Bush’s “fascination” with manned spaceflight and exploration began just as China was demonstrating how serious it was about putting people in space. Period. He’s envisioning (and frankly, I think, welcoming) another Cold War situation with China.
The Bush Administration has consistantly demonstrated that it has no interest in scientific research, especially that which might contradict the beliefs of his Fundamentalist supporters. While the Mars mission is given a sizeable budget (but not enough for NASA to actually undertake a development program) smaller but extremely valuable and effective unmanned research and exploration programs have been slashed like a corn field in September. The folks I know at JPL are struggling to retain funding on good, productive work, while this poorly-concieved Mars thing absorbs budget like a black hole in a planetary nebula.
I’m not constitutionally opposed to manned space exploration (preceeded by and accompanied with unmanned exploration) but Mars is perhaps one of the least useful targets for manned travel. It’s a stunt, not science.
The Soyuz has a launch escape tower that can rescue cosmonauts/astronauts even if the launcher explodes on the pad. That actually happened on the Soyuz T10a flight.
The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo vehicles also had similar escape rockets, to protect against accidental death due to the most common failure, which is explosion of the main booster during launch and ascent.
The Shuttle, on the other hand, could only detach safely from a failing booster if it had achieved an altitude high enough to glide back to Earth without crashing, and only then if it could get away from the failing boosters quickly enough to avoid being destroyed in the explosion. Chances of survival of common booster failure on the Shuttle are virtually nil. On Apollo, which could pull the command module away from the booster at an acceleration of over 15 gees, survival was likely.
You don’t have to exceed booster reliability by all that much; you just have to be able to get away from it when it fails. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo could do that. The Shuttle never could, by design. When you consider that launch is normally by far the riskiest part of the mission, it becomes pretty clear that even a 1% failure rate for the Shuttle, which is excellent by any rocket standards, still has much more serious consequences than that number might suggest.
As someone who has jonesed for a job at JPL for years now, this saddens me. There is certainly the facility to do both manned and unmanned to their fullest.
However, while the scientific exploration of space is crucial, I don’t think science shoould be the only focus of a national space agency. Part of the reason for the current backlash against NASA is its failure, 35 years after the fact, to bring space exploration to the public at large. Self-styled pragmatists are now saying the manned program should be scrapped as a result. Focusing NASA on science and nothing but is to guarantee its doom.
Several years ago, while Mars Oddysey was still in flight and NASA/JPL were still smarting from the twin failures of the 1998 flights, I attended a public lecture at JPL giving an overview of the history of Mars exploration. During the Q&A, the question of a manned mission came up. The answer from the experts at the time was: It’s very risky, and we can’t imagine why anyone would want to go. In other words, the scientists, knowing Mars to be the forboding environment it has proven to be, could not see any reason for a person to risk death by venturing there other than to say they had done it. They were quickly informed by over half the audience that that was a damn good enough reason for them.
Continued blindness to this desire on the part of the public by NASA will result only in their funding drying up further.
But there really is no reason why we can’t have both manned and unmanned programs. Of the $8680.71 Bush plans to spend on behalf of each US man, woman and child in FY2006, only $55.78 is slated for NASA, which is actually a decrease in per capita spending from a couple of years ago. You could double the agency’s entire budget, manned, unmanned, admin, etc. without seriously impacting anything else. Not that NASA doesn’t need a lot of tightening up in terms of how they do business, but considering what they do accomplish on the table scraps the government budgets for them, I would love to see what they could do with more, spent wisely.
Indeed. All the more reason to stop with the spit-and-polish jobs on the two-decade-old demo shuttle fleet, and fully fund the next model, as NASA would have liked to do years ago.
NASA got burned once by popular opinion. Before Apollo XI, there was very wide support and excitement for manned space exploration. After we did it once, support plummeted and Nixon had no trouble cutting the heart out of the program. Say we go to Mars based on popular opinion (which I’m not sure exists). What next?
Loopydude has it exactly right. You evaluate the success of a program based on how well it met its stated objective, and the shuttle is a disaster on those terms.
Maybe we would have done better with the von Braun/Ley model of a space station first and then a moon launch. Being able to shortcut that process got us to the moon long before anyone expected us to, but left us hanging.
We first need to answer the question of why we should be in space. If there are commercial reasons (what ever happened to solar power satellites anyway?) that would work. If there are national security reasons, the government should do it. But they have to be sustainable, and not the next reality TV show.
