A good wrap up over at the Orlando Sentinel:
For NASA allies on Capitol Hill, news that the agency does not have enough money to do what it wants is not so shocking. For years, members of congressional science committees have complained about underfunding.
But in a time of enormous budget deficits, a major boost is seen as unlikely.
“NASA is getting $18 billion a year. That’s more than all the other [space] agencies in the world combined. It’s very difficult to make the argument for more money,” said Vincent Sabathier, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Sabathier said NASA’s best hope lies in giving a greater role to its international partners to develop key components of an exploration system, such as using a French rocket to launch a U.S. capsule.
One point that people don’t understand, though, is that it isn’t a budget problem per se. It is a budget problem in the context of the politics. As I said over at Space Politics:
It is disheartening — but not surprising — to read that the Augustine Commission doesn’t see any way the current NASA budget can get us back to the Moon or to any of the spectacular alternatives that have been contemplated in anything like a reasonable time frame.
Actually, it’s not that the NASA budget can’t do it — it’s that NASA can’t do it with that budget, given its political constraints. Certainly it could be done for that amount of money, or even a lot less.
A long as we have a political requirement to maintain thousands of jobs at KSC and Marshall and Houston, it’s going to be hard to reduce costs. That’s a point that needs to be made strongly in the panel’s report. If the politicians want to shut down human spaceflight, or dramatically increase the budget, we should at least be clear on why those are the two options — it’s not because it is as intrinsically expensive as NASA always makes it. By the time Dragon is flying with crew, Elon will have spent far less than a billion dollars, a tiny percentage of what NASA plans to spend on Orion and Ares I. And the difference in size doesn’t explain the difference in cost. What does explain it is that he’s spending his own money, and his primary focus is on developing space hardware that closes a business case, not “creating or saving” (to use the administration’s wonderfully nebulous criterion) “jobs.”
There are rumors that the White House liked the “Deep Space” option rather than lunar return. An “NEO mission” could satisfy several political concerns at once
1. Asteroid deflection practice to provide an urgent justification to the space program;
2. Greater “gee whiz” factor in going beyond LEO in lieu of lunar return – especially if Phobos plans are included.
3. Cheaper than the Moon if we avoid lander development costs.
4. Both science and potential resource extraction can be pursued.
= = =
As for this . . .
Actually, it’s not that the NASA budget can’t do it — it’s that NASA can’t do it with that budget, given its political constraints. Certainly it could be done for that amount of money, or even a lot less.
I agree. NASA will always do it more expensively, however NASA will also always have goals and objectives not limited to becoming spacefaring.
That is why NewSpace could be very successful if they pursued non-NASA revenue streams as vigorously as they fought to overcome those political constraints.
Related, I also read that the White House has just now initiated a review of ITAR review.
That could allow using Soyuz to support a Bigelow station today thereby creating a market for Dragon or Atlas V Orion-lite tomorrow.
Rand, I’ve had a lifelong interest in space and space policy (why I like your site), but my technical career took me in other directions. As an outside observer who follows these things on a casual basis my intuition tells me we’ll be seeing the HLV given the green light, perhaps a 2 to 3 year extension to the shuttle, continuation of the Orion capsule and a slow shifting of emphasis to commercial launchers for NEO access for Orion. I don’t expect any substantial policies around what this actual hardware might do, but perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Why does my intuition say this? Simply because it seems a relatively simple approach to keep things going that will keep the most jobs at KSC, Marshall and Houston for the smallest dollars spent. I’ve since given up on seeing any planning from NASA regarding manned flight where 85% of the decision is not about keeping the bureaucracy employed. Given the predilections of the current administration, I don’t see anything changing this. If any reductions do occur, it will be through neglect rather than by any actual planning.
Seeing the title of this post, I just realized something. Six months ago when I saw the title “The President,” I had very little trouble picturing Barack Obama in that role.
You’d think this much further into his presidency it should be getting even easier — not harder. Now when I see the title “The President” the first image that pops to mind is Obama’s predecessor.
It is easy to explain the difference in cost. Musk has a vertically integrated enterprise and does nearly everything in house. Production and R&D are centralized in the same place.
Yeah, the NASA center organization sucks as well. The fact it was done as a political jobs creation scheme by LBJ to industrialize the south does not help.
The SpaceX Dragon shines a bright light onto the unbelievably inefficient NASA run Orion program.
I’ve always been a proponent of NASA’s manned spaceflight program and have thought that their budget should be increased 10-15%. But I’m rapidly coming to believe that NASA should be completely overhauled and ordered to competitively bid outcomes or goals to rather than running entire programs from engineering of systems to the carrying out of missions.
