Why Did It Take NASA a Decade To Get Back Into Space? (hackaday.com) 150
An anonymous reader writes: When talking about the nine year gap since America last flew astronauts with their own spacecraft, it's often said that NASA didn't have a plan in place when they retired the Space Shuttle. But the reality is a lot more complicated than that. NASA was working on a new spacecraft and rocket, and even made a successful test flight two years before the last Shuttle flight, but the program ended up getting canceled when the White House Administration changed.
A review concluded that completing the program "would cost at least $150 billion dollars, and even then, a return to the Moon or a mission to Mars in the foreseeable future was unlikely," according to the article. Money was instead allocated to private alternatives like Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spaceplane as well as Boeing's CST-100 Starliner -- though in the end it was SpaceX's Crew Dragon which would launch the next American rocket carrying American astronauts into space.
"The dark horse soundly beat the entrenched giants," the article concludes, "and the democratization of space has never been closer.
"It's hard to predict what the next decade of human spaceflight will look like, but there's no question it's going to be a lot more exciting than the previous one."
"It's hard to predict what the next decade of human spaceflight will look like, but there's no question it's going to be a lot more exciting than the previous one."
years of funding cuts! (Score:4, Insightful)
years of funding cuts!
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Good answer, if a bit terse... I would add bureaucratic inertia and corporate capture, along with a lack of political will which may be attributable to a lack of big, "visionary" human missions. Just going around in circles in the ISS isn't all that inspiring, compared to walking on other worlds.
But now that we're back to launching people -- or more precisely, now that launching people is no longer the exclusive domain of governments -- the future looks brighter than ever for space exploration and developme
Re:years of funding cuts! (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this article summary hilarious.
This doesn't represent the "democratization of space". If Elon Musk had to rely on the popular vote to gain power, he would have spent his life bagging peoples groceries.
This represents the complete and absolute opposite of the "democratization of space". This represents the victory of capitalism and private enterprise over democracy and state run enterprise in the arena of space.
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Re:years of funding cuts! (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole contracting model was broken, and enslaved (or itself inslaving) the giant bureaucracy that was NASA.
NASA was ordered to straighten up and slim down its bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy after that was deemed responsible for Challenger explosion in 1986, but there is no real evidence that it ever really did clean itself up.
Our latest successes were in large part due to another change at NASA, which emphasized private, and to some degree competitive, corporate efforts.
One of the benefits of that approach was bypassing much of that very overgrown NASA bureaucracy.
Earlier, it was a new Presidential administration which made the decision to divert money from the space program. What the summary does not mention is that it was planned to use that money on "social welfare" projects instead. The politicians said there was not enough money to do both, so they decided on the social programs instead.
Which is complete BS. Those b**ds in D.C. waste more money than the whole space program just about every day. It was never an either-or proposition.
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Re: years of funding cuts! (Score:3)
SpaceX would not be profitable, and would have no real path to profitability without massive government spending on both NASA and military satellite launches, both of which we could continue just fine without.
Nonsense. Commercial satellite launches would have given them "a path to profitability" without any government contracts whatsoever. They would, however, have needed to raise far more cash from investors, and it would have taken much longer for them to become profitable. They likely would not have had the funds to start Starship/Super Heavy development for many years still, and the Starlink project would probably be similarly delayed. I'm glad that NASA did contract with spacex; it has greatly benefited
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If SpaceX needed to be more profitable, they would bill just as much as their competitors bill even though it costs them a hell of a lot less since they're the only aerospace entity that has the capability of reusing first stage rockets.
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It's given us mostly unsafe Shuttles
There were 135 Shuttle missions. Prior to that there were 5 test flights. Out of those 135 missions there were only two catastrophic missions. There was one mission when it was questionable if the Shuttle would survive re-entry but it returned safely.
Out of the 135 missions, 833 astronauts were sent to space.Only 14 of those astronauts died in the process.
I'm not so sure I would call that a "mostly unsafe Shuttle[s]" program.
Re: years of funding cuts! (Score:2)
You're right, technically. "Mostly unsafe" would be if 50.1% of them blew up. But that's just silly. Obviously what he was trying to communicate is that based on the number of launches it was far less safe than any other manned space vehicle.
I loved the shuttle. It was an incredible vehicle. A marvel of technology, and absolutely fucking gorgeous. Every time I saw one launch it filled me with awe, and watching documentaries about it always brings a tear to my eye. Yet he's absolutely right; its safet
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If you contrast the Shuttle missions with the Apollo missions though it was a lot more successful. There were only 3 deaths during the Apollo missions but that was out of only 17 flights. This does not include the problems with Apollo 13 that didn't result in death but could be considered a failure by most. If the Shuttle missions were mostly unsafe then I guess the Apollo missions were an utter disaster (safety wise).
