- Take up a challenge proposed by a member of Congress
- Propose something that that member will never support
That’s the approach the Cato Institute has seem to have take with regards to budget cuts. On Tuesday House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was asked if Congress would consider budget cuts to help offset the costs of hurricane relief. DeLay’s response: “bring me the offsets, I’ll be glad to do it.” Well, Cato scholars Steve Slivinski and Chris Edwards proposed $62 billion in cuts that would offset what has been appropriated to date for hurricane relief. Included in those cuts was a plan to take $7.9 billion from NASA’s budget, a cut of roughly 50 percent. Cato’s rationale for the cut? “NASA is obsolete with the arrival of private manned space flight.” Um, whatever. That’s an argument that many in the “alt.space” community would disagree with, let alone a staunch NASA supporter like, say, Tom DeLay.
Might not Cato, then, also propose cutting the USAF budget by 50 percent. Obviously, the Air Force is obsolete with the arrival of private manned aircraft.
The bigger problem with cutting NASA funding in the face of private human space flight is those companies are counting on NASA as a customer, for that to happen NASA will need that money to spend.
Jeff Foust has noticed something that applies to the libertarians generally. When it is time to criticize the Democrats, most of them are as righteous as Sean Hannity. But when it is time to criticize the Republicans, most of them are as weak as Alan Colmes. Basically, most of them are Republicans or close to it, whether or not they admit it (to others or to themselves). The continuing occupation of Iraq could hardly be less libertarian, but it is also a fundamental Republican cause, so it has inflicted great damage on the Libertarian Party. Even its first presidential nominee, John Hospers, endorsed Bush outright in 2004 because of Iraq.
It would be more convincing for the Cato Institute to criticize the space shuttle as a failure that rendered itself obsolete. Instead of affirming the obvious, they chose to deny the obvious: Rutan’s suborbital leaps are no substitute for the shuttle. The underlying problem for Cato is that the shuttle is a powerful Reaganite symbol. No president in history believed in the shuttle more than Reagan.
This phenomenon is most likely due to where Cato gets its money, I imagine. Think tanks of all stripes are in the intellectual prostitution business.
Your explanation lands in their blind spot, because the libertarians want to legalize prostitution.
The CATO Institute is funny.
That’s about all I can say about the outfit.
It’s been my observation that many of the less helpful dialogs arise on blogs like this one when people start pigeonholing each other.
In particular, I’ve noticed that some individuals in are very prone to assume that anyone who expresses an opinion in common with group X automatically accepts the rest of group X’s philosophy.
As for Cato, I really felt their suggestions departed from reality at the point where they wanted to cut the Army Corps of Engineers. It just seemed a bit too vengeful. But Cato are also against all the paperwork bureaucracy, which this month is the cause of hundreds of deaths aside from the usual dissipation of tens of billions in taxpayer money.
Curiously enough, my advisor (who was on the JPL advisory board) recently wrote an editorial suggesting that NASA be cut in half too, though his reasoning was to stop the Shuttle sucking the R&D part of the agency dry. You know, once upon a time the shuttle and manned spaceflight part was not the center of gravity, and NASA/NACA used R&D to lay the foundations for the aerospace industry. Imagine that.
If only they would do something similar for the space industry today.
I forget where I read it, but someone pointed out that the whole intent of the Moon-Mars initiative was to stimulate NASA to innovate again like they used to, and their response so far has been anything but.
Unfortunately, Kevin, I think that if we want to actually get somewhere in the Solar System, the last thing we need right now is innovation or direct support of the aerospace industry. We’ve spent the last thirty years on innovation and make work for aerospace companies.
The best way to support the aerospace industry is as a customer.
This does not mean that I don’t think some part of NASA should not also support the old NACA role. But that won’t get us into the Solar System. We also need someone establishing forward bases to act as customers for all this technology people want to develop. I’m agnostic on whether that role should be filled by NASA, but somebody has got to fill it or we’re not going anywhere very soon.
— Donald
Kevin, does it surprise you that your advisor, whose job depends on how much research money he brings in, thinks NASA should only exist to fund research? How self serving is that opinion? I agree with Donald, what we don’t need is more make work. I don’t care if you call it research or standing on your head all day (my current job). The fact is, the only way technical people get good, or differentiate themselves from those who suck, is by building things that work.
