Over at Reason, Ted Balaker takes a whack at NASA. It's not always fair:

When I interviewed him earlier this year, X Prize winner Burt Rutan pointed out that after almost half a century of manned space flight, NASA still hasn't achieved the kind of safety breakthroughs his small team achieved in a just a few years. Take the "care-free re-entry" design. It allows Rutan's SpaceShipOne to align itself automatically for reentry, making it much safer to plunge back into the earth's atmosphere. Although Rutan's ship only returns from suborbital space, the design takes the traditionally complex process of reentry and makes it simple.

Emphasis mine. That "although" makes all the difference. Burt's approach wouldn't work for an orbital entry, and it's not a valid comparison. Entry from orbit is a tough problem, and it's going to take a lot of experience and approaches to figure out how to do it safely.

And when he writes:

...when they're not swimming in tax dollars, inventors come to appreciate the value of simplicity. Take the hatch, for example. Private astronaut Brian Binnie explained to The Space Review's Eric Hedman that SpaceShipOne's hatch opens inward and has no moving parts. Binnie estimates that it costs a couple hundred bucks. Compare that to the multimillion dollar shuttle hatch which swings outward and requires complicated mechanisms to seal it for flight.

While the principle of parsimony is good, this is a dumb example. NASA's hatch designs are a legacy of the Apollo I fire. I hope that Burt doesn't kill too many people before he figures out that there are sometimes good reasons for the way NASA does things.

I do agree with this, though, at least in concept if not detail:

How many cosmic hints does NASA need to realize that it might not be long before it's eclipsed by space entrepreneurs? If it wants to stay in the game, NASA should move from player to manager: Spell out the mission, offer a nice reward for its completion, and kick back until someone collects the dough. NASA could borrow from a suggestion made by the Aldridge Report, itself the result of a presidential commission, and offer, say, $1 billion "to the first organization to place humans on the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period."

Commander Binnie visited Virginia Tech last February to talk about SpaceShipOne. It was disappointing for the same reasons you mention here. I wrote a bit about it
here.

"NASA could borrow from a suggestion made by the Aldridge Report, itself the result of a presidential commission, and offer, say, $1 billion "to the first organization to place humans on the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period."

Could NASA really do this? Or, to be a little more to the point, could _NASA_ do this? Doesn't it require somebody _else_ to make it happen?

In other words, doesn't this require both a) presidential action, and b) legislation from Congress?

Which brings up a related point--how much progress has NASA actually made at getting legislation changed to enable the Centennial Challenges program (i.e. increasing the cap on prizes)? Closely related to this--has Congress fully funded the Centennial Challenges program, at least to the amount that NASA (i.e. the White House) requested?

I don't know the answers, but my suspicion is that Congress has not been terribly enthusiastic about CC. If they're not fans of it at a low level, why does anybody think that they would be willing to roll the dice on a $1 billion prize?

NASA often becomes the focus of ire for space cadets who want somebody to blame for the fact that their daydreams have not come to fruition. But it's not all NASA's fault. Those who claim that the agency should simply offer a $1 billion prize for doing X often act as if this is a simple thing to accomplish if only we would "get serious" about doing it. But they don't recognize that there is widespread skepticism, if not outright hostility, to such an approach throughout the government. Too often they follow a familiar path in their arguments--they assert that something should be done while not really outlining all of the steps (for instance, in terms of political lobbying and legislation) that are necessary for it to happen.

Could NASA really do this? Or, to be a little more to the point, could _NASA_ do this? Doesn't it require somebody _else_ to make it happen?

Yes, indeed it does. Much criticism of NASA is really criticism of the entire federal space policy establishment, including the porkmeisters on the Hill, but most people are insufficiently sophisticated about space policy to understand this.

Someone commented to me a few months ago about the SS1 hatch and the Apollo 1 disaster. It should be noted, however, that the SS1 nosecone can be jettisoned in an abort situation to allow for the pilot to parachute out. (One can then argue about how practical such a jump would be for a given altitude but at least it offers a fighting chance to survive.)

This AvWeek article describes the nosecone mechanism and also some plugs that can be popped to equalize the cabin pressure with the external atmosphere. We'll have to wait and see what he will do for the SS2.

The hatch argument is flimsy. SS1 isn't using pure O2 as Apollo 1 did, either. In fact, the redesign post Apollo 1 probably could have changed the hatch, or the pressurization scheme, and either solution would have solved the problem, but they did both... we'll just say 'cause.

Personal opinion on prizes: No one in Congress (opposite of progress) gets to legislate/negotiate where things will be built, therefore they're surrendring control, and dislike the idea.

