Will America's Next President Change Its Space Program? (bloomberg.com) 134
America's next president takes office in three weeks and two days. What changes should he make to America's space program? An opinion writer at Bloomberg tackles the question:
Donald Trump badly wanted to be the president who sent Americans back to the moon. Instead, his administration has presided over Artemis, a lunar-landing program plagued by "uncertain plans, unproven cost assumptions, and limited oversight," according to a new watchdog report. Pieces of the program, including the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, are billions of dollars over budget, years past deadline and poised to eat into NASA's more promising projects. As a result, the U.S. space agency will almost certainly miss its goal of landing Americans on the moon again by 2024. President-elect Joe Biden inherits the task of deciding what to do next.
- He should focus on what has made the U.S. space program distinctive in recent years: the power of private competition...
- The government bears all the risk of missed deadlines and rising costs. A more efficient alternative is fixed-price contracts, in which a company keeps as profit whatever's left over after it completes its assigned task. Beginning in 2006, NASA has used such contracts to boost the development of private space companies capable of reaching the International Space Station. The initiative has worked far better than anyone could've expected. In a 2011 report, NASA expressed bewilderment that SpaceX, then a young upstart, managed to develop its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for just $390 million — as opposed to a likely cost of $1.7 billion to $4 billion under traditional cost-plus assumptions. Today, the rocket delivers hardware and astronauts for companies and space agencies around the world. Come January, the Biden administration should take a similar approach to the troubled Artemis system. Step one should be eliminating SLS and Orion altogether in favor of cheaper private-sector alternatives....
Currently, there are a number of Artemis elements being developed under fixed-price contracts, including future lunar landers. The new administration should use a similar approach with as many aspects of the project as possible, thereby harnessing the efficiency and inventiveness of private competition.
- He should focus on what has made the U.S. space program distinctive in recent years: the power of private competition...
- The government bears all the risk of missed deadlines and rising costs. A more efficient alternative is fixed-price contracts, in which a company keeps as profit whatever's left over after it completes its assigned task. Beginning in 2006, NASA has used such contracts to boost the development of private space companies capable of reaching the International Space Station. The initiative has worked far better than anyone could've expected. In a 2011 report, NASA expressed bewilderment that SpaceX, then a young upstart, managed to develop its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for just $390 million — as opposed to a likely cost of $1.7 billion to $4 billion under traditional cost-plus assumptions. Today, the rocket delivers hardware and astronauts for companies and space agencies around the world. Come January, the Biden administration should take a similar approach to the troubled Artemis system. Step one should be eliminating SLS and Orion altogether in favor of cheaper private-sector alternatives....
Currently, there are a number of Artemis elements being developed under fixed-price contracts, including future lunar landers. The new administration should use a similar approach with as many aspects of the project as possible, thereby harnessing the efficiency and inventiveness of private competition.
Needs another Kennedy speech (Score:2)
Kennedy's famous speech not only set a clear, lofty goal, it created an environment where future governments were inclined to support those goals as well.
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Will you do it because it's easy?
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Re: Needs another Kennedy speech (Score:2)
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You go to the moon because it's the first stepping stone to the rest of the universe. 99.infinite-9s percent of all of the resources in the universe are OUT THERE, if Homo Sapiens doesn't want to go the way of Homo Neanderthalis then that's where we need to go.
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You go to the moon because it's the first stepping stone to the rest of the universe.
No, that's orbit. The Moon is a pain to land on and take off from, and there are plenty more resources elsewhere, often at a lower delta-v budget due to the aforesaid landing/taking off.
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Sure, but you need to learn how to access them first. Humans made wooden rafts first, their first nautical expeditions weren't carried out on the Queen Mary.
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It's a pain to land on, because we've not built a landing pad. A few days of sintering with an orbit based laser is all it will take. Then you build a platform, to keep you out of the regolith, and burrow underground. That part isn't even rocket science.
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It's a pain to land on because you need powered descent. Atmospheres (except for shit ones like Mars') are good for landings. Bad for liftoffs, but good for landings.
Just think of how convenient Earth or Venus would be if there were a big-ass plateau poking out of the bulk of the atmosphere on which a mass driver could be built.
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The Apollo program made extensive use of contractors.
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And so did the Shuttle program. The question is which contractors, ie, whose district. I think the phrase "political boondoggle" fits.
