NASA

Griffin: scientists’ claims of cuts “a political tactic”

Griffin’s interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program Sunday covered a lot of familiar ground. There were a few particularly interesting points he raised, though:

Griffin made some of his strongest comments to date about claims by scientists that their funding is being taken away to support exploration and other programs. “I’ve almost gotten to the point where the claim by scientists that their portfolio is being sacrificed to pay for manned spaceflight is— you know, I used to think that it was a legitimate concern, and now I’ve gotten to the point where I think it’s a political tactic.” He says that the budget data doesn’t support that: while 32% of NASA’s current budget is spent on science, in the early 90s, when NASA’s budget was about $20 billion (adjusted for inflation), science programs got 24%; science programs got only 17% of the budget back in the Apollo era. “It’s really hard for me to see anything other than the fact that science has gained enormously at NASA, and, frankly, I think scientists should be grateful rather than complaining.” He added that science would not fall back to the 25-percent levels “in the foreseeable future”.

While Congress has hinted that it would be willing to provide more money should the president request it to accelerate development of the Ares 1 and Orion, Griffin suggested that no such request would be coming in the near term. “We, certainly, in the course of our fiscal year ’09 budget preparation, Deputy Administrator Shana Dale and I will certainly make it clear to our colleagues in the White House what the consequences are of the funding path that we’re on and what would be required to narrow the gap. As to what the decisions will be, I have no idea.”

Regarding the “space summit” that Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) recently proposed, Griffin said that he was unaware of any progress towards holding such a meeting. “US senators, I don’t think, feel the need to include me in their discussions as to whether or not they’re going to have a space summit with the White House.”

29 comments to Griffin: scientists’ claims of cuts “a political tactic”

  • al Fansome

    Jeff,

    Since you are bringing up “political tactics” and the NASA budget, note the press release that Chairman Gordon sent out on Friday on Climate Change.

    http://science.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1762

    The FULL House Science & Technology Committee will have a hearing on this subject on April 17th.

    I predict that whatever NASA’s top line is (which will almost certainly come in below the President’s request) the % of NASA’s budget dedicated to Exploration will also take a cut. One of the big winners will be “Earth science”, and GSFC.

    In the Senate, Mikulski will probably just “make it so”.

    The House might take a different route. Will the Democrats intentionally wait until the NASA budget goes to the House floor, to propose an amendment — taking money from Ares 1 & Orion, and giving it to Earth science — in the hopes that the Republicans would fight against Earth science in full public view?

    Assuming the Dems think this is a political winner in 08 — a “wedge issue” that gives heart burn to (and divides) the Republicans — they just might do this.

    This is probably just a little bit too sly, but it would be an interesting political tactic.

    – Al

  • al Fansome

    Oops. I meant to post this in the previous thread.
    – Al

  • anonymous

    I, for one, am getting a little sick of Griffin’s percentage-based budget comparisons. They’re highly misleading. He (or his budget folks) are picking ideal years from which to make the comparisons, which accentuates the troughs and makes the prior period percentages look considerably lower than they would be if sampled over more regular time periods. Moreover, the budget percentages gloss over the actual impacts of the reductions. Stepping outside the world of spreadsheets and into the real world, it doesn’t matter if science is 25, 50, or 75 percent of NASA’s budget. If Griffin has to cancel or indefinitely defer missions, cut research, and reduce technology development, those are real and measurable lost opportunities that must be weighed against where the redirected money is going. And when the redirected money is going to a poorly conceived, underpowered, and duplicative reinvention of the EELV wheel (and it’s oversized capsule) that’s sucking up all the political opportunity and resources for actual human space exploration, it’s a very bad choice.

    Instead of using gamed budget figures to throw blame at a blameless science community, the NASA Administrator needs to take responsibility for his decisions and the cuts and reductions that have resulted from those decisions, and take proactive steps to get his human space flight programs back into a budget box that aligns with political realities.

    Unfortunately, it sounds as if Griffin is resigned to his fate, limiting his role to reporting consequences to the White House and Congress instead of taking proactive steps to change course, even though Griffin now appears to finally recognize that more dollars are probably not forthcoming and that the gap is only likely widen from here without a change in course.

    Until the next White House takes office, it’s up to Griffin whether such a course-change is attempted. Although I’m not betting on it, here’s hoping… the fact that Griffin now apparently recognizes the new budget and political landscape opens up a small ray of light.

  • D. Messier

    I agree with anonymous here. You can look at any funding levels on a percentage basis and cherry pick years and make the numbers say whatever you want them to say. The overall budget trends are not good for science. There were recent reports that indicated that.

    I recently heard about an environmental program at JPL that’s run into some problems. There was a review to try to figure out a way of getting the program back on track, and there seemed to be a good recovery plan. It’s apparently a valuable program, would tell us a lot about what’s happening with the climate, but….there’s no money to fund it. Last I heard, it was probably going to be canceled.

    The recent studies on global warming indicate to me that we’re at a very crucial stage. We need to move fast on making changes. We also need to really understand precisely what’s going on in with the climate. But, Bush wants to have it both ways. He and his allies always question if there’s enough data. Then they merrily go about gutting the programs that would provide these same data points. Sadly, I don’t expect that to change in the next 21 months. He’ll probably try to run out the clock.

  • Griffin made some of his strongest comments to date about claims by scientists that their funding is being taken away to support exploration and other programs.

    While I have little sympathy for space scientists who unwilling to except a brief pause in their programs to fund the high up-front costs to deploy a new generation of human spacecraft (however good or bad the actual plan may be), I have long thought that Dr. Griffin is politically unwise every time he loses his temper and opens his mouth like this. While he has acted to protect some important missions he cancelled (DAWN) and succumbed to pressure so fund near-complete wastes of money (SOFIA), his statements make it too easy for scientists to see him as an unalloyed enemy. He’d be far better off, politically, to make the hard choices he has to make (whether they are in space science or ESAS), stick to them (which he does with ESAS but not with science), and keep his mouth shut except to tell scientists how well he protected them against even worst cuts (e.g., if the Administration had chosen to develop a second generation Shuttle rather than the relatively low-cost options they did chose).

