Will NASA Abandon Ship?
For over a decade, the International Space Station has never seen a day in which it didn’t have occupants. Many thought when it was first permanently crewed, back in November of 2000, that it was a watershed in history — the day after which there would never again not be humans living off the planet. That was certainly the plan, because it was assumed that there would be follow-on programs even after the ISS was decommissioned. But it may have been another false start, because NASA is now contemplating at least temporarily giving up our tentative first foothold in the long climb to eventual space settlement.
As a result of the failure of the upper stage of the Russian Roscosmos Progress flight last month, the agency can no longer rely on the Soyuz crew launcher, because it is essentially the same rocket. Until the Russians have determined what caused the problem and how they will fix it, their rockets cannot be trusted. The implications for the ISS are potentially dire. First, there were plans to deliver a new crew on the Soyuz in a few weeks. These will now obviously be delayed.
Also delayed will be the return to earth of three current crew members, which had been planned about the same time as their replacement would be arriving. This isn’t an immediate issue, other than prolonging their stay in space, with whatever health detriments may accrue. The real problem is that they can’t delay it indefinitely, because the Soyuz capsule only has a limited on-orbit life (seven months), after which it cannot be used to return crew home with confidence. The one they planned to bring back will reach its use-by date in late October. So they’ll have to come home then, leaving only three aboard, reducing or eliminating any science that can be performed there until it reaches a full crew complement again.
The remaining three could in theory stay until January, when their Soyuz also starts to get stale, but there are earthly issues to deal with in terms of their schedule. If they wait that long, they will come down in a brutal Kazakh winter, and if they want to get in before that, the last time they can leave and still come down in daylight is in November, so for safety reasons, if the Russians haven’t figure out the problem and gotten a new expedition up by then, they will abandon the station entirely until they can. NASA believes that it can continue to maintain the facility remotely, at least for a while, but it will be a major psychological setback, particularly now that the station has just completed assembly and was about to start finally doing some serious research, including experiments with potential implications for medical cures.
Ironically, it would also be a setback for the most promising near-term means of reducing or eliminating our reliance on the Russians.
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is currently scheduled to launch its Dragon capsule to the ISS in late November, with plans for a test docking with the system in early December (almost exactly a year after its first successful flight). If that mission is successful, it will be cleared to start delivering cargo to the station next year, and it will be a major milestone toward using it as a crew delivery vehicle and lifeboat. To deliver crew, conventional wisdom is that it will need a life-support system and a launch abort system, which are in work, but won’t be ready for two or three years, depending on funding availability. It could serve as a lifeboat (and one capable of returning seven instead of three) with the addition of the life-support system only, and it could be a fairly rudimentary one for the short trip back to earth. With these capabilities, America would have its own answer to Soyuz.
Just one more foreclosure in the Obama economy.
The only way Obama would come to its rescue is if the Muslims wanted to turn it into a mosque and they agreed to let the unions take 10 years to build it, come in two years late, two trillion over budget and he could pay for it by taxing small businesses for looking at the night sky.
so very true cf,
We should just keep the space station alive long enough to develop a laser beam to zap all union members and their supporters off the face of the earth and then everything will be alright.
Wait…
Then…zap the government and their supporters.
Then…small businesses can become big business without regulations, work men, women, and children six fourteen hour days, and on the seventh day hire a preacher to tell them how worthless they are, and then Monday rolls around again same old same old.
Ah…finally the Space Station will become useful and the Great Blue Marvel a better place to live…for the ones that count anyway.
Maybe just a little over the top whacko, Lynn?
At least cfbleachers didn’t recommend killing or enslaving people.
It’s what Lynn would do and she imagines it must be, therefore, what everyone else would do too.
“It’s what Lynn would do”
Wow, you sound extremely certain that you know the inner workings and complete thoughts of a person you’ve never met. P’raps you fancy yourself to be a divine entity, like maybe you think you’re God? Or maybe you’re just spookily clairvoyant — i.e., palm or crystal ball reading heretic?
At any rate, I don’t have a big enough ego to assume I know exactly what another person “would do,” but I do have a big enough sense of humor to say that I believe that Lynn was using sarcasm. Spoofing. Cracking irony. Etc.
They had a perfectly good space station before and they abandoned it then too. Called Skylab. That’s one reason I have always considered this new station to be a colossal waste of money. It won’t be long and they will dump it in the ocean just like they did skylab and that will be more billions right down the ol’ drain. . . again.
I don’t dispute your conclusion. But Skylab went into the ocean because government contracters made sure ‘functional obsolescence’ was built into it. If it worked too well, they wouldn’t be able to take the government for any more money down the road. We could have conceivably brought it down safely, or blown it up, or just left it there, but as it’s power failed, steering jets no longer worked, it’s orbit began to decay, and there was nothing for it except to let the ocean have it. At least, that’s what we’ve been told!
