Later today the Obama Administration will reportedly announce major changes in the U. S. space program that may amount to the effective end of manned space flight after this decade. As a guy who has been trying to mount his own mission to the Moon I’m not yet sure how I feel about this. Maybe it is a great opportunity, but probably not.
The FY2011 federal proposed budget will be published with the following changes:
— NASA’s Constellation program to replace the Space Shuttle will be cancelled and all hardware development will be stopped including Ares 1, Ares 5 and Orion.
— The Moon is no longer the first stop in the exploration program, replaced by the so-called Flexible Path which really does not mean anything: “We are not sure where we are going, whether to the Moon, asteroids, empty space (Lagrangian points) or Phobos, so we will spend years and billions of dollars thinking about it while deferring any real mission development.”
— NASA human spaceflight will concentrate on International Space Station (ISS) flights, using commercially developed hardware (whatever that means: NASA has had zero success in relying on outsourced systems).
— There is no real post-ISS program. Maybe something will happen past 2020 but that is for the next administration to figure out.
Where NASA goes other space agencies will follow (the Europeans, Indians, even the Russians, possibly leaving only the Chinese still headed to the Moon). The Moon is out as a destination, considered by some as too hard and others as too boring. Over the next two years we will see a serious drop-off in interest expressed by various groups (like the Google Lunar X-Prize effort).
This has happened before: back in 1990s everybody was into Mars missions (NASA, other government agencies and private groups). When NASA lost interest in Mars around 2001-03 and turned to Moon other nations followed.
On one hand this pending announcement is terribly disappointing. There is a very high chance that we will see an end to U. S. human spaceflight within the next few years. But it was probably inevitable. NASA is too screwed up to do anything else without a major restructuring and that would require spending too much Presidential capital in this terrible economy.
My Moon mission, of course, is still on.
Really we need breakthrough technology here, the liquid rocket fuel stuff just isn’t getting us or enough else out there. Perhaps hibernation and contemplation of radical new approaches to propulsion are desirable. We need a better idea, a new Robert Goddard.
I know that Steve Jobs will save the day when he takes the stage to announce iRocket…
It’ll be underpowered, stylish, expensive, and so easy to fly your mom could do it.
so rude. ah, but true.
Well, Apple has taken the first step. They’ve got the iPad ready.
We need to vote up or down on these comments. Yours gets +1.0 e+10.
Looks like Obama will either leave the door open so that the rest of the world can overtake America’s dominance of space or a great opportunity for the plucky privateer like you.
Either way it”ll be sad not to see a proper replacement for the shuttle.
The manned mission to Mars was just yet another unfunded mandate from Bush and company. When it was announced, all of us knew that the science missions would be crushed… and they were… in favor of a media event. This announcement is just a (welcome) step back toward reality. Perhaps next they’ll call it a day on the ISS — which has been yet another money pit with infinitesimal scientific return.
The only manned space program that makes any kind of sense at this point is a focused program to put in place a real space elevator. (You know, the carbon nanotube-based cable from the Earth’s surface out past geosynchronous orbit.) And there’s no need to start sending men into space for that until we figure out how to make the thing in another twenty years or so.
The Proud Tower cannot be built.
Extending a cable vertically through the planet’s magnectic field will cause a charge to flow through it, and the cale melts.
Not unless you make a circuit.
How about get that cable nice and coated with rain, as a big thunderhead moves in?
I think that will make a good connection to “Earth”. It works for lightning..
True, a bolt of lightning dissipates enough energy to power a major city, and all that energy flowing through a space elevator cable will probably destroy it. That’s where superconducting materials come into play. When such materials are created they can be used to coat the carbon nanotube ribbon and suddenly this doomed project will become a conduit for harvesting vast reserves of clean electric power from the ionosphere.
In areas of fair weather, the atmospheric electric field near the earth’s surface typically is about 100 volts (V) m−1 and is directed vertically in such a sense as to drive positive charges downward to the earth. In areas of fair weather this field decreases in magnitude with increasing altitude, falling, for example, to only about 5 V m−1 at an altitude of about 10 km.
How long is the cable?
You are providing a direct short through the entire atomosphere. The amount of energy that will flow through that cable is represented by the entire potential of the planet.
Think about it for just a minute, and you will see that it will burn up before you even get partially there.
PUGNO PROVED THE SPACE ELEVATOR (PROBABLY) CANNOT WORK BACK IN 2006.
READ HERE:
https://www.anthonares.net/2006/05/paper-critiques-space-elevator-and-scientists-overstate-their-case.html
You all seem to think the cable will be a conductor, not an insulator.
Who is John Galt? Anyone? …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galt
That really depends on what one defines “science” to be. The “science” missions you speak of are just observation missions. Those observations advance science, of course, but the mission development in itself doesn’t do it so much. On the other hand, sending a human to mars might not tell use anything about mars, but it will generate a lot of scientific advances related to the task itself.
The former benefits mainly purely theoretical science, while the latter is definitely closer to the engineering side — an old fight. It must be pointed out, however, that the advances brought by the latter can make missions of the former cheaper and more effective in the long run.
A point worth mentioning is that unmanned missions are so many orders of magnitude cheaper that manned missions one much think of the opportunity cost of pursuing manned missions. For example, would you rather have 100 unmanned or 1 manned mission? I bet the price tags are similar. Let’s not ignore the importance of the advances in robotic systems necessary for non-manned missions and that non-manned missions can pursue particularly dangerous missions unsuitable to manned missions.
The military has figured this out with its drone programs, NASA will too.
One might point out that the predecessor to Avatar were the mars rovers.
So all of the engineering experience of NASA has made manned space flight cheaper now than it was in the 1960’s? Not. Yet that’s what your statement implies.
Looking for clues as to when China takes over? I say this is a big one.
That federal deficit comes home to roost. Thanks to GWB.
Perhaps we need to take a break from space exploration and take a look back down at this planet. With climate change, pollution and general waste in everything we do perhaps we need to take stock and fix up our own back yard before we pollute the final frontier.
whoops meant to have the reply above in the general comment stream, never comment while tired.
