…from the head of the Space Policy Institute (who I should disclose is a good and long-time friend and former colleague):
Scott Pace: I am disappointed that they chose not to fund the Constellation program or add the additional funds that the Augustine committee said would be necessary for a robust human spaceflight program. I think the NASA [budget] increase is good, and there is some good science and technology spending in the program, but it really did not restore a lot of the reductions that had been made in the fiscal year 2010 budget, so it continues a pattern of reductions to exploration, even though the NASA top line did go up somewhat.
TR: Are these reductions going to have a significant effect on the U.S. space program?
SP: The real issue is the future of human spaceflight and the question is, what [is NASA] doing after the space station? Because that is not very clear. [The administration] has made a commitment to the space station through 2020, which really gives us an opportunity to use it as a research facility, but it’s not clear what, if anything, is to come after the space station. Right now, with the canceling [sic — rs] of the Constellation program, there are no announced plans for going beyond low Earth orbit. The deeper question is what NASA will be doing. What is it going to do when we rely on commercial rockets, and how is it going to maintain its skills as a good customer and overseer?
The new effort does not have an overall architecture yet; it may get one, but right now [the plan] has a heavy technology development effort, and there is a lot of new technology that one could do, but without an architecture, how efficient is that technology development going to be?
The question of how it’s going to maintain its skills as a good customer and overseer presupposes that it has now, or ever had such skills. NASA is a terrible customer, always has been, and is likely doomed to always be, but one step toward improving it is forcing it to buy services instead of labor by the yard.
As for the lack of architecture, it’s too early to expect that. They didn’t even know what their proposed budget was until a couple of weeks ago. I imagine that there will be studies over the next few months to come up with one, but the agency could do a lot worse than to dust off the CE&R results that Steidle commissioned, and Mike Griffin ignored, at least as a starting point. And there are some technologies that are fundamental, and independent of architecture (e.g., on-orbit propellant storage and transfer). I don’t see how the “efficiency” of their development will be impaired by a lack of one. As Charles Miller reportedly said today at the FAA event, NASA is going to do something that it’s needed to do since it absorbed NACA and became an operational agency half a century ago — get back to basics of supporting technology development that industry needs to thrive.
[Update a few minutes later]
I’m afraid that Scott has fallen into the trap of thinking only of SpaceX when he talks about the “risk” of commercial not being able to step up to the plate. Regretting the loss of Orion is one thing, but there was no risk reduction with Ares, at least none worth the cost. There would be much less risk in modifying an existing vehicle (e.g., Atlas) to carry the NASA capsule, and it’s not like ULA knows nothing about rockets. And of course, there is always a tradeoff of risk versus cost. The cost ratio between commercial and NASA-centric (at least an order of magnitude) justifies the “risk,” at least in my mind. Of course, I don’t think it’s very high.
[Update early evening]
I think that it’s a mischaracterization to say that there are no plans to go beyond LEO. The administrator has been quite vociferous in saying that the goal is Mars. I don’t necessarily agree with that, and he hasn’t laid out a timetable and goals to achieve it, but to say that there are no plans is to imply that we will be in LEO ad infinitum, which I’m quite sure is not what the administration intends. At least not the NASA administration.
> I think that it’s a mischaracterization to say that there are no plans to go beyond LEO. The administrator has been quite vociferous in saying that the goal is Mars. I don’t necessarily agree with that, and he hasn’t laid out a timetable and goals to achieve it, but to say that there are no plans is to imply that we will be in LEO ad infinitum, which I’m quite sure is not what the administration intends. At least not the NASA administration.
According to Jeff Foust’s Space Politics blog, much of the reason that more precise timetables and goals weren’t laid out are b/c Bolden & co. only had less than 2 days to flesh out the details after they got the final budget number. According to this recent interview with Bolden though, it looks like many more details should be ready by the end of the month, likely involving a path that results in (among other things) a manned Mars exploration in the early 2030s:
http://blog.al.com/space-news/2010/02/nasa_administrator_charles_bol_2.html
If there’s uncertainty about the private sector’s ability to provide crew transport to LEO it lies in whether the government will set out realistic, clear, consistent, and stable regulatory and procurement standards for buying the service. Ideally, the space policy should also include an exemption to the Anti-Deficiency Act’s ban on multi-year contracts, similar to that on electric power, and for similar reasons. This will lower the substantial financial risk of dealing with the government.
