Congress, NASA, Other

Briefly: Augustine, Cernan, and Florida’s missing $40 million

A few space policy items from the last few days you might have missed given the other news:

Nearly two years after being named to lead a committee to study the nation’s human spaceflight plans, Norm Augustine remains concerned about the funding allocated to those now-revised efforts. “I think with regard to this year’s budget, the match is reasonable,” he said in an interview with MSNBC. “But if we’re to have a program of the type that we described as attractive in the report that we put out, there’s not enough money in the out years to do it.” If that additional funding, on the order of $3 billion a year, is added, Augustine says the agency’s current effort is “the right program, in my judgment.”

Augustine added that he’s optimistic about the prospects of commercial spaceflight, saying “we will eventually have widespread tourism into orbit”. He also appears to advocate for propellant depots, saying the government should provide contracts to commercial firms to transport those propellants into orbit in a manner analogous to the airmail contracts of the 1920s. As for NASA’s ongoing commercial crew efforts, Augustine said that is progressing “better than I expected”.

Augustine acknowledges that some space veterans “and some of my most admired friends” don’t agree with that plan, citing in particular Neil Armstrong. Another would likely be Gene Cernan, who told the Houston Chronicle that, unlike Augustine, he doesn’t “have a lot of confidence” in some elements of the commercial sector to take over transporting astronauts to LEO. While some companies, he says, are “highly qualified”, others are “young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby”, an apparent reference to SpaceX in particular (who he does not mention by name.) He adds that he thinks that “there are wiser heads in Congress and I believe they will prevail”, apparently through making sure NASA develops the heavy-lift vehicle included in the NASA authorization act last year.

On Sunday, Florida Today examined what happened to the $40 million in economic aid promised to the Space Coast to help mitigate the effects of the end of the shuttle program. That funding was promised by President Obama in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center last year, but last week the newspaper reported the funding was not included in the final FY11 continuing resolution that Congress passed last month. The funding was to come from NASA’s Cross-Agency Support account, but when funding for that was cut by $83 million over 2010 levels, the workforce funding bore the brunt of the cut.

The article goes on to curiously note that the workforce funding was not included in either the agency’s 2012 budget proposal or in the House budget resolution. However, there would be no reason to include it in the 2012 budget request since the $40 million was a one-time item to be funded only for 2011 (and FY11 spending levels were not finalized for about two months after the FY12 proposal was released), and the House budget resolution, which also came out before FY11 was wrapped up, did not go into that level of detail.

122 comments to Briefly: Augustine, Cernan, and Florida’s missing $40 million

  • SpaceColonizer

    “But if we’re to have a program of the type that we described as attractive in the report that we put out, there’s not enough money in the out years to do it.” If that additional funding, on the order of $3 billion a year, is added, Augustine says the agency’s current effort is “the right program, in my judgment.”

    Ok… and what if NASA doesn’t get that extra $3 billion a year, because it won’t, then what would be the more attractive program? The one where we build a 130tn rocket before we’ve even specified anything for it to launch or the one where we develop the technologies we’ll need for the next generation of missions and put off the launcher until we know what we’re going to launch and when we want to launch it by? Or how about the one were we never build a launcher at all because out investments in commercial crew and cargo development have payed off and all that money we used to spend on launch infrastructure to get to space can finally be spent of doing stuff in space? Yeah…. now that’s a program you can take home to momma.

  • NASA Fan

    Augustine: ““But if we’re to have a program of the type that we described as attractive in the report that we put out, there’s not enough money in the out years to do it.”

    This statement makes me laugh so hard,….Gee, Congress isn’t willing to commit the budget necessary for NASA’s HSF programs/ new direction. First it was the dozens of new Shuttle replacement programs before Cx, then Cx, now its ObamaSpace. Makes no difference.

    History is repeating it self, again.

    HSF at NASA is dead.

    When the ISS come tumbling down, then we’ll really see if commercial HSF space has any legs to stand on.

  • It was good to read Augustine’s comments. I’m biased, but think he was spot on in saying that the “exploration program” Congress has settled on (SLS/MPCV + commercial crew + a tiny pittance for R&D, all focused on NEO missions in mid to late 2020s) doesn’t really have the out-years budget to really be realistic. Even if Congress jettisoned the parts that don’t put money into the pockets of their campaign donors and constituents, they still really couldn’t afford to do much of an exploration program without as significant budget increase for NASA. And even that would have to be done on the back of wasting the ISS, risking not having any domestic way of getting crew to orbit till late this decade at best, and not having any mission elements and hardware to actually use the toys they’re building right now.

    I wish that it was the case that if NASA’s “friends” in Congress couldn’t get it the budget to do things their way, that they’d at least find a way to let
    NASA accomplish great things on the budget it has. Alas, they seem to care more about providing funding to politically connected contractors than they do in having NASA actually accomplish anything meaningful.

    Here’s to hoping that the parts of Congress that aren’t as bought-and-paid-for by the usual suspects can bring some sanity to the situation…

    ~Jon

  • Major Tom

    USAF/STP is voting with Augustine:

    fbo.gov/download/fa9/fa969df95114a05020763af671994715/BAA-SD-010_CALL-001_29_Apr_Posting_version.pdf

    networkworld.com/community/blog/air-force-wants-long-look-commercial-spacecra

    FWIW…

  • David Teek

    This is the conclusion of the commencement address President Obama gave Friday, which touched upon his visit to KSC and space exploration as an example of American achievement.

    The whole thing is worth a reading or seeing, link to both after the excerpt. Especially in retrospect.

    We didn’t raise the Statue of Liberty with its back to the world; we raised it with its light to the world. Whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower or a slave ship; whether they signed in at Ellis Island or they crossed the Rio Grande — we are one people. We need one another. Our patriotism is not rooted in ethnicity, but in a shared belief of the enduring and permanent promise of this country.

    That’s the promise redeemed by your graduation today. That’s the promise that drew so many of you to this college and your parents to this country. And that’s the promise that drew my own father here.

    I didn’t know him well, my father — and he lived a troubled life. But I know that when he was around your age, he dreamed of something more than his lot in life. He dreamed of that magical place; he dreamed of coming to study in America.

    And when I was around your age, I traveled back to his home country of Kenya for the first time to learn his story. And I went to a tiny village called Alego, where his stepmother still lives in the house where he grew up, and I visited his grave. And I asked her if there was anything left for me to know him by. And she opened a trunk, and she took out a stack of letters — and this is an elderly woman who doesn’t read or write — but she had saved these letters, more than 30 of them, written in his hand and addressed to colleges and universities all across America.

    They weren’t that different from the letters that I wrote when I was trying to get into college, or the ones that you wrote when you were hoping to come here. They were written in the simple, sometimes awkward, sometimes grammatically incorrect, unmistakably hopeful voice of somebody who is just desperate for a chance — just desperate to live his unlikely dream.

    And somebody at the University of Hawaii — halfway around the world — chose to give him that chance. And because that person gave a young man a chance, he met a young woman from Kansas; they had a son in the land where all things are possible.

    And one of my earliest memories from growing up in Hawaii, is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders to see the astronauts from one of the Apollo space missions come ashore after a successful splashdown. You remember that no matter how young you are as a child. It’s one of those unforgettable moments when you first realize the miracle that is what this country is capable of. And I remember waving a little American flag on top of my grandfather’s shoulders, thinking about those astronauts, and thinking about space.

    And today, on this day, more than 40 years later, I took my daughters to the Kennedy Space Center. And even though we didn’t get to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch, we met some of the astronauts, and we toured the Space Shuttle Atlantis. And looking at my daughters, I thought of how things come full circle. I thought of all that we’ve achieved as a nation since I was their age, a little brown boy sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders — and I thought about all I want us to achieve by the time they have children of their own.

    That’s my proof that the idea of America endures. That’s my evidence that our brave endeavor on this Earth continues. And every single day I walk into the Oval Office, and for all the days of my life, I will always remember that in no other nation on Earth could my story be possible, could your stories be possible. That is something I celebrate. That is something that drives every decision I make.

    So what I ask of you, graduates, as you walk out of here today is this: Pursue success. Do not falter. When you make it, pull somebody else up. (Applause.) Preserve our dream. Remember your life is richer when people around you have a shot at opportunity as well. Strive to widen that circle of possibility; strive to forge that big, generous, optimistic vision of America that we inherited; strive to carry that dream forward to future generations.

    Thank you. Congratulations. May God bless you. May God bless the United States of America.

    http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2011/04/29/president-obama-delivers-commencement-address-miami-dade-college

  • $40 million is trivial compared to the loss of the Shuttle program. It is still difficult to explain the decision to shut down a working system for launching humans into spacewhen we had nothing to replace it. Were we just bored with doing a good job? To shut down our only working system for human spaceflight, and cripple the ISS, which was built to work directly with Shuttle, was shortsighted and completely revisionist. The very term “Space Transportaiton System” referred to the Shuttle, Station, and the never-built Space Tug. O’Keefe’s claim, in 2004, that we no longer needed the Shuttle because the ISS was complete was historical revisionism.

    Small as they are, the cuts to cross-agency support are also a mistake. This small fund in the money that local managers use to actually do useful things quickly, without spending a fortune on administration.

    As to the grousing about SpaceX, this is really juvenile behavior on the part of numerous NASA personnel. I have seen them talk disparagingly about SpaceX picking up the Dragon with a barge and a few people when NASA would have used a major naval vessel with hundreds of personnel. In reality, SpaceX had just the number of people and level of redundancy that were needed to do the job. The NASA plan was, and is, ridiculously expensive for what it does.

    NASA needs to realize that excessive complexity cost, and redundancy absolutely assure that a program will fail, often without reducing risk at all. There is absolutely no possibility that Orion or HLV (at least with SRBs) will ever function productively. The NASA arguments the Orion will give them the ability to explore the solar system fly in the face of reason. The same people who accuse Obama of “ending the space program” want more tax cuts for themselves.. Anyone who thinks the US taxpayers will finance “Apollo on Steroids” is living in a vacuum.

    One of the big problems is the lack of any practical experience in launch vehicle design and construction among NASA decisionmakers. That leads to a failure to recognize how signiicant an achievement the Shuttle is, and claims that Constellation will be safe because every system will be “failure tolerant”. Any reliability engineer experioenced with real hardware would consider his approach naive and simplistic, since excessive weight and cost guarantee failure. Constellation, under any name, should be canceled. That’s a hard thing for me to say, there are good people working on it. But it serves no useful purpose.

    Second, the CCDEV specs make no sense. We already have two sources of capsules to get people to the ISS. What we need is to restart the RLV program and develop technology for all-liquid-fuel booster and orbiter, both capable of landing on a runway, that could really lower the cost of spaceflight. There’s no explanation for pushing the HL-10; all the lifting bodies that actually landed on a runway were mockups about a quarter the weight of a real spacecraft.

    There’s plenty of useful work NASA could do. Start by giving its research and development people some funds to actually do R&D of practical value to a billion real people here on earth, rather than forcing them to support only a mythical handful who might land on Mars in the next century., while claiming that anything useful they do is a “free” benefit of human spaceflight.

  • Matt Wiser

    Oh, if only there was a symposium or a Congressional Hearing where Gene and Neil were on the same panel as Mr. Musk. The chatter would be very lively….not to mention sharp. Gene having more confidence in Boeing than in Space X is probably an accurate statement. Musk’s own comments about “retiring on Mars” only give ammuntion to those who think of him as a hobbyist.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Cancel the Senate launch system and the money is there Robert G. Oler

  • There’s two types of HLV advocates: those who think the budget will go up so they can finish building it and actually do something with it, and those who think the budget doesn’t need to go up.

