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O’Keefe: president still defining NASA’s mission

The Syracuse Post-Standard published an interview Monday with former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe that touched upon a variety of issues, including his thoughts about NASA. O’Keefe reflected on the highs (landing Spirit and Opportunity on Mars) and lows (the Columbia accident) during his three-year tenure at the agency. O’Keefe then fielded a question about NASA’s current status and its future somewhat gingerly:

Q: What’s your view on what’s happening at NASA today? How do you see the agency’s future?

A: The most diplomatic way to say this is the president is still defining what the mission of the agency should be. Right now, it’s combination of things that doesn’t really resonate with trying to describe it in a bumper sticker or a sound bite. They’re pursuing many different paths and I’m hoping that will clarify itself in the next term, whether that’s (President Obama’s) or someone else’s.

Also, on broader policy issues, O’Keefe warned of “a real wreck” coming on January 1 with sequestration, the debt limit, and other looming budget issues. “This is unbelievable,” he said of the situation. “To have all of them together is nitro in a bottle.”

66 comments to O’Keefe: president still defining NASA’s mission

  • Coastal Ron

    This gets back to what we see NASA’s goal to be.

    Is it to be an exploration agency, or a NACA-like organization that helps to shape the technologies and techniques so private industry can expand our presence out into space (with the goal of increasing our GDP).

    The space geek in me wants it to “boldly go” to new places and do neat things, but the fiscal reality of that dream is that it won’t happen. There is not enough money.

    I’m OK with NASA’s current budget, although I’d like it to stay constant against the rise of inflation (it’s been decreasing for decades). But I’d also like it to be more supportive of the space industry, which means we should expect NASA to do more basic R&D in collaboration with the space community. You know, the old “give a man a fish…” analogy. So I guess I’m leaning more towards NASA being a more NACA-like agency, with some exploration that fits into that goal.

    So far our entire political leadership is unsure what NASA should do, regardless what party they are. So until a clear vision of NASA’s future is articulated and agreed upon, expect the same level of accomplishment from the agency – regardless who is President, or which party is in control of the House and Senate.

  • common sense

    @ Coastal Ron wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 11:04 am

    NASA can be both but cannot be both simultaneously. After over 40 years of un-success or literal failures I think it is time to revert proper to NACA for some time. In such a way NASA will develop new technologies and support the country, transfer said technology to the private sector thereby stimulating the economy. Some of the exploration will be and is actually being left again to the private sector.

    Apollo was a one time chance for the nation. Not for NASA. NASA serves the nation not the other way around. And at this time there is no such need to go to the Moon, Mars or an asteroid for that matter. These only are politically expedient goals.

    When the time comes again to serve a national purpose and it might be to go to Alpha Centauri then possibly NASA will be reinvigorated to do exactly that or maybe by that time the Nostromo will be on a return trip.

    The point is let it go! NASA must evolve or disappear. Y’know the trick evolution plays on us…

    FWIW

  • Robert G. Oler

    Okeefe is on target with at least the comments that are quoted in the thread.

    NASA under both Bush and Obama (and how many Presidents have been since JFK or LBJ?)

    To be fair Obama and Bolden/garver are coming to a defacto “vision” which is deal with ISS and do robotic exploration; but the space pork junkies mostly Republican are determined to try and hold on to the past glories even as they fade…and keep running up programs and projects that have no bearing with the current reality.

    Bolden in my view has not helped by not being more articulate (and Garver is down right incoherent) on what he (or she) feels a vision should be and engaging on projects which are basically relics of the past.

    In this NASA is just parroting the rest of the political class.

    The GOP right now is stuck in “faded glory”…they have as David Brooks noted a bunch of “loons” who have gotten more and more brazen as they have rewritten history and simply ignore reality (they have some guy “unscewing polls” and even Fox News is babbling is…as are the intellectual centers of the party…Rick Perry)

    If the GOP would “think” and start to function in this century or simply be beaten in elections (this might happen) then at some point projects like SLS and Orion which consume money but do nothing…can go away and NASA can formulate a vision for itself.

    In the end NASA has since Tranquility base become an agency of inertia…failing at almost everything it does; lurching from one catastrophe to another kind of like a corpse stinking more and more and to quote the song from Oklahoma “we are running out of ice”.

    It is impossible to form a vision (although Bolden should try) when the other sides contribution to the discussion is to chant “USA”.

    RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    NASA under both Bush and Obama (and how many Presidents have been since JFK or LBJ?) ….

    sorry had a Ronald Reagan moment there going up the California highway…..well Lorelei got my attention…

    should add “…J?) have lacked a coherent vision as to what they were going to do in the future that could change America. Presidents have tried; Reagan for instance with the station, but NASA is stuck on some notion of projects to be done for the sake of doing projects not actaully accomplishing anything. If you want some measure of that go read the “next logical step” the EML station. Thats a real turkey”

    Sorry for the non add on RGO

  • amightywind

    O’Keefe was a bad administrator because he was paralyzed by the fear of losing another space shuttle. In hindsight the debris issue was solved and NASA launched perfect shuttles until the end.

    They’re pursuing many different paths and I’m hoping that will clarify itself in the next term, whether that’s (President Obama’s) or someone else’s.

    Seems to me this is the flexible path prescribed by the Augustine Committee. How do you all like ‘change’ now? I notice those skulkers are keeping a low profile now that NASA tango uniform.

  • The next logical step is to exploit the Moon’s ice resources at the lunar poles in order provide water, air, and rocket fuel for a permanently manned lunar outpost and to provide mass shielding, water, air, and fuel to space habitats at the Lagrange points within cis-lunar space and for manned interplanetary vehicles.

    But as long as the current administration continues to avoid this next logical step, the longer NASA will remain in its malaise.

    Exploiting the natural resources of the solar system, just as NASA spacecraft currently exploit the natural solar energy of the solar system, is the key to dramatically lowering the cost of space travel and expanding humans and our economic realm to the rest of the solar system.

    Marcel F. Williams

  • common sense

    ” O’Keefe warned of “a real wreck” coming on January 1 with sequestration, the debt limit, and other looming budget issues. “This is unbelievable,” he said of the situation. “To have all of them together is nitro in a bottle.”

    BTW this is again what I think is the real deal here that our bewildered friends keep ignoring… And that coming from the former Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget. It should mean something.

