Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Government Mars NASA Space United States Science

Former NASA Chief On US Space Policy: "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" (arstechnica.com) 171

Posted by whipslash from the washington-we-have-a-problem dept.
An anonymous reader writes: During a congressional hearing Thursday, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin had harsh words for the space agency and the space policy crafted by President Obama's administration. Under the Obama administration's guidance, NASA has established Mars as a goal for human spaceflight and said that astronauts will visit the red planet by the 2030s. However, a growing number of critics say the agency's approach is neither affordable nor sustainable.

On Thursday, Griffin, administrator of NASA from 2005 to 2009, joined those critics. The United States has not had a serious discussion about space policy, he testified, and as a result, the space agency is making little discernible progress. NASA simply cannot justify its claims of being on a credible path toward Mars, he added.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Former NASA Chief On US Space Policy: "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" More

Former NASA Chief On US Space Policy: "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget"

Comments Filter:

  • Money will return once China lands on the moon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Friday February 26, 2016 @02:48AM (#51589901)

    China, Europe or India have to put people on the moon to relight US population's push to get back to the head of the race.

    Until then, it seems simply too hard to get enough political support.

    • China, Europe or India have to put people on the moon to relight US population's push to get back to the head of the race.

      No, it won't. Not only is the Space Race long over, the political conditions that lead to it no longer exist, and the general public of the US never supported the race that much in the first place.
       

      Until then, it seems simply too hard to get enough political support.

      Apollo only had political support because JFK took a bullet to the head in Dallas. And even then that support barely lasted two years before the budgets started getting slashed - by the time we actually landed, the program was already running on vapors.

      • Re:Money will return once China lands on the moon (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Friday February 26, 2016 @06:42AM (#51590461)

        A good indication of how public feeling was fading was that Apollo 13 wasn't going to be televised during the lunar approach, and doubts were being had about the landing itself.

      • Apollo was also backed by a legislative genius name LBJ. His "small" role ensured there would money for the 10 year investment (actually 6 years); and expenditure IIRC would amount to 4-5% of the national budget per year (US federal budgets were really small back then...).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          If only he hadn't tied himself to the Viet Nam conflict. When Kennedy died we had, IIRC, 52 military advisors on the ground. And that whole imbroglio yielded NO promise of national advantage that I've ever been able to detect. The way it worked out there was certainly no advantage. ... Unless you count the ending of the draft, which allowed the govt a relatively free hand with how it used military force. *I* count that as a negative, but I can see why some might think it a bonus.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Nutria ( 679911 )

      Now that we've discovered how (1) incredibly harsh that outer space is, and (2) stunningly expensive it is to supply everything that we take for granted here on Earth -- from the downward force needed to keep our bones from cracking and our eyes from exploding, to the UV shielding that prevents us from (a) toasting and (b) going blind, and radiation shielding so that our sperm still works, and we don't die of cancer before having the chance to use it -- to the air, water and food all around us to the fuel a

      • What you're saying, then, is that China will get a colony going first, whereupon (Trump | Sanders) will accuse them of "cheating" somehow.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Maritz ( 1829006 )
        As far as I can tell, your point is 'outer space is a harsh environment for humans". Well done you. You raised a point and it was correct. It was a completely facile point, yes, but you've got to start somewhere.
    • I don't think Europe would trigger our competitive instinct. India, maybe a little. China definitely would.

  • Americans are just not in the mood to pay for humans on Mars, unless somebody finds a cheapo way to pull it off.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Mike Frett ( 2811077 )

      Yeah but we are in the mood to drop bombs on children and pay taxes to spy on everybody. Just imagine if we spin all that into a positive and put our efforts, instead, on the cosmos.

      • Yeah but we are in the mood to drop bombs on children and pay taxes to spy on everybody.

        No, we're not.

        Power-hungry government morons do that. We peons have no choice in the matter.

        Technically, we could replace those morons with someone else. But the current presidential race proves that our only choices are either morons or liars.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Maritz ( 1829006 )
      You don't need it to be cheap, you just need there to be brown people there that you don't like.