Let’s not be to emotionally attached to Skylab. It was a testament to American ingenuity, but never intended for long-term use, like most things manufactured in the 1970′s.
Nothing here that a few extra billion to the Russians can’t fix. This was entirely predictable. Let the shakedown begin.
“It’s what our ancestors would have done and how they created this great nation that once put men on the moon. What has happened to us?”
Our ancestors weren’t foolish enough to chose an idiot for their boss.
Sure they did, many times – but the stakes were never so high!
MANY incompetent leaders were chosen in the past; the difference is that then the reach of the central government was shorter, and the system was more fault-tolerant. If you look at how the Constitution sets up the government, you will see that it was designed to ENSURE gridlock; the Founding Fathers had already seen efficient government, and wanted nothing to do with it. Most actual governing was done at the local or state level; the national government was relatively small, and limited to things that affected all of the states. With things moving at the speed of horse-drawn land transportation and sail-driven ships, there was time to replace an ineffective leader with someone more competent before he could cause too much damage in case of a war (which was about the only situation which really mattered at the national level then). And the settlers eagerly took the rest of what is now the U.S. all the way to the Pacific in less than a century, with much suffering and loss of life, using technology not much more advanced than what the Roman Empire had access to.
The space frontier is different from all other past frontiers, in that it currently requires technology beyond the reach of the average individual. It will be a while until the tech gets to the point that it will be as accessible as, say, a light airplane, or a flight on a DC-3. Once it gets to that point, the Space Frontier will really open up. But always remember what NASA has tried so hard to make everyone forget: as the late John W. Campbell, science fiction author and editor, said of the Apollo 1 pad fire, “Pioneering basically consists of finding new and more horrible ways to die.” If we accept that pioneering is an inherently risky occupation, and, even more importantly, the government ALLOWS people to accept risks knowingly (one proposed regulation for private spacecraft would have required that the passengers be given the same level of safety as people ON THE GROUND, which is a higher level of safety than NASA has been able to demonstrate), we will go a lot farther in a lot less time.
You cannot afford to drive a Bentley on a wellfare income and Obama is no chauffeur. When Obama is in full retirement mode we will all feel the pinch of his spending spree and many things of old will go by the wayside just like the ISS.
“…..NASA is now contemplating at least temporarily giving up our tentative first foothold in the long climb to eventual space settlement.”
NASAists are Star Trek fantasizers. There are just too many technical obstructions to overcome in order to colonize the solar sytem. First, the vast distances, which will require long lengths of time in weightless “flight”. Speeding up is no problem, but slowing down is. Lack of oxygen atmosphere, bulky protection against low pressure survival, etc., etc. A continuous outpost on the moon is possible but will be difficult. NASA is nothing more than a welfare program for government scientists and should be disbanded.
I am always baffled by jumbled comments/conclusions like this. NASA, as an institution and a bureaucracy, is fraught with all sorts of problems. Fine. No real argument. It may not be on the critical path to expansion beyond LEO.
But that there are “too many technical obstructions” has nothing, particularly, to do with NASA… and represents a depressing lack of imagination and faith in human ingenuity.
Feel free not to partake of any benefits that have acrued from technologies and activities that were, at some point, considered “impossible.” Good luck with that.
“Speeding up is no problem, but slowing down is”
Wrong. Reverse thrusters.
And just why again do we have a space station? What profits does it generate or what research does it do that generates profits? Oh, none, its a money pit. Satellite launches pay for themselves – at this time the space station does not. Any prospects for recovery in a reasonable period of time? No. So the long term net present value of the space station is negative. Why are we doing this? Is it a payoff for certain companies? Certainly yes. National technical base? We got that anyway without paying off Russia or Lockheed/Boeing/etc. Lots of gummint jobs? In the right districts? Yep. Manned spaceflight is a circus for the public and bread for the contractors. All at your expense.
Full disclosure: author 15 years experience in manned space flight ground systems and in payloads. Time for the jobs program for American engineers to end. And the H1B visa program too, btw, which may provide some balance.
This is a direct result of canceling the Constellation program – NASA had essentially built the new orbital vehicles and the new boosters, but had its’ budgetary legs cut out from it, because Obama wanted to make the Muslim world feel better about itself…and thought the best person to do that for him would be the NASA administrator, who really isn’t being paid by the taxpayers for that sort of thing. So, instead of moving the space program forward and maintaining our flight links to the ISS along with restarting the moon program, we’re in the business of improving the self-esteem of other countries – ones, by the way, who haven’t contributed ANYTHING to ISS.
