Obama Pulls the Plug on a Great Run in Space
America belongs in space. After Space Shuttle Atlantis lands this week, the American space program is where it was fifty years ago: lacking a proven capability to put astronauts into low earth orbit. Most Americans cannot remember a time when the United States wasn’t the world leader in space exploration.
Make no mistake, this is President Obama’s space legacy. NASA’s budget is being refocused on global warming and other politically charged projects instead of manned space flight. No word on whether “outreach to Muslim nations” remains a NASA priority.
After the launch of Atlantis on July 8, sympathetic media outlets like CNN were trumpeting NASA’s new “focus on deep space exploration.” This administration spin doesn’t match reality. NASA doesn’t even have the heavy lift capability necessary for the deep space project.
Obama’s termination of NASA’s manned space capabilities may carry political consequences. In 2012, thousands of unemployed aerospace workers along Florida’s Space Coast and I-4 corridor are unlikely to forget who aborted the program. There are also military consequences to the Obama policy. Allowing so much unemployed aerospace engineering talent to scatter to the wind affects America’s military capabilities. Relying on Russia to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station is only the most visible example of other countries surpassing America in space.
I attended the final launch of the Space Shuttle with my daughter. A year earlier, I saw her eyes wide with amazement when she met John Blaha, a veteran of six Shuttle missions. Hers will be the first generation since the 1950s where the dreams of space are merely part of America’s history, as compared with her certain future.
Space dominance was America’s atom bomb 2.0. After American atomic dominance was matched, first by the Soviets, then others, world leadership in space exploration provided Americans with evidence that there is something great about this nation. Some might tut-tut the worth of such intangibles, but to the vast majority of Americans who support the Space Shuttle program (2 to 1), it is real.
Vocal opponents of NASA’s manned space program crow about the benefits of privatized spaceflight. Of all the other federal functions ripe for privatization — the dinosaur postal service for example — Obama targets the one function that provides both national security benefits and requires massive accumulation of capital to conduct. Too bad Obama’s zeal to wipe out manned space flight through privatization doesn’t extend to other parts of the federal government.
I remember being a little kid and going to see “2001: A Space Oddyssey” because my brothers and I bugged our mom to take us to it. We didn’t care that it was boring as all get-out (to bunch of little kids, anyway); we were just looking at the moon base and the vehicles and the space suits, etc. We were utterly convinced that we would be living in that world; that we would be working on Mars.
Talk about a letdown!
This is the lousiest 21st Century I’ve ever been in! No space exploration at all! Advancements in technology have led to nothing but easier access to porn… and for me to register this complaint.
Nice going, America.
Ok you can say whatever you want about the 21st century being lousy, but don’t rag on the porn, dude. Thats just not cool.
And by the way, i think we all know that obama is shutting down NASA BECAUSE of the fact that its work and research has “national security benefits”, not in spite of it. But I guess there’s really no need to state the obvious here, right?
That’s part of it, but there are other reasons.
First, liberals have whined for decades about NASA’s budget. As Tom Clancy put it, their only use for the space program has been the constant refrain “A country that can put a man on the Moon can”- spend even more money on their pet projects. They have been salivating over all the “good” they could do with the money budgeted for NASA every year, and Obama is going to give it to them.
Second, Obama shares the common progressive hostility to actual science, as opposed to the politicized kind (AGW, etc.) Real science, especially space science, has a terrible potential to discover things that progressives cannot deny, or co-opt for their grand plans. Imagine what would happen to their plans for an “energy limited” Utopia with solar power satellites pumping out a few terawatts of power each 24/7/365, as opposed to their preferred “appropriate technology” surface receptors, which have a couple of small problems- called “night” and “the atmosphere”.
To say nothing of the hell that would ensue if NASA should inadvertently discover a controllable fusion system architecture that actually worked. (But as long as the likes of James Hansen are in the center seat, Greenpeace and ELF can rest easy- to say nothing of Stevie Chu.)
Finally, and this is the one they would cut their own throats rather than admit, as long as there are no independent, self-sustaining human colonies off Earth, the elitists have a gun to humanity’s head. “We have all sorts of ways to kill you, from bioweapons to politically-created famines to nukes. Don’t give us any trouble, or else.” They prate of their “love” of humanity, but it’s all BS; all they care about is power, and having everyone else under their thumbs.
The future described in SF, with humans expanding into space, and colonies on habitable worlds elsewhere, is their worst nightmare. Partly due to their deep-eco contingent’s reflexive hatred of humans, but mostly because it subverts Paul Atreides’ Axiom; “He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.” If they can’t reach all of us to destroy us if we step out of line, they have no power.
Crazy? Yes. But no one ever said we were dealing with rational people here. At least, not with a straight face.
clear ether
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I have been a big proponent of solar power satellites (powersats). But to work 24 hours a day, those powersats have to be constructed and maintained in geosynchronous orbit. NASA has no such capability, manned or unmanned.
To build and maintain a network of stations–each a kilometer in diameter–in geosynchronous orbit would require a titanic effort on the scale of the original Apollo moon landings. A whole new effort taking perhaps 20 years, that NASA has not planned for.
I wish Obama had done that. But he didn’t give up any existing or planned NASA capability by not doing that.
They wouldn’t have to be constructed in GEO. You could assemble them in LEO and then use electric propulsion (e.g. VASIMR) to boost them to GEO. It would take some time – weeks to months – but it’d be far less expensive than sending everything from the surface to GEO for assembly. The old O’Neil concept of assembling solar power satellites at L5 from lunar materials is a very distant vision.
Someone else may bring this up, and if so I apologize. NASA is the expression of the colonialism that is inherit in the US. By leading the space race the US is basically in position to take advantage of all of the other countries in the world, especially the third world ones which Obama seems to care about more than this country.
By destroying NASA he can prevent the US from taking over space, Moon, Mars, Asteroids, Planet Playtex, etc. If a private company is ever successful, then the government can force them to spread the colonial wealth that we have or will have stripped from the poor and oppressed.
Why else would Obama have wanted NASA to give warm fuzzy feelings to the muslim community, other than to destroy the “colonial” or “crusader” label that the US has and make this a world of peace and tranquility and unicorns and fairies (not the San Francisco ones but the ones with wings that hang around Peter Pan).
We already blew that issue 44 years ago, when the Senate ratified the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Sci-fi writer Heinlein warned us what would happen. The treaty states that outer space is “the common heritage of all mankind,” not to be exploited by any one nation or group.
If that mindset had existed in the 16th and 17th centuries, no European country would have bothered exploring and settling North America, since the treaty would have forbidden any one nation to profit.
I’m sure Reagan would never have negotiated such a treaty. But LBJ, a liberal, could and did.
As a retired NASA “rocket scientist” I have had this discussion of why politicians of both Parties hate the US space program many times with colleagues, & our best conclusion (especially applying the philosophical concept of Occam’s Razor), is that the politicians have always hated anything technical (& of course the space program is the height of technical), because virtually none of them have any sort of technical education & thus they have absolutely no idea what is happening. Politicians have no understanding of the “scientific method” of thinking, & if they did understand it, they would realize the “scientific method” is anathema to their view of life & political maneuvering – which is simply how to lie convincingly. The fact is that any scientist or engineer can make any politician look like a fool due to the politican’s lack of knowledge, & since politicians live & die by their image, their greatest fear is being made to look foolish, or especially stupid.
In any event, NASA is now dying, & only private companies like SpaceX can continue to keep us in space. And of course the current NASA bureaucracy (now totally politicized), fears SpaceX because this small company makes the NASA managers look like politicians (the worst insult I can think of to call someone) because SpaceX has built & launched its Falcon-9 rockets at 1/100th the cost & in 1/10th the time it would now take NASA to do something similar.
