The House Science and Technology Committee is holding a hearing later this morning on National Imperatives for Earth and Climate Science. The hearing will be based on the Earth sciences decadal survey released last month that warned of a potential future gap in space-based Earth sciences data because of funding cuts (cuts that, as previously noted here, are often blamed on the Vision for Space Exploration even though said cuts started before the Vision’s announcement three years ago.) The two co-chairs of the decadal survey, Richard Anthes and Berrien Moore, will be witnesses at the hearing, as well as former Wyoming governor James Geringer, who will talk about the importance of space-based remote sensing
funding cuts (cuts that, as previously noted here, are often blamed on the Vision for Space Exploration even though said cuts started before the Vision’s announcement three years ago.
So like a good little Bush/Cheney/Marburger/Griffin apologist, Jeff thinks that VSE/ESAS are blameless for the current Earth, Space and Life Sciences NOAA/NASA fiasco. Who knew!
“So like a good little Bush/Cheney/Marburger/Griffin apologist,”
I don’t think we can label Mr. Foust’s politics either way based on his posts here and his essays on The Space Review. What little opinion and commentary he offers is carefully measured, middle-of-the-road analysis.
“Jeff thinks that VSE/ESAS are blameless for the current Earth, Space and Life Sciences NOAA/NASA fiasco.”
Mr. Foust is correct that the trend started before the VSE, but Griffin also made cuts to Earth science research and missions to keep the ESAS plan on schedule after the Bush Administration failed to live up to its VSE budget promises in 2005-6.
FWIW…
TLE, if you had actually read the link in that quote that you used, you would have seen the statement that disproves what you posted:
There’s no doubt that NASA’s Earth sciences program has suffered serious cuts, and that these cuts may well be short-sighted in the long run. However, to blame them solely or primarily on the Vision for Space Exploration is inaccurate.
According to last week’s Space News, the budget for these missions is still $1.5 billion (down from $2 billion in the 1990s). There are currently twenty-nine US Earth Observation satellites on orbit, with 122 instruments. This situation is the result of the ramp-up in funding during the Shuttle operational period and spacecraft surviving longer than expected. There is no way the latter could have been sustained while the Shuttle capacity is replaced, no matter what politically realistic budget was proposed. Once the VSE / ESAS (or its replacement or alternative) reaches operational status, there may again be more money for Earth observation.
Even under their worst case scenarios, the NAS believes there will be seven operational satellites in orbit at once in the future.
Ideologically, I am a strong environmentalist, but I have to ask, how many satellites are enough? If the choice is really as stark as space scientists would have us believe, are we really going to forgo human space exploration in order to baseline twenty-nine satellites (or any other arbitrary number) as the minimum in orbit?
Dr. Griffin has been presented with few choices. In cutting a little bit of everyone while trying to keep the Shuttle replacement on line, he is making the correct financial and political choices. (I agree that, with the Ares-1, he is making the wrong technical choices, but that is a different, though related, issue.)
— Donald
“However, to blame them solely or primarily on the Vision for Space Exploration is inaccurate.”
And TLE has been 100% inaccurate since the moment of his conception. It is certainly a function of his nature, like breathing, at this point.
I blame problems across the board in NASA and NOAA Earth Sciences, Life Sciences and Spaces Sciences programs, to a flagrant disregard for science at the the highest levels of our administration. You can’t accumulate the kind of problems that we have across the scientific, political, social and economic spectrum over the last six years, on anything other than outright gross negligence and incompetence, which has at its fundamental roots, a outright disregard for our scientific institutions, and for science and rationality itself. These problems lay squarely on the shoulders of Bush, Cheney, Marburger, Lautenbacher and Griffin.
Yes, everything is just swell. You may now return to your regularly scheduled apologies and denials.
statement that disproves what you posted
Wow, that’s pretty definitive. No equations or anything. Cuz he said so, right?
/i>And TLE has been 100% inaccurate since the moment of his conception. It is certainly a function of his nature, like breathing, at this point.
And I see the smearing goes on here unabated. You must be so proud.
DONALD SAID:
>>>
Don,
“How many satellites is enough” is a very good question, which I am expecting will soon become a topic of heated debate.
I do think the answer is not related to the “number of satellites”, but to the sensors that we really need in orbit in order to answer fundamental science questions about our global environment, and how it is changing.
Some of the most important science is related to tracking “change” over time. In this case, we just need to get that sensor back up in orbit to track the change. I am guessing that tracking the change over time is more important for some sensors than others. I am also guessing this is a major source of debate. Meanwhile, technology is always improving, and there will be new sensors that they want to put up … which competes with the need to just put up the old sensor to track change over time.
The bottom line is that ONLY the scientists can tell us which sensors we need to have up there to answer the fundamental Earth science questions.
I am assuming the decadal survey was supposed to give us this information.
But most of this will become secondary (or tertiary) in importance as the politics of global warming will overshadow (on both sides of the aisle) what the actual science is telling us to do.
– Al
PS — I would not assume that the “space scientists” are enthusiastic about the growing political pressure to put more $$ into Earth remote sensing. Now that the Earth remote sensing budget & programs have been put under the same tent as the “space science” programs, the space science programs will become obvious & easy targets.
“And I see the smearing goes on here unabated. You must be so proud.”
If hypocracy caused obesity, they would have to bury you in an Shipping Conex.
That fact the irony of your protest is lost upon you is certain testimony to you low IQ and total lack of judgement.
You slander the host (and others) and then loudly cry ‘I’m the victim here!”
I am sure we are near the point where you will ask your critics to produce their rocket designs as if that invalidates their correct ciritcisms on your incessant, mindless trolling of this site.
What a loser you are.
You slander the host (and others) and then loudly cry ‘I’m the victim here!
Mr. Faust is apologizing for a obviously corrupt and incompetent US administration, perhaps the most corrupt and incompentent United States administration ever, certainly with regards to science, and I called him on it. There is nothing extraordinary about my response, and there is nothing extraordinary about your smearing. In fact, I could have predicted it.
On the other hand, I can feel your pain. I can only imagine how disturbing you must find reality to be, when confronted with an America fundamentally based upon lies and deceit, and naturally you feel you must keep lying and smearing to maintain the deception, reality and nature itself being too incomprehensible for your senses. You know, things like war, debt, lose of US stature and influence, global warming, etc, generally all your fault. They make a fraudulent US administration seem like a minor problem indeed.
However, the problems remain, and apologizing for them and denying them aren’t generally accepted as credible scientific methods in the science world. Fortunately, I can think of five problems, which appear to be related to all the others, and easily solved. Bush, Cheney, Marburger, Lautenbacher and Griffin. Once we get rid of those specific problems, we can begin to solve the much larger ones in earnest.
You may now return to your regularly schedule lies and smearing, Mike.
“You slander the host (and others) and then loudly cry ‘I’m the victim here!
Mr. Faust is apologizing for a obviously corrupt and incompetent US administration, perhaps the most corrupt and incompentent United States administration ever, certainly with regards to science, and I called him on it. There is nothing extraordinary about my response, and there is nothing extraordinary about your smearing. In fact, I could have predicted it.”
No, Jeff is telling the absolute truth as it realtes to a thing every one else here calles reality. Now I could predict you next move. This is the point where you get deep in your victimology and start arguing from your perspective in the ‘bazzaro’ universe you inhabit.
Sorry Tom, you get to do all the smearing in this thread.
You can try and weasle word your way out of it all you want to but no one else is buying the shit sandwich you are trying to sell as fine dining.
Perhaps you should change your menu instead of blaming your patrons for complaining about the poor quality of your fare.
Jeff is telling the absolute truth as it realtes to a thing every one else here calles reality.
