Senators Blast NASA For Lacking Vision 319
An anonymous reader writes "A Senate science subcommittee clashed with NASA's chief on Wednesday, saying the agency and the White House lacked a clear vision and goal for the program. Skeptical senators told the space agency that it should not just talk about plans, but set out to do something specific. Lawmakers expressed a bipartisan opposition to the agency's plans and the initiatives of the Obama White House." Updated 23:13 GMT by timothy: Reader Trent Waddington contributes this video link to the hearing, if you want to come to your own conclusions.
NASA had plans... (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe that senator didn't realize that NASA had lots of plans that it was working towards, up until Obama killed them all with his new budget. The death of the Constellation program nixed everything that NASA had been working on for the last few years.
Realistically though, the senator probably *did* realize this and was just being a jackass and trying to score some political points by "demanding results" and making NASA look bad in the process. Hooray for politics.
No bucks no Buck Rogers (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuff said
Re:Mars (Score:2, Insightful)
Playing to the votors (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA has spread around the work to the maximum number of congressional districts to maximize their political support. But ask those same congressmen what they are willing to give up...ask them how important it is to balance the budget and even ...gasp..to begin paying off some debts..and they go quiet about what they want to give up...except to demand that the budget be balanced (but let someone else's district pay for it).
Obama puts a freeze on some agencies spending and already the constituencies are whining.
Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?
Re:Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to live in a barren desert, there's thousands of square miles here on earth that no one particularly wants.
Re:NASA had plans... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it looks more like vintage-1960s Soviet space launch technology.
making NASA agile? (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem here is clearly about the leadership changing priorities and budgets before anything gets finished.
The projects that NASA work on have long timelines, this is not compatible with budgets which change annually and where the govenment who holds the purse strings also often changes (as in this case) before the project is completed.
This is not too different in concept (but is admitedly different in scale) to software development where if priorities are allowed to change before projects are completed, nothing ever will be finished.
Maybe NASA can try and work to smaller achievable goals within a smaller timeline that have a clearly defined benefit?
Sound familiar?
MOAR WITH LESS! (Score:3, Insightful)
NASA si long term, senate is six years (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, of course, there is the pork. Representative Olsen, not of the senate, has voting against the economic stimulus package, which consensus seems to indicate that it has stopped the hemorrhaging of jobs, and now he is complaining that a few thousand government employees are going to lose their jobs. What is it Pete? Do we want to balance the budget or keep support a federal jobs program where the average salary is over 70K a year? Sure the NASA jobs are great, but the budget is the budget. These jobs and ancillary costs could save over a billion a year. I know that Clear Lake is the probably the most federally subsidized place in America, but we really need real jobs based on capitalism, not socialism.
In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Its Less Jobs, Not Vision (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the budget? (Score:1, Insightful)
How do you make long term plans when you have no guarantee on the budget? NASA just had their budget cut without warning and there hasn't been any interest in fully funding anything really big for decades. If NASA can reasonably expect projects to die half way in, because Congress has done that to them before, it's just common sense to not plan for anything too big.
Technology first (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a completely backwards way of thinking. New propulsion systems are vastly more valuable than any specific space mission. Advanced propulsion systems could take the most difficult mission we might attempt today and turn it into a routine trip.
We need a willingness to develop new technologies that might take more than a few years to pay off, and even try things that might not work at all. We should tie this work to a specific goal in order to provide focus and to justify the price, but the real prize is the technology itself. Reducing fuel mass or cost to orbit by a factor of ten would open up the solar system to us.
Re:The President has to lead (Score:3, Insightful)
[R]ealistically the President has the power and means to kill a program if he doesn't like it. He can appoint a schmuck to replace the executive director, for example, and he can argue that the money for NASA would be better spent on school lunch for poor kids, or building shelters for the homeless, or any number of similar but meaningless populist mouthings that make great TV sound bites.
Which seems like a fine argument for NASA to move to the private sector. Privately funded by corporations with a profit motive.
If you look back to the exploration of the last frontier, I think you'll find that greed was the single greatest force contributing to its success. For example, would the West have seen nearly the same amount of interest without any gold rush of any kind?
