What department does NASA fall under?

[JStarStar]

Well, unfortunately in the current political climate, most people who want to "break up NASA" want to break it up, all right -- and shut it down completely.

 

[luke strawwalker]

Well, unfortunately in the current political climate, most people who want to "break up NASA" want to break it up, all right -- and shut it down completely.

Sadly that seems to be slowly happening anyway...

I'd put the prospects of SLS ever ACTUALLY being built and flown (certainly for more than a "test program" consisting of a handful of flight-- IOW, "operationally" on actual missions) as less than 25%... it's very expensive, huge, and the missions are too far out and too DRAWN OUT to really justify it long-term, IMHO, at least politically speaking.

What it will be replaced with, is anybody's guess... (if anything).

Later! OL JR

 

[RadManCF]

The Air Force is/was run by pilots. When you put that into the equation you can see why manned bombers were/are a vital part of our nuclear deterent.

Fighter pilots to be specific, it made things interesting for the units operating the A-10, at least until the Gulf War. I would assume that the Soviet Air Force was the same, so how did their ICBMs end up under a seperate branch?

 

[RadManCF]

Well, unfortunately in the current political climate, most people who want to "break up NASA" want to break it up, all right -- and shut it down completely.

I would also suspect that most of those people are absolutely unaware of DODs space program...

 

[luke strawwalker]

Fighter pilots to be specific, it made things interesting for the units operating the A-10, at least until the Gulf War. I would assume that the Soviet Air Force was the same, so how did their ICBMs end up under a seperate branch?

It was mainly an organizational thing... up until that time, the ICBM development efforts in the USSR had been shared among numerous "special machine building" bureaus and factories with oversight by various institutions within the Soviet military, especially artillery related organizations. The political oversight was equally Byzantine. The Soviets were even more accomplished at creating bureaucratic red tape than our own gov't has been, until recently.

The move, in 1959, to create the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces was more about streamlining the organizational system than about creating a separate and independent service within the Soviet Armed Forces. It removed the Artillery sector from the responsibility and chain of command for the Strategic ICBM efforts and simplified the organizational, command, and control functions, primarily.

Sort of the way the US forces used to be divided into tactical and strategic units... but of course both of those were under the command of the Air Force (or their specific service as the case may be. It's sort of a difference of semantics more or less.

Both routes get you to the same place... Later! OL JR

PS. I'm reading about this very subject at the moment in Asif Siddiqi's "Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge".

 

[luke strawwalker]

I would also suspect that most of those people are absolutely unaware of DODs space program...