Calling anything the absolute truth is in itself an indictment, but I’m sure you don’t understand those nuances of language and science. I’ll hand Mr. Faust this much. Three years of the VSE/ESAS disaster, on top of a previous three years of the Bush Cheney Marburger Lautenbacher Griffin disaster, has only added more insult to to the fundamental injury this administration has been to American science and its institutions.
Certainly VSE and ESAS are not blameless.
Al: The bottom line is that ONLY the scientists can tell us which sensors we need to have up there to answer the fundamental Earth science questions.
I don’t think so. That’s like saying that ONLY the engineers at NASA Johnson can tell us what we need to return to Earth’s moon.
Like everyone else, Earth scientists need to prioritize and live within a budget, probably one that is lower than the budget they got used to in the 1990s. Then, the entire government space endeavor needs to prioritize and recognize that it is going to have a lower budget.
But, “prioritization” does not automatically mean that the highest priority (e.g., Earth science) gets all the money or even the largest percentage of it. Earth scientists of got used to more than “their share” of the money, and now they may need to get used to a bit less during Orion’s development period.
For a whole lot of reasons, human spaceflight should not be sacrificed at the alter of environmental research. Scientists (of whatever stripe) seem to forget that theirs are not the only space endeavors that have been cut, and that the VSE also is having to get by with far less money than was promised by the Administration.
The bottom line is that we need human spaceflight _and_ Earth observation, and that if you are going to have a human space program, something like the VSE involves the lowest up-front investment. Other alternatives (e.g., continuing to waste money trying to come up with reusable space planes that have no market) involve higher investment up front, and thus a bigger impact on science of all stripes.
— Donald
The bottom line is that we need human spaceflight
Actually, no Donald, human spaceflight isn’t the bottom line, it’s the top line. It’s dependent upon a myriad of other middle and bottom lines, some of those lines, like solvency and prosperity, for instance, are so down deep in a hole now, we’ll be lucky to get back up to sea and ground level. We are in a deep smoking hole in the ground Donald, with respect to all science, when once upon a time we were just scraping by with the democrats.
We are confronted with serious planetary problems, Donald, and the soon that the rank and file of NOAA and NASA acknowledge and address the monumental task before us, the sooner we can begin to develop a planetary strategy to solve them.
And yes, human spaceflight is a part of the solution. That goes without saying. However, it’s not the priority here. VSE and ESAS should not be the sum total contribution of the human spaceflight part of the global solution to the planetary problem, we all recognize that too. On the front lines we have instruments and spacecraft, and clearly we’ve got a problem in this area, a problem that is directly the fault of this administration, and the people who voted for them.
Now that we have the blame game sorted out, what are your solutions, besides rearranging the budget deck chairs?
Donald F. Robertson
Don…I dont think that we need human spaceflight or earth resources, or military or whatever spaceflight UNLESS there is a geniune constituency of these things doing something useful that is productive to the amount of dollars spent AND the dollars/years ratio for productivity.
I am oppossed to “return to the MOon” because in theend, nothing zero will come of it. There will be a few NASA people doing bunny hops on the Moon, some good science and then bang it will disappear into the medocrity of the space station. NOTHING done on the space station has at any point justified the gazillions of dollars spent on it.
My take is that all these space things should be chopped off to the various groups that do this research or effort “anyway” and see if they can compete for the dollars that are there to do the research in the first place with “land assets”…If they cant, what is the point of having them?
I think that a great many of them can…I think that some of them cannot.
There is no point to going back to the Moon..none. As it is currently glued together it isnt 1) making American enterprise stronger, 2) building any new national capabilities in space, or 3) really doing anything to summon a future much different from the present.
Robert
> If the choice is really as stark as space scientists would have us believe, are we really going to forgo human
> space exploration in order to baseline twenty-nine satellites (or any other arbitrary number) as the
> minimum in orbit?
That’s a false choice.
If we reduce the cost of getting into space, NASA could have 29 satellites in orbit and *more* human space exploration than VSE allows.
It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game, Donald. Why do you insist on making it one?
> if you are going to have a human space program, something like the VSE involves the lowest up-front investment. Other
> alternatives (e.g., continuing to waste money trying to come up with reusable space planes that have no market) involve
> higher investment up front,
VSE will cost one hundred billion dollars before the first astronaut lands on the Moon.
Reusable spaceplanes could be developed for hundreds of *millions* of dollars.
Hundreds of millions is not “higher” than hundreds of billions, no matter how many times you say so, Donald.
Even using existing EELVs would have lower upfront cost than VSE. VSE actually has the *highest* up-front costs of any alternative.
Robert: nothing zero will come of it . . . some good science
Both of these statements cannot be simultaneously true.
Actually, as long-term inmates of this site will know, I think quite a lot of really good science will be achieved — far more than could be done by any conceivable robotic program, and at far less cost per unit science. Check out David Harman’s book about what was done by Apollo astronauts. Second generation astronauts will do even more. I did a review of likely lunar science results here a year or so ago, check out the archives.
Moreover, the Space Station became the market that made COTS politically possible, which may lead to routine access to orbit. Likewise, a lunar base evolved from the VSE could create the market to allow something like a lunar COTS. Read my Op Ed piece in Space News, The Oxygen Road.
There are many reasons to go back to Earth’s moon.
— Donald
Edward: Reusable spaceplanes could be developed for hundreds of *millions* of dollars.
Not to orbit, they can’t. SpaceX is rapidly demonstrating that not even a self-financed entreprenure can get even to orbit even with a simple expendable vehicle even with government-financed payloads and subsidies for somewhat less than that kind of money.
Show me the results to orbit, not the usual “NASA won’t let me” excuses, then I’ll buy the product.
— Donald
Show me the results to orbit, not the usual “NASA won’t let me†excuses, then I’ll buy the product.
You already own the product, Donald, you said so yourself. It’s the Space Shuttle Main Engine.
Donald…you are correct they cannot be simo true “IF” (and please accept my pardon) I meant “good science” as something sincere. I sometimes forget and that is why I beg your pardon..but I was mocking using the NASA line “good science”.
Going to the Moon was probably worthwhile in terms of what it did in the cold war…but I dont know even that. I dont think that it was worth the science…I dont think ISS is worth the science and I dont think going back to the Moon is worth the science.
If space is ever worth the science of humans doing things it will only be when we do the “science” there as we do the “science” on EArth…ie as a function of the value of the science vrs the dollars spent.
I ran out of “big dollar” human spaceflight projects with the shuttle. It has (as Mr. Wright will testify) been a long evolution for me, and what we are stuck with, we are probably stuck with…but in the end I dont see much value in NASA human spaceflight.
If it were poltiically viable I would be for smiply ending it.
Robert
>> ***Reusable*** spaceplanes could be developed for hundreds of millions of dollars.
> Not to orbit, they can’t. SpaceX is rapidly demonstrating that not even a self-financed entreprenure
> can get even to orbit even with a simple ***expendable***
You’re talking about two different things, Donald. A reusable is not an expendable.
> Show me the results to orbit, not the usual “NASA won’t let me†excuses, then I’ll buy the product.
Donald, your hypocrisy is amazing. Delta and Atlas have shown results to orbit. Your Ares hasn’t shown any results.
Despite what you claim, you don’t want to buy a proven product. You want the taxpayers to fork over a hundred billion for new, unproven rockets.
If there were a private RLV on the pad right now, I’m sure you would come up with some excuse why NASA shouldn’t use it. Just as you do with Delta and Atlas right now.
FWIW, Bush’s attitude and policies toward science in general – and particularly climate science – has been desultory. He promised a vigorous effort while cutting budgets, casting doubt, and sending his industruy and religious minions into the bureaucracy to rewrite reports and intimidate scientists.
