Lori Garver says NASA Should Cancel SLS

[aerostadt]

Lori Garver says that NASA should not build SLS.

https://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2014/...ld-not-build-the-sls-where-is-it-going-to-go/

 

[cwbullet]

I just don't get it. They cancel all hopes of human exploration by US Astronauts.

We need to go back to the moon and plan on Mars.

 

[Viperfixr]

These days we seem to lack the leadership audacity and imagination JFK inspired in so many. There's so many "ripples in the pond" with space exploration that the bean counters will never take into account. In the balance of the US government, a $17B is nothing...fractions of a percent of other things that produce (or seem to) so little. Instead, we cut the military's retirement while it is still in a war, hobble the units at home with no money to do anything, and then fund illegal alien job search programs. YGBSM.

You could say I am getting rather frustrated with our government's elected leaders. What really confounds me is that it doesn't seem like the rest of the American society is with me in that conviction.

 

[cwbullet]

Mark,

You should run for office (After retirement of course). I would vote for you.

 

[RoyAtl]

You must not have really read that article. Lori Garver's not at NASA now and she is just giving her opinion. And for everything she says NASA shouldn't do, if you read between the lines it sounds like she's saying, "If Congress is going to give NASA only $17 billion we should do as much exploration as cheaply as we can (i.e. robotics) and send them to other scientifically interesting places (not just to Mars). The "Senate" Launch System is just taking money away from those programs with no real goal."

I'm sure if NASA were getting $50 billion a year, she would be singing a different tune.

 

[Viperfixr]

You must not have really read that article. Lori Garver's not at NASA now and she is just giving her opinion. And for everything she says NASA shouldn't do, if you read between the lines it sounds like she's saying, "If Congress is going to give NASA only $17 billion we should do as much exploration as cheaply as we can (i.e. robotics) and send them to other scientifically interesting places (not just to Mars). The "Senate" Launch System is just taking money away from those programs with no real goal."

I'm sure if NASA were getting $50 billion a year, she would be singing a different tune.

I did read the article. I got that point too with regards to the SLS taking so much of a limited budget and trying to maximize what little NASA has. But, she also left precious little 'push' for manned space exploration and the minimum life-support NASA funding. Why not go out on a limb when she's already left NASA? instead, she pushed robotic missions to Europa that the public will not connect with (though it would be cool). Funding will not change with missions that are interesting but ultimately uninspiring to the common person or lawmaker. I bet the majority of the population doesn't even know what Europa is other than maybe a continent across some ocean that speaks French.

Perhaps she and others have reached an apathy level since the funding is so laughable--I don't know. It seems to me we need another project that will elevate us all through the sheer scope and magnitude...like a manned mission to Mars. I'd rather have a NASA that dares and dreams big than the pathetic one we have today. Maybe it's time for a NASA kickstarter "Mission: Mars" campaign with corporate tax write-offs for contributions plus access to the technology spin-offs to motivate big dollars? Yea, it will take ~$100 billion to do and many years, but better to try that accept what we have. Maybe a "Return to the Moon" one first to whet the appetite.

Have we lost the ability to dream? Or worse, the ability to act upon them?

 

[luke strawwalker]

I just don't get it. They cancel all hopes of human exploration by US Astronauts.

We need to go back to the moon and plan on Mars.

We're not going anywhere, with or without SLS... SLS is going to cost by present estimates about $36 BILLION dollars to develop before it's ready to fly... and that's starting with the largely existing 5 segment SRB's that were being designed for the Ares I first stage and will now be used for SRB's for SLS, but which will NOT be recovered and reused, but instead these former shuttle SRB steel casings will be flown in "expendable" mode without recovery gear and allowed to simply fall back and impact the ocean and sink as twisted, flattened metal, and with the existing SSME shuttle main engines to provide propulsion for the core vehicle. Granted redesign of the shuttle ET into a core for SLS was more involved than originally anticipated, but then what isn't??

The problem is, NASA/gubmint isn't serious about going anywhere... NASA had canceled development of the Altair lunar lander YEARS ago-- several years before the bloated Constellation program finally got the ax, in fact... Kinda hard to land on the moon with NO LANDER! NASA basically sacrificed EVERYTHING to get its new rocket(s), including the necessary hardware to do any deep space missions.

Presently, NASA's working on SLS, Orion, and the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, which is basically a modified version of the Delta 4 Cryogenic Upper Stage. That's it. No landers, no deep-space habs or other equipment that will be necessary for deep-space missions. Oh, they're doing MOCK-UPS of things like pressurized rovers and the MMSEV (basically a pressurized maneuvering exploration "pod" like from "2001: A Space Odyssey", which could POTENTIALLY serve as a module/crew cabin for a lander or pressurized rover (though I don't think it likely-- it would run into the same problems as the Ascent Stage of the LM did-- those multitude of big windows are too heavy, as well as "suit-locks" and other such things that didn't even exist back then... too much weight=poor performing lander). They're also playing with various deep-space hab (DSH) designs and even some propellant depot stuff, "gateway station" plans, and other such stuff-- but NOT ONE SINGLE BIT OF IT IS A FUNDED PROGRAM-- meaning it's got just enough 'seed money' handed out under the basic-study level funding (which doesn't need Congressional authorization, unlike a multi-billion dollar development program, which would be necessary for ANY of this stuff to actually be designed, worked out, and turned into flight hardware). There's NO PROSPECTS for getting any of this stuff funded, either-- Congress is arguing over how much and what to fund in NASA as it is...