For me, innovation brings to mind revolutionary advances made by inventive people at the grass-roots. Things like automated docking and fluid transfer, tethers, new on-orbit construction techniques, robotic mining, astronaut gloves that work, skin-bonded spacesuits, directed energy launch, gun launch, lunar base architectures, plastic electronics printers for space stations, low resupply biospheres, resonant absorbtion layers for radiation, low energy trajectory maps for asteroid capture…
What I wasn’t thinking of were Lockheed/Boeing/ACME subcontracts to develop higher power solar panels, better avionics, more accurate star-trackers, lighter fuel tanks, bigger space telescopes, new classes of chemical rockets etc.
I see little evidence of the former type of development in the past 30 years. The latter is incremental development of commodities that in an ideal world be driven by market forces in the private sector.
I do think NASA has a role to play as a customer, but Katrina just ended any hopes of government money making a guaranteed market to spur entrepreneurial development. There needs to be a certain amount of turnover before flight rates are high enough to start maturing new technologies and accumulating concentrated expertise on the ground.
Even before Katrina, GAO was expecting a 30% reduction in discretionary spending (which includes military procurement) over the next few years. Just imagine what that decline will be now.
I was rather hoping that DARPA would be taking up the space technology slack that NASA hasn’t addressed. There hasn’t been a cutting edge for 30 years and the lead created before that looks set to be overtaken by China/India/(Europe+Russia) in the not-too-distant future.
Sar Lupe for example (http://www.ohb-system.de/Security/sarlupe.html) is a German military system which is 90% as capable of the equivalent US system for less than 10% of the cost. Of course the Germans are able to successfully build their system, the US is still stuck in programmatic difficulties…
is a German military system which is 90% as capable of the equivalent US system for less than 10% of the cost …
Can you cite any evidence for that assertion?
Dfens, my advisor retired last year.
He has no research money now and didn’t have enough to support students for several years before that. Nor is there much point in trying to find funding now, either for me or his other student. He expected the editorial to have no impact whatsoever, but he wrote it anyway.
… but it’s good to see that NASA still has enough money left to pay contractors to stand on their heads all day. Who needs students anyway.
I don’t disagree with much that you said, above, Kevin. However, I would note that the kinds of development that you list in your first paragraph are the kinds that are attained through practical experience. As Dfens pointed out a few weeks ago in a different context, we learn by doing. We will develope better spacesuit gloves (for example) by using the ones that we have on the Space Station, seeing where they don’t work and developing fixes, then testing those fixes on the Station. We won’t do it, or at least nowhere nearly as well, in an ivory tower setting trying to imagine the kinds of gloves you need to do work in space in some distant future.
This is why Greg, et al, are so wrong about the usefulness of the Space Station. The majority of the experiments on the Station do involve learning to keep people alive in orbit, but what is wrong with that? (I note that many of those who say nothing useful is going on on the Space Station haven’t bothered to actually look at what is going on even with the current inadequate crew. Neville Kedger’s summary of Space Station activities in December 2004 alone, in Spaceflight, includes ongoing measurement of the real radiation environments in many different areas of the modules, with an eye to understanding the real exposure of the crew and what it does to their bodies in the future; ongoing measurements of real particle contamination throughout the modules; space soldering experiments toward future repair techniques; cardiovascular tests; studies of the behavior of particles and different fluids suspended in containers to better understand and improve the behavior of rocket engine tankage; neurology and cognition experiments; doing ultrasound scans of bones, teeth, and abdominal cavities and transmitting the results to the ground to test the ability of untrained personnel to do diagnostics and send the results to remote doctors and returning their analysis to the crew for action; on-going collection of blood and urine samples, and electrocardiograms, to create a database of long-term reactions to microgravity by many different human bodies; a test of a new technique for precision reentry with an abandoned Progress freighter; preparing for tests of a German experimental robot arm; hand-held photography of tsunami damage — all in addition to the usual practice and lessons learned while during routine and non-routine maintenance. None of this is likely to revolutionize anything. It is not the kind of science Greg wants, but a lot of it is science. What it is, is practical experience which we must get if we are going to successfully send missions to Mars.)
Real live experience is critical to going forward, and, for better or worse, the Space Station is where we are getting our experience.
— Donald
Donald, when I was an undergrad in physics, a friend of mine named Matt Smith (also an undergrad in physics) worked the summer in a cardboard box factory.
