Comments on: NASA budget debate shifts to the Senate

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 08:28:31 +0000

Agreed that anything the Dark Lord of Alabama has to say is potentially ominous. But it could also be that it's just a face-saving bit of rhetoric to cover the fact that he lost on cutting commercial crew back from the $805 million level. Perhaps, as I have speculated here more than once, the Orbital-ATK merger has changed the political alignments on these matters enough to give the upper hand to the good guys for a change. Once the money's actually authorized and appropriated, I have no doubt the NASA functionaries in charge of commercial crew will be every bit as deft at actually getting and spending that money as their SLS counterparts have been. This could be good news.

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 08:20:44 +0000

Precisely my point. Science will follow availability and affordability of supporting services such as – critically – launch.

By: Fred Willett

Fred Willett — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 03:57:19 +0000

Short answer No.
Long answer. He could pressure congress to pony up, after all they control the purse strings. But that would require him to expend a lot of political capital and that ain’t going to happen.

By: Henry Vanderbilt

Henry Vanderbilt — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:27:09 +0000

Only fragmentary results so far out of the Senate CJS Subcommittee markup today. SLS up $100m (from last year, and from the House CJS Appropriation) to $1.7b. (That’s not including something over $300m for SLS-related construction.)

The markup set Commercial Crew to $805m – from $696m last year, $848m White House requested this year, and not broken out in the House CJS Appropriation.

Senator Shelby mentioned the markup also provides for “greater accountability and budgetary transparency in Commercial Crew and future Commercial Cargo”, which from an opponent of both programs is ominous. This could be anything from minor additional paperwork to crippling imposition of full FARS Cost-Plus contracting. It’ll be interesting to see once the text is available. (Anyone seen it yet?)

By: Gary Warburton

Gary Warburton — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:27:08 +0000

So if Obama can sign an executive order to halt pollution could he sign an executive order to fund commercial space to the full amount?

By: Fred Willett

Fred Willett — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 09:31:18 +0000

If you’re poor scientist I’m sure SpaceX selling flights on F9 at $5-7M a pop is going to be very attractive. But I’m equally sure SpaceX is not going to care if it’s a science payload or some hair brained business man who is shipping empty bottles to space to be filled with vacuum and then sold on ebay.
(I’ve actually heard this business plan, I think it’s a doozy. Better than pet rocks.)
Bottom line: Science will still get done.
It’s just that the model is different.

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 08:24:03 +0000

Science and exploration are not commercial concerns. They're not intrinsically commercial concerns. But if an established commercial launch services provider (cough, SpaceX) with bargain-priced used boosters on its lot decides to run a President's Day Sale on, say, 2 metric tonne payloads to the outer solar system, do you think a few major research institutes and/or research universities might cobble something together and take them up on the offer? I do. Once launch opportunities get cheap and frequent enough, I'm guessing a lot of researchers who can rustle up their own probe funding would geek to commercial providers in a hot minute.

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 08:14:03 +0000

More to the point, they would have no aircraft or helos, no self-defense weapons and nothing in the jet fuel bunkers.

By: Coastal Ron

Coastal Ron — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 05:13:09 +0000

amightywind said:

“Thatâ€™s like saying there is no place for a government owned aircraft carrier.”

No wonder you are always confused.

An aircraft carrier is a reusable vehicle that is dependent on it’s crew to project force around the world – something that has a long established and proven need.

The SLS is an unmanned mass mover that has yet to have a proven need.

Understand the difference?

By: Fred Willett

Fred Willett — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 01:21:28 +0000

Actually getting back too NASA’s budget for a second. It’s worth noting that NASA’s budget has fallen to 5.5% of the global space economy.
Compare this to a few years ago when I reported in this forum that NASA’s percentage had fallen to 9%.
In a Brookings forum here
http://spaceref.biz/space-policy/forum-the-future-of-the-us-space-program.html
the point was made that commercial is moving away from looking to NASA for leadership in space. Commercial aims are different. Space mining, space tourism and so on.
Science and exploration are not commercial concerns.
And with the space economy growing at an amount around $10B a year NASA’s relevance is going to continue to slip.
Not that NASA is going to disappear any time soon. It still does good work and punches well above it’s actual weight. But commercial space has moved on. No one’s waiting around for SLS anymore.