Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Well, the first sentence in this quote is nuts. I don't think there's any way people stopped supporting "Moon shots" after Apollo 11 primarily because of the cost. I don't think there would have been much support if it had cost 1/10 as much, or nothing at all.

The cancellation of Apollo itself was the doing of Richard Nixon, and I would blame his inveterate malice toward John Kennedy. Every time people talked about Apollo they played that little clip of Kennedy proposing to put a man on the Moon by 1970, and people got all misty-eyed about Camelot. Nixon hated Kennedy for the 1960 election the way Al Gore hates GWB for the 2000 election, and for escaping responsibility for Vietnam, probably for the cock-up in Cuba (both of them), and for becoming a legend in his own time by being martyred in Dallas. I think Nixon felt wonderful cancelling one of Kennedy's "We Choose Not to Do These Things Because They Are Easy But Because They Are Hard" initiatives as a frivolous money-waster.

Also, a major original motivation for the space program was alarm at the Soviet ventures into space. It's hard to realize now how scary this was, following on the heels of the astonishing Soviet ability to duplicate the atomic and thermonuclear bombs, and their success with rocketry that led to the (in fact illusory) "missile gap". But by 1972 we'd beaten the Soviets to the Moon, and it was clear they'd resigned the space-race game. For a lot of people not interested in space per se the motivation for more spaceships waned.

Finally, the narcissist boomer generation always had (and still has) an uneasy relationship to spaceships, because of its culture of can-do, best-and-brightest, model citizenry. It was the kids who got A's in citizenship, were Boy Scouts, and volunteered for Vietnam who became astronauts, and those who dropped out, smoked dope, and talked until 2AM over Kahlua and clove cigarettes about the futility of the rat race and the unpardonable arrogance of technophiles never much liked them.

In 1975 the boomer generation arguably reached its greatest revolutionary influence, and they were tired of their parents' whole Cold War 1950s strive-for-excellence value-set. It was time to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Not pack your space camping gear for an arduous trip to the Moon to plant (another) flag.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 13, 2007 07:43 AM

The article strikes "almost" the correct tone.

I think Apollo lost support and Orion/return to the Moon has no support among the people because they cannot see any value in it...any value worth anywhere near the cost.

The sad thing of course is that there was no value in Apollo after 11 and there is NO value in return to the Moon as NASA is doing it.

We have yet another program that exist with no reason for being other then keeping the pork monster happy.

The acid test is that if all the crewed spaceprogram went away, there would be nothing but the jobs lost...and eventually, quickly all the areas would recover.

What we have today are people on the far right doing what extremes always do..supporting their pork.

It all ends not with a bang but with a whimper.

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 13, 2007 07:48 AM

The cancellation of Apollo itself was the doing of Richard Nixon, and I would blame his inveterate malice toward John Kennedy.

No, Carl. This is a popular myth, but Apollo was cancelled by Johnson, in 1967, exactly for the reason that the costs (and they were very high--probably four times as much as the current NASA budget, and a much larger percentage of the discretionary budget of the time) couldn't be justified in light of the war and building the Great Society. The decision was made at that time to procure no more hardware. Everything that happened after that was just program momentum. Nixon could have revived it, I suppose, in 1969, but there was no reason to--it had accomplished its original purpose.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 13, 2007 07:51 AM

Simberg Says:

and a much larger percentage of the discretionary budget of the time) couldn't be justified in light of the war and building the Great Society.

------------

Ok Rand,

Assume you are a senior staffer in the Bureau of the Budget,
working on a report for LBJ. You need to reduce spending.

Which would have prioritized? Vietnam or Apollo?
Those were the choices at the time, LBJ had made the
decision to do the great society, the National security/
foreign policy initiatives were Vietnam and Apollo.

Which would you have cut and why?

Posted by anonymous at March 13, 2007 08:06 AM

Rand

The problem that I have is that the lunar effort is slowly sliding into the First Lunar Outpost mold of 1993, Griffin's last effort to go to the Moon.