After a while assembling boxes on the production line, the guy next to him says that he’s doing it wrong and shows him the proper way to do it. But Matt pointed out that his way was quicker and better. The guy stood back aghast; he had done it the same way for 20 years, and it never occured to him that there was a much easier way to do it.
The situation that you describe is incremental development in the context of engineering. I come from a background where people did genuinely new things all the time in physics. And for the space side of the department (at Leicester University) the lunch room where everybody congrated had a window onto the clean room, and you would eat sandwiches, do homework, and watch them build a satellite (ITAR would never allow that over here). But even on the engineering side they were doing new things: Building the first carbon fiber spacecraft bus, creating new x-ray detectors etc. It was tangible progress occurring right in front of us.
It’s hard to come from somewhere like that into an engineering environment whose mentality is more akin to the cardboard box factory than to the physics department. Progress came slowly to that cardboard box factory.
I think you need both. The problem is, we’ve been doing only the “genuinely new thing” for the past thirty years, generally failed or semi-failed attempts at new launch vehicles. It’s time to actually use some of what we’ve developed and return to the moon with it.
If we spend all of our time and money trying to develop the perfect way to build and support a lunar base, we’ll never do it. At some point you have to say, let’s use the fifty years of development and experience we have in cis-Lunar spaceflight, and use the tools we’ve already created, and go. Otherwise, we’ll still be building the first [insert revolutionary new material] spacecraft bus fifty years from now, when an aluminum shell would have done just fine to get as back to the moon.
As for the Space Station, it’s already up there. We don’t need any more revolutionary development for space stations. But we do need to learn how to live and work and do what the military calls “operations” in space. We won’t do that building the first X or Y bus, but we can use what’s already deployed to learn.
— Donald
Donald: I agree that the health of astronauts in a microgravity is valid science, in principle. Its direct application to human spaceflight is premature, in my opinion, but I could still have at least some respect for it. If nothing else, it could be relevant to other research into osteoporosis and things like that — it would join the greater web of knowledge.
But just like a lot of other things that happen on the space station, it’s a Potemkin version. It was denounced as voodoo science in an internal NASA report by Larry Kuznetz. Just like a lot of other things at NASA, it has degenerated into make-work and thrills for the astronauts. The data from it is spotty, haphazard, unmotivated, and otherwise worthless. Despite a general feeling (even shared by Kuznetz, who after all works for NASA) that the topic is important, they can’t think of new questions to answer. Murphy’s Law of the space shuttle and the space station interrupt, obstruct, and delay data collection. Last but not least, the astronauts themselves are the royal class of NASA, so the experiments are scheduled to satisfy them rather than the medical scientists.
Your comments about radiation are much to the point. All radiation data they take on the space station is irrelevant to deep space travel, because LEO is still protected by the Earth’s magnetosphere. If they really wanted a new and realistic model, they would have to irradiate the astronauts at the deep-space level. Of course you can’t do that to celebrities. Moreover, radiation reinforces some of the effects of weightlessness, for example immune suppression. Studying weightlessness without realistic radiation is like studying alcohol and sleeping pills separately, when the real patients will have them together.
Nonetheless Bush gave radiation and weightlessness research as the main future purpose of the space station. (And international commitments, but that argument satisfies no one.) He doesn’t know about the Kuznetz report, and he doesn’t know about the magnetosphere. Or he doesn’t care, or care to know.
> Might not Cato, then, also propose cutting the USAF budget by 50 percent.
> Obviously, the Air Force is obsolete with the arrival of private manned aircraft.
Bill: Most air transport is already private. If you look around, you will find that most aircraft are not owned or operated by the Air Force, and even the Air Force depends on the private sector to meet most of its non-combat air transport needs.
> The bigger problem with cutting NASA funding in the face of private human
> space flight is those companies are counting on NASA as a customer
Karen: Name those companies. I know you’ve spoken to Pat Bahn. Have you asked him if TGV Rockets is depending on NASA as a customer?
You have long advocated that NASA build a new HLV, which would eliminate any need (or ability) for NASA to buy from private enterprise. Like many other VSE supporters, you seem to want it both ways
> When it is time to criticize the Democrats, most of them are as righteous
> as Sean Hannity. But when it is time to criticize the Republicans, most
> of them are as weak as Alan Colmes.
Greg: Nice rant. Of course, the evil libertarians were, in fact, critiizing a Republican policy.
Furthermore, the NASA employees union endorsed John Kerry in the last election. So, the cheif beneficiaries are not evil Preublicans but good Democrars, like yourself.
