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.
Re:Damn SOCIALISM (Score:0, Interesting)
Just waiting for Fox News pundits or other similar pundits to be up in arms about privatizing space travel as being unamerican (unAmerican? un-American? How do you spell this?) and a slap in the face for NASA.
Personally? Eh. Privatization of manned space flight could lead to new innovations and cheapening, but with the whole "launch sites near the equator" thing, there's a real limit to how many sites you can create. And once that land gets up for grabs, things might end up going crazy for a while. I know quite a lot of people would despise launch platforms near their homes.
I suppose the gubbermints could setup launch facilities a la airports and just lease out launch dates and so on giving them some direct revenue from space travel. Having only Cape Canaveral could really bottleneck things. And the whole piggybacking of satellites model might not be possible for manned spaceflight? Since I'm assuming the private companies would build and finance the rockets, fuel, etc?
But sure. Most of the trends in tech seem to involve the government getting the basics done followed by US private companies making it better then east Asian countries making it even better. Let's keep that tradition going.
Re:How's that working out (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly right. This is one of the main reasons the space program went down the toilet in the early 1970s and has stayed there. As Martin Luther King, Jr said: "If our nation can spend twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth." http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-04b.html [spacedaily.com]
Re:"Launch astronauts into space"? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure I understand your objection. NASA would still be free to do big projects (horribly), they'd just have to buy the first ride from commercial providers.. which is really the way it should be. NASA shouldn't do anything that can be bought off-the-shelf and, if it currently cant buy something off-the-shelf, it should be doing the work to ensure that it soon will be able to do so. No commercial company has ever launched a person to orbit. Suborbital was only done 5 years ago. How freakin' disgraceful is that?
Privatisation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BEGIN (partisanBickering) (Score:3, Interesting)
Cap and Trade - Pragmatic, market-based solution to a serious problem, a solution that Libertarians loved until a Democratic president proposed it. Centrist.
Universal Health Care - The standard for Western industrial nationals, and supported in some form by 60-80% of the US population. Centrist.
Income Redistribution - A loaded term for making the wealthy pay their fair share for the national infrastructure that as capital owners they get far more use from. Centrist (the rightist Republican version of course is Income Redistribution from the poor and middle classes to the rich).
Canceling NASA projects - eliminating wasteful spending. Centrist.
Studying global warming - Necessary science to resolve a looming crisis. Non-political.
So yeah, fairly centrist so far.
Re:How's that working out (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How's that working out (Score:3, Interesting)
(Just a note before we start: I'm a black American. Don't misconstrue my hard truths as "racism" or some bullshit like that.)
We have, as a nation, given huge amounts of aid to all sorts of "disadvantaged" groups. It's not the giving that has been the problem; it is that many of these groups have outright refused to take advantage of the generosity provided to them.
That's why we have thugs in L.A. who bitch and moan about living in the ghetto, but then they never even try to get an education or even any sort of remedial training that will allow them to get a legitimate job. We provide all of that to them, basically free of charge, too! They just don't want a "white education," even when the curriculum has been designed by blacks, and is taught by blacks.
So let's stop wasting our time and resources on them. If they want to marginalize themselves, so be it. Let's spend the money on spaceflight. Let's spend the money on science. Let's spend the money on funding research.
We've tried to help these people, but they just don't want the help. So let's cut our losses and say to hell with them. Those of them who have the yearning to succeed will, and the rest should be ignored.
Re:A sound plan (Score:4, Interesting)
NASA had originally planned to do dozens of flights per year - the logistics of turnaround on the Shuttle turned out to just consume too much time, particularly due to the fact that even with a "reusable" spacecraft it was essentially being rebuilt every time it was turned around. For example, even though the landing gear were rated for say 10 flights they would be stripped down and refurbished after every launch. Same goes for the thermal protection system, the main engines, and hundreds of other functional units. NASA's fastest turnaround performance was in 1985, with 9 flights that year. Next year was Challenger. When something goes wrong and people are killed, who wants to be the person in management who ends up having to say "Yeah, we could have refurbished that part, but we needed to shave a day off our turnaround time"?