Here is the latest manifest, posted on collectspace:

http://collectspace.com/ubb/Forum39/HTML/000107.html

The ESAS Ares V cargo missions have been eliminated and I hear many rumors of descoping of the mission to a minimal presence on the Moon because NASA cannot get the budget to do it right (right in this context is the Ares I/V).

The Ares architecture is going to kill the lunar effort just as surely as the heavy lift architecture of 1992 killed SEI.

Dennis

Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo at March 13, 2007 08:53 AM

It all comes down to "why" are we going to the Moon, or Mars, or anywhere. Answer "why" persuasively and the money will be there.

If not, it won't be there.

Posted by Bill White at March 13, 2007 08:59 AM

Dennis, I would attribute the changes you describe as being due to a desire to "get on to Mars" and not get dead-ended on the Moon, supporting an ISS style lunar base. This is related to "why" we are doing space at all.

This leads to the "BIG" question of whether NASA would be capable of actually accomplishing genuine low cost NewSpace style Earth-to-LEO lift that would lower costs far below current EELV price points. Otherwise, I just do not believe that using Atlas V rather than Ares & ESAS would save enough money to make a difference.

If a genuine NewSpace breaththough occurs, then ESAS and EELV architecures BOTH become obsolete. But how do people persuade Congress to fund NewSpace ventures, especially if those ventures would make the EELVs obsolete?

At nasaspaceflight, people are already saying we should cancel both Ares and COTS and buy EELVs instead.

Posted by Bill White at March 13, 2007 09:07 AM

Sorry Bill but I exit when things to to far into fantasy land.

The USG military/industrial complex is simply too far gone to do what you say. It will take a Burt Rutan with private money to build a low cost RLV. I do think it can be done but I have watched the beast long enough to know that it will sit in its cave and roar at anyone who seeks to steal its treasure.

The Mars lobby has little power at this point, the problem is funding and funding alone at this point.

As long as Mike Griffin is administrator, we will go down this path. However, that will change and it is almost guaranteed that the system will shift after his is gone.

Dennis

Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo at March 13, 2007 09:34 AM

Maybe more folks would support NASA and Orion if we could tie it into diet fads, talk shows, dying pseudo-stars and the like.

Posted by Fred Kiesche at March 13, 2007 10:22 AM

If NASA had actually absorbed Marburgers speech on the subject of incorporating the solar system into our economic sphere, then the agency would have it a home run with the softball tossed at it. It would have garnered the support that it needs. Mike at least made a half hearted attempt at it but with the evolving plans for the lunar effort, the goodwill is being spent.

Without this as a goal, the agency will continue to bob about, like a ship without an engine in a stormy sea.

Dennis

Posted by dennis Ray Wingo at March 13, 2007 10:38 AM

Actually, Dennis, I fully agree with this:

The USG military/industrial complex is simply too far gone to do what you say. It will take a Burt Rutan with private money to build a low cost RLV. I do think it can be done but I have watched the beast long enough to know that it will sit in its cave and roar at anyone who seeks to steal its treasure.

Which is why I believe it is a waste of time for NewSpace and Space Access people to whine about NASA not building space planes. Space planes will be built by the private sector spending private money, not by contractors feeding off Uncle Sugar.

But then, I do not see how using EELV rather than Ares and ESAS can "save" more than a few percentage points, at the margins, if that.

I am definitely a "lunar platinum" guy and incorporating the Moon into a genuine cis-lunar economy is a terrific idea, however BOTH Ares and Delta/Atlas EELVs may be too expensive to accomplish that mission.

Soyuz / Proton / Angara / Zenit? Or even Long March? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Posted by Bill White at March 13, 2007 11:12 AM

Which is why I believe it is a waste of time for NewSpace and Space Access people to whine about NASA not building space planes.

Apparently they agree with you, Bill, since very few, if any of them do that.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 13, 2007 11:16 AM

Except on the tubes of the intar-web . . .

:-)

As I have been saying for a while now, the key will be finding money for space exploration that does not first pass through Uncle Sugar's digestive system.

Posted by Bill White at March 13, 2007 11:38 AM

Except on the tubes of the intar-web . . .

Where? Who?

