I agree that “we” (if by that he means NASA) are not on a path to Mars, but this is nonsense:
“The answer is because we are not a spacefaring nation,” Griffin asserted. “The bottom line, for me, is that we have better stuff in museums than we have in operations today. I can’t think of another technical discipline in which that statement would be true.”
Really? What do we have in museums that’s better than a Falcon 9, particularly if it becomes partially or fully reusable? What are his criteria for “better”? More (Tim the Tool Man) Power?
I do agree that we’re not a spacefaring nation, though. But neither Constellation or SLS/Orion are on a path to make us one.
[Update a few minutes later]
We’ve blown ten billion dollars on Orion so far, with billions more to go before it flies (if it ever does).
The article seems to be little more than something to give Republican statists a club to beat Democrat statists.
This was exhibited in the comment by donsimon at princeton.edu
“We need to be in space because its special environment will lead to the next evolutionary steps in Humanity. We cannot help but go there either through thoughtful goverment guidance or the chaos of privatering.”
“Thoughtful government + “chaos of privatering (sic)” is precisely what both sides of the statist camp think about how human beings act best. This is in spite of a century of quantitative proof that human society *is*chaotic*, and the world-wide networks that can link and relink the productive capacities of our species are our best bet for building a spacefaring society.
I believe we will be a spacefaring nation once it becomes close to as easy to make a lot of money flying in/utilizing Space than making it here on Earth.
p.s. OR….vastly bigger fortunes can be had if it’s not quite as easy.
Spending 10 billion on Orion? For that money, plus a billion or so more, we’ll have an unmanned 2 orbit flight of a test article spacecraft that might be nearly as capable as Dragon v1.0 in some ways, and takes a Delta IV heavy to launch.
If anyone is still wondering why we’re not a space-faring nation, that’s a clear example of why.
I’m sure I agree with all of you on crewed spaceflight, but I think we’re a spacefaring nation because a spaceship with an American flag is on its way to Pluto, while another is on its way to Ceres, while another is in orbit around Saturn, while another is. ….well, you get the point. The whole list of active US spacecraft beyond Earth orbit is impressively long.
Similarly, I think we’d be a sea-faring nation if a robotic unmanned warship with an American flag traveled across the ocean and conducted diplomacy by other means, or if a robotic unmanned US owned cargo vessel traveled goods to distant shores for import and export. With all due respect to sailors, ships are the more notable aspect of a fleet.
Unmanned asteroid mining ships making us a fortune or allowing us to avoid an earth impact would make us even more spacefaring than we are now.
Nothing against robotics. I’m a big fan of our copper and steel buddies. But even space exploitation is going to benefit from human presence. And it’s pretty much mandatory for detailed exploration if it’s ever going to be done on any kind of reasonable time scale. Barring the invention of Star Trek’s subspace radio, the further out in the Solar System we go, the more difficult it is to do purely robotic telepresence when human intelligence must also be interlaced into the remote activities. People need to be reasonably close by to minimize speed-of-light-based commo lags. Sustained human presence, of course, is simply another way of saying human occupancy as commuting to and from, say, Europa every day is hardly in the cards based on any physics we currently understand.
Really Mr. Griffin?
NASA has an operational vehicle that can do this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIlu7szab5I
SpaceX is half a step away from having an actual reusable first stage as most people think of that term. All the parts seem to be there now, just have to move to landings on land.
(Yes, I know he is not reading this particular page.)
The shuttle. The shuttle could do that in the 80’s. With people.
Yeah… $10B on Orion and it is hard-pressed to meet a 12/2017 launch date. Just wow. I’m actually afraid of somebody writing the book on this one, the collateral damage could be horrible.
Someone did write the book on this one. The link is at the top right corner of the page.
“It isn’t about the money,” sayeth the fool. Hey, Mike, it’s always about the money.
I noted this article a few days back for this quote from Mike Griffin,
“When it matters to us as a society, it will happen,”
Which is an echo of what Rand has been proclaiming for some time now, that “space doesn’t matter” . When it comes to explaining the many policy and execution problems that cause our space effort to be so dysfunctional, I think Rand and Griffin are still worlds apart. Griffin thinks when it “will matter to society” the funds will miraculously be coughed up by congress. Rand, and many of us here, see the problem is that policy is captive to interests who could care less of the accomplishments, as long as the pork flavored gravy keeps flowing, and that to change this paradigm would require that “space be important”, which unfortunately, it is not. The irony of Mike Griffin echoing, in his own way, but for a somewhat different causation theory, the same thing Rand has been pushing was kind of delicious.
