Show Us The Money

CxP was a broken program, overly expensive program. Anything can be fixed with enough money and time. But, is that money well spent?
I'm completely in favor of Congress allocating an extra $5B to NASA. But please, spend it on things that matter:
- Increasing America's space competitiveness
- Innovative new technology that will support our long term aspirations
-On reducing the launch costs through competition and continuous insertion of new ideas
- Reducing the mass required to boldly send American's to distant planets
- On methods to allow us to utilize the in-situ resources once we get there

More of the same baloney from Posey. "Unproven commercial vendors"? Does he think that only SpaceX will bid for crew transport contracts? Are Boeing, Lockheed Martin (both separately and together via ULA), ATK and Orbital just planning to walk away from a business opportunity? I think not.

So, he thinks it'll cost "Around $1B to fly two Shuttle missions a year". Who is he kidding? Besides, it's still a lot more expensive than four or so seats per year on Soyuz.

He's a big fan of spinoffs too, calling out the Blackberry specifically. Too bad the service relies on terrestrial networks and, oh yeah, it's a Canadian company. Opps!

This Republican representative also complains about the "Administration’s arbitrary December 31, 2010, deadline for the last Shuttle launch." That's opposed to the previous Administration's arbitrary September deadline?

If Rep. Posey doesn't want to give up our lead role in human space exploration he should have said so years ago when the decision was made to cancel the Shuttle. A castrated LEO Orion is no better than the Soyuz and certainly doesn't demonstrate any leadership in human spaceflight. As for falling behind China... please.

Okay, I'm ranting. Time to go relax!

Well, that all depends on how much of teh awesome budget requires that Obama keep his promises... right?

What's that? Only a few hundred million is actually up front and the rest is just promises down the road?

Errr... okay...

So basically she said "get out of our way or we'll do worse"...
Nice.

You've got hundred billion dollar military fighters that look like they'll never be delivered, questionable bailout programs with no oversight, and a health care package looking to cost a pretty penny.
Why the insistence on trimming NASA's budget when we could have it all with just a few shavings from other programs?

It sounds like all of the commercial vendors are unproven. Which companies have designed and built on their own, crewed spacecraft? I was under the impression that Boeing and LM designed their spacecraft under NASA control and supervision in the past.

"America's lead role in human space exploration"

Is anyone ready to play hardball, and call out the chest pounders? This is a great fiction but the truth will set you free.

From the contractor side of this argument, I can only say that "NASA control and supervision" is highly over-rated and damned expensive to the final product. In my experience, it adds 25-50% to the cost of the program without necessarily improving the end product. I think Boeing and LM are both capable of producing a good vehicle without that kind of help.

NASA supervision might be a little of an overstatement. NASA and contractors have typically worked together. Grumman came up with the design for the LEM and then worked out the details with NASA. NASA came up with the Space Shuttle and Rockwell had to figure out how to make it all work and build them. I have no doubt that any of the aerospace contractors in question can produce safe, quality spacecraft.

So Maxwell... what "hundred billion dollar military fighter that looks like they'll never be delivered" are you talking about?

"So, he thinks it'll cost "Around $1B to fly two Shuttle missions a year". Who is he kidding? Besides, it's still a lot more expensive than four or so seats per year on Soyuz."

Come on Mike - get real - comparing the per-seat cost of the Shuttle with that of the Soyuz is like comparing a row boat with a battleship.

The Soyuz is a fine craft, and it has done a yeoman's duty for decades but come on, with the Soyuz you get what, three seats and maybe enough stowage room for a box lunch and a couple of decks of playing cards.

With the Shuttle you get seven seats and the ability to concurrently deliver a whole new module to the ISS, or maybe an MPLM's worth of chow.

More imprtantly, you get significant down mass capacity - so you can bring your experiments and failed equipment back for analysis.

Yes, failed equipment - our tenure in space is still short and we are still learning what works well in the space environment, and what would be better left behind in Poughkeepsie.

Think about it for a moment, I am sure you will realize that both craft play an important role in the game.

In the question lies the answer: too much expensive space hardware being built and serviced and the wages thereof going to undeserving lower classes.

The best programs enable those sitting at the top to funnel the billions into their accounts with as little interference or actual goods produced as possible.

