Paradigm Shift Ahead

I hope people don't use us as a bellwether for commercial space," Musk said."

ROFL!

I think that was the [George H. W.] Bush-[J. Danforth “Dan”] Quayle early years, Bush-41, and that was our charter, was to find ways to—we were under the mantra, “Faster, Better, Cheaper.”

Mr. Goldin had decided that NASA would be the trailblazer for government, that we would set the example for all other organizations in government in demonstrating that you can do bigger and better things for less money, and you can do them quicker.

It looked like it was working for a while, but I think something went awry somewhere.

So, for somebody to think that we’re going to build a new vehicle that’s going to be significantly safer than Shuttle, they’re smoking dope, to be quite honest.

Now, we do need a replacement for the Shuttle, but not because of safety.

I think we need a replacement for the Shuttle because we need a vehicle in which we can go to the Moon and to Mars and on to other places the way that we envisioned it when the concept of a space transportation system was briefed to President [Richard M.] Nixon.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with that. And I think you could still fly that system, but add the third component, the orbital maneuvering vehicle that we didn’t have enough money to build, and don’t have enough money to build now, and you could have been flying Shuttle for the next thousand years to an International Space Station and the orbital maneuvering vehicle, or orbital transfer vehicle as it used to be called, from Station to the lunar surface, or from the lunar surface to Mars, or wherever you want to go.

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/BoldenCF/BoldenCF_1-15-04.pdf

AnObamanaut writes " for somebody to think that we’re going to build a new vehicle that’s going to be significantly safer than Shuttle, they’re smoking dope, to be quite honest."

IMO more people need to smoke some dope. Deep space exploration is the most exciting thing (to me anyway) but the real vision is of large numbers of commercial launches for paying customers.

This may fail if it does not create a market - that's the big gamble. But if there is a market waiting then the industry will deliver on safety and cost just like the aircraft industry and for the same reasons.

At this stage, the US is the only country in a position to develop a commercially driven space launch industry. We certainly "... need a vehicle in which we can go to the Moon and to Mars ..." and NASA is the organisation to build it. But we need a commercial/economic purpose more urgently if this is to be sustainable, not just another Apollo.

Fortune favours the bold, but you have to work out what is the bold course and what is the safe.

IMO more people need to smoke some dope

anybody else think it's odd that a bag-o-dope was mysteriously found in a controlled access shuttle area, for which the workers were subjected to drug testing, and no users were found?

the industry will deliver on safety and cost just like the aircraft industry

which are designed and operated with better or lesser safety first consciousness than NASA hsf (before Goldin/O'Keefe/Griffin & co. better-cheaper-fastered)?

Fearless prediction: If it works perfectly the Government Monopoly Fanboys will say that it proves nothing 'cos NASA did the same thing 50 years ago. If it fails in any way the GMFs will say that it proves that space must be left to NASA 'cos these private sector upstarts will never get it right.

AnObamanaut, to answer your question, the airline industry has an incomparably better safety first consciousness than NASA. For one thing, they use fail operational designs rather than fail safe designs. For another, they try to design failure modes out rather than overwhelming them with expensive redundancy. Of course, they use redundancy when it makes sense. They produce safer vehicles that people can actually afford to fly. When NASA can do that, it will be safe for you to make such comparisons.

And, BTW, the shuttle was designed under Fletcher and Challenger exploded 6 years before Goldin became NASA Administrator.

To believe that the design options available for a commercial airplane are available for human space flight is just plain wrong. The ability to get payload into space isn't easy and requires a serious sprint with power densities that are orders of magnitude larger than commercial aviation. It's not a question of NASA being dolts who don't get it, it's a question of physics. The question of SpaceX being successful on one demo launch isn't the issue. The issue is whether they can make money off doing it while providing the same success rate. Since their business model has never been publicly shared, it's hard to say that they can make a go of things with 4 to 5 launches a year and pay back their investors. There has been off and on talk about reusing parts of the Falcon but that seems like even a bigger long-shot given there are some serious technical issues with that haven't even been discussed on any public forum.

People blather about armies of paying customers standing at the ready to plink down millions to visit the space station but those market studies aren't public either. It just seems unlikely but who would think there's a waiting list for Ferraris? All this talk about astronauts who can no longer get health insurance due to radiation exposure makes this even more unlikely. The part that irks me is that we're assuming this business case is good enough that we can commit now, sight unseen, to this model. If, in about 5 years (or 20 flights, whichever comes first) we see the new starts matching EELV reliability for so much less cost then nobody would say a word. Before launch one, or even launch ten, to throw away the entire existing, world-leading infrastructure seems like folly with unseen political motivation behind it.

"Before launch one, or even launch ten, to throw away the entire existing, world-leading infrastructure seems like folly with unseen political motivation behind it."

This is a great argument to have been made back in 2004 when the 'off switch' for the Shuttle was flipped and then especially as the gap grew and grew.

You didn't really just compare a vehicle that flys at 500 MPH to one that flys at 17,500 MPH did you? A vehicle that has a gross takeoff weight of 272,500 lbs, Boeing 757 for example, to one that has a gross takeoff weight of 4,500,000 lbs. To further the example of the 757, a vehicle with about 84,000 lbs of thrust total compared to one that has about 6,500,000 lbs of thrust.

That's just plain silly.