    — Donald

  • Adrasteia

    In science programs, ‘a brief pause’ means having the entire department pinkslipped, thus losing forever valuable expertise and years of research.

  • anonymous

    “In science programs, ‘a brief pause’ means having the entire department pinkslipped, thus losing forever valuable expertise and years of research.”

    I agree with Adastreia. Halving the number of Mars missions through the end of the next decade, indefinitely deferring Mars sample return, indefinitely deferring two space telescopes needed for the search for extrasolar planets, indefinitely deferring any flagship-class missions to the outer moons, terminating all high-energy space telescopes, halving astrobiology research, and making cuts to all other research disciplines is no “brief pause”. NASA’s science programs are experiencing real, major, and long-lasting harm on practically every front that, even if we started today, will take a couple decades to recover from.

    One or two of these cuts might have been worth a well-conceived and actual human space exploration system. But not dozens of terminations, deferments, and grant program reductions, and certainly not for the redundant and poorly designed LEO truck (Ares 1) NASA is getting.

    That said, Mr. Robertson’s point about Griffin picking fights he doesn’t need to is also well taken. Griffin accusing his scientists of being too “political” when they are forgoing once-in-a-generation (some once-in-a-lifetime) missions, shelving years of design and research work, accepting abrupt research grant terminations, and laying off doctoral students shows an incredible lack of political and leadership sensitivity, and just plain old human decency, on Griffin’s part. Griffin must be reminded that as NASA Administrator he leads and represents all of NASA, not just his pet human space flight development programs. Poor budget and leadership decisions are one thing. But if Griffin is so emotionally invested in his Ares/Orion programs that he now sees his own science communities as the enemy, then he has become too paranoid to effectively lead and represent the agency in its entirety and needs to step down.

  • Anonymous and Adrasteia,

    The implications of your comments is that space science is a sacrosanct entitlement that may never be sacrificed to larger national goals or needs. Setting aside the question of whether ESAS was the right way to go, any plan to fund end-of-life for the Shuttle, complete the Space Station, while developing a next generation human vehicle within a fixed NASA budget was going to result in at least some of these cuts. Choices like these were inevitable.

    “Halving the number of Mars missions through the end of the next decade,” for example, is not eliminating Mars exploration. To suggest that it is is every bit as dishonest as Dr. Griffin’s rhetoric.
    There are still huge sums of money being spent on projects of dubious measurable value to anyone but the scientists themselves.

    You both might recall that “having the entire department pink slipped, thus losing forever valuable expertise and years of research” was exactly what happened to the human space program after Apollo, and what is going on now should be viewed as restoring the skills and capabilities that were lost then.

    — Donald

  • anonymous

    “any plan to fund end-of-life for the Shuttle, complete the Space Station, while developing a next generation human vehicle within a fixed NASA budget was going to result in at least some of these cuts. Choices like these were inevitable.”

    No they weren’t. A smaller capsule on a single-stick EELV, for example, would not have stretched the exploration budget to the point that there was no money left for actual human space exploration systems development before 2010. And when the 2007 budget debacle hit, Griffin would instead have been arguing about how much to delay a human lunar return, not how much bigger the post-Shuttle gap in U.S. human launches should be allowed to grow.

    “is not eliminating Mars exploration”

    I never said or implied that NASA is eliminating Mars exploration. Those words are yours, not mine.

    Likewise, NASA’s human space flight programs are hardly being eliminated either.

    “To suggest that it is is every bit as dishonest as Dr. Griffin’s rhetoric.”

    I fail to see how stating a plain, unvarnished fact — that the planned number of Mars missions has been cut in half from two to one at every 26-month mission opportunity — can be construed as “rhetoric”.

    “projects of dubious measurable value to anyone but the scientists themselves”

    That’s your opinion. It is not the opinion of the literally hundreds of scientists that participate in National Academy planetary science mission planning exercises and Mars planetary science mission planning exercises.

    Nor is it the opinion of this non-scientist and probably most non-scientists who have taken an interest in following the unfolding and revolutionary history of water and habitable environments on Mars.

    “You both might recall that “having the entire department pink slipped, thus losing forever valuable expertise and years of research” was exactly what happened to the human space program after Apollo,”

    No it wasn’t. For all of Griffin’s whining about the coming “gap”, thousands of individuals were retained by NASA in the transition from Shuttle to Apollo. No doubt some people were lost, but NASA has yet to quantify how many or qualify how important they were.

    And even if this convenient myth about devastation in NASA’s human space flight ranks after Apollo were true, the Apollo-Shuttle transition — where literally no American human space flight vehicle was operating for over a half-decade — will bear little resemblance to the coming Shuttle-Constellation transition — where the ISS operations, Ares test flights, COTS test flights and operations, and foreign partner vehicle visits to the ISS with U.S. astronauts on board will be occuring on a continual and annual basis.

    “what is going on now should be viewed as restoring the skills and capabilities that were lost then.”

    That might be worth some science offsets, but it’s not what’s happening. NASA is not restoring lost Apollo lunar exploration skills and capabilities, and won’t start doing so until 2011, at the earliest, even if the ESAS plan survives the next election. Instead, NASA is cutting very good science programs for duplicative human LEO capabilities of dubious design and value.

  • Anonymous: Instead, NASA is cutting very good science programs for duplicative human LEO capabilities of dubious design and value.

    First of all, I agree with you on this. Likewise, that NASA should have gone with a smaller capsule on an EELV or equivalent. However,

    A smaller capsule on a single-stick EELV, for example, would not have stretched the exploration budget to the point that there was no money left for actual human space exploration systems development before 2010.

    And if that “actual human space exploration systems development” were added to the small capsule / EELV, instead of blowing it all on ESAS, you still have more than the actual budgets we got can support. Do you really think the “science” people would be screaming any less if their budgets were cut to fund lunar landers and experimental oxygen factories, rather than an unnecessary launch vehicle? Do you really think all of the exploration items in the original plan would have fit inside the budgets that actually came about? Dr. Griffin’s plan has meant that reconnaissance needs to be curtailed for longer than it needed to be, but it changes nothing else.