We’re now faced with a criticial situation with Earth and climate sciences while trying to rein in deficits, pay for the war, pay for tax cuts, pay for sending a handful of people to the moon 13 years from now, and cover the pending retirement of the baby boomers in a few years much earlier than that. Rather than getting into a chicken or the egg argument vis-a-vis science cuts and VSE, let’s focus on the big picture here. And that’s petty ugly.
Donald,
Be careful of hasty generalizations from a very limited data set. Whether Elon succeeds or fails really doesn’t prove whether it is or isn’t possible for someone else to succeed at developing an orbital RLV for similar amounts of money. It may shed some light on the difficulty, but just because one group couldn’t accomplish something does not prove that it is impossible.
More to the point, I think there is some reasonable evidence that Ed’s claim might just be true. One of the big problems that Elon has faced to-date is that his rocket *has* to function 100% perfectly the first time, or it fails. Despite popular belief, rockets don’t inherently have to be that way. It is possible to design rockets that can be incrementally tested, and reusable vehicles make that even less expensive.
Now, I may be biased because of where I work, but I think that a company starting small, and getting experience with developing, testing, and operating suborbital RLVs could likely jump in to developing orbital RLVs a lot less expensively than companies going straight for orbital vehicles. As you move up in capabilities, you learn lots of useful lessons about how to test out failure modes, how to make things robust, how different subsystems should work, which technologies make the most sense, etc.
Trying to go straight for orbital launch with an expendable is arguably one of the hardest ways of solving the problem. Were it not for ICBMs and the Apollo program, I don’t think any rational engineer would want to go about developing an orbital launch vehicle in that manner. Way too high of “pucker factor”.
~Jon
Jon…
I dont know if I agree with the “reusability” is easier theory.
ELV’s and RLV’s strike me as having the same problems for the technologies maturity level…as airplanes did when they were at the same level of maturity.
It was routine decades ago for airplanes to “crash” on test flights…As memory serves the B-17 and B-29 prototypes both were “lost” on test flights.
Likewise I dont think that an RLV and ELV have that much difference in figuring out failure modes. Musk seems to have figured out what went wrong on the first go…my guess is that he is doing what ever “homebuilder” does …he found some problems and in finding those found someother problems.
He may have a few more “tries” before he either gets there or gives up…but I AM NOT surprised that as he has thundered to his second launch he has found a lot of things along the way that he has paused at. I see that as prudent engineering…
I look at Musk effort as pretty much a “homebiuilt”. I know that is not really correct, but what he is doing is putting together a vehicle that has a unique main goal, cost of operation…with a reasonably new team.
I would imagine (guess more then anything) that an RLV will have some “catastrophes” along the way toward its operational efforts. AS I noted the B-17 and B-29 were both reusable and I think that the first examples of both more or less were destroyed.
Robert
Well said, Jon. I would extend your argument beyond incremental RLV work to space activity in general. Ever since Apollo, the “great leap forward” mindset has been a curse, whether applied to hardware — we’re going to have an operational space truck in STS ver 1.0, we’re going to have a 900 (700) (500) ton space station — or to missions (back to the Moon! on to Mars!)
Everybody likes whizzy clean-sheet engineering breakthroughs and “first to…” missions. But we don’t need those nearly as much as we need incremental, cumulative experience and the incremental, cumulative design iterations that support it and draw on it.
> I dont know if I agree with the “reusability†is easier theory.
Robert, look up the General Dynamics study from the 1960’s.
They looked at actual flight data from expendable and reusable vehicles of similar size and performance (Atlas A and X-15). They found that the reusable vehicle, although more complex, cost 50% less to develop and had many fewer failures during development.
Those results were confirmed by a parallel Air Force study, conducted using completely different methods, at about the same time.
If you want more recent data, SpaceShip One was developed for $25 million. The test program included 66 flights of White Knight and 17 flights of SpaceShip One. If the system had been an expendable, Scaled would have needed to build 66 first stages and 17 second stages for the test program, for a total of 83 stages. Assuming each stage could be built for only $2 million, the combined test program would have cost over $160 million. And they would have gotten less data from the tests because they wouldn’t get the flown, intact stages back to examine.
The cost of a flgiht test program is greatly affected by the number of times you crash and have to replace your test vehicle. With expendables, you crash the vehicle and have to replace it on every flight.
> Likewise I dont think that an RLV and ELV have that much difference in figuring out failure modes. Musk seems to have
> figured out what went wrong on the first go…my guess is that he is doing what ever “homebuilder†does …
A homebuilder who suffered an engine failure shortly after takeoff would switch off the engine and glide back to a landing. Just as the X-15 did when it suffered an ignition failure. In Elon’s case, the pilot failed to take corrective action, because someone forgot to install the pilot in the cockpit.
> AS I noted the B-17 and B-29 were both reusable and I think that the first examples of both more or less were destroyed.
Out of how many test flights? There’s a big difference between crashing one airframe during the course of 100 test flights and crashing 100 airframes. Numbers matter, unless you think building one airframe costs as much as building 100.
John and Monte (and even Ed), details aside, I don’t disagree with your larger positions. However, the problem with reusable spacecraft right now is that the market of a few tens of satellites per year is not enough to get the financiers who distribute “grandma’s” money to finance their development. For that to happen, we need large new markets ASAP. Orbital tourism holds great promise, and is already contributing in a small way, but the only large market that is available right now is the Space Station. The existence of the Space Station is what made COTS politically (and potentially financially) possible. Without the Space Station, we would not be having our early orbital tourism flights, and, while the suborbital flights may or may not have been as far along in that alternative universe, it is safe to say that the excitement and publicity both would have been less.
The key lesson of the last thirty years of near absolute failure of private individuals to develop lower-cost spaceflight before a market is in place, is that you need the government to establish that market before anyone will cough up grandma’s money to finance it.
While it may just be possible to bootstrap orbital tourism to lunar tourism (or a lunar oxygen economy) without government help, it is a safe bet that it would take a very long time. Private industry would need to come up with a cheaper way to orbit, low-cost trans-lunar and landing stages, and return vehicles — all before the market exists. If the government deploys a lunar base, all of that should happen a lot faster. You could have the odd tourist helping to finance the base, and existing transportation would make it much easier for oxygen to go along for the ride. Then, once a proven market exists, grandma’s money may become available to develop second- or third-generation transportation, a la COTS.
Look at every great technological development — large passenger aircraft, the modern diesel-electric train, the highway and freeway systems that made fast automobile travel possible, ICBM-based expendable rocketry, the integrated circuit, the Internet — and all of them were government/private collaborations. Not one of them was started by private industry before a market was created, usually by the government. Even Mr. Biglow (probably the best counter-argument to my position) finds it in his heart to use technology first developed by NASA and rockets developed by (of all people) the Soviets. The current ideology, by insisting that only one-half of the “American technological miracle” is all you need, risks destroying the golden goose, and not just in space.
The choice is not VSE versus Mr. Biglow, et al. We need a lunar base and Mr. Biglow to make modules for it, Mr. Musk to get them there, and the rest to start the tourist and oxygen economies that could make the moon part of our wider economy.
Just because I am for the VSE (and for ESAD only because the two are politically tied together at this point in time) does not mean I am against the entrepreneurs. To do this in our lifetimes, we need both.
— Donald
> Orbital tourism holds great promise, and is already contributing in a small way, but the only
> large market that is available right now is the Space Station.
No, that isn’t the only large market. Suborbital is a larger market in the near term.
Yes, I know you don’t believe suborbital is “real” space. So what? Your belief is not founded in reality or the laws of physics.