After that, we need to design a launcher that actually meets the design criteria for the shuttle. Hve we really made so little progress in 30 years? The best model I know for why we’re in trouble is that astronauts bring laptops with them to orbit to get some decent computing power.
I agree with everyone that we need to accept some losses. But NASA shouldn’t claim that the shuttle is safe enough for school teachers either.
I wonder how populated the New World would be today of the Spanish hadn’t discovered gold there. Where is the gold in space?
I’m not going to defend any of NASA’s well-publicized shortcomings, but the notion that a space program should be “managed by requirements” has been proven disastrous. The Air Force tried this in the 90s and lost billions of dollars worth of space assets. They learned their lesson and returned to the proven method of hands-on, detailed oversight of contractors and there hasn’t been a launch failure in almost six years now.
The fundamental problem with “managing by requirements” is that one of the requirements is reliability. There is no way to accurately predict whether a complex space system will experience one failure in a hundred or one failure in a million. Thus, it’s pointless to set a reliability requirement, because such a requirement is unenforceable. The only proven way to get reliable space systems is to constantly look over the contractor’s shoulder and make sure he’s doing things right, every step of the way.
By requirements, I meant top level mission needs. The Air Force wants a supersonic bomer. They want it to carry X tons of payload, cruise at X knots, climb at X feet per second. They want it to have a range of X miles. Then, they let the company build it.
What we have now instead, is the dread Requirements Creep. The requirements keep changing, with the result that nobody can meet them. You are right, there is no way to have reliability by decree (reliability requirements). You can overdesign a thing, to handle higher loads or stresses than you expect to see, but that’s about it. You can never say “My widget has 99.99995 reliability”.
Yes. But what happens then? The company complains to NASA that we (DCMA) are holding them up and causing delays (never mind we have no authority to stop anything). Then NASA directs us to back off, accept whatever shit is presented, and to shut up. Then, when the item indeed is shit, NASA tries to hang us (for doing exactly what we were ordered to do) and denies that they gave the orders. I’ve learned to keep all emails, faxes and voice recordings for CYA. Most of our documentation and record keeping here is not to “surveil” the company, it is to protect us from Our Own People.
It’s all Nixon’s fault. Nixon hated Kennedy with a passion and the Apollo program was Kennedy’s baby, so Nixon killed it. This was just at the point when economies of scale were starting to kick in on building the Saturn Vs, so what could have been an exceedingly cheap program that delivered more science (the advancements in technology were coming so fast that each Apollo mission had better gear than the one before it) for less money. If that wasn’t bad enough, NASA knew when they first designed the shuttle that it was going to be problemmatic. Nixon told the folks at NASA to say whatever the hell it took to get Congress to approve the thing, and the result was promises that never could be fulfilled and 14 dead astronauts. If there’s a Hell, I hope that Nixon spends eternity in it getting cornholed by a demon that looks like JFK.
NASA current problem is that they’re trying to recapture the glory of the past, which is impossible. What they need to do, first and foremost, is to hire someone like Kevin Smith, Ridley Scott, or James Cameron for their PR department. Someone who not only understands the “gee whiz” nature of space exploration that geeks feel, but who can also get other folks to feel it as well. Then they need to develop a cheap method of getting astronauts into space. It doesn’t ahve to be something flashy, but something that’s cheap, and that works. (Hire Burt Rutan and don’t smother the guy in paperwork.)
With that, they can set about doing some real work. Once they do their “milestone moments” like putting people back on the Moon, then don’t seek publicity for the next missions. Lots of government agencies chug along, doing whatever is they do, with no publicity. This is actually a good thing, since you don’t have people wondering why, for example, that HUD can’t end homelessness with a budget of nearly $32 billion/yr. NASA could safely chugg away, and return good science under such situations.
That’s a “safe” mode of operation for NASA, and given the lack of vision that many of the people who work there seem to have, one that they could pull off. The other possibility would be for them to find an administrator who really “got” space and put him in charge. A dynamic leader would do wonders for NASA and I, personally, would enjoy seeing him tell some neanderthal who thought all space exploration was a waste of money, to go stuff it. But that’s just me.
Then they ought to get better at it before they quit their day job. The current paradigm is that subcontract work is a “contract administration” function, and not a “program management” function. DoD and NASA both know this, and are rapidly getting sick and tired of watching subcontracts go to hell because there’s no program manager at the prime.
Not that I have a particular axe to grind or anything.
First, there is absolutely nothing routine about any vehicle launched into space. These machines are designed to be as light as possible and still withstand acceleration to 17,000 mph into a subzero, oxygenless environment. The G-force, vibration and temperature shock these machines are exposed to are beyond anyone’s comprehension or experience with commercial aircraft.