Or perhaps we need a plan B in case this planet becomes uninhabitable for some reason. It isn’t wise for us to keep all of our eggs in this one basket.
Yes but Plan B has to be attainable. We can’t just move all of humanity to the nearest Earth-like planet. That’s a fantasy, not a plan.
You misunderstand my meaning. Plan B isn’t about saving the lives of refugees, it’s about preventing the extinction of our species. At a minimum, a self sustaining offworld colony of less than a couple dozen people would be enough to accomplish that goal. Of course it’s in our best interests to keep this planet safe for humanity and that should be our priority, but while we’re working on that it we should also send people offworld. Every colony multiplies humanity’s chances of survival, and I think we’re sophisticated enough to understand the wisdom of building an ark or two without needing to be told by some diety.
I think space exploration is really important. A lot of products we rely on today are byproducts of it but more importantly, it sends the message that anything is possible.
Having said that, we really need to get our financial house in order. We have too much federal debt that is going to be left to our children and grandchildren. One day, when they are old enough to understand it, they are going to ask us, “What were you thinking?”
I realize that the entire NASA budget is a small fraction of the total Federal budget. However, it’s still spending money we can’t really afford to spend any longer. I would like to see the Obama administration make HUGE cuts to the defense budget as well but they don’t see to have any interest in doing that.
I wonder what it’s going to take to get the government to get serious about the debt?
I agree with all our points but one:
“A lot of products we rely on today are byproducts of it…”
There is no real ROI of the space program. The few advances are likely to have been “discovered” a few years later on their own. The other reality is that the number of these advances people tend to point to were the result of the space program in the 60s and 70s. Even less has been “discovered” today. I would argue that defense spending has been more fruitful (as I type to you on the Internet) for consumer ROI.
Your sad attitude, “if we can’t make money out of it, it ain’t worth doing”, is exactly why leaving space exploration to the mercenary short-term “thinkers” in the commercial world is such a bad idea. You are in for decades of people selling sub-orbital space tourism with ISS eventually sold off as a space hotel. Stupid human beings!
If Columbus had taken the same approach, he’d have loaded up his ships and sailed back to Spain, declaring the voyage a waste of time and resources. After all, he was searching for the East Indies and the riches of the spice trade. He found neither.
What he found, instead, was a whole new set of opportunities that others developed after him. Sure, you could insist that those later voyages “would have been made anyway.” But, when? Fifty years, a hundred later? The last five hundred years of human history and exploration would have been completely re-written.
I don’t think we need space flight to tell us that anything is possible.
I’m mighty impressed by a 1.7 Trillion deficit. Wow, anything is possible!
You have listened to too much Faux News and Rush.
Orion will not be stopped. It will continue. Only AresI/V will stop (Thank God for that). HOWEVER, we will give money to new.space (less than .5B over the next 2 years). We will also spend about 5B helping current space building DIRECT. First stage DIRECT Jupiter will only 3 years, will launch 70 MT to LEO, and will cost less than what it would cost to finish Ares I. It will use Orion as the capsule.
Oh, NASA is to get a 1B/year increase to do this.
In a nut shell, we are rebuilding our space systems, not destroying it.
BTW, for those that argue that Ares I costs 9 B, it does not. We have spent less than 4B on it, but it will require another 5B to get it going AND would not be ready by 2015 (in fact, most expect that it would not be ready until 2017).
Anyone who’s worked with NASA will tell you the organization is old, lazy and past its prime.
I’m not sure what the value of manned space flight is (at least relative to its cost), but I know that NASA is a bloated, inefficient organization. I grew up surrounded by men who worked for NASA (not my father, but many friends’ fathers for example), and adjectives like “brilliant”, “hard working” and “valuable” don’t come to mind.
Sure that’s true of many (most?) large corporations, and that is also not good, but those organizations don’t feel entitled to billions of tax dollars from hard-working Americans like me.
If someone could demonstrate to me a clear ROI, I’d reconsider. So far, I haven’t seen a compelling case for the existence of NASA.
Dave Ramsey would say “No Vacations until we pay our bills:” Sadly, our fiscal policies have left us broke, unable to do what is in the best interests of humanity. The job of congressmen is to pass bills and spend money. Perhaps if we just sent them on vacation for a year we would all be better off. We have too many poor laws, and we have spent our money. Time to go home. Both parties GWB is TYPICAL, we don’t have enough fingers to point one at each responsible official. I mean that WE.
I don’t see why private industry can’t take over the mission of getting into LEO. Cost? Once it’s proved out, the cost will drop.
The question is not “why can’t privatization of LEO be done,” but really, “is the privatization of Space ought not to be done.”
The present fact the 21st century “space grab” is underway is not well announced to the general public.
Those who arrive “Sooner” will definitely be in position to “write the rules for those who follow.” If it is to be a private company or non democratic government what then?
The first private agendas are for manufacturing are producing small batches of materials and pharmacology not possible on earth. For comms/surveillance it is to reach all populations first with “your service.” Harvesting energy from space could lead to a worldwide monopoly worse than Saudi Penn oil.
Militarization of space is also a consequence. Putting high value targets into space means a defensive/offensive capacity must also be put into place. This would cause escalation and arms race once again.
Privatization of space really has no great humanitarian goal, but really could put a power play for dominance into play, not yet seen in human history.
First — I have been a life long advocate of NASA and space exploration. I have friends who work at NASA and I have toyed with the thought of working there too. I know NASA has and will advance technology, and that will benefit all of us.
I’ve have attended a few talks involving real astronauts and shuttle crew members. Space and weightless is very rough on the human body. While the worlds space agencies have made great progress in understanding the effects and compensating for them, the fact remains. Space is rough on the human body Long missions, for example to a planet will be extremely dangerous to the crew’s health. What if they get to Mars and can’t walk? So there is a realization we must face — human exploration of space beyond the moon is probably impractical.
Lets assume for a moment there is something really valuable on the moon, lets say — gold or diamonds. How much would it cost to bring back 100 lbs of it? This brings us to another realization — it is economically impractical to mine for materials off our planet. Get the facts, do the math, this result is inescapable.