    Then again we will double NASA’s budget soon when Romney becomes President and Gingrich NASA Admin or conversely.

    Whatever.

  • Coastal Ron

    amightywind wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 2:17 pm

    In hindsight the debris issue was solved and NASA launched perfect shuttles until the end.

    You have a romantic recollection of the Shuttle, but not an accurate one. The unfixable issue with the Shuttle was that if ANYTHING occurred that caused a loss of the vehicle, the passengers were dead because there was no LAS. Let’s all be happy we ended the program with only a loss of 40% of the fleet.

    Besides, at a cost of $200M/month regardless if it flew, there were far less expensive and far safer alternatives.

    Which brings us back to the topic at hand.

    Should NASA provide a government-run transportation system (Amtrak in space?), or should NASA rely on the private industry for it’s routine transportation needs?

    Should NASA be focused on moving humanity into space, or should it be more of an enabler to help private enterprise move out into space?

    I notice those skulkers are keeping a low profile now that NASA tango uniform.

    Hmm.

    Four years ago NASA had two programs with budgets out of control and the programs themselves were far behind schedule. Both of those programs (Cx & JWST) have been dealt with.

    Four years ago the U.S. had no choice but to rely on Russia to keep our astronauts at the ISS longer than two weeks, and now we have a program in place to rectify that issue.

    While it could be debated if NASA is on the right track, for what it’s supposed to be doing it seems like things are working pretty good. As usual, we have a different perspective on things.

  • Robert G. Oler

    amightywind wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 2:17 pm

    O’Keefe was a bad administrator because he was paralyzed by the fear of losing another space shuttle. In hindsight the debris issue was solved and NASA launched perfect shuttles until the end. >>

    goofy statement. The debris issue was not solved…there were pieces falling off the vehicle as the vehicle limped into history.

    But there were other issues…neither you nor I have any clue what the intertank of the ET looked like after ascent to orbit….any agency that is launching vehicles into orbit with metal that is “less” has lost its edge.

    RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    It really is not that hard to find a vision for NASA; it just takes coming off of planet “make believe” and coming into today’s world.

    If NASA could go exploring the Moon, EML’s or the planets; could actually go do it for the dollars that it has today…then we would be fine. The problem is they cannot.

    The agency literally can do almost nothing actually for the 3 billion it is spending each year on SLS/Orion other then have a program to build them in 10 years…and those 10 years are advancing almost as fast as days are coming off the calender.

    On the sister to this blog Space Review there is an excellent article about the EML effort…you wonder why that thing couldnt be put together absent launch cost for oh say 3 billion dollars total? Most of the parts are spares/they could tap Bigelow and a few other things…but you know that if it cost a dime the thing will end up costing nearly 50 billion dollars…

    So its clear that human spaceflight to “go exploring” needs enormously more dollars and its clear that neither of the people who have a chance at administrations come Jan 20th have any incentive to spend that money.

    So scratch exploration by humans.

    The uncrewed people use to be able to do 800 million dollar missions to Mars that “did” something…but no longer…having tasted the 3 billion dollar mission well we are back at the Battlestar Galactica format.

    One could sense a program where the 3 billion from SLS/Orion and maybe a half billion or so shaved off the stations standing army could run both a pretty fair technology effort in human spaceflight but then agaain all the people who are working on the technowelfare jobs of SLS/Orion would be bitching that they had lost their jobs…

    So there we are. stuck between political pork and NASA incompetence.

    NASA should be able to build Orion for 3 billion total…SpaceX built the Dragon for under 1.

    RGO

  • Interesting that Mr. O’Keefe’s name should come up now, because over the weekend I found a 2005 GAO audit which suggested that O’Keefe’s administration had lied to Congress.

    Click here for the audit report.

    Basically, NASA had been directed by Congress to research alternatives to the Shuttle for accessing the ISS. This was while Shuttle was grounded post-Columbia.

    According to the audit, NASA told Congress they did a study and concluded there were no alternatives. But when the GAO audited this claim, there was no written documentation to prove any study was ever performed. They were told NASA executives in D.C. said no option was feasible and that was that.

    Those D.C. executives would be O’Keefe’s people, if not O’Keefe himself.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Stephen C. Smith wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 5:02 pm

    I bet you that you will find a lot of those studies at various points in the shuttle program…it was Richard Truly who was pressed pretty hard on some deployment issues for station which at the time ranged from a Shuttle C to how it was done to using some notion of expendables (which actually the Europeans were at the time pressing for).

    I recall his line like it was yesterday “I would still have to launch a shuttle to put things together” Or something almost like that.

    IN the list of “why we cannot do THAT” which in good “yes Minister” fashion NASA keeps handy to respond to all objections to whatever method of doing things there is always a good line of “why we have to fly the shuttle”. YOu can see this effort restarting in the “why we have to build Orion/SLS”…(that some of them are now contradictory is quiet juicy to me)

    in reality there were lots of ways to put the station up without using the shuttle…and for probably far cheaper cost…RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 2:52 pm

    The next logical step is to exploit the Moon’s ice resources at the lunar poles in order provide water, air, and rocket fuel for a permanently manned lunar outpost and to provide mass shielding, water, air, and fuel to space habitats at the Lagrange points within cis-lunar space and for manned interplanetary vehicles. ”

    there is not a chance this happens until propellent depots are demonstrated RGO

  • “NASA should be able to build Orion for 3 billion total…SpaceX built the Dragon for under 1.”

    I think you mean Lockheed-Martin. NASA doesn’t build rockets. It simply funds them.

    Also, the Dragon doesn’t have a service module capable of returning astronauts from lunar orbit back to Earth like the Orion does. Orion is a deep space spacecraft while the Dragon is only designed to go into low Earth orbit.

    Marcel F. Williams

  • Coastal Ron

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 2:52 pm

    The next logical step is to exploit the Moon’s ice resources at the lunar poles…

    If only the world were that simple, or at least money grew on trees.

    But it’s not that simple, and NASA’s budget continues to shrink as it has for decades. What that says is that space, of which NASA is our vessel for allocating funding for it, is not all that interesting to most people.

    Water on the Moon? All the people who are paying attention to space-related stuff are watching Curiosity on Mars, or getting ready to watch the SpaceX cargo launch this weekend. Our need for water on the Moon is too removed for any known need we have today.