ICPS could propel an Orion on a loop around the moon-- basically a repeat of the Zond missions the Soviets pulled off with Protons and lunar complex modified Soyuz's in 1968 just before we did Apollo 8... SLS/Orion cannot even do a repeat of Apollo 8, because Orion and/or ICPS doesn't have the delta-v to perform a Lunar Orbit Insertion burn and still have enough fuel to do a Trans-Earth Injection burn to get back to Earth from lunar orbit... so the most we could do is a loop round the back of the moon ala Apollo 13 on a free-return trajectory... not much point to doing that-- we already did it in 1970... so THEORETICALLY ICPS can provide enough propulsion to get Orion into "deep space" beyond LEO, but it doesn't have enough power to really do anything else once it's there... To do any MEANINGFUL deep-space missions "BEO" (beyond Earth orbit) will require NASA to develop an entirely new stage, the "CPS" or cryogenic propulsion stage, which is another part of the 'system' that's not being funded and has no realistic prospects of being funded. Even then, Orion was stripped to the bulkheads attempting to make it light enough for the anemic Ares I before it got cancelled, and so Orion isn't meant to provide living and operating space to sustain a crew for the duration of a deep-space mission-- for instance, no toilet, no hot food or other amenities that will be important for any mission of any duration... All that stuff was jettisoned from the design to save weight, and put into the "Mission Module" (which of course isn't funded, whatever that might be-- at first it was Altair lunar lander, before that got canceled-- "if you're going to stay on the Moon for a few weeks/month or more, you're going to need a toilet, so put one in there rather than in Orion and let them use that one the whole time" was the thinking (along with the hot water/hot food capabilities, etc.) Of course that means without a mission module, or until you can dock with your mission module, you're stuck eating dehydrated stuff, cold wet reconstituted food mixed with water, or eating stuff out of a tube, and you're also stuck taping a bag to your butt to take a dump... and that gets old real quick! Sure, our guys managed for a couple weeks doing that on the Apollo missions, but seriously-- who's gonna go on a deep-space mission for a month or two, or six months, having to crap in a bag taped to your butt and eating out of a tube?? That's fine for the short-duration Apollo "camp-outs" but when you're going somewhere for months on end, morale quickly collapses... plus, with four crew of MIXED GENDERS, it creates a privacy problem as well as hygiene problems...

Anyway, while all these talking heads go on and on about grand Mars expeditions or a return to the Moon, and arguing incessantly over it, all you have to do is look at the budget and the prospects, as well as how NASA programs operate, to realize that this whole thing is just an expensive joke... A return to the Moon with anything like a "long term" mission capability is going to cost many dozens of billions of dollars... probably at least in the neighborhood of $50 billion to develop all the capabilities required (suits, lander, pressurized rover, propulsion stages, habs, equipment, etc). NONE of this stuff is funded or likely to be funded. (and it's probably a lot higher than I estimated). It would take about 10 years from the approval and funding of a new program to develop a lander, CPS, etc. before it would be ready to perform any missions-- and NOTHING has been approved and given the word "go" yet (nor is it likely to be). That is why NASA has been floating goofy ideas like lassoing a space-rock floating around out there somewhere and dragging it back to the vicinity of the moon, so that an Orion can limp out there on an ICPS for astronauts to do EVA's out of the open hatch of Orion to "explore" this "asteroid" and take samples and conduct experiments-- it's a ridiculous proposal, but it's ALL that Orion is capable of doing with what is actually being developed and should be available to use for a mission. Without a hab module and a CPS to push the stack through escape velocity, Orion cannot do an asteroid mission to "deep space"... and NASA didn't like the contractor-proposed "Plymouth Rock" mission that would have used a PAIR of Orions, one normal one transporting and returning the crew to Earth, the other specially modified and outfitted as living quarters, laboratory, and airlock/mission module for a "cheap and dirty" asteroid mission... which would use the Service Modules (which has also been canceled to free up money for SLS/Orion development, and the work farmed out to the Europeans to modify a few of their MPLM propulsion modules into cheap SM's for Orion) for the final push to an asteroid, braking to match the asteroid's orbit, and then "docking" or "landing" on it (no lander needed due to the extremely low gravity of an asteroid) and then to propel the stack back home to Earth... with the lab/hab modified Orion cast off at some point to burn up in the atmosphere or sail off into the void of solar orbit forever, like the ascent stage of the lunar lander Snoopy... This plan was shot down already...

Missions to Mars are a farce-- NASA will require not a few dozen billion, but a few HUNDRED BILLION to accomplish that-- development not only of propulsion stages, but stages capable of being staged together and refueled in orbit... a hab with life support systems and provisions to provide a sustainable environment for the crew for about 2 years or more, plus radiation protection as needed, with absolute reliability... a heat shield capable of landing a Mars vehicle on the surface weighing a few dozen tons-- probably at least TEN TIMES the size of anything landed on Mars to date (including Curiosity). The heat-shield designs that have been used so far are basically maxed-out for what's practical to build and launch... something entirely new like a biconic aeroshell or inflatable heatshield will be required, and that will take years and many billions to design, build, test, and produce mission hardware... only the most rudimentary studies and research has been done so far, compared to the intricacies of actual flight hardware is concerned. Of course, NOTHING has been funded for development. A Mars lander will be much more sophisticated and difficult to engineer than a relatively simple lunar lander-- and thus MUCH more expensive and difficult to accomplish. A lunar lander only has to deal with 1/6 gravity and no atmosphere, a similar-size Mars lander will have to deal with twice the gravity (1/3 g) meaning much more fuel for propulsive descent and landing, as well as the difficulties of an atmospheric entry requiring a heat-shield and transition to propulsive powered descent, as the Mars atmosphere is only thick enough to complicate entry and require a heatshield, not thick enough to allow a soft landing via parachutes... If Congress isn't willing to fund and NASA can't afford to develop a LUNAR lander, NO WAY are they going to be able to afford to develop a MUCH more expensive and complex MARS lander...