Well, the goals and means of the DOD milspace program are markedly different and share virtually nothing in common with NASA and its aims, goals, and mission. NASA could disappear tomorrow and the DOD milspace program would continue pretty much unaffected. In fact I'm toying with an "alternate history" story much to this effect... had the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted into a nuclear war in the fall of 1962, the US would have survived, but likely would have been damaged and enough people displaced to throw the country into a Second Great Depression at least as bad as the first, if not worse. Nuclear winter, spillover from the TOTAL PASTING SAC would have given the Soviets, literally obliterating the USSR (we had the strategic bombers and missiles to do it, while the USSR only had a few SS-6 (Soyuz launcher type) ICBM's and a few SLBM's in old diesel subs (IIRC) plus what MRBM's and IRBM's they'd managed to move to Cuba and had ready to go, plus their rather paltry (at the time) long range aviation bomber units against our much stronger interceptor defenses, including nuclear antiaircraft missiles like Genie and Bomarc, so there's no question that the US would have suffered at most "minimal" damage in even a highly effective Soviet surprise attack from Cuba and the Soviet mainland, (though Europe would have likely been destroyed) while our forces could have obliterated the USSR virtually at will in 1962. Under such circumstances of nuclear winter from smoke and fallout from the destruction of Russia, which would have most likely caused a massive crop failure in the northern hemisphere in 1963, likely disease outbreaks from radiation and malnutrition, and a general economic upheaval, the massive discretionary spending on the moon race and NASA would have ceased... the moon race would have been called off (after all, no Soviet Union to compete against anymore) and with nobody else even close to flying in space, there would have been little reason to even bother flying manned spacecraft anymore (in actual history, Wally Schirra's "Sigma 7" would have been the last spaceflight prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis-- in my story, I went ahead and let NASA fly Gordo Cooper's "Faith 7" mission the following year; everything needed for it was pretty well paid for and done by the time of the Cuban Missile War and the US, after having suffered significant damage in the war, would have wanted to signal the world that it was still a force to be reckoned with and wasn't on the ropes... and the political benefit of showing things getting "back to normal" and the "triumph of the human spirit of exploration will go on" would be a good message to project worldwide to a world of people suffering from the aftereffects of such a limited nuclear war. However, by the fall of 1963, with the US economy on the ropes, hunger and food shortages rampant, disease rife, civil unrest on the rise, and a gov't ill equipped to deal with it all, spaceflight would have been judged just too expensive a proposition, and NASA would have, in effect, been shut down, or reduced to some rump organization with a miniscule budget for "research" and nothing else. I'd suspect that there would be a MASSIVE push for an increase in milspace though, for photoreconnaissance and signals intelligence assets, new advanced missiles and launch vehicles, perhaps even manned military presence in space (though surely unmanned assets would have had precedence), especially after the Chinese detonated their first atomic bomb in late 1964 (which might well have been accelerated to early 1964 or perhaps late 1963 if the Chinese felt threatened by the United States after the war and the USSR's destruction with a fear of "we're next".) Under such circumstances, it's quite likely that most of the best and brightest in NASA would have gone over to the milspace program, which would have been getting increased funding and needing more manpower, even as the civilian space program and the moon race were drying up and forgotten. In this climate of economic decay and malaise after the war and austerity, it may well have been another 10-15 years before a new President, seeking to reinvigorate the nation and pull it out of economic malaise, proposed a national space program to return Americans to orbit and continue pushing the new frontier, perhaps even again proposing a trip to the moon. It would likely have been in 1979 or the mid-late 80's though before it would be likely to happen. (at least per my story).

Anyway, the main thing milspace has going for it now is, that it has the world's only reusable spacecraft (at present) in the X-37B (also the world's only operational spaceplane, and an unmanned one at that!) and it has the US's two biggest and most capable launch vehicles in the EELV's (Delta IV and Atlas V). While NASA is contracting for commercial cargo delivery to the space station and "planning" for commercial manned spaceflight to get our astronauts there, and working on their SLS rocket to replace the shuttle and improve on its capabilities, it will be the better part of a decade before those systems will even be in testing phase, let alone operational. Milspace is pretty well humming along as well as it ever has, maybe even better, while NASA is fumbling around building HLV's that won't be used for a decade and sending our astronauts to Russia with $72 million to pay for rides to ISS.

It's a mess... Later! OL JR

 

[Fred22]

I think the idea of USAF running the American space program is insane. The F35 boondoggle kind of speaks to the ineptitude of the DOD when it comes to spending money. NASA is at present making the "private sector " it's lead on the manned space program which is what it critics have called for for years. That apparently is not enough anymore I guess.
I belive letting the air force take the lead in the American space program will also provide a first rate propaganda victory for America's rivals. The Air Force would be severely tempted I belive to siphon even more money away from any format of science to fulfill their main function which they do very well by the way.
I think that the American Space program faces a degree of hostile scrutiny that is amazing given the miniscule portion of the budget it represents. I am hoping that the Dragon works and the West ceases being dependent on overpriced rides sold by a nation led by a brutal KGB thug. Given the budget crisis in the US right now the reality is the pace of exploration will be slowed but the fact it still goes on gives me hope. I think a much higher better option would have been to cooperate with ESA to create a new ride but we will have to see.
Cheers
Fred

 

[RadManCF]

I think that the American Space program faces a degree of hostile scrutiny that is amazing given the miniscule portion of the budget it represents.