    So logical? Nope. In fact as of now it is completely disconnected from any logic, since it doesn’t support any recognized needs.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 7:38 pm

    “Also, the Dragon doesn’t have a service module capable of returning astronauts from lunar orbit back to Earth like the Orion does. ”

    Orion has no service module…that is an “extra” that will need more money Orion is no more a deep space vehicle then the Apollo CM or Dragon are. RGO

  • DCSCA

    =eyeroll= Beancounter O’Keefe was/is a Cheney man. ‘Nuff said.

    Sean could put the images of people in the paintings of a Congressional hearing room to sleep with his endless, bureaucratic-tech-no-speak drone. One of NASA’s worst administrations. Ever.

  • GUEST

    None of O’Keefe’s or the other comments here are surprising, nor should they be. Many of us have been reporting the same things for several years. I guess if everyone waits around for the President or some Congressman to define something, then it will never get defined to anyone’s liking and more than likely the next politician will turn it around, so no progress will be made.

    On the other hand if NASA had some leadership to define a direction and a plan and get some politicians to buy into them, we might be able to make better progress.

    That was how the moon decision was made:NASA technical managers identified the moon as a good goal for a decade out, then the Administrator James Webb told the Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who told the President, John Kennedy, who made an eloquent speech.

    That was how the Shuttle decision was made. Johnson was shutting down the moon program in 68 when George Mueller said what we really needed was a system that could shuttle people and cargo from earth to orbit. Politicians like VP Agnew came up with space stations, moon bases, Mars missions, and lots of other great ideas but NASA got what NASA said they needed next, since without a Shuttle we had no way to launch people once there were no more Saturns, and we had no way to launch Space Station modules. Von Braun also said a Shuttle was the toughest job in contrast to the others, and while we still had the expertise that had been Apollo, we needed to take advantage of it.

    This was how the ISS decision was made. Studies in the late 70s identified a small station as being the next step once Shuttle was flying. James Beggs put forward the idea of a modular space station launched by Shuttle, in accordance with Mueller’s earlier ideas; NASA and industry sold space station as the next logical step.

    What were Beggs, Mueller and Webb? They were strong leaders who defined an idea and a plan and went with it.

    Who is NASA’s strong leader today? What is the plan? Missions to asteroids? Stations at L-points in deep space? Capsules soaring round the moon or off to Mars satellites?

    My vote is for semi-permanent, upgradeable, cis-lunar vehicles based on ISS elements that can travel from ISS to other earth orbits and eventually to the moon and beyond. It makes use of the systems we have been developing and using on ISS plus new advanced propulsion systems. Define that as the plan, then you can assess how to do the job most efficiently? Do you need an SLS? an Orion?

    Neil Armstrong in a final email as he was going into the hospital invoked Yogi Berra’s statement that “if you don’t know where you are going you may never get there”.

  • “If only the world were that simple, or at least money grew on trees.But it’s not that simple, and NASA’s budget continues to shrink as it has for decades. What that says is that space, of which NASA is our vessel for allocating funding for it, is not all that interesting to most people.Water on the Moon? All the people who are paying attention to space-related stuff are watching Curiosity on Mars, or getting ready to watch the SpaceX cargo launch this weekend. Our need for water on the Moon is too removed for any known need we have today.So logical? Nope. In fact as of now it is completely disconnected from any logic, since it doesn’t support any recognized needs.”

    The $8.4 billion dollar a year manned spaceflight budget that President Obama inherited from George Bush is plenty of money to establish a permanent human presence on the surface of the Moon to produce water. Plenty!

    The problem is that Obama has prioritized continuing our 40 year long– mission to LEO– at a cost of $3 billion a year plus additional funds for developing Commercial Crew development for missions (you guessed it) to LEO!

    Its easy to say that there’s no money for beyond LEO development when you keep spending around $4 billion a year of our manned space flight funds on LEO.

    Marcel F. Williams

    That’s just the facts!

  • amightywind

    The next logical step is to exploit the Moon’s ice resources at the lunar poles in order provide water, air, and rocket fuel for a permanently manned lunar outpost and to provide mass shielding, water, air, and fuel to space habitats

    I have discussed this at length on this forum in years past. Ya just can’t fix stupid. Do you know what you are saying? Imagine the equivalent strip mining the Athabasca Tar Sands in an environment 10^8 more difficult and expensive. Imagine the tailing piles. This is beyond crazy. Lunar water is a curiosity. Nothing more. You would be far better of mining a small volatile rich asteroid which may hold accessible water in abundance..

    About the only interesting thing that simpleton Obama has ever suggested is making an asteroid an exploration target. So when’s the first mission?

  • DCSCA

    “Water on the Moon? All the people who are paying attention to space-related stuff are watching Curiosity on Mars, or getting ready to watch the SpaceX cargo launch this weekend.”

    All? Except they’re not.

    Only the dead-enders; the purveyors of the Magnified Importance of Diminished Vision are frothing at the gills about an unmanned satellite launch to top off the pantry at a space station– routine stuff for decades (see Progress for details) and hints of water on distant Mars is nothing new- that has been old news for years thanks to much cheaper probes- certainly cheaper than the $2.6 billion gold-plated turtle called ‘Curiosity.’ The moon, just 3 days away, is a lot closer and fiding H20 in the vaccum of Luna is a grand find. The distantr Mars rover continues to fail to return anything close to the level of valuable science to justify ithe $2.6 billion price tag odf the, throw-away toy for the elbow-patched, faculty lounge set. But it was splendid engineering- engineering whuch Americans cheered two months ago. The cheering has long since stopped. Waiting for anything of value to be returned has long since started- and the meter is ticking at $3 million/day.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    The next logical step is to exploit the Moon’s ice resources at the lunar poles…

    Let’s be clear. Mining large quantities of water on a low gravity body in space is of great value ONLY if the ultimate goal is throwing large numbers of people and a huge amount of equipment all over the solar system. If the goal is human “exploration”, as in sending a few folks to check places out, it isn’t. The importance of ISRU for space transportation depends on a commitment to populate the solar system in a big way. We have no such plans. We may have dreams, and we may have fantasies, but we have no such plans.

