This week’s issue of The Space Review has a couple of articles that will be of interest to readers. Dwayne Day has a very detailed look at the claims promulgated in the media that the new space initiative would cost $1 trillion. He went back through all the articles to find the very first time the price tag was attached to the concept, by an AP writer. He also illustrated why many of the explanations for that figure are simply very wrong. I also have an article noting that NASA has not been very proactive in providing information both about the new initiative nor their decision to cancel the SM4 shuttle mission to Hubble. By not being more open, I argue, NASA (and the administration) are letting their critics dictate the terms of the debate, putting the agency on the defensive.
(I had planned to post this yesterday, but The Space Review was slashdotted for much of the day Monday because they linked to Dwayne Day’s article. You can read their discussion of it, although I recommend it primarily only for the humor value.)
Nice of Dwayne to diss our UPI article in one paragraph and not bother to explain where all the errors were. Curious how all the people who are “in tune” with space policy don’t want to admit that someone else got the story and ran with it before they did. Oh well.
I’m a little curious about your comments. I wasn’t “dissing” your article. In fact, I explicitly mentioned that this article broke the story. But I didn’t think it was necessary to discuss every error in every article that I reviewed, or to heap praise on somebody’s scoop, because my focus was the origins of the trillion dollar myth. For instance, the Lindlaw article that I mentioned included some dubious claims about Helium-3, and other articles had some mistaken assumptions about the Mars rovers. I ignored them to focus on the numbers issue.
Anyone reading your one paragraph summary would walk away with the impression that what we wrote for UPI was more or less wrong.
I.e. you wrote ” …provided a few details, some of which were later proven false.”
If we only had a “few details” and some were “later proven false” that sounds like not much was right to begin with.
What were the “few details” and which ones were “later proven false”?
You write “but did not provide an overall budget figure for the plan” – Gosh, neither has Bush. They only head out 5 years.
“It also made clear that a return to the Moon, not a human mission to Mars, was the primary emphasis of the new plan.”
Yes, so? WH policy fact sheet says “Third, America will return to the Moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for more ambitious missions.” The plan does not speak of sending people to Mars except as a long term goal. The focus is on th elunar missions.
As I noted, the article was about the $1 trillion cost estimate and your UPI article was not part of that story. I mentioned it only for context.
But you did ask what details in your article were later proven false. Here are the few that I found with a quick read:
-the plan does not call for a 5% budget increase over five years, as reported in the article. Instead, I believe that it calls for a 5% increase for the first two years, then dropping after that. The average over five years is around 3%, not 5%.
-the actual increase in FY05 is not $800 million.
-the first unmanned flight of a CEV is scheduled for 2008, not 2007.
-no manned missions to asteroids were mentioned in either the speech or the policy and are not on the NASA roadmap.
-the first human missions to the moon are scheduled for the second half of the decade, not early in the decade.
None of these approached the egregious errors in the AP article, which is why I did not bother to mention them in the text.
As for noting that your UPI article also did not have a cost estimate and did not state that Mars was the primary goal, I mentioned this only to make clear that these things were _not_ in the article that broke the story, but were actually introduced by the AP story that followed it. Note the next paragraph in my article which stated that the AP claimed that the $1 trillion cost estimate was for a mission to Mars.
“-the plan does not call for a 5% budget increase over five years, as reported in the article. Instead, I believe that it calls for a 5% increase for the first two years, then dropping after that. The average over five years is around 3%, not 5%.”
“NASA’s budget will increase by $1 billion over the next five years when compared with the President’s 2004 plan. That is an increase of approximately five percent per year over the next three years, and approximately one percent for the following two years. [Sean O’Keefe 3 Feb 2004]
“-the actual increase in FY05 is not $800 million.”
FY 2004 $15,378
FY 2005 $16,244
Net increase $866m i.e. 5.6% [Budget Summary, pg. 15 – NASA HQ FY 05 budget briefing chartrs]
“-the first unmanned flight of a CEV is scheduled for 2008, not 2007.”
[NASA is constantly changing these dates. I have gotten senior NASA folks to give different answers – on the record -within hours of each other. They can’t even say whether or not it will even fly to the ISS.]
“-no manned missions to asteroids were mentioned in either the speech or the policy and are not on the NASA roadmap.”
“Where advantageous, NASA will also make use of destinations like the Moon and near-Earth
asteroids to test and demonstrate new exploration capabilities.” [FY 05 budget summary under “Guiding Principles for Exploration”]
“-the first human missions to the moon are scheduled for the second half of the decade, not early in the decade.”
[NASA is constantly changing these dates. The bar charts show 2014/2015] Where does the first half end and the second half begin?
Okay, so 5% each year over 5 years was clearly an error. $800 million was close, so not an error. I have not seen any unmanned CEV dates earlier than 2008, although the first manned date has fluctuated. The Roadmap places the manned landing in 2015, with first manned CEV a little earlier, clearly mid decade.