    What you said was, Halving the number of Mars missions through the end of the next decade . . . [results in] real, major, and long-lasting harm on practically every front that, even if we started today, will take a couple decades to recover from.

    Okay, maybe that’s not “eliminating” Mars exploration, but it is implying that having anything less than two complete missions at every flight opportunity amounts to “major and long-lasting harm.” And, that every other desire of the scientific community cannot be reduced without major and long-lasting harm. That is ridiculous on its face.

    Maybe I’ve misinterpreted you, but you should not misinterpret what I am saying either. I, too, am very excited by what’s happening on Mars. At least once a week, I spend an hour or two doing what I call “backseat driving,” downloading the raw images from the rovers. The difference is, I don’t confuse observing that there may have been an unknown quanitity of possibly standing water at some undetermined point in the past as something that really adds a lot to our understanding of Mars. Doing that requires absolute dates, detailed stratigraphy, large numbers of diverse and well-chosen samples obtained over very large areas and at diverse depths, and all the other things that no rover or set of rovers is ever going to get us. The rovers are doing the most basic of reconnaissance, and doing meaningful science is going to take having people on site doing long-distance traverses with well-equipped labs. I don’t expect you, or many who are intimately involved in today’s automated space programs and have a stake in them, to ever agree with that — but, based on the history of science over the past two hundred years, it is my bet that history will side with me. Throughout modern science, we are drawing way too many conclusions on the basis of far too little evidence, and we are spending far too much of our science budget — especially in astronomy — on ivory tower theorists and trying to pretend that you can automate science, and far too little actually going out there and gathering evidence and running experiments. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong — but I doubt it.

    For all of Griffin’s whining about the coming “gap”, thousands of individuals were retained by NASA in the transition from Shuttle to Apollo.

    And, just how many people are actually being retired from the automated science side of NASA?

    — Donald

  • richardb

    Science is taking a shallacking, and it will be costly to the nation as grad students drift off to China, India, Europe, if they can, to stay employed. At the same time ESAS is taking a shallacking as its schedule keeps moving right very early in the design phase.

    Personally I don’t care for the pro stick/pro EELV/pro COTS debate. That decision was made and its not going to change. There are pros/cons to both approaches and the debate will only end once launchers start leaving the pad.

    If there is a villain in all of this, its the Democrats, they are the ones whacking half a billion from Nasa’s already miniscule budget. The reality is its success or failure will be in the hands of a Democratic House & Senate for the next couple election cycles.

  • anonymous

    “And if that “actual human space exploration systems development” were added to the small capsule / EELV, instead of blowing it all on ESAS, you still have more than the actual budgets we got can support.”

    Again, that’s simply not true. While we’d want the EELV capsule on as fast a track as technically feasible, it would still consume only a fraction (albeit a large one) of the VSE budget, even after accounting for reductions since the VSE was rolled out and COTS funding. And as long as NASA gets a human lunar camel’s nose under the tent before the next White House takes office, the funding and schedule for those remaining human lunar return elements can be shifted as necessary to accommodate budget and political realities without cuts to other NASA programs.

    I don’t want to pretend that this is the only strategy that could have worked, but something like it — where not all of the exploration dollars (and a good chunk of science and aeronautics dollars to boot) were bet on something other than actual exploration systems — is what NASA needed (and still needs) for reasons of budget and political feasibility to get a sustainable human space exploration program off the ground.

    “Do you really think the “science” people would be screaming any less if their budgets were cut to fund lunar landers and experimental oxygen factories, rather than an unnecessary launch vehicle?”

    No. And neither would I be arguing that the reductions to science are going towards duplicative and dubious LEO human space flight systems.

    But that doesn’t mean that real and lasting harm is not being done to the science programs. And it still doesn’t mean that those science reductions were necessary in the first place to get NASA’s human space flight programs off Shuttle and on towards the Moon.

    “Do you really think all of the exploration items in the original plan would have fit inside the budgets that actually came about?”

    Not on the original schedule for the lunar elements, but an EELV capsule and something resembling COTS could have been afforded with change to spare to get some lunar elements underway before the next election.

    Heck, if Griffin had just shown some managerial cajones when it came to the Shuttle workforce flyout plan, he could still afford Ares 1/Orion and COTS on schedule with some change to spare for some actual exploration systems and no impacts to science or aeronautics.

    “Dr. Griffin’s plan has meant that reconnaissance needs to be curtailed for longer than it needed to be, but it changes nothing else.”

    No, that’s a vast understatement. Just in the Mars program alone, Griffin’s cuts mean that there is no longer a Mars sample return mission, previously scheduled before the middle of next decade, on any kind of foreseeable horizon. Forget reconnaissance — the very kind of hands-on, lab experiment-running, human brains and eyes in real-time science that you hold up as a paradigm has been eliminated from the Mars program for the sake of funding a duplicative and oversized human LEO launch vehicle.

    “Okay, maybe that’s not “eliminating” Mars exploration, but it is implying that having anything less than two complete missions at every flight opportunity amounts to “major and long-lasting harm.””

    Even if you don’t buy into or understand the two mission strategy, again, just look at what’s happened to sample return in the Mars program. I would think that even someone with your archeological background and hands-on science point-of-view would see loss of getting any Mars samples into the hands of hundreds of scientists in dozens of labs around the world as doing real, major, and lasting harm to science.

    “And, that every other desire of the scientific community cannot be reduced without major and long-lasting harm. That is ridiculous on its face.”

    I would agree with you, but you’re not arguing reality. In reality, it’s not one or two science programs or priorities that have been knocked. It’s been an across-the-board deferment or termination of missions in every program and reductions to every research discipline and technology development program.

    “I don’t expect you, or many who are intimately involved in today’s automated space programs and have a stake in them, to ever agree with that — but, based on the history of science over the past two hundred years, it is my bet that history will side with me.”