    The argument is often posed with a high degree of tight circularity. We need to mine the Moon for air, water, and propellants because we need to send people and equipment outward to mine for air, water, and propellants.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi common sense, all –

    “NASA serves the nation not the other way around. And at this time there is no such need to go to the Moon, Mars or an asteroid for that matter. These only are politically expedient goals.”

    Back to the “Why?” question again.

    For the last 15 years, since I realized how bad the impact hazard is, I have thought that NASA has no choice as to manned goal. It is to build impactor detection instruments on our Moon, in the most cost effective manner possible. I think that China, Russia, Europe and Japan do not have any choice either.

    Despite the psychological denial mechanisms of many, and all the babble that has been put out, I am pretty certain that a sufficient majority of people will finally understand that.

    You can be sure that if I had not had a stroke, along with a few other setbacks, that process would be much farther along.

    Perhaps the EM2 architecture may enable that.

    I completely disagree with the criticism of O’Keefe given above.

    As to what went wrong with NASA, it looks to me like 3 letters, ATK, is sufficient.

  • NeilShipley

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 9:22 pm
    ‘The $8.4 billion dollar a year manned spaceflight budget that President Obama inherited from George Bush is plenty of money to establish a permanent human presence on the surface of the Moon to produce water. Plenty!’
    Not with the NASA or the Congress we have today nor the SLS or MPCV programs.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “O’Keefe was a bad administrator because he was paralyzed by the fear of losing another space shuttle.”

    No, wrong as usual.

    If O’Keefe was “paralyzed by the fear of losing another space shuttle [sic]”, he would have shut down the Shuttle program instead of returning it to flight.

    O’Keefe did weigh the political risk of losing another Space Shuttle crew on another Hubble servicing against the benefits of that particular mission (not all the ISS missions). Had the TPS on the orbiter for the Hubble servicing mission become damaged in the same way as Columbia, it would have been nearly impossible to rescue the crew (unlike an ISS mission). The Hubble servicing crew likely would have died a long and very public death from the same fundamental flaw in Shuttle design that killed the Columbia crew. The probability of the event was small, but the political implications of losing another crew so soon after Columbia with the same root cause as the Columbia tragedy were huge. Perceptions of NASA’s incompetence would have shot through the roof, and right or wrong, O’Keefe decided that NASA could not take on such an enormous political risk.

    “In hindsight the debris issue was solved and NASA launched perfect shuttles until the end.”

    The issue was never “solved”. There was falling ET insulation on every mission after Columbia — in some cases worse than on Columbia — and there was TPS damage on every mission after Columbia.

    All NASA could do was inspect the damage from orbit, and cross their fingers that there was no obviously unsurvivable damage to the TPS and that they they were right when they assessed damaged TPS as still survivable for reentry. They got lucky.

    “Seems to me this is the flexible path prescribed by the Augustine Committee. How do you all like ‘change’ now?”

    Augustine is still right. NASA should be building a robust exploration capability and undertaking fundamental investigations before committing to destinations. There’s little reason to commit to a lunar base until there is ground truth about the existence and concentration of any polar ice. There’s little reason to commit to a NEO mission until Earth’s quasi-satellites are better understood and Trojans are ruled out. There’s little reason to commit to an Lagrange point mission until there are serviceable telescopes at these locations (or resources from the Moon or NEOs). There’s little reason to commit to a Mars mission until that planet’s past and current habitats, if any, are better understood.

    Unfortunately, instead of undertaking these critical investigations, NASA is being forced to spend all of its exploration funding on an egregiously expensive, redundant, and likely unnecessary superheavy lifter and equally expensive, redundant, and oversized crew capsule. This program is so fragile that not only is there no funding for transfer stages, landers, or proximity vehicles — there’s no funding for the MPCV’s service module. Unless the Europeans come through on the service module, SLS and MPCV will become another NASA human space flight program stuck in LEO.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “Also, the Dragon doesn’t have a service module capable of returning astronauts from lunar orbit back to Earth like the Orion does. Orion is a deep space spacecraft…”

    No, wrong as usual.

    MPCV (or Orion) has no service module. There’s no budget for it. Two years into MPCV (and seven-odd years into Orion) and NASA is still begging the Europeans to fund it.

    http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_01_09_2012_p42-409144.xml

    “… while the Dragon is only designed to go into low Earth orbit.”

    Any capsule can have a service module attached to it. There’s nothing magical about a service module — it’s just propellant tanks, engines, and cabling. The Dragon stack is even designed to have one inserted in place of Dragon’s standard or extended trunk.

  • Coastal Ron

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 9:22 pm

    The problem is that Obama has prioritized continuing our 40 year long– mission to LEO– at a cost of $3 billion a year plus additional funds for developing Commercial Crew development for missions (you guessed it) to LEO!

    If an LEO space station with six people costs $3B/year to support, imagine how much a lunar outpost with six people will cost. And you still have to pay for developing the logistics infrastructure, of which the Commercial Cargo & Crew will likely be part of, so that cost doesn’t go away. And you still need to develop the reusable LEO-to-Lunar orbit reusable transport, and the heavy lift landers for the mining equipment, and the human landers, and human surface transports… on and on and on. This is not a cheap endeavor, especially if you’re using disposable hardware.

    Oh, and so far Congress (who pays the bills, not Obama) likes the ISS, and has no interest in going to the Moon.

    You have a bigger problem than Obama.

  • A M Swallow

    If we do build an EML spacestation we will need a way of getting people there. SLS is one possibility. A second possibility is a two launch solution. First launch is the inspace stage to push the manned spacecraft from LEO to EML. The second launch is the manned spacecraft to LEO. The two items could rendezvous and dock or possibly meet at a spacestation.

    Dragon, Orion or CST-100 can be the manned spacecraft. The inspace stage could be developed using a CCDEV type competition.

  • Fred Willett

    Marcel F. Williams wrote @ October 2nd, 2012 at 7:38 pm
    I think you mean Lockheed-Martin. NASA doesn’t build rockets. It simply funds them.
    Actually no. NASA builds ‘em. LM is just a contractor.
    Also, the Dragon doesn’t have a service module capable of returning astronauts from lunar orbit back to Earth like the Orion does.
    Actually no. SM is not yet funded.
    Orion is a deep space spacecraft while the Dragon is only designed to go into low Earth orbit.
    Actually no. Dragon’s heatshield is designed to return from Mars. Now why do you think Musk designed to that level of requirements if he only wanted Dragon for LEO?
    Overkill?

