Without support, the VSE has been nothing but a lot of empty words. I expect the whole thing will go the way of the dodo the end of next January. In the mean time the SMD, and science in general, have indeed taken a serious blow, with space/planetary scientists (and up and coming scientists) getting out of the field, and those who remain stressed to the max. I currently avoid advising students to enter it, as it is just a plain BAD career move.

The message of this article is overly alarmist. How can you really take this "rallying to arms" seriously when globally the U.S. government accounts for 81% of all annual government-funded investment on space?

Keith, the latest quote in Florida Today online newspaper from Jeff Hanley is that the additional funding that has been provided by Congress won't really help close the gap between the shuttle and ARES. See "Dollars may not close gap between space programs" on their web site.

So why is Mike Griffin begging money from Congress to accelerate ARES? What is going to be done with the extra funding?

How can we have built Redstone, Atlas, Titan, Saturn 1B, Saturn 5, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo in 9 years with slide rules and no experience and now it takes 9 years with all of the super computers that NASA owns and 40 years of rocket building experience? I do realize that there are funding limitations but doesn't all of the experience and computational and productivity gains count for something?

I have been a life long space program advocate but about ready to say lets close down NASA.

Anyone could see this happening years ago. To say lets go to Mars but not provide funds, ment only thing. Strip other programs. We almost lost the Hubble to funding cuts.

I have a "Grand Vision" also. "A "SUV in every driveway, an oil well in every back yard." It's a vision, I didn't say I would pay for it.

Some of you just don't get it. It's *never* been stated that the VSE will be implemented at a "before this decade is out" pace. It's "go as you pay" - or have you forgotten? It would be great to have more money, but if you were in the trenches and saw how hard people are working to make this happen with what is being supplied - with what we knew would be supplied, within the limitations we knew would be there - you'd be a lot less whiny. Do you know what the budget was during Apollo (in 2008 dollars)?

Dear Engineer. I am an engineer as well and have done both electronic hardware design and software design. Don't be so condescending. I have looked up Nasa's budget on Wikipedia which gives the amount in dollars at the time and equivalent, inflation adjusted (2007 dollars. Except for a span of 6 years from '63 to '69 the budgets now ARE greater. During the years of shuttle design and build AND the last flight to the moon the budgets are significantly less. Are you telling me that the ARES 1/ORION is that more complex than the shuttle? If it is, then I don't see how it could be more cost effective.

Let's face it. Nasa has been turned into a jobs bill. I don't know if that is a bad thing but let's at least be honest about it.

I can't believe that a cost benefit analysis on shuttle vs ARES/ORION for ISS is actually less. Even at 400M per flight, you can't tell me that the it is going to be more cost effective designing and building ARES 1/ORION, paying for additional Soyuz, paying for COTS, ATV HTV resupply than keeping the shuttle and only flying one or 2 flights per year for maintaining and utilization of the ISS.

Still don't fully understand comments like those of JC and others. Even with flat budgets (and loss of spending power because of inflation), NASA is still spending $5 billion a year on space science, more than all other nations combined. Sure, everyone would like annual budget increases, but some people treat this like an entitlement. It is not. Yes, VSE and finishing the space station have cut into every program, but can space science say its been hurt more than aeronautics, a NASA crown jewel that has really suffered? So with $5 billion a year in expenditures, you would encourage students not to consider planetary and space science? I would hardly think so. Even in these tough budget times (and one should remember that the entire country is in an economic recession and a lot of people are really suffering), there is a lot of science to do with that kind of money. And space science at NASA would be helped a lot if big projects like Mars Science Laboratory weren't out of control and sucking valuable dollars from other smaller class missions which are the real training grounds for young engineers and scientists. This would be a good time for space science to clean its own house before pointing to other programs as the sole source of its problems.

When looking at the current NASA budget when compared to previous years, a simple look at Wikipedia isn't going to show the whole picture. During Apollo, a large majority of the NASA budget was devoted to that program. Today, the NASA budget pays for a much broader array of manned and unmanned programs. Today, NASA is operating the shuttle as well as funding Constellation. Given what we are talking about here, you need to look at what NASA allocated for Apollo (in current year dollars) and at what is now allocated for Constellation. Let's be honest about that.