    In an ideal world where human planetary expeditions required resources on scale with terrestrial archeological, geological, or oceanagraphic expeditions, I would not disagree with you. The marginal cost of going human over robotic is more than paid for by the advantages of having human brains and eyes on site.

    But that’s not the world we live in. In the world we live in, a small fraction of just one human space flight project’s budget can fund multiple robotic science missions and untold amounts of research. As much as we might want to put a geologist on Mars, the cost differential is so huge that human space exploration cannot be justified on the basis of science alone.

    “And, just how many people are actually being retired from the automated science side of NASA?”

    I understand that grant acceptance rates for some NASA science disciplines have fallen into the single digits. A less than 10-percent funding rate is very unhealthy for any science community. (I believe the National Science Foundation strives for 20-30 percent, enough to sustain a community on three-year grant cycles.) It won’t actually be this large, but in the theoretical extreme, NASA is facing a 75-90 percent reduction in the number of researchers in many of these fields if the trend continues for more than three or so years (enough time for researchers in the field to get enough grant rejections that they have little choice but to leave it — a time period easily reached before the next White House changes budget policy). But setting aside the extreme case, I’d say a 30 to 50-percent reduction is realistic from here.

    Moreover, those numbers are coming off a much smaller base (many fewer people involved in the robotic programs) than the human space flight program.

  • Anonymous: I would think that even someone with your archeological background and hands-on science point-of-view would see loss of getting any Mars samples into the hands of hundreds of scientists in dozens of labs around the world as doing real, major, and lasting harm to science.

    But, what kinds of samples? We have samples of Mars from Antarctica (which were not found, recognized, or retrieved with robots). A quick grab of a few samples from an area of a few tens of kilometers and / or a depth of a few meters is not going to tell us a whole lot about Mars, especially if it done at the cost of failing to make the investments now needed to send real expeditions later. I think we’d get too little information to make it worth the multi-billion dollar cost. The infrastructure to enable extended human exploration at a later date is more valuable.

    The marginal cost of going human over robotic is more than paid for by the advantages of having human brains and eyes on site. . . As much as we might want to put a geologist on Mars, the cost differential is so huge that human space exploration cannot be justified on the basis of science alone.

    I disagree. First, an automated sample return mission is likely to cost at least one percent of the cost of sending humans to Mars, but would obtain far less than one percent of the science of having a couple of geologists there, especially if they stayed for a year or so and could travel and drill to hard-to-reach samples and had an on-site lab. And again, you are comparing the full cost of human missions with the incremental cost of automated missions. Once the capability to send humans is established (or re-established in the case of Earth’s moon), then the difference in incremental costs will be far less dramatic, and the advantages of sending human expeditions correspondingly more obvious. But, you have to get there. And if you spend all your money indescriminately haring all over the Solar System with robots that cannot answer anything but the most superficial questions, you never will, and you’ll never know what the diverse worlds of the Solar System that humans can explore are really like.

    Again, I don’t expect my views to be popular, but I also do not think they are wrong.

    Richarddb: Personally I don’t care for the pro stick/pro EELV/pro COTS debate. That decision was made and its not going to change.

    Agreed. While I agree with Anonymous of most of his conclusions re. ESAS, I think he is wrong to appear to throw up his hands and say that everything is lost and ruined because the wrong decision was made and isn’t going to get unmade, and to make no effort to find a way from where we are now to where we want to be. He may well be right, but his apparent approach only guarantees the negative outcome.

    Regarding political fault, its my recollection that it was the Republicans who failed to pass budgets when they had overwhelming control of the House, Senate, and the Presidency, and left the problems to others to handle when they have a far more tenuous handle on power. It seems rather disingenuous to blame the Democrats for this state of affairs, at least so far.

    — Donald

  • anonymous

    “Personally I don’t care for the pro stick/pro EELV/pro COTS debate. That decision was made and its not going to change.”

    The problem is that the Ares/EELV/NewSpace decision tree is bound up in issues of budgetary feasilibility and political sustainability precisely because Ares 1/Orion is sucking up all the exploration dollars and some of the science and aeronautics dollars, leaving nothing to get actual exploration hardware underway before the next White House axes the effort and creating unnecessary enemies where NASA human space flight does not need them. Even if Ares 1/Orion had no technical issues — and it’s appearing more likely every month or two that she will suffer a major setback — her development would still have the problem of requiring too many dollars and too much time.

    Personally, I could honestly care less if the human LEO transport vehicle that succeeds Shuttle is a flying saucer. But as long as the next NASA human transport vehicle (whatever it is) stands in the way of getting actual human space exploration underway at NASA and is doing great damage to NASA’s science and aeronautics programs, I think we have no choice but to consider EELVs, COTS, Direct, and other solutions.

    “If there is a villain in all of this, its the Democrats, they are the ones whacking half a billion from Nasa’s already miniscule budget.”

    The Democrats are just the latest in a string of budgetary setbacks for the VSE, including repeated failures by the Bush White House to live up to the budget promises made in the VSE and Griffin’s refusal to manage the Shuttle flyout workforce.

    I’d also note that it was failure of the prior Republican-controlled Congress to pass an FY07 budget that put the Democrats in a position to effectively cut the exploration budget with an across-the-board continuing resolution.

    This should not be a partisan issue. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

  • Anonymous: I understand that grant acceptance rates for some NASA science disciplines have fallen into the single digits. A less than 10-percent funding rate is very unhealthy for any science community. (I believe the National Science Foundation strives for 20-30 percent, enough to sustain a community on three-year grant cycles.) It won’t actually be this large, but in the theoretical extreme, NASA is facing a 75-90 percent reduction in the number of researchers in many of these fields if the trend continues for more than three or so years (enough time for researchers in the field to get enough grant rejections that they have little choice but to leave it — a time period easily reached before the next White House changes budget policy). But setting aside the extreme case, I’d say a 30 to 50-percent reduction is realistic from here.

    Ithink this analysis is ridiculously pessimistic. Even after the deferments, there are still a lot of planetary and space telescope missions in flight and in the queue, and these should keep researchers busy for some time. But even if you are fully correct, recall that this comes off a ramp-up in funding. Space scientists were made promises that could not be kept, and they have every right to be bitter, but that does not mean that NASA should forgo a human future in space to fund everything they want.

