NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes 642
Teancum writes "NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was recently interviewed by the USA Today Editorial Board regarding the current direction of the U.S. Space Program, and in the interview he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources. As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources. Griffin quoted in the interview regarding if the shuttle had been a mistake "My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Regarding the ISS: "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.""
Re:Better uses! (Score:1, Interesting)
The space program benefits those it was designed to benefit. Thank you for the future we have today, Raytheon, General Dynamics, etc...
Re:$250 billion. (Score:3, Interesting)
Think DARPA-derived Internet, and GPS.
Things they could be working on (Score:5, Interesting)
2) First generation platform at one of the Lagrange points [wikipedia.org].
3) Lunar observatory on the dark side.
4) Another Hubble-like telescope at L3.
5) Space elevators, aynone?
Re:$250 billion. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Imagine if... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's almost poignant.
Re:ISS Orbit (Score:5, Interesting)
I Often Wonder About Statements Like These (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Miserable Failures (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like you don't like him simply because he's a Bush appointee, which is hardly relevant in this case. Besides, he right. NASA has been horribly mismanaged for the lat three decades, and it's time someone on the inside came out and said that.
Not the same thing (Score:5, Interesting)
is not the same thing as
he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources
which is not the same as
"It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible....we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in"
Manned versus unmanned (Score:5, Interesting)
At this stage of the game, what is it that we can do on Mars with a manned mission that we cannot accomplish better, cheaper, and safer, with a robotic mission?
I really don't see a point in a manned mission to Mars until we've been on the Moon long enough to have a permanent station of some kind there.
As much as I loved Apollo, I'm not sure I see that it really accomplished anything with manned missions that a robotic mission couldn't have done. Especially since if I'm not mistaken only one or two real 'scientists' went on any of those missions.
Re:$250 billion. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, you should consider how much money the USA spends on defence. It's astronomical. Just because some R&D benefits come out of it doesn't mean that it's not an inefficient and wasteful use of resources.
Re:Imagine if... (Score:5, Interesting)
If Scaled Composite was handed a check for 250 Billion they'd wet themselves, hire a ton of new engineers, and start on their way to becoming NASA. But forcing them to work with a small budget makes each and every bolt a considered cost, and a lot more streamlined.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that Scaled Composites can do better than NASA, but it will take some self control when it comes to spending, designing and testing. But I would be greatly disappointed if they were handed a huge check for a quarter trillion dollars.
not so blunt? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wrong headline ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that is, after we get a space vehicle that can go further up than the shittles
Re:Waste of Resources? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not quite. (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, international politics aside.
One of the real problems we saw was the US Congress, and yes, NASA management.Space Station Freedom was often a dumping ground for "retired in place" senior engineering management waiting for that magic day when they could sit at home and impede their wives instead of coming to the office and impeding engineers. That's not to say we didn't have decent, enthusiastic, qualified management but they were outnumbered... or simply out-numbed... by the incompetents.
A lot was preordained, despite engineering advances. "Don't try to convince me, my mind is made up." I could go on at length about the decision to scrap the 100 khz power distribution system on Freedom in favor of the DC system. I was around when the "test" destroyed some computer hardware at MSFC that was used as justification, despite the fact that the test was protested by competent engineers with a knowledge of VAX power supply design. Were there problems with the high frequency AC distribution? Some, but not insurmountable.
SSF was also a training ground for kids right out of college. Get them in, turn 'em loose with little guidance, slap 'em around a bit until they started doing good design, then move them to Shuttle.
We had a lot of design by Aerospace Conglomerate, too. Let's get that design that Lockheed wants, because it'll make them easier to deal with at contract time. Let's use THIS design that MD wants, even if it's not what NASA wants/requires, because we think their design is going to make them do something else for us on another project.
Still, and all, most of the conglomerate designs I saw, worked with, and helped shape (and, yes, I worked for a contractor company, too, but I was doing specs and requirements, as well as working with the prototyping) would have been acceptable, even if somewhat limiting in their own ways.
The BIG problem, however, was Congress. Every three years or so, we'd get a "stop what you're doing, reassess the design, and then start over" command from the Hill. I've gotta say, we wasted a LOT of money on those exercises, and we wasted a LOT of time.
There are improvements borne of waiting time and engineering advances in ISS that would not have been, and may never have reached SSF or Alpha, but we could well have bent metal and flown hardware by 1990 if Congress had stuck to original budgets and timelines and stayed the hell out of the way. I flew prototype hardware in 1992 that was the first piece of Space Station hardware to fly, be proven and certified for on-orbit Space Station operation. I could have flown it 3 years earlier save the Challenger accident.