Space travel in general is "absurdly expensive" and the wastefulness is kind of relative (
Re: years of funding cuts! (Score:2)
If you contrast the Shuttle missions with the Apollo missions though it was a lot more successful. There were only 3 deaths during the Apollo missions but that was out of only 17 flights.
No, it was out of zero flights. All 3 deaths occurred on the ground before a single mission had flown, and the capsule design was changed due to that.
Out of 17 flights, Apollo had zero deaths.
Space travel in general is "absurdly expensive" and the wastefulness is kind of relative (it all depends on what value you put on the benefits). So far SpaceX missions appear to be less wasteful though.
"Appears to be". Uhuh. The Shuttle and the Falcon 9 have almost the same lift capacity, but the shuttle cost around $1.5 billion per launch while the Falcon 9 costs something like 50-70 million per launch. Just a teeny tiny difference there.
Even if you want to talk manned launches, SpaceX is charging NASA $200 mill
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It's not that simple either. SpaceX would not be profitable, and would have no real path to profitability without massive government spending on both NASA and military satellite launches, both of which we could continue just fine without.
We'd be fine without the F35 program, too, but that costs a lot more than using SpaceX.
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NASA and Space X need each other. If there's no market for what Space X is building then there's no Space X.
NASA on the other hand will be researching and developing things like rovers, space probes, satellites, telescopes, space stations, or planetary and lunar habitats.
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PopeRatzo snorted:
As long as it's still the government writing the checks, right? It's all "capitalism and private enterprise" until the bill arrives, and then it's still the taxpayers forking over the dough.
Wait, did you think that this recent SpaceX launch was funded by "capitalism and private enterprise"? Did you really not know it was entirely taxpayer funded?
Wait, did YOU think Bob and Doug, the astronauts SpaceX launched to the ISS were private citizens? Did you really not know they're both full-time NASA employees and members of the U.S. Astronaut Corps? And that SpaceX was paid a helluva lot less than Russia would have charged to launch them to the Space Station?
Yes, yes, I know you did. I also know that you failed to mention those facts because they don't support your point that SpaceX is somehow pretending that it did the launch as a publ
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Whether you agree with them or not there's long been a small contingent on /. which has basically declared that taxation = theft. If you want to go there NASA money is government money aka stolen money whether it's going to SpaceX or the Space Shuttle. Despite the satellite/Starlink business they'll always see the company as sucking on the government's teat. And they're not exactly wrong but well you could take pretty much the entire military sector, systems for the police, IRS and so on
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SpaceX does business with more than just NASA and other governments [wikipedia.org]. The government uses them because it's cheaper, just like the
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So were all the companies NASA contracted with to do the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, etc missions.
NASA has always used private contractors.
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Yeah it's capitalism and private enterprise. It was a company started and funded by private investors. NASA might do business with them,
It is more than that. SpaceX would not exist without both NASA and private funding. While they have now got the the point where they could survive independently, doing commercial launches, it required a lot of public funds to get here. Elon is quite open about that. Space exploration is a public-private partnership in the US, and has been since before NASA was created.
Re: years of funding cuts! (Score:1)
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Did you forget about the space shuttle? For me, it is the most impressive rocket ever built, fully reusable too, except for the external fuel tank. Its RS-25 engines are still best in class, and are expected to end up on SLS.
It didn't turn out as well as expected, the refurbishment costs were so high it ended up costing more than disposable rockets. But one has to realize it was 40 years ago and using cutting edge technology. Despite their cost effective re-usability, Falcon rockets are actually using a mor
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BULLSHIT
SpaceX's program has mostly been financed by the government, about the same way the government financed the entirety of the Apollo or Shuttle programs, all manufactured by private entities.
Re:years of funding cuts! (Score:4, Insightful)
More to the point, the NASA program was stuffed with too much pork to get off the ground. It's expensive to develop a spacecraft when the funding to do so is contingent on finding a way to award a contract in every single congressional district. IIRC, there was much grumbling when that no-name upstart SpaceX received funding. Not so much when the more pork compliant Boeing got a check.
Re:years of funding cuts! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is also the problem that the "sunk cost fallacy" doesn't work with political projects.
After Apollo, NASA proposed building a "space truck" that would dramatically reduce the cost to space.