Well put. On a related note, have any of NASA's operations ever generated revenue for them? From what I understand of their sounding rocket operations, those are conducted for organizations outside of NASA. I doubt they would do it for free... And haven't they been involved in the launching of commercial satelites?

 

[luke strawwalker]

Well put. On a related note, have any of NASA's operations ever generated revenue for them? From what I understand of their sounding rocket operations, those are conducted for organizations outside of NASA. I doubt they would do it for free... And haven't they been involved in the launching of commercial satelites?

Interesting Fred... I wasn't aware that anybody WAS suggesting the USAF run the civilian space program. The USAF has their hands full and does very well doing the milspace role which they have been doing. USAF has NO need of manned space flight, and as far as I know, no interest in it anymore. It's been WELL and THOROUGHLY PROVEN that unmanned satellite assets and systems are MORE than capable of performing the milspace missions they have been charged with performing than a similar manned system would be anyway, and doing it MUCH cheaper, simpler, and with better results, over longer periods of time. Even the Russians learned this lesson, as they actually flew their version of manned military space stations, in their Almaz (diamond) Program, whereas the US canceled first their Dyna-Soar military spaceplane and then the MOL manned military space station spysat which replaced it, both without having ever flown. Almaz worked, but it was found that adding the "manned" part to the equation just complicated everything and made it more expensive, difficult, and limited the time on orbit and the quality of the results. That's why they dropped them. The USAF has NO business in the manned spaceflight business, and you're right in that they would have little interest in the scientific mission and would divert funding to higher priority milspace or other military projects. Heck NASA has always put "science" in the distant back seat to "national prestige" when it comes to manned spaceflight anyway, so the military would doubtlessly be far worse!

@ Radman... whatever "income" NASA has gotten has been a meager paltry pittance compared to the gov't paid expenses involved to create the ability to receive those incomes... AFAIK, NASA has NEVER made a profit on anything it's done (nor is that its role). NASA was involved in satellite launches-- in fact, Shuttle was justified on that very grounds... that it would be "so cheap to operate" that NASA would become a moneymaking operation, which of course NEVER panned out. In fact, in the early days of shuttle development and operations, the laws were changed to favor, if not outright force all satellite launches possible onto the shuttle, and phase out expendable rockets. This was done to ensure that shuttle would have a sufficient "captive customer base" and lack of competition from expendable rockets to make it the 'sole provider' to the extent possible. Shuttle's manrating requirements, being a manned vehicle, its unusual cargo mounting requirements (from the sides rather than from the bottom like all previous space launch vehicles) and its numerous flight constraints, scrubs, and other difficulties conspired to make developing satellite payloads for shuttle launch MUCH more expensive than satellites launched by expendable LV's, and made their probabilities of timely launch without long, drawn-out delays before they were actually in space far lower than using simpler expendable vehicles. This had the effect of driving commercial satellite customers to other launch providers, such as Europe, and later on Russia, Japan, China, and India. In picking up the slack to take advantage of this new launch opportunity, ESA heavily subsidized thier launches and developed new launchers to service this need, and Russia started offering their existing and cost-competitive launchers to payloads from foriegn commercial enterprises, as did China and Japan... in effect, WE in the US subsidized the building of the competitive systems, especially the ESA Arianes and to a lesser extent the existing launch vehicles in Russia and China, to allow them to keep producing them, improve them, and make them cheaper, by subsidizing them with US launches that were forced overseas by commercial companies tired of the constraints and high costs and endless delays of shuttle launches, and having few US alternatives. IOW, we sold them the rope to hang us with... so to speak.