  • "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Weirsbaski ( 585954 ) on Friday February 26, 2016 @03:07AM (#51589963)
    "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" ?

    You know, that third one might be the cause of the first two...
    • "No Vision, No Plan, No Budget" ? "You know, that third one might be the cause of the first two..."

      You know the first two might be the cause of the third... NASA publicity would have us all believe that a major Mars mission is just a small step up in difficulty from landing on the Moon, despite the fact that most of that Apollo expertise is aging and dying AND the fact that NASA hasn't done squat outside of LEO in 40 years (manned flight, of course). Nevermind ROI, people just want to believe that the

  • What more could one expect taking guidance from the commander-in-chief.

  • I thought its priority was muslim outreach with bit of "earth science" on the side.

  • Sad state of affairs and how we got here (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26, 2016 @04:32AM (#51590169)

    Before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, the Apollo program was already winding down. NASA had purchased the final Saturn IB and Saturn V rockets and Apollo spacecraft. As much as President Johnson supported NASA, he valued his Vietnam war and his "Great Society" programs, including his "War on poverty" even more.

    When Nixon walked into the oval office, he inherited the space program of JFK, the man he believed had cheated him out of the White House in the 1960 election. Every success of the program that landed a man on the moon in Nixon's time was attributed to JFK and LBJ, and this probably made the deeply flawed man even more insecure. The Apollo13 incident occurred on his watch and his administration was certain that it would be blamed for any fatalities, so they wanted NASA to stop the missions that went to places where rescue was not possible. The number of moon landings was cut on top of the Johnson cuts and hardware was re-purposed for safer Earth-orbit uses like Skylab and Nixon's Apollo-Soyuz. Nixon approved the space shuttle program but selected the least-expensive-to-develop option (reusable orbiter on the side of the stack, boosted by 2 SRBs). There were designs that would have been cheaper and safer to OPERATE, but cost more to develop including one that flew inline atop a Saturn V 1st stage, one that flew mated to the side of a manned fully-reusable flyback booster, and others - but as a typical politician he picked the one that would look best on the books during his time in office.

    Ford ignored NASA. He was focused on the post Watergate mess. With NASA in an R&D and building phase, there was nothing there to provide him with the photo-ops that all politicians crave, and as a congressman from michigan with barely enough IQ points to play football and who'd been appointed VP (rather than being elected) and then elevated to President (again, without an election) he lacked any sort of mandate to do anything.

    Carter ignored NASA. He inherited a program with no available spacecraft, and poor non-human-rated Launch Vehicles and with no desire to do anything with NASA he just neglected it. NASA just used the Carter years to quietly push ahead with the money congress provided to do the development of the shuttles.

    Reagan loved NASA, embraced the Shuttle program including showing up at Edwards to welcome one of the early missions home. He called for a winged single-stage-to-orbit "national aerospace plane" to be developed to eventually replace the shuttles, called for a permanent American space station (which he named "Freedom") and ordered NASA to plan to eventually transition shuttles to commercial service like an airline with private sector operators. When Challenger exploded, he made sure the congress provided the funds to build a replacement orbiter. Unfortunately, with political problems in his last two years, his attention was elsewhere and he lacked the political power to get his higher priority items funded and still have the clout for the NASA items. The Space station and NASP were both funded, but not to the levels needed. Both survived his administration, but not with much inertia.

    Bush41 had been involved with NASA during the Reagan years (it's customary for the VP to be involved with NASA) but seemed tepid. He is famous for saying that he just did not get "the vision thing". On the 20th anniversary of the moon landing he announced a "Space Exploration Initiative" to return to the moon, then move on to Mars, but rather than doing it on a pile of new money like Apollo, he proposed a pay-as-you-go pace .... then he never funded it, and he was booted out of office after only one term. in the middle of his one term, Bush appointed Norm Augustine to run a committee, which recommended ending human exploration beyond Earth orbit.

