Reported Obama Plan Would Privatize Manned Launches 450
couchslug writes with this excerpt from the not-yet-paywalled New York Times: "President Obama will end NASA's return mission to the moon and turn to private companies to launch astronauts into space when he unveils his budget request to Congress next week, an administration official said Thursday. The shift would 'put NASA on a more sustainable and ambitious path to the future' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the changes have angered some members of Congress, particularly from Texas, the location of the Johnson Space Center, and Florida, the location of the Kennedy Space Center. 'My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program,' Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement." If true, this won't please the federal panel that recommended against just such privatization.
Its better than good (Score:4, Informative)
If necessity is the mother of invention, its time we get to inventing. Nasa has subsidized extremely expensive shuttle launches that cost us $500 million a pop. Ares I wont put a man into space until 2017 at the EARLIEST if at all. Ares V is a bad joke thats already on the verge of being scrapped. The current plan would not get men back to the moon before 2028 at the earliest, project constellation was an epic fail. Lets give private companies like spacex (which will test launch a man ready falcon 9 THIS YEAR) a chance
This is actually an awesome thing (Score:3, Informative)
For those of you who are wondering about this and not just using it to blast Obama/dems with ever breath,
then read the last 10 pages of the Direct forum [nasaspaceflight.com].
In a nut shell, Boeing, et. al. will be building Direct and offering it for commercial space. Yes, SpaceX, Orbital, and even the EELVs will have their role in space. HOWEVER, direct will now be allowed to be developed by Boeing and offered for commercial launches. Once that happens AND they have 2 launches per year via commercial, it will drop the price per launch. And what commercial space will be interested in this? Well Bigelow figures VERY prominently in this. That is why we are seeing them suddenly get active. That is also why they shifted their schedule to have station in 2015. Basically, we are about to see a MASSIVE expansion into space, but via the commercial world. Think of the railroads for USA in the mid 1800's.
This is not the end of America's human flights. It is the FINALLY the beginning of it. Most importantly, it will remove Space from politicians hands like W's who said that we were going to the moon and the provided next to ZERO funding for it. Heck, only in 2007 and 2008 did NASA budget increase. Prior to that it was being cut.
NASA will instead do what it does best; high tech RD as well as getting all parties to connect well (ignoring a mars probe).
Windbourne.
It's not spin, it's Obama's personal priorities (Score:5, Informative)
NASA has always had its ups and downs, perhaps more downs than ups lately. It helps to have a sympathetic President in office. Kennedy wanted a moon landing, and his successors honored his memory by following through. Nixon was lukewarm to the space program, and he used NASA as a diplomacy tool--during his time they had Skylab (somewhat useful) and the Apollo-Soyuz space linkup (pure entertainment).
Reagan was a space nut and an enlarged NASA fit into his SDI/Star Wars vision. Bush I spoke of a Mars mission, but left before he could really push it through. Clinton was lukewarm to space but lucked out with a temporary stock boom that filled the tax coffers, so NASA could keep rolling while he partied. Bush II liked space and authorized new missions. That brings us down to Obama who is the first president in my memory to shut down a manned space project.
NASA is a victim of politics and of poor leadership in the 1970s and 80s, leading up to the avoidable Challenger tragedy. To spread the wealth (and pain of cuts), NASA in the 1970s embarked on a decentralization project to spread out its facilities all over the country, thus maximizing Congressional support for its various missions. The unfortunate side effect as pointed out by many observers over the years was to dissipate engineering teams. Perhaps today in the new century, with our modern communications abilities, virtual teams can work almost identically to localized teams, but this was not so in the 1970s. Thus, the rugged and long lasting space ships of the 1960s such as the Pioneer which survived decades beyond anyone's expectations gave way to buggy, incomplete efforts such as the Shuttle and some of the planetary probes.
NASA's never been a perfect space agency but it has contributed hugely to improving the human condition through science and technology. It keeps hundreds of thousands of aerospace engineers and scientists employed, who would otherwise have gone to law school or some other less productive field. It keeps the U.S. at the forefront in aerospace technology which it needs in order to maintain its military edge. It promises great riches should we ever get self-sustaining stations online in near-Earth orbit or beyond--moon mining, asteroid mining, solar power, zero grav manufacturing, and all the scientific and engineering developments which will be a part of these efforts.
We simply can't afford to not go into space. The Constellation program has been harshly criticized by some dissident engineers--fine, that's what engineering is all about. You design something, find the flaws, fix them, and move on. It's an iterative process.
Simply walking away from billions of dollars of effort is not only a waste of time and money, it displays a distressing lack of vision by the current leadership. Obama obviously feels we can't afford a national space program, so he's sloughing it off on the private sector. Privatize it, he says. Indeed? Then the U.S. will no longer have a manned space exploration program at all, but only a very cautious and profit-oriented space tourism program. Others will pick up the slack and take over space exploration--the Chinese, the Japanese perhaps, the Russians, and the Europeans. Some day, we will sit in our yards and watch them through our Chinese-made telescopes. Look, Dad, there's the China Station! There's the European Station! There goes another Russian moon shot! And we can look back on this pivotal time in our history when we turned our back on the future and technological leadership.
