30 thoughts on “More Thoughts On Congress’s Monster Rockets”
It’s pretty sad that Jim F. over there in the comments seems to think SpaceX is “a full on private industry solution”. Sigh.
Trent, it’s still an improvement over the days when no one in the industry dared to pull a ‘Dutch’ Kindleberger-style expansion of capability. I speak here of his decision in 1947, to use North American Aviation’s own money to build a liquid rocket engine test stand that could fire rocket engines nearly 2 orders of magnitude more powerful than any we had built so far. It was said by Von Braun that this saved 3-4 years for the US.
In 1965 I was being told by my classmates it was silly to talk of rockets being built by anyone but the government, because who could trust anyone else? I have sat next to Max Hunter at the Space and Robotics conference in 2000, listening to him describe Robert Mueller’s attempt to talk him in to joining the whisper campaign against Space Services Inc., which started in 1979. That sort of thing went on for decades.
It seems to me that the best advantage of the Commercial Crew program is that there is now a place inside NASA where a investor looking at a new private startup in ‘due diligence’ mode can call and *not* get a whispering campaign response. It won’t be pure itself, because cronyism is always developing. That said, it’s better than 1955-2005 in attitude.
The real question, to my way of thinking, is how many private space startups making their anticipated ROI do we need, to make whispering campaigns ineffective?
“how many private space startups making their anticipated ROI do we need, to make whispering campaigns ineffective?”
If the whisper campaigns are because people distrust private companies having the means to attack any place on the globe, money won’t ease their concerns.
Just to be clear, this is not my worry but I have heard it expressed before, usually by older people who were alive before we went to the Moon, when people had a better grasp of the dangers of nuclear war.
Hell, why not outsource the ICBM capability to SpaceX? I’d love for Elon to deliver more missiles for less money and watch Putin have a stroke.
Treaties, schmeaties.
Wodun, if the whispering campaigns had been done by conspiracy theory types, that might have merit. However, Robert Mueller, Assistant Administrator, knew quite well that wasn’t going to happen. He was one of too many who decided to become a NASA Turf Warrior. He was far more used to being afraid of losing jobs in key congressional districts than what some businessman would do, minus a nuke warhead, with a rocket.
Most like him were interested in keeping a NASA monopoly on space launch, and even fought the permission that allowed contractors to launch customer’s payloads on rockets developed decades before under government contract, from which the government had received far more than it anticipated in return already.
True, class bigotry would make *any* shift in tech use to the private sector an academically inspired nightmare for many. The keys, however, were what investors heard through “good friends”, and “my brother-in-laws’ cousin at NASA. Those are and were unlikely to believe in “Moonraker” styled fantasy about businessmen maniacally destroying the human race through rockets.
Mostly a copy-and-paste job from your PJMedia piece with nothing new of note. But, they’re good points, so I guess they deserve reiteration.
Not just reiteration, but another venue for people who don’t read PJMedia.
It isn’t obvious why anyone cares whether NASA continues SLS.
Yes, if NASA stopped building SLS, it could spend all the money on things which Rand wants. In theory. In some alternative universe, where Rand is the Central Planner.
In practice, it’s much more likely that Congress would choose to spend the money on something else. Something that would turn out to be as bad as SLS, or perhaps even worse
If anyone believes that’s impossible, remember — 10 years ago, the New Space community thought Congress and NASA could never come up with a replacement that was worse than the Shuttle. But they did.
The worst effect of SLS may be the opportunity cost, as the New Space community continues to squander its limited energies on the age-old goal of “Fixing NASA” at the expense of other, more viable strategies.
In practice, it’s much more likely that Congress would choose to spend the money on something else. Something that would turn out to be as bad as SLS, or perhaps even worse
Probably. But at least we wouldn’t be burdened by the “we need a giant rocket!” myth any more.
Again, that’s exactly what people said would happen “if we just cancel the Shuttle.”
What reason do you have for believing SLS won’t simply be replaced by *another* giant rocket? History shows that is the most likely outcome.
What reason do you have for believing SLS won’t simply be replaced by *another* giant rocket? History shows that is the most likely outcome.