The pretty lies of Mike Griffin and the likeminded pols are sometimes pierced ( unknowingly) by the outside voices, and it is difficult for them to reconcile that they are in large part the problem they lament. The cognitive dissonance in his aspiration to accomplish something in space alongside the absolute failure of that his way of doing things keeps inevitably producing, is just too much for an ego like his to fully reconcile. Sad man, poor excuse of a leader, hopefully he will retire for good soon.
“The bottom line, for me, is that we have better stuff in museums than we have in operations today. I can’t think of another technical discipline in which that statement would be true.”
Go see the Concorde or SR-71 in some museum Mike.
People sometimes think progress is continuous and irreversible but this is not so. Quite often great strides are made for whatever reason. This can be some special political environment or rivalry. It can be some specific natural resource. Lots of disposable income to blow. Then it gets shaken down and technological progress reverts for a time until someone figures out to make it cheaper. This is what is happening right now.
As for what made the Concorde and SR-71 uneconomical for me the answer is quite simple. The 1970s fuel crisis. Afterburners are not cheap anymore.
Fuel prices were certainly a factor in Concorde’s demise, but it’s main problems were that it was too small and, a bit paradoxically, too slow. If it had been a Mach 3 or 3+ design it would have better justified its high ticket prices and limited seating even with the same over-water-only flight path limitations that also hobbled it its entire career.
The SR-71’s economics were poor because almost everything about the aircraft was one-off – seals, fluids, lubricants, fuel, you name it. If there had been other Mach 3 or 3+ aircraft in service – even other strictly military aircraft – the markets for the firms in the supplier base that developed all SR-71’s custom goodies would have been larger and the unit prices lower. If Concorde, alone, had been a titanium Mach 3 or 3+ design, these two remarkable aircraft might have synergistically helped one another to longer and even more consequential careers than they actually had.
From the article about the $10 billion spent on Orion (and $17 billion spending up through to alleged date of first launch), we have this comment from Vladislaw:
It is incredible how little is actually achieved with this spending compared to what it could be doing. One of the things that has always struck me is the incredibly low standards for what NASA does. Spending $17 billion on a paper rocket is just fine even though that money could have bought 120 launches of an existing rocket.
Besides the NASA contractor structure what is amazing to me is how they spend $17 billion and develop essentially no new technology. Even a decade ago that money was enough to develop three main booster engines from scratch and a rocket. So this money should have, at least to me, bought the staged combustion first stage engines and the LOX/LH2 second stage engine. Part of the problem is the size of the rocket. It probably makes the tooling, transportation, and pad costs go through the roof. Yet another reason why LOX/Kerosene wins for space launch.
I think at this point the US needs to drop SLS/Orion altogether. They need to make a market based exploration plan which uses existing resources to develop cislunar space. This should include space stations, which IMO should be more automated than the ISS so it is not necessary to continuously man them, plus lunar resources exploration so we can bootstrap a mostly self-sufficient space based economy.
$10 billion!?
I could do more than the entire industry with that to start with. SpaceX has already for less than a billion in start up capital. Gregg has it right. Being space faring means we are operating in many direction for commercial profit.
I would not build a single thing. I would be buying stuff from vendors already operating at profit or near profit. $10 billion gives me an annual budget of 1/2 to 1 billion a year.
Year one. We put a BA330 or three in earth orbit and immediately rent space for profit. That is to say after sunk cost of perhaps $200m we keep operational cost so low that anything above transportation cost to and from (less than $20m per renter/crew from SpaceX or anyone else willing to sell tickets.)
Get proposals for a departure stage that can attach to a 13 ton module consisting of red lander and upgraded Sundancer class vehicle. The departure stage is launched on an FH. The 13 ton module is launched on an F9 with a crew of four. We send these together to mars on the next window after supplies have been pre-positioned on the mars equator.
Once we have about 5 dozen colonists on mars we start doing the same for every other viable body in the solar system.
Everyone that goes is a volunteer. They sink or swim.
We do this before the government decides space does matter.
I’ve got almost a billion a year for eternity to send supplies to the destinations of my choice. Competition will do amazing things trying to be my vendor.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to SpaceX actually reflying a stage too, but it hasn’t happened *yet*. I remember a few years ago when everyone was talking about Falcon Heavy like it was already flying.. but it still isn’t. It really does seem like counting chickens before they hatch is all the space community does these days.
