If you have such a vehicle you must keep crews trained to accomplish this task. The ISS is to give the shuttle something to do to keep the vehicle ready. NASA tried to use it for launching satellites to attempt some return on the investment but his proved to be impractical.

Retiring the shuttle is betting on nobody putting a nuke in orbit either on purpose or by accident. If we do not retrieve a LEO nuke it will come down on it’s own anyway in a much less controlled fashion.

I worked at JPL for 10 years on various spacecraft teams and have always resented the cost of the shuttle as a black hole all the NASA money went into. The Voyager mission from concept to date has cost less than one shuttle launch. My first supervisor at JPL was on the original concept teams and is the one that told me of the underlying mission.

Everyone’s missing something important: I have yet to see any talk of the economic and national security risks associated with China or Russia mining Helium 3 from the moon, in the absence of U.S. presence, in light of the current race for the moon.

The argument will be H3 will be used for peaceful use of clean nuclear power generation, but means Earth will have a far more deadly dual-use nuclear technology to try to control.

H3 will enable far more compact and powerful nuclear bombs. Not much need for China, or rogue countries to come up with more capable rockets to deliver nuclear warheads to us or our allies, once H3 is used for fusion reaction bombs.

There’s an alternative that would provide electricity to Earth at a cost far lower than today’s rates, using existing technology, not using nuclear energy, that would make nuclear power generation far too expensive, thereby eliminating the feasibility of any dual-use nuclear technology. It’s called the Lunar Solar Power System, as promulgated by Dr. David Criswell.

Links:
http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-2/p12.pdf
http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-5/p28.pdf

World Energy Council, 18th Congress, (includes detailed analysis/comparison with all other alternatives)
http://www.highfrontier.org/Archive/Jt/LunarSolarPowerSystem_Criswell.pdf

China isn’t going to the moon for vanity’s sake.

China’s power needs outstrip its ability to supply present use and growth – and their options on earth are limited. There’s legitimate need for them to be looking to the moon options. In addition, this week, Google turned over information to the U.S. government, implicating the Chinese government in the hacking of U.S. Financial, Chemical, Technology, and Mobile Communication companies, as well as the theft of Google’s own intellectual property.

It’s pretty clear that China’s control of resources on the moon would be a huge economic and security threat.

It should be clear that keeping the Shuttle program in place is of major U.S. economic and national security importance. Couldn’t the shuttle program be used to leverage the ISS, in cooperation with our ISS partners, to reach the moon and implement a Lunar Solar Power System? Alternatively, couldn’t the U.S. use the Shuttle within an exclusive national program, as a payload and assembly asset to transfer equipment, supplies and personnel to and from low earth orbit, with moon missions launched from low-earth orbit to the moon?

Either way, it’s apparent the economic benefits to participants in the LSP program will be significant, and ongoing.

The alignment of this particular human spaceflight program with U.S. priorities is obvious – and I think the media must begin to do its job to inform the public of what is at stake. The shuttles must not be grounded.

Phil Albee

Without lunar flight, which is unaffordable and provides no practical benefits, Constellation is limited to LEO transport. In this role it has fewer capabilties than Shuttle and costs much more than Falcon/Dragon. If we have to jettison one current project, this would be it.

But unfortunately the ASAP panel report has just been released and seems intended to strike back at both SpaceX and Shuttle, putting us back to square one.

I find almost nothing to agree with in your post.

The history of the world is full of generation after generation having to deal with events that their predecessors could not predict nor understand nor have the ability to fix. Things “evolve” in world affairs. Generations from now might marvel at the MAD generation between the two superpowers but it worked perfectly fine.

I am sure that there are “dark days” ahead on the road where there are minor nuclear powers, even ones who we might not like the stability of their governments, or the cut of them…but I have no doubt that we will deal with that situation in a fairly efficient or at least satisfactory manner.