Given this dose of reality it was penny wise and pound foolish for the Bush administration to pursue a manned space program. NASA has been able to collect great science through lower cost unmanned, robotic missions. This is our best use of money.
If I were President, I have something more important for NASA to do. I would give NASA a 10 year mission to make the USA energy independent. In the first year they would be asked to produce a comprehensive energy policy and plan for the USA. I would then fund them to develop the needed technology to realize the plan.
“If I were President, I have something more important for NASA to do. I would give NASA a 10 year mission to make the USA energy independent.
These guys… http://www.energy.gov are already supposed to be doing that.
Obviously they (DOE) could use some more help, because so far they haven’t exactly blanketed the country with solar energy panels and solar energy plants. If they say their current work and budget is sufficient, then they have bad leadership.
As an engineer who spent thousands of dollars and dozens of personal man hours on solar panels to heat a small pool I can tell you solar is not the solution.
Maybe you’re not that great of an engineer ?
Today the proof is in the lack of use of solar even on a small scale. Where is the solar powered laptop? The problem is not the sun’s energy which is enormous, but the amount of that energy availabe per square foot at any given location on earth.
There are things far more valuable on the moon than just diamonds and gold
The book ‘MoonRush’ explores some of those materials, why we’d want them in the quantities best available on the moon, and how we could do that job far more efficiently than NASA can, ideally for a modern day Howard Hughes.
https://www.apogeespacebooks.com/Books/MoonRush.html
Those materials are one key part to a humanity maintaining a moderate power usage model addressing the need for storage of power as batteries only go so far. And as for batteries, we still need to find an effective method of extracting Lithium from low grade sources, otherwise countries such Peru with the limited high concentrations of Lithium, will just replace the lead oil producing regions as key influencers.
We’re getting really good at robotic missions and they are arguably more productive per dollar spent. Manned missions are nothing but weenie waving oneupmanship. Just my 2¢ worth.
It’s priceless when people say “the pending announcement is a big disappointment.” People were saying the same thing about Apple’s iPad, pronouncing it a disappointing failure before they even knew anything about it, or even whether it existed at all! Hilarious!
Meat-In-Space is a waste of money. Our chemical rockets too slow, our bodies too weak in the face of microgravity and hard radiation.
Work on developing Artificial Intelligence and robots, the natural denizens of space. It’s much cheaper, too.
You know, I was out skiing on the weekend and there was a little kid in front of me in the chairlift line talking to his ski instructor. He said he liked video games. The instructor said “this is way better than a video game, isn’t it?” And the kid replied “no, it’s not, video games are better”. I guess we can do so much more with the video game version. I mean everyone can go to the moon in a video game, not just a handful. Progress.
Thank you Robin, right on! Robots are getting better, smarter, faster, cheaper, and telepresence technology is improving too. Should we really feel the (rather juvenile, in my opinion) need to be on the rockets ourselves, we can come close to that with telepresence. Saying “we need to send humans up so we can better understand how to do life support systems for humans so that we can send humans up so that we can better understand how to do life support for humans so that we…” is a circular argument, in case nobody noticed that.
As far as the uplifting and inspirational aspects of space travel, we could get a much bigger uplift and it would be much more inspirational to do things like joining Bill Gates who just committed $10 Billion to vaccinating children in poor countries. With 35,000 people ***PER DAY*** dying of hunger worldwide (that’s a lot of 9/11s right there; do the math yourself) we could spend some of the money saved on improving the food distribution systems of the world to address some real, actual problems faced by actual people on an actual planet that we actually live on.
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Some day future generations will say to Gates “What were you thinking? You are to blame for the explosive overpopulation of the planet.”
Demographics indicate we are about to have a huge die off of humans over the next 20-30 years, vaccinations won’t change that.
[…] read Bob Cringely’s column about the end of manned space flight, at least as far as the US is concerned. This more than defence cuts indicated the stepping down of […]
No one really has a good enough reason to explore space. Our “space race” against the Russians was as much about propaganda (our way is better than your way) as it was about scientific endeavor.
It might take a potential catastrophic event (a huge meteor coming toward Earth) to make us focus and spend the money needed.
I lived then. It was ALL about propaganda. It was well known that nothing of interest exists on the moon. Sputnik was the impetus. Sputnik started the militarization of space. It will continue to be militarized. Along with any other territory anywhere.
I’ve read some postings by engineers with the Ares project that suggest it’s something of a boondoggle. They claim important engineering decisions were made according to some political agenda.
What congressional districts benefit the most from NASA projects? The cynic in me thinks that certain congressmen, senators or bureaucrats have fallen out of favor with the White House.
My point is: money is power in Washington. There is more to this decision than lack of vision. Money has stopped flowing, the result: some politico is less likely to be reelected/reappointed/promoted. I wonder who?
There’s an interesting story in there somewhere.
Mod parent up Interesting and Insightful!
Congress appropriates the money, not the President. The same representatives that currently fund NASA in order to provide paychecks to the people that reelect them will undoubtedly continue to do so. Let’s hear it for term limits!
Term limits are unlikely to solve anything. California put term limits in place a hair under 20 years ago, and they haven’t solved any problems. If anything, they have caused more problems than we would have had without them.
Great! Another thing we can “thank” to the economic environment wich the world was led by the “finance experts”. Sorry, I don’t know about economics, but space travel has been my dream forever, and I blame them for this. Greetings to you all.
I’m not American, so I don’t really have any right to comment on the monetary side of things. However…
I was quite young when the Apollo missions were happening. I can still remember them. I remember the worldwide excitement of those times, and the celebrations when Apollo 11 landed that day in July 1969.
I think that it was Dave Scott on Apollo 15 who said “Man must explore”. This is very true. A thriving, dynamic society will be exploring and expanding on many fronts. Conversely, a degrading society will curb exploration.
The moon missions of the 1960’s and early 70’s were but one measure of a dynamic society. There are undoubtedly others.
Its not just the cancellation of Apollo and the end of the space shuttle. Those are just items in a list of similar things. Unfortunately, the trend is apparent.
My question to you Americans is this: if you think that exploration of space is expensive (and it is), what do you think the cost of NOT doing these things is?