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 13, 2007 11:44 AM

>>I just do not believe that using Atlas V rather than Ares & ESAS would save enough money to make a difference.

Ok, run this simple calculation: how much payload tons in LEO could you buy for one billion dollars, launched on Progress ( read: market prices ) ?

A hint, Futron says, Progress launch costs around 80 mil, for a single launch.

Now, look up the latest numbers on Ares I development costs ..

Even if you take into account a hefty cut in payload to LEO due to additional required docking and propellant transferring hardware, boiloff losses and whatnot .. lets say a 50% of payload to LEO being useful in the end .. just the development costs of Ares I and Ares V will buy you a LOT of payload on LEO, that could easily go to moon several times over, especially if some parts of the system are reuseable.

Posted by kert at March 13, 2007 11:51 AM

Progress? As in cargo-Soyuz? Yup. Buying those off the shelf would save a ton of money. Proton as well.

I said Atlas and Delta, not Soyuz.

$80 million may be the official asking price with negotiated prices being much lower. Rumor has it Dennis Tito et. al. paid $12 million linked to a promise to never deny that they actually paid $20 milliom.

Heh! Sounds like capitalism to me.

Posted by Bill White at March 13, 2007 12:01 PM

I was relying on memory, Rand, but after some quite interesting reading here, I agree you're right (as one would expect from your background, of course).

I think it's still a little naive to think that the cost of the program was its major problem. The cost would have been borne easily if people had wanted it to go on. Landing on the Moon every 4-6 months cost much less than any number of programs in Johnson's Great Society, probably the largest and most futile religious construction attempted by mankind since the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

It's very interesting reading the history of those decisions in '66-'67, and I can see if you were involved with this stuff how you built up your implacable contempt for NASA. In fairness, though, I get the impression that buried among all the time-servers, paper-pushers, speech-makers, glory-hounds and other such parasites attracted to the space program by the mountain of cash and personal glory it represented, there was a core of capable and interesting folks with whom it would be a real pleasure to work. No?

Also notable is that the very same arguments then seem to be repeated now. This points ever more strongly to the conclusion that public projects for space exploration are ipso facto doomed to failure, and private venture is the only hope of long-term success. I guess that's not news to anyone who's served on a committee.

Posted by Carl Pham at March 13, 2007 12:05 PM

>>public projects for space exploration are ipso facto doomed to failure

On the contrary, public funds are very suitable for conducting exploration. most of the deep space planetary probes NASA has sent out are very much worth the money, and have strong public support.
what the public funds are not good for, is providing general transportation services.

NASA could do a fine manned lunar exploration program, using the existing transportation architectures where they are available ( the earth to LEO leg ) for relatively "modest" funds, at least when compared to STS and the proposed ESAS

Posted by kert at March 13, 2007 12:20 PM

Bill

I disagree about EELV vs Ares 1.

Despite what they are saying Ares 1 will cost between $8-10 billion dollars.

EELV Heavy will cost about $250M each for launch on a block buy.

At an $8 billion dollar overhead cost that means that I can launch 32 EELV heavies for the price of just the development cost.

According to the just released manifest there will only be 19 launches until 2020 and that inlcudes 8 extra missions to ISS that was not manifested until last month.

If ISS is cut of then and then there is another ten years worth of Ares 1 launches at 2 per year you now have 39 launches between 2013 and 2030. You NEVER recover the NRE costs at that flight rate as there is no way that the Ares 1 will cost less than EELV to fly.

Sorry, the numbers just don't grok.

Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo at March 13, 2007 12:31 PM

The USG military/industrial complex is simply too far gone to do what you say.

Dennis

How annoying (grin) we agree on something.

I think it actually goes farther...but I agree that the entire military industrial complex is simply "to fat" (my words) to accomplish anything of value worth the cost. Oh they build fine equipment but it is several magnitudes of cost above the value.

Actually I think the problem is that the entire country is kind of hosed right now. We have grown so "fat" (I am looking for a more descriptive word) so use to a life of relative stability and luxury that for most of the reasonably well off (and this includes the various companies around) there is this syndrome that "it never ends"...