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And those very same contractors (North American Aviation now part of Boeing, Grumman Aerospace now part of Northrop Grumman and others) are wasting taxpayer money on useless crap like SLS.
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What is needed is a clear commitment and $, speeches are easy.
Bush 2 and now Trump both set dates to put a man on Mars/Moon. And everyone, even at the time it was being said, knew they were just blowing wind. I also thought Regan and Clinton said something about sending men to the Moon or Mars too, which again was never committed to.
If any country will do something like that, it will probably be China, since from where I live, at least they can make commitments.
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Every president since 1988 has declared that the US is going to send men to Mars, but not a single one has ever budgeted the money to do so. (Yes, Congress approves the budget but the Executive proposes it and uses their political capital to preserve the items they want.)
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Everyone needs to chill a bit, there has been a big change of direction in space vehicle technology, that has caught them all on the hop. Bringing a lot of their existing technology to and end mid development to be replaced by new changes to space technology now in development. They all want to keep their cards close to their chest to get a jump on the other guy who they fear they have fallen far behind.
The wanted an arms race and they got a most unwelcome drone race (as it undermined a lot of existing huma
Re: Needs another Kennedy speech (Score:2)
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Yeah, problem is that Trump is only capable of speeches which are baffling, insensible, or infamous.
Biden is only capable of speeches which are rambling, mostly besides the point, and frequently go nowhere.
So are we expecting Harris to become president and then say something inspiring about space? Or will we have to wait more than four years for the next chance?
Re:Needs another Kennedy speech (Score:5, Insightful)
That wouldn't fly today. Back when Kennedy was president, we had a very different political and media environment. Television had 3 channels, which were owned by CBS, NBC and ABC. News on these chancels were limited to 1-2 hours a day. So for the masses who watched him on TV just got Kennedy high points vs. those who read multiple news papers at the time where they may get a more objective view. News on the TV Stations were mostly just a public service announcement and the News got in the way of Prime Time Television viewing. However having news on TV help justify its existence as a service and not a luxury.
Today they are 24 hour news stations and web sites, that need multiple updates a day. To keep peoples interest they need to make sure the news follows some sort of narratives for many who want to be on the news will be happy to try to play the part of one of the narratives.
For example the Conservatives "War on Christmas" where Liberals are trying to kill Christmas. or the Liberals "Attack on the poor" where the conservatives are blaming the poor for abusing the system, where they just need to go to work.
They will be people willing to play the Hero and Villon just to get exposure. Usually members of the House of Representatives, who are elected by a smaller local community, thus can be more politically radical than the Senate, or State Governors.
These news stations want conflict, and will try to make some where it may not really be an issue. Because that is what brings in the viewers.
If a modern president tried to do such a speech. There will be commentary that will point out how it was just propaganda, and how it offered little substance, and just chearleading, and redirect the focus on the points they dislike about the president.
Old News was just propaganda without much diversity.
New News is mostly just entertainment just to keep you watching.
Neither really helps informs us on what is really going on. As they are normally exaggerated to nearly cartoons of the actual events, and people.
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The Kennedy speech worked in no small part because it gave the US a clear way to beat the Russians who at that point were the leaders in the space race.
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Unfortunately the motive was never uncovered. I expect we will probably portray Lee Harvey Oswald to be whatever boogee man we currently think is making the world such a bad place. Just as we also See Kennedy and Lincoln as the best of us, while they both had major problems, that would probably make them difficult to elect in today's culture and media
let's be clear (Score:2)
"...program plagued by uncertain plans, unproven cost assumptions, and limited oversight..." ...Could be describing the entire US manned space program since Apollo.
The program has been really a failure since then, resulting in expensive, nearly pointless white elephants like the iss and space shuttle.
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It could be describing ANY Federal Program in the past few decades, period.
The US government is not known for any huge, efficient successes really.
They should be used only sparingly for things that just cannot be done on any other scale for the most part.
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WTF are you on about?
SLS is a multiple-administration disaster (Score:3)
When the Obama administration trimmed back the Constellation program and left SLS targeted for a vague asteroid return mission, I asked here how SLS differed from its Constellation counterpart, and received the perfect answer: “they painted it white.”
I’m all for going to the moon, but not by trying to force-fit SLS and Orion into the program; they’re obsolete before they launch, if ever, and they’re only still alive because of one Sen. Richard Shelby.
