Today's Space Policy Feedback

Maybe these horribly wrong CxP backers got some of those fake emails too?

but here's the big news anyway (so much for the no wings crowd)

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/03/18/secret-mini-space-shuttle-could-launch-april-19/

I dare speculate that President Obama won't even go to KSC on his visit, much less stage his summit there. A bit too awkward to say you admire the contributions of the KSC workforce and then look them in the eye and say "F**k you". I don't even think Bolden has made too many visits to KSC in his tenure. Way to keep on the pulse boys.

How much longer do we have to witness the never ending stream of politicians worried about jobs, their own?

Far be it for any of them to consider, much less talk about, the possibility that the new direction may be far better in the long term (like beyond the next election) for jobs, economy, technology, and exploration and that the current Manned Space Program was stuck in the LEO mud with little prospect of really going anywhere of worth for decades. Perhaps the astronauts that sit on earth for years without going into space can go back to doing real work. I would think 10 - 15 actual astronauts would be enough for quite a while.

How about thinking about science, improving travel for millions of people who travel on aircraft everyday, and the people who rely on aerospace technology to provide for defense?

The MSF program needs to be ratcheted way back until the technology is ready for really big accomplishments, not going to the moon in 20 years or having 6 people orbit the earth doing little science beyond repeating what has been done for decades.

NASA needs to leave the past behind and make the long term investments that are needed. The big fat cat politicians and contractors will just have to adapt.

If they were paying attention to the space program they would have insisted a couple years ago to save jobs by extending the Shuttle retirement until the U.S. had a tested alternative. NASA wouldn't have had the money to waste $9 Billion, soon to be $11.5 billion on the Constellation mess. If Griffin would have implemented COTS for cargo and crew competition back in 2005 we may have had an EELV or "new space" solution in the very near future. But he decided he wanted to design his own rocket and we are left with this mess. As far as the LockMart, Boeing, Northrup/Grumman et al old space. They have to just realize that they aren't going to be getting these lucrative Cost Plus contracts any more and will have to do some real work and accurate estimating to come up with accurate and cheap Fixed Price proposals.

Apparently, we just decided to spend $250B to reduce wasteful spending.

Decades of human space flight pittances appropriated almost without notice, and pointed to reduce government waste. Only in America. The mind boggles.

Absolutely. Had we done the right thing from the start, instead of Horowitz and Griffin pushing their personal interests on us.

For example, we could've planned to phase Shuttle out over 10 years starting in 2005. Fly 3 orbiters 5 times a year for 4 years and finish the heavy ISS construction, reduce to 2 orbiters for another 3 years flying 3 times a year to fly spares and logistics to ISS, and finish with 1 orbiter flying 2 missions per year for the last 3 years. Over that same 10-year period minimize development costs and layoffs by developing a cheap Shuttle-C inline rocket with spacecraft on top and engines on bottom, using SSME's until the inventory is depleted. This rocket would have plenty of capacity to allow the full-up Orion, deep space-capable with all the redundancy and reserves it was intended to have. This could all have been done from the start within the budget if the right decisions had been made.

This transition would have saved enough money to fund these things and do research and development on an SSME updgade to a cheaper, one-use engine (formely called STME in the Shuttle-C days) and other future technologies. We could today be looking forward to 5 more years with a total of 12 Shuttle flights while phasing in test flights of the Shuttle-C inline. It and the STME were practically at PDR level in the late 80's, we could easily have had that operational in 10 years.

With development and operational savings from what we learned from Shuttle, we could have a launcher that was cheap enough to operate from 2015 to 2020 for ISS while transitioning LEO to a now mature commercial space industry. Use those savings to fund a heavy-lift version with 5-segment solids, extended ET, and 5 engines, followed soon by a transfer stage. By 2020, we would be ready to do NEO flybys until we developed landers for any surface we wanted to go to by 2025. Even if the schedule slips, we would still be accomplishing new things every 5 years.

Think this would garner more public interest than what we've been going through? But instead it's 2010. And we are looking at tens of thousands of layoffs, cancellation of Shuttle and Constellation, no commercial capability to take their place next year, buying expensive rides on Russian-made rockets, and no technology in development to have a future to look forward to.

Yep, we could've had a lot to look forward to over the next generation. Had we only had the right leadership at the right time.