So the only race every"one" is in is a race to mediocrity.

We should quickly go back to disagreeing and being "harsh" to each other. LOL

Robert

Posted by Robert G. Oler at March 13, 2007 12:59 PM

Dennis, the appropriate comparison is Ares 1 plus Ares V versus EELV. Ideally, that morphs to a light crew taxi (Falcon 9?) plus Ares V versus EELV.

If LM deploys an Atlas variant crew capsule for Bigelow at private sector price points, then to combine that with Ares V may be a terrific idea. If the private sector funds development of a crew-rated Atlas V (Bigelow!) won't the total cost and the cost per flight end up being far less than if NASA funds the same program?

Get Bigelow and LM to fly their Atlas crew taxi, with crew, privately funded, and I will join a lobbying campaign to ask NASA to buy them in the dozens at the Bigelow price point.

But remember, Ares 1 development costs are to be counted against Ares V development costs and the real trades are Ares V versus all-EELV. On the trade of cancelling Ares I & Ares V in favor of all-EELV (O'Keefe & Steidle's vision) does not strike me as leading to significant savings.

Posted by Bill White at March 13, 2007 01:10 PM

On the trade of cancelling Ares I & Ares V in favor of all-EELV (O'Keefe & Steidle's vision)

How do you know what their "vision" was? They never got a chance to actually make a decision. All the options were included in the CE&R trade studies. If they'd had such a "vision," they would have excluded Shuttle-derived from the options (actually, they always tended to lose out to the others due to (guess what!) high development costs that didn't allow the program to meet the budgetary "sandpile").

...does not strike me as leading to significant savings.

Whether it strikes you or not, what analysis have you done? All of the analysis that the CE&R contracters did indicated tremendous savings. You've certainly provide zero basis for your assertion here.

Bill, have you ever noticed that, much of the time, you don't know what you're talking about? You seem to kind of just make stuff up as you go along.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 13, 2007 01:19 PM

Bill

Sorry I can't cost something that does not exist.

The development costs for the Ares V is estimated at $25 billion dollars according to the Aerospace corp's cost models.

At two flights per year and a 20 year lifetime that is a 1.25 billion per launch just in DDT&E amortization.

This is at the core of the reason that lunar operations continues to be cut back to where we will end up with an ISS on the Moon as there will be no money for anyone to do anything there.

Dennis

Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo at March 13, 2007 02:09 PM

The development costs for the Ares V is estimated at $25 billion dollars

To develop a big rocket? Why so high? You can build an aircraft carrier for a mere $4 billion. It's comparable to the cost to develop a new top of the line jet fighter (the JSF cost about $38 billion, I think). I wouldn't have thought rockets were as complex and tricky as STOL-capable supersonic jet fighters...

Posted by Carl Pham at March 13, 2007 02:27 PM

To develop a big rocket? Why so high? You can build an aircraft carrier for a mere $4 billion.

There's a huge difference between "building costs" and "development costs," Carl. One of the reasons that spaceflight is so expensive is that the development costs are just as high for both space vehicles and aircraft, but the fleet size and flight rate for the latter is so low.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 13, 2007 02:32 PM

Rand

Also, with an Aircraft Carrier there is a production line of sorts that has been developed and refined over the last 70 years. There is no production line, no tooling, no workforce, no design, no nothing for a heavy lifter. There are some facilities that were built for the Saturn V. So the only savings out there is from the Saturn program and facilities built 45 years ago.

Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo at March 13, 2007 02:44 PM

To develop a big rocket? Why so high?
Posted by Carl Pham at March 13, 2007 02:27 PM

Because if NASA tried to develop anything, say a toliet it would run into millions of dollars...oh they already have done that.

If NASA was tasked with hitting the ground with a book, the outcome would be a hundred thousand dollars, just in the spec sheets alone.

Robert

Posted by Robert Oler at March 13, 2007 03:35 PM

the development costs are just as high for both space vehicles and aircraft

Yeah, but this is what I don't understand. New jet fighters significantly advance the state of the art in aeronautics (e.g. inherently unstable designs for faster response), materials science (composites), engineering (supercruise, stealth) and avionics (multiple targets). Plus they have extraordinary cost-is-no-object standards for performance and survivability since they're going into warfare.