SO, it boils down to NASA making a lot of plans but there's no money for any of it... I'm planning to buy an island in the Caribbean, marry a supermodel, and buy my own fleet of jets and fast cars... but of course there's that small problem of funding it all which makes these plans just about as realistic as NASA's... SLS is going to be THE single most expensive rocket vehicle ever conceived-- its development costs, and more importantly its OPERATIONAL COSTS due to the choices that have been made already ensure this. The longer a development program is spread out, the more expensive it becomes... Although program cheerleaders will spout that SLS has only been around since about 2010 and should be making its first flight (according to the schedule, which will probably slip given NASA's historical precedents) around 2017, and despite glowing reports that SLS is "ahead of schedule" and all this, it basically ignores the sunk costs that contributed to SLS-- the now-canceled Constellation program and the developments paid for under it, namely, the J-2X engine (which is being completed and "put on the shelf", likely never to be seen again, unless a true second stage for SLS gets funded for a super-heavy version of SLS (the "block II" SLS with advanced boosters, again, about as likely as me winning the lottery) and more importantly, the 5-segment SRB's and Orion development of course. NASA has basically been working on a "shuttle derived" shuttle replacement HLV/deep space exploration rocket/spacecraft since 2005. SLS is scheduled, again, remains to be seen if it will actually happen (shuttle was supposed to first fly in 1975, which slipped to 1977, then to 1979, then finally ACTUALLY flew in 1981) sometime in 2017, ON AN UNMANNED TEST FLIGHT. The second flight won't occur for another FOUR YEARS after that, sometime in 2021, for a "loop round the moon" ala Apollo 13 or Zond 5... beyond that NOTHING has been scheduled. According to NASA's own plans and intentions and best estimates, SLS will only launch about ONCE ever 2-3 years... this alone is going to drive SLS to be staggeringly expensive-- the lower the flight rate, the more expensive the per-flight costs, because the overhead and requirements to maintain the capability to prepare and fly the vehicle must be maintained and paid for-- workers have to be kept on the payroll, facilities equipped and manned and maintained, etc... and all these costs accrue year by year whether you're flying OR NOT... look at shuttle costs during the two stand-downs after Challenger and Columbia, and you'll get a rough idea of SLS program costs... sure they're will be fewer people working SLS than shuttle program, but then again, shuttle costs were divided by a flight rate averaging 4-6 flights a year most of the time-- SLS will carry MULTIPLE YEARS of maintenance costs for a SINGLE FLIGHT... this will mean each SLS launch will run into the $1.5 billion or MORE range... even worse than shuttle which was already breathtakingly expensive! Add to it that this is just the LAUNCH COSTS-- NOT mission costs like the Orion, any habs/modules or landers, propulsion stages, or other hardware required for the mission launched by SLS... factor that in and the costs are going to be literally astronomical.

I'll believe that Congress/NASA is serious about Mars when I see the NASA budget double or triple, or a VIABLE, REALISTIC plan to pay for all the required stuff put forward, and accepted and actually funded... until then, it's all vaporware, political pipe-dreams, and PR fluff...

Later! OL JR

 

[luke strawwalker]

You must not have really read that article. Lori Garver's not at NASA now and she is just giving her opinion. And for everything she says NASA shouldn't do, if you read between the lines it sounds like she's saying, "If Congress is going to give NASA only $17 billion we should do as much exploration as cheaply as we can (i.e. robotics) and send them to other scientifically interesting places (not just to Mars). The "Senate" Launch System is just taking money away from those programs with no real goal."

I'm sure if NASA were getting $50 billion a year, she would be singing a different tune.

Absolutely, you hit the nail on the head, Roy...

Lori Garver was assistant administrator, before she left the agency last year. Obama had her on his "transition teams" advising him on NASA/space affairs before his election. He had her "looking under the hood" at NASA before he ever took office, which basically led to the appointment of the "Augustine Commission" shortly thereafter that reviewed the Constellation program and NASA plans as they stood then under former Bush appointed NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. After a thorough review, the Augustine Commission report was damning-- it stated basically that NASA COULD NOT do exploration with the existing budget, REGARDLESS of how long development was dragged out (which adds a lot of costs of its own, BTW, and simply adds huge inefficiency and expense to development projects-- a self-defeating principle). It was SO bad that basically they said that even if NASA were handed a FULLY DEVELOPED, READY TO FLY Ares I and Ares V rocket system FREE OF CHARGE and READY TO GO, NASA would have to cancel it... they simply couldn't afford to do missions with it at the current funding levels... they recommended either 1) upping NASA's budget by at least $3 billion and some change a year, or 2) canceling exploration plans and reverting to an Earth-orbital only program for the foreseeable future.

Now, Obama took this information and canceled Constellation in 2010. Constellation needed canceling anyway-- it was a bloated train-wreck of a program that never had any chance of doing what was planned for it with the money available... it was a champagne solution on a beer budget... and the additional funding NASA required was simply never in the cards, except in their own minds... now we're making the EXACT SAME MISTAKE ALL OVER AGAIN... and the results will be the same, too... years of expensive development and work, with no realistic goal or mission in sight, while scavenging NASA of everything else to pay for it, ultimately leading to cancelation after (maybe) a test flight or two when its realized the system is hopelessly too expensive to ever use... (just like Ares I, canceled after one boilerplate test flight). With it will go the BEO exploration plans, and after some looking around and scratching about NASA will revert to some sort of LEO plans for ISS extension in perpetuity (like shuttle, keeping alive what it's got to justify its continued existence) or some sort of follow-on program, a sort of "ISS-2" or whatever, probably after ISS is simply too geriatric to continue to use, (whenever that is) just like was done with the Mir space station and the shuttle before it...