  • Fred Willett

    @A M Swallow
    If we do build an EML spacestation we will need a way of getting people there. SLS is one possibility. A second possibility is a two launch solution. First launch is the inspace stage to push the manned spacecraft from LEO to EML. The second launch is the manned spacecraft to LEO.
    An even better option is a fuel depot or 2. One at L1 and one in LEO.
    This encourages you to build a reusable spacecraft to cycle between LEO and L1.
    That keeps your costs down. Pay for it once. Use it many times.
    And really, that’s the inovation we need in space. Fuel depots give you that.

  • Fred Willett

    Further to the above you’d really need a second vehicle. A SEP fuel tug to carry fuel from the depot in LEO up to the depot at L1.
    But 2 reusable vehicles is still going to be way cheaper than either SLS or a disposable 2 launch mission sans fuel depots.
    Another consideration: Once you have this sort of infrastructure in place then Marcel F. Williams ice mining on the moon really does start to become the next logical step.

  • Martijn Meijering

    Mining large quantities of water on a low gravity body in space is of great value ONLY if the ultimate goal is throwing large numbers of people and a huge amount of equipment all over the solar system.

    Bingo. And that requires making space launch much, much cheaper. That is where our efforts should be focussed.

  • DougSpace

    Amighty, are you aware of the LCROSS results? 5.6% water. 5.7% carbon monoxide. It is in high enough concentration to be more than a curiosity.

    Marcel, you are correct that that should be more than enough money. But only if done in the SAA way. Otherwise companies developing the technology using the FAR approach will tend to run up the costs and out the schedule.

  • amightywind

    Amighty, are you aware of the LCROSS results? 5.6% water. 5.7% carbon monoxide. It is in high enough concentration to be more than a curiosity.

    I don’t know what 5.6% water means. I’ll assume its by volume. At what depth? The outer regolith is surely desiccated to some depth. Lets say its just 1 meter. That means you would have to move 20 cubic meters of overburden and process another 20 cubic meters of water bearing ore to produce 1 cubic meter of water. Assuming a regolith density of 2700 kg/m^3. That’s about 100,000 kg of material processed for 1 cubic meter of water. That processing must run the material through a heat and pressure vessel of some kind. I suppose Caterpillar could build such equipment for NASA. You won’t get it there with a Falcon 9. I wonder what the eco-lunies would think about the tailing piles left to lie unchanged on the surface for billions of years? You aren’t thinking clearly on this matter.

  • Heinrich Monroe

    are you aware of the LCROSS results? 5.6% water. 5.7% carbon monoxide. It is in high enough concentration to be more than a curiosity.

    What has to be considered is that this region is also in permanent shadow. It’s not an easy place to run digging or refining equipment or to send humans. Not by far. Very low temperatures, and a serious dearth of power.

    To the extent that extracting water from the Moon is important, and our present national space policy doesn’t make it clear that it is, the next logical step is not to “exploit” it, but to figure out if we can extract it and manage it at those sites. Show me a liter. That’s not a human space flight proposition, and certainly not even an SLS proposition. Until then, it will remain just a curiosity.

    Even then, it’s hard to believe that this could be accomplished in any exploitable way without a nuke, and we’re really quite far from having a space qualified nuclear fusion reactor. As for many such challenges, space nuclear capability is a grand challenge that, like low cost lift, could really change the whole picture of space exploration. That R&D will cost money and effort down here on the ground.

  • yg1968

    O’Keefe is right that the missions are still being defined. But I wouldn’t expect any news on these missions prior to the election. It would be the wrong time to be announcing these. As O’Keefe says, many things (including sequestration, extension of the Bush tax cuts) will need to be resolved right after the election but prior to the end of 2012. And these issues are a lot more urgent than what ever problem NASA has.

  • @Marcel Williams
    “Its easy to say that there’s no money for beyond LEO development when you keep spending around $4 billion a year of our manned space flight funds on LEO. “
    Continuing to repeat that lie does not make it true. No one is saying that there is not enough money for beyond LEO development, just that there is not enough for beyond LEO development with the combination of SLS and and ISS. Get rid of SLS, and we could start beyond LEO now rather than waiting for year after year for SLS to be completed.

    You keep avoiding answering my question that I have put to you over and over again. You claim you want to do all of these things beyond LEO. You say to do those things that you want to do, you want to cancel ISS to pay for SLS. But why cancel ISS to get SLS to do those beyond LEO projects that you say you want, when we can do all of the things without SLS sooner than we could with SLS and keep ISS besides?

    Have enough integrity to honestly answer that quite reasonable question or shut the hell up!

    The only thing I can figure from your ignoring key facts, is that going beyond LEO is not really important to you. That is apparent because you are not willing to make the choices that get us beyond LEO sooner and that will allow us to keep more existing assets just because those alternate choices won’t use SLS. In other words, all you really want is SLS, anything else to you is merely nice to have.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi DBN –

    Here’s another item like the true size of the impact hazard that no one wants to hear about:

    My thinking is that while the orbiter would have been lost, there was a possibility of saving Columbia’s crew. The breakup did not being until Columbia turned into the damaged area during its first S turn. I suppose Dr. Kerrebrock may have more information on the hypersonic flows involved.

    EVA capability on Columbia and a repair kit in response to the known TPS problem would have opened far more options.

    There were NASA engineers screaming about this problem both before and during the flight; that their concerns were ignored is indicative of a systemic breakdown.

    “There’s little reason to commit to a lunar base until there is ground truth about the existence and concentration of any polar ice. There’s little reason to commit to a NEO mission until Earth’s quasi-satellites are better understood and Trojans are ruled out. There’s little reason to commit to an Lagrange point mission until there are serviceable telescopes at these locations (or resources from the Moon or NEOs). There’s little reason to commit to a Mars mission until that planet’s past and current habitats, if any, are better understood.”

    Once again, here’s the most recent estimate of the impact hazard, and its two orders of magnitude greater than NASA’s earlier estimates, which are known to be severely faulty. In other words, there’s the reason.

  • Robert G. Oler

    The “lets use lunar resources people” are in my view the current group of pie in the sky people in the space advocacy business having replaced the “we are going to create wonder drugs” in space group.

