I admire Walt Cunningham as a hero of Apollo, but it’s hard to do so as a policy analyst. The very title of his opinion piece is nonsense:
We must not discard greatest innovator in history
Presumably he’s talking about NASA, and specifically the human spaceflight program. But in fact, due to risk aversion, it is probably the least innovative technology program going, with “Apollo on Steroids” the most prominent and recent example. I’d wager that we get more innovation out of Silicon Valley in a month than we have from the entire history of the human spaceflight program. He expands in the first paragraph:
Except in wartime, there has never been another government program that produced as much technological innovation as the U.S. space program, and there likely never will be. No other program has so successfully infused the economy, rallied the nation, inspired youngsters toward academic achievement or established the U.S. as the world leader in technology.
Has this really been true since the sixties (if then)? It seems to be an article of faith among defenders, but I don’t buy it, and they never present any evidence to support it. We’re just supposed to take it as given. I’d bet that a lot more kids are motivated by video games, robotics, nanotech, and movie CGI to get into technical fields than the moribund human spaceflight program.
In spite of this, on Feb. 1, President Barack Obama announced the cancellation of the Constellation program of exploration, leaving NASA, for the first time in history, without a specific mission. It is as if President Gerald Ford had canceled the space shuttle program in 1975, just as the last Apollo mission was being flown. The shuttle orbiter development was well under way at the time, but that did not save us from a six-year gap before the next American was launched into space.
Today there is no realistic successor for human spaceflight waiting in the wings.
Once again, we have this false dichotomy, as though Ares I/Orion was “realistic,” and the vehicles that have been flying reliably for years, and new ones ready to launch within a few months, are not. Why was a vehicle that was going to cost much more money that NASA could ever hope to get in this political environment, and had severe technical issues in terms of cost and weight growth and schedule slip, more “realistic” than any of the current existing or planned systems that will be available much sooner at much less cost?
The biggest consequence of that first gap was the best and brightest of the NASA engineers and scientists leaving to seek more challenging jobs. It took years to rebuild the professional team that would eventually launch 134 shuttle missions and construct the most amazing engineering project in history — the International Space Station.
He writes this as though we are going to be disbanding the best and the brightest and tossing them out on the street. But with all due respect to the people working the Shuttle program, they are ops people, not developers, and not innovators. And as already noted, the gap was already guaranteed to last through most of the decade under the current plan, and the Shuttle workers weren’t, for the most part, going to be shifted to Ares/Orion development, which already had teams in place. It also implies that it is NASA engineers and “scientists” (sorry, no, very few scientists develop launch systems) that do all the heavy technology lifting, and are somehow crucial to maintaining our technical edge when much of it is in fact done by the contractors. In fact, one of the reasons that Ares was a disaster was that Mike Griffin was trying to resurrect an in-house NASA team to learn how to build launch systems again. Why this was a crucial skill for NASA in the twenty-first century, when we have a robust American launch industry, was never explained.
Congress is our last hope of putting a stop to the dismantling of a once great agency. Members of Congress are concerned about job losses and the economic impact, but in the long run they are not nearly as costly as the loss of an inspirational vision for the next generation of space scientists, engineers and explorers. You have only to look at Lewis and Clark, our westward expansion and Armstrong and Aldrin landing on the moon to know exploration is in our blood. We should be proud of it. Americans need a frontier.
I really, really, really tire of this nonsensical hyperbole. One would think from reading it that NASA was being dismantled and shut down, instead of a) having its budget increased b) refocusing on technologies that will take us beyond LEO in an affordable manner, c) creating a new low-cost commercial human launch industry, d) providing funding to allow hundred of researchers to actually go into space, perhaps repeatedly to do experiments, e) has a stated goal of hundreds or thousands of people in space with an eventual goal of Mars, f)…
No, that’s apparently not opening a frontier. It’s only opening a frontier if we send a few civil servants once or twice a year to an unsustainable and unaffordable lunar base on an expensive heavy-lift expendable rocket.
It’s like they haven’t read the budget or listened to the NASA leadership at all. But they pretend they have:
Spokesmen are trying to rationalize the debilitating cuts in the agency’s programs. They claim the “$6 billion increase over the next five years demonstrates President Obama’s strong commitment to space exploration.” That is just over 1 percent a year, and $2.5 billion of it is committed to the shutdown of Constellation, the same amount proposed for research on how global warming is affecting the Earth.
