…of the Augustine panel was today. Clark Lindsey has been keeping an eye on it.
[Update mid afternoon, Pacific time]
I don’t know what Bill White means in comments when he says that Jeff Greason “blew up the meeting,” but there is an old concept from the military (and later from the computer industry) called FUBAR: Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition (though some think that the first word may actually be something else…).
That’s a fair description of the US human spaceflight program, and has been, really, since the end of Apollo, if not before, at least in terms of being effective at getting humans into space in reasonable numbers. My New Atlantis essay was a long-winded way of saying that, with some recommendations for fixing it, which are probably politically unfeasible. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be pointed out.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bobby Block has a real-time report over at the Orlando Sentinel:
“We are on a path right now for a system on a close order of just double the budget to operate,” said panel member Jeff Greason of Constellation, which stemmed from President George W. Bush’s 2005 “vision” to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and then move on to Mars.
Greason added that if Santa Claus gave the program to the country fully developed, NASA would still have to cancel it because the agency could not afford to launch it.
Greason and former astronaut Sally Ride later questioned the utility of the Ares I rocket, which was supposed to launch humans to the international space station by 2015 but which now won’t be ready until well after the station is deorbited in 2016, as NASA currently plans.
Constellation has spent more than $3 billion in the past four years. And while the panel stopped short of recommending that the program be killed, it wasn’t immediately clear what financial solution it might suggest.
Presumably, they’re assuming that the administration is smart enough to draw their own conclusions…
[Update a few minutes later]
Clark has a late update:
Some discussion items that stand out include:
/– Agreed that splashing the ISS in 2015 is not realistic so all program options that include it will be eliminated.
/– The program of record (i.e. Ares I/V/Orion/Altair), which exceeds the expected budget substantially, will no longer be in the options table but kept separately just as a reference.
/– There will be two options that fit the expected budget. Others will assume growth up to $3B more than current annual budget.
/– A lengthy discussion of the Mars First option seems to have led to its removal. Instead the Lunar and Deep Space options will be presented as preparing the technology and in-space infrastructure for Mars missions later. The current baseline is far too expensive and any other scenario would involve too much sci-fi.
Emphasis mine. Bye bye, Constellation.
Here’s the chart of all the options being evaluated. There is no obvious weighting of the criteria, but to first order, all of the options seem to suck. There are a lot more negative numbers than positive ones. None of them are scored as sustainable. It really is an unsolvable Rubik’s cube. I don’t envy the panel members. Or the new NASA administration.
[Late evening update]
Commenters indicate that the numbers in the chart are changing in real time. As I noted above, I don’t envy the panel, or the new administrator and his deputy who have to implement whatever comes out of this process.
Jeff Greason just blew open the meeting.
Suggests they consider canceling everything.
Ares I looks in big trouble.
Stop the presses.
Altair looks to be in big trouble as well. ISS extension to 2020 seems to be an agreed recommendation.
Phobos missions and an NEO gravity tractor?
People at NSF are jumping up and down about HSF being in peril of getting completely shut down. So please can someone explain me this:
NASA has a pretty stable budget of $16B a year or so. Lets modestly say that a quarter of that goes to HSF.
What kind of a world is that where for $4B a year, you cant sustain a useful HSF program ??
Korea, Japan or Russia would probably be sending postcards from Europa or Enceladus now if they had sustained HSF budgets of $4B a year over a past few decades.
Much more than half of NASA’s budget goes to HSF.
I meant “blew up” in a positive manner, as in challenge pre-existing paradigms.
I didn’t assume that it was necessarily a negative thing — I just wasn’t sure what you meant exactly.
Some of those negative numbers include silly “risk” assessments. Bo considers anything new to be to risky to “chance” the space program on. And Norm tended to discount anything that didn’t require super heavy lift. Jeff tried to fight it but got little support from others. He seems to have convinced everyone but Norm and Bo but no on else seemed willing to back him on it. It does seem that Sally has come around to Jeff’s reasoning fairly strongly.
Rand – one thign for clarification – that chart has changed quite a bit, during the meeting. From my notes, I’ll see if there is a way to put together a revised chart
> Here’s the chart of all the options being evaluated. There is no obvious weighting of the criteria, but to first order, all of the options seem to suck. There are a lot more negative numbers than positive ones. None of them are scored as sustainable.
First off, this was the preliminary version of the chart, and after it was presented they had some in-depth discussions which led to many of the numbers being changed. Also, the definition of “sustainable” was a little funny, having to do a lot more with the likelihood of it getting initial congressional support, rather than economic sustainability. I think Jeff Greason made a comment about how it shouldn’t really be described as sustainability, because if you overcome the initial congressional resistance to transformation, it doesn’t become something you have to worry about in the long term. The economic sustainability aspect probably falls more under the “economic expansion” criterion.
Korea, Japan or Russia would probably be sending postcards from Europa or Enceladus now if they had sustained HSF budgets of $4B a year over a past few decades.
This was so good I just thought that it should be repeated. Just about spewed my water on that one.
Hey, a Singapore flagged EML-1 transfer station complemented with RLLs could help facilitate that result.
Yes yes yes, this whole mess that is the huge disconnect between a spacefaring future* and NASA human spaceflight is finally an inch closer to discussion. Everybody has had to act so extremely ignorantly and short sightedly, layman-like, about it. Jeff Greason has really done a huge service to humanity by just being rational and directly looking at things.
I once had a research group leader who was like that. She just attacked problems directly and solved them. Sure, there were some nifty inventions, and a couple of big ideas, and some trial and error when you iterate, but most of the time it was “it’s so obvious, why didn’t anyone think of it before?”
Our world is still so much built on irrational assumptions, that many problems are much harder than what they seem, since the whole approach to them is completely wrong. Perhaps the approach is wrong for historical reasons, or due to some misunderstanding. Once you realize what the problem really is, the solution is straightforward.
With spacefaring, the problem is launch rate – a low one prevents RLV:s. Everything else is just small rational steps.
*)
spacefaring future meaning humanity launching stuff into space daily, doing things there, using extraterrestrial resources routinely and many people living off-earth.