But don’t let facts get in your way.
It’s true that the radiation experienced on the Space Station is far less than you would get in interplanetary space, but to say that studying the former is irrelevant to the latter is a gross overstatement.
First, the more interplanetary operations we do, the more operations we’ll be doing in LEO. We have to understand how to survive in both environments. Just because you’re going from Europe to America does not mean you can ignore the dangers you will experience in the littoral environment.
Second, the radiation in LEO is different in quantity, but you still experience some of the same qualitative issues, particularly during periods of extreme solar activity like we are experiencing now.
Third, one of the reasons for getting back into deep space is so that we can apply what we are learning in LEO to the more extreme environment. Once again, you learn to survive in the littoral environment, than apply what you have learned to the deep Atlantic. You don’t leap straight into the Atlantic and hope to survive.
Finally, you’ve ignored what I consider the most important contribution from the Space Station, and that is operations experience. You’re never going to get it on the ground, and you need to get it close to home before you can venture far away. Again, you may be headed for American, but you’d damn well better be able to function in the littoral regions first.
— Donald
Kevin, you’re limiting your imagination of how things could be due to what you know from relatively immediate history. Look at the propulsion system for the SR-71. They didn’t do a research program first to see if they could build a hybrid propulsion system. They decided they needed an airplane that cruised at more than Mach 3, which meant a ramjet/turbojet engine would be a big advantage. Even your examples were primarily those of applied research, developing buses or whatever to solve practical problems in the building of spacecraft.
Pure research is great and we need it, but let’s face it, we all stand on the shoulders of giants in everything we do. Sometimes we add a little, sometimes we add a lot. What’s killing me right now is that we’ve now gone a generation not adding anything. We’ve lost more than we’ve added. As Donald points out, we have plenty of opportunities to do new things, such as the needs developed by station, unfortunately we are in a position where there is too much disincentive for innovation. It’s crazy. Who would have ever thought this would happen here?
No doubt your advisor has seen this too, but he probably doesn’t know enough about the applied side to have any insights into how to fix it. Absent that, he would likely prefer to deal in a realm he is comfortable in, and let the other part to die off, as it clearly deserves. The problem is, it’s all part of a cycle. When the applied part doesn’t work, there is nothing to drive the pure research. Why do pure research when there’s no chance of using it? Then when there’s no new pure research, there’s nothing to prime new applications.
It’s a spiral. It either spirals up or down. Right now, it’s going down. I say, let’s take advantage of our own not so distant history and fix it so it spirals up again. There is no shortage of brilliant minds in this country, but there is a marked shortage of opportunities for their brilliance to shine.
OK this appears to be our sticking point: “we’ve been doing only the “genuinely new thing” for the past thirty years”
I don’t think you have. Certainly, there was an activity with that label which was marketed as research, but wherever that money went (not here) it was not supporting a cutting edge; the results show that.
It does not follow that “the last thing we need right now is innovation” although I can understand why you would think so. If the next batch of research money is to go to Lockheed and Boeing et. al. for “innovation” then I agree that we might as well put a happy face on it, give our 50 year-old technology a superficial makeover, put some more footprints on the Moon while we still can, and hope some other country comes up with a better way of doing it.
Kevin: “I agree that we might as well put a happy face on it, give our 50 year-old technology a superficial makeover, put some more footprints on the Moon while we still can, and hope some other country comes up with a better way of doing it.”
I think my fundamental disagreement with so many on this list is in that sentence. I believe there is nothing wrong with using fifty year old technology if it will do the job. After all, we’re doing that every time we launch a scientific satellite on a Delta-II.
The problem with Apollo was not the technology we used, it was that we quit before we had a chance to learn much from experience. (Even so, compare Apollo-17 to Apollo-11; I think we improved more in that one short period of practice than we have in all the studies combined ever since.) If we go back to the moon, and do it just once a year to keep it relatively cheap, but keep doing it for a decade, we will learn far more in that ten flights than we will sitting here at home pretending to learn how to “do it right.”
Use the technology and tools we’ve got, go as far as we can with the money available, and use the experience we’ve gained in real operations to design the next generation. That’s the only way to run lunar exploration program that actually explores the moon.
— Donald
Isn’t Cato that little guy on “Fantasy Island” that says “Look boss, the plane boss, the plane” ???
Cato lives in fantasyland.
