No, NASA has no strategy. And neither does the administration or Congress, when it comes to space policy. We don’t even have a clearly articulated goal.
16 thoughts on “A Strategy For NASA?”
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No, NASA has no strategy. And neither does the administration or Congress, when it comes to space policy. We don’t even have a clearly articulated goal.
Comments are closed.
Keeping spaceflight rare, expensive and under government control appears to be a pretty consistent strategy that agency has adopted for decades.
That’s not a strategy, it’s merely the result.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
The question is, what will happen in the near future when spaceflight is no longer rate, expensive, or under government control?
What happens when the number of citizen astronauts flying from Kennedy Space Center in a single year exceeds the total number of government astronauts who have flown since Day One? How will Senator Bill Nelson justify spending billions on his “monster rocket” when he can no longer say human spaceflight is “coming to an end” without appearing to be a laughing stock?
If NASA saw suborbital space(tourism/research) as a serious threat to the status quo, they’d squash it. So far, thankfully, they don’t.
Just recently, the commercial crew office announced that the test flights of the partners will not be able to dock to the ISS, unless there’s a NASA astronaut aboard.
http://www.spacenews.com/article/civil-space/36098nasa-astronauts-to-fly-on-space-taxi-test-flights-to-station
This is a reversal from the prior policy, that no NASA astronaut will fly on a partner vehicle until it has been “certified”. Why the change in policy? They don’t want to set the precedent of independent visiting vehicles. Control.
How will Senator Bill Nelson justify spending billions on his “monster rocket” when he can no longer say human spaceflight is “coming to an end” without appearing to be a laughing stock?
One way is to not have any such embarrassing alternatives. I think Trent has a good point here. Even if there is no explicit intention to thwart private space activities, the risks of obsolescence and embarrassment provides considerable incentive for the US government to block progress such as it did when it banned the launch of private payloads on rockets other than the Shuttle in the early 80s.
“Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. ”
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
They should hire a strategic consulting firm like the one that advises the Underpants Gnomes.
I think NASA, as currently tasked, is too broad to have a coherent strategy, suggesting that it needs to be acting as several independent but collaborative agencies.
Off the top of my head I’d have them branch off robotics and deep space probes to JPL and the private sector, with a completely separate NASA offspring providing research, funding, and support.
Another offspring agency should focus on launch propulsion technology and push innovations in cost and efficiency, similar to the old NACA role in aviation, and quite the opposite of spending the bulk of their budget finding out how long obsolete 1970’s technology can remain in service.
Earth observation could be farmed out to NOAA and other agencies, while predictions of apocalyptic climate disruption could be outsourced to crazy Indian gurus or hallucinating rain forest shamans, which would save money.
And finally, of course, an offspring agency would maintain a manned spaceflight program to find out if man suffers bone loss in zero-G.
Earth observation could be farmed out to NOAA and other agencies
What, exactly, is the excuse for continuing this as a government function?
The Reagan Administration tried to privatize Earth resources and weather satellites 30 years ago. Even if it was beyond the realm of the private-sector technology at the time (highly debatable), it is easily within reach today.
Well, the weather is clearly a government function because the administration controls the sea level, and many government priorities are contingent on massaging or hiding raw data. If the weather and Earth observation satellites were privatized, perhaps on the invalid observation that the government doesn’t have any more reason to be subsidizing your local TV news station’s weather segment than it does subsidizing their sports segment (or that The Weather Channel’s eyes in space are like ESPN’s blimp platforms), why then we’d have social chaos.
TV stations would compete on the basis of satellite sensor coverage, resolution, accuracy, and innovations, much like the enhanced Doppler radar wars. Then TV stations and networks would form consortiums and launch large numbers of ultra sophisticated private satellites, time sharing with news networks in other countries to spread out the costs to match the coverage provided by large numbers of low-orbit sensor suites. There would be no one who could state authoritatively that running your weed-eater will cause a global mass extinction event and that your house is buried under ten feet of snow because it’s too warm outside.
Okay, maybe the only reason the government has anything to do with weather satellites its that it took a ballistic missile to get one into orbit and the Navy wanted to see where the tropical storms were heading so they didn’t lose more destroyers in typhoons.
George,
There are two reasons the government became involved in weather satellites. First, it was one of President Kennedy’s space goals, along with creating a network of communication satellites and going to the Moon. Funny how folks forget those first two goals 🙂
Second, the government has been in the weather business since 1870 when Congress directed the Department of War to collect and report weather observations to a central office in Washington. So it was natural for the government to get into the weather satellite business.
A strategy is especially important considering the high price in time and money to do the most mundane things in space. It is far too easy to lose a decade but also consider that while a decade is a significant portion of a human’s lifespan, it is a short period of time in relation to space based activities. Settlement or exploration require generational commitment and that means we need a strong and clear overarching strategy to guide us.
A lost decade can be absorbed but it is far too easy for ten years to become twenty.
Actually NASA does have a strategy. Its the classic agency entitlement strategy of keeping money flowing to employees in key Congressional districts and its contractors. The goals and vision thing is just hype to make taxpayers believe they are getting something worthwhile for their money.
Really, NASA has long out lived its usefulness and its time to shut it down. The strategy should be to allocate $2 billion a year to NSF for space science and surplus the rest to private industry, including ISS.
And what would “private industry” do with ISS, whose upkeep and operating costs would likely exceed the total cost of a Bigelow space station?
That is the fallacy behind MirCorp, Alpha Town, etc. — the belief that a commercial system is simply a government system with a different coat of paint, rather than something designed from the ground up to meet commercial requirements.
Hey, you take what you can get. Perhaps the upkeep and operations costs are so high because it’s a government system and the first year of commercial operation would automate a lot of stuff. Go look at the ISS Daily Summary Reports, those things are full of junk that could be done by a perl script.
Just like all those privatized Space Shuttles.
Those who do not learn from experience…
Yes, space advocates don’t lean as the COTS/CCP programs show. Or do you expect that the privatized versions of the COTS/CCP program once NASA is finished “certifying” them as “safe” for astronauts will be cost effective for real commercial spaceflight?
Edward,
I said surplus, not privatization. Very different.
There are 15 other partners who have been riding on Uncle Sugar’s pocket book in terms of the ISS. Putting the NASA portion of ISS up for bid as government surplus (NOT privatization…) means they would either have to start paying their fair share or watch it get splashed into the ocean. Especially if NO private firm bids on the ISS portion of it when it’s put out to bid as surplus.