Am I missing something here?
Am I missing something here?
I can count on one hand the number of things Obama has done right and still have several fingers left over. Cancelling Constellation was one of the things he did right. According to the Augustine Commission, it would’ve cost tens of billions of dollars to build Constellation and it likely would not have been ready to fly until 2017 or later, and that only if they abandonded the ISS in 2015. It was an incredibly bad program even by government standards with its poor management only exceeded by the Space Launch System and Orion capsule currently in development. According to a Bose Allan Hamilton study, SLS/Orion would likely cost $38 billion over the next 10 years and only fly twice in that time. The only reason it hasn’t been cancelled is that it provides pork to Alabama, Florida, Texas and Utah.
From a certain perspective it does appear that the Obama adminitration’s decision on Constellation was correct. However saving money and doing things that make sense was not the motivation. I have yet to see any money “saved” or anything that makes sense wrt NASA other than COTS feather-bedding. The motivation is to get that damn flag out of orbit.
I can count on one hand the number of things Obama has done right and still have several fingers left over.
Those leftover fingers represent “hope.”
Of course it would cost billions – you think the nation that grew a moon launch program from scratch to landing within a decade does space exploration on the cheap? And is there waste and mismanagement at NASA and space contracting – of course there is; just like there is waste in government, healthcare, manufacturing, and my local McDonalds.
Does that mean we shut government down, stop seeing doctors, quit building things, and eat hamburgers? Of course not! We fix the problems with the right people and the right solutions, and then we move onward and upward. That’s what this country does.
It may very well have cost some 40 billion over the next ten years; well, our President spent 10 times that amount in the last wasted “stimulus” he dumped on us, so really … where ARE the costs being saved in this country right now? Everybody seems to think, when there is a budget problem or financial problem in this country to – first, cut the military, and second – eliminate the space program. Well, one defends our nation, and the other creates new science and technologies that benefit our lives, as well as maintaining America’s influence in the world. Only liberals would think those are bad things – the same people who spend more money that’s not theirs to begin with on pork and wasteful spending than anyone else.
We have the largest spaceflight tech base in the world; we’ve launched over a hundred shuttle flights to explore space and help build, with several other nations, a 100 billion dollar cooperative space station in orbit that’s doing fantastic science. Where else in the world do countries cooperate so much and so well as in the space program? We disagree with and fight the Russians on Middle East policies; but we’ve launching each other’s astronauts and doing joint missions in space! Why throw all that away – just because we have a child President who doesn’t know the first thing about one of his country’s greatest achievements – the space program??
NASA had essentially built the new orbital vehicles and the new boosters …
Wow. You either are amazingly misinformed, or else you have a definition for “essentially” that is shared by few other people on this planet.
Um, well, excuse me but the Ares I-X booster was successfully test-launched from launch pad 39B in Florida in October, 2009 — two YEARS ago! And even though they had a problem with one of the recovery parachutes not opening properly, the overall mission was considered a successful test. Are you going to honestly tell me that NASA can’t build and launch Ares, which uses a lot of technology from both the Saturn and Space Shuttle periods, merge it with the latest flight control tech from the last 10-15 years, and call it something that hasn’t been done and can’t BE done? Seriously?
Lockheed Martin was awarded the Orion/Altair contract in 2006. They’ve got test capsules built (again, they didn’t have to re-invent a lot of this stuff, since the general idea was to use the Apollo knowledge base and tech with new spaceflight technologies from the past 10-20 years, since the Apollo missions, in a new capsule-transport program).
Lockheed and NASA had a complete construction and test program already laid out; they were going to do the first unmanned orbital test in either late 2012 or early 2013 … and do the first manned test probably in the 2014-2016 time frame. Of course, with more funding, that work could have been completed faster – in time to mitigate or even eliminate the problems the Russians are now having with their launch systems.
So, “Murgatroyd,” if you’re indicating that this program was just an idea on someone’s white board at NASA, then it’s YOU who is amazingly misinformed. I would suspect that NASA probably started Constellation not only to replace the shuttles but because they suspected the Russians weren’t as advanced with their launch systems as they said they were; and, with commercial spaceflight still in infancy, saw Constellation as the way to keep America in space.
Of course, common-sense strategies and plans like that work perfectly fine under Republican administrations – with people who really understand the value of spaceflight; but, we got stuck with a loony liberal who wouldn’t see any more value in science than as the latest batch of golf balls he plays with.
And NASA, the space program, and we all suffer as a result.
Maybe you could research the past few years a little more, and then revisit Constellation; you may learn more that way.
