Congress, NASA

Is conservative support for Constellation “hypocrisy”?

Earlier this week, a group of House members led by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) introduced legislation, HR 5614, intended to compel NASA to spend its FY2010 Constellation funding on program activities, and not hold it in reserve to cover contract liability costs. In a blog post for The Hill this week, Aderholt explained his introduction of the legislation as necessary to protect a human spaceflight program threatened by the White House’s plans for NASA. “Since February, I have fought the President’s proposal to cancel Constellation because it will forfeit America’s leadership in space and it will cut thousands of jobs in Alabama and the entire nation,” he states. Referring to layoffs already underway to comply with the administration’s use of the Antideficiency Act, he added, “President Obama and NASA are putting American jobs in jeopardy because of a drastic proposal that isn’t even actual law.”

That argument—that potentially thousands of jobs could be lost if the plan goes through—is being criticized by some conservatives as contradictory, and even, in the words of one, an example of “hypocrisy”, given Republican opposition to other administration initiatives like stimulus spending. “You can’t criticize the idea that government should create jobs through stimulus programs and then go out and stop the elimination of an unnecessary over-budget space program just because it will save jobs in your district,” argued Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute in an article in The Daily Caller published today.

Aderholt defended his support for NASA but opposition to other government programs to The Daily Caller. “There are a lot of government programs that need to be cut,” he said. “But when it comes to our defense and our space industry, I see them in a different category.”

290 comments to Is conservative support for Constellation “hypocrisy”?

  • Mark R. Whittington

    The linked article actually makes a pretty good case for NASA in general and space exploration in particular as contributing to national security. The preserve jobs argument can be seen in that context as well. It’s a little bit imprudent to throw a lot of engineers and scientists under the bus who might otherwise be contributing to national security and economic growth. But neither goal seems to be much of a priority with this regime.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    FWIW, I consider the argument “You are conservative, ergo you should support private enterprise over state agencies” as far too simplistic and ideologically ossified. The real world is more flexible. There are areas in which central governmental efforts are more effective (and sometimes fairer) than any private enterprise.

    In the terms of this debate, I would say that private enterprise for launching cargo to LEO of up to 20t and GTO of up to 10t has won the argument. Private launch of crew however, is theoretical, as is private launch of weights above 25t to LEO, let alone to BEO. So, for now, a conservative (IMHO) should support the conservation of what works rather than lose a capability that would be costly to regain at a later date.

  • KDH

    The power of pork. :-)

  • ROTFFLMAO!!!!!

    It is laughable to the extreme when listening to so-called ‘conservatives’ twisting logic around into pretzel/Gordian knots to explain why “we don’t support liberal big government programs” while supporting a big government program that pays a huge standing army to do nothing and a launch system that puts a rocket into orbit at a cool billion dollars a pop.

    And then couch it in terms of “national security.”

    As fine an example of Orwellian double-speak I’ve ever seen!

  • Page 1 article in Florida Today about KSC Director Bob Cabana addressing the troops yesterday regarding KSC’s future:

    http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20100701/NEWS02/7010311/Robert-Cabana-KSC-s-future-looks-bright

    If you read the posts, it’s the same bilge about protecting government jobs and the resulting Apocalype if we dare change the status quo. Ick.

  • Aderholt oinked:

    Aderholt defended his support for NASA but opposition to other government programs to The Daily Caller. “There are a lot of government programs that need to be cut,” he said. “But when it comes to our defense and our space industry, I see them in a different category.”

    I guess he thinks we’re going to take out Osama Bin Laden with an Ares I.

    If that’s his thinking, he should use a SpaceX Falcon 9. It’s cheaper and it’s actually flown.

  • Ferris Valyn

    Ben,

    I would argue it is far to ideological. The problem is that the conservatives set themselves up for it, since they quite frequently take the position that “private industry can always do it better”

    When you say stuff like that, expect to be called on your hypocracy

  • sc220

    This link of NASA work to national security is unadulterated BS, and the American public knows it. The association was moderately true in the 1960’s when the two superpowers were vying to show the world who could build the most powerful rockets and ICBMs. This is certainly not the case anymore. The new policy gets us away from this Cold War/Apollo/Government Design Bureau mindset and in a direction more consistent with your values as a Nation (i.e., free enterprise).

  • sc220

    It’s a little bit imprudent to throw a lot of engineers and scientists under the bus who might otherwise be contributing to national security and economic growth.

    OK, let’s use Huntsville as an example. Redstone Arsenal is crying for engineers, and I think their efforts are much more relevant to national security than MSFC. What’s the problem here?! Canceling CxP is actually helping the Army out, and better preparing it to fight the wars of the future.

    Another example. How does NASA continuing CxP and the Ares boondoggle help KSC and the Space Coast? None of these rockets would be ready before the end of this decade. Certainly accelerating commercial launcher development and use of the KSC infrastructure will do more for this area than waiting for MSFC to deliver rockets.

    This resistance to cancellation of CxP is nothing but defense of a senseless government jobs program, nothing more.

  • sc220 wrote:

    This link of NASA work to national security is unadulterated BS, and the American public knows it.

    I agree with the former, but I’m not sure about the latter. I see posts on this blog, Florida Today and other space sites from people who think we’re still in a space race with the “Soviets.” Not to mention the Red Menace du jour, the Chinese.

    I bet if you polled the American public, less than 10% would know we have a long-standing treaty with the Russians to collaborate on our space efforts. Much less that the Bush administration decided back in 2004 to contract with the Russians to fly U.S. astronauts to the ISS on Soyuz. A lot of people act like Obama thought it up six months ago.

  • Space Cadet

    Since NASA will receive an overall INCREASE in funding under the new plan, the effect on jobs is a net increase. When a congresscritter says “thousands of jobs will be lost” this is code for “thousands of jobs will be lost in my state/district and gained in some other state/district.”

  • Robert G. Oler

    Mark R. Whittington wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 7:43 am

    It’s a little bit imprudent to throw a lot of engineers and scientists under the bus who might otherwise be contributing to national security and economic growth

    but the jobs and projects are doing neither…they are not contributing to economic growth nor national security.

    As usual when you run out of factual arguments you start with a falsehood that is popular on the right wing and then proceed to argue as if it was fact.

    The national security arguments about Constellation or space exploration in specific are as false as the arguments that Saddam was going to attack the US or was a part of 9/11 or had WMD which could threaten the US. Those arguments are invented out of fears and simple right wing rhetoric.

    Economic growth…that is even more of a joke.

    There is not a single “thing” coming out of the Constellation program which is a growth multiplier past the shear dumping of federal dollars into a particular region. There is no new product, there is no new type of “thing” that is done…nothing. It fails in all respects the “multiplier” test.

    At least this “conservative” congressman was being honest

    ““But when it comes to our defense and our space industry, I see them in a different category.”

    sure..when it is in his district it is great, when it is not, not so much.

    You have argued against “small spending” such as NEA or PBS or any number of things which are peanuts compared to the spending on Constellation. To now argue for Constellation is just the latest example of “conservative hypocrisy”.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    “For instance, think about what kind of world we would live in in which the Chinese and the Russians have lunar bases and America has not. The Moon, by the way, as George Friedman of Stratfor suggests, would make a perfect platform for the launching of stealthed/disguised weapons to strike at a country’s space assets without warning.”

    this is from Whittingtons blog and it is what passes for “logic” when one has run out of it.

    The Chinese and for sure the Russians have no plans to build a lunar base…but the last sentence is silly. Spend 100 billion to do what can be done from earth anyway.

    The DoD has long gamed how it would be possible to launch a purely “scientific” satellite to the Moon, enroute detach parts of it for a “free return” that put a satellite into a retrograde GEO orbit…and engage various sats (or the entire belt). You dont have to build a lunar base to do this.

    But when ones program is all about pork, the logic behind the reasons dont matter.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Eric Sterner

    This is a stupid way to try and frame the argument. Conservative views about the role of government in society, its ability to acheive certain goals, its proper relationship to the private sector in the economy, and the threat of a concentration of any power in government institution differ from those of liberals. They are not anarchists that view no government as either feasible or preferable. Arguments that accuse them of hypocrisy for concluding that: 1) there is no commercial demand for human spaceflight to LEO at a price for which the private sector is willing to sell it(a demonstrable fact) and, 2) human spaceflight is still important to the country as a superpower, thus mandating dependence on the government really aren’t worthy of discussion among grown-ups. Sounds more like an inane talking point from the CATO Institute, which is libertarian (not conservative–although they share some common views) and doesn’t share the belief that human spaceflight is important to the country.

    Now, here’s the real shocker my mind, that parts of the country with a self-interest in the human spaceflight program have the temerity to elect representatives who believe that such a program is important to the country. What a shocker!

  • common sense

    @ dad2059 wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 8:18 am

    “And then couch it in terms of “national security.””

    So much so that most of these “ideologues” can’t even close to understand that a robust health care and financial reform have much more to do with national security than HSF has or ever will be. If you are broke, cannot pay your mortgage, are in debt over medical concerns how do you work HSF or anything?

    Comedians… I take that back, at least comedians have a role in the society!

  • common sense

    @ Eric Sterner wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 11:52 am

    “1) there is no commercial demand for human spaceflight to LEO at a price for which the private sector is willing to sell it(a demonstrable fact) ”

    Where is the demonstration?

    “2) human spaceflight is still important to the country as a superpower, thus mandating dependence on the government really aren’t worthy of discussion among grown-ups. ”

    ??? Why is that important as a superpower? Are you saying China is a superpower? They have an embrionic yet flying HSF program. We don’t or won’t soon. “Grown-ups”??? Wow! Do you refer yourself as such and those who oppose your views as not?

  • Conservatives have Federal socialist programs that they tend to support: the US military, the CIA, the TVA, NASA, plus automatic increases in their own Congressional wages. And liberals have Federal socialist programs that they tend to support: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Welfare, the TVA, plus automatic increases in their own Congressional wages.

    Socialism is an integral part of practically all economic systems which are typically a mixture of capitalism and socialism. Having the wisdom and the courage to run such socialist programs efficiently or to replace or eliminate such programs if they are not efficient is the key to prosperity– not whether such programs are big or small.

    But so far, the Federal government’s investment in space has been extremely beneficial to the US economy and for US technological advancement.

  • common sense

    @ Marcel F. Williams wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 12:51 pm

    I was essentially with you until “But so far, the Federal government’s investment in space has been extremely beneficial to the US economy and for US technological advancement.”

    Oh well…

  • Conservatives have Federal socialist programs that they tend to support: the US military, the CIA, the TVA, NASA, plus automatic increases in their own Congressional wages. And liberals have Federal socialist programs that they tend to support: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Welfare, the TVA, plus automatic increases in their own Congressional wages.

    I don’t have a problem with this paragraph, but conservatives shouldn’t dissemble or outright lie about supporting their own ‘socialist’ programs.

    Not that liberals are any more honest. Politicians of any stripe seem to be devoid of the ‘honesty’ gene.

  • Paul D.

    Yes, it is hypocrisy, Laughably blatant hypocrisy.

  • ISSvet

    @ dad2059 wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 1:29 pm

    Most politicians are capable of telling the truth and even attempt it from time to time. Usually, that tendency gets beaten out of them by the voters. Remember, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”

    When a politican tells the straight truth, the supporters of that truth generally give it tepid applause, while the opponents of that truth attack the speakers viciously. The result of this process is obvious. If you want honest politicians, get honest voters.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “It’s a little bit imprudent to throw a lot of engineers and scientists under the bus”

    What makes it “imprudent” to throw JSC and KSC engineers under the bus when engineers elsewhere doing more valuable stuff are suddenly going to find a bus to drive? If you take off your blinders, you’d understand that a large fraction of NASA appropriation is salary money for engineers and scientists. That appropriation is increasing. NASA will be employing MORE engineers and scientists, not less. Yes, the Obama plan is costing jobs … in a couple of places. It’s making jobs in other places. I do have pity for those particular engineers who are losing their jobs, but it comes down to whether or not space exploration is a jobs program for specific states.

  • Eric Sterner

    @common sense:

    Um….demonstration? Look out your window. Right now, there is no commercial company providing commercial spaceflight capabilities at a price the private sector is willing to pay.

    Re HSF being important as a superpower….Good question. Different subject.

    In re “grown ups.” Presumably you’re trying to score points and aren’t interested in an answer. FWIW, I often find myself disagreeing with people I consider “grown-ups” and agreeing with people I generally believe to be childish. Like a lot of people, I’m capable of both sets of behavior, sometimes involuntarily.

  • Ferris Valyn

    Eric Sterner

    Um….demonstration? Look out your window. Right now, there is no commercial company providing commercial spaceflight capabilities at a price the private sector is willing to pay.

    Utter BS. If that were true, then all com sats would be government. But that certainly isn’t the case. And if you want to put humans up, there is even that – its called Energyia & Space Adventures.

  • When a politican tells the straight truth, the supporters of that truth generally give it tepid applause, while the opponents of that truth attack the speakers viciously. The result of this process is obvious. If you want honest politicians, get honest voters.

    Y’know, I have to agree with that. Voters in general don’t like the truth, they like a pretty story instead.

    And some politicians are more than happy to oblige. Especially when it gets them votes!

  • Doug Lassiter wrote:

    Yes, the Obama plan is costing jobs … in a couple of places. It’s making jobs in other places. I do have pity for those particular engineers who are losing their jobs, but it comes down to whether or not space exploration is a jobs program for specific states.

    The primary purpose of a government program should be to provide a service to the taxpayer, not to create jobs just for jobs’ sake. If a program doesn’t provide a legitimate and tangible service to the public, it should be cancelled, even if it costs government jobs.

    Even during the Great Depression in the 1930s, government job programs employed laborers for tangible benefits — roads, bridges, buildings, dams, etc. Those projects still benefit us decades later.

    Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a repeat of Apollo provides no tangible benefit. All it would do is bring back more Moon rocks. The last time I checked, none of us is allowed to even own a Moon rock, much less they provide no tangible benefit.

    Extending the ISS for full-time medical, biological and physical research will result in tangible benefits for the American taxpayer and for the world.

    Anyone who works as a government contractor should realize that job is finite and lasts only so long as the government requires the service. I’m astonished that some of these people seem to think they’re entitled to lifetime employment with excellent benefits and a comfortable retirement. Those of us in the real world don’t have that guarantee. They should be on the same footing as us.

  • Eric Sterner

    @Marcel and dad2059

    Most economists define socialism as “a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.” It’s not clear to me that ANY of the examples of government activities you listed as being supported by conservatives or liberals constitute socialism, since none of them constitute the means of production. It looks to me as though you’re confusing government activity with socialism.

    Now, government majority ownership of a car company, hiring and firing the CEO, and mandating what kinds of cars the company shall manufacture and when….that’s socialism. Temporarily necessary to avoid a worse consequence, perhaps.

  • common sense

    @ Eric Sterner wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:09 pm

    Right now, there is no commercial company providing commercial spaceflight capabilities at a price the private sector is willing to pay. ”

    Okay fine I agree with “right now”. See I am not here to just score points.

    “Re HSF being important as a superpower….Good question. Different subject.”

    This is a key question for us all! And if we were not so childish about it we would give it serious thoughts and considerations. Unlike what our representatives are doing. They base their arguments on hot air. And that is killing us as a community! I hope people could see that. There must be a “good” reason. And right now, as you say, there is none. Worse: There is none at NASA. First we define “superpower”? Military? Economy? Society? Etc? Then we check where HSF fits in there. And so on and so forth. Handwaving is just that. So how about a conversation between grown ups that does not involve “national security” used in vain for example.

    “In re “grown ups.” Presumably you’re trying to score points and aren’t interested in an answer. FWIW, I often find myself disagreeing with people I consider “grown-ups” and agreeing with people I generally believe to be childish. Like a lot of people, I’m capable of both sets of behavior, sometimes involuntarily.”

    You are the one making differences between grown ups and children on your own. Not me. I challenge you to find somewhere where I make such a difference.

  • common sense

    @ Ferris Valyn wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:17 pm

    I was assuming Eric was talking about HSF of course.

  • common sense

    @ Stephen C. Smith wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:28 pm

    “The primary purpose of a government program should be to provide a service to the taxpayer, not to create jobs just for jobs’ sake. ”

    I don’t necessarily agree here. Such program would ideally do the former and at least do the latter. But then down goes free market ideology nonsense…

    Oh well.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “The primary purpose of a government program should be to provide a service to the taxpayer, not to create jobs just for jobs’ sake. ”

    “”I don’t necessarily agree here. Such program would ideally do the former and at least do the latter. But then down goes free market ideology nonsense…””

    Fine. Create jobs for jobs sake, therein providing service to at least THOSE taxpayers. But what’s so special about League City and Cocoa Beach? Why should I be more worried about jobs being preserved at those places than about jobs not being created elsewhere?

  • Any time you create “jobs for jobs’ sake” you are destroying wealth.

  • common sense

    @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:51 pm

    “But what’s so special about League City and Cocoa Beach? Why should I be more worried about jobs being preserved at those places than about jobs not being created elsewhere?”

    Yep, why indeed? This is the conversation we all ought to have…

  • Robert G. Oler

    Rand Simberg wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:53 pm

    Any time you create “jobs for jobs’ sake” you are destroying wealth….

    yes well put exactly

    Robert G. Oler

  • Eric Sterner

    @Ferris:

    Your comment makes no sense. There are no commercial companies offering commercial human spaceflight services to LEO right now. Name one that is. (Energia isn’t “commercial.” It’s a government entity. See below.)

    Other than being space related, what do communications satellites and human spaceflight have to do with one another when it comes to economics? There is enough global, commercial demand for long-haul communications at prices high enough for private sellers to enter the market. There isn’t in the case of human spaceflight.

    Ah, yes. Space Adventures and Energia. The myth that a commercial provider created human spaceflight capabilities he could sell at $20 million/seat.

    Space Adventures, laudible as it is, is a marketing firm/travel agent. It doesn’t own a capability to sell. It rented marginal capacity from a government entity.

    Sure, sure, I’ve heard the arguments for years now that Energia is capitalist/commercial. It was created on the government nickel. It’s controlled by the Russian government. (Go look at its Board of Directors, the gov’ts official 35% ownership of shares, and then check out the constituent parts of the Russian Federal Space Agency….Energia is on the list.) It uses government facilities and capabilities to deliver its services. (FWIW, that meets the definition of socialist; see the earlier post.) It didn’t have to raise capital or provide a return on the investment to any private investors because there weren’t any. It is immune to the laws of supply and demand when it comes to its existence.

    All that happened was a cash starved government told its operating arms (the design bureaus) that they had to come up with additional sources of funding and gave them some flexibility to sell their goods and services to non-government entities. Once they’d been through training, the customers went off and visited another government-owned and operated facility.

    If we want to look for signs that a commercial human spaceflight capability might come along, it seems to me that Bigelow Aerospace and Virgin Galactic (and its would-be competitors) offer a lot more reason for optimism. They both raised private capital, developed their own capabilities, and control their own futures. They might not exist without the Space Adventures/Energia story, just as comsats might not exist today without the earlier government investment in developing the relevant technologies, but they’re both a long, long way from selling LEO HSF services, should Virgin Galactic decide to go there and should Bigelow get his technology and access questions solved. That begins to address the supply side. The demand side at prices these guys would have to charge to make a profit may well prove to be the harder question.

  • common sense

    @ Rand Simberg wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:53 pm

    “Any time you create “jobs for jobs’ sake” you are destroying wealth.”

    Yes and no. It could be a temporary measure until life gets better. If you lose the “know-how” of something it may become really hard it in the future to re-acquire it (see Constellation/Apollo). It is all about the right balance. One may argue that there may not be such a need… Anyway. Wealth is subjective too. R&D is seen quite often as applied R&D. However R&D is not always applied right away so you may need to carry on R&D with no creation of wealth right away and possibly but with no guarantee in the future. Just an example. Not all jobs are about wealth.

  • common sense

    @ Eric Sterner wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:18 pm

    “All that happened was a cash starved government told its operating arms (the design bureaus) that they had to come up with additional sources of funding and gave them some flexibility to sell their goods and services to non-government entities. Once they’d been through training, the customers went off and visited another government-owned and operated facility. ”

    Hmm. Reminds me of something now. Does it not?

  • Major Tom

    It’s a little bit imprudent to throw a lot of engineers and scientists under the bus who might otherwise be contributing to national security”

    NASA’s human space flight programs havn’t made significant contributions to national security since the last Shuttle national security payload circa Challenger and there are no plans for them to do so. If you want NASA human space flight civil servants and contractors to contribute to national security, then the only thing you can do is fire them so they’re forced to look for a job in (or just hire them away to) the national security space sector.

    Don’t make things up.

    Moreover, NASA is a civilian agency, specifically created to pursue a non-military class of government space activity as part of a larger foreign policy strategy. Unless Congress and the White House rewrite the Space Act, NASA shouldn’t be undertaking substantial national security space roles. A congressman like Aderholt who represents the interests of NASA workers shouldn’t be so ignorant about the charter of the agency that employs his constituents.

    “and economic growth.”

    What NASA human space flight program has ever made a net positive contribution to the U.S. economy? Where’s the evidence?

    Don’t make things up.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “Yes and no. It could be a temporary measure until life gets better. If you lose the “know-how” of something it may become really hard it in the future to re-acquire it (see Constellation/Apollo).”

    Fair point. But then one has to ask, exactly what “know-how” do we risk losing jobs at League City and Cocoa Beach? Certainly not propulsion engineering, and probably not even in-space life support. Launch ops? Perhaps, though DOD is much more richly endowed with that expertise (mostly buried in bunkers and on subs) than NASA ever was.

    What’s the know-how that these two sites offer uniquely? In particular, what jobs are disappearing there that are not well represented elsewhere?

  • Gary Church

    “Any time you create “jobs for jobs’ sake” you are destroying wealth….

    yes well put exactly

    Robert G. Oler”

    Redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich or from the rich to the poor. It is one or the other. When the rich have it all the poor eventually rise up and murder them. When the poor have it all……well, that never happens. It ends up with alot of people with guns telling alot of people with no guns what to do (communism). What happens is the rich either stop being so greedy- or they die. Simple.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Eric Sterner wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:18 pm


    Other than being space related, what do communications satellites and human spaceflight have to do with one another when it comes to economics? There is enough global, commercial demand for long-haul communications at prices high enough for private sellers to enter the market.

    thats now. In the 60’s when the US government through NASA and Hughes pushed the Syncom experiment (a technology experiment) it was 1) not sure if the entire thing (geo synch satellites) could be done with the technology in hand and 2) sure that there would be a demand for it.

    Indeed after Syncom 2 and 3 were a success the question was “what to do now”. There were large arguments and debates among both the political class and the business folks arguing different sides of the debate. Some thought that since the effort had been proven that the “American thing” (to quote a senator) to do was to sit back and let private industry do it…the other side of the argument was the one that won…Comsat was born.

    The main traffic that cranked through the satellites was telephone calls (to start) and then as Vietnam heated up slowly but surely the networks started using “film flown to Japan and uplinked by satellite”…”live via satellite” was still a novelty.

    It was the early 70’s before the first domestic satellite network formed (those sneaky Canadians) …Anik.

    These were compared to today exceedingly small and limited satellites.

    The debate in the military was even more intense. The Armed forces, but the Navy and USAF in particular had extensive and very robust HF links and there was enormous reluctance to shed those. Again what started the ball rolling was the vietnam war and LBJ’s insistence on seeing the strike photos more or less “as they were recovered”. The IDSCS satellites were the start of that. Today bandwidth is driving.

    The argument that people like me make is about the same for human spaceflight. There could be absolutely nothing that can be done by humans to justify the cost of them in space….but that is for darn sure if the cost remain at NASA levels. If the cost come down…then the applications start to widen.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Gary Church

    “There could be absolutely nothing that can be done by humans to justify the cost of them in space…”

    Except surviving extinction- the ultimate DOD mission. One trillion dollars in defense spending fiscal year 2010; NASA SD-HLV deserves a couple percent of that as a prerequisite for BEO-HSF.

    Absolutely true. So what does that do to your “absolutely nothing” statement Mr. Oler? We have a difference of opinion.

  • common sense

    @ Eric Sterner wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:18 pm

    “but they’re both a long, long way from selling LEO HSF services, should Virgin Galactic decide to go there and should Bigelow get his technology and access questions solved. That begins to address the supply side. The demand side at prices these guys would have to charge to make a profit may well prove to be the harder question.”

    Yep. But it if you assume that the government as a role as an enabler then some of this will be shown to work, or not, pretty soon. And if we don’t try then we’ll never know. Constellation does/did not try and actually ate up all the cash there was to enable a capability. Therefore it was not a good approach.

  • Mitch Hagney

    It’s not only hypocritical for legitimate fiscal conservatives who opposed things like the auto-bailout and the stimulus package to suddently throw up arms at Constellation’s cancellation, it’s foolish. When the NASA administrator has said that he can’t get us to mars right now with all the money in the world, then going to the moon isn’t the next step in the human spaceflight program. Obama hasn’t proposed a NASA-wide budget cut, he has backed Bolden’s choice for smaller research programs and financial incentives, which is the correct strategy for how to deal with a burgeoning space industry where those incentives can aim their research.

    The Constellation program isn’t going to get any cheaper. Research on how we can make solar powered satellites in the industry, research on how we can make solar sails in governments, research is the next step, not construction.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Gary Church wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:42 pm
    ”

    Except surviving extinction..

    yeah that sounds good, but if there is not a functioning economy in space (or some planet) that can survive independently of “Earth” then surviving the initial impact doesnt do one much good does it?

    Robert G. Oler

  • Vladislaw

    “The Report card is out and the results are embarassing.”

    The idea that America has a employment problem at a time when America’s infrastructure is falling down around our ears is laughable.

    http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

    Aviation – D
    Bridges – C
    Dams – D
    Drinking water – D
    Energy – D+
    Hazardous Waste .. D
    Inland waterways .. D-
    Levees … D-
    Public Parks & Rec … C-
    Rail … C-
    Roads … D-
    Schools … D
    Solid Waste … C+
    Transit … D
    Waste Water … D-

    Estimated 5 year Cost 2.2 Trillion

    That would be 440 billion a year.

    I don’t give a rat’s a$$ what you call it, but this is something the federal budget should include and there should be MASSIVE public works being funded right now.

  • Eric Sterner

    @Common Sense

    Let’s go back to my original post. I don’t believe I called you childish… unless I hit some sore point because you’ve been arguing that conservatives are hypocrites for supporting human spaceflight?

    I wrote: “Arguments that accuse them of hypocrisy for concluding that: 1) there is no commercial demand for human spaceflight to LEO at a price for which the private sector is willing to sell it(a demonstrable fact) and, 2) human spaceflight is still important to the country as a superpower, thus mandating dependence on the government really aren’t worthy of discussion among grown-ups.”

    My point was that accusing conservatives who support a government run space program of hypocrisy because they don’t support other government programs is a childish misrepresentation of conservatism and ignores a logical argument that conservatives can make to come to their position. One may disagree with the argument, but it’s hardly a hypocritical argument.

    In re your point about the “key” question. It is a good question. It is a different subject. Jeff started a thread asking whether conservatives were hypocrites, not asking for yet another debate on first principles.

    That said, one should answer that question satisfactorily first, since it has a very strong influence on how you answer all the other questions about the future of HSF. For better and worse, logically and illogically, the country has generally answered the question that human spaceflight IS important for a superpower. Bush 2 and two different Congresses said it was. Obama says it is. That’s not to say they have a convincing argument as to WHY it is, just that they’ve all said it is.

    Truth be told, it seems to me that different people are convinced (or not) by different arguments at different times. As intellectually unsatisfying as that is, it may well be the best we’re going to get. I’ve come to believe that our form of representative government doesn’t function to make rational decisions for the good of all; it functions as a means for people from different groups with different view points to come together and make decisions that are binding on everyone. (Rational arguments are helpful–one hopes–to convince the majority of one’s preferred decision. It’s not clear to me that they’re necessary and it has long been clear to me that they’re not sufficient.) It’s not a requirement that those decisions make sense, only that the majority agree to them, which they may do for different reasons, and that they respect the rights of those who disagree with the decision. Sadly, now I’m way off topic. Sorry.

    Bottom line: I don’t think we’re likely to have one big debate where the country definitively answers the key question. We’ll get the series of mini-debates that we’ve always had over specific decisions: which program to fund, what kind of capability to build, how to promote innovation and commercialization, how do we define commercialization, etc.