I agree in the main; FH hasn’t flown, and SpaceX hasn’t demonstrated re-usability, yet.
On the other hand, this dynamic (counting chickens pre-hatching) is even worse with NASA (where the seem to count them before laying, let alone hatching). Orion exists only as an incomplete test article, and SLS exists not at all save for a few barrel sections plus some old used SSME engines.
Dragon (V1) certainly exists and is flying, and as for the F9 1.1 first stage, it too exists and is flying. Dragon V2 is actually further along than Orion, even if you ignore V1 and the experience gained on a largely similar vehicle. Orion has been in development for longer than SpaceX has existed.
Falcon Heavy… they’ve never assembled one, but the components mostly exist (unlike SLS). I feel safe in saying that we’ll probably see a FH launch before a SLS. (the latter isn’t going to make it’s December 2017 first flight date, so we’re talking 2018 at the earliest, and more likely 2019 or later).
Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. SpaceX was founded in 2003. Orion didn’t start until late 2005.
Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. SpaceX was founded in 2003. Orion didn’t start until late 2005.
Oops. I trusted my memory, with the usual bad results… for some reason, I thought SpaceX was founded in 2005, and Orion began in 2004.
I just checked, and SpaceX was founded in June, 2002. Orion dates to 18 months later (if we go by the announcement date) January 2004.
Thanks for the correction.
No, Orion didn’t happen until Griffin announced Constellation in the fall of ’05. Prior to that, it was just the “Crew Exploration Vehicle,” which was not well defined by the VSE.
Falcon Heavy would not be a big deal if it wasn’t for the propellant cross-feeding and the need to build a launch pad for it.
I do not share Trent’s skepticism however. SpaceX has done a lot of things since then including Dragon and the multiple Merlin engine revisions. It is not like they have been standing down. In fact I think if they never won the COTS contract they would have flown the Heavy already and Dragon would have been in the back burner.
Says the newbie. While you complain about years, the rest of us have endured decades of crap on this.
Heh, I’ve endured decade of it too. Probably not as many as you, old man.
About 99% of what’s coming never does, but with decades of experience you can get pretty good at predicting that 1%.
Here’s hoping we’re all wrong about the emdrive and it does happen. Luke needs his speeder don’t ya know or how will he ever pay to get off tatooine?
Somewhat off-topic, but I’m really wondering now, only half in jest, about the impact of Kerbal Space Program (the video game) on NASA. A generation of rocket scientists is growing up who will be totally baffled that we ever abandoned NERVA, and who find propellant cross-feed and reusable boosters blindingly obvious solutions (excepting a respectable minority who prefers some sort of hybrid airbreathing/rocket SSTO spaceplane).
When I was a kid I played Buzz Aldrin’s Race in Space. Kerbal Space Program is a lot more sophisticated with the orbital mechanics simulation and whatnot. Still a computer game by itself is not good enough. Unless there is a market for actually getting those skills people will only do it as a hobby at best and at worst will eventually forget about it. This is why companies like SpaceX are important and should not be underestimated.
I hope that as launch prices get lower thanks to SpaceXs efforts more launch customers will show up so that we get a 2nd and 3rd operator to compete with SpaceX. The other efforts so far have been subpar in actual product or price.
Well, NASA definitely worked with the developers of KSP for the asteroid retrieval part of the game.
While it is only a game, the physics is sufficiently detailed to give a first order approximation of spaceflight. If something won’t work in the game (especially when using the FAR aerodynamics mod and Deadly Reentry mod) it won’t work in real life either. There are tens of thousands of people now regularly pushing the design space in all directions. And those people can play with NASA designs and SpaceX designs and Russian designs as well as the stock game parts.
Once one plays KSP for a while, it becomes painfully obvious how important propellant crossfeed and ISRU and propellant depots are and how futile it is to build bigger and bigger rockets.
The one key development that exists in the game but not yet in real life is the clamp-o-tron: an electromagnetic docking port with fuel crossfeed capability. I’d much rather see NASA developing that rather than an SLS.
He’s obviously talking about the Shuttle, which is easily better than anything available now. *technically* it is. Economically not so much.
That begs the question of what one means by “better.” And actually, given that he’s said in the past that the Shuttle was a mistake, and his heavy-lift fetish, I’d bet he was talking about Saturn.
“Better” in what metric? Cost-per-mass to orbit? Flight rate? Safety? Mass ratio?