This is the key point. Privatization IS working. It is not that they have only managed to put a cheese into space; It is that they did it so cost efficiently. Folks, this is the next step. Would the Internet be what it is today, if the government still ran it?
Obama does not know that he is doing the country a big favor by getting the government out of space travel. Now, it will have to be done cost-efficiently. No more throwing gobs of money at politically-based (my district) projects.
Can’t really even “blame” Obama for this. Politicians of all stripes have been down on NASA for years. The Columbia disaster was the beginning of the end for government-funded space programs.
They did their part to get it started. Time for them to step away. Other governments are just getting into it. They are way behind us, because we have private enterprise getting into it. If I had money, I would be looking into SpaceX as an investment, because they will come to dominate the satellite launch industry. 1/100th of the cost?!? Holy crap!
I saw 2001 when I was 12. I would be 46 in 2001, I calculated. It seemed unimaginably far away but, like you, I was confident that I was looking at something like the future.
Even at the age of 17, in 1972, I registered amazement and unease when the US, in the throes of the oil crisis and general confusion about its role in the world brought on by a mawkish, self-indulgent guilt from which it has never recovered, enede the Apollo project with nothing to replace it. There was something not quite right about the self-confidence of a nation that having achieve the admirable feat of landing men on the moon, just turned inward and dropped the whole thing. There was nothing to be ashamed of in that achievement and everything to be incredibly proud of, but even then there were nanny-like voices saying that the US had to fix third world poverty or the looming food crisis, or whatever, before it was entitled to think about space. What was more astounding was that those voices were taken seriously by educated people and opinion-makers in the US.
I thought then, and still think, that the abandonment of the space program, the appallingambivalence of Americans towards it, and the lack of pride in its achievements, was a significant milestone on the road of American decline. And I’m not talking about economic decline.
I still remember as a child watching the blurry black and white image of Neil Armstrong taking our first step onto the moon.
We were once a great nation that did great things.
Then we elected Democrats…
I happened to watch a doco last night on NatGeo about the Aplollo program. Watching Aldrin, Lovell and others talk to the camera – modest, easy-going, utterly courageous – made me think that (grumpy old man alert) the US once produced great people, too.
Barack Obama has destroyed the American Space Program and the thousands of jobs thereof. Anyone that works, or worked, for NASA would be an absolute idiot not to vote that loathsome maggot out of office in 2012. And that goes for owners and employees of the oil industry, coal industry, car dealerships, investment institutions, businesses, and anyone else that wants this country to prosper!!
Obama IS a destroyer of ALL things good about America.IF he gets reelected the US will never recover, even in a hundred years.
Damn him to hell….
This is why I wish the people as a whole would wisen up and try to force him out BEFORE 2012.
There are no voters in space, no ACORN offices, no cities to turn into Gary, Indiana, and no Mosques. There’s nothing to see or do there. Obama supporter, Congresswoman, Yale alumna, and Juris Doctor, Sheila Jackson-Lee thinks we’ve already had manned missions on Mars and she wasn’t all that impressed. NASA is the place where James Hansen works his fraud of Anthropogenic (man made) Global Warming. So, yeah, the shuttle missions are over and there are no plans to go anywhere in outer space. It’s as if what happened to the astronaut’s wife, Congresswoman Giffords in Arizona, is a metaphor for what has happened to the whole country.
“There are also military consequences to the Obama policy. Allowing so much unemployed aerospace engineering talent to scatter to the wind affects America’s military capabilities. Relying on Russia to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station is only the most visible example of other countries surpassing America in space.”
This could be serious. We need to develop fighter aircraft that will be able to fly in the earth’s atmosphere to take on 5th or even 6th generation fighters from other countries in the future. These fighters would dominate hyperspace, or warfare in the earth’s atmosphere. They would either take on other fighters or shoot down enemy statellites. This could be an important element to any future war and should not be overlooked. Hopefully, these same engineers can find work in other American aerospace corporations.
“We need to develop fighter aircraft that will be able to fly in the earth’s atmosphere to take on 5th or even 6th generation fighters from other countries in the future. These fighters would dominate hyperspace, or warfare in the earth’s atmosphere. They would either take on other fighters or shoot down enemy statellites. This could be an important element to any future war and should not be overlooked.”
It’s not just man-carrying launch vehicles that are being abandoned by the US. So too are advanced fighters. Where we were once the world leader, we’ve got nothing – NOTHING – in the works beyond the years-late and over-budget F-35. Most of our fighters were developed in the 1970s. The F-22 production line is being shut down (even as Japan and Israel wanted those planes). China and Russia are, of course, moving ahead. We never built a successor to the SR-71. Today we rely on drones (some of which Iran claims to have shot down) and satellites (which China has demonstrated it can shoot down or blind).
But though I grew up watching space launches back to Mercury, and studying engineering for a while, I’m not partial to manned flights beyond near-earth for one simple reason: There hasn’t been the requisite technology leap beyond chemical propulsion, thus we’re speed and distance limited. Whatever we or the private sector come up with, they’re still using the technology equivalent of vacuum tubes. But as long as we’re supporting near-earth activity, we should *not* be relying on other countries for something so basic as transportation. The death of the Shuttle program is just another sign the country’s decline from prominence.
It’s not just man-carrying launch vehicles that are being abandoned by the US. So too are advanced fighters. Where we were once the world leader, we’ve got nothing – NOTHING – in the works beyond the years-late and over-budget F-35. Most of our fighters were developed in the 1970s. The F-22 production line is being shut down (even as Japan and Israel wanted those planes). China and Russia are, of course, moving ahead. We never built a successor to the SR-71. Today we rely on drones (some of which Iran claims to have shot down) and satellites (which China has demonstrated it can shoot down or blind).
American aerospace is in trouble. After spending about $80 billion to develop and procure less than 190 F-22s, the entire fleet of planes sit grounded due to a problem with their oxygen syste. Meanwhile, the F-35 program just announced another billion dollar overrun, this time on the first production lot of planes. NASA spent billions on the abortive Ares boosters only to have the schedule slip at least one year for each year of developmnent and the cost to duplicate a launch capacity (that already exists in the EELVs) of over $40 billion.
We never developed a successor to the wonderful SR-71 for a reason – it’s military utility wasn’t that great for the cost. A Blackbird blowing overhead at Mach 3.15 is only over a target area for seconds. Today’s drones can loiter over an area for hours and they’re working on flights lasting up to a week for future drones. Persistent surveillance is much more useful than a snapshot in time and with satellite links, the images are sent in near real time. That’s something the Blackbird couldn’t do – it’s intelligence collection wasn’t available until after the plane landed. Stealth drones are under development and one was reportedly used during the Bin Laden raid. Those will be a lot harder to detect and shoot down.
My brother in law has just retired from NASA. He says the amount of engineers who are retiring would have been challenge enough for NASA to replace since so much at NASA really isn’t written down or archived. (Years ago when much of the paper files were being eliminated, my brother in law took all of the files being thrown away that had to do with his area. He kept them in his garage…and for years, something would come up that no one could remember or find and he would go back to his garage and find a note, a memo etc that helped answer or solve the problem.
Obama is soooo stupid, he doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know!
With all of the layoffs and downsizing, brother in law says the collective memory of NASA will go away very quickly, almost impossible to replace or put back together. Kind of like Humpty dumpty!