  • Rhyolite

    “and for them it’s kind of like a hobby”

    Isn’t it ironic that the “hobbyists” are the only ones in America putting capsules in orbit and returning them to the Earth. The “highly qualified” ones are playing catch up right now.

  • common sense

    All right y’all SLS and MPCV cheer leaders. Can you read this?

    “If that additional funding, on the order of $3 billion a year, is added, Augustine says the agency’s current effort is “the right program, in my judgment.”

    $3B a year added, not subtracted! See the difference? And I am not even saying whether it is a good idea, or not. It would require $3B a year in addition. And I am not sure if Augustine means before the CR cuts or after. Does he assume $3B only added to the HSF part of the house? I would assume so. Which would just ever slightly antagonize every one else inside NASA btw who see their budgets in decline.

    So. What do you think will happen in regard to SLS and MPCV in the coming years? $3B more? Per year? Or not?

    What is the sensible conclusion? Augustine has an agenda? Maybe…

    Oh well…

  • Das Boese

    If you read the full statement, it becomes clear that that Augustine’s remarks are less of a call for increasing NASA funding, more of a general statement that exploration goals need to be in line with their funding and vice versa:

    “”But if we’re to have a program of the type that we described as attractive in the report that we put out, there’s not enough money in the out years to do it. The question is whether we’ll add that money in the out years or not. If we don’t have it, then we’re probably pursuing the wrong program. If we add the money, then this will be the right program, in my judgment.” (emphasis mine)

    The way I see it NASA isn’t getting any more money anytime soon, so yeah… you’re not probably, but definitely “pursuing the wrong program”, ergo SLS and MPCV.

  • I have to wonder why 1960s-era test pilots are considered experts on what 2010s-era commercial aerospace companies are doing today.

    I respect the “Right Stuff” era astronauts for their service to their company. But they have no involvement with what the participants in CCDev are doing and therefore are not experts on the subject.

    My guess is some of them don’t like the idea of anyone other than a government employee going into space and ruining their monopoly.

    Chuck Yeager looked down his nose at the “spam in a can” astronauts because he didn’t think they were true pilots, just passengers. He did admit a little bit of interest in Shuttle because someone flies the orbiter for a few minutes on landing approach.

    I think it’s the same phenomenon with Armstrong and Cernan. It wasn’t what they did so they dismiss it — and, perhaps, don’t understand it.

  • Typo in the last … That should be, “… service to their country,” of course, not company.

  • red

    Cernan wants lobbyists, not hobbyists!

  • Doing research on the Internet this morning, I found this February 1991 interview with Chuck Yeager.

    On Page 6 of that interview is this Q & A:

    What other problems do you see with NASA as it stands?

    Chuck Yeager: Basically, the bureaucracy. It’s a civil service organization. It’s difficult to get dead wood out of it, it has a tendency not to let loose of operational programs and keep on doing research and development. The shuttle is a good example. We could probably run the shuttle program for about one-tenth of what it is costing today with a good civilian organization that’s in it to make a profit. (Emphasis added.)

    Wow. More than 20 years ago, Yeager was calling for commercial crew.

    Take that, Armstrong and Cernan.

    Yeager didn’t think much of Armstrong either, if you read through the interview.

  • amightywind

    Why is Augustine’s opinion news? He is just another faceless CEO with a leftist political agenda. Real weight should be given to the opinion of the Apollo commanders like Armstrong and Cernan

    Some of these guys are highly qualified, but some are young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby.

    The brutal truth.

  • Justin Kugler

    The stale wind blows again, only, this time, it has the stench of what Neil deGrasse Tyson calls “necrophilia” for prior accomplishments.

  • Joe

    Eugene “Gene” Andrew Cernan (born March 14, 1934) – 77 years old and of course over the hill. Therefore his opinions mean nothing.

    Norman Ralph Augustine (born July 27, 1935) – 75 years old and of course the fount of all knowledge.

    A couple of questions:
    Has anyone told Augustine that he has only one year four months to go before he is over the hill and his positions will be summarily dismissed because of his age?
    Or will his positions still be accepted as long as they agree with yours?

  • common sense

    @ amightywind wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 8:32 am

    Cernan piloted Apollo all the way to the Moon and landed and back and worked as a businessman to provide services to JSC. Augustine was the CEO of one of the largest aerospace defense contractor in the world.

    Who has the correct experience to judge what a program like SLS really needs in terms of budget?

    The brutal truth.

  • common sense

    @ Stephen C. Smith wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 8:31 am

    Chuck Yeager and Gene Cernan and all the other right stuff pilots come from an era when you as a pilot were actually well piloting an aircraft, the heirs to the goggle and scarf pilots of the early 20th century.

    Nowadays a modern fighter aircraft is more piloted by computers than by pilots. Pilots have become combat situation manager. Their attention is to be dedicated to weapons system management and not to piloting, looping the loop. If you can shoot an adversary 150 miles away you will not enter in any dogfight.

    All this to say that their notion of the “right stuff” belongs to the 50s and 60s. Not that it is wrong, just that it is obsolete.

  • Some of these guys are highly qualified, but some are young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby.

    The brutal truth.

    Just like this “hobbyist”, eh Windy ?: http://american-business.org/2279-air-transportation-industry.html

    And here: http://american-business.org/2544-howard-hughes.html

    There’s some historical similarities here Windy and as usual you’re on the wrong side of them.

    But keep it up, you’re entertaining! 8)

  • Major Tom

    “Musk’s own comments about “retiring on Mars” only give ammuntion to those who think of him as a hobbyist.”

    NASA is already studying Dragon for Mars testing:

    parabolicarc.com/2011/05/03/nasa-send-dragon-mars/

    FWIW…

  • Joe

    dad2059 wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 10:20 am
    From your own link:
    “After World War II, he was summoned before a congressional committee to account for his failure to deliver the famed Spruce Goose, a specially designed fighter plane made primarily of wood, in time to be of help during the war.”

    In fact he never delivered the Spruce Goose as an operational vehicle at all.

    Howard Hughes was certainly a very colorful guy, but are you sure you want to use him as a role model for Musk?

  • Vladislaw

    From the first link dad2059 provided:

    “Eventually airlines made a distinction between first class and coach, but even flying coach was so expensive that Pan Am partnered with the Household Finance Corporation to help middle-class travelers pay for tickets through installments.”

    I would imagine you will see the same thing for space tourism.

  • Coastal Ron

    Joe wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 9:48 am

    Cernan and Augustine. You actually have an interesting question Joe.

    It could be that those of us that look at space issues with an eye to cost like Augustine because he built the stuff that people like Cernan used to go to space. His perspectives on the budget are not based on thrill-seeking, but on what can be accomplished money-wise (important in this day & age).

    For those that look at space from the perspective of space exploration (especially the Moon), they like Cernan because he successfully used the technology people like Augustine built to do things that were “cutting edge”. He incurred lots of risk, but he was the paid talent so to speak, and likely didn’t care how much things cost (especially when putting your butt on the line).

    Both have valid points of view depending on what the conversation is. If we’re doing cutting edge exploration, then Cernan has valuable input on the hardware and operations aspects. But if we’re talking about the economics and budget of a new class of rockets, or the viability of a new class of LEO transportation, I don’t know if his opinions provide any insight.

    My $0.02

  • Szebeheley

    So, the Augustine Committee concluded that Constellation needed a budget increase of $3B to get back on schedule. Garver, Holdren, Kohlenberger, Shawcross and Robinson use that to justify canceling Constellation. But, it turns out that NASA still needs an extra $3B to do COTS, CCDev, and HSF. Oh, and COTS schedule is slipping, as will CCDev, and we’re n

  • amightywind

    My point is that we have had 2 Augustine Commissions. Judge the results, a badly dysfunctional and broken NASA whose leaders obsess on wealthy dotcom white knights. Why pay any further attention. It is time to hand the reigns of authority to a new group, like an Armstrong Committee. From a political standpoint Cernan is right. Congress has arrested and pushed back Newspace (as I predicted). The next President has a chance to set NASA’s course for decades. We must make sure she is better advised than this one.

  • Szebeheley

    So, the Augustine Committee concluded that Constellation needed a budget increase of $3B to get back on schedule. Garver, Holdren, Kohlenberger, Shawcross and Robinson used that to justify canceling Constellation. But, it turns out that NASA still needs an extra $3B to do COTS, CCDev, and HSF. Oh, and COTS schedule is slipping; we’re now 1 1/2 years behind schedule.

    Here are some questions to occupy those here who love long posts. What will happen if CCDev schedule slips? Why is there only one customer for CCDev–NASA? Commercial start-up’s and enterprises are usually financed by investors. If commercial crewed space is around the corner, Futron’s study predicted it would blossom in 2009, where are the investors who should be lining up for a chance to get equity in a new and hot market? Why, with such assistance as the 2004 Commercial Space Act and COTS, are the “commercial” space companies falling further behind schedule (GAO-08-618, pp 19-22) every month to perform simple cargo launches (simple compared to crewed flight)? And what does that predict for “commercial” companies’ promises for achieving crewed flights by 2013 or 2014? First crewed flight by 2015-2016? The same as was predicted for Ares 1 by Augustine?

  • Szebeheley

    “NASA is already studying Dragon for Mars testing”

    Anyone who thinks Dragon is a BEO capable craft must turn-in their aerospace, mechanical or electrical engineering degree. Absent a real degree, they must return their first passion; writing sic-fi.

    Dragon is being designed and built for LEO.

    As to Musk retiring on Mars, one should ask how much, our gov’t has already subsidized this man’s “dreams” in the amount of over $750 million ($140 million Falcon 1, $238 million Falcon 9, $450 million Tesla), this effort will cost American taxpayers?

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hughes is not a good model for Musk.

    Musk is married with children; Hughes was not. Hughes likely suffered head injury in his test flight accident while testing a P 38 prototype, and his later health problems in the 1950’s appear to have eventually led to insanity.

    Most test pilots are aeronautical engineers, and have been for quite a while, whether self taught up to the 1940’s, or formally afterwards.

    Among test pilots there are two types – those who test systems designed by others, and those who fly systems they themselves developed. That is the Difference (with a capital D) between Dr. Armstrong and Dr. Aldrin.

    (Cosmonaut Feoktistov was and Cosmonaut Grechko is of the second type.)

    It appears President Obama relies on Dr. Aldrin’s advice. It is true that a persons mental abilities can decrease with age and/or injury, and that their views may be time bound by the period of their greatest activity. (I can personally testify about stroke damage.)

    But this is not universally true.

    Norm Augustine is an engineering manager, and very well suited for and capable of performing the task he was assigned, in my opinion.

    Let’s go to today’s spin. Musk does not have “hobbyists” designing his launchers.

    Among the Mars, there somehow is an idea that the ISS is worthless, as it is not manned flight to Mars. This idea was promoted by Rick Tumlinson, with lines such as “just going around in circles”.

    Needless to say, but essential to point out, this idea is nonsense.

    Another bit of spin – somehow some manned Mars flight enthusiasts have the idea that Musk is solely fixated on Mars, and that if NASA was just shut down and SpaceX given all their budget, then manned flight to Mars would happen overnight.

    Musk is not fixated on manned flight to Mars.
    SpaceX can not perform manned flight to Mars on its own.
    NASA has tasks other than manned flight to Mars.

    Finally, I want to plainly tell all of you again that the Congress will issue yet another set of explicit instructions to NASA to deal with the impact hazard before the end of this year.

    You can call it a delusion of grandeur, or megalomania if you like.
    It’s not.

  • In fact he never delivered the Spruce Goose as an operational vehicle at all.

    It never killed anyone and how was it a failure? He proved to the military it could fly. http://hrhughesjr.webs.com/aviationhighlights.htm

    And Hughes Aircraft (and its other incarnations from 1932) existed until 2000 when Boeing bought them.