    Clinton seems to have taken no real interest in NASA (presumably it did not help anyone but Astronauts "get the chicks", so it was of little use (yes, I'm joking here)) but his VP Gore did appear genuinely interested. Al Gore championed the X-33 demonstration vehicle to be a pathfinder for a private-public partnership on a larger single-stage-to-orbit "Venture Star" to replace the aging shuttles. There was apparently little support in the administration or congress so the project was dumped as soon as it hit trouble, this was probably one of the worst missed opportunities in the history of NASA. The Clinton administration also cut-back the space station and then invited the Russians into the project, in-part to keep their top aerospace people busy doing something other than proliferating ballistic missile tech to every tin-pot dictator on the globe. This may have been a good geopolitical move, but with the new smaller and less-capable station dependent upon Russian modules for critical functions, the name "Freedom" became unacceptable, so it was renamed to "Space Station Alpha" briefly before being renamed again to the "International Space Station" (ISS). The continual budget starvation for NASA led to many of the core elements of ISS which were part of the justification for the facility being abandoned (including most-sadly the Centrifuge Accommodations Module) and left to rot on the ground.

    Bush43 mostly neglected NASA and like most presidents have done he let congress provide the cash to just keep it bumping along. After the loss of Columbia, he ordered a study to determine if we should be risking the lives of astronauts on mundane missions to low Earth orbit. The study concluded that we SHOULD have astronauts and SHOULD ask them to risk their lives, but only on actual exploration. This led to the "Vision for Space Exploration" (VSE) which was a well thought out plan to return to the moon and build a permanent base there before then moving on to Mars. The congress, in a bi-partisan way, approved the plan but with many vested interests in defense contractors who were involved with the shuttles, mandated that the implementation of the plan re-use almost all the elements of the shuttle program. What resulted was the "Constellation Program" (which many critics confuse with the VSE) which Mr Griffin ran. Constellation program haters blame Griffin for the project, apparently presuming he should have ignored congress and gone in some other direction contrary to the law. As usual, NASA was given a mission, but then ordered to do it with the slowest and most expensive vendors on Earth and then not given the funds in needed to implement the plan. As a result, while the program slowly marched forward its schedules were always slipping. A side effect of the VSE was that ISS was down-sized again in an effort to rush to call it "complete" so the orbiters could be retired to protect the politicians from any possible public outrage over more dead astronauts. In another moment of stupid short-sighted loss, the X-38 space station lifeboats were cancelled even though they were better managed and performing closer to budget and schedule than nearly any program in NASA history. The US thus became permanently dependent upon Soyuz capsules for lifeboat functions. One bright spot was that Griffin started the program to transition to commercial resupply of the ISS, without which SpaceX would not be what it is today, and without which the Obama administration would have had no path to the "Commercial Crew" program it now brags about.

    In 2007 President Obama campaigned on many themes, but one that got little attention beyond its target audience of unionized teachers was his promise to delay all NASA activity by 5 years and transfer the money to K-12 education. This was a HUGE change from the traditional neglect of NASA and flat budgets to open hostility and big cuts. His first budget as president eliminated the Constellation Program, eliminating all funding for manned spaceflight other than Americans commuting to ISS on Russian rockets - and all the early activity of his administration at KSC and JSC was designed to make sure the shuttle program could not be restarted, by demolishing facilities and ordering partial disassembly of the orbiters (none of which are now still completely intact - they've all been stripped of essential systems and all are displayed with dummy engines). Obama appointed Norm Augustine to run a committee, knowing what he would recommend, and then used the resulting recommendation to try to end human space exploration. Congress was outraged and wrote the current SLS program into LAW to force the president to keep building a version of the large Ares V rocket of the Constellation Program (though it is now called "SLS") and the Orion spacecraft. The president and congress have however been using NASA as the rope in a 7 year long political tug-of-war game. For the entire duration of the Obama administration, NASA's web site has been decorated with all sorts of "Mission to Mars" and "we're going to Mars" articles and artwork, even though officials have repeatedly testified under oath that they have no such plans and have offered no budgets for such a mission. Congress has regularly found the administration slow-walking SLS and Orion, and the administration keeps trying to use the fight to force congress to lift all spending caps in the federal budget. The Obama administration knows that multiple launches of SLS would be needed in quick-succession for a Mars mission (because cryogenic fuels boil-off quickly on orbit, limiting the HOURS a stage can be on Earth orbit before it has too little fuel for a lunar or Mars departure burn) and that this requires multiple launch pads (which require refurbishment between launches), but they are only setting up to build one SLS rocket every other year and have leased one of its two possible launch pads to SpaceX and allowed SpaceX to make that pad permanently unusable by SLS or by any other rocket. Their actions have made a mission to Mars within the next 20 years highly unlikely. These years will likely be remembered like the Carter years as a period of no US manned space flights, but a time when NASA slowly marched forward building a new system that originated before the administration.