    — Donald

  • D. Messier

    If there is a villain in all of this, its the Democrats, they are the ones whacking half a billion from Nasa’s already miniscule budget. The reality is its success or failure will be in the hands of a Democratic House & Senate for the next couple election cycles

    Ummmm…..I beg to differ with part one of this analysis. The bushcheney admin, nasa and the repub-led Congress may well have created an unsustainable program. The elements of that include massive deficits, a horrendously expensive war, unsustainable fiscal policies, and what is probably a needlessly complicated and expensive lunar effort. The problems are a lot bigger than simply a budget cut.

    The second part of this may be accurate.

  • anonymous

    “We have samples of Mars from Antarctica (which were not found, recognized, or retrieved with robots).”

    A lie of omission. Carnegie Mellon’s Nomad robot deployed to Antarctica’s Elephant Moraine in 2000 and autonomously found and classified five meteorites from dozens of terrestrial rocks.

    http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/meteorobot2000/

    The fact that none of the five meteorites were of Martian origin is a function of time and probability, not Nomad’s capabilities.

    “A quick grab of a few samples from an area of a few tens of kilometers is not going to tell us a whole lot about Mars”

    An untrue portrayal of Mars program planning prior to ESAS budget impacts, which, over the next couple decades, included multiple missions retrieving multiple samples from multiple and varying sites on Mars.

    “and / or a depth of a few meters”

    A red herring that applies equally to robotic and human extraterrestrial drilling. To a first order, the state-of-the-art in extraterrestrial drilling depth is limited by power. A human presence is not going to change that limit — only new, power-efficient drilling techniques (e.g., piezoelectric) will.

    Moreover, automated drills have been tested in lunar and Mars analog sites and conditions to depths of ten meters, not a few meters.

    http://marte.arc.nasa.gov/drill.htm

    And designs and demonstrations were on the drawing board to depths of 20-50 meters, before ESAS budget cuts hit the Mars program. See the second award in the list below:

    http://research.hq.nasa.gov/code_s/nra/current/NRA-01-OSS-01-AST/winners.html

    “is not going to tell us a whole lot about Mars, especially if it done at the cost of failing to make the investments now needed to send real expeditions later.”

    Again, the extreme cost differential between robotic and human space missions makes it practically impossible to justify human space exploration on the basis of science alone.

    Even a well conceived and run NASA human Mars program will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to the first mission and tens of billions of dollars for each mission thereafter.

    By contrast, even the most ambitious NASA robotic Mars sample return program will cost several, maybe five, billion to the first mission and one or two billion for each mission thereafter.

    We’re talking one or two orders of magnitude here. Literally scores of robotic missions can be completed with samples returned from hundreds of sites on Mars and put into the hands of dozens of labs with thousands of scientists on Earth for the cost of putting a couple, part-time human geologists on the surface of Mars.

    Dollar-for-dollar, the scientific return of the human Mars exploration program pales by comparison to a Mars sample return program with the same (or even a significant fraction of the same) funding.

    Does that mean NASA should not pursue human space exploration? No, there are other, non-science rationales that can justify the cost.

    Does that mean that NASA science programs should be cut to fund human space flight programs, on the basis of greater scientific return? No, because no human space flight program will have greater scientific return than the comparable and comparably funded robotic program with any foreseeable technical or economic base.

    “I think we’d get too little information to make it worth the multi-billion dollar cost.”

    So we should spend multi-hundreds of billions of dollars to go after the same science goals?

    In terms of the total economy, science is something that is done on the margin. Even when we step away from space science and exploration, pure research projects (or as pure as we can get) that exceed costs of ten or a few tens of billions of dollars do not get funded (e.g., the Superconducting Supercollider).

    We cannot win the human space exploration argument on the basis of science. Human space exploration is a multi-hundred billion proposition, and it requires other justifications that transcend scientific research.

    “The infrastructure to enable extended human exploration at a later date is more valuable.”

    Spend the same magnitude of dollars (or a fraction thereof) on robotic exploration and we’ll get an even bigger and much better bang for our science buck.

    “First, an automated sample return mission is likely to cost at least one percent of the cost of sending humans to Mars, but would obtain far less than one percent of the science of having a couple of geologists there”

    This is a false comparison. You’re comparing an effort with one percent of the funding of the second effort. Of course the first effort will have a much lower total return.

    Spend the same dollars on both — a robotic Mars program funded not in the billions of dollars (today’s program) but in the hundreds of billions (equivalent to a human Mars effort) — and the robotic program’s returns will far exceed the human effort.

    “especially if they stayed for a year or so”

    The MERS rovers have already stayed much longer. Nuclear-powered rovers could reach decade-long lifetimes. And work round the clock. And traverse much greater distances over those lifetimes. And be sent to much riskier, but more geologically rewarding, locales.

    “and could travel and drill to hard-to-reach samples”

    See drilling comments above. Again, the issue is power, not automation, and the state-of-the-art is better than you appear to be aware of.

    What’s more, even if astronauts are present, any extraterrestrial drill is going to be highly automated compared to terrestrial drills. Bruce Willis asteroid movies aside, suited astronauts in dangerous vacuums and atmospheres cannot handle drilling equipment in the same ways and for the same periods of time as their terrestrial counterparts without exposing themselves to huge dangers. Those Mars drills are going to have to operate themselves and the commands will likely come from Earth regardless.

    “and had an on-site lab.”

    See Nomad expedition link above. We have robots today that can autonomously differentiate geological samples with a good degree of precision. I’d much rather put ten or a hundred advanced Nomad-equivalents on dozens of Mars sites for years and bring their samples back to be examined down to the last microscopic detail in Earth labs for decades than spend the same (or likely much greater) money putting a couple part-time geologists on one Mars site for a handful of months.

    “And again, you are comparing the full cost of human missions with the incremental cost of automated missions.”