Russian Progresses have been used for the two decades without any fault and have failed just after the Shuttle program end.I think Russians think and plan the Space Station future today.
” It has never been “safe” to open a frontier, and this frontier is the harshest one that we’ve ever faced. ”
“These are the voyages….”
Seriously. Not to diminish what NASA has done, or Kennedy’s kick-start of the Apollo program, but I really think we attacked this wrong from the start. Getting to the moon was basically political theater. Very important in its own right of course, but we were out to beat the Soviets.
I believe that if space travel had been allowed to grow and develop normally (w/o steroids), with private participation (yes folks, I mean like a business venture by evil profitmongers wanting to make nasty ol’ money) our entire space presence would be much stronger and healthier. Pre-Apollo, virtually every speculative scenario assumed a space station *first*, at/from which extra – orbital ships would be assembled/launched. We might not have gotten to the moon until the ’90s — but I betcha there would be a hotel there now.
What do you expect? We’ve become a society that can’t even execute stone cold killers (some people do deserve to die), because the lawyers are on strike in the name of the sanctity of human life. Surely we can’t volunteer the innocent for the low earth orbit “new frontier” when we have no justice and no peace on planet porno and greater Kabul? And it isn’t getting any cheaper keeping those killers alive. Let’s see, do we do a bullet train from Bakersfield to Coalinga or a rocket ride from Kennedy to the moon? Maybe if the Chinese state sets up shop on the moon, we’ll decide to go back without playing all these private sector space games by a president who has absolutely no private sector credibility. So, how did that half a billion dollar solar panel investment by the feds work out where the company, Solyandra, just went bankrupt a year after the president’s due diligence visit?
What about the obvious solution? Halt and reverse the decommissioning of the Space Shuttles.
The shuttle is done. After Columbia, President Bush made the right decision to end shuttle flights. There wouldn’t have been any more shuttle flights after Columbia, were it not for international commitments to complete the ISS. All the production pipelines are empty. If money was no object, we might be able to get one more shuttle flight up in a few years.
President Bush ended the space shuttle on a different timeline (including replacements) than what actually happened.
Bush announced the gradual end of the Shuttle program in 2003 with the last flight scheduled for 2010. He proposed a new vision that would include vehicles capable of deep space missions. He then turned it over to Mike Griffin who cancelled all design studies and proposed “Apollo on Steroids,” featuring the Orion capsule, Ares I and Ares V boosters, with the boosters supposedly derived from legacy Shuttle hardware. Right from the start, the project was doomed to failure.
The original Ares I was going to use a legacy 4 segment SRB and a SSME on the upper stage. Only, the SSME was designed for a ground start with a bunch of specialized support hardware so an air start was out of the question. So, they switched to Apollo era J-2 engines but were going to have to upgrade them to J-2X to have more power. Still, that wasn’t enough power so they went to a 5 segment SRB. The amount of legacy was slipping, as was the schedule. The price was climbing rapidly and the schedule was slipping by at least one year for every year that passed. Progress!
The Augustine Commission results shows that the Ares I/Orion wouldn’t be ready until at least 2017 but they’d have to get rid of the ISS in 2015 to have the funding. Meanwhile, little progress was being made on the Ares V and nothing was being done on any payload for the vehicle. NASA was on track to spend upwards of $50 billion to develop an underpowered booster and a 4-seat capsule (downscoped from 7 seats) to fly to LEO. It was an abomination that deserved to die and one of the very few things Obama has ever done right, IMO. We simply don’t have the money to support such idiotic projects.
Fortunately, multiple private initiatives are in the works and it’s highly likely that one or more of them will be ready to carry people to orbit before 2015. The idea that America should pay tens of billions of dollars to create a big Soviet-style space program is long over. We’re on the cust of a better way.
And if all of this had been planned out more strategically over a longer period of time, we would have had a pretty seamless transition from the shuttles to Constellation – no matter who was in the White House. NASA knew the shuttles and its’ technology were winding down; that’s why they started exploratory projects with booster and spacecraft manufacturers long before the mid-90′s. And, remember – the same companies that are building our military machine are also the ones who build boosters and spacecraft for NASA. So … fighting two wars, defending the country after 9/11, in the midst of the financial collapses (that had nothing to do with NASA) were all factors in this.
NASA did the smart thing by saving money in going back to Apollo and Saturn V booster tech, and essentially upgrading this tested tech with the latest materials, fuels, engines, and everything they learned from the shuttle program to fold into Constellation – which is exactly what President Bush asked NASA to do. And the boosters, engines, and spacecraft were coming – way past the drawing boards. Lockheed Martin was working with NASA on next-generation boosters and spacecraft in the early 90′s! This is a prime example of – you stay out of NASA’s way, except for overseeing their efficiency and assembly/testing processes … and we WOULD have had Constellation seamlessly appear, once Bush decided that was it for the shuttles.