    Hardly a failure.

    I think Elon is aware of his potential place in history and the comparisons drawn between him and Hughes. And I think he welcomes it.

  • “Eventually airlines made a distinction between first class and coach, but even flying coach was so expensive that Pan Am partnered with the Household Finance Corporation to help middle-class travelers pay for tickets through installments.”

    I would imagine you will see the same thing for space tourism.

    Certainly a possibility, but only after the appropriate waivers for insurance liability and collateral for the loans are signed IMO.

  • Das Boese

    Szebeheley wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 11:48 am

    So, the Augustine Committee concluded that Constellation needed a budget increase of $3B to get back on schedule. Garver, Holdren, Kohlenberger, Shawcross and Robinson use that to justify canceling Constellation. But, it turns out that NASA still needs an extra $3B to do COTS, CCDev, and HSF. Oh, and COTS schedule is slipping, as will CCDev, and we’re n

    No, the Augustine Committee concluded that even if Constellation were magically finished, the running costs would simply not be sustainable.

    COTS/CCDev seem to be doing just fine at current funding, a modest increase would merely serve to speed things up.
    The only thing that truly needs every penny it can get is SLS/MPCV, a laucher without a payload and a capsule that is redundant for LEO transport and ill-equipped for BEO exploration.

  • Joe

    Coastal Ron wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 11:35 am
    “It could be that those of us that look at space issues with an eye to cost like Augustine because he built the stuff that people like Cernan used to go to space.”

    I do not want to beat this to death, since the actual point of my post was the bravo sierra seen on various websites that Cernan cannot possibly know what he is talking about because he is “old”.

    The following is an excerpt from Augustine’s biography:
    “Norman R. Augustine was raised in Colorado and attended Princeton University where he graduated with a BSE in Aeronautical Engineering, magna cum laude, and an MSE. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi.
    In 1958 he joined the Douglas Aircraft Company in California where he worked as a Research Engineer, Program Manager and Chief Engineer. Beginning in 1965, he served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Assistant Director of Defense Research and Engineering. He joined LTV Missiles and Space Company in 1970, serving as Vice President, Advanced Programs and Marketing. In 1973 he returned to the government as Assistant Secretary of the Army and in 1975 became Under Secretary of the Army, and later Acting Secretary of the Army. Joining Martin Marietta Corporation in 1977 as Vice President of Technical Operations, he was elected as CEO in 1987 and chairman in 1988, having previously been President and COO. He served as president of Lockheed Martin Corporation upon the formation of that company in 1995, and became CEO later that year. He retired as chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin in August 1997, at which time he became a Lecturer with the Rank of Professor on the faculty of Princeton University where he served until July 1999.”

    Mr. Augustine has had a very successful career and deserves full credit for his many accomplishments, but if you check the dates of for whom he worked and when you will notice he had very little (if anything) to do with the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo Shuttle and Space Station Programs. You can argue that that makes him neutral (or biased against) in regards to HSF, but it does not justify the assertion that “because he built the stuff that people like Cernan used to go to space.”

  • John Malkin

    NASA is on track in carrying out credible, affordable, and effective programs to meet the mandate set before us. This FY 2008 budget request has been carefully considered, and it balances many competing demands upon limited resources. However, Congress has not yet appropriated funds for NASA for FY 2007, and adjustments to NASA’s plans contained herein may be necessary based on this appropriation.
    – Michael D. Griffin

    Constellation Systems (M) FY09 – 3,451.2; FY10 – 3,784.9; FY11 – 7,666.0; FY12 – 7,993.0

    Advanced Capabilities (M) FY09 – 855.8; FY10 – 861.6 973.0; FY11 – 1,059.1; FY12 – 1,083.9

    Orion and Ares I are currently targeted for operation no later than 2014.

    NASA is pursuing partnerships with the emerging private space sector to provide Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) to the ISS. Currently, this capability is not available within the United States or NASA.

    So what is the logic that SLS/MPCV will be successful?

  • common sense

    @ Joe wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 9:48 am

    I am sorry Joe but you’re way out of line. Who made the case for their respective ages? Who said either was over the hill because of their age?

    Are you changing into amightywind? Personally I prefer the original windy.

    Oh well…

  • common sense

    @ Joe wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 10:59 am

    “Howard Hughes was certainly a very colorful guy, but are you sure you want to use him as a role model for Musk?”

    It may be the closest to a past personality that Elon can be compared with. But in order to understand that you have to try and understand both men. Not the usual pundit bravo-sierra that some have to say about Elon.

  • common sense

    @ Coastal Ron wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 11:35 am

    “Cernan and Augustine. You actually have an interesting question Joe.”

    No it is not interesting. It is out of line. It is a form of discrimination based on age.

  • tps

    E.P. Grondine wrote

    Musk is married with children; Hughes was not. Hughes likely suffered head injury in his test flight accident while testing a P 38 prototype, and his later health problems in the 1950′s appear to have eventually led to insanity.

    Actually he was flying a Hughes XF-11 prototype recon plane.. There’s also evidence that he had had mental issues even before the accident but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  • common sense

    @ amightywind wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 11:52 am

    “My point is that we have had 2 Augustine Commissions. Judge the results, a badly dysfunctional and broken NASA whose leaders obsess on wealthy dotcom white knights. Why pay any further attention. It is time to hand the reigns of authority to a new group, like an Armstrong Committee. From a political standpoint Cernan is right. Congress has arrested and pushed back Newspace (as I predicted). The next President has a chance to set NASA’s course for decades.”

    Even assume you’d be served your wish it will not work. What is so hard to understand that it is Congress which does not support your dreams! Thay have the cash and they do not give it.

    Reality my friend. Reality.

    ” We must make sure she is better advised than this one.”

    Still rooting for Sarah??? We saw how she handled advices during the ’08 campaign… Good luck with that.

  • common sense

    @ Szebeheley wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 12:11 pm

    “Dragon is being designed and built for LEO.”

    Another knows-it-all. Do you work for SpaceX? How do you know?

    You are free to return to your FoxNews program now.

  • Hughes is not a good model for Musk.

    The reason I make the comparison is because both are/were; rich, talented, intelligent, pushed the technology envelope weren’t afraid of the media (of the day) and hired the best IMO.

    You and others might disagree, but this is how I see it.

  • Joe

    dad2059 wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 12:23 pm
    “It never killed anyone and how was it a failure? He proved to the military it could fly.”

    I flew once in 1947 (two years after the war ended) reached an altitude of less than 100 ft. and flew around one mile. Yes he proved it could fly years late and to serve no useful purpose.

    It’s true it never killed anyone (I assume that is intended as a cheap shot at the Shuttle); neither did it ever accomplish anything.

  • It may be the closest to a past personality that Elon can be compared with. But in order to understand that you have to try and understand both men. Not the usual pundit bravo-sierra that some have to say about Elon.

    Yup.

  • …since the $40 million was a one-time item to be funded only for 2011 (and FY11 spending levels were not finalized for about two months after the FY12 proposal was released), and the House budget resolution, which also came out before FY11 was wrapped up, did not go into that level of detail.

    I think it was simply forgotten and/or over-looked, thus never included in the budget CR negotiations.

  • Joe

    common sense wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
    @ Coastal Ron wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 11:35 am

    “Cernan and Augustine. You actually have an interesting question Joe.”

    “No it is not interesting. It is out of line. It is a form of discrimination based on age.”

    My comment was anti age discrimination. How hard do you have to work to intentionally misunderstand people?

  • My point is that we have had 2 Augustine Commissions. Judge the results, a badly dysfunctional and broken NASA whose leaders obsess on wealthy dotcom white knights.

    Yes, because Congress paid no attention to either of the commissions.

    Idiot.

  • common sense

    @Joe wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 1:55 pm

    “My comment was anti age discrimination. How hard do you have to work to intentionally misunderstand people?”

    Your comment was not. It came out of the blue accusing people that were doing it. Show me a post in here that does it and you’ll have my apologies. In the mean time…

    Out of line.

  • What will happen if CCDev schedule slips?

    The same thing that will happen when SLS/MPCV slips, except it will cost an order of magnitude less money.

    Why is there only one customer for CCDev–NASA?

    Because it’s a NASA program? Was this supposed to be a trick question?

    Commercial start-up’s and enterprises are usually financed by investors. If commercial crewed space is around the corner, Futron’s study predicted it would blossom in 2009, where are the investors who should be lining up for a chance to get equity in a new and hot market?

    They’ve been investing in Space X, Virgin, XCOR, Sierra Nevada, Masten, Armadillo, etc. Was this also supposed to be a trick question?

    Why, with such assistance as the 2004 Commercial Space Act and COTS, are the “commercial” space companies falling further behind schedule (GAO-08-618, pp 19-22) every month to perform simple cargo launches (simple compared to crewed flight)?

    When they’re falling behind schedule more than a year per year, as Constellation was, while costing tens of billions, get back to us.

    And what does that predict for “commercial” companies’ promises for achieving crewed flights by 2013 or 2014? First crewed flight by 2015-2016?

    From what I can see, they’re on track, if Congress doesn’t pull the funding plug next year.

  • How hard do you have to work to intentionally misunderstand people?

    Harder than you, apparently. Can you cite an actual person who has said we shouldn’t listen to Cernan because he’s old?

    What people have said, is that his advancing age might be an explanation for why he’s saying such blatantly clueless things. If he were younger, we would have to seek a different explanation, but his statements would be as clueless, regardless of his age.

  • It’s true it never killed anyone (I assume that is intended as a cheap shot at the Shuttle)

    Actually, it wasn’t and as a Marine Veteran I wouldn’t disrespect the STS crews that way.

    I meant it as an example against any commercial crew argument that seems common with the punditry (future casualties).

  • Major Tom

    “You can argue that that makes him neutral (or biased against) in regards to HSF, but it does not justify the assertion that ‘because he built the stuff that people like Cernan used to go to space.'”

    The point is that Augustine is a (very experienced) aerospace hardware developer and manager. Armstrong and Cernan, for all their accomplishments, are not — they’re operators. That puts Augustine in a much better position to judge the feasibility of ongoing aerospace development programs (like Constellation) and their alternatives.

    NASCAR drivers and pit crew chiefs are very experienced automobile operators. But neither (usually) has training or a track record in the design and development of production automobiles. Their jobs involve cars and they may be high stress, high profile, or even heroic. But they don’t have skills and knowledge that are relevant to creating the next Civic, F100, or even Mustang or experience in analyzing what Toyota or Ford’s next model should be.

    FWIW…

  • Major Tom

    Stupid, rich-boy, amateurs — what do they know?

    http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=29236

    FWIW…

  • Coastal Ron

    Joe wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 12:59 pm

    I do not want to beat this to death, since the actual point of my post was the bravo sierra seen on various websites that Cernan cannot possibly know what he is talking about because he is “old”.

    And notice my response had nothing to do with age. I don’t see age as an issue, but what I do think is important is relevancy.

    Since the discussion at hand is not whether it’s possible to build the SLS/MPCV but whether we can afford to, Cernan doesn’t seem to have much relevant input into the discussion – Augustine does. Other topics, including those requiring bravery and gumption, Cernan would, but this is not one of them.

  • Peter Lykke

    Augustine is my hero, but his arguments could use a little dose of political uncorrectness. Why not call a spade a spade?
    So: “if we’re to have a program of the type that we described as attractive in the report that we put out, there’s not enough money in the out years to do it” becomes ” you are doing exactly the opposite of what we recommended in the report”.
    And another: “If that additional funding, on the order of $3 billion a year, is added, the agency’s current effort is the right program, in my judgment” becomes “you will never get the money needed to finish this, so find something less expensive”

    Be what that may, the money quote from the article for me is this: “The only way you can fully justify the human spaceflight program is in the form of intangibles. That is, great nations do great things. President Kennedy said great nations like to explore. If we don’t do these things, others will. Do we want to be a part of it, or do we want to stand back and watch?”

