NASA currently does not design, build or maintain any of its launch vehicles (with the arguable exception of the shuttle external fuel tank, which is manufactured by Lockheed in a NASA-owned plant). In fact, NASA was not even really involved in the conceptual planning of the vehicles it uses for unmanned launches. Those were done by the Air Force.
How could NASA be any less involved in the launcher biz?
sven: *I recognize that a space program provides a thing of acheivment to rally a country around and leads to scientific development that helps us all- even if our plans for the stars are futile. *
More essentially, I think, it’s just something that human beings are programmed to do. We were a largely nomadic species for tens of thousands of years, and we have what amounts to an instinct for liking to see what’s over the next hill.
IMO that’s what all the chest-thumping about “pushing our boundaries”, “reaching for the stars”, “lifting up our souls”, blah blah blah, really boils down to. Same sort of rhetoric that used to motivate polar expeditions and searches for the source of the Nile. Simply put, by now, we’ve become pretty familiar with what this planet looks like, and we come from a long line of itchy-footed ancestors. Wanting to move on somewhere else is just what comes naturally to us.
As long as we’re not really destroying our terrestrial prospects to spend money on space exploration (and as has been noted, $16.4 billion isn’t that much—hell, the expenses for four months’ worth of war in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more than that), I don’t see much point in trying to suppress the impulse. More important, I think, is the need to be watchful about what sort of political and military exploitation gets piggybacked onto our jones for space travel.
And launched on a Delta IV. That’s $190 million each just for the launcher. Why are we sticking with this system and spending billions to design lightweight payloads (capsules) for it? NASA has a lot of technology which, given a few billion dollars, can be integrated into a reusable launch vehicle. And right now the US government is the only entity that can afford such a development project.
If launch cost can be reduced by a factor of 10, think how that would impact all areas of space exploration, manned and unmanned! Currently a non-mainstream field of science can afford 1 launch every 5 or 10 years. So we have to design satellites that last 10 years, which means sticking with old, proven technology. If we can launch every year we’ll be able to tolerate a higher rate of failure and shorter lifespan, allowing a much faster pace of advancement. Manned spaceflight will benefit from less strict weight constraints, resulting in better redundancy and cheaper development cost.
Look, I’m all for lower cost to orbit. I just don’t think it’s as simple as saying, “hey, let’s just build a reusable ship!”. From what I understand of the X-33 program, it died under the weight of unsolved engineering problems and ballooning costs.
And while yes, an expendable rocket like the one shown might cost $190 million to launch today. But if you increase the number of rockets required, the per-unit costs will drop. And anyway, you have to look at the cost in perspective - let’s say the budget for the Exploration Initiative right up to the first moon mission is 20 billion dollars, and over that time there are 20 launches, each costing 150 million. That’s 3 billion out of the 20 billion for launch costs, or only 15% of the overall cost of the program. And by this time, hopefully other lower cost to orbit alternatives will become available. Why burn up all your resources now on a huge program to come up with a reusable space ship, delay the rest of the program by years, and use up a lion’s share of the budget? Focus the engineering on the problem that needs to be solved, and ONLY that problem. Then once that one is solved, move on to the next.
One problem with reusable launchers is that, because they use up such a big chunk of the budget, they have to be universal vehicles. Look at the requirements list for the shuttle, and you start to see why it was such a white elephant right from the beginning. Scope creep is the killer of engineering projects everywhere. So stay focused. There are already launchers good enogh - use them. Spend your effort and money where it can do the most good.
Besides, if NASA stays out of the launcher biz, it allows the free market to fill the void. Once a sustainable exploration program creates a regular demand for space launch, you’ll see venture capital flowing in to meet the need. Or Boeing or Lockheed-Marton or someone else will develop some new that gives them a competetive edge.
NASA has never really been in the launcher biz, at least not since Apollo-Skylab. I don’t know where this notion comes from that NASA is preventing anyone from pursuing any private space projects. There are some regulatory problems that need to be worked out, but NASA has nothing to do with those, except through its influence over the existing launch ranges (they have to make sure that whatever anyone launches from their ranges isn’t going to go haywire and land on Titusville or Santa Barbara.) Burt Rutan knows aerospace engineering, but he is politically flaky and has a huge chip on his shoulder. When he said Boeing and LM were “shaking in their boots” after his peashooter went 60 miles high, I had to laugh. He thinks the government should give NASA’s budget to him, and let him do whatever he sees fit with it, because he’s such a super-genius and all.
Also, unless you think NASA has no legitimate role to play in space exploration, why would Boeing, LM or anyone develop a manned orbital launch vehicle unless NASA released a detailed RFP?
Damn that APS (American Physical Society)! They actually want a project that is being sold as science to actually be good cost-effective science! The nerve of some people. Look, the day that the manned space program is sold not as science but PR, and is not taking from budgets that are claimed to be science budgets but rather from PR budgets is the day when I’ll say, “Fine.”
