Senate Bill Adds Shuttle Flight, New Shuttle-Derived Vehicle 230
simonbp writes "The Senate Commerce Committee this morning marked up a compromise NASA Authorization Act that rolls back some of Obama's plans for NASA, while keeping others. The bill adds at least one more shuttle flight, keeps Obama's technology demonstrators and commercial access to ISS (albeit at reduced funding), restores the Orion crew capsule, and replaces the Ares rockets with a Shuttle-Derived 'Space Launch System' for going to the ISS and Beyond, which could be ready as soon as 2015."
KILL IT (Score:2, Insightful)
Preface: I'm firmly in the camp that believes that Bush wasn't as bad as we were all told and that Obama is nowhere as great as we've been all told but, Obama got the idea of privatizing LEO work 100% right. I'm getting tired of the rest of the weasels (in both parties) trying to shove even more pork into NASA instead of letting it do its job..
Hell I think the whole "foremost mission of NASA is to make Muslims feel like they are smart" is something that proves that the characters in Atlas Shrugged actually do exist in the real world, but if it means that NASA actually stops actually sabotaging private companies getting into orbit faster & better, I'm all for it! It would be a bonus if NASA actually kept doing the really out-there stuff that's way beyond Earth, but right now I'm not asking for much.
Wrong Direction (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad, bad mistake. (Score:5, Insightful)
What we've got here is the worst of both worlds, reducing the effectiveness of both robotic and manned spaceflight, with no meaningful budget to pay for either. Adding one more Shuttle flight won't bridge any gap whatsoever, but to get an alternative launch vehicle any time soon is going to require ploughing in ten times the resources that had been allocated to the task. The new capsule plus the extra shuttle launch will, however, bleed cash away from other projects, making them far less likely to yield useful results. Thus, what you get is a lot of money wasted with no possibility of return, all for the sake of helping out some poor rocket provider who is running out of death merchants to sell to.
This is worse than bailing out the banks. At least the government was honest enough to say that it was the banks they were giving the money to. It was dishonest about everything else, sure, but at least there was at least one bullet point you could claim was sincere. In this case, there is a clearly defined effort to obscure who is getting the money and why. Perhaps because nobody is going to believe that this rocket vendor is too big to fail.
NASA gets nothing from this compromise. Let us understand that right from the start. NASA will lose. The only way NASA can win is if they get sane objectives AND the backing to make those objectives possible. Almost anything could be made "sane", if it were clearly stated and adequately funded and was likely to remain adequately funded from start to finish and was not going to be tortured into oblivion for political reasons. (The Space Shuttle should have been twice as good as it was, and even the Russians had a better space shuttle, but it was crippled in order to serve the selfish desires of politicians who put their popularity over not only the space program itself but also over the lives of those who would put that program into action.)
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the 'old stuff' is very expensive to maintain, is inherently dangerous and the only thing it's good for is barking around in LEO.
If you want NASA to push out of LEO, you need some better systems. If you had enough money, then sure, you could keep the Shuttle and start on the Shiny New Thing but we don't have enough money, so it was felt that it is better to cut your losses and start over. Keeping the Shuttle pieces parts going is mostly a make work project for a couple of Senators and their constituents. It has no scientific or engineering value.
Re:Wrong Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Until we can structure a space organization that won't be a political football
Short of a war that includes activities in space I really don't see how that's going to happen. There's no way to involve the Federal Government in anything remotely related to appropriations that won't become a political football.
Re:Bad, bad mistake. (Score:5, Insightful)
Insurance: (Score:5, Insightful)
The phrase "baby with the bathwater" comes to mind here. NASA does some things that no other US entity currently does.
We're about to rely on a foreign country as our sole source supplier for manned access to the ISS for at least several years. We don't have a backup. Just as you say NASA is a political football, international relations can be just as unpredictable. Right now we have a shortage of Pu-238 for RTGs in part because we felt we could buy what we needed from the Russians. That's fine. It's a good source for it. But, we didn't move ahead with funding for getting DOE ready to produce more. There's a contract dispute with the Russians that no one anticipated, and that's left us looking for other alternatives.
I prefer to keep a couple of shuttles around and launching at a low rate rather than just relying on Soyuz. Expensive, and hopefully unneeded, but most insurance is like that.
It gives us a backup that won't take years to be ready. Ultimately, a man rated Falcon 9 or some other private launcher would be a good solution. But, we don't have it yet.
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:3, Insightful)
We could if the goal of NASA was to accomplish something. It's not. The goal of NASA is to steer contracts to campaign donors and to create jobs. That's why we're going to get a shuttle-derived program no matter what happens. Most likely it will end up like VentureStar or NASP - lots of money spent with nothing to show for it. But all that money is going somewhere.
Your tax dollars. Providing jobs for senators since 1788.
Re:Wrong Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
And that falls under "short of a war", Bruce. ARPA was a DoD entity, not a civilian entity.
Re:Wrong Direction (Score:5, Insightful)
A bill that kills NASA entirely would be a better direction for space research and the United States.