This is really Big Space vs Little Space... (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who has personal (and close) contacts and friendships with people in the various X-Prize contests (including the latest winner [masten-space.com]), I'm a bit biased here.
However, what Obama is talking about is really changing the ways that NASA procures it's systems. Right now, they get practically everything from one of about 3 or 4 big contractors, and essentially run like a massive Defense Contractor, complete with problems around innovation and cost-inflation.
The proposals are to quit funneling every significant contract just to these Big Space corps. Rather, the "hobbyist" rocket industry is now sufficiently mature to begin competing for real space equipment. What it needs to continue to grow and innovate are a steady, reliable supply of work. NASA is the only place this can happen right now (though, likely once the market is more mature, private space use/trips will fund more and more of industry). Breaking the grip of Big Space means that NASA can continue to use it's hard-won knowledge of manned missions as a information resource for these "space entrepreneurs", and at the same time, open up the infrastructure for better efficiencies.
Of course, Big Space sees the end of the NASA-funded (and guarantied) gravy train, so they squeal about safety and other issues that Little Space couldn't possibly (no, never!) do, forgetting (conveniently) that they themselves were once Little, and only became Big by sucking on NASA's teat. What we're talking about here is NASA enabling a new, vibrant market for space systems from a wide variety of suppliers.
To use the tired car analogy: NASA current designs the car, but farms out the manufacturing and design of the parts to SuperMegaCorp1 and GiganticConglomerate2, all of which use the notorious "cost-plus" method of development. Instead, Obama wants NASA to be deciding the PURPOSE of the car, and the desired CAPABILITIES of it, but then put out for bid all the different parts to anyone capable of making that part to the desired specs. So, perhaps we get a Volt, an Accord, and a Caravan all offered from various suppliers, rather than a Greyhound bus with all but 5 seats removed, as we would under the old system.
I hate to break it to everyone, but LEO Rocket Science is no longer, well, Rocket Science. Masten won the latest X-prize with a staff of 10, working out of a small machine shop, using only about $2 million. Putting people into orbit is not that difficult anymore (though, it's still dangerous), and it's entirely reasonable to start moving away from the single-entity agency and into a more competitive, cost-effective marketplace.
To space with airplanes? [was: Re:Damn SOCIALISM] (Score:2, Informative)
If we used aeroplanes to get to a decent altitude, then fired the rockets, the cost to launch would go way down.
No, actually it wouldn't.
First, you may be able to get above some of the atmosphere, but not all (because an "aeroplane" needs to be in atmosphere to fly.) But, mainly, you can't get any significant percentage of the orbital energy while you're in atmosphere-- you need to get to the equivalent of Mach 25 to make orbit.
Second, though, is that rockets are simply heavy. You can lift a Pegasus up in an airplane, but it takes a 747 to do it, and it's a tiny rocket. Even there, the airplane doesn't give you much of a boost toward orbit (the real advantage the air launch gives you is the ability to chose your launch point.) If you try to ask, how big would the airplane be if you were to launch something much bigger than a Pegasus with the capability to make orbit, the answer is that it would be unrealistically huge, andairplanes stop being practical when they start getting that big, because they are structurally inefficient.
(And, before you shout "Space Ship One" at me, let me remind you that SS-1 achieved the edge of space in altitude, but only got a whopping five percent of orbital energy),
But this isn't economical when there are huge public subsidies for a hugely flawed system.
This sentence would be correct if you simply put the period after "this isn't economical".
Re:It's not spin, it's Obama's personal priorities (Score:4, Informative)
Aside from repairing the Hubble, what has putting people in space ever accomplished other than stealing resources from legitimate science?
A hell of a lot, apparently. [spacecoalition.com]
Re:Beware of the spin. (Score:4, Informative)
How's that different from any other president?
"Read my lips; no new taxes." O RLY Mr. Bush?
Re:A sound plan (Score:3, Informative)
Well, there's also the potential for more people on the ground to be killed from bad launches/re-entries.
That's pretty much why launches are generally done on a coast (with a flight path over the ocean), a desert, or a tundra. Until someone like Boeing or SpaceX sets up shop in Chicago or NYC, I don't see any further danger here.
NASA Wasn't Always Like We See It Now (Score:3, Informative)
The politics of NASA killed the plans of NASA.
At one time, they had a plan that would have put a base on the Moon by the end of the 70's and missions to Mars in the 80's. Some of the Apollo astronauts saw themselves as part of that.
After we went to the Moon, Nixon killed the hope. Under his 'leadership' we scrapped the last three planned Moon missions, stopped building anything new outside of an under-funded (and possibly ill-advised) Space Shuttle, and those that led us to space, from Astronauts to Engineers to Machinists and Janitors, left NASA with the cuts. We never regained the drive, or the ability we had since then. NASA had become a tool of politics, which it hadn't really been before.
Sure, we went to the Moon to beat the Russians. Along the way, we learned things, and we even maybe pulled the nation and the world a BIT more together. Is that so bad?
Whether you like Obama or not, whether the realities of our current crises are the end, are we not losing sight of the grand picture given us by those who came before?