And Obama thought he'd get to play to the rabble on the left as anti-HSF and to the rabble on the right as "fiscally responsible"...

... all the while freeing up a few billion on the side for the now-inevitable second crash.

@ J Web: "From the contractor side of this argument, I can only say that "NASA control and supervision" is highly over-rated and damned expensive to the final product. In my experience, it adds 25-50% to the cost of the program without necessarily improving the end product. I think Boeing and LM are both capable of producing a good vehicle without that kind of help."

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From the NASA side of this, I can say that both Shuttle and Ares contractors have systems and mgmt that are as irritating and obstructive as NASA control and supervision. I'll accept your comment that you think Boeing and LM are both capable of producing a good vehicle without that kind of help. But, if your company shares your view, then it should develop these vehicles on its own without NASA money.

We learn slowly, don't we? All this talk about the coming commercial competition sounds like the Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program of the late nineties. They had a shootout with four finalists, Lockheed Martin (Atlas V), McDonnell Douglas (Delta IV), Boeing (Reusable propulsion module), and ATK (RSRM based). The prize would be dozens of launch contracts but the participants would have to develop the vehicles on their own dime. LM and MD (merged with Boeing in '97) won. The first flight of the new launchers as in 2001. Impressive, given a 1996 start. 100% payload delivery success to date.

This plan called for US commercial launch leadership to help offset the government launch cost. Sound familiar? Reputable, proven suppliers stepped up and delivered. What didn't happen was the commercial side. All the Teledesics and Iridium follow-ons were displaced by terrestrial systems. Traditional geosats migrated to the subsidized launchers overseas. We stockholders in those companies took a bath and wrote down billions in losses. Today this commercial competition has been merged into United Launch Alliance to reduce the fixed costs of the operation. We have two independent launch systems, in case one has a problem, however the commercial side has completely disappeared. It seems 100% launch reliability isn't worth a premium to the commercial world but the Air Force and NASA users are getting a nice ride initially subsidized by mistaken investors. Trust me, those companies won't be lining up to make more multi-billion dollar investments.

Cut to 2010. We have what could be the most naive Executive branch ever. In a year they've pushed through ARRA (Repaved roads and funding shell games) and cash for clunkers - with a supermajority in the senate. They come up with a great plan to tap that huge, emerging commercial market hungry for joyrides in space. This plan kicks all the institutional learning over the past 50 years and throws the ball to anyone out there already not burned by this type of investment. People keep asking why don't the established contractors step up. That's because the company leadership would be voted out by stockholders who know it's a sucker bet. That leaves it to the privately held companies who only answer to the whims of their ownership, none of which have experience in the fickleness of the space market. This is plan has a very, very low probability of paying off for the United States.

Congress needs to overcome the administration's naivety and keep the newbies from throwing out all the space experience we have in this country. It's OK to offer payloads to start-ups as incentive to see if they can find a real business case but it's disaster to back off from pushing the limits through a robust BEO human space exploration program. If Constellation isn't affordable, focus it on heavy lift, a crew vehicle, and near term flight of these systems. The good news is I can identify $1.6B in the proposed budget you can use for moving forward (rather than termination costs).

"I think Boeing and LM are both capable of producing a good vehicle without that kind of help."

"I have no doubt that any of the aerospace contractors in question can produce safe, quality spacecraft."

I agree. I think they are the most likely to produce a human rated spacecraft in the shortest time with the best reliability. Not 3 years as SpaceX has touted and Garver has believed.

But even they haven't done so in the past, no commercial company has so they are unproven.

Reality hurts, but Garver is right. Unless someone dumps a pile of money on NASA, and can accept the inevitable 2-year gap, it is too late to extend Shuttle. The decision to end Shuttle was made over six years ago, and the necessary supply chains no longer exist. No one wants to hear it, but that train left the station years ago.

And Constellation, as constructed, was an impossible task that required unsurpassed leadership, management, and cooperation. Instead, it was a huge multi-project Program spanning 10 Centers, each exercising their own unique set of politics and gamesmanship. The beast had so many heads it looked like a Hydra. You can’t implement a Program that complex when each Center is allowed to construct their own political sandbox, and in some cases create huge and expensive jobs programs.