    No I’m not. Once the first is done, the marginal cost of an extra Mars sample return is measured at a billion or two dollars. The marginal cost of an extra human Mars mission is measured in the ten to tens of billions of dollars, depending on who’s doing the estimating. Even once the sunk costs are thrown away, the robotic programs still win out from the perspective of scientific return for marginal investment. Again, we have to use other, non-scientific arguments to justify human space exploration.

    “Again, I don’t expect my views to be popular, but I also do not think they are wrong.”

    In the abstract, I don’t think your reasoning is wrong. Of course, having human brains and eyes on site in real-time is better than any possible robot.

    But we don’t develop and execute space programs in the abstract. The reality of robotic and human capabilities and costs when it comes to space exploration drives real-world reasoning in favor of the robots when only scientific return is considered.

    If we want to justify human space exploration, we need different arguments.

  • anonymous

    “While I agree with Anonymous of most of his conclusions re. ESAS, I think he is wrong to appear to throw up his hands and say that everything is lost and ruined because the wrong decision was made and isn’t going to get unmade, and to make no effort to find a way from where we are now to where we want to be. He may well be right, but his apparent approach only guarantees the negative outcome.”

    I have to take some personal exception to this statement, for several reasons:

    1) I have consistently differentiated between “ideal world” (what should be done) and “real world” (what is feasible given the personalities in charge) arguments. I still argue for what I see as the best “ideal world” solutions — like ditching Ares 1/Orion for a small capsule on an EELV — while recognizing that the powers that be are unlikely to undertake such a change in course given what they have invested in the current course. I’d hardly call that “throwing up my hands”. If anything, the fact that I still spend time arguing for that “ideal world” while recognizing the limits of the “real world” should indicate that I still hold out hope for future change, even if I can’t currently conceive of how it will happen.

    2) In my very first post in this thread, I stated that:

    “the fact that Griffin now apparently recognizes the new budget and political landscape opens up a small ray of light.”

    Even in the “real world”, I acknowledge when changes in attitude amongst the powers that be could portend future positive changes in course. I fail to see how that “apparent approach only guarantees the negative outcome.”

    3) I have made lots of efforts in this forum to outline what I think is a technically, budgetarily, and politically feasible approach to getting a sustainable, public human space exploration effort off the ground. That is hardly making “no effort to find a way from where we are now to where we want to be.”

    4) And to be brutally honest, I think the approach I’ve outlined is a lot more technically and politically honest than what Mr. Robertson has offered — hoping that the ISS versions of Orion being built today can somehow be adapted to lunar missions, that Ares 1 will be abandoned after billions have been spent on it, and that additional dollars will be expended to transition these ISS/lunar Orion vehicles to an unproven EELV variant.

    Now, with that out of my system, for the second time in this thread, I’d ask that we keep the debate to the facts and our opinions about them and not bring our perceptions about other posters into the debate.

    Thank you…

  • anonymous

    “I think this analysis is ridiculously pessimistic.”

    Assuming my sources are correct and acceptance rates are falling into the single-digits, the analysis is pretty straightforward. That figure means that less than 10% of the researchers sending in grant applications are getting funded with each annual grant call and selection process. If those grants are one-year grants, then 90+% of the researchers in the field are going unfunded at any one point in time. If those grants are two-year grants, then 80+% of the researchers in the field are going unfunded at any one point in time (assuming no one wins and holds more than one grant at a time). If those grants are three-year grants, then 70+% of the researchers in the field are going unfunded at any one point in time (again assuming no one wins and holds more than one grant at a time). Etc. Given enough time, those unfunded researchers will leave the field. Again, the numbers won’t be that high — some researchers will tough it out and a lucky few will find other sources of research funding — but they will be very large fractions of the involved fields.

    Again, IIRC, most research grant agencies, like the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, shoot for a 30% or so acceptance rate, which, assuming three-year grants, theoretically allows for the great majority of folks in the field to hold a grant at any one time, although obviously a few percentage of the worst researchers will not win and get weeded from the field through successive annual selection processes. A 20% acceptance rate is considered the minimum to keep a field healthy. It forces a larger number of the lower-performing researchers to get weeded from the field but that can still allow for a healthy population in a steadily declining field. But hitting the teens or single digits is very unhealthy. It forces a large, dramatic, and sudden shrinkage in the research population and you lose the best researchers along with the worst ones.

    “Even after the deferments, there are still a lot of planetary and space telescope missions in flight and in the queue, and these should keep researchers busy for some time.”

    Actual research (not just initial data analysis) is funded through grants that are separate from the mission funding. Cut research grant funding and you cut the number of researchers in the field, regardless of how much data may (or may not) be piling up from the missions.

    “But even if you are fully correct, recall that this comes off a ramp-up in funding.”

    So what? That $500 million-plus cut to Ares 1/Orion in the 2007 budget also came off a ramp-up. Does that make the year-long delay to Ares 1/Orion operations any less painful?

    Aside from the selective quoting, this is why Griffin’s budget figures are so misleading. It doesn’t matter what went before — a budget cut is a budget cut, and programs have to lose content or schedule or both to accommodate them. The effect is real and the same regardless of the prior budget trend.

    “Space scientists were made promises that could not be kept,”

    Who says? Griffin? Oh yeah, Mr. Not-One-Thin-Dime, King of Promises to the Science Community, himself.

    We shouldn’t take the word of any NASA Administrator as gospel. We have to do our own research and critical thinking. And in this case, the science budget could have gone untouched had Griffin made different decisions on ESAS and on the Shuttle flyout workforce, regardless of the external political challenges that later confronted him on the budget.

    “but that does not mean that NASA should forgo a human future in space to fund everything they want.”

    NASA is so far from funding “everything” that the science community wants (or needs) right now as to make this statement ridiculous.

    Neither should every NASA science program and discipline suffer major seetbacks to fund a poorly conceived, oversized, and unnecessarily duplicative human LEO transport system that stands in the way of getting an actual human space exploration effort underway before NASA’s limited political window closes for another generation.

  • Anonymous, Donald,
    I have to say that I agree with about 99% of what anonymous has been saying in this thread. However, there’s one thing Donald wrote that I almost agree with that I wanted to bring up for discussion:

    “The infrastructure to enable extended human exploration at a later date is more valuable.”