“History” has exactly one example of a giant rocket being replaced by another giant rocket. That was then, this will be now.
Saturn IB, Saturn V, Shuttle, Ares, SLS — that’s more than one, by my count. (Not to mention abortive programs like VentureStar.)
Going back even further to Redstone, Mercury, and Titan, NASA retired each rocket as soon as possible to replace it with a bigger, more expensive rocket.
NASA and Congress have always desired the biggest rocket possible. Expecting them to suddenly abandon 50 years of ingrained behavior just because it’s “now” seems irrational.
There will reach a point at which it is so obviously ridiculous that it will become politically unsustainable. There was no serious very-real competition in any of those past cases.
Unfortunately, you don’t get to define who is “serious.” NASA and Congress do.
Based on the outcome of COTS and CCDev, the only companies they take seriously are SpaceX and the usual suspects (Boeing, Orbital).
Every one of those companies wants a giant rocket, including SpaceX. Or perhaps I should say, “especially SpaceX.”
Trying to go up against all their lobbyists is throwing weakness against strength. And it’s a distraction from battles that really could be won.
Even if so, at least SpaceX’s giant rocket has a chance of being affordable.
SpaceX’s giant rocket has a chance of being affordable.
If you believe NASA is incapable of writing requirements that make it otherwise.
NASA has already imposed 1000 separate requirements on SpaceX under CCDev (per SpaceX project manager Garrett Reisman). But the New Space community simply smiles and pretends those requirements won’t increase costs by a single dollar, because Elon is magic and therefore immune to the laws of economics.
In the absence of any pushback from the community, it’s logical to expect that NASA will continue to increase these requirements over time.
In the meantime, the opportunity costs keep piling up. What could be achieved if a fraction of the time spent on SLS went toward supporting AST’s commercial research budget, or DARPA space, or Centennial Challenges, or…?
Ed, we get it. It is all or nothing. There is no possible way to improve the situation except to abolish NASA.
In the absence of any pushback from the community, it’s logical to expect that NASA will continue to increase these requirements over time.
Given that SpaceX isn’t building either the Raptor engine or the BFR it will power for NASA, it’s hard to see where NASA’s ability to bark orders about such things might come from. Anything Elon does on his own dime will be done the way he wants it done. Nobody else gets a veto.
“There is no possible way to improve the situation except to abolish NASA.”
That isn’t quite what he’s saying. And he has a point – absent a seismic shift in the NASA structure, NASA will not change, nor will the relationship between Congress and NASA.
The presence of a commercial industry is a necessary but not sufficient step. Commercial enterprises can only push NASA from one direction. NASA needs to be squeezed from the other side too.
This is why I think the Space Guard is such a good idea. The formation of such an entity would not only offload non-military space activities like range safety and orbital debris tracking from the military, but would absorb 90% of NASA. NASA itself would be reduced to strictly its core competency of R&D, returning it to a NACA style agency – and building only test vehicles. The Space Guard, being modeled after the Coast Guard, would have a different type of authority structure than the NASA bureaucracy, and NASA itself would have to vastly reduce and change its own bureaucracy.
If the giant monster rocket formerly known as the SLS gets replaced by a giant reusable monster rocket using new reusable engines, that would be a great improvement over the P.O.S. SLS.
There are already two giant reusable monster rockets in the queue anyways, the opportunity lost is NASA’s and NASA’s alone. This is the biggest NASA screwup since the last big NASA screwup.
Who said anything about abolishing NASA?
You are fixated on changing/abolishing/fixing NASA (while, paradoxically, insisting that you don’t care about NASA).
For more than 10 years now, the New Space community has insisted that everything else has to wait on the NASA and the Bush Vision of Space Exploration (or whatever it’s called this week). But NASA is no closer to going to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond than in was 10 years ago.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
I am part of the New Space community. I have never insisted on any such thing.
Anything Elon does on his own dime
Elon has said (repeatedly) that his plans for Mars Colonial Transport depend on NASA’s dimes. SpaceX fanboys ignore what he actually says in favor of what they want to believe.