NASA needs to be a CUSTOMER and nothing more.
What I’d like to see is vigorous development of propellant depots and commercial manned transport to ISS, Orion development continued in case of failure of a commercial capsule, and termination of NASA owned and operated launchers after the shuttle completes its current manifest.
What I suspect is the best politically achievable result is replacement of Ares with Direct or the Sidemount, and try to terminate that program once the cryogenic propellant depots prove themselves.
In fairness, Musk’s actual costs are pretty opaque to outsiders and where you can observe his performance on schedule and reliability he has wildly overpromised.
Musk’s actual costs are pretty opaque to outsiders and where you can observe his performance on schedule and reliability he has wildly overpromised.
We have a pretty good idea of the inputs. It is far south of a billion dollars and I doubt if it’s half a billion to date, to get as far as he has. He simply doesn’t have any way to spend a lot more — he produces most things in house, and he doesn’t have that big a company.
I would go for ELV Heavy replacing Ares I. Dumping Orion for some other capsule design that can be launched in an EELV Heavy/Falcon 9 Heavy/whatever. Funding heavier EELV variants. Funding SpaceX BFR engine development in exchange for them selling engines to third parties. Further funding for COTS, including a third provider to SpaceX and Orbital. Automated in-orbit assembly and refueling.
What we will get? Shuttle side mount.
That is why NewSpace could be very successful if they pursued non-NASA revenue streams as vigorously as they fought to overcome those political constraints.
Sigh. Even a semi-informed person knows that there are plenty of companies that are pursuing non-NASA revenue streams. Why do you insist on making yourself look ignorant by constantly claiming otherwise?
Yes, I know — those are suborbital companies. They aren’t working on the Warp Five engine or promising to go to the Moon, Mars, and Epsilon Eridani tomorrow morning.
So what? Just because we have to take a few small steps to get to a destination, instead of one giant leap, doesn’t believe it’s worth going.
The only people who are relying entirely on NASA for funding are the Moonies and the Marsies — and how is that working out?
Okay, the Moonie Church says that cheap access to space must wait until after someone (aka NASA) “generates a market” by mining the Moon for platinum group metals, but do you have any reason other than religious faith to believe that? Do you have any evidence that Moon Rush or Mars Direct is likely to succeed before XCOR or Virgin Galactic is flying to orbit?
As long as there are ‘real jobs at real wages’ dependent on carry-over NASA/industry overhead, no way that Washington’s going to reduce that more than minimally, in particular during the recession.
The best we can hope for out of Washington based on the committee report is that we’ll get a few more bucks for stuff that encourages private sector development – for a couple of years, anyway.
That might help pull in credibility and new _private_ business at the ‘upper end’ (orbital access and Bigelow) while in the meanwhile VG and XCOR are pushing at the suborbital end.
I.e. fundamentally I agree with Ed. Any positives we get from the Washington/industrial space complex are gravy. As long as the politicos do no harm to the present ‘bottom up’ options in the private sector, we’re at least still on the map.
COTS has been ‘gravy,’ and if we can extend that to carrying humans as well as cargo – who knows, we could lose both (however unfairly) if the first Falcon 9 flight goes awry – that’s a tremendous win.
Physics and economics drive engineering. However, the economics drives an intermediate stage of ‘politics’ (which happens anytime you get 3 people within shouting distance of each other). The free market tends to squeeze the politics stage as small as possible, because it’s inefficient and inefficient companies go out of business. Coercion (i.e. government) causes politics to expand, because they can’t go out of buisness and so there is no economizing mechanism over it.
Almost all of the space launch systems built to date have been heavily politicized; and as such it is almost impossible to determine what the real costs are. However, we have numerous existence proofs of private enterprise doing similar things to government operations at lower costs. (One of my favorites being the PT-17 ‘Stearman’ airplane which was privately developed and built, compared to the government designed and built N3N. The Stearman cost roughly half as much.)
‘Job creation’ is a bunch of political hot air. Jobs are very easy to create. Outlawing the wheel would immeditately create the need for a lot more labor. A government program to create holes then fill them back in would also ‘create jobs’ and employ people. We need to recognize the difference between productive work and nonproductive work. After listening to an interview with a NASA astronaut, I got the distinct impression that they spend 4 days out of 5 filling out paperwork and going to meetings instead of training for their mission. This is *not* productivity and would not be tolerable if NASA had to earn its money instead of leveraging the government to forcibly take it from taxpayers.
Elon Musk earns his money by improving people’s lives. If he didn’t, they wouldn’t give him money. If he becomes inefficient or misjudges the market, he’ll go out of business and his resources will be bought up by someone who will use them to improve people’s lives in a more desireable fashion.