I’m not American so this shouldn’t matter to me, but I fear Bob is right: where America leads, the rest of the world follows, and so we’ll see a decline in manned space flight.
Regardless of the practical reasons for cutting back, I think this is really sad. It’s like standing up and saying, “Ok, we had a dream, but we don’t any more. We don’t need inspiration, and aren’t really interested in the future, and space isn’t cool at all.”
Oh well. Gotta put our hope in China….and in the Cringely Moon Mission!
My sentiments exactly. All I can think is that the current administration is saying, “We did something amazing once (’60’s moon shot), and we thought we could do it again … but it turns out, we can’t. But what we can do (yes we can) is re-distribute wealth, so we’re going to focus on that.”
I agree that the hope for amazing achievements in manned space flight lie in the other hemisphere (China), but I wouldn’t count out India, either. They’re developing the brainpower, and their space program is ramping up.
As for the Cringely moon mission … I’ve waited for many, many months for Bob to say *anything* about it. Bob’s very good at keeping us in suspense, and I fear all our waiting may not amount to what we’re collectively hoping for …
So, Bob, if your moon mission is still on, why don’t you tell us something about how it’s going?
It’s probably behind schedule and over budget so far… that’s perfectly ordinary. But there’s a different danger: that it’s a nothing more than a wild idea with no follow-through. Please… show us that it’s not by giving us some sort of a progress report! You don’t even have to dedicate a full blog entry: you could just reply to this comment with something short like “So far we’ve tried to launch twice, but both failed.” or “We’re about half-way through building the mini-rover.” or perhaps “So far we’ve got 3 or 4 CAD drawings, but not much else.”
And an update to the Team Cringely wiki couldn’t hurt, either … https://www.teamcringely.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Bob
What if your mission succeeds and you find no footprints or flag on the moon?
Finally!
Now to start cutting back the rest of the military from the bloated federal coffers!
NASA abandoned all pretense of being a scientific program the day someone proposed the space shuttle and they weren’t laughed out of the room. Since then they have become a gravy train for the aerospace industry, and nothing more. Abandoning the manned space program is the first real sign that science may move to the front instead of purchasing & marketing.
To put things into perspective . . .
It costs $2 to put each GRAM of payload into low earth orbit (numbers can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Flight_statistics). Right now we have the world’s biggest camper van, with a shirt-sleeve environment, food, bathroom, bunks, &c. . . . going up & down, again & again . . . at a cost of $2/gram for each trip. It’s like hauling a camper van to the top of Mt. Everest for each climb, and then sliding it back down so the next climber can do it again! Anything sent into space should be sent with the primary goal that it STAY there.
If you’re going to send people into space, it should be for something that clearly cannot be done by robots. Look at the data the Mars rovers sent back. What would an equivalent human mission cost? Dollar for dollar, robotic missions produce results at less than 1% the cost of manned missions.
I’m delighted that these nonsense missions may finally end.
“… it should be for something that clearly cannot be done by robots.”
Like, maybe, lifting the rover out of the hole it got itself stuck in? Or brushing the dust off it’s solar cell panels?
Why isn’t anyone talking about Solar Power Satellites any more? Gerard O’Neill did all the conceptual work, blueprints have been on the table since the mid-1980s. You’d think the prospect of ending our energy problems would be an exciting enough prospect, and certainly worth the money.
This will advance space exploration technology:
Have some megalomaniacal Bond villan type send autonomous rovers to the moon for the express purpose of using their tracks to write insults in huge letters visible to the naked eye from anywhere on Earth, and a statement of “you want it to stop? Come and turn off the rovers.” and have a classic “off” switch on each rover.
This looks like another nail in the coffin of a future “American World”.
Sad that that ridiculous unfunded Bush announcement fooled and distracted so many people. (So much the IQ of the species!!)
All this when the cost of going to Phobos/Deimos (not the Martian surface) might be very reasonable.
If our species gets stuck here at the bottom of this gravity well maybe we will go extinct. Thinking about that it might just be a blessing for the universe.
This is the act that has turned me against Obama for whom I had great hopes. The only real fiscal stimulus that would have done much good would have been a huge investment in infrastructure and R & D. An expanded space program should have been part of that. Obama has let our essentially bought and paid for crooked Congress limit real stimulus to a relative pittance and instead has blown hundreds of billions on pork and wasted subsidies. Now he is blowing his chance on real health care reforms and real financial reforms. His failed efforts and clueless rhetoric will likely lead to greater harms to our economy in the next year or two. I fail to see how he is an improvement on Bush. Obama has been a great disappointment.
“Congress limit real stimulus to a relative pittance and instead has blown hundreds of billions on pork and wasted subsidies.”
Where you been the past 100 years ? Pork and Subsidies are nothing new, why blame Obama for them ? Space exploration is nice when you can afford it but the last administration spent us into a hole and we’ll have a tough enough time borrowing more from the Chinese if we don’t tighten our belts. You want to be mad at Obama be mad that he didn’t launch a Pecora style investigation of Goldman Sachs and all the other wall street parasites his 1st day in office.
“Pork and subsidies are nothing new, why blame Obama for them?”
Because he claimed he would not tolerate them, and campaigned against them. To which perhaps you’ll say “So he lied during his campaign … all politicians do that.” And I agree, but again, 51% of America believed he was “different”. Now people’s eyes are a little bit more open, and he’s clearly earned the anger he’s receiving.
Did anyone actually believe that a politician from Chicago would be a reformer? Are the voters even dumber than I thought?
I have no love for Obama, but even I will admit that, as far as what to do about the economic emergency, he can’t be blamed much for the initial response. He didn’t have much, if any, freedom of action. He couldn’t do much without Congress’ approval, and they had already decided generally what their “solution” would be.
He certainly can and should be criticized for how he has been spending his time since then. I doubt anyone can make much of a case that investing in space program R & D would have been helpful for stimulating the economy, so I would not criticize him for not trying to do that, but there are lots of other things about what he has/has not been doing that deserve criticism.
I wonder how history would have been different if Europeans had available, and used, robotic technology in the 15th century when they started exploring the Americas?