Unfortunately for us, a profit motive for going into space might not exist. Honestly, though, if that's the case, then maybe it shouldn't be the highest of priorities. Ideally, we want humanity to strive selflessly, but realistically we know that this doesn't exist. Not even in scientific pursuits. If the past is to be relied upon at all, it seems safe to assume that humans need to get something valuable out of the exchange or failure will follow.
People want to be ignorant. (Score:2, Insightful)
Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?
That'll happen when the electorate becomes informed on the issues.
...Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah....
*wipes tears from his eyes and changes underwear*
You see, the bulk of the electorate is spoon fed information - over simplified information, I might add - about the issues from the electronic media because that's what sells. And the electorate ONLY wants information that fits in their World view. Fox News has this down to a science. Most people like it this way. Most people are ignorant and WANT to be so.
Now I know why Freud said what he said when asked why he always had a scowl on his face - something to the effect of being disgusted with the human race.
People are idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
It just pisses me off to no end. We need a space program that opens access to space for EVERYONE. Not just the few lucky NASA picked government employees. Do you want to go into space at some point? I certainly do, and constellation had zero chance of ever letting me do that. Maybe you think constellation would have opened access to space and expanded the possibilities for the rest of us, but I think you are wrong. So, so wrong. The current plan for NASA has the best chance of anything NASA has done since its creation of truly opening access to space. New technologies, reducing cost, encouraging multiple options for access to orbit. That's what NASA's goal should be and needs to be. Not a repeat of Apollo. Not another huge expense for flags, footprints, and some neat video that ends up getting 5 minutes on the evening news. So there's my rant. Take it or leave it.
Cutting pork *is* leading (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, it's leading to a place you happen to disagree with going to -- but going up against all the congresscritters getting jobs (and thus votes) off the Constellation program is unquestionably a gutsy move.
Moreover, I think it's the right one. Getting private investment into the business of shuttling things in and out of orbit and freeing up NASA's resources for "leaner, meaner" scientific work is exactly the right place to be going. Look at what kind of ROI we've gotten on the rovers; if NASA is going to be doing science, let them do science rather than being forever in the overpriced transport business.
Re:Typical US government (Score:5, Insightful)
America started to cede its position as the world power in space exploration as soon as it had buy-in to the system. Every time something goes wrong in a NASA mission and people die, or expensive equipment explodes, it can no longer be a learning process for the organization. Instead, it becomes a negative PR statement and, since American's know their tax dollars pay for it, they bitch like they were just robbed. As a result, budgets are cut. Politicians pretend to be engineers and enforce design decisions through budgets and political grandstanding. NASA becomes scared because, well, little by little it gets killed off. And, as a result, the space program stagnates.
As long as the American public perceives itself to have buy-in or ownership or stock in NASA's going-ons, the organization will remain to risk adverse to do anything truly stupendous anymore. The reason we were able to put a man on the moon in 1969 was because, at the time, the space program was new and mysterious. The American public didn't feel it had much buy-in over the system. All in all, it was a pissing match with the Russians so any ownership the tax payer did feel it had over the program was justifiable as it meant we have bigger space penes than the USSR. Nowadays, though, the organization neither has the freedom or elbow room to do real engineering and take real risks. Without risk, there is no progress.
Re:NASA had plans... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
"Move some of us to a self-sufficient base on Mars, and even if Earth turns back into molten slag, humanity will continue to exist."
The hard part of that idea isn't getting to Mars, but making it self-sufficient.
Re:Playing to the votors (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are the purple flying unicorns?
A politician cannot get elected to the highest offices unless they prioritize getting (re-)elected over achieving meaningful progress. This is why there are no politicians with the fortitude to do what must be done. And if one somehow manages to claw his way to the top and get elected to Congress, he is quickly marginalized by the deadbeat politicians who dominate the system. He'll slowly be brought into the system, as he willingly trades away his ideals in order to get something done, one small step at a time.
