The Emperor's new Space Program

[Winner]

If this is a silly prestige project (it isn't and was never intended as such - get over the fact that it was announced by Bush, sheesh), I wonder what justifies the other, 1000x greater expenses...

Seriously, why do I have to keep explaining this? The US budget is over $ 3 TRILLION. The military got another dozens of billions more, but our Messiah and oh-the-great-visionary decides to cut NASA budget, of all things.

How could it even remotely make sense?

And even if I accepted that Constellation needs revamping, why kill it completely, wasting $ 9 billion (plus another $ 2-3 billion when NASA cancels contracts with Lockheed-Martin)? Why giving up on everything based on a thin hope that 'commercial providers' somehow bend the laws of physics and miraculously manage to do everything faster and cheaper, even though they lack expertise, funding and most crucially experience?

Not everything in the proposal is bad - more money for future propulsion technologies is good, I support that. But it is far offset by the utterly idiotic decision to end Orion spacraft - the only spacecraft which could allow people to travel beyond LEO. This will have far reaching consequences for US space programme for decades to come, so in order to save a tiny sum of money, Obama will castrate NASA and leave it impotent for at least 20 years.


---

Some time ago, the French space agency made a feasibility study of launching Orion on European Ariane-5 rocket. Since Orion got the axe, perhaps ESA could take over the project and fund its development. It would take longer, but Lockheed-Martin would hardly complain. In some 10 years, we'd have a crew launch vehicle and a spaceship, whereas the Americans would have nothing. Umm, nice thought But even if we wanted, the US laws would probably forbid it.

 

[Winner]

China are teh 3vil totalitaraisn

Besides, IIRC, Winner does not have much faith in the Chinese Space Program.

I am simply opposed to the China hype. But seeing how the US space programme 'progresses', I might have to re-evaluate my position. China is at the first stages, but in its case the focus is clearly on doing manned missions, sending people to space. They are developing bigger rockets and plan to launch their own space station in the next few years. If they invest more in the future (they certainly can, their national budget isn't in shambles), they could become a significant player. They'll still be technologically inferior as far as the top science projects are concerned, but that's not what they're shooting for.

And in fact they haven't done much so far compared to, say, ESA. Then again, the Europeans are in a much better position, internationally, financially and technologically.

Which is why we could, in the end, gain a lot from cooperation with China and Russia. It would be a weird alliance, but it would certainly make sense. Europeans need access to space for their astronauts and Russians or the Chinese can do that. In exchange, they can profit from European technology transfers and money.

(BTW, did you know that China actually asked to join the ISS project, but was turned down by the Americans?)

And it's not a mere "prestige project" at all. It's paving the way for actual human colonization of other celestial bodies.

Amen. The Moon was intended as a stepping stone, a place where to try technologies enabling long term human presence in space.

 

[Karalysia]

NASA will have wasted 9 billion US dollars which it has already invested in its Constellation programme. That is the money used in development of Ares-1, the Orion spacecraft and other related projects. I don't have to say there are no refunds.
NASA will lose thousands of engineers and scientists, who depended on it. This will make any future "restart" of major space exploration extremely difficult as NASA will have to create its team from scratch.
US will lose its leadership in manned space exploration. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it will come back to haunt the Americans just as the end of Chinese maritime exploration turned out to be a gigantic mistake.
Human Mars mission will be delayed by at least another decade. Robots will continue to send us pretty pictures and limited science data, but the real stuff we need to do ourselves will have to wait.

All of this sums up to be the sunk cost fallacy.

 

[warpus]

Are you aware that this will profoundly and negatively impact both the CSA and ESA, both of which rely on NASA for human spaceflight?

Good point, I haven't thought of that.

So will the CSA and the ESA turn to the Russians? Or maybe it's time for the ESA to develop their own manned space program? (I doubt that the CSA has enough resources to pursue something like this which is why I left them out)

Maybe in the end this will kick-start some other agencies to develop their own manned space programs? I'm just guessing....

