about where they think space (e.g. NASA) policy and science will be going in the next few months and years. Many events conflict with one another in terms of timing. Many more of these events overlap in terms of their participants with a high quotient of the usual suspects in attendance at multiple meetings saying the same thing over and over again to one another. Guess what: no one knows what is going on. Seriously. From the White House on down, no one knows where space policy is going. And the more someone tells you that they do know, the more suspicious you should be of what they say – starting with me. It is a mess folks.
As they say in Vegas at the Roulette tables – around and around the ball goes and where it stops no one knows.
At least President Trump hasn’t created a blue ribbon Presidential Commission on space – yet…
Yet ….
At the risk of calling a spade, a spade, not a new situation. NASA and US space policy has been lost, not knowing where they were going, for about 13 years by my estimate. I think under O’Keefe and Bush there was a reasonable plan. The one thing missing was an effort to either fix Shuttle or use its elements for Shuttle-C. Then things went awry, mainly starting with Griffin. Constellation was a mistake. Orion was a mistake. Somehow NASA was going to reestablish Apollo, with vehicle more massive, less sophisticated, tens of times more expensive, all because some really shoddy strategy said that instead of doing something useful in space we should go somewhere to do nothing of particular use. “Shuttle was a mistake: throw it away. ISS was a mistake: terminate as soon as we can.” NASA managers have no strategy, no plan, havent even thought about what a meaningful plan is, b ut they are willing to wait for even more idiotic politicians to tell them where to go, with absolutely no dollars to support the effort. We’ve been in this situation for well over a decade. We are going absolutely no place any time in the forseeable future. Best to hang onto what little we have, ISS, and make some use of it, except the clowns in management have not a clue of what it takes to make good use-they do not even have any idea of what good use means.
The system is the way that the system is and no one is inclined to fix it.
72% of SLS is overhead, apparently. https://arstechnica.com/sci…
This should surprise no one. This is one of the big reasons that programs like commercial cargo and commercial crew cost about 1/10th of what traditional NASA cost models predict.
“In order for NASA Managers to have a strategy and plan,” they need to know which policies are in force and what the Administration intends. The National Space Council is being reestablished and will need time to find staff and get up and running. Until that occurs it seems likely that concrete policies and implementation of priorities are a bit down the road.
And unfortunately we will never have a president or majority in Congress who understands space and what we should be doing there. They are focused on the 4 year job cycle and sadly their personal aggrandizement. And so we continue as we have for the past 40 years.
13 years…?? More like 40 years..
It looks perfect here from my chair. The commercial sector is humming along. Vulcan, NewGlen, and Falcon all humming along. Yes they are being subsidized with federal dollars but they will be the back bones of our human and robotic space mission for a decade.
Someone with balls of steel needs to remind the 9th floor that they have a rocket to nowhere. The wight of SLS/Orion is getting heavier.
We’ll have to see if the Alabama faction is vanquished and if the commercial faction actually has enough mojo to make things happen.
I never thought I’d say this, but if anything is going to happen in space it’s going to be animated by the commercial sector.
Good to hear attitudes are finally changing. The technological and more importantly the financial success of commercial cargo and commercial crew is finally to great to ignore.
Team Alabama and the SLS Mafia is well ensconced. However, the war that is waged is not political – its time. And Father Time always wins. The politicos who continue to support this are in a fight they cannot win.
In 2019, when Elon sends his D2 around the moon – that will be the jumping off point. Yes, 2019.
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It’s low priority for Trump, and that’s where it will likely remain for the next couple months (unless one of his advisers really loves space).
And yet he keeps referring to it in cryptic comments, as in this week’s recorded address. But, yes, he does have his hands full beating back the alligators and snakes that infest the swamp he is trying to drain. It’s hard trying to seek the stars when they are trying to pull you under.
Hmm, given the effects of climate change and the original environment in and around Washington, Trump’s actions are likely to only increase the swamp in DC…
This entire post is ludicrous. Yes, we don’t know all the details nor have budgets gone up (yet) to make it possible but we just had the NASA Transition Act of 2017 passed by unanimous consent in the House, overwhelmingly by the House, signed by a new President at the start of his term. The act clearly sets Mars as the future destination, tells NASA to do some implementation related studies and supports both SLS and Orion as well as a future role for commercial activity. There is more consensus than there has been in over a decade and between the President’s Saturday address and the soon to be reactivated Space Council, chaired by the Vice President, there is more high powered interest and support since Bush ’41. The only problem, unstated in this post, is that those who want the nation to cancel SLS and Orion and turn over our future in space to Elon Musk and his fantasy of near term mass Mars colonization are not getting their way. Get real.