The politicians bought into the vision and funded it.
Yet pretty quickly it was obvious that it was going to be extremely expensive, and that the original engine proposal was infeasible. It would need extra rockets and a liquid H2 tank strapped onto the side. Since cryogenic tanks shed ice debris, this was a terrible idea and was recognized as such at the design stage.
Yet the political buy-in was for a "space-truck", and since interest in space was fading, any attempt to say "we goofed" and change the plan would likely lead to cancellation or scaling back. So NASA chose to blunder forward toward disaster.
TL;DR: Politicians shouldn't make technical decisions.
Re:years of funding cuts! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, jobs (and money) for congressmen's home states are the reason the space shuttle was built and why the SLS is so very similar.
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The real story about the Shuttle was that the key requirements, and ultimately the design, came from the military (this why it had to be a fragile space plane instead of a ballistic capsule) even though it was built with civilian funds. It is well established that the DOD and National Reconaissance Office actually led the Shuttle design process. The military even build a launch pad at Vandenburg Air Force Base for military launches. The push to complete the program when budget and schedule problems arose al
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Film return surveillance satellites. At the time this has all going down, surveillance satellites needed to use photographic film to achieve good resolutions. Getting film back from surveillance satellites involved de-orbiting the film carrier and trying to catch it with a helicopter before it hit the ground (risky), and there was no way to restock a satellite with film (meaning you had to build them to a low enough price to be single-use)
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Yeah, by the time the Shuttle was in operation, not by the time it was being planned and put out to tender. As I already explained, digital photography advanced rapidly while the Shuttle was in development.
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And what funding they did have, was spent on a rudderless corporate welfare project called STS.
God knows how much money is being thrown into that pit, and we *might* launch 3 of them before just contracting it out to SpaceX and ULA on Falcon Heavy and Delta-IV
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STS was the space shuttle. SLS is the current boondoggle.
It seems that the MIC just got too good at siphoning money out of the government. It took SpaceX to come in with a different mentality, with a drive to compete with only small sips from the pork spigot, to actually get shit done.
I honestly don't see the SLS ever flying. Maybe 1 demo flight.
SpaceX is so incredibly far ahead already, and they're going to be even further ahead by the time SLS gets to the launchpad. And if the SLS has one setback....
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That and the two, yes, two, separate STS replacement projects that were both cancelled midstream.
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Yes, but no.
It was a deliberate decision to funnel the money into better endeavors than the Shuttle, because the shuttle was not a realistic solution for ongoing space exploration. The Shuttle had a good run, but it was over. Funding cuts in the late 90’s and early ‘00s did play a role, but that wasn’t the definitive reason.
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Not completely. The NASA budget has been essentially flat in terms of a trendline since 1971, though, fluctuating between $14B (late 70s/early 80s) and $24B (peak in 1991), most commonly around $18B-19B in constant 2014 dollars. With the most recent years going $18.8B, $19.5B, $19.9B, $20.7B, there's certainly no recent decrease.
Politics... Next! (Score:2)
State lolly scramble of contracts with no regard to sensibility or optimisation.
Will the Boeing manned craft (if it ever makes it) be affected by politics over SpaceX? SpaceX will be out in the cold if Boeing manage to get a working, if not expensive, system going; got to look after the donors...
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got to look after the donors
SpaceX is one of those donors. [opensecrets.org] And decades down the road they're just as likely to be as entrenched as Boeing. Those who forget history......
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Also, SpaceX operates in California, Texas, and Florida.
By numbers of Congressional representatives, they are #1, #2, and #3.
Washington is #13.
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Also, SpaceX operates in California, Texas, and Florida.
By numbers of Congressional representatives, they are #1, #2, and #3
Florida is more or less a requirement of orbital mechanics regardless of whether Congress is involved. Same goes for southern California. The closer you are the equator the more "assist" you get from the earth's rotation. Both of these also have easy access to ports, another necessity for heavy industry like building big rockets.
Texas is an inertial holdover from the Apollo days. It's not called "Johnson Space Center" just for kicks. LBJ was put in charge of the Apollo program. LBJ was from Texas. An
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Boeing is way behind SpaceX and their culture will not allow them to catch up.
SpaceX has a strategy of "fail early, fail fast" which means blowing up a lot of prototypes.
That philosophy is alien to Boeing's culture. They build expensive over-engineered systems funded with cost-plus contracts.
Re: Politics... Next! (Score:2)
SpaceX has a strategy of "fail early, fail fast" which means blowing up a lot of prototypes.
