NASA, White House

Obama: “pushing NASA to revamp its vision”

Yesterday the White House hosted a “Twitter Town Hall”, where President Obama answered questions directed to him though Twitter. (Unlike the questions, the president’s answers were not restricted to 140 characters.) While much of the forum dealt with economic issues, one of the questions–perhaps not surprisingly, given that the final shuttle mission is set to launch on Friday–dealt with space policy: “Now that the space shuttle is gone, where does America stand in space exploration?”. The president’s response, from the official transcript:

We are still a leader in space exploration. But, frankly, I have been pushing NASA to revamp its vision. The shuttle did some extraordinary work in low-orbit experiments, the International Space Station, moving cargo. It was an extraordinary accomplishment and we’re very proud of the work that it did. But now what we need is that next technological breakthrough.

We’re still using the same models for space travel that we used with the Apollo program 30, 40 years ago. And so what we’ve said is, rather than keep on doing the same thing, let’s invest in basic research around new technologies that can get us places faster, allow human space flight to last longer.

And what you’re seeing now is NASA I think redefining its mission. And we’ve set a goal to let’s ultimately get to Mars. A good pit stop is an asteroid. I haven’t actually — we haven’t identified the actual asteroid yet, in case people are wondering. (Laughter.) But the point is, let’s start stretching the boundaries so we’re not doing the same thing over and over again, but rather let’s start thinking about what’s the next horizon, what’s the next frontier out there.

But in order to do that, we’re actually going to need some technological breakthroughs that we don’t have yet. And what we can do is for some of this low-orbit stuff, some of the more routine space travel — obviously no space travel is routine, but it could become more routine over time — let’s allow the private sector to get in so that they can, for example, send these low-Earth orbit vehicles into space and we may be able to achieve a point in time where those of you who are just dying to go into space, you can buy a ticket, and a private carrier can potentially take you up there, while the government focuses on the big breakthroughs that require much larger investments and involve much greater risk.

That’s a summation of previous policy on space, including his speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April 2010. While the president argued that NASA needs to stop “using the same models for space travel” that date back to Apollo, the NASA authorization act he signed last fall does include some elements, like the Space Launch System and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, that harken back to those old models and technologies. And as for his focus on technological breakthroughs, at almost the same time as he spoke, House appropriators released a draft FY12 appropriations bill that would cut the administration’s proposed spending on NASA’s space technology program by over 60 percent.

28 comments to Obama: “pushing NASA to revamp its vision”

  • NASA Fan

    Obama: “let’s start stretching the boundaries so we’re not doing the same thing over and over again,”

    Why should NASA ‘not keep doing the same thing’, when our elected officials continue to do the same stupid things, like the Senate Launch System.

    What idiots they all are.

  • This is a recipe for stalemate:

    = = = And as for his [Obama’s] focus on technological breakthroughs, at almost the same time as he spoke, House appropriators released a draft FY12 appropriations bill that would cut the administration’s proposed spending on NASA’s space technology program by over 60 percent. = = =

    As for “commercial” space, this comment from the NSF forum strikes me as being spot on:

    = = = If commercial HSF is truly going to be successful, it needs to *seriously* plan on being successful without NASA. Any commercial business plan that includes a dependency on NASA funding for success is going to be caught up in this swamp = = =

    If “commercial” space is counting on NASA to be their anchor tenant, they may be building on a foundation of quicksand.

  • Mark R, Whittington

    Doing nothing is certain not “doing the same thing over and over again.”

  • VirgilSamms

    Our elected officials manage to do the smart thing once in a while.

    Not buying the private space hobby rocket was the best move they could have made for NASA.

    The people who are criticizing the the “senate launch system” are really idiots.

  • Bill Nye is right, SLS is causing the most carnage. JWST comes in second. Hopefully JWST will be terminated and congress decides SLS needs to be competed or drastically reduced. CCDev and technology demonstrators need to be fully funded.

    SLS is slaughtering NASA and yet so many fight for it.

    Respectfully,
    Andrew Gasser
    TEA Party in Space

  • John Malkin

    They are not idiots, they know exactly what they are doing. Politics are local and the words on the MPCV display say it well, “Built near hear”. Not to mention the picture of the US. I think that if it was an honest view of the politicians that NASA should only use government rockets, than they wouldn’t fund CCDev2 but they did because they know exactly what SLS and Orion MPCV mean. Jobs.

  • GOP House leadership would revamp that vision into myopia by denying the next generation telescope and our children the worlds it would reveal.

  • Andrew Gasser wrote @ July 7th, 2011 at 12:48 pm

    === Bill Nye is right, SLS is causing the most carnage. JWST comes in second. Hopefully JWST will be terminated and congress decides SLS needs to be competed or drastically reduced. CCDev and technology demonstrators need to be fully funded. ===

    Apparently the Republican House of Representatives disagrees with you.

    Any suggestions on how to change that?

  • Robert G. Oler

    John Malkin wrote @ July 7th, 2011 at 1:04 pm

    They are not idiots, they know exactly what they are doing. Politics are local and the words on the MPCV display say it well, “Built near hear”.,,,

    oh please say yes (do they really use “hear”? probably just a typo as I make them all the time but wow if the sign did say that!)

    Actually I think Charlie knows exactly what he is doing, and if there is no HLV announcement (as I predicted there would not be) on July 8th then its pretty clear to me that Charlie must have known the House number a while back.

    What is about to happen is a feeding frenzy by private enterprise over SLS…all are going to say that if it is competed it can be done cheaper…and that is going to play out against the backdrop of the lack of money for almost anything.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Bob Mahoney

    It is interesting to glance back at my prognosticational (sic?) boundaries (and my specific hunches) from last March (prior, mind you, to the President’s April 15, 2010 announcement that he would task NASA with turning Orion into an ISS lifeboat and long before SLS arrived on the scene) regarding where the space program was going:

    http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1594/1

    My B1 and A2.i boundaries were seemingly right down the rails for MPCV & SLS, respectively…at least thus far.

    Time of course will tell if these hold true and/or if my other predictive boundaries remain valid…

    With the way the President speaks here again of generically pursuing technologies while keeping a particular strategy for exploration undefined…my fears as I stated them last March remain. I still hope they are misplaced.

  • ok then

    Yeah, this is probably pushback. Obama knew the House was slashing his technology budget request and he’s firing back. They are largely opposed to technology development and commercial crew because Obama wants it and that makes it bad. Never mind that these concepts existed pre-Obama.

    There will be a yearly drama over the proper balance between tech, CC, and SLS.

  • tg

    Folks, I wish I weren’t quite as cynical – but let’s be honest here, the plan is for nothing other than the dismantling of NASA piecemeal. Manned Spaceflight, for better or worse, is the face of NASA to the public. With that now all but dead for the foreseeable future, NASA loses its biggest public-facing program. Robots? Sorry, while a great benefit to the science community and humanity as a whole, simply don’t draw the same attention.

    For those of you who think that the SLS will actually get built or that commercial will be online and safely operating in the near term, I hope for the best, but really don’t see either coming to fruition.

    A year from now when we’re discussing budgets once more I think you’ll find that Obama’s plan for “technology research” will go nowhere and will in fact continue to get whittled away.

    There is no plan, there is no mission. Outside of vague promises, we’re simply doing “research”…..for what, exactly? Give us a mission, a timeline and a destination and then the engineers will know WHAT to research. Obama’s promise of “an asteroid” is quite possibly the vaguest non-announcement you could make.

    Those saying that the NASA of Apollo is dead are correct. It is dead, for better or for worse. The problem is that The United States has not taken any concrete steps in the next direction. We’ll squabble amongst ourselves for the next several years as NASA’s budget slowly gets chopped up and reduced.

  • Coastal Ron

    tg wrote @ July 7th, 2011 at 5:30 pm

    Manned Spaceflight, for better or worse, is the face of NASA to the public. With that now all but dead for the foreseeable future, NASA loses its biggest public-facing program.

    You make it seem like “Manned Spaceflight” is ending for the U.S., is that right?

    How do you define the term “Manned Spaceflight”?

    What do you call the Americans flying overhead every day, 365 days a year, for the last 10 years in the ISS?

    And if flying in space on a space station is not “Manned Spaceflight” (or really HSF), then maybe what you really mean is “launch events”, and not “work in space” as the definition?

    The Shuttles have mainly been “launch events”, since I think most people ignore what the Shuttle is actually doing in space once it doesn’t blow up during launch. I’ve never witnessed a launch in person myself, but I do watch the astronauts on the ISS through NASA TV, so maybe my perception of “Manned Spaceflight” is different from yours.

    And really, shouldn’t spaceflight get to the point where it is routine? Where it is normal every day work that we are doing in space? NASA has always sucked at marketing, so to predicate NASA’s budget on “excitement factor” instead of science done, new discoveries, or the validation of new technology, seems pretty discouraging.

    Are there other government agencies that are justified in this same way? NIH, DoJ, or the NPS?

    And as far as the foreseeable future part, maybe you can’t see out to the year 2016, but that’s when I see a very good chance that NASA will have certified two or more commercial crew providers for ISS transportation duty. And I think that is far more likely to happen by 2016 than the MPCV flying crew, or the SLS flying at all.

    The prior Administration and Congress are responsible for the situation the Constellation program got itself into, and multi-$Billion mega-launchers and crew vehicles don’t get built over-night, so where we are now is a direct result of decisions made over 5 years ago.

    So I see the opportunity here as a glass half-full, not half-empty, and while I salute the Shuttle program for the good they have done, I came to terms years ago with the true need to end the Shuttle program.

    Time to move on to what’s next, not get maudlin.

  • I do not want to dismantle NASA. I do not want to kill NASA. I do want to end the fiscal irresponsibility, delays, and shrink the NASA footprint… not its accomplishments.

    $16.8 billion is a lot of scratch, but not when you have to feed 60,000 plus mouths.

    NASA needs to buy rides into space and build things in space that the private sector cannot do.

    People throwing around insults and names does no one any good. Fiscal responsibility is not idiotic. People saying manned spaceflight should only be a NASA mission may need to revisit history.

    The government couldn’t run a railroad, but it helped build the industry. The government couldn’t run an airline, but it helped build the industry.

    NASA needs to help build the industry and congress needs to end earmarking money and handing out bailouts. It is shameful.

    Respectfully,
    Andrew Gasser
    TEA Party in Space

  • VirgilSamms

    ” I do want to end the fiscal irresponsibility, delays, and shrink the NASA footprint… not its accomplishments.”

    It is shameful to whine about the NASA budget wihen anyone working on a DOD project breaks down in maniacal laughter when they hear complaints about NASA overspending.

    Not only shameful, it is of course not authentic or appropriate to any discussion of funding space exploration.

  • In terms of long term vision and strategy, if we combine recent comments by Lori Garver, Charles Bolden and Barack Obama to discern the big picture strategy of this Administration it seems to me that strategy is very much at odds with the strategic plan suggested by Jeff Greason at this year’s ISDC.

    As I understand Jeff Greason’s “island hopping” strategy, the plan should be to create a network of depots and fill those depots from ISRU resources.

    The current Administration strategy appears to be to

    (1) Service ISS via commercial

    (2) Fund R&D

    (3) Touch an asteroid in the mid 2020s
    (4) Visit Mars in the 2030s

    Garver, Bolden & Obama have all spoken about space policy in recent days and none of them talked about networked depots or ISRU fuel or the extension of any permanent presence beyond LEO, at least for several decades.

    Any contrary thoughts relative to the above?

  • Coastal Ron

    Bill White wrote @ July 8th, 2011 at 7:12 am

    As I understand Jeff Greason’s “island hopping” strategy, the plan should be to create a network of depots and fill those depots from ISRU resources.

    I think the Administration is more closely following Flexible Path, which was stated in the Augustine Final Report as:

    There is a third possible path for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, which the Committee calls the Flexible Path. On this path, humans would visit sites never visited before and extend our knowledge of how to operate in space while traveling greater and greater distances from Earth. Successive missions would visit lunar orbit; the Lagrange points … and near-Earth objects … and orbit around Mars.

    The Flexible Path represents a different type of exploration strategy. We would learn how to live and work in space, to visit small bodies, and to work with robotic probes on the planetary surface. It would provide the public and other stakeholders with a series of interesting “firsts” to keep them engaged and supportive. Most important, because the path is flexible, it would allow for many different options as exploration progresses, including a return to the Moon’s surface or a continuation directly to the surface of Mars.

    So where are we now?

    NASA’s budget is not likely to increase, so whatever we want to do in space has to take that into account. Can NASA do more than one thing at a time in space? The ISS plus a lunar program? Plus a Mars program? Doesn’t look like it. So I think we need NASA to help spur as much commerce as possible along the way to help shoulder the financial burden.

    The ISS is in place, and it’s supposed to help us understand what it takes to live, work and survive in space. I think that supports Flexible Path.

    How do we get to the ISS? We could continue to use the Russians, and at $60M/seat and rising, it’s still far cheaper than using the MPCV/SLS. But I think Commercial Crew would cost the U.S. even less over the long run, and it opens new markets for U.S. aerospace firms. So while not doing Commercial Crew would not end the ISS, doing Commercial Crew provides the U.S. with more capabilities, and possibly new ways to afford to do more in space.

    I’m also of the opinion that there are near-term technologies and techniques that we could validate that could enable us to do more without breaking the bank. Fuel depots (which you mentioned), SEP tugs, automated docking, and in-space reusable spaceships are just a few, but we also need the little breakthroughs that come from the ISS.

    None of that requires ISRU in the near-term. I have always viewed ISRU as something that should start with robotic explorers (we should be doing that now on the Moon), and expand only as we need it. We can source our initial exploration fuel needs from Earth, and add other sources as we understand our actual needs.

    The key here is to have basic capabilities that we can use as stepping stones, because NASA’s ability to attract and keep a steady funding stream (and use it responsibly) is a huge limiting factor. To increase the odds of getting funding, the funding amounts have to be smaller, and the payoffs have to come quicker.

    At this early point in our capabilities, I see what the Administration wants to do as supporting Flexible Path. But we have a long ways to go before we’ll be heading off to an asteroid or the Moon, both from a capabilities standpoint, and an affordability one. Now we just need Congress to fund these small capabilities, instead of demanding an unusable rocket to be built.

  • Policy Analyst

    an unusable rocket

    Nice. I’m going to quote you on that.

  • Das Boese

    Coastal Ron wrote @ July 8th, 2011 at 11:01 am

    Can NASA do more than one thing at a time in space? The ISS plus a lunar program? Plus a Mars program? Doesn’t look like it. So I think we need NASA to help spur as much commerce as possible along the way to help shoulder the financial burden.

    The ISS is in place, and it’s supposed to help us understand what it takes to live, work and survive in space. I think that supports Flexible Path.

    I’d say that there’s a bit of a false dichotomy here, as ISS could and should well be an integral part of a smart BEO program. After all it was not only envisioned as a laboratory, but as an orbital shipyard as well.

  • Jon

    Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

  • Hans

    Have you ever wondered why horses have their peripheral vision masked off by their owner? It’s so that the horse will not go off course, and go ONLY in the direction his owner wants him to go. That is exactly what government controlling science does… It blocks off the peripheral vision and only allows people to look in the direction they want you to look. Farewell to NASA’s spaceflight for now.

  • Coastal Ron

    Das Boese wrote @ July 10th, 2011 at 1:23 am

    I’d say that there’s a bit of a false dichotomy here, as ISS could and should well be an integral part of a smart BEO program. After all it was not only envisioned as a laboratory, but as an orbital shipyard as well.

    Good point. Because of it’s modularity, the ISS of 2028 may look completely different than the version we built today. Even during assembly modules were moved around to different ports, and fully utilizing the ISS could mean splitting the station up to support the building of more stations.

    Kind of like cuttings from a tree to grow more trees.

    Of course this type of thinking represents reusability, which is a different mindset from the disposable nature of Apollo and CxP, so it’s no wonder some people have a hard time understanding the benefits.

  • Das Boese

    Coastal Ron wrote @ July 10th, 2011 at 2:12 pm

    Good point. Because of it’s modularity, the ISS of 2028 may look completely different than the version we built today. Even during assembly modules were moved around to different ports, and fully utilizing the ISS could mean splitting the station up to support the building of more stations.

    That is, in fact, the plan that the Russians had for their segment all along, especially with the prospect of US involvement in the ISS ending due to Constellation .

    That is why DSCSWTFCSA’s comment’s about how the station was absolutely positively going to splash in 2015 are so hilarious, though.
    Because all orbit control is done from the Russian side, the US segment wouldn’t have any means of deorbiting itself. As far as I know NASA never announced a detailed plan on just how they were going to achieve that until the cancellation of Constellation, a mere 5 years before the supposed “splashdown”, which is an unusually short lead time for such a task. IMO it’s another thing that shows how poorly thought-out the entire thing was.

  • GaryChurch

    “That is exactly what government controlling science does…”

    You might know a little about horses but you don’t know much about science. Where do you think the technology for the Falcon engines, Dragon heat shield, and friction stir welding came from? Government investment and control of research. Musk is trying to make money off technology that cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. What a deal.

    Reagan gave all that space tech that used to belong to we the people to private business. We will never see a cent of the profits from it.

  • John Taylor

    Have you ever wondered why horses have their peripheral vision masked off by their owner? It’s so that the horse will not go off course, and go ONLY in the direction his owner wants him to go. That is exactly what government controlling science does… It blocks off the peripheral vision and only allows people to look in the direction they want you to look.

  • Thomas J.

    GaryChurch : Everybody wants to reduce the national debt but nobody wants to be the one whose job does it. NASA’s decision to retire the space shuttle program was absolutely necessary. Driven sometimes less by vision than by politics -reluctance of those who hold office neglected to set clear, achievable objectives; to provide the resources to meet those objectives; and to justify not only plans but the larger purpose of space exploration in the 21st century.

    After spending $9 billion over the past four years on Constellation it needed to be canceled due to serious design flaws right from the beginning. NASA was not very far along in developing any part of Constellat­ion. That was the problem. Most of it only ever existed on PowerPoint­. ATK test-fired a 5-seg SRB, and Lockheed Martin built an Orion drop-test article which was thoroughly destroyed because they botched the mechanism for dropping it out the back of C-130 and the parachutes never opened.

    The entire Altair lunar lander project had been canceled due to overruns in other parts of the program for over a year by the time Constellat­ion was canceled. It was a lunar exploratio­n program that couldn’t afford the part that actually lands on the moon.

  • Anton Giordano

    A lack of vision and leadership in Washington & by NASA administrators led to the demise of the space program. The exploration of space is not just about the national pride of being first “to boldly go where no man has gone before” (to quote Capt. James T. Kirk). It was about innovation, product development, job creation, and by the way it can also lead to improving the quality of life for all mankind. Unfortunately, a failure to get our financial house in order led the road to eliminate our ability to fund a space program, or anything else for that matter. In the end, NASA reaped what they sowed. Living off fumes of past engineers who first created the space program to what it is today. They left them with a clear path for advancements but NASA administrators lost focus & lost it to idleness thus handing it to the competitive private markets like Space X. Better than handing our space program entirely over to China, Russia or Muslim countries. Commercial companies might be our last hope to save American space jobs in the future. Wouldn’t want to see the shuttle with American astronauts with a Made in China logo on the side. Would you?
    Your life is defined by its opportunities… even the ones you miss. For what it’s worth: Let’s expect NASA to have a clearer vision for the future of spaceflight & the strength to start all over again.

  • Clark

    Wishful thinking in this economy! Financial Armageddon Seems Inevitable with the way our congressional leaders are handling everything! Greed has taken its toll on the American Economy as well as the American Dream.

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