Here by the way is a link to the full APS report (big PDF file) and here is a link to their press release. In a nutshell their concerns are:
And, as always, we have physicist Robert Park providing a concise summary of all of this:
Here, according to that APS report is how some scientific programs are already being negatively impacted by the NASA Moon-Mars initiative:
The APS and the space science community are trying to protect their budgets. I’d do the same thing, and I hope they keep their money, as long as Moon-Mars gets its money too. But you can’t use purely scientific criteria to decide which kind of science society ought to fund. If the APS were really about cost-benefit, they would have recommended canceling Gravity Probe B and spending the money on better haircuts.
There is also an ego factor at work here. Physicists have the biggest egos in science, so they’re always trying to cut down the big dog of technology, which after all these years is still spaceflight. Our machines put men on new worlds. Good luck trying to win a popularity contest against that. Robert Park will have to go home to the comforting arms of his robotic wife.
Well, everybody certainly is influenced their own self-interest. On the other hand, the APS has a long history of giving sound scientific advice on issues (such as national missile defense where they turned out to be right about the difficulties faced) even when their own self-interest in the matter isn’t clearly on the side that they come out on. [Actually, I was at a science policy conference a few years ago where a reporter for Nature had some really caustic comments for scientific societies that had become little more than lobbying groups fighting for more funding. When I asked him afterwards how he would characterize the APS, which is the professional society I belong to, he said that they were really the model for what a professional society ought to be and a standard for other societies to live up to. And, given the bluntness of this fellow in his talk, I don’t think he was telling me this just to be nice.]
At any rate, the APS recommends that the National Academy of Sciences be allowed to weigh in (and that the GAO look at the budgetary aspects). Isn’t that a sensible way to proceed? I do think that the scientific value of various proposals is best evaluated by scientists, not politicians.
And, if the politicians want to overrule the scientists by saying that there are non-scientific considerations that come into play here, then let them make that argument explicitly. Let them say, “We want to take money away from good science and put it into this great PR / national pride / technology / welfare-for-the-aerospace industry project” and make the case that way. However, they never seem to do that. What they do is try to claim that it is important science, something that they have no real qualifications to evaluate. That is intellectually dishonest.
By the way, your argument about physicists wanting to cut down technology makes no sense to me. In that case, Park wouldn’t be singing the praises of robotic probes.
What seems apparent to me is that manned space exploration at this point in time is really a solution in search of a problem. The scientific exploration of our universe can be done about as well as, and way way more cost-effectively, by unmanned rather than manned expeditions at this point.
And, in the meantime, if we want to embark on some big expensive technology project, why not direct it toward something useful like an Apollo-type project to develop new energy sources that can prevent us from making the habitation of the planet we actually live on a lot less pleasant? Talk about big egos…All these science fiction imaginings of humans colonizing other planets ought to yield to the reality that we seem to have enough trouble preserving the environment on our own planet. It seems to me that before you give a teenager the keys to the new Porsche, you ought to make sure he has shown that he can reliably drive the old jalopy.
Which assumes that NASA’s role is to exclusively study space. In my opinion the mandate should include making space a place for humans.
When do you expect the economy of scale to kick in if it hasn’t already - an earlier poster noted that the rockets proposed are hardly the latest and greatest in aerospace technology - rather they are offshoots of proven designs (albeit ones that still blow up from time to time). Going that route, absent active/agressive NASA pressing for newer better launchers, if you want to cut costs it’s not going to be by cranking out more of the same - let’s face it, pretty much all of the infrastructure costs have already been sunk. You should go to Russia, China, India, and buy their launchers for less. You may kill our launch industry, but that is the cheap, market driven solution.
You’re right that the X-33 had problems. So did the X-30 and other prior SSTO and reusable vehicles. But that shouldn’t restrict us from exploring better way’s of getting to orbit. Rocketdyne wanted the SSME to be aerospike engines but were overruled (essentially) for reasons of conservatism. At some point Boeing Rocketdyne will stop working on aerospike engines because they will be unwilling to bear the entire cost in a market that is pushing towards foreign built big dumb rockets.
Right now the hypersonic airbreathing community in the US is slowly falling apart. Rocketdyne is pretty much out of the business. IIRC Marquardt has given up on it. The launch of the X-43 this month was effectively the end of NASA’s hypersonic airbreathing propulsion program, given that follow on programs have been cancelled for the Moon/Mars push. There are still some players out there, kept alive mainly by DARPA and the military’s desire to have rapid response capability without overseas footprint, but they don’t necessarily fit the same requirements as an orbital lifter.
Look, I understand that to do stuff RIGHT NOW requires big dumb rockets, for all the same reasons that (largely the same) big dumb rockets have been favored for the past 50-60 years. I just don’t think that it is necessarily the best thing long term to abandon all other pursuits.
It only seems that way because scientists end up having to fight for our share of the NASA budget against manned flight projects. Did you actually read the APS report? Did you see the list of projects that are cancelled or delayed, so that the funding can be re-allocated to the Mars exploration initiative?