Profit vs. Safety (Score:1)
Re:Profit vs. Safety (Score:4, Interesting)
If a private company loses an astronaut, It's an industrial accident. When NASA loses an astronaut, It's a national tragedy.
This is exactly why the NASA rockets are so high over budget. They cannot fail because if they do, expect executive heads to roll and at least two years of congressional disaster inquiry investigating the disaster.
Because they cannot fail, NASA Rockets are extensively over engineered and cost exponentially higher than their private counterparts. It's also why you see more innovation in the private sector because NASA wants to play it safe with proven technologies rather than experiment with better but possibly more volatile designs.
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If a private company loses an astronaut, It's an industrial accident. When NASA loses an astronaut, It's a national tragedy.
We haven't yet seen what the national response will be the first time a private company loses an astronaut.
I am guessing that it will trigger a very large amount of recriminations and finger pointing.
This is exactly why the NASA rockets are so high over budget. They cannot fail because if they do, expect executive heads to roll and at least two years of congressional disaster inquiry investigating the disaster.
Yep.
Because they cannot fail, NASA Rockets are extensively over engineered
Depends on what you mean by "over engineered". If you ignore the fact that when NASA fails there is a much larger outcry than when a private company fails, and so you hear about NASA failures more, in fact NASA engineering has an absolutely amazing success record.
Saturn V launched 13 times and never f
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If a private company loses an astronaut, It's an industrial accident. When NASA loses an astronaut, It's a national tragedy.
We haven't yet seen what the national response will be the first time a private company loses an astronaut.
Michael Alsbury would like to have a word with you, but he can't, because he's dead. He died in the 2014 crash of SpaceShipTwo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . There were investigations, and criticisms - but the program continued after required improvements were made.
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It's a law of nature (Score:2)
Re:It's a law of nature (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the stupidity of allowing a herd of lawyers masquerading as congresscritters to run an engineering program.
Re:It's a law of nature (Score:4, Interesting)
The USA (along with other countries) is run by lawyers for the benefit of other lawyers. Politics 101 or didn't you take the class?
Lawyers pass laws that keep other lawyers in employment until it is their turn to go into politics who will carry on the theme.
How else do you think that the Blue book of US Federal Codes got so thick? (the same applies at the state level)
The sooner that there are laws passed limiting the number of lawyers in any parliament, congress etc the better.
A wider range of talents would be better for everyone apart from the lawyers.
Come the revolution, the lawyers will be close to the top of the list of enemies of the people. At the top are the Politicians who are either Lawyers or Bankers.
Pretty much each one does (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't recall Nixon or Carter or Reagan significantly changing the trajectory on which Kennedy had put the space program.
In my opinion, the Biden administration should concentrate on getting NASA back to doing science and not become a political cartoon of "Put a man on Mars". Sending meat up in space won't achieve much for the near term. It would rather they let the science catch up to launch capabilities.
Re:Pretty much each one does (Score:5, Informative)
Then your memory isn't very good. There were three more Apollo missions completely bought and paid for, astronauts trained, hardware delivered and even fuel purchased, when Nixon cancelled the last three. Then he and Ford handed the Space Shuttle to the Pentagon for a complete redesign and gave Congress carte blanche to assign where the pieces were to be built and by whom. Carter ignored the gutting of NASA's budget, and Reagan made NASA take on the burden of most of the Air Farce's R&D and launch military payloads for no charge.
Not Kennedy's trajectory at all, which would have seen the opening of the first permanent lunar colony in the mid-'80s.
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Not Kennedy's trajectory at all, which would have seen the opening of the first permanent lunar colony in the mid-'80s.
Yeah, not so much. If Kennedy had lived, most likely he would have canceled Apollo himself.
Kennedy, Before Choosing the Moon: 'I'm Not That Interested in Space' [theatlantic.com]
Re:Pretty much each one does (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't recall Nixon or Carter or Reagan significantly changing the trajectory on which Kennedy had put the space program.
Are you kidding? Nixon decided that the risk of losing an Apollo mission wasn't worth the benefit, and cancelled Apollo 18, 19, and 20.
The Agnew commission had recommended that the next step would be a mission to Mars, supported by a space station with a re-usable launch vehicle; Nixon cancelled the mission to Mars, cancelled the NERVA program to develop the engine for a Mars mission, and said space station or re-usable launch vehicle, pick one.