How are for-profit corporations going to be any faster at turning around a space vehicle than NASA? Even though manned spaceflight went on hiatus after Challenger and Columbia, it did continue after a time, and all the costs involved in the recovery, analysis, and remediation of the accidents were eventually footed by the US taxpayer. With a for-profit corporation, one fatal accident and you are finished, if not from the legal costs of the inevitable lawsuits, then from the loss of market share in what will most likely be a rather limited market. If you're going to drop $200,000, why do it with the company that killed people? Of course, perhaps companies like Virgin Galactic have figured something out that NASA was unable to figure out during the 30+ years of the Shuttle program. Then again, it's not like the current private spaceflight corporations have exactly been racking up the numbers of completed flights. It's a money pit, if there is no longer the political and/or economic will in the US to continue manned space flight for reasons of national pride, technological research, or scientific discovery, I don't think one should expect for-profit reasons to continue doing it to suddenly materialize. I'm of the opinion that you'd probably have more luck opening a transatlantic steamship line.
Re:BEGIN (partisanBickering) (Score:1, Interesting)
That 'income redistribution' as you call it has a much more common name. It's called 'Taxes', and it pays for everything your country does. The country has been collecting taxes for over a century. Obama did it, Junior did it, Clinton did it, etc, etc, ad-nauseum. The simple fact is, that right now, the rich hold almost all of the wealth in the country. It's now at levels not seen since the last great depression oddly enough. It's time for a little balance, or the middle class will simply cease to exist. Did you ever stop to consider that applying more taxes to the rich at this time is actually returning the US to a much more healthy balance?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/worldbusiness/29iht-income.4.5075504.html [nytimes.com]
Re:A sound plan (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that one thing for-profit corporations would do (presuming someone is buying manned space launches. If there's no market they won't do anything.), is look at the costs and turnaround time and realize that they would need to have more vehicles if they want more frequent launches.
Then they'll realize that it's stupid to spend money on sending stuff to space only to bring it back, so you only bring back the stuff you absolutely need to instead of a whole freakin' rocket. Which would lead them to the conclusion that single-use rockets are both less expensive per launch and inherently parallelizable.
They should be safer, too, although the numbers at the moment still suggest otherwise, and also that "safer" is a relative proposition: in the history of manned space flight, a 1:50 failure rate with loss of crew seems to be the economically acceptable risk factor.
Re:"Launch astronauts into space"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially BECAUSE NASA should focus its resources on those visionary missions does it make sense to shift to commercial partners for the initial launch part. Why? Because launching by itself is not all that interesting. There will never be a vehicle that will launch from Earth and fly to Mars in one go. The only sensible solution for manned deep-space missions is to develop pure space-vehicles, that never touch own on a solid surface. If NASA can simply purchase seats to LEO on a commercial launcher for its astronauts, this frees up a tremendous amount of resources it now spends on launchers to work on those deep-space vehicles.
Of course, this assumes there will be something to replace the moon-landing portion of Constellation. Since NASA is actually expected to get an increased budget in the next few years, despite a general budget-freeze in many departments, I have some hopes for this. They have to spend the money on something, after all.
Re:"Launch astronauts into space"? (Score:3, Interesting)
You honestly think that's thanks to Obama?
And it has nothing to do with spending billions of dollars on war, increasing your country's national deficit beyond even something imaginable?
Take my temperature (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Damn SOCIALISM (Score:2, Interesting)
Meh. It's probably not as bad you think.
Actually, I think a lot of commercial and privatized launches will end up being overseas. For example, SpaceX is launching from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the U.S. Marshall Islands. There's a lot more of these little atolls in the South Pacific, many of them either uninhabited or semi-uninhabited. Many of them are even U.S. territories.
Now on some of them you can't sustain any sort of long-term housing because the food (vegetation) will irradiate you since they did nuclear bomb teesting on these islands decades ago, but that actually makes them ideal for a rocket launch site. No one needs to live there long-term; you set the launch site up a couple of weeks prior to launch, ship in all the supplies you're going to need, and then ship them all out when the mission is done. The water and land surface itself aren't irradiated anymore, it's mostly just the vegetation and underground mineral deposits present on the island.
And since they're far nearer the equator than central Florida, they present lots of low-cost launch options.
So I wouldn't be surprised in the next 5-10 years if we heard of spaceflights launching from Bikini Atoll, for instance.
Re:"Launch astronauts into space"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Private companies only produce as little science as they possibly can get away with, putting much more emphasis on patenting the crap out of the little they do produce, and then keep it for themselves.