After the Challenger disaster exposed the inherent stupidity in using a complex and expensive MANNED vehicle to deliver unmanned satellite cargo to space, a job better and cheaper to perform with unmanned expendable vehicles, the main "reason" for shuttle evaporated as the gov't finally relented and finally quit trying to force everything onto shuttle, and instead brought the expendable LV's back from the brink of extinction in the US. The Air Force, which had, in its lingering lust for manned spaceflight on its own vehicles, a holdover from the 50's and 60's and its unrequited love of systems like Dyna-Soar and MOL, which never flew, (and thus the AF never learned the lessons FIRSTHAND that manned spaceflight is inferior to unmanned satellites for the milspace role, as the Soviets did on Almaz) had foolishly put all their eggs in one basket with shuttle, for the prospect of saving some money on development and getting approval to build a manned milspace vehicle (which wouldn't happen) and had "jumped in bed" with NASA (who themselves had agreed to "jump in bed" with the AF in order to get more funding for shuttle development, which was underfunded and of course was running into problems and cost overruns, being far more expensive than expected and taking longer to develop, leading to schedule slips). Hence the reason the shuttle evolved as it did, morphing from a totally-reusable booster rocketplane and stubby airplane like orbiter as proposed by Faget and others to the huge, delta-winged high-crossrange glider the Air Force demanded for their polar milspace "once-around" launches flying from Vandenberg over the South Pole and landing back at Edwards on the next pass. It was the backdoor way for the AF to FINALLY get the milspace manned program they had always wanted, and the backdoor way into more funding that NASA wanted for themselves. A perfect "marriage of convenience" (which rarely ends well, as this one proved not to as well). Challenger opened the Air Force's eyes to the inherent problems of relying on a single vehicle for the launch of virtually all the national defense assets, as well as the inherent drawbacks and limitations of manned spaceflight and manned vehicles in general, especially for the milspace mission. The Air Force had to scramble to pull Atlases and Deltas and Titans out of mothballs (so to speak) and carefully husband their use over the ensuing couple of years after Challenger to ensure their own access to space for the military launches that they needed to make for the national defense, and ramp up and revive the production of expendable launchers, as well as develop an alternative method of launching the massive spysats they had envisioned being launched on the proven unreliable shuttle, should it be unavailable. Hence the Titan IV program. It soon became apparent that expendable launch WAS more cost-competitive to expensive shuttle launches, due to allowing simpler, more efficient design of the spacecraft being launched (not having to endure the requirements of being "man-rated" for launch aboard shuttle, not having to account for it's strange payload integration and mating requirements on launch in the shuttle payload bay, making the satellites cheaper to design and build). Sadly, Titan IV was NOT the expendable vehicle they wanted or hoped for-- it was roughly as expensive as launch aboard a shuttle, in no small part to the additional costs of the large segmented SRB's. SO, the AF went looking for a better solution, especially since the supply of Titan cores wasn't going to last forever. Hence, the EELV (Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle) Program to develop Delta IV and Atlas V. EELV, using the common core principle of using three first stages firing in tandem with the outer two functioning as liquid rocket boosters on heavy launches, did away with the expensive necessity of maintaining a separate large segmented solid rocket booster program, as well as the supporting infrastructure and personnell to support them. This was going to save a lot of costs in and of itself. The other idea which has a lot of merit is the "dial a rocket" idea, of using small monolithic solid strap-on boosters in varying numbers as needed, tailoring the vehicle for the weight and needs of the specific payload. EELV hasn't turned out to be the panacea it was promised to be, as it is more expensive than planned, in large part due to the vigorous foriegn competition for commercial launches from ESA, Russia, and China, coupled with a downturn in the world launch market due to the tech-bubble implosion of the 90's and the drying up of the massive launch requirements to support large constellations of satellite telephone relay sats from various providers. The ideas behind EELV's is sound, though...