That philosophy is alien to Boeing's culture
Well, to be fair, there was the 737 MAX ....
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Boeing will die and be replaced by others.
I expect that Boeing is just biding their time until there is a momentary lull in the launch business. SpaceX will have to tighten their belts but Boeing is guaranteed government contracts for toilet seats at a few thousand a pop. Then Boeing will acquire SpaceX.
It's American government (Score:1)
Why are government actions slow and expensive? Why don't we just acknowledge that government actions will be slow and expensive and get messed up by politics and stop using government mechanisms to do things when there are other options?
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Re:It's American government (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are government actions slow and expensive?
Politicians what to launch big projects, but they don't want to raise taxes.
So they vote for big boondoggles but stretch out the schedule so the costs come due after they have moved on.
When the costs finally arrive, the new politicians don't want to raise taxes to pay for a project that they can't even take credit for. So they scale it back (discarding years of work) and make major changes (discarding more work) so they can "own" it. Since the design changes will take time, they then stretch out the schedule even more so they don't have to pay for it either.
This is called "Kicking the can down the road."
This is why NASA has accomplished little while spending billions.
It is also why America has $5 trillion in unfunded government pension obligations.
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I think you are right, but need to emphasize the "other options". part. I think industry is extremely effective at doing things where there is a clear connection to profit. There are some things, like research, where that coupling doesn't exist and then government is a better option.
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Okay. Let's eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Grandma really, really wants to come and live with you. We can kill off the FAA because airlines' accountants are very adept at figuring out the maximum number of causalities that will allow the airlines to still be profitable. We don't need the EPA either...turns out neither do the Republicans....a bit more mercury poisoning for everyone, one the basic ingredients to a healthy diet. And workplace safety overseen by OSHA? Safety schmafety, companies can lo
Because space is F'ing hard. (Score:1)
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Thats one effing good design if it was designed in the 60s and Boeing still cant match it 50 years later. Or to be more honest the name has stayed the same but Soyuz has evolved with the times.
Oh come on, it's not (Score:3)
Geez it's not rocket science. Oh wait....
USAF (Score:2)
Elon Musk was not obliged to subsidize the desires of the USAF. SpaceX could build rockets to achieve certain specific missions like shuttling back and forth from the ISS, and the laundry list of demands that the Pentagon would push through Congresspersons with aeronautics company interests in their district could be ignored.
But they still didn't "get back into space" (Score:1)
Elon Musk did. They're merely along for the ride.
Re:But they still didn't "get back into space" (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. NASA didn't "get us back to space".
A private company did the job.
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A job that was paid for by NASA. The only difference between this and the Space Shuttle is the amount of autonomy given to SpaceX.
For Commercial Crew, NASA basically said: we'll pay X per flight to the ISS, here are the basic safety requirements.
For the Shuttle, NASA (with Congress breathing down its neck) micromanaged everything and had to end up with subcontractors spread over all 50 states. Then the Government set a ceiling on R&D so NASA couldn't go for the vehicle they really wanted (a fully reusab
ignorant title (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA has had robotic and manned missions all along, with no gaps. Some people are fixated on the bus service?
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Yeah, and to make it worse, there is only even one bus stop!
With other missions going all over the system.
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ISS is a spacecraft and space station manned for 20 years which the USA paid almost all the money. We never left space, never stopped manned missions. All ISS expeditions had American.
Cost plus contracts (Score:3)
With cost plus contracts traditional NASA contractors have never had any motivation to be efficient rather they have every incentive to stretch programs as long as they can.
Senate Launch System (Score:2)
One tiny difference (Score:2)
SpaceX makes lots of money away from government (Score:2)
Once the taxpayers stop funding the private space companies
SpaceX is only funded in part, by contracts to do flights for NASA.
But what you Amy not have realized, is SpaceX is doing a lot of other flights for non-government entities. At this point SpaceX is easily a viable entity without any NASA contracts.
Beyond that SpaceX also has plans to bring in further revenue - both from Starlink, to activate later this year, to private point to point Earth travel which has the potential to be a MASSIVE business tha
Space Seals (Score:4, Insightful)
If SpaceX can offer on demand launch and delivery anywhere in the world in 2 Hrs the Marines will pay for the service. They dont have to get into orbit. Just be able to launch folks to sub orbit and have them land safely. Dragon can already do that. Launch 4 Dragons and you have a Seal team on the other side of the world in 2 hrs. Heck the Boat teams or submarines could recover the capsules.