Spoken like a true ignoramus. Who do you think developed the automobile? The airplane? The microchip? Who develops the pharmaceuticals which keep us living twice as long as our great-grandparents? Who's creating newer, more efficient forms of power, whether it be solar, wind, or nuclear? Who created the high-yield crops which are the only thing staving off mass starvation?
Private industry does more R&D than all the government organizations put together. Most of the great advances in our history were created by private individuals and small companies, and most of the incremental changes around us are driven by private industry. Governments are great for putting together huge research projects like the LHC and the ITER which cost billions and have no immediate practical application, but for everyday innovation and discovery nothing beats private business in search of larger profits.
Re:BEGIN (partisanBickering) (Score:2, Interesting)
That 'income redistribution' as you call it has a much more common name. It's called 'Taxes', and it pays for everything your country does. The country has been collecting taxes for over a century. Obama did it, Junior did it, Clinton did it, etc, etc, ad-nauseum. The simple fact is, that right now, the rich hold almost all of the wealth in the country. It's now at levels not seen since the last great depression oddly enough. It's time for a little balance, or the middle class will simply cease to exist. Did you ever stop to consider that applying more taxes to the rich at this time is actually returning the US to a much more healthy balance?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/worldbusiness/29iht-income.4.5075504.html [nytimes.com]
Can you show me where in the Constitution it says that the government's job is to provide a balance of wealth for the people? I can't seem to find it in there anywhere.
Also, income redistributes itself naturally. Rich people spend money to get goods and services. These goods and services are almost always provided by people who are not rich. Rich people also invest money so they can stay rich. This means that jobs are opened up and filled by people who are usually not as rich as the owner of the company.
Re:It's not spin, it's Obama's personal priorities (Score:1, Interesting)
Do you know anything about NASA's history?
Obama who is the first president in my memory to shut down a manned space project
I guess you never heard of Space Station Freedom...most of Houston was scrambling for work after Clinton killed that and many other aerospace projects.
Obamas legacy ... (Score:3, Interesting)
He gave up space.
Re:It's not spin, it's Obama's personal priorities (Score:2, Interesting)
Mr. Obama’s proposal would further dismantle what remains of the human spaceflight initiative started by the Bush administration in 2004. Last year, $3.5 billion in spending was cut from President George W. Bush’s NASA budget projection for 2011 through 2013, money that would have been used to develop the lander that was to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.
The proposed budget increase would also be much less than the $3-billion-a-year increase that a blue-ribbon committee appointed by the Obama administration said was needed for NASA to successfully pursue a human spaceflight program beyond low-Earth orbit.
Doesn't sound like Bush II was quite so friendly to the space program, eh?
I honestly think that it's worth a shot to try and take the space program to the free market. It doesn't always work out but I feel it has the best shot of reducing costs and potentially accelerating space development by transferring it from a government monopoly to competitive entities.
Re:It's not spin, it's Obama's personal priorities (Score:3, Interesting)
I have mixed feelings about this. But basically the manned space program is:
a) more political than scientific. People can plant flags on moons. Doesn't mean so much when bots do it.
b) manned space travel is virtually privatized already, in that it's essentially run like a big corporate welfare program for the big defense contractors who make shuttle parts. As I see it, pretty much the main reason that the Constellation parts are being fashioned from modified Shuttle parts, even though the original purpose was to go back to Saturn V - style launch vehicle configurations.
c) sucking all of the funding out of NASA's other science work
So by becoming privatized, manned space travel will hopefully become /less/ political, since NASA would not have to answer as much to congress when it comes to keeping jobs in their jurisdictions. And manned space travel will become riskier and more rewarding again, leading to faster technological advances, whereas NASA had been seen as holding progress back with conservative designs and high safety factors.
Hopefully this will be a win for science and robotic space exploration, as well as for the fledgling private space industry.
Re:It's not spin, it's Obama's personal priorities (Score:3, Interesting)
"Someone must have informed him that the space program is important for the United States, because this proposal was removed before the election. "
Probably Elon Musk [wikipedia.org], a major contributor of cash and support to the Obama campaign. In what I'm sure is just a coincidence, Mr. Musk also has a company called SpaceX [wikipedia.org] that, surprise!, is set to begin supplying NASA with commercial launch services.
Not that I disagree with the commercialization of some of NASA's duties. I think that it is in fact long overdue. But It's also curious that while President Obama is moving towards a kind of nationalization-lite with other major industries... autos, banking, etc... he seems to have gotten the free-market gospel when it comes to NASA.