This isn’t just about the science. It’s also about building new communities. Except for the damage done to native cultures, those new American communities have added greatly to humanity.
Earth is essentially closed to colonization. The only new opportunities are in space. It will take a while to develop the technology and infrastructure to make space colonization practical, but it will never happen if we stop manned space development.
When America was young, each generation wanted to expand the opportunities for the next generation. Over time America became very strong. This process is winding down now. Historically, every great civilization had its sunset. I fear we Americans are now experiencing ours.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
NASA outsources all of its work. It isn’t NASA that is designing and building the Aries rocket and other stuff — its private contractors who go off to congress to lobby for NASA to be given money so that NASA can give it to them for developing, building, and launching hardware. Is politics involved? Yes. Does politics outweigh engineering? Hell yes! Is the result anywhere near the best or brightest that America can do? Not only no, but Hell no! Is NASA in its current form a symptom of an America that once could do, but cannot now do anything of significance? Not only yes, but Hell yes!! You notice that no administrator or politician repeats the old bit that if could go to the moon, then we can do (built, go to, etc)…… (whatever pet project the speaker likes).
So much for the rant. The last time NASA actually tried to build something was their attempt to build a winged re-entry lifeboat for the ISS. I went to the annual show-off day at NASA’s Johnson Center in Clear Lake, Texas and one place we were allowed to go was the hanger where the hand-built test model was being built. We also got to talk to the engineers who were actually designing and assembling the various parts that were to go into the lifeboat (it looked like a lifting body craft made like a heat shield and landed under a big parachute). The guy doing the attitude thrusters, I recall, seemed especially proud of his work as he showed us an actual thruster. Either GWB or Clinton killed it in favor of paying $$ to the Russians for Soyuz lifeboats. To my knowledge, NASA hasn’t tried to design or build anything itself since then.
Maybe the idea of going back to space is to decide to not have a single outside contractor do any work for NASA. Instead of hiring Boeing–McDonnell Douglas –Grumman, require NASA build it themselves. Let the engineers run the lathes and weld the piping. Let them program the computers and fuel the tanks. We’ll probably get more bangs for our bucks and have some very happy engineers. If there are any propulsion breakthroughs out there to be made, they can make them. If an electric car needs to be built first, they’ll build it. Turn loose the engineers and stand back.
A government bureaucracy is an unlikely place to look to for fostering the innovation and risk-taking you want.
The writer that mentioned Apple’s contribution to the space program with their ‘launch’ of the iPad is most poignant here!
NASA’s position in recent years of… iCan’t-Get-The-Job-Done is making Americans look inward, asking themselves if the iQuit platform is the correct one. Many Americans are thinking that the iDon’t-Care position may be the correct one moving forward, when so many are saying iDon’t-Have-A-Job and iCan’t-Afford-It is what needs to be heard by the President.
…in all seriousness… Travel to other places is as much about exploration as it is about military dominance and security. One needs to think how amateur astronomists would feel looking up at a scene of the moon – like the one at the top of this article – and seeing a Chinese missle base staring back at them.
…lots to think about iSuspect.
Well, perhaps all the science fiction we read as boys was too utopian . . . and Star Trek too . . . now we are middle aged and it’s $$ and jobs that matter, not going to the stars. Guess we are all growing older.
Honestly, if it wasn’t for science fiction, I probably wouldn’t have become an Engineer. I was in the science fiction section of a bookstore lately. Not very big; it was dwarfed by the Fantasy section. Didn’t see much that was captivating either. Has science fiction change, or me, or both?
Before the first primates walked the earth, the moon was there. And it will still be there long after all primates are forever gone. But there are footsteps on the moon, and in that airless vacuum, perhaps they will endure.
End of manned space flight? I guess you never heard of SpaceX. They are working toward replacing the shuttle to supply the space station. When they get their Falcon 9 rocket working they will be able to do that. Next will be the Falcon 9 heavy lift which will be able to send a manned expedition to the moon.
I’m surprised Cingely Express isn’t hitching a ride on one of their test flights.
NASA’s new roll will be robot exploration and fudging global temperature data.
How about an update on your moonshot? I think it’s a great idea!!!
On an emotional level, this just sucks. On an intellectual level, what sectors of the economy are we going to spur innovation in? NASA is a civilian agency. A lot of its technology spun off into the commercial sector. The DOD’s tech takes time to trickle down to civilians because of secrecy and national security concerns. And the same BS arguments I heard in 1972-3 are coming back around. We need to take care of people on Earth. Did the government ever spend more on the poor after NASA’s budget was gutted by Nixon? Hell, they didn’t even save the original tapes of the Moon walks for historical purposes. Social safety nets have been shredded for thirty years except for the rich. We have spent trillions of dollars bailing bankers, insurers, and other financial frauds and incompetents, but we can’t afford to fund NASA and a new crew delivery vehicle for the ISS, or keep the space shuttles flying? This is just absolutely insane! It’s not like Obama will offer a billion dollar prize for a reliable private manned spacecraft, or reorganize NASA to make it more efficient. It’s likely all that knowledge will be lost as well.
In spite of everything, I’m quite certain the phrase “end of manned spaceflight” is laughable.
Well its all about economics, at the moment the USA can’t afford to fix its deficit, fight two wars and pay for the stimulus package which will overhall it’s infrustructure so somethings got to give although the NASA budget will be a tiny drop in the bucket.. The problem is that the USA (along with most of the western world) does not think in terms of 10 – 20 years ahead, it can barely think in terms of 4.
That is until China, which always plays the long game, announces its intentions to land on the moon and establish a permanent base there from which it will mine resources and fabricate materials for its own space station in earth orbit and build space craft for futher exploration.
The cost of launching such materials from the moon using somthing like a rail gun would be much cheaper than launching it from earth.
Then it will become a matter of national security for the USA to go back there and the money will be found. I don’t really see the USA letting China have the only capability of launching large objects at the earth at high speeds.
But it would still be between 2020 and 2030 before China can gear up for this. So until then it’ll just be expensive holidays to near earth orbit for people with too much money.
