And The Children Shall Lead

I can't believe I saw this Star Trek reference _anywhere_.

Boy, I'm sure glad he didn't come talk at my graduation! How depressing. Almost all of the talk was about how everything is about as f-upped as it could be, and his uplifting message at the end is he asks that despite all that, please don't walk away from your aerospace career that you spent the last four years working towards. Happy graduation!

Now there is an honest, no BS, non-delusional, straight vision that can be presented to children and the young with out any moral or ethical dilemmas.

Homer your legacy may yet to be realized. Great work!

Dear Students of Embry-Riddle University,

My friend Homer has a grand passion for American space leadership that clearly infuses his recent talk with you. But if our great nation is to sustain the half century of leadership in space, then NASA must change in a fundamental way. President Obama's new direction in space is, I believe, the essential next step for us, and for your generation. Here's why:
In January 1984 President Ronald Reagan proposed the building of a permanent space station. Yet because of political wrangling and repeated budget cuts, assembly of the station didn't begin until 1998. And although President Reagan challenged NASA to build the station in a decade, the final assembly will take place this year-26 years after Reagan's speech.
Worse yet, under the plan that Obama inherited, that station - which has cost America tens of billions of dollars- would be deorbited in 2015, after only 5 years of operations. The succeeding NASA budgets over the years had little funds available for actually making use of the station's laboratory space. Why? Because the cost of operating the Space Shuttle fleet, and its follow-on vehicle, the Orion-Ares capsule and booster system, literally ate up NASA. Just as troubling, the original technology innovation program for the Constellation vehicles was cannabalized just to keep pace with the new vehicle's development. As the NASA Administrator said at that time (2005) it merely became "Apollo on Steroids".
If your generation was ever to have the chance to go to space, you'd have to be a federal government employee. That was it. And the new rocket and capsule wouldn't even reach the station, because the tight budget and normal development problems pushed the first flights in Constellation until after the station was dropped into the Pacific. Yet, the American people were expected to fund the new vehicles and new directions in President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration. Sounds weird, huh?
That was the mess that Obama inherited on January 20, 2009. He appointed a review committee to look at the program and evaluate its status. That panel, which sent its report to the president last October, said that the current path that the Constellation program was on "was not sustainable". A space station that was never to be fully used. A replacement vehicle so far behind that the actual return to the Moon would never be reached. And no money to develop the kinds of technology and equipment that we need to voyage to more distant places if and when we really wanted to.
The President's new plan opens space - finally -to the average researcher or experimenter, by funding the seed money for a whole new commercial space industry. It pumps billions into the kind of technologies that we will need to go beyond Earth orbit. Right now, calling us to Mars rings hollow-we don't know how to do deep space manned flight. That will change. New kinds of vehicles to shrink the transit time to Mars? That's in there,too.
At a time when America is beset with two wars and a troubled economy, Obama made space exploration a national priority once again. He put his money where previous Presidents only put words.
If you and your peers ever have a chance to actually fly to space yourselves, this plan is the only way that will ever happen.
Far from dismantling the space program, as Homer suggests, this actually gives it a new lease on life. So I challenge you to study the facts before you make your judgments. And get ready for a great new age of space exploration, in which the people get to play, not just a handful of elites.
Ad Astra!

Well said, Frank!

I tend more towards your response than to Homer's speech.

"NASA is a national asset that the people of the United States have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to create. Its engineers and technicians combined with its test, training, development, and launch facilities are unequaled in the world and are the result of fifty years of experience in spaceflight. NASA is not only the most experienced, it is the most successful spaceflight organization ever. No others come even close, not even the Russians."

The NASA of Constellation is the NASA of the last fifteen years. This was a group of managers who never had to do the hard work of designing and developing anything.

The management of Constellation had been handed it all.

They had pressed the buttons and flew the missions but the research, design, development, testing and engineering was something they never learned how to do or to appreciate.

This was not the NASA of the moon landing nor the NASA that developed the Space Shuttle.

NASA, space exploration, space commerce, and US human space flight are all things that the country needs, but the way in which Constellation approached it was not going to bring us any of these things.

It is time for radical change.

If NASA shows some real leadership, something it has not been doing in many years, then perhaps NASA can stimulate reinvention and expansion of human and human commerce into space. If NASA continues to behave as it has been behaving for many years; managed by inside politics, placing people with no technical or no leadership abilities into leadership positions, then likely it is all over.

