Panel Recommends Major Changes in Space Policy
Extending the life of the space shuttle and encouraging private space companies are two options being considered.
The Augustine panel, assembled to deal with the daunting issues facing NASA’s implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), is wrapping up its work, with a final report to be presented at the end of the month. I’m gratified that, in large part, they seem to have acted in accordance with my recommendations (not to imply that they were following, or even aware of them). But even with options informed by such guidance, the new administrator’s task doesn’t grow any easier. He, the president, and other members of the administration were briefed this past Friday on the options that will be provided by the panel.
The good news is that for the first time a major panel of this sort has explicitly stated that the goal of having a human spaceflight program has to be for the ultimate settlement of space, and if we aren’t aiming toward that, there’s not much point. Also, for fans of sending humans to Mars, all of the options are designed with that end in mind, though probably not fast enough for them. The other good news is that the panel seems to strongly support commercial space and believes that the new policy should be much more supportive of it than NASA’s current plans. But for advocates of anything resembling the current four-year-old plan to do “Apollo on Steroids,” with new launch and crew delivery systems dubbed “Constellation,” none of the options will be pretty.
As reported at the Orlando Sentinel space blog, the five broad options provided to the administration were:
1.) Constellation constrained to FY2010 budget projections (ISS — International Space Station — closed in 2015).
2.) ISS +Lunar mission constrained to the FY2010 budget which uses a commercial rocket and capsule instead of Ares I to take crew to the station.
3.) ISS +Lunar less constrained to the FY2010 budget, which also uses a commercial rocket instead of Ares I to take crew to the station.
4.) Extend the space shuttle under a less constrained budget to 2015 to close the gap in U.S. human spaceflight and give NASA time to build a rocket from shuttle parts for lunar orbits and scouting missions on the moon.
5.) Three “Flexible” deep space exploration options all under less constrained budgets:
A) Uses a smaller version of the Ares V called Ares V lite and no orbiting fuel depots;
B) Uses an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle and fuel depots;
C) Uses a rocket made from space shuttle parts and fuel depots.
Option 1 is the current NASA plan. Even ignoring the myriad technical issues to be overcome with the planned new systems, NASA lacks the budget to execute the plan, with a $50 billion shortfall. In fact, the first three options, described as “constrained to the FY2010 budget,” all vastly exceed it. And none of the options are good news for proponents of the Ares I launch system that NASA wants to develop. An expensive (over $300 million) test article (that doesn’t contain any actual relevant flight hardware, and for which the Air Force Range Safety office at Cape Canaveral has yet to provide permission for flight) was proudly rolled out this week. Even if the Potemkin rocket test goes forward, it may be for naught, as will much of the billions spent on the program so far.
Moreover, with the current planned budget level, the panel reported that it doesn’t have the money to do it in any alternate way, at least with business as usual, and keeping thousands of existing jobs at large NASA centers in Florida, Alabama and Texas. In addition to the need to maintain the politically important employment, a large part of the problem is that a key premise of the VSE — the Shuttle phased out next year, and the International Space Station abandoned in 2016, with the funding thus saved to be applied to the new exploration program — is also viewed as politically untenable.
Budget overruns and schedule delays have resulted in a growing “gap” in our ability to service the station and change out U.S. astronauts with a U.S. system. This was originally planned to be only three years (the new system, the Ares I launcher and the Orion crew module, was supposed to be available in 2014). But the agency now has little confidence of achieving that operational goal before 2017, six years after Shuttle shut down, and a year after the space station was to be deorbited or handed over to the international partners. During all of this time the U.S. would be dependent on the Russians for rides to and from the facility.
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Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.
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19 Comments
1. eon:I notice there was no mention of the Jupiter proposal, to build a next-generation heavy lift launch vehicle (HLLV) from “off-the-shelf” components from the present shuttle program (engines, etc.)- just minus the aging and increasingly unsafe shuttle orbiters. We’ve lost two of them , one going up, one coming down; the latter was a signal that the airframe time is reaching a critical state. “Extending” their use is another way of saying, “we’re willing to kill another crew to save money.” (Except that with increasing maintenance costs, it doesn’t even accomplish that.)
As for the Ares program, that is the “prestige” item at NASA right now, the last time we decided to go with a “designed from scratch” system to get a package upstairs without using proven existing components, the result was the Navy’s Vanguard, based on the rather cranky Viking sounding rocket- which blew up on the pad. It was the Army’s Jupiter C, an uprated Redstone ballistic missile, that took first Explorer 1 and later Alan Shepard into space.
(Vanguard was the result of a PR-based decision to use only “non-military” developments for the satellite program- never mind that the Navy paid for same. Like most PR-based decisions, it became a major PR embarrassment.)
The Orion vehicle (basically an improved Apollo)is a good design, and one we should have been building and using for the last three decades, just as the Russians have used Soyuz. We should also have unmanned, robot cargo carriers, on the same principle as the Russian Progress vehicles. Such “one-shot” vehicles are, believe it or not, cheaper to build and “expend” than a “multi-use” vehicle like the shuttles. (They are also safer, as they rarely have time to develop “hangar rash”, etc.) The cheaper it is to put people and materiel’ in orbit, the sooner we’ll get back to the Moon, and on to Mars.