In the meantime, EVERYTHING is being sacrificed at the altar of SLS... Charlie Bolden (NASA Administrator) has already told the scientific community for FORGET ABOUT any "flagship class" robotic missions, such as Curiosity or Cassini, "for the foreseeable future" (other than the bloated and horrifically overbudget and delayed James Webb Space Telescope) because there's simply no funding for it... everything that can be diverted into SLS funding IS being diverted to SLS funding... Remember the "first great age of planetary exploration" in the 70's, when we had a pair of Vikings on Mars, a pair of Pioneers sailing past Jupiter and Saturn for the first time, and a pair of Voyagers touring most of the outer solar system?? Then remember the dearth of ANYTHING but shuttle during the 80's, that "lost decade" when the only thing going was shuttle, save for a handful of "cheap" missions, most of them performed with spacecraft cobbled together with modified or spare parts (like Magellan)?? This was when EVERYTHING was being sacrificed on the "shuttle altar" and development of robotic spacecraft had been diverted to shuttle development costs which ballooned remarkably in the late 70's-- the very time the missions that WOULD have flown in the 80's would have been being developed in the labs and engineering departments... except there was no funding for it because it all went to solve shuttle development problems... back when much-needed tests, like a final REAL test of Hubble's mirror wasn't performed at the factory because there WASN'T ENOUGH MONEY to test it... so they did a 'simulated' test instead (which didn't reveal the problem with Hubble's mirror and nearly cost the mission, but instead ended up costing hundreds of millions to correct via engineered repairs and an extra shuttle mission to repair it, as well as enormous lost opportunities costs and years of delays, which cost money as well). Remember all those canceled missions (like Ulysses and others) and the missions that were delayed by YEARS, ballooning their costs substantially and causing all sorts of problems (like the aforementioned Hubble and even more obviously, the Galileo probe to Jupiter, which was hobbled REPEATEDLY by it's being required to be launched aboard shuttle, which delayed it for YEARS and caused several redesigns as propulsion requirements and capabilities were revised over and over again as the mission was flip-flopped by NASA HQ between using the shuttle's insufficient IUS solid propulsion upper stage (which required Galileo to do flyby's to gain enough "slingshot affect" boosting to get it to Jupiter, extending the mission cruise time by years) and the Shuttle-Centaur (much more powerful liquid hydrogen/oxygen stage, but canceled in the wake of safety reassessments after the Challenger disaster). When Galileo finally flew, it had sat for YEARS on the ground waiting launch, and then had to fly a hobbled mission due to a long multi-flyby trajectory that took additional years of transit time spent achieving sufficient velocity via "gravitational slingshot" to get to Jupiter, and the additional time on the ground and in space caused its main high-gain antenna to fail to unfurl properly, nearly losing the mission, until a work-around was devised that allowed a fraction of its actual collected data to be transmitted back to Earth via the low-gain antenna, salvaging the mission (but returning only a small fraction of the data Galileo actually collected in situ, most of which could not be returned due to the communications bottleneck caused by the high-gain antenna failure-to-deploy... how many discoveries were on photos or data simply erased from its memory after being collected by its cameras and sensors, because they simply could not be radioed back to Earth?? We'll never know for sure...)

Remember the "Second great age of robotic exploration" that FINALLY came about after the long dearth of missions in the 80's was finally broken near the end of that decade... when we sent rovers and orbiters to Mars, Cassini to Saturn, Messenger to Mercury, PNH to Pluto, etc... the age of exploration which is winding down as we speak, because the next generation of follow-on spacecraft that would continue those explorations once Cassini has taken its last picture and once Curiosity has rolled its last few feet have all been sacrificed due to their funding being diverted to develop SLS, a gigantic rocket with NO FUNDED OR PLANNED MISSION... with NO FUNDED HARDWARE TO PERFORM ANY MISSION! How stupid is this??

Remember the promises that Ares I and Orion would replace shuttle starting in 2011, which basically became 2014 as soon as the ink was dry approving development funding for them... at a time when ISS itself was planned to be scrapped and dropped to the bottom of the Pacific by 2016... then of course by the time it was canceled, the plan was it MIGHT be ready to fly to ISS by 2017, with ISS ops to cease and it to be splashed in 2020, to free up money to develop Ares V and all the hardware needed for lunar/beyond missions... NOW we have ISS til AT LEAST 2020, and talk of extending it to 2028... some 30 year program to nowhere, just like shuttle before it... soaking up billions and making it impossible to afford to be able to do anything else until it's canceled and the money freed up...

Now we have SLS doing the same thing... tying up billions that we COULD be using to develop robotic missions that we COULD afford-- or develop the commercial crew capability that took Ares I/Orion's place when it was COMPLETELY OBVIOUS that 1) Ares I/Orion would NEVER be ready for crew transport to ISS duties until the ISS was basically ready to be dropped into the ocean, and 2) Ares I/Orion was so stupidly expensive to use that even shuttle was a bargain compared to it, and thus was too expensive to ever use for a simple "LEO taxi" to ISS... hence that job was "farmed out" to commercial crew-- which of course Congress has ALWAYS given short-shrift and insufficient funding to, because it doesn't support the "shuttle derived" contractors and Congressional lobbying and contributor chains that have existed since the shuttle program...