I'm with Homer.

Frank:

We would love to believe that Obama has very good reasons for all of the reversals in his space policy, and that the proposed NASA budget has nothing to do with his having lost TX, AL, MS, and UT in 2008.

We would love to think that his offer of billions for a new Orlando passenger train is unrelated to his concerns about loosing FL in 2012.

We would love to believe that there is some secret warp drive technology that a professor at MIT is just waiting for NASA to fund.

We would love to belive that paying SpaceX and friends to transport a few astronauts every year will dramatically lower launch costs for everyone, and that we will all be able to buy an LEO vacation for $5,000 within 10 years.

To quote the inspirational words of Charlie Bolden, "Ain't going to happen!"

I'm hoping someone on this web site can help me with answering a question. If a group of college students gets together to design a rocket system, does that fall under ITAR? And if you can, please point me to official documentation supporting your answer.

I've poured through this budget (no, I have no "insider" knowledge)and it contains serious funding for new booster designs (flybacks, anyone?)in-space propulsion, fuel transfer and refueling demos, automated rendezvous and docking tests, etc. Wanna go to Mars? Well, this is the kind of tests that would be needed. When JFK committed us to the moon, Von Braun had the M-1, F-1 and J-2 engines to arrange into a specific booster configuration. Wanna go to Mars? We've got zip in the pipeline-until now. NASA is only one customer for these new commercial orbital crew carrying vehicles. The industry will grow, finally, because of the money in this budget. Yes it will be hard. yes NASA is resistant to change. But in a world of limited choices, isn't it better to place your bets on many suppliers rather than the same group of huge industry contractors?
I see this budget and feel optimistic that we will actually get to Mars in my lifetime (or its moons) because once these technologies and capabilities are tested, developed and demonstrated, if NASA won't go than others will take these designs and go for them.
I am optimistic and I think you all should be too.

Martin, as always, it depends on who you ask. However, no one is going to say it's OK if the penalties mean that they can go to jail if the government thinks otherwise.

Jail. Get it. You in jail, not a fine, not losing your job, not your company losing business, no, it's you in jail. The individual is responsible. The companies just have to show that they told you so put up some posters, hire some consultants/lawyers and they are mostly off the hook.

Your university has probably taken some government money in the past. They probably would be worried, not as administrators but as fathers and mothers and you know, people don't like to go to jail.

And NASA wants to turn into a R&D organization!
But all their R&D will be secret lest it fall into the hands of the evil ______.

All of this is because you can put a bomb on a rocket and kill people.

ITAR has actually turned into a marketing tool for Europe. They are advertising stuff as 100% ITAR free. The push is on to develop non-US technology to fill their needs. We are locking ourselves out of the future with this Cold War thinking.

Sorry to use your post as a soapbox. You best get with your professors and talk with them. And see if you can find a copy of "ITAR for Dummies".

It's the bureaucracy stupid.

A fearless man striking the listener with a fear of the future. Way to motivate the kids.

Listening to this chest pounding piece you might think von Braun was still in his office.

I wouldn't take advice on innovation and the future from this particular historian. Elon built an entire rocket company in the time it takes Homer to write a book. Maybe the school should have chosen a different speaker.

It took 25 years to develop the ISS because NASA was not a high priority with the past administrations or Congresses. I do not think this will change in the future. I think President Obama gave NASA $6 billion over the next five years and will not look at NASA for the remainder of his term in office.

Because NASA is not a priority we have to cancel current programs to pay for future programs. Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled so NASA could go to the next program. Shuttle always had a space station to go to as part of the plan. Congress would not fund both Shuttle and station so Shuttle was developed first and station was put of to the future.

The station eventually was funded and designed and available funded didn’t support the design. It got redesigned to fit available funding and eventually assembly was begun. There were problems in the beginning when we had several assembly schedules in a year or so.

The assembly was going fairly smoothly until the Columbia accident. And has gone smoothly since the return to flight.

We decided that the Shuttle was too dangerous to fly, after the Columbia accident and we were bored going to LEO after 30 years and it was decided to go to the Moon and Mars. But to get the funds to develop the necessary vehicles, Shuttle and ISS had to be cancelled.

