Nicely stated opinion.
On July 21, 1969 what kind of odds could you have gotten by betting someone that in 2010 we would be talking about ending the manned space program?
I suspect people have discussed ending the manned space program about every year between 1969 and 2010, for about the same reasons we’re discussing it now. It’s expensive and has few obvious returns.
Actually, the Apollo program was being severely curtailed circa 1968 with regard to future missions, and by the close of 1970, Apollo 18 and beyond had been canceled and Saturn V production halted. (S-IC-13 was used for the first stage of the Saturn INT-21 that launched Skylab into orbit; only two other S-ICs were in production and they never went through full acceptance trials.) Richard Nixon saw no value in the manned space program, and only aerospace interests that were a large corporate benefactor in his home state of California persuaded him to provide tacit support for the Space Transportation System (Shuttle).
It is true that the manned space program has little scientific return and (despite efforts to attribute certain technologies to the program) essentially no commercial benefits to date, it does have both the prestige of being a member of that exclusive club, and the eventual advantage of developing the technology and methods of indefinite habitation in space. There are plenty of other efforts supported by the government that have no immediate fiscal benefit, and indeed, one can assert that the business of government is doing that which it is not profitable for commercial business to sustain itself.
Stranger
First of all, the cancellation has nothing to do with the deficit or the recession. NASA’s budget is actually being increased.
I reluctantly support this change. I was as big a supporter of the Moon/Mars vision as anyone, and I still think some kind of goal is necessary to focus development and force engineering compromises. I’ve been on too many projects with weak requirements to know that doing engineering without a use case and a goal is a prescription for bad designs and budget bloat.
But unfortunately, the Ares program was a mess. It was probably a bad decision to use a solid fuel rocket for astronauts, and by the time they worked through all the issues the vehicle was severely compromised.
I’ve always said that I only supported NASA taking on manned space flight because there was no commercial market for it, so government was the only game in town. But now there’s a market for it in the ISS, so it makes perfect sense for NASA to subcontract that out and let the private market take over. And that’s what pleasantly surprised me the most about this budget - the explicit support for private enterprise, including apparently a deal with Bigelow aerospace to test their inflatable modules for the space station.
NASA should do what the market can’t. That means advanced space engineering, propulsion research, planetary exploration and the great telescopes. Now that there’s a regular supply run to space requirement, let private industry take over. This budget appears to encourage that.
In the best-case scenario, this could wind up being an event similar to the U.S. government giving up the airmail service - the point at which a real industry starts to mature. In the worst-case scenario, it turns out to be way too expensive to be profitable, and the whole manned space economy collapses when ISS is decommissioned. But it’s worth a shot, because NASA’s track record is starting to look a little shaky.
Please, o please let the CEO’s son be a hotshot pilot nicknamed Duece thats trained and hired to “service” the ISS. Headlines can then read “Duece Bigelow-Space Gigalo”.
I take issue with this claim. I saw a Saturn V rocket (on its side) at the Huntsville, Alabama space museum.
If you have the actual harware (as we do) you can duplicate it easily.
So, you are an expert in reverse engineering and aerospace manufacturing?
Stranger
There’s certainly enough old hardware and prints out there to build another Saturn V. The trouble is, you would have to totally requalify it, just like you do when you switch vendors for any item. The requalification program would likely involve fewer unpleasant surprises than with a clean-sheet design, but it would still be expensive and time-consuming. A lot of very large and expensive test equipment would need to be rebuilt, as well as some specialized manufacturing lines. We just don’t chem-mill and explosively form parts on that scale any more. The Shuttle ET is almost as big (diameter), but it is built using very different processes.
Also, the S-IC stage was pretty conservatively designed. There would be room for improvement. So, considering the time and expense, it would be questionable whether using the same design would be the best choice. That is, assuming there were ever a need for a heavy lifter again.
Somebody would have to retool a factory on a major scale to build them again. I reckon that would have to be done whatever large booster you build, though.
I’m inclined to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but I can’t help but wonder about the process control to tilt the exhaust nozzles with the gemini computer has the equivalent of a hand calculator. I don’t know about the Apollo computers; I remember the LEM descent radar computer became overloaded.