Final thought. We developed or promoted a lot of stuff that's now common place in the world. Speaking from the perspective of medical hardware development (I also did a bit for the medical facility in terms of GNCC and COMMS) there's a lot of stuff I see in hospitals, doctors' offices, dentists' offices and ambulances that makes me smile and think, "I worked with the prototype of that...", or, in a couple of cases, "I wrote the SBIR paperwork that made that happen".
So, yes, NASA's efforts HAVE improved life ont he planet. Really.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Imagine if... (Score:5, Interesting)
The first prerequisite of any successful engineering project is to have a worthy goal that is clearly identifiable and governs everything else. In this sense, Scaled Comoposite's acheivement has a lot in common with Apollo, and the Shuttle and ISS have a lot in common with each other. The Spaceship One effort and the Apollo program were both narrowly focused on one thing -- sending one or more humans to a specific place and returning them safely. All the engineering done on them was focused on achieving that goal. The Shuttle and ISS programs, while they support many worthy scientific an technical goals, are primarily driven by pleasing enough constituencies to continue their operation. These are political goals, which means many types of missions under many types of conditions.
If you had to put the Shuttle's purpose on a bumper sticker, it would be "Cheap Access to Space". Except "Access to Space" is vague. Obviously, we mean "Manned Access to Space", but even stipulating that, different missions under different scenarios require different performance characteristics. The shuttle has all kinds of capabilities that it uses on very or none of its missions; yet all the things needed for those capabilities are shot up to space and landed on every single mission. I'm thinking primarily the wings here, but its large payload capacity and its capacity to launch satellites into polar orbit count here too. It follows that the Shuttle design is likely never to be the cheapest way of doing any mission. But, without the ability to perform a wide array of missions, NASA would never have got the backing of the Air Force, which wasn't really all that interested in the Shuttle.
You can't design any system to do everything; and the more the system does the more complex costly and unreliable it's bound to be.
Specific goals such as "get two men higher than 100km and return them to the surface safely" are inherently more efficent to pursue than broad, vague goals such as "build an orbital launch capability" or "cheap access to space". And, this has other consequences. Scaled's accomplishment, while signficant in its own right, gets them practically zero percent of the way to orbit. They just built an air launched rocket plane like the X-15. About the only thing they're almost immediately ready to do is create a suborbital space tourist business. If the mission was "get two men higher than 100km and return them to the surface safely primarily with components that will be part of a future orbital capacity," they'd have spent a lot more money, taken longer, and may not have been as safe.
Return on Investment (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Things they could be working on (Score:4, Interesting)
Only if you go all the way to ground level. A LOT of different designs have been thrown around over the years; I recall a recent Analog SF story using a high altitude dirgible platform. While it was done in the story to avoid a legal jurisdictional SNAFU, it could be done at a high enough altitude (above 50000' ?) to put the cable entirely above the weather.
There's another detail... the economics of space transport dictate that whoever is first to build a working space elevator will effectively own space. Natural monopolies occur when there is a high entry cost, and reduced costs thereafter. In almost every design, the main cost element (aside from R&D) is not the exotic materials, but lifting them to orbit-- $100 to $1000 per kilo multiplied by beanstalk cable weight per meter multiplied by a whole lot of meters. A space elevator (capital amortization aside) cuts the costs of space access on a per-pound lifted basis by at least two and perhaps three orders of magnitude. This means once you have one beanstalk, your capital cost for putting up another is vastly reduced.
Re:Wrong headline ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Launching that amount of fuel to the ISS is prohibitively expensive.
Partially due to the orbit that ISS is curently in. Catch-22s are great, arn't they? (Though, really, the major problem is the station is so large it takes a huge amount of fuel to move it anyway, intertia being what it is, and the high speeds involved in orbital velocities would mean you would have to move it a bunch.)
Re:Things they could be working on (Score:3, Interesting)
Thus, a space elevator makes going 100% nuclear a viable option. Everybody has all the electricity they can use. Far less CO2 gets pumped into the atmosphere. You don't have to worry about storing the nuclear waste.