So, now NASA is FINALLY starting to catch up to the lessons the Air Force learned in the late 80's and early 90's. Commercial is the way to go and holds a lot of promise. It will have its share of setbacks along the way, surely, and will probably not be the panacea that some folks make it out to be, but it's a good way forward and holds a lot of promise. Problem is, NASA is a political animal, unlike the milspace program which can operate in a far better funded position as a "national defense priority" and operate behind a curtain of privacy to an extent due to the "sensitive nature" of its intelligence gathering role and supporting military operations. NASA must operate in the glaring spotlight of public debate and policy, and enjoys none of the 'anonymity' that milspace operates behind. NASA also has it's own inbred supporting structure in the political bureaucracy which uses it for their own best political benefit, whether it makes particularly good technical or mission sense or not. Usually the political effects of a decision are of far more importance than the technical or scientific ramifications. This of course leads to some of the silliness and seemingly counterintuitive decisions coming out of NASA, which, if you dig deep enough, are politically motivated and have NOTHING to do with the best way to actually perform the assigned mission... most things are calculated to reward specific areas in the "space states" (and thus help ensure reelection of specific lawmakers) or to reward specific selected space contractors, usually those who are the most active in lobbying or the best political benefactors to said lawmakers. Commercial has an uphill battle to wage against the entrenched "system" as it exists within and without of NASA... It really is a "political/industrial complex" like what Eisenhower warned against in 1960 (or January 61 anyway). Hopefully they'll succeed... IF you look at the way Congress is funding commercial crew (at a pittance and wanting to cut that every chance they get, and wanting to "muck up the process" every way they can, like their recent attempt to force a "downselect" to a single provider when the actual competition hasn't even gotten underway in a meaningful way yet) it becomes apparent that their intention is to maintain the "status quo" of the system as it now exists. That's why Congress is perfectly content to allow NASA to fiddle with building a huge shuttle-derived HLV rocket that won't even be ready for testing for another 5-7 years, and won't be flying "operationally" for another ten years from now, while US astronauts are "hitching rides" on Russian Soyuz's at $72 million a pop... it also shows why they're not worried that there are NO landers, NO habs, NO supplementary systems (like rovers, etc.) approved for development programs now, which will be ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to perform ANY "exploration missions" the SLS and Orion are supposedly being developed for in the future. I'm aware that not everything can afford to be developed at once (hence the brilliance of the "spiral development" program that O'Keefe and Steidle proposed) but at the same time, a rocket without payloads is pretty useless. It will take the better part of ten years to develop a lander or hab after it IS approved as a funded program, meanwhile SLS will just be sitting around gathering dust, while the overhead and infrastructure expenses and workforce necessary to build and operate it will have to be maintained with little or no actual missions of any consequence possible, meaning it will be EXTREMELY expensive to maintain (remember it cost around $2 billion a year to keep the shuttle program alive during its stand-downs after Challenger and Columbia, even with NO shuttles flying-- so it will be with SLS, and probably more so.) This will make SLS a prime target for cancellation, as it has every other expensive space project in the past with too little benefit for the costs involved.

Even assuming a best-case scenario, and everything goes swimmingly as planned... SLS/Orion will ONLY be flying missions about every 24-36 months... the halcyon days of flying missions every 6 months like on Apollo, or every couple of months or so on shuttle (depending on what part of the shuttle era you look at) are gone and forgotten. Our "exploration" program, even if it works *as advertised* will MUCH more closely resemble the current Chinese space program with its 2-3 year gap between missions than it will resemble the good old days of Apollo. This will make it VERY expensive indeed, as the infrastructure and overhead costs to maintain everything for those infrequent missions every couple years will have to be borne alone by each one... as well as lowering the flightrates and making production of the vehicles highly expensive and inefficient (unless you do like Apollo did, and commit to simply ordering ONE batch of "sufficient size" for the program missions you have planned, and then either have to face the expenses and difficulties of 'reviving' the capability to build more at some point, or retire the entire system and go with something new, as Saturn was retired and replaced by shuttle... (a second production run of Saturn V's was contemplated but never occurred.)

Things are usually a lot more complicated than they appear on the surface. When you really get into it, you start to see all the little nuances that go into making things work the way they do, whether with the intricacies of the vehicles themselves and the interactions and tradeoffs involved or in the more 'vulgar' machinations of the management and political decision-making process governing the space program and NASA itself...

Later! OL JR

 

[k-rad du0d]

Paragraph breaks. Use them if you actually expect people to read your drivel.

 

[Tarasdad]

Courtesy. Use it if you expect anyone to take you seriously.

 

[chadrog]

Courtesy. Use it if you expect anyone to take you seriously.

That ship set sail long ago.