Without NASA there would be virtually no space research in the United States, which is only "better" if you aren't in favor of space exploration to begin with. Nobody but NASA is going to launch missions like LISA, Cassini, Deep Impact, Mars Science Laboratory, etc etc. The only people on earth that are doing things like that are other governmental space agencies. Much like NSF, NASA serves a vital function of providing funding for projects that are infeasible for universities and unprofitable for private industry, with basic research that advances the state of knowledge and technology for the future.
The problem with NASA, the thing that makes it a political football, is the huge in-house rocket projects. The shuttle (and now derivatives) represent $billions/year all going to a single project and a small number of contractors. A giant target like that is tempting to get rid of, and nearly impossible for those profiting from it to let go of. Thus the political stalemate.
Yet all the interesting projects I mentioned, and all the technology programs that Obama wanted to have happen and which I pray to God won't be crippled by this compromise, are individually much cheaper. No single constituency has such a stake in them that they will fight tooth and nail to keep them, nor are they such tempting targets for cuts. They're more flexible, and also more broadly addressing the needs of future space exploration.
The shuttle-derived HLV, that does nothing but keep a contractor in business and let NASA have a rocket with its logo on the side, is the problem. Other than that, NASA is fine and does great work and saying it should be killed is the worst idea ever.
Re:Bad, bad mistake. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just wait till this same sensible decision making acumen of the political class is more powerfully governing our banking system, our health care system and our energy policy.
Re:Bad, bad mistake. (Score:3, Insightful)
But you have to learn to think like a Congress-person
Errr, maybe the word you are looking for is "bribe"?
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want NASA to push out of LEO, you need some better systems.
If we want to get out of LEO, then we need to make getting to LEO cheaper and easier, and develop technology that will let us go from there as a separate step. Lifting everything we need for a manned moon or (ha!) Mars mission from the surface of the earth one one giant rocket is foolish and will just mean the mission scope is cut down to the point of, well, pointlessness.
Keeping the Shuttle pieces parts going is mostly a make work project for a couple of Senators and their constituents. It has no scientific or engineering value.
Don't forget it also apparently keeps prices down on ICBM parts, because the DOD is so strapped for cash they need NASA to subsidize their equipment(?!)
Oh well. At least the pointless moon mission is dead. Hopefully this compromise doesn't cripple the actual useful and new projects that will expand our capabilities. And hey, maybe we'll actually find a good use for our HLV to LEO, and not just find arbitrary ways to justify its existence.
Re:KILL IT (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you read the book? Sure, it sucks, but the fact is, that line about "NASA's foremost mission" being one of outreach to the Muslim community could have come straight from one of its villains.
Only a fool rejects wisdom because of its source.
Re:Insurance: (Score:3, Insightful)
The phrase "baby with the bathwater" comes to mind here. NASA does some things that no other US entity currently does.
Completely agreed but none of the things I care about are tied to the shuttle or derived vehicles.
We're about to rely on a foreign country as our sole source supplier for manned access to the ISS for at least several years.
It gives us a backup that won't take years to be ready. Ultimately, a man rated Falcon 9 or some other private launcher would be a good solution. But, we don't have it yet.
Except it will take years to be ready. The new schedule has the new HLV's first launch in 2015. SpaceX has claimed they could have their first manned launch in 2013.
Frankly I don't expect either schedule to hold, but I still think it's likely that SpaceX will be delivering crew to the ISS before the shuttle-derived launcher can, and at a greatly reduced cost too.
There is no circumstance under which we aren't dependent on the Russians for some period of time, so what is this plan getting us exactly?
Too late (Score:5, Insightful)
But discontinuing Aries/Constellation is a mistake. Any accommodation for a Mars mission for those craft should be dropped as premature and uneconomic. Orion should be limited in scope to earth/moon shuttle visits and no more - and the timeline appropriately accelerated. With just sliderules and pencils we went from Mercury to Apollo in fewer years than the Constellation program has taken to do next to nothing. We're stuck in a cycle of increasing the capabilities of the program in order to make it "sexy", and by the time it's approved it's much more costly to build and will take much longer to develop.
So task Aries/Constellation with a moon mission, and leave LEO to private industry or contracting with the Russians. Instead of spending $2 billion on another shuttle flight, give 10 space start-ups $200 million each, and a free hand - I guarantee that in the end we will have much more to show from it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Insurance: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I'm sure that Elon Musk et al would like to present that as a done deal. But, they don't have a man rated rocket fully operational yet. I do think that ultimately it's a good solution.
Their latest test was very impressive. But, it's just one step on a several year track to being able to provide manned access to the ISS.
Both Soyuz and the shuttle are fully operational now. Not just likely to be in the future. I've watched a lot of projects that looked good not work out for whatever reason. And it's usually not purely technical. (American Rocket, anyone? It can be argued that mostly failed due to an automobile accident.)
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:5, Insightful)
True enough, but using the Shuttle (or parts thereof) doesn't appear to be the way to go. Nothing about the Shuttle is cheap or easy. Sure, take your lessons learned, improve on the technology that we've developed (the Shuttle engine is pretty impressive and seem to have the bugs worked out of it).