Don’t you worry, Bob. When the Chinese say they are getting ready to target Taiwan from the moon, we’ll mobilize right away. Maybe by then, all the knowledgeable staff at NASA will be retired, and we’ll get a whole new crew that, like those in the 60’s, won’t know that it’s too difficult. Now I think I’ll go celebrate the great technological advances that came from the early programs by having a nice glass of Tang.
Seriously though, other than the fun of showing that ours is bigger than theirs, what do you expect we will be missing out on without manned space flight? That is to ask, Why do you find it disappointing?
Obama is a typical Jimmy Carter style loser democrat.
Remember my words because by the time 2012 rolls around you’ll be agreeing with what I say.
You should have predicted this election day 2008. Sorry old boy I know you have leftward leanings but you have been fooled by their propensity to prevaricate.
As bad as republicans are democrats are 3X as bad because they have the mainstream media on their side to plaster over their shenanigans. That simple. Sorry. I know you thought you knew better. You did not.
I wanted to note that the picture you posted for this post is inaccurate. The tree in question located on Highway #3 from Calgary to Crowsnest Pass in Alberta was damaged by vandles a few years go. The branch is now supported by a metal bar. This picture clearly omits the metal bar. Shame Cringely, shame.
There is a great deal of interest here in robotic space exploration. Maybe a lot of effort should also be put into developing robotic system which can go out to the office, go to the shops and even go for a walk in the park. What is the point of human beings doing these things if robots can do it for you? Always send a robot to do a man’s job! /s
The comment about a Chinese missile base staring at us from the moon is particularly telling. A missile on the moon is several days away from you, a missile in China is several minutes away. Actualy that’s a bit funny, as I’m writing this from Beijing. There are no practical reasons to send people to the moon whatsoever, the ones people dream up are just that – dreams with no connection to reality.
There are other places and other ways to explore. Throwing good money after bad in a space programme isn’t achieving anything that we (you) haven’t already acheived back in the 1960s and realy don’t need to achieve all over again.
Full disclosure, I’m a Brit.
Boldly go forth and establish sustainable independent life in as many places as possible. Just in case something comes along and smashes earth into a million pieces.
I’ve never understood this argument. These colonies won’t be able to save the billions of us trapped on earth. Why is it important that humankind survive? If you’re religious, I assume your god would not allow an asteroid to destroy 99.999% of humanity. If you’re not religious, you know that the universe does not need us, so our extinction is hardly a tragedy from a cosmic perspective.
Look, I’m not arguing against trying to stop an asteroid from wiping out the planet, but if it’s inevitable I don’t see the point in sending a couple thousand of us into space to try to carry on. It’s like helping Noah build the ark while knowing you’re not on the passenger manifest.
Hollywood had that all worked out in 1951.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044207/
It’s rather more like going down with the Titanic so a woman or child can have your seat on a life boat. As little as we matter to the cosmos, we have our own reasons for wanting to continue to exist and those reasons are good enough to act upon.
I am not one to look for silver linings, but perhaps the closure of public funded manned space missions will be the beginning of privately funded ones, even if it relies on “space tourism” to get it going.
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Whatever the US or China does India will do about 3X cheaper and 2X more effective. Nasa is already using Indian instrumentation designed by ISRO to explore the moon. India’s manned mission will be launched in 2015 and the manned moon mission will fly in 2020. India already makes the most powerful launcher in operation, and the 3rd most powerful ever. China does it for prestige, Russia and India have always done it for results.
NASA was just muscle flexing with the Soviets. Once we proved we could go to the moon, which really meant nuke them better than they can nuke us, the missions really lost their purpose.
I agree with folks posting earlier that it’s a waste of time going on until a new form of propulsion is invented. The space tourists, i.e. idle rich, will have their jollies until something lands where it’s not supposed to. Then amateur/private flights will be banned as well.
Take a look at what Buzz Aldrin had to say back in November.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/why-we-need-better-rocket_b_351335.html
Sound familier? I’d rather have Obama following Buzz’s plan instead of wasting our money on Ares.
Buzz responds to the new NASA budget today!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.html
My strength is in history not in rocket science.
The English attempted several times to establish colonies in North America. However, they were largely unsuccessful until those colonies in the new world could provide something that was wanted in the old world.
In Virginia and the south, this was mainly tobacco. In the North it was, initially, service to the Cod fishing industry. Cod was perhaps the most important source of protein to Europe in the 17th and 18th century because, unlike with meat, once dried, it would not spoil. To put in perspective the importance of this, the demand for spices to make salted and semi-spoiled meat palatable is what drove the whole age of exploration.
Once these colonies were established, they took on a life all their own, but getting started, initially required providing something useful to the old country.
What has this to do with the moon? Well, much like Sir Walter Raliegh’s colony at Roanoke, the moon and beyond won’t be our destiny unless it provides commercial possibilities.
What commercial possibilities are available to the moon?
Nothing less than energy production, it would seem to me. It appears to me that the moon is made up of the things necessary for the production of solar cells. Solar cells on the moon could capture sun light without any obstruction. However, all surfaces of the moon spend half their time in the dark. During that time those areas could be used for production of nuclear powered electricity.
Solar and Nuclear sourced energy could be relayed to the earth by short wave relay stations set up between the Moon and the Earth.
This would create the critical early industry. By importing our energy from the moon, the environment on earth would be under much less stress.
After this, the moon, like England’s North America colonies, could take on a life of it’s own as it discovers other uses for itself: production of drugs and other items that prefer low gravity environments and as a space port for deep space projects, like reaching Mars.
When I was a kid in the ’50’s I remember that about once a year I’d see a “picture phone” on the cover of Popular Science suggesting it was the coming thing. I saw those for close to fifty years until “picture phones” precipitated out of the internet. They were not even brought to us by the phone companies. Space flight to the moon I think will precipitate out some advanced materials technology that makes space elevators practical in the next ten years or so. All of a sudden (relatively) it won’t cost thousands of dollars a kilo to get stuff up there and a moon shot like a picture phone will not be a big deal.