Like Humpty-Dumpty. Or, more like the Egyptians, or the Incas in Peru, or even Stonehenge. We have almost unlimited engineering and mechanical expertise and advantage, and stand in awe trying to figure out how the ancients pulled off the work they did with the degree of precision they accomplished. It was all lost somewhere, probably thrown out of someone’s brother-in-law’s garage after he passed.
That said, I was kind of disappointed to learn that the last shuttle launch wasn’t scheduled as a night shot. Living in Orlando, it’s most impressive to watch the sky light up with all of that fire from over at the coast. And I’ve “witnessed” every Cape Canaveral landing by the shaking and rattling of my windows, sometimes in the dead of night, as the shuttle passed overhead on it’s descent.
Say what?! Ask yourself, does this wash: “In 2012, millions of unemployed Americans are unlikely to forget who aborted the country.”
Wrong. Obarky and the Democrat’s plan to wreck the US affects America’s military capabilities, and just yesterday they told you so. Spare us the hyperbole.
I get such a kick out of all these pro-space potboilers on PJM. That socialism for scientists is so popular — the commenter above lamented that all those jobs will go missing now and blew right past the point I’m making — says something about the “right” that hangs around here.
NASA is a taxpayer-funded national agency, kinda like every other disaster to come out of Washington in that way. It is wasteful and agenda-bound, these days in boostering AGW more than anything that’ll ever make money out in hard vacuum.
There’s nothing in space, which is why they call it space. There is no space race. There are no worlds to conquer or mine. We can’t colonize Mars, not in a country tens of trillions upside down and facing existential threats on all sides. Nothing makes money in space, and we already know how to put stuff in orbit.
President Ogabe may have had just another Marxist plan in mind when he axed it but it needed axing.
All the “conservative” hoorahing about Space!™ is rubbish. Let the private sector do what it can there, which it is, and let the wasteful, make-work plans DC craps on us all dry up and blow away like they should.
Grow up. Tom Swift was a long time ago. If you believe in mandated patriotism, have DC buy you a flag. And if you believe in strange new worlds and civilizations, go invest in one of Branson’s adventures and leave my taxes alone. We’re in deep enough shite as it is.
Excellent idea Ten to invest on one of “Branson’s ventures.” That way, instead of returning to low earth orbit, suborbital flight will be the farthest extent of America’s presence in space. Aim low.
Ending “Socialism for Scientists” at NASA should be significantly down the list after “Socialism for ____________” at hundreds of other burrows inside the federal government. After some progress is made in other areas, get back to us about NASA.
Your rationalizations are weak at best.
Get back to us when the private sector launches something more than a cheese wheel.
“NASA doesn’t even have the heavy lift capability necessary for the deep space project.”
NASA doesn’t need an HLV or a more correct term Super Heavy Lift Vehicle. What NASA doesn’t have is funding for any of the other technologies that would enable deep space exploration.
“Obama’s termination of NASA’s manned space capabilities may carry political consequences.”
Bush cancelled the shuttle.
“Vocal opponents of NASA’s manned space program crow about the benefits of privatized spaceflight.”
There are no opponents to NASA’s manned space program, at least not in how you are referencing them. The difference between a SpaceX Falcon9 and the Shuttle is the method of contracting. Guess what, private corporations made the shuttle.
“Too bad Obama’s zeal to wipe out manned space flight through privatization doesn’t extend to other parts of the federal government.”
Obama ended up proposing a massive SHLV that won’t be completed for decades at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. That money could be better spent on payloads for an existing class of launchers that could do real space exploration beyond earth orbit. That is the essential thrust of using SpaceX and other corporations to supply the ISS. They are cheaper than the shuttle and will allow NASA to spend more money on exploration but it all hinges on NASA being allowed to explore.
“There’s only one problem with privatization with space flight — it isn’t working. Space X is where NASA was in 1960 with Project Mercury. Namely, the ability to put humans into orbit exists on paper, and nowhere else.”
SpaceX is currently working on fulfilling their COTS contract, which is the delivery of cargo to the ISS, not humans. They are well on track to do so. They made it this far spending tens of billions less than NASA spent on the AresI. The AresI was also going to use a stick and capsule.
“Instead of humans or animals in the Space X Dragon capsule, it carried a wheel of Le Brouere cheese.”
They are demonstrating that their rocket and capsule are safe. They are flying the missions that NASA contracted them to do and NASA didn’t contract with them to launch cargo to the ISS or humans on those test flights.
“So the Chinese are keeping their foot on the accelerator, not backing off.”
If this is a concern, then don’t push for NASA waiting 15-20 years before they have their own launch vehicle when we can use the current class of EELV’s to start exploration now. NASA should be focusing on building a real space ship, one that only operates in space not on launchers.
I appreciate your concern and enthusiasm but it appears to be misplaced.
What wodun said.
Christian, why do you hate private space so much? Your extreme position will make you look pretty foolish within a year when SpaceX’s Dragon is docked to the ISS (unless your Russian buddies try to block it).
What the hell is deep space exploration? Trillions of dollars speculated by a government agency in a bankrupt country in the interest of knocking around in hard vacuum?
That’s not conservative; that’s make-work socialization of the highest order.
Hyperspace. Or even 7th generation fighters — Tie fighters, probably, with ion engines. You’ve got to be kidding but somehow I know you’re not.
What do you say we revive NASA and develop hyperspace fighters. I hear they’re cheap.
All part of The One’s dream of diminishing America. The great leveling marches on. Under Obama’s visionary leadership we’ll all become dependent upon food stamps.
We already are. So let’s revive a failed program with no rational future because we need the national image of beating the Russians again.
NASA is a huge pile of government waste. What’s wrong with you people?
How significant…or ironic that your piece is run today, July 20, 2011. From History Today:
“1969: First Moon landing
On this day in 1969, the Eagle lunar landing module, carrying U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin (“Buzz”) Aldrin, landed on the Moon, and several hours later Armstrong became the first person to set foot on its surface.”
Another destructive blow by Mr. Obama to American Exceptionalism.
Blame not Obama, blame the 50 million people that voted for him while knowing nothing about his hate of America, Americans and our culture and being either too lazy or indifferent to do the research.
“Whether unlimited helium-3 supplies on the moon or discoveries beyond our imagination, the countries most committed to space will reap the rewards.”
Oh, please! Not this “access to resources” or “industrial processes that can’t be done on earth” nonsense again! Considering the hundreds of millions for a near-earth launch, or the billions it will cost to go beyond near-earth, there’s simply no way such activity is more cost-effective than sourcing terrestrially. And only those who don’t understand the Periodic Table envision some mysterious “unobtanium” element that only exists beyond earth.
I have mixed feelings about the U.S. getting out of the space race. On one hand it is a symbol of national pride, and now we are giving it up, abandoning it. We were not been beaten in the space race, we forfeited.
On the other hand, everything the government is involved with is hugely expensive, and much is unnecessary. Since Obama announced we are pulling out, I have read of several private companies that are ready to take the government’s place at no cost to the taxpayer other than whatever the government pays for their services. While I know little about these companies, I am willing to bet their services are a fraction of what the same things would cost had the government done them.
Time will tell if space is best explored by private companies or by governments.
Like Ten, I am unconvinced that space exploration will yield concrete dividends of the sort that will help our military or economy. It might not offer revelations that greatly advance natural philosophy (physics, chemistry, etc.). We’d be unwise to RELY on such paybacks for space exploration.
Unlike him, however, I consider it the sort of project that a civilization worthy of the name ought to undertake, if it can. Because we ARE a civilization, not merely a financial entity, or a government. A country worth a man’s time does something like this, if it’s doable. A country that wouldn’t is something less than a civilization, and its decision-makers something less than men.