    It is impossible for any “sane” manager to describe the cost or effort that is entailed in harvesting lunar water (or any resource) because there is 1) not enough basic knowledge or 2) basic experience to quantify even an experimental effort much less an operational one. It is the nonesense with the space shuttle system all over again….ie we can go from a completely non reusable system to a cost effective operational reusable system in one fell swoop.

    And this is only “mining” the water…it has nothing to do with breaking it up into fuel and then storing and transporting the fuel.

    And of course advocates believe this is all somehow going to be economical.

    Come on people…think. Whats wrong with trying this in basic steps…lets see if we can handle on orbit stored fuel, then lets try refueling, then lets try some basic knowledge finding missions to the Moon…and maybe some small scale experimental efforts.

    Oct 1 and 2 is the anniversary of the first flight of a jet airplane in the US (1942 P-59). It was an amazing feat less then 1 year after Pearl Harbor…but all it was was a test device. The US was very wise in pursuing the technology; but it did not push it as a wartime weapon.

    Why? that is because we had to win WW2…not just do technology.

    Think about that. RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    E.P. Grondine wrote @ October 3rd, 2012 at 10:44 am

    My thinking is that while the orbiter would have been lost, there was a possibility of saving Columbia’s crew. The breakup did not being until Columbia turned into the damaged area during its first S turn. I suppose Dr. Kerrebrock may have more information on the hypersonic flows involved.”

    The vehicle was fighting and losing the battle with survivability from the very moment that heat started being felt on the orbiter. There is no realistic scenario where the orbiter survives reentry to any point where the crew could have used the ‘pole”…and there is little or no chance that most of them would have survived the high speed parachute “effort”.

    The orbiter was performing well past specifications in terms of holding onto control. It only lost it when the port wing went away….a tribute tot he folks who wrote the control software and the autopilot RGO

  • common sense

    @ Robert G. Oler wrote @ October 3rd, 2012 at 12:02 pm

    “Come on people…think.”

    I think you hit the nail on the head as they say ;)

    However, there is a possible market case to be made for ISRU on the Moon. I said possible and I also said market. So in the end private companies are going to give it a try and possibly with some Lunar COTS type program as I have already predicted thanks to my crystal-ball-v5.0 which so far gave you the zombie-Ares-V-prediction among other things.

    But now my head is hurting a little. All this thinking ;)

    We shall see.

  • Paul

    The breakup did not being until Columbia turned into the damaged area during its first S turn.

    There was no way the vehicle, as it was, to have survived down to a speed at which the crew could have ejected. The wing began to be eaten alive well before control was lost. Pieces were coming off before Columbia entered California airspace.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi RGO –

    “Come on people…think. Whats wrong with trying this in basic steps…”

    One thing I’ve noted over the years has been that space utopianists have entirely unrealistic understandings of costs and engineering problems. When confronted with any facts that upset their fantasies they react like 3 year olds.

    I attended an engineering symposium years ago on the Gruman Shuttle based Moon architecture. One veteran astronaut walked out when vastly more expensive expanded designs were presented.

    In my opinion, the requirement is human construction assisted and tended impactor detection instruments based on the Moon. The cheapest and safest architecture I could come up with to do that was from Moon orbit.

    Convince me that that can be done cheaper and safer from EM2, and then I’ll support doing it that way.

  • RGO:
    “NASA should be able to build Orion for 3 billion total…SpaceX built the Dragon for under 1.”

    Marcel:
    “Also, the Dragon doesn’t have a service module capable of returning astronauts from lunar orbit back to Earth like the Orion does. Orion is a deep space spacecraft while the Dragon is only designed to go into low Earth orbit. ”

    And so RGO gave you a factor of three over Dragon development. Plus the fact that we’re not starting from scratch. There’s a body of experience and knowledge in beyond LEO flight

    How much more than Dragon *should* Orion cost, to boldly go where Apollo has gone before…?

    “Its easy to say that there’s no money for beyond LEO development when you keep spending around $4 billion a year of our manned space flight funds on LEO.”

    You speak as if there’s no more research to be done by humans in LEO (and the ‘exploration’ so many crave, is a *subset* of research…most unmanned research satellites don’t have to leave LEO to do what they need to do, either), and/or a serious increase in the NASA budget is likely…

  • common sense

    I can’t believe this! Neither candidate talked about NASA and HSF and Moon stations and the ISS and… Whatever.

  • A M Swallow

    @Fred Willett

    1. I am a long term fan of propellant depots.

    2. The cost trade-off on returning from EML-1/2 needs to be performed carefully. Due to the exponential nature of the rocket equation the return fuel is not twice the one way fuel but exp(2) = 7.39 times as much fuel.

    For a reusable LEOEML vehicle to be viable a one-way inspace stage must cost more than (7.39 – 1) = 6.39 times the launch cost of the one way fuel.

  • vulture4

    Strange the O’keefe didn’t mention (and wasn’t asked) about the 180 degree change in direction during his tenure under Bush. Funny no one complained about presidents changing direction them. (Well, I did, but that doesn’t count).

    Regarding propellant, Although it takes considerably more fuel to launch from earth, on the earth all this energy costs almost nothing. LH2 is 98 cents a gallon delivered to LC-39, LOX is 60 cents, RP-1 about $4.00. Energy is an insignificant part of the launch cost for a liquid-propelled LV. These fuels are a _lot_ more expensive to produce on the moon.

    That’s why reusability (and reducing the cost of servicing between launches) is important. Almost all the cost is in building and servicing the vehicle, so reusing it is the only way to really reduce cost. It’s true we made a lot of errors implementing it for Shuttle, comarable to going from an airliner that is thrown away after one flight (ELV) to one that just needs a heavy overhaul and a new fuselage between flights (the Shuttle). But reusability remains the only path to practical human spaceflight, as SpaceX and many others are well aware.

  • Martijn Meijering

    The cost trade-off on returning from EML-1/2 needs to be performed carefully. Due to the exponential nature of the rocket equation the return fuel is not twice the one way fuel but exp(2) = 7.39 times as much fuel.

    We need to look very closely at more than just the costs, the benefits are important too. While vulture4 is right that the propellant itself is not very expensive, the cost of launching it is, even if you use relatively expensive hypergolics. But the flip side is that if we can reduce that, the benefits will be enormous. In fact high launch prices (not the same as costs, though clearly related) are the only serious obstacle standing in the way of rapid commercial development of space. Fix that, and the emerging commercial manned spaceflight sector will be economically viable indepently of what NASA does.

