Wayne Hale wonders if NASA’s culture will allow it to enter a new era of private space transportation.
It all continues to come back to the fact that actual accomplishments in space are not politically important, as they were during Apollo. When something’s not important, it’s hard to justify risk for it.
You have often argued that the fact that space isn’t important to decision makers (rightly or wrongly) is one of the main reasons the space program is such a disaster. In the next few years we may be entering a new phase however, one in which the lack of importance of space will work to our advantage. Space will remain unimportant but public debt and deficits are important to decision makers, not important enough yet, but we may be getting there.
If there isn’t enough money for exploration with an SDLV, politicians will likely want to hang on to the ISS. There was talk on NSF today of NASA asking for an extension of ISS to 2028! And in that case there definitely will not be enough money for an SDLV. Commercial crew will likely get a major boost, there is talk of billions over the next couple of years.
The position of commercial space will be strengthened (it only needs LEO) while that of the shuttle stack will be weakened (it needs exploration). The struggle will not end in this administration but if we get commercial crew and ISS extension the decisive battle in the struggle may well have been won.
Of course, we will still have lost a decade and a half or more and none of us are getting any younger.
While getting stuff done in space is not politically important, buying the stuff of national pride from Russians is. That is the number one thing working in our favor right now. NASA has been too successful in destroying domestic launch competition, and in doing so it has opened the door to slightly less reptilian space agencies overseas and made itself look incompetent by comparison. The market works eventually, even for socialist jobs programs. If there was a lot of money available, I have no doubt a big government guy like Obama would double down on the bad policy. But in this case the unimportance of space to the adminstration works in our favor, because it is a high-profile opportunity for Obama to show in a relatively meaningless way that he supports private sector innovation as a solution for government spending. It’s much more of a no-lose situation for him to go commercial – if it doesn’t work, we won’t know until he’s a lame duck anyway. If it does work, watch him try to parlay that success into 100X as much spending on “green energy.”
And concerning risk aversion: is that really the main obstacle? Conflicts of interest and empire building seem to be much more of an obstacle. It looks as if Hale can’t bring himself to accept that.
Remember the sheer amount of different rocket engine and launcher designs done in the 1960s? Now people expect everything to work right first time, that everything there was to be invented has been invented. Well this is not true. Even chemical rockets can be improved a lot further.
NASA rocket R&D funding is concentrated into reverse engineering the J-2 engine and RS-68 upgrades. Hardly inspirational. The Japanese are doing more leading edge research in rocket engines for Pete’s sake!
To truly understand the politics involved, you have to understand a subtle but vital distinction. Actual accomplishments in space are indeed not politically important. But the *appearance* of accomplishments in space is, since “Americans exploring space” has been a significant part of our national self-image since the sixties.
Most of the American public can’t tell the difference, which is why NASA has gotten away with doing less and less for the money (roughly constant since the Apollo wind-down) for a generation now, as long as some cool video results. (The recent Ares 1X half-billion-dollar bottle rocket flight is a prime example.)
What this means is, the regional Congressional NASA jobs coalition is not totally self-perpetuating. Absent the ongoing PR top cover provided by cool NASA Americans-doing-things-in-space images on the evening news a few times a year, at some point the coalition will break. NASA currently act as if they can extend the trend of more bureaucracy and less accomplishment forever, but if they fail to fly for long enough, at some point NASA as we know it will undergo a, ahem, major funding discontinuity.
If NASA keeps trying to fend off the commercial launch providers in favor of the in-house approach, that point could arrive remarkably soon. If they reluctantly accept the commercial providers but then force costs back up to NASA levels by insisting the current NASA bureaucracy be allowed to swarm all through the commercial organizations to “help”, the end might be a little delayed but it will be equally inevitable.
I’d love to see NASA transition to being a much leaner agency leveraging commercial capabilities to do much more actual exploration, but I have grave doubts as to either the necessary will for change or the necessary ability to change being present in the agency. In individuals there, perhaps, but the main body of the bureaucracy seems powerfully inclined “to learn nothing and to forget nothing.” It may be time to start planning for, once NASA self-destructs, what next?
I don’t think it’s possible for Obama to care less about space and space exploration. Ditto Reid and Pelosi. So any prediction based on profound neglect is probably reasonable. I would also surmise that in the absence of White House or Congressional leadership leadership, the outcome will be dominated by whichever Senators and Congressmen of high seniority have some private axes to grind, or private fiefs to expand.
“Wayne Hale wonders if NASA’s culture will allow it to enter a new era of private space transportation.”
No, it won’t. NASA has two missions; doling out the pork to keep Congresscritters in jobs and keeping humanity in any meaningful numbers out of space for as long as possible – preferably forever. In the latter mission, they will be aided and abetted by the FAA, no doubt, as soon as it begins to look as if humans might get into space despite NASA sabotage.
The reason? More than a couple of thousand people living in space means the permanent and irreversible end of American hegemony, and on a slightly longer timescale the increasing irrelevance of Earth humanity as a whole.
There is a problem with this strategy, though, and it is bound up with the arrogance that has been a part of America for a century or more. The assumption that others are incapable of doing what Americans can. Well, Americans, you are wrong. Keep on the present path, and all you will achieve is that the lingua franca of the Solar System will be Mandarin – or perhaps Hindi.
We may finally have an answer to Obama’s plan for NASA.
Let me just say that Rand thought heavy lift was overrated before he thought Obama was overrated.
This morning there’s a new article about Indian HSF ambitions:
http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/article95516.ece
They are planning to put two astronauts in orbit by 2016. They expect it will cost about $2.76 billion. I don’t know how realistic that is, but I think it’s ironic that it’s not just SpaceX — even the Indians think they can beat Ares I/Orion to orbit! (And for a fraction of the money.)
In response to Fletcher, I’d like to say that nobody in NASA or the FAA is trying to keep people out of space. Certainly they’re not trying to keep other nationalities out of space. How could they? What you’re seeing is just a general retrenchment of the American spirit in the last couple of generations. That legendary “can do” spirit is becoming the spirit of “better not”.