    The point I would like to make is that real infrastructure that actually enables real extended human exploration will benefit robotic missions as well as manned missions. But CEV, Ares I/V, EDS, and LSAM are not what I would call “real” infrastructure. They really don’t contribute that much to real exploration and development, and really don’t deserve much if any of our support. Quite frankly, I find it hard enough not to waste all my time actively opposing such a pathetic, wasteful, and underachieving approach. As one of my more eloquent friends recently put it: Apollo on Steroids: No Brains, No Balls.

    Real infrastructure, that could benefit both manned and unmanned exploration would be things like propellant depots, orbital tugs, reusable cislunar/cismartian transportation (don’t laugh, it’s doable), aerobraking, ISRU, onorbit assembly/servicing of missions, low-cost manned habitats (ala Bigelow), lower cost space access, etc. As you lower the cost of sending off Martian missions, you can get more done for the same or less money. Some proper martian infrastructure might allow for much more robust ISRU (and mixed robotic/human expeditions).

    But almost none of that has anything to do with NASA. NASA has more or less abandoned the field when it comes to research into space operations capabilities that might actually matter. It’s now pretty much left up to the commercial space world to find ways to connect those dots, and alas that is a *much* harder nut to crack.

    But barriers to entry just makes your business plan more secure against me-toos… :-)

    ~Jon

  • richardb

    “Real infrastructure, that could benefit both manned and unmanned exploration would be things like propellant depots, orbital tugs, reusable cislunar/cismartian transportation (don’t laugh, it’s doable), aerobraking, ISRU, onorbit assembly/servicing of missions, low-cost manned habitats (ala Bigelow), lower cost space access, etc. ”

    I agree that this describes an attractive future infrastructure to traveling within the inner planets. If Bush had proposed something along these lines in 2004 he would have been mocked and hounded by Democrats (loyal opposition), anti-Nasa lobbyists and rebotics true believers. I think the odds of VSE(in those new cloths) being DOA in Congress would have exceeded 50%. Basically wouldn’t pass the laugh test. Wouldn’t pass the BattleStar Galatica epithet still ringing in his ears from his dad’s Mars proposal.

    I think Griffin has this viewpoint. If the nation can’t spend around 20 billion on Nasa out of a 3 trillion dollar budget, then don’t bother with a lunar or Martian manned program and stick to the station and robotic exploration. Oh, buy towels to wave as Chinese, Indians, Russians(even), Japanese and Europeans blast off to the inner solar system. Don’t forget the airline tickets to their launch sites too(if Nasa can afford them).

    To me, the fact that industry is beginning to stake a claim to LEO proves that Nasa, Bush and others were right to shift focus to more distant locales. Leave LEO to Bigelow, LMT, Virgin, SpaceX, and a growing tourist business.
    If Nasa can’t execute due to poor engineering than we’ve squandered a once in 40 years chance. We’ll know soon enough.

  • Anonymous: Even once the sunk costs are thrown away, the robotic programs still win out from the perspective of scientific return for marginal investment. Again, we have to use other, non-scientific arguments to justify human space exploration.

    From the perspective of someone who understands the requirements of field work, I simply disagree with this. (I admit I had forgotton about the Antarctic robot; but note it “found” meteorites after somebody else had experienced finding them and told it in detail what to look for; likewise, that won’t happen on Mars in the absence of someone to find the truly unexpected.) Moreover, I disagree with the idea that one-hundred automated missions could possibly be worth more to science than even one extended stay by geologists.

    Can I prove this? No (though, again, I point people to Mr. Harland’s book or another detailed survey of what Apollo actually accomplished for science). Can you prove the opposite? No. And, this argument is getting to angry and personal to go further; I did not mean a personal attack and I’m sorry that you appear to have taken it that way.

    That said, I fully intend to stick with my position, because I think it is the correct one.

    — Donald

  • Richard,
    I think you’ve missed my point entirely. I’m not saying that every last one of those technologies should be done first, but that NASA should have a plan that has enough budgetary breathing room that it can afford to do technology development while moving forward with the Lunar exploration plans. As it is, they’re going to blow a decade and tens of billions of dollars to develop vehicles that have only a slight marginal advantage over what we had 50 years ago. They could do a lot better, and accomplish a lot more if they hadn’t have gutted technology development funding.

    ~Jon

  • Jonathan: As it is, they’re going to blow a decade and tens of billions of dollars to develop vehicles that have only a slight marginal advantage over what we had 50 years ago. They could do a lot better, and accomplish a lot more if they hadn’t have gutted technology development funding.

    I agree with this part of the current strategy. You can always “do better” by investing in technology, but then you never actually do anything. I think we need to use existing or near-existing technology to establish reasons for developing new technology: the Space Station as a pull for COTS, a lunar base to encourage focused technology to reduce the cost of getting to the moon, and to reduce the costs of staying there by living off the land to the degree possible. Establish “facts on the ground” to pull technology development, rather than do what we’ve been doing, which is to push technology that has no defined existing purpose and never gets used.

    The strategy of using existing launch vehicles and spacecraft technology to return to the moon is exactly the right one. Where we went wrong is to waste all our money developing an unneeded launch vehicle, instead of using the existing EELVs. Establish a lunar base, and create the political need to support it, and the technology to reduce the cost of doing that will take care of itself.

    — Donald

  • richardb

    Jon, I’m sorry I missed your point. However I would observe that your technology menu can’t be selected al la carte, “one from column A, one from column b”. Its more like you’ll need a few of them all at once to be workable. Tugs, refueling, ISRU, cyclers between earth & moon for instance.
    None of that is cheap, all could take many years to prove out. In the meantime what does Nasa do? The space station is the end of the line for LEO human presence. Getting money from Congress is hard enough now, technology studies that don’t produce hardware in districts won’t survive long in committee.
    As Donald said above, the ISS is an enabler for technology improvements with COTS. As a corollary, who’s to say that the lunar program won’t do the same? If it’s to be as costly to fund a lunar outpost program as some say, then Nasa should call for cheaper support options as they are doing for ISS. Let the SpaceX’s of the 2020’s go for it. Let them come up with innovation and hope Nasa of the future will fund it if it’s cheaper. I read that Rutan’s feather feature got a patent this week. Did Nasa develop it or fund it? The only other space station, prototype that it is, is Bigelow’s. Did Nasa fund it? No to both. Nasa doesn’t have to be the technology inventor, its best when the private sector does. Nasa, under Griffin, is saying if you create a better mouse trap, he’ll use it.