Military space could also be a large market, if we just get rid of the belief that “only NASA can.”
> The key lesson of the last thirty years of near absolute failure of private individuals to develop lower-cost spaceflight
I guess you live in some parallel universe, where Spock has a beard and spaceflight has been a private endeavor for the past 30 years.
In the real word, private individuals are *successfully* lowering the cost of spaceflight, and it isn’t taking 30 years, either. Calling that “failure” is nothing more than slander.
> While it may just be possible to bootstrap orbital tourism to lunar tourism (or a lunar oxygen economy) without government help
No one said that it has to be done “without government help,” Donald. You’re creating strawman arguments.
We would welcome government help, but aside from a tiny COTS program, you aren’t offering any help. You are offering *hurt*.
Constantly telling investors taht NASA has “proved” RLVs are impossible and we have to go back to Apollo capsules for the next 40 years does not help. It hurts.
Refusing to purchase commercial services, as the law requires, does not help. It hurts.
Cutting Centennial Challenges from $35 million a couple years ago to $4 million this year does not help. It hurts.
Gutting aeronautical research does not help. It hurts.
Refusing to fund the development of military space capabilities does not help. It hurts.
> If the government deploys a lunar base, all of that should happen a lot faster. You could have the odd tourist helping to finance the base
The government already did that. Remember Tranquility Base? Odd tourists did not flock to buy rides on Project Apollo. Even if the government was willing to sell them, no one could afford them.
The only thing Apollo did was scare investors away from human spaceflight. We already did that experiment, Donald, and it did not result in the utopia you think it will. Why should we waste another 40 years just because you’re opposed to trying anything new?
> Just because I am for the VSE (and for ESAD only because the two are politically tied together at this
> point in time) does not mean I am against the entrepreneurs.
Yet, you want the government to ignore existing laws that would help entrepreneurs?
And you oppose every reform that would help?
With friends like you, who needs enemies?
Agreement abounds, Donald. I didn’t mean to imply a preference for RLVs — I’d be just as happy to see more progress in E(nhancing)ELVs than there has in fact been since the 1960s. And I certainly didn’t mean to take sides in “public vs. private.” That’s an enormous red herring, because the primary obstacle to expanded activity in space — the vicious circle of low volume, high costs/prices, and inelasticity — is the same whether the money comes from taxes or investors.
My point was that out of impatience and frustration, we are all prone to look for big-bang breakthroughs that will Transform! the Entire! Situation! … and to under-value the kind of “nibbling away” at the vicious circle, learning as we go (about economics as well as technology) that Jon was talking about. I want to see more of that, whether it’s done by New Space, NASA, or both.
“If you want more recent data, SpaceShip One was developed for $25 million. The test program included 66 flights of White Knight and 17 flights of SpaceShip One. If the system had been an expendable, Scaled would have needed to build 66 first stages and 17 second stages for the test program, for a total of 83 stages. Assuming each stage could be built for only $2 million, the combined test program would have cost over $160 million.”
Just to add to Mr. Wright’s comments, SS1 and the Mercury program made roughly similar technical achievements. One could thus compare SS1’s costs to those of the Mercury program through the equivalent number of flights. I imagine you’d find another jump in cost (maybe by as much as a factor of 10) if you compared the Mercury’s costs in today’s dollars to those of SS1. Some of that would be due to the costs of running of government program, some due to the technical heritage that SS1 could build on but that was not present at the outset of the Mercury program, and some due to the expendable nature of Mercury’s systems.
FWIW…
I agree with most of what Mr. Robertson says until I get to this:
“If the government deploys a lunar base, all of that should happen a lot faster… once a proven market exists, grandma’s money may become available to develop second- or third-generation transportation, a la COTS.”
Which conflicts with this other statement from Mr. Robertson:
“Look at every great technological development… all of them were government/private collaborations.”
One of the (many) problems with the ESAS approach to the VSE is that there is no public/private collaboration from the get-go (aside from an underfunded COTS effort that must compete for ISS business with a much better-funded in-house government Ares 1/Orion system). Instead of incorporating and supporting private capabilities in its lunar plans, NASA expects the private sector to wait a decade-and-a-half and then compete with established government systems to supply the lunar base (assuming its ever built). Excuse my language, but that’s ass-backwards. In the 19th century, the U.S. government did not build and operate new railways, locomotives, and rolling stock for a couple decades and then invite railroad companies to build their own locomotives and rolling stock and operate them on government-owned railways. Rather, the U.S. government incentivized the railroads to build the first railways and locomotives themselves. In the 20th century, the U.S. government did not purchase airplanes and operate a airmail system for a couple decades and then invite air transport companies to compete for airmail business. Rather, the U.S. government purchased airmail services from air transport companies from the get-go. Although it goes against the agency’s institutional bias, NASA needs to follow these successful models in the 21st century if it is serious about establishing a more permanent presence on the Moon and not just repeating exploits of Apollo with a couple extra astronauts for a few extra days.
Yes, COTS holds great promise and COTS would not exist without ISS needs. But NASA did not have to wait until ISS was built to start COTS. ISS requirements were known years ago, even decades for some high-level needs. In an ideal world, NASA would have stimulated COTS development and services in parallel with ISS development and operations.
The VSE is unconstrained by the Cold War factors that forced Apollo into a military hardware, rather than business, development model. The VSE provides NASA with the opportunity to pursue that more ideal business development model in its lunar return efforts. But to do so, NASA has to stimulate new private sector capabilities and purchase private sector services, unfettered by in-house government competitors, from the get-go. NASA cannot build, own, and operate a government lunar infrastructure for almost two decades and then start thinking about private capabilities and services if the agency actually expects to develop the Moon. NASA (and we) must be careful not to take the wrong lessons from COTS, because historically, successful public/private partnerships are parallel, not serial, affairs.
FWIW…
> Rather, the U.S. government incentivized the railroads to build the first railways and locomotives themselves. In the 20th
> century, the U.S. government did not purchase airplanes and operate a airmail system for a couple decades and then invite
> air transport companies to compete for airmail business. Rather, the U.S. government purchased airmail services from
> air transport companies from the get-go
And the NACA did research to help improve military and commercial aviation, rather than developing its own airplanes to take NACA employees on trips to Hawaii, Tahiti, and Beyond.
All that was under the New Deal. I guess FDR was a right-wing libertarian?
Anonymous: Just to add to Mr. Wright’s comments, SS1 and the Mercury program made roughly similar technical achievements.
That’s something I would expect Edward to say, but not you. Space Ship-1’s accomplishment can be compared to the X-15, which it duplicated at probably far less cost — circa forty years later. Project Mercury’s latter accomplishments were vastly more difficult and have yet to be duplicated by any private reusable spacecraft. I don’t expect them to be in the foreseeable future, though I do have hopes that COTS will ultimately lead to it.
One of the (many) problems with the ESAS approach to the VSE is that there is no public/private collaboration from the get-go . . . because historically, successful public/private partnerships are parallel, not serial, affairs
I disagree with your implied argument that this has never worked (outside of Europe and the United States, it has usually been done that way, and while it does take longer, it has been known to work; certainly, that’s the way the Soviets did it, and you could certainly argue that they have the most commercial space program today). However, I do agree with almost everything else you say. Although Edward chooses to ignore it, I’ve argued forcefully for using the EELVs and other existing capabilities. Unfortunately, at this point in time, ESAS is what is on the table. We can either go forward with that and attempt to modify it later to better suit our goals, or we can attack it when it is extremely vulnerable and we have a good chance of killing it, and vastly increase the already high chances of missing this rapidly closing window of opportunity.