  • Soo (Score:1)

    by Kartu ( 1490911 )

    Well, with major program put on shelves:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    I don't really know whom to blame, Obama, for sparing money on it (NASA's budget is roughly 18 billion $, which is about 0.5% of the federal budget) and effectively stopping the program, or NASA, for Constelation program being behind schedule and much more costly than planned.

    Probably more of NASA's fault.

    Anyway, as far as I get the recommendation of the committee::
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    goes, the plan is to skip the Moon (as

    • I don't think there's really any single person to blame. Given that the kind of research needed to do achieve kind of substantial manned space flight objectives outside of LEO takes many years, NASA is always going to be hamstrung by the changing winds of political support. As a few have mentioned, the Apollo program owes a lot of its success to the fact that Kennedy died in an extremely public and sympathetic manner, and had already lost most of its political support even before Armstrong set foot on the
  • It's kinda like a war, isn't it? Oh wait.. that is affordable and sustainable. /sarcarsm

  • No vision? Well, arguably NASA has served its purpose; founded to "beat the Commies" after Sputnik "terrorized" the USA by orbiting over it, and then the Sovs. got the first human in orbit, NASA was successful in beating them to the moon. With a bit of help from some ex-nazi scientists and engineers...
    An amazing achievement, but it was always a "because it's there" kind of thing.
    Kennedy's remarkable "we choose to go to the moon" speech made no mention of establishing permanent moon colonies; that was neve

  • It is my understanding that NASA is essentially denied the ability to make any money off of its innovations. Maybe if they where allowed to do that they would have been able to supplement a decent part of their own budget over these past decades.

  • wow, this is super interesting.

    iff it proves to be the case that the same event causes G.W. & G.R.B observations and there is a relationship that connects the speed of the two arrivals,
    like in an earthquake's P&S waves, this is a whole new tool to trace events in the cosmos, as they occur. Combining with an extra handful of observations points,
    it would be possible to easily find the source point via triangulation, at distances which are mind-glowing (pun intended!). Good luck with this - literally!

  • In this case "no vision for putting a manned mission on Mars in the foreseeable future."

    I know "politics" is a dirty word for most nerds, but if you want to spend the hundred billion taxpayer dollars that the optimists think it'll take to mount a manned Mars mission you should at least do them the courtesy of convincing them it's a the best use of their space science money.

    "I want to go to Mars at any cost," isn't a vision. Taking a few half-assed first steps toward Mars in the hope that future admistrators

  • That explains the Obama Administration to a "T"!
    • Maybe if we didn't have two pay for two wars, two recessions, crumbing infrastructure and tax cuts by W, we'd have the money for Mars...

      • Two recessions? I just remember a really long one that's lasted most of his administration.

      • Two wars became 3. Two recessions became one long, extended one (with record numbers out of the workforce because of a lack of jobs). And our debt still skyrockets - nearly $1 trillion in the last 12 months. Yep - no vision, no plan, no budget (remember the first 4 years of the Obama Administration, and the complete LACK of a Federal budget, just continuing resolutions by Reid and Pelosi and Obama?)

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Yeah, let's just ignore the fact that was because of a certain right wing party refusing to do anything, and blame it on Obama.

          Moron.

  • NASA broke the ground for us, but their day is over. Nobody has gone past near-earth orbit in 40 years. Let's not relegate our space exploration to a risk-averse government bureaucracy, paid for by taxes. Elon has the right idea.

Slashdot Top Deals

The last person that quit or was fired will be held responsible for everything that goes wrong -- until the next person quits or is fired.

Close