    Lets not forget Nasa is the only agency on Earth that has real useful experience with manned lunar outposts and bringing all the crews home safely. So maybe they know something about mass & mission requirements. Maybe they know something about how to enhance the new missions beyond the Apollo model. Maybe they can do what they say and give birth to new privately funded technology innovations that perform real work.

  • Monte Davis

    richardb: I would observe that your technology menu can’t be selected al la carte… Its more like you’ll need a few of them all at once to be workable… all could take many years to prove out. In the meantime what does Nasa do?

    For just one minute, forget NASA, forget New Space, forget politics, forget EELV vs Ares vs PowerPointTech, forget the sunk costs of past mistakes,

    Something like the list of capabilties Jon Goff lays out is– and always was — prerequisite for any large, sustainable expansion of space activity. That, not “what does NASA do?” (or its subtext, “how can we reach our desired space thrill level?”), should be the starting point. There’s lots of room for speculation and debate about how. But one way or another, we simply have to break out of the Apollo-born cycle:

    First define a cool fundable mission/project…

    Then develop highly optimized mission-specific hardware to be manufactured and flown at levels so low it can’t possibly make economic sense…

    Then wonder when the Great Space Boom is gonna happen.

    Several people have said or implied in various ways “Let’s go for my goal, and infrastructure will take care of itself.” I’ve been waiting for Santa, the Easter Bunny, or the Great Pumpkin to deliver on that for decades now, and it’s getting old.

  • Monte,
    Thanks for putting things better than I was able to. The saddest thing about a lot of those technologies is how close we are to being able to master them, and how often shortsighted decisions keep pushing off their development. As NASA continues down its preferred implementation of the VSE, it’s becoming more and more apparent that NASA is not going to help with developing any of those technologies, and that the private sector is going to have to foot most of the bill if we ever want to see anything interesting happen in space.

    It’s frustrating, because such development is much harder for a for-profit entity than a publicly funded one. Space businesses developing technologies have to do it within the constraints of maintaining profitability all along the way, and bringing on sufficient funding at the same time. This part of the marketting-finance-engineering design space is really, really, tough. But I have some ideas for some of the technologies, and more important a way to make some money while developing them. But its going to be a long uphill slog unfortunately.

    Which brings me back to the space politics side of things. One of the few legitimate justifications for having a large publicly funded aerospace program is to do that basic research that’s so tough for for-profit companies to do, so that the technologies are available for all, and everyone benefits. I wouldn’t call the difficulties of space technology development a market failure per se, but it is pretty close to one, and therefore is one of the more legitimate reasons for having a publicly funded space entity. “Exploration” and “Science” are also legitimate reasons, but doing them at the expense of not trying to improve the fundamental level of space technology/infrastructure seems extremely short sighted.

    One of the common mistakes I hear for companies that fall on tough times is they fire off a lot of their sales and marketing staff. NASA’s recent abandonment of the space technology development field feels like stupidity on about that same level.

    ~Jon

  • anonymous

    “From the perspective of someone who understands the requirements of field work, I simply disagree”

    And that’s fine. I would just caution that you’re espousing a viewpoint that’s representative of your particular science discipline’s current research frontier and methods. It may or may not align with the current research frontier and methods of other disciplines. As I’ve mentioned in other threads, many space science disciplines have a long way to go before they’re ready to ask the kinds of questions that a field archeologist with a pickax can help answer. And as I’ve mentioned in this thread, the cost differentials are so different in space science that it may not make sense for a very long time to come to send that archeologist over a robot or sample return mission, at least from the singular point-of-view of scientific return.

    “Moreover, I disagree with the idea that one-hundred automated missions could possibly be worth more to science than even one extended stay by geologists.”

    But mere “automated missions” was not the comparison I laid out. The comparison was a hundred (or dozens or whatever massive number of) automated _sample return_ missions. And those missions would put hundreds of samples into the hands and labs of thousands of geologists on Earth. I just see no way that a human space missions can compete with that kind of huge sample size and diversity, high-powered Earth-based lab instrumentation, and enormous number of human brains and eyeballs as long as human mission costs are an order or two higher than robotic mission costs.

    “Can you prove the opposite? No.”

    I dunno. I think anyone with a decent feel for the relative costs of robotic versus human missions ultimately comes to the same conclusion — that human space exploration cannot be justified on the basis of scientific return alone.

    That doesn’t mean that NASA shouldn’t pursue human space exploration. But it does mean that other rationales are necessary to justify the cost of doing so.

    “I did not mean a personal attack and I’m sorry that you appear to have taken it that way.”

    No worries. But when someone assumes my thoughts and actions and claims that I’m “throwing up my hands” and that I think “everything is lost and ruined”, I have to push back a little and correct their assumptions.

    “That said, I fully intend to stick with my position, because I think it is the correct one.”

    Nothing wrong with that.

  • Adrasteia

    Anonymous and Adrasteia,

    The implications of your comments is that space science is a sacrosanct entitlement that may never be sacrificed to larger national goals or needs.

    I never said that at all Mr Robertson. I am simply clearly defining the weasel words used in this discussion. Deobfuscated, ‘A Brief Pause’ in effect means ‘Killing The Program’.

    There may be legitimate reasons for discontinuing a poorly conceived or stalled science mission, or for reallocating funding to other areas. However, it must be understood by everyone when making these funding decisions that this means destroying decades of progress, and losing the expertise of highly specialized researchers forever. This is expertise that takes decades to be rebuilt, and should not be destroyed on a political whim.

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