    Well said, I think – but that will not provide the extra 3B/year, either.

  • John Malkin

    Interesting post on SpaceX site related to the cost of spaceflight:
    http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

  • Joe

    Rand Simberg wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 2:10 pm
    “Can you cite an actual person who has said we shouldn’t listen to Cernan because he’s old?

    What people have said, is that his advancing age might be an explanation for why he’s saying such blatantly clueless things.”

    So maybe he is saying things you disagree with because of “his advancing age” , but you are not saying that what he says should be discarded “because he’s old”.

    I would say that borders on self-parody, but the borders part doesn’t fit.

    Questions:
    Are you a Medical Doctor?
    Have you examined and diagnosed the patient?
    If not why would you make such baseless (not to mention sleazy) implications?

  • So maybe he is saying things you disagree with because of “his advancing age” , but you are not saying that what he says should be discarded “because he’s old”.

    The issue is not whether he is saying things with which I disagree. It is whether or not he is saying things that correspond to reality on this planet. I am not saying that what he says should be disregarded because he is old, but because it is nonsense, regardless of his age. His age is just a possible explanation of why he’s saying nonsense, for those who seek an answer to that question.

  • Interesting post on SpaceX site related to the cost of spaceflight:
    http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

    This is why I compare Elon Musk and SpaceX to Howard Hughes, Glenn Curtiss and Jack Northrup.

  • common sense

    @ Major Tom wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 2:25 pm

    A great feat yes.

    Now on the reporting:

    “mean that the skin temperature during re-entry stays very low compared to previous manned spacecraft and thermal protection systems such as heat shields or tiles are not needed.”

    Hmm. See a Mach 3.0 (if similar to SS-1) or so max velocity is the real why here not the light weight and high drag. A high drag will usually result in high heat rates and therefore significant TPS. Capsules have high drag, actually that is all they have compared with lift. Well okay the light weight play a role since it relates to the ballistic coefficient and a high weight would also most likely result in high heat rates. So in the end it’s every thing. BUT: Mach 3.0 really is why. It is not even hypersonic. Not really.

    FWIW.

  • Joe

    Rand Simberg wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 3:18 pm
    “The issue is not whether he is saying things with which I disagree. It is whether or not he is saying things that correspond to reality on this planet. I am not saying that what he says should be disregarded because he is old, but because it is nonsense, regardless of his age. His age is just a possible explanation of why he’s saying nonsense, for those who seek an answer to that question.”

    Disagree with the guy all you want, say that he is not “saying things that correspond to reality on this planet” (he probably thinks the same of you). But until you can answer the first two questions in the affirmative (and I would suspect that will be never) then leave references to his age out of it. You have no basis for those speculations and saying you are only speculating to why he is saying things you think do not “correspond to reality” is to put it politely disingenuous. You may not believe this but I thought better of you.

  • Bennett

    John Malkin wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 2:47 pm

    Thanks for the link to that, John. I hadn’t seen it and it was quite interesting to read. I interpret it as SpaceX tossing down the gauntlet.

    Or rather, providing facts about the gauntlet (tossed down on December 8th, and thrown down with the FH rollout) in order to counter the disinformation campaign being waged by those who would like to shut down CCDev.

  • Coastal Ron

    Szebeheley wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 12:11 pm

    Anyone who thinks Dragon is a BEO capable craft must turn-in their aerospace, mechanical or electrical engineering degree. Absent a real degree, they must return their first passion; writing sic-fi.

    Dragon is being designed and built for LEO.

    As of now, yes I would agree that SpaceX is targeting the LEO crew transportation marketplace.

    But I think what you’re missing is that Dragon could, with limited modifications, be used to land unmanned on Mars. Falcon Heavy has enough capacity to send Dragon to Mars, and the basic systems that they are building into Dragon are planned to be usable on Mars too. NASA is even looking at the concept to see if it has merit, especially since it makes sense from a cost standpoint.

    Personally I think we’re quite a ways away from sending anyone BEO, since Congress is fixated on building the largest unneeded rocket in the world, and is ignoring funding technology we need to take us BEO (true spaceships, radiation protection, closed-loop systems, refueling systems, etc.).

    Why don’t you think an unmanned Dragon couldn’t go BEO?

  • common sense

    @ Peter Lykke wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 2:34 pm

    “Why not call a spade a spade?”

    Because, usually, it is not how you make it to CEO in this business.

  • You have no basis for those speculations and saying you are only speculating to why he is saying things you think do not “correspond to reality” is to put it politely disingenuous.

    One does not have to be a medical doctor to be aware that (sadly) some peoples’ faculties decline with age. Are you denying this? I was simply pointing this out as possible explanation for his statements. Perhaps you have a better one?

    And once more, no one has said we shouldn’t listen to him because he is old.

    Have you ever had a course in logic?

  • Jeff Foust

    The age and mental faculties of Messrs. Augustine, Cernan, and Hughes are off topic for this post. Thank you for your cooperation.

  • Peter Lykke

    The difference between Cernan and Augustine? Well, Cernan says that they don’t know what they don’t know. Augustine thinks he knows what he knows.

    :)

  • common sense

    @ Coastal Ron wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 4:07 pm

    “Why don’t you think an unmanned Dragon couldn’t go BEO?”

    Mars is a very different game for a crew. Not for a vehicle that could deliver say a rover…

    This being said a Moon-Dragon is a fairly small step to be made. Same for CST-100. It will cost money though and here is what I think Elon may be thinking. Hold on let me take my crystal ball. He is going to make some money, profit, on CRS. At some point he will cost a vehicle that can send an uncrewed Dragon around the Moon and back. After a few ISS flights he will send a crew. After a few flights to ISS and if he can afford it on his own dime he will send a crew around the Moon. No landing just a proof of concepts. Timewise: The next say 2 flights to ISS and he might send an uncrewed Dragon to the Moon for tests. If he pursues the pusher escape it might take 4 to 5 years from now before he can send a crew, the rest will be history. I think 4 years is reasonable. They will have to identify the LOC of their concepts and take any acceptable (TBD) risks. It will most likely be a SpaceX crew to the Moon. All right I’ll put my crystal ball on its stand now.

  • Bennett

    “Dragon is being designed and built for LEO.”

    I disagree. Dragon was designed for everything up to and including being part of a Mars mission. Its current iteration is that of an ISS ferry for cargo. Work is now underway for a human rated version.

    When the CEO/CTO of SpaceX states that their spacecraft’s heat shield can withstand Mars reentry velocities, well, I kinda have to go with that.

  • If I was to compare Elon Musk to someone, it would be Werner von Braun — if von Braun had been rich enough to fund his own program.

    Von Braun was attracted to government programs — first in Germany, then in the United States — because it was the only place where he could find enough money to pursue his dreams.

    If Von Braun had been rich … he’d have built rockets on his own.

    Von Braun thought big. So does Musk. Von Braun was infamous for self-promotion. So is Musk. Von Braun was charismatic. So is Musk.

    A hundred years from now, I think Musk will be viewed as the Von Braun of the 21st Century. And if he’s not … well, I won’t be around for you to say I was wrong. :-)

  • Major Tom

    FYI…

    “Here are the facts:

    The price of a standard flight on a Falcon 9 rocket is $54 million…

    The average price of a full-up NASA Dragon cargo mission to the International Space Station is $133 million including inflation, or roughly $115m in today’s dollars…

    The total company [SpaceX] expenditures since being founded in 2002 through the 2010 fiscal year were less than $800 million, which includes all the development costs for the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon. Included in this $800 million are the costs of building launch sites at Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral and Kwajalein, as well as the corporate manufacturing facility that can support up to 12 Falcon 9 and Dragon missions per year. This total also includes the cost of five flights of Falcon 1, two flights of Falcon 9, and one up and back flight of Dragon.

    The Falcon 9 launch vehicle was developed from a blank sheet to first launch in four and half years for just over $300 million…

    The Dragon spacecraft was developed from a blank sheet to the first demonstration flight in just over four years for about $300 million…

    SpaceX has been profitable every year since 2007… We have over 40 flights on manifest representing over $3 billion in revenues…

    For the first time in more than three decades, America last year began taking back international market-share in commercial satellite launch. This remarkable turn-around was sparked by a small investment NASA made in SpaceX in 2006 as part of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. A unique public-private partnership, COTS has proven that under the right conditions, a properly incentivized contractor — even an all-American one — can develop extremely complex systems on rapid timelines and a fixed-price basis, significantly beating historical industry-standard costs.”

    spacex.com/updates.php

    FWIW…

  • guest

    Today was the JSC Innovation day where a lot of people put on demonstrations and exhibits of new technology in development. Very interesting was the flown Dragon capsule, the second Boeing capsule airframe, and a plastic or wood Orion mock-up. It made for a good display. Which is furthest along?

    I think you have to read the Augustine report and understand what Augustine is saying. He is saying that if NASA continues to operate as it has been then it cannot do much without an additional $3 billion.

    Congress and the American people have said they think NASA is good, they like it, and they will fund it, at about 1/2 of 1% of the federal budget per year. That funding level has come down just a bit but has been remarkably stable for 40 years.

    The fix is in the way NASA does business and how much it spends to develop, of late, very little, in human space flight. It is time for NASA to fix its organization and how it operates so that it reaches some level of efficiency. The fix is not in more money, which is unlikely to come, or in more people. The fix is in putting your people to work. I see a lot of people who have worked hard in the past (sometimes the distant past), and they are still capable and want to work hard now. But as long as NASA is organized so that few people are given an opportunity to contribute, it is not going to get better. They are wasting much of the money and many of the people that they have now. They have an outlook and a focus looking at the recent past. The recent past, Shuttle, ISS, and Constellation are all dismal stories when it comes to efficiency or effectiveness. Until the NASA management comes to the realization that it is the management and organization that is the fault, nothing will change for the better. I keep hearing the top NASA managers say their organization is great. No, it isn’t.

  • Das Boese

    Major Tom wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 5:01 pm

    Sadly, none of this will change the minds of people who are dead set against commercial participation in space exploration and see SpaceX as the figurehead for that effort.
    Funny thing, it’s kinda the same with Tesla, with the difference of course that in the automotive world people are even more entrenched in their opposition to new developments, and they represent a sizable chunk of the actual market. Head on over to autoblog.com or Jalopnik and read some the comments there on articles regarding Tesla… this blog will seem like an ivory tower of civility and reasoned discussion ;)

  • Musk in announcing his heavy lift hinted he’d had several buyout offers in an attempt to keep space access prices artificially high. Same time he said to reach 130T or more he would need NASA’s help in designing a new engine. Replacing ULA by SpaceX or another lower cost innovative launcher might provide the additional funding for those outer years Augustine is worried about.

  • Musk in announcing his heavy lift hinted he’d had several buyout offers in an attempt to keep space access prices artificially high.

    In what way did he “hint” that?

    Same time he said to reach 130T or more he would need NASA’s help in designing a new engine.

    i.e., there is no business case for such a vehicle, or engine. Note that this is not the case for Falcon Heavy.

  • Coastal Ron

    sftommy wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 7:31 pm

    Replacing ULA by SpaceX or another lower cost innovative launcher might provide the additional funding for those outer years Augustine is worried about.

    We don’t need to replace one monopoly with another.

    What we need is a competitive marketplace that will keep costs as low as practical, and drive innovation. Neither of those things will happen with a government-run mega-launcher whose sole existence depends on the largess of Congress. Where is the incentive?