Obama swiped 500 million dollars from the Medicare program to help pay for Obamacare; you could have taken just 10% of that money – 50 billion dollars – and we’d have a working Constellation program ramping up RIGHT NOW.
With all the waste and bad spending in government, finding 50 billion for a worthy project like Constellation would have been easy as pie – with the right people in charge.
This isn’t Bush’s fault, or NASA’s, or Lockheed Martin, or anybody else involved in it — it’s putting the WRONG LEADERSHIP IN CHARGE and letting them make boneheaded decisions like canceling Constellation JUST as the program was getting its’ sea legs!
Out of curiosity, why exactly would it take a few years to arrange an emergency shuttle launch? Something tells me the bulk of that time would be required only to fill out paperwork. Not that I think it’s a good option; it’d be much simpler to just launch the Dragon capsule with a crew.
As to how we got into this sad situation, I think Rand is party right. NASA’s obsession with safety and risk-avoidance has crippled the government space program. But, sadly, they’re not the only ones to blame. The rest of us have allowed ourselves to view regulations as insurmountable physical barriers to progress, which is nonsense. If it’s of paramount importance to avoid regulatory entanglements and make sure you always have a note from your mom before exploring the dangerous new frontier, then sit back and relax – everything is going fine. OTOH, if it is important to keep a human presence on the ISS, then go put some humans on the ISS. There’ll be hell to pay, but the frontier is not a safe place.
“What has happened to us?”
That’s easy. It is a different psychology today from the 1960s breed of man.
Little Johnny gets suspended for drawing a pic of a gun. Little Johnny and little Jimmy get suspended for playing cowboys and indians. Heck, Little Johnny can’t even ride a bicycle now without being suited up like an NFL linebacker.
We have become a nation of WIMPs. Little Johnny and little Jimmy grew up to become Weakly Interacting Mediocre People. More popularly known as bureaucrats.
There are still those diminishing numbers that overcome the teacher’s unions and public school culture and keep their spirit of adventure. But as a nation? Nope, it is more important to become well schooled in multi-cultural nonsense than become well schooled in science and math. We as a nation may be some of the worst in the world at math and science, but we feel good about it.
I’ve enjoyed the comparisons to “Star Trek” in the above comments! I had alot of trouble ‘getting into’ the Next Generation, and further series of “Star Trek” follow-ups. The problem? Like our leaders, the Captain and crew of the ever bigger, ever more complex USS E., were less and less willing to risk a fight. They TALKED themselves out of most calamities, preached tolerance and ‘non-interference’ until I wanted to gag, and basically did the same stuff over and over with different ‘humanoid’ aliens. Ick. Boring. The original series mainly had a balance of diplomacy (old school!), willingness to fight, bluffing, espionage, and tricks up the sleeve of every character in the show, when necessary! It spawned books, movies, cartoons, etc. Many accomplished and well-known (or obscure) authors took the raw material of that series and turned it into something so rich, so seamlessly brilliant that I was hooked for life. But as our society yearned for ever greater ‘safety’ and ‘security’, so did reiterations of the original idea slide further and further away from the original. Our national character was changing, and so did the ideology of the folks writing, producing, and acting in, the show. Finally, in a last ditch effort to keep fans loyal, they invented a new enemy with which to have a new war (the Borg may have been scary in a sort of ‘never trust machines’ sort of way, but they didn’t prove to be the ultimate test of human ingenuity). I call it ‘the Clinton era Star Trek’ because the political climate of D.C. interestingly affects the climate of Hollywood’s latest projects. (Hmm…wonder how that happened?) All that is to say we grew wary of even ‘acceptable’ risks for the few who go where most of us never will, while blithely ignoring the dangers of simply driving to work every day. It’s used in article after article as a statistic to argue that dangerous things aren’t really as dangerous as they’re purported to be. On top of all this, an increasing urge to re-embrace isolationism, drawdown of our military, and delusional diplomats who wanted to ‘talk’ their way out of terrorists’ gunsights caused savvy politicians to talk up and fund projects that were ‘risk-free’ or ‘guaranteed to work!’. Apparently most of our fellow citizens felt it was ok to buy it on a 16 lane highway during the evening commute, but somehow wasteful and sad to die reaching for the stars (cue famous dream song from ‘Man of La Mancha’). If all of that is just wasted space to you, I recommend a slightly out-dated but comprehensive study of our first steps into space, triumphs, failures, mistakes, and politics. It’s James Michener’s book “Space”. He’s famous for writing such books as ‘Hawaii’, ‘Alaska’ and many others. ‘Space’ is an eye opener, not only giving a well-written and detailed history of how our first steps were conceived and taken, but what the scientists (especially Werner Von Braun) thought of the politicization of the ‘space race’ into a short sprint to the moon. In one paragraph, Michener quotes von Braun as saying that we should never have focused so singularly on getting to the moon. It was an automatic dead end proposition. It had tactical implications of course (what, you didn’t know that?) but if we had continued with the giant rocked booster program, we could have been to Mars and even past the asteroid belt by the year 2000, if not sooner. The guy who defected from Germany shortly before he would have been detained as a Jew who knew too much, insisted that our political leadership was wrong, that space was in fact conquerable, and in the short-term, but it would require a very different approach (and thus greater funding) than a short hop to the moon and back. I suspect he was right. I also suspect many of the shuttle ‘accidents’ during our space years were no accidents. Demoralize the public, and suddenly congresspeople and other government types see no profit-monetary or politically-in further pursuing what many call ‘a dead end’. Life on Earth will eventually be a dead end. Do you want to be here when that happens? I don’t!