To argue that unpredictable events make it necessary to colonize other planets is nuts. If were to colonize other worlds it is just as likely, indeed more so that the unpredictable events on those worlds will snuff out that colony.

moving on.

“NASA should not have to be dependent on some private company in order to access orbit. That’s like the US military depending on Blackwater to transport them to the battle field.”

LOL. the US military takes almost NONE of its troops to the battlefield on its own assets. For all the now millions of people who have cycled in and out of hte Iraq the vast majority have flown on commercial assets. The US military has specific assets once deployed to take troops to battle but these are dicated by the essence of the battlefield requirements. NASA faces no such requirements.

The third part of your post is equally flawed.

The Russians are successful in space tourism simply because the “dollar” there buys things far out of proportion to its value in western economies. In other words if a millionare pays 10 million to the Russians they can buy far more with that 10 million to keep their program afloat then a western launch organization could.

Space tourism as a market is advocated by space advocates simply because 1) most are not very sophisticated and 2) most space advocates “want to go”.

In my view the first “money maker” for private launch firms is going to be providing a service that the government needs. That is in turn going to grow infrastructure that can branch that same service out to other groups.

The government needed Syncom (GEO communications) because the military needed more bandwidth. That allowed the heavy lifting to be done and eventually the concept branched out.

In my view the first service after up/down mass to ISS that is coming is private groups building and then servicing for the US military large just barely sub geo platforms. Platforms that give 1 meter or better resolution anytime the military needs it, large comm platforms, and other assets.

SpaceX is not an amateur rocket club.

nice try.

Robert G. Oler

Yes, it is possible that a thermonuclear war could make the world uninhabitable for humans. And it almost happened during the Cuban missile crisis back in 1962.

And who would have predicted the rise of Hitler and his attempts to conquer other country and exterminate so called inferior races. Who would have predicted the rise of Communism and its attempts to spread it all over the world. And who would have predicted the rise of international Islamic terrorism. So we have no idea what kind of nutty religions or regimes will arise on Earth during the next 100 or 200 years. I’m not predicting the end of the world but a much more dangerous world– if we continue to course that we’re currently on of restricting our civilization solely to the Earth.

Trying to create a private manned commercial space launch industry based on revenues from government contracts is simply a bad idea. First of all, NASA should not have to be dependent on some private company in order to access orbit. That’s like the US military depending on Blackwater to transport them to the battle field. This would be a totally unnecessary middle man. Secondly, if the tax payers suddenly decided that they no longer wanted to fund the ISS program then these space corporations would be immediately put out of business.

So far, the most viable model for commercial manned space flight appears to be space tourism combined with utilizing the same launch vehicles for placing commercial satellites into orbit. This is the way the Russians are doing it. And this is the direction US space companies need to go, IMO. If the French end up man rating the Ariane rocket for the Orion, then the European Space Agency could end up in the space tourism business. A man rated Japanese H2B rocket might also be able to carry an Orion into orbit. A US Delta 4 heavy could also be man rated for an Orion.

What US private commercial companies need is not government contracts. What they need is a reliable rocket! Space X has potential. But all they seem to be doing is attempting to imitate what NASA and Russia already did way back in the 1960s. And Space X is far behind behind Russia, Europe, Japan, China, the Sea Launch consortium, and of course the US government in their space launch technology and capability.

What NASA, the Air Force, and US private industry should be doing is getting together to develop the simplest, safest, and cheapest man rated liquid rocket vehicle possible that would be mutually beneficial for NASA, the Air Force, and private industry to operate. The US needs to develop the rocket equivalent of a DC-3 that can easily be mass produced, fueled, and launched into orbit.

Once private has a viable space craft and manned space flight capability, then they could afford to take some chances by attempting to develop some novel space flight technologies. But this is really no time for amateur rocket clubs in the US to be attempt to develop what the US and other governments already developed decades ago, IMO!

I am trying to sort out what your point is.

OK I get the point that you think the world is going to somehow become unihabitable and that we have to have off world colonies that can survive on their own.