    The big question that keeps being avoided is “what is the need”? Where is the need for launchers with more capability than what is available today? The only funded needs for any payloads to space fit nicely on existing launchers, and if Augustine is right, Congress won’t have enough money to build the SLS and build a payload at the same time, so it is going to sit around for a long time consuming budget with nothing to show. How smart is that?

    Even the SpaceX Falcon Heavy is likely to be under-used for years after it becomes operational, since the demand for larger satellites (or any payloads) will be lagging the Falcon Heavy launch capabilities. But that’s OK for SpaceX, since Falcon Heavy is less expensive than even some Atlas V configurations, so they will get customers.

    Bottom line is that if NASA wants their budget woes fixed, all Congress has to do is cancel the SLS. No programs depend on the SLS yet, so the only downside is political… which is why we’re in this mess to begin with.

  • Das Boese

    Rand Simberg wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 9:01 pm

    In what way did he “hint” that?

    Perhaps he’s referring to the Q&A session.
    When the question of going public and who would be in control of SpaceX came up -like it always does-, Musk answered -like he always does- that a) he’s not currently interested in an IPO, and b) will not go public unless he can keep control of the company so it does not lose sight of its “philantropic goals” under a different management.

    Granted, that’s a far stretch to “hint at buyout offers”, but it’s the only statement I remember that even goes remotely in that direction.

  • Robert G. Oler

    common sense wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 9:53 am

    “Nowadays a modern fighter aircraft is more piloted by computers than by pilots. Pilots have become combat situation manager. Their attention is to be dedicated to weapons system management and not to piloting, looping the loop. If you can shoot an adversary 150 miles away you will not enter in any dogfight. ”

    not so much. When the Triple Seven debuted I had the pleasure of escorting some retired Boeing Air Transport (and later United) pilots from the Boeing 247 through some simulator flights. These were “elderly” pilots but clearly quite capable, all worked their way through the HUD quite easily and given not much more then “average” time I felt pretty certain that most could have mastered the plane. I asked each one of them about the advances in technology and what it meant…and the reply was along the lines of “I’ve heard this with each generation of new airplane…” one guy even remarked that the 247 was said to fly itself by people…it had an autopilot another remarked that people thought the “fuel gauges” were amazing..

    Fighter pilots have always been “combat systems managers” and that was true of the good Baron or Bishop or anyone who stays alive in combat. you are nothing if you cannot make the plane do what it was suppose to do to the best the plane and its equipment can do it…..and that is accurate for any airplane.

    That wont ever change as long as airplanes (or space craft) have people “in the loop”.

    Where pilots (and managers) transitioning into new technologies HAVE PROBLEMS is when they are STUCK on viewing new technologies as a way of accomplishing previous processes AND not be able to deal with the possiblities of new processes.

    This is Cernan’s problem. I’ve talked to Gene and he is mentally quite alert (as one might expect) and I find talk of his and others mental acuity weak. What Gene, and Wayne and a lot of the other folks cannot figure out is that new technology or capabilities has enabled new processes not merely a refinement of old processes.

    Yeager is (or was the last time I had a chance to be in a small room with him) is as much open for “the new deals” as he calls it today as he was back in 47. Col Yeager is not captured by any “method” or process from the past, but constantly (at least it seems to me) is emboldened by the possibilities of “the new” as he puts it.

    We have a lot of this “split” In our country right now. Bush’s drive to redo Apollo is in my view an example of it. Wind is an example of it here (as is Whittington). Mark W just cannot think “in the new”. New problems, terrorism, various national challenges etc (and this includes space) are all seen in the light of the past.

    This is a headline from his blog ”
    Sarah Palin a Modern Cold War Hero in the Making”

    Mark cannot leave the cold war…it colors everything about his thinking and he cannot deal in the land of a new reality. To even compare Grenada or Panama military actions by this country with Iraq or Afland in any shape or scope is absurd…but he does that.

    (ignore the part about Palin in the first place).

    The past is very comfortable…its mistakes are on their face obvious, the fixes on their face clear…and the future not so much.

    Gene Cernan, Jay Barbee, most of NASA cannot break out of either the shuttle mode, or the big government space program mold. It is all they know..

    Robert G. Oler

  • DCSCA

    Armstrong has really been MIA in this fight now for a decade or more and only recently began to make noise of any consequence, of late along side Cernan. Armstrong’s message has remained remarkably consistent over the decades, but muffled in reclusion. More’s the pity. A decade or two ago, his viewpoint might have carried more weight. Today, at 80, not so much. These days his comments draw more interest as a curiosity than for content as an authority in this era. A ‘day late’ and ‘several billion dollars short,’ Neil. Where were you when NASA really needed you to ‘work the room’ as it were. Cernan, on the other hand, makes noise all the time and has valid points. (Interviewed him myself many, many years ago and he loves to talk space.) However, ‘Gene-O’ omits the cost factors, particularly in his interview referencing shuttle. Shuttle has been grounded due to accidents, redesigns, component flaws and muddled management longer than the entire span of time between Apollo 7 and his Apollo 17 flight- the guts of NASA’s glory days. The birds may be ‘middle aged,’ in terms of ‘flight time’, but the cost to operate and maintain them is gets more expensive, not less. Just because you can fly them doesn’t mean you should. But his thinly-veiled reference to Musk is spot on.

    The problem at NASA isn’t really the technology. It’s the HSF managment culture. It needs a serious house cleaning and given how bureaucracies are want to perpetuate themselves, the only way to get rid of mediocre management entrenched from shuttle is to end the program. Still, the Apollo guys must appear to be more and more obtuse to the NASA of 2011, chattering on about a management structure long since retired out of the agency. May 5 marks the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard’s Mercury/Redstone launch which finally put some American skin in the game back in 1961 and the NASA of today would never have launched Shepard on a missile w/a 60% chance of success- as Chris Kraft’s team did– in fear of risking their budgets hardware for next year. Just look at the slippage for STS-134. Absurd given the experience and down time needed to make flight ready. And the problem in microcosm. Incompetent management on display to the world.

    @Stephen C. Smith wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 8:31 am
    Yeager doesnt think much of anyone anymore– except Yeager. Met him once. Once was enough. He’s a yellowed page in the history books now– and his plane, the X-1, an antique about 20 years older than another antique- Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.

  • DCSCA

    @common sense wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 4:44 pm

    “This being said a Moon-Dragon is a fairly small step to be made.”

    LOL Small step that’s a giant leap of faith. When are you going to realize that a space project by press release is still a paper space project. It is May, 2011. SpaceX has not launched and not flown anyone into orbit and returned them safely aboard a Dragon. And they never will. But then, Musk is planning to retire on Mars, isn’t he. LOL

  • adastramike

    I think Gene Cernan genuinely wishes to see America’s HSF program do great things again, like going beyond low-Earth orbit. And he sees NASA’s role as central to that. ‘Commercial crew’ cannot replace NASA in that regard. To that end none I don’t think he said anything offensive and definitely doesn’t deserve some of the comments he’s been getting on here.

    We’ve been in LEO for far too long and given what we’re capable of when given the resources (e.g. Apollo and building a reusable crewed vehicle–the Shuttle) and right engineering talent, we SHOULD be able to achieve completion of our HSF projects. If not then we need to either pick the right challenges or restructure how we are to achieve them. I agree that part of the problem may be a bloated bureaucracy at NASA and cost-plus contracts on some engineering projects, but there’s also the problem of the political and fiscal will to do great things. We need smarter politicians in office who are fans of HSF and not just of making political policies.

    The question is what can we really achieve beyond LEO exploration with a limited HSF budget? Obama advocates are saying he’s not trying to end HSF–and I sure hope so, otherwise he doesn’t deserve to pull any strings at NASA. Now, Augustine’s again saying NASA may need $3b more per year to finish the SLS/MPCV/CCDev/COTS efforts in HSF. I find it funny that Constellation also needed that amount to get back on track (and question whether he’s just re-using that number to convince people that SLS/MPCV is unaffordable–but that’s just a speculation). In my opinion, we should have just altered the Constellation architecture where necessary and appropriated the funds to meet a revised schedule (the beginnings of a Moon base by 2025). I really hate to see this cycle of NASA “next crewed launch vehicle” programs being started and then canceled with election cycles, just so politicians AND presidents can put their stamp on NASA.

    If Augustine is right about NASA needing $3b more and NASA does not get more money from Congress, then to me what NASA needs to do is cancel the ISS rather than extend it (to free up funds) and focus on developing the replacement for Shuttle (be it through CCDev if that works) and on building the minimum infrastructure on the Moon that would benefit a manned mission to Mars. The build-up to those Mars missions are only 20 or so years away, so decisions and work need to start NOW on the capabilities needed to do that. My personal opinion is that sending people to Mars is probably just too difficult to go it alone and will need to be international. So despite our best intentions, the sheer nature of the problem may mean humans on Mars could really be 30 or 40 years away. We need to have a viable beyond LEO program in the mean time, and in my view it has to involve the Moon.

    I think the SLS schedule may be too aggressive with the current visionless NASA leadership, but I also think that NASA needs to ‘get onboard’ and study how to get the SLS within a limited budget profile, starting with a 70 metric ton version. If that’s still not possible then NASA should just focus on beyond LEO payload demonstration missions and use EELVs or similar medium/heavy lifters to get crew and cargo back to the Moon and beyond. I don’t believe in simply ‘visiting’ Lagrange points, except for the purpose of establishing a waypoint station for missions to/from the Moon and beyond. NASA”s central HSF mission should be beyond LEO exploration, NOT simply servicing a 20-yr space station barely beyond the edge of the atmosphere.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    FWIW, I would be interesting to send an LEO cargo Dragon, with the crewed landing system, to Mars off of a Falcon Heavy just to see if it could. Fill the capsule with various exposure experiments and possibly put cameras in the external sensor bay. Then use the currently-orbiting Mars probes to verify its condition. A stunt, yes, but a stunt that could radically change how SpaceX is viewed by many people. Musk may be planning it.

    With regard to the complaints about astronauts’ opinions: It is my opinion, based on some interviews I’ve read, that these guys are remembering the NASA of the 1960s that could and did do wonders. I’m sure that the team that brought us Saturn-V could build the DIRECT 4/5 scalable SDHLV and its associated mission equipment and do so with a reasonable budget and on an ambitious time-line. The problem is that this is not the NASA that exists today, apart from some small and unusual little project teams in various centres.

    Once again, this is my opinion but I think that the shuttle era was too long from the perspective of skills and mind-set retention at NASA. The agency is literally having to learn all over again how to do the job and, right now, isn’t doing well. The pioneering mind-set is still alive and well in the R&D ends of companies like Bigelow, SNC, OSC, ULA, Blue Origin and SpaceX; That is why they are the ones coming up with the ambitious ideas. Now, in all honesty, not all ideas make it so we can expect only a few to bear fruit but even that is worth the investment.

  • There’s not now, nor is there ever going to be another $3B/year. This is my biggest criticism of the Augustine committee.. they did a great job in the time and under the other restrictions that were placed on them, but the number of options they presented that were outside the historical budget of NASA was disproportionate and the only workable option (continuing Constellation over Shuttle) was disappointing. I can’t help but feel that if they had stuck with their original mandate they would have still come to the conclusion that Constellation was unworkable under the existing budget and actually figure out how to do a sustainable exploration program with the significant funds HSF gets every year now. I expect it would involve the greatest possible use of commercial providers.

  • “I expect it would involve the greatest possible use of commercial providers.