Drsgon is already being designed to comply with “1000 separate NASA requirements” (according to Garrett Reisman). He is not simply doing it “the way he wants it done.”
18.5 billion dollars a year!
Good thing we’re not talking about real money that could get things done. Musk may be worth $12b, but only a small fraction of that gets spent on rockets and payload each year. That small fraction may soon have more results than NASA’s entire budget.
Govt. is the problem. When are we going to rein it in?
–Govt. is the problem. When are we going to rein it in?–
Death and taxes, I suppose.
But let’s start small, like ending the federal EPA. Transfer half of EPA’s budget to pay for a depot in LEO, and put ISS into higher orbit, to mothball it, so have enough funding to do Mars program. And do Lunar exploration program for 40 billion spent within 10 years and be finished
the lunar exploration by 2025, and start Mars program before 2025.
And have extra money for something like Mars sample return or robotic
to Europa or something.
But let’s address bigger amount government waste and government oppression. Let’s stop requiring the electrical companies being required
to pay for “alternative energy”. So lower everyone electical bill by say 5 cents per kw hour. So since it’s a regressive form of taxation, we call it a progressive tax reform which save hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and mostly benefit lower income Americans.
So yeah it’s not much pruning of the government bureacracy, granted, but it’s a start.
Any thoughts on the latest failure of the new Mars parachute?
I’ve been thinking about writing something up. tl;dr Some technologies don’t scale well, we need to get more creative.
Their supersonic parachute looks a lot like a regular parachute. My gut (yeah, I haven’t done the math) tells me that a supersonic parachute should look more like a long ribbon.
Regarding Russian space failures, how about today’s?
“A glitch at the International Space Station on Tuesday caused its position in orbit to change, but the crew was not in danger, the Russian space agency said.
Roscosmos said the engines of a Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station unexpectedly started during testing of the radio system that controls the docking procedure.
Steps were taken to stabilize the station and specialists were now working to determine what caused the engines to start, the agency said.”
It’s pretty sad that Jim F. over there in the comments seems to think SpaceX is “a full on private industry solution”. Sigh.
Trent, it’s still an improvement over the days when no one in the industry dared to pull a ‘Dutch’ Kindleberger-style expansion of capability. I speak here of his decision in 1947, to use North American Aviation’s own money to build a liquid rocket engine test stand that could fire rocket engines nearly 2 orders of magnitude more powerful than any we had built so far. It was said by Von Braun that this saved 3-4 years for the US.
In 1965 I was being told by my classmates it was silly to talk of rockets being built by anyone but the government, because who could trust anyone else? I have sat next to Max Hunter at the Space and Robotics conference in 2000, listening to him describe Robert Mueller’s attempt to talk him in to joining the whisper campaign against Space Services Inc., which started in 1979. That sort of thing went on for decades.
It seems to me that the best advantage of the Commercial Crew program is that there is now a place inside NASA where a investor looking at a new private startup in ‘due diligence’ mode can call and *not* get a whispering campaign response. It won’t be pure itself, because cronyism is always developing. That said, it’s better than 1955-2005 in attitude.
The real question, to my way of thinking, is how many private space startups making their anticipated ROI do we need, to make whispering campaigns ineffective?
“how many private space startups making their anticipated ROI do we need, to make whispering campaigns ineffective?”
If the whisper campaigns are because people distrust private companies having the means to attack any place on the globe, money won’t ease their concerns.
Just to be clear, this is not my worry but I have heard it expressed before, usually by older people who were alive before we went to the Moon, when people had a better grasp of the dangers of nuclear war.
Hell, why not outsource the ICBM capability to SpaceX? I’d love for Elon to deliver more missiles for less money and watch Putin have a stroke.
Treaties, schmeaties.
Wodun, if the whispering campaigns had been done by conspiracy theory types, that might have merit. However, Robert Mueller, Assistant Administrator, knew quite well that wasn’t going to happen. He was one of too many who decided to become a NASA Turf Warrior. He was far more used to being afraid of losing jobs in key congressional districts than what some businessman would do, minus a nuke warhead, with a rocket.