But as we've flogged to death on many a post here, the entire premise of the Space Shuttle was falsified from the beginning. Personally, I would be in favor of keeping it going as a servicer for the ISS until the next generation of craft is actually up and running. However, since (as has been pointed out), the production lines are dead AND the money isn't there, we have to scramble a bit for a decade or two. IMHO, for the foreseeable future, I'd stay in LEO and work out the nuts and bolts engineering of keeping people alive in space for extended periods of time. When you take six months to plan each space walk, you're not quite ready to venture out of the Van Allen belts.
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering the last manned spaceflight program to actually make it into orbit was started under the Johnson administration (the Space Shuttle), I would say that the established record for getting into space is pretty dismal indeed. Every single manned spaceflight vehicle that has ever been proposed since then (and in particular since the Nixon administration) has been systematically killed either the the subsequent or even current administrations involved. The question isn't why did this particular program (Constellation) die, but why did any succeed in the past at all?
left over parts (Score:5, Insightful)
The big caveat here is that there are enough parts sitting around for at least another 3 flights of shuttle hardware. We already paid for it to be built, so we should try to find a way to use it, and as cheaply as possible. Doing it cheaply means bolting on a payload with an engine instead of a shuttle.
The same budgetary things happened with Apollo. We had the hardware for Apollo 18, 19, and 20 ready to go, but funding got cut for them and that was that.
Re:KILL IT (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm of the opinion that every president that is elected is worse than their predecessor.
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet, given the chance, I'd take a ride without a second thought.
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:4, Insightful)
"How do you propose sending humans into LEO, without Shuttle pieces? Your choices seem to be 1) don't do it, or 2) ask the Russians for help. Stupid."
Both points 1 and 2 are perfectly valid. The primary reason to send humans into LEO is to staff the INTERNATIONAL Space Station of which Russia is part. We actually have NO NEED to send humans into space. If we did then I suspect we would have spent the money to keep the capability. Many people have the desire to send humans into space. Very different.
The only thing I find incredibly stupid is spending money to be able to send humans into space for no apparent reason. We don't send humans into space for research or exploration. We send them for PR and justify it with science. We always have.
Re:Wrong Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Signing the checks, providing mission direction, providing design support and reviews, keeping the budget in check, keeping the plans from growing too grandiose, providing contract support, coordinating launch and DSN services, etc... etc...
Caltech/JPL builds some damn fine hardware and runs some damn fine missions - but you're a fool if you believe that all NASA does is 'sign the checks'.
Re:Wrong Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
What, scientists don't have politics and all the bullshit that comes with it? How would scientists decide what projects to fund, towards what ends? You think just because someone is a professional in sciences that he or she is automatically altruistic? Good lord, some of these science peeps are the most condescending, lost-in-their-own-world, self-centered bastards imaginable!
Yeah, professional politicians suck. But I say, better the devil you know.
Re:I've got a dumb question (Score:4, Insightful)
A reasonable question. The shuttle is not the right design for that. It is expensive to build, is the wrong shape to stack well, and has lots of mass devoted to winged landing. It's also rated for about three weeks in orbit tops; beyond that it'll run out of many consumables and you'll have to start wondering if the tires will still hold air and suchlike.
But! If one had a design for an orbital habitat module suitably sized for launch on a cheap mass produced rocket - 20 tons to LEO is probably about right - and the capability to robotically assemble and supply them in orbit, one could in principle build an arbitrarily large modular orbital habitat. As big as budgets allow, anyway. The crew can ride up in different flights. And if one had an orbital fuel depot and robotic refueling capability, one could in principle push such a habitat somewhere beyond earth orbit.
Cool, huh?
That's the kind of capability NASA had been planning to develop before the senate fucked it up today.
Re:Wrong Direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Our entire government needs to cut the pork out. Picking on only NASA isn't exactly fair, and they're hardly the worst offenders. Maintaining a space program is important for our political image on the international stage if nothing else; would you prefer that we going begging hat-in-hand to China for our next rockets? What are you going to do when one of our benevolent allies simply tells us no?
Space exploration is a noble goal, of course, and one that I fully support. Someday it will even be considered a necessity by more than a small minority, especially once we figure out how to monetize such things as asteroid mining. In the short term, we should be a lot more worried in the weaponization of space that's going to take off in the next few years. Not having a space program would be about as smart as scrapping the military.
Re:Proven delivery system (Score:4, Insightful)
oddly enough the shuttle has the same safety as soyuz with roughly 2% failure. Of course no one wants to actually say that. We have lost 2 shuttles, but have launched 2.5 times more shuttles/people than russia has 3 man capsules.
One point that has to be made is that with the Shuttle its 'manned or no flight', while the Soyuz system is actually three different 'configurations' for different situations - the Soyuz manned capsule for launching three people into orbit plus a small payload, the Progress unmanned capsule for launching a medium payload into orbit and the Soyuz booster for launching other payloads.
Based on the above, I think the whole Soyuz/Shuttle record needs to be looked at from a different angle - as already noted, with the Shuttle the people are sent up regardless of whether the core mission requires it, and thats not a good situation.