I say cut NASA's budget in half till they decide to use existing rockets or shuttle heritage. President Bush said lets go to Mars, Mike Griffin's choices gave us the 5 year gap and budget busting rockets.

As far as I'm concerned, it all went up in smoke in 2001 with the militarization of the replacement shuttle (X-33) http://www.spaceprojects.com/x33/. They got a good 90 second test of the aerospike engine, then classified it to DARPA. Bush and his puppet masters wrecked NASA as well as a billion other things on this planet. If they had kept working on the X-33, there may be a replacement shuttle flying in 2010. Now they have an excellent space bomber and no ride to ISS. I want to throw up every time I hear the expression "to the Moon, Mars and beyond". It's the Buzz Lightyear mentality that has ruined space flight and will take generations for America to recover.

Just curious...Will the Ares I,V, and Orion combination even be able to get us near Mars? It would be great to design with the future in mind...

I may be completely wrong, but we never hear anything about how the current Constellation architecture will help us for Mars...

I think NASA is paying the price for the slide in American science literacy. One of the things that the WaPo article quotes from the Futron report is that the general public has no real interest in space. If the voters aren't interested in space, they won't elect people who are, either.

Yes, I have heard this 'entitlement program' baloney before . . .

"Just curious...Will the Ares I,V, and Orion combination even be able to get us near Mars?"

Read the ESAS

As for the X-33, it was not militarized and the aerospike did not go to DARPA. The person has been reading too many conspiracy websites. Venturestar (X-33) would have never worked as launch vehicle

I see comments here about "go as you pay", "spending power", and "how hard people are working" and comparing the planned system to Shuttle.

First off, Shuttle has no launch abort system (exclude that escape pole or certain very limited abort modes please). It has no dedicated abort system. So every launch is a risk we take only because we have weighed the risk against the benefit of further construction to the International Space Station.

Second, "go as you pay" is not an excuse to shrug aside all goals or promises related to schedule or recurring costs. I believe we have the experience and insight finally to take knowledge of future budget scenarios and spending power and combine them with hardworking people to achieve desired outcomes.

To think otherwise in "go as you pay" is exactly what will result in cannibalizing of future budgets (Mars for example, or a Lunar Outpost, or ISS maintenance) in order to pay for the failed outcomes, especially recurring costs, of our current plans.

It is the focus on Mars with the Moon as a side show that is derailing the VSE just as SEI was derailed 16 years ago.

If you actually read the VSE speech Mars was to be done after we actually built an infrastructure on the Moon to support it.

That is where the ball has been dropped.

I would like to know why the x-33 failed. What happened to our space plane. Does the military have a working space plane, but won't let nasa use it, or use the tech? Why don't we have a space plane NOW?

NASA and the goverment spent God knows how many millions on the x-33. As tax payers , we should get a full detailed accounting on how the money was spent and what we have to show for it.

Is NASA even working on a space plane that can deliver people and cargo to the space station?

I really hate the term "space plane."

Just sayin'.

"Yes, I have heard this 'entitlement program' baloney before . . . "
Posted by: JC at July 10, 2008 8:12 AM

"Baloney?" Yeah, great response to the issues raised. Dealing with harsh reality appears to be difficult for some.

Far from it. I built houses for four years, and did six as an 0311 in the United States Marine Corps, before I even when to college, Well-enough; *you* have absolutely *nothing* to teach me about reality.

I *still* won't advise students to work for NASA these days, or even its contractors, unless they actually *like* that path enough to sacrifice a 'home-life', job security, money, and low blood pressure. Guess the people who do it must be doing it out of sheer dedication to their country, huh? Or maybe you know a better reason?

"Space planes" & other single-stage-to-orbit vehicles sound neat, but the problem is that you would have to carry a lot of dead weight (a gradually emptying tank) for a good part of the trip. Staged vehicles have the advantage of dropping the dead weight of tanks, motors, &c. after they're no longer needed. The payload (the crew or the cargo) is a very small fraction of the total weight of a rocket on the launch pad. If you are curious about the X-33, the NASA History Office has a website devoted to it: http://history.nasa.gov/x-33/home.htm

If NASA uses a double lifting body, like "White Knight Two", that will lift "Space Ship Two," then they can substatialy reduce wieght and avoid the worst of Earth's atmosphere and gravity. The lifting body (a double body jet aircraft), would lift the space plane to above 100 miles before releasing. This would make it a fully reuseable space craft that would take off horizonally like a jet plane. Thereby making launches simple, safe and inexpensive.

