I’m glad to read that you _still_ agree with me that the American freeway and highway systems, supported by the government for government purposes, are two of the world’s most socialist institutions. I find it obscenely ironic that all the supposedly free market capitalist ideologues out there freely consort with the devil by using this immensely subsidized system, without batting an eyelid, while continuing to pretend that government institutions have little or no place in our economy or in realistic roads to confident and reliable space transportation. Shame on you.

I also have repeatedly and frequently agreed with you regarding the insanity of supporting both the EELVs and Shuttle-derived vehicles at the same time.

If you are trying to make a point beyond arguing for the sake of arguing, David, I am completely missing it. But, then, I’m just a simple Liberal refusing to live in the real world. . . .

— Donald

Why? So the public won’t get in the habit of life going on without American spaceflight. It’s not as if American spaceflight were an essential activity
…

You remain confused about two very basic points, which are:

A. If NASA stops flying the Shuttle right now, without any other plan to finish the Shuttle, then the USA will abandon the International Space Station.

B. If the Shuttle/ISS lobby is thereby disappointed, and the general public perceives that American manned space efforts just don’ work no mo’, then it’s going to be hard to sell your beloved return to the Moon project.

You are nuts if you think people will say. “Oh, the Shuttle and the space station have proven to be dudmobiles, so let’s double down on our bet on NASA and give ‘em all the funding they want to go to the Moon.” Unh-unh, mass psychology won’t work that way.

Nope, transport via car and truck on the highways was quite economic in the era 1930’s-early 1970’s, because gasoline was abundant and cheap at that time in history.

Anyway, thanks to Google, we now know that the American autobahnen are the fault of the Commie-infiltrated, collectivist New Deal, instead of upright and uptight Eisenhower Republicans conspiring with the evil business pigs of Detroit.

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or even in theory the VSE itself, but I want to hear technically and politically justifyable proposals on how to get from here to where we want to go, not just variations on “the aerospace industry sucks”

Both Lockheed and Boeing had better Return to the Moon Power Point shows five or so years ago when O’Keefe was NASA’s big cheese.

At that time, LockMart wanted to return to the Moon using a lifting body spacecraft and Earth orbit rendezvous of two Atlas V’s; Boeing likewise with two Delta IV’s and a very Apollo-like crew capsule. If I had more time to Google tonight, I’d try to find ‘em.

These plans were politically palatable to the first Bush Jr. admin, and technically accepted by NASA and the respective contractors. What changed? I dunno, other than another election cycle.

The Boeing-Northrop capsule for Apollo on Steroids (TM) looks like the same capsule from five years ago, except bigger.

Cecil:That would mean firing practically every single STS employee, right now.

I’ve seen this argument countless times before, but i never understood it. The way i have seen organizations operating with big projects is .. if its screwed, then its screwed. A couple of managers get fired, but the specialists and workers get reassigned to new projects, the company takes the loss and wriggles out of it if it has sufficiecnt resources avaialable. Why should STS be any different ? Especially as the “company” running it seems to be unable to go bankrupt, nevermind how many big budget projects it has botched in the past few decades.

Unless, of course, the thousands of “specialists” employed are actually trained monkeys unable to learn anything new, but just turning that one screw, signing that one approval document or watching an indicator on the panel that he has been taught to watch for decades ..

The presumption that a cost cap is the maximum that NASA can spend on the space station does not always hold. They can always spend past the cost cap, in principle, they just aren’t supposed to. There may also be expenses not covered by the cost caps.

$25 billion plus $17.7 billion is still not the relevant calculation, because it is in historical dollars, not current dollars. If you add inflation, you easily pass $50 billion. But I suppose that it would be hard to make it to $75 billion, even if there are other hidden costs besides this 25+17.7. As I said, $75 billion was not my number.

I fully agree. I wish people would be more constructive here. I once asked Dfens what _he_ would do if he were “god king” of the space industry and he didn’t answer (though he may not have seen the post). I’d still like to hear that. I think it is okay, and even good, to criticise certain aspects of the VSE, or even in theory the VSE itself, but I want to hear technically and politically justifyable proposals on how to get from here to where we want to go, not just variations on “the aerospace industry sucks” or “the government sucks” or “alt.space is useless because they can only get to LEO.”

The negative aspect of HHS, et al, was once pointed out by The Economist. While you do want to support the elderly, the way we fail to means-testthat while hugely underfunding public education creates a vast transfer of wealth from young people to elderly people, which is not what you want if your economy is to have a future.

— Donald

Perhaps if Mr. Kuperberg spent some time actually reading the document, instead of debating what it is (report? testimony? output of large numbers of monkeys, typing ceaselessly?) he would know his statement above is incorrect. As Ms. Smith writes, “Congress did enact a cost cap on the station, including in the conference version of the FY2000‑2002 NASA authorization act (P.L. 106‑391) a Senate‑passed provision limiting development costs to $25 billion and associated shuttle launch costs to $17.7 billion.” That amount is, presumably, the maximum NASA can spend through ISS completion (whatever “completion” means nowadays).

True, the $25 billion doesn’t include shuttle costs, but that’s provided in the separate $17.7 billion cap. I suspect the actual amount spent on both ISS and shuttle launch services for ISS is below both caps (when corrected for inflation), but I do not have those figures in front of me.

I am not an expert in mathematics, but I do not see how 25 + 17.7 = 75.

NASA, however, is doing something more than redistributing wealth. It isn’t just paying engineers, it’s also taking their labor. If it squanders that labor, that really is government waste. It takes skilled labor away that would almost certainly have gone to other uses.