Most like him were interested in keeping a NASA monopoly on space launch, and even fought the permission that allowed contractors to launch customer’s payloads on rockets developed decades before under government contract, from which the government had received far more than it anticipated in return already.
True, class bigotry would make *any* shift in tech use to the private sector an academically inspired nightmare for many. The keys, however, were what investors heard through “good friends”, and “my brother-in-laws’ cousin at NASA. Those are and were unlikely to believe in “Moonraker” styled fantasy about businessmen maniacally destroying the human race through rockets.
Mostly a copy-and-paste job from your PJMedia piece with nothing new of note. But, they’re good points, so I guess they deserve reiteration.
Not just reiteration, but another venue for people who don’t read PJMedia.
It isn’t obvious why anyone cares whether NASA continues SLS.
Yes, if NASA stopped building SLS, it could spend all the money on things which Rand wants. In theory. In some alternative universe, where Rand is the Central Planner.
In practice, it’s much more likely that Congress would choose to spend the money on something else. Something that would turn out to be as bad as SLS, or perhaps even worse
If anyone believes that’s impossible, remember — 10 years ago, the New Space community thought Congress and NASA could never come up with a replacement that was worse than the Shuttle. But they did.
The worst effect of SLS may be the opportunity cost, as the New Space community continues to squander its limited energies on the age-old goal of “Fixing NASA” at the expense of other, more viable strategies.
In practice, it’s much more likely that Congress would choose to spend the money on something else. Something that would turn out to be as bad as SLS, or perhaps even worse
Probably. But at least we wouldn’t be burdened by the “we need a giant rocket!” myth any more.
Again, that’s exactly what people said would happen “if we just cancel the Shuttle.”
What reason do you have for believing SLS won’t simply be replaced by *another* giant rocket? History shows that is the most likely outcome.
What reason do you have for believing SLS won’t simply be replaced by *another* giant rocket? History shows that is the most likely outcome.
“History” has exactly one example of a giant rocket being replaced by another giant rocket. That was then, this will be now.
Saturn IB, Saturn V, Shuttle, Ares, SLS — that’s more than one, by my count. (Not to mention abortive programs like VentureStar.)
Going back even further to Redstone, Mercury, and Titan, NASA retired each rocket as soon as possible to replace it with a bigger, more expensive rocket.
NASA and Congress have always desired the biggest rocket possible. Expecting them to suddenly abandon 50 years of ingrained behavior just because it’s “now” seems irrational.
There will reach a point at which it is so obviously ridiculous that it will become politically unsustainable. There was no serious very-real competition in any of those past cases.
Unfortunately, you don’t get to define who is “serious.” NASA and Congress do.
Based on the outcome of COTS and CCDev, the only companies they take seriously are SpaceX and the usual suspects (Boeing, Orbital).
Every one of those companies wants a giant rocket, including SpaceX. Or perhaps I should say, “especially SpaceX.”
Trying to go up against all their lobbyists is throwing weakness against strength. And it’s a distraction from battles that really could be won.
Even if so, at least SpaceX’s giant rocket has a chance of being affordable.
SpaceX’s giant rocket has a chance of being affordable.
If you believe NASA is incapable of writing requirements that make it otherwise.
NASA has already imposed 1000 separate requirements on SpaceX under CCDev (per SpaceX project manager Garrett Reisman). But the New Space community simply smiles and pretends those requirements won’t increase costs by a single dollar, because Elon is magic and therefore immune to the laws of economics.
In the absence of any pushback from the community, it’s logical to expect that NASA will continue to increase these requirements over time.
In the meantime, the opportunity costs keep piling up. What could be achieved if a fraction of the time spent on SLS went toward supporting AST’s commercial research budget, or DARPA space, or Centennial Challenges, or…?
Ed, we get it. It is all or nothing. There is no possible way to improve the situation except to abolish NASA.
In the absence of any pushback from the community, it’s logical to expect that NASA will continue to increase these requirements over time.