By contrast, a rocket is, well, just a rocket, no? Same thing Werner von Braun flew eighty years ago into Aunt Effie's cabbage patch, only a lot bigger. What's really new about the job Ares V is supposed to do, or the way in which it does it? Why would its design specs be as fundamentally different from those of Saturn as the F-35's design specs are different from the F-4's?

And if the design specs are not that different, why is it so expensive to develop a new rocket? Is it the fact that it's flying hypersonically, and the least little flaw in design and manufacture (cf. Columbia) leads to total vehicle loss? I'm grasping at straws...help me out here...ye lurking astronautical experts...

Posted by Carl Pham at March 13, 2007 04:06 PM

> And if the design specs are not that different, why is it so expensive to develop a new rocket?

Aircraft are tested incrementally, starting with low-speed taxi tests and gradually expanding the envelope through dozens (or hundreds) of test flights. Rockets can be tested incrementally (e.g., X-15, DC-X, SpaceShip One) but expendables cannot. Each flight test of an expendable requires building a new flight article, so the number of flight tests is very small. The very first flight is usually to maximum performance and expandables have limited redundancy compared to reusable aircraft. So, even a slight failure is likely to be catastrophic. All of which multiplies the requirement for ground-based testing, analysis, and quality control.

Also keep in mind that you need someplace to launch the rocket. You can take a new aircraft out to Mojave or Edwards AFB and fly it off runways that are amortized every day. Large ELVs like Ares require launch pads, vehicle assembly buildings, and other facilities that are essentially single use. Constructing the facilities for a large ELV can run into billions of dollars. Those very large, very expensive facilities must be completed before the first launch and maintained between launches. The expense does not go away, even when the flight rate goes down.

Posted by Edward Wright at March 13, 2007 04:57 PM

> Get Bigelow and LM to fly their Atlas crew taxi, with crew, privately
> funded, and I will join a lobbying campaign to ask NASA to buy them in the
> dozens at the Bigelow price point.

Kick the football one more time, Charlie Brown, and I promise not to yank it away.

Get private enterprise to commit billions of dollars, but don't ask NASA to commit one red cent.

You take all the risk, while we take none. In the meantime, please give us billions of dollars to fund your competition. If you succeed despite all the obstacles we put your way, Bill will ask NASA to lay off the standing army of technicians and mothball its shiny new fleet of Ares launch vehicles. We promise. Right, Bill?

Posted by Lucy Van Pelton at March 13, 2007 05:33 PM

Posted by Edward Wright at March 13, 2007 04:57 PM..

Ed. Off topic.

I have kind of lost track...how is (or is it still going/finished what) the 307 rebuild?

Thanks

Robert

Posted by Robert Oler at March 13, 2007 05:43 PM

Rand, what analysis have you done?

The recent discussion of Ross Tierney's Direct proposal is a potential case in point. "Everyone" was certain Direct was better than ESAS until NASA and Tierney sat down and did some numbers together. Then, even the Direct proponents agreed the numbers do not work for Direct.

Ever since ESAS was announced, the EELV camp has been screaming that all-EELV would be "obviously cheaper" but as far as I can tell, no one has done those numbers in a comprehensive and persuasive fashion.

Rand, do you favor cancelling ESAS and COTS and going back to Steidle's EELV spirals?

Posted by Bill White at March 13, 2007 08:05 PM

Bill

There were several million dollars put into the CE&R efforts that Rand talks about. I supported Andrews Space which used Ares 1 only and solar electric propulsion systems.

Even the CBO (it may have been GAO) study showed that EELV was cheaper than ESAS and they gamed the books as much as possible.

Heavy lift only works if there is a high enough flight rate to support the infrastructure overhead. NASA's infrastructure overhead is going to be $2-3 billion a year for launch no matter what especially supporting two vehicles.

