6 thoughts on “Fifty Years On”

  1. An example what NASA should not be doing: comsat servicing missions. Would this be of value to the US? Absolutely! So why shouldn’t NASA astronauts be out there doing real work? Same reason they shouldn’t be flying humans to LEO: the commercial sector now has the technology to do it, and there’s a market which can support it. How did this set of circumstances come about? Well, the market evolved naturally.. but NASA pioneered on-orbit servicing and when the astronauts they trained moved on to greener pastures they took those skills with them. Trailblazing economically valuable activities like this are what NASA could be doing intentionally, but instead they’re trying to compete with commercial interests that can do it cheaper and better, if only they get a chance. I’m too cynical, so I fully expect NASA to start doing comsat servicing on the taxpayer’s dime and, in the process, destroying the next in-space market.

  2. NASA wasn’t practicing for servicing comsats back in the 1980s. The satellites they would’ve been servicing were the ones on sun synchronous orbits with really expensive optics. The only comsats in LEO are things like Iridium and they’re mass produced. Going out to GEO for a servicing mission is probably best left to robotics.

  3. Rand:

    In your article you wrote:

    “That day was actually the beginning of a long national detour in space development, at least for human spaceflight. ”

    My question is (regarding human spaceflight only):

    detour from what? What track were we on prior to the May 1961 Kennedy speech? From what path did we detour?

    This is not an attack on your article – though it might turn out that “detour” wasn’t the best word to use – but more of an attempt, on my part, to gain a wider picture.

    My knowledge of the pre-speech era is, I admit, sketchy. About all I know is:

    Kittinger had made several high altitude jumps (not NACA/NASA)

    Lots of human factors work 1948-1958

    Speed and altitude was gradually being pushed ever higher with projects like the X-15.

    Project Mercury begins roughly 1958 with objectives:

    * To orbit a manned spacecraft around Earth
    * To investigate man’s ability to function in space
    * To recover both man and spacecraft safely

    The Air Force seems to have generated a need for a human in space around that time.

    So when you use the word “detour” it suggests you think we were on a path already, and we deviated from this path. If that suggestion is correct, do you know (or does anyone know) what that path was?
    Is there a discernable path that would have been taken otherwise, and what was/is the trajectory that path would have taken?

  5. So when you use the word “detour” it suggests you think we were on a path already, and we deviated from this path. If that suggestion is correct, do you know (or does anyone know) what that path was?

    I think the path was a similar one that the aviation industry took, with NASA being simply the NACA with space technology. That’s what it was from 1958 through 1961.

  6. The part I most liked:
    And, perhaps most importantly, the government is out of money, so we can no longer justify pork for no progress. Americans will demand value for value when it comes to our presence in space — with tax dollars far more likely to support an outer-space version of the Coast Guard than a bureaucratic behemoth monopolizing and narrowing our activities in orbit and beyond.

    One reason I can’t stand any of our political ideological groups, is that they collectively … don’t get this. For different reasons.

    The right likes its pork, preferably encased in national security – “closer my weapons system to thee”, willing to overlook the difficulty in separating the cost structures of weapons – which often require irrational costing by need – from the strategic “soft power” which can’t have this because its an economic activity and the better economics are part of winning at the soft power game. This basic contradiction causes an internecine “purity battle” with a bad outcome.

    The left likes any pork without results and spends its time finding clever ways rationalizing it into broadening the social pyramid so as to be “loved”.

    Both waste in this mode. They find ways to agree, which often means screwing the US in ways neither want to admit to. Nor do they wish to examine the details because if they did, they’d find the ideological contradictions too embarrassing to deal with (that they are like their rivals), so the requirement to “save face” dominates.

    Gotta win even if it means losing. Part of why we are in this mess to begin with.

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