Obama Backs New Launcher and Bigger NASA Budget 391
The AAAS's ScienceInsider confidently reports that NASA is in line to receive $1 billion more next year. Reader coop0030 sends this quote: "President Barack Obama will ask Congress next year to fund a new heavy-lift launcher to take humans to the Moon, asteroids, and the moons of Mars... The president chose the new direction for the US human space flight program Wednesday at a White House meeting with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, according to officials familiar with the discussion. NASA would receive an additional $1 billion in 2011 both to get the new launcher on track and to bolster the agency's fleet of robotic Earth-monitoring spacecraft."
Re:Hopefully (Score:3, Informative)
Should be plenty of room to fit 'em all. You don't need a lot of payload, they'll provide their own forced-hot-air heating system until the oxygen runs out, and you want to make that mercifully (*) quick.
(*) for us, not them.
Re:MORE FUNDS?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Saturn V (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of the blue prints no longer exist. Most of the original engineers have died off. There were a lot of issues that arose during design and construction that were largely undocumented. My stepfathers father as one of the designers of the saturn V's first stage.
Re:Saturn V (Score:3, Informative)
There's also the fact that a lot of parts used back then are long-EOL.
As I understand it, Constellation recycled many of the key mechanical aspects of the old Apollo-era designs, because they Just Plain Worked.
However, the avionics have to be pretty much designed from scratch, for two reasons:
1) Nearly all components used in the past are no longer available
2) Modern electronics can achieve far greater performance at a fraction of the power/weight
3) Modern space missions have significantly more requirements in terms of communications capability and such
Re:LIKE WE DID ANY BETTER. (Score:4, Informative)
It must be noted, for completeness, that the Republicans have had control of the government for two years of the last 40.
It should also be noted that the Democrats haven't produced a single balanced budget in the last 40 years.
As to Reagan's budgets, one might remember the Democrat mantra during the Reagan years as regards the Federal Budget - "Mr President, your budget was DOA in Congress".
Re:Smart move (Score:3, Informative)
Franken was portraying JFK's real-life science adviser, Jerome Weisner, who was vehemently opposed to manned spaceflight, going all the way back to Project Mercury.
You may not care for Franken, but the attitude portrayed was accurate.
Re:MORE FUNDS?! (Score:3, Informative)
The thought of Palin as President turned a lot of people off.
It made me wonder about McCain's decision making abilities.
Re:Hopefully (Score:3, Informative)
"we passed the recovery plan free of earmarks" - B. Obama, Feb 24. speech to congress.
"new higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight. We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert projects without review." - B. Obama, Jan 6. statement at transition office.
Being against earmarks and pork is sort of Obama's trademark, and you can find dozens of instances where he mentioned something about ending earmarks.
Re:Hopefully (Score:3, Informative)
Your pejorative, and erroneous use of the word "socialism" betrays your bias.
Re:New Heavy Lift Vehicle - From TFA (Score:3, Informative)
"Big news today was SpaceX winning the NASA CRS contract for an initial $1.6 billion, representing 12 flights to the International Space Station starting in 2010." - http://www.spacex.com/updates.php [spacex.com]
Re:New Heavy Lift Vehicle - From TFA (Score:5, Informative)
I checked Spaceflightnow, [spaceflightnow.com] SpaceFellowship, [spacefellowship.com] and ParabolicArc [parabolicarc.com] and couldn't find anything but a parent of the original ScienceInsider article. Google doesn't reveal a whole lot at cursory glance either. Hell I don't even see anything on NASA's own website. If anyone digs up some particulars, please post some links, I would be very interested in seeing them.
Also, offtopic, but for those who say Slashdot is behind the news release cycle and doesn't post breaking news, considering it just posted a story that 4 other space news websites haven't picked up yet, I'd say you've just been proven wrong =P
Re:LIKE WE DID ANY BETTER. (Score:4, Informative)
Um, that would be over 30 of the last 40. Remember those first five years of the Bush II Presidency, when the Republicans controlled Congress, too. And Bush didn't issue a single veto... the whole machine was just rubber stamping anything the Repubes wanted. That's were about half the deficit came from. The other largely started with Mr. Reagan. Before that, there was a little bit left over from WWII. A tiny drop in the bucket, by today's standards.
Also, Clinton did produce a balanced budget. It took some years of doing to get there, but he did. It was, of course, immediately trashed by the Bush Administration.
-1: Strawman (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of folks were uncomfortable with the deficit spending under Bush. Even leaving that aside, and leaving aside the bank bailouts, stimulus, and auto maker bailouts of the past year, the Obama budget deficits will be significantly greater than the largest Bush deficits:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/03/21/GR2009032100104.html [washingtonpost.com]
Note how *none* of Obama's deficits will be less than Bush's deficit of '08, by the White House's own admission, and how the Congressional Budget Office thinks their numbers are too optimistic.
Re:MORE FUNDS?! (Score:5, Informative)
1/15th is 6.6%, parent is outright lying.
And as mcgrew says, war is easier to not have than... Old people? Sick people....?
Re:Article makes no sense (Score:4, Informative)
They were supposed to, but they didn't. They developed a new solid rocket motors for the ARES-I. They're developing new engines, new solids, new tankage, new upper stage engines (as well as needing new crawlers, and nwe launch pads) for the ARES-V. About the only thing that's reused from the shuttle (or so I've read) is the system that ignites the solids.