Our culture disembowels those who wish to maintain principles while in office. But we put them there... we vote on 15-second sound-bites. We vote on who has better hair, who we'd rather our daughter date, who we'd like to imagine our fathers and grandfathers would look like if they weren't drunken whoring bastards (never mind the fact that many of those we elect ARE drunken whoring bastards -- they just don't look like it because they have an army of PR staff).
And the worst part of it -- for me -- those who do appear to have principles, who have a spine, too often are mired in a religious conservatism that I believe has no place in national politics. But I digress...
Why do we need a single marquis program? (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA does lots of cool stuff - research and science on both earth and the rest of the universe. I happen to think manned space flight is very cool, but I'm getting more and more frustrated that NASA is seen as only manned space flight*, or that space research has to include manned space flight to be worthwhile.
If a congressman doesn't think NASA has any goals or program direction, it means he or she hasn't looked beyond putting people on a ship to [insert non-earth destination].
* this problem has plagued NASA for decades - manned spaceflight sucks up the bulk of funds, despite having a relatively low science per dollar quotient. It's good for marketing, though.
Re:The President has to lead (Score:3, Insightful)
In a word, 'Pork'.
Texas, Florida, and probably many other States' interests are served by these sort of dollars going through Congress.
Re:Mars (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, it's hard. So was building an airplane little more than a century ago. What's your point?
Re:Commercialisation (Score:3, Insightful)
Tier One/Space Ship One traveled suborbitally. The Space Shuttle (STS) is an orbiter. The difference? SSO travels at Mach 3. STS hits Mach 25.
SSO flights take 3 people suborbitally. STS takes 7. Which is more important when you consider:
SSO flights take dozens of minutes. The STS can be up for 16+ days. It has to carry food, water, and process wastes for that length of time.
Space Ship One carries essentially no cargo. The Space Shuttle takes 25 metric tons to orbit.
Space Ship One is a suborbital craft. It is not a true space ship, despite its name. It would likely require multiple orders of magnitude more than $30M before it could orbit the planet.
Re:Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
Why live your life, why do anything? In the grand scheme of things, there's no point to anything. We create that meaning for ourselves.
Re:NASA had plans... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok so you feel that you need to throw away a working system and start from scratch then? DIRECT leverages existing infrastructure and existing designs.
your idea is the same as Ford deciding to release a new F150 pickup truck but abandoning using Steel and internal combustion engines as well as wheels.
It's really dumb to redesign it all with fancy new pie in the sky technology. Use what works and get it in place fast. Why set your self up for a 2 year delay because of a problem that needs to be corrected? The SRB's and current tech works and works well no problems to have to design out. ALL DONE.
Best vision in years (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I work for the space program, but I'm not high enough to make these decisions.
Some people will never be happy. All the dreams of the last 50 years are about to come true, and all people can do is bitch!
Look, chemical powered rockets have not changed much since the development of the SSME. So why are we only now getting private space launch? Because there was nowhere reasonable to go! ISS cargo is an easy enough mission for non-cutting edge rocketry, and since it is manned there is a long term need for supply flights that won't go away.
The future looks like this:
1. NASA guarantees it be buy x flights at y price from now until 2020.
2. Multiple vendors (currently SpaceX, Orbital, Lockheed, Boeing, and others) use this promise to secure capital to develop launchers.
3. Several years of regular supply flights gives ample qualification of the new boosters.
4. Once confidence is gained, NASA transitions from buying human flights from Russians to buying flights from Americans. Lots of politicians get reelected.
5. All the tech for better than chemical rocket launch now has a concrete mission to design for. Someone perfects laser ablative launch of cargo to ISS and does it much cheaper. Someone else gets an even cheaper launch option going.
6. NASA works on designs for solar system manned exploration craft. Design is steady and largely free from political pressure.
7. Private cargo launch matures, and one day both it and the NASA designs are ready.
8. ISS, which is now a largely private operation, is sold off or deorbited at its end of life.
9. NASA (and hell, maybe even private spacecraft) launch on commercial boosters and usher in a new era.
Look, promises smomishes. Unfunded mandates scmuded fandates. This is the ONLY way to get beyond LEO in a sustained manner by the 2050s ( when I will retire). You all should be overjoyed.