Nice critique of the different generations of Star Trek. Nothing like Captain Kirk’s ol’ Cowboy Diplomacy. I Think Deep Space Nine also came close to the Original Series in terms of dramatic action, consequences and the need to make tough decisions; decisions that actually make a difference. I think I still have a copy of “Space” around here somewhere. About time I got around to reading it. Unfortunately many in Congress, especially the Senate, do see profit in pursing a “dead-end:” it’s the $38 billion earmark known as the “Senate Launch System,” which will waste billions of dollars over the next ten years and produce, at best, only two launches. If our leaders were serious about opening the frontier of space then they would get themselves out of the way and turn it over to those who are willing to risk all, to lose everything, or to profit greatly.
You ask me, Kirk was the archetypical Starfleet officer – smart, a diplomat when necessary – but a rule-breaker and ass-kicker when he needed to be as well. No other captain matched his template, until Benjamin Sisko came along. Picard and Janeway made me cringe sometimes; Sisko always left me with: “If that had been me, I’d have done the same thing – paid the same prices, and accepted the consequences the same way.” To me, that’s the mark of a leader … someone who would make the hard decisions, and then deal with them, knowing that he’d done his best.
And, in the middle of everything he did, saw, and heard … he was STILL the father to his son, widower to his lost wife, and leader of his crew — even AFTER he tricked the Romulans into the Dominion War on the Federation’s side.
Now, THAT’S a tough guy.
The POTUS wants to wreck things.
The remaining three could in theory stay until January, when their Soyuz also starts to get stale, but there are earthly issues to deal with in terms of their schedule. If they wait that long, they will come down in a brutal Kazakh winter …
OK, can someone explain to me why the Soyuz has to land in Kazakhstan? It’s not as though there’s a giant catcher’s mitt on the ground there. And nobody can say that the Russians don’t understand orbit dynamics well enough to target another spot on the globe. So why can’t it land somewhere else?
Politics, just politics.
The Russians designed their manned spacecraft to land on solid ground because they didn’t have the naval assets – even during the Cold War – to retrieve their missions from ocean landings. Still don’t. Oh, they probably COULD have tried to, at the cost of a LOT more rubles — but, they didn’t want to be under the close eyes of the US Navy, which – not to brag or anything – has pretty much sole dominion over the oceans everywhere. That’s been the case since the end of WWII.
How would YOU like to be a country that sees its’ spacecraft parachute into an ocean with a US Navy carrier group nearby, watching? Not the Russians, that’s for sure. Now, almost anyone else would think – cool, if we run into any problems, the American Navy will give us a hand. And, they’d be right. BUT, if you happen to be Russian, or Chinese, and you’re trying to match those same Americans in space flight and exploration … you don’t want to have us watching your spacecraft landings on the seas.
(Not that we don’t, anyway ….)
Anyway, another reason we DON’T do the ground landings is because we don’t have the wide, uninhabited land space the Russians do – except for maybe Alaska … and that doesn’t work from the orbital mechanics side. BUT, post-shuttle, we’ll get back to ocean landings because WE have the retrieval capabilities that few, if any, countries can match.
If NASA does abandon the station… how will they avoid the axe? The station was pitched as the starting point to farther out (ignoring the fact that it’s in the wrong orbit.)
Private industry is climbing this mountain with toes and fingers. I hope they have a good grip. Frontiers are not opened by governments (some exploration aside.)
… toes and fingers. Gradatim Ferociter.