Re:Beware of the spin. (Score:3, Interesting)
You know what? Obama is also white! Most people really forget that he's half Irish.
While I'm at it, most people consider Tiger Woods black, but he's only 1/4 African. He's also 1/4 Thai and 1/4 Chinese, so it's more accurate to say he's Asian.
Re:"Launch astronauts into space"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhm... fyi, a scientist working for the British Ministry of Defense came up with the idea of the microchip, though he didn't create one himself.
Also, pharmaceutical companies generally just take drugs that have been found promising in publicly funded academic research, and do the lifting necessary to get them approved by the FDA and into humans; they usually don't do much of the basic research that finds these drugs (or that points to where these drugs could be).
Basically, discounting publicly funded academic research is a bad idea. Private industry turns basic research into stuff you can use, but it rarely does that basic research in the first place - because funding basic research requires that you think in terms of decades, not next quarter's financial statements.
Re:"Launch astronauts into space"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Prior to WWII, private industry based on privately funded research. After WII, increasingly private industry based on government funded university research or goverment funded research.
In particular, aviation vastly benefited from the work of the NACA - a predecessor to NASA. Microchips benefited greatly from government investment in the form of the government pushing development and buying much of the early production for missile guidance systems.
Nuclear power got it's big boost, and continuing funding, for the Navy's nuclear power program. Solar cells, until very recently, depended largely on NASA funding for much of their research. Wind power also has gotten tremendous support from NASA and the DOE.
For most of history women were virtually property - and that too has changed in recent decades.
Re:To space with airplanes? [was: Re:Damn SOCIALIS (Score:3, Interesting)
There are efficiency advantages to launching rockets into space from aircraft.
A: Rocket motors work best when there is little or no air pressure for them to burn into, increasing the jet speed and the Isp figure. Solid boosters benefit more than liquid fuelled rockets as the exhaust pressure is less. At 35-40,000 feet the air pressure is about 30% of that on the ground, making rockets a few percent more efficient at that altitude compared to sea-level.
B: Existing land-based launchers have to spend a significant chunk of their fuel and oxidiser getting to the velocity and altitude an aircraft launcher has already reached using conventional Jet-A fuel and atmospheric oxygen. This is why there are no single-stage-to-orbit launchers, they all have to lift off heavy and throw away sections of their airframe on the way up so the remaining parts can make it to orbit.
C: The addition of 1000km/hr horizontal velocity from the launcher is, as you say very much less than the orbital velocity of 25,000 km/hr required for LEO, but it's 4% which is worth having.
A rough BOTE calculation suggests an air launch to LEO can be done for about 10-12% less fuel load than a similar launch from the ground. That parlays into less parasitic airframe, tankerage etc. that has to be flightworthy and capable of withstanding extended multiple-G accelerations and which requires fuel and oxidiser to get it off the pad.
As for size limitations on air launches that's due to a lack of really big off-the-shelf aircraft capable of being modded for use as launchers. If there was a determination to build an air-launch system for getting, say, 20 tonnes of payload into LEO per launch then designing and building a couple of dedicated carrier aircraft to do the job would be easy. They don't have to be efficient fuel-misers the way modern airliners or even military aircraft are, they can use multiple off-the-shelf aero engines to make up for the lack of efficient design and excess weight as their fuel costs are going to be a minor part of the operating TCO. My own thoughts on what they would look like tend towards a land-launched catamaran high-wing seaplane with the orbital vehicle suspended between the hulls (a bit like the Virgin Eve carrier aircraft).
Re:Outsourcing to China (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, the US has one - count them - one man-rated orbital vehicle.
Bzzzt! Wrong! The US has zero - count them - zero man-rated orbital vehicles. If you disagree, then do this simple exercise. Find any man-rating standards you can. Then look at the requirements for abort at and after launch. See that the Shuttle can't possibly abort within 5 minutes or so of launch. Conclude that the Shuttle is not a man-rated vehicle.
For bonus points, take that same man-rating standard and look at the engineering margin for structural members. Note that the Soyuz doesn't meet that margin. Conclude that the Soyuz isn't man-rated either! Nor anything else (aside from the Shuttle) that has ever flown people into orbit.
Conclude that the human race never had man-rated vehicles! Wonder what the purpose of man-rating actually is. (Hint: it was to rationalize the selection of the paper rocket, Ares I over the real commercial rockets, Delta IV and Atlas V).