NASA is not obsolete. NASA simply did not learn nor incorporate the Apollo 13 unlearned lessons.
The mistakes of the visionless Apollo Cronies were never corrected. Like the FBI and the NSA regarding 9/11, FEMA regarding 9/2005, and NASA regarding OSP – the short-sighted Bureaucracies lack leadership and vision for the future.
NASA is not obsolete. Parhaps still lost in space, and obese, but not obsolete.
The shuttle ought to be obsolete.
How long before the dollar bill is obsolete?
Fair enough, I understand where you’re coming from.
So if you have $16.4bn, in what proportions would you allocate money to each of the existing programs, including shuttle, space station, return to the Moon, and R&D?
PS my last remark was in relation to Donald’s post.
I’d develop a vehicle to get humans to and from LEO, or at least have a probability of keeping them alive if the rocket misfires occasionally. Apollo 13 should have taught us that if you flop a mission occaionally, but the crew lives, you are deemed a “success”.
Just like driving to work, you do not want to make a habit of totalling your car, and there are no guarantees whether in a car (Unsafe at any speed – Nader) or rocket. But if occasionally you total your car and survive, I think that is called “success” and the insurance rate should not be too drastic and you can buy another car.
So first NASA management needs to re-read Apollo 13 testimony to understand the difference between “success” and “failure”.
While automakers stepped forwards with destructive tests to determine seat belt and air bag probabilities, NASA got rid of its November 1963 destructively tested seat belt equivalent.
So NASA needs to catch up to the automakers. I don’t know how good launch escapes systems, etc. can be. The Ruskies system worked once, but one data point is what NASA banked on pre-Columbia with Challenger.
In other words, NASA is nearly completely ignorant of how well the equivalent of seat belts and air bags can be. The automakers made small steps forwards, and NASA made a leap backwards.
The to and from LEO survival, escape and rescue technology will be needed for Mars, as the to and from Earth and Mars transfers are among the highest risk tasks in a Mars mission.
I just don’t envision NASA going anywhere until the LEO dilemma is strategically attacked. Once that battle is controlled, the moon and Mars should fall like dominoes.
I guess politically feed space station ball-and-chain and space duddle until Congress can dance the shuttle scuttle.
But even Skylab did not incorporate the Apollo 13 independent system level for success redundancy lesson.
NASA has not learned lessons and has not had a leader with vision since Strongarm stepped back safely on Earth, and certainly not since Apollo 13.
NASa is still too arrogant to even look inside to see NASA is ignorant.
Once humbled, if ever, NASA can realize the need for ignorance, and statistically determine and design and build from there.
Ed,
I don’t believe we will ever have NASA paid for alt-space company missions but it is totally proposterous for Cato to suggest slashing the NASA budget when some of these companies are planning for NASA to be a major customer.
I don’t think these guys have the technological capability to do what they say they are going to do.
Donald: This “littoral environment” view is just putting a good face on scientific research that was once novel, but has gotten boring. It’s a lot of been there, done that. As the Kuznetz report should tell you.
And so is the operational experience, morally. The world already learned how not to manage a space station from Mir. This is not a lesson that the world needs to learn again.
In any case you were the one who argued that human weightlessness research on the space station is valid science. It isn’t. Even if weightlessness research could get you tenure at Harvard, you wouldn’t get far with space station data.
Also, for the record, the character who shouted out “The plane! The plane!” on Fantasy Island was Tattoo. Cato was Inspector Clouseau’s maniacal butler in the Pink Panther movies.
Some of Cato’s proposals, like cutting farm subsidies and privitizing the air traffic control system, are somewhat promising. But the NASA proposal, with the fantasy assumptions and the bad math, seems more an attempt to tweak Tom Delay than to be any where near serious. I’m also surprised that Cato has ignored the pork in the Transportation Bill and the corporate welfare in the Energy Bill.
Cato has done some good work, but methinks its credibility just took a big hit.
Even though I badmouthed Cato as an ineffectual critic of the governing Republicans, I at least agree with this:
However, admirers of President Bush can rest assured that their comments about Iraq have hardly more traction than their comments about NASA.
Nor, indeed, do most of Cato’s comments about government spending. Only their wisdom on tax cuts matters. These days, Washington is libertarian when it comes to taxes, socialist when it comes to spending. Is that a glass half full, or a train wreck in slow motion? We report, you decide.