Given any realistic time line in the next 100 years that is in my view an unrealistic expectation to start with and in my view the circumstances which generate that expectation (ie the Earth becoming unihabitable) is pretty wild as well.

You are free to continue to hold them, I think that they have as much validity as Dick Cheney’s various other “possibilities” that are as improbable as “me” becoming the King of The United States.

What is some profitable discussion in my view is the proper mix of government to private industry involvement in any human spaceflight activity. I agree with you that if we had waited for commercial industry to launch the FIRST satellite we might have waited some…but in the US at least it came about at the right point in public private development.

In a system such as the US (ie Free Enterprise) the role of government in developing products is to develop infrastructure that commercial companies can take advantage of. It is very unlikely that a private company would have launched the GPS system for instance.

But the industr(ies) that have spawned up around that infrastructure in the US alone far outweigh the investment of money (and indeed in taxes far pay back that investment) that the taxpayer put and still put into the system. The GPS system is following the same (pun not intended but I like it) “road” as the interstate highways did. Infrastructure.

The trick, which some space advocates (and I think this includes you) seem to miss is that not all space vehicles are created the same. As long as one looks at ISS as a space vehicle I think you are looking at it the same as NASA does. And in fact I suggest that you are looking at ISS no different then NASA would “the Moon”. People who dont like ISS say all it does is “go around in circles”…yeah but so does the Moon. NASA views ISS and the Moon or Planet Vulcan if they could get to it as nothing more then a “project” which keeps the cash coming.

A more sophisticated analysis thinks of ISS as infrastructure. A place on which the US taxpayer has invested substantial funds to develop infrastructure different then the GPS system or the Interstate highway system…ONLY in that right now there is really no ability for private industry in the US to take advantage of that infrastructure.

You label commercial access to space (SpaceX etc) as corporate welfare. Wow if that is the case I am curious what you would label government run government operated infrastructure (such as NASA going back to the Moon) which has zero ability for real private enterprise to take advantage of?

CAS is in my view no different then infrastructure development similar to the Air Mail act in the early part of the last century.

Musk has put in (Unlike most NASA contractors) a substantial part of his own money to develop a product which can take advantage of the ISS infrastructure and EXPAND it as private industry does in The Republic.

If that cannot work, if that cannot follow the same path as Syncom did going to the private launched com satellites of today (and Sycom had government/private money in it) then there is no future for humans in space, much less your colonies which are self sufficient.

Again, what is your point?

Robert G. Oler

I’m strongly in favor of unmanned space exploration. And I have no objections to manned space exploration as long is its not the main priority of the manned space program. The political attractiveness of space colonization, commercialization, and industrialization depends on the plan and how its promoted to the public.

Humans are natural colonizers. We first emerged in tropical Africa and eventually radiated into some extremely hostile environments in Eurasia, Australasia, and the Americas– surviving during long periods of global warming and global cooling over the last 2.6 million years.

Now we live on an over crowded planet of nearly 7 billion people on a world that just 10,000 years ago only contained about 10 or 20 million hunter-gatherers. Two nations (US & Russia) currently have the power of life and death over the entire planet with the push of a button– but before the end of the century, countries like China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Japan could easily join that club. We also live on a world of limited economic resources where continued human population growth is rapidly pushing other species into extinction.

Already, our meager investment in the New Frontier has dramatically changed our lives with satellite technology that has created a world wide $100 billion a year telecommunications industry. Yet we live in a solar system that is so incomprehensibly rich in natural resources that if we divided this wealth amongst every individual on Earth, each individual’s share would come out to be more than $100 billion. And we also possess the technological know how to exploit these resources to eventually create our own Earth-like worlds all over the solar system– enough to potentially accommodate quadrillions of people if we had too!

Yet, we choose to live in poverty on this planet and on the verge of extinction because we continue to believe the dangerous myth that the Earth is all there really is!