Second, when it was designed it was a known compromise. But it was built, as opposed to not building it and using the same reliable launch vehicles. This is how designs are advanced. It was necessary in the same way all advancements are necessary in the evolution of a product. Failure is inevitable but that is how change occurs.
Third, to see Ratan’s “space vehicle” used as an example of what can be done privately is interesting but it has nothing to with the subject. He did not attain anything useful in respect to space flight. When he gets 3 people into orbit for a week and then safely returned then he has produced a true space vehicle.
Finally, NASA is already in the Prime Contractor mode. The limitations of changing the ratio of designer/producer is not going to change radically because of the substantial amount of research money required. There are no contractors capable of funding a prototype of a replacement to the shuttle (for the purposes of competitive bidding). Even though American companies are partially funded in competitive military bids it still involves a private investment. Although funding a competitive bid works for the military it is for minor leaps in technology. IMO, the economic ratio of technology to product is just too different between military aircraft and space transport vehicles.
What you are describing was called “acquisition reform”. It sounds like a common-sense approach, but it just never worked for space systems. No human being is smart enough to write a set of requirements that is clear and concise, yet fully captures all the stated and unstated needs of the procuring agency. For example: government tells the contractor to build a launcher that can lift 20,000 lbs to LEO. Contractor spends $2 billion developing the hardware and proves it can lift 20,000 lbs to LEO. In the meantime, the payload grows to 21,000 lb. The government tells the contractor to modify the design to lift 21,000 lb. Contractor gets dollar signs in his eyes and says, sure, that’ll be another $2 billion, because you didn’t tell us that our previous design had to be able to accomodate payload growth for a reasonable price. Oh, and by the way, we’re the only company that knows how to build this kind of hardware. So if you want to fly your payload, cough up the extra $2 billion, or you can convert your payload into a static display for the lobby at Headquarters. Contractors love this kind of situation, because the government has put itself in a box by letting a firm fixed-price contract. What you end up with is either cost overruns, or a final product that is not as good as it could have been.
The sad thing is, we could have had a space plane 35 years ago-it was called “Project Dybasoar”-and it was cancelledby President Kennedy (as a cost-cutting move). The Dynasoar concept was a space palne, that could carry three astronauts into low earth orbit. Using this and heavy boosters, we could have built a space station decades ago-but we chose to follow the space shuttle concept-which turned out to be expensive, unreliable, and dangerous.
The Dynasoar was a pretty good design (admittedly I’m biased since the principle designer was Alex Tremulis who also designed the Tucker), but it wasn’t the first design to have that potential. The first was the X-15 which damned near put a man into space before the Soviets did. The Dynasoar was almost revived a few years ago as the escape system for the ISS (they didn’t call it that, but that’s clearly where the design came from), but budget cutbacks forced it to be killed again.
Also, already in the 1960s, the “headliner” NASA project (Apollo) sucked the financial/“political will” lifeblood out of anything else that may come up. Dynasoar, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, proposals to do the Moon-orbit mission with Gemini technology, it all got left by the wayside. A sort of rule that there could only be one manned spaceflight project at a time took root, too.
I’d like to modify that to “I hope that Nixon spends eternity in it getting cornholed by JFK, in East Berlin, the capital of China.”
For all of you that love to throw around the “Practice real science!” phrase, I’d like to know if studying the effects of space travel on the human body is ‘real science’ or not.
Sure it is. But we’ve studied the effects of a microgravity environment and radiation exposure for going on 40 years now. We’ve got a fair idea of the problems involved, some of which are intractible for long duration missions (i.e. radiation exposure).
The ISS, in its current planned configuration, doesn’t do anything that can’t be done cheaper by unmanned orbital platforms. We have highly trained astronauts up there at fifty million or more a pop doing high school science experiments. That, in and of itself, does not justify a manned presence in space. I think one can make good, if somewhat rationalized, arguements for a manned space program, but there ought to be an ultimate goal of getting beyond Earth (or Mars) orbit and making use of the tremendous material resources to be found out there.
The problem with a manned space program, as currently conceived, is that it cuts significantly into more valuable (in terms of amount of information returned) unmanned projects. NASA is gutting programs that have been simmering for a decade or more in order to put the current Mars initiative in boil, despite the fact that this mission isn’t going to happen (and is a justification for an alterior motive, i.e. competition with other nations–China in particular–to go someplace we’ve already been.)