SO, while we argue over "moon or Mars or asteroids" or other such nonsense, while NONE of the necessary items are being funded and our space capabilities shrivel away to dust, we send our astronauts to Russia for them to launch to the ISS at $72 million bucks a pop... while Congress refuses to adequately fund the commercial crew program to launch OUR astronauts on US-built and US-operated commercial launch vehicles that would employ US engineers, technicians, and personnel...

ALL THIS to fund a shuttle-derived "super rocket" that Congress has NO INTENTION of providing the necessary funding for to build the necessary hardware for or actually fly missions with??

Ain't politics a wonderful thing?? Is it any wonder any thinking person thinks the inmates run the asylum now??

Til something fundamental changes, it's all a FARCE...

Later! OL JR

 

[luke strawwalker]

I did read the article. I got that point too with regards to the SLS taking so much of a limited budget and trying to maximize what little NASA has. But, she also left precious little 'push' for manned space exploration and the minimum life-support NASA funding. Why not go out on a limb when she's already left NASA? instead, she pushed robotic missions to Europa that the public will not connect with (though it would be cool). Funding will not change with missions that are interesting but ultimately uninspiring to the common person or lawmaker. I bet the majority of the population doesn't even know what Europa is other than maybe a continent across some ocean that speaks French.

Perhaps she and others have reached an apathy level since the funding is so laughable--I don't know. It seems to me we need another project that will elevate us all through the sheer scope and magnitude...like a manned mission to Mars. I'd rather have a NASA that dares and dreams big than the pathetic one we have today. Maybe it's time for a NASA kickstarter "Mission: Mars" campaign with corporate tax write-offs for contributions plus access to the technology spin-offs to motivate big dollars? Yea, it will take ~$100 billion to do and many years, but better to try that accept what we have. Maybe a "Return to the Moon" one first to whet the appetite.

Have we lost the ability to dream? Or worse, the ability to act upon them?

Remember when Newt Gingrich stated that we should have a much more "goal oriented" space program and stated that our goal should be a manned Moon base?? He was jeered and ridiculed even by the so-called "space cadets" within the space establishment itself, and eviscerated in the mainstream press and public opinion...

I think Ms. Garver is well aware of the fact that, while these sort of grandiose "awe-inspiring" missions are all well and good, and quite laudable, they're also totally unrealistic. The general public was excited about a "return to the moon" for about a year or so after the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's recommendations that we seek a "higher purpose for manned space travel, worthy of the risk of life asked of our astronauts" and Bush II announced his "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" Vision for Space Exploration program (which incidentally almost exactly mirrors Bush I's "Space Exploration Initiative" Moon, Mars, and Beyond program he announced on the steps of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing-- and we're NO CLOSER to a realistic chance of a manned Mars landing now, 44.5 years or thereabouts from Apollo 11, than we were THEN (or heck, than we were back in 1969 itself! Bush II's plan floundered and was canceled, just like his Daddy's).

Heck, the population didn't stay "inspired" past Apollo 11, for the most part... the majority of folks, and politicians, started calling for cutbacks in the lunar landing missions or outright cancellation as soon as Apollo 11 was over... Remember the 'bad old days' of the early 70's, when the war in Vietnam had no end in sight, and the days of oil embargoes and all that led to "downscaling" and "conservation" brought on by a decade of inflation and austerity-- people paid as much attention to Apollo as they did largely because it was basically canceled as soon as it succeeded, and the end was in sight and everybody knew it. There was ZERO support for an extended lunar exploration program, even within NASA itself, outside a few mission planners and dreamers. NASA operations people were convinced it was just a matter of time until someone got killed on an Apollo mission, either a crew stranded on the lunar surface or crashed or blew up on either the Earth or the Moon in flight... and they were more concerned about the risks of bad PR and impacts on funding than they were about actually performing more missions. IF anything, that attitude today is 1000 times WORSE!

NASA wants to develop new systems, not operate them. Operations involve risks, ESPECIALLY deep-space missions to the Moon, or beyond. The Moon is in our backyard, so to speak, but Mars is the equivalent of on the other side of the continent... and thus the risks are MUCH higher... and NASA would rather do nice, safe, development programs than do operations that might get people killed a long way from home on TV in front of the world, with all the bad PR and the hot seat that goes along with that...

Congress is perfectly content with this state of affairs... look at what they're doing now... funding a $36 billion dollar development program for SLS, a shuttle-derived rocket being built largely by the same group of old-space contractors (and lobbying political supporters) that built and operated shuttle for decades... a rocket with NO mission, and NO hardware to perform missions... NO FUNDING for missions, heck NO PLANS for missions other than "trial balloons" run up and usually shot down in short order, or fluffed off as "too expensive" or "too far-out" or "too risky" or whatever...

NONE of this is going to change... Just wishing for "another JFK moment" is about like wishing to win the lottery or marry a supermodel-- virtually nil chance of it happening... As time passes, serious students of the space program's history are coming to the realization and acknowledgement that the "JFK moment" that allowed there to be an Apollo program was actually a perfect confluence or convergence of events in an incredibly rare way that made the whole thing possible-- the timing and events were all perfectly aligned at that time and place to allow it to be seriously proposed and successfully executed... And, absent that "perfect alignment" of events and times, it's just not possible today... and the stars are simply NOT aligned for any such "grand pronouncement" of any such goal to be taken seriously...