Bob, you’re wrong on this one. Finally Obama got something right! This does exactly what the space program needs – get the gov’t back in the role of expanding the technology, and let the private sector take over the more mature parts of the mission. No way that NASA needed to be in the booster business, not with Atlas and Delta already flying a lot (and easily adapted to manned missions), Musk ready to fly Falcon 9 this year, and Bezos even getting some government money. This will give us a space INDUSTRY, not a space PROGRAM.
And yes, I actually AM a rocket scientist. For real.
Actually, I’m a rocket scientist, too, by education, (though by profession, its been several years).
I’m not sure that I completely agree with you. Yes, an “industry” COULD emerge from this, but we need the 21st Century equivalent of a spice trade. We don’t have that. Not even close. Unless there’s something to mine on the moon, Mars or an asteroid, and be economically viable, there’s no chance anyone will raise the capital.
Your Atlas and Delta comments are well-taken, but of the two, only a previous version of Atlas, (40 years ago) was man-rated. Could be a toss-up in terms of cost to get one of them man-rated vice developing a whole new vehicle.
The SpaceX guys have a lot to learn. Its one thing to fly unmanned missions, altogether different putting astronauts on board and expecting them to live. While I am hopeful that the new, “dot.com” blood may yield some fresh new ideas, I am not confident it will be very soon. There will be many setbacks.
In the meantime, ISS is in deep kimche. Without a heavy-lift capability, it will be difficult to sustain 6 crew. Progress modules don’t have the capacity, and there won’t be enough launches per year to make up for the loss of Shuttle. There’s be the occasional (perhaps annual) launch of an ATV, but not more than that. For all its faults, it is actually fulfilling the mission for which it was designed: re-supplying a space station. Following its retirement, there’s a big hole in the requirement to sustain ISS.
Also, O2 generators on ISS aren’t keeping up with the extra load, and the engineers have not been able to figure out why. The failures are not on the fault tree. That means scaling back to 3 crew. Without only 3 crew, science will be significantly curtailed. If it drops back to 2 crew (unlikely) science comes to an end. Cargo brought up on Shuttle was making it possible to sustain the 6 crew.
Net-net, while the new budget provides some opportunity, it left serious deficiencies that will not be fixed in perhaps 10 years. But, I’ll grant you that the old Cx-based plan didn’t address the near-term, either.
Man-rating is really a meaningless term – what you really do is decide what an acceptable probability of loss of crew is, then figure out how to get your launch system to meet that requirement. It’s highly unlikely to require an effort equal to the design of a new vehicle (i.e., Ares 1) to get Atlas or Delta to that point, especially given their historical flight rates. The REAL way to get safe systems is to fly the hell out of them and learn all of their problems – never possible with the Shuttle (which never met any of the old man-rating requirements), and would have been just as impossible with the inherently low-flight-rate Ares 1 and 5.
And you don’t need a new heavy lifter either – develop the on-orbit propellant depot infrastructure and ship huge stuff in pieces. Yes the depot infrastructure needs development, but that’s the kind of stuff that NASA should actually do.
All the gloom and doom just baffles me…
“…And you don’t need a new heavy lifter either – develop the on-orbit propellant depot infrastructure and ship huge stuff in pieces.”
So, you still need the ability to lift the propellant into orbit from earth to the depot.
Either you launch a few large rockets with the propellant (unmanned of course) or many smaller rockets. Regardless, you still need the launch capability, which has just been cut back by the recent budget.
“Man-rating is a meaningless term…”
Not so. A system designed – from the ground-up, so to speak – to carry human beings is going to have the “acceptable” probability of loss (low) factored into the vehicle’s architecture and design. A low acceptable risk, will usually drive engineers in a different direction than a higher acceptable risk. Retro-fitting to accommodate humans long after the vehicle has been flying a different set of missions will cause the engineers to make necessary compromises (to deal with constraints imposed by the original, un-manned design) that would not have been made with a purpose-built, “man-rated” vehicle.
You are correct in your statement that the only way to positively “assure” a low risk is to “fly the hell out of it.” I also agree with your statements about flight rates for Atlas and Delta, vice Ares I and V, and their effects on mission assurance. But, you can never really learn all there is to know about any complex system, (ask Toyota). You can’t know what new flaws are being introduced in a retro-fit design, because its impossible to know how apparently “small” changes may drive “big” problems; (i.e. the “butterfly effect”).
It is a complete myth to assume that modern launch system are designed to greater probability of loss requirements than one designed for manned use would be. I assure you that nobody in the launch system business – at least, the launch systems that could be adapted to manned use, such as Atlas and Delta (and SpaceX’s Falcon 9) – is willing to accept loss rates for a mature system that would be more than anything Ares 1 (or the Shuttle) could muster. And a great many launch system failures can be mitigated by a crew escape system similar to that used by Apollo. So I definitely take issue with your insistence that either Atlas or Delta would have ended up much different than they are today if carrying astronauts had been their primary job from the beginning. I believe that SpaceX always had human cargo as a requirement for Falcon 9, though.
And to KM: Either Falcon 9 or most of the Atlas / Delta configurations would be fine for propellant lifting. Lots of smaller rockets are definitely preferable to a heavy lifter for this – makes a loss of mission much more tolerable, plus drives the inherent reliability up by driving the flight rate up over the expensive heavy lifter.
Asteroid Capture
The most economically worthwhile goal is probably the asteroids. Minerals, ores, chemicals and water (hydrocarbons? – ie. “oil”) – not hampered by being in a gravity well.
Currently lithium is the dream mineral. Capture a lithium rich asteroid and bring it home and make mega-bucks. Pick a mineral, any mineral, including radiological minerals.
Do the easy things first – extract liquids that could be used as fuel – in place. Just moving a liquid rich body closer to the sun would bring about changes in the state of the liquids present and could be used to extract useful products.
Later, bring selected asteroids to the Earth-Moon system, maybe at a LaGrange Point and extract all useful materials.
Being able to move asteroids around would have the added benefit of being able to prevent a cataclysmic NEO strike.
The entire NASA budget is about $17B. This is a tiny, tiny part of the total US government budget of $3T+. Apparently the world renowned space scientist in the White House has other priorities.
