No Bucks = No Buzz Lightyear

I'm glad someone decided to speak up on NASA's behalf. Unfortunately coming from astronauts, and especially several who have been integral with the existing Constellation program, it probably does not mean as much as if some 'independent' well known visionary thinkers would have declared their support. But NASA and Constellation have run off some of those people in recent years.

"It's just really hard to fit it all in. A lot of the assumptions made in 2004 (for the Bush plan) have just not materialized."

Prediction: When Obama makes his 'decision' there will be assumptions he makes that will not materialize.

Bush was so focused on the Iraq war that he grossly underfunded the Constellation program. And there's really been no serious money for the Ares V or the Altair lunar lander.

There's been a lot of talk about privatizing manned launches to LEO-- even though no private launch infrastructure currently exist and has never existed.

If Obama decides to seriously go the route of waiting for private industry to develop a manned space vehicle, then it looks like the current space shuttle will probably be around for at least the next decade. And that immensely exciting ISS program (the mission to nowhere) will probably go on indefinitely. I'm so excited:-)

ISS4Ever- you need to go back to the presidential announcement of 2004 and show me where NASA was ever promised a lot more money. I think this was a fiction invented by a prior administrator and some Constellation managers as an excuse. The NASA budet has been just about constant for 40 years, starting its decline in 1966, and NASA was told to budget to accommodate this. That meant the next step was a CEV with a launch capability, and then followed by other rplans for a lunar missions. Instead Griffin and his boys tried to take a giant leap and fell flat...

I've said it before and I'll say it again. International partners only work if they are willing to put money behind their claims of wanting to be international partners. We have been carrying Russia's space program for years. How exactly did that lower our costs? We pretty much paid for and built their service module, we pay for all their Soyuz launches when they arent sending paying tourists aboard. I am all for working in an international collaboration, if the other country actually shares the financial burden. If China wants in, fine, then pony up at least $3 billion a year. Don't send us a Chinese astronaut and some $50,000 experiment. International partnerships will only work if the countries involved actually share a significant portion of the financial burden. It was a nice dream that sold ISS to Congress, but it never materialized in reality.

I think the more correct phrase is "No bucks, no Buck Rogers"... from "The Right Stuff".

I know NASA engineers and contractors do pretty well money wise. NASA could make money with solar powersats. The USA needs to become energy independent. The dems say no domestic oil or nukes, the repubs say ground solar costs ten times more than coal. Mankins says with current growth trends we will be out of all fossil fuel and uranium in 90 years. Why not get ahead of the curve and have NASA do something productive?

@Spaceboy

Europe wanted to develop its own space station (the Columbus free flier) and we lobbied hard to bring them over to Space Station Freedom, only to then to go back on our promises and scr*w them over and over. Both Europe and Japan spent billions on building hardware that had to sit at KSC gathering dust for many years.

The space station had already undergone several redesigns and it's cost gone from a 'reasonable' $8 billion for Freedom to a whooping $65 billion for ISS before the Russians were invited to join.

We have only ourselves to blame.

Marcel Williams - it looks like the current space shuttle will probably be around for at least the next decade.

Can't happen. There is one shuttle external tank in inventory which might be used for one more shuttle flight, but even stretching out the schedule for the last shuttle flights, we will be out of expendable hardware somewhere in 2011. And meanwhile, Boeing and Lockheed are slowly but steadily laying off shuttle support people. And all the while, the NASA and contractor workforce is bleeding people who reach retirement age without being replaced. It would cost billions to change these circumstances -- even if only to delay the inevitable for a few more years -- and no one wants to spend those billions.

So shuttle is going to end in another year or two. That there's no immediate alternative US path to space for manned spaceflight is unfortunate, but .... history happens that way. In Obama's next term, or in his successor's first term, this lack of capabilty may seem a problem which demands solving. Or maybe outfits like SpaceX or even Boeing-Lockheed will produce new launch vehicles after being properly "incentivised" by Congress. We'll have to wait and see.

Spaceboy, NASA has a lot of money. More money will not make Ares finish on time. Did you watch the Augustine meetings?

And you have your space station history backwards. Russia was the brains and the money, NASA was just the money. We need them on ISS. They don't "need" us. We're a "nice to have".

@mike shupp

Somethings gotta give Mike. It will be at least a decade before a private space craft will be ready to launch people safely and routinely into orbit. One of the reasons the current shuttle is being decommissioned is because of its 2 out of 127 flight failure rate. Space X, which has never launched a human into orbit, currently has a 3 out of 5 launch failure rate.