One percent a year of what? And of course it will cost a couple billion to shut down Constellation. That’s what happens when you cancel contracts with termination clauses. But it’s a bargain compared to spending the next hundred or so billion that will have us no better off than we were forty years ago in terms of affordability or access.
The $19 billion for 2011 is less than 0.5 percent of the proposed federal budget, one-ninth of what it was at its peak in the 1960s.
Why do these people continue to use this absurd comparison? We are never again going to get as much for NASA as we did in the sixties. That was a unique historical circumstance, and if all it had been about was space, we’d have never gotten it then. There was a war on, and going to the moon was viewed as a crucial part of it. That time is past, never to come again. Get over it.
The $300 million increase eliminates the program of human space exploration and sentences the agency to the same starvation diet it has existed on for the past several decades. NASA needs a $3 billion increase to continue operating a viable human space program.
I’m not going to call Walt a liar — he may really believe this, but it Is.Not.True that the program of human space exploration is being eliminated. To say so is palpable nonsense. The ISS is extended by at least half a decade. Companies are being funded to send not just a few astronauts a year, but dozens and hundreds into space, sooner than would have ever happened with Constellation. Technologies are being funded that finally will make it practical for them to venture, almost four decades after Walt did, beyond low earth orbit. To look at this and call it the “elimination” of human space exploration is, frankly, insane. People who really believe this don’t need a NASA human spaceflight program because they’re already living on another planet.
NASA spin is touting “new technology development programs to expand the capabilities of future explorers”— in-orbit fuel depots, rendezvous and docking, closed-loop life support systems, heavy-lift research and development of new engines, propellants, materials and combustion processes. These may sound new to someone unfamiliar with what NASA has been doing for 50 years, but (with one exception) they are pursuits for which NASA already has an unmatched reputation. Each of these would have played an essential role in the now canceled Constellation program.
Again, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he really believes this, but it is simply not true. None of those things, other than heavy lift, were part of the Constellation program. Constellation was Apollo on Geritol, and did not incorporate any of them. Mike Griffin starved any technologies not directly associated with Ares and Orion to feed the monster.
Let’s go on:
Without the focus of a specific mission, the raison d’être for these technologies is now “to advance the field of space science.”
I don’t know where the quoted phrase comes from, but this makes no sense. Why do we need a specific mission to focus on? When we built the transcontinental railroad, the “mission” wasn’t to build a road to Sacramento, or Reno, or Ely, or Salt Lake, or Laramie or Cheyenne, or Grand Island. The goal was to open up the west, without any specific destination. That is the much more visionary goal of this new direction. Focusing on a specific mission, in fact, as we saw with Apollo, and later with Apollo redux, creates a wasteful system designed to do a single thing, without much utility for other locations, or the economies of scale necessary to expand the activities for even that single thing. We don’t need a destination — we need an infrastructure that will allow us to attain any destination, and that’s what the new plan (or rather, goal — the plan won’t appear for several months until after the necessary studies) is intended to do.
In the place of the canceled Ares and Orion hardware, we now have increased support for education, increased spending on the discredited global warming hypocrisy and subsidies to several new commercial rocket companies. And, oh yes, don’t forget a new outreach program to Muslim countries without established space programs.
OK, I’m not a big fan of NASA as an educational tool — I think that it’s a very inefficient and ineffective way to do that, I agree that the global warming crisis has been discredited (though the jury remains out on whether or not it’s really a problem), and I’ll go on record (for the first time, as I’ve had nothing to say about it previously) as thinking that the outreach to Muslim countries is nutty. But I’m willing to accept that nonsense in exchange for a much more useful policy than we had under the Griffin regime. But beyond that, I’m appalled to have the support for commercial space lumped in with those things, and I think that it’s a misnomer to call it a “subsidy.” It’s simply NASA finally procuring things in a sane manner, in terms of value to the taxpayer, and long-term benefit to the country, compared to giving at least two orders of magnitude more money in cost-plus contracts to companies to build hardware for NASA’s exclusive use, and for which they get paid by the yard, rather than whether or not they perform. I’m simply astonished by people who think that the latter is a preferable way for NASA to spend our money.
In canceling Constellation with nothing to take its place
A repeat of the falsehood.
…the president is saying the U.S. should not have its own human space program and is directing funds to the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS. If NASA wants to participate in human spaceflight, it will have to be through contractors.