Everyone here talks about how bad ESAS is (and I agree), but I’ve heard not one clear description of how we change that in the next two years in a way that Congress and the Administration will sign off on, or how we stop the program and get Congress and the Administration to sign off on a new approach.
The reason is, you can’t. We’ve got a program with political support behind it. I still believe we’ve got to make this program work, and substitute better launch strategies as we go forward. (And, don’t forget that, in using the Delta-IV engines, Dr. Griffin has already gone a small way toward doing that.)
I was right when I predicted here a couple of years ago, and against the strong prevailing opinion at the time, that the decision not to go with the EELVs would get the VSE into serious financial trouble, and could ultimately undo the whole project. Mark my words now when I predict that if we succeed in killing the VSE because it is not being done the way we want it to, the political window will close tight and we’ll spend another decade or three playing in the “better launch vehicle” sand box and accomplishing nothing on the government side of things.
We’ve been down the build-a-better-launch-vehicle road for too long. It is time to try the build-a-market-and-they-will-come approach, especially since Mir and the Space Station have been demonstrating that this approach will work.
— Donald
Also, anonymous, I’ve argued before when you weren’t here that the “airplane” model in general is not appropriate for spaceflight. When the airplane entered commercial service (of any kind), destinations with established populations ready to by the services already existed. Outside of the Space Station, that does not exist in space, where you have to create your destination first.
— Donald
> Although Edward chooses to ignore it, I’ve argued forcefully for using the EELVs and other existing
> capabilities. Unfortunately, at this point in time, ESAS is what is on the table.
I don’t “ignore” it, Don. I distinguish between fiction and reality. Other people argued for NASA using EELV and existing capability. You opposed it.
> Everyone here talks about how bad ESAS is (and I agree), but I’ve heard not one clear description of how we change that in the next two years
There’s a Presidential election in less than two years. I’m sorry if you haven’t heard about it, Don.
> The reason is, you can’t. We’ve got a program with political support behind it.
Oh, stop already. Anyone who follows politics knows that support for VSE is a mile wide and an inch deep. Blowing smoke won’t change that. It just makes you look politically naive.
> We can either go forward with that and attempt to modify it later to better suit our goals, or we can attack
> it when it is extremely vulnerable and we have a good chance of killing it, and vastly increase the already high
> chances of missing this rapidly closing window of opportunity.
That sounds like a pretty good choice. You aren’t offering us an opportunity to do anything except pay higher taxes. You don’t support anything that would make it possible for us to get into space. You want to make spaceflight less affordable, and you want us to pay for that. By all means, let’s slam the window and nail it shut.
> if we succeed in killing the VSE because it is not being done the way we want it to, the political window will close tight
> and we’ll spend another decade or three playing in the “better launch vehicle†sand box and accomplishing nothing
> on the government side of things.
We can reduce launch costs by orders of magnitude, develop military spaceplanes capable of delivering weapons or soldiers anywhere in the world within 60 minutes, and open the space frontier. How did Conan put it? “To crush the enemies of the United States, see launch costs driven down, and hear the lamentations of the worshippers of Apollo. That is what is best in life.”
> When the airplane entered commercial service (of any kind), destinations with established populations
> ready to by the services already existed. Outside of the Space Station, that does not exist in space, where you have
> to create your destination first.
Don, that statement is so bizarre I hardly know how to respond. Do you really think people only travel to destinations that have established populations?
Do you think there was an established population living up in the sky, when barnstormers started selling tickets?
Do you think people buy airplane flights to the North Pole because they want to visit an established population that’s living there?
Or visit Death Valley because of the established population? Or Antarctica? Or climb Mt. Everest?
“Project Mercury’s latter accomplishments were vastly more difficult and have yet to be duplicated by any private reusable spacecraft.”
I’m sorry. I should have been more specific. I was referring to the suborbital Mercury flights. It would be unfair on both sides to incorporate the orbital flights. My bad.
“I’ve heard not one clear description of how we change that in the next two years in a way that Congress and the Administration will sign off on, or how we stop the program and get Congress and the Administration to sign off on a new approach.
The reason is, you can’t.”
Actually, I think we’ve both put forward similar proposals — kill Ares 1, scale back Orion to fit on an EELV (prefeably single stick), maybe make a bigger bet on COTS, and put the rest of the money and the massive NASA workforce and infrastructure to work getting some actual exploration hardware (heavy lift or in-space fueling, lunar lander, etc.) underway before the next election — that would be politically palatable.
The problem is not that we don’t have a worthwhile or politically viable alternative to ESAS. I think we do (or at least the outlines of one). The problem is that we have a NASA leadership that is (understandably) vested in their solution, however poorly their solution fits the available window of opportunity. And no matter how bad the political and budgetary prospects become, they’re not going to budge from that solution given the time, effort, and egos they’ve put into it.
“We’ve got a program with political support behind it.”
I don’t think we do anymore. The House cut exploration by $577 million, knowing it would likely delay Ares 1/Orion by a year or so, and put dozens of other federal departments, agencies, and programs, including Earth science and aeronautics at NASA, ahead of Constellation in the budget resolution. The Senate is about to (maybe did today) approve an identical budget resolution. Only 40 congressmen were willing to sign a letter in support of NASA. White House support in the SAP for NASA exploration was confused (and that’s being generous); the chance of a supplemental, especially with a war going on, is very low; and those congress-critters who do care about NASA are either promising to rebalance further away from exploration (NASA’s new House authorization chair) or have other interests in NASA (Goddard and Mikulski in the Senate).
Folks like to make generalizations about bureaucratic and political inertia, NASA workforce votes, suppossed prime contractor lobbying, etc. But here on the ground in the Beltway, there’s just no evidence of the critical mass of political support that will be necessary to carry NASA’s lunar return ambitions forward.
Worse, even assuming perfect budgets, under the ESAS plan, no exploration hardware will even be started until 2011, two years after a new White House with no vested interest in NASA, the VSE, or ESAS will have entered office. That new White House will be facing massive debt, entitlement, and defense shortfalls in the federal budget, and unless the new President is a closet space cadet, they are simply not going to have any interest in spending $100 billion of precious federal dollars on new lunar return hardware for a repeat of Apollo that won’t payoff in a lunar landing until long after that White House is out of office.
Again, folks like to say we don’t know who the next President will be or what they’ll think of NASA exploration. But when you look think about what nation will be facing in the budget, where NASA and exploration will rank in terms of priority, and the fact that all the lunar hardware development will still lie in the future with no payoff until the next President is out of office, there’s just nothing to point to after the next election that indicates that the lunar elements of the ESAS plan will be carried out. All the indicators, even the waning parochial congressional support that so many folks count on, are pointed in the opposite direction.
I could be wrong and the tide could turn again. But it’s definitely turned once and not in exploration’s favor.
“I still believe we’ve got to make this program work, and substitute better launch strategies as we go forward.”
I appreciate your optimism. But I think it’s a futile cause at this point. Except for Ares 1/Orion and maybe a lucky COTS winner, I don’t expect the rest of the ESAS plan to survive the next election. Unless NASA’s leadership is willing to seriously consider a major change in direction soon, I don’t think any support that you or I provide for or against ESAS will influence how the coming events play out. Even with a good plan, all the space cadets in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans when it comes to White House and Congressional politics. Even more so with this plan in this political and budgetary environment.
Sorry to be such a negative Nellie, but I got to call them like I seem them.
“Also, anonymous, I’ve argued before when you weren’t here that the “airplane†model in general is not appropriate for spaceflight. When the airplane entered commercial service (of any kind), destinations with established populations ready to by the services already existed. Outside of the Space Station, that does not exist in space, where you have to create your destination first.”
But again, those airplane destinations were not government bases (although some may have grown up alongside forts) — they were population centers made up of private citizens and property, and they were that way from their founding.