So if both the Ares 1 and the Orion are canceled and the Space Shuttle are canceled, NASA is going to have $6 billion extra dollars a year with no manned space program except for the $2 billion a year we'll still have to support the ISS and buy rides on Russian space craft.

Congress is not just going to let that $6 billion in extra funds just sit around for the next ten years at NASA headquarters. And I doubt if they'd even give 10% of that money to private space companies.

So they're either going to continue funding the current Space Shuttle with those funds or they're going to use it to develop a shuttle replacement or they're going to cut NASA's budget down by $5 or $6 billion a year.

Somethings gotta give!

"I think the more correct phrase is "No bucks, no Buck Rogers"... from "The Right Stuff".

Editor's note: Yes. But I updated it for a more current reference.

Posted by: Dave at August 30, 2009 3:40 PM"

Dave, it's a generational thing. Those of us who remember Gil Gerard's "Buck Rogers" when it was on TV now watch Buzz Lightyear...along with our grandchildren.

Heck, I'll show my age and tell you that when I was in grade school, the school would show the original Buck Rogers serials in the school auditorium every Saturday morning.

Things were different 40 years ago, very, very different.

Marcel --

Beefing up COTS from a contractor's demo to flight hardware will likely cost a billion or so for three to four years. Playing around with next generation rockets (X44? X45?) can chew up the odd billion. But beyond, Grifin cut back on planetary science missions and low-level technology development programs to feed Constellation; bringing those things back to funding levels scientists will like is going to cost a billion or two extra per year. And Obama would like to see more earth satellites. loking at global warming and other environmental issues -- figure those get two billion dollars a year. And there are facilities that could use some delayed maintenance....

Even without an ambitious manned space flight program, NASA can chew up 17 billion dollars per year.

@mike shupp

NASA's unmanned space program is unlikely to see any of those dollars since the public generally loses interest in NASA once there is no manned space program.

Human interest in space is part of our instinctive desire to pioneer and to settle new frontiers. That's why people really want to go to the Moon and Mars and eventually to the stars.

@Marcel @Mike S

I've been around NASA for 20 years, and the one thing there is not a shortage of is exciting robotic missions with profound science return. What has been lacking is sufficient funds to get these ideas flown.

It would be very easy then to spend it on such endeavors; however, we are all dreaming if we think Congress/OMB/President is going to allow NASA to spend what HSF doesn't. There are other pressing political matters that will easily eat whatever Billions HSF can't spend.

ISS4Ever --

Why do you think God gave us Senator Barbara Mikulski?

More seriously, how do you think robotic missions would fare if manned space flight really got back. I think there's a notion in most folks' minds that somehow someday somthing like Star Trek is going to happen -- not the Vulcans and Romulans and rest of that silliness -- but the new frontiers Marcel Williams mentioned, sweeping all the way out to the stars. And if we could convince, really convince them, that this is absolute nonsense which no one in authority is ever going to allow and which they shouldn't even dream of, and absolutely wiped out manned space flight to show that humans are never going to get off this planet .... do you suppose they'd become fonder of unmanned space missions?

I don't think so, but I might be in the minority.

"I think the more correct phrase is "No bucks, no Buck Rogers"... from "The Right Stuff".

Editor's note: Yes. But I updated it for a more current reference.

I think it's a perfect reference. To quote Woody:
YOU... ARE... A... TOY!!! You're aren't the real Buzz Lightyear! You're-- oh, you're an action figure! You are a child's plaything!

Let's think - does this apply to Constellation? To Ares? To management? To entire parts of NASA? Hmmm - Keith may be onto something.....

If Obama does decide to fully fund a return to the Moon, it has to have a time line that is achievable within the next ten years. This 15 to 20 years in the future stuff-- does not capture the public imagination at all since many older adults might not even be around to see it by the time it happens.

If you want to ask for billions more for NASA (especially from older citizens), then the public expects you to get it done as quickly as possible!

It took us only 7 to 8 years to reach the Moon after Kennedy's decision-- starting from scratch and using primitive 1960's technology. There's actually no reason that we can't have a shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle ready to go within 5 years capable of lifting nearly 50 tonnes into lunar orbit. And if we started fully funding the Altair lunar lander next year, that could be ready too-- well within 10 years.

But its time to get going!