 

[Dachs]

Hah, I think a dude I know will be pissed as all hell about this

 

[Aegis]

If this is a silly prestige project (it isn't and was never intended as such - get over the fact that it was announced by Bush, sheesh), I wonder what justifies the other, 1000x greater expenses...

Seriously, why do I have to keep explaining this? The US budget is over $ 3 TRILLION. The military got another dozens of billions more, but our Messiah and oh-the-great-visionary decides to cut NASA budget, of all things.

Actually, NASA's budget was increased by $6 billion over the next five years. Instead of continuing the over-budgeted, behind-schedule Constellation program, they will be focusing on developing technologies which will take us further than the moon.

The budget changes will not prevent NASA from returning astronauts to the moon and exploring the rest of the solar system, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in a conference call with reporters on Monday.

"Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year; people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the Moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts ... That is what the president's plan for NASA will enable, once we develop the new capabilities to make it a reality," Bolden said.

The NASA administrator emphasized the fact that the president's budget would increase NASA funding overall and said the Constellation program was behind schedule and over-budget anyway.

"The truth is we were not on a sustainable path to get back to the moon's surface, and as we focused most of our efforts and funding on getting back to the moon we were neglecting investment in key technologies to get us beyond," he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/space/02/01/nasa.budget.moon/?hpt=T1

 

[Winner]

Yeah, exactly what I expected from Obama - lots of nice babble, but little substance. All these technologies are already being developed and would have been developed under Constellation - that goes especially to life support systems and better rocket engines which were to power a new generation of heavy-lift rockets (now cancelled). Since all of this requires testing, the new plan is basically to develop new technologies theoretically. Wonderful.

As for better interplanetary propulsion, there it's even more obvious that you actually need to send it to space and test it, no matter if you plan to use nuclear thermal rockets (for which you need super-heavy lift rockets to launch them into space -> cancelled by Obama) or nuclear electric engines (like VASIMR, which was supposed to be tested on ISS, gods know what happened to that plan). Again, Obama is actually going to delay the development and testing of these systems.

And the Bolden's comments are just He could have added "... and this is what we would have done if our President didn't kill our program of record. Now we'll just sit here on Earth and play with toys and dream about better tomorrow." I see that Obama's purge in NASA's leadership was very successful.

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Here's news for you: EVERYTHING space-related is ALWAYS behind the schedule and underfunded. That's simply the way it is in this business (and not just there, military-related contracts suffer of the same fundamental problem). It is reasonable to expect that every programme you start will get more expensive than you expected and will take longer to accomplish. If you cancelled everything that's not right on time and not a penny over the budget, you'd never launch anything at all to space, be it a human-rated spaceship or a simple robotic probe.

 

[Karalysia]

If you're so upset you Europeans can do it with your space program, pick up some slack for a change and stop riding on our coat tails.

 

[Winner]

Good point, I haven't thought of that.

So will the CSA and the ESA turn to the Russians? Or maybe it's time for the ESA to develop their own manned space program? (I doubt that the CSA has enough resources to pursue something like this which is why I left them out)

Canada is an associate member of ESA with pretty much all the rights of European member states

I doubt ESA will develop a new crewship in cooperation with the Russians. ESA thought about it and it even funded several Russian studies, but it always ended with Russians basically saying "Give us your technologies and few billion euros and we will build something, of course in Russian factories and with Russian workforce and we'll keep all the plans to ourselves. Deal?" ESA obviously told them to screw off. That's not to say it doesn't cooperate with the Russians any more, it does, but joint development of spaceships is IMO unrealistic - too important in terms of prestige and national security interests.

Russians are currently planning to build a successor to Soyuz (which means a new launcher + new spaceship) by 2020, but it's VEEEERY questionable whether they can actually pull it of without SIGNIFICANT budget increases. My guess is that for the foreseeable future, they're gonna stick with Soyuz - it's relatively cheap, very reliable and totally adequate for LEO spaceflight.

Our (I mean Europe+Canada(+Japan) now) problem now is that NASA is probably going to book most free seats on Russian ships, so it will be more expensive for us to get our people to the ISS - where all our instruments, laboratories and other things are. And there are rumours that the Russians plan to milk all their customers, precisely because they need every dollar/euro for development of their own rockets and spaceships.