NASA has always used contractors to “participate in human spaceflight.” The only difference, as noted above, is that it is finally doing it in an economically sane way. Moreover, we are only doing it for the earth-orbit portion, which after half a century, should be sufficiently mature enough for NASA to buy rides, so that it can focus on the hard part — getting beyond LEO. And with the Program of Record, NASA was going to have to participate with human spaceflight through a foreign contractor (Russia) that doesn’t have America’s interests at heart, until that day, sometime in the distant future, when it can finally get its own vehicle after spending at least an order of magnitude more money than it will spend on the commercial option which will deliver results much sooner.
To succeed in the private sector a company must raise capital, develop a product, sell it at a profit and show a return on investment commensurate with the risk within a reasonable time frame. Unfortunately, space will not be an attractive commercial opportunity for the foreseeable future. Space exploration is a costly precursor to uncovering commercial opportunities, and it will be decades before a private investor can expect a return commensurate with the risk of exploration.
No one is proposing in this plan that private investors will be investing in “exploration,” unless you consider getting people to LEO “exploration.” NASA boosters have been telling us for years in fact that we had to get out of LEO to do real exploration, because we were “just going in circles.” Well, we agree. So let the private companies take over that mundane task so that NASA can get on with real exploration, and stop wasting tens of billions of dollars on unneeded launch vehicles, just so that it has its own.
The COTS program — companies selling services to NASA — made some sense with NASA still in the exploration business,
OK. This is called shouting on the Internet. I do so because, apparently, there is no other way of getting through.
NASA IS NOT GETTING OUT OF THE EXPLORATION BUSINESS. IT IS FINALLY GETTING SERIOUSLY INTO THE EXPLORATION BUSINESS, AND NO LONGER WASTING ITS TIME ON THE RELATIVELY TRIVIAL TASK OF GETTING PEOPLE INTO ORBIT AND BRINGING THEM BACK, LEAVING THAT TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR.
Only government programs — regardless of country — will get humans to the moon and beyond.
Let’s ignore whether or not this is true (I disagree), but it’s irrelevant, because (sorry, have to shout again) NO ONE IS PROPOSING THAT PRIVATE PROGRAMS WILL GET HUMANS TO THE MOON AND BEYOND. All that is being proposed is that NASA focus on that, and leave the first, well-understood stage of the journey to more cost-effective private solutions, which are being funded anyway for their own customers.
We have been told by the agency that future exploration programs, such as returning to the moon or going to Mars, will be a global effort, not an American one. That may sound appealing with respect to sharing costs and other resources, but it virtually guarantees those programs will take longer, cost more and render them vulnerable to political bickering — like the International Space Station.
Hey, long-time readers know that I’m no big fan of international cooperation for international cooperation’s sake, but if the politics requires it, the new approach is the least damaging way of doing it, because by having the private sector deliver things to LEO (like propellant) it opens up opportunities for multiple providers — commercial, foreign — to support the activity without putting any one of them on the critical path.
Have we really degenerated as a country to the point where we can no longer fund our own exploration?
Where does this come from? Who does he think is going to fund our exploration, if not us? The dispute is not who funds it, but how the funding is spent.
Oh, and of course, now comes the inevitable and flawed Ming Dynasty comparison.
NASA was always considered in a class by itself. Now, when the world is becoming increasingly dependent on space-based systems, we seem bent on slipping back into mediocrity. How do you rationalize surrendering our pre-eminence in space? The last time a country voluntarily gave up its pre-eminent position in exploration was when the Ming government recalled the Chinese fleets in 1433. That critical error condemned China to worldwide stagnation for centuries.
As I’ve noted in the past, that “critical error” was not in abandoning a flawed exploration effort, but rather in doing things the way that NASA (at the urging people like Walt Cunningham) has insisted on doing them — in a very cost-ineffective manner that was unaffordable to a nation with other pressing needs, with little or negative return.
Henry the Navigator had a much more efficient approach, investing in the technologies needed for exploration, and the infrastructure of way stations like the Canaries and Azores that allowed the Portuguese (and later the Spanish) to cost-effectively open up a new world.
In other words, an approach very similar to that proposed by the Obama administration.
NASA has always been a mission-driven agency that attracted a particular kind of individual. It focused on the objective, determined the obstacles, solved the problems and, in the end, accomplished the impossible.
Well, Walt, NASA has finally come up against some problems that can’t be solved. To wit — how to inspire people and maintain funding when it insists on reinventing square wheels inappropriate for the times. The new NASA administration is trying to save the agency, and human space exploration, from its worst enemies — people who insist on reliving the sixties, at taxpayer expense. I honor your contribution to our winning the Cold War. It’s much harder to honor your contribution to the current debate, with editorials like this.