For all that, though, I’m not really sorry to see Atlantis’s last flight. The space-shuttle program was a decades-long boondoggle that sidelined all exploration beyond Earth’s orbit, hoovering up all the funds and all the scientists & engineers. Except for the odd unmanned Martian mission, we’ve been marking time with 1970s-era technology and limiting manned space travel to Mother Earth (at whatever altitudes). Killing off the space shuttle should’ve happened several administrations back.
Ten and Le Cracquere are right. There is no economic benefit from blasting things into space. My cell phone and blackberry are just a tether to work. I can never get away. And GPSs usually give me bad directions. Didn’t someone write a book about the End of History? There is no more progress to be made. We are as advanced as we will ever be. Thanks goodness we are saving that space money so we can have great healthcare.
Thank you for pointing out the foolishness of their claims. Space can be very profitable, but we have been hobbled for decades by the idea that the government must manage it at a loss. Just keep them out of the way, please!
I hope you are right but I fear you are not. I susepct it will not be the private sector that steps in. It will be other governments and their private industry will benefit from the advancements.
No one really adequately quanitifed the value of NASA in terms of derivative private sector profits. All we heard about was Tang and memory foam. Some government investments actually do have a multiplier value. But no Nancy, foodstamps are not one of them.
Perhaps the Chinese will do a better job at assesing the value than we did. There are a lot of things our government should not be doing but when I ask myself this question, NASA is not top of mind.
Hmmm. Wasn’t it someone from the US Patent Office who in the late 1800′s said there was no longer a need for more patents since everything that could be invented had already been invented.
The Luddites need to butt out of this discussion. Their arguments are specious and ignorant in the extreme.
Thanks, ACJ, though to repeat, I don’t present that as an argument AGAINST space travel. I think we should continue space exploration, but would rather be honest and admit that the argument from utility is pretty shaky.
Now, I do think that’s one reason why the private sector is unlikely to replicate NASA’s achievements, or even come close to them.
And forgive me for letting your joke fly over my head before sending that last post! (Knew I should have had an extra cup of coffee.)
In my defense, I’m not saying that no measurable benefits CAN come of space exploration–plenty of unexpected, unrelated benefits accrued in the course of splitting the atom and the early space programs as well. I’m just saying that such practical gains aren’t a sure thing, and it’d be wise for proponents of space exploration not to count on them and then look silly later. If such discoveries accompany our space projects, I’d be thrilled. But it’d be rash to guarantee them to the skeptics.
Why is it that normally sane right wing people go totally bonkers for command economy lunacy (both literally and figuratively) when NASA’s human spaceflight program comes up?
NASA’s HSF, in the shuttle and the space station, is a poster child for the horrific waste that occurs when the government grabs control of a segment of the economy. Neither has come remotely close to achieving the goals that justified their construction and operation. And why should we have expected them to? Unlike in the private sector, government experiences little market discipline that would force them to abandon vain fantasies.
NASA is broken because it costs them so many billions of dollars to do anything. They admitted as much themselves in a recent report which stated that developing the Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX did for $390 million, would have cost NASA as much as $4 billion. Constellation was cancelled because of the extreme expense – an estimated $45 billion just to put a new capsule into orbit. The James Webb Space Telescope is threatened with cancellation because it is billions over budget. The new commercial approach that NASA is taking for cargo and crew to ISS makes a great deal of sense, and will save us a lot of money. Since NASA is not likely to get its budget increased any time soon (indeed, it will likely shrink) doing more with less is essential. The gap after shuttle is unfortunate, but it is due to years of poor government policy and bureaucratic dysfunction at NASA rather than some fey attempt by the Obama administration to sabotage our space program.
I’m surprised to find arguments like Mr. Adams’ on a conservative website.
Mr. Adams claims that private industry can’t provide access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), because so far they haven’t. That makes no sense at all. Private industry has to move at deliberate pace, because it operates under the constraints of the free market: A catastrophe like the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster could put a private company out of business. Their access to space must be cost-effective, scalable, and capable of economies of scale. Exactly what we as conservatives have always defended as the superiority of the marketplace vs. government-run projects.
As a kid, I enjoyed the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But did you notice that it was supposed to be a private company–Pan Am–providing space shuttle access? And that the space station was privately owned, by the Hilton Hotel chain? That really did seem like the future to me.
The notion that we must pay NASA just to keep a bunch of workers from moving out of Florida sounds like the worst kind of welfare. How does that differ from Obama’s bailout of the Detroit auto industry?
The military benefits of space are real enough. But the U.S. Air Force began to hedge its bets on NASA’s Space Shuttle, after the Challenger disaster convinced them that they had better not depend on that thing anymore.
The Air Force continues to launch numerous payloads itself from Vandenberg AFB. Their X-37B, an unmanned reusable shuttle, has already been launched into orbit from Florida twice. It’s still up there right now. I’m surprised Mr. Adams ignored it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
There is a place for government agencies like NASA: Exploration, not travel. The transcontinental railroads were built by private companies.
As some other conservatives have noted, what Mr. Adams supports here is similar to the U.S. Government, 100 years ago, inventing its own airplane and chartering a Government agency to act as the sole U.S. airline.
“The notion that we must pay NASA just to keep a bunch of workers from moving out of Florida sounds like the worst kind of welfare. How does that differ from Obama’s bailout of the Detroit auto industry?”
I wrote no such thing. I made a political observation that the economic effects of the decision will have political consequences. A description, no more. I did note that the effect on the pool of engineering talent will have national security implications- and not even the most crackpot hater of NASA would argue that national security is suitable for privatization.
Regarding the airline compare, the barriers to entry to build planes or fly an airline are sigficantly higher than going to space.
Should have said, “significantly LOWER” than going to space.
The barriers to building a wide-body airliner and maintaining an airline were once very high–in the 1920s.
Air travel back then was like space travel has been: Mostly stunts by the daring (used to be called “barnstormers”). It was neither safe nor cost effective, and commercially not successful.
And for that time, the fledgling airlines were kept afloat by a Federal subsidy–the government paid them to carry air mail.
But eventually a private company, Douglas, built the DC-3, the first large (for its time) and safe airliner. And commercial air travel began to blossom of its own accord.
And that’s what has been missing: The space shuttle never achieved the cost effectiveness and reliability of a DC-3. And NASA never had, and still hasn’t, any plans to build such a thing. Probably because they couldn’t if they tried.
If and when private industry builds the DC-3 of space, space travel will start catching up with air travel as a safe, reliable, and ROUTINE means of transportation.
The space program will not be the only deconstructing barry soetero achieves. He is on target to destroy the Republic. After personally engaging numerous Congressional members it appears they also are to content to permit an illegal putative president to accelerate the extinction of an abiding document called, the CONSTITUTION. Of course, it is way more prudent to save a minnow or lizard from becoming extinct and allow the rule of law to fall by the wayside.
The justice dept. is corrupt, the legislature is compromised, the executive branch is fraudulent. When government installs hopelessness, you have nothing to lose by dying for future freedom. Patriots we are. Sacrifice we will. Obama’s hatred for America will not win.
The death of the 1970s vintage Space Shuttle is no tragedy–it’s an awfully expensive way to fly and therefore consumes vast amounts of money that could be spent on more fruitful endeavors (no pun intended). The tragedy is that, despite its well-known limitations, it was allowed to become the alpha and omega of US human spaceflight.
Obama was right to allow Bush’s decision about the demise of the program to stand, and he is right to provide an opportunity for the promising commercial space industry to compete for contracts to service the International Space Station–not that he really had a choice, since the folks who build many of the key subassemblies and other components of the shuttle no longer were capable of producing what was needed to continue the program. He’s done plenty of boneheaded or cynical things in his tenure (including steering vast sums to his political allies in the United Auto Workers in a manner that, even if technically legal, is a disgraceful abdication of his fiduciary responsibilities to the nation); however, we should applaud the occasions when he avoids massive error or mismanagement.