    And one good thing with reuse is that you would be launching much more propellant, and spending a larger percentage of your budget on launches and a smaller percentage on expendable hardware. At today’s prices I don’t think the total cost will differ very much. It’s unclear which would be cheaper, but neither option is likely to be radically cheaper. The one launching more propellant will give a bigger stimulus to the launch sector, and will therefore drive prices down more quickly. It doesn’t even matter if this is cheaper or not over the lifetime of an exploration program, although it likely would be, because the value lies in opening up space for mankind.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi RGO –

    I think that you may be far off on Columbia’s survivability.

    If the attitude were held towards the starboard wing, port wing in the shadow, and no S turns used, maybe…

    I also don’t know if it would have been possible to dump momentum (mass) before entry – or lengthen the firing period of the re-entry engines.

    Or slowly bleeding off speed in the upper atmosphere over a long period of time…

    If the crew compartment integrity has of been able to be maintained to 200 mph, then the crew would have had a chance…

    Of course these are highly technical issues, but I am also of the opinion that no one REALLY wants to look at them, and take a close look at what might have been. It’s like the instantaneous death myth, “They never knew what hit them” which we heard before in Apollo 1 and Challenger.

  • common sense

    “I think that you may be far off on Columbia’s survivability.”

    Columbia was not survivable.

    “If the attitude were held towards the starboard wing, port wing in the shadow, and no S turns used, maybe…”

    Nonsense. Try that with a DC-9 and then try it at about Mach 25.

    “I also don’t know if it would have been possible to dump momentum (mass) before entry – or lengthen the firing period of the re-entry engines.”

    So? Then what?

    “Or slowly bleeding off speed in the upper atmosphere over a long period of time…”

    How about you need specific TPS and available support system for the crew?

    “If the crew compartment integrity has of been able to be maintained to 200 mph, then the crew would have had a chance…”

    What?

    “Of course these are highly technical issues, but I am also of the opinion that no one REALLY wants to look at them, and take a close look at what might have been. It’s like the instantaneous death myth, “They never knew what hit them” which we heard before in Apollo 1 and Challenger.”

    Yeah. Highly technical issues and highly technical people tell you that you should ask them at the very least or not venture nonsense because if and when you you kinda kill your credibility on anything else you are saying. Sorry.

  • pathfinder_01

    “2. The cost trade-off on returning from EML-1/2 needs to be performed carefully. Due to the exponential nature of the rocket equation the return fuel is not twice the one way fuel but exp(2) = 7.39 times as much fuel.”

    As the saying goes the devil is in the details.

    If you have a powerful enough SEP to push a 50ton space station out to L1/l2 you have enough to push propellant back and forth. In that case the return chemical propellant does not need to be carried with the chemical rocket. You only need to move the same amount of propellant as was used to send the rocket to EML-1. Still expensive, but now you don’t need near as much heavy lift or the same kind of heavy lift as before(this set up really favors the FH and to a degree the Delta Heavy.).

    Another way would be via aero braking. If you could repeatedly aero brake back to LEO, you could save sending the mass of the LEO/L1 spacecraft up again and in theory the delta V to do this is low. So let’s say depart/return to the ISS(or other space station), get pushed by a transfer stage and have the crew share the ride up/down on commercial crew. The cost of restocking could be a problem and you need to be able to share the ride up/down for this to make any kind of sense(however that problem could solved with the station’s supply chain).

    You could combine these ideas for more possible cost savings. Aero brake the crew back to a LEO station, share a ride up/down. Use SEP to push the empty chemical transfer stage back to LEO to be refilled. Fill the chemical stage with say an earth to LEO re-useable system (otherwise returning the chemical stage to LEO might not be worth it). Each system optimized for each leg of the trip.

    The real problem is that the politics of NASA do not support much in the way of technological development atm.

  • pathfinder_01

    “Of course these are highly technical issues, but I am also of the opinion that no one REALLY wants to look at them, and take a close look at what might have been. It’s like the instantaneous death myth, “They never knew what hit them” which we heard before in Apollo 1 and Challenger.”

    No they did look at those issues. There are several problems. Basically the normal reentry of the shuttle is as gentle as possible on the heat sheild.

    If you go for a longer reentry you have to problems. Long reentries mean the heat shield has to cope with the heat longer (which it isn’t designed to). In fact the shuttle’s reentry is rather worse than Apollo. Apollo came in fast but being less massive slowed down more quickly. It had worse peak heat, but for a shorter period of time. The Shuttle being 100MT and not 3MT has much more energy to dissipate.

    The other problem is the APU’s which provide electrical and hydraulic power to the shuttle during reentry and there is only enough propellant to run them from a limited amount of time.

  • Paul

    E. P. Grondine: there is no way Columbia could have survived to a speed at which the crew could have jumped. The front spar of the wing burned through when the orbiter was still a minute west of the California coast. It’s amazing, and a testimony to the design of the control system, that the vehicle held it together as long as it did, with the horrific damage inside the wing.

    The delta-V the OMS could deliver before reentry could not have removed any significant energy. The orbiter was going to enter the atmosphere at close to orbital velocity. As for slowly bleeding off energy — that’s what a normal reentry already did. The damage was so early and so extreme no tweak on that was at all likely to work.

  • Martijn Meijering

    APU’s which provide electrical and hydraulic power to the shuttle during reentry

    Only hydraulic power I believe, electrical power comes exclusively from the fuel cells.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi pathfinder –

    When I say mentioned bleeding off of velocity, I a m talking about modifying the old von Braun long re-entry scheme with big wings – In other words real slow, maybe even with skips off the upper atmosphere.

    Paul –

    Ground location wasn’t the timing factor, it was when Columbia turned into the damaged wing.

    Hi common sense –

    Let’s start with available time to find solutions.
    If your reporting system is fast, then your reaction can be fast – more time to identify and implement.

    The TPS folks were never alerted/never asked.

    Not much was said afterwards about the integrity of the crew compartment, either.

    I knows its comforting to declare the nothing could have been done when you made no attempt to do anything.

    For that matter, NASA wanted to put this behind them so fast they buried the crew before they recovered their bodies.

