NASA Unveils Sweeping New Programs For Next 5 Years 278
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that after terminating the Constellation program, which was to develop rockets to return humans to the moon, NASA has announced that instead it will focus on developing commercial flights of crew and cargo to the ISS and long-range technology to allow sustained exploration beyond Earth's orbit, including exploration by humans. 'We're talking about technologies that the field has long wished we had but for which we did not have the resources,' says NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. 'These are things that don't exist today but we'll make real in the coming years. This budget enables us to plan for a real future in exploration with capabilities that will make amazing things not only possible, but affordable and sustainable.'"
"Among the new programs is an effort known as Flagship Technology Demonstrations, intended to test things like orbital fuel depots and using planetary atmospheres instead of braking rockets to land safely, a program that will cost $6 billion over the next five years and will be run by the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kennedy Space Center in Florida is to get $5.8 billion over five years to develop a commercial program for carrying cargo and astronauts to the space station. These new programs will be 'extending the frontiers of exploration beyond the wildest dreams of the early space pioneers,' added Bolden."
Inspiration (Score:5, Interesting)
How many of us grew up wanting to be scientists an engineers because we thought NASA was the coolest thing since the Super Nintendo?
We have a terrible shortage of scientists in the US and a culture that ill-supports our nerdy kids. NASA serves an an inspiration not only to them, but to children all over the planet to get into the sciences and excel. The trickle-down technologies that come from NASA research are just a bonus.
FAIL (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm seeing a lot of talk about figuring out how to do things that we might want to do, maybe, at some point.
You know why Apollo worked? We set goals and a date, and the figuring out took care of itself.
Lets Send Bags of Meat To The Moon... (Score:4, Interesting)
NASA paved the way with huge, expensive spacecraft. It's time now for the USA to put private sector ingenuity and efficiency to the Space sector. The US government should put some nice Tax incentives in place for space companies to keep them in the USA, thus keeping incentives for engineers and scientists to stay here.
It isn't a waste of money if it pays for itself in Private hands!
Former Rocket Scientist View (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work as a contractor at NASA writing real-time GN&C software for space vehicles. I was very young, but I do recall watching TV when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. It didn't really mean that much to me, but it was one of my earliest childhood memories. July 20th is an important date for me, personally.
Years later, I did very well in math and science classes, so my engineer/pilot father pushed me towards engineering as a profession. I planned to be an EE, but fate and transferring between Universities forced me into Aerospace Engineering. When I was eligible to transfer into the EE program, I chose to stay put and concentrate on aircraft design, fluids and viscous boundary layer CFD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics [wikipedia.org]. At graduation, none of the aircraft producing companies were interested in me due to lower grades (I worked 25+ hrs/wk and paid my way through school with ZERO loans). I was offered a job at a NASA contractor writing GN&C software. Non-CS graduates were better in that role - we weren't interested in doing every trick the compiler or hardware allowed. We wrote highly maintainable, solid, boring code that worked. Our error rate was/is the lowest in the world, at a price in productivity. In 5 yrs of that job, I introduced 1 error. I probably wrote a total of 8,000 LOCs. That counts 4,000 initial values for a big new failure mode module. I was highly specialized and knew my marketability was very limited in coding. I was an expert at software development processes with very low error rates, however.
Took a few C/C++, OO, and other classes during that time and found a position writing cross platform code in the mission control center rebuild for the space station and shuttle updates. That taught me *NIX operating systems and cross platform GUI programming. Highly marketable skills at the time. I was the Windows and OS/2 porting expert on the team and responsible for bringing the software into the new MCC's world-wide, Canada, Russia, France, etc. As the new development for the project was completing, the NASA sponsor added me to a list of critical skills required to continue the project. Basically, it was a job for the life of the project. I worked for the "development" contractor, not the "run/maintenance" contractor company, so by doing that, he was taking huge political risk for him and me. He was very politically powerful and anywhere I worked within NASA (we had team members at JPL, AMES, Huntsville, and Goddard in addition to ESA folks), I'd be pulled back at least part time to work on the project. He never asked if I were interested in the position either. I left and have been working in the private sector since mid-1996. I pay more in taxes now than I earned at NASA.
NASA is a highly political entity, both externally with congress/funding and internally with the different teams getting the best resources.
NASA provides welfare for engineers and a way to get political favors for congress. Nothing really new has come from the manned space program in years. All the new propulsion crap being rehashed now was ground tested in the 1950s. Until they take 5+ experiments into space and let them be proven in around moon flybys, I won't be convinced we aren't wasting money. NASA is too afraid of failure to risk anything now. Failure appears to congress like throwing money away, regardless of how much knowledge is gained as part of the failure. OTOH, going into space is hard. People will die. Expect it. Commercial space science can take the risks that NASA can't. The people who go into space and don't survive should be certain to have iron clad life insurance policies. The only people getting rich off space technologies today are the spies selling secrets to foreign governments.