Make a list of what we got right, what we got wrong, and what is debatable. Stack it against what others were saying – that is if they weren’t saying that Bush had no interest in space and that there was no space policy.
You want to focus on the subset of all that the article said which was not 100% right – not the totality of what it contained. I am clearly not going to sway you form that going in assumption.
Ciao
Hey Keith – I noticed Dwayne’s comments about your article, but it was almost entirely peripheral to his main point; if he got something slightly wrong there it’s certainly far less egregious than the average press report. And I’m glad both of you are getting reasonably accurate details out there for the rest of us!
Keith Cowing, it seems you are a well connected fellow. What is the inside scoop on the ability of orbiter to actually finish ISS by 2010?
Many of us hoi polloi space advocates are not real happy about spending billions per year on the orbiter when there may be a good chance we will end up not finishing ISS anyway.
My opinion (if you care) is that we either finish ISS with shuttle derived and then include that technology as an intregal part of Project Constellation =OR= we walk away from the STS/ISS debacle right now. Orbiter NEVER flies again and we invest all the STS/ISS money in Constellation beginning today.
I remember reading an article (which unfortunately I cannot find) that did the math and concluded that there is no way that the shuttle can complete ISS on time – the flight rate would be too high. Something has to give.
The amount of money it takes to be completely assured of a safe shuttle mission is somewhere less than infinity and greater than the current budget (evidently).
It’s just a thought, but I wonder if NASA has considered adapting the shuttle for unmanned launch of the remaining ISS components. The astronauts would launch on Soyuz until CEV was available, and rendezvous in the proximity of ISS to fine maneuver the shuttle into position and perform the on-orbit assembly. To land the shuttle, they would only need to risk one person – that’s it – the rest would return by Soyuz/CEV.
This way, only the orbiter needs to be man-rated, and it can be inspected on-orbit using Soyuz/CEV before re-entry. For the same level of risk, the ground-handling would become more affordable, and perhaps the flight rate would go up sufficiently to finish ISS before re-certification. You’d expect to lose one or two more shuttles before ISS is complete, but nobody would be on board, and there would be no need to waste money on the Shuttle-C.
I see two drawbacks with this approach: One is that (if I remember correctly) the early ISS modules will still be in need of replacement by the time ISS is complete. The other is that launching payloads on the Shuttle and personnel on Soyuz could be highly embarrassing to NASA. It would be an interesting and perhaps cruel test of “new NASA” to see if they could put cost and mission success ahead of institutional humiliation. In any case, stage management of such things appears to be a fine art these days, so perhaps it’s a non-issue after all.
Keith Cowing’s breath-taking self centered (one is tempted to say narcissistic) response to Dwayne Day’s article is exceeded only by Mr. Day’s restraint in rebutting Cowing’s assertion’s of–what? That Cowing’s original UPI wire story in advance of the President’s announcement had some errors in it?
Ignoring that before-the-fact scoops are inherently prone to such lapses, Mr. Cowing seems to intentionally miss the larger point: That Dwayne’s article was not about Cowing or his UPI article. It was instead about the propagation in the media at large of a false budget figure for the President’s space initiative.
Instead of carping about interpretations of how Day’s story reflected (indirectly) on his story, Cowing should just be happy to have been mentioned at all.
You would think, anyway.
[Sorry–forgot to ID myself in the above post]
Keith Cowing’s breath-taking self centered (one is tempted to say narcissistic) response to Dwayne Day’s article is exceeded only by Mr. Day’s restraint in rebutting Cowing’s assertion’s of –what? That the original UPI wire story in advance of the President’s announcement had some errors?
Ignoring that before-the-fact scoops are inherently prone to such lapses, Mr. Cowing seems to intentionally miss the larger point: That Dwayne’s article was not about Cowing or his UPI article. It was instead about the propagation in the media of a false budget figure for the President’s space initiative.
Instead of carping about interpretations of how Day’s story reflected (indirectly) on his story, Cowing should just be happy to have been mentioned at all.
You would think, anyway.
Hi Tom. I simply tried to correct some inaccurate characterizations I (and others BTW) feel Dwayne made about the UPI article Frank Sietzen and I wrote. I confined my comments to that topic. I really have no arguments with Dwayne’s otherwise well written article – so I said nothing about it.
Imagine what you wish, but given our sources, this was not a “before the fact scoop”. Rather it included a last minute snapshot as portayed by actual participants in the process just before the last numbers and working were agreed to.
That’s how “scoops” actually work.
As for narcissism – gosh, why not. I seem to recall a lot of self promotion waaaaaaaaay back in the 80’s on your part. You are always free to just ignore me, of course.
>As for narcissism – gosh, why not. I seem to recall a lot of self promotion waaaaaaaaay back in the 80’s on your part.
Quite right. But I outgrew it.
Like I said, you are always free to just ignore me. I am certain you’ll feel better when you do.