    In any event, it’s been fun. Need to get some work done, still. Everyone have a good fourth.

  • Gary Church

    “a burgeoning space industry ”

    Really? Except for alot of hype about tourism it looks about the same. In fact there are threats to the industry in the form of hi-altitude solar powered dirigibles performing many of the communications functions of satellites. The satellite industry may be dying. There are very few things that a satellite can do that a network of lighter than air craft at 100,000 feet cannot do for pennies on the dollar compared to space systems. Goodbye commercial rocket market.

  • common sense

    “What’s the know-how that these two sites offer uniquely? In particular, what jobs are disappearing there that are not well represented elsewhere?”

    Let’s pick Launch-Ops as an example. The DoD has their own requirements and does its own recruitment. NASA will most likely reduce its launch ops in the near future. So who might contribute? Well if the private sector comes up to speed they will need a skilled workforce. The NASA workfore might as well transition to the private sector hence providing huge savings to the private sector. Yes indeed the private sector might benefit from government investment (preemptive remark to the usual suspects), so what? As a country we also benefit if we have an effective private sector. People here apparently tend to dissociate goverment from private sector. It’s a false dichotomy based on ideology. There is synergy, alwas has been, always will be. We must make use of the resources we have to go forward in each and every way: Economic, societal, etc.

  • common sense

    @ Gary Church wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:42 pm

    “Except surviving extinction- the ultimate DOD mission.”

    It is not NASA’s charter. If you want to change it then go for it. Until then it will not happen. See Space Act.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 8:00 am
    > ==, I consider the argument “You are conservative, ergo you
    > should support private enterprise over state agencies” as far
    > too simplistic and ideologically ossified. The real world is
    > more flexible. There are areas in which central governmental
    > efforts are more effective (and sometimes fairer) than any
    > private enterprise.==

    Not sure I’d go that far, but defiantly there are uses. Certainly in the case of funding cutting edge research and technology development, that are to far away from turning a profit, you can justify a gov funded – if not staffed – program.

    What I really get furious is this dogmatic “if your not for the Glorious Obama plan your only possible motive is Pork” (or that your a racist if you want to go Janeane Garofalo).

    Lets face it, talking about “taking a step back, and building the technologies and infrastructure for the future, and facilitate commercializing space” is a good slogan, but that’s not what were talking about doing. The actual immediate effect is disbanding the engineering and tech groups needed for that future, and the planning and training etc groups most critical to developing any new technology, integrating them into a mission, and developing the mission and trained crews needed to implement it. Not only the NASA infrastructure to do this is to be disbanded in the next few months, but all the industrial support will be gone. This is glossed over with promises of big missions later after spending years studying various on the shelf technologies, or ones worth little more than a product development program scheduled ahead of the big mission dev program. Burning down the house while talking about how great it will be to get new carpeting and chairs.

    And that same aerospace infrastructure also does support the military, so raising national security issues isn’t unreasonable.

    You could well argue that transitioning over to private organizations doing this would be better and far more efficiently – but no ones doing that. Its just If you for constellation your a socialist, if you for Obamaspace you want to destroy our aerospace industry and military.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:06 pm
    >> “It’s a little bit imprudent to throw a lot of engineers and scientists under the bus”

    > What makes it “imprudent” to throw JSC and KSC engineers
    > under the bus ==

    Most of the engineers laid off will not be at the centers, but in the supporting industries.

    >== a large fraction of NASA appropriation is salary
    > money for engineers and scientists. That appropriation is increasing.
    > NASA will be employing MORE engineers and scientists, not less.

    It will be employing more people at the centers – likely fewer scientists and engineers – at least not ones doing science adn engineering.

  • Kelly Starks

    >Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:32 pm
    >
    > one has to ask, exactly what “know-how” do we risk losing
    > jobs at League City and Cocoa Beach? Certainly not propulsion
    > engineering, and probably not even in-space life support. Launch ops?

    Yes exactly. propulsion, life support, launch ops, mission planning, vehicle design, etc etc etc. 90% of those folks arn’t at the centers, but they will be laid off when the programs close.

  • common sense

    @ Eric Sterner wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:52 pm

    “Let’s go back to my original post. I don’t believe I called you childish… unless I hit some sore point because you’ve been arguing that conservatives are hypocrites for supporting human spaceflight?”

    Ouch, well maybe. ;) In any case, maybe Jeff should have specified conservative Congress people that are hypocrits?

    “My point was that accusing conservatives who support a government run space program of hypocrisy because they don’t support other government programs is a childish misrepresentation of conservatism and ignores a logical argument that conservatives can make to come to their position. One may disagree with the argument, but it’s hardly a hypocritical argument.”

    And my point is that the argument put forth, the main one, i.e. national security is what is hypocritical. Worse it is wrong. It is a lie.

    “That said, one should answer that question satisfactorily first, since it has a very strong influence on how you answer all the other questions about the future of HSF. ”

    Indeed.

    “For better and worse, logically and illogically, the country has generally answered the question that human spaceflight IS important for a superpower. Bush 2 and two different Congresses said it was. Obama says it is. That’s not to say they have a convincing argument as to WHY it is, just that they’ve all said it is.”

    So in all logic Congress and the WH are supposed to represent the public, I agree. However when the public has Congress in the low 10%s approval and the WH not so much higher it is fair to ask whether it is an accurate representation of what the public wants. Eternal debate. But if public’s indiference is any gauge then the interests is only limited to people like us.

    “Truth be told, it seems to me that different people are convinced (or not) by different arguments at different times. As intellectually unsatisfying as that is, it may well be the best we’re going to get. I’ve come to believe that our form of representative government doesn’t function to make rational decisions for the good of all; it functions as a means for people from different groups with different view points to come together and make decisions that are binding on everyone. (Rational arguments are helpful–one hopes–to convince the majority of one’s preferred decision. It’s not clear to me that they’re necessary and it has long been clear to me that they’re not sufficient.) It’s not a requirement that those decisions make sense, only that the majority agree to them, which they may do for different reasons, and that they respect the rights of those who disagree with the decision. Sadly, now I’m way off topic. Sorry.”

    I agree. Rationality is not always why we do things, actually it is not most of the time.

    “Bottom line: I don’t think we’re likely to have one big debate where the country definitively answers the key question. We’ll get the series of mini-debates that we’ve always had over specific decisions: which program to fund, what kind of capability to build, how to promote innovation and commercialization, how do we define commercialization, etc. ”

    Indeed since HSF and NASA are not one of the public’s priority.

    “In any event, it’s been fun. Need to get some work done, still. Everyone have a good fourth.”

    You too.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “So who might contribute? Well if the private sector comes up to speed they will need a skilled workforce. The NASA workfore might as well transition to the private sector hence providing huge savings to the private sector. ”

    Well sure. Bob Cabana is upbeat about the future of KSC these days (see today’s Fla Today) because of private sector efforts. He’s talking about what you’re talking about.

    So you’re saying that when people get laid off because of Constellation cuts, no skills actually get lost?

    OK, so aside from people who are eventually transitioning from one account to another, but may be sitting on a pink slip right now, where’s the pain? Again, NASA is going to be employing MORE PEOPLE in the coming year than in previous years. The legislators from FL, AL, and TX seem to have a problem with that.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “The actual immediate effect is disbanding the engineering and tech groups needed for that future”

    How exactly is that? As I’ve been saying, NASA is going to be employing more engineers and scientists over at least the next few years working on things like propulsion, life support, EDL, habs, etc. etc. than in previous years. What we’re not going to have anytime real soon is hardware on the Moon, nor are we going to be pretending we’re going to have hardware on the Moon anytime soon.

    What we’re disbanding is a plan that wasn’t going to work. Yes, engineering and tech groups focused on that unexecutable plan are getting disbanded, as they well should if there is other, better stuff for the engineers and technicians in those groups to be doing. As per my previous post — what’s getting lost? “Groups”? Big deal.

  • Doug Lassiter wrote:

    So you’re saying that when people get laid off because of Constellation cuts, no skills actually get lost?

    Y’know, people talk about “lost skills” but no one seems to be raising the question of whether those skills SHOULD be lost.

    Do we still need the skill to build stagecoaches?

    Do we still need the skill to build steam locomotives?

    Do we still need the skill to build biplanes?

    The truth is … not really.

    It’s really silly to argue that we should have blocked the development of the horseless carriage, the diesel locomotive, the jet engine because it would have rendered obsolete some earlier technology.

    Some skills will translate from one to the other. Turning a bolt on an Ares is the same as turning a bolt on a Delta, Atlas or Falcon.

    But there really isn’t a demand for the skill to send a humans on a rocket beyond Low Earth Orbit. No other nation has a serious human deep space program. But a lot of them are working on human LEO programs.

    It’s amazing that some people just can’t get that reality in their heads. No other nation has ever gone to the Moon. It’s been nearly 40 years. Nobody else cares. Obviously, there’s simply no immediate compelling reason to go.

    So why should we waste billions every year in preserving some mythical work force skill that isn’t needed?! Honestly.

  • common sense

    @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 4:32 pm

    “So you’re saying that when people get laid off because of Constellation cuts, no skills actually get lost? ”

    I do not know that for a fact and I would not go that far but the loss may be minimized/mitigated by private sector hiring. We never can make sure of such a thing but we can think it over hard enough to minimize the impact. What I find sad is that our government does not seem to do that as a whole. The WH has the initiative to put $100M (?) in Florida to help do just that and it’s been derided. Nothing is ever perfect and ther will be casualties but it is true in any other aspect of our life is it not?

    “OK, so aside from people who are eventually transitioning from one account to another, but may be sitting on a pink slip right now, where’s the pain? Again, NASA is going to be employing MORE PEOPLE in the coming year than in previous years. The legislators from FL, AL, and TX seem to have a problem with that.”

    The pain stems from the uncertain times we live in. The worry not to have a job in the future. The worry to feed your family, pay your debts etc. That I think is the worry of the worker being laid off. The national security argument is that of the politician or that of the one who is not in this business nor will be laid off any time soon: A luxury. The legislators are jusst trying to use the “fear” argument as a means to their end.

  • amightywind

    Constellation *is* the conservative approach. For the $5 billion NASA HSF spends annually we can let world class NASA engineers do their job and build Ares/Orion. The designs are vetted, low risk, highly and befit a great nation. Or we can continue the administration practice of crony capitalism and hand the money to well connected billionaire hobbyists to reinvent 1960’s technology, and not hold them strictly to account! The sad fact is many on this forum cheer the later for reasons that one cannot fathom.

    BTW, nice troll Jeff Foust. Couldn’t have done better myself.

  • common sense

    @ Stephen C. Smith wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 4:40 pm

    “It’s really silly to argue that we should have blocked the development of the horseless carriage, the diesel locomotive, the jet engine because it would have rendered obsolete some earlier technology.”

    Very true but let me give you an example: During Apollo there was a push for ablative thermal protection systems. After Apollo and since we did not need to return at such high velocities from LEO the expertise essentially disappeared. Today as we try to go BEO the expertise in needed again. It took something like 4/5 years for NASA to recreate the technology. It is expensive. On the other hand if we do not ever go BEO then it is moot.

    “So why should we waste billions every year in preserving some mythical work force skill that isn’t needed?! Honestly.”

    Now I think you’re making a mistake. The workforce we are talking about mainly is Shuttle workforce which is LEO workforce so to speak. I would say that a good example of what is not needed and most likely will never be again is the SRB workforce (sorry) at least for a crewed vehicle (horse carriage and all). Then it really is the job of our leaders and our job to decide where we want to go in the future wherever that is. When this is decided you’ll know what skills to keep and what not to keep. After Apollo the decision was that anything BEO was a goner…

  • Robert G. Oler

    Eric Sterner wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:52 pm

    they hypocrisy argument comes in when either “conservatives” or “liberals” or “middle of the roaders” abandon for programs that they like the same ground rules that they use for programs that they dont like. to put it another way programs that they like but are not working well they make excuses for, ones they dont like they attack no matter what”.

    To give a clear definative example. There was no more loud attacker of Mr. Clinton’s efforts in Bosnia or his effort in Iraq on Desert Fox then say Mark Whittington. But the entire “Rush Limbaugh” crowd was very loud in terms of Clintons efforts in both theaters. During the 2000 Campaign a favorite topic, that got a lot of applause lines in Mr. Bush’s campaign was to attack Clinton on “nation building”.

    Then comes 9/11. There is no real knowledge or link that Saddam Hussain (a bad person) had anything to do with 9/11 or any serious links to OBL, there are still none to this day. But yet all the people who had really blown their circuit breakers over Bosnia were all gung ho over invading Iraq. The same people who had been in horror over a well orchestrated tightfly focused bombing campaign in Yugo land (that deleted about 10000 or so Serbs) seemed to not care at all as about 200,000 Iraqis were “killed”…after all we made them (or at least the surviving ones) free.

    Clinton in Desert Fox was in the midst of impeachment, but he seemed to have a measured response to Saddam’s tossing the inspectors…he deleted the WMD capability of Saddam at almost no cost to “us” and quite a lot less cost to the Iraqi civilian population. But that did not stop the right wing from shouting “distraction from impeachment”.

    In Iraq with a bumbling strategery the right wing chanted “stay the course” right up until Mr. Bush changed it. Most of us still are trying to figure out how Mr. Bush let OBL stay alive.

    The point is that had Mr. Clinton bungled into Iraq or Afland the very same people who spent years defending Bush would have engaged him hammer and tong.

    The “conservatives” supporting Constellation has no problem talking about social programs that waste money…but somehow cannot explain NOR REALLY CARE TO, how Constellation got 10 billion dollars and has accomplished little.

    “To thine own self be true” means having values and concepts that are greater then individual moments. As Richard Shelby tells us on the one hand how everything now done by the federal government should be commercialized but on the other hand is quick to mention that doesnt include Constellation…

    it is clear that there is little truth in some conservatives.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Major Tom

    “1) there is no commercial demand for human spaceflight to LEO at a price for which the private sector is willing to sell it(a demonstrable fact)”

    First, you’re trying to prove a negative, which is a logical fallacy.

    Second, it’s not even true. There are seven individuals who have each put down ~$20 million for LEO rides on Soyuz. One of them has paid twice for two flights (eight flights total). This activity has been going on since 2001. Any idiot can look it up on wikipedia.

    On top of that, more individuals have made multi-million dollar deposits with Space Adventures to have preferred status for future Soyuz rides.

    On top of that, Energia is building additional Soyuzes to meet orbital tourism demand.

    space-travel.com/reports/Russia_Wants_To_Build_An_Extra_Soyuz_For_Tourists_999.html

    Don’t make things up.

    “2) human spaceflight is still important to the country as a superpower”

    No it’s not. The Cold War ended over a decade ago. For better or worse, the Russians are now partners on the ISS, not competitors to Apollo.

    And even if the Cold War wasn’t over, the importance of NASA’s human space flight programs to that competition ended over 40 years ago, when the Soviets gave up on N1 and a lunar landing and settled for a lunar circumlunar mission on UM-500.

    A space policy wonk should know better. Don’t make stuff up.

    “Now, here’s the real shocker my mind, that parts of the country with a self-interest in the human spaceflight program have the temerity to elect representatives who believe that such a program is important to the country. What a shocker!”

    It would be a shocker if it were true. But Aderholt and his staff clearly don’t understand the Space Act and NASA’s function as the nation’s civil space agency. If they don’t understand NASA’s civil charter and they think the agency is part of the military, then they can’t accurately assess the agency’s national importance.

    All Aderholt is interested in is parochial politics and jobs/votes. If was interested in NASA’s importance, then he would have at least a clue as to the agency’s stated purpose in law.

    Oy vey…

  • Major Tom

    “Constellation *is* the conservative approach. For the $5 billion NASA HSF spends annually”

    NASA spends $9-10 billion on human space flight operations (SOMD — STS & ISS mainly) and development (ESMD — mainly Constellation) annually, not $5 billion.

    Don’t make things up.

    “The designs are vetted,”

    By an internal 90-day ESAS study with obvious factual errors and no substantial independent technical review, large sections of which have never been released publicly.

    For a multi-hundred billion dollar program that going to put dozens of lives at stake during flight, that’s not vetting. That’s shamefully careless handling of U.S. taxpayer funding and astronaut lives.

    “low risk”

    Thrust oscillation on unflown SRB configurations, no SRB trend tracking tracking, a single-string upper stage, a single-string capsule, no radiation shielding, undetermined landing configurations, large launch abort failure modes — these are all technically “low risk [sic]”? Really?

    A flawed suborbital flight using a non-relevant SRB configuration and dummy upper stage is “low risk [sic]” compared to a successful orbital flight of operationally relevant and functioning first and second stages? Really?

    A program that delivers a human ETO capability after ISS is in the drink, and then only if taxpayers cough up another $5 billion per year every year between now and 2017, is “low risk [sic]” for the rest of the human space flight program? Really?

    A program that takes 30+ years to repeat what Apollo did in less than ten, and then only if taxpayers cough up another $5 billion per year every year between now and 2035, is a programmatically “low risk” approach to human space exploration? Really?

    What are you smoking?

    Oy vey…

  • Major Tom

    “Other than being space related, what do communications satellites and human spaceflight have to do with one another when it comes to economics?”

    If NASA was smart about its human rating requirements, they could use the same launch vehicle families, instead of NASA bearing the entire burden of a very unique and very expensive launch vehicle infrastructure and workforce.

    Duh…

  • What I really get furious is this dogmatic “if your not for the Glorious Obama plan your only possible motive is Pork”

    That’s called a “straw man.” We aren’t arguing that your motive for opposing the new direction is pork. We’re arguing that supporting Constellation is pork.

  • John Malkin

    I wouldn’t call Constellation pork. I would call it an over budget behind schedule program with little hope of success. The main reason it will never work is Congress will never fully fund it to completion. Flexible path offers NASA the best hope of operating inside a flexible budget for human exploration.

    Robotic missions show that small contained missions work well. It’s easier to grow than to shrink. The shuttle retirement is showing the pain of shrinking. Three years ago Congress could have kept shuttle going and fixed Constellation but they didn’t and they won’t do it.

  • Coastal Ron

    amightywind wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 4:51 pm

    Constellation *is* the conservative approach. For the $5 billion NASA HSF spends annually we can let world class NASA engineers do their job and build Ares/Orion. The designs are vetted, low risk, highly and befit a great nation.

    The problem of course is that the designs are not finished, even for Ares I (much less Ares V), there are still many high-risk areas that need to be addressed (vibration, weight, thrust, etc.), and there is no defined payload for any HLV yet. Oh, and HLV’s befit a deep pocket nation, because they are the only ones that can afford it (building/operating and funding payloads).

    And why should the U.S. Government be running a delivery service?

    The military can get away with having some dedicated cargo haulers because of the need to work in war zones, but space is not a war zone. When the military needs to move stuff outside of a war zone, they use commercial transports as much as possible. Why wouldn’t this work for space?

    Oh, and the Obama/Bolden proposed budget keeps the NASA personnel employed (maybe even adds more), it’s the Constellation contractors that will suffer RIF’s. Unless you’re saying the U.S. should be funding a jobs program…

  • John Malkin

    Keeping Shuttle workers with no work for years is pork. The reeducation money is pork.

  • Gary Church

    Except surviving extinction..

    yeah that sounds good, but if there is not a functioning economy in space (or some planet) that can survive independently of “Earth” then surviving the initial impact doesnt do one much good does it?

    Robert G. Oler

    Well, yes it does. Survival is survival. Economy does not equal life but life does equal a possible economy. Unless you do not consider life without money to be worth living. I will take existance over oblivion thank you.

  • @Eric Sterner wrote

    Most economists define socialism as “a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.”

    I think you’re describing communism. The way the term is used in the West usually refers to government programs.

  • @common sense wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 1:13 pm

    “I was essentially with you until “But so far, the Federal government’s investment in space has been extremely beneficial to the US economy and for US technological advancement.”

    Yeah. The space rocket and the $100 billion a year satellite based telecommunications industry has really had little impact on the US and the world:-)

  • I would call it an over budget behind schedule program with little hope of success. The main reason it will never work is Congress will never fully fund it to completion.

    Even if it “succeeds” on its own criteria (a couple trips to the moon per year at a cost of many billions each) it would be a failure in terms of advancing us in space.

  • Robert G. Oler

    John Malkin wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 5:50 pm
    Three years ago Congress could have kept shuttle going and fixed Constellation but they didn’t and they won’t do it….

    this is the fault of the Bush the last administration. One reason I KNEW that the VSE would flounder (and to the great annoyance of some “here” at that time said so pretty clearly) is that in all the grand rhetoric no one, least of all Bush and certainly not his administrator(s) said anything about “fixing NASA” as the VSE advanced.

    NASA had just lost its second orbiter for essentially the same reason as it lost the first…and that reality seemed to not really “phase” anyone inside of NASA or the political staff at the Administrators office. No one seemed to grasp that this meant that all the reforms which had supposdly been put in place after Challenger had either 1) been effective or 2) had really been well done. (indeed a lot of the “genius” from the last mission of Columbia found work on Constellation…go figure).

    What suprised me a tad was how fast “ELV Mike” (Mike Griffin) went under. He appeared on MTP and you knew that it was done, but he had so much rhetoric promise. All I can figure out (and Mike could chime in on this) is that he was just overwhelmed by the NASA “way of doing business”.

    What did not surprise me (and I was many time zones away) is that the Administration political people seemed oblivious to this. Bush and his political folks seemed throughout there tenure to ever match “what was hoped for” with “what was actually happening”.

    At some point someone in Bush’s WH political shop should have (if the policy had been important to them ) “wow this isnt going how we thought it would”. But of course they were so out of touch in Iraq (“Stay the course” right up until they are killed in the election) that everything else seemed well less.

    Mike Griffin drove Constellation way off the track…we are just now seeing the train wreck

    Robert G. Oler

  • Doug Lassiter

    “Y’know, people talk about “lost skills” but no one seems to be raising the question of whether those skills SHOULD be lost.”

    That’s a fair point. I should have asked about “important skills”.

    “After Apollo and since we did not need to return at such high velocities from LEO the expertise essentially disappeared. Today as we try to go BEO the expertise in needed again. It took something like 4/5 years for NASA to recreate the technology.”

    But did we really “recreate the technology”? Or did we come up with a new technological solution that would not have been possible in the Apollo era? Perhaps a better solution. (I really don’t have a lot of insight on ablative technologies.) If the latter, then the original expertise was not worth preserving. Something was worth preserving. Maybe the engineering smarts to understand ablative systems. But it isn’t clear that this understanding is best preserved in people who think they already know the answer.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “Yes exactly. propulsion, life support, launch ops, mission planning, vehicle design, etc etc etc. 90% of those folks arn’t at the centers, but they will be laid off when the programs close.”

    Let’s be honest. They’ll be laid off not because they’re doing propulsion, life support, etc., but because they were doing it for Constellation. That program is closing so that other programs can open. Life may be tight for a bit, but that agency budget boost isn’t going to pay for managers, bricks, custodians, and secretarial help. There are new programs on the drawing board — the whole new tech development portfolio, including REAL MISSIONS, that will need their expertise.

    I’ll say it again. NASA budget is increasing. Charlie Bolden isn’t stuffing the extra money in a pillow somewhere. NASA will be employing MORE propulsion engineers, life support engineers, and even launch ops and mission planning people. They just won’t be doing Constellation. Chew hard on that fact.

  • common sense

    @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 6:49 pm

    “But did we really “recreate the technology”? ”

    Yes absolutely: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/apr/HQ_09-080_Orion_Heat_Shield.html
    The prime TPS contender was PICA, newer technology. However a heatshield made with PICA is made of tiles, a la Shuttle. There were/are known/unknown issues with the gap filler material between the tiles (remember Robinson under the Shuttle removing the gap filler before reentry? Well it’s much worse at lunar return velocities).

    Ablatives are very complex and you may want to look at this to gauge the enormity of the task http://pecos.ices.utexas.edu/

    So there are two side to your question: 1. The knowhow to build the TPS was lost 2. The understanding was very limited.

    Hope this helps.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “So there are two side to your question: 1. The knowhow to build the TPS was lost 2. The understanding was very limited.”

    Thanks. I guess I knew about Avcoat. That technology was “lost” because PICA looked better at some point (at least for shuttle reentry), and I guess ablation engineers just didn’t look back. But that was a case where the recipe was lost, not so much the hands on experience. Now I concede that Avcoat probably also required some black magic to make it, and experienced hands and eyes were needed to recover it. Some things do. But lots of things don’t.

  • Doug Lassiter

    @ Moron

    You missed an entire thread devoted to this. See

    “House appropriators defer on human spaceflight plans”
    June 29, 2010 at 9:59 pm

  • common sense

    @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 7:17 pm

    “Now I concede that Avcoat probably also required some black magic to make it, ”

    So I was told…

  • Dave C.

    Right now those of us inside the bees nest know that senior management is tearing the Agency apart. Most of them are fighting to build their empires during these uncertain times…the others are sitting around with their head between their knees. The worker bees don’t know who is in charge or what the future holds. So quite frankly we don’t care if a conservative, liberal, or something in between steps up with a plan. Any adult will do.

  • Gary Church

    What about Shannon and Sidemount?

  • Coastal Ron

    Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 6:49 pm

    But did we really “recreate the technology”? Or did we come up with a new technological solution that would not have been possible in the Apollo era?

    Many people in manufacturing use the term “tribal knowledge” to indicate when a product or process is not easy to document, and needs to be taught hands-on. In these modern times, it’s more likely that Engineering has not done a good job in defining the product and processes enough, but nevertheless it still exists.

    The further back in time you go, the less well documented some products and processes are, especially due to their inability at that time to quantify & control purity, temperature, weight and other parameters.

    These days, with ISO 9000 standards being forced on even the smallest suppliers, “tribal knowledge” has become less of a concern, assuming the company records are maintained and available in the future.

    I guess the real question is whether the skills that Constellation have are that unique? Certainly there are some niche disciplines that don’t have a large market demand, but is that a reason to employee the non-unique workers too?

    The aerospace industry has been going through boom & bust periods ever since I was in college (former roommate lost his job with the B-1 cancellation), so why should government step in to “stabilize” the industry? Wouldn’t that be stopping the natural market forces from reallocating supply & demand? Should only Constellation workers be singled out for this special attention from Congress?

  • Kelly Starks

    > common sense wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:54 pm

    > = Let’s pick Launch-Ops as an example. The DoD has their own
    > requirements and does its own recruitment. NASA will most likely
    > reduce its launch ops in the near future. So who might contribute?
    > Well if the private sector comes up to speed they will need a skilled
    > workforce. The NASA workfore might as well transition to the
    > private sector hence providing huge savings to the private sector. ==

    They already were private sector – and NASA was the customer – one far bigger, and requiring more complex skills, then anything what your thinking of as private sector has ever needed – or likely will need for a very long time. These folks, the whole space industry, needs jobs now – in a few months. If they don’t have any – they will disappear. You don’t have 10-15 years for a commercial space launch demand – and a demand for complex, large scale, space ops – to develop. If you wish to retain the skills and industrial base to do something major in space, you need to do something fast.

    > common sense wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 4:42 pm

    >> @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 4:32 pm
    >> “So you’re saying that when people get laid off because of
    >>Constellation cuts, no skills actually get lost? ”

    > I do not know that for a fact and I would not go that far but the
    > loss may be minimized/mitigated by private sector hiring. ==

    There is no other private sector jobs in the market on the scale or complexity this workforce is built to serve.

  • red

    Eric Sterner: “Arguments that accuse them of hypocrisy for concluding that: 1) there is no commercial demand for human spaceflight to LEO at a price for which the private sector is willing to sell it(a demonstrable fact) and, 2) human spaceflight is still important to the country as a superpower, thus mandating dependence on the government really aren’t worthy of discussion among grown-ups.”

    On point 1, we already have seen Space Adventures selling human spaceflight to LEO rides.

    We also know of various private sector businesses that are interested in and to various extents working on this type of service and related services (i.e. space station business like Bigelow, the suborbital ride businesses with orbital ambitions, SpaceX, etc). They aren’t ready with the services yet, and possibly would not be by themselves in time to meet NASA’s needs, but they are working on it in various ways.

    Even if we accept point 1, the conclusion you imply doesn’t necessarily hold. Even if there is no commercial demand for human spaceflight to LEO at a price for which the private sector is willing to sell it, and even if we assume that will remain the case in spite of the efforts of various commercial HSF businesses, the business case may close if the government, not just the private sector buys services from the commercial sector (such as development of technologies and capabilities that NASA needs and/or agreeing to buy services from commercial businesses instead of competing against them).