How many of us... (Score:1, Interesting)
Watched the first Moon landing live [sic] on TV?
When I was a kid, there were only two* things I played with: Hot Wheels, and Major Matt Mason, Mattel's Man In Space. I was either going to be an astronaut, or a race car driver.
*Up to a certain age.
A funding proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA cannot do anything long term because they have no long term funding - every year their funding is up for the chop in the name of political expediency. Since almost ANYTHING NASA can do is long term, this means they really cannot do anything.
So, here's my proposal as to how to fix this. This would require Congress passing a law, but once the law is passed, Congress is out of the loop.
1) Create a class of bonds - NASA bonds.
2) The money from selling these bond SHALL BY LAW only go to funding NASA.
3) Any technological spin-offs from NASA developments funded by these bonds SHALL be owned by NASA, SHALL be licensed to industry under reasonable and non-discriminatory rates, and those license fees SHALL be used to repay the bonds.
4) Interest rates on the bonds SHALL be based upon the license fees above - no fees, no payments. In this sense the "bonds" aren't "bonds" in that they can fail.
5) IF NASA can convince the market the bonds will be profitable, THEN the bonds will sell well and NASA will have a steady source of funds. If NASA cannot convince the market, then the bonds won't sell to the market.
6) However, if you are truly a star-struck geek, you can still buy the bonds, even if you don't think they will pay off, if you feel that the work is worth the risk of losing your money.
7) Since the funding is now voluntary, nobody can reasonably complain about "their money being wasted" (not that will stop them).
8) If NASA starts doing things that people don't want to fund, the bonds will dry up, and NASA will (hopefully) get the message.
9) For those who will claim this is just "NASA, Inc." - not quite. A company MUST make a profit, and failing to do so can be actionable by the shareholders. This setup purposefully allows NASA to NOT make a profit.
Re:stop sending bags of meat into space (Score:4, Interesting)
for every astronaut we send up into LEO, we can probably send 40 cutrate probes all over the solar system.
It's more the other way around. Current seat price on the Shuttle (which is already pretty darn expensive) is something like $100 million, perhaps a bit more. The Discovery class probes are around half a billion dollars. This is as close to "cut rate" as NASA gets. That's five astronauts in space. You're off by a factor of 200.
Now, if we really did cut rate probes, then we could as well do cut rate manned missions as well. I still don't see the price advantage that probes are supposed to have over people. It remains, for example, that a few geologists on Mars for a few years, would do a lot more scientific work than a few dozen space probes, perhaps even a few hundred space probes over a few decades of exploration (there's some hideous inefficiencies here, since in the unmanned exploration scenario an unanswered question requires a new unmanned mission, which typically takes a decade or more to develop and deploy currently). They wouldn't have the geographical coverage, of course, but most of the problems with space probes is that they simply are too limited to do much science at a time.
Re:One of the best apologies I have ever read (Score:5, Interesting)
We just spent more money shoring up some major banks than we spent in the last ten years on the space program!
OK, enough of this bullshit that I keep hearing mindlessly repeated. The TARP funds that went to banks were structured as investments, which haven't done too bad considering the circumstances.
A big chunk of that has been paid back (at an annual rate of return around 8.5% [snl.com]). Yes there will be some write-offs that will ultimately lower that rate and in the end, it may end up being a wash. That means little or no net loss. Pretty good for a government program.
Stop spewing this ridiculous meme that the bank bailouts were some huge money sink. It is not true.
Now, if you want to complain about how things went with our money and AIG (an insurance company) and the automakers, fine. But on the balance, the bank bailout wasn't too bad...