    While this happened on Administrator O’Keefe’s watch, none of it was due to any dereliction of duty on his part, in my opinion.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi Paul –

    Let me modify that. The TPS damage crew were asked, and applied a faulty computer model that understated the damage.

    This faulty estimate would not have occurred had the launch not been off nominal with the TPS damage monitoring cameras out of action.

    There’s more along these lines, but it is outside the scope of space politics.

    What did you learn from Columbia?

  • According to the CAIB report, Columbia was going 13,000 MPH at an altitude of 40 miles when it broke up. No one could survive that.

  • Paul

    EPG, there are many lessons that can be learned from Columbia, but how the crew could have survived that entry in that vehicle isn’t one of them.

    Ground location wasn’t the timing factor, it was when Columbia turned into the damaged wing.

    We’re trying to tell you this is irrelevant. The wing began to melt before the orbiter began any of its S turns. The timing of when the wing fell off wasn’t because of an S-turn, it was because the wing has become so structurally compromised, and the aerodynamic forces had increased enough, that the control system could no longer compensate for the increasingly imbalanced forces. At that point, the vehicle tumbled and broke up.

  • common sense

    “Let’s start with available time to find solutions.
    If your reporting system is fast, then your reaction can be fast – more time to identify and implement.”

    Not sure what this has to do with Columbia and its actual survivability on reentry and the scenarios you suggested.

    “The TPS folks were never alerted/never asked.”

    No difference either.

    “Not much was said afterwards about the integrity of the crew compartment, either.”

    Nothing needs to be said when the shuttle disintegrated at such velocity. It is not designed to reenter from LEO and if it is not designed to reenter then it will not. Not even close to compare with Challenger. Assuming that all the so called hypothesis about crew compartment survival is remotely true. I don’t recall any analysis showing so. But maybe there is.

    “I knows its comforting to declare the nothing could have been done when you made no attempt to do anything.”

    I did not say any such thing. I said, or tried to, that on reentry Columbia was doomed. Period.

    “For that matter, NASA wanted to put this behind them so fast they buried the crew before they recovered their bodies.”

    Reference?

    “While this happened on Administrator O’Keefe’s watch, none of it was due to any dereliction of duty on his part, in my opinion.”

    And I did not say that either.

  • pathfinder_01

    “When I say mentioned bleeding off of velocity, I a m talking about modifying the old von Braun long re-entry scheme with big wings – In other words real slow, maybe even with skips off the upper atmosphere.”

    Nope, there is the APU issue (they only last a cetin amount of time (110 mines I think max) and the heat shield issue (such a reentry of skipping would cause repeated heating of the heat shield which could build.) Anyway the old Von Braun idea was to reenter slowly say and circle once around the world during reentry. This was a 1940ies idea to the problem of reentry heat. It was found that such a reentry is actually worse than a faster one. Basically with the slow reentry the heat shield stays hotter longer which can be transmitted to the vehicle. It is sort of the difference between grabbing a hot pot and dropping before you get too bad a burn and grabbing the same pot but holding on to it. The longer you hold on the more heat will be transmitted to your skin and the more damage will be done.

    One option was perhaps RTLS abort but that is meant more for engine failure and could easily result in loss of crew all by itself (very risk maneuver) plus they had no reason to do so since they didn’t know anything was damaged. TAL,AOA, AOO would all require a functioning heat shield.

    The best option was launch Atlantis but again they didn’t think there was danger (and later it was learned that Atlantis had an issues and could not have been launched. Discovery was further back in processing and Endeavour was out of service for maintenance.)

    The last option is repair but again you need to know something is wrong(they merely think the orbiter got hit around the wheels and probably isn’t damaged(the thing had been hit since flight 1 and made it home over 100 times by the time of Columbia). Even if you tried the area that was hit was a hot spot (leading edge of wing which is carbon-carbon, not tile). Basically you need a material able to withstand thousands of degrees F and some way to hold it in place and hopefully it does not alter the airflow over the wing too much(else you could get over heating elsewhere).

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi Paul –

    “The wing began to melt before the orbiter began any of its S turns. The timing of when the wing fell off wasn’t because of an S-turn, it was because the wing has become so structurally compromised, and the aerodynamic forces had increased enough”

    … which was when Columbia turned into the port wing during the first S.

    Hi CS –

    I am not going to go through the debris recovery/event timing again for you here.

  • vulture4

    There is one way we could possibly have saved Columbia. We had an orbiter stacked and ready in the VAB when Columbia launched. If we had know the problem, the USA techs would have worked night and day and they might well have gotten it ready to launch in two or three weeks, with extra suits for the transfer. The crew on Columbia could have shut down all systems and minimized consumable use, and waited for them. It might have been possible – if we had known.

  • common sense

    @ E.P. Grondine wrote @ October 4th, 2012 at 10:12 pm

    I think you should stick with comets and the likes.

    @ vulture4 wrote @ October 4th, 2012 at 10:17 pm

    I heard that and I also heard the opposite. Not sure if this was a solution in the end. I just don’t know.

  • Paul

    … which was when Columbia turned into the port wing during the first S.

    Irrelevant. The vehicle went out of control because the wing had become so distorted the controls could not cope with the forces, not because of any pre-planned maneuver. Had the vehicle not been doing any S turns at all (ignoring that it this wouldn’t have been a trajectory that could have landed in Florida), it would still have gone out of control and been lost.

  • E.P, Grondine

    Hi V4, pathfinder –

    Thanks. Since I don’t know the TPS radiation to space, I don’t know if “slow” re-entry would have worked. Without computer runs of the flows, I also don’t know if the “standard” re-entry profile could have been modified.

    CS –

    In my “”comet” work I deal with the random unexpected deaths of millions of people and simply astounding NASA incompetence and bureaucracy, as well as a lot of nuts.

  • common sense

    “In my “”comet” work I deal with the random unexpected deaths of millions of people and simply astounding NASA incompetence and bureaucracy, as well as a lot of nuts.”

    Hey look. You go from one subject to another. We talked about a real event Columbia and you talk about possible yet unlikely event. You do not actually deal with the death of millions of people. You maybe somewhat plan and even that I am not sure considering what you write here. The point is you are mixing up stuff. Columbia was doomed on reentry. No one really knows if something could have been done *after* the foam impact.

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