Given that SpaceX isn’t building either the Raptor engine or the BFR it will power for NASA, it’s hard to see where NASA’s ability to bark orders about such things might come from. Anything Elon does on his own dime will be done the way he wants it done. Nobody else gets a veto.
“There is no possible way to improve the situation except to abolish NASA.”
That isn’t quite what he’s saying. And he has a point – absent a seismic shift in the NASA structure, NASA will not change, nor will the relationship between Congress and NASA.
The presence of a commercial industry is a necessary but not sufficient step. Commercial enterprises can only push NASA from one direction. NASA needs to be squeezed from the other side too.
This is why I think the Space Guard is such a good idea. The formation of such an entity would not only offload non-military space activities like range safety and orbital debris tracking from the military, but would absorb 90% of NASA. NASA itself would be reduced to strictly its core competency of R&D, returning it to a NACA style agency – and building only test vehicles. The Space Guard, being modeled after the Coast Guard, would have a different type of authority structure than the NASA bureaucracy, and NASA itself would have to vastly reduce and change its own bureaucracy.
If the giant monster rocket formerly known as the SLS gets replaced by a giant reusable monster rocket using new reusable engines, that would be a great improvement over the P.O.S. SLS.
There are already two giant reusable monster rockets in the queue anyways, the opportunity lost is NASA’s and NASA’s alone. This is the biggest NASA screwup since the last big NASA screwup.
Who said anything about abolishing NASA?
You are fixated on changing/abolishing/fixing NASA (while, paradoxically, insisting that you don’t care about NASA).
For more than 10 years now, the New Space community has insisted that everything else has to wait on the NASA and the Bush Vision of Space Exploration (or whatever it’s called this week). But NASA is no closer to going to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond than in was 10 years ago.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
I am part of the New Space community. I have never insisted on any such thing.
Anything Elon does on his own dime
Elon has said (repeatedly) that his plans for Mars Colonial Transport depend on NASA’s dimes. SpaceX fanboys ignore what he actually says in favor of what they want to believe.
Drsgon is already being designed to comply with “1000 separate NASA requirements” (according to Garrett Reisman). He is not simply doing it “the way he wants it done.”
18.5 billion dollars a year!
Good thing we’re not talking about real money that could get things done. Musk may be worth $12b, but only a small fraction of that gets spent on rockets and payload each year. That small fraction may soon have more results than NASA’s entire budget.
Govt. is the problem. When are we going to rein it in?
–Govt. is the problem. When are we going to rein it in?–
Death and taxes, I suppose.
But let’s start small, like ending the federal EPA. Transfer half of EPA’s budget to pay for a depot in LEO, and put ISS into higher orbit, to mothball it, so have enough funding to do Mars program. And do Lunar exploration program for 40 billion spent within 10 years and be finished
the lunar exploration by 2025, and start Mars program before 2025.
And have extra money for something like Mars sample return or robotic
to Europa or something.
But let’s address bigger amount government waste and government oppression. Let’s stop requiring the electrical companies being required
to pay for “alternative energy”. So lower everyone electical bill by say 5 cents per kw hour. So since it’s a regressive form of taxation, we call it a progressive tax reform which save hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and mostly benefit lower income Americans.
So yeah it’s not much pruning of the government bureacracy, granted, but it’s a start.
Any thoughts on the latest failure of the new Mars parachute?
I’ve been thinking about writing something up. tl;dr Some technologies don’t scale well, we need to get more creative.
Their supersonic parachute looks a lot like a regular parachute. My gut (yeah, I haven’t done the math) tells me that a supersonic parachute should look more like a long ribbon.
Regarding Russian space failures, how about today’s?
“A glitch at the International Space Station on Tuesday caused its position in orbit to change, but the crew was not in danger, the Russian space agency said.
Roscosmos said the engines of a Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station unexpectedly started during testing of the radio system that controls the docking procedure.
Steps were taken to stabilize the station and specialists were now working to determine what caused the engines to start, the agency said.”
The rest is at
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SCI_SPACE_STATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-06-09-17-39-52
By “position in orbit” I think they actually mean attitude. Still, not a good thing to do.