… with an eye to understanding the real exposure of the crew and what it does to their bodies in the future; ongoing measurements of real particle contamination throughout the modules; space soldering experiments toward future repair techniques; cardiovascular tests;
Why not do that outside the Van Allen radiation belts on the Moon?
… studies of the behavior of particles and different fluids
A former prof. of mine, Dr. Basail Antar, has hours and hours of videos of liquid helium flows gathered during several earlier Shuttle missions.
His findings: there’s not much convective heat transfer in microgravity. Convection requires a gravity gradient. Surface tension effects become much more dominant. It’s a pretty well studied topic at this point.
… to better understand and improve the behavior of rocket engine tankage
If NASA has learned anything new, why do they want to keep on using SRB’s and the same old External Tanks in their “new” launch missiles?
neurology and cognition experiments; doing ultrasound scans of bones, teeth, and abdominal cavities ….
ZZZzzz … snore … I wanna explore space so I can get an abdominal cavity scan.
NASA is nearly completely ignorant of how well the equivalent of seat belts and air bags can be. …
Que? Can you explain that in English?
He is reffering to the Shuttles lack of an escape system like an escape tower.
If a car has a collision, various automakers cllect crash dummy test data and develop statistical confidence regarding how well the crew / passengers may come out of the ordeal.
Before the automakers were conducting such tests, NASA in Nov. ’63 essentially crash dummy tested the launch escape system (LES).
Instead of moving forward and performing more crash dummy tests, NASA took away the crash dummy test with the shuttle.
So as the automakers stepped forwards, NASA leaped backwards.
SO even now if NASA puts a launch escape system into the CEV, what good is it? What statistical confidence will there be? None until the tests and data are performed and analyzed. So NASA is ignorant regardig srew escape, survival, and rescue systems and technology – the very technology that may be among the breakthroughs needed for success to be achievable.
I am not saying a LES and crew escape systems should be installed. I am saying something more basic – we are too ignorant to know if such systems will even work to any confidence level. Thus one of the needs to become a developmental agency.
Automakers do the side impact, front impact, and roll over crash dummy tests … where did the Nov. 1963 crash dummy test leader NASA run off and hide to? Not behind the moon … NASA can’t be hiding there? WHere is NASA hiding?
Instead of using dummies for astronaut safety equipment crash tests, why not use live Mexicans? They are cheap to hire. The survivability testing would be more realistic.
Look, Toro, if you want to worry about safety, fret about the new six person space capsule during low altitude descent.
This proposed space capsule or CEV, which I fervently hope will never actually be built, will weigh on the order of thirty (30) metric tonnes if the vehicle includes the functional equivalent of the Apollo Service Module.
NASA wants to land this CEV on dry land within the property lines at either Kennedy or Edwards. Apollo-style water landings are O-U-T.
This dry land landing will require a large, steerable parachute, probably a rectangular ram air parachute as was tested with the small X-38 subscale prototype. Testing and developing such a large parachute system will be quite a program in iteself. Recall that the Apollo capsule weighed less than 6500 kg at touchdown.
If the Service Module for the new CEV is made disposable to save weight under parachute, the CEV will not be able to land at Kennedy, because the Service Module will be too massive to burn up entirely before impacting the ground somewhere in the US west of KSC. Hmmm, the Service Module could be rigged with explosive charges to break the SM into smaller pieces before re-entry. I suppose that would address the SM re-entry issue.
The proposed capsule will also have retro rockets and exterior airbags, and, possibly, retractable landing feet.
Rectractable landing feet? Yes. It seems that this big new capsule will also be the lunar landing vehicle. Direct lunar injection without a separate Lunar Excursion Module, that seems to be the new plan.
Also note that a direct-to-lunar-surface CEV with retractable feet/landing gear would resemble the DCX-Delta Clipper single stage to orbit spacecraft. The CEV sure would be more interesting if it resembled the Delta Clipper. This CEV proposal may end up with little resemblance to the Apollo design of separate Crew Module, Service Module, and Lunar Excursion Module.
One supposes that the crash test dummies or astronauts inside the CEV might have automobile-style interior air bags as well as seat belts. To perfect these safety technologies for the new space capsule, NASA could hire former Oldsmobile safety engineers as consultants.
That’s today’s NASA: Your Father’s Rocketship Agency!