Except in wartime, there has never been another government program that produced as much technological innovation as the U.S. space program, and there likely never will be.
Counterexamples are the Department of Defense (in peacetime) and the National Science Foundation.
People who really believe this don’t need a NASA human spaceflight program because they’re already living on another planet.
You kill me. Great line. 😉
That article is a work of art. I have never seen so much boilerplate in one place. I mean, all that talk without making a single cogent point or bringing up a single original thought. It’s almost like he works for the mainstream media.
Good rebuttal overall. one nit…
But with all due respect to the people working the Shuttle program, they are ops people, not developers, and not innovators.
No, we’re not developers, but operations requires its own type of innovation that is different than development. And development can benefit from operational knowledge.
And as already noted, the gap was already guaranteed to last through most of the decade under the current plan, and the Shuttle workers weren’t, for the most part, going to be shifted to Ares/Orion development, which already had teams in place.
I won’t speak for ground ops, but here in mission ops, we absolutely were shifting over. Many of us were already half time Constellation.
I’d bet that a lot more kids are motivated by video games, robotics, nanotech, and movie CGI to get into technical fields than the moribund human spaceflight program.
You might win that bet. Still, is motivating children to get into technical fields even a valid goal? Those who have the talent for it will gravitate towards it anyway. Those whose talents lie elsewhere are more useful elsewhere. If anything I think there are too many people in software development who have no business being in software development. That’s probably not true in other technical fields, but efforts to inspire children to get into chemistry or physics might lead to similar harmful effects in those fields.
Note that Aviation Week has been discussing the need for more students to go into engineering, especially aerospace, for some time now. The letters column runs a lot of letters from readers explaining why it is a poor choice economically, with several engineers saying that they advise their own kids not to go into it. Others have said that they regret their own choice of career. AvWk has a lot of good ideas, but will the business community actually follow thru? So far, all I see is talk, no action. IMHO, engineering staff is the first to be laid off, while keeping bloated finance departments overstaffed.
Job hunting, I am registered with a job site for engineers and designers, and they are pushing engineers to go for a business degree to get them out of the lab. Is this really what this country needs?
First, a comment about Cunningham’s piece. This is the way narrow authoritarian cultures work. New ideas are routinely shot down with comments like “What do they know?”
Don’s comment about the realities of life for engineers is on the mark. The finance sector, besides screwing up to a fare thee well, is too big and too powerful for the good of the nation.
I think there are too many people in software development who have no business being in software development.
Especially in the “climate science” community… 😉
I’ld agree that much of Walts statments are .. misniterpretations of the real situations, but your not doing better.
>Companies are being funded to send not just a
> few astronauts a year, but dozens and hundreds
> into space, ==
;/
>=sooner than would have ever happened
> with Constellation. ==
Sooner then never?
>== Technologies are being funded that finally will make
> it practical for them to venture, almost four decades
> after Walt did, beyond low earth orbit.
;/
And here yuo move from kool-aid to hard liqure.
>= NASA IS NOT GETTING OUT OF THE EXPLORATION
> BUSINESS. IT IS FINALLY GETTING SERIOUSLY INTO
> THE EXPLORATION BUSINESS,==
And here yuo move from kool-aid to hard liqure.
Even ignoring the inability to spell, I await some substantive response from you. I won’t hold my breath.
> Don Says:
> Note that Aviation Week has been discussing the need for
> more students to go into engineering, especially aerospace,
> for some time now. The letters column runs a lot of letters
> from readers explaining why it is a poor choice economically,
> with several engineers saying that they advise their own
> kids not to go into it. Others have said that they regret
> their own choice of career. ==
>
>== they are pushing engineers to go for a business degree
> to get them out of the lab. Is this really what this country
> needs?
Sadly the vision of the US as a “service economy” or “green economy” doesn’t include us building things. Technically were a underdeveloped country, exporting mainly food and raw materials, and importing manufactured good. Shown succinctly by the huge stacks of shiping containers clognig the US ports. For every seven we import, we noly send out 1.5.
As for aerospace, its pretty much gone. about 95% of the big aero firms shut down or sold out. More then 99% of the secound teir ones are gone.
And Last week as Robert McCall the space artist died, and NASA is presenting to congress Obamas plan to get NASA out of doing maned space or any development programs – Indias announcing major fundnig nicreases to their space program including maned space.