That was a major change in direction.
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Even JFK was trying to change course. A few months before his death he was calling for the USSR and USA to work together on getting to the moon.
Artemis has the stated goal of 'sustained access'. (Score:2)
For this, you get about 5 moon landings, spaced on average a couple years apart.
And after that five, new ones are going to cost you about 3 billion dollars each.
NASA spent several hundred million dollars making a welding machine that took many more millions to get working after it was built wrong to do SLS.
They spent well over a billion
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Spot on. Another fun comparison is that the RS-25 engine you're talking about is going to be something like $146 million per, used once, and dumped in the ocean.
From SpaceX you can get a fully built Falcon Heavy for like $160 million in expandable configura
Betteridge's law of headlines: no (Score:5, Insightful)
This is beyond the President's power. Congress allocates the money, and dictates how NASA spends it. The SLS, to name the most ridiculous example, is clearly nothing but a program to put money in all the "right" Congressional districts. It's long past the point of absurdity - the program should have long since been cancelled. Yet it trundles along, a "cost plus" program that is unlikely to ever deliver a single successful mission.
The President stop the pork? Sadly, not possible. Anyway, your President-elect is himself a career politician, with zero motivation to change the system.
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When we have a "normal" President, they negotiate with Congress over what money gets allocated where. That's one of Trump's basic failures - he doesn't put in the work. He just tweets.
Ditto with the pork - if the President (and to some extent his party) want to spend the political capital, the pork ends. That's been basically the problem with US spac
Bewilderment? (Score:2)
In a 2011 report, NASA expressed bewilderment that SpaceX, then a young upstart, managed to develop its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for just $390 million — as opposed to a likely cost of $1.7 billion to $4 billion under traditional cost-plus assumptions.
#1: Here is what I want you to do. Money is no object, charge me all you want, as long as you are actually doing stuff related to the project and file the paperwork for it.
vs.
#2: Here is what I want you to do, and that's the money I am giving you.
What bewilderment? How would #1 be anything by vastly more costly than #2? The price difference would be proportional to the shamelessness of a corporation and for-profit corporations are well known for their shamelessness, government contractors even more so.
Cost
Would Biden get rid of an Obama-era program? (Score:3)
Most of all, it seems the author is looking for a change in how contracts are written - fixed price instead of cost plus. That's a great idea overall - it would fix some ridiculous issues with how the government pays for things - but it would be a radical departure from the status quo that would piss off a lot of influential companies and powerful industries. There is no way Biden would go for it, and I doubt the necessary legislative changes would even hit the floor, let alone pass without a President spending some political capital.
It's not a new idea though. In the end, this author is a Johnny-come-lately, unknowingly hopping on a bandwagon Newt Gingrich started last year - https://www.newsweek.com/trump... [newsweek.com]
I wonder if his opinion piece got posted on /.
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It was a "reality show-style plan", because neither Gingrich nor the rest of his party had any intention of actually carrying it out. They and their financial backers make far too much money on the system as it, they're not going to kill the golden goose just because it's the right thing to do.
Will the Biden administration slow SpaceX down? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will the Biden administration slow Elon Musk's SpaceX down?
SpaceX has certainly been on a roll recently. The company’s Falcon 9 has been very busy, launching a probe to measure the rise of the Earth’s oceans, another batch of the Starlink constellation, and a planned cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS) in less than two weeks. SpaceX became the first private company to launch people into space in 2020, most recently four new crewmembers to the ISS.
SpaceX is creating a great deal of excitement with its development and testing of the Starship rocket in Boca Chica, Texas. A prototype of the Starship, the SN8, has been scheduled for a test flight of 15 kilometers. The test of the vehicle, a stainless-steel tower with fins and a nose cone that brings to mind more Buck Rogers than Neil Armstrong, may have already happened by the time this article goes live. Elon Musk suggested one in three odds that the SN8 would land intact.
However, according to space journalist Robert Zimmerman, not everyone is excited about the prospect of a private company launching giant rocket ships from south Texas. Government regulators both in Texas and on the federal level may want to start slowing SpaceX down.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) originally granted environmental impact approvals for the Boca Chica space port when SpaceX was still planning to launch Falcon 9s and Falcon Heavies from the Texas Gulf Coast. However, since then, SpaceX has turned Boca Chica into a test facility for the Starship/Super Heavy spacecraft. Environmental regulators have raised concerns about how launches and landings of the new SpaceX rocket ship could affect wildlife and nearby ecosystems.