Year to Year budget VS. Planning (Score:4, Insightful)
It is difficult to make long term plans given that your budget changes (usually in a downward spiral) each year.
NASA has a number of mandates that they have to use their funding for. And then they have the proposals that they are told to work on ("Go to mars", "privatize everything", "minimize risk because it is bad publicity"..) These cost lots of $$. Given no budget they mainly turn into paper exercises.
This should be a dilbert cartoon.
Re:The President has to lead (Score:4, Insightful)
don't blame obama. the incredible, astounding debt that this country has racked up under the leadership of the people *we* elected is to blame. obama might end up being a terrible president, but you can't blame him for things that happened before he was in office.
at least he's realistic, unlike bush jr. that made wild claims about sending a man to mars in a completely unrealistic time frame unless of course you were willing to throw money at it like the future of the human race depended upon its success. manned spaceflight is really a silly idea. it serves no scientific purpose at this point in our development and costs hundreds of times more than robotic spaceflight.
Re:Commercialisation (Score:4, Insightful)
FYI, the craft was called SpaceShipOne. The program is called Tier One. Too bad neither compares with what the NASA programs are/were working on. To sum up:
1. Altitude. That 20-30 MM got to suborbital altitude only. How about going high enough to actually *get something done*?
2. Duration. SpaceShipOne can only stay at altitude for a few minutes due to the ballistic nature of the final trajectory. How about staying long enough to *get something done*?
3. Payload. SpaceShipOne has a max payload of some 2400 kg (in theory -- has not been tested), compared to 22,700 kg for the shuttle program, and projected 188,000 kg for LEO / 71,000 to the moon for the Constellation program. Even the Ares V Lite would carry 140,000 kg to LEO.
4. Crew capacity. SpaceShipOne can carry three crew members only, compared to seven for the shuttle, and six for the Orion capsule.
If you want to compare cost of the programs, you need to compare utility as well. And Tier One is woeful in terms of anything other than a stepping stone for more ambitious programs.
If you want to compare the cost of Constellation and Orion to what Scaled Composites is doing, then you need to wait until we know the full cost of TierTwo, which is supposed to encompass LEO, and some of TierThree, which is rumored to encompass both lunar travel and interplanetary travel. Until then, kindly fasten your seatbelt before takeoff and enjoy the view, because commenting on cost of programs with disparate utility and goals is meaningless.
Re:Plans but no strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
What you describe sounds like space communism, complete with a politburo and five year plans. How about we try a different strategy - let NASA open-source all of the technology that it has developed so far and see what the private industry can make of it. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have already created launch systems independently. They could do much more if they had access to NASA's vast collections of information about what does and doesn't work for spaceflight.
Re:Commercialisation (Score:4, Insightful)
This is America (Score:3, Insightful)
One word: Jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what all of this grandstanding is about. Vision? Bullshit! It's about jobs and votes back home. I'm sick of this fucking hypocrisy. Building an industry based on government handouts is stupid to begin with. They should consider themselves lucky to have made any money at all. The new plan for NASA is realistic and reasonable and these senators should go fuck themselves.
Re:Playing to the votors (Score:5, Insightful)
A politician cannot get elected to the highest offices unless they prioritize getting (re-)elected over achieving meaningful progress.
Get rid of career Politicians is the only solution. This means "term limits". However, I propose a lifetime term limit to serving in the public sector elected offices.
I don't know how long is too long, but I can see where serving 24 years is PLENTY long enough for someone to serve in elected office, including municipal, state and federal elected offices combined.
It would require more people involve in governance as we'd have a much higher turnover allowing a more diverse set of opinions into the marketplace of ideas.
And it would have the "vote them all out" kind of effect every few years as there would be no stagnation of leadership.
I know the complains about term limits and lobbyists, but it seems that the lobbyists already have their pound of flesh.
As it is now, I'm 100% certain that the people running our country are not the "best" we have. They only run it because they are entrenched.