Priorities like a couple of messy wars and a near-wrecked economy that he inherited from the last guy. Yeah, I think he made the right choice.
I’m not sure whether to take consolation from this or not, but there was a gap of nearly 500 years between the first Europeans reaching the Americas and the start of sustained exploration. Apollo is looking more and more like L’Anse aux Meadows. I hope this time we can manage a shorter gap.
RIP Constellation. I think NASA lost “the Right Stuff” when the Apollo generation retired. It’s interesting that NASA brought back a few Apollo-era engineers to help get through Ares I-X, which did work, after a fashion.
I think the next step for manned spaceflight by the US will come from the Air Force, not private enterprise.
I’m an idealist turned cynic, by hard experience. I grew up with Apollo and the moon missions, later the space shuttle. I’ve watched post-Apollo NASA limp along, just barely surviving, until the latest budgetary setback.
Let me put out a thesis, namely that when the past 40 years are considered, NASA has actually been remarkably successful.
Some people say that politics is the art of the possible. The cynic says that politics is the art of doing nothing while appearing to be doing something. If you commit to doing something that entails risk, it might fail; or, worse, it might succeed, and then you have to keep funding it. Better to pretend to do something and make it look like something substantial.
The recent NASA budget changes are an outstanding example of this principle, in my mind.
World politicians in general, including American politicians, are very short-sighted. The only thing that matters is getting re-elected. The four year terms mean that usually only those ideas which can be translated into very short-term programs will actually be implemented.
One exception to this, perhaps the only exception, is if you can get a sufficiently large number of your fellow citizens behind the idea. Then, a longer term program just might withstand the short term focus. The idea can acquire sufficient emotional momentum so as to make it past the four-year short term limitation.
Space exploration is not a short-term program. Kennedy knew this when he launched the space race back in 1961. Man on the moon by the end of the decade was ambitious to put it mildly. It played on people’s fears of the Soviet menace to acquire that momentum. Even then it was a near thing. NASA’s Apollo budget was being severely cut back even at the height of its successes.
Somehow, in the 40 years after Apollo, NASA has managed to keep manned spaceflight alive with the flying-compromise that is the space shuttle. It has been able to do so, in my opinion by not being seen to be excessively over-ambitious, as well as morphing itself into the very picture of a bureaucratic agency.
Is it any wonder that NASA is seen as stogy and risk averse, so unlike the NASA of the 1960s? It had to become so in order to survive the four-year short term thinking of its political masters.
Obama’s budget for NASA is more of the same of the past 40 years. It pushes the need for concrete action, with a definite timeline out beyond Obama’s potential terms of service, yet does not actually kill NASA, nor necessarily lead to forced firings of NASA employees (the employees of companies with NASA contracts are another matter).
So here is NASA in circa 2003. The President appears to give tacit approval for more than just Low Earth Orbit operations, with lukewarm approval for another moon landing program. NASA, working within its budgetary limits, makes plans, and actually commits to actually implementing its plans. The result, the Constellation program, with the Ares series of rockets and the Orion and Altair spacecraft. NASA actually gets to the point of test launching a rocket in the Ares 1 family.
And then, just when momentum is beginning to build, the legs are kicked out from under the agency. No heavy lift capability, no spacecraft to fly anywhere. Just idealizations of what might be achieved in some future time.
You can probably argue that Constellation, and Ares in particular, was flawed. So too was Apollo/Saturn V in its early stages, and yet the 1960’s moon landings still occurred.
So, now NASA plans have been curtailed, in the name of financial expediency. Meanwhile military spending is increased…
Well, unlike the younger readers, I still have my Apollo memories and my telescopes. I can look at the moon and remember that once, humans were actually there.
B O has screwed us again.The NASA program gave the good old USA a tremendous technical advantage over the whole rest of the world and we are living off of this tech boost today. Even with Russian and Chinese spys stealing our info as fast as we could generate it we still stayed way ahead. Mr. Cringley most of what you have done depended on the extreme push to make things smaller and better and faster and better again and better again, and etc.
NASA was the closest thing we had to a National R & D program and they have lost it all with out political direction.
Mr. Cringley maybe you write an artilce on what good NASA has done for us over the past 50 years. Of course an article on how NASA changed your life would be better. Just the Hubble has given us enough data on space for quite a while to go.
I firmly believe a colony on the moon would provide us with so much more info on how to better manage resources from everywhere. Can you imagine what we could learn about saving the earth from our selves with this info.
Well you know B O ain’t JFK. Talk about a lack of vision.
I did not need any more reasons to vote against Obama and his party for eternity but now I have another one.
Manned space missions are ludicrously expensive given the complexities of the life-support system required.
It’s uncertain that we even have the technical expertise required for a manned Mars mission.
We’ve been getting much more bang for the buck from the unmanned probes recently.
Man going into space is a curiosity driven by ego. Not to put a pall on all this space scientist engineer stuff. We better focus on this panet cuz we ain’t leaving it, and even if where we gonna go?
Spend the money here. We need to help the enviorment stay
well enough to substain us here not on Mars. You could not build
enough ships to vacate this planet. I meanwhile am moving to
higher ground. I live in New Orleans…oh yeah !
“Who Dat say they gonna beat dem Saints”.
Think of how much better off our economy would be today if all those billions of dollars spent on moon landings and space stations had instead been invested in profitable businesses here on the ground.
Not much at all. The NASA budget is less that Wall Street’s bonuses. Think how much better off our economy would be if those bonuses were invested in space technology!
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Not much at all. The NASA budget is less that Wall Street’s bonuses. Think how much better off our economy would be if those bonuses were invested in space technology!
Obama did not cancel Aries because he thought there was a better rocket design out there……….
Obama wants all the money for his cronies.
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i am sure Obama is taking the right decision.
Thanks for good article. Hope to see more soon.
I trust in Obama! THX
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Apollo is looking more and more like L’Anse aux Meadows. I hope this time we can manage a shorter gap. cheap VPS
It will be very sad to me if the manned space program is really going away. Perhaps that will be one of many policy decisions that will be reversed once the Obama administration is over.
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