    This is exactly the case with the COTS cargo business (including the unfunded COTS-D) under Bush and Griffin. I don’t see any pertinent difference between COTS cargo (i.e. getting spacecraft to send cargo to the ISS) and the current commercial crew plans.

    Conservatives that favored COTS cargo over a big government program to have NASA build rockets and spacecraft to deliver cargo to the ISS while criticizing other wasteful big government programs were not being hypocrites. Any taking the opposite view would have been hypocrites.

    On point 2, the importance of human spaceflight to a superpower is highly debatable.

    Even if we assume that human spaceflight is important to a superpower, that doesn’t excuse the Constellation jobs advocates. This is just a matter of defending the jobs that Griffin took from robotic science, technology development, aeronautics, ISS, Shuttle, and so on.

    If we assume human spaceflight is important to a superpower, Constellation (and similar approaches like Ares V Lite) is not the answer. Constellation destroys NASA human spaceflight by ending the Shuttle in 2010, sinking the ISS in 2015, getting Ares I/Orion ready by about 2018 with nowhere to go, getting Ares V ready by 2028 with no payload, and finally redoing Apollo in 2035 (by which time Constellation would almost certainly have been cancelled for lack of results).

    If human spaceflight is important to a superpower, the FY2011 approach is a lot better. It extends the Shuttle to allow it to finish its job, keeps, adds to, and uses the ISS, improves commercial cargo for HSF, runs commercial crew for HSF with multiple services expected well before Ares I/Orion could have been, improves the NASA human research budget by 42%, begins serious HLV work early instead of waiting years in the Constellation plan, runs numerous essential technology demonstration space missions for propellant depots, inflatable habitats, solar electric propulsion, ECLSS, automated rendezvous and docking, and aerocapture, runs numerous other essential HSF technology demonstrations (ISRU, autonomous precision landing, telerobotics, and several others), develops the Orion-based CRV, develops a tug vehicle (the AR&D vehicle), flys numerous HSF robotic precursors, HSF robotic precursor scouts, and HSF precursor instruments hosted on science missions, encourages the commercial suborbital RLV industry by purchasing services from it, and greatly strengthens NASA’s general technology program which will help HSF in many cases.

    On point 2, I would argue that “human spaceflight is still important to the country as a superpower, thus mandating dependence on the government” is not true. Even if we accept the first part of this assertion, the second part does not necessarily follow. I see no reason why the government can’t use commercial services for human spaceflight instead of depending on itself even if human spaceflight is important to the country.

    Finally, even if HSF is important to the country, and ignoring all of the damage Constellation actually does to HSF, that still doesn’t mean Constellation should be funded. It’s very likely, even in NASA’s domain, that there are other areas that are even more important to the country, such as Aeronautics, Earth observations with their national security, disaster management, and general environment monitoring capabilities, Helliophysics with its practical space weather overtones, and general Space Technology development.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Rand Simberg wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 6:19 pm

    > Even if it “succeeds” on its own criteria (a couple trips to the
    > moon per year at a cost of many billions each) it would be a
    > failure in terms of advancing us in space.

    Shutting down most of the space flight agency and industry isn’t likely to advance us.

  • Kelly Starks

    >Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 6:36 pm

    >> John Malkin wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 5:50 pm
    >> Three years ago Congress could have kept shuttle going and fixed
    >>Constellation but they didn’t and they won’t do it….

    > this is the fault of the Bush the last administration. One reason I KNEW
    > that the VSE would flounder (and to the great annoyance of some
    > “here” at that time said so pretty clearly) is that in all the grand rhetoric
    > no one, least of all Bush and certainly not his administrator(s) said
    > anything about “fixing NASA” as the VSE advanced. ===

    Agreed. Congress had pretty clear view that NASA without a defining goal simple stumbles along incompetently. Hence the support for VSE which was seen as a goal that the agency could unite around and regain their skill. Pretty quickly it was obvious that it wasn’t working. Griffen’s proposals were pork rich, which Congress liked, but seemed a mess and the agency wasn’t getting its act together. So Bush washed his hands of it.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 8:48 pm

    > The aerospace industry has been going through boom & bust
    > periods ever since I was in college ==

    Boom and Bust?! We’ve lost upper 90% of the aerospace industry since the ‘70’s.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 9:33 pm

    Boom and Bust?! We’ve lost upper 90% of the aerospace industry since the ‘70’s.

    And my answer to that would be – so what?

    Assuming your numbers are even close to being right, why should the aerospace industry be any different than any other industry. Why should it take the same amount of touch labor to make a landing gear assembly or design & test a new wing section today as it did in the 70’s?

    Are you arguing that the aerospace employment rolls must always be kept at a certain level? That, I think, would be Socialism (Wikipedia – “…cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources”).

    In true capitalism, supply and demand reallocates resources to satisfy the market demands. I’m not saying the government (local, state, federal) shouldn’t lend a hand in job placement or retraining, but if the market doesn’t need slide rules or pagers anymore, then why should we retain that workforce?

    NASA has a graphic showing the distribution of Constellation jobs at the various NASA facilities, and except for Michoud (External Tank), it looks like the rest of the facilities have other work to keep the centers open. Lower workforce maybe, but NASA keeps going. For the prime & sub-prime contractors, shame on NASA contracting if they chose a company that received 50% or more of their work from Constellation (big rule is never have a supplier too dependent on you).

    The industry will shrink, but Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences, ATK and just about every other aerospace contractor still has other business to keep them going. During these tight times, the good businesses tighten up their business practices, and get themselves ready for when business starts picking up. Aerospace is no difference.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 10:00 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 9:33 pm

    >> “Boom and Bust?! We’ve lost upper 90% of the aerospace industry since the ‘70’s.”

    > And my answer to that would be – so what?

    >==In true capitalism, supply and demand reallocates resources
    > to satisfy the market demands.==

    Your forgetting the competition part. The markets still here – the US is simply being driven out of it with policies strangling our aerospace adn especial space, busness out of the markets.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “There is no other private sector jobs in the market on the scale or complexity this workforce is built to serve.”

    Re scale, that’s balderdash. HSF is a $5B operation. There are many many private sector companies with annual budgets that big. Lockheed has net sales of order $40B/year. Their annual operating profit is about $5B. It’s apples and oranges but, in many respects, large aerospace industries could teach NASA a thing or two about large scale operations.

    Re complexity, I think it may be simplistic to say this particular HSF workforce is extraordinary. The aerospace industries have hugely complicated jobs, for which launching rockets, some with people in them, is just one facet.

    Like the other posters, I suspect that many of the jobs that Constellation is shedding are hardly unique in their relevance to other sectors.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “We’ve lost upper 90% of the aerospace industry since the ‘70’s.”

    I find that hard to believe that we’ve lost 90% of the aerospace industry since the 70’s. Is that what you mean? Can you point to a reference? The AIAA figures I have show a 20-40% decrease from 1990-2007 depending on the job classification.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 10:08 pm

    Your forgetting the competition part.

    You’re taking competition out of the equation! Let’s be honest here – you’re advocating a jobs program, and Constellation just happens to be the vehicle to do it.

    The markets still here – the US is simply being driven out of it with policies strangling our aerospace adn especial space, busness out of the markets.

    I agree with Doug Lassiter – the aerospace industry is far larger than what Constellation encompassed.

    Without Constellation, ULA, and it’s parents Boeing & Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital Sciences, Pratt & Whitney, Aerojet, SpaceX, and hundreds (if not thousands) of other aerospace companies continue working on space and aerospace products and services. Even ATK, which probably is affected the most by the combination of the Shuttle and Constellation programs, will still exist, but with less business (their fault for not diversifying). Add up the employees that make up just the companies I mentioned, and you’ll see how the Constellation program is dwarfed by the rest of the industry.

    Maybe you can provide some specific data that could support your opinion?

  • Gary Church

    I do not really believe in that term “specific data” except as it applies to performance numbers and other measures based on physics. You can call the people who make airline meals aerospace workers and hide it in a mountain of other figures. The people that make rivets- are they aerospace workers? Or the people who stock them at the factory? Or just the people who buck them? Are the people who make liquid oxygen and hydrogen aerospace workers? Or just the people who fuel up launch vehicles? The aerospace industry can be as large or as small as you want it to be. When the Numi toyota factory went out of business in the SF bay area it was not the car factory that lost all the jobs- it was all the businesses that supplied the factory. Another reason why economics is witch doctory. Stick a needle in a voodoo doll and you never know what will happen. You let the market decide people are nuts. More like russian roulette.

  • common sense

    @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 7:17 pm

    The hard part is to identify critical technologies. In the case of a reentry vehicle the TPS is critical. Without it you only have nice ppt files. Nothing else. Ablative TPS at NASA was most likely deemed unnecessary when we chose to only go to LEO. Now it does not necessarily mean we will need it forever. Once we understand deployables well enough maybe we can come up with something not ablative. However in the meantime and in the near term that particular technology enables BEO trip. If you don’t have it you just cannot go.

    Oh well.

  • common sense

    @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 7:17 pm

    Along the same lines another example is the LAS. It is a difficult pain-in-the-neckish thing to develop and build to make work er safely. The one good thing that Constellation did was to flight test one. We need more altitude tests whose data needs to be shared. Here again it may, note may, be a critical technology for safety purposes. Unclear but nonetheless.

    Bottom line is not all jobs are created equal. They have to be viewed in light of the policy/missions/requirements/future.

  • DCSCA

    @ Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 10:35 pm
    “We’ve lost upper 90% of the aerospace industry since the ‘70’s.” “I find that hard to believe that we’ve lost 90% of the aerospace industry since the 70’s.” It’s not so hard to believe at all. Anectdotally speaking, drive around the west side of Los Angeles near LAX and you’ll find roads and small industrial parks festooned with legendary aerospace names and corporations once familiar to you no longer based there. Hughes Aircraft once ran from Culver City out to the sea– it’s all gone now, redeveloped into condos, a few sound stages and even a Home Depot. It’s strange to see. This is not to say there’s is no aerospace work going on in the area, but it’s a far cry from the heyday of the ’70s.

  • It’s not hypocrisy cause they’re not really fighting for jobs-in-their-district.. they’re fighting for campaign-contributions-from-BoeLockMart.

  • Brian Paine

    Observation:
    The Moon rises presenting itself as the first and easiest destination and it deserves our attention and it’s exploration. To ignore it is BAD SCIENCE at best. The problem is how to establish a base there without it breaking the bank. 200 billion for a 7 day visit is nuts.
    To solve the cost problem means solving all cost problems associated with manned space flight including the cost of achieving LEO.
    Depleting the skilled human resources available together with the decision to ignore the Moon must tell a storey and that storey is the true intentions of the architects of a manned space policy that is failing misserably to enthuse almost anyone…hence the weight of oppinions laced with political posture on this web.
    Without the right directions “we are on a road to nowhere.” Those directions come from the political executive…and only from there. To date the sign post erected by President Obama points to OZ…

  • wtf is a “storey”.

    Are there actually web browsers out there that doesn’t have spelling checking installed? Are you using IE5 or something?

  • Don’t ya just love Libertarians?

    Here’s a clip of a brief editorial I wrote about this one-

    “The (hypocracy) charge comes from nutball Libertarians, who actually called it “a slam dunk example of hypocrisy,” who defend their charge by quoting other Republicans, but not Aderholt. That is a classic strawman.

    It’s actually only hypocrisy if you say one thing and do something opposite. Nasaengineer.com took a look at the Congressman’s bio on his own web site, and it says,

    “..He (Aderholt) believes that the federal government has a role in assisting state and local projects as well as economic development efforts…”

    Politics would be boring without Libertarians, who are sometimes right on target, but sometimes nutty as a pecan pie. If they had their way, there would be no NASA in the first place, so who cares what they think?”

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Trent Waddington,

    I don’t know if it is correct in context but ‘storey’ is the UK English word to descrbe the level of a building (a building with four floors has ‘four storeys’).

  • Vladislaw

    Griffen’s proposals were pork rich, which Congress liked, but seemed a mess and the agency wasn’t getting its act together. So Bush washed his hands of it.”

    It seems that was the plan and wasn’t a failure it was the selling point to congress.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “Anectdotally speaking, drive around the west side of Los Angeles near LAX and you’ll find roads and small industrial parks festooned with legendary aerospace names and corporations once familiar to you no longer based there.”

    Well, that’s what anecdotes will do to you! Hughes, which was LA-based, was bought out by Raytheon, which has business units all over the country. As does Northrop-Grumman, that acquired the aerospace assets of TRW. So your anecdote is about Redondo Beach losing jobs, not the aerospace industry. That sounds a lot like the the anecdote of Cocoa Beach losing lots of Constellation jobs, and translating that into job loss by space industry as a whole. Looking around in your own neighborhood is, for aerospace, not a great way of assessing what’s going on in the country as a whole.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “The Moon rises presenting itself as the first and easiest destination and it deserves our attention and it’s exploration. To ignore it is BAD SCIENCE at best. The problem is how to establish a base there without it breaking the bank.”

    No, the problem is to figure out why we should establish a base there.

    “Depleting the skilled human resources available together with the decision to ignore the Moon must tell a storey”

    As per the thread above, it is by no means clear that skilled human resources are being depleted by the dismantling of Constellation. What’s being depleted are folks walking around with Constellation logos on their lapels living in Clear Lake or Cocoa Beach. You want a story? That’s it.

    Also, this business of “ignoring the Moon” is a burgeoning myth. The administration did a poor job of explaining why returning humans to the Moon was being given a lower priority. But no one in the administration is ignoring that rock. In fact, it’s being given a lower priority precisely to devote more attention to solving the cost problems that you properly identify as key.

  • Brian Paine

    In answer…spelling has always been bad…
    Math and physics other end of scale!
    Well that’s my stor(e)y…
    And I had to grow up with a sister who could spell the whole damned dictionary, which you have reminded me of…no wonder I want to go to the Moon. (At the right price.)

  • Doug Lassiter

    “The industry will shrink”

    No, NO, NO! NASA spending will increase next year, and that increase will reflect an increase in aerospace industry investment. It just won’t be for Constellation! Again, a large part of NASA’s $19B is for engineers and technologists. So not only is there no reason to believe the whole industry will shrink, it is very unlikely that even NASA’s part of the industry will shrink.

    You guys just don’t get this, do you. Press reset and start over.

  • Gary Church

    “You guys just don’t get this, do you. Press reset and start over.”

    How about lets throw away the most powerful and fully developed launch hardware on planet earth- that has no rival- and pay the russians our tax dollars by the tens of millions to fly our people in a 50 year old launch system? Yeah, that makes sense.

    We don’t need to build Cx, we don’t need to continue flying the shuttle, we need to finish Orion and build Sidemount. Do not start over- start with what works and make it better.You people do not get it, do you?

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 10:14 pm
    >> “There is no other private sector jobs in the market on
    >> the scale or complexity this workforce is built to serve.”

    > Re scale, that’s balderdash. HSF is a $5B operation. There are
    > many many private sector companies with annual budgets that big. ==

    Private sector space jobs? Yeah most of these folks will find jobs – but not in aerospace.

    > == large aerospace industries could teach NASA a thing
    > or two about large scale operations.

    Oh certainly. If instead of Obamas make work R&D he just declared the budget for the next 25 years of half of constellation open for commercials to field a operable big (dozens of people) permanently manned moon base and associated transportation infrastructure – they could easily do it, and as a spin off we’ld have a high efficiency low cost earth to space transport infrastructure.. But that’s not in the cards.

    > Re complexity, I think it may be simplistic to say this
    > particular HSF workforce is extraordinary. ==

    No that they are that extraordinary, but they have unique skills not used in other fields. Like what’s happened with the shuttle. Now you really can’t keep the shuttles going. It would cost less then commercial crew etc, but when they stopped ordering supplies, those companies went out of business. Not that there aren’t other companies that could supply those parts – but it will take years for them to train the people, develop the infrastructure, etc. NASA in the ‘60’s- ‘70’s was one of the best systems engineer groups in the world – but after the shuttle they lost all those people, and when they tried being the Prime no the space station freedom program they bungled it so badly they quietly turned the program over to Boeing to run, closed the space station program office, and renamed it ISS. Its taken them 20 years to rebuild the skilled teams of NASA personnel and contractors they need to do a project like that again – and now they aer all getting pink slips.

    What were talking about is shutting down all of it, all the teams, all the contractors, involved in developing Constellation, all the support infrastructure for shuttle, the staffs who know how to do everything from on orbit repair, to designing moon bases, to developing space craft. Their not going to stay frozen until you want them again.

  • So your anecdote is about Redondo Beach losing jobs, not the aerospace industry.

    Just a nit, but it’s more about El Segundo than Redondo. TRW (now NG) is still in Redondo. And the El Segundo jobs are still there — they’re just a lot more diversified (including sound stages).

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 10:35 pm
    >> “We’ve lost upper 90% of the aerospace industry since the ‘70’s.”
    > I find that hard to believe that we’ve lost 90% of the aerospace
    > industry since the 70’s. Is that what you mean? ==

    More then that. Just thinking of the top tier forms lost since then Grumman, Fairchild, North American, Rockwell, Ryan. Av Week did a chart of the 40 or so top Tier firms in the ‘70’s and trailed them down to the 2-3 now. The mils finding they don’t really get competition for new contracts – because there’s only one credible supplier. Want a tanker – the US vendor is Boeing. A fighter? Theres L/M, Boeing – or Boeing L/M – maybe Northrop will bid as a prime or be part of the team. Secound adn third teir supliers are hit worse.

    >==Can you point to a reference? ==

    See what I can find in a quick web search. God the gov sites are lousy
    http://www.wingsoverkansas.com/features/article.asp?id=1221
    >> ==The number of new piston engine aircraft shipped per year was at a peak in 1978 with about 17,000 aircraft. Since then it has declined to around 2000 aircraft.<<
    http://www.aia-aerospace.org/assets/stat12.pdf
    List total employment in aerospace in 1990 of 1.120 million 2010 is 0.640M 40% down. And thats long after the big crash in aerospace in the ’60-‘70’s
    (Disneyland in Florida employs 60,000) Layoffs from shuttle and Constellation are projected to be ni the low tens of thousands. (Say 10,000 for every billion and a half.)

    http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR688/MR688.chap2.pdf
    though lists the peak at 1.6 million in the ‘80’s

    KSC impact study http://www.floridatoday.com/assets/pdf/A9150405120.PDF They expect to lose8,000 from dec ’09 to dec ‘10
    Humm 25% of the workforce is over 54…yeah they’ll be avalible in 2015+

    http://www.history.com/topics/space-race
    In the ‘60’s the Apollo program alone had 400,000.

    web.mit.edu/ctpid/lara/pdfs/Chronology.pdf
    1971: Boeing reduces workforce to 38,000, down from 105,000 in 1968. 127 Community feelings about this decline are expressed by a which appeared on Highway 5 which said, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?”128
    I don’t even know what these groups are refing as employees?

    Sorry taking to much time.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 10:59 pm
    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 10:08 pm
    >> “Your forgetting the competition part.”

    > You’re taking competition out of the equation! ==

    I’m saying if we (the US) lose the industry, certainly anything related to manned space, we can’t compete there, and were not in a good position to bigger countries with bigger economies, to catch up..

    Also frankly, I’d like to retain some ability in the US to have a space program, to build modern launch vehicles, etc.

    >> “The markets still here – the US is simply being driven out
    >> of it with policies strangling our aerospace and especial space, busness out of the markets.”

    > I agree with Doug Lassiter – the aerospace industry is far larger
    > than what Constellation encompassed.

    Agreed – so?

  • Kelly Starks

    > common sense wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:35 am
    >
    > The hard part is to identify critical technologies. In the case of
    > a reentry vehicle the TPS is critical. Without it you only have nice
    > ppt files. Nothing else. Ablative TPS at NASA was most likely deemed
    > unnecessary when we chose to only go to LEO. ==

    Check out ultramet.com for non ablatives using new Ceramic composites — Course you still need someone who knows reentry vehicle thermal needs.

  • Kelly Starks

    > DCSCA wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:03 am
    >
    > drive around the west side of Los Angeles near LAX and you’ll
    > find roads and small industrial parks festooned with legendary
    > aerospace names and corporations once familiar to you no
    > longer based there. Hughes Aircraft once ran from Culver City
    > out to the sea– it’s all gone now, redeveloped into condos, a few sound
    > stages and even a Home Depot. It’s strange to see. ==

    I hear the Gruman facilities on Long Island are a Mall now.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Brian Paine wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 9:38 am
    > In answer…spelling has always been bad…
    > Math and physics other end of scale!

    Welcome Brother!!

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 9:49 am
    >> “The industry will shrink”

    > No, NO, NO! NASA spending will increase next year, ==

    Spending on what though?! That’s the point. Yeah SOME workforce will be retained, we’ll just lose the ones we need for a space program, and replace them with bureaucracy and waste, and engineers in make work studies.. All the pork, none of the meat and bones.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “What were talking about is shutting down all of it, all the teams, all the contractors, involved in developing Constellation, all the support infrastructure for shuttle, the staffs who know how to do everything from on orbit repair, to designing moon bases, to developing space craft.”

    Right. And we’re shutting all that down so that NASA can do other aerospace engineering and innovation.

    These engineers aren’t going to end up driving buses and flipping burgers. They’re going to be doing this …

    http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/new_space_enterprise/home/workshop_home.html

    … using a NASA budget that is larger than it is today. On-orbit repair? It’s there. Moon bases? Well, at least hab and life support technology. Developing spacecraft? It’s all there.

    It’s simply false that shutting down Constellation translates into shutting down U.S. space engineering and technology. What it translates into is terminating Constellation specific contracts so new ones can be offered, and getting rid of logos and letterheads.

    Actually, if there is some engineer out there whose expertise is so Constellation-specific that they’re going to end up driving buses and flipping burgers, that’s probably what they should be doing. Bad career management.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 10:40 am

    “but when they stopped ordering supplies, those companies went out of business.

    Other than ATK, I think you would have to look long and hard to find a business that relied on the Shuttle program for the majority of their business. Even with ATK, the vast number of businesses have other products and services that they offer, so the worst that could be said is that Shuttle specific personnel are affected by the program shutting down.

    For Shuttle specific products, the flight rate was so low that manufacturers would not have dedicated personnel sitting around waiting for the next Shuttle order, so they would use cross-trained workers. Some of those could be laid off, but I would say that those types of people (ability to learn multiple jobs) are also the ones that you tend to keep in a downturn (so you ramp back up again easily).

    For Shuttle specific services, I would think those personnel are also cross-trained for other work, because of the unpredictable amount of Shuttle work that was available. For instance, the people that drive the crawler-transporter don’t sit around for months waiting to move the platform around. Maybe they’re doing mechanical maintenance, and that kind of skill easily translates to other jobs.

  • Also frankly, I’d like to retain some ability in the US to have a space program, to build modern launch vehicles, etc.

    There’s plenty of that in Decatur and Hawthorne (and developing in Mojave and other places), and no reason to think it will go away.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:18 am

    I hear the Gruman facilities on Long Island are a Mall now….

    and all the Tomcats are gate guards. Thank Dick Cheney for that

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:17 am

    I’m saying if we (the US) lose the industry, certainly anything related to manned space, we can’t compete there, and were not in a good position to bigger countries with bigger economies, to catch up..

    not so much.

    Most of the industry related to human spaceflight (aka NASA and its contractors) is useless. it is to bloated, fat, and non responsive to be of any real use…unless the future is simply one government make work project after another.

    Companies rise and fall based on their ability to stay competitive. NASA has frozen that.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:18 am

    I hear the Gruman facilities on Long Island are a Mall now.

    Well they weren’t building F-14’s there anymore, so now it’s a residential and office complex. Did you think Grumman was going to keep sinking money into a facility they weren’t going to use? Weird.

    It’s nice to have a romantic view of an industry, but then there is the reality of life. Back in the heyday of aerospace, there were lots of companies making lots of products because we didn’t know what the market needed or wanted.

    As time goes by, the strong companies start gobbling up the weaker ones, and consolidation happens. That’s why Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas are no longer making commercial aircraft, because Boeing beat them on price, reliability and features. And now Boeing is going gangbusters in Washington, and having to open new production lines in other states.

    The other thing that has driven competitors out of the market is complexity. The F-22 is currently priced at $150M per ship, which makes it hard to buy for any but the richest customers, and manufacturable by only the largest and most capable companies. Even the F-35 is breaking the bank of the countries that want to buy it, which leaves even less money for other aircraft they may want or need.

    The same thing happens in every industry – it’s not personal, it’s just business…

  • Gary Church

    “I hear the Gruman facilities on Long Island are a Mall now….
    and all the Tomcats are gate guards. Thank Dick Cheney for that”

    F-14’s were extremely expensive to keep flying- because of their variable geometry wings- and wear and tear from carrier landings and the salt water environment. My dad worked on them for many years. Planes do not last forever. It gets to the point where there is nothing left but a skeleton of the original and keeping them flying costs several times more than what they cost off the production line. Cut corners and keep flying them and they crash. Carrier aircraft has always been pretty life limited and disposable. Kind of like expendable rockets.

  • Doug Lassiter

    >> No, NO, NO! NASA spending will increase next year, ==

    >Spending on what though?! That’s the point.

    See the URL is just posted above, and download the presentations that were made. That’s the plan. That’s the point. They had very little time to produce the plan, but they manage to lay a lot of it out. You should have been at that Galveston workshop. ESMD and industry reps were walking around with smiles on their faces.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “I don’t even know what these groups are refing as employees?”

    Yes. But sure, if you’re totaling up the number of people who work on DC-3s, I can imagine that we’ve lost most of them in the last few decades. Gee, maybe we should have started a federally funded make-work project so we wouldn’t lose all that DC-3 expertise! We didn’t do that and, oh my, just look at where we are now.

    Yes, the aerospace workforce has decreased somewhat, but not by a factor of ten, as I thought you were saying. Not even close. The amount of that decrease is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion though, because NASA policy had little to do with it.

  • Gary Church

    “Gee, maybe we should have started a federally funded make-work project so we wouldn’t lose all that DC-3 expertise! ”

    They were making better planes than the DC-3. There is nothing in the near future that comes close to the most powerful and fully developed heavy lift hardware on planet earth (SRB,SSME’ and ET). I like to keep reminding everyone of this because it seems like you are all ostriches and stick your heads in the sand when I bring it up. Because you have no argument against the obvious fact.

    We should go with Shannon and Sidemount.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:23 am
    >> “What were talking about is shutting down all of it, all
    >> the teams, all the contractors, involved in developing
    >> Constellation, all the support infrastructure for shuttle,
    >> the staffs who know how to do everything from on orbit
    >>repair, to designing moon bases, to developing space craft.”

    > Right. And we’re shutting all that down so that NASA can
    > do other aerospace engineering and innovation.

    No, but even if it was true they, and the capabilities of those teams are still lost.

    >== a NASA budget that is larger than it is
    > today. On-orbit repair? It’s there. ==

    really? What missions are going to use it? Given were laying off the operational staffs that did it – what are these new “studies” going to do?

    >== Moon bases? Well, at least hab and life
    > support technology. Developing spacecraft? It’s all there.

    What bases? Not studies of decades old technologies (heaven help us they fund something important or cutting edge) What are they going to build? They are laying off all the teams who would really do on orbit repair, design and build moonbases, designed and built all our space life support systems.

    A line item on a study list, dose not equate to maintaining the industrial infastructure adn design teams that actually DO the topics NASA now (perhaps someday) going to study.

    Better to have a contract out to build the life support system for Orion, then a academic study contract.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:46 am
    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 10:40 am
    >> ““but when they stopped ordering supplies, those companies went out of business.”

    > Other than ATK, I think you would have to look long and
    > hard to find a business that relied on the Shuttle program for the majority of their business.

    Don’t forget the little shops providing specialty parts. Hell the reason they rebuilt the avionics for the shuttle in the ‘90’s, is the vendor who built critical bits gave up with on market for parts that obsolete.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Rand Simberg wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:51 am
    >> Also frankly, I’d like to retain some ability in the US
    >> to have a space program, to build modern launch vehicles, etc.

    > There’s plenty of that in Decatur and Hawthorne (and developing
    > in Mojave and other places), and no reason to think it will go away.

    ROTFLMAO!