    A good assumption. The only problem is the resistance of people who psychologically cannot let go of the comfort they derive from a way of doing things they have been familiar with all of their lives. Such has always been the case throughout history when a new disturbingly disruptive paradigm occurs. This unease causes a knee-jerk rejection that automatically leads such persons to ignore seemingly irrefutable evidence of the obsolescence of their cherished status quo, whilst causing them to “cherry pick” certain superficial information that only appears to support their position because they are not delving deep enough to find anything that counter argues their assumptions.

  • John Malkin

    Trent Waddington wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 6:51 am

    (continuing Constellation over Shuttle)

    The chances of Shuttle continuation was slim to none for many reasons. They had to weigh keeping ISS going to at least 2020, finish Ares I and develop Ares V, do advance development like fuel depots and actually fund hardware to fly on Ares V which still isn’t funded.

    $3B would cover building things like Altair or something else for humans to use to travel to the Mars moons or other bodies. Dragon is being designed to merge functionality between a capsule and a lander. Also Humans aren’t going to go directly from the Earth to Mars in a capsule. They need living quarters which no capsule can provide still no money for this hardware. Instead it’s put into SLS.

    Augustine in testimony about the final report said that Flexible Path plus Commercial offered the most flexible cost to fit into NASA’s budget.

    Another advantage of Commercial is having multiple commercial providers, if one has an accident a the rocket blows up and the crew escapes safely. Another provider can pick up the slack while an investigation on the malfunction is carried out and we don’t have to loose access to space like after Challenger or Columbia. When commercial aircraft crashes today, it doesn’t shutdown the industry.

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 10:41 pm

    “not so much”

    I like your version and I am not sure that we disagree that much about fighter pilot. Choice of words maybe. Indeed always been managers of a weapon system. But the trend is not to have pilots engage in dogfight (granted always has been) but rather to eliminate the threat ASAP.

    Some of it can (will) be seen with UCAV. You may have a flight of say 4 aircraft 3 of which will be UCAV. The last one being a two seat fighter, one pilot and one “weapon combat situation manager” (whatever you want to call it) and as everything becomes more and more automated the second seat might eventually go as well. The role of the piloted vehicle will be more like an advanced AWACS, with weapons, and send the other 3 to combat. Eventually all maybe controlled from within an AWACS or a ground station or a carier, we’ll see.

    The mistake early on with fielding of missiles, in my view, is that the “new” could not imagine that the “old” could still happen, i.e. dogfight. They removed guns from the F4 if not mistaken initially. When missiles showed they were not fail proof did they reintroduce guns. Yet the technology is far more advanced than then. And there are fighters being fielded today without guns. Check it out you’ll see.

    Again, I don’t think we disagree that much.

  • common sense

    @ DCSCA wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 11:37 pm

    “LOL Small step that’s a giant leap of faith. When are you going to realize that a space project by press release is still a paper space project. ”

    Again, I ill try slowly. A capsule ready for LEO return is a small step from a capsule ready for lunar return. I did not say Mars and I meant crewed.

    Mars for a crew is a totally different game for several reasons too long to enumerate here yet again.

    The Moon not so much.

  • Coastal Ron

    adastramike wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 2:21 am

    Part 1 – Disposability and Fixed Budgets

    If Augustine is right about NASA needing $3b more and NASA does not get more money from Congress, then to me what NASA needs to do is cancel the ISS rather than extend it (to free up funds) and focus on developing the replacement for Shuttle (be it through CCDev if that works) and on building the minimum infrastructure on the Moon that would benefit a manned mission to Mars.

    Disposability:

    I hadn’t quite realized this before, but I think one thing that defines ones attitudes towards space is whether what we put in space is disposable (i.e. Constellation-like) or reusable (i.e. ISS so far).

    Your call to “cancel the ISS” is an example of a throwaway mentality (i.e. disposable). You see nothing wrong in spending $100B and close to 20 years of effort to put something in space for a short time, and then discard it.

    Then when you want to go to space again, you have to create another hugely expensive program, spending more decades of time, to do something temporary again. I don’t get it.

    Fixed Budgets:

    NASA has historically had relatively fixed budgets, and within that budget people want to keep piling more and more things. For instance, in order to make room for the SLS, you would discard something that already works and has international support. Also keep in mind that Congress hasn’t even funded a program or payload of the SLS, so you need to make room in the budget for that too. If you couldn’t cancel the ISS, I’m sure you’d advocate for the cancellation of more and more non-spaceflight programs within NASA. Am I right?

    What you have to come to grips with is that NASA is an exploration and research agency, and that means it should always be on the pointy end of our capabilities. If you want those capabilities to be further and further away, then you need to move non-NASA activity further and further away.

    For example, with the ISS in orbit NASA is getting close to turning over their portion of the transportation and logistics to commercial companies. That will lower their sustaining costs compared to what NASA can do, but the more important part is that it gives commercial entities a chance to get established in LEO. If/when that happens, then if history is any guide, prices will fall and capabilities will expand. That means when NASA wants to venture beyond LEO, they can rely on already existing transportation services to go further within the same budget.

    But remember, that the more NASA assets you put in space, the more operational costs you accrue. When we do put that “minimum infrastructure on the Moon”, part of NASA’s budget has to be used to keep it operational. And when NASA is ready to move onto Mars, are you going to cancel the Moon infrastructure too? If not, why wouldn’t the same concept be used for the ISS?

  • Coastal Ron

    adastramike wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 2:21 am

    Part 2 – “Vision” and the SLS

    I think the SLS schedule may be too aggressive with the current visionless NASA leadership, but I also think that NASA needs to ‘get onboard’ and study how to get the SLS within a limited budget profile, starting with a 70 metric ton version.

    I don’t know what you are saying here. Your opinion of NASA leadership is clear (“visionless”), but is the SLS schedule too aggressive or not?

    Let me ask you this – if the schedule for the SLS is fine, when will Congress fund a program/payload for it? When will that be debated, and how will that affect the NASA budget?

    More importantly, if the SLS is ready by 2017, is there enough time to build a series of payloads for the SLS? Because otherwise NASA will be spending part of it’s limited budget on things that caused you to “cancel the ISS”. Why would it be OK to spend money on an unneeded rocket, but not OK to spend it on a destination in space that Congress has designated as a National Laboratory? Can you explain that?

    What I see as a dividing point for many space advocates is their concept of how we will expand into space. One model seems to be based on the Apollo model to some degree, with NASA doing everything and everything is defined as a “program”. Another model is based on our experiences opening up the American frontier, where government, individuals and companies pushed and prodded the edges of the frontier forward over time, in both planned and unplanned ways.

    This is the debate that hasn’t happened yet, and one that ignores the fact that we (the U.S.) are not alone on this Earth on wanting to expand into space. Our ISS partners could end up outmaneuvering NASA by using the latest and greatest commercial services, which would be highly ironic. Or commercial companies could find economic opportunities in leapfrogging NASA’s capabilities.

    NASA’s self-described mission statement is to “pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” Any change to that will require a large debate, so I don’t see that happening very quickly. I also don’t think the SLS is sustainable on it’s current budget, nor have I seen a true need for it, so I think there is a showdown coming on that soon too.

    There needs to be a vision that everyone can get behind, and I don’t mean the “go to X by Y” type stuff. That vision needs to be HOW we will do it, which means what part everyone will play – NASA only, public/private, international joint ventures, etc.? Until we do that, the politicians in Congress will continue to use NASA as their own personal fiefdoms, allocating money that doesn’t make sense for the future.

    Who will put that vision together? When? I don’t know, but I hope it’s soon.

  • Vladislaw

    adastramike wrote:

    “We’ve been in LEO for far too long and given what we’re capable of when given the resources “

    NASA can not do cheap, they have enormous infrastructure and labor costs. 200 million a month for shuttle if it flys or not. There goes 2.4 billion right off the top. You do not believe NASA had the talent to do something like the Falcon 9 and dragon? Major Tom posted what the costs were for that. NASA is unable to come in with costs like that. They have to keep all those engineers busy so 5 get assigned to do what 1 would do in the private sector. NASA has always had enough funding if only they were willing to break the mold. Political forces have just not allowed that to happen. Congress, with special interests in NASA want the jobs, and care little about the hardware and exploration.

    “If Augustine is right about NASA needing $3b more and NASA does not get more money from Congress, then to me what NASA needs to do is cancel the ISS rather than extend it (to free up funds) and focus on developing the replacement for Shuttle”

    Where would this replacement go then once it reaches LEO? You are talking Constellation all over again. Let’s build Orion to goto LEO, but let’s dump ISS so orion will have nothing to do in LEO until 15 years later when the heavy lift, eds, and lunar lander are completed.

    If you think the space program is only going in circles now with the ISS, what would it be with an Orion capsule with only LEO capabilities and no space station to dock at?

    The ISS is paid for, lets wring out every experiment we can get funding for while we have it. In the meantime focus on the tools we need in the tool kit for when we make the push out.

    Advanced propulsion.
    Advanced power.
    Closed loop life support.
    In space fuel handling.
    Fuel depot/station.
    Radiation mitagation.
    Aerocapture returns.

    To name just a few. If the Falcon heavy comes on line, and increasing the TRL (technology readiness level) of those things we need if we want to extend our presence we can build something like the Nautilus X. A better way to go then orion.

  • Ferris Valyn

    adastramike – What Cernan has said, and continues to do, is perpetuate lies. He has done so, I submit he did so last year in front of Congress, and he seems intent on doing so. And that, I find offensive.

    We’ve been in LEO for far too long and given what we’re capable of when given the resources …. We need smarter politicians in office who are fans of HSF and not just of making political policies.

    Ok, I don’t deny the need for smarter politicians, but thats a problem we’ll always be facing so to complain about it is, IMHO, a stupid pointless gesture. The reality is that we have the level of funding we have, and we’d better learn to live with that level, until we demonstrate that we are deserving of more funding.

    The question is what can we really achieve beyond LEO exploration with a limited HSF budget?

    We had better figure out what we can do with a limited budget – we aren’t getting more.

    Regarding the consistant $3 Billion increase – the reality is that, any program that utilize shuttle hardware, whether its Constellation, or SLS, or DIRECT, or whatever – if it is using Shuttle hardware & shuttle infrastructure as its basis for rockets and missions – if it is using those pieces, it needs a $3 Billion increase. If you get rid of that, get rid of Shuttle hardware, and focus on utilizing the other hardware you have, and focus on capabilities development that does things at a lower cost, and in a way that allows us to incorporate real & major advancements as they occur.

    I really hate to see this cycle of NASA “next crewed launch vehicle” programs being started and then canceled with election cycles, just so politicians AND presidents can put their stamp on NASA.

    The best way to deal with this is to get a viable spaceflight industry, so that we have something to counter-balance the government.

    As for the rest of your comment – Are you really suggesting that we go to the tax payer, and say, in essence “Sorry, we’ve wasted the last the last 27 years, and $100 Billion dollars going in the wrong direction – we’re gonna just have to write it off as a loss”

    Do you know how arrogant, and offensive most taxpayers would find that attitude? I am a liberal, I have no problem having more taxes, and I find it completely offensive.

    If you really dump ISS, you will dump NASA HSF.

  • DCSCA

    @common sense wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 12:05 pm

    It is May 5, 2011. 50 years and 23 days after the Soveit Union launched, orbited and safely returned Gagarin and 50 years to the day after Alan Shepard was successfully launched on his suborbital Mercury/Redstone flight and returned safely by NASA. Both efforts by government funded and managed space agencies. As of today, half a century on, commercial HSF efforts, including SpaceX, have still not successfully launched, orbited and returned a human crewed spacecraft. Tick-tock, tick-tock. End of story.

  • DCSCA

    @Stephen C. Smith wrote @ May 4th, 2011 at 4:54 pm
    “If I was to compare Elon Musk to someone, it would be Werner von Braun — if von Braun had been rich enough to fund his own program.”