 

[Peartree]

...in effect, WE in the US subsidized the building of the competitive systems, especially the ESA Arianes and to a lesser extent the existing launch vehicles in Russia and China, to allow them to keep producing them, improve them, and make them cheaper, by subsidizing them with US launches that were forced overseas by commercial companies tired of the constraints and high costs and endless delays of shuttle launches, and having few US alternatives. IOW, we sold them the rope to hang us with... so to speak.


Later! OL JR

Heck Luke, we even helped them design the rope. One of my wife's cousins works at JPL, one of our NATIONAL laboratories, and they were flying satellites on Ariane too. Probably because they couldn't get a "ride" on the shuttle and couldn't wait years and years for their turn.

 

[luke strawwalker]

Paragraph breaks. Use them if you actually expect people to read your drivel.

Drivel like this?? Really... if you don't have anything substantive to add, better to say nothing at all.

Later! OL JR

 

[luke strawwalker]

Heck Luke, we even helped them design the rope. One of my wife's cousins works at JPL, one of our NATIONAL laboratories, and they were flying satellites on Ariane too. Probably because they couldn't get a "ride" on the shuttle and couldn't wait years and years for their turn.

Yep... wouldn't surprise me. Shuttle was probably THE worst satellite launch vehicle ever conceived. Don't get me wrong, it had incredible capabilities as a MANNED vehicle, but for satellite launches, it was basically everything you DIDN'T want...

Funny thing is, Hubble is always touted as Shuttle's crowning achievement, yet most of Hubble's problems were a direct result of funding cuts made to the Hubble program to pay for SHUTTLE DEVELOPMENT OVERRUNS. Perkin-Elmer wanted to do another test of the Hubble mirror, which would have exposed the flaw in the mirror before it ever left the ground... but cuts in Hubble funding diverting money to Shuttle development precluded the possibility since there was no money to pay for the test. Had Hubble been designed for launch on a more capable expendable rocket, it could have been in geosynch orbit or even a LaGrange point halo orbit that would have been MUCH more efficient for observation time, essentially DOUBLING the amount of observation Hubble could have done. Instead, shuttle was only BARELY capable of staggering up to the orbit Hubble was put in, which is a LEO (higher than "standard" LEO but still LEO nonetheless). This means that Hubble can only observe 45 minutes out of every 90 in a best-case scenario, sometimes less, because there's a big honkin planet in the way between it and the stars its observing.

Same thing is true for the Magellan mission. Magellan was bounced back and forth and delayed for years (most of a decade) and its design was constantly in flux because of the constant swaps between the solid shuttle boost motors that didn't have enough power to push Magellan to Jupiter, and the Shuttle-Centaur that did, but was scrapped after Challenger when it was judged too risky to fly in a manned vehicle. It was known that the unfolding high gain antenna on the Magellan could cause problems after long storage periods, but again, there was insufficient money to really fix all Magellan's problems, since it was delayed SO long that Magellan itself was already terribly overbudget simply because of the Shuttle-induced delays!

Later! OL JR

Later! OL JR

 

[reg]

It would probably be helpful to readers to divulge many of the direct impacts the Department of Defense and various other Defense Intelligence agencies have had on the creation and continuing operation of NASA. NASA is not strictly a civilian government agency. It's not a conspiracy, it's just how our government functions.

 

[luke strawwalker]

It would probably be helpful to readers to divulge many of the direct impacts the Department of Defense and various other Defense Intelligence agencies have had on the creation and continuing operation of NASA. NASA is not strictly a civilian government agency. It's not a conspiracy, it's just how our government functions.

It would... when you figure it out, let us know...

Other than the obvious, (AF/DOD requirements impacts on shuttle design, the whole SLC-6 debacle at Vandenberg, and the AF/DOD abandonment of shuttle and return to ELV's after the Challenger disaster, and the present pressure to keep NASA addicted to SRB's to keep the price down for DOD solid propellant missiles) it's an INCREDIBLY complex area, and much of the "behind the scenes" stuff will never be known...

It's VERY hard to quantify stuff that's "off the table" and behind closed doors...

Later! OL JR