Re:100 KHz? (Score:5, Interesting)
-Jesse
Space is never a waste of $$$ (Score:2, Interesting)
Why I Support Big Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Newsgroups: sci.space
From: j...@pnet01.cts.com (Jim Bowery)
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 07:16:54 GMT
Local: Tues, Jun 29 1993 12:16 am
Subject: Who I am and why I support Big Science
There have been some questions about who I am and what my positions are. Here are the relevant details for sci.space readers:
As chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce [geocities.com], I have, over the last 5 or so years, been the principle activist promoting the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 and the launch voucher provision of the 1992 NASA authorization.
To preempt some noise:
Allen Sherzer has yet to apologize to me for his repeated slanders in this forum 2 years ago, declaring that my contributions to the passage of the LSPA were insignificant compared to those of Glenn Reynolds [slashdot.org], then chairman of the legislative committee of the National Space Society. However, during congressional hearings on space commercialization, the LSPA's sponsor, Congressman Packard, gave me a personal introduction (the only panelist out of over 10 to receive such an introduction) and my organization credit for passage of the LSPA. Congressman Packard did so with Glenn Reynolds sitting next to me on the same panel -- and he did not mention Glenn Reynolds or the NSS. This is in the Congressional Record and on video tape. Allen Sherzer's words are in the sci.space archives of late spring to early summer 1991. I encourage those with access to the sci.space archives to retrieve them and see exactly what Allen Sherzer said and the manner in which he said it.
I've been involved in several other, as yet unsuccessful, legislative efforts to reform NASA, DoE (primarily fusion [geocities.com]), NSF and DARPA. In so doing I've come across gross inefficiencies in technology development -- inefficiencies that some small high technology startups were ready to fill with technical advances of great economic and social import. The government agencies I just mentioned see these high technology startups, not as vital partners, but as deadly political threats to the credibility of those, within the agencies, that picked incorrect technical directions. These government-funded individuals drive funding away from those who would bring us critically needed technical advances -- rather than working with and help them.
The dollars we spend on NASA, DoE, DARPA and NSF to promote technology are actually used to suppress this country's technology in a frighteningly effective manner. But when one looks at the political incentives of these institutions, one wonders how anyone could believe it to be otherwise.
My first and most tragic experience in this area was George Koopman's statement to me, made in person just before his untimely death, that NASA had been relentlessly driving his suppliers and investors away from doing business with his company, AMROC. NASA appeared to reverse its behavior in a tokenistic manner just prior to Koopman's death. The first test of an AMROC booster, shortly thereafter, failed and AMROC was forced into capitulation with established aerospace firms. This pattern of hostile behavior from NASA, combined with the means, motive and opportunity, leave room for reasonable suspicions of murder against individuals within or funded by NASA.
This is only one story and I wasn't even inv
Re:Imagine if... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not trying to troll here, but what kind of experiments are being done in space and how do they benefit us? Since the start of the space program, how have we benefitted aside from getting dried ice cream and Tang? It's nice to learn more about the environment we live in, but I can't think of anything offhand that has come out of space exploration other than learning about our surroundings, getting pretty pictures, or development of better materials that were driven by the desire to get into space.
I'm sure there are many valuable things that we have learned as a result of being in space, but most people just don't know about them. Most average non-techies probably do not understand exactly why we're going into space so much - I'm even a nerd and I don't understand. Perhaps the public needs to be enlightened, and they'll be able to appreciate the space program.
Re:100 KHz? (Score:5, Interesting)
The tradeoff is that the transmission lines become more difficult. At 60hz you can run the power on nearly any old wire and it'll be fine. At 100khz the skin effect is stronger so fat wires to carry lots of amps don't work. You need special litz wires that have individually insulated strands.
Interference isn't much of an issue, at 100khz the wavelength is 9,835 feet long. You won't get anything even near 1/4 wavelength long that could radiate a significant amount of power. For the same reason transmission line impedance isn't much of a thing to worry about.
Re:$250 billion. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the hallmark of Bush, and probably the one reason I really despise him. In every facet of government he has worked to increase cronyism and place yes-men. He only promotes and rewards those who agree with him, and consistently punishes those who disagree with him. Whether it's stripping scientists who come the "wrong conclusions" from research projects and replacing them with scientists who will come to the "right conclusions", or it's marginalizing his secretary of state for disagreeing with Bush's assessment of the war in Iraq., or it's appointing an incompetent friend of a friend to the head of an emergency management agency.
Re:$250 billion. (Score:2, Interesting)
Just because nothing has happened doesn't mean you've prevented anything, either.
And when was the last time I was attacked in the U.S.? I'm attacked here daily. Whether it's on an intellectual level by the religious zealots in this country trying to overturn liberty and scientific common sense in favor of "god's way", senators and politicians raping me of my liberties and privacy or the corporations that they do much of the raping on the behalf of - trust me, I'm attacked all the fucking time.