No, I’m nort surproized the bulk of folks in the aerospace companies are gettnig gray adn nervious about making it to retirement.
there are too many people in software development who have no business being in software development.
Complete agreement. I left a company for what I thought were greener pastures and ended up being rehired by them a year later. What I found after a year was amazing. We had to get rid of two guys that in a year had not written a single line of code we could keep. The other side of that coin are programming prima donnas that don’t respect the efforts of those working under them. I’ve seen guys totally humiliate someone that made a good effort.
The problem is that programming isn’t something that can be taught in a classroom. An apprenticeship makes more sense.
Management only has a vague idea of who is doing the job and who isn’t (after a year they should have been able to figure it out but they can’t really see into that black box.) So called designers get tunnel vision and aren’t open to clearly superior ways of doing things. Or worse, come up with flawed designs that a programmer is forced to implement even knowing it’s wrong.
It’s not just junior programmers either. College professors will argue for things that as an experienced working programmer I know is just crap. There’s a kitchen sink mentality in language design that irritates the hell out of me. I could even live with that except they still leave out essential features.
“NO ONE IS PROPOSING THAT PRIVATE PROGRAMS WILL GET HUMANS TO THE MOON AND BEYOND.”
While I agree that a government-sponsored systematic exploration of the Solar System would be much more effective and scientifically rigorous, there have been in the past and will be in the future proposals to return to the Moon that are entirely financed by private individuals.
To me, this is more of a sad statement in the sense that after all of the decacdes since Apollo, NASA can’t get its act together sufficiently to be able to put together a coherant manned spaceflight program. It also shows that NASA is more interested in gilding the lily with hugely expensive and ultimately unworkable equipment rather than having as a legitimate goal to reduce the cost of access to space. If the point of NASA is to provide a way to keep thousands of aerospace engineers employed in make-work projects, perhaps NASA is accomplishing its goals.
NASA seems to be very good at proposing interesting vehicle programs and then having them cancelled at the last minute. To me, what was amazing about Constellation isn’t that it is being cancelled, but that it got as far as it did before getting cancelled and got some flying hardware built before the plug was pulled. In NASA terms, that is a success. For those wondering what I’m talking about here, it is the DC-X, the “Venture Star”, the “Big G” Gemini II program, CEV project, and literally dozens of other major manned spaceflight vehicles that have been proposed over the years and some of which even had “bent metal” as well that ultimately were cancelled. From this viewpoint, Constellation is just one more of many on this graveyard of projects that have come from NASA.
Since the 1960’s, there has been one and only one manned spaceflight vehicle that has been launched wth any kind of regularity: The Space Shuttle. If anything, the problem with even the Shuttle program is that there was no follow-up, no attempt to build a Shuttle Mark II or to be extending and improving the vehicle concept. In the aviation industry, a vehicle like the Shuttle would have had dozens of follow-on vehicles with the same basic design but with further refinements in terms of different materials for the heat shields, a modified structure that would have concentrated on maximizing performance, or done genuine R&D in terms of finding out how to get the basic design to be improved.
Instead, what NASA did is they went and simply retro-fitted the engineering test articles that were originally intended to be sent to a museum or landfill and with a whole lot of money sent them into space. And how is that innovation? That should have been a sign of trouble in the Shuttle program as soon as that happened in the first place. That is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems with the Shuttle. Yeah, perhaps that made sense at the time in terms of cost savings, but it wasn’t innovation and it wasn’t spaceflight research.
Even now, with all of these changes, I don’t see NASA doing anything approaching a “build a little, test a little, learn from our mistakes and make a new version” approach that some of the more innovative commercial space operators are now doing. Yes, space vehicles can be built in that manner, where they are tested in incremental ways and their design is modified over time. For NASA, they feel it has to either be working out of the box of not at all. That isn’t spaceflight research, that is a jobs program to keep engineers busy.
While I agree that a government-sponsored systematic exploration of the Solar System would be much more effective and scientifically rigorous, there have been in the past and will be in the future proposals to return to the Moon that are entirely financed by private individuals.
I’m not saying there won’t — just that this isn’t part of the new NASA plans.
Kelly Stark said “As for aerospace, its pretty much gone. about 95% of the big aero firms shut down or sold out. More then 99% of the secound teir ones are gone.”
