I’ll agree with you that at minimum, we’ll probably get some new space vehicle hardware: probably a new heavy lift vehicle, an EDS stage, and probably the Orion-CEV. But no one really knows what future Republican or Democratic administrations will do with this hardware over the course of the next 20 years.

And without clear quickly achievable goals that give the public a sense of progress and direction, a lot of this new hardware could end up just being tested a few times and then stored away until future presidents and legislators decide if they have the appropriate funds to use it in some manner.

not really.

I cannot speak to the actual motivation of the Administration. My thoughts are that the current program simply expanded cost and schedule wise into something that no one is willing to fund anymore.

moving on…the reality of how things work is that as long as human spaceflight stays where it is, that there is no immediate or reasonable short term cycle of economic payback (say 5 years) the days of anything short of politics driven space based spectaculars are the only thing that one can hope for…and they wont happen.

Unless the short term implications of human spaceflight can become obvious and realized the only way hsf is funded is either when there is an external imperative (such as the Moon race) or when society has a lot of capital (see the Chinese) and all those are very short term.

If the economic feedback ever starts then well watch out.

The genius of flexible path, to me, is that it essentially shuts down human exploration of space…and concentrates on technologies which have some reasonable chance of near term economic success.

If by 2015 human spaceflight is not making money. Then it is on a very short path to being ended.

Robert G. Oler

President Bush finally decided to send us back to the Moon– to stay– but decided to fund the new crazy architecture with an installment plan that would take nearly two decades to complete. And then Congress decided that they really didn’t want us to stay.

Now we have the Flexible Path plan that supposed to be a lot cheaper than returning to the Moon! A plan that imitates the old Soviet Union style of space spectaculars, instead of a logical plan to establish the first permanently manned facility on the surface of the Moon, our closest neighbor in space.

If Obama chooses the Flexible Path which takes more than 20 years to reach its ultimate goal, a visit to the moons of Mars, I guarantee you that this silly long term plan will be terminated by the next administration and we’ll be looking at another incarnation of an ‘Augustine Commission’!

I enjoyed his note.

Look there are two reasons bureaucracies change.

The first is that a leader motivates change…the second is that a force greater then the inertia of the bureaucracy acts upon it…and pushes it into a new vector.

What NASA and human spaceflight are about to undergo is that latter. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at the Obama/Bolden meeting…or at the Bolden/Garver meeting when Bolden dropped the word. whatever it is.

NASA HSF has finally just run out of horsepower. In the past they have created launch vehicle replacements for the shuttle that spent a lot of money (and got no where near flying) before they were canceled because the money just dried up as the project floundered…but that was OK, the point really never was to develop a new vehicle…it was to continue flying the shuttle which the agency has institutional comfort with.

Problem is that the powers above them are REALLY Serious this time about ending the shuttle and no one seems to give a darn as to any reasons why it should be extended.

in the process the shuttle replacement got the usual suspects managing it and the dollars got higher and the schedule slipped and the effort like all the efforts in the past has floundered. So now they are faced with the worst of both bureaucratic worlds.

The shuttle is going away and the replacement is to expensive to build.

As In the past they might have kept on going but for pesky Elon Musk. OSC is floundering, there is almost no chance in my view that they are going to produce a Launch vehicle, much less a capsule of some sort anytime soon. Boeing and Lockmart want a piece of the pie but are kind of like Braniff trying to compete with SWA…they just dont have a clue what is happening. There isnt a commercial bone in any of the managers there bodies…and hence they are kind of watching the asteroid coming saying “gee that is a pretty sight”.

Musk however seems determined to succeed, he has cash… and might have pulled a Donald Douglas…gathered the correct people with the right technology and inspired them to do something pretty cool. And like all people who launch new products and win…he might have timed himself to be at the start of a new market.

Imagine where the Augustine commission would have been (or had gone) had there been no “SpaceX” only OSC and the usual suspects at Lockmart and Boeing.

As such change is coming, because the bureaucracy simply could not perform (never had to in the past) and indeed I think never thought this day would actually come.

I would love to be surprised, but it is to bad, in my view Obama is not embracing the power of the change that I think is going to happen. I believe that he could make it metaphoric for a “restart America” program that is sorely needed. Sadly I dont think his folks (Or he) Understand the peril of The Republic again I would like to be wrong…but they are starting to strike me as “Khan” doing battle with Big E. As Spock told Kirk “His tactics demonstrate two dimensional thinking”

Long Live The Republic

Robert G. Oler

I am sure that the administration will propose an exception to this for NASA (Smirk alert).

Robert G. Oler

A Moon base will finally tell us if a 1/6 gravity hypogravity environment is also deleterious to human health. If it is not, then colonizing the Moon and Mars will be relatively easy. And this will greatly enhance the survival of our species. Finding out if humans can survive– permanently– beyond the Earth will be one of the greatest discoveries since tool using humans first emerged in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2.6 million years ago and eventually went on to colonize the entire planet!

The administration support may be “murky” because the administration may wisely not be giving us a real “vision” just yet. The “mess” one has by not having a vision is vastly less than the mess you get by promoting a vision, and then walking away from it and underfunding it.

As I said, we need pointers and a commitment to culture change more than we need, or deserve, a vision right now. The time simply isn’t right for a new vision, but very ripe for some managerially and politically astute feelers and sanity checks that have to accompany such culture change. As per Wayne Hale’s latest blog entry, culture change doesn’t happen overnight. “That will take a tremendous amount of energy, and time must pass,” he says. Wayne is one of the wise old guard, and doesn’t want that culture to change, but he’s also smart enough to know that it probably has to.

Isn’t that, in a way, what got us into this mess in the first place? An administration (Bush’s) giving NASA an ambitious vision and then failing to support that vision with an appropriate long term funding plan? The more things CHANGE…

So we have to make ISS productive if we are going to have human spaceflight at all. And ISS support is the first mission of human launch.

On a per-seat basis Orion will actually be more expensive than the Space Shuttle, with almost no resupply cargo capacity (few hundre kg vs 12-15 MT), fewer flights (2/yr vs 5-6/yr), and a smaller crew (4 vs 7). I suspect that hen overhead is included the annual program cost of Orion will be about the same as Shuttle and the per-flight cost higher.

Constellation is MUCH more expensive than SpaceX for ISS resupply due to the much heavier vehicle and vastly more facilities and personnel required for ground processing, and even the larger ships required for recovery. Yet Dragon actually carries a larger crew.

Orion was simply not designed for ISS resupply, Shuttle and Dragon were.

It makes sense to drop Constellation, which provides the fewest capabilities and has the highest cost. It makes sense to extend Shuttle until SpaceX or other carriers can clearly meet all ISS logistics requiremnts.