The real question is what happens in the future? I agree with the idea that NASA is a fine institution to lead the way in basic research and riskier ventures whose commercial promise is uncertain; however, the commercial market is the place to look for the innovations that will affect our lives, and we must take care not to extinguish the entrepreneurial flame that is America’s true competitive advantage in the world.
“In 2012, thousands of unemployed aerospace workers along Florida’s Space Coast and I-4 corridor are unlikely to forget who aborted the program.”
That may be true, but those thousands of unemployed workers will also likely be collecting unemployment and be dependent on government handouts/assistance/whatever. If that’s the case, the Democrats may look more appealing to them.
And, I think that’s all part of Obama’s plan. Get as many people as possible on some kind of government assistance or dependent on Uncle Sam, so they’ll be more likely to vote for the party that will keep the money coming.
Claiming that the SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon flight is no advance over Project Mercury is as ludicrous as claiming the DC-3 was no great advance over the Wright Flyer because they both got off the ground and landed safely.
NASA recently confirmed that the total development cost of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was less than $400M while according to the agency’s cost model it would have taken $4B for NASA to develop the same vehicle. Why in the world doesn’t that sort of cost reduction matter to you?
Congress just allocated another billion dollars for NASA’s Orion capsule project. That’s on top of $5B already spent on it and billions more will be required. The SpaceX Dragon capsule, which has now flown, has cost about $400M to develop. We’re talking factors of 20 lower in cost. (And, yes, Dragon is also capable of deep space operations.) Again, why in the world doesn’t that sort of cost reduction matter to you?
Throughout your essay you completely miss the point – the challenge of spaceflight is lowering cost. If costs are not lowered by factors of 10 to 20, human spaceflight will never be practical and affordable.
It costs a few dollars of fuel to put a pound of payload into orbit. Yet the average cost to put a pound of payload into orbit is several thousand dollars. High costs of development, low flight rates, and throwing away the vehicles is what adds up to those thousands of dollars.
The Shuttle was the worst of all cases. Being the “most complex space vehicle built by man” made it both extremely expensive to operate and extremely fragile at the same time. It threw away a huge and expensive tank and the boosters required total rebuilds. Keeping the system flying required a huge standing army. That was great for an agency with many centers and lots of employees to support but it was terrible for making spaceflight affordable and routine. The Shuttle was suppose to fly weekly and to lower costs to a few million per flight. Instead it struggled to fly 3 or 4 times a year and the average cost came to over $1.5B per flight.
As with most every other technology, incremental development via competition among commercial companies, who have very large investments of their own on the line, will bring down launch costs. Using fixed price contracts, paid only as milestones are met, prevents the cost-plus motivation that drives up costs. (BTW: more than half of that $800M total for Falcon 9/Dragon development came from private investment.)
Commercial development of low cost spaceflight is underway regardless of what happens at NASA. However, NASA can accelerate this and greatly lower costs for its own exploration program. It’s a shame that so many conservatives can’t see a win-win situation for both private spaceflight and the one government agency that they idealize.
“Claiming that the SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon flight is no advance over Project Mercury…” Actually, I never wrote any such thing. I said that Space X has not gotten as far into space as Project Mercury. In other words, Mercury acheived more. The Dragon Capsule may be fancier and contain more advanced technology. But it still hasn’t accomplished what Mercury has – put a human into orbit.
I understand people are big fans of space companies. I appreciate the benefits of privatization. But for the reasons I outline in the article, space is one of the least effective places to privatize. Let’s worry about Amtrak or the multitude of federal offices. Private companies, owned privately, with uncertain longevity, with a host of other inherent limitations, have limits the privitazation disciples refuse to recognize. Any posting comments in here an employee of Mr.Musk? Nobody should limit or restrict private space flight, but neither should it be relied upon. I will be pleased when private (truly private, not subsidized) space flight is a reality. But for now, Space X and the others have accompished next to nothing compared to NASA.
“space is one of the least effective places to privatize”
Mr. Adams, how do you reconcile that statement with the fact that NASA’s own cost estimates show it would have taken them 5 to 10 times as much money to develop the Falcon 9 booster if they had done it themselves? That sounds like pretty effective privatization to me. Do agree that order of magnitude cost reductions are important? Do you understand that we won’t be able to afford human deep space exploration if we can’t get the cost down for getting to low earth orbit? How else is NASA going to be able to get such deep cost reductions?
Add to that the sad fact that NASA’s cost models are notorious for underestimating the actual costs of development. Overruns of 100% or more are common along with years-long delays. By that metric, while NASA’s cost models estimate it would’ve cost them $4 billion to develop the Falcon 9, history shows it actually would’ve cost them far more than that, more likely $8 billion or more. It would’ve taken a lot more than 3 years to do the job as well.
NASA has started work on several manned space systems over the past 30 years. Every single one of these projects has failed.
“But for now, Space X and the others have accompished next to nothing compared to NASA.”
Again, you utterly, completely miss the point. How much have “SpaceX and the others” SPENT compared to NASA?
The point, again (and again, and again…), is cost. How difficult is that concept, for a free-market conservative?
I just fail to understand how people continue, in good conscience apparently, to compare the accomplishments of young, small, private companies with those of a vast, taxpayer-funded government program that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over half a century. Especially when recent events are so clear, so easy to contemplate: Orion, many billions spent, no flights, years and billions to go; while SpaceX has designed, built, and launched the Dragon for a small fraction of that.
“The point, again (and again, and again…), is cost. How difficult is that concept, for a free-market conservative?”
That is only one metric. NewSpace advocates like to focus on this as though it were the only factor moving forward in the development of space. It’s not. Just as important a factor, if not more important, in the Shuttle retirement decision was *safety*. Continuing the Shuttle program meant subjecting astronauts to roughly 1-2% risk of death every launch, and that was unacceptable. The Ares I was being designed for a 1-in-500 (0.2%) loss-of-crew requirement, which is about an order of magnitude better than Shuttle.
What LOC requirement is SpaceX using in its designs? NewSpace folks love to cite the low costs of the Falcon rockets, but hate it when you bring up the fact that 3 out of 7 Falcon launches have ended in failure — 20 times cheaper, and only 20 times the failure rate! That does not bode well for the future, especially given that the three failures are all seen as preventable failures. Have they fixed their design system? Does anyone know? Do they have a credible reliability growth management plan in pace? Does anyone know? What are their predictions for launch MTBF for the next 100 launches? Are their predictions credible?
The most troubling thing about NewSpace advocates is that they are willing to let the reduction of launch costs justify skipping steps in design and development, steps that experience has shown prevent failures.
“NewSpace folks love to cite the low costs of the Falcon rockets, but hate it when you bring up the fact that 3 out of 7 Falcon launches have ended in failure — 20 times cheaper, and only 20 times the failure rate!”
And people who use the 3 out of 7 figure hate it when you point out that the 3 failures to achieve orbit were the first three flights of the Falcon 1 rocket, not the Falcon 9.
They hate it when you point out that the first two F1 flights were explicitly tests. Tests are something common in engineering to understand the hardware. That was rather important here since almost all of the hardware was brand new. Furthermore, there were enormous modifications and improvements in the F1 between the 1st and 2nd flights and between the 2nd and 3rd. The 3rd failed due to a slight mis-timing in the staging. There were very few hardware changes between flights 3 and 4 other than correcting the staging timing. The F1 then worked fine in its next two flights and the F9 has worked fine in its next two flights. The F9 worked no doubt because of the test program provided by the F1, with which a lot of hardware is shared.