Perhaps we should tactfully ask the Chinese how much would a ride to ISS cost us on one of their Shenzhou spaceships

Maybe in the end this will kick-start some other agencies to develop their own manned space programs? I'm just guessing....

It would be expensive though. Man-rating Ariane-5 itself would cost billions, and developing a new crewship would be very expensive too. On the other hand, we have the ATV which is a good start (part of it can easily be used as service module, all you need is to develop a re-entry capsule).

We'll see. ESA would most likely need EU funding for this and Barroso said something about € 3 billion annual increase after 2013. And ESA is just finishing the construction of a new launch pad in French Guyana for Russian Soyuz rockets. ESA officials refused to deny the possibility of building facilities necessary for manned spaceflight in the future, which could hint that ESA is at least seriously thinking about these plans...

 

[Lillefix]

Too bad ESA won't user their own Soyuz rockets for manned spaceflights. Or perhaps they will if NASA won't come up with manned spaceflight soon.

 

[lovett]

It's paving the way for actual human colonization of other celestial bodies.

Why would we want to do that?

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

No, it is very relevant. Period.

An insightful and relevant engagement of my arguments.

Funny, after all the posts I've made on this forum speaking in favour of conservation and intelligent use of resources, one would say nobody can accuse me of the contrary. But this is CFC, what did I expect?

Another blinding riposte fully countering the points you ignored.

Ok, enough of this crap. Time for bigger fonts:

Annual expenses of ALL SPACE AGENCIES IN THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD COMBINED are less than 50 billion US dollars. That's like the military budget of France, in other words about 0.08% of the world's GDP. How could anybody POSSIBLY target this for "cost reductions" is really beyond my capacity to understand.

Let's move on.

A brilliant display in completely countering my issues with manned space flight, rather then a refutation of a position I never held. A refutation which is fallacious anyway.

You have a talent for this.

 

[Bill3000]

Yeah, exactly what I expected from Obama - lots of nice babble, but little substance. All these technologies are already being developed and would have been developed under Constellation - that goes especially to life support systems and better rocket engines which were to power a new generation of heavy-lift rockets (now cancelled). Since all of this requires testing, the new plan is basically to develop new technologies theoretically. Wonderful.

The hell are you talking about? Constellation used the same damned fundamental jet propulsion technology as Apollo.

 

[bhsup]

Link to video.

(watch the video, it's inspiring)

Thanks for killing the dream, Barack.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Why am I reminded of Team America World Police?

Nothing substantial is being changed by abandoning this PR campaign of men going back to the moon and then to Mars on a schedule and budget which in all likelihood was destined to be a failure. NASA funding is actually increasing under Obama's new budget. It is just not going towards elaborate schemes to gain political support for a 5-year-old presidential election anymore.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Link to video.

(watch the video, it's inspiring)

Good show.

Thanks for killing the dream, Barack.

He didn't outlaw going into space, V. Stop trying to to hate every single thing he does.

NASA is still around. They will still be launching things into space. Us returning to space is by no means whatsoever out of the question. No dream has been killed. Get over yourselves.

That said, some of the critics in this thread are right, cutting spending here is stupid, where it should be cut is Defense, and massively.

 

[The Imp]

where it should be cut is Defense, and massively.

Amen brudda.

 

[SG-17]

I didn't think that I could dislike Obama anymore than I already did, but space exploration is a passion of mine and this kind of crap administration pisses me off.

 

[JollyRoger]

Thanks for killing the dream, Barack.

There's nothing in the Constitution authorizing the Federal Government to spend on space exploraton. It is left to the states.

 

[bhsup]

I know! I freely admit, this is where I utterly fall into hypocricy is space exploration. I absolutely support furthering it and funding it at the federal level. America, to the stars!

 

[warpus]

I know! I freely admit, this is where I utterly fall into hypocricy is space exploration. I absolutely support furthering it and funding it at the federal level. America, to the stars!

Man, those founding fathers.. didn't they want America to dominate space? Why leave space exploration out of the constitution?