I wouldn’t argue that the government leads on high-risk technologies and research. But opening new modes of public transportation or settlement and development of new frontiers does not work on the same government leads/private sector follows model. Those goals require parallel government and private sector development. Otherwise you wind up with a government-only infrastructure that is not amenable to private sector development.
“I was right when I predicted here a couple of years ago, and against the strong prevailing opinion at the time, that the decision not to go with the EELVs would get the VSE into serious financial trouble, and could ultimately undo the whole project. Mark my words now when I predict that if we succeed in killing the VSE because it is not being done the way we want it to, the political window will close tight and we’ll spend another decade or three playing in the “better launch vehicle†sand box and accomplishing nothing on the government side of things.”
I never have and never will debate you on this point. I would just add, though, that even with considerable USAF support, the EELV fleet is owned and operated by two publicly held companies. This is part of why I debate you when you point to the timing of the COTS/ISS model and apply it to a future lunar base (assuming it’s ever built). By your logic, NASA shouldn’t buy rides on EELVs to support its lunar effort until after the lunar base is built. But in terms of concrete recommendations, you’re recommending the opposite — that NASA start buying commercial rides on EELVs now to support its lunar effort.
Maybe I’m just too anal retentive, but I just want your (our?) theoretical models and historical precendents to match up with the specifics of our recommendations.
My 2 cents… hope I’m not revisiting to many old bloguments.
anonymous wrote @ February 14th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
pretty good analysis.
Robert
Wow, this discussion has gone from the sorry state of Earth sciences at the crucial juncture to one almost exclusively about lunar plans. Almost nobody here gives an expletive deleted about the former.
The truth is, both may go down the tubes. Bush has done real damage to the environmental programs while launching an expensive lunar effort for which there may not be enough money. We’ll be stuck with no access to space once the shuttle is retired, instead relying for years on a Russian government that seems to grow increasingly autocratic and hostile by the month. Meanwhile, we’ll be half blind on what’s really happening with the planet’s climate.
Edward Wright wrote @ February 14th, 2007 at 12:44 pm ..
I agree with you that if a reusable vehicle has abort modes and abort areas that it clearly has a better chance of being “fixed” then one which by definition is “expended” (grin).
I guess my point was that I wonder how many “reusables” meet “expending” accidents in the flight testing of a resuable…
but you are correct in your point and it is well taken. The DC-x certianly had at least 1 abort (that I recall there might ahve been more) and clearly that would have tossed an expendable….
I’ll be interested to see how much money and tries Musk has to do (IF) to get his Expendable working…and hopefully along the way there will be quite a few reusable even sub orbitals to get some larger data points on development.
I do agree with your major point.
Robert
D. Messier wrote @ February 14th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
I agree with your larger point…I think that the entire effort is slowly collapsing. It is a sad state of affairs but I think that the entire civilian space flight system for the government is slowly “going down for…” approaching the last time..
Robert
DR:
> When the airplane entered commercial service (of any kind),
> destinations with established populations ready to b[u]y the
> services already existed. Outside of the Space Station, that does
> not exist in space, where you have to create your destination first.
EW:
>Don, that statement is so bizarre I hardly know how to respond.
No, It’s so patently true and obvious that you’re compelled to tap-dance and hand-wave around it.
Barnstorming was a good way for WWI-trained pilots to keep their hand in — but do you really believe it was barnstorming fares that paid for developing better aircraft during the 1920s? Do you really believe that the demand for flights to the poles or Death Valley has been a significant driver in the growth of commercial aviation? Or that the reason the real cost of travel from the US to Asia has declined is all those climbers bound for Everest?
I welcome sub-orbital barnstorming for what we can learn from it about leaner, more routine operations, and to a lesser extent for what design innovation it may support. But Don’s point — that aviation has been able to “skim the cream” from very large existing markets for city-to-city terrestrial travel — is perfectly valid. Expecting “adventure” travel alone to drive rapid advances in space access is expecting the tail to wag the dog.
People are hyperventilating about it not because it’s such a big opportunity, but because the baseline — the total launched for all other reasons — has been so small, for so long, that any new source of demand feels like a big deal.
Flights
think it was the nflying — but it was
> But Don’s point — that aviation has been able to “skim the cream†from very large existing markets for
> city-to-city terrestrial travel — is perfectly valid.
Of course, that wasn’t Don’s point at all.
Don’s point was that there could be no commercial airplane flights of any kind without “destinations with established populations.”
To prove that is “patently true,” it is not sufficient to hyperventilate about how many airplane flights are city-to-city. That’s called the “Black Swan fallacy.” You have to show that no one ever paid for an airplane flight that was not city-to-city.
You can’t, because it isn’t true. It took a long time for aviation to advance from the barnyield to city hopping. You and Don see only the aviation market that exists today. What you fail to see is all the intermediate stages through which the market evolved. Spaceflight will go through such stages as well.
“It took a long time for aviation to advance from the barnyield to city hopping”
A British charter service began in 1912, and converted WWI bombers were flying scheduled inter-city passenger service in Europe by 1920. Do you know what they cost in constant dollars? I do: about 1/200th the cost of SS1.
See, Ed, I don’t “see only the aviation market that exists today.” I’ve actually researched the economics of the early market. That’s why I get such amusement from your selective, tendentious, deeply ignorant version, which depends less on the facts than on an emotional conviction that the future of spaceflight must be like the history of aviation because…because… well, because you want it to be .
Airplanes/spaceflight
I have slowly (gasp) come to view Ed’s position (gasp) as more right then wrong (gasp again).
I”ve “discussed” with Ed in particular the notion that aviation had “set destinations” already in place (ie they didnt have to invent the cities) as oppossed to space flight which really has no destinations which are by themselves self supporting.
That to me is still “obviously” accurate but I have come more to Ed’s view that we need something like the barnstorming era to try and realign things.
Aviation as not stuck with 40 plus years at least of really really horribly bad federal government and industry decision making and execution (to be kind) of those decisions. On NASA Watch when KC posted the “Jealous Astronaut” thing (which is good) he mused about why (paraphrase) that people dont turn their creative talents to supporting the space program.
Answer is that “Well Jack I am backing the screw out five and one half turns” or “we are doing the fifth run of the mating habits of the asian fly” isnt very exciting stuff and going back to the Moon will be more of “Lets go look at that same color rock” …and there has been fifty years of “It is so hard to fly in space only super women and super guys can do it”.
If anything NOwak (obligatory slam needed) has managed to convince the people that strows are very normal. We need more. We need a lot of people who are normal (grin) going up suborbital and eventually into orbit in fashions that are more “normal” to people then what is happening now.
We need some realization that althrough it has its dangers space travel is NO MORE inherently dangerous then any other high machinery interface that humans do.
Plus there is a lot more wealth in the country then there was in the early 1900’s.
My dispising of big government programs aside, I have come to the conclusion that another big NASA program doesnt accomplish anything but turn money into jobs…All I think it does is reinforce the bureacracy which is strangling human spaceflight…
As I noted to a friend the other day, I cant tell the difference between the program we have had for the last 40 years and no program at all.
Robert
Anonymous, thanks for a respectful and intelligent debate but I think we’ll have to agree to disagree — but a few specific comments:
I think we’ve both put forward similar proposals — kill Ares 1, scale back Orion to fit on an EELV (preferably single stick), maybe make a bigger bet on COTS
I agree that our proposals this far are similar. I think we differ on what is politically realistic. The problem I see with those of you who want to fix ESAS now is that the wider world — i.e., most of Congress, and probably even most of the Administration — do not differentiate between the VSE and ESAS: they are one and the same. When even we — who want this to happen — publicly argue that ESAS should be cancelled, most politicians will hear, cancel the VSE [and they’ll fill in “put all the money into automated science” since those are the people shouting the loudest].