Critics of NASA’s commercial crew program hate it when you point out that it is more than SpaceX. The Atlas V will have flown probably 40-50 times before it carries crews. It is only by flying that a rocket becomes reliable.
The Falcon 9 will have launched up to a couple of dozen times before it carries crews. Consisting of so much new hardware, the F9 will be lucky to get through the early flights without a failure. Most rockets have a non-zero infant mortality. (The Atlas V has had no catastrophic failures but it also had lots of legacy hardware to build on.)
NASA was planning to fly crews on the Ares I after just two or three test flights. (The Ares I was far too expensive – a billion dollars per flight according to the Augustine panel – to do extensive unmanned test flights.) If you believe that was safe, then you probably believe those Ares 1 flight probability estimates with 4 significant digits.
I know I would feel a lot safer on a F9/Dragon on its 25th flight, even if it had one or two early failures, than I would on an Ares I/Orion (or an SLS/Orion) on just its 2nd or 3rd flight.
Clark:
[I'll reply to my own comment since the PJM software apparently limits the reply depth.]
“It is only by flying that a rocket becomes reliable.”
Absolutely. Let’s talk reliability growth management (RGM). [Anyone following this thread might want to look at the NIST website section on Duane plots, http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/apr/section1/apr192.htm ]
“And people who use the 3 out of 7 figure hate it when you point out that the 3 failures to achieve orbit were the first three flights of the Falcon 1 rocket, not the Falcon 9.”
No, I don’t mind at all. First, I’d like to say the troubling thing about the Falcon I failures is that they were all preventable, had SpaceX chosen to use standard design practices. The clearest example of this is the failure of the Demo 2 flight, which would have been prevented had SpaceX chosen to put baffles in the LOX tank, or if they had even used standard protocols for verifying and uploading trajectory data. The loss of flight 3 could have been avoided if they had done their homework and characterized the vacuum thrust tail-off of the Merlin engine before flight. These are kind of rookie mistakes, don’t you think? We’ve known since the early 1960′s that propellant tanks generally require features like baffles to provide damping for lateral slosh (as far as I know, SpaceX has never put forward a convincing explanation of why they thought they could get away without baffles). We’ve also known that thrust tail-off is a crucial in staging performance.
In re RGM, there are a couple of important statistical issues that need clarification. First, the 3/7 failure rate is a cumulative failure rate. The instantaneous failure rate is lower by a factor of (1-n), where n is the Duane exponent (“Duane slope”), which is to say, the instantaneous MTBF is related to the cumulative MTBF by IMTBF = CMTBF/(1-n). Now, we don’t have enough data on Falcon vehicles to compute the empirical Duane exponent, but experience over a large number of complex systems shows that the Duane exponent is usually between 0.3 and 0.6, with the latter value considered “state of the art” for a reliability growth management program. The Delta rocket family, for example, follows Duane’s law, with an exponent of 0.31. Atlas vehicles also follow Duane’s law, with an exponent of 0.49. If Elon Musk can somehow devise a state-of-the-art RGM program, having started after the third flight, then after 100 flights the IMTBF should be around 20 [=(100/3)^0.6/(1-0.6)], i.e. a 5% failure rate.
It’s a free country, you’re welcome to give us any “patter” you think is convincing, but that’s what the numbers tell us today.
“The Atlas V has had no catastrophic failures but it also had lots of legacy hardware to build on.”
Like the Falcon 1 / Falcon 9, here you want to take credit for the development work that has already been done but not accept the MTBF numbers that reflect that hard-won experience. There are two ways to work this (well, three, if you count hand-waving, but I’m trying to elevate this discourse to the level of rocket science). Method 1 is to count reliability growth starting from the first flight of a launch vehicle, make a Duane plot, see if the vehicle obeys Duane’s law, and then accept the empirical CMTBF and IMTBF if it does. Doing this for Atlas, for example, there have been 381 flights to date (I’m not counting the ICBM tests), with 38 failures. Doing the Duane plot, I get a slope of 0.49, with the best estimate for IMTBF of 17.3. Doing the same thing for the Delta family, there have been 337 flights, and IMTBF = 34.9. Your mileage may vary (there is always an uncertainty band around empirical estimates), but it should be clear that both Atlas and Delta are currently in the 3-5% loss rate category.
The second method of dealing with this is to ignore the long history of development and launch failures and just look at the experience with the current model, e.g. Atlas 5, which has 26 launches with only one partial failure (which we’ll ignore). So what does a 0 out of 26 empirical failure record tell us about the intrinsic reliability of the vehicle? Not as much as laymen apparently think. The 50% confidence value for the failure rate is 1-exp(ln(0.5)/26) = 2.6% failure rate. The 90% confidence value is 1-exp(ln(0.1)/26) = 8.5%. Note the value from the Duane plot, using all the Atlas data since 1958, is 1/IMTBF = 5.8%, which is clearly consistent with the 90% confidence band. In other words, method 1 and method 2 tell the same story. These are the numbers; I’m not hand-waving here.
Oh, and of course, the Falcon 9 has 0 for 2 failures (ignoring the booster recovery issues). What does that tell us? The 90% confidence interval for failure rate is 1-exp(ln(0.1)/2) = 68.4%. In other words, the 2 successes show capability, but not reliability. And as long as the same design team is using the same design methods and philosophy as they did for Falcon 1, there is reason to suspect that it will be a long time before SpaceX can carry astronauts safely.
“But it still hasn’t accomplished what Mercury has – put a human into orbit.”
They haven’t gotten there yet (though, as Elon Musk pointed out, a person would have had a perfectly comfortable ride on the Dragon last December) but do you really think they will not achieve crew capability? They will clearly do that for a fraction of the cost that it would take NASA.
“space is one of the least effective places to privatize”
The Falcon 9 already has about a billion dollars in commercial contracts for satellite launches. Even without NASA contracts, SpaceX with the Falcon 9 is a viable company. The other companies (Boeing, SNC and Blue Origin) in the CCDev program are also solid, well-funded firms.
“Space X and the others have accompished next to nothing compared to NASA.”
This is not a NASA vs Commercial Space issue. The point is for NASA to take advantage of the low cost access to earth orbit provided via a competition among commercial companies. This frees up funds in a shrinking budget that NASA can use to focus on the actual space frontier, which lies beyond low earth orbit.
In turn, by providing a market and by sharing the initial development costs, NASA will help create a commercial spaceflight industry. The same systems that take people to the ISS can also go, e.g., to a Bigelow space station.
There is nothing in NASA’s charter saying it must use only its own internally developed rockets. To the contrary, there is explicitly in the Charter a requirement that the agency use commercial launch services when they are available.
The Atlas V and Delta IV, which were developed by Boing and L-M with private and DoD money, take billion dollar military payloads to orbit about once a month. As even Mike Griffin told Congress back in 2002, there is nothing you would do to make rockets more reliable for crews that you would not also do for rockets for expensive satellites. That’s particularly true for rockets for military satellites that are crucial for US security and for soldiers in the field. There is no NASA magic pixel dust that will make an Atlas V more reliable.
Three of the four companies in the CCDev program (Blue Origin, Boeing, and SNC) will use the Atlas V. The probability is extremely high that at least one, if not all three, will produce a crew module that is safe and cost-effective.
You talk about recognizing the limits of private spaceflight but you refuse to recognize the limits of the NASA as it exists today. It is not the agency of 1969.
