File under better late than never: the Fall issue of Space Lifestyle Magazine is now available online, with an article about where John McCain and Barack Obama stand on space issues. (The issue was supposed to be available online last week, but a publishing problem delayed it until today, the author, Nancy Atkinson, informed me in an email today.) The article features insights from Keith Cowing and Scott Pace, as well as myself (including a photo of myself with an attractive blonde, albeit aircraft nose art). No permalink directly to the article: select the “Space Vote 2008″ from the Contents menu.
One hopes that President Elect Obama will follow through on his promises about space and not, as one suspects, jetison them now that he is safely elected.
“One hopes that President Elect Obama will follow through on his promises about space and not, as one suspects, jetison them now that he is safely elected.”
In the interest of advancing the nation’s civil space program (and not just retaining Florida jobs), Obama’s promise of at least one additional Shuttle flight (and possibly more) is not a promise that his administration should follow through on. The same goes for his campaign’s earlier, specific promise to accelerate Ares I/Orion (versus a more general commitment to accelerate Shuttle’s replacement).
For the sake U.S. access to the ISS and the future of the nation’s civil human space flight program generally, it’s important to get off the Shuttle as soon as possible and field one or more safer crew transport options as soon as possible after that. Extending Shuttle operations is obviously at odds with the former, and the myriad technical, schedule, and cost woes on Ares I/Orion are at odds with the latter.
This is not the 1960-70s when the nation had little choice but to construct Mercury/Gemini/Apollo/Shuttle out of whole cloth. The nation has multiple, viable alternatives available to it (EELVs, COTS-D, DIRECT, etc.), and the Obama Administration should at least assess those alternatives against extending Shuttle operations and/or continuing Ares I/Orion development before committing to a path.
The campaign is over, and the Obama civil space policy should no longer be about parochial promises to win Florida votes. It’s now about governing the nation’s civil space program well and leading it in a positive direction.
FWIW…
Anonymous.Space – do you think that we should drop AMU, or is there an alternative delivery mechanism?
“Anonymous.Space – do you think that we should drop AMU,”
I think you mean AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer).
As many resources (~$1 billion) as have been poured into AMS by its foreign partners, there are doubts about the value of the investigation and worries about the instrument’s technical readiness. It’s is a pretty narrow experiment that may turn up nothing (no particles in the new, extremely high energy ranges it’s designed for), and because of the highly multinational nature of the collaboration, it’s not clear that the instrument has been subject to the kind of end-to-end, integrated testing that a space instrument of that magnitude is normally subjected to. In many ways, AMS is very much like Gravity Probe B (GP-B) — there’s a good chance it won’t work, and even if it does, it’s a point experiment that may only prove that the particles that it’s looking for don’t exist (versus, say, a telescope that can examine myriad objects and phenomena). Even if it was a ground-based instrument, on the basis of scientific promise and technical risks alone, I doubt that AMS would compete well against other U.S. investments in physics (i.e., if, instead of a Shuttle flight, the U.S. was being asked to contribute $500 million to finish AMS, I doubt that we’d do so). That wouldn’t surprising, given that AMS was never subjected to the normal DOE selection process for major physics experiments or NASA selection process for space science missions. (Practically all AMS construction was paid for by foreign agents, and the Shuttle flight/ISS mounting was a sweetheart deal between its principle investigator and a former NASA Administrator.)
When we add the impact of extending Shuttle operations on Shuttle’s successor, the gap, independent U.S. access to ISS, and the future of the civil human space flight program, flying AMS arguably makes even less sense. It would be one thing if we were delaying Shuttle’s successor to fly a well-vetted instrument that had a high likelihood of revealing the nature of dark energy or some other high probability/priority. One could argue that’s worth the pain to the human space flight program. AMS is just not in that category, though.
The one solid reason to fly AMS is to live up to foreign commitments. However, the commitment was made to the instrument’s principle investigator, not governments, so it’s not rising to the same level as, say, NASA deciding not to fly Columbus or Kibo. (Honestly, government-funded scientists — even when the funding is an in-kind Shuttle flight/ISS mounting — should be punished when they go to agency heads and circumvent the normal grant/experiment/mission selection processes.)
“or is there an alternative delivery mechanism?”
There’s really not unless the U.S. is willing to pick up the tab for rebuilding the whole instrument. Designing a highly sensitive instrument to fly in a Shuttle bay is obviously different from designing the same instrument to fly on, say, an EELV. And she’d still need an upper stage to dock with the ISS or a spacecraft bus of her own to fly independent of the ISS. Total it up and that’s beaucoup bucks that will outstrip the cost of the Shuttle flight by a substantial margin.
FWIW…
I just posted a big analysis of early space policy (even before January 20th) we could see from President-elect Obama—http://tinyurl.com/5r4cjx.
Do you think I’m largely accurate there, and what do you think we could see from Obama on space/lunar policy, both early and overall?