As wonderful as Spirit and Opportunity are, they ain't role models for young children and won't be inspiring the next generation to study math, science and hard engineering courses, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt in the process. Space exploration requires explorers, flesh and blood men and women that mirrors the best in us at all levels. I can't tell you how many of today's astronauts have told me they got the space "bug" watching Neil and Buzz on the lunar surface on grandma's black and white TV set.
We've got to boldly go again, as Buzz himself has said. So for Pete's sake let's get on with it-government CEV or private capsule or runway lander.

Somethings gotta give Mike. It will be at least a decade before a private space craft will be ready to launch people safely and routinely into orbit. One of the reasons the current shuttle is being decommissioned is because of its 2 out of 127 flight failure rate. Space X, which has never launched a human into orbit, currently has a 3 out of 5 launch failure rate.

That's an extremely misleading statistic, falsely implying that the reliability going forward is only forty percent, but that's nonsense.

Falcon 1 had three failures, each less severe than the previous, and then two consecutive successes. In other words, they had some development teething problems, which are normal, but worked them out. If they have a successful Falcon 9 launch this year (as planned), there's no reason they couldn't develop a launch abort system and have a crewed Dragon flying within three years. There's certainly no reason to think it would take a decade, given their schedule to date.

I hate watching history being rewritten. The blame for our being stuck in low Earth orbit lay on the space shuttle program and Rockwell (now Boeing). The space shuttle was supposed to carry well over 120,000 lbs to low Earth orbit, about the same as or more than the Saturn V. It's predicted payload fraction was off by a factor of 1/3rd or more. Also, shuttle's launch rate was supposed to be much higher than 8-10 launches a year. It was supposed to be able to launch twice a month. The combination of the low launch rate and the low payload mass is specifically what has kept us from doing manned exploration of the solar system.

I get really tired of articles that claim our lack of recent manned exploration is because "we suck" or blames this political faction or that one.

Dfens-
Your recounting of the shuttle's history is right on the mark.
Imagine if you will the space flight environment of the past 30 years had the shuttle system yielded the capabilities it once advertised? Launching regularly and large payload masses would have-literally-revolutionized the capability to lift and assemble large structures in orbit.
Alas, it was not to be!

But all the awesome science missions that people care about are the ones that seem like they support future humans.

Lots of the funding is going to things like Mars rovers that search for water, assess habitability, and look to see if anything is inhabiting Mars already. Then we send probes to Saturn and its all about the water there. And the water under Europa. And the hunt for Earth-like planets in other star systems.

People who like it and think its awesome do so because they think "maybe we could live on Titan some day".

If we only ever intend to look, all this becomes trivia.

Its still fun to know, but how many billions of dollars of federal money is "fun to know" worth?

If people think Mars rovers are useless now - and many do - wait til you tell them that humans going to Mars is such a daft idea that even NASA isn't pumping it anymore.

Which reminds me. I can't help but notice that space advocates seem to have the most reasons that space is useless and irrelevant. I really appreciate the likes of Dennis Wingo for suggesting that things in space are materially useful, and that maybe we should look into things like that.

Historical note: Buck Rogers from Phillip Francis Knowlan's novel "Armageddon: 2419 AD." The character was named Anthony Rogers (a gloomy and disaffected WW1 vet who gets trapped in a mine cave-in in 1919, knocked out by radiactive gas, and wakes up 500 years later). When developed as a comic strip, the character's name was changed to "Buck" as being more manly and stirring than "Tony."

Rand Simberg: Glad to see somebody take on the anti-SpaceX-spin directly, and the general misuse of statistics on space discussion boards generally. If I had a dollar for every time somebody posted a statistical whopper about this kind of thing (or, for example, about the single vs. multiengine issue), I could fund my own manned space program.

Marcel,
"go the route of waiting for private industry to develop a manned space vehicle"

I do not agree with Alan Stern because sending Astronauts into space has not been NASA's forte. It has been the robotic missions over the past 50 years. Manned missions pale in comparison to the wealth of knowledge and discovery the robotic spacecraft have delivered. Where Manned flight has been an asset is when they have been able to repair a robotic vehicle such as Hubble. Certainly, landing men on the Moon was valuable, partly for its social impact and also for the pounds of Lunar material returned. But it still does not compare to the robotic missions' returns and returned at far less than 1/10th the cost of Manned flight. NASA has been broken because of the mistakes made in designing the Shuttle and ISS. An exorbitant amount of NASA funding has gone to these activities over the last 30 years. Adjust how much of the budget goes to manned flight and you will have your "star athlete" back. Lets have NASA develop Interplanetary Propulsion to make trips to the planets a matter of a few weeks, then Manned expeditions will make sense.