    And you’d be comparing poorly. Absurd. In fact, Von Braun came from a wealthy aristocratic family. Von Braun was also singularly, apolitically dedicated to his vocation, for better or worse. Von Braun was a rocketeer. Musk is a profiteer. Musk is no Von Braun.

  • Das Boese

    DCSCA wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 2:54 pm

    End of story.

    Not by a long shot.

  • common sense

    @ DCSCA wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 2:54 pm

    As of today, half a century on, commercialgovernment HSF efforts, including SpaceXX33/OSP/Constellation/SLS/MPCV, have still not successfully launched, orbited and returned a human crewed spacecraft. Tick-tock, tick-tock. End of story.

    I am sure this is what you meant so I fixed it for you since SpaceX actually launched and orbited an F9 rocket and recovered a Dragon capsule.

    Nice try though.

  • Egad

    This isn’t quite the right thread for the following, but needs must. ATK as a company, it appears, isn’t totally dependent on making huge segmented SRMs for its survival. So one wonders how far it will go in trying to keep that part of its operation alive.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2011/05/05/atk-fourth-quarter-earnings.html

    ATK beats Wall Street with record earnings
    Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal – by Ed Stych, Staff Writer
    Date: Thursday, May 5, 2011, 10:43am CDT

    News

    ATK beat Wall Street predictions and recorded it’s highest annual earnings per share in history. Profits increased on the strength of a favorable settlement of IRS audits of the company’s 2007 and 2008 tax returns and in lower costs. Increased pension expenses offset some gains in earnings. ATK had strong sales growth in military small-caliber ammunition, as its armament systems division grew 10 percent for the quarter and 9 percent for the year. Security and sporting sales grew 39 percent in the quarter and 22 percent for the year. The company suffered double-digit sales declines in its aerospace and missile products divisions.

    Stats

    Period: Fourth Quarter (ending March 31)
    Sales: $1.3 billion, up 4 percent
    Analyst Expectations: $1.2 billion
    Profit: $71 million, up 22 percent
    Profit Per Share: $2.10, up 37 cents
    Analyst Expectations: $1.94

    Period: Full Year, Fiscal 2011 (ending March 31)
    Sales: $4.84 billion, up 0.7 percent
    Analyst Expectations: $4.77 billion
    Profit: $313 million, up 12 percent
    Profit Per Share: $9.32, up 99 cents
    Analyst Expectations: $9.15

    Quote

    Mark DeYoung, CEO: “In a challenging budget and economic environment, we held the line on sales and delivered strong earnings growth, record net income, and impressive full-year margins despite significant pension headwinds. In addition, we initiated the company’s first-ever dividend.”

    Outlook

    Expected fiscal 2012 earnings per share: $8.00-$8.60 per share
    Sales: $4.6-$4.8 billion

    Analyst expectations come from polling done by Thomson Reuters.

  • common sense

    @ DCSCA wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 4:46 pm

    “Von Braun was also singularly, apolitically dedicated to his vocation, for better or worse. Von Braun was a rocketeer. Musk is a profiteer. Musk is no Von Braun.”

    Absurd eulogy of a former member of the Nazi party. “apolitically” dedicated? I am sure he was all moved when he learned about slave labor building his rockets…

    Are you trying to outwind amightywind? Nice effort here.

  • Vladislaw

    DCSCA wrote:

    “Both efforts by government funded and managed space agencies. As of today, half a century on, commercial HSF efforts, including SpaceX, have still not successfully launched, orbited and returned a human crewed spacecraft.”

    So our government funded a human spaceflight 50 years ago and starting the day after that when did the:

    FAA produce commercial human spaceflight protocals and regulations to encourage commercial human spaceflight? What year did they make these regulations public?

    DoT produce commercial human spaceflight protocals and regulations to encourage commercial human spaceflight? What year did they make these regulations public?

    NASA produce commercial human spaceflight protocals and regulations to encourage commercial human spaceflight? What year did they make these regulations public?

    Show me the timelines for when the federal government passed all these regulations and made them public to encourage commercial human spaceflight. How many days, weeks, months, years, DECADES has it been after that first flight that the FAA, DOT and NASA has published this data?

  • Major Tom

    “ATK as a company, it appears, isn’t totally dependent on making huge segmented SRMs for its survival.”

    Never has been. NASA is only 18% of their business:

    atk.com/CorporateOverview/corpover_ataglance.asp

    Their bread and butter is munitions.

    FWIW…

  • DCSCA

    common sense wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 5:18 pm
    You dont read too well. SpaceX has flown NOBODY. And never will.

  • Major Tom

    “Disagree with the guy all you want, say that he is not ‘saying things that correspond to reality on this planet’…”

    No, Cernan _is_ making false statements that have no correspondence to reality. If we abstain from the hero worship and actually read his interview, there are multiple examples:

    “I don’t have a lot of confidence in that end of the commercial space spectrum getting us back into orbit any time soon…”

    Falcon 9 has gotten “back into orbit” not once, but _twice_ now. And Dragon has been brought up to and _back down_ from orbit.

    bbc.co.uk/news/10209704

    bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11948329

    It’s not a question of confidence. It’s happened, past tense. It’s reality, and Cernan is either out-of-touch with or willfully denying it.

    “… some of them are making claims to get into space in five years for $10 billion”

    No COTS or CCDev company has ever claimed that they require “$10 billion” (with a “b”). In fact, SpaceX has spent less than $800 million (with an “m”) on everything that’s ever been done in the history of the company — Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Dragon, and all their support:

    spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=33457

    And the taxpayer has shelled out less than $278 million for Falcon 9 and Dragon development to date (the total value of the SpaceX COTS agreement) and is only on the hook for another $75 million on Dragon (the total value of the SpaceX CCDev agreement).

    Cernan shouldn’t be expected to know these figures exactly. But he shouldn’t be spouting false figures that are off by two orders of magnitude (!). Reality is 100x less than Cernan’s false figure, and Cernan is either out-of-touch with or willfully denying it.

    “Suppose we, NASA, have no need for their services. There’s no other marketplace for them.”

    Any grade school student can count up the number of non-NASA missions and payloads on SpaceX’s publicly available manifest and see that even if NASA disappeared tomorrow, the company has a backlog of more than 14 non-NASA launches.

    spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

    SpaceX has also won the largest commercial space launch contract in history:

    space.com/8611-largest-commercial-rocket-launch-deal-signed-spacex.html

    And the Air Force is putting solicitations on the street for commercial launches:

    fbo.gov/download/fa9/fa969df95114a05020763af671994715/BAA-SD-010_CALL-001_29_Apr_Posting_version.pdf

    And market surveys are forecasting ~140 commercial passengers on orbital vehicles over the next decade:

    parabolicarc.com/2011/05/05/survey-predicts-140-private-space-travelers-orbit-2020/

    You could cut that forecast in half and it would still require ten Dragon missions to satisfy the commercial demand. (By comparison, NASA has contracted with SpaceX for only 12 missions to the ISS.)

    Even hyper-expensive, Apollo 8-type, lunar circumnavigation missions are getting booked privately on Russian-derived vehicles:

    onorbit.com/node/3297

    Again, Cernan shouldn’t be expected to know every single one of these facts or figures. But to claim that there’s _no_ market for these launch vehicles or capsules is blatantly false or utterly out-of-touch with reality.

    I don’t know if he’s knowingly lying or totally ignorant, but the reality remains that Cernan is repeatedly making false statements about publicly available, black-and-white facts like whether vehicles have flown, what vehicles have cost, and how many launches have been bought. I personally find it shocking that he would stoop so low and/or be so out of touch. An Apollo astronaut (or any aerospace professional) should know better. You don’t get to make up things up or spout off about things you don’t understand just because you’ve walked on the Moon (or done anything else).

    It’s shameful.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi SB –

    “As to Musk retiring on Mars, one should ask how much, our gov’t has already subsidized this man’s “dreams” in the amount of over $750 million ($140 million Falcon 1, $238 million Falcon 9, $450 million Tesla), this effort will cost American taxpayers?”

    Where did you get those numbers from?

    Hi tps –
    Thanks for adding in the details on Hughes.

    Hi CS –

    von Braun was a man so obsessed that his obsession led him to moral blindness.

    Hi Egad –

    “This isn’t quite the right thread for the following, but needs must. ATK as a company, it appears, isn’t totally dependent on making huge segmented SRMs for its survival. So one wonders how far it will go in trying to keep that part of its operation alive.”

    It is as good a thread as any. ATK will take profits from its other operations to develop other parts of its operations.

    PS – I am wondering why gravatar.com suddenly asked for an image of me – a new “feature” not particularly wanted.

  • DCMORON wrote:

    SpaceX has flown NOBODY.

    That is a (temporary) fact.

    And never will.

    That is an unsupported (and moronic, but consider the source) opinion.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi CR –

    “The big question that keeps being avoided is “what is the need”? Where is the need for launchers with more capability than what is available today? The only funded needs for any payloads to space fit nicely on existing launchers, and if Augustine is right, Congress won’t have enough money to build the SLS and build a payload at the same time, so it is going to sit around for a long time consuming budget with nothing to show. How smart is that?”

    Yes, that is the question that keeps being avoided.
    The answer keeps being avoided as well.

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    DCSCA wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 9:03 pm

    Agreed except for the last bit “And never will.” which is only conjecture at this point and has no basis in fact.

  • Das Boese

    DCSCA wrote @ May 5th, 2011 at 9:03 pm

    And never will.

    And why is that?
    It can’t be technical reasons, for as you yourself acknowledged, the technology has been there for over 50 years.
    It can’t be lack of demand, because after the last two shuttle flights NASA will be without a means of transporting crew to and from ISS, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

    So what is it?
    Will the heavens conspire to deny any crewed Dragon the launch to space, forever?
    Will the gods smite Elon Musk for his defiance of the traditional government-operated HSF paradigm?
    Will ISS inexplicably experience a sudden, complete and unrecoverable failure of all flight systems?
    Will the Russians secretly sabotage SpaceX’s LAS development? Or the Chinese? ULA? The Illuminati?
    Will the US president announce that a secret government group has successfully reverse-engineered the technology of the Roswell UFO?

    Explain yourself.

  • pathfinder_01

    “If not then we need to either pick the right challenges or restructure how we are to achieve them.”

    This is what commercial spaceflight is doing, restructuring how to achieve them. A good example is the ISS. Twelve flights of the shuttle did nothing but carry up cargo in the MPLM. What if the cargo had went on another system? Twelve flights of the shuttle would have been freed to carry up ISS modules and when Columbia broke up there would have been no need to reduce the crew on the ISS to two. The ISS would have been completed up to two to three years sooner. I love baking bread, but if I had to grow and process grain, procure and maintain a source of yeast, procure a fuel source with which to bake the bread, I wouldn’t have time (or money) for anything else.

    NASA can not leave LEO and accomplish much at current prices. For the price of the moon landings of Apollo you could keep an astronaunt at the ISS for months. When a rocket that can lift 119MT to LEO(Saturn V) but only send about 45MT to TLI you get an idea of how expensive a BEO mission can be. And of that 45 only about 15 it landed(the rest being the CM). If you wanted to send crew and 15MT to the ISS it could be done for less than the price of a Saturn V launch(roughly 2 billion dollars today).

    Launching items to LEO might have been a challenge in the 60ies but today it is done for profit by ULA, Orbital, and now Space X. It can be done cheaper than NASA could if it did itself and the systems have uses beyond NASA HSF.