It has been estimated that each lunar flight is going to cost about $5 billion dollars. For that much money they damn well better be doing some really good stuff there. However, that five billion does not get you really good stuff.

Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo at March 13, 2007 09:57 PM

Well Bill White the difference between Direct and ESAS was something on the order of 5 billion US dollars in Direct's favour. Those savings seem to have been brushed aside as trivial but would they need to spend even half of those 5 billions to fix the shortcomings of Direct?

I'm not sure and in many ways I don't care. NASA is mostly irrelevant already except for as an academic exercise in what not to do (this is what you might have misinterpreted as NewSpace whining).

NASA will be scaled back to pure science when Bigelow Aerospace beats them to the moon in 2028.

The future is non-governmental.

Posted by Just passing by at March 13, 2007 10:16 PM

Just as a reference, the $25 billion quoted for Ares V development would buy you approximately 5000 ( yes, that is five thousand ) tons to LEO on Proton, at current launch costs.

If you take half of that away for whatever losses, it would still buy you around 500 tons to lunar surface.

thats one big lunar base. doable now.

Posted by kert at March 13, 2007 10:50 PM

With a $25B purchase order, I'm sure that you could buy 15,000T+ in LEO on Proton. If you're spending that sort of money though, a Sea Dragon starts making an awful lot of sense.

Posted by Adrasteia at March 14, 2007 02:03 AM

"On the contrary, public funds are very suitable for conducting exploration. most of the deep space planetary probes NASA has sent out are very much worth the money, and have strong public support.
what the public funds are not good for, is providing general transportation services."

I'm starting to wish NASA would just dump manned spaceflight altogether and put it's resources into unmanned probes. By time 2020 or 2030 comes around, computer power and AI capabilities will probably be so advanced that people will be pretty much irrelevant as far as pure exploration goes anyway.

Posted by X at March 14, 2007 02:41 AM

>> If you're spending that sort of money though, a Sea Dragon starts making an awful lot of sense.
Posted by Adrasteia

Taking you back to square one. Sea Dragon does not exist, and will not exist for x years into the future. building one would wreak havoc on existing launch markets, and you would be back to single point of failure in your architecture.

the whole point is, that the money _to be spent_ on developing new launchers would be much better spent buying existing launchers NOW and using the rest of the money to actually forge ahead with the lunar plan, i.e. the parts that you cannot buy off the shelf.

Posted by kert at March 14, 2007 03:17 AM

Rand, what analysis have you done?

Go read the Boeing CE&R Final Report.

That's because you haven't read any of the analyses. Thus, "as far as Bill White can tell," isn't very far, and shouldn't be taken very seriously.

do you favor cancelling ESAS and COTS and going back to Steidle's EELV spirals?

If those are the only two possible options (they aren't), no. I'd rather keep COTS alive, because either way the NASA systems will be worthless, or at least not sufficiently worth the money to survive in the long run. But I can't even imagine how you came up with such a silly false choice.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 14, 2007 03:58 AM

kert writes:

Just as a reference, the $25 billion quoted for Ares V development would buy you approximately 5000 ( yes, that is five thousand ) tons to LEO on Proton, at current launch costs.
If you take half of that away for whatever losses, it would still buy you around 500 tons to lunar surface. thats one big lunar base. doable now.

Exactly right.

And once a lunar base exists (even if it is built with Proton) then NewSpace will have a market to sell to. But since it is very, very unlikely Congress would ever agree to buy Proton and Soyuz, the private sector will need to do it.

Or, we can spend our time arguing about whether its better to shovel tax money to Boeing, or to Lockheed, or to ATK.

Posted by Bill White at March 14, 2007 05:20 AM

But I can't even imagine how you came up with such a silly false choice.

How did I come up with that silly false choise? I didn't. I read it in a post at nasaspaceflight by a guy saying Delta IV is what NASA should be using instead of Ares.

And, if I were chief financial officer for LM or Boeing, I would see cancelling COTS as being job #1 for maintaining the economic viability of EELV. Elon Musk's lawsuit concerning EELV may have lacked legal merit but can anyone deny that he understood the relevant market dynamics?