A couple of comments to previous posts:

To the comments on how short amount of time it took to get to the moon, remember it was acceptable for death to occur. If NASA ran the same way as they did then, it would have been closed down a long time ago.

There was inherent risk as nobody had gone to space before. Now, there are those who believe that going to space is routine. These are the same folks who have control over the budgets and are also the same who vote in politicians. Few people really understand the complexity of a space vehicle and to think its routine is foolish. But the 'image' must be maintained for the general public that space is easy now, since we've been doing 'it' for 30+ years.
Another aspect is that NASA had a dual path during the 60's. They had the Saturn V with the 5 F-1's, but they also had a 260" solid booster for the first stage (similar to Ares I). The second and third stage were designs of magnitude that had been built and tested before and carried much less risk. When the same design criterion's were applied to the larger F-1 it didn't work. Significant effort was done to get the engine stable. Specifically, injector to injector had enough manufacturing variability that if it was built 'the same way' one would be good, one would be bad. That engine design was not well understood at first because of the injector issue, among others. Does NASA have a dual path without the Russians? Not without Bigelow.
Finally, NASA in the '60's wasn't as theoretical, or academic as today. You had the pioneers of rocket science and a bunch of manufacturing and designers who really understood how to make parts. You couldn't spend time analyzing things over and over, then building and testing as is done today. Before you did your best, built it, fired it, and went though a design iteration. The cycle is much longer now because there are more steps to supposedly cheapen the design cycle. Now you have so many more criterion to satisfy before you can end a meeting, let alone a design, its appalling. As an example, when the Titan II almost failed on the pad in the '60's and had a bad fuel valve, it was replaced and the vehicle was launched within 3 days. Yes, 3 days. It took MONTHS to finally fix the fuel problems on the main tank due mostly to paperwork issues.

Also, seeing how the primes and sub primes are managing this, especially with NASA changing requirements and not slipping schedule 'offically' to maintain political face, you'd have to be a fool, or a Project Manager to think any system save for the abort motor, roll controls, and a few others will be ready by the end of the decade.

NASA doesnt have a space plane, but the Air Force does. Its called the OTV, or X-37.

Time to get off the soap box

Joe

To Joe

Thanks for pointing out the x-37. I have read all I could find on it. It would be nice if NASA would put some updated info on the x-37 and x-37B, on the internet.

Just throwing money at the problem will not solve it alone there needs to be massive reform inside NASA to move forwards.
VSE is dead because the upper management at NASA cannot admit they can make mistakes and prefer to just stay the course much like the president whom appointed them.
A classic example is the mistakes made on Ares I.
The fact Marshall seemed to have missed out on a very fundamental issue with all SRBs known as thrust oscillation.
The shuttles handles this via a torsion bar that passes though the ET and the fact the ET acts as a big liquid filled damper.
All boosters that use an SRB as it's core suffer from high TO and usually must sacrifice about 25% of their payload for a damping system or the payload simply designed to handle high vibration.
Instead of dropping Ares for Direct they cut the mass of the vehicle and add a thruster system that fires the wrong way to cancel the TO.
They managed to make a capsule less safe then the shuttle is now after the O-ring and foam issues have been dealt with.
Also the latest Orion is not much more capable then vehicles that cost a fraction as much such as Soyuz,Dragon,Dream Chaser, and Shenzhou.

Things are bad enough maybe we need to start thinking about a post VSE plan such as an expanded COTS program and even giving Boeing's offer for the Shuttle II reconsideration.

For the Cost of Ares you could launch a lot of EELVs and a lot of DC's and Dragons ,field a nuclear shuttle for moving stuff between LEO and lunar orbit and still have money left over for a next gen RLV program. This time they should use a VTOL design like DCX,Rombus or the SASSTO or use a lox kerosene HTHL TSTO design vs messing with a bad VTHL design like the X33.