NASA now needs to find a different way to do business. Unfortunately, uncertainty adds heads to the Hydra, and each head wants to eat the same piece of meat. NASA needs a clear mission to replace Constellation, and someone needs to slay the beast. NASA needs HQ and Center leadership that can put an end to the egocentric political maneuvering, and get our “leaders“ to cut the crap and lead. NASA is capable of great work; it is our lack of leadership and the ugly infighting that is preventing us from doing so. Working at NASA sucks right now.

Well I don't have access to the budget at the moment but where do you get 5 billion from? What is the proposed r&d budget now for game changing stuff? I thought it was around 3 billion, then take the billion allotted for commercial side, and move some of the increase from planetary and earth science back to exploration.
Problem solved.

No so bad thinking there SB
However the fatal flaw is very evident.
$5 billion-a-year increase, where will we cut the budget?" she asked."

Note the"-a-year" in the question. We all like fire and smoke here at NASA but we do not want to destroy the entire agency on a lunatic fringe effort. See what happen when you use Steroids? Your health becomes a very big issue.

There's no denying that the institutionalized myopia regarding the actual FUBAR state of Constellation is leaving huge holes in any argument to save HSF at NASA.

And ordinarily such a shakeup as was theoretically proposed could have been a good thing... except that Garver's commercial and R&D dreams will be also be left by the wayside by Obama at the next excuse.

Compromise or lose it all.

Perhaps Jupiter-130 as a stopgap until commercial actually has crewed ships flying, and Jupiter-246 as backstop HLV and BEO with whatever R&D enhancements seem worthwhile added as needed.

Funny how that works out...

The $5 billion/year would be the Augustine estimated $3 billion/year required funding boost for CxP added to the $2 billion/year for keeping ISS. THere was no Augustine option that funded POR and ISS as it was too expensive (thus the $5 billion/year).

Since when was Garver tied in with SPACE X? Now what could the connection be...

Since Soyuz is far cheaper than flying a Shuttle, we should just buy Soyuz seats. Makes sense, right? Maybe not. Here's why...

Soyuz carries passengers only. The US last purchased six seats at $306 million, that's $51 million per seat. But Roskomos will be raising the price (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hWcqbj-QifFRii5HpgKTCKt_dhpA) (the law of supply and demand I guess) So let's say the US buys 7 more seats at a cost of $60 million each. So launching 7 Astronauts, no cargo, would theoretically cost $420 million. (BTW: A by-product of our new bold new Space Plan is that no more seats are available for civilian space flight participants because NASA is has to buy them, a set back for private space flight participants - but that's a different discussion)

According to this official NASA FAQ (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#10) A Shuttle launch costs about $450 million (their number, contact NASA if you disagree, remember to bring all receipts to back it up too). That also includes 24,400 kg to LEO and back.

So lets say we assume a relatively (even unrealistically) cheap $4000 per kilogram of cargo (a person's gotta eat, doesn't he or she) to LEO and add 24,000 kg to the $420 million cost of our 7 Astronauts, that's an additional $96 million, for a total of $516 million. But wait, that's only up-mass. Their is no significant down-mass capability available, at all. So let's just ignore that fact for now.

Keep in mind that all these figures are rough estimates and that we're not looking for down to the dollar figures to determine who is cheaper, but ball-park ranges. And yes, the Shuttle is seven all at once, and Soyuz is two at a time, plus one Russian Cosmonaut. So an "off the back of a napkin" calculation shows that Shuttles are not all that expensive when compared to outsourcing to Russia, and they provide a unique down-mass capability that no one else can provide (yet*).

Furthermore, we can also consider that the half billion dollars goes into either the Russian or American economy. That's gotta count for something too. Made in USA and all.

BTW: *Even SpaceX is only advertising 3000 kg down-mass with Dragon.

As leaders it is both Bolden's and Garver's responsibility to make the plan work and within budget provided. If they can't - or won't - then perhaps FOR ONCE, the people at the top should be seeing some pink slips...by way of a HUGE change, instead of it always being the little people who are the victims of the Big Boys(and Girls now!) screw-ups...