Posted by Bill White at March 14, 2007 05:27 AM

Currently, neither does a demand of 2000t+ payload per year to LEO. Obviously this is pretty much a precondition for building a Sea Dragon.

Posted by Adrasteia at March 14, 2007 05:30 AM

I read it in a post at nasaspaceflight by a guy saying Delta IV is what NASA should be using instead of Ares.

OK, some other silly guy came up with it, and you just bought into it. My apologies.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 14, 2007 05:44 AM

PS -- If LM starts selling Atlas to Bigelow then the dam will be broken and EELV pricing will start to fall. Which will save the US taxpayers billions when NASA starts buying Atlas at Bigelow price points.

I do pretty much agree with just passing by:

I'm not sure and in many ways I don't care. NASA is mostly irrelevant already except for as an academic exercise in what not to do (this is what you might have misinterpreted as NewSpace whining).
NASA will be scaled back to pure science when Bigelow Aerospace beats them to the moon in 2028. The future is non-governmental.

As for the Moon, Bigelow and other private sector players can "do the Moon" NOW if they buy Proton & Soyuz. No need to wait until 2028. If the goal is lunar economic development (as Dennis says, and I agree) then I say it may be better to keep NASA off the Moon.

Me? I'd still vote to fund a NASA mission to Mars. But I respect the idea that opinions vary on that.

Posted by Bill White at March 14, 2007 05:44 AM

>>very unlikely Congress would ever agree to buy Proton and Soyuz, the private sector will need to do it.

Er .. who said anything about Congress buying Proton ? I posted the example numbers just because i happen to remember approximate relevant numbers for Proton ( payload tons to LEO and singe launch price )

You can do the simple math for any Atlas, Delta, Ariane, Zenit if you like and happen to have relevant numbers at hand. Whatever looks politically acceptable.
The result will be somewhat less than 5000 tons on LEO, but still likely much much more than Ares will ever launch.

With the added advantage of not being tied to single launcher ...

Posted by ker at March 14, 2007 07:06 AM

>>Currently, neither does a demand of 2000t+ payload per year to LEO.
>>Posted by Adrasteia

Um.. i simply dont understand what are you trying to say here ?
What i said, is that that current NASA budgetting for new launchers _could_ buy you this much payload to LEO on current launchers. With the amount of payload ending up being far more than any reasonable plan for lunar outpost would require over any timescale worth planning for.

One caveat. We dont know anything substantial about the NASA outpost plan itself yet .. cart firmly before the horse.

Posted by kert at March 14, 2007 07:19 AM

> As for the Moon, Bigelow and other private sector players can "do the Moon"
> NOW if they buy Proton & Soyuz. No need to wait until 2028.

No, Bill, the private sector can't. There's no one in the private sector who has that much money which they're willing to gamble on a wildcard. The point, which you continue to miss, is that COST MATTERS.

I don't know why you can't understand that, Bill. It really isn't very hard.

Only the government has enough "gambling money" to build a moonbase that's dependent on Protons and Soyuzes.

> If the goal is lunar economic development (as Dennis says, and I agree) then
> I say it may be better to keep NASA off the Moon.

You don't want NASA to return to the Moon? Okay, fair enough, but that doesn't explain why you insist that taxpayers should spend $100 billion on a flawed plan to return NASA to the Moon.

If the goal is to NOT reach the Moon, you can do that for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

> Me? I'd still vote to fund a NASA mission to Mars. But I respect the idea
> that opinions vary on that.

That still doesn't require a superheavy lifter. This has been explained to you many times.

Posted by Edward Wright at March 14, 2007 03:05 PM

Edward, it looks like Mike Griffin has more faith in the private sector than you do:

Some have opined that the scale and difficulty of spaceflight is such that it will remain an inherently governmental enterprise for the foreseeable future. I do not share this view. For me, the question is more properly “when,” not “if,” the state of the art in astronautics will permit a private enterprise to develop a successful orbital transportation capability without the direct support – and the accompanying onerous and expensive oversight – of a government prime contract.

Link

Posted by Bill White at March 15, 2007 07:06 AM

Post a comment