Politicians take risks, like gamblers... every proposal is a risk. How much do you want to bet and what the odds of winning are separate the smart ones from the stupid ones. JFK didn't have a lot to lose by proposing the moon landing goal-- the Soviets were handing us our @$$ for a hat when it came to space achievement, the military and populace was frightened by the prospects of a "red world" where the Soviet ideology was seen as superior or ended up triumphant, to the point of paranoia, and he needed something that would demonstrate US technological and organizational superiority while at the same time would bolster the US position abroad while stimulating the US aerospace industry at the same time... it was a win/win/win... and proposing it held little political risk-- nobody was going to shout him down, say it was a ridiculous waste of money, or blow the whole thing off as unimportant, because of the ramifications of being "second to the Soviets" and being seen as "soft on communism" and other such viewpoints held by the establishment and a good part of the population of the day. Even if the Congress had just ignored it and let it fall flat on its face, Kennedy could always point to the fact that "he proposed an audacious program to answer the Soviet challenge, which the Congress refused to take up or stand behind", and thus had fulfilled his duty-- he'd tried his best, and been 'let down' (along with all other Americans, in political speech) by the Congress's lack of leadership. It would roll the crap downhill onto Congress, and they knew it, which is why they supported Apollo and the lunar challenge... it put the monkey on NASA to deliver... Heck Kennedy himself wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the Moon Race... had he lived he would likely have proposed a cooperative mission WITH THE SOVIETS as a foreign relations ploy... just as Nixon and Brezhnev did with Apollo/Soyuz Test Project and Clinton did with the Shuttle/Mir program and ISS... and the Soviets, after initially refusing Kennedy's feelers for a joint lunar mission, were amenable to the idea and putting out their own feelers about just such an endeavor about the time Kennedy was assassinated, and Johnson just ignored it, so that was the end of that...

Several years ago, the Chinese announced their intention to land their own astronauts on the Moon by 2020 or thereabouts... lots of "space cadets" in the space industry and academia thought it the beginning of a new space race, this time between us and the Chinese... of course we know, nothing of the sort happened. I'd say that Chinese plans to land on the Moon are far more realistic and have a better chance of happening than our own as things presently stand... they're more motivated as well. Certain space cadets hoped that the Chinese announcement would "light a fire" under the political powers-that-be to initiate a new "moon race", or at least stir up enough public sentiment and fears that the "Chinese are going to beat us!" that it would put political pressure to support more space spending... of course the result was a resounding YAWN from the public and policymakers alike.

Gingrich took a risk with his statement supporting a goal of a moonbase, and his risk backfired-- instead of garnering support and public excitement, or being "inspiring", it brought only derision and cost him political capital and credibility-- a high price to pay when you need those things to be elected... Heck he had the obviously divided space cadets sniping at him from the very "peanut gallery" from which he expected the most support-- the "Mars firsters!" were all carping at the idea as a tremendous waste of resources and needless delaying of the goal of getting to Mars... and the general population responded with the same huge YAWN they always do while decrying another sorry politician wanting to spend billions on pipe dreams instead of "more important things" here on Earth...

Obama basically took the right path and canceled Constellation and Orion with it, basically forcing Congress to "put up or shut up" in regards to the space program... Constellation was an underfunded train wreck and he followed Garver's and advisor John Holdren's advice to focus on a commercial-crew ISS transport capability for ISS, which of course Congress rejects out of hand because it doesn't satisfy the big former shuttle contractors that lobby them and support their election campaigns and it doesn't keep the folks working for them employed back home, hence the House, which always has wacky ideas and can't let go of the status quo, calling for the reinstatement of Constellation and Ares I development, while the Senate realized those were dead as a dodo politically and therefore "compromised" by proposing SLS to achieve the exact same results (shuttle derived vehicle for the big contractors to work on) while ditching Ares I and Constellation and all the baggage that went with them. Meanwhile, Congress has underfunded and merely tolerated commercial crew, which is the ONLY REALISTIC means by which the US will regain the capability of launching its own astronauts in much less than a decade, while outsourcing the US manned launch capabilities to Russia at $72 million a seat...

Bush I proposed the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) back in 1989, a grandiose "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" program to inspire the next generation of explorers, students, and the populace for generations to come... the whole thing got bounced around inside NASA and Bush's buddy then-NASA Administrator and former shuttle astronaut Richard "Dick" Truly kept coming back with more and more grandiose plans for shuttle derived vehicles, space docks and stations, huge new heavy-lift rockets (some shuttle derived, others not) and "First Lunar Outposts" and such leading to moon bases and Mars ships that the whole thing ended up with a price tag of $450 billion dollars in early 90's money (back when it was worth a lot more than now!) Bush pleaded with Truly to "downsize it" and "trim out the fat" and every time Truly took it to NASA, it came back more bloated and expensive than before. The whole thing was laughed out Congress in 90 or 91, derisively dismissed as the "Battlestar Galactica" program...

Bush II's "Vision for Space Exploration" is a virtually identical retread of his Daddy's "SEI" proposal... the main difference being that from about 2005-2010 the VSE was actually an approved program of record and funded, even if inadequately... Of course it met the exact same fate-- Bush appointee NASA Administrator Mike Griffin followed the same sort of "most expensive way possible" methodology because it used his own preference for the biggest rocket ever built, and a shuttle derived one at that, Ares V, as its centerpiece... nevermind it also required a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SECOND ROCKET to work, and there was not enough money for the Ares V, let alone ANOTHER new rocket to go with it. BUT, because it checked off the requirements for "shuttle derived" and thus supported the Congressional needs to repay their political contributors via government contracts and keep their folks back home working on SOMETHING in the wake of the wind-down and phase-out of shuttle, they supported it, regardless of whether it would be funded enough to ever see the light of day or if it ever worked or not... that was beside the point, as was where the money to actually use it was to come from. Of course the whole thing imploded under its own weight...