Never gonna run out of money if you can sell to the military.
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Yes, it will be expensive. But there are p many cargos where worldwide delivery of a modest payload is useful. I anticipate that high bandwidth, secure data transfer will be a critical money maker. From Andew S. Tannenbaum, one of the authors of Minix:
> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Betteridge tells me the answer is “no” (Score:2)
But I really don’t see how that fits in this case.
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NASA still doesn't have any capability, so the answer starts with the word "no."
Sure, democratization... (Score:1)
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I think the author misspelled monetization.
To be charitable, I think the author meant commoditization but then had a thesaurus-fart.
Oh really? (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that "the democratization of space has never been closer", when in fact a billionaire is the person doing it, seems much more than a stretch. How democratic is one person saying what is going to happen? I don't understand how people think like this. You can say you love the idea that now we need billionaires to do big projects, but that has nothing to do with "democracy". Why not just say "the oligarchization of space has never been closer"? Sounds a bit more honest.
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The idea that "the democratization of space has never been closer", when in fact a billionaire is the person doing it
He wasn't a billionaire when he started SpaceX.
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Absolutely absurd argument. Billionaires did not get us to the moon, working people who worked hard and paid their taxes paid for it and the government implemented it. Your argument is ridiculous. I don't have a narrow definition of democracy, I have a functional one, whereas you think that if rich people can afford to pay Musk to get a trip into orbit that somehow democratizes space. You should think harder before you write. How many regular working people are going to get a trip into space? Hmmm? Yeah, th
Watched the launch and (Score:2)
Where are they going to go to? Maybe there was not a need yet.
We now have a somewhat viable way to start getting people in to space in increasing #'s but no where to go to. YET
We need to give commercial entities a bit of time to fix that.
Just my 2 cents
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There has been a need for decades. Various scientific research and manufacturing techniques require a manned space station.
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> And none of these "various scientific research and manufacturing techniques" are remotely economically viable,
Research is not necessarily _directly_ profitable.
Chip manufacturer and electrophoresis may be far more effective and provide better yield. But it's very difficult to pre-design the tools and techniques to complete them without an engineer or scientist there with the tools. Repair of equipment, rather than over-engineering it and expecting it to continue without maintenance raises the cost of
NASA Did Not (Score:3)
30 years o Space Shuttle waste drained NASA (Score:2)
There were many political, non-technology and non-engineering decisions that ruined the Space Shuttle program. 30 years of supporting that stunningly expensive boondoogle and pork barrel burdened program drained NASA of technologically competent and leadership capable personnel with decasdes, even entire professional lifespans of "Peter Principle" promoted bureaucracy.
NASA did some fabulous projects in that time, but it definitely was not worth the wasted investment to create a new Space Shuttle program. Th
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When we look across the influence of the Federal Government, we see individuals like Senator Shelby (Republican, Alabama), who basically controls what NASA can and cannot do by holding their purse strings.
I haven't seen actual evidence, so it's hard to say for sure what's going on, but the actions of Shelby look highly suspicious to me. Come to think of it, the "revolving doo
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> Do you think it was NASA themselves who were resistant to SpaceX, or do you think it was other, "established", NASA contractors?
Both. They have a large, multi-layered bureaucracy with many layers evolved after 50 years to protect their turf, not to advance space exploration.
Cost optimization (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem was fundamentally that NASA was acting like a business, trying to optimize costs by expanding on already-existing technology they had extensive experience with. That led to their systems being based off the existing Saturn series, the Delta rockets, the Space Shuttle. That led to the problem all optimization is subject to: local optima. That's where there's a nearby minimum or maximum and your solution locks onto that, ignoring a better minimum or maximum that's far enough away from your startin
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Business handles risk using mostly defined hard rules.
It is Politics and Government that is incapable of dealing with risks. Because everything is based on the politics. And politics is like jello, you can't build anything on jello.
I am very glad to see the commercial entities taking over in space.. Because human
NASA ossification (Score:3, Interesting)
My brother works in the aerospace industry for basically all the current players at one time or another. His take is complicated and nuanced to be sure but I can sum it up for you.
In the aftermath of the Challenger and Columbia vehicle losses the culture changed in NASA. They went from a goal oriented agency to a deeply, deeply risk averse one. Of course, space flight is a dangerous and unforgiving business, but this was much deeper than that. Managers were rewarded for making sure nothing bad ever happened. As they rose through the ranks, all the progress essentially ceased as no one would EVER put there neck on the line. Think passing around "TPS reports" as a management style (please get the reference) and you will have a good idea about what I'm talking about.
The reason SpaceX has succeeded so far is really because Elon Musk has a singular vision and is relentless in his pursuit of it. Now this presents its own set of problems as well (that is another and very lengthy discussion). But it has put us back in space. Oddly enough, President Obama takes some credit as well with the push toward a contract based setup rather than everything being done by the government. Which is kind of atypical for someone of his political persuasion of statism (at least in my mind).
I do not mean Elon Musk did it all by himself. He has (and has had) a very talented group of engineers around him who have made that rocket fly (and land!). Just that his goals are the driving force behind the effort (and frequently a source of much turmoil internally).
The problem now is one of scale. Building a rocket to throw stuff in space is hard, really hard. Doing it over and over again on a timeline is shockingly more difficult. This is the next major challenge to all the players.
Politics (Score:2)
This has been an issue since George HW Bush, in 1990, announced we would go to mars. NASA was so fucked up that every division wanted a piece of the action. They wanted to land in the moon and then re-launch to mars. And of all fucking things stupid, they didnt even design 1 rover design that works on both the moon and mars. The result was a 100 Billion Dollar price tag in 1990 dollars.
Read: - The Case for Mars - by Robert Zubrin
It will tell you everything you need to know as to why the NASA that brought u
Lots of stupid reasons (Score:2)
One of NASA's biggest problems is they have to make multi-year plans but have a yearly budget. They also have to appease Congress people from fifty states. They are additionally bound by the whims of Presidential administrations. So they make plans which get tweaked by Congress and then have to fight for the money to carry out those tweaked plans.
Another huge issue was the Constellation program was just plain stupid and wasted a ton of money and resources within NASA. The original concept of the CEV was a d
NASA never left space (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA never left space. They only stopped sending humans into space.
Sending humans into space is very expensive and risky. Sending robots is a lot cheaper and not risky. Why is it necessary to send humans?
I remember the Apollo missions. First few moon landings were exciting. Obviously Apollo 13 was scary. It was cool seeing astronauts driving around on the moon. But by the end of the program it became kind of routine. Okay, they went there, they picked up some rocks, they came back. Now what?
There was an expectation that it would lead to some kind of deep-space Star Trekkie kind of missions but the technology just wasn't there, and it still isn't there. As the probe and robot technology matured it became obvious you could do much more science by leaving the humans on Earth.
I like the SpaceX technology but it changes nothing with respect to our ability to send humans great distances.
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I think we could have continued toward the original, if not often spoken, goal of colonization of space. It would have been enormously expensive,in money and lives, but we could have done it.
Science is of course better done with robots, but that never really was the point of manned space. Colonization was itself the goal, not a means to some other end. Viewed by many as the natural next step for mankind.
Interplanetary manned missions, at least as far as Mars, would have been difficult, but not impossible
SLS is late because it's cancellation-proof. (Score:2)
It achieves this by spreading the work across over a thousand subcontractors, spread across 43 states. Cancellation would *inevitably* result in widespread job losses that Congress wouldn't stand for.
Contrast this with SpaceX which is highly vertically integrated -- almost everything is done in-house. Their ginormous Starship vehicle was supposed to be composite, but after running into problems with that that they said, screw it; it'd faster to build this thing out of steel.
If you tried that with SLS, it
Lost in space (Score:3)
NASA didn't do it. Space X did.
The incompetence of NASA has existed for decades.
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Wrong, the International Space Station has been manned for 20 years and USA paid for the vast majority of it, and every expedition had American. We've been doing manned missions all along, and NASA has many achievements in the exploration of the solar system that dwarfs all other space agencies.
There is no notion of NASA not being in space, that's just ignorant talk of people fixated on the taxi service to the ISS.
Re: We were in a massive recession... (Score:5, Insightful)
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People didn't want their health care messed with. Dems messed with it. A decade later the price of that action is still being paid and Dems still haven't learned any lessons.
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You mean the ACA which was a wet dream for the insurance companies and modeled on Romney's, that health care?
And health care was previously a Xanadu of happy people all busy enjoying their healthy lifestyle. Of course if you didn't have a decent job, your health care was the ER. One ER bill would sprout legs and chase you the rest of your economic life until you died or declared bankruptcy.
I think the difference is we don't have to remind (Score:2)
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and, oh heck, lets thrown in Pelosi a well.
Is that you Yoda?
Yagshemash, this Borat! Throw the Pelosi down the well, and we'll set my people free, ...
Re: (Score:2)