Then again, you're probably one of those "You have to give up some freedom to get security" types who is so pussified that you'll go along with anything your government tells you as long as they say it's for your own safety.
Re:$250 billion. (Score:2, Interesting)
My apartment was robbed this one time. So what I did was got a gun and went to an apartment complex across town and started shooting everyone that looked like a thief and a criminal. Granted, some people would say I should have spent my time and money securing my apartment better, but I wanted to fight criminals on their own turf. I'm sure I'll never ever get robbed again, because criminals only exist where I attack them at and I'm sure they won't break into my apartment again while I'm away from home fighting their kind.
Politics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Quote: "It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin said. "We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can."
So, Griffin thinks the path was wrong? Couldn't it be that the path was right but the conduction was wrong, or some minor planning?
For me that sounds like big games of politics again.
The original purpose of the Shuttle Fleet was not only small lifts and minor exploration. As everybody knows the shuttles carry a hughe main tank, which is dropped after burn out.
The original plan was: take the main tank into orbit, move them into parking orbits, use them later for space stations and interplanetary vehicles.
This was first reduced to: drop them on a parachute for refuling and reuse. And later it was reduced to: just drop them.
If NASA did not had stepped back from the original path we now had about 111 empty main fuel tanks in orbit around earth. If you use 6 main tanks to produce one ISS like space station the shuttle starts would translate to 5 space stations with together 30 fuel tanks used. There would still be 80 fuel tanks left for building manned Lunar vehicles or a lunar orbiting station, or 2 Earth/Lunar L4/L5 stations, probably several manned Mars vehicles and unmanned Mars supplies vehicles.
Landing some on the moon for having a starting base for a manned Lunar base would also be an option. Selling them to other nations with a space program, but not the resources to place "containers" in orbit would have been an option also.
The Shuttle path was completely right, but it got stripped down more and more until only the shuttles itself where left. The reason behind that mainly are political, the cold war was over, no need anymore to to show presence or impress the enemy or to fund the "military industrial complex". In fact budget cuts where needed to use the resources elsewhere (but they did not get used wisely anyway, look at the education system e.g.).
And now, we hear a NASA politician/bureaucrat making big words
angel'o'sphere
Re:Waste of Resources? (Score:3, Interesting)
The question is, however: would it be better that money be thrown at shuttle/ISS, or some other manned program, and if so, what? If you think the cost overruns on a space station in LEO are high, wait till you see the cost overruns on a Mars mission. Did you like Apollo? In modern dollars, it cost an average of $13.5b/yr (NASA's current entire annual budget is $16.2b/yr). The space shuttle currently gets about $750m/yr spent on it, half of that is general and applied research (i.e., some applies only to the shuttle, some applies to rocketry in general), the other half operations, and even if you assume that the shuttle is *twice* as expensive to operate as other launch vehicles (an overestimate), you're looking at a surcharge to the public of under $200m-$600m/yr (depending on how much of the research money you count). Shuttle development, spread over its expected lifespan, totals about $1b/yr (also in modern dollars). As for ISS, it's about $3b/yr over its expected lifespan, although we don't pay that entire tab; also note that about half of the research that goes on in ISS is privately funded.
Think a Mars mission will come this cheap when all is said and done? Not the slightest chance. It'll overrun worse than ISS. ISS overruns are largely due to things that we thought would be easy turning out to be much more difficult. Well, there is *far* more potential for that on a Mars mission, where you can't just pop up a resupply vehicle.
If one cares about getting real science and technological advancements done, they should give the public what they want for as cheaply as possible. I think the CEV may be a good step in that; the Moon/Mars mission isn't, really, although it does make a nice inspiring thing to tell your grandchildren about.
For anyone curious about where NASA plans to spend their money, this [cbo.gov] page has some interesting charts.
** - There are important things that are developed by the manned programs, to be sure - in fact, these often tend to have the most direct impacts here on earth (simple, portable medical equipment; water treatment; etc). Also, technologies that do eventually allow a long-term human presence in space at affordable prices will take a lot of pratice to get right - look at how difficult it's been to make a long-term usable water electrolysis system that works in space, for example (and "refining" processes don't get much easier than water electrolysis - just wait until we try all of the steps needed to produce, say, aluminum offworld). In general, however, as far as gathering knowledge goes, robotic craft are far, far more cost efficient.