    If that’s really your idea of a space program, we don’t speak anything like the same language. This isn’t the ‘50s where just getting to orbit in a ICBM design with a capsule on the nose was pushing the frounteer.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 12:09 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:18 am
    >>
    >>I hear the Gruman facilities on Long Island are a Mall now….

    > and all the Tomcats are gate guards. =

    Worse, all the Tomcats were shredded – not in a bone yard – shredded. The few in Museums had team come in a cut up their insides. One museum guy ni the New England Air Museum (?) said they came in with reciprocating saws. The museum later glued black plastic on the insides of the canopies so folks couldn’t see.

  • Gary Church

    “The same thing happens in every industry – it’s not personal, it’s just business…”

    You are talking about military jets like they are commercial jets Ron. I do not think “business is business.” There is a difference. Just like there is a difference between NASA and private space. It is our space agency, it is not our SpaceX or ULA. And definitely not our Energia.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 12:41 pm

    > == Yes, the aerospace workforce has decreased somewhat, but
    > not by a factor of ten, as I thought you were saying. ==

    I was saying a factor of 10, actually more then that, which was the statistic I’ve been hearing for years in the trades. The the numbers i could find made no sence (unless you assume 1/3rd of the current US aerospace industry works at NASA centers.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 12:20 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:18 am
    >>
    >> “I hear the Gruman facilities on Long Island are a Mall now.”

    > Well they weren’t building F-14’s there anymore, ==

    Yeah why would the US gov want to maintain a healthy fighter industry. You know with world peace breaking out all over the world.

    >== The other thing that has driven competitors out of
    > the market is complexity. The F-22 is currently priced
    > at $150M per ship, which makes it hard to buy for any but the richest customers,

    Actually its not that, ( adjusting for inflation $150 is about 2.5 times the cost of the F-15s) there were several eager allied buyers – but we refused to sell – so they spent more building their own F-22 like fighters. India went into a joint program with Russia and developed one better then the F-22 they expect to sell hundreds of internationally. So we just made decisions driving our industry out of business, and arranging for our future enemies to be better armed.

    ;/

  • Gary Church

    “So we just made decisions driving our industry out of business, and arranging for our future enemies to be better armed.”

    You do not make much sense most of the time Kelly, and those little arrows make your posts hard for me to read.

  • Better to have a contract out to build the life support system for Orion, then a academic study contract.

    Why do you continue to talk about this fantasy of yours of “academic study contracts”? The plan is to develop technologies, including orbital demonstration and maturation, not do “academic studies.”

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:04 pm

    The Tomcat and A-6 were another bad decision by Dick Cheney supported by “hawks” because their guy was making it. Not Dickles dumbest decision, but in the top 10.

    as for the F-22…another example of a project that went on to long and ran out of a mission…there is no reason for it.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Doug Lassiter

    “I was saying a factor of 10, actually more then that, which was the statistic I’ve been hearing for years in the trades.”

    So I guess you were hearing from the wrong people. There is no support for a decrease in aerospace workforce by anywhere near a factor of ten in the last thirty years. We’re talking about factors of 50% or so, for any responsible definition of the aerospace workforce.

    Re “Academic study contract”. Huh? Where do you come up with that label? Academia has nothing to do with this, at least not directly.

    “What missions are going to use it?”

    In the near term, ISS. In the longer term, the “Technology Demonstration Missions” that the whole plan is about. Eventually, the missions that the technology demonstrations enable, from a technical and budgetary perspective. Read the papers I pointed you to. Our technology and budget did not enable Constellation, and it took us many years and many $B to figure that out.

    “what are these new ‘studies’ going to do?”

    “Studies”, eh? As in, Powerpoint studies? Handwaving studies? Nope. That’s not what this is about. Read the papers I pointed you to. This is about cutting metal. They are going to prove capability. That’s what this is about.

    “the capabilities of those teams are still lost”

    A team is a bunch of people. Each of those people brings wisdom and insights to a “team” that is constituted to focus their wisdom and insight on a very specific problem. If that very specific problem is no longer that important, then dismantle the team, and make use of the wisdom and insights of the individuals by making them into new focused teams. This is about wisdom and insight preservation. Not team preservation.

    Seriously, come back when you’ve actually read about the plans, and comment on them directly instead of just making stuff up (to borrow Tom’s phraseology).

  • Paul D.

    Except surviving extinction..

    Church, if you think anything NASA is doing is going to contribute to this goal, you’re even crazier than I thought.

    But perhaps you could explain, in detail, how the Cx program will achieve this goal, or move us significantly toward this goal.

    If humanity is wiped out on Earth, and Earth is rendered uninhabitable, the only way it survives extinction is by having a separate, economically self-sustaining society in space. The scale required for this would be enormous — technological societies have lots of specializations, which means they don’t scale down well — and this implies the costs of the activities there would have to be low. There wouldn’t be tens of millions of taxpayers subsidizing the survival of each spacedweller.

    We are, of course nowhere close to this situation. It’s many orders of magnitude harder than flags-and-footprints on Mars. It’s so far in the future, I’ll contend, that using it as justification for any current action is ridiculous.

  • DCSCA

    Conservatives in both major parties in the U.S. have never been strong advocates for the civilian space agency without some kind of strong link to national security and the military, or as pork — or a drive to turn civilian space operations into quasi-profit centers. The Congressional record is loaded with the far right opposing funding begining back in the Apollo days. But practical office holders wed to right wing ideologies bend those vows and rationalize bleeding off opposition when the down-to-earth realities of constituents demanding jobs hits home and election day approaches.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Rand Simberg wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:18 pm

    Why do you continue to talk about this fantasy of yours of “develop technologies?” Little study and demo contracts, on tech that’s been in studies for decades or operational for decades, but this time doing subscale “demos” in orbit. A giant step backward from the proposals of decades past. Done while our capacities and infrastructure to do things in space is gutted.

    If they were developing cutting edge tech, something that could make a high leverage change in our abilities in space. Or developing and fielding a new system like commissioning RLV’s that can drop cost to orbit by a big chunk, increase safety/flexibility, something. That would be worth gutting out NASA for a while. Were not doing that.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:34 pm

    Scraping the Tomcats because some commercial avalible parts got to Iran that also weer used no TomCats. What shreading the ones in Museums adn boneyards was going to do to keep Irans F-14 out of the skies I’ve no idea.

    > == as for the F-22…another example of a project that went on
    > to long and ran out of a mission…there is no reason for it.

    We still need fighters, and we’d rather they were much better then whoever were fighting so we can have lopsided kill ratios. Also having F-15’s falling apart in mid air from age and wear, and still planning on them to be the front line fighters for the next 10-15 years?

    Agree they draged the F-22 program no to long though – its already obsolete, or at least not the best in class by the time they get the last ones.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:35 pm
    >> “I was saying a factor of 10, actually more then that,
    >> which was the statistic I’ve been hearing for years in the trades.”

    > So I guess you were hearing from the wrong people. ==

    They are the best sources I can think of in such maters, and confirmed by a lot of other experts. Hell aerospace execs are talking about US aerospace being gone in the US in 5-10 years. Not that I’m not benefiting from their desperation for skilled people – but it doesn’t speak well for the industry.

    >> “What missions are going to use it?”
    > In the near term, ISS. ==

    Already finished it, and its going to be runing out its service life before any of these cuold be developed. I mean you could have a VASIMR on it – they are trying to market those so they must at least have a functioning flight worthy copy – but so what?

    >== In the longer term, the “Technology Demonstration
    > Missions” ==

    Those arn’t missions. There NASA buracrats say we wont use it until its already flown — except thats not how they worked on actual mission plans before.

    >== Read the papers I pointed you to. Our technology and budget did
    > not enable Constellation, and it took us many years and many $B to figure that out.

    Read better papers. Constellation was (other then some electronics) using decades old tech. Yeas Griffin came up with a dumb assed configuration grossly more expensive then ones we used in the 60’s to do the same missions with mostly similar designs (excluding stupid crap like the Ares-I. And the long endurance orbiter life support systems designs) but in no way was technology or budget the wall stoping us. You could easily field far more capable craft at far cheaper cost faster – but the design was to up the costs to nicrease political support. They overplayed that hand.

    >> “what are these new ’studies’ going to do?”
    > “Studies”, eh? As in, Powerpoint studies? Handwaving studies?==

    Find demos of off the shelf or dated systems. Paying someone to build a LOx/Rp motor to compete with the ‘70’s era RD-180’s. Or assemble still another closed cycle life support system prototype.

    All of those are technically mature enough to just be included in a mission plan to do something. I.E. if we had a moon base or manned Mars program, the contractors would be tasked to build and demo one early in the timeline of the program. Something these studies or demos won’t change.

    >> “the capabilities of those teams are still lost”

    > A team is a bunch of people. Each of those people
    > brings wisdom and insights to a “team” that is constituted
    > to focus their wisdom and insight on a very specific
    > problem. If that very specific problem is no longer
    > that important, then dismantle the team, and make use
    > of the wisdom and insights of the individuals by making
    > them into new focused teams. ==

    So we don’t need these organizations, skills, infrastructure? Which would take NASA or others a decade or two to reassemble and retrain.

    No problem with all these folks leaving the industry – or retiring at this point.

    I get you feel like the plans are outlining huge cutting edge projects, and the tens of thousands of folks projected for lay-offs, and industries told to close down their contract teams, are just going to limp along with nothing to do but little demos and “research studies”. Did you not notice the major layoffs being discused in blogs like this one?

  • Kelly Starks

    > Paul D. wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:11 pm

    > If humanity is wiped out on Earth, and Earth is rendered uninhabitable,
    > the only way it survives extinction is by having a separate, economically
    > self-sustaining society in space. The scale required for this would be
    > enormous — technological societies have lots of specializations, which
    > means they don’t scale down well — ==

    I read a anthropologists paper analyzing this and figuring you need at least millions of people to sustain a autonomous technological civilization. But since no Nation on Earth now can manage it, he admitted that might only be possible with radically advanced technology beyond what we have now.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:04 pm

    Worse, all the Tomcats were shredded – not in a bone yard – shredded.

    Iran has been using nefarious ways to try and keep their fleet of F-14’s working, and the U.S. decided to destroy the most important spare parts, even if they were in museums. Unless you planned to restore one to flying condition, no big deal.

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:08 pm

    Actually its not that, ( adjusting for inflation $150 is about 2.5 times the cost of the F-15s) there were several eager allied buyers – but we refused to sell – so they spent more building their own F-22 like fighters. India went into a joint program with Russia and developed one better then the F-22 they expect to sell hundreds of internationally. So we just made decisions driving our industry out of business, and arranging for our future enemies to be better armed.

    There you go again – spinning words without doing any research.

    India was never a potential buyer for the F-22, as they have always been a Russian/Soviet buyer. The Russians, who developed the fighter than India is going to co-produce, can barely afford to keep their own fleets flying, much less build expensive new fleets.

    Then there is the question of who are you arming to fight? As time goes by, we are finding fewer standing armies that require the super-sophisticated levels of technology, and Secretary of Defense Gates is getting ready to sharpen his axe to further realign our defense spending with the new world realities. Act, react.

    It’s the same with every industry, and the same with the Shuttle. We built it for a specific market, changed when that market never materialized, used it’s best features to build the ISS, and now don’t need it. There is no future mission for the Shuttle that cannot be done by another, cheaper, system. Maybe parts of the Shuttle infrastructure will be reused, but the Shuttle as we know it just about done.

    On the “7 Stages of Grief” scale, you’re on #3, getting ready for #4. Don’t worry, better times are ahead…

  • Doug Lassiter

    “Read better papers.”

    Excuse me? Read better papers that explain what the current plans are for U.S. space exploration than the ones officially released last month by ESMD? I’d be delighted to read better papers, but if NASA isn’t issuing them they don’t mean a whole lot. If you’re not reading the ESMD plans because you’re reading these “better papers”, I’d reevaluate your reading strategy.

    I never said that these papers commented about the technological and fiscal mistake that was Constellation. That was my opinion.

    “Did you not notice the major layoffs being discused in blogs like this one?”

    Layoffs? Who would have guessed! But seriously, these folks are being laid off of Constellation. When Constellation stops, the Constellation money goes somewhere else. If you have a Constellation contract, you’re not going to use that contract vehicle to do that something else. In that sense, layoffs are inevitable. BUT, that money is going into things that will drive new efforts, supported by new contracts. That’s why I believe that, once laid off, most of these workers will eventually find new jobs doing NASA work. There is more NASA money to do engineering work than there was before, and by that token, the jobs will come. But when you stop a big project, pink slips are inevitable. The question is how fast those slips will change color.

    I think I noted this before, but Bob Cabana is pretty upbeat about the workforce future for KSC, as he repositions the center to better serve commercial space. More power to him.

    With regard to reemployability, one should ponder words from Jeff Greason at ISDC. If I remember correctly, Jeff made the point that, in his view, workers from a cost-plus culture almost never succeed when they move to a fixed cost culture. Cost-plus damages their brains, he feels. So for an upper management pink slip from a cost-plus outfit, at least, that’s not too encouraging.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:29 pm
    > Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:04 pm
    >> “Worse, all the Tomcats were shredded – not in a bone yard – shredded.”
    >== the U.S. decided to destroy the most important spare parts,
    > even if they were in museums. ==

    Running the whole aircraft into a shredder is most important spares? And the only spares allowed out of the mil bone yards into commercial channels – are parts already commercially available.

    >Unless you planned to restore one to flying condition, no big deal.

    Or you want to allow the public to see the cockpit — and the plus side of this?

    > Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:08 pm

    > India was never a potential buyer for the F-22, ==

    Didn’t mean they were – but Israel, Japan, and others weer.

    > Then there is the question of who are you arming to fight?
    > As time goes by, we are finding fewer standing armies that require
    > the super-sophisticated levels of technology, ==

    Really?

    The Russians and India are going to be selling there F-22 equiv. in the hundreds. China’s new fighter and the one they will be building for their new air craft carriers will be F-22 equivalent. So pretty much every air force around the world will be out gunning the F-15s that will be our frountline force.

    >== There is no future mission for the Shuttle that cannot be done
    > by another, cheaper, system. =

    Haven’t seen such a system proposed.

  • DCSCA

    Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 3:14 pm
    Rand Simberg wrote @ July 1st, 2010 at 2:53 pm Any time you create “jobs for jobs’ sake” you are destroying wealth….
    yes well put exactly Robert G. Oler <- utter, utter, rubbish– the kind of conservative garbage thrown out by Reagan/Goldwater types, repeatedly rejected by sane Americans.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:55 pm

    >> “Read better papers.”

    > Excuse me? Read better papers that explain what the current plans
    > are for U.S. space exploration than the ones officially released last
    > month by ESMD?=

    Yeah given you think (largely because those papers PR spin it that way) that these are new cutting edge dev programs. check on how many of these are decades old.

    >= I never said that these papers commented about the technological
    > and fiscal mistake that was Constellation. That was my opinion.

    I understood that.

    >> “Did you not notice the major layoffs being discussed in blogs like this one?”

    >== these folks are being laid off of Constellation. ==

    And Shuttle and ISS, and long range programs.

    > ==that money is going into things that will drive new efforts,
    > supported by new contracts. That’s why I believe that, once
    > laid off, most of these workers will eventually find new jobs doing
    > NASA work. ==

    That’s not the projections or expectations.

    >==There is more NASA money to do engineering work than there was before,==

    The new programs aren’t big engineering projects. Nor are the contracts for engineering on anything like the scale of what’s being shut down. Say the shuttle adn launch efforts at JSC are shuttling down in a year – then they do facilities upgrades for a couple years. Yeah the ghead count stay the same, but a hundred roofers on the VAB, isn’t the same as a 100 launch prep folks in the VAB.

    >== Bob Cabana is pretty upbeat about the workforce future for KSC,
    > as he repositions the center to better serve commercial space. More power to him.

    Still your talking about a MASSIVE downsizing. Far fewer flights, less complex ships and missions on those flights. When you staff goes from flying several shuttle ISS construction flights a year, with 40 some no folks a year – to 2 ISS crew

    >== With regard to reemployability, one should ponder words from
    > Jeff Greason at ISDC. If I remember correctly, Jeff made the point
    > that, in his view, workers from a cost-plus culture almost never
    > succeed when they move to a fixed cost culture. ==

    I.E. you don’t expect any of the laid off folks to get rehired? Or just not rehired by any commercial program?

    By the way from what I’ve seen of engineers shifting between commercials or mil contracts – though you do need retraining on the different bureaucratic processes.

  • DCSCA

    @EricSterner “This is a stupid way to try and frame the argument. Conservative views about the role of government in society, its ability to acheive certain goals, its proper relationship to the private sector in the economy, and the threat of a concentration of any power in government institution differ from those of liberals. They are not anarchists that view no government as either feasible or preferable.”

    With respect to manned spaceflight, this is simplistic nonsense. You really should do your homework and learn about the pedigree of the conservative movement. Conservatives in both major parties in the U.S. have, for the most part over the history of the civilian space agency, opposed funding NASA activites, particularly those associated with manned spaceflight, voicing that funding would be better used to expand military space activities. For goodness sake, Gingrich himself advocated dissolving NASA in the 90’s and was widely rebuffed.

  • DCSCA

    “Rand Simberg wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:51 am
    Also frankly, I’d like to retain some ability in the US to have a space program, to build modern launch vehicles, etc.” “There’s plenty of that in Decatur and Hawthorne (and developing in Mojave and other places), and no reason to think it will go away.”

    And you drive a Tucker.

  • DCSCA

    @Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 1:03 pm

    Look at Tesla and you see the future of SpaceX. These private rocket companies can never sustain a viable space program n the scale seen by the civilian space agency in this era. Maybe 100 -150 years from now, but not in these times, and certainly not in an era that’s trying to stop corporations from privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:57 pm

    The Russians and India are going to be selling there F-22 equiv. in the hundreds.

    An airplane does not a fighter make. First of all, there are few countries that can afford such a plane. Secondly, you have to have a training infrastructure to make use of it’s capabilities. Outside of NATO, Russia, China and India, who else has the money and knowledge base to use such expensive hardware? Only countries with strong economies can afford expensive military hardware, and they are increasingly less likely to upset their economic systems by going to war with the U.S. or our allies.

    Times are a changin…

  • Coastal Ron

    DCSCA wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    Look at Tesla and you see the future of SpaceX. These private rocket companies can never sustain a viable space program n the scale seen by the civilian space agency in this era.

    Yes, and the U.S. government could not sustain it either, so that goes to show that a different model is needed.

    What SpaceX is doing is going back to the basics, which is getting hardware to space in a simple fashion. They also do this in a vary cost-concious fashion, which allows them to gain market share and bring in enough revenue to slowly start expanding their capabilities.

    People laugh at the idea of using a capsule like Dragon, and in comparison to the Shuttle is does seem counter-intuitive, but the lesson from the Shuttle was that it was a very expensive way to transport humans to & from space. Capsules take us back to the cheapest possible way to accomplish the job (a Minimum Viable Product), which then will allow more people able to access space.

    As the market for people going to & from space increases, so will the desire to land in a more civilized way (runway vs the ocean), and that’s where products like the Dream Chaser will start becoming viable for the commercial market.

    Once we get to the stage of using Dream Chaser-like space taxis, that’s when the commercial use of space (both business & pleasure) will really start to increase, and it won’t have to rely on NASA contracts to survive.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “The new programs aren’t big engineering projects. Nor are the contracts for engineering on anything like the scale of what’s being shut down. ”

    Coulda’ fooled me. FY11 NASA budget allocates $2B/yr to this technology development and proofing work in the runout. A bit less than the $3B each for Constellation, and Shuttle.

    “I.E. you don’t expect any of the laid off folks to get rehired? Or just not rehired by any commercial program?”

    No, my point about cost-plus workers having a hard time transitioning to fixed cost jobs was specifically about upper management. I said that. Yes, I think cost-plus upper management may be stained. No, I don’t think the workers down in the trenches are.

  • DCSCA

    People laugh at the idea of using a capsule like Dragon….. <– oh sure, people have been "laughing" at Soyuz and the R-7 family of LVs for over 40 years. Good grief.

  • cthulhu

    Kelly Starks wrote:
    “More then that. Just thinking of the top tier forms lost since then Grumman, Fairchild, North American, Rockwell, Ryan.”

    When Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical was purchased by Northrop Grumman in July 1999, there were about 400 people employed by TRA. Today, there are about 3,000 people at the NGC division that is the legacy TRA in San Diego; the vast majority of them are working in jobs created since the buyout. Consolidation has been marvelous for TRA.

  • DCSCA

    @CoastalRon —> As the market for people going to & from space increases, so will the desire to land in a more civilized way (runway vs the ocean), and that’s where products like the Dream Chaser will start becoming viable for the commercial market. People have been venturing into space for over 50 years and the demand for commercial services on the scale you’re dreaming about have simply not materialized. The marekt just isn’t there. What you’re advocating is the ol’ “if-you-build-it-they-will-come’ line of commercial space development. Might work in fantasy baseball movies but not in this era given the state of the art of space operations. Maybe 100-150 years from now. But not today, and certainly not with a pure private enterprise model. Privatize the profits and socialize the losses is where the ‘free market’ is drifting these days. And taxpayers don’t like it.

  • DCSCA wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 5:06 pm

    “…Privatize the profits and socialize the losses is where the ‘free market’ is drifting these days. And taxpayers don’t like it…”

    That’s an old trick called “externalization” and it’s part of the culture.

  • Kelly Starks

    “….And you drive a Tucker.”

    The new mantra of the spacepolitics board.

    ;)

  • Kelly Starks

    > DCSCA wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    > Look at Tesla and you see the future of SpaceX. These private rocket
    > companies can never sustain a viable space program n the scale seen by
    > the civilian space agency in this era. Maybe 100 -150 years from now,
    > but not in these times, and certainly not in an era that’s trying to stop
    > corporations from privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

    The political bits are irrelevant. They might stop US companies – but the US is a declining fraction of the world economy. Saying a 100-150 years is almost specious. Its like George Washington trying to speculation on the impacts of jet airliners.

    Given the comparatively moderate investment needed (low billions) to develop a good commercial launch system, or deep space transport. The big question is can someone find a market? If you could profitably bring down the OIL in the oil rich NEO’s – companies could invest tens of billions and field systems well beyond New space or NASA’s best.

    Who knows, maybe space tourism will really take off. A decent cuise ship runs billions.

    ;)

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 3:36 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:57 pm
    >> “The Russians and India are going to be selling thier F-22 equiv. in the hundreds.”

    > == there are few countries that can afford such a plane. ==

    About 32 nations bought the F-16s, About the same the F-5s, Mirages about a dozen.

    Course some of the likely customers like Iran – are high likely to want to start something with us – and also have things like super cavitating torpedo’s.

    >==Secondly, you have to have a training infrastructure to make use
    > of it’s capabilities. Outside of NATO, Russia, China and India, who
    > else has the money and knowledge base to use such expensive hardware? ==

    If you can buy the planes, you can buy the training.

    >== Only countries with strong economies can afford expensive
    > military hardware, and they are increasingly less likely to upset
    > their economic systems by going to war with the U.S. or our allies.

    Then why are they increasingly aggressive toward us?

  • Kelly Starks

    Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 3:49 pm

    >==
    > People laugh at the idea of using a capsule like Dragon, and in comparison
    > to the Shuttle is does seem counter-intuitive, but the lesson from the
    > Shuttle was that it was a very expensive way to transport humans to & from space.==

    Actually it wasn’t. Worse for your argument is reusable’s like shuttle have proven cheaper to develop and operate – and can be made far cheaper if your doing them commercially (I.E. your not porking out the costs to appeal to congress and voters.). Cost savings of at least a factor of 10 are often contractually guaranteed in vendor offers.

    I find these assumptions bizar. (Especially know how mush cheaper the shuttle orbiters were compared to the Apollo and Constellation Capsules and service moduels.) Folks arguing that that having a big orbiter is more expensive because its so “complex”. What wings and a cargo bay are exotic technology? Needing to drop the SM is easier to design?

    SpaceX oddly is copying older capsule on boster designs NEVER thought to be efficient or economical. They were just quick to do if you already had ICBMs to put the capsules on.

    Weirder – SpaceX intends to make the Falcon-9 a RLV, and they started with a design optimized for disposability, andhigh performance where cost is no object.

    ??

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    >> “The new programs aren’t big engineering projects. Nor are the
    >>contracts for engineering on anything like the scale of what’s being shut down. ”

    > Coulda’ fooled me. FY11 NASA budget allocates $2B/yr to this
    > technology development and proofing work in the runout. A bit less than
    > the $3B each for Constellation, and Shuttle.

    A nit, none of that’s actually in the 2011 budget. Actually there isn’t going to be a 2011 budget.

    ;/

    Past that no they are not on the scale – though pricey. All the pork, non of the bone or mussel.

  • Coastal Ron

    DCSCA wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 5:06 pm

    people have been venturing into space for over 50 years and the demand for commercial services on the scale you’re dreaming about have simply not materialized. The marekt just isn’t there.

    Yes, and there is no market for instant point-to-point teleportation using free energy, because no one has ever done it before. Your logic is infallible…

    Let’s look at the situation from a supply and demand point of view:

    Demand – What we know is that prior to May 6, 2001 you had to be sponsored by a government to fly into space, regardless of how much you were worth. On May 6, 2001 Dennis Tito became the first self-funded space tourist (or spaceflight participant). He paid $20M for that trip, and since then seven other people have also paid a similar amount to ride a Soyuz to the ISS. This tells us there is demand for non-government space travel. How much is TBD.

    Supply – The history of HSF has been governments creating and running their own space programs for various reasons, but to support government goals. Many people have gone to space, including civilians, but those civilians served a national goal, not a purely personal one. Even if you were a billionaire, you could not buy a seat on the Shuttle. If you were able to convince someone that it made sense to send you (Senators, Congresspeople, teachers, etc.), you did not have to pay for your portion of the cost of the trip. Then Russia started making extra Soyuz seats available to the open market, and they have filled every single one of them.

    So we know that there is a demand, and that so far it seems to at least match the supply. The price point so far has been ~$20M.

    SpaceX is developing a capsule that can carry up to seven passengers & crew, and they have stated that they plan to charge $20M/seat. This is a price point that has already shown demand, so it’s reasonable to expect that if a similar experience were offered (trip to & from the ISS), that there would be some demand.

    The future pieces that still need to be put in place are:

    – Commercial crew services. SpaceX is the closest, but does not have an announced plan to finish the missing pieces.

    – A Destination. I’m sure some tourist flights could go to the ISS, but I can’t see them morphing into a Space Disneyland, and I think the ISS partners will put a severe limit on this. Bigelow seems to prefer going for the sovereign nation business as opposed to the tourist destination one, so this space still needs to be developed.

    My view is that there is demand for self-funded space tourists today, but that the service is still not well defined, and that the ability to get into space will probably develop first. If this is true, then SpaceX will hope for government contracts to fully develop their crew capability.

    Instead of a 100-150 year horizon that DCSCA has predicted, I think it will be more like 5-10 years for the first non-Soyuz commercial space tourist flight.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:57 pm

    “The Russians and India are going to be selling there F-22 equiv. in the hundreds.”

    good for them. It wont change the balance of power period. It takes far more to make an effective weapon system then either the basic training to operate the vehicles or simply having them.

    Live fire excersizes are always useful! Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:57 pm

    “The Russians and India are going to be selling there F-22 equiv. in the hundreds.”

    I should be clear and not flippant.

    I find people who make this statement, as if it is something we should all be alarmed at (I note you make the claim that the F-15 will s hortly be outclassed) somewhat amusing.

    It takes far more then having the vehicles or the training to operate them (even at a very advanced level) to constitute a military threat (even assuming that any of these countries (India?) are a possible aggressor).

    The F-22 (or the F-14 or the F-4 or the P-51 all in their day) are not just weapon systems composed of an airplane and electronics….they are products of “doctrine” that drove their design..and that doctrine came from either a lot or hard won experience and theory.

    I was far to young to have trained Iranians in the Tomcat, but I had instructors who had…and their theory was what I latter learned to be fact as I instructed a lot of “others” in the use of US equipment (both commercial and others)…that doctrine is enormously important in the execution of the weapon system…and without it the airplanes (or whatever) are pretty useless.

    We have, after much nashing of teeth finally decided (and got a group trained) in Iraq to use US M-1 tanks. It will be interesting to see how that works out. The Tomcat experience in Iran was “less” and if the “games” are any indication while on an individual basis some say RSAF pilots might be good…they would be brushed aside in any opening combat effort.