The Augustine panel reported on the huge overhead and fixed costs that suffocate NASA projects. For example, the Shuttle was to be retired to free up funds for Constellation vehicle development. However, only half of that $4B would have been available for development. The rest would go to maintain facilities and support staffs.
I believe it was Scott Pace at GWU who recently compiled a list of NASA space transport projects in the past 20 years or so that were started and canceled before they were finished. They totaled $21B. Since the Shuttle, NASA has not developed a single orbital rocket.
NASA is still capable of leading a dynamic space development and exploration effort but the agency needs drastic revitalization. Taking maximum advantage of the commercial sector is the first big step in that direction.
Yes, Clark, as I’ve been saying, “We need a private space industry, not a government space program.“
“The Dragon Capsule may be fancier and contain more advanced technology. But it still hasn’t accomplished what Mercury has – put a human into orbit.”
And it isn’t supposed to yet and that doesn’t mean that they wont. Right now they are on track to launch a human into space a decade before NASA. Give them a chance to meet their own development schedule before writing them off. Why give money to the Russians when we can give it to an American company, especially if it helps American companies dominate the launch industry?
“Nobody should limit or restrict private space flight, but neither should it be relied upon.”
The goal is to have multiple launch providers as well as multiple crew and cargo delivery systems. This way if something goes wrong, the space program doesn’t shut down like it would after a shuttle accident.
NASA and the DoD already rely on private companies in many aspects of their operations.
“I will be pleased when private (truly private, not subsidized) space flight is a reality.”
Actually, SpaceX will do just fine without NASA contracts. They have a launch manifest around $2b.
In 1961, John F Kennedy had a vision. He knew that American exceptionalism could take the lead in space and show the soviets what real America was made of. Even after some pain and loss, America never gave up and strode to the moon, unimpeded…while simultaneously fighting a very expensive war in Vietnam.
The lefty fruit loops may think that the NASA budget may be better spent getting Shaneiqua her fifth abortion in as many years, or financing needle exchange programs so that addicts don’t “get sick” but in reality, social welfare money is the most wasted kind of money there is. The smoke and mirrors of “compassionate spending” is total crap and has done more harm in the past forty years than any war or any natural disaster. The reason is that it fosters bad human behavior.
In 2008 Barack Hussein Obama (mmm, mmm, mmm) had a vision too. He wanted to call upon those who hated America more than anything and spend all its money on crap. On garbage and for the takeover of our healthcare system, lying that it would save money. He managed to curtail the US Space program with the stroke of a pen, putting the most productive federal employees out of work. All while fighting three very expensive wars abroad. Of which, one he started and two he promised to end. If Kennedy was alive today, I really wonder what he’d say to this petulant man-child commie president.
All this sudden glorification of a government program is rather surprising. The Space Shuttle was only a mixed success, very expensive for what what it accomplished. One of the greatest successes of the shuttle was the repairs carried out on the (unmanned) Hubble telescope. Please note that funding for the shuttle was cut under G. W. Bush, not Obama. That is the fundamental error many here seem to be making. For further arguments against this wasteful program, see Rand Simberg’s post elsewhere on this site.
There’s only one problem with privatization with space flight — it isn’t working. Space X is where NASA was in 1960 with Project Mercury. Namely, the ability to put humans into orbit exists on paper, and nowhere else.
Excuse me, Sir?
These are the kinds of stupid remarks that discredit critics of “Private Space.”
Let me clue you in, Sir, to certain technological realities: Private Space doesn’t have the money to build exotic new propulsion systems, but does have the money to make the “old” technology cheaper, faster, and more reliable. New Space, or Private Space, also adds additional capabilities to the so-called “old” space technologies, such as better computerization, more efficient and less costly manufacturing and operational systems, and launching with far fewer ground personnel.
And while we’re talking about “old” space tech: what the hell do you think all the other space powers, and the current big-name legacy contractors in the U.S. have been using, anti-gravity propulsion?
For all practical purposes, because of hugely exhorbitant launch costs gouged from the U.S. taxpayer, we have made almost no progress in propulsion and launch technologies because ther was no money. Brilliant idea hatched decades ago never came to fruition because of lack of funding. To compound the problem, overly-ambitious attempts at developing new launchers flopped, wasting huge sums, when interim systems should have been developed that were doable.
So you understand now Mr. Adams? Would you like to rewrite your piece in light of these new facts? Please stick to what you know, justice and legal issues, something at which you are both brilliant and courageous, but leave this subject matter to those who know the history and the technology. Have a nice day.
Darn those HTML tags
Well, I’ve made my point. Besides, SpaceX has been succeeding by leaps and bounds. The problem here is: Obama critics have been conflating the reduced space program with Obama’s apparent intent to wreck America as a superpower and an economic giant. The supposedly free country that we are desperately needs private, free-enterprise solutions in space, and it’s apalling when “Republicans” support giant welfare/jobs programs for engineers. The programs Congress wants will never get us to the Moon and Mars. Never. That is a scandal. Better to spend the same or less on a robust LEO infrastructure with private space being the linchpin, and have NASA and the Air Force spend what would then be the surplus funds on those more advanced toys that Mr. Adams naively thinks SpaceX ought to be able to develop.
Nothing pains me more than seeing an MSM-type distortion devoid of solid facts at Pajamas Media; it’s hypocritical.
In reply to #3 eon.
You are on the money in your explication of pro versus anti- space exploration camps. What I find to be the most unexplainable trait that seems to follow the space exploration haters, is their superstition of a primitive stripe that clouds their person, along often times with a need to expand the welfare state. Typically their retort is “man has no business on the moon”, and this not too far to my ears from this reply; “God would have given you wings if he wanted man to fly”. Sometimes the fear of the unknown is as insurmountable as the fear of the lack of food, water and shelter (warmth). Looking at those three things objectively they are miraculous in their propinquity and abundance to Americans, and only unique to Americans in the present modern age. Prior to World War II Americans in many parts of this great nation experienced 3rd World deprivations that would cause space exploration to be the last priority to seemingly transcend one towards reversing the lack of those 3 basics. Undoubtedly the modern eras embrace of heady science (physics,chemistry, astro-physics, biology, geology,etc etc etc….brought forth a brave new world of a different sort of human being (mostly American) prepared to accept and head off into transcendent places, unmoored by superstition or doubtful of its’ role in the world (remember these declarations : “We Feed the World”, “Breadbasket of the Nation”. Now we our burdened with a male cheerleader in chief and the sign he holds aloft has “e” for exceptional, alas it’s in lower case spelling.
A shame you can’t grasp the comment right above yours but you can cartoon opponents of the waste that is government make-work — wherever it’s found — as intellectual primitives.
Look, it’s not profitable. There’s nothing out there but bravado and an antiquated patriotism. Clear enough?
Prove those two assertions faulty before you arrogantly lie about who makes them.
NASA in theory should not be profitable. It is the research into the future. It is a way for humanity to use the resources in our solar system -just not what is here on Earth. Yes, research is expensive. By cutting NASA, we have stopped doing what governments should do – protect our future and invest in the future.
America was not set up to be a welfare country, but unfortunately, that is where our money and future is going – maintaining status quo to a bunch of unachievors (NOT people who have paid into Social Security and should get their hard work back, but all the others) who just cry “more” and “It is my right.” If we really want to get somewhere in the future, we need to invest in research, and cut the welfare. NASA is essential.
NASA’s job should be research and exploration.
Not operating space trucks shuttling crews and cargo back and forth to low earth orbit.
America has never had a government-run airline.
Why do we need a government-run spaceline?