It will also be important to separate the purchasing decisions and regulation (both civil – – CSLA — and de-facto via procurement regs from NASA organizationally.
These are where the policy battlegrounds will be. Get ready.
I think that it’s a mischaracterization to say that there are no plans to go beyond LEO.
I don’t. A vague statement that “people WILL move beyond low Earth orbit ‘sometime’ isn’t a “plan.” This whole idea of improvising 30-year plans to fit this year’s version of the out-year budget is idiotic. But I guess I’ve come to expect that from NASA.
The administrator has been quite vociferous in saying that the goal is Mars.
Vociferousness isn’t a plan. The agency has been saying the “goal is Mars” for 50 years. They’ll still be saying it for the next 50 years, while they’re making viewgraphs and creating new committees to engage in “process.”
From what Bolden has said so far, I really don’t see why we should be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He clearly thinks that “planting a flag” somewhere is equivalent to checking off a box. The logical end conclusion of such an attitude is that once we actually land on Mars, we leave forever and move on to the next PR stunt. So I am not reassured by the fact that he hasn’t had much time to “digest his budget.” My sense is that the end product of such diugestion will strongly resemble the usual end products of digestion.
Plans that extend 20 years aren’t really plans anyway; they’re comforting fantasies. Freeman Dyson observed that any program longer than five years is seriously flawed, since the conditions that justified the program (if any) change in that time. He was talking more about science, but the observation is more widely applicable.
A realistic path forward will acknowledge that long term goals are at best suggestive, and focus effort on a series of shorter steps, particularly focusing on developing enabling technologies that will be broadly useful.
Bait & switch
If EELVs & Falcons & Orbital are used for ISS logistics, Congress can support ISS for less money than was needed using shuttle.
Where will that difference go? NewSpace seems to think Congress will invest that money in promoting spacefaring capabilities. I think Mr. Holdren will spend that money on robotic exploration and Earth observation and be pleased that fewer federal tax dollars are being spent on human spaceflight than before.
If this new plan facilitates economically viable non-NASA LEO destinations sooner rather than later (Bigelow based LEO hotels) then real benefit will emerge, but the crux of that will be people buying spaceflight without using tax dollars.
The agency has been saying the “goal is Mars” for 50 years.
No, throughout the nineties they weren’t allowed to say, or think about such things. That’s one of the reasons that they couldn’t fly Transhab — Congress saw it as a camel’s nose under the Martian tent. This is an improvement.
If NASA openly says that the plan is to go to Mars in 2030 or later, then that will be a political and operational failure. NASA’s budget will increase under Obama’s new plan while the Space Shuttle (at $5 Billion a year in operating costs) will go away.
If NASA becomes a technology, science, and exploration leader for the United States, then it can not take its $19 Billion annual budget and openly tell the world that it is working to a goal over 20 years in the future. This is not leadership; this is lethargy.
In this age of free information, it is already clear to some that there are ways to get to Mars within NASA’s existing budget before 2020. This will be a risky and hard challenge, but what else is NASA supposed to do as the “leader” of aerospace for the post powerful country on Earth? The billions of people with access to free information on the Internet will understand that NASA is not the information source to rely upon when trying to chart the future of aerospace and the future of manned spaceflight.
People around the world can go to the DARPA web site to see concepts for the future of warfare, the future of spaceflight, and the future of American leadership in these areas. What does NASA represent? It surely is not leadership that serious people can follow.
As a leader, NASA needs to start articulating serious goals. If Mars in 2030 is the goal, then NASA’s budget should be cut until it is ready to ask for the money to go to Mars on a 5 or 10 year plan. America would not give DARPA a large budget for a specific goal that is 20 years away.
Ok, here is a five year plan that supports the ‘fexible path’ NASA seems to be adopting. Within five years, develop and demonstrate working standards for automated orbital randevous, docking and assembly, propelant transfer and storage. Develop and demonstrate methods for using aerobraking/aerocapture to rendezvous a vehical returning from our moon to the ISS. Then start building a reusable ‘earth departure vehical’, to use orbital assembly, orbital refueling and aerocapture return to LEO