Ms. Garver's statement sounds a little like a threat. Take it or leave it or else. Cute. She'd be right at home with the Borgia's. Then again, that's the problem with stepping on people during a rapid rise up the slippery slope...one misstep and the return trip is just as quick.

"Perhaps Jupiter-130 as a stopgap until commercial actually has crewed ships flying, and Jupiter-246 as backstop HLV and BEO with whatever R&D enhancements seem worthwhile added as needed."

What? How will developing new rockets help America's crew gap. What we are missing is the crew capsule. America already has 2 very reliable on-going rockets, Delta IV and Atlas V. Either can readily support crew.

Don't get me wrong on this... I believe the Shuttle is an amazing vehicle and it should not have been canceled. Going from the orbiters to a capsule is a big mistake and in the few years we're going to be talking about all the things we could do if we only still had the Shuttle.

However, extending Shuttle flights at this point is closing the barn door after the horses have all bolted. It serves no purpose other than reducing the gap and patching American pride. They have a plan for ISS operations without the Shuttle and it can be executed. Extending the Shuttle will be expensive... a lot more expensive than just swallowing our pride and paying for Soyuz seats until the commercial vehicles are ready to fly. It'll just suck up a lot of money that NASA doesn't have.

"They have a plan for ISS operations without the Shuttle and it can be executed."

Not really!

We can get an astronaut or two there every few months, but if anyone thinks we will have full use of ISS and the ability to to serious research when upmass is seriously restricted and with essentially NO downmass capability, you are seriously mistaken.

Just as ISS reaches completion, the crew size has gone to six and could now focus on research and experimentation, hands are now being tied with little capability to do experimentation.

"Since when was Garver tied in with SPACE X?"

When the cancellation was announced, Garver said that a manned spacecraft could be available in as soon as 3 years which is what SpaceX has promised.

"What? How will developing new rockets help America's crew gap"

One rocket. J-130 and J-246 are the same LV in different configurations. Build a J-246 and a J-130 is literally sitting inside that same LV.

And thus you skipped the important part: Jupiter allows us to backstop commercial launchers while they get up to speed without needing to eat that commercial market in order to keep itself alive... as has been NASA's unfortunate habit in the past.

The J-130 is essentially a freebie of developing the J-246 HLV and would serve as a needed second string to commercial efforts... and nothing would be wasted even if everything goes smoothly with the commercial launchers as the J-130 is also the core of the J-246 HLV... which would in turn serve as Heavy Lift until commercial HLVs are available. And Jupiter would be flying long before commercial HLVs are ready.

Then, with commercial LEO and HLV established the Jupiters can be deprecated and resources switched to other projects... not incidentally without throwing thousands out of work on little notice.

"What we are missing is the crew capsule."

Even the currently hamstrung version of Orion would be the long pole in the tent for all launchers.

"America already has 2 very reliable on-going rockets, Delta IV and Atlas V. Either can readily support crew."

And each was meant to backstop the other... but now both are run out of the same company, so who backstops ULA?

Orbital? T-II can't lift Orion. SpaceX? Promising, but they'll be breaking in both a new launcher and now also a new capsule for the first time.

The compromise isn't "commercial can't do it"... the compromise is keeping NASA going in the interim with a viable launch vehicle that's neither hostage to commercial space nor needs to cripple commercial space in order to feed itself.

I didn't say it was the best plan. I simply said that it could be executed within the up/down mass cargo constraints that it comes with. Pouring money into restarting the Shuttle program will simply drain it away from everything else.

Personally, I think we really need Shuttle II. An evolutionary upgrade of the entire system would yield a much safer, more capable and less expensive vehicle. It would also yield the sort of vehicle we NEED for the future, rather than going back to spam in a can.

However, we should have gone that route 15-20 years ago and it's too late now.

Actually, while there will be a deal of extra work to keep shuttle going it's not so bad as all that...

Remember that a primary objective of Griffin was to kill shuttle dead dead dead and thus a lot of verbiage was generated in meetings and at hearings to that effect... but in the meanwhile smart people were quietly ignoring the excessive orders to scrap all shuttle tooling ASAP and preserved what they could while slow-walking any unneeded dismantling.

Thus restart can be done quite a bit sooner than the party line given out at the hearings indicated.