we can get far more cutrate (Score:3, Interesting)
when you don't have to deal with something that eats, drinks, breathes, shits, and pisses, you can get a hell of lot more bang for your buck. surely you can see this
i want to see RPI managing 5 probes on venus, i want to see lehigh managing 10 probes on the moon, i want to see northwestern managing 15 probes on titan. i want to see carnegie mellon and case western arguing over which of their probes gets to prospect the interesting block of ice on ganymede, because they both spotted it at the same time. i want to see caltech sending out an email saying they don't have enough researchers to manage their 50 probes. i want MIT sending out an email worrying about running out of places to explore. i want to see bickering about coveted slots on launch windows when mars is closest to the earth. i want traffic jams of probes in space and on other planets
hell, i want to see AP Space Exploration 101 at Stuyvesant High School, managing their mars rover with a twitter-like interface, high school students deciding where to go and how to get there. i want to see Brooklyn Tech hack Stuyvesant's mars rover and drive it off a cliff. a few red faces, and no one worries that much about the loss, because we are cranking out dozens of probes a month
AND WE CAN DO ALL OF THIS FOR FAR LESS MONEY THAN ONE OR TWO MISSIONS OF MEATBAGS TO MARS
the day of the astronaut, for the foreseeable future, is over folks
bring on the era of cheap, quick, mass produced remote probes as the dominant face of spacefaring in our lifetimes
we are in the embryonic stages of space exploration. your firefly and star trek fantasies, i'm sorry, are many centuries away. please lose the false, extremely expensive assumption that people in space is necessary for a space program. sending bags of meat into space, in your lifetime, is nothing more than a display of vanity by the rich. its not real science, and it can simply be ignored by our public entities as a valid pursuit
but if you are really, really attached to the idea of meatbags in space, then go glom yourself onto the rich assholes with space fetishes wasting their disposable income on the conceit. but for the rest of us, enough with the boyhood fixations. let's roll up our sleeves and do easily achievable mass quantities of interplanetary science the best and cheapest way possible: probes. lots 'em. right. now.
Re:FAIL (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it's a little of both. There was a national prestige thing going on- AND they set goals, a series of planned dates, and then just did it.
Cargo Cult? Only to those that don't have any of the history at their disposal- and access to some of the people that were there while they were growing up (My Father and Grandfather...and I've got verifiable proof of some of the stuff I've been told over the years in their shop notes, etc...). And there is something to the complaints from that "cargo cult".
NASA's not the same org it was when the Apollo program was in full swing. The NASA that was in the Apollo era wouldn't have allowed a design like they deployed for the shuttle's solid fuel boosters to have been fielded in the first place. The NASA of that era wouldn't have allowed the launch in the case that it'd been deployed based off of concerns at the time instead of making the Challenger disaster. NASA's a decent enough org these days- but as one other poster pointed out, it's highly political- and things are much more about the politics than the engineering and science. This is at least partly due to dwindling budgets- in comparison to the current budget dollars allocated, NASA actually has nearly HALF the money it used to have available to it when the Apollo program was in full swing (32.106 billion versus the 17.912 billion adjusted to 2007 value dollars). You can't do as much with half the money. The fire is gone because of the lack of funds and politics.
In the end, it should be that we have what that "cargo cult" keeps asking for- whether it comes from the private sector or NASA. We just largely don't have it right now. That fire helped provide a lot of what you've got now and we're slowly sliding downhill as a result of not putting efforts into things like it- however they're done.
It should be observed to those around that there's actually a very similar situation going on right now with another country and the US- this time, instead of the Soviets, it's the PRC doing it.
that is pure fucking bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
a probe is merely an extension of a human's senses
if you send a probe, a human being is still evaluating, deciding, and learning, just as if he were standing on an alien surface
yes, with a time delay for radio signals. as if whatever a meatbag is learning, deciding, and evaluating on an alien surface isn't also time delayed when being relayed back to earth! and how much more does it cost to send the guy instead?
think of the military guys sitting in a cubicle farm in nevada killing al qaeda assholes remotely from predator drones. why do you need those actual guys sitting in the actual drones? YOU DON'T! what are you gaining by doing it remotely? what are you losing by doing it remotely? THINK! drones are the model for space exploration in our lifetime: more bang for the buck, very little is lost, plain and simple
and what of the massive price reduction? sending 1 meat bag to mars=sending 100 probes around the solar system. why don't you see that the tradeoffs between meatbags and probes obviously and overwhelmingly balance out in favor of unmanned probes?
think of sending probes as the same as sending astronauts, but the astronaut is sitting in a room in cape canaveral using a probe to see, hear, feel, and touch FOR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS MONEY
why don't people see this? because of fan boy sci fi fantasies, that's why. everyone wants to be an astronaut. 5 out of the 5 million who want to be astronauts will actually get the chance. but with drones, 5,000 out of 5 million who want to be astronauts get to do real space science... remotely instead. so think of what your boyhood fantasies and your mental deathgrip on the "need" to send meatbags into space is costing you in terms of your real chances, in your lifetime, to do real space science
the fan boys have inculcated star wars and star trek as the only cognitive model that makes sense to them. you adhere to the idea of astronauts out of passion, not logic and reason. SOMEDAY, we'll go into space. and our probes will have, in the meantime:
1. decided the best place to go
2. made massive strides in science and technology
3. even set up the infrastructure and facilities waiting for our arrival
compare that with the emotional but expensive and impractical and limited idea of actually going there in person first. its poor strategic thinking
face facts: we only have extremely primitive spacefaring technologies. work with what you got, and resign yourself to the fact that firefly is centuries from now, and will never occur in your lifetime
you get probes instead. work with what you got. if you instead waste your resources on investing in the idea of meatbags in space instead, you will satisfy some sort of atavistic fantasy life, but you will also see far less discovery and far less science in your lifetime, because the simple truth is that your financial and technological resources are limited
it really is a no brainer: no more astronauts. stop wasting your time and money on that conceit, please
Re:One of the best apologies I have ever read (Score:3, Interesting)
". All they've been doing for the last 40 years on that front is delivering animations of ships and missions that never pan out and holding press conferences about how *one day* we're going to the moon and/or Mars (promises which get pushed back every few years). The cancellation of Constellation was just a tacit admission of what anyone with eyes, ears, and any memory at all has known for a long time."
