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| Re: NASA to announce undeserving shuttle winners today (764226) | |||
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Re: NASA to announce undeserving shuttle winners today |
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Posted by WillD on Wed Apr 13 01:22:58 2011, in response to Re: NASA to announce undeserving shuttle winners today, posted by orange blossom special on Tue Apr 12 14:04:25 2011. Yeah, that article was somewhat entertaining, at least because it asked where the 'Space Shuttle 2' was, when that was perhaps the first space shuttle replacement program to be ground through NASA. It was an effort by Johnson Spaceflight Center to move from the as-built Space Shuttle back toward the designs of the early 1970s.But in any event Mr. Hale probably knows what he's talking about, and plenty of other spaceflight pundits have said the same thing. We can finance the operation of a launch vehicle, or we can finance the development of the next launch vehicle, but we cannot do both at the same time without drastically changing the way we do business. The only time NASA had concurrent vehicle development and operation programs going was during the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo flights, and then they had a small fraction of the US Budget. Today with the outrageous cost of the Shuttle it is unreasonable to expect NASA to continue flying it while also financing any serious replacement study. All we got were a series of incomplete paper rockets which usually sounded pretty good, but were also usually a very long and painful engineering process away from the launch pad. Part of the problem other than the money certainly must be the mercurial nature of NASA's politically appointed leadership. The Shuttle was only supposed to be one element of a full space transportation system allowing 'low cost' travel from the Earth to the Moon. Since then NASA's mission has been redefined by every president, sometimes changing within one presidency. This could be as simple as going from the 'support the USAF' mission of Reagan into George HW Bush's push for a post-Cold War exploration program, through Clinton's curtailing of exploration and focus on LEO space stations, and on to George W. Bush's resurgent push for exploration. In particular during George W. Bush's administration Sean O'keefe stepped down and took his fairly logical plan to replace the Shuttle with a mostly EELV based architecture which would grow into an exploration system. In his place we got Michael Griffin who cast the EELVs aside, and focused on the 'safer' Shuttle Derived rockets, an act which immediately made him the darling of the congressmen whose constituents benefit from the Shuttle infrastructure. Now we have a different leader, and a different target, but by and large the hardware does not appear to have changed enormously. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of the NASA SLS study groups. We may end up with another Ares V, or a brand new design for a Saturn V redux. It's unlikely they'll reach what I am rapidly coming to realize may be the best alternative: having NASA just get out of the business of building and launching rockets. But at least with the growth of commercial spaceflight we appear to be headed in the right direction. Once the commercial providers get up and operating they'll be far less susceptible to the whims of NASA's leadership, and so long as NASA still has some money with which to buy launches they'll be in good shape. Who knows, maybe the pundit's wildest dreams will happen and we'll see real commercial spaceflight, without a NASA subsidy. |
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