“We had a lot of capability, a lot of infrastructure and a lot of capable people.”

Be specific. What capability? What infrastructure?

Are you talking about Apollo or the Shuttle?

If you’re going to say the Shuttle, then first start by outlining how the Shuttle would have been changed to meet NASA’s new safety requirements (the ones CCiCap have to meet). Then describe what the Shuttle was supposed to do after the completion of the ISS – what value would taxpayers be getting for the $3B/year it took to keep the Shuttle system going.

As far as capable people, other than the USA Shuttle reconditioning workers, there hasn’t been any major changes in the aerospace industry. I could even argue that SpaceX and Orbital have actually been expanding their employment, so overall it’s probably not been a change headcount wise. Besides, unless you’re going to argue for a continuously funded government space worker program, I’m fine with the private sector managing the size of the workforce – the fear of being laid off is a great motivator to keep your skills in peak shape.

“We are producing nothing.”

I could go on and on about how wasteful the SLS and MPCV programs are, so if you mean them, I’m in agreement. But otherwise you have your eyes closed to the rest of the aerospace industry. Small companies like Masten, Armadillo and XCOR are doing great stuff, Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada are mid-sized companies with big company goals, and SpaceX is fundamentally changing the cost structure for doing things in space. Then there is Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Stratolaunch, Planetary Resources, Golden Spike, the Google Lunar X Prize and lots of other interesting endeavors that could turn into something good. These are exciting times, and I’ve been around a while.

Maybe you just don’t know where to look?

I disagree.

We had a lot of capability, a lot of infrastructure and a lot of capable people. It was being poorly managed. We were not producing much. We were spending a lot of money.

Now we have a lot of laid off workers. We are spending as much money as ever. We are producing nothing.

“Good luck trying to rebuild what we used to have.”

What did we used to have? Disposable architectures that could only be supported by massive government funding?

And how many decades ago was that? Five decades ago?

You need to reset your expectations – our future human space exploration will be supported by private companies, and funded by no more than $8B per year for hardware development and sustaining operations.

Why so little? Because no “National Imperative” is forcing us to spend more. Don’t believe me? Go stand in the middle of a crowded public place and ask people if they would be willing to pay more taxes to go back to the Moon, or go to Mars (or wherever).

And that’s also the reason there is no perceived “leadership”. You need a recognized problem for a solution to be perceived as “leadership”, but there is no problem. Apollo was a political solution, the Shuttle was a try at building infrastructure for what they thought was going to be a lot of payloads going up, and the ISS was built to figure out how we’re going to be able to live and work in space. Only Apollo was perceived as “leadership”, and even back then it was pretty controversial.

Human space exploration is, in business startup parlance, a “nice to have”, not a “gotta have” solution for a “problem” that doesn’t really exist. And Congress is, in reality, funding a human space exploration hobby. Until it can graduate up to a “National Imperative”, all the club members will keep trying to push the club in their own favorite direction.

My $0.02

Bolden-Flight Ops. Gerstenmaier-and virtually all of his underlings-Mission Ops. Most of the lower echelons in ISS, the only organization left have never done anything except ISS project management, and since that has included almost no US hardware there is not much experience in those ranks. This bunch has managed to cause the collapse of US human spaceflight.

As we’ve said right along, these folks are usually pretty good at carrying out orders, following procedures and checklists. Their hardware was designed and built decades ago before they came on the scene. Any recent hardware was turned over to the internationals to supply. The last 15 or 20 years they’ve done a fine job of flying Shuttle missions and assembling and operating the ISS-just as long as nothing goes wrong. Is it any wonder that Orion has spent
billions of dollars with nothing to show for it?

But strategy, vision, concepts…these people are lost.

The Space Foundation report says that more attention needs to be paid to stabilizing the management and they suggest moving people out after a period of time. I did not find anything in their report that said they needed to ensure some level of continuity of technical functions. Some of us worked our entire careers, often for 20 or 30 years, often multiple programs in functions like payload integration or safety or GFE hardware design, etc, but as new programs have come in in recent years they were each sure they would do a much better job if they simply could establish their own organization without any of the ‘undue influences’ of past programs, so instead of being a learning organization that makes maximum use of past experience, every time there is a new project in human spaceflight they try to reinvent the wheel. Any wonder why its unreasonably expensive? It was not this way through the early years of Station in the mid-80s. At that time we looked up to and respected the people with the experience and they were usually the leaders. Now I look at the managers in human space flight and I know they are there because they had a friend in the right place, and not because they have any prior applicable experience, or education, or demonstrated ability…

Well, you folks have done us in now. Good luck trying to rebuild what we used to have.

(1) NASA budget has been pretty stable; its been going down a bit in recent years mainly because NASA seems to be more wasteful than ever
(2) NASA has adequate support from the President, Congress and the American people; they do not need to be ‘stressing’ that a lot more support is required before they can make plans

Most significantly:

(3) NASA is supposed to be the civilian leader in this field of space flight. If NASA is going to lead, they need to have a vision, a strategy, a plan. Sure they need to gain some concurrence from their management (President), from the funding organizations (Congress), from the people who’s taxes they are spending, but it is NASA’s job to figure out how to move forward. No one else is smarter than NASA is and no one else is going to figure it out for them. The common excuse I keep hearing over and over again is that NASA can only do what they are told. This is nonsense.

The issue is lack of NASA leadership. NASA leadership needs to be fixed. They are the problem.

I would be happy with my own personal packet relay satellite myself, and it will be interesting to see how the FCC and ITU begin to adjust to these new licensing realities. Already the ITU is screaming about the internet.

Maybe that is what they mean by ‘pioneering’.

In large measure I agree with everything you (Stephen) said in an earlier post…the trick is how to break that?

Natural selection.

If NewSpace can take over LEO, then the current HSF program will have no reason to exist.

In that vision, it’s SpaceX-Boeing-Sierra Nevada flying people to Bigelow habitats, Planetary Resources exploiting asteroids, and Virgin Galactic/XCOR handling suborbital adventure tourism flights.

Why would the government needs NASA?

We’ll find out more today about the Golden Spike Company and whether anyone serious is behind it.

Once Virgin/XCOR start taking customers up for joyrides, in my opinion that will start the discussion about why we need a government space taxi service. By the end of the decade, it’s possible that thousands of humans will have been to space, even if only for a few minutes.

That’s what will transform NASA.

two points stand out

First I think Goresat is finally going to fly…wow…right wing nashes teeth even more

Second there is a lot of spare mass on the heavy…amateur radio satellite time RGO