    The Russians (really the Soviets) were unique in that their battle doctrine was well ingrained and (like ours) dated from hard combat in WW2 molded by future developments. How “toe to toe” combat would have worked out would have been interesting to see (sort of a brawn against brain approach) fortunately we never did.

    having said that…if we (for whatever reason) needed to fight any armed force in the world in a stand up fight. You can take their I will take ours…it wont even be a fair fight. (and you can have all the high tech Russian stuff you want)

    Robert G. Oler

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 pm

    >== Only countries with strong economies can afford expensive
    > military hardware, and they are increasingly less likely to upset
    > their economic systems by going to war with the U.S. or our allies.

    Then why are they increasingly aggressive toward us?

    “They” who? Who are we on the brink of war with that is buying sophisticated fighters? The Taliban? Somalia? North Korea?

    You always curiously lack details in your assertions, it’s always “they”, and “experts”, but you never specifically say who.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 pm

    Worse for your argument is reusable’s like shuttle have proven cheaper to develop and operate – and can be made far cheaper if your doing them commercially (I.E. your not porking out the costs to appeal to congress and voters.).

    We already know that you tend to ignore that the Shuttle program consumed at least $2.4B per year (and $B’s to develop), and that somehow that has no bearing on the cost of getting people into space.

    Let’s take up the commercial aspect of your statement. Is there a company that would gladly take over the Shuttle and it’s operations? Like you would get out from a piece of real estate by letting someone take over the payments from the government. All they have to do is fork over $200M/month to start with, and then start working cost reductions over time. Would a company step forward and do that? I think not, but that would be the ultimate validation of your assertion.

    Cost savings of at least a factor of 10 are often contractually guaranteed in vendor offers.

    “a factor of 10″ – another factory floor rule of thumb?

    We also know that you have no knowledge of how government contracting works. Contractual incentives tend to be with well defined products or services, and both sides agree on the terms of early delivery or lower than planned cost savings (most often splitting the costs saved). If this happens, it would be after the competitive bidding process has already determined the lowest practical cost winner, which normally will not leave a lot room for further cost reductions.

    I could have my friend, who is a subcontracts professional working for Boeing, provide you more details, but I’m afraid it would be forgotten like the other stuff I have pointed out to you.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 pm

    Folks arguing that that having a big orbiter is more expensive because its so “complex”. What wings and a cargo bay are exotic technology?

    Ever see the Shuttle orbiter assembly, or the rollout? Or watch the parade of vehicles that it takes to make the Shuttle safe from toxic chemicals, and then move the vehicle back for processing? Then the inspection process to look at all the tiles, and inspect all the other little things like electronics, engines and thrusters?

    Lots of parts, lots of systems, and lots of people. And if any of them have a problem during countdown, the countdown may be scrubbed for the day, which costs how much? And how many people are involved with the various emergency landing sites around the world? It’s hard to add up all the people it takes to keep the program going, but they are a significant amount of the $200M/month burn rate.

    Capsules may be very simple, but they accomplish the same job (getting astronauts to & from LEO destinations), and do it for far less. I’ve detailed this out before, but SpaceX is offering $20M/seat for up to seven people per flight, and Soyuz does $56M/seat for up to three.

    Watch a Soyuz rollout and see how uncomplicated capsules are. Maybe then you’ll understand why the best way to lower the cost to access space is not with the Shuttle, but going back to the basic transportation that capsules provide. Then as the market demands better return capabilities, winged vehicles can make a comeback (but less complicated like Dream Chaser).

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 pm

    “Folks arguing that that having a big orbiter is more expensive because its so “complex”. What wings and a cargo bay are exotic technology?”..

    Kelly. you either know better then that and are trolling for a response (its OK I do it sometimes) or you dont and are making ludicrous statements.

    Other then the mass of wings etc for the lift…(and that affects the dynamics of lift) the big issue is “flying” back to earth. either you know that, and you know that this is several magnitudes more difficult to do then a ballistic or “lifting ballistic” capsule or its like the national debt thing…you dont know

    Robert G. Oler

  • DCSCA

    @CoastalRon “Instead of a 100-150 year horizon that DCSCA has predicted, I think it will be more like 5-10 years for the first non-Soyuz commercial space tourist flight.”

    It would please this writer if it were so, however, bear in mind were nearly 50 years on now from Shepard’s Mercury flight, 40 years of flights with Soyuz and headed toward half a century since the Apollo landings; 28 years since Conestoga 1 was launched and three decades since the shuttle first flew. Progress in expanding space operations into the private sector are slow, by the measure of human lifespans, and the market does not appear much larger today than it was in 1982. No doubt a space vehicle could be developed for ‘tourist’ arcs up and down a la Shepard and Grissom’s 1961 jaunts, (whether it could be profitable is another matter) but the point is there doesn’t appear to be a viable market for it, especially in the approaching Age of Austerity. Although ‘retired’ for an assortment of reasons, even Concorde lost its affluent flyers market — they couldn’t keep it profitable. You’re probably correct that the base ‘technology’ can be created for ‘tourist trips’ but it’s doubtful there’s a market base willing to pay the price for the ride, beyond the odd trips for wealthy eccentric we’ve seen aboard Soyuz.

  • Gary Church

    “Soyuz does $56M/seat for up to three.”

    Oops..not quite right Ron. There is always a Russian in Command so that would be two seats.

  • Gary Church

    Yes, Capsules are better- spaceplanes are a failed concept. But 7 in that dragon? I have seen the layout and sitting for a couple days with my head buried in someone’s fanny chasing down the ISS is not my idea of fun.

  • Gary Church

    Church, if you think anything NASA is doing is going to contribute to this goal, you’re even crazier than I thought.

    If you think it is ridiculous you can go ahead and die and it would be best for the human race that survives in space. I do not support Cx. Pay attention.
    Go Sidemount!
    This is what I said;
    How about lets throw away the most powerful and fully developed launch hardware on planet earth- that has no rival- and pay the russians our tax dollars by the tens of millions to fly our people in a 50 year old launch system? Yeah, that makes sense.

    We don’t need to build Cx, we don’t need to continue flying the shuttle, we need to finish Orion and build Sidemount. Do not start over- start with what works and make it better.You people do not get it, do you?

  • Doug Lassiter

    >> Coulda’ fooled me. FY11 NASA budget allocates $2B/yr to this
    >> technology development and proofing work in the runout. A bit less >>than the $3B each for Constellation, and Shuttle.

    >A nit, none of that’s actually in the 2011 budget. Actually there isn’t going >to be a 2011 budget.

    That’s partly correct. That’s why I referred to the runout. A lot of what takes the place of tech development in FY11 ($1.9B) is “Constellation transition”. I guess those pink slips are pretty pricey after all! That sum will roll over to tech in the runout years.

    Not going to be an FY11 budget? Tell that the the White House who released the budget in back in February. It’s a done deal. Maybe what you mean is that there isn’t going to be a NASA-specific appropriations bill, such that NASA funding will get rolled up in to an omnibus. Probably true, but so what? What I was pointing out here is administration intent.

  • Gary Church

    “Folks arguing that that having a big orbiter is more expensive because its so “complex”. What wings and a cargo bay are exotic technology?”

    They are not arguing Kelly, they are just stating facts- the orbiter is maintenance monstrosity, it eats up most of the payload of a Saturn V class launcher and that jacks up the price per pound. It also meant their was so little payload left that little things like ESCAPE SYSTEMS were sacrificed. Wings are a cargo bay in space are not exotic- they are stupid. For a commercial vehicle they are stupid anyway. For a spyplane they are exactly what you need. Thank the USAF. Unfortunately those SRB’s did not have the power to allow for a polar orbit so as a spyplane the shuttle was largely a failure. It was a failure at everything because it tried to do everything. And anyone defending the shuttle at this point is defending failure. I defend the success of the hardware but condemn the orbiter. You might want to think about it.

  • Coastal Ron

    DCSCA wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 1:33 am

    It would please this writer if it were so, however, bear in mind were nearly 50 years on now from Shepard’s Mercury flight, 40 years of flights with Soyuz and headed toward half a century since the Apollo landings; 28 years since Conestoga 1 was launched and three decades since the shuttle first flew.

    It’s one thing to look to the past for inspiration, but you look at it to find limitations. I look at it for lessons.

    As I’ve already posted above, we already have a demonstrated demand and supply for self-funded space tourists, so this is now a known fact. How large a market it is remains to be determined.

    I see you threw Conestoga 1 in there with HSF flights, and I’m not sure if you knew that they were not working on a crew category, just doing cargo. But let’s say you meant cargo, and the answer to that would be that we have lots of commercial launchers these days, and that SpaceX even has a $2.4B backlog, so the commercial cargo launch market is doing very well. No question about that.

    Back to commercial crew. As I pointed out in a previous post, other than the Soyuz, there is no way someone can buy a ticket to orbit the Earth. There is demonstrated demand for briefly going into space (Virgin Galactic), and since we know that seven civilians have already paid $20M to ride to the ISS, we also know that there is a market for space tourism.

    SpaceX having a $2.4B backlog is very important in looking at the possibilities of commercial crew, because they have built their business based on commercial cargo, both for launchers and for cargo delivery. Because they built a cargo capsule that can easily be converted to crew, they can enter the commercial crew market with a lower incremental development cost (LAS, facilities, etc.).

    Other companies need to build the company, the launcher and the vehicle, and prove that they all work. And they have to have a business model that sustains them during that development, and that provides some assurance to the potential customers that their deposits will not be in vain. Unless you have a lot of investor backing, it’s hard to build a commercial crew company that does not have any other revenue streams. This has been one of the reasons so many other companies have failed in the past.

    Bigelow is leveraging leftover NASA technology to give them a fast start, and they are sensing that the commercial launcher market is getting close to providing commercial crew services. If they had started 10 years earlier, they would not have been so optimistic, but having Boeing as an interested party (and their ULA joint-venture for launchers) can assure Bigelow that they don’t have to depend on one provider of either cargo or crew.

    All of this could not happen, for many reasons. But there is a clear path for it to happen, and that has not been there previously.

    There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
    – Robert Kennedy

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:29 pm

    >>DCSCA wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 5:06 pm
    >>“people have been venturing into space for over 50 years
    >> and the demand for commercial services on the scale you’re
    >> dreaming about have simply not materialized. The marekt just isn’t there.”

    > Yes, and there is no market for instant point-to-point teleportation
    > using free energy, because no one has ever done it before. Your logic is infallible…

    Actually yours is faulty. Playing devils advocate, or giving a investors eye view.

    Even the global demand for launches has declined. Comsats are being phased out in favor of fiber optic networks. Though vendors have offered CATS ships with dramatically lower per pound/flight costs, no interest (buyers) materialized.

    Its possible there is a potential market investors don’t take seriously but should (large scale tourism say) but that’s not obvious, nor is there evidence that its there.

    >== On May 6, 2001 Dennis Tito became the first self-funded
    > space tourist (or spaceflight participant). He paid $20M for that trip,
    > and since then seven other people have also paid a similar amount
    > to ride a Soyuz to the ISS. This tells us there is demand for
    > non-government space travel. How much is TBD.

    The disturbing part is they already have flown a repeat customer. Which would make one fear there are only that many customers to be had at those prices. Russians announced they won’t be taking tourists anymore since they got a far more lucrative $50M per ticket charter deal with NASA, for 6 astronauts per year.

    A implication is the Russians don’t see enough market at these costs to warrant supporting it – though given the deterioration in Soyuz production facilities and staffs, they might just be incapable of it.

    > Supply – The history of HSF has been governments creating and
    > running their own space programs for various reasons, but to suppor
    > t government goals. Many people have gone to space, including civilians,
    > but those civilians served a national goal, not a purely personal one. ==

    True. It’s also true the amount of flights the gov’s are even interested in supporting are plunging. 2/3rds of all people who ever got to orbit, got their in a shuttle orbiter. Over 40 a year in shuttle when the program was running well, but NASA’s plans have been to drop this to 6 to maybe 8 after shuttle. Which is a major blow to the commercial space industry, and suggests even gov interest in space is declining.

    > SpaceX is developing a capsule that can carry up to seven passengers
    > & crew, and they have stated that they plan to charge $20M/seat. This is a
    > price point that has already shown demand, so it’s reasonable to expect
    > that if a similar experience were offered (trip to & from the ISS), that
    > there would be some demand.

    Nits I suppose – but how much demand? And the ISS can’t take 7 tourusts at a time and its docking ports will likely all be used by docked Soyuz or whatever NASA and Russia choose later.

    > The future pieces that still need to be put in place are:
    > – Commercial crew services. SpaceX is the closest, but does not
    > have an announced plan to finish the missing pieces.

    They announced they’ld make the peaces for Biggelow busness, but don’t think they have anychance at getting any commercial crew busness.

    > – A Destination. I’m sure some tourist flights could go to the ISS, but
    > I can’t see them morphing into a Space Disneyland, and I think the ISS
    > partners will put a severe limit on this. ==

    Yeah, NASA had its fill of tourists ”demeaning” their station.

    ;/

    >== Bigelow seems to prefer going for the sovereign nation business as
    > opposed to the tourist destination one, so this space still needs to be developed.

    Bigelow just wants to market the stations – he’ll market the space to anyone – but apparently no tourism group has signed up. Nor does is seem like his little stations would be that big a draw as is?

    > My view is that there is demand for self-funded space tourists today,
    > but that the service is still not well defined, and that the ability to
    > get into space will probably develop first. If this is true, then SpaceX
    > will hope for government contracts to fully develop their crew capability.
    > Instead of a 100-150 year horizon that DCSCA has predicted, I think
    > it will be more like 5-10 years for the first non-Soyuz commercial space tourist flight.

    Space is a chicken and egg thing. If there was someplace for tourists to go, and a low cost safe way to go there, there might be a huge market. But no ones convinced enough to put up the money. The money is on a scale industry puts up for things – but they need evidence. [After all the bulk of the money in Wall Street is from pension funds, who are not run by risk takers!]

    On the flip side. The technology is all well in hand. So if any industry breaks, or the gov actually did something to facilitate space development on any scale, it could rapidly expend. Once real ships to orbit (CATS RLVs, not EELV or Falcon/dragon), increasing the flight rates to new customers would be trivial, and getting around and doing things in space is a lot easier then getting to space. Hence the market could explode rapidly to serve other markets. So likely now there will be little if anything happening for the next 10 years (unless Biggelow actually gets enough customers to need the 20 + flights a year he’s supposedly taken options on). It does not appear the current admin, and probably not the next, will be very interested in expanding gov space. The military wants to replace EELV with a RLV and are interested in long range suborbitals for troops – but its uncertain how far this will go, or what spin off industries it will spawn.

    But at some point low cost ships will be fielded, and a market will develop to drag things to the threshold where other industries can take off. Frontiers tend to expand explosively ones a way is found to make money there. So your looking at a couple decades, not a century. If its not well in work in 50 years – its likely not going to happen any more then ocean bottom cities.

  • Kelly Starks

    >Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 9:19 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 2:57 pm
    >>“The Russians and India are going to be selling there F-22 equiv. in the hundreds.”

    > I should be clear and not flippant.
    > I find people who make this statement, as if it is something we
    > should all be alarmed at (I note you make the claim that the F-15
    > will s hortly be outclassed) somewhat amusing.

    > It takes far more then having the vehicles or the training to
    > operate them (even at a very advanced level) to constitute a
    > military threat (even assuming that any of these countries (India?) are a possible aggressor).

    >==they are products of “doctrine” that drove their design..and that
    > doctrine came from either a lot or hard won experience and theory.

    >==that doctrine is enormously important in the execution of the weapon
    > system…and without it the airplanes (or whatever) are pretty useless. ==

    Your confidence in the inferiority of all non US air Forces reminds me of US confidence before WW-II that Japanese were all nearsighted and couldn’t possibly fly, much les develop top rate fighters and pilots.

    Nations have done so in the past. Lately we have won dramatically because we had aircraft far better then theirs, and pilots far better trained then theirs. Now US policy is to not build competitive aircraft and keep with out ‘70’s and ‘80’s era craft, while they buy more modern ones. And also there’s been a steady decline in training – especially under Gates who doesn’t need pilots this year, and hate the military generals make any preparations for future conflicts.

    So China makes a game of its subs sliding unseen through our anti sub perimeters even in war games where we’d be most alert and popping up well within firing range of the carriers. They talk about nuking LA, and are constructing their own carrier task forces, and openly state they intend to be the dominant military in the western pacific. And of course were showing a lot of weakness, and our global status and respect is in decline.

    Confidence breeds failure.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 9:24 pm
    >>>== Only countries with strong economies can afford expensive
    >>> military hardware, and they are increasingly less likely to upset
    >>> their economic systems by going to war with the U.S. or our allies.

    >> Then why are they increasingly aggressive toward us?”

    > “They” who?==

    China, Russia, Iran, North Koreas just nuts but they are in a whole dif world.

    China and Iran have bee demonstrating significant anti US carrier capabilities. Making a point of demoing them. Russias obviously been getting very militant.

    As for other smaller countries – Dozens lineup for all the hot new fighters (check with your favsource Wikipedia for who bought F-16s, Mirages, etc.) Even Pakistan and Somalia. And give Russia and India are talking about selling several hundred of the new Sulhoi (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_PAK_FA ) Might want to check other new fighters and see who they are selling to.

    Other previous buyers of interst of up model Sikhoi’s are Venezuela, South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, Malaysia.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 10:23 pm

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 pm
    >> “Worse for your argument is reusable’s like shuttle have proven
    >> cheaper to develop and operate – and can be made far cheaper
    >> if your doing them commercially (I.E. your not porking out the
    >> costs to appeal to congress and voters.).”

    > We already know that you tend to ignore that the Shuttle program consumed
    > at least $2.4B per year (and $B’s to develop==

    No I don’t. The full shuttle dev cost in curentyear dollars was $37B, the Orbiter alone was $17B. Compare that to Apollo and Orions Capsule and service modules $19B and $20+B costs. Ares-1 alone was projected at $30B

    I.E. the reusable huge orbiter was cheaper to develop then the expendables. The semi reusable STS program under NASA averaged about $1.3B per shuttle flight to operate, Constellation was looking to cost over $7B per launch =8O and commercial crew/life boat program is looking like $1B to $3B.

    >==Is there a company that would gladly take over the Shuttle and it’s operations?==

    There were offers years ago. NASA was not interested, and they have title to the ships and facilities.

    Though this is way off topic.

    >==
    >> “Cost savings of at least a factor of 10 are often contractually
    >> guaranteed in vendor offers.”
    > “a factor of 10″ – another factory floor rule of thumb?

    No that was the grantee McDonnel Douglas and L/M were offering NASA or others when they offered DC-X and VentureStar.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 11:03 pm

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 pm
    >> “Folks arguing that that having a big orbiter is more expensiv
    >> because its so “complex”. What wings and a cargo bay are exotic technology?”

    > Ever see the Shuttle orbiter assembly, or the rollout? Or watch the
    > parade of vehicles that it takes to make the Shuttle safe from toxic
    > chemicals, and then move the vehicle back for processing? ===

    Yup – compared to Apollo and Orions Aircraft carrier recovery operation, its quite cheep and simple.

    The capsules have all the same systems in the orbiters (life support, nav, maneuvering, power, etc etc), they just cost more to develop and operate. And of course the orbiter has much more systems and capabilities, and was still cheaper to develop and operate.

    >== how many people are involved with the various emergency
    > landing sites around the world? ==

    And expendable capsules don’t have emergencies? Soyuz wound up droping way off course a couple times in the last few years.

    > It’s hard to add up all the people it takes to keep the program
    > going, but they are a significant amount of the $200M/month burn rate.

    Again, and I’ll type slowly for you. The reusable shuttles been cheaper. The $200M is not a artifact of the shuttles reusability, but of NASA porking out the programs. Other programs with ELVs, like commercial crew, quickly get their layer of unnecessary pork costs, and bureaucratic ineptness.

    >== Capsules may be very simple,==

    Really? What expensive to design, build and operate system is on Shutle that wasn’t in Orion? Or what needs to be in a general commercial RLV that wouldn’t need to be in a ELV capsule? Or what needs to be in a RLV winged commercial spaceplane like the shuttle that wouldn’t need to be in a commercial capsule?

    Capsule have a simple shape, but they are very complicated – all the complexity a similar winged spaceplane would need – but all that stuff gets crammed into a little pod. That miniaturizing costs more. [So does expandability it seems.] Putting the capsule and service module on their sides and adding wings (or putting a cargo bay between them) doesn’t make them more complicated. Making them bigger makes things easier and a bit less complicated.

    > == SpaceX is offering $20M/seat for up to seven people per
    > flight, and Soyuz does $56M/seat for up to three.

    Yes but that isn’t the question. If spaceX got commercial crew the program cost to NASA would be in the billion(s) per flight. SpaceX charges are lost in that.

    Also note my statement was a orbiter doesn’t become a lot more complicated, and hasn’t proven more expensive then a similar capsule system. Comparing NASA orbiter to SpaceX capsule is hardly comparable, because that brings in NASA/gov cost inefficiencies vrs and small commercial firm.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 12:11 am

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:11 pm
    >> “Folks arguing that that having a big orbiter is more expensive
    >> because its so “complex”. What wings and a cargo bay are exotic technology?”..

    > Other then the mass of wings etc for the lift…(and that
    > affects the dynamics of lift) the big issue is “flying” back to earth. ==
    >== this is several magnitudes more difficult to do then a ballistic or “lifting ballistic” capsule

    Its not that much more difficult (either involves balancing lift/drag over reentry thermal profiles, etc.

    One big plus for the orbiter is being winged its bigger underside gives it more lift allowing it to do a longer cooler reentry, and spreading the heat across the bigger underside.

    But back to my point. Folks argue orbiter like craft are more expensive to design and build then capsules (which has not proven true), saying this is because they are more complicated. I don’t see the winged reentry flight as that much more complicated or costly, and the “they are more complex” part seems to point to the craft. So what’s in a winged orbiter – or reusable – that folks think should make it more expensive?

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 11:03 am

    > Not going to be an FY11 budget? Tell that to the White
    > House who released the budget in back in February.

    They released a budget PROPOSAL to congress. Congress didn’t approve it, and has said no budget will be approved this year.

  • Kelly Starks

    “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
    – Robert Kennedy

    Ironically, Kennedy saw no value in space. He was ADMENT that the only point was to beat the Russians, andsaw no reason to maintain space capabilities past that.

    ;/

  • Gary Church

    “So China makes a game of its subs sliding unseen through our anti sub perimeters even in war games where we’d be most alert and popping up well within firing range of the carriers. They talk about nuking LA, and are constructing their own carrier task forces, and openly state they intend to be the dominant military in the western pacific. And of course were showing a lot of weakness, and our global status and respect is in decline.

    Confidence breeds failure.”

    You scare me Kelly. Right out of Dr. Strangelove.

  • So what’s in a winged orbiter – or reusable – that folks think should make it more expensive?

    TPS maintenance on the orbiter is extremely expensive and labor intensive, because each tile is custom made and fitted. A capsule has much more symmetry, and could have standardized tiles. SpaceX expects the PICA system on the Dragon to be very fast turnaround.

  • Gary Church

    “So what’s in a winged orbiter – or reusable – that folks think should make it more expensive?”

    Have you watched soyuz land? There is nothing more simple, functional, and economical. Nothing even close. One parachute and a couple solid rockets that light off for a second. It can bring it’s crew through reentry completely dumb with no control whatsoever. Brutal in dumb mode, but survivable. They landed one in a frozen lake and it took them hours to be rescued. They survived. There was a pad fire- the escape tower worked- they lived while the lauch vehicle exploded.

    Why do you keep arguing this Kelly?

  • Doug Lassiter

    “They released a budget PROPOSAL to congress. Congress didn’t approve it, and has said no budget will be approved this year.”

    Of course it was a proposal. Congress will iterate on it and turn it into legislation. If you want to call that final legislation a “budget”, instead of the budget proposal, then you may do so, but that’s just semantics. There will be final legislation funding the agency, and if you want to call that the “budget”, then that’s when it will happen.

    The Commerce, Justice, and Science subcommittee never said that no NASA budget would be approved this year. Their markup approved a mark of $19B to the agency (passing that mark on to the full committee), but said that expenditures on the human space flight component of it would have to wait on Authorization legislation that would specify the direction that federal funding for human spaceflight should take.

  • Gary Church

    “SpaceX expects the PICA system on the Dragon to be very fast turnaround.”

    I cannot argue with that, phenolic impregnated carbon ablator (Pica), on a capsule is the best way to go.

    The last I heard about the escape system was a “hypergolic pusher” with propellent tanks built into the capsule and also used for deorbit burns.
    That does not sound so good. A tower is much better and can be recovered at sea and reused- I do not see why they are not going that way. It might bite them.

  • Gary Church

    “SpaceX developed the ability to manufacture PICA-X with the assistance of NASA, The tests were conducted at the Arc Jet Complex at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, which has a rich history in the development of Thermal Protective Systems for NASA spacecraft, including Apollo, Space Shuttle, and robotic missions to Venus, Mars, and Saturn. The NASA Ames Arc Jet Complex is uniquely capable of simulating conditions experienced during reentry.

    In January 2006, NASA’s Stardust sample return capsule, equipped with a PICA heat shield, set the record for the fastest reentry speed of a spacecraft into Earth’s atmosphere – experiencing 12.9 kilometers per second (28,900 miles per hour). SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft will return at just over half of that speed, and will experience only one tenth as much heating.”

    Nice to have NASA labs testing all your equipment- a sweet deal. Get to use taxpayer funded technology, get it tested in taxpayer funded labs with taxpayer paid scientists and engineers, and then you get to charge the taxpayer for using it to transport astronauts. Real entrepreneurship.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Stark said a lot of things:

    Though vendors have offered CATS ships with dramatically lower per pound/flight costs, no interest (buyers) materialized.

    What’s a CATS ship?

    Nits I suppose – but how much demand? And the ISS can’t take 7 tourusts at a time and its docking ports will likely all be used by docked Soyuz or whatever NASA and Russia choose later.

    The ISS has taken full Shuttle’s of crew/passengers before, and they always keep a port open for supply deliveries.

    Biggelow” It’s Bigelow. Seriously, you are just about unreadable with all these typo’s. Proper names are one thing, but Isn’t your browser alerting you to some of these?

    Other previous buyers of interst of up model Sikhoi’s are Venezuela, South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, Malaysia.

    Some of them also buy U.S. military hardware, so does that make them an enemy of the Russians & Indians? Unless they can expand out past their borders, they are not a threat to us.

    I know Robert G. Oler tried explaining this to you, but apparently military doctrine is not one of your strengths either. Let me explain it this way:

    Small countries – They have airplanes, and they buy the best training they can afford. They may even attend a few military war games, and practice against each other. In the end, they rely on the pilot in the cockpit and some assistance on the ground to direct them.

    The U.S. Military – We’re not just an air force, but a coordinated land, sea, air & space force, and we employ a doctrine knows as “overwhelming force”. Another country may get in the first punch, but we have the ability to counter-punch and destroy a country’s entire military infrastructure. There is no equivalent in the world today. Countries buying sophisticated airplanes are planning to use them for local or regional influence, not to fight us.

    The full shuttle dev cost in curentyear dollars was $37B, and The capsules have all the same systems in the orbiters (life support, nav, maneuvering, power, etc etc), they just cost more to develop and operate. , and finally this gemCapsule have a simple shape, but they are very complicated – all the complexity a similar winged spaceplane would need – but all that stuff gets crammed into a little pod. That miniaturizing costs more. [So does expandability it seems.] Putting the capsule and service module on their sides and adding wings (or putting a cargo bay between them) doesn’t make them more complicated. Making them bigger makes things easier and a bit less complicated.

    OK, it’s also clear you are not an aerospace engineer, because you have no idea what it takes to build an aircraft, much less a spacecraft.

    I’m not going to waste time pointing out everything that is wrong in your statements. All I will point out is that using your figure of $37B for developing the Shuttle, that SpaceX spent far less than $500M for their Dragon capsule, with less than $1B to add crew capability. Then they plan to offer $20M/seat to LEO, which is far below anything the Shuttle can offer. Simple capsule, simple math, easy to see the difference.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 1:17 pm

    Ironically, Kennedy saw no value in space. He was ADMENT that the only point was to beat the Russians, andsaw no reason to maintain space capabilities past that.

    What is “ADMENT”?

    The quote was clearly labeled as coming from Robert Kennedy. Why would the U.S. Attorney General under President John F. Kennedy have a stated position on space?