Re:Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mars (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this won't happen at all. And these agencies are supposed to be filled with the smart people? Yeah, well i can walk on water and summon plagues out of my ass.
NASA is filled with smart people. The problem is that it works with a budget and mandates from Congress, which is full of mediocre-intelligence people who really don't care that much about accomplishing anything great, only about their own personal power and wealth. And these Congresspeople are elected by people who are mostly complete morons.
Re:Mars (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're on to something there.
The problem is the current focus of non-commercial spaceflight--science. That is, pure science for its own sake. We spend billions of dollars on flights (manned and not) for the sake of doing "science". Now, I like science as much as the next guy--its a great thing. But spending our billions of spaceflight dollars to launch a mission just so we can watch worms wriggle around in zero gravity is a waste. It's one thing to run such experiments in the course of something larger, but as an end in themselves, they're a terrible idea.
We need to drop all the BS about "science" and "exploration" and "discoveries". The only goal of the public space program should be establishing as many permanent, self-sustaining stations and settlements as we can. Moon, Mars, asteroids, Jovian moons, 2001-style "wheel" stations, generation ships. Expand, or die.
The efforts to support this should be national level, right up there with fixing the national infrastructure and transitioning to nuclear/renewable power. I'm talking bigger than Apollo, bigger than the bailouts or the stimulus package. These ought to be the national domestic priorities, not shoveling billions of dollars down the drain for useless, ineffective social programs we've already wasted trillions on, only to pay trillions more because the first 20 years of payments were pissed away.
The first goal should be the development of a high flight rate, low-cost, robust orbital launch vehicle, because without affordable space access, you can't do anything else up there. This is what the shuttle was supposed to be, but wound up failing miserably at. Yes, it will be expensive to develop. It will probably take a few generations of vehicles and two or three decades to get it right. Offer it out to Lockheed, Boeing, EADS, N-G, SpaceX, Scaled, Dassault, even Sukhoi.
Supporting this and the future goals will take lots of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Add funding to existing educational money so that school systems can afford to hire existing engineers, scientists, and mathematicians at wages they will be willing to work for, and have them teach. Cut administrative and school board positions by at least two thirds, get rid of the do-nothing, know-nothing "education" majors that merely pretend to teach, and hire some retired drill sargeants to straighten up the schools with discipline problems. Give the kids a chance to work towards something worthwhile instead of glamorizing entertainers.
Once the reliable launch vehicle is in service, then you start the colonization and utilization push. Mine some asteroids, put bases on the moon and Mars, build thousand-person stations in low orbit. Set up space-based solar collectors and beam energy down to remote areas.
It comes down to this: we can sit here staring at our belly button lint for the next fifty years, or we can actually go and do something worthwhile with our lives. Doing it will be hard, it will be expensive... but sitting on our collective ass waiting for things to happen won't work. New technology doesn't jsut materialize out of thin air; someone needs to work on it.
Re:Plans but no strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
How about we get back to the idea that if my tax dollars pay to develop it then it defaults to the public domain. That should include when it is developed by a third party contractor.
Then SpaceX and Virgin can do what they will AND NASA can do its thing.
The senate is still right. NASA needs a goal and it needs to be a goal that the public can get behind. NASA has devolved from a National program promoting the interests of the nation to scientific welfare catering to testing obscure theories.
Re:Plans but no strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
For there to be a next wave, we have to make some fundamental scientific progress. E.g. a space elevator is not merely a matter of improved engineering, we need some real breakthroughs in material sciences.
Ah but therein lies the rub. Once we know what we are going to do up there (mine and refine available resources, extending to highly automated manufacturing) we have in fact got engineering goals which can be attained and used to build towards the milestones. For example, if we were to set up a LEO fuel dump, launched via cannon or similar mechanism, it would resolve many difficult problems by itself. Similarly, a railgun-type macrolauncher stretching for several tens of kilometers might divide launch costs by a large amount. I've never been a fan of the space elevator concept myself, for reasons you have outlined, but many small step will a journey make.