Too bad the Shuttle wasn’t kept flying for a couple more missions. The problems discussed in this article would have been solved. Somehow this simple solution elluded the adminstration – unless space (and the space station) really isn’t much of a priority.
Christian, might as well wish for the moon. The shuttle retirement was not something you could just turn around. Once there were enough components to finish the program, they junked the patterns, tore down the lines, laid off the staff.
There are no more parts. A couple more flights was never possible.
And that’s as it should be … the shuttles, even though they were fantastically complex machines, were getting long in the tooth and were not designed to absorb new technologies well. I were Bush, I’da done the same thing – once NASA told me they were clear to build and fly Constellation. It made sense then, and it makes sense now …. except, we have an idiot in the White House, who thinks its’ nothing but a way to tell his cronies he’s “saving money.”
Obama’s learning and demonstrating how to save money would be like me being asked to pitch the last inning of the seventh game of the World Series – two on, two outs, with the bases loaded.
The Shuttle could not have solved the current problem, since the Shuttle is only capable of taking people to the ISS, but not keeping them there. We have always been reliant on the Russians to keep our crew at the ISS for anything longer than two weeks because of that. NASA had been building the X-38 as a lifeboat for the ISS, and that would have solved this problem, but that program was cancelled. Government planning at it’s best.
People keep forgetting that you can’t depend on everything working perfectly, which is why we keep shutting down our “space program” after NASA kills someone. If that isn’t the best reason to have multiple commercial crew and cargo providers, I don’t know what is.
Here’s a question for journos out there to find out: the delays in carrying out SpaceX’s COTS flights, compared to the original dates. How much of the delays were due to NASA, and how much due to SpaceX?
Questions to debate in this context: if the delays were due to NASA, were they in order to avoid the appearance of SpaceX’s competency compared to Shuttle, and especially to Constellation/SLS? Did Shelby, Hutchinson and Hatch have anything to do with it?
SpaceX had the COTS-D proposal on the table for some time. What were the chances that COTS-D (e.g. manned Dragon pilot operations) would have been ready in time for Shuttle retirement, and thus no single-point-of-failure dependency on the Russian third-stage rocket motors? We are grounded, but not due to a failure of engineering.
A man whose lectures I once attended used to describe a freeway traffic jam as a collision between capitalism and socialism – capitalism built the cars (competently and cost-effectively), while socialism built … the roads.
Is this actually a textbook example of such a collision?
I think SpaceX would say that most of the delays were caused by them (that’s what I think too), and I don’t see any conspiracies that have added to the delay. New small company building everything – even if everything goes right, nothing ever goes fast enough.
Regarding COTS-D, I don’t think anyone would have been ready in time for the Shuttle retirement, but we certainly would be further along. Hard to tell how much, since that would depend on how much money Congress allocated, and they have not been too enthusiastic about programs that reduce spending in their direct political districts. But COTS-D was never funded for anyone, so we’ll never know.
Who cares? SpaceX is closer than anyone else out there with commercial spaceflight; and NASA knows this, which is why they’ve been working so closely with SpaceX. But, man … SpaceX has some GOOD stuff – and NASA sees them not as competitors, but as complements to their own programs and projects. Plus, SpaceX handling some ISS traffic and supply frees up NASA dollars to get to Mars faster. So, everybody wins. With SpaceX’s boosters, they could even get in, hardware-wise, on the first manned Mars missions – they could help NASA build the orbital jump-off points for the Mars missions, as well as help build and supply any Moon bases.
It’s a nice meshing of government and commercial business – three things, unfortunately, that Obama knows nothing about.
The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program began before LBJ rammed his hideous “Great Society” scheme through a prostrate Congress, and before he escalated the Vietnam fiasco.
The last three Apollo missions were canceled due to lack of money.
You can have a manned space program.
Or you can have a welfare-warfare state.
You can’t have both.
It’s really as simple as that.
More than one astronaut and NASA insider has suggested the last three Apollo flights were cancelled due to unnaceptable risk. Many believed with, justification, that the likelihood of a LEM crashing or simply not taking off from the moon was very high (read how the LEM was designed and you wonder how the damn thing worked so well so many times.)
If the station is abandoned, can anyone with orbital capability claim salvage?
Yeah, I’ve been wondering whether, when Dragon gets up there, it’ll be the new Chinese occupants of the ISS who welcome them in.
No.
Not unless you want to go to war with America and its’ partners in building the station – only Iran and North Korea are dumb enough to even THINK about doing that! People who spend 100 billion dollars building something aren’t going to sit still while someone tries to sneak onboard.
Anyway, the station has remote control and security systems routed through NASA, DOD, ESA, and the Russians – nothing goes on up there without them knowing it.
