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

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…

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

pretty good analysis.”

Thanks to Mr. Oer.

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.

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.”

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

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

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 .

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.

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