I believe I understand how you feel. My only point was to try and be critical about what the Sentinel is reporting. They do have a vested interest in this matter. Yet I would not just take their words, I know I don’t. So let’s assume that “they” are doing the right thing for once. We’ll know pretty soon anyway.

Good luck!

What I was trying to comment about was the Orlando Sentinel article that stated in part “the White House, not NASA, will choose America’s space-exploration strategy, and the hardware to be used”. I was trying to get the point across that perhaps the NASA administrator should at least be included in the policy decision that he will ultimately have responsibility for carrying out, and the article made it sound like he wasn’t. If in fact he is, then yippie, who cares anymore, I know I don’t.

Recall I also said earlier “none of this matters, congress/ politicians (including Obama) will do what they’ve always done, NASA will do what it’s always done, and in the end we’ll all just be left with a giant crap sandwich anyway.” I wasn’t just saying that to be “edgy” or for some half assed attempt at dark humor. That’s pretty much how I feel about the entire political system at this point.
_|__

BTW: It seems that Charles Bolden is in the loop, unlike what you seemed to believe in earlier posts…

Oh well…

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/related_documents/what-the-committee-is-doing.html

09.08.2009 – A summary of the report from the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee was provided to the Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and NASA Administrator on Tuesday, September 8. The summary’s text is consistent with presentations made during the committee’s final public meeting on Aug. 12. The summary has been posted on this website for the public.

The full Final Report is still being prepared and will be released when complete. NASA is working with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and other representatives of the Executive Office of the President to plan the next steps leading to a decision by the President about future U.S. human space flight policy.

Now is not a good time to have a career in an industry that depends on federal funds. Get into an industry that will make goods or services that the US will be exporting after the dollar collapses.

Yes, I’ll concede that navigational technologies did improve in the intervening centuries and that craft capable of making trans-oceanic voyages became much more reliable with better construction techniques as well. But that wasn’t the whole problem.

The major issue facing the Vikings was that the territory that they encountered in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (not to mention parts further south from there) is that it was already inhabited. If we had to build a Mars landing vessel that would also have to evade stinger missiles and hostile natives, I don’t think the tone of this conversation on this thread would be quite the same. Sending in Marines to occupy territory on another planet is a very different task than sending somebody to explore previously uninhabited territory.

When the HMS Bounty finally made it to Pitcairn Island, it was a vastly different experience landing somewhere uninhabited than if somebody had been there first (yes, I know the island had people there earlier, but they had all left/died before they got there).

Putting this into more modern context, we have had advances in spaceflight technologies over the past 40 years that more than rivals the differences between the Viking longboats and the 16th/17th century sailing vessels that crossed the oceans. Advances in metallurgy, composite vehicle construction, electrical miniaturization, navigational systems like the GPS constellation, and other significant manufacturing and even propulsion technologies that have been developed to make genuinely new and original spacecraft of today to be significantly different from what happened in the past. A legitimate debate can be waged in terms of if this has been enough, but I’d also argue that one of the reasons why companies like Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, and SpaceX are able to do what they do is precisely because these advances in basic spacecraft technologies has lowered the threshold costs sufficient for private individuals to be able to access spaceflight.

I’ll even go so far as to thank NASA for the decades in basic research they have done on these problems, even if NASA seems to fall flat on their face when confronted to turn that research into something tangible. The DC-X is almost classic NASA, as it was an impressive program that was ultimately scuttled just when results started to come forth. Ares I, arguably, is following a similar path in terms of its development.

NASA does an excellent job of making “proof of concept” projects and to simply push the envelope of technology when nobody else is willing to take that risk. A legitimate risk that can cost billions of dollars and sink the private fortunes of most individuals. Even Elon Musk put it appropriately: “Spaceflight is a good way to make multi-millionaires into mere millionaires”.

Vehicles like the Dawn and New Horizons spacecraft do what NASA does best: they come up with prototype vehicles that explore not only the Solar System, but also new vehicle technologies as well. Every Apollo flight was pushing new technology and doing something different and unique. Indeed, after every flight there were always some modifications to later flights based on the new experience.

Yes, stuff like that sort of happens with the shuttle, but firsts there are things like the first married couple in space together and the first astronaut from New Guinea. NASA is stuck in the nautical equivalents of the Horse latitudes. The question now is how to get them out of it.

As for whether Holdren fits that definition I remembered hearing about this a little while back…

‘…shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.’

Really??? I don’t want to start a debate about global warming because this isn’t the place for that, but seriously. That’s the most batshit crazy thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

Two points:

1) Whatever one thinks about Holdren’s global warming policy positions, on the topic of this forum (space policy), his technical background is very relevant, holding a bachelor’s in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from MIT and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics and theoretical plasma physics from Stanford.

2) Holdren’s comments on geoengineering concepts like seeding the atmosphere with reflective particles are not his alone. They reflect where the larger science community is headed these days. For example, the National Academy of Science held workshops on these topics and solicited written input on them this past summer:

http://americasclimatechoices.org/geoinput.shtml

FWIW…

“We wasted nearly $700 billion dollars in an unnecessary war in Iraq which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of refugees. So I’m not going to get too excited about the money wasted on the Ares 1 program– as long as they eventually terminate the program in favor of the SD-HLV.”

its more then 700 billion. When I stopped counting the money ticker had gone well over 1 trillion and its more considering that the dremel tools who were in power in the Bush administration refused to pay for the equipment worn out.

However waste is waste. And it all is relative. NASA is wasting almost all of the money set aside for human spaceflight on a design (a solid first stage) which they were warned well before hand by the folks who flew the Posideons etc about the various problems.

The only reason that there is a solid first stage is the “vision” really has a slogan of “No contractor left behind”…and ATK had to build the solid.

Waste is waste and should not be tolerated.

Robert G. Oler

“What do you mean just the provider? You can build as many satellites as you want, but if you can’t transport them into space, they’re pretty much useless:-)”

that is the role of a “launch provider”.

what actually accomplishes a task once in orbit is the satellite. What creates the industry is “the satellite”.

your claim was that NASA spawned a 100 million or something communications industry.

They didnt…they managed the launch of the vehicle that did. The vehicle that did was built lock stock and barrel by Hughes.

The point being that it took the interface with private industry to make the geosat business blossom.

Go look at the history of Advent and Syncom and you will see.

Robert G. Oler

Trying to put humans on top of a solid fuel rocket has never been done before. But NASA, for some reason, thought it would be easy. Its not! But should they have tried?

I wouldn’t have gone that route. It felt intuitively wrong to me. That’s why I was against the Ares 1 program right from the start.

But NASA is also an aerospace R&D program. And NASA thought they could do it at a reasonable cost. Sometimes you have to try new things. But I think its pretty clear now that the Ares 1 program should be canceled in favor of the Sidemount-HLV.

Sure we wasted a few billion dollars. But we learned something. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the 5-segment solid rocket booster won’t eventually be developed sometime in the future for other purposes.

We wasted nearly $700 billion dollars in an unnecessary war in Iraq which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of refugees. So I’m not going to get too excited about the money wasted on the Ares 1 program– as long as they eventually terminate the program in favor of the SD-HLV.

What do you mean just the provider? You can build as many satellites as you want, but if you can’t transport them into space, they’re pretty much useless:-)