At this point in time, I don’t think getting the lunar infrastructure in the next two years is in the cards, no matter what happens to the Ares-1, et al. We can probably help kill the Ares-1 and Orion, but the current crop of politicians are not going to okay the next step when we haven’t even got a good start on the first few steps and the principle advocates of the VSE are saying stop now. Since getting the lunar infrastructure is not a politically unwinable game at this point, there is no point in using your limited ammunition to fight for it.
What just may still be achievable is getting Orion — a lunar capable spacecraft — but only if the VSE is not killed by those wanting to kill ESAS. If we have Orion without the rest, we probably won’t be going to the moon by 2020 — but we’ll have a spacecraft capable of going to the moon, which puts us in much better shape than we’ve been at any time since the mid-1970s. With the capability, being used for LEO tasks, it becomes a much smaller step to start a lunar program than it is today, which makes it politically more likely. (Note that Orion would also be available for tasks of greater value, e.g., missions to near-Earth asteroids.) That is why I think the Orion is still worth fighting for. We’ve lost some key battles, and we’ve lost any near-term “win,†but we may not (yet) have lost the war.
The VSE is probably already dead, and with it ESAS. But Orion is not, necessarily, and I disagree with you and everyone else who appear to believe that Orion is synonymous with nothing.
Regarding political support, you can also note that, while Exploration got a lot less than they wanted, they still got a bigger increase than anyone else in NASA (and most other government projects). The current Congress hardly appears gung-ho for exploration, but neither are they prepared to kill it, I think at least as far as seeing through Orion. There will be a different emphasis, and things will get pushed out, but that’s a long way from, we don’t have any political support any more. The key is to manage what little support we have and try not to turn it off by insisting on the “perfect” or “better” at the expense of “good enough for now.”
they are simply not going to have any interest in spending $100 billion of precious federal dollars on new lunar return hardware for a repeat of Apollo that won’t payoff in a lunar landing
I agree. So what makes you think they’ll be prepared to start from scratch with a new plan? The lesson is that we need to write off the lunar infrastructure, and get what we can out of the projects currently underway. If we try to start from scratch, we won’t get lunar infrastructure and we won’t even get Orion, and we’ll be right back where we were before the VSE.
they were population centers made up of private citizens and property, and they were that way from their founding.
That’s not true, and certainly not always correct. If you haven’t done so, check out my article on this subject, http://www.speakeasy.org/~donaldfr/sfmodel.pdf.
But opening new modes of public transportation or settlement and development of new frontiers does not work on the same government leads/private sector follows model.
Here are completely disagree with you, although I think we would often be better off if you were right. Today, our principle means of transportation — the nation’s highway and freeway networks — were entirely government led, and to this date there is very little private contribution outside of contracting. I happen to think we would all be far better off if this government boondoggle had not happened, but it demonstrably did work, creating what is to this date humanity’s largest engineering feat.
Regarding the EELVs, these were built to serve a market that _did_ exist, transport of military spacecraft to LEO and GEO. Through a happy happenstance of physics, that also means they are useful for lunar transport. My argument has always been that what has worked in the past, and what we should do now, is to adapt existing transportation — built for whatever reason — to create your market, then use that market to justify (both politically and financially) better transportation in a positive feedback relationship. I stand by that position.
Edward: Don’s point was that there could be no commercial airplane flights of any kind without “destinations with established populations.â€
That is not my point at all. My point _is_ that nobody is going to invest large amounts of grandma’s money in building better transportation until “destinations with established populations” exist. As I have stated repeatedly, “barnstorming” suborbital flights, EELVs, and all the rest are important. But, they won’t get us to the moon in the near term without a market established with the transportation we already have.
— Donald
“Anonymous, thanks for a respectful and intelligent debate but I think we’ll have to agree to disagree”
Fair enough. Some more comments/clarifications — I think we’re in violent agreement on some points and I need to make others more clear.
“When even we — who want this to happen — publicly argue that ESAS should be cancelled… We can probably help kill the Ares-1 and Orion… The key is to manage what little support we have and try not to turn it off by insisting on the “perfect†or “better†at the expense of “good enough for now.—
You seem to place a lot of stock in keeping the “space community” (my words, not yours) unified behind VSE/ESAS. But as I said in my earlier post, I don’t think the opinions of space cadets and blogonauts like us — even if we were unified — amount to a hill of beans in the halls of Congress or the Oval Office. Not to knock the efforts and enthusiasm of the National Space Society, Planetary Society, Space Frontier Foundation, etc., but I can’t recall an instance when their lobbying was critical to initiating, saving, or killing the budget for a NASA program They’ve had influence in other ways (frameworks for thinking about the nation’s space program and inspiration for projects like Lunar Prospector, SETI, solar sails, etc.), but not in terms of direct budgetary lobbying (at least that I’m aware of).
“most of Congress, and probably even most of the Administration — do not differentiate between the VSE and ESAS… what makes you think they’ll be prepared to start from scratch with a new plan?”
But if the argument to switch tracks now came from a position of authority (not space cadets and blogonauts like us), I think the White House and Congress would listen. If the NASA Administrator went back to the White House and Congress today and said “Look, after yesterday’s vote, we clearly are not going to get the resources necessary to carry out the program we’ve been pursuing on a sustainable timeline. To get us back on track, I’d like to do the following things…” then I think the White House and Congress would hear the NASA Administrator out. And if those “things” were the politically acceptable proposal you and I have written about here, then I think the White House and Congress (with the exception of the Utah delegation) would give the NASA Administrator the latitude he needs and maybe even thank him for his forthrightness and adaptability in the face of the budgetary adversity they created.
The problem, of course, is that our current NASA Administrator is not going to do such a thing — he is too invested in the current approach. Thus, although I disagree with the ESAS plan, including a bloated Orion vehicle, I take the development of Ares 1 and Orion in their current form as a given. Barring a technical debacle or new NASA Administrator, Griffin has at least two more years left to his tenure and these vehicles will be too far along in their development by that time and too critical to retiring the Space Shuttle for a future Congress or the next White House to kill.
“What just may still be achievable is getting Orion — a lunar capable spacecraft — but only if the VSE is not killed by those wanting to kill ESAS.”
Again, I’ll readily admit that if I was in Griffin’s position, I would kill ESAS today, including replacing Orion with a more modestly sized crew capsule. But, as I said earlier, what I (or anyone else on this blog) thinks is not going to influence what happens over the next few years. And if you go back to my earlier post, I clearly take Ares 1 and Orion as a given. In the world we live in and with the NASA Administrator we’ve got, any support from you for ESAS and any argument from me against ESAS are not going to change the likelihood that Ares 1 and Orion will be built. I think you’re arguing for something I’ve already conceded.
That doesn’t change my assessment of the political and budgetary landscape surrounding ESAS, which is what most of my posts here are focused on. And that landscape is clearly saying that Ares 1/Orion will likely get stretched out and that Ares V/LSAM will probably never be built. And I think you also agree with that assessment.
I think all we’re really arguing over is whether:
1) The opinions of folks like you and me, assuming we’re unified, matter to those who make the decisions. I say “no”, you say “yes, and that’s fine. We can leave it at that.
2) In a more perfect world with a more perfect NASA Administrator — one that would reconsider the current ESAS plan — would the White House and Congress let him change course today based on what’s happened in the budget. I say “yes”. I’m not sure what you would say now that the argument is articulated like this. Regardless, our opinions matter even less here since it’s not the world we live in or the NASA Administrator we’ve got.