Interestingly enough, this was exactly the approach favored by Dr. Wernher von Braun, the architect of our manned space program before the shuttle. Who, incidentally, was the man who led the team that put Explorer 1 in orbit, and later put the Apollo missions on the Moon.
We didn’t listen. The Russians did.
clear ether
eon
Aug 18, 2009 - 5:50 am 2. Instapundit » Blog Archive » RAND SIMBERG: Panel Recommends Major Changes in Space Policy. “The good news is that for the first…:[...] SIMBERG: Panel Recommends Major Changes in Space Policy. “The good news is that for the first time a major panel of this sort has explicitly stated [...]
Aug 18, 2009 - 7:06 am 3. Falconsword:Don’t expect Obama to do the right thing, expect him to do the political thing. Allowing the private industry to leap ahead via contract incentives and X-Prize inspired competition is an effort that would make the great Robert Heinlein proud. Unfortunately it does not provide our current president with more votes, or more people on the public dole who will then vote for others of his party. We’re at a critical juncture on the road to space, its up to the president to choose the right path and LEAD. For a man who mainly votes ‘present’ and blames others for problems, my expectations couldn’t be lower.
Sic Semper Tyrannus
Aug 18, 2009 - 7:15 am 4. Fairbanks99:Just like Obama’s Fedex and Post Office analogy, so is NASA. Budget overruns and bad decisions. I was stationed at Cape Canaveral in the mid-80s, and personally witnessed the Challenger disaster and went to sea for the salvage effort. A year or so later, on a very, very stormy day with lots of lighting, NASA launched a military satellite. Of course it was struck by lightening and exploded. Great management, eh?
Of course private industry can do it safer and cheaper. But no glory or control for government in that, is there? Obama will no more provide the right leadership in space than he does here. He will select the most expensive least efficient way of getting back into space, just like he wants to do health care.
Aug 18, 2009 - 8:02 am 5. Rand Simberg:A year or so later, on a very, very stormy day with lots of lighting, NASA launched a military satellite. Of course it was struck by lightening and exploded. Great management, eh?
That would have been an Air Force launch, not NASA. I don’t think that NASA managed launches of military payloads in the eighties, unless they were in the Shuttle.
Aug 18, 2009 - 8:15 am 6. Rich Vail:As with everything else, the governmment does NOTHING efficiently. NASA is probably the least efficient program of the federal government. My father designed space suits and life support systems for the Air Force (1950’s), then later for NASA in the 1960’s. He, to his dying day, maintained that NASA was the least efficent way to promote space travel. He claimed that we could have had colonies on the moon by the 1980’s and Mars by the late 1990’s had the government permitted commercial exploitation of space travel. Additionally, he thought that we would be mining the asteroid belt by now.
By allowing the government to have a monopoly on space travel we have hobbled ourselves and forced us to remain a terrestrial race.
Aug 18, 2009 - 8:25 am 7. Fairbanks99:Imagine if the government had been in charge of cell phone development. We would be lucky to have the brick like phones of early days with very limited networks. Or government in charge of PC development. A 286 would be a FAST machine these days! These are two examples of what private enterprise can do when the government stays the hell out of the way. If government got out of trying to micromanage health insurance, and restricted the trial lawyers, private industry could do for health care what it has done for the cost of computing and communications.
#5 Rand, maybe my memory is failing, but I seem to recall at the time that NASA was involved in that launch. My flight instructor at that time had a day job as a range safety pilot. He had told me that NASA was launching a satellite.
Aug 18, 2009 - 8:45 am 8. DensityDuck:Fairbanks: On the other hand, if you had a government-designed cell phone, you could throw the cell phone out of the back of a plane while nuclear bombs were going off during a hurricane, and after it landed it would still work at full capacity.
eon/Rand: Remember that the USAF designed the shuttle to put Big Bird vehicles into orbit on short notice. The fact that it had a NASA sticker on the side (and occasionally launched civvie missions) was an arms-control dodge.
Aug 18, 2009 - 9:06 am 9. Kent:In-space refueling for station-keeping satellites is one thing, but cryogenics can’t be transferred in space via bladders like room-temperature station-keeping propellants can. You either would need some sort of heavy piston arrangement (which probably would not work because having a moving part go from room temperature to near-absolute zero and maintain a seal in itself is problematic) or use small ullage rockets to propel both the depot and the vehicle being fueled at such an acceleration that the fuel goes to the bottom of the tanks for extraction.
Aug 18, 2009 - 9:20 am 10. Rand Simberg:A propellant depot in LEO would be like a gas truck in a shooting range, provided the gas truck was next to a liquid oxygen truck, and the shooting range involved bullets that go 15 times faster than most bullets on Earth. The risk of space junk hitting it would be far too great to actually build it.
Hmmmm…
NASA does seem to have been involved. I had thought that the Air Force took over military launches prior to that, but (if we can believe Global Security) apparently NASA was still doing it in ‘87:
So I stand corrected.
