Okay, let see if I get this straight, you’re against using existing technologies and you’re against trying to see if truly game changing technologies could work.

So just how is it you are going to get ‘hundreds’ of thousands of new jobs generated by the Space industry again?

The RFI specifically ‘requires’ a new Kero/LOX engine of at least a 1 Mlbs which would effectively replace the 9 Merlin 1a engines used to by the Falcon 9 with one engine.

So the ground rules of this so called ‘competition’ are pre setup to compete the development of domestic RD-180 (ie Atlas) vs needed improvements to the SpaceX Falcon 9. In fact going from nine smaller engines to one may be absolutely critical depending on the whether the significant base heating issues of the Falcon 9 rear their ugly head when they final get around to flying it.

Overall, despite the fact that the RFI eliminates from consideration all SDHLV options, I could certainly see this leading to a better state of affairs all things considered than the PoR. You must keep in mind though that DIRECT was intended to balance all three forces of technical, budget and politics. Congress has yet to act in this whole debate. Only time will tell just how strong that political force will be ultimately. If they can get their act together they could completely reverse the President’s plan if they wanted to.

Right now my primary concern is that the anger with how this policy came out and the political force behind the PoR within Congress may be so strong as to actually be able to resurrect the PoR pretty much as is, thereby sucking the life out of the commercial and advanced technology initiatives wisely called out in the President’s budget proposals. A possibility which I think we would both agree is the worst of all possible futures?

DIRECT retains enough of the PoR technical and political inertia but keeps its budget within bounds by using what we already have thereby enabling both the commercial and advanced technology initiatives room within the overall budget. Politics in the end is the art of possible. Until the Space industry primary customer is not the government politics will be an important force to reconcile with regardless of what the physics and budget tell us engineers to do.

Then go for it, because I have already laid the groundwork and foundation for you guys to compete with the rest of us on a very level playing field.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=34019

Looks like they finally got my memos. Delicious. Simply delicious.

Nothing would make me happier to see something like the Bussard IEC Fusion rocket come into reality (BTW a technology I think should be investigated under the new plan)

My suggestion to you is to stay far away from crackpot ideas like that. But it’s too late, you just stuck your foot in your mouth. Good luck with the RFI.

I think we are in closer alignment than you think. I’m very supportive of advanced technology development that if successful could lead to the ‘true’ commercialization of space by significantly lowering the entire lifecycle cost. At which point the dominate use of space would be by for profit commercial businesses in which the government becomes just minor (ie 20% or less) customer.

Unfortunately, ‘commercialization’ has been confused with trying new government contracting methods. An excellent outline of which is discussed in this weeks Space Review article “Looking for a Silver Bullet” by Daniel Handlin.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1619/1#idc-container

Nothing would make me happier to see something like the Bussard IEC Fusion rocket come into reality (BTW a technology I think should be investigated under the new plan). I would be the first one to man the wrecking ball against any HLV if this technology or some other enabled its cost effective replacement.

But as an engineer I’m also driven by the practicality of not basing future plans on wishful thinking. As Carl Sagan once said, “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition”. We may in fact live in a universe where something even remotely close to our science fiction dreams is simply not possible.

The key in the end is striking a funding balance between existing operations and approaches while attempting to also find new lower cost more effective approaches to the same.

The PoR represents one extreme in which every dollar plus some is used to scale up existing technology enabling zero funding for advanced technology and new approaches. The Feb 1st plan represents the other extreme in which we scrap everything that works (as expensive as it is) in favor of wishful thinking and chasing rainbows.

DIRECT attempts to strike a balance between the two extremes currently dominate this debate. The problem is when you attempt to break up a dog fight you are likely to bitten by both dogs.

In other words give the shuttle people a guaranteed place and let everybody else compete for the crumbs that remain. If the shuttle people want a place at the table they should earn it, just like anybody else. There should be no place for special privileges. The fact that you are arguing for special privileges suggests you know the shuttle stack cannot compete and you have to rig the game to have your favourite team come out on top.

“But for the value of hsf in energizing and advancing a nation just listen to JFK’s rice speech. If only we had a President now that would take the leap and push our nation forward with a powerful and enrgizing goal as did Kennedy.”

Um, that speech isn’t what you think it is.

I did some research, which is posted here on my SpaceKSC.com blog.

The famous so-called “Moon speech” to Congress was actually a long boring speech mainly proposing job programs to get the economy out of a recession. At the end of the speech, one of the many programs he proposed was the Moon program. It was no more than a couple paragraphs. So the speech wasn’t about the Moon, it wasn’t about the space program, it was about creating jobs.

As for the Rice speech, that was in the context of a Congressional election. The local Congressman was a Democrat who was chair of House committee responsible for the NASA budget. JFK came to Houston to help out the Congressman by justifying for him the huge expense of the Moon program.

In 2001 a tape was released in which Kennedy said, “I’m not that interested in space” to NASA Administrator James Webb. Kennedy was using NASA for purely partisan political reasons.

If you look at the National Aeronautics and Space Act, nowhere does it say that NASA is supposed to own its own rockets, fly its own astronauts into space or explore other worlds. NASA was created primarily to push the technological envelope. It was hijacked by JFK for political reasons, and we’ve been paying the price ever since.

No, you are the one trying to save just a few thousand jobs with existing technology at a price (development and operational) ten times the current and anticipated future commercial rates, in a timeframe far beyond anything that can still be considered as reasonable for extrapolating costs.

As a simple analogy, you are still advocating mainframes when the PC people are blasting past you. It’s far worse than that, you are still proposing building magnetic ferrite memory using discrete logic when we are attempting to move lithography out of the labs and into the fabs. Even modern supercomputers now use microprocessors, or haven’t you noticed.

Creating jobs with existing technology is easy as well; you either increase demand or lower costs. You and NASA are doing neither, in fact you are proposing the opposite. The commercial space sector is pursuing both.

The Obama/Holdren/Whoever approach is eminently rational, and we have an awfully deep hole to dig ourselves out of – that you guys created. And we don’t attempt to predict future industries, we are just trying to nurture the ones we have trying to get started, and we do know that future job creating industries will involve both astrophysics and quantum physics at the macro and micro levels, and something in the middle commonly referred to as ‘biology’. You know, the planet and stuff. The planet you live and/or depend on – you and soon to be nine billion other people all trying to squeeze oil and fresh water out of it like a wet decaying sponge.

Techniques and goals you propose to solve that problem are laughable.

Are you suggesting that the creation of 100,000 new jobs is possible based on ‘existing’ technology?

Actually, I was referring to the HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of jobs that would be created by 2020 with a vibrant suborbital and low Earth orbit space flight industry and numerous other industries waiting in the sidelines for lower cost space access enabled by a new direction in US national space policy. But I do know how Mars is so important to space addicts.

By the way, you Direct fanboys can call me by my other name – ‘Whoever’.

And I’m not angry at all. It’s was my space policy and I got what I wanted. And I’m certainly intending to fight like hell to keep it – trust me on that.

Delicious. Simply delicious.