It is called surrender.
We did have Skylab which was big leap in Space station. Did you know we have a second Skylab? It is sitting in Washington DC. You can go see it. We also have another Saturn V to launch it.
We had plans to launch it and make in an international space station. With visits not just by Apollo but the Soviets and eventually the Shuttle. The Shuttle was going to fly to it and Skylab a and refuel them and add to them. This was supposed to start in the 70s.......
I really don't like giving up. We stopped work on the X-33 because things got hard. We didn't go forward with DC-X. We didn't build the Shuttle-C heavy lift vehicle.
We built and tested very large monolith solid rocket boosters before we built the Shuttle with it's segmented SRBs that took out Challenger.
Heck we even built and tested the F-1a engine that made even more thurst than the F-1 in the Saturn V but never flew it.
Frankly I didn't like the Ares 1 It reminded me way to much of the P-75 Eagle from WWII.
What I had hoped for was a new Saturn Ib inspired booster using a single F-1a for the first stage with a J2 based second stage. Maybe even an aerospike motor eventually.
Of course using modern materials and electronics. With the F-1a in production it would have been a logical step to build a Saturn V class vehicle as well.
I would have even been happy with a modern updated shuttle with the thermal protection system from the X-33!
But yes I am ticked and I fear we as a nation are lost.
And to those MORONS that say. Things are bad here and we should fix things here before wasting money on space. WE FREAKING DID THAT STARTING IN 1970!!!! DID IT HELP! REALLY DID KILLING NASA IN THE EARLY 70s MAKE ANYTHING BETTER!
Not from what I have seen!
stupidity makes me angry (Score:3, Interesting)
and it is obviously fucking stupid to send a meatbag into space instead of 100 probes for less money
i'm angry because i am seeing less scientific discovery in my life time because some macho posers have boyhood astronaut fantasies
i think my anger is justified: are you passionate about space exploration? then why aren't YOU angry at this stupid obsession with meatbags in space?
YOU are seeing less space science in your lifetime for the sake of a chest thumping conceited vanity, so get angry if you care about space exploration and science
Re:Money and Sales (Score:4, Interesting)
The sales guys don't even have to expend effort to redirect money in their direction: they get obscene commissions on the sales they make, sometimes on top of high salaries.
More accurately, it comes down to skill sets - sales people are good at convincing other people to do what they want. This is a good skill to have when negotiating salaries and benefits.
Engineers and scientists work in factual reality, which is a disadvantage in these situations. (Particularly if you're negotiating with sales-types.)
Re:stupidity makes me angry (Score:3, Interesting)
i think my anger is justified: are you passionate about space exploration? then why aren't YOU angry at this stupid obsession with meatbags in space?
I am passionate, which is why I work in the field and study the design issues at hand before ranting like some lunatic religious idiot trying to sell Jesus or Mohammed or whatever. Because well thought out, rational, developed thinking is what is required to do any amount of space exploration. Not batshit insane preaching on the internet like a fucking used car salesman.
As for why I am not angry about manned space exploration, because so far nobody has every demonstrated that manned exploration is, indeed more cost for less science than unmanned. Putting people in space is expensive, but, arguably, you get more science out of it. The only stupid obsession and chest thumping going on right now is the actions you are partaking in yourself, declaring loudly and proudly to anyone stupid enough to listen, that you have this great idea that just has to work because you said so.
You're a zealot, an idiot, and an all around butt-fucking crazy person. If you seriously want to understand spacecraft design, please read some of the other, rather lengthy posts I have put up in response to you previously. I even provided some nice references for learning spacecraft design. I hope, however, you learn to STFU before you know something of substance regarding the subject you are talking about or else you are never going to be taken seriously.
I, for one, am not wasting anymore time reading your unfounded lunatic bullshit. You've been absolutely disgraceful to both science and engineering if you think this kind of ranting is in anyway productive, useful, or realistic.