    Do you spend a lot of time making up this stuff?

  • Coastal Ron

    Gary Church wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 2:13 am

    Yes, Capsules are better- spaceplanes are a failed concept. But 7 in that dragon? I have seen the layout and sitting for a couple days with my head buried in someone’s fanny chasing down the ISS is not my idea of fun.

    The Dragon is capable of carrying seven, but as you point out, for long duration it’s a bit tight.

    I think the seven-person configuration would be for LEO delivery to the ISS or other orbiting stations, so most likely the duration would be less than 48 hours (or whatever Soyuz is currently doing). Dietary prep is going to be very important before a launch… ;-)

  • Gary Church

    From a NASA soyuz web page:

    “Once the Soyuz reaches orbit, it spends two days chasing the Station. The crew performs systems checks and keeps in touch with controllers at the Russian Mission Control Center during that time.

    Before the final rendezvous phase, the crewmembers put on pressurized suits and then monitor the automated docking sequence.”

    Dragon could use a “wet workshop/MOL” system for those two days. With a hatch in the heat shield leading though a tunnel to the empty second stage the 7 would have a nice big compartment to float around in during the chase. There are two problems with that idea;

    1. SpaceX wants to recover the second stage using pica technology.
    2. Kerosene contaminates empty stages making them unsuitable for wet workshop equipment installations.

    But the second stage engine can be recovered like the proposed engine recovery module for Sidemount. The tank will probably not be reusable anyway after hitting the water. If the tank is used it will not be a workshop, so an inflatable “tent” can be used in the Kerosene area to prevent Kerosene contamination.

    Just make sure Musk sends me a check for this idea, OK Ron?

  • Gary Church

    “Putting the capsule and service module on their sides and adding wings (or putting a cargo bay between them) doesn’t make them more complicated. Making them bigger makes things easier and a bit less complicated.”

    Kelly that is pretty close to ridiculous. I am not even going to bother glancing at your posts if you keep writing stuff like this.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 1:07 pm

    I always find it entertaining when a few facts are used by people to justify very broad sweeps of assumptions. Kind of like Bush with his WMD.

    So for instance you see a “cut in training” and roll to a really uninformed assertion. Well no.

    The “cuts in training” are doable because what is replacing them are actual combat. Training dollars use to be (pre Mr. Bush) used to ensure that aviators stayed “combat ready”. When EACH VF or VA NA is averaging every year 250 hours in theater combat…there is no need for the flight ops training budget that existed before.

    Then there is the “wow the Chinese are sneaking subs in”. Not so much. There are operational reasons that one would let aggressor units from countries we are not at war with to penetrate screens particularly of ships that are not on “war status”. In addition the boats in question have been sailing with either no or minimal escort…in particular friendly subs. The “boats” sail at different threat levels ie when I knew her the USS Lexington (AVT 16) had almost no escort capable of combat. When carriers are doing “work up” of their airgroup (which Kitty Hawk was doing) there is little combat escort.

    we are at peace with China and the folks who have Navies.

    The rest of your military examples falter. It would take about oh 30 minutes to sweep the Yugo airforce from the skies.

    As for the Japanese pre WW2 and today.

    Most of the “buck teeth/myopic” statements were propaganda for the press. It is Dick Cheney and “dead enders”.

    The Japanese had their own about us “Americans are soft/wont fight etc”. The pre war skirmishes dispelled those for any of the military folks that still held them quite quickly. Pre war the Japanese attack on the USS Paney was widely read and understood for what they meant (Oddly enough if you read as I have Imperial Japanese Navy reports, they dispelled some for the IJN as well).

    It was/is also an illusion for the public of that era that the “Japs were going to be a roll over”. The professional military is full of comments both inside and out (evaluations of the Fleet Problems for instance) that pointed out the likely problems with engaging the Japanese Navy and the fixes for it. The fixes were all sound it is just there was no money to put them into affect pre the 1940 buildup. Indeed the 1940 buildup was based on most of those “FleetEvals”.

    What did not exist at the time, but does now is modern “national verification means”. However, the USN had a good idea of what it would face with the Japanese Navy again there was just no money to fix things pre 1940 and then there was no time.

    To compare then with now is ridiculous.

    Robert G. Oler

  • DCSCA

    @Kelly “Space is a chicken and egg thing.” Ha! This writer sees space more as the ‘frying pan’ to the chicken and egg– which can end up being very unforgiving to both. ;-)

  • DCSCA

    Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 2nd, 2010 at 8:18 am <– Uh, this writer lived in the El Segundo/Redondo/Marina Del Rey area for 14 years. It's an anecdote based in reality– and frankly, it was a little sad to see, especially if you support the efforts of the aerospace industry.

  • DCSCA

    @CoastalRon- “Yes, and the U.S. government could not sustain it either, so that goes to show that a different model is needed.” Of course the government can sustain it– if it stops appropriating $80 billion supplementals for war like it did July 2. Good grief.

  • DCSCA

    @Kelly/@Church- “You scare me Kelly. Right out of Dr. Strangelove.”

    You want Dr. Strangelove? Here’s a thought along those lines- consider China ‘advising’ the American government in some quiet, hush-hush talks, that among other numerous ‘conditions’ on continuing to lend the U.S. government money to finance its deficit-riddled operations and policies worldwide, it ‘suggests’ it abandons its ‘return to the moon’ program. ‘Confucius say man on top of hill not on level.’ ;-)

  • DCSCA

    @CoastalRon “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
    – Robert Kennedy”

    Now you’re trying to use the emotion of the ‘Cernan intangibles’ to peddle commercial space to investors. Intersting. You quote RFK to a room full of cold hearted investors and you’ll leave the conference room empty handed. You might make your point if you noted that RFK ‘appropriated’ that line from George Bernard Shaw and exploited it — just as you wish to do with commercial space. You’re advocating a business enterprise to return a profit for investors — not some grand vision of interstellat conquest.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Rand Simberg wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 1:32 pm

    >> So what’s in a winged orbiter – or reusable – that
    >> folks think should make it more expensive?

    > TPS maintenance on the orbiter is extremely expensive and labor
    > intensive, because each tile is custom made and fitted. =

    Its about $6M a flight to check all the tiles on a Orbiter, that’s about 10% of the GAO margin cost per flight and about 1/2000th total cost per flight; but its NASA dumb choice, not a intrinsic problem with a winged orbiter.

    One advantage of the winged orbiter is reentry skin temps are lower, so you your TPS has a easier job. .

    >== A capsule has much more symmetry, and could have standardized tiles. =

    The shapes not a biggy. They can cut out new tiles from a block easy enough. Frankly bolt on metal skin tiles, or just TPS panels like Ultramets composite TPS hull skins, would be a better design in general. Lighter and tougher.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 1:37 pm

    >> “They released a budget PROPOSAL to congress. Congress
    >> didn’t approve it, and has said no budget will be approved this year.”

    > Of course it was a proposal. Congress will iterate on it and turn it into legislation. ==

    Not this year. It did not get the support, and congress is out of time.

    Actually I think congress said they won’t due a federal budget this year either.

    Really its not policy so much as they are just out of time. They go for 2 months of summer vacation/campaigning in a couple weeks, then come back in the fall for 2 months of campaign and some work, before the elections. Next year the new congress starts over. [they really don’t like starting before the new congress since the new guys just restart anyway.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 2:22 pm

    > Kelly Stark said a lot of things:
    >> “Though vendors have offered CATS ships with dramatically
    >>lower per pound/flight costs, no interest (buyers) materialized.”

    > What’s a CATS ship?

    Cheap Access To Space

    Also Cheap Reliable Access To Space is used.

    >> “Nits I suppose – but how much demand? And the ISS
    >> can’t take 7 tourusts at a time and its docking ports
    >> will likely all be used by docked Soyuz or whatever NASA and Russia choose later.”

    > The ISS has taken full Shuttle’s of crew/passengers before,
    > and they always keep a port open for supply deliveries.

    Suppose iy depends on how long they stay..

    > Countries buying sophisticated airplanes are planning to
    >use them for local or regional influence, not to fight us.

    Ah ha. I salute your telepathy.

    >> “The full shuttle dev cost in curent year dollars was $37B, and
    >>The capsules have all the same systems in the orbiters (life support,
    >> nav, maneuvering, power, etc etc), they just cost more to develop
    >> and operate. , and finally this gem “Capsule have a simple shape,
    >> but they are very complicated – all the complexity a similar winged
    >> spaceplane would need – but all that stuff gets crammed into a little
    >> pod. That miniaturizing costs more. [So does expandability it seems.]
    >>Putting the capsule and service module on their sides and adding
    >> wings (or putting a cargo bay between them) doesn’t make them more
    >> complicated. Making them bigger makes things easier and a bit less complicated.”

    >OK, it’s also clear you are not an aerospace engineer, because you
    >have no idea what it takes to build an aircraft, much less a spacecraft.

    Sr systems engineer, and given I wrote the requirement specs for Parts of Orion, and worked on 7877 Comanche, parts of A400, etc – I think your wrong.

    >== using your figure of $37B for developing the Shuttle, that SpaceX
    > spent far less than $500M for their Dragon capsule, with less than $1B to add crew capability. =

    Actually SpaceX expects to spend less then $1B on Dragon, Falcon, etc all combined.

    Of course that isn’t related to the question of RLV’s being cheaper then ELVs to develop (you do know Dragons reusable?).

  • Kelly Starks

    > quote was clearly labeled as coming from Robert Kennedy..

    Ops, missed that.

  • Kelly Starks

    >Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 4:58 pm
    >?> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 1:07 pm

    > == The “cuts in training” are doable because what is
    > replacing them are actual combat. ==

    The AirForce doing a lot of Air to Air in Iraq or Aphgan?

    >== Then there is the “wow the Chinese are sneaking subs in”.
    > Not so much. There are operational reasons that one would let
    > aggressor units from countries we are not at war with to penetrate
    > screens particularly of ships that are not on “war status”. In addition
    > the boats in question have been sailing with either no or minimal
    > escort…in particular friendly subs.==

    In war games they don’t bother with defensive escorts?

    >== we are at peace with China and the folks who have Navies.

    Were at peace with everyone until were at war. You need to prep (and train) assuming you’ll be at war with most all credible threats.

  • Kelly Starks

    > DCSCA wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 5:03 pm

    >> @Kelly “Space is a chicken and egg thing.”

    > Ha! This writer sees space more as the ‘frying pan’ to the chicken
    > and egg–

    Perhaps you are sitting to close to the heat shield?

    ;)

    > DCSCA wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 5:25 pm

    > You want Dr. Strangelove? Here’s a thought along those lines-
    > consider China ‘advising’ the American government in some
    > quiet, hush-hush talks, that among other numerous ‘conditions’
    > on continuing to lend the U.S. government money to finance its
    > deficit-riddled operations and policies worldwide, it ‘suggests’
    > it abandons its ‘return to the moon’ program.
    >‘Confucius say man on top of hill not on level.’

    Yeah they also “requested” we not protest their cyber attacks, and we alter our position on a few international issues.

    When you sell your soul, expect someone to come to collect.

  • common sense

    @ Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:27 pm

    “The AirForce doing a lot of Air to Air in Iraq or Aphgan?”

    Ever heard of interdiction? Close Air Support?

    Air to Air??? Oh well…

  • Doug Lassiter

    DCSCA wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 5:09 pm

    “Uh, this writer lived in the El Segundo/Redondo/Marina Del Rey area for 14 years. It’s an anecdote based in reality– and frankly, it was a little sad to see, especially if you support the efforts of the aerospace industry.”

    I wasn’t questioning the anecdote. I was questioning the usefulness of that anecdote in making a national assessment of the aerospace workforce. I’m sure there are other anecdotes from other places about the expansion of the local aerospace workforce.

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:25 pm

    “Not this year. It did not get the support, and congress is out of time.”

    No budget for FY11? Um, no. Maybe you’re saying that the FY11 budget won’t be finalized in 2010, which is almost certainly going to be the case, with CRs followed by omnibus legislation. But FY11 appropriations will happen. But there is actually a lot of incentive on Congress to have it happen before the next Congress moves in.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:27 pm

    “The AirForce doing a lot of Air to Air in Iraq or Aphgan?”

    lol you probably think that all air to air is still “dogfighting”. Actually the charm of American weapons and technology is mostly killing people before they know that they are dead. That way one can kill many and be home for supper. It is called ‘weapons delivery”

    but this is the one I get a hoot out of

    “In war games they don’t bother with defensive escorts?”

    you dont play poker do you?

    The Reds have Russian hardware but what is unknown (or was until recently) is do they have Russian doctrine or are they freelancing on their own. When you dont know how someone plays the game, the trick is to give them a setup where they cannot resist playing.

    And then you get to learn. My across the street neighbor use to fly B-52’s…they would run right up to Ivan’s airspace to see how Ivan would act and while they were doing that others were watching what they did.

    So in theory if you wanted to see how a Chinese sub would try and engage a flattop battle group…well would you try and stop it or would you do what my cats do…play with the mice? Part of the fun of playing with the mice is that they dont know that they are being played with.

    now figure it out.

    As for the Reds acquiring flattops…wow the USN would love that. Ever since the IJNS was swept from the seas…well another carrier navy would be great for appropriations.

    Do you work for NASA? Either you are playing with the mice (thats OK I do it some) or you are into really one dimensional thought which is a hallmark of MOD and other groups inside the agency.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Coastal Ron

    DCSCA wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 5:36 pm

    Now you’re trying to use the emotion of the ‘Cernan intangibles’ to peddle commercial space to investors. Intersting. You quote RFK to a room full of cold hearted investors and you’ll leave the conference room empty handed.

    I can tell that you, DCSCA, are not an investor. The people that invest in startups are different than those that invest their retirement funds in established companies. Startups have a great deal of emotion with them, divided between the startup team and the product itself.

    Getting back to your favorite commercial example, Elon Musk has been part of great teams that created great value for their investors. He’s a serial entrepreneur, and good at it. One could argue that he has over extended himself with three different startups in three different marketspaces, but investors believed in both the man and the ideas to invest with him in those new ventures. I have no doubt that a SpaceX IPO would do as good as his Tesla one, especially since SpaceX is both profitable and has a large backlog of commercial and government orders.

    If you want a safe amount of ROI, then invest in a money market fund, and you’ll get boring but predictable returns.

    But there are quite a few people out there that are willing to bet on a startup run by a serial entrepreneur (with his own money in the venture), that is doing something that they believe in (lowering the cost to access space). And even some investors that are willing to bet on someone with an exciting vision. It’s probably better than buying a lottery ticket, and without startups, we wouldn’t be using and discussing all this great tech stuff.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:51 pm

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:25 pm
    >>“Not this year. It did not get the support, and congress is out of time.”

    > No budget for FY11? Um, no. Maybe you’re saying that
    > the FY11 budget won’t be finalized in 2010

    No I mean Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said june 22 that Congress won’t do a budget this year. [I would have thought it would get more airplay on the news?]

    Google Congress won’t do a budget this year if you want some articles.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 7:34 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:27 pm

    >> “In war games they don’t bother with defensive escorts?”

    > you dont play poker do you?

    When your having a war game with Australia – especially given they (and Canada) sunk your carrier in previous war games – you might want to not think bluffing will work.

    Having the Chinese walk through your defensive net right up to the carrier is stupid tactically and politically.

    >==
    > Do you work for NASA?==

    You mean civil servent? No. Course NASA doesn’t build or design their ships – so why would you think I did?

    Worked at NASA centers and HQ over a 15 years period, which looks good on the resume. First 7 was at MOD actually.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:26 pm

    >OK, it’s also clear you are not an aerospace engineer, because you have no idea what it takes to build an aircraft, much less a spacecraft.

    Sr systems engineer, and given I wrote the requirement specs for Parts of Orion, and worked on 7877 Comanche, parts of A400, etc – I think your wrong.

    What is “Parts of Orion”? You capitalized “Parts”, so it must be important.

    What is the “7877 Comanche?

    When you say the “A400″, do you mean the A400M?

    The problem is that you say the weirdest stuff, have horrible spelling, and don’t appear to do any research before you write.

    For instance, you wrote:
    Of course that isn’t related to the question of RLV’s being cheaper then ELVs to develop (you do know Dragons reusable?).

    Is “ELVs” supposed to be “EELV’s”? And then you asked if Dragon is reusable, which you’ve been arguing is a worse alternative than the Shuttle. Shouldn’t you know this already if you’re making comparisons between Dragon and the Shuttle?

    Using the magic of the Internet, I put “Dragon” and “reusable” into Google and found the answer to your question. Why can’t you do the same? Why do you force others to keep correcting you?

    Maybe you are a “Sr systems engineer”, but you sure don’t write or spell like one.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 8:26 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 6:26 pm

    >>>OK, it’s also clear you are not an aerospace engineer, because
    >>> you have no idea what it takes to build an aircraft, much less a spacecraft.

    >> Sr systems engineer, and given I wrote the requirement specs
    >> for Parts of Orion, and worked on 7877 Comanche, parts of
    >> A400, etc – I think your wrong.”

    > What is “Parts of Orion”? ==

    Sections of thermal control thermal control, Life support, water.

    > What is the “7877 Comanche?

    Boeing 787 and the Comanche attack helecopter program.

    > When you say the “A400″, do you mean the A400M?

    Yeah, I was helping set up the systems engineering depart for the company who got the contract for the cockpit and avionice.

    > The problem is that you say the weirdest stuff, have horrible
    > spelling, and don’t appear to do any research before you write.

    You point?

    >For instance, you wrote:
    >> “Of course that isn’t related to the question of RLV’s being
    >> cheaper then ELVs to develop (you do know Dragons reusable?).”

    > Is “ELVs” supposed to be “EELV’s”?

    No Expendable Launch Vehicle. EELV stands Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle.

    > And then you asked if Dragon is reusable, which you’ve been arguing
    > is a worse alternative than the Shuttle.==

    No I said Dragon is reusable. I also mentioned that RLV (reusable Launch vehicles) or reusables in general, generally cost less then expendables, and wings orbiter style craft, aren’t more costly and more complex then capsule and service module styles. Specifically I mentioned how both Apollo and Constellations Capsules and service modules were 10%-20% more expensive then the shuttle orbiter.

  • DCSCA

    @Coastal Ron wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 7:53 pm =sigh= “If you build it, he will come” works swell in fantasy baseball movies. It is, however, not a sound pitch to attract multi-billion dollar investments for private space ventures. But you keep on trying… just keep Conestoga 1 in the back of your mind.

  • Doug Lassiter

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 8:24 pm

    “No I mean Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said june 22 that Congress won’t do a budget this year. ”

    Right. The FY11 budget will likely not get finalized until early 2011. Everyone knows that. But when it does, it’s still the FY11 budget. We were talking about what was going to be IN the FY11 budget as passed by Congress, and somehow you turned the conversation around to the fact that these appropriations would not be approved until after December 31. That’s completely irrelevant.

    The point is the the President’s budget (proposal) calls for a large and increasing investment for focused technology development that involves proof-of-concept using real missions. For FY11, the investment would be modest, because the proposal calls for a large amount of termination costs. But in the runout, which is formally part of the FY11 budget proposal, and reflects administration intent, that amount rises to several $B.

    You said about the technology development efforts “The new programs aren’t big engineering projects. Nor are the contracts for engineering on anything like the scale of what’s being shut down.” That’s incorrect. Period. The expenditures would easily be on the scale of Constellation or Shuttle.

    Now, this all assumes that this investment strategy makes it through Congress, involving Constellation and Shuttle termination. We don’t need to add to the arguments about whether or not that would happen. I’m talking about administration intent. That’s the plan, until Congress says it isn’t.

  • Coastal Ron

    DCSCA wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 9:02 pm

    “If you build it, he will come” works swell in fantasy baseball movies. It is, however, not a sound pitch to attract multi-billion dollar investments for private space ventures. But you keep on trying… just keep Conestoga 1 in the back of your mind.

    The investors did come, they did build it, and they got customers – $2.4B in orders, so your assertion for SpaceX has proved wrong.

    In Silicon Valley the frequent view is that it’s better to invest in great teams with mediocre ideas, instead of mediocre teams with great ideas. With Elon, I think his investors saw the great team, and believed in his vision. So far he has executed their business plan very well – compelling products, compelling prices, and creating market disruption. Elon has done this before with his startups, and the Wikipedia definition of disruption is:

    Disruptive innovation is a term used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by lowering price or designing for a different set of consumers.

    That perfectly defines the Falcon 9, Dragon, and their prices.

  • vulture4

    Coastal Ron said: “People laugh at the idea of using a capsule like Dragon, and in comparison to the Shuttle is does seem counter-intuitive, but the lesson from the Shuttle was that it was a very expensive way to transport humans to & from space.”

    The real lesson of Apollo was made clear by Nixon when he cancelled the program in 1974. It was that capsules and ELVs are much too expensive to be practical for human spaceflight. Even SpaceX, which is by far the most efficient US ELV operator, cannot launch a person into LEO for less than $20 million. At this price the total market demand is one or two seats per year. Human spaceflight with ELVs is no more practical than air travel would be if we needed to build a new airliner for every flight.

    That was why we built the Shuttle. The only thing a reusable spacecraft absolutely has to have to fly is fuel, and even for the Shuttle the cost of fuel is trivail. LOX is 60 cents a gallon at LC-39. It’s cheaper than gasoline.

    The Shuttle is expensive to fly, not because it is reusable or because it has wings, but because it was our very first attempt at a reusable spacecraft, and it was built without prototypes that could test its new technologies in actual repeated spaceflight. Consequently design decisions were made that proved costly in many ways. Many improvements have been made over the years, but most of the high-cost processing cannot be changed without a completely new design. But abandoning reusable vehicles now is like flying only the Wright “A” flyer until 1930 and then concluding that heavier-than-air flight is impractical and going back to balloons!

    Just 10 years ago NASA understood this, and was building a new series of unmanned X-planes that could test new technologies for reusable launch vehicles in actual repeated flight, but all were canceled between 2000 and 2004, except for the X-37 which was salvaged by the Defense Department. The DOD is planning a new flyback booster stage to use with an X-37 derivative. Both stages will return to the launch site for runway landings. The X-37 is unmanned, and carries almost no cargo. Its goal is to test new technologies for reusable spaceflight, not to serve as a landing craft for space marines.

    As a former industrial engineer I have walked, climbed, and crawled into every part of the Shuttle and Delta processing facilities I could for over 20 years. If we, as the space advocate community, are going to provide useful ideas for the future, we can’t make the superficial decisions of both the current and previous administrations. The solution to human spaceflight is not simplistic, but neither is it “rocket science”. We need to consider what costs so much, in engineering, construction, and maintenance, in reusables and expendables, in spaceplanes and capsules.

    The cost of human spaceflight must be reduced to at most $2 million per seat to LEO before there will be anything more than a handful of government astronauts and billionaires in space. This will require fully reusable launch vehicles and spacecraft. New technologies must be developed and tested.
    Experimental vehicles. unmanned but reusable, must be built by contractors but paid for by taxpayers, since no private company can afford the risk. Supporting the development of technology, not re-enacting Apollo, is the proper role of NASA.

  • Coastal Ron

    vulture4 wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 10:20 pm

    I agree with your general direction and conclusions, but I disagree with some of your statements about the Shuttle.

    There is no way a vehicle as large as the Shuttle could ever be a cost-effective crew carrier – unless you filled up the cargo hold with passengers. As a pure crew carrier, the Shuttle was overkill. You had to also fill it up with cargo to make the trip worthwhile from a cost standpoint.

    The Shuttle was meant to be a do-everything vehicle, which is OK if you don’t have any other alternatives, but not OK if you’re looking at doing things for the least practical cost.

    But we are where we are, and we don’t have any of the vehicles from the X-program. We could do some sort of crash program to develop a winged orbiter for just crew, and that is part of what the CCDev program is doing with SpaceDev’s Dream Chaser. Unless the U.S. Government really feels that landing on a runway is mandatory, we are going to be landing capsules in water for a while.

    But I don’t see that as a long term problem. If anything, that gives the commercial space industry a chance to see what the actual market demand really is. How many crew does the ISS need every year, or what is the market for commercial crew? Maybe the Dream Chaser will turn out to be the best size for the market. But it still has a lot of development to go through, and then there is that little problem of putting a winged vehicle on top of a long, tall rocket – lots of testing needed to make sure things don’t break.

    For the Air Force, their winged boosters are a long ways off too, and they don’t even know for sure what they will look like. Reusability is a goal, but in the current market, it’s not mandatory.

    Even SpaceX has reusability high on their list of things to do with the Falcon 9, but it’s not going to stop them from launching Falcon 9’s. Each launch will keep improving their recovery techniques, and they will eventually achieve a point where reusability is either worthwhile, or they have to try a different launcher design to achieve it.

    I completely agree with your closing statement:

    Supporting the development of technology, not re-enacting Apollo, is the proper role of NASA.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 8:25 pm

    I dont think anyone is worried aboutthe Chinese subs, we learned a great deal from that effort…as we do all the time.

    Robert G. Oler

  • DCSCA

    @CoastalRon- Tesla motors has yet to turn a profit; it has sold roughly 1500 uinits in seven years… and there is an unquestionable market just waiting to be properly exploited for a product to replace conventional vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine. Ford was successful in making and marketing a product that was affordable to the many. Musk has not, to date. This should be a cautionary consideration for any investor in a Musk helmed commercial venture, given the largess of capital his ventures demand.

  • Kelly Starks

    >Doug Lassiter wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 9:35 pm

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 8:24 pm
    >>“No I mean Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said june 22
    >> that Congress won’t do a budget this year. ”

    > Right. The FY11 budget will likely not get finalized until
    > early 2011. Everyone knows that. ==

    Actually that is doubtful. Given a new congress, your stating with a new set of folks, so you’ld need to start the budget process over pretty much from scratch – so really you couldn’t finish the ’11 budget, before you pretty much end that budget year –at which time, like now in this year, you don’t have enough time to finish the ’12 budget before its fiscal year starts in october.

    Articles suggested ’11 will simply be funded via continuing resolution, rather then a budget.

    I don’t really want to go into a debate or discussion of budget processes – but its good to get the context. Bluntly, Obama’s NASA proposal has not gotten unanimous support, and congress critters just don’t have the time to sort out major changes in comparatively trivial agencies. Further if congressman feel like lame ducks now –they are really going to see Obama that way by the time they finish the ’12 budget – likely in early 12.

  • Kelly Starks

    > vulture4 wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 10:20 pm

    Vulture, Istrongly agree with what you’ve said – though from what I’ve heard a couple types of refits could bring the processing costs down dramatically.

    Also the X-37 doesn’t seem to be a test craft anymore – it appears the DOD views it as a special purpose operational craft.

    Actually I’ve been thinking about it because it seems like the X-37 is a better start to a life boat then Orion given its farther along in development, can already autonomously land on runways, and is designed to remain functional in orbit for 6 months or a year? Refiting it with a tight cabin and life support seems easier and cheaper then building a full capsule.

    >==If we, as the space advocate community, are going to
    > provide useful ideas for the future, we can’t make the superficial
    > decisions of both the current and previous administrations. The
    > solution to human spaceflight is not simplistic, but neither is it
    > “rocket science”. We need to consider what costs so much, in
    > engineering, construction, and maintenance, in reusables and
    > expendables, in spaceplanes and capsules.

    Big agree.

    >== The cost of human spaceflight must be reduced to at most
    > $2 million per seat to LEO before there will be anything more
    > than a handful of government astronauts and billionaires in
    > space. This will require fully reusable launch vehicles and
    > spacecraft. New technologies must be developed and tested.==

    Actually most of the technologies have been tested. Even shuttle, with its $60M a flight margin cost, and 25 ton cargo capacity, could give margin cost per passenger far bellow your $2M per passenger level. Fix some serviceability issues (and clean up the absurd NASA overhead costs) and up the flight rate and your there.

    Course then you need to find that market.

    Course as is, its competitive with the other choices NASA considering – which does not speak well for NASA.

    The experimentals are a good idea. If theres any technology vital for doing things in space, its cheap reliable access — which disturbingly, is the one technology not even mentioned in Obamas plan.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 3rd, 2010 at 11:05 pm

    > There is no way a vehicle as large as the Shuttle could
    > ever be a cost-effective crew carrier ==

    You should note it is cost comparable to the other options –and really cheap compared to Orion/Ares.