I read the article and it demonstrates all of the dangers of ideology over knowledge. Clearly the writer has lots of ideology--"government bad" vs. "private enterprise good." What he lacks is knowledge. He seems fundamentally unaware of the vast differences between the things that he is comparing.

For instance, he claims--citing Burt Rutan, who should know better--that SS1 achieves a "safety breakthrough" that NASA could not achieve after decades. This safety breakthrough? A hatch. How is this a breakthrough? It's cheaper. But how is the fact that it is cheaper a "safety breakthrough"? If anything, it is a cost breakthrough. But we're not even sure that it is a cost breakthrough, because the two hatches are mounted on vehicles that are significantly different. This is like saying that a wooden door is a breakthrough compared to a car door, because the wooden door does not cost hundreds of dollars and weigh tens of pounds. But they are different things, even though both control access to something.

It is a bad comparison for a lot of other reasons as well. We have no reason to believe that the space shuttle hatch is flawed in any way, and it is designed to much more stringent standards than the SS1 hatch (such as having to hold pressure for weeks, as opposed to only a few hours for SS1's hatch). But the author seems pretty ignorant of this fact.

He also picks other lousy comparisons. For instance, he lists many things that NASA did and then compares them to things that were simply _promised_ by private space entrepreneurs. Nobody has won Bigelow's prize. Virgin Galactic is not flying yet. And just because Space Adventures announced "plans" to send humans around the moon does not mean that it is actually going to happen. I'm not saying that these things are impossible or even unlikely. But press releases are cheap. Anybody can claim that they're going to do something. But until they do it, there's no reason to believe that the claim proves anything at all. The landing of Space Shuttle Discovery was an actual achievement, and comparing it to a press release indicates that all the writer cares about is his ideological argument and has left common sense far behind.

I have to remove my foot from my mouth--or at least a couple of toes. (That's what happens when I post after not sleeping in 24 hours.) The author did not explicitly refer to the hatch as the "safety breakthrough." Instead, he called it an example of the "value of simplicity." But it's not really a good comparison.

His example of the "safety breakthrough" is the "care-free reentry" system. Although this was certainly innovative, it's not so much an advance in safety as it is simply an advance in reentry technology. It is hard to say anything conclusive about the safety of the SS1 vehicle considering how few flights it actually made. In fact, SS1's designers have said that it had far thinner safety margins than they would have liked. (There are reasons why no passengers flew on any of its flights.)

And Mr. Simberg is correct that reentering from orbit is a far more serious challenge.

I guess Burt knows not to run ground tests at 16psi pure oxygen i.e. above anbient by 1 psi or more.

Outward opening hatches are real safe aren't they? I seem to remember some problems with them on DC-10's and 747's .

Mike

"Outward opening hatches are real safe aren't they? I seem to remember some problems with them on DC-10's and 747's."

Problems that were fixed several decades ago. Do you have a point?

Isn't the Apollo style capsule shape a carefree reentry design? I thought that NASA studied a wide variety of conical and spherical designs. They stuck with the basic shape we have today due to favorable reentry characteristics.

While a big fan of Rutan and his efforts, I'm getting quite tired of the repeated suggestion that we are now on the verge of private space exploration. In truth what Rutan did was a stunt and not much more. He advanced the engineering of going to orbit by zero.

To put it another way; we are no more closer to private flights to orbit than we were twenty years ago, Rutan, NASA and the Space Shuttle, not withstanding.

I thought that NASA studied a wide variety of conical and spherical designs. They stuck with the basic shape we have today due to favorable reentry characteristics.

Actually, NASA abandoned capsules in favor of orbital gliders about a third of century ago. NASA wanted more accurate landings than can be achieved with ballistic reentry vehicles.

Whereas, Apollo on Steroids (TM) is specified to land within the property lines at Edwards. This requirement is going to be a challenge, particularly in view of that fact that the 30-plus ton Apollo on Steroids (TM) will be a record-sized load to land under parachute.

I believe that this landing requirement will be one of the things that causes the Apollo on Steroids (TM) design proposal to unravel and come to naught. Apollo on Steroids (TM) is not really that much like the orginal Apollo, never mind what its salespeople say.

Why can't the bigass new capsule land at Kennedy? Because if it tried to do so, its Service Module would fall to Earth somewhere in the Gulf Coast states. The Service Module will be too large and dense to burn up entirely before reaching the ground. Ungood vibrartions and bad P.R. if that thing were to land on somebody, or somebody's house.