Contending Modes
1959 to Mid-1962
Politically setting a goal of manned lunar landing during the 1960s meant little technologically until somebody decided on the best way to fly there and back. Numerous suggestions had been made as to how to make the trip. Some sounded logical, some read like science fiction, and each proposal had vocal and persistent champions. All had been listened to with interest, but with no compelling need to choose among them. When President Kennedy introduced a deadline, however, it was time to pick one of the two basic mission modes – direct ascent or rendezvous – and, further, one of the variations of that mode. The story of Apollo told here thus far has only touched on the technical issues encountered along the tangled path to selecting the route.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4205/ch3-1.html
In 1962, there were three ways of making a round trip to the Moon under consideration. The most popular means among NASA experts was “direct ascent,” meaning astronauts would take off from earth and land on the Moon in the same space craft, using one big launch missile and no orbital rendezvous.
The drawback to direct ascent, a.k.a. direct lunar insertion, was that it required launching larger payload mass per missile than rendezvous methods.
There were two types of rendezvous methods, Earth orbit rendezvous and lunar orbit rendezvous.
Earth orbit rendezvous was what some of us have been advocating herein, using two or more missile launches to place lunar expedition modules in Earth orbit for docking with a translunar propulsion module.
Lunar rendezvous meant using a Lunar Excursion Module to land on the Moon and then ascent and rendezvous with the Crew Module to return home. Lunar rendezvous was of course the way Apollo was accomplished.
However, circa 1962, direct ascent was more popular than rendezvous proposals. Experts at that time feared that orbital rendezvous and docking was pushing the state of the art of avionics and spacecraft maneuvering systems. Besides, almost everybody agreed that having a missile bigger than anything the Rooskies had would be cool — or hot, or however the saying goes.
Lunar rendezvous eventually won out, however. One reason why is that direct ascent threatened payload weight growth that would be too big for even the Saturn V. Separating the LEM from the Crew Module meant less total payload mass becasue the re-entry vehicle and heatshield could be smaller.
It seems that todays NASA under Mike Griffin has reverted to the direct ascent plan of 1962.
Today’s NASA: Your Father’s Rocketship Agency
Trying to do direct ascent with a smaller rocket, I wonder if they have really worked out all the details?
Direct lunar insertion versus lunar rendezvous, Pres. JFK, and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962:
… The Webb-Wiesner and Shea-Golovin discussions had, if anything, widened the gap between NASA and PSAC (President’s Sci. Advisory Comm., which favored direct ascent and direct lunar insterion.). Early in September, Wiesner again wrote Webb, reiterating his concerns about lunar-orbit rendezvous and this nation’s inferiority to Russia in the big booster field. ( Ours has to be bigger than the Commies’!) PSAC, he assured Webb, stood ready to assist NASA in gathering “the best talents nationally available” to study the mode question. Wiesner sent a copy of this letter to the President, perhaps hoping that Kennedy might step in to settle their differences.47
President Kennedy did, in fact, become involved while on a two-day visit to NASA’s space facilities on 11 and 12 September 1962. After viewing the Apollo spaceport being built in Florida, Kennedy flew on to Huntsville, Alabama. There, during a tour of Marshall and a briefing on the Saturn V and the lunar-rendezvous mission by von Braun, Wiesner interrupted the Marshall director in front of reporters, saying, “No, that’s no good.” Webb immediately defended von Braun and lunar-orbit rendezvous. The adversaries engaged in a heated exchange until Kennedy stopped them, stating that the matter was still subject to final review. But what had been a private disagreement had become public knowledge. Editorial criticism stemming from the confrontation-including the question, “Is our technology sound?” – forced NASA to justify its selection of lunar-orbit rendezvous to the public, as well as to PSAC.48
…
Another indictment of PSAC’s choice was that the panel members persisted in claiming that lunar rendezvous had no time advantage over the other modes. NASA was equally obdurate in its belief that adopting one of the other modes would mean a lag of ten months.
Once upon a time, NASA was obdurately opposed to ten month delays.
…
… After Webb’s letter of 24 October, Wiesner decided not to take his objections to Kennedy, since the President was occupied with the Cuban missile crisis. Subsequently, Wiesner took the position that had the situation been different, his actions might not have been the same. Webb then advised the White House that Apollo was committed to lunar rendezvous.57
… At the end of the first week in November 1962, NASA announced its selection of a manufacturer for the lunar module.58
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4205/ch4-4.html
Back when Arthur Kantrowitz was on the Gardner Commission to recommend launch options to President Kennedy, they concluded that on-orbit assembly using existing and cheap smaller launchers would be about a factor of 10 cheaper than building a big launcher.