    The point is the parts with the expensive bits aren’t much bigger then they are in Orion. The rest is just wings and hold –which are not servicing hogs. So obviously making it smaller to just contain the crew carry functions and support (like the capsule and service modules.) and you haven’t saved anything. (And obviously being reusable as apposed to expendables like Orion saves a lot of per flight cost..)

  • Coastal Ron

    DCSCA wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 1:27 am

    Tesla motors has yet to turn a profit… This should be a cautionary consideration for any investor in a Musk helmed commercial venture, given the largess of capital his ventures demand.

    And yet, on the Space Politics blog, you leave out that SpaceX has been profitable for the past 3 years. Inconvenient truth? It is very apparent that you have a personal grudge against Elon Musk – did he slight you when you tried to get his autograph at the Iron Man 2 movie premiere?

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 1:42 am

    OK, here is that math problem – again.

    Actually most of the technologies have been tested. Even shuttle, with its $60M a flight margin cost, and 25 ton cargo capacity, could give margin cost per passenger far bellow your $2M per passenger level. Fix some serviceability issues (and clean up the absurd NASA overhead costs) and up the flight rate and your there.

    You keep leaving out that the U.S. Taxpayer has to pore $200M PER MONTH into the program BEFORE you can start adding the $60M (or whatever the real number is) “marginal cost”.

    And your supposed “Fix some serviceability issues” require more money being paid by the U.S. Taxpayer BEFORE any cost savings are realized.

    Here, I’ll provide you with a simple formula to use:

    Figure out how many people you want to fly in one year, and how many Shuttle flights that is.

    $2.4B ($200M/month recurring program costs) + $xB (your marginal cost) / # of people transported in one year = $/seat (person).

    Let’s say that we can put an infinite number of people on one Shuttle flight. To get to the $2M/seat price we would have to fly 1,200 people. And that’s without the $60M “marginal cost” added in. Even if you use the $60M number, that is still 30 people that you would have to transport to space.

    If you think you can run the Shuttle program for $60M/year, then contact your Senator. Otherwise take into account the $200M/month that the Shuttle Program Manager has said that it takes to run the program, even without launching the Shuttle.

  • Jeff Foust

    No I mean Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said june 22 that Congress won’t do a budget this year.

    What Rep. Hoyer was referring to was a “budget resolution”, and not the appropriations bills themselves. The House Rules Committee has a primer on the budget process, describing the role of the budget resolution in the overall process, specifically: “The budget resolution provides Congress with the opportunity to lay out its spending, revenue, borrowing and economic goals and serves as the vehicle for imposing internal budget discipline through established enforcement mechanisms.” Hoyer said the issue of the “soaring national debt” is the reason why the House wouldn’t do a long-term budget resolution this year, instead promising a “budget enforcement resolution” while the bipartisan deficit commission continues its work.

    It is almost a given that FY11 will start with a continuing resolution (CR) of some kind, since in recent years it has been all but impossible to get most appropriations bills done by October 1. How long that CR period will extend is the big question.

  • Vladislaw

    “The cost of human spaceflight must be reduced to at most $2 million per seat to LEO before there will be anything more than a handful of government astronauts and billionaires in space. “

    I believe this is incorrect. At 20 million a seat, someone with 100 – 200 million could easily afford a flight, but would they? That is something we will find out as we move forward. You are also forgetting something else. Credit cards, we put almost everything we do on them, I do not see why space will be any different. Pay 2 million a year for 10 years plus interest. T/space and scaled composites, in there bid for the CEV said 5 million a seat for their airlaunched vehicle. I tend to believe Rutan’s numbers.

  • The real lesson of Apollo was made clear by Nixon when he cancelled the program in 1974.

    The decision to end Apollo was made in the Johnson administration. Nixon cancelled the last two flights in 1970. I’m no fan of Richard Nixon, but I wish that people would get the history right.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 3:24 am

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 1:42 am
    >> “Actually most of the technologies have been tested. Even
    >> shuttle, with its $60M a flight margin cost, and 25 ton
    >> cargo capacity, could give margin cost per passenger far
    >> bellow your $2M per passenger level. Fix some serviceability
    >> issues (and clean up the absurd NASA overhead costs) and up the flight rate and your there.”

    > You keep leaving out that the U.S. Taxpayer has to pore $200M
    > PER MONTH into the program BEFORE you can start adding
    > the $60M (or whatever the real number is) “marginal cost”.

    No I didn’t. That was the “(and clean up the absurd NASA overhead costs)” part. You keep wanting to ignor the alternate programs overhead costs.

    It doesn’t take $200M a month to support shuttles. Little of it goes to support shuttles – it goes to support NASA. If you’re a NASA launch program, you have to help carry NASA. Hence why Even commercial crew/lifeboat is looking to run about the same per year costs, even excluding the cost of the launches.

    Here I’ll provide you a simple equation. Program cost over the next 10 years proposed by Obama is $12B-$20B so far to facilitate the commercial crew program and build the Orion life boat. Or 1.2 billion $ per Commercial crew flight, or $200M a month while they fly commercial, BEFORE ANY COMMERCIAL CREW FLIGHTCOSTS ARE INCLUDED. If Orion life boat winds up costing closer to $15B, your at twice that.

    Then you add about $3 billion for KSC facilities upgrades for other types of launch vehicles, like commercial launchers (not that any commercial launch firm was listed or to my knowledge mentioned needing billions in KSC refits). Then of course if you fly commercial crew you’ll need launch support, trainig,etc – which was parts of that $200 million cost you quoted.

    Oh yeah, and you need to fund the commercial crew capsule modes etc.

    And at some point you need to launch lifeboats, commercial crew, etc. That’s really the margin costs, or what the vendor will actually sell you one more launch for. Those cost are pretty minimal. I think only about 10 times Shuttles margin cost per flight.

    Ares / Orion would of course be much worse. Maybe$7B per ISS flight with operations over head not included.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 11:31 am

    It doesn’t take $200M a month to support shuttles. Little of it goes to support shuttles – it goes to support NASA…

    Kelly. that sounds great, but there is no valid method by which the “overhead” of the shuttle is reduced.

    History loves ironies…Many years ago (the 90’s) I had a modest role in attempting to cut shuttle training cost. The entire affair is unimportant but the thrust was to do some heavy streamlining of personel, some modern equipment etc…and one of the most critical people of any attempt to streamline NASA’s involvement in the entire “training” effort was Linda Ham. Her great line was “who will stand up for the astronauts”. (I remember that thought ringing in my ears as the plane I was on watched Columbia disintegrate over East Texas).

    It really doesnt matter for the Shuttle or Cx because both programs are toast. But for station and access to orbit, it is vital that some structure be found (or preserved) that makes the operation one of two things…a completely government run organization OR a private for service purchase. As KBR and Haliburton have proven in military contracts there really is no way that an incestuous relationship such as on shuttle works….unless one is OK with mediocre performance and the occasional gross incompetence that kills people.

    Because in such venues there really is no accountability. There is no person who is figuratively marched out and stood up against the wall and shot for an organizational gaff. OK thats not our culture anymore…everything is no ones fault. But at some point we should get back to some venue where incompetence is rewarded by shame.

    Last I heard Linda is still working her magic on the Cx program…but I have really been out of touch on that.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Gary Church

    “The decision to end Apollo was made in the Johnson administration. Nixon cancelled the last two flights in 1970. I’m no fan of Richard Nixon, but I wish that people would get the history right.”

    Most space buffs are probably recalling LBJ’s comments about “the American people pissing away this great capability” or something to that effect. I am not sorry I voted for Obama because he was the lesser evil but I was praying he would do three things; Bring the troops home (and reign in the DOD) and get out of the middle east, do a “moon shot” on solar energy and cover the mojave with solar panels (so we would not have to be in the middle east), and reign in the corporations. Has not turned out that way.

  • Gary Church

    “It is almost a given that FY11 will start with a continuing resolution (CR) of some kind,”

    could it be sidemount?

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 12:06 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 11:31 am
    >>
    >> It doesn’t take $200M a month to support shuttles. Little of
    >> it goes to support shuttles – it goes to support NASA…

    > Kelly. that sounds great, but there is no valid method by which the
    > “overhead” of the shuttle is reduced. ==

    I could debate that, but the flip side is, you really also are saying theirs no valid reason that overhead would be reduced for commercial crew or any other program to launch people and stuff.

    That seems supported by Obama and NASA actions to maintain and increase the overhead, irregardless of what flight program its supporting.

    >== History loves ironies…Many years ago (the 90′s) I had a
    > modest role in attempting to cut shuttle training cost. The entire
    > affair is unimportant but the thrust was to do some heavy
    > streamlining of personel, some modern equipment etc…and
    > one of the most critical people of any attempt to streamline
    > NASA’s involvement in the entire “training” effort was Linda Ham.
    > Her great line was “who will stand up for the astronauts”.==

    Ah small world, I was across the side road in Building 4 doing Flight planing.

    Yeah astronauts often pointed out the vast bulk of “planing” time was just shuffling scheduled events a minutte or two one way or the other even though the Astronauts kept telling folks they never used the minute by minutes schedules, since nothing ever flowed that exactly. [Which was why the astronauts weren’t in charge of what they needed for training and planing.]

    On the MOD side McDonnell Douglas had to fight to not have them directed to have the system built to schedule 10 second activities to the fraction of a minutte.

    >== (I remember that thought ringing in my ears as the plane I was
    > on watched Columbia disintegrate over East Texas).==

    I was there for Challenger, and remembered the calm statements during the hearings about how the fault was known, and a correcting design was on the shelf, but the political risk of announcing it was considered unacceptable – even though they knew it would cost them a ship and crew sooner or later. To further reduce the political risk the astronauts and flight ops folks wern’t informed to keep it quiet.

    Yeah, who stands for the astronauts.

    >==that makes the operation one of two things…a completely
    > government run organization OR a private for service purchase. ==

    Neither is possible. NASA couldn’t possibly actually run all this stuf, the civil service laws, bureaucracy, and support for dead wood makes it impossible for them to even keep on staff the skill sets needed, much less manage the personnel.
    As for a private for service purchase. I’d love that, but thats politically DOA. Politicians can’t get rid of the civil servants, so they need to have them do something, even if its useless or harmful to getting results.

    Even at the height of shuttle activity and planing there were whole departments that did nothing but provide data to MOD that MOD never even looked at. In one case there were 5 departments providing projections of where the shuttle would be second by second throughout the flight. MOD had its own program to do the same, and never refereed to the others (I collected the data from the others and filed it next to my desk for each flight). No two projections matched each other – or the resulting actual shuttle orbits. But no one would reassign the folks to do something useful.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 11:31 am

    Program cost over the next 10 years proposed by Obama is $12B-$20B so far to facilitate the commercial crew program and build the Orion life boat.

    OK, more made up stuff. In actually looking at the FY11 NASA budget proposal, here is what they propose:

    …the Budget invests $6 billion over five years to spur the development of American commercial human spaceflight vehicles.

    Nothing about a 10 year plan, or $12-20B, and nothing about the Orion.

    For Orion Lite, on May 26th before a House committee it was stated:

    Last week, NASA officials informed Committee staff that NASA is in discussions with OMB and OSTP on several options for pursuing a crew rescue vehicle. Those options include 1) restructuring Orion to be developed as a crew rescue vehicle, and 2) initiating a competition that would be open to new concepts for a crew rescue vehicle. A decision to pursue the latter option would necessitate cancelling the Orion contract and incurring contract termination costs, while also starting a new contract competition and development program.

    So they don’t even know what it will cost for Orion Lite, and they don’t even know if they will do it. A better bargain would be to buy a Dragon capsule after they have qualified it for cargo to/from the ISS, install seats, and launch it empty to use as a lifeboat – if they really need a lifeboat, which the Soyuz already provides at the current staffing levels. A Dragon Lifeboat could probably be bought by NASA for <$100M, and launched for $56M outside of the COTS program. Such a bargain, if that's what they want.

    "It doesn’t take $200M a month to support shuttles.

    Reality is a harsh mistress. The Shuttle Program Manager, John Shannon, who no doubt would love to keep the Shuttle going longer, stated the $200M/month number. I think he knows, and you don’t.

    Now maybe you have “hopes” that if the private sector took over the program, that they could lower the costs. I would agree that they probably could over time, but that would mean some company would have to see the economic benefit in running the Shuttle program, and I don’t think one exists. You would think that USA’s parents (United Space Alliance) would know best how to run the Shuttle program better, but I never heard them advocating to take over the program before the shutdowns started.

    Even if the government gave a company the NASA facilities for $0/month, who would the customers be, and how would they compete against incumbent competitors? This supposed company would also have to foot the bill to get the program back up and running, which is a two year sinkhole of investment – who is going to invest in such a company, and what happens if one of the Shuttles is damaged or lost? Would the program continue or shutdown. So many unknowns – it’s no wonder a private company has not stepped forward.

    The Shuttle program is at an end, even if they launch the extra one. If there was that much interest in extending it, we would know about it by now.

  • Gary Church

    “The Shuttle program is at an end, even if they launch the extra one. If there was that much interest in extending it, we would know about it by now.”

    The orbiters are going- as well they should. But the hardware? Shannon has proposed sidemount and there is always hope.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 2:06 pm

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 11:31 am

    >>“Program cost over the next 10 years proposed by Obama is
    >>$12B-$20B so far to facilitate the commercial crew program
    >>and build the Orion life boat.”

    > OK, more made up stuff. =

    Gone over this several times Ron – you don’t get to ignore the parts you don’t like.

    >“…the Budget invests $6 billion over five years to spur the
    > development of American commercial human spaceflight vehicles.”

    Obama also talked about doing Orion as the lifeboat (Orion/Ares was to handel both lifeboat and crew carry functions.) given the heatover canceling it.

    L/M said if NASA would take a hands of manage oversite – they could develop Orion lifeboat for $4.5-$5.5b – that would be about $11b so far.
    $6+($4.5-$5.5)= $11ish.

    If Orion instep is developed “normally” you’ld be looking more like $15b
    $15B+($4.5-$5.5)= $20B ish.

    ===
    >== A better bargain would be to buy a Dragon capsule ==

    Doesn’t mater..

    >>”It doesn’t take $200M a month to support shuttles.”

    >== The Shuttle Program Manager, John Shannon, ==

    Who knows as well as anyone else he needs $200M a month for the shuttle program — not for the shuttles. Thats why were seeing costs for crew carry quickly balloon

    >== Now maybe you have “hopes” that if the private sector took
    > over the program, that they could lower the costs. ===

    Different question. Yes they could do it cheaper — but not if they were doing it for NASA. They are doing it now for NASA, and it costs (this year) $200M per month. Used to cost 3 times that, hasn’t been effected by shuttle launch costs. Not it still cost 3 times that when shuttles weren’t flying at all.

    Little of that $200M a month is in any way related to the shuttles. Eliminate the shuttles, the cost remains. Its currently billed to the shuttle program, but the costs will be retained after the shuttles are all gone. And the facilities that can be shut down are.

    Since the costs are related to NASA and not shuttles, eliminating shuttles doesn’t change it.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Gary Church wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 2:12 pm

    >The orbiters are going- as well they should. But the hardware?
    > Shannon has proposed sidemount and there is always hope.

    The Obama plan is to end all the infrastructure to preempt that – Congress seems to be interested in a quick HLV program. Course both are in limbo until next year.

  • DCSCA

    Rand Simberg wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 11:20 am “The decision to end Apollo was made in the Johnson administration. Nixon cancelled the last two flights in 1970. I’m no fan of Richard Nixon, but I wish that people would get the history right.”

    WE wish YOU would get the history right, because you’re consistently wrong. Time for summer school, again:

    “[On January 14, 1970, nearly a YEAR TO THE DAY the NIXON ADMINISTRATION was in office], after preliminary discussions on the fiscal 1971 budget, [NASA] administrator Thomas O. Paine [IN THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION] revealed more changes in space exploration. Saturn V launch vehicle production was to be suspended indefinitely [<- IN THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION] after the fifteenth booster was completed, leaving NASA with no means of putting really large payloads into earth orbit or continuing lunar exploration [<- IN THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION.] The last Saturn V was reassigned from Apollo 20 to Skylab [ <- IN THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION] . Unmanned explorations of Mercury and Mars were reduced or deferred [<- IN THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION.]. Some 50,000 of the estimated 190,000 employees of NASA and its contractors would have to be laid off, and many university scientists would find their projects without funds [<- IN THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION]. Though the new plans imposed real austerity [<-IN THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION], [NIXON NASA ADMINISTRATOR] Paine noted that they did provide for a start on the next project, development of a reusable spacecraft to shuttle crews and payloads between earth and a space station in earth orbit." — source, NASA

    Study the above and learn your lessons, starting with 1+1=2, not 11.

  • Yes, Nixon didn’t restart what Johnson had stopped.

  • DCSCA

    Rand Simberg wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 5:04 pm <- Inaccurate, again, as usual.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 1:55 pm

    I could debate that, but the flip side is, you really also are saying theirs no valid reason that overhead would be reduced for commercial crew or any other program to launch people and stuff…

    no I didnt say that and I certainly dont believe it is accurate.

    As I have commented here and elsewhere (NASA watch for instance)…the problems at NASA with the shuttle/station/and Constellation are attempting to do operational with an organization whose lines come from a R&D effort. Logsdon more or less nailed it in his Space News piece…

    Thats ending. It is ending because the whole thing finally got simply to expensive for the dollars people were wanting to spend and Obama took a new direction.

    I have no doubt that SpaceX or someone (Boeing) can regroup and fly people and things for much less and with much less people…particularly if the rocket part of it is dual use.

    10 years from now NASA is going to be a very different agency or it wont survive. Think a modern NACA.

    Happy Fourth

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Happy 4th of July everyone. I would suggest that people go take a look at the DOI as it was written before it was “worked” for political passage. Even the parts that were cut are amazing.

    Long Live The Republic

    Robert G. Oler

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 6:13 pm

    > As I have commented here and elsewhere (NASA watch for
    > instance)…the problems at NASA with the shuttle/station/and
    > Constellation are attempting to do operational with an organization
    > whose lines come from a R&D effort.===

    Disagree. Its not R&D oriented. Just bloated. Its civil service. They get paid more the more they bloat their staff. They are not into efficiency – and in a lot of cases they are to tied – WAY TO TIED – to how it was done way back when.

    > Thats ending. It is ending because the whole thing finally got
    > simply to expensive for the dollars people were wanting to
    > spend and Obama took a new direction.

    That’s not quite true. Its not like the new “direction” is cheaper then in the past — its not up Ares/Orion costs (almost nothing is) but its at least as expensive as before.

    NASA the federal gov, and a agency’s whose main political value is its fame, and jobs in districts. Given that political reality, NASA and congress will make sure the costs stay up.

    Also they have big expensive centers they have to maintain, adn those costs have to be carried by someone – so whatever programs around gets stuck with the bill.

    > I have no doubt that SpaceX or someone (Boeing) can regroup
    > and fly people and things for much less and with much less
    > people…particularly if the rocket part of it is dual use.

    Irrelevant, the launch costs never were a big part of the per launch program costs.

    > 10 years from now NASA is going to be a very different agency or
    > it wont survive. Think a modern NACA.

    No one will fund that, and I don’t see the political support for terminating NASA.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 10:54 pm

    not so much

    “They are not into efficiency – and in a lot of cases they are to tied – WAY TO TIED – to how it was done way back when.”

    The R&D legacy is precisely the “past” for NASA. To be honest and with all due respect to not see that problem is well a major problem.

    I wont go into a point to point disagreement except to note two more things.

    you wrote: “the launch costs never were a big part of the per launch program costs.”

    Launch cost are the program cost…the cost to fly the shuttle once “airborne” are high in terms of the numbers of people…but they are a product of “launch cost” which include planning etc…you fight like you plan (or train) and to reduce those is to reduce the entire ball of wax. What works for multi million dollar payloads works (mostly ) for humans if you let the “humans” on orbit bring the unique things humans have to the task…

    Plus if you get the “launch cost” down to 200 or so people total…thats a big savings

    “No one will fund that, and I don’t see the political support for terminating NASA.”

    we disagree but we are going my direction. We will get a chance to see what Congress will fund. I dont think, except for the space fan club Congress cares all that much about “what” NASA does in terms of if it gets funding. It cannot flounder like Constellation has.

    Happy independence holiday

    Robert G. Oler

  • Gary Church

    “It is ending because the whole thing finally got simply to expensive for the dollars people were wanting to spend and Obama took a new direction.”

    That is not true. In fact- it is a falsehood.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 9:00 am

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 4th, 2010 at 10:54 pm

    >>“They are not into efficiency – and in a lot of cases they are to
    >> tied – WAY TO TIED – to how it was done way back when.”

    > The R&D legacy is precisely the “past” for NASA. ==

    NASA’s past is not as a R&D organization. Its NACA roots weer for R&D, but the vast bulk of the agency, and its big centers, were constructed for the space race. The R&D parts are tiny, and usually slighted in budgets and agency consideration. The vast bulk of the agencies infrastructure, organization, and staffing trace their lineage to the huge space race program.

    That’s a MAJOR problem, because it mixes a cost is no option, any risk to achieve the goal, we are the best of the best of the best, mentality — with a civil service organization under political pressure to do little more then justify their staffing levels in important districts.

    The effect is similar to what your referring to, though more pointless. A R&D organization would focus on research and discovery, as is though NASA does big research missions (deep space probes, things like X-33, there’s virtually no interest in actually getting any results or learning from them. Little of the data from the space probes is even looked at — it some cases it was simply abandoned and lost in basement floods. X-33 was just a program to have a program, directed away from finding or developing any really useful technology. Obama’s plan seems to tap exactly that vein.

    >you wrote: “the launch costs never were a big part of the per launch program costs.”

    > Launch cost are the program cost…the cost to fly the shuttle
    > once “airborne” are high in terms of the numbers of people…but
    > they are a product of “launch cost” which include planning etc…you
    > fight like you plan (or train) and to reduce those is to reduce the
    > entire ball of wax. ====

    Yes but even all that is a fairly minor fraction of the program costs per launch. For example the original development costs (in now years dollars) of the Shuttle were $37B, divided across the 130 that’s a big chunk of the total costs per flight. For Ares/Orion the dev costs weer to be $50B, and if divided over the 10 ISS flights from 2015-2020 that would be a staggering $5B per flight. Add in facilities needed for flights, and bureaucratic inefficiency, etc — the flights, even the usefull support efforts to the flights, are a really small part of the program cost per flight.

    Past that, most of NASA’s “support overhead”, in no way supports the flights or does research, training, etc. Its just there and they need to keep it regardless of its being usefull.

    Think about it. Were talking over a billion $ a flight. Add in all the training costs, all the ground staffs at KSC, JSC etc. All their yearly salaries — do you get anything like a Billion $ a flight?

    ===
    >>“No one will fund that, and I don’t see the political support for terminating NASA.”

    > we disagree but we are going my direction. We will get a chance
    > to see what Congress will fund.==

    Well Obama plan went over like a brick. Attempts to force it through around congress with legal tricks burned any bridges the White House and NASA HQ had with congress. And bigger – this congress term is about up and the big anti incumbent sentiment suggests a major staffing change by political norms of elections. So we’ll get a new crowd arguing about it.

    On the other hand funding NASA at or a bit above current levels has historically gotten good bipartisan support. Really I think Constellations cost was pushing it – but worst, it looked like a colossal bungle. Congress wanted SE’s direction and goal to measure NASA against and focus them on, but the implementation was frustratingly crappy.

    But with Constellation and Obama plan both trashed at this point, theres no real sign where they or a future admin will drive NASA — and there’s no time. NASA is scheduled to be gutted out in the next few months. Post that, there many not be enough left, to be worth the political will and effort (or ability) to restore in Congresses view. By extension – not enough left of the US’ human space flight capacity.

    losing NASA is a waste – but losing everything related in a significant way to human space projects of any significant scale and complexity is far worse.

    And hope you had a good 4th as well.
    Kelly Starks

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 12:03 pm

    For example the original development costs (in now years dollars) of the Shuttle were $37B, divided across the 130 that’s a big chunk of the total costs per flight.

    You really need to stop talking about things financial.

    The $200M/month that the Shuttle Program Manager talks about is his recurring costs (salaries, contractor payments, facilities, etc.), not the non-recurring (design & build the Shuttle system) that was paid for 30 years ago.

    We’re not talking about coming up with the program cost from womb to tomb, we’re talking about what the U.S. Taxpayer has to take out of their pocket every month if you want the Shuttles to keep flying.

    losing NASA is a waste

    You see adding $6B to NASA budget over a 5 year period as shutting down NASA. I disagree.

    You think that if the vehicles that take NASA astronauts into space don’t say “Built & Operated by NASA”, that even if a U.S. company is providing the service, NASA is somehow diminished. I disagree.

    You feel that unless there is a large program building new hardware to go to a heavenly body by a certain date, NASA cannot survive. I disagree.

    Your opinions I can live with. Your math however – you need to take a finance class.

  • Kelly Starks

    As for my math you misread what I said – or at least you reply was unreltaed to it.

    >> “losing NASA is a waste”

    > You see adding $6B to NASA budget over a 5 year period
    > as shutting down NASA. I disagree.

    Ignoring the $6 (which wasn’t approved. I was refering primarily to NASA’s ability to do space projects, especially manned space (which is certainly declining) and the likelihood of their retaining political support.

    Neither are looking great.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 3:02 pm

    Ignoring the $6 (which wasn’t approved

    Using the word “wasn’t” implies that it has been voted on, and that they lost the vote. You are incorrect, since the budget has not been voted on yet.

    The proper word to use is “hasn’t”, meaning that it’s fate has not yet been determined.

    Words matter – spelling too.

    I was refering primarily to NASA’s ability to do space projects, especially manned space (which is certainly declining) and the likelihood of their retaining political support.

    I saw the end of U.S. participation in the ISS after 2015 as the end of NASA’s ability to do space projects. The outcome of Constellation was far from certain, and if it would have been cancelled by future congresses (by continuing to be over budget & behind schedule), then the U.S. would have been left with no government presence in space. That would have been a travesty.

    The new budget keeps the ISS as a continuing U.S. presence in space, which gives us a jumping off point to doing other things. Programs like CCDev are a great starting point for rebuilding our HSF ability, and for creating a broad-based transportation system, as opposed to the single-point-of-failure that Ares I would have been.

    Once the new budget is approved, that will signal the commercial space industry (including all the established players) that NASA will no longer be standing in the way of commercial space, but helping them to move forward with direct & indirect assistance.

    The future’s so bright, I gotta wear sunglasses!

  • Gary Church

    “NASA will no longer be standing in the way of commercial space”

    Why don’t you just say that commercial space is taking NASA’s budget away so those tax dollars can go in someone else’s pocket?
    Is that the bright future we are all hoping for?

    Why not Sidemount? Why not preserve our HLV infrastructure and work force and improve it. Is a shuttle that launches three times as often and has no orbiter to turn around what we should have had from the start to make the STS work? We can have it now instead of handing it over to profiteers.

    The profit motive is poison to space exploration. There is no profit to be made in space until there is a way to get out there and a place to live. Space tourism is not going to make that happen.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 4:58 pm

    >>Kelly Starks wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 3:02 pm

    >> “Ignoring the $6 (which wasn’t approved”

    > Using the word “wasn’t” implies that it has been voted on,
    > and that they lost the vote. ==

    How? Though given it was not even offered for a vote by the committes it seems even worse.

    >> “I was refering primarily to NASA’s ability to do space projects,
    >> especially manned space (which is certainly declining) and the
    >> likelihood of their retaining political support.”

    > I saw the end of U.S. participation in the ISS after 2015 as the end
    > of NASA’s ability to do space projects. ===

    Building ISS was the big project – and really the mission of the ISS program. Continued operation doesn’t seem as major – especially combined with the reductions in NASA capacity, staffs, etc. Canceling Constellation on top of that further reduces it, though Constellation itself is crap.

    >== Programs like CCDev are a great starting point for rebuilding
    > our HSF ability, and for creating a broad-based transportation
    > system, as opposed to the single-point-of-failure that Ares I
    > would have been.

    Strongly disagree.

    >== Once the new budget is approved,==

    It can’t be this year. next year looks no brighter for it.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 6:13 pm

    Though given it was not even offered for a vote by the committes it seems even worse.

    Hmmm, election year, no overwhelming majority in the Senate, large national debt, high unemployment, two wars, immigration issues, oil leak in the gulf… yes, you’re right, NASA should be their highest priority!

    You’re reading too many tea leaves.