Re:LIKE WE DID ANY BETTER. (Score:3, Informative)
That any Republican or so-called conservative can complain about a Democratic deficit with a straight face is beyond me, when our party has not produced a single balanced budget in 40 years and ushered in the mega-deficits under Reagan.
Republicans fail when it comes to budget cutting.
You must be forgetting about the GOP Congress in the 90s that had some balanced budgets.
Re:Article makes no sense (Score:5, Informative)
Don't discount the fact thsat the SRBs were Man Rated
No they're not. There's no man rating for the Shuttle and hence, for its components. As a first stage (renamed the "solid rocket motor" or SRM) of the Ares I, NASA still has to figure out a crew escape system that can escape from a SRM rupture (it's faster and hotter than equivalent liquid stage ruptures, hence requires a better escape system than the current design). That escape option is required to man rate the vehicle (using the current standard which is of course, subject to change at the whim and convenience of the NASA leadership).
By reusing the SRBs from the shuttle they were supposed to be able to rely on the safety record of the SRBs and get a new vehicle put into production far faster than a built from scratch new vehicle.
The irony here is that the SRBs aren't that safe. They have a historical failure rate of 1 in 250 or so. Yet the Ares I's SRM is claimed to have a failure rate of something like 1 in 3700. So how do they get that, when their first stage has a demonstrated failure rate more than ten times worse than the rate they claim for it?
Further, the choice wasn't between Ares I and a built from scratch vehicle. It was between a variety of Shuttle derived vehicles and the EELVs, Delta IV Heavy and Atlas V Heavy. The latter two are much further along in development than anything else and comparable in safety and cost (even using the flawed ESAS as your guide). The Delta IV Heavy even flies now.
Re:MORE FUNDS?! (Score:3, Informative)
You've fallen for one of the classic Washington Beltway tricks. This chart is for "Discretionary Spending," in other words, the spending the Congress gets to decide on every year. The military budget is required, under the Constitution, to fall into this category. On the other hand, it represents less than 1/4 of the overall 2009 budget, which includes all the programs that are required, by law, to be automatically funded each year, including all of the social programs in the United States. If we take into account that the budget for 2008 was about $3.2T, and for 2009, will approach $4.5T, then we have an estimate that the entire discretionary spending (about $1T) is only going to represent about 22% of the total budget. If the Military is 60% of that, then it represents about 13.2% of the total budget.
So, maybe the 6.6% is wrong (although it's correct for direct Military spending, not including the items you added) but it's still not 60% like you claimed either.
Be careful when you read budgeting numbers from Washington, because they like to hide behind the discretionary term, while bemoaning the fact that they can't do anything about the "non-discretionary" budget items. Which is utterly untrue, of course.
Re:New Heavy Lift Vehicle - From TFA (Score:3, Informative)
To me SpaceX seems to be more of an airline that builds it's own planes then a NASA supplier like Boeing and Lockheed.
Ironically, the Air Mail Act of 1934 broke up the original airplane manufacturers from the airlines they built. For example, Boeing Air Transport became United Air Lines. North American Aviation owned what became Eastern Air Lines.
Re:Simpler? (Score:3, Informative)
OK, true enough. However, the conclusion (it's only 3%, obviously that's not enough to do anything) is not only wrong, it has no scientific basis. Since when is it scientific to just say "oh that's a small number, can't be significant?" Seems to me a good starting point for "significant" would be "exceeds the ability of the ecosystem to absorb the increased emissions."
Feel free to dance around your Kool-Aid jug if it makes you feel better.
Re:DIRECT (Score:1, Informative)
The Augustine Commission did evaluate the DIRECT 3.0 Jupiter rocket, but there were many problems with their analysis. Here are just a few:
1) The had Aerospace Corp only evaluate a single configuration, the Jupiter-241. Thus, the Jupiter-130 was not evaluated for its performance or how long it would take to develop.
2) The DIRECT plan develops the first stage of the Jupiter rocket first, allowing it to be used for LEO much earlier than other options while the Jupiter upper stage is still being developed. This would allow us to use the Jupiter-130 for ISS missions before it splashes down into the ocean, unlike Ares I. Unfortunately, this part of DIRECT, while briefly hinted at in the final report, was never evaluated.
3) DIRECT Jupiter was considered a three-launch system because it couldn't lift as much as two Ares V Lite rockets using two launches. Nevermind the fact that two Jupiter rockets lift more than the Program of Record (Ares V + Ares I). In other words, the Augustine Commission moved the goal posts.
4) Shuttle-Derived launchers (including Jupiter) were considered to be less safe than an Ares V Lite for manned launches. This is almost entirely the result of the additional maneuvers resulting from the extra launch they require. At the same time, the reliability of Shuttle-derived technologies and the extra engines on the Ares V Lite don't seem to have been factored into the safety analysis at all.
Re:MORE FUNDS?! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MORE FUNDS?! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure how "[Biden] makes Palin look like an Oxford Scholar" can be modded insightful. I will agree that Biden makes the odd gaffe but he is unquestionably better informed. He has chaired senate committees on the judiciary and foreign relations which will have exposed him to a whole gamut of issues that Sarah Palin may not even have conceived of. Let's not confuse willful ignorance with an otherwise intelligent person getting caught with their foot in their mouth from time to time!
Disclosure: Note that I'm not American and don't have a particular interest in either the Republicans or the Democrats. From where I sit both parties do little to effect any real improvement over the status quo. And I think Obama has done little to back up his rhetoric of hope and change from the election campaign