Only if they can recruit Andy Griffith to help: http://youtu.be/HODkJABWo08?t=28
Seriously, I guess someone could try. NASA, ESA, etc. can’t actually prevent a forced entry, being as they’ve gotten themselves stuck all the way down here. Heck, a few strategic bribes and the Russians would probably unlock the door for you.
I guess NASA could deliberately inflict damage on the station remotely if they were willing to go scorched-earth, but I don’t see that happening.
NASA has been suffering from a dearth of leadership for decades and an overabundance of “Government” bureacracy. There is no way that government is going to solve the issues with our “Space Program”. It hasn’t been working for a long time. Shame, because America can do so much better.
The way back is to get rid of the Socialist-Marxist robots in our government and begin THINKING and moving toward the FUTURE. NASA is scerotic and moribund. It makes me sad. But this can be a NEW BEGINNING.
If the ISS is abandonned, will the last astronaut to leave lock the door?
The ISS was funded in large part to keep major defense contractors alive after defense budgets were slashed following the collapse of the Soviet empire. It was derisively called the Defense Contrators Welfare Act. It is a very expensive national vanity project. It has taken funding away from innumerable unmanned projects, delayed satellites for weather and tropical storm tracking and is in general a money hog we don’t need in today’s tight fiscal environment.
Worst of all the program is run by an agency that has strayed far form idealistic beginnings. It is now a typical bueaurcratic empire with the proper number of minorities whose only solution to solve its problems is to ask for more money. Its Constellation (heavy lift) program was grossly expensive and was engineered to the needs of 5 senators whose states would benefit. Mercifully President Obama killed it, favoring private enterprise that will likely be able to deiver payload to orbit for one tenth of NASA systems.
NASA is simply unable to make rapid, decisive cost effective decisions. The new spsce telecope project has quadrpled in price and is 3 years (possibly
behind schedule. Cost overruns on this program are threatening the sacred cow of manned spaceflight, and the agency is in the midst of an internecine war to see which survives.
It’s time to be realistic and put national vanity projects back burner. The Russians may have done us a great favor when its Progress failed.
Abandoning the U.S. space program is an unfortunate but necessary step in the eradication of American exceptionalism. Michelle Obama warned us that her husband would call each of us to make painful sacrifices, “get out of your comfort zones” in the remaking of a different nation.
Space superiority has long been a foundational tenant in American cultural and scientific hegemony. President Obama’s beloved home countries of Kenya and Indonesia (in spirit, not citizenship, of course!) can barely point to a pack of bottle rockets to signify their space programs. Each American launch thrust the dominant Western culture into the papers; can there be any doubt that the Shuttle was designed to look like a fist with its middle finger lifted upward?
Closing the shameful chapter on American space superiority may be painful to some, but in the end, it’s necessary to ensure Barack’s vision for an egalitarian world, subordinated to China, OPEC and Islam, becomes a reality during his two terms.
Enjoyed the parody, but, again, Obama didn’t abandon the space program in general, or the shuttle in particular. The Bush admin ended the shuttle program years before Obama was elected. They did it for good reasons. Unfortunately they also hired Mike Griffin, who quickly proceeded to make the present situation inevitable.
From a scientific standpoint, the ISS has been a very expensive, collosal failure.
From a scientific standpoint, unmanned missions have been relatively inexpensive marvels for which NASA can be justifiably proud. Even at $6.8 billion, the James Webb telescope will do more for science than the entire manned space program since Skylab was abandoned in 1974 (yes, even Mir only retread what we already learned from Skylab.)
Well, 70-something year old John Glenn survived a ride into space. If they are just going to leave the ISS vacant, I’d take the risk to go up in the Dragon, for free. I’m sure I could push some buttons, or whatever the heck they do in the ISS all day.
But there is absolutely no way that a team of volunteers, who understand that there may be a “risk”, would ever get clearance from NASA to head into space.
If we died, there would be wailing by the pundits: “How could you kill that nice chubby middle-aged white guy? We’ll have his crying family on the Today show!”
If we survived the trip and the return 6 months later: “Why does it take $10 million to train an astronaut when that nice chubby middle-aged white guy did it for free?”
“Why does it take $10 million to train an astronaut when that nice chubby middle-aged white guy did it for free?”
Gee, I don’t know, Marco, but you might ask yourself a similar question if you ever need major medical treatment down the road.
“Why does it take so much money to train a thoracic surgeon to operate on Marco’s lungs, when that nice chubby middle-aged white woman from the pajamasmedia blog offered to do it for free?”
So in other words we wasted all that money building this thing that we cannot use until we get rid of obama or find some way to get funding for NASA so they can build another shuttle for our people to use. I do not trust the Russians built crap for nothing.