IMHO higher flight rate is badly needed, as is automated rendezvous and docking of components. The trouble with one heavy launch is it builds into this one high-expense all-or-nothing production; it’s always non-routine.
But Kennedy wanted to build a big launcher because part of the point was to show the US could build bigger and better than Russia, so Johnson classified the final report and kept every copy in his safe. When they were eventually declassified in the 1990s Kantrowitz says NASAs only excuse for not pursuing that path then was that “it would be embarrasing to us”.
Kantrowitz: “The suppression of scientific information for political purposes has delayed the start of what one day will be an important part of the world economy. As far as I know this consideration of Earth Orbital Assembly is not mentioned in official historical accounts of NASA’s early years”
From http://www.dartmouth.edu/~arthurk/Caitlin.html
Correction: It was the Gardner Committee, not the Gardner Commission.
Gardner was evidently a prophet before his time (good read):
http://www.peterson.af.mil/hqafspc/history/gardner.htm
The Point of Apollo was not so much that we could build a bigger, better rocket but that we could build a bigger, beeter rocket FASTER then they could even though they had a head start.
Wars are won by those who have the best National System of Innovation and the means of production to back it up. By starting from behind and beating the Russians to the Moon we showed we head a better system and we would win any war.
That is why those 10 months mattered. Now it doesn’t unless we get so far behind again we find ourselves in another space race.
Kevin, I think I’ve answered your distribution question. I’d put almost nothing in launch vehicles; instead, I’d develop the most efficient deep-space propulsion and the lightest lunar vehicles possible and launch them on EELV’s with the minimum possible modifications. I’d create a light CEV in a crash program that would fit on any existing medium launch vehicle. I’d probably abandon the Shuttle now, and use private vehicles to maintain the Space Station more-or-less off-budget; if it can’t be completed with the EELV’s, I’d use it as is and pay the partners off some other way. I’d try to make HST last long enough to be serviced by the CEV. I’d use any remaining money to fly Apollo-class missions to the moon in to get experience for longer stays with second-generation equipment.
Greg: Mir was not how not to do human spaceflight; it was exactly how to do human spaceflight (albeit an extreme example). They traded risk for money and made the program work at a budget that should make any American engineer blush. They accomplished their goals long after the resources of the Soviet Union evaporated. The International Space Station would not be possible, or a lot more difficult, without the lessons the Russians learned with Mir.
This is how exploration has been done throughout human history. I see no reason to do it differently today.
— Donald
We still cannot get a human being to and from low earth orbit and keep them alive…
There is your purpose for human space flight.
Automakers stepped forward, adding the airbag.
NASA stepped backwards, emitting the launch escape system.
NASA needs to go back to the space age, but the space age is over.
If the only purpose of humans in space is humans in space, and and long term survival, then what is the purpose of transporting humans to and from low Earth orbit, or for that matter a person to and from work in a car, other that survival, first and foremost?
> I don’t believe we will ever have NASA paid for alt-space company missions
> but it is totally proposterous for Cato to suggest slashing the NASA budget
> when some of these companies are planning for NASA to be a major customer.
You didn’t think NASA will ever pay for alt-space missions, but it’s preposterous to slash the NASA budget because some companies are planning on NASA doing that?
How is it advantageous for companies to plan on NASA doing something it won’t do? Does that actually make sense to you?
> I don’t think these guys have the technological capability
> to do what they say they are going to do.
So, where does NASA keep the magic technology that isn’t available to private enterprise? Area 51?
Ed, I don’t think NASA will ever pay for alt-space missions because I don’t think the will actually be able to fly. They might surprise me.
There is no magic capability. Space is hard and expensive. The old line contractors have taken that into account. The young turks think it can be easy and cheap, I don’t think they will ever fly sucessfully. Until they do NASA shouldn’t pay them one cent. After they do NASA should definatly purchase their services. Maybe purchase garuntees is the way to go, contracts promising to buy a certain number of launches at a set cost when sucessfull so that these companies can raise money.
The point I was trying to make up is that you can not use private space companies to justify slashing NASA’s budget when they are counting on NASA having that money to pay them for launch services. Cutting that money will shut down all the alt-space companies immediately and there will be no public or private space flight.
Try reading and understanding before you argue.