    What commercial crew and cargo do is bring lower cost ways of doing spaceflight so that:

    a. NASA (or at least U.S. Spaceflight do not have to abandon LEO) in order to afford the next destination.

    b. NASA has more tools at its disposal. i.e. You could adapt dragon or Cygnus for BEO resupply and put them on a Delta IV heavy. You could build a SEP cargo craft that goes to LEO picks up a Cygnus or a Dragon and carries it out say to L1/L2 for BEO resupply.

    c. With commercial crew you get lower cost ISS crew exchange and the possibility of using some of those crafts for BEO work or in support of. For instance if you took the LAS off Orion and lifted unmanned, you could get something lift able by a much cheaper Atlas rocket rather than needing a man rated Delta V heavy or SLS. If the unmanned Orion is docked to the ISS (or other station) you can then use one of the commercial crew craft to provide crew for both the ISS and the BEO mission. Then launch an upper stage using a more expensive delta rocket and push the crew BEO(l1/l2). I.e. Like the lunar tourism trip being hawked by space adventures.

    This way NASA focuses on developing what is needed: an earth departure stage possibly with long linger times and possibly the ability to accept propellant in orbit and not what is not: Huge rocket like SLS. If heavy lift is needed ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Space X can design and build it. Even if Nautilus or something like it is built the commercial crew and cargo craft can service it while in LEO.

  • common sense

    @ E.P. Grondine wrote @ May 6th, 2011 at 1:06 am

    “Hi CS –

    von Braun was a man so obsessed that his obsession led him to moral blindness.”

    I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt but are you an apologist too? In what way does that excuse is role in the Nazi party. A man revered by many who actually was part of the genocide of millions of people. I don’t know… Just asking.

    But I’d rather cut this one topic off. Goes to show other people’s moral values when they find excuses for murder…

  • common sense

    @ E.P. Grondine wrote @ May 6th, 2011 at 1:06 am

    “ATK will take profits from its other operations to develop other parts of its operations.”

    Very unlikely. Ever worked in the defense contractor world? They use profits wherever they think they will make more profits. And there is quite a bit of government scrutiny. So it is pretty unlikely they will use their profits for Liberty if this is what you are thinking since there is no business case for Monstrosity-2, the son of Monstrosity-1.

  • DCSCA

    @Rand Simberg wrote @ May 6th, 2011 at 1:21 am
    It is close mid-2011. It is poor economics for a ‘for profit’ enterprise like SpaceX to continue to pour millions into developing a ‘crewed’ LEO capsule to service a space station slated for splash as early as 2020. American interests have indicated a reduction in US involvement w/t ISS as early as 2015 as well. Little wonder the private sector investor class continues to balk. Even Cernan is skeptical. Dragon may likely end up hauling cargo up to the ISS which is fine; but it is simply not cost effective to develop a crewed LEO capsule and given the time constraints necessary to valiate systems, including ECS and LES requirements- to man-rate the capsule for safe, reliable flights– particularly with an existing, proven operational access already in place using Soyuz. SpaceX has flown nobody. And never will. Branson is the ‘for profit’ “ticket-to-ride” and will fly paying passengers by next year on his suborbital jaunts. That is the next logical step in ‘commercial HSF.’

  • Major Tom

    “It is close mid-2011. It is poor economics for a ‘for profit’ enterprise like SpaceX to continue to pour millions into developing a ‘crewed’ LEO capsule…”

    Not according to independent market studies:

    “In a teleconference with reporters on Thursday, Space Adventures chairman Eric Anderson said his company projects approximately 140 people to fly in space commercially in the coming decade. By comparison, during the last ten years seven people flew to space commercially on eight flights (one, Charles Simonyi, flew twice.)

    Anderson said Space Adventures was asked by NASA and by Boeing (who Space Adventures has partnered with on development of a commercial crew vehicle, the CST-100) to provide an estimate on the demand for commercial human orbital spaceflight. That figure, he said, includes direct sales to individuals (the traditional ‘space tourist’) as well as lotteries and other competitions, corporate research, and educational missions. Anderson said the total specifically excludes what are often called ‘sovereign clients’, representatives of national space agencies flying for their governments. Those 140 people, he said, would fly to the ISS as well as Bigelow Aerospace facilities and one proposed by a Russian company, Orbital Technologies. ‘Realistically, having 140 individuals fly by the time 2020 rolls around is a pretty darn big accomplishment,’ he said.

    That estimate uses some relatively conservative assumptions on factors such as price and training time, Anderson said later. ‘For the majority of the next ten years, we would see prices roughly where they are now,’ between $20 million and $50 million, he said. Price, he said, is probably the most important factor in demand, and there would not be dramatic changes in prices unless there was the development of a fully-reusable vehicle. Training time, he said would likely be no less than two months even for missions not going to the ISS.”

    newspacejournal.com/2011/05/06/space-adventures-optimistic-about-the-next-decade-of-space-tourism/

    Dragon’s crew capacity is seven. Assuming one of those seats is assigned to a pilot, that leaves six passengers per mission. Satisfying 140 passenger trips would therefore require over 23 Dragon missions. At $20 million per seat, we’re talking about $2.8 billion in revenue.

    Even if we cut the number of passenger trips in half, we’re still talking about 70 passenger trips, over 11 Dragon missions, and $1.4 billion in revenue.

    And we havn’t begun to touch NASA astronaut or sovereign client markets.

    These are not “poor economics”, to say the least…

  • Vladislaw

    They have already talked about a second extension out to 2028.

    I know that no one is ever going to launch crew but NASA and I know no one else will put up a space station but NASA in your world BUT I believe SpaceX will fly crew to a Bigelow station by 2016-17.

  • Martijn Meijering

    This way NASA focuses on developing what is needed: an earth departure stage possibly with long linger times and possibly the ability to accept propellant in orbit

    That too is best left to the market, specifically ULA, though with NASA funding. That funding could be direct, but I would prefer to fund this through market pull. Under the latter scenario NASA could provide an immediate propellant launch market for both unmanned exploration spacecraft and storable deep space transfer stages operating from high energy orbits like L1/L2, instead of for EDSs, which are a much greater challenge. The spacecraft / transfer stage could be derived from the Orion SM + avionics, with Orion itself cancelled or spun off as a commercial crew capsule with no special privileges and no extra NASA involvement. Buying a hundred metric tonnes or more of storable propellant at L1/L2 each year would probably be enough to let the market fund infrastructure development. ACES and then an ACES-derived depot would be low hanging fruit.

  • DCSCA

    Major Tom wrote @ May 6th, 2011 at 10:35 pm

    Except, of course, the continuing lack of expanding capital investment by the private sector is all that matters. It continues to balk at high risk/low ROI proposals- such are the frustrations of the parameters of the free market these for profit enterprises are attempting to service. Orbital HSF proposals have yet to convince the private sector to risk capital investment. It’s just not worth it in this era. (which is why governments do it.) Hense these ‘for profit’ firms keep begging governments for subsidies to socialize the risk on the many while planning to profit a few. Won’t wash these days. Recent history has shown Americans arent too keen on that– especially now in the Age of Austerity where the U.S. government has to borrow 43 cents of every dollar it spends.

  • DCSCA

    Major Tom wrote @ May 6th, 2011 at 10:35 pm

    “Dragon’s crew capacity is seven.” Another press release.

    Yeah and the R/V parked across the street can carry a dozen. Except the R/V exists and actually DOES carry people. No crewed Dragon with an independently verified/integrated and flight tested ECS or LES has been launched, orbited and returned on a test flight, let alone an operational mission to LEO. SpaceX’s HSF project exists only on paper. A crewed Dragon will never be orbited– not because it is not eventually possible to do so but because there is no profit in it, as the American interests in the ISS begin to wind down after 2015 and it is currently slated to splash by 2020. It’s poor economics… which may explain why Tesla is still not a profitable enterpriise.

  • Martijn Meijering

    Hense these ‘for profit’ firms keep begging governments for subsidies to socialize the risk on the many while planning to profit a few.

    At best that would be an argument against government funded manned spaceflight in general. But if there is going to be government funded manned spaceflight anyway, then it should be procured fairly and competitively and in a way that makes the hardware available to commercial customers and friendly foreign governments. That is much more fiscally prudent (and more useful too) than the old cost plus NASA-only way.

  • vulture4

    “American interests in the ISS begin to wind down after 2015 and it is currently slated to splash by 2020.”

    Really? In the early days of the ISS program there was no “splashdown” date contemplated; the modular design was intended to allow any part to be replaced. If continued human activities in LEO are not sustainable and justifiable, there is no realistic prospect for human spaceflight beyond LEO. Of course at some point more advanced hardware, a new vehicle in different orbit, commercial management, etc. might occur. But the goal of ISS was never to prove we could go to Mars and then be abandoned, nor was it to do microgravity or biological research, except as a sideline. The main purposes were spacecraft and satellite servicing (including satellite and upper-stage refueling, as some of the other comments have noted), and space and earth observations. The first space observation instrument to be placed on ISS, the AMS, is on the pad now. So far there are no earth observation instruments, which is bizarre given that the high inclination of the ISS allows it to overfly almost the entire inhabited surface of the earth. One application that wasn’t foreseen was as a tourist destination, but this also fits in with long-term utilization of LEO.

    Current politically-directed spending on Orion and HLV notwithstanding, I do not think any of the current ideas for human flight BEO provide a meaningful justification that would be taken seriously by either the taxpayers or private investors when the real cost of a sustained human presence BEO is considered, and I continue to be surprised at the superficial nature of justifications for human flight BEO even within NASA. Even with a reasonable potential for ISRU, at least an order-of-magnitude reduction in transportation cost is needed before such missions might be considered a worthwhile investment for scientific, geopolitical or tourism purposes. We really need to prove we can make human operations in LEO a practical proposition first, and even that will require all the resources of both commercial enterprise and NASA. Just my $.02.

  • vulture4

    I also note that the reason Florida did not get the money was that Congress cut CMO funds while preserving Orion/HLV. CMO are funds that local managers get to, on occasion, actually do things that are useful, like the occasional medical research or industrial technology project that has application somewhere else than the moon.

  • LMS

    So— the Augustine Panel stated “Constellation program is on an unsustained trajectory” due to lack of funding but Congress should pony up $3B for Augustine’s “recommended path” i.e. Augustine’s wishes? Since Constellation was not criticized technically but fiscally. Why didn’t the panel just recommend more cash to Consteallation? The Augustine Panel’s charter in my humble opinion was to sweep away anything with the “Bush Taint” regardless of then candidate Obama’s support for Constellation.
    The NASA Administrator is has no technical background, the Deputy Administrator is a lobbyist, and the result is it will take 10 years for NASA to recover from these poor decisions in direction and leadership appointments.
    NASA for the first time in a long and storied tradition has no Mission for Exploration and that is a shame.

  • Ferris Valyn

    Lets take LMS’s comments 1 at a time

    the Augustine Panel stated “Constellation program is on an unsustained trajectory” due to lack of funding but Congress should pony up $3B for Augustine’s “recommended path” i.e. Augustine’s wishes?

    Augustine did not have a recommended path. They provided 6 viable options

    Since Constellation was not criticized technically but fiscally. Why didn’t the panel just recommend more cash to Consteallation?

    Well, because they didn’t provide recommendations – they provided options. And indeed, one of the options was what you state. It was not selected (for good reason)

    The Augustine Panel’s charter in my humble opinion was to sweep away anything with the “Bush Taint” regardless of then candidate Obama’s support for Constellation.

    Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but you know what what they say about opinions and body parts?

    Also, Obama did not support Constellation. Go read the white paper & watch his Titusville speech – he doesn’t endorse it

    As for the rest – thats just rather pointless moaning (and not particularly informed moaning) so I am not certain how to respond.

  • common sense

    @ Ferris Valyn wrote @ May 11th, 2011 at 2:17 pm

    “Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but you know what what they say about opinions and body parts?”

    No, what?

    ;)

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