So, since Obama and Garver supported a commercial-space solution and opposed the sort of massive NASA-centric program like Constellation, WHY do we have SLS and a withered commercial crew program?? WHY didn't Obama fight harder for his preferred solution?? The answer is self-evident-- there was NOTHING TO GAIN by fighting for it. Political capital is the coin of the realm in Washington-- to get someone to support what you want, you have to give them something THEY want... REGARDLESS of whether its a good idea or not, or whether it's the right thing to do or not, or the intelligent thing to do or not-- that doesn't even come into the equation-- the only thing that matters is "what will you give me for my support?" Obama's big push, his priority, was "universal health care" and NOT space-- heck "space" isn't even on the radar for most Presidents-- hasn't been since Kennedy and Johnson! At best, space is a "means to an end"... at worst, and most of the time at that, a political "hot potato" that simply costs political capital with little/no reward forthcoming, especially when one considers that most space projects won't be completed within even a second term, ESPECIALLY nowdays with the deliberate glacial pace of space program design, development, testing, and evaluation... So fighting for a particular direction in the space program, especially one that runs counter to the interests of SO many "space state" politicians (who want to keep their big aerospace contractor lobbyists and political supporters back home happy at any cost, regardless of whether it's the "right thing to do for the country" or not) costs a LOT of political capital to be expended for virtually NO political payoff... the exact opposite of how things were when Kennedy proposed the lunar landing goal in 1961...

THAT is why things are the way they are, and until/unless something fundamentally changes, that's how it will continue to be. That's also why, despite all the press release rubbish and powerpoint engineering and grand political pronouncements and pretty rocket porn to the contrary, we're NOT going to Mars in either of our lifetimes... and probably not in our kids lifetimes either...

Sorry, but that's the reality... wish it weren't so, but to quote an old axiom from the last century (or the one before), "if wishes were horses, everybody would ride"...

Later! OL JR

 

[Chrisn]

Has anybody told you, Luke, that you should write a book? :eyepop:

 

[astronwolf]

Man... I'm going to print this thread out and tape it up on the wall next to the commode. Dang...

I can't withdraw too much from that little sound-bite of an article about what Garver is thinking. But I venture a guess that an administrator has to make decisions based on the budget she has, rather than the budget she wishes she had. Congress makes the big decisions and determines the budget.

-Wolf

 

[shreadvector]

https://www.google.com/search?q=tl;dr&sourceid=ie8&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=&oe=

Has anybody told you, Luke, that you should write a book? :eyepop:

 

[GregGleason]

If only we could get Chris Kraft to run things ...

https://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2013/09/apollo-legend-on-nasa-its-a-tragedy-it-really-is/

... then if we could get congress to agree with the mission, fund it, and leave them alone. In the current political climate, it will never happen.

Greg

 

[Maxx Mayhem]

On one hand, I kind of like the idea of the SLS, after all, I grew up watching the Saturn Vs take off, but then I also like Sauropods, and I, personally, would not want to have to pay to feed a sauropod. Not even a small one. The problem, (and the math) is simple... The heavier the payload, the more fuel you need. The more fuel you have the more fuel you need, the more fuel you end up with, the more fuel you need, and so on... The mistake was ending, rather than evolving the shuttle. Material engineering could give us the answer to heat shielding. Hybridizing the engine cluster could allow for powered descent. A smaller orbiter could be an option. The SLS program is clearly little more than a modern congressional jobs program. Good in that it provides good, high paying jobs that the taxpayer can feel better about than paying the guy that supervises the crew of guys who watch the guy who digs the hole, yet not a great bang for the buck. Remember the Moon program was great, perhaps the greatest American venture, but is was first and foremost a war with Russia, so the money flowed like the mighty Amazon, until the battle was won. There is no future orbiter in sight, my money is on Falcon heavy for now, but a return to a shuttle, one that is more convenient to reuse, would make the most sense. Because delta V at sea level is the most expensive part of space flight. Soon, we should be able to 3D print a lot of the things in space that we had to manufacture on the ground. That means less jobs per mission, but it could mean a lot more missions. Imagine, a shuttle (2nd gen) taking of into medium earth orbit, with a J2, a 3D printer and a few bags of plastic and metal powders in its payload bay, along with some electronics, and a set of lem engines (descent, takeoff, rcs) A trans lunar module ( 2 parts - CSM and LEM) are printed and hard bits fitted. Robot arm lifts assembly out of the payload bay, and it travels to moon, lem lands, top comes back, is brought back into payload bay, engines and electronics are stripped out and the printed bits are thrown over the side, to burn up on re entry. Total translunar to recovery cost is in the millions, instead of billions. The more I hear about SLS, it seems like an all the eggs in one basket approach, forced by a congress divorced from reality, who has not considered that all of their constituent businesses could do even more by creating a broad quilt of different missions, all going at the same time, each using or advancing different subsets of the technology offered by the traditional batch of contractors. I would love to see an SLS take off, but is this science and jobs, or is this show business?

 

[luke strawwalker]

Man... I'm going to print this thread out and tape it up on the wall next to the commode. Dang...

I can't withdraw too much from that little sound-bite of an article about what Garver is thinking. But I venture a guess that an administrator has to make decisions based on the budget she has, rather than the budget she wishes she had. Congress makes the big decisions and determines the budget.