This led to the ‘gap’ that everybody, who paid attention, noticed when Constellation was first announced and it ended the ISS in 2016.

The Constellation didn’t get the funding profile, for several reasons, and the whole thing collapsed. Soon the U.S. will be unable to launch its crews to its own station and the Moon-Mars program have been kicked to the road to some future administration.

This may not have happened if the U.S. had a national goal to develop space, meaning LEO, as part of the national economy. Once LEO is part of the national economy then you can have true commercial space.

The ISS will become commercial when private money is supporting research with the possibility of developing improved processes for implementation on Earth or develop product that require to be in LEO as part of the manufacturing cycle.

I'm with Homer.

The R&D in the new budget is just a wish list.
It is disjointed and unfocused at best and a smoke screen
for dismantling NASA HSF at worst. It kicks the can WAY downstream.
Most people who work in the industry can see it for the crock of BS that it is. It is all high level buzzwords. Meanwhile the HSF workforce starves
and dies. There is no HSF job creation, only HSF job decimation.
No private venture is going to launch to the moon or Mars on their
own dime. No thousands of jobs are going to materialize. This is delusional.

Handing out research grants scattered about is not a roadmap to anything.
Handing out $6 billion over five years to multiple companies as seed money to "whoever" for "whatever" is not a roadmap to anything. It's woefully inadequate.

If we're lucky, in 5 years we'll have a 1965 HSF capability. And I wouldn't even bet on that.

If there's no project, there's no progress. Just long term, disjointed, open ended stuck on the ground "research".

There are no specifics in the budget for HSF because there are no credible plans for HSF in the budget.

Welcome to the Lori Garver NASA.

Wow, you would think that the gap in the USA's ability to launch humans into space is the fault of the current administration! Has everyone forgotten that this is the consequence of the decisions to shut down the Shuttle *and* the ill-fated investment in project Constellation? Even if Obama continued the present course, we'd still be about a decade without human launch capabilities.

I agree with Frank. Investing in commercial launch services while simultaneously investing heavily in developing and demonstrating advanced systems -- that could make human space flight affordable -- is a possible way out of the current quandry. To be sure, there is some risk, but I prefer this risk to the near certainty that "Apollo on Steroids" would have been too expensive.

If NASA is as capable as Homer says, they should be able to make the Administration's plan work. Certainly, no one has warp drive waiting in the wings, but we do have the prospects of things like orbital propellant depots and space resources which can make space exploration more affordable.

Manned spaceflight will never be affordable as long as their are less than a dozen manned space flights per year. And even if you cut the cost of manned spaceflight in half, that would still be astronomically expensive because of the low demand for annual spaceflights.

The key to dramatically reducing cost is to dramatically increase the demand for manned space flights so that economies of mass production can finally kick in order to lower rocket manufacturing cost.

Polls suggest that there are several thousand wealthy people willing to pay $20 million or more to travel into space. And if an international space lotto system could generate just $10 billion a year (close to the current NASA manned spaceflight budget) that would mean over 100 manned spaceflights per year taking average Joes and Janes into orbit.

If there was just one big Skylab-like space station in orbit that could accommodate 4 tourist for just a 10 day stay, that one station could potentially accommodate more than 30 manned flights per year. Ten such stations, 300 manned flights per year. And that would dramatically lower the cost of space launches which would further increase the volume of passengers.

Space tourism is the key to everything! And that's where the real market is-- not NASA ISS contracts.

Marcel F. Williams

Not a completely terrible speech, but surely the wrong venue.

Homer hit the nail exactly on the head with that speech, IMO. He's quite right: NASA was taken totally aback by the new Garver 'plan' because it was drawn up entirely in the White House.

Martin;

ITAR does not cover any information which is in the public domain, which is primarily what a university will be using. We did a hybrid rocket design for our Sr. Project and did not have to go through any ITAR hoops; Depending on what fuels you will be using and how they will be ordered &/or handled you may have to register your team on certain rocketry lists (i.e. buying HTPB is generally a red flag & people generally want to know what you're doing with it). There is a lot of info in the public domain through high powered rocketry clubs & other university projects; unless you're doing something totally novel or for an agency or contractor, I wouldn't be worried. Feel free to contact me, I'm interested in your project;

Stacey
contact@yurisnightcleveland.net