I don’t know where you get your facts from, but having been in manufacturing for most of my career, I think you’re confusing a number of real facts. For instance, in aerospace even though Boeing has started buying sub-assemblies for the 787 overseas, the vast amount of work performed for their product line continues to be in the U.S. Need a fighter or helicopter? Yep, made in the U.S.
Do we as a country import a lot of stuff? Yes. There are lots of containers of consumer goods that come in from all around us, and that will continue as long as we in only look at the price of the product, and not the true cost – think global, but buy local.
There is still lots of manufacturing going on, and all you need to do is drive to your local industrial park to see a huge variety of products being built in your community. But because of progress, there will continue to be less & less hand labor required to create a product. In one company I worked for, we used to figure that the labor component of costs was >50% of the overall direct cost. Twenty years later, that figure had been reduced to less than 5%.
But back to Rand’s overall topic. The new NASA directive will actually support more manufacturing being done in the U.S. because it encourages a wider variety of products and services from U.S. companies. SpaceX reportedly manufactures 80+% of their product in-house, and Atlas & Delta are all built in the U.S. (DOD requirements). Build a bigger market for launch services, and you will build a bigger space industry. The Constellation program treated our current manufacturing base as suppliers, and would not have had a multiplier effect.
I don’t know where you get your facts from
He just makes them up on the fly, apparently.
1. > Robert Horning Says:
> March 2nd, 2010 at 2:50 am
>> “NO ONE IS PROPOSING THAT PRIVATE PROGRAMS WILL GET
>> HUMANS TO THE MOON AND BEYOND.”
> While I agree that a government-sponsored systematic exploration of the Solar
> System would be much more effective and scientifically rigorous, there
> have been in the past and will be in the future proposals to return to the
> Moon that are entirely financed by private individuals.
True, I mis spoke. I ment no one related to the new NASA plans/gov etc.
Though sadly I think a gov agency more like a DARPA or NACA could certainly COULD contract with private and commercial services to do science and deap space, like how NASA contracts JPL to do deep space unmanned, theres no intention – adn strong political arguments againt doing it that way.
> To me, this is more of a sad statement in the sense that after all of the
> decacdes since Apollo, NASA can’t get its act together sufficiently to
> be able to put together a coherant manned spaceflight program. ===
True. In a rant I wrote to the Augusting panel they actually quoted a couple lines from, I said the idea that after 50 year the best NASA could come up with is a reenactment of Apollo, with design that were substandard in the ‘60s, disgusted adn embaresed me as a american.
> ==It also shows that NASA is more interested in gilding the lily with
> hugely expensive and ultimately unworkable equipment rather than
> having as a legitimate goal to reduce the cost of access to space. If the
> point of NASA is to provide a way to keep thousands of aerospace
> engineers employed in make-work projects, perhaps NASA is accomplishing its goals.
Sadly that is the goal – its what is most likely to motivate voters (adn hence congress) to support a program, adn of course as with any civil servants, NASA managers are rewarded handsomely for bloating their organization. When I worked at JSC I was stunned at how enthusiastically NASA managers would propose staff increases if they could find a justification – even if it would hurt organizational productivity.
> NASA seems to be very good at proposing interesting vehicle
> programs and then having them cancelled at the last minute. ==
And all the really cool proposals never get past the power point adn illistration phase.
>== To me, what was amazing about Constellation isn’t that it is being
> cancelled, but that it got as far as it did before getting cancelled and
> got some flying hardware built before the plug was pulled. ==
No flying hardware. Ares-1X had nothing in it related to stuff in the Ares designs. It was really more a stunt then a test.
>== For those wondering what I’m talking about here, it is the DC-X, the
> “Venture Star”, the “Big G” Gemini II program, CEV project, ==
Ah yes, adn a ton of cool ideas from the Air Force adn their Flight Dynamics Lab.
All that gold, and NASA tosses it aside ni favor of crap like constellation. Even shuttle was crude and backward by the standards of the ‘70’s, and with Constellation they went back to something even cruder then the Apollo craft that preceeded shuttle.
>== The Space Shuttle. If anything, the problem with even the Shuttle
> program is that there was no follow-up, no attempt to build a Shuttle
> Mark II or to be extending and improving the vehicle concept. ==
Big agree. There were tons of proposed upgrades to shuttle to improve its operability adn safety – but they were rejected by NASA and more critically congress because they would lay off to many folks who were working around the old problems.
It was the waste, not the ability, of shuttle that got the most enthusiasm. And given even in its crappy rough draft form Shuttle did the bulk of everything humans ever did in space