Congress, NASA, and the White House have ignored every NASA Authorization Act ever passed when it suits their whims. That’s why they only bother to pass one more than once or twice a decade. Appropriators modify things into the form that actually gets implemented.
That’s always true but hardly the nihilistic free for all portrayed in the original post. And of course, House Appropriations Chair Culbertson or Senate Appropriations Member and Rules
Committee chair Shelby will certainly cancel Orion and SLS and ask Musk to save our species by having SpaceX colonize Mars. To quote the Geico commercial, that’s not how this works, it’s not how any ot this works….
Since none of us know who you are, sure why not. Have a nice day.
Will the Appropriators provide a budget to accomplish the directives of the Authorization Act?
If course not. They never have.
It will be interesting to see who successfully flies astronauts around the Moon first, SpaceX or NASA. But whoever accomplishes it will be in the driver’s seat for going beyond it.
Why would that be true?
Because there will be be reoccurring customers that will need servicing. Either private sector consumers or NASA astronauts…
Good point! NASA flew astronauts around the Moon in 1968. And NASA was in the driver’s seat for going beyond this for the last 49 years. Now its time to turn it over to some folks who can actually go beyond what was accomplished 49 years ago.
USC Fall 2016 team project slides just posted.
https://sites.google.com/a/…
…just the right time to go back to the Moon :
SeleneOption 2016
The tactic is *multiple conflicting talking points* so that reinforcement is provided to what folks want to believe, ideology over facts. Health care is the latest example. (Cons, Ryan, DT, Blue, _) are to blame for AHCA failure. A consistent repeated theme however is that a “federal bureaucracy” exists and its always done better in the private sector. When will folks wake up and see that they are being conned?
“View old questions with fresh eyes” -> implies private Apollo redux?
“NASA teaches us many, many things” ->climate change is ___?
“To think in new ways because we have new information” -> coal?
“Mars as a future destination? conflicts with “I hope we never find life on another planet because if we do there’s no doubt that the US will start sending them money!”
So start thinking about how one can make $$ off of the fed (less regulations, outsource) and retain the voting block. SLS is outsourced, so lets make a ‘competition’ for ‘mooning’. Right on cue:
Kushner to lead ‘American Innovation’ office aimed at reforming the federal government through private-sector solutions. White House Office of American Innovation, which will be tasked with crafting ideas to reshape the federal bureaucracy to make it leaner and more effective”
Yea. Here’s a good idea: let’s put a 36 year old kid in charge; let’s give him sweeping powers to ‘drain the swamp’.
Incidentally, the so-called ‘swamp’ only looks that way because those at the WH don’t have a clue how to govern, as recent events have illustrated.
Nobody knew how hard it would be!
Someone recently pointed out an old line from one of P.J. O’Rourke books: “Republicans are the party who says the government doesn’t work. When elected, they prove this.”
So… is it SNAFU or FUBAR?
And if you read every word of the Transition Act of 2017, and are in any way a student of NASA, History or Human Behavior, then you realize that less than 15% of all the wording in it has anything to do with Mars. Therefore, Mars can not be considered anything more grandiose or noteworthy then anything else mentioned in the bill. Furthermore, when you look at history and human behavior, this bill is so full of verbiage that is vague and full of caveats that it, as usual, puts Mars no more in reach than it has been in the past 50 years. Lastly, by the proposed reduction in the budget there is only ongoing proof that we are going no where soon. But, if you can glean a clear, unbiased, unpolitical, attainable goal out of such verbiage then you’re a better human than I.
On a slightly unrelated topic: can anybody comment on the upcoming “Humans To Mars Summit?” Lots of big names, but mostly the same names; ULA well represented (and funding), SX nowhere in sight.
Would this be another regurgitation? I’m inclined to attend, but paying my own way I wonder if there’s really anything new.