It is normal for every leader of a country to put their own country first before other countries. One of the major things that has led to Obama being disrespected is that Obama is seen as not putting his own country, America, first. Not only does this create disrespect, but also creates a very significant lack of trust. The following is just one example of this:
The Telegraph
Barack Obama: Nasa must try to make Muslims ‘feel good’
The head of the Nasa has said Barack Obama told him to make “reaching out to the Muslim world” one of the space agency’s top priorities.
…he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html
While NASA has had serious problems for years, suffering from the same bloat and inertia as any entrenched government bureaucracy; and should not be in the business of building rockets (we have plenty of rockets):
That said, the Obama administration’s emphasis on reaching out to Muslims is completely bizarre, and in my opinion is the strongest evidence yet that Obama is really a closet Muslim.
Friends;
I have worked with and dealt with NASA for several decades, and I have to say that many of the writers here are missing the forest for the trees.
It is quite true that SpaceX is a more efficient development organization than, say the Marshall Spaceflight Center, and so subcontracting hardware development out to them or others like them is a more efficient way to get things done than to spend the money in house at NASA centers.
But it remains the case that SpaceX is primarily funded by NASA, that nearly its entire workforce and technical foundation was created by NASA, that its business plan is totally dependent upon NASA, that the recon knowledge of extraterrestrial worlds that SpaceX hopes to explore, and the methods used to explore them, were discovered by NASA and continues to be advanced by NASA, and etc., etc. etc.
If NASA goes away, SpaceX goes away.
Today is the 42nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the 35th anniversary of the Viking 1 Mars landing. Both were done by NASA. No one else has sent men to the Moon or successfully landed robots on Mars.
The United States comprises 4 percent of the world’s population. Yet we have sent 100 percent of all human expeditions and 90 percent of all probes beyond low Earth orbit. That is NASA’s work.
Five hundred years from now, no one will give a rat’s ass about the Weiner or Murdoch scandals, or which side got the blame for the budget mess. But our time will be remembered, because this is when humanity first set sail for other worlds.
NASA is, and will be remembered, as the ornament of our age.
Future ages will wonder at it, even as the present age wonders at it now.
By conspiring to insure that the space program would be left adrift after Shuttle retirement, Obama administration has set up NASA for the wrecking ball. This is an extraordinary crime – a crime against science, against America, and the human spirit itself. It should not be allowed.
Robert.
No one is advocating closing down NASA, I’m sure we’re all supportive of the important role it has in science.
Many of us are simply pointing out that it’s the efficiency of the free market that made the US and other Western nations rich, and the inefficiencies of socialism that made East bloke countries poor.
We think that this in itself is a pretty good reason to expand the role of the competitive, monopoly free, marketplace into the space launch industry.
But it remains the case that SpaceX is primarily funded by NASA,
This isn’t true at all.
As an engineer and space enthusiast, I’m glad the shuttle is finally being put out to pasture. It was a gigantic disaster and probably the reason the American government is out of the space business. NASA told us the shuttle would launch every 2 weeks. TWO WEEKS! Has anyone noticed they missed this by just a little bit?
The shuttle is a great example of how government can screw things up. NASA already had a reliable, proven heavy lift, man-rated orbital delivery system: the Saturn V (and other, smaller rockets such as the Titan). They *destroyed* the plans for the Saturn in order to make sure the shuttle program would keep going.
They required the military to launch all their heavy payloads on the shuttle to help cost justify it. That was a brilliant move – require a man-rated launch system for payloads that did not need that hyper-expensive level of reliability.
Instead, they built the Shuttle, a gigantic kludge which killed more astronauts, by far, than all the rest of the world’s space efforts. The think is an engineering nightmare!
Furthermore, NASA demonstrated dramatically how badly government can screw things up. Conservatives should be holding it up as an example of how badly government systems work.
Apollo was a heroic effort, and NASA had a great success – but even then the bureaucrats were busy scrambling things. My Dad, a NASA funded space researcher, commented that NASA succeeded in building the most complex bureaucracy in the least time.
If we need to go into space for national reasons, then we need a better way for government to help. They could use the DARPA model (you know, the guys that brought us the internet). DARPA often creates prizes and then awards a bunch of money to the first/best outfit to meet their goals (such as the autonomous vehicle competition). They don’t have a zillion bureaucrats running every detail – they just provide funding and let the stuff run (okay, they’re a bit more bureaucratic than that, but nothing like NASA).
Let the government offer $X Billion to whatever company achieves a particular milestone, and it will probably happen. On the autonomous vehicle competition, tremendous creativity was unleashed and a number of competitors met all objectives, and had a good time doing it. That’s one of the great ways to make engineering progress.
Finally, as others have commented, this article does not belong on a conservative site. Conservatives indeed are interested in American exceptionalism, but we also recognize the folly of leaving most things up to the government.
If you are seeking to lay blame on the demise of excellent vehicles like the Saturn V, look no further than Kennedy himself.
He set the parameters of American space projects with these immortal words -”First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth”.
The shuttle was meant to be a recoverable space vehicle from the get-go in the sixties and seventies.
Our aerospace engineers will be working for China.
This is one more way Obama is gutting our defense capabilities along with our economy. A two-fer.
Have you never heard of ITAR? Look it up.
There are two aspects to space exploration there is no getting around with. One is the technology of putting a manned capsule up. America has spent most of its money on this. Apparently, the US won the “space race”, whatever that meant. It did not win the tech race – witness the recent launch of a Russian telescope which will make the Hubble look myopic.
The second essential aspect is enabling humans to live long in space. America has long lagged behind and the Russians have forged ahead.
Because America never figured out how to help astronauts to live in space, it never got out of low-earth orbits.
I don’t know why anybody is surprised at Obama’s space policy. Any guy who wants NASA to concentrate on Muslim outreach has to be seriously deluded. Anybody who wants a Mars project to first land on an asteroid as a pit stop is definitely deluded.
Or, maybe not. How to kill the American space mocking bird – read Obama.
Hey, don’t worry. With Obama’s new muslim head of NASA’s first mission to be an Islamic outreach program, the muslims will be running the show down there in Florida. They’ll be able to add it to their immpressive list of Islamic achievements in the last 1400 years, which includes…er…which includes…er, nothing whatsoever.
Riddle: If we could put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?
Answer: Obama.
Someone at NASA Is in Hot Water on a Cool Planet
When any governmental entity is involved, the line between intended and unintended consequences can be extremely fine, indeed. . .
At the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, NASA, an intended consequence has developed into quite the opposite. Satellite data have left the government’s global warming reservation by exposing that money-making, money-wasting sham for the scam it is.
For years now, governments and their fellow travelers in the scientific community have been warning that the sky if not yet falling soon would be, that the Earth’s environment, if not yet universally toxic was on the verge, that polar bears were drowning due to melting glaciers, that mankind’s only habitable planet was slowly being cooked because our atmosphere was trapping all those evil human emissions of CO2 .
It turns out, not unsurprisingly, that alarmist global warmist prognostications are all a crock. A study co-authored by Dr. Roy Spencer, a noted University of Alabama scientist “reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.”
Those “alarmist computer models” were generated by the United Nations which has had everything to gain and nothing to lose over the past few decades by perpetrating and perpetuating the monumental fraud variously known as global cooling-global warming-climate change.
Not even dissuaded by “Climategate,” the 2009 expose’ of conspiratorial data manipulation at its own University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, the U.N. has plodded on with its baseless fearmongering charade that global warming is anthropogenically-created since that’s where the grants, the money, are.
Apparently choosing not to tow the U.N. company line and newly-evolved NASA political propaganda, Spencer’s team handily refuted the U.N.-NASA myth.
They report, ”Real-world [versus fantasy world] data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptiions . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5148)
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