What this proposal endeavours to do is make as many of those steps profitable as we go along - for example a new kind of crane arm mechanism might be funded by this agency and sold to construction companies, but much of the engineering would be perfectly applicable to manipulating rough ore loads prior to refinement in orbit, etc.
Re:Technology first (Score:3, Insightful)
Completely agreed.
The biggest problem with having a specific mission in mind, like say "land an astronaut on Mars in 20 years", is that to actually implement such an ambitious mission you have to start making decisions today that tie you into a particular technology development path. You would have to take existing technology, and figure out what could be improved or created to accomplish the specific task set out in the time frame set out. Not only would this limit the development of NASA to that specific path, it would also mean that any new technologies invented by others may not be usable even if they're better. You can't just go changing the technology behind a mission like that every time something shiny and new comes out like it's Duke Nukem Forever.
The basic research and technology development that the new plan calls for is the right thing to do. Personally I would much rather spend the next ten or twenty years building up an arsenal of space technology, then pick the most suitable from that for a Mars mission, or whatever else we're capable of doing then.
Re:Playing to the votors (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to start somewhere. It's not my first choice, but it's more than the jackasses in Congress are willing to do.
Re:Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, if we could get a person to Mars fast enough (need undeveloped technology), cheap enough (need technology about 1000x cheaper than now), and keep him alive on the trip and on mars and on the trip back (need undeveloped technology), a human with a rover could outperform the robot we did send.
Also, you perhaps overestimate what a human can accomplish under those conditions. The human will need to tote around life support equipment. He will be in a pressure suit, which really drops mobility and productivity. Also, repairing equipment under those conditions mostly means clearing jams and swapping in spare parts.
And last, the human can't hang around for months and months while scientists back home digest data and decide the best place to send him next. Accumulated radiation dose will do him in first.
Question is, with all that technological development needed to send a human, couldn't we just send a better robot instead with the same resources? And wouldn't that better robot technology help us in 1000's of other ways?
--PM
Consistent Budget Needed (Score:1, Insightful)
When NASA knows they have set budgets for 15 yrs, then they can plan. Without committed budgets that are truly committed, NASA plans mean nothing.
In the past, they would come up with a grand mission, get everyone excited about it, then go off and start estimating the real cost and time lines. When the budget numbers came in 18 months later, the costs were 2-3x the initial estimates. Congress says "no way" and all the people working on the project disappear and wait for the next budget exercise so they can earn another paycheck.
The other part of the problem is well known. Almost every congressional district gets something they can claim is part of the space program. It doesn't matter how much more expensive that makes it. Sometimes spreading things out doesn't allow collaboration. I was amazed at how much cross thought my team had over lunches with others working on the shuttle and ISS programs. When 80% of the parts are designed and built 200+ miles away from the center, it is hard to get that mixing of thought.
Re:Playing to the votors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
For me it's as simple as survival. As long as humanity is confined to a single planet, we're vulnerable to being wiped out by a planetary scale disaster.
Okay, but we're a long, looong way from having 100% completely self-sufficient off-world colonies that it doesn't even make sense to start. The chain of technologies necessary to allow a human to survive in space is ridiculously long and at the moment completely infeasible to implement outside of the hospitable environment of our home planet. And that even applies after some global disaster. It pretty much would take the destruction of the earth [qntm.org] for it to be less suitable for human life than any other rock in the solar system.
Certainly a "get to Mars in 10 years" plan makes zero sense in this context, since such a rushed mission would absolutely not be the foundation for a permanent off-world colony, much less a self-sufficient one.
And any colony that isn't self sufficient isn't a back-up to preserve the human species in case the earth is destroyed. It's just a place to recreate a really depressing novel [wikipedia.org] in a sci-fi setting.
Personally, even for the purpose of eventually giving humans another place to live besides earth, the current plan is much better than one with the specific goal of reaching Mars. New propulsion systems, in-space construction and assembly, these are things we will need for a future off-world colony to be feasible. Trying to implement such a colony starting today would be silly. Wait until we can at least access LEO cheaply before worrying about landing habitats on Mars or building them in space.