Aug 18, 2009 - 9:24 am 11. Rand Simberg:Remember that the USAF designed the shuttle to put Big Bird vehicles into orbit on short notice. The fact that it had a NASA sticker on the side (and occasionally launched civvie missions) was an arms-control dodge.
This is nonsense. The Air Force provided some basic top-level requirements (thousand mile cross-range, 65,000 lb payload in a fifteen-foot diameter) which were one of the things that drove it to be a failed system, but they didn’t design it, or pay for it, and most Shuttle missions were civil (and pretty much all were after 1986). It was and is a NASA-designed, NASA-owned, NASA-operated vehicle, that did an occasional military mission.
Aug 18, 2009 - 9:38 am 12. Fairbanks99:In one of the most disappointing days in the Cape’s history, the FLTSATCOM-F was launched through heavy cloud cover on 26 March 1987 only to be struck by lightning and destroyed. NASA’s formal mishap investigation concluded that there was “no convincing evidence” that an important criterion-the avoidance of potential electrical hazards-was met by the launch crew.
Brevard County Florida is either the second highest or highest counties in the nation for lightning strikes. The day they launched that bird, the sky was almost black with cloud with a LOT of visible lightning. That NASA launched a moving lightning rod on that particular day demonstrated to me the same appalling lack of judgement that they displayed the frozen day they launched Challenger. I lost almost all respect for NASA management that day. (The continued employment of global warming shrieker James Hanson took care of the remainder of the respect).
Aug 18, 2009 - 12:08 pm 13. Fairbanks99:Density, on the OTHER other hand, if today you said “GO” and government and private industry began to design and build that extremely rugged cell phone, which one do you think would field a model first?
Of course the government could always contract out the developement of the phone, much like it does its Express Mail overnight handling to Fedex. Hmmmm…
Aug 18, 2009 - 12:13 pm 14. rssg:At the risk of being labled a backwards-looking, xenophobe here’s my two cents:
I think the US needs a more aggressive space program, emphasizing domestic engineering and manufacturing which not only helps the economy but inspires and leads many young Americans into those fields, instead of careers in marketing, law, media and other non-productive, economic rent seeking occupations.
This is called “isolationist” and “xenophobic” by today’s “one world globalists utopians” of either the liberal or conservative stripe but it’s what I think.
But we now have a president who is borderline anti-American but he’s also anti-armed forces because he wants, he needs taxpayer dollars to be redirected to his social utopian schemes, that bear witness to the fact that he’s a socialist/statist. Likewise, we won’t have economic recovery until we have economic growth and we won’t have economic growth until we have capital investment and the goal of making a profit. But the president does like profit and private enterprise. We’re kaput.
Aug 18, 2009 - 12:36 pm 15. IcePilot:2 plus 5B. Faster, please.
Aug 18, 2009 - 4:14 pm 16. Gozer the Carpathian:As a current worker in the NASA “arena” I have to admit that NASA is by far the worst way to do this. I work in Deep Space Communications and we’ve just been given new consoles for our computer systems. Just two years after getting new consoles.
Yet we are constantly fixing every single antenna around here! We’re using stuff that was used for the Apollo program! O.O!
So yeah, priorities in this industry are all political.
Personally I’m more for a cannon instead of a rocket lift system. Unfortunetly we’re in a stupid international treaty preventing “Space Guns.” So instead of wasting all that fuel to get into orbit by using a mag cannon or something to “Shoot” our fuel and stuff into orbit we’re still having to carry everything with us all the way.
Oi Oi..
Aug 18, 2009 - 5:33 pm 17. If You Care About Spaceflight » hrrf:[...] I do. It’s the one thing I wish the government would spend more money on – since we know they won’t get completely out of the way for commercial companies to do space exploration. [...]
Aug 18, 2009 - 5:37 pm 18. Marcel F. Williams:The Federal government should be spending about $30 billion a year (close to the Apollo days in today’s dollars) on the NASA budget instead of $17 billion. There would be no $100 billion a year world wide satellite telecommunications industry without NASA.
After its creation in 1958, NASA put Americans on the Moon in less than 11 years– a remarkable accomplishment! If we had allowed NASA to establish a lunar base in the 1970s, we’d probably already have bases on Mars and would probably already be exploiting the stupendous platinum resources of the asteroids for our energy efficiency and synfuel production needs on Earth.
Trying to be penny wise and pound foolish with our space program over the last 35 years has hurt America’s economy. America would be a much better country if we had self sustaining colonies on the Moon and Mars right now.
Aug 30, 2009 - 12:38 am 19. Mars trip would exceed NASA’s radiation limits | world science,encyclopedia of physics formulas:[...] Damn Interesting • The Martian Express AstroSpace Update – October 2009 | Tzec Maun Foundation Pajamas Media » Panel Recommends Major Changes in Space Policy In the Dark and the Cold, the Mars Phoenix Lander Begins to Shut Down | 80b.. Life On Mars: Nasa [...]
Sep 29, 2009 - 4:17 am