The longer the lifespan of any given corporate entity, the more people who can have one-company careers. Which leads to better benefits, better pensions, less uprooting to chase jobs, fewer abandoned company towns, etc.
The shorter the lifespan, the more money wasted on churn for churn’s sake, but also the more legit economic efficiency.
Where it gets ugly is when all the downsides get assigned to one economic group or class and all the upsides get assigned to a different group/class.
An excellent pick for the next NASA administrator:
Isaacman is the one behind the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions. Very passionate about space, as well as aeronautics–the first “A” in NASA but seems to get short shrift these days. There is lots of opportunity in aeronautics research, with new interest in supersonics, electric aircraft, VTOL craft, autonomy, etc.
Clearly also interested in keeping the commercial space partnership going. And maybe we’ll get that Hubble repair mission after all…
The full original article NASA Doesn't Want Random Billionaires Messing Up The Hubble Space Telescope is long on snark and short on substance. When it pauses for breath long enough to stop bashing Jared Isaacman, the short version is that NASA hasn’t decided (as of the article date) whether a repair attempt is worth the potential extension of Hubble’s working life versus the risk of shortening it if the attempt were unsuccessful. And no, neither Isaacman nor Musk would be attempting to be on the repair crew themselves.
And note something which undoubtedly comes as a complete surprise:
Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, a veteran private astronaut with strong ties to Elon Musk and his rocket company SpaceX, has been nominated by the incoming Trump administration to serve as NASA’s next administrator, the president-elect said in a statement Wednesday.
So Blue Origin will be filing a lot more lawsuits?
Isaacman actually did want to be on the repair crew and proposed paying for the mission himself. NASA said no, though part of their argument was the lack of EVA suits and experience within SpaceX. That’s now changed after the Polaris Dawn mission.
As admin, it seems unlikely that he’d still be on any repair crew… but he can certainly push to save Hubble. Cancelling SLS, or at least its future Block iterations, would certainly free up a bunch of dollars.
Which sort of saddens me because objectively SpaceX simply is almost completely the best option NASA has for operations in space; but this will look like (and might even actually be) favoritism.
ETA: I wonder if at some point if NASA officially declared that Hubble couldn’t be saved and shut down operations, if there would be a window in which Hubble could legally be declared salvage, belonging to anyone willing to recover it.
NASA is still restricted by acquisition requirements and if they try to bend those they’ll get sued. Isaacman has always demonstrated a high degree of fairness and integrity though, so I don’t expect anything significant there. Blue Origin and others will get contracts if they can bid competitively.
It won’t stop people from complaining, of course, but… oh well.
Even at a maximally cynical level, why would Artemis be cancelled? SLS, yes. Orion, maybe. But SpaceX is making big bucks from Artemis, and could make even more with SLS off the table. Blue Origin as well. They’ve already been selected as a second lander.
Isaacman wants more funding to go to pursuits like saving the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble, and probably a lot of other high bang/buck items. He doesn’t like that there was a second award for an Artemis lander, but even that pales in cost compared to keeping SLS going. Just cut that and there is more than enough to pay for a bunch of other things. There are a dozen other ways to replicate SLS’s role in Artemis.
Incidentally, NASA has figured out the heat shield problem:
In short, the issue is that the material isn’t permeable enough. Hot gases built up within the material and caused cracking.
The interesting part is that it’s only a problem for a particular flight regime where they used an atmospheric skip maneuver. The heat load from the first dip was retained when the capsule went back into space and this caused the damage.
In a hotter and more stressful environment, it’s actually not a problem, because the material ablates away normally before the gases can build up enough to cause damage.
At any rate, they’ve reproduced the problem and seem to understand it now, so they can just pick a trajectory with heating rates within the safe areas. They’re also qualifying more permeable material that shouldn’t have the problem at all.
That will definitely have to be the needle that gets threaded. But Richard Shelby is gone, and Boeing has lost the last scraps of their reputation, while SpaceX is at their zenith, so maybe with a few promises here and there it can be made to happen.
No final decisions have been made, but a tentative deal is in place with lawmakers to end the rocket in exchange for moving US Space Command to Huntsville, Alabama.
(it’s a good article about Isaacman in general, too)
So how would NASA astronauts get to the Moon without the SLS rocket? Nothing is final, and the trade space is open. One possible scenario being discussed for future Artemis missions is to launch the Orion spacecraft on a New Glenn rocket into low-Earth orbit. There, it could dock with a Centaur upper stage that would launch on a Vulcan rocket. This Centaur stage would then boost Orion toward lunar orbit.
That sounds so complicated it could cause problems.
Won’t go into the topic as a whole, but NASA is only 0.3% of the total budget. There’s much lower hanging fruit overall.
But within NASA, it’s crucial to reduce waste since it competes with other internal projects. We’ve seen a bunch of stuff get canceled or put on the back burner because the SLS budget eats everything.