“I disagree with you and everyone else who appear to believe that Orion is synonymous with nothing.”
I think Orion is important, but for different reasons. Orion is critical for getting off Shuttle. If the White House and Congress cared so little about NASA’s human space flight program that they wouldn’t even provide the funds necessary to finish Orion and forced NASA to keep flying a system that kills astronauts in 1-in-50 flights at a fixed cost of $5-6 billion per year, then I think it would be time to close up shop and retire the whole NASA human space flight effort. Clearly the nation would have judged it to no longer be a worthy endeavour, at that point.
Regarding exploration, although having a capsule built helps, I don’t think Orion is as critical to a future exploration effort as you do. It’s one of the smaller (budget-wise) components to a lunar or Mars architecture and even smaller/cheaper/faster capsules could be built. You and I seem to agree that Ares V and LSAM will not get started, and if that proves to be true, the lunar variants of Orion will not be initiated anyway.
Getting the expensive, exploration-specific elements (heavy lift, human lander, etc.) of an architecture underway is much more important to sustaining a human exploration effort through political cycles than a relatively less expensive, multi-purpose crew capsule. That’s not what’s going to happen, but I’d argue that would be a better scenario in a more perfect world with a more perfect NASA Administrator.
And regarding the real-world scenario we’re dealing with, Orion is useless to exploration if none of the exploration-specific elements are built. We seem to agree that Griffin has wasted the window of opportunity that the Bush II Administration gave him and that the next White House is not going to build those elements either. Holding out hope for a future White House after that is admirable, but it’s so far over the horizon and so subject to different scenarios as to be almost irrelevant for the purposes of debate today. With that long of a timeframe, where NASA doesn’t start actual exploration hardware at the end of the ‘teens and doesn’t start exploration missions until the end of the ’20s or early ’30s, I almost buy into the some of the arguments of the more strident commercial advocates here and figure that some Bigelow/Musk/Rutan Jr. will have beaten NASA back to the Moon.
“If you haven’t done so, check out my article on this subject, http://www.speakeasy.org/~donaldfr/sfmodel.pdf.”
Sorry, maybe my index finger is broken, but the link doesn’t seem to be working. I just get the intro page for speakeasy.
“Today, our principle means of transportation — the nation’s highway and freeway networks — were entirely government led, and to this date there is very little private contribution outside of contracting.”
Not to kill ourselves over these historical models since we both agree that EELVs should be used from the get-go, but two points:
1) In terms of the total ground transportation system (not just the pavement), the freeway system started by Eisenhower relied on decades of prior private investment in automobiles. Private sector automobiles didn’t appear 20 years after the initial freeway system was built — the private sector could participate from the get-go — again, something I’d argue that any lunar development plan should try to encourage and leverage. In the lunar case, EELVs are the equivalent of those automobiles.
2) From a policy and incentives standpoint, I would argue that the freeway model is not the best model for lunar development anyway since Eisenhower started the freeway system to serve a military/civil protection need (evacuation of population centers in the case of nuclear attack) and because it built on and leveraged an existing road system. Unlike the development of the railroads and air transportation, which intended to cut new business models and transportation systems out of whole cloth, our freeway system upgraded an existing transportation system in order to better protect the American population. Although Eisenhower’s gang certainly envisioned commercial benefits, unlike lunar development, new business models and new modes of transportation were not the driving rationales for the freeway system.
“My argument has always been that what has worked in the past, and what we should do now, is to adapt existing transportation — built for whatever reason — to create your market, then use that market to justify (both politically and financially) better transportation in a positive feedback relationship. I stand by that position.”
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. I would just add that I don’t think we have to wait 20 years for a government lunar base built with a government transportation system to start leveraging our existing, commercial space vehicles.
As always, my 2 cents, your mileage may vary.
“anonymous wrote @ February 14th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
pretty good analysis.”
Thanks to Mr. Oer.
Anonymous, I’m not sure why it doesn’t work; try this one,
http://www.speakeasy.org/~donaldfr/sfmodel.pdf
If that doesn’t work, try navigating to my page, then look for “San Francisco Model.”
http://www.speakeasy.net/~donaldfr
Regarding the rest, I actually agree with most of your analysis here. (The only exception being your implication that heavy lift is required for a basic lunar base. Given my “use what we’ve got” position, I think we can — and should — drop that and use the EELVs to get started with a very basic human-tended base, whatever the logistical difficulties. Then, that base can be used as political and financial justification to develop a Shuttle-derived or clean-sheet HLV.) Also, while I agree that space advocates have little direct influence, the noise they’re generating may. Every anti-ESAS article in Space News becomes an anti-VSE voice in some Congress person’s mind. We’d be far better off shutting up, at least until Dr. Griffin is out of office and a different launch vehicle for Orion becomes a realistic possibility.
All that said, I think we agree more than we disagree, so I’ll quit here.
— Donald
“Anonymous, I’m not sure why it doesn’t work; try this one,”
Thanks. For some reason, the second link worked while the first one still doesn’t.
“(The only exception being your implication that heavy lift is required for a basic lunar base.”
Actually, I agree with you there, too. In a perfect world, I would avoid investing in a heavy lift infrastructure as much as possible and try to the in-space fueling route first.
But to the extent that the NASA workforce and infrastructure must be given something useful to do to appease parochial interests in Congress, heavy lift is probably the best option. Certainly better than wasting their talents on reinventing EELV with Ares 1.
“Every anti-ESAS article in Space News becomes an anti-VSE voice in some Congress person’s mind.”
Aside from SFF opinion pieces, I’m not sure there’s much of an anti-ESAS voice for Congress to hear. Even if there was, if the space community doesn’t have much influence on raising funding or starting/maintaining NASA programs, then the reserve is probably also true — the space community doesn’t have much influence on reducing funding or stopping NASA programs.
FWIW…
ANONYMOUS said: Aside from SFF opinion pieces, I’m not sure there’s much of an anti-ESAS voice for Congress to hear. Even if there was, if the space community doesn’t have much influence on raising funding or starting/maintaining NASA programs, then the reserve is probably also true — the space community doesn’t have much influence on reducing funding or stopping NASA programs.
Anon,
I agree with the general statements about the limited effectiveness of space advocacy organizations. I can think of a number of success stories, but they are small and I am not going to quibble. (As just one example, I believe that the Planetary Society would disagree with you, as they have declared their lobbying effort to save the Pluto spacecraft to be quite successful. It was pretty clear that neither NASA or the WH wanted to to Pluto, but the Congress made them do it.)
In addition, it has been my personal experience that is easier to kill a program, than it is to get one started and funded and successfully over the finish line. Neither one is easy.
With regards to the debate that takes place here, I find it interesting when some attempt to persuade others to line up and salute whatever the latest position is. These attempts and the response by others can be educational.
Beyond this, I think that topically focused blogs, which contain thoughtful & reasoned discussion and analysis, can be useful to decision-makers who care about those issues.
Current management theory is that instead of looking at these kinds of websites as “the enemy”, that top management should pro-actively use these sites as a means to get immediate, direct and unfiltered feedback from outside the organization on their products and programs. It is often quite difficult, inside the cultural bubble of a big organization, to take the blinders off and really get a handle on what the outside world thinks.
Some even suggest that companies pro-actively enter the blogosphere. See the Harvard Business School article at
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5111.html
Pete Worden tried this suggestion at Ames. Not sure if he is still trying, as a couple of his posts got him in hot water.
Note that one of the three (3) benefits of a blog according to the HBS article is “Achieve customer intimacy: Speak directly to consumers and have them come right back with suggestions or complaints—or kudos.”
You can get that right here, as you don’t even need to post your name, or who you work for.
– Al