Well, if Buck Rogers hadnt run off with the last exploration shuttle in 1987 we might have a little more money. And that was the last shuttle-based deep space probe we ever launched.

When all of manned space flight's failures can be traced back to one initial failure, the space shuttle, it seems ridiculous to argue that manned space flight in general is a failure simply because shuttle was. Shuttle failed. The point is conceded. Apollo, on the other hand, provided near miraculous results. In fact, had the first lunar lander not been manned it would have crashed into a field of boulders. Not too impressive. The Apollo program was sending back televised pictures of the Moon back when unmanned satellites were barely doing anything beyond beeping from orbit and for them to get a high resolution photo of anything back to Earth required a film cannister drop. The James Webb Space Telescope proves every year that idiotic levels of cost overruns are not solely a function of whether the vehicle is manned or not. Although if every single unmanned program NASA has were dependent upon JWST as a means of getting off the ground, I'm sure a similar trashing of unmanned science could similarly be propogated.

@Michael Mealling

Governments were what started the space program and the satellite industry. If we had waited for private industry to figure out how to make a profit out of sending objects into to space, we'd probably still be waiting.

NASA got us to the Moon in less than 8 years,launched the first communications satellites, created the first space plane, placed space stations into orbit, sent probes to Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, and to the surface of Mars and beyond, placed telescopes into orbit that have given us whole new perspectives on the universe. But now, NASA is somehow viewed as a failure by some people despite having an annual budget smaller than the military's space budget and at least 30 times lower than the annual US military budget.

I'm as critical as anyone about NASA's priorities which are actually the politician's priorities, but in general, NASA has been one of the most successful government agencies-- ever created! And there is no government or private organization in the world that can even come close to matching NASA's technological and scientific accomplishments.

NASA is an extremely good investment! And if I were the president, I'd actually increase the NASA budget by $10 billion annually and thank NASA for what they've done for this country and for the world as far as advancing science and economic growth!

@Frank & Dfens (& the commercial cheerleaders):
Think the Shuttle thing was more about Lockheed taking Shuttle into "Operational" mode from Rockwell, with new inexperienced mgmt.

We really don't know whether Rockwell (or Lockheed eventually) could have come closer to actualizing the intended launch rate because of the fallout from Challenger NASA management waiver on launch requirements.

But, regardless - seems like the US Govt is finally getting the contractor-govt check & balance oversight thing:

A most excellent article was just published by Harvard Business about "outsourcing" mentioning NASA & DOD & Boeing, etc. for IT & aerospace commercial along with & a Noble Economics winner advice.

Worth a read (& the Augustine commission & Bo the greybeard should have a look too before finalizing that report!)

Outsourcing: Where Will You Draw the Line?
3:15 PM Monday August 31, 2009
by Ben Gomes-Casseres

The Defense Department is due to report to Congress that in Afghanistan, U.S. troops continue to be outnumbered by private contractors. The contractors are described as performing auxiliary duties so that military personnel can focus on core tasks. Sound familiar? How many companies do you know that have outsourced "non-core" activities to focus on its "core competence"?

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/08/outsourcing_where_will_you_dra.html

responding to -
Posted by: Dfens at August 31, 2009 2:30 PM

Dfens,

But JWST overrun don't compare to manned flight overruns. Same goes for MSL which is over budget. But both unmanned missions will return much more data than any pair of manned missions could. And MSL could still be operating when Humans land on Mars and there to wave and greet them... or point its Laser and say, get off my property, you darn city slicker.

I mentioned that Manned exploration has its benefits. And I'd agree that we will always have to accept that manned flight is more costly. But I think NASA and Admins can easily dream of greater missions than are economically feasible at the moment. Lets rely on Robotics to do our dirty jobs dangerous work and we reap the returns. Eventually, robotic missions will setup a lounge chair and ice-chest filled with nice cold beer awaiting our arrival. And some future Kennedys will be racing in a Solar System sailing regatta.

Dfens, Frank Seitzen --

Always nice to see Space Historians at work. Did either of you guys pull down paychecks for helping design and build the shuttle? I did, for about six years.

And my recollection is, just about every year, the development period got stretched six months or so because OMB and the folks in the White House felt clipping half a billion bucks or so from the federal budget was a damned sight more important than building spaceships. And every year, expected payload launch costs went up because OMB wanted to balance the budget and explicitly traded future shuttle operational costs against R&D costs.

You complain you get a lemon in the shuttle? You damned well demanded that lemon. Don't blame NASA or Rockwell for producing the lemon you insisted upon.