I’m a scientist and I have nothing bad to say about manned spaceflight in general. Just specific aspects where I think they are not doing the best they can. My field of research (solar physics) has benefitted from manned spaceflight - Skylab provided revolutionary results, and the SMM was saved by the first satellite repair mission ever conducted. Also a prominent member of our field (Loren Acton) flew on the Shuttle to do observations.
I don’t see how 20 launches will suddenly cause the economy of scale to kick in, especially since it’ll be spread over many years.
The Mars exploration initiative has already fallen into the same old trap - taking high launch costs as a given, and trying hard to do interesting things with as few launches as possible. This might produce some advances in lightweight materials, but I’d much rather fly heavy instruments on cheap rockets.
I’m all for it. But I must say I enjoyed your use of Apollo as a descriptor for your proposal. There is no Apollo but Apollo, my friend. Notice I said that physicists have the biggest egos in science. Rocket engineers have the biggest egos period.
[Tenacious D]
We are fueled by Satan,
Yes we’re schooled by Satan.
Fueled by Satan!
[/Tenacious D]
Excellent point!
I attended a lecture at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory about a year and a half ago, a panel discussion of various luminaries reflecting on Mars Exploration. During the Q&A period, they were asked about Human Exploration. They replied that none were planned, because they couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to go. They were rather taken aback when most of the audience expressed interest in making the journey.
NASA constibutes to some incredibly important science work. No doubt a lot more science will need to be done in order to make a Mars mission a success. But to think that NASA’s job is to spend our money only on science is folly. The push for a human mission to Mars is simply a backlash against too much spending on science the public doesn’t understand much about. But NASA is a government agency, and should be responsive to the desires of the people.
Part of me wants the US to embark on a long term strategy for developing new and cheaper methods for getting larger and larger payloads into orbit, creating efficient and safe transit craft for moving between the earth and other planetary destinations, and ways to exploit resources abundant throughout the solar system, while using robotic exploration at a much higher level to plan out and explore interesting sites for eventual human exploration. That part of me is a bit dubious of this vertical tactic with such narrow goals that Bush seems to be proposing…of course, I’m dubious that the government HAS to do it at all, or that they can’t do better by pouring the money in the short term into privatization. But thats another matter.
However, the other part of me realizes that its simply impossible for the US to EVER have such a long range outlook on anything…let alone space exploration. There are simply too many folks yammering out there that a manned space program isn’t needed at all, that it takes too many resources from much more (well, a bit more I suppose looking at NASA’s current and projected future budget) vital tasks of dumping money down the drain on our various failing social programs…or to be fair on our military budget.
So, if the alternatives are a space program that MIGHT actually accomplish something worthwhile as far as human exploration of space goes…and the LEO bullshit we’ve been basically dicking around with since the demise of the Apollo program, I’ll put myself on the side of this new initiative from Bush…and just hope it actually goes through, that it doesn’t get cut or reshaped 50 times by new administrations, and that it actually accomplishes something.
-XT
jshore: All these science fiction imaginings of humans colonizing other planets ought to yield to the reality that we seem to have enough trouble preserving the environment on our own planet. It seems to me that before you give a teenager the keys to the new Porsche, you ought to make sure he has shown that he can reliably drive the old jalopy.
Yes, and before people have sex we ought to make sure that they can be responsible about relationships, and how well has that ever worked? Common sense just doesn’t count for that much in the face of basic human instincts, and I really think our wanderlust is one of them. There are always going to be lots of people who really want to go somewhere we haven’t been before, and they’re always going to be able to rationalize it with lofty-sounding motives.
My take is that instead of trying to repress the urge, we should indulge it (in moderation: spending huge amounts of money on it really would be irresponsible) and exploit the resulting shame factor. Remember the saying “A society that can put a man on the moon should be able to…” etc.? Let’s just openly admit that manned space exploration is in many ways inefficient and unnecessary but we’re going to do it anyway because we want to. And then let’s use the contrast between manned space travel and some well-chosen terrestrial problems that are much more critical and solvable, and keep asking tough questions about our priorities until the space cadets are shamed into spending some of the leftover money on the mundane problems.
Ransom, translating Weston in Out of the Silent Planet:
"He is saying again that perhaps they would be able to keep moving from one world to another and wherever they came they would kill everyone. I think he is now talking about worlds that go around other suns. He wants the creatures born from us to be in as many places as they can. He says he does not know what kind of creatures they will be.
“He is saying that he will not stop trying to do all this unless you kill him. And he says that though he doesn’t know what will happen to the creatures sprung from us, he wants it to happen very much.”
I bet it would be a lot cheaper to do something about global warming here, than it would be to terraform Mars from scratch. And what’s to say our descendants would take decent care of Mars anyway, once they’d been there long enough to take it for granted?
Besides, Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kid; in fact, it’s cold as hell. 
wait a minute. NASA won’t do maintenance on the Hubble Telescope because they’re afraid another space shuttle will be lost, but now we’re going to Mars? Cognitive dissonance, anyone?