Jeff Foust has a report of what Jeff Greason had to say about the Augustine panel at the Space Investment Summit. I agree with the coment from Paul Spudis that it was another lost opportunity to straighten out space policy, though that’s no fault of Jeff’s.
7 thoughts on “Greason Speaks”
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I suspect that this opportunity has been taken full advantage of. What previous commission has accomplished more?
Actually, we don’t know what this commission has accomplished until we see the policy that results from it.
“The reason why we’re going to space is because we’re going to live there some day. This is what the future is about… It’s time for the real justification for human spaceflight to come out of the closet.”
This is a strategy that will get the manned space budget zeroed out. No one at this juncture can claim with any kind of confidence that space will be colonized. Manned space needs a much shorter term justification.
No one at this juncture can claim with any kind of confidence that space will be colonized.
This is a statement that surely needs to be memorialized for future generations — alongside statements about the impossibility of settling the “Great American Desert” and the Aldridge Commission’s report (less than two weeks *after* Mike Mevill earning his commerical astronaut wings in SpaceShip One) that human spaceflight would “remain the province of government.”
“This is a statement that surely needs to be memorialized for future generations —”
That’s fair enough, Ed. Why don’t you stick your neck out and predict that there will be x number of people living in space by year y? Like when you once predicted that there would be 80 manned, reusable Mach 10 flights by 2001?
Why don’t you stick your neck out and predict
Because I have better things to do with my time than play “prediction” games for the amusement of trolls.
I take it you have nothing resembling an intelligent argument, as usual?
NASA lacks a sustainable cost focus – always has. It does have the budget, the public support, the political support, the talent, the technology, the facilities, the justification, etc., to develop space. I just can not buy the argument that the mandate is not there (though it is badly articulated).
Reform does not seem possible, has not happened in the last fifty years, so something else has to take over (ARPA-S?). NASA has sufficiently poisoned the government funding well that I doubt that will be another government agency, this leaves the private sector.
When SpaceX, not even a small low cost RLV company, can develop a launch vehicle for something like 1-2 orders of magnitude less money than NASA, then the situation has become completely unsustainable. And presumably these NASA cost structures do not just apply to launch vehicles. With this in mind I have no reasonable hope that NASA can develop space, which is all about economics, whether it is doing launch vehicles, space stations or exploration. I would have to state, with some confidence, that NASA can not colonize space (not for lack of funding).
So can “New Space” colonize space? I think so, but confidence in the economic case is not yet high enough to warrant large scale commercial investment. Hopefully it will come.
It is NASA that was the wasted opportunity, not the Augustine commission, which could not be truly independent and was always going to be ignored, even mollycoddling their message as much as they did.
A NASA HLV might actually be a good thing about now – it would take ten plus years not to happen and convincingly take NASA out of the game. Removing a lot of uncertainty for private space investment, and opening a lot of new markets. If it suddenly became publicly accepted wisdom that the future of space development lay entirely with New Space, then I suspect more funding and clarity would quickly arise.