-Wolf

NASA gets its marching orders from Congress, plain and simple. NASA, however, largely decides on the implementation and the design. The SLS was pretty unique in that Congress actually stipulated a lot of the "requirements" of the design... for instance, the desired payload capability (70 tonnes with the capability of being upgraded to 130 tonnes), and using "as much shuttle technology as practicable". This was largely a response to the fact that when assigned the task to come up with a way to perform the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" program goals of the VSE, NASA first came up with a plan called "spiral development" under then-NASA Administrator Sean O'keefe with the assistance of Admiral Steidle, which would have used the existing EELV rockets (Delta IV and Atlas V) and modify their designs over time to increase their capabilities as it was needed (the Atlas V Phase II was a very interesting and capable design!) By using existing rockets to "kick-start" the program, energy and resources (money) could first be focused on the development of a new spacecraft (CEV, which later became Orion and now MPCV) to replace shuttle, then development of other necessary parts of the system one by one as needed, when needed, with each successive "spiral" building upon the capabilities established in the previous spiral. Of course the one thing this plan DIDN'T have going for it was political-- it didn't keep the established power base of shuttle contractors employed as the primary contractors of the new system with a fistful of billion-dollar and up development programs lasting a decade. So, the push was on for a "Shuttle-derived" solution.

First it required new leadership-- O'keefe was replaced with Mike Griffin, who had been doing "back of the napkin" designs for mega-rockets for decades and was amenable to the "shuttle derived" requirement, if it got him his mega-rocket. Hence, spiral development was out, and "shuttle-derived" was in, and the new plan took form as the super-duper-uber-rocket, the Cargo Launch Vehicle (CaLV, which became known as Ares V). Of course the larger landers and capsule and longer mission durations (requiring more supplies and equipment be carried, increasing mission mass) meant that even this massive new super-rocket couldn't do it all alone, as Saturn V had... thus the necessity of a smaller, "safer" Crew Launch Vehicle, the "CEV" that became known as "Ares I"... sold as "safer, simpler, sooner", as it turned out it was NONE of those things...

Anyway, given the fact that many of NASA's own people were opposed to the Constellation plan, because of the enormous expense of Ares V and mounting problems with Ares I, in addition to it not being anywhere near as cheap as promised, nor as simple or safe and facing continuing development issues and schedule slips, and the sacrifice of things like the Altair lunar lander (which was cancelled to free up development funding for Ares I and Orion, which suffered its own setbacks in large part due to problems with the Ares I design) the entire program was becoming a slow-motion train wreck. Those opposed to the Constellation program of Ares I and V were vocal in their criticism and propounded their own alternatives (such as the "Direct" vehicles which were much more similar to the original plans for Ares V, which was much closer to the shuttle ET design and thus easier to design and implement, versus the continuing increases in size to the design, going from the 8.4 meter diameter of the ET to a 10 meter design (33 feet diameter, same as Saturn V), adding more liquid propellant engines (RS-68's, which went from five to six, with seven even being floated, before it was discovered that clustering that many RS-68's next to the hot SRB exhaust plumes would cause them to disintegrate due to excessive heating/insufficient radiative cooling). The supposedly "identical" SRB's that were to serve as a reusable first stage for Ares I and SRB's for Ares V were switched to 5.5 segment boosters to increase lift capability on Ares V, making them dissimilar designs, and 6 segment boosters were being discussed (but this would have had HUGE repercussions on the infrastructure at KSC, which was not designed to handle the weight of a pair of 6 segment boosters along with a massive core vehicle and would have required MASSIVE reinforcement and upgrades to make work, costing hundreds of millions or billions to perform). The whole plan was unraveling and everybody who was honest and willing to look at it knew it-- it had NO CHANCE of working without a large increase in funding which was simply NOT going to happen.

SLS was defined much more closely than Constellation was... of course, NASA has a long history of "biting off more than it can chew" and choosing "champagne solutions on a beer budget". This goes back to the shuttle, whose design was compromised in efforts to save money on development, but compromises which increased operations costs down the road (and directly led to the weaknesses in the system that killed 14 astronauts and resulted in the loss of 2/5 of the fleet). The same sort of "requirements creep" has infected pretty much every NASA project since Apollo... and the same is true today. Hence the implementation of SLS is also in the same boat... Like Constellation before it, it's going to be too expensive to fly. The low flight rates also ensure that the overhead costs are going to be astronomical to support it and maintain the capability...

Later! OL JR

 

[TopRamen]

Perhaps someone should Cancel Lori Garver???

 

[luke strawwalker]

Perhaps someone should Cancel Lori Garver???

You know she was Obama's first choice for NASA Administrator, right?? Congress wouldn't have it... her appointment would have been held up (and was in fact) indefinitely in the Senate-- she was "unacceptable" to the "space state" Senators because she was progressive and against the status quo of "shuttle mafia" control of everything relating to the space program...

Obama had to find someone "acceptable" to the Senate, and hence chose Charlie Bolden... Charlie's a nice guy, and he's a Marine General and ex-shuttle astronaut (flew the original Hubble repair mission IIRC) so what's not to like-- but basically he's a "talking head" type figurehead for the Agency... Garver had MUCH more pull when it came to actually directing the thought process and agenda... Bolden was just along for the ride and to make pretty speeches (and some gaffes as well along the way).

Unfortunately, the entrenched "powers that be" don't want NASA to change how it does business or with whom it does business, and thus we have the "status quo" we see now with SLS as "son of Ares V"... "meet the new program, same as the old program" sort of thing...

Later! OL JR