  • Coastal Ron

    Gary Church wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 5:12 pm

    Why don’t you just say that commercial space is taking NASA’s budget away so those tax dollars can go in someone else’s pocket?
    Is that the bright future we are all hoping for?

    Actually commercial space needs NASA to buy their services (launch, cargo & crew delivery, etc.), and without a healthy NASA budget to do things, commercial space would have much slower growth. This is no different than most other parts of the government (like your favorite one, the DOD).

    Why not Sidemount?

    I’ve already stated my opinion on this – if Congress deems it necessary to build an HLV (despite a clear lack of need), then SDHLV-Sidemount would be one of my “lesser of many evils”. It would be fairly quick to build, and lift heavier things that what we have ever needed, but it would not be a viable crew launcher because of the SRB issues covered by the CAIB.

    The profit motive is poison to space exploration. There is no profit to be made in space until there is a way to get out there and a place to live.

    Don’t tell that to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX and the many other companies that are servicing commercial customers, and NASA too. The role of commercial space is to lower the costs by doing the routine things for the government. NASA can actually do more by using commercial companies than if it does everything itself. It happens now, and all the cargo & crew services are doing is expanding it to new areas. It’s more a psychological barrier than a physical one.

    ULA & ESA already launch all of NASA’s satellites, four entities will be providing cargo services for the ISS, and we need to have more than Soyuz for shuttling crew to the ISS. The market is there, and it’s starting to grow.

  • Gary Church

    “because of the SRB issues covered by the CAIB.”

    I have read that CAIB several times after having it thrown in my face and never found anything to support what people claim. Give me page number please.

    “The role of commercial space is to lower the costs by doing the routine things for the government. NASA can actually do more by using commercial companies than if it does everything itself.”

    I have to dispute that Ron. Where is the HLV capability? You want to go BEO-HSF? I have detailed the narrow path and fully explained why the flexible path is not going to happen.

    I hate to stop posting here when I am finally answering arguments instead of trading insults- but I have to start a move in the next few days and this posting takes up way too much of my time. So I will check back when I can.

  • There is no point in arguing with Gary Church (or DCSCA, or “abreakingwind,” or Chris Castro). People with subnormal IQs are not going to be persuaded by facts and logic. Please stop feeding the trolls.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 7:11 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
    >>
    >>“Though given it was not even offered for a vote by
    >> the committes it seems even worse.”

    > Hmmm, election year, no overwhelming majority in the Senate, ==

    Oh please!

    ==
    > large national debt, high unemployment, ===

    And not doing more big layoffs isn’t related?

    >== two wars, immigration
    > issues, oil leak in the gulf… yes, you’re right, NASA should be their highest priority!

    Different comittes. Who normall get things done.

    ;)

    And its not like they are getting a lot done on all the other stuff on your list eiather.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Rand Simberg wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 12:19 am
    >
    > There is no point in arguing with Gary Church (or DCSCA,
    > or “abreakingwind,” or Chris Castro). People with subnormal IQs
    > are not going to be persuaded by facts and logic. Please stop feeding the trolls.

    You should remember the “People in glass houses” thing Rand.

  • You should remember the “People in glass houses” thing Rand.

    I am always aware of it, not that it’s applicable here.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 12:03 pm

    Kelly. I know you put a lot of thought into your reply, but it is hard to take it seriously when you claim that the development cost of the shuttle are a large part of each flight.

    Those are sunk cost, that were paid a long time ago and NASA doesnt figure them into anything or anywhere of its yearly ops cost.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 11:09 am

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 5th, 2010 at 12:03 pm

    > Kelly. I know you put a lot of thought into your reply, but it is
    > hard to take it seriously when you claim that the development
    > cost of the shuttle are a large part of each flight.

    > Those are sunk cost, that were paid a long time ago and NASA
    > doesnt figure them into anything or anywhere of its yearly ops cost.

    Different question. It does for a good sized cunk of the total program cost of each flight (which naturally would mean more to commercials then gov operators) adn certainly the press like to use numbers like that (for example the of quoted $2 billion for each B-2 bomber saw), but your right for the current flight costs for shuttle – the fixed cost that kills them is having to carry so much of NASA (related to the program or not) and the NASA bloat.

    What folks forget, is the same factors are there waiting for Commercial crew or anything else.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 12:48 pm

    the fixed cost that kills them is having to carry so much of NASA (related to the program or not) and the NASA bloat.

    Yes, I’m sure it couldn’t be because of the inherent cost of the Shuttle program – or is it?

    A quick Internet search revealed the following:

    SRB’s cost $68.6M/set ($2.4B contract for 35 sets), and the External Tank costs $173M ($2.94B contract for 17 ET’s).

    For the SSME’s, Pratt & Whitney has a 9 year $2.1B contract, or $233M/year. This appears to be for maintaining/rebuilding the engines.

    For Shuttle processing, USA’s initial contract in 1996 was for $7B over 6 years, or $1.2B/year. That alone seems to be about 50% of the Shuttle program.

    So just for Shuttle processing, and if you assumed two flights/year of refilled SRB’s, SSME upkeep & new ET’s, that would equal $1.87B/year. That’s just four non-NASA cost drivers, and if you go by John Shannons $2.4B/year to run the program, those four items are more than 3/4 of the program cost.

    The Shuttle is expensive – period.

    Commercial crew costs will be based on fixed-price expendable launchers, and reusable capsules. Those capsules have very little that needs to be done to them in comparison to the standing army that works on the Shuttle (i.e. $1.2B/year), so capsule per seat costs will reflect the lower overall costs. Remember that SpaceX plans to offer $20M/seat to LEO, and the launcher-only costs for Atlas V would be $19M/seat assuming a 7-seat capsule. Commercial crew will be cheaper, by a significant factor.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
    – the fixed cost that kills them is having to carry so much of NASA (related to the program or not) and the NASA bloat…

    I dont agree with that.

    The fixed cost that kills “them” (or the shuttle system) is a combination of factors.

    1. The NASA/Contractor “standing army” that is required to operate/maintain the shuttle.

    2. The fact that NASA (as the lead) has never quite figured out how to operate the shuttle in a cost effective manner (or ever had to try). This is everything from when the inspect various things, to the use of autoland, to well almost everything. NOTHING has been looked at in terms of cost.

    3. An “emphasis” on safety that has nothing to do with safety.

    Carefully done little of this will affect commercial operators

    Robert G. Oler

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 3:23 pm

    “The fact that NASA (as the lead) has never quite figured out how to operate the shuttle in a cost effective manner (or ever had to try).”

    There is a simple reason for that. NASA was never asked to do it. So why would they?

  • Robert G. Oler

    common sense wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 3:27 pm …

    NASA would never on its own do it; but the essence of an operational agency of the federal government is to try and figure out how to do “things” more efficiently hence freeing up money to either do more or to do different thing.

    The leadership of the shuttle program is about the worst in the federal government

    Robert G. Oler

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 4:03 pm

    Any organization ought to look how to make any given job less costly. But remember the premises: Congressional pork or jobs program as others call it. There is a simple way to achieve what you describe and it occurs often in the regular world.
    Manager: “We need to make things cheaper: Your budget is cut 30% or sometime worse”. Subordinate: “Here is what I can do for 10% cut”. Manager: “Okay 17% cut and do it anyway”.
    Very tought times usually ensue when it happens. It can be done in a smart way when you have the luxury of time like for Shuttle or in a stupid way when the only important thing is bottom line that promotes said manager. And every other way in between. Nevertheless.

    In any case. Just look at all the rethoric from the concerned Congress. Balloney. Let’s also remember that one of the goal of Constellation was to reduce the Shuttle workforce. A lot of people forgot it. See what happened?

  • Robert G. Oler

    common sense wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 4:09 pm

    I have no doubt that people like Shannon think that way, but it is not universal around the federal government.

    It is in agencies that have no real goals or whose goals have no real performance measures.

    But I dont accept that it has to be that way. The Congress people who are NASA benefactors would be the same in fact even more so if NASA was successful in what it did….or at least could define what it did.

    Robert G. Oler

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 4:17 pm

    “The Congress people who are NASA benefactors would be the same in fact even more so if NASA was successful in what it did….or at least could define what it did.”

    This is totally unclear to me. Again suffice to look at all the rethoric about Constellation, Shuttle and the new plan by these people. I think they do not care one way or the other. Of course every one would be happy if NASA were successful but if not well… Still is cash and votes.

  • DCSCA

    @Kelly- LOL, re- glass houses. When valid points strike home, they usually elicit personal attacks from desperate astroturfers who’ve run out of inventory to lay down an artificial argument.

  • DCSCA

    @Kelly- “losing NASA is a waste – but losing everything related in a significant way to human space projects of any significant scale and complexity is far worse.’ It hasn’t happened yet… but if it does it’ll just be another nail in the coffin of the ‘American Century’– Born 12/7/1941 – Died 9/11/2001. They dont really miss the WTC… they wont miss NASA either… until the next Sputnik moment.

  • The Next Sputnik Moment will be another country launching astronauts clear OUT of LEO! Man, I don’t care if it’s the Communist Chinese, with North Korean & Vietnamese junketeers! I’d freaking love it!! It would FINALLY get America off it’s lazy rear end, and induce the national leadership to do something. Something other than the same dull, stupid LEO merry-go-round. I tell you what, when that Red Flag gets unfurled and mounted on the Lunar surface; when a Communist country’s spacecraft is successfully orbiting the Moon; when the deep space transmissions speak back to the Earth, in a language other than American English; you’re going to have a nation stung to its core, its pride dumped on the floor, upset why & how the Commies could’ve leapfrogged over us.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
    >> “the fixed cost that kills them is having to carry so much of
    >> NASA (related to the program or not) and the NASA bloat.”

    > Yes, I’m sure it couldn’t be because of the inherent cost of
    > the Shuttle program – or is it?

    If it was due to the shuttle then it would show up in costs for the shuttle – like margin costs amoung others.

    > A quick Internet search revealed the following:
    > SRB’s cost $68.6M/set ($2.4B contract for 35 sets), and the
    > External Tank costs $173M ($2.94B contract for 17 ET’s). ==

    There you go again. It doesn’t help if you don’t know what the numbers are talking about. In this case are they paying for your assumed intrinsic shuttle costs? Or my useless, but politically vital overhead costs?

    Focusing on the ET’s. If you’ld checked back over several years, you’ld notice the cost per tank varies wildly. Generally its quoted at $50M a tank. Reason: they are manufactured in NASA facility out side of New Orlean’s that costs about $300M a year to keep open. [It was built for a Saturn-V mass production facility.] Last time I researched this, it cost $300M a year to keep the facility open regardless of its making tanks or not. Up to a dozen tanks a year there’s no extra cost. I.E. Margin cost per tank if you build ==
    > Commercial crew costs will be based on fixed-price
    > expendable launchers, and reusable capsules.==

    Says who? NASA won’t even allow COTS to reuse the cargo capsules (SpaceX plans to reuse them, but NASA will get a freash one for each COTS flight), and dictated Orion be single use.

    >== Those capsules have very little that needs to
    > be done to them in comparison to the standing army
    > that works on the Shuttle==

    Really? Assuming they were reused – how much no the shuttles needs servicing that the capsules don’t have or wouldn’t need serviced? Or rather built from scratch if your considering the service module systems that the capsules throw away.

    >== capsule per seat costs will reflect the lower
    > overall costs.

    We already covered how their costs wont be cheaper.

    > == Remember that SpaceX plans to offer $20M/seat to LEO,

    And they arn’t in the runing.

    >== launcher-only costs for Atlas V would be
    > $19M/seat assuming a 7-seat capsule. ==

    That’s assuming a 7 passenger flight (NASA only wants to carry 3) your not counting the cost of the capsule (which could run hundreds of millions per flight) and your ignoring all the other program overhead, which proposed so far, adds up to about a Billion per flight – ignoring the cost of the actual flight. And could double or triple that given various scenarios.

    So cost for your firm fixed price – is very infirm, but likely to exceed shuttles..

    Alternately you could talk about commercializing the shuttle program. Congress did, resulting in NASA:

    CONCEPT OF PRIVATIZATION OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM
    Ronald D. Dittemore September 28, 2001
    Manager, Space Shuttle Program
    They used to have the full PDF up no naswatch.com

    bits included lower costs per fight down to a couple hundred million, etc.

    And that would be one way you could compare shuttle vrs Commercial crew costs.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Robert G. Oler wrote @ July 6th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
    >= The fixed cost that kills “them” (or the shuttle system) is
    > a combination of factors.
    >
    > 1. The NASA/Contractor “standing army” that is required
    > to operate/maintain the shuttle.

    Having been part of that army, most of the effort gets wasted, though waste is more valuble them flights politically.

    > 2. The fact that NASA (as the lead) has never quite
    > figured out how to operate the shuttle in a cost
    > effective manner (or ever had to try). ==

    Why would they? Political pressure and financial rewards due to civil service rules, rewards them for inefficiency.

    > 3. An “emphasis” on safety that has nothing to do with safety.

    ?

    > Carefully done little of this will affect commercial operators

    If NASA didn’t do it carefully for the 30 years and 130+ shuttles fights, why would they do it carefully for the 10 commercial crew flights?

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 10:01 am

    I’ll try to summarize some points here, since this blog is getting ready to end:

    1. You’re an engineer and not an accountant, and you see that only “margin cost” (I think you mean marginal cost) is important when considering the overall cost of the Shuttle program to the U.S. Taxpayer. Statements by the Shuttle Program Manager that it costs $200M/month to run the program are using old information.

    2. On the one hand, NASA is a bloated bureaucracy that is able to increase the cost of a project 3-4x just by being “involved”. On the other hand, the Shuttle program is so inexpensive that it only costs $60M to launch a Shuttle, and is no more expensive to use than commercial alternatives.

    3. Commercial capsules, which will weigh around 10,000 lbs, are just as expensive to refit after every use as the 172,000 lb Shuttle, even though the Shuttle has more square footage of tiles (and not replaced like on a capsule), more miles of wiring, more displays and control panels, an airlock, a robotic arm, and three SSME’s. That’s not much of a difference, so they will cost about the same.

    Ah, it’s a wonderful world you live in Kelly. But I’ll stay with everyone else in the real world.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 11:44 am
    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 10:01 am
    >I’ll try to summarize some points here, since this blog is getting ready to end:

    yeah its going round in circles.

    > 1. You’re an engineer and not an accountant, and you see that only “margin cost” =

    Not true, I mention several types of costs. You can’t assume any one will let you calculate teh resulting per flight costs.

    > 2. On the one hand, NASA is a bloated bureaucracy that
    > is able to increase the cost of a project 3-4x just by being
    > “involved”. On the other hand, the Shuttle program is so
    > inexpensive that it only costs $60M to launch a Shuttle,
    >and is no more expensive to use than commercial alternatives.

    Both untrue. NASA due to federal law and political demands (adn just incompetence) must do things in ways that are much more costly then for private parties to do it. Generally its 3-4 times more expensive. In the Case of SpaceShipOne it waas calculated more like 30-40 times more expensive.

    These are not new ideas. Its a very old saw. Often hitting the news in cases like the Militaries $100 hammers’ etc – which in congressional investigation turned out to be $1.25 tool, sold to them for $1.25, with $99 of federally mandated paperwork. (Due to laws the congressmen in the hearings had voted into law.)

    > 3. Commercial capsules, which will weigh around 10,000 lbs, are
    > just as expensive to refit after every use as the 172,000 lb Shuttle,
    > even though the Shuttle has more square footage of tiles (and not replaced
    > like on a capsule), more miles of wiring, more displays and control panels,

    > an airlock, a robotic arm, and three SSME’s. That’s not much of a difference,
    > so they will cost about the same.

    The capsules are projected to weigh 30 tons, not 5, the orbiter weighs 70 tons, not 86. They have about the same systems (life support, nav, maneuvering, etc) other then the wings and the bay, and the orbiter doesn’t need to be replaced after each flight. As for the relative costs of replacement ET’s and SRB’s vers EELVs – not a big dif. Little out of the “program costs” per flight.

    The big thing you keep refusing to add in is the servicing and launch cost of these beasts are trivial compared to the “program costs”. So far commercial crew/life boat has been proposed to have AT LEAST $11B so far. Adding up to a greater cost per flight then Shuttle. Further costs will be operating program costs, other program and train costs in the $200M you keep throwing around uncritically. Also Boeing and L/M (and some NASA sources) suggest a couple more billion – possibly 10 – to develop custom capsule(s) for commercial crew to carry.

    So at best – If Obama’s current proposals were excepted commercial crew would be as expensive – or more expensive – then the current per flight or per year shuttle program costs. Since that’s the opening announcements, it presumably would have gone up a lot in actual costs, but it seems a dead proposal. So its moot.

    Be interesting to see what does result, but likely not fun for any of us.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 1:16 pm

    Well you pretty much confirmed my assessment with your responses, and I’ll just point out a couple of places that show that you rely more on “rules of thumb” & “someone said” than verifiable facts.

    In the Case of SpaceShipOne it [i.e. NASA] waas calculated more like 30-40 times more expensive.

    Someone may have asked someone at NASA their opinion what it would take to win the X-Prize, but NASA never entered the contest, and NASA never published any official estimates. You rely too much on “opinion” as the basis for fact.

    The [commercial] capsules are projected to weigh 30 tons, not 5

    Both SpaceX (Dragon) and Boeing (CST-100) are planning on launching their commercial capsules on single-core launchers like Falcon 9 and Atlas V. The maximum payload of those launchers is in the 10 ton category, so you must be using your “3-4x” rule of thumb again.

    Or maybe you’re confusing “commercial” with Orion, but Orion is a government product. Maybe NASA will divest itself of the Orion some day, but as of today, Orion is not in the commercial crew category.

    the orbiter weighs 70 tons, not 86.

    I rely on various public sources of information (including Wikipedia), and they say 86 – are you saying you know better? This gets back to the types of information sources you rely on, i.e. rumors, memory and “rules of thumb”, instead of published facts. Even still, a 140,000 lb orbiter is a lot more complicated than a 10,000 lb capsule.

    So far commercial crew/life boat has been proposed to have AT LEAST $11B so far.

    It’s these kind of statements that are the weirdest, because you end up mixing “facts” from your “NASA 3-4x more” stuff with statements regarding Orion, which is not commercial crew. Your blended answer ends up being way out of line with reality. Using SpaceX as an example, there is no way they could spend that much money to develop a crew capsule, and they haven’t.

    So far SpaceX has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $500M for two launchers AND a capsule, and the capsule is already designed to be upgraded to crew (less than $1B for complete test program). Boeing is very focused on cost too, and though they may be more than SpaceX, their CST-100 should be in the same neighborhood as Dragon.

    Since commercial crew relies on existing launchers, and all that needs to be developed are the capsules & service modules, your figure of $11B seems to be off by a factor of 5-10x.

    Of course you may be confusing the experience that Orion has gone through as typical for any capsule design, but you keep forgetting that Orion was dependent on Ares I, and Ares I kept changing (causing ripple changes to Orion), and that Orion was to satisfy both LEO operations as well as extended duration missions (the Moon). Commercial crew is focused on being an LEO taxis, so a good part of the Orion cost growth doesn’t apply.

    I too look forward to what happens with the proposed budget and commercial space, and apparently I, unsurprisingly, have more optimism about both than you.

    TTFN

  • Kelly Starks

    .
    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 4:04 pm

    >> Kelly Starks wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
    >>
    >> “In the Case of SpaceShipOne it [i.e. NASA] was calculated more
    >> like 30-40 times more expensive.”

    >== NASA never published any official estimates. You rely too much
    > on “opinion” as the basis for fact.

    This wasn’t an opinion. The X-prize committee asked for a insurence policy to cover half the prize ($5M). The insurence company hired several experts in the field to evaluate it, etc. They calcultaed it would take NASA $1B to $1.2B to do it, they assumed no one could do it cheaper then NASA, and no one would be stupid enough to spend over a billion for a ten million prize, so the insurgence company issued the policy.

    Later Shawn O’Keefe (then NASA administrator) in congratulating the SS1 folks gave a similar price estimate for NASA trying to do it, and later a new report got confirmation from NASA contractors that that is the right price range.

    >> “The [commercial] capsules are projected to weigh 30 tons, not 5”

    > Both SpaceX (Dragon) and Boeing (CST-100) are planning on
    > launching their commercial capsules on single-core launchers
    > like Falcon 9 and Atlas V. The maximum payload of those launchers
    > is in the 10 ton category, ==

    And EELV can lift 20-25 tons to LEO – not including any help from its capsule, and Orions weight is 25T pushing 30T. Dragons not in the running.

    >= Orion is not in the commercial crew category.

    Thats under debate.

    >== Even still, a 140,000 lb orbiter is a lot more complicated than
    > a 10,000 lb capsule.

    Is it, or you just assuming?

    >>“So far commercial crew/life boat has been proposed to have AT LEAST $11B so far.”

    > It’s these kind of statements that are the weirdest, because you
    > end up mixing “facts” from your “NASA 3-4x more” stuff with
    > statements regarding Orion, which is not commercial crew. ==

    Commercial crew got $6 proposal from Obama, and lifeboat Orion (also mixed in to make up fort the loss of Orion/Ares life boat capacity was (as you yourself pointed out) to go in the $4.5B-$5.5B range at least. 6+5 = 11.

    And of course Boeing and L/M talked about probably needing a couple billiob to develop a capsule to what NASA will desire.

    And this relates to my commercial vrs NASA cost growth numbers how?

    > Your blended answer ends up being way out of line with reality.
    > Using SpaceX as an example, there is no way they could spend
    > that much money to develop a crew capsule, and they haven’t.

    SpaceX isn’t in the running for Commercial crew.

    ==
    == your figure of $11B seems to be off by a factor of 5-10x.

    6+5=11

    try a calculator if you don’t beleave me.

  • DCSCA

    CONCEPT OF PRIVATIZATION OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM
    Ronald D. Dittemore September 28, 2001
    Manager, Space Shuttle Program

    Hmmm. This is the same Dittemore who was on national television early on saying they’d dismissed the idea of foam bringing down Columbia.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 8:14 pm

    You definitely have a thing about trying to show how inept NASA is – the SpaceShipOne thing is the lamest example of “proof”, since it relies on “opinions”, not actual studies conducted by NASA. Do you really think that O’Keefe glad-handing people and saying “yep, it would have cost NASA $1.2B” is some sort of firm-fixed-price contract? You are hilarious!!

    >= Orion is not in the commercial crew category.

    Thats under debate.

    It’s only a debate that lives on in the minds of people that don’t understand the difference between commercial and government. Apparently former government contractors like you get confused.

    Commercial crew got $6 proposal from Obama, and lifeboat Orion (also mixed in…

    Kelly, all you have to do is read the NASA FY 2011 Budget (it’s on the NASA website), and it would keep you from having to guess what reality consists of. Commercial crew is one of the many programs outlined in the budget, and none of them is Orion – Orion is an idea they have proposed, not a budget proposal. They don’t even have an official NASA estimate for it (contractor public statements don’t qualify as contractual obligations), and they haven’t determined the requirements for what it would do.

    SpaceX isn’t in the running for Commercial crew.

    Actually no one really is yet, since all they have handed out is a $50M technology development contract, and that was with stimulus money. Here’s part of what NASA says in their budget proposal for the $6B they are allocating:

    NASA will allocate these funds through competitive solicitations that support a range of higher- and lower-programmatic risk systems and system components, such as human-rating of existing launch vehicles and development of new spacecraft that can ride on multiple launch vehicles.

    Despite what every one says in public, there is going to be fierce competition for commercial crew, and if you think SpaceX is going to be standing on the sidelines, you’ll be wrong.

    6+5=11

    Yes, 6 apples + 5 oranges = 11 pieces of fruit, and somehow that has meaning for you – good for you.

  • Kelly Starks

    > DCSCA wrote @ July 7th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
    >>CONCEPT OF PRIVATIZATION OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE PROGRAM
    >> Ronald D. Dittemore September 28, 2001
    >> Manager, Space Shuttle Program

    > Hmmm. This is the same Dittemore who was on national television
    > early on saying they’d dismissed the idea of foam bringing down Columbia.

    Wouldn’t surprise me. He was the shuttle program manager, so they’d be someone they’d point a camera at.

  • Kelly Starks

    > Coastal Ron wrote @ July 8th, 2010 at 2:09 am

    >>>= Orion is not in the commercial crew category.
    >> Thats under debate.”
    > It’s only a debate that lives on in the minds of people
    > that don’t understand the difference between commercial
    > and government. ==

    In this case that includes NASA, Boeing and L/M.

    >> “Commercial crew got $6 proposal from Obama, and lifeboat Orion (also mixed in…”
    > Kelly, all you have to do is read the NASA FY 2011 Budget ==
    The unapproved budget proposal you mean? As apposed to the Presidential proposal which its derived from?

    >> SpaceX isn’t in the running for Commercial crew.”
    > Actually no one really is yet, ==

    No, I mean SpaceX is not in the running, not – even by Musk – considered a acceptable or credible bidder. Boeing and/or L/M are it.

    Yes I know Commercial Crew itself hasn’t been approved by congress or funded.

    As for the rest, argue with NASA, SpaceX, all the top experts in the fields, Presidential and Bolden policy statement.

  • No, I mean SpaceX is not in the running, not – even by Musk – considered a acceptable or credible bidder.

    Musk has never said that. You can continue to repeat that “Spacex is not in the running,” but repetition doesn’t make it either true or sensible.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 8th, 2010 at 9:16 am

    The unapproved budget proposal you mean? As apposed to the Presidential proposal which its derived from?

    Congress doesn’t fund speeches, they fund budgets.

    Politicians say many things to many audiences, and while some of it may be specific, much of it is goal related. Obama didn’t demand that Orion become a lifeboat, he floated the idea. Then NASA testified in front of Congress that they don’t have a budget estimate for it (even if they wanted to add it to the proposed budget), and they don’t even know if they will really go through with it. And then Congress would have to actually fund the Orion budget line-item (which doesn’t exist yet).

    You focus too much on public comments, which include a lot of posturing from both government and private companies – public comments are PR, and don’t have the force of law. Contracts and approved budgets are what make the world go round.

    And regarding SpaceX, if you want to believe the PR, go ahead – it was aimed at deflecting unwanted attention away from SpaceX ahead of the Falcon 9 test launch, and also to allay fears that NASA was too focused on SpaceX for commercial crew. Once the budget is approved and the RFQ’s go out, SpaceX will be 1st in line to submit their crew proposals.

    As for the rest, argue with NASA, SpaceX, all the top experts in the fields…

    You sound Maj. Eaton from the first Indiana Jones movie:

    [Discussing the fate of the Ark]
    Maj. Eaton: We have top men working on it now.
    Indiana: Who?
    Maj. Eaton: Top… men.

    ;-)

  • Kelly Starks

    > Rand Simberg wrote @ July 8th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
    >
    > Musk has never said that.

    Did in the interviews I read — some I thought weer linked to from your blog?
    Really, with all the hay made over turning crew carry over to “inexperenced commercials”, do you really think Congress can green light SpaceX or orbital for it over Boeing and/or L-M?

    Musk can be out there – but hes not that dumb.

  • Kelly Starks

    P.S.
    After Bolden’s Al Jezeera interview talking about the US not going beyond LEO again as a nation — thats going to bury commercial crew and Obama’s other prposals even more.

  • Coastal Ron

    Kelly Starks wrote @ July 8th, 2010 at 2:27 pm

    Michael Steele had more Republican lawmakers up in arms with his comments than Bolden has had with his, so I think this news snippet has run it’s course.

    Jon Stewart also gave the subject it’s due last night, and not to give it away, but it was Fox and Friends that ended up looking silly, not Bolden.

  • Did in the interviews I read

    No, he didn’t. He has said that ULA is more likely than SpaceX to get the work, but he’s never said that he’s not in the running. This is what I mean by your vivid imagination, and making things up.

  • Coastal Ron

    Rand Simberg wrote @ July 8th, 2010 at 4:25 pm

    [Kelly] Did in the interviews I read

    [Rand] No, he didn’t. He has said that ULA is more likely than SpaceX to get the work, but he’s never said that he’s not in the running. This is what I mean by your vivid imagination, and making things up.

    Kelly, by just doing some simple searches, you can quit using your “memory” to try and remember “facts”. You don’t seem to be very good at that, so let you fingers do the walking instead of your memory cells doing the talking.

    Here is an article that validates what Rand said:

    http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/04/spacexs_elon_musk_sen_richard.html

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