Not that it matters much, of course. Everyone working on the space shuttle figured in ten years or so the anti-space sentiment in this country would have dissipated and we could get to work on a second generation vehicle which delivered what was originally promised. Fools that we were!

The shuttle is a piece of crap from conception, not from this or that contractor taking over some piece of it. The point is to get men and materials into space, not to get them back on dry land for a nice photo op. The shuttle wings and landing gear are nothing but expensive boat anchors for all but the last 10 seconds of the shuttle mission. The tiles too, have no purpose at all for most of the mission, yet the cover the entire craft and if any are missing or damaged you write off the whole vehicle. That's true of even the tiles that cover the parts of the shuttle that have already served their purpose and are just along for the ride.

The most expensive part of any launch vehicle is the first stage. Yet the first stage spends its entire life in a relatively benign environment. The Saturn V first stage fell entirely intact into the ocean on every Apollo launch. That's where all the expense is. It never leaves the atmosphere, and if it had air breathing engines, it could have one hell of a lot better specific impulse than a rocket engined first stage will every have. Does that suggest anything to anybody? To me, those facts do not make me want to throw away the first stage just so I can keep the part that goes on-orbit. Those facts do not make me want to cover some vast expanse of vehicle with fragile heat resistant tiles.

Shuttle was catastrophic to our nations space program. Not just the shuttles that crashed. The whole program was a catastrophe. Prior to shuttle, NASA's vehicles had been designed by Werner Von Braun. Shuttle was the first to have been designed by committee. When you design by committee that's what you get, crap. Back when we had a viable aerospace industry, vehicles were designed by men. Now they're designed by committees, and we are reaping the appropriate rewards.

The shuttle failed, not manned space flight. Let's quit revising history and learn from it for a change.

While the shuttle was not the success it should have been, I fear we keep writing off workable concepts just because we simply cant organize to build the things we want. Which makes revolutionizing technologies (like SSTO, space planes, and other RLV's) impossible.
The programatics and politics faltering results in people thinking the idea itself is impossible.

This is probably why a private space company or another nation could succeed in doing what NASA failed at simply by going back and trying old ideas.

In the mean time we could be wandering in the wilderness for another few decades. Especially if people get to thinking the failure of Ares means traditional rockets also don't work anymore.

We need to stop blaming the machines for our shortcomings.

Dfens-
You must be a joke.

While Shuttle might not have made it to DC-3 performance, it has proven tremendous concepts of technology including the engines and reentry heat protection systems, and it has performed more and more varied missions and carried more crew and more payload by mass and volume to space, and nothing else even comes close to comparing to its return capability.

Yes, it could have been more efficient with smaller wings and a smaller payload bay but go talk to the USAF about that.

"The first stage environment is benign" - what are you smoking ? 0 to hypersonic, through Max Q, and in Shuttle's case the ability to abort and return to the launch site or go trans-Atlantic.

The people who developed Shuttle 35 years ago were at the peak of NASA's space capabilities. The management had the experience of WWII, te supersonic generation, and the development of X-15, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab.

They did things that the engineers and managers today don't have a clue how to do anything comparable - Constellation being a prime example.

Take a look at Constellation's development costs to date and planned operations costs, which Mr. Augustine has been doing, and in a few years Shuttle will look like a bargain, especially since nothing else on the drawing board can compare with its capabilities.

Do you have any idea what it will cost to set up the recovery force for ocean landings ?

What you and the current crop of engineers and Constellation managers, and our last Administrator all forgot, was that when Apollo ended in 72 no one was interested in funding it any longer or in continuing the program as risky and inefficient as it was with the hardware that was flying. The public lost their thrill with Apollo after 11 landed. We had lunar outposts, pressurized rovers, advanced spacesuits all in work and there was not interest in continuing.

Constellation might look like a good idea now because its something different, but it is unaffordable, unsafe, and unsustainable, with an Apollo-like architecture; the vast majority of the tax paying public does not care about going back to the moon especially if all we are doing is Apollo and more science.

You complain about two Shuttles being lost but out of 130 flights and 700+ passengers while in 21 Apollo missions and 60 passenger seats we lost one crew and very easily could have lost a second if the A13 accident had not happened exactly when it did.

A careful and thoughtful analysis, which I think is what Augustine is doing, is the best thing for deciding how best to proceed. The failing is that it was not done by the last Administrator, at least four years ago. Griffin and the Constellation minyuns were on the road to Abilene. Now no matter what we choose to try and do, its too late to save jobs and capabilities.