Thus far the FAA, the regulatory agency responsible for overseeing commercial space launches, has suggested that current tests of the Starship have or will meet “all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval.” Apparently, this is not the case for full suborbital and orbital flights with the Starship/Super Heavy system.
The Starship, a reusable rocket that would be capable of taking 100 tons of people and cargo to the moon and Mars, would be launched by the also reusable Super Heavy first stage. The combined flight vehicle would be the largest, most powerful rocket ever built.
The FAA is working with SpaceX to draft an environmental review of its plans to make Boca Chica a space port for the Starship. The FAA has declared that, “The proposed update to Starship/Super Heavy operations falls outside of the scope of the existing final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision for the launch site and requires additional environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).”
President Donald Trump has a decidedly business-friendly approach to government regulations. He was, after all, a builder in a previous life. He has long experience in dealing with government bureaucrats to get permission to construct his hotels and golf clubs. Furthermore, the Trump administration has a keen awareness about what sort of a national asset the SpaceX Starship could be.
The incoming Biden administration is likely to have a more traditional view of government regulation. It will regard regulation as a necessary function to keep private business in line, to make sure that it doesn’t take advantage of the environment in pursuit of profit.
As a result, under President-elect Joe Biden, the alliance that the government has with SpaceX is likely to end. Government will assume its accustomed role as an adversary to the commercial sector. SpaceX will likely be required to go through the environmental impact process all over again. The process, as Zimmerman suggests, could take years.
Absent government red tape, Musk hopes to have his Starship operational in a few years. A version of SpaceX’s rocket ship is a candidate for NASA’s Artemis Human Landing System competition for a return to the moon. Musk expects to
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He was, after all, a builder in a previous life.
Yeah, too bad he came back as a money launderer and con man in this life.
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Will the Biden administration slow Elon Musk's SpaceX down? ... ] ... ]
[
The FAA is working with SpaceX to draft an environmental review of its plans to make Boca Chica a space port for the Starship. The FAA has declared that, “The proposed update to Starship/Super Heavy operations falls outside of the scope of the existing final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision for the launch site and requires additional environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).” [
Well, Starship is significantly more powerful than Falcon Heavy, so a new impact assessment does seem reasonable. Here's hoping it passes.
But SpaceX might not need to launch from the land they have near Boca Chica. Musk wants to eventually launch multiple Starships per day. Which is one of the reasons that Musk has been talking about doing ocean launches for Starship. Boca Chica is on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
The program will be changed soon. (Score:2)
Rocket (Score:2)
It's an old political trick -- cancel the previous administration's NASA projects, take the loot bonus now, and avoid having to be Nixon standing there as Kennedy's initiative pays off some day.
Then start your own. Rinse and repeat.
That's how we got stucn in the current situation, relying on Russia for launches. Cut the shuttle, close down any large rocket projects, and rely on paying Russia and Russian scientists (so they don't get into the black market goodies business).
This was all well and good until
The US Space Program is inherently unstable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Because while the parties agree that the space program should be supported, they want fundamentally different things from it, and indeed are hostile to each others' priorities. Every time the presidency or Congress changes hands, expect NASAs priorities to shift in incompatible ways.
Republicans are interested in space for reasons of national security and prestige. Think Space Force and manned Mars landing. Democrats are interested in space for environmental and science purposes. Think climate monitoring and robotic planetary science missions. This is why Republicans who were hostile to Obama's plan to privatize the next Moon landing are more enthusiastic about privatizing the International Space Station. Privatizing the next moon landing would gain the US less national prestige but privatizing ISS gets rid of spending where national prestige has to be shared.
The battle lines between parties are always there, but they shift by generation, and back in the Apollo era the battle lines weren't drawn so squarely through NASA's priorities. We were locked in an international soft power struggle with the Soviet Union in which the Soviets painted liberal democracy and capitalism as outmoded, so the technological prestige of having the best space program paid real Earth political dividends. Also, anti-science types weren't particularly influential in either party, although they were concentrated in Democratic Party factions that have since been coopted by the Republicans.
2024 (Score:2)
Pretty sure Trump will return in 2024, with all his loony supporters and negativism ... so he might still have a chance of landing people on the moon during his administration.
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Thank you for that negativism.
Always weirdly phrased (Score:2)
Come January, the Biden administration should take a similar approach to the troubled Artemis system. Step one should be eliminating SLS and Orion altogether in favor of cheaper private-sector alternatives....
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, their illegal ULA collusion, and all of the usual suspects are private-sector companies. None of them are owned by the government. Private citizens pocket the profit from all of them.
Private-sector contracting for the government does not magically solve anything. As has been pointed out repeatedly, every year for the last decade, SLS/Orion/Artemis are fulfilling their purpose perfectly. Their purpose is to funnel money to specific congressional districts. Building functioning,
Corporate welfare (Score:2)
Since Trump preferred giving welfare to corporations and rich people, paid for by poor, while Biden tends to give welfare to poor, I'd say yes.
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Having proven that you had no clue what President Trump supported or what Biden has supported through 40yrs of getting rich on a $170k/yr salary, I'd say your opinion is worthless.
The wealth gap GREW during Obama's administration.
The wealth gap SHRANK during the Trump administration.
Those are the simple facts. Why do you hate science?
The failure of Trump. (Score:3)
"Donald Trump badly wanted to be the president who sent Americans back to the moon."
He could have been too... But the basic failure of his Administration is that he never put in the work. He signed an Executive Order and went golfing. He never understood that the necessary next step was submitting a program to Congress laying out the plan and requesting the necessary budget authority. (Which is pretty much true right down the line, with all his legislative programs, he completely and utterly failed to put in the work.) Sure, he'd have to horse trade with Congress, giving some of what they want to get what he wanted... But (as he completely failed to grasp), that's how things work.
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You could rephrase what I said was "failure to supervise" or "failure to follow up", and you wouldn't be wrong at all. It's still all a part of the same overall pattern. He doesn't do the work.
SLS sucks, but is Orion any good ? (Score:2)
We can all see that SLS is going to be obsoleted by Spacex's Starship, but are there any reasons to keep Orion going as an alternative to Crew Dragon ?
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Dragon's backup is Starliner, not Orion, and vice versa. With the issues Starliner is having, you might want a company other than Boeing building that backup, but with the issues Orion is having, it doesn't look like there's a strong argument for Lockheed being that company (the first Orion to fly on SLS isn't flying with its complete life support system, and is flying with a known failure in its electrical system because it was designed in such a way that fixing it would take a year). Orion would also be i
Bloomberg & Senate Launch System (Score:2)
First, people should be wary of any story touching politics and run on Bloomberg, given that Bloomberg is the company of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg and the organization announced last year [cnbc.com] that it would not do negative reporting on Democrats during the 2020 primary but would continue hammering Trump. This meant half a year of totally partisan politics from a "news" org.
Second, there's a reason critics of the SLS rocket nicknamed it the "Senate Launch System" many years ago: The la
Nothing will change (Score:2)
The congressmen and senators who's districts benefit from the waste of money that is SLS and Orion will continue to force NASA to spend money on those projects (to keep their constituents happy)
Private companies who don't need to care about constituents (SpaceX for example) will continue to work on projects that actually move towards putting people on the moon, Mars or elsewhere.
Biden may be able to make some changes but unless he can convince Congress to stop wasting money on pork barrel projects like SLS
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It should, but it won't (Score:2)
There are plenty of things that should be changed about the way the US space program is handled (no more cost+ contracts, streamlined administration, hard deadlines, etc), but they definitely aren't going to change under the administration of a career politician. The current NASA administrator has made some progress, but I'm not hopeful his replacement will continue those efforts. We'll likely slide back into a lethargic, bloated agency more focused on running childrens education programs and launching ov
Re:Biden's pretty spacey so maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama canceled the idea of returning to the moon and Biden should do the same. There is little scientific value to putting people on the moon. There may be a military motive but even that is not clear. Machines can do whatever needs to be done there.
The success of SpaceX is not just due to fixed-price contracts, although that is a good idea. SpaceX has a "fail early, fail often" approach to development that only recently has attracted notice from NASA administrator Bridenstine. Elon Musk favors building the "minimal functional" prototype and testing it to failure. Old Space (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman) try to design perfection the first time. Of course, that's expensive and usually does not work. So their real plan is to continue to collect NASA money and not really ever launch anything. That's why SLS is so expensive and will probably never launch. There is also a political motive since Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama has blocked more sensible plans in order to funnel development money to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
Success is the product of failure (Score:5, Insightful)
...SpaceX has a "fail early, fail often" approach to development ...
^
I think that this is under-appreciated in the community. You learn by doing.
NASA has been put in a position where they are told "failure is not an option."
Failure should be an option; if you're not failing, you're not trying new things. Success is the product of failure.
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Since the Pentagon has refused to go into Venezuela for four years what makes you think they'd agree to a takeover of DC?
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The pentagon has already stated they are staying out of it. The national guard and unorganized militia (technically every male between certain ages and without disability but in practice several thousand organized boyscouts with guns groups across the country) are more than enough to get the job done. The Constitution gave the authority to call them up to congress and congress passed a law passing that authority to the President in times of emergency and/or insurrection.
Who do you think all those guys with
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Damn, now I've got tea in my keyboard. Your UID low enough that my only conclusion is that you must be really, really stoned, since you're old enough to know better otherwise.
Re:Biden's pretty spacey so maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Machines can do whatever needs to be done there.
Machines can't LIVE on the moon, or colonize space, which is the whole frelling point of having a space program in the first place. Sure, knowing what it's made of and how it formed is cool, but that's not the actual reason for going and never has been.
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Colonizing space doesn't mean landing on the Moon. In fact, given how little value there is to the Moon, and the difficulties of living there (dust, long nights, little water, enough gravity and too little atmosphere making landing annoying, no appreciable resources aside from a lot of oxygen, aluminum, and silicon, radiation shielding, and a little gravity), there is little reason to colonize it.
We're probably better off with large space stations, which can be parked in orbit anywhere that's convenient.
Re:Biden's pretty spacey so maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're going to build a space station then the raw materials for the first few are going to have to come from the moon. Earth's gravity well is too deep to drag anything that doesn't absolutely have to be manufactured here, and asteroid mining is beyond our current capability. The moon is a good first step for a number of reasons, such as being nearby, gravity making plumbing function logically, an abundance of useful resources like oxygen, silicon and aluminum, etc. The Wright Brothers Airplane Company didn't start out making jumbo jets, they built rickety wood and fabric biplanes for years. In order to do something complex, and building a space colony is the most complex thing currently imaginable, you first need to learn **HOW** to carry out the initial steps in the process before you can proceed.
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Why not robotic asteroid mining?
If you had ever worked in a factory or mine you wouldn't ask. We're just learning how to do this, the systems are going to need constant poking, prodding and repair through the first couple dozen revisions. Stuff is going to wear unexpectedly and break without any obvious reason, stuff that worked in the test lab on Earth will refuse to function, stuff that shouldn't be a problem will be. Once we can do it reliably in vacuum and low-G then we can try it at 0-G. In the meantime others can be figuring out
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Why not robotic asteroid mining?
For the same reason we don't have fully-automated mines, refineries, and factories on Earth. Some stuff you just *can't* automate. A fully autonomous mine/refinery/factory would need a high level of AI that doesn't exist, and a level of self-manufacturing that also does not exist. Humans can solve problems that weren't anticipated, and humans can apply tools to make new tools to deal with those unanticipated problems.
Robots help with repetitive, known tasks. Humans deal with everything else. When a rover on
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In fact, given how little value there is to the Moon
How sure are we of this though? Do we know that there aren't actually large mountain size metal deposits under the surface? Asteroid mining is a tricky business (and probably not profitable for Earth) but getting materials from the moon to earth isn't that difficult with something like a mass driver. With decreases in launch costs, I could see the Moon being profitable depending on the density of resources and how accessible they are.
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but getting materials from the moon to earth isn't that difficult
Outside of finished goods or extremely rare materials, why would we ship stuff back?
The value of materials in space is chiefly that they are in space and don't have to be shipped up out of our gravity well and atmosphere. We don't particularly need or want them on Earth, especially given the primitive state of landing things.
For example, we make roughly 60 million tonnes of aluminum a year on Earth. Do you really want to drop 60 million tonnes of aluminum slugs on the Earth from the moon (plus reentry shie
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Machines can't LIVE on the moon, or colonize space, which is the whole frelling point of having a space program in the first place.
Says who?
The whole point of any country starting a space program has been to demonstrate to the world that it has the capability of building and launching ICBMs.
The point of historic manned "firsts" (and any future firsts) has been nationalistic flag waving.
The point of unmanned missions has been collecting scientific knowledge.
Living in space has no point. See: ISS. Permanent manned space missions are little more than expensive make-work welfare projects for geeks and flyboys. They sit around doing nothing
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So in your opinion Homo Spaiens is a dead end destined to go the of Homo Neanderthalis? Sorry, I disagree. The universe is waiting.
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The best way to lessen tensions between countries is to get their citizens working together. The colonization of space is a large enough project that a single nation/corporation will not be able to undertake it, but if (for example) the US and China were to undertake the project there would be a lot less sabre-rattling as a result.
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We will not have fully self-sufficient colonies on any planet for centuries.
Hundreds of centuries, if we follow your path. You do know that the first voyages to America began with useless trips to islands off the coast of Africa. Right? Ya' gotta drive if you want to learn to drive.
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Those trips were not useless. Europeans could immediately start exploiting the people and resources they found, and at very low cost to them.
They also weren't trying to justify their adventures with stupid excuses like "We're doing a backup plan for human civilization!". They were simply grabbing loot. There is no loot in deep space that is economically viable, now or in the foreseeable future.
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I thought it was useful trips all over the N. Atlantic, those Vikings got around looking for sex, slaves and loot.
If you're talking about the trips that Prince Henry the Navigator sponsored, they were looking for a mythical place, where Prester John was supposed to reign and where all the gold came from. The important part was those caravans of gold.
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Living in space has no point.
How could it, when living has no point in the first place.
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Just like Democratic Hopeful Adlai Stevenson, I have no objection to man walking on the Moon.
However the idea is one thing, while how it is implemented is an other thing. American's for the most part are above doing it just to show off that 'merica is number 1, and just doing this mostly just for propaganda reasons, like it was during the 1970's But it will need to be for more solid reasons, Military, Economic, and Scientific reasons. The 1970's Moon program was mostly just to show to the Soviets that A
Re: Biden's pretty spacey so maybe (Score:2)
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The anti human space travel crowd uses this same logic in their personal lives. Why leave mom's basement for the outside world which is so hostile to them and does not provide the immediate sustenance of electricity, internet and bags of Doritos? I mean with that logic you never get anywhere.
Humanity is like a fucking dog without a job, its bored and destructive, compulsively licking its anus, chewing its tail, fighting and digging up the back yard.
Going to space provides humanity with a focus beyond pett
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That makes sense as does going all-in on colonization with unmanned supply deliveries.
I'd also support a kind of "one way" trip that utilized the first ship to Mars as a long-term orbiter, with an excursion to the planet surface as mostly a brief, Apollo-style visit. This limits the necessary investment in surface habitation as well as providing a longer-term orbital spaceport for future ships. In something like this I would probably build two ships at the same time, one for long-term orbital habitation a
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Obama still kept all the lifter pork alive and so will Biden whether they keep a flimsy reason like the moon or just pork for pork's sake. He has had 40+ years to do something...
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"That, to me, is the biggest legacy [of the Obama administration] â" fully embracing the potential of commercial launch capabilities, and really, really making that a priority, and fighting for it against a lot of opposition from Congress," Dreier told Space.com. "I don't think commercial crew was fully funded at NASA until 2015."
Disagree (Score:2)
If there is a choice between the Moon or Mars then I agree, Mars makes a lot more sense..
However, I have recently been convinced that the Moon can also be worth while. The lack of many necessary resources and the abrasiveness of regolith on the Moon render it more expensive, dangerous and Earth-dependent than Mars.. However, their are rich deposits of metals from meteors and abundant sunlight energy -- far more than on the surface of the Earth. Imagine a railgun delivering foundry products or even entire
Re: Disagree (Score:2)
Re:Biden's pretty spacey so maybe bzzt (Score:2)
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The problem is that any major government space project has the life span of at most 8 years, and then a new president comes in and cancels it in favor of his own agenda. If you can't get to Mars within 8 years, you ain't goin'.
However, we can get to the moon within 8 years, and given that the moon isn't nothing, we're better off pursuing that and getting something accomplished there instead of initiating a Mars expedition that will end up getting canceled after umpteen millions of dollars have been spent.
El
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