No biggy. My keyboard is always trying to sabotage me as well.

What’s the problem? That made it through my spell check, and its factually correct as well.

Sorry to dissapoint you with a taste of reality.

Any personal sojourn in earth orbit or beyond in this century, including ISS, does or will fit this description, whether you or the designers intend it to be that way or not.

Of course, you are holding out for your voodoo “infrastructure” out of the pages of pulp ficiton, Collier’s, and Popular Mechanics: astronomically lowballed construction of doll-houses that magically spawn even more astronauts and doll-houses and fantasy markets-of-the-future, all while keeping their diapered touches innocent of any embarassing contact with actual space development. Such attempts at “infrastructure” will join all previous such attempts in splashing into the Pacific or spawning space junk at enormous taxpayer expense.

If so it would be like the great white fleet, a lot of the battleships were already obsolute as soon as they were launched.

A quite good description of the long sorry history of orbital HSF you’ve come up with here. Only the cult never gets around to recognizing that astronauts are obsolete. They keep lobbying for their Clydesdale wagons and coal-fired battleships regardless of the actual trajectory of real-world technology and economics.

Get help (and a dictionary).

I mean’t on the way back towards earth. You are saying this is a one time shot, stand alone mission with a disposable capsule?

If so it would be like the great white fleet, a lot of the battleships were already obsolute as soon as they were launched.

While I did not report on it at the time, for reasons which were and are sufficient for me, I attended one of the very first Next Gen engineering conferences at GSFC, long before Griffin, the Ares1, the Ares5 and the SLS.

No $5 billion cost overruns were anticipated.

Your attempts to limit dicussion to some topic of you own are noted and ignored.

It appears that you do not understand this yet, but impactor detection is a national security necessity, and one that has become fairly immediate at that. I held nothing against Weiler, as for a long time I did not understand this myself. You do need to understand that oberving cosmologists hold simple NEO observors in contempt.

The way that Weiler planned to spend other federal agencies money without consulting them was what really irritated me:

http://bob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce091702.html

You may view this as a good thing, I don’t.
I also really wish you would leave James Webb out of the Next Gen.
Call it what it is, the EWST, the Ed Weiler Space Telescope.

Your dislike of Ed Weiler has been noted, and is certainly curious. Now retired, he still seems to haunt you. If you knew the man, you might think differently. As Science AA, and as Astrophysics Director, Weiler oversaw successes in a huge range of NASA science programs, and is perceived as very much a hero in the science community for his defense of high priority projects that were at risk. The cost issues in JWST sure aren’t pretty, but they sure aren’t uniquely his fault.

The Casani Report, which reviewed the JWST cost problems, reporting to the Agency and to Congress, concluded that needed changes to the project to diminish future cost risk included “Assign management and execution responsibility for the JWST Project to the GSFC Director, with accountability to the Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator at HQ.” Well, Ed Weiler held both of these positions at different times during the early stages of the project. The report was recommending that Weiler have MORE control over the mission. Not less.

Yes, I know that Ed was never a big supporter of impact mitigation as a NASA science activity, and that probably sticks in your single-issue craw. But you know, impact mitigation ain’t science. It ought to be done, but it wasn’t his job.

In this context, and to get back on topic, it is interesting that with this string of astonishing science successes, Paul Ryan seems to feel that our space agency has been “dismantled”, and that our global leadership has been compromised. Did Ryan make any note about Curiosity? Although he’s said very little about NASA and space, his perspective on it seems pretty one-dimensional.

It’s a mission, not a base or a station. The whole budget should not exceed $15 billion, and much less than that would be even better. No more than half of that should be spent on launching and housing the astronauts, and ideally less than a third. The rest on unmanned spacecraft which would do more than two-thirds of the work. The astronaut part is just one SLS/Orion launch, including a return stage, although if you can figure out how to do it with a less expensive rocket and Dragon all the better. The unmanned spacecraft in the flotilla can be launched much like any other satellite to GEO.

Such a mission only needs to be flown when foreign policy would particularly benefit from such a show of capabilities, or when we need to reward a few allies by putting them in the elite club of partners for this mission, or some combination of both. It gives us some other foreign policy levers one example of which I describe below. It would also be a great STEM deal, showing off a wide variety of interesting and practically useful spacecraft that have been operating in GEO over the decades.

What kind of propulsion would you propose?

Chemical propulsion to get into a near-GEO orbit (slightly above or below and thus slowly drifting along GEO). Then some storable propellant for up-close maneuvers and perhaps some SEP, ion or Hall thrusters, for small orbital changes (e.g. to temporarily enter GEO itself to get up-close with or even non-cooperatively dock with a satellite). And propulsion for the return trip.

How long would you propose a tour would last?

As long as is feasible given the radiation dose with minimal shielding, and what supplies fit in an Orion or Dragon capsule for a crew of three, along with some on-board equipment. (The vast majority of the useful equipment would be in the accompanying unmanned flotilla). Visit as many satellites as possible until the lifetime radiation dose is approached or they run out of water, whichever comes first. The unmanned machines in the fleet can stay up far longer.

How large of crew per ship?

No more than three.

The white fleet had 16 battleships, how many spacecraft the same 16?

Only one manned capsule. The rest of the fleet would be unmanned spacecraft “armed” with good lenses and cameras, and perhaps some remote-control smallsats to non-cooperatively dock, do laser-sputtering spectrography of spacecraft surfaces (like Curiosity does with rocks on Mars), and x-ray spectrography, seismography, or other characterization of the internals of some satellites. Ask our satellite engineers what they want to learn about how their birds have faired over long-term exposure to the GEO environment, our intelligence analysts what they want to learn about what countries’ spacecraft, and our foreign policy folks what embarassing secrets about our foes they want to reveal, and put the corresponding instruments up there. There’s also a bit of pure science to be done. Some surfaces provide information on solar and cosmic radiation in GEO. Some might also hold retrievable samples of interstellar, cometary, asteroidal, lunar, or other interesting kinds of dust — a crude and unintended version of the Stardust mission.

The “White Fleet” label could refer either to this temporary flotilla or to our existing fleet of large unmanned security and commercial spacecraft in GEO some of which we’d be showing off on this mission. The main purpose of the label is a loose foreign policy analogy to Teddy’s White Fleet of yore, not to the technical design of our mission.

Optionally these remote-control spacecraft, or the astronauts themselves on EVA, or both, can take samples of exposed satellite surfaces to return to earth. These samples will contain a variety of information about the behavior of materials in the GEO environment of interest to engineers and scientists. The capsule requires some ability to take in small sample modules. However if this drives up the costs above the aforesaid budget forego this option.

The White Fleet would develop skills we’d need for much later (second half of 21s century) manned missions to asteroids, Phobos/Deimos, or similar. The White Fleet would be a prototype for a slightly saner exploration architecture in which unmanned portions do most of the work, and astronauts serve as the faces of the mission along with doing a few tasks as long as they are there. Instead of just schlepping Buzz Lightyear doll houses around the solar system and calling that “exploration”. Not that developing capabilities for future exploration should be a multi-billion-dollar consideration when spending taxpayer dollars — the White Fleet has to be justified primarily by its foreign policy benefits — but said pale constellation should please the cult in this regard, if they can get over the idea of having to work with all those unmanned spacecraft.

The fleet made port of calls in various countries, would the fleet dock at various space stations?

Um, no. There are no space stations in GEO. There are several spectacular football-field sized radio dishes, some big solar power arrays, gold-covered thermal blankets, a wide variety of rocket engines, and a bunch of other interesting things. We could nose up to any spacecraft of any agreeable country. Or more controversial of any non-agreeable country we happen to particularly dislike at the time, asserting our unique right to inspect anything and everything up there. For cooperative countries we respect any wishes they might have to maintain secrecy. For uncooperative countries, up the photos go on WikiLeaks. Another foreign policy lever.

For that matter, a much cheaper project, LeakSat, might be accomplished by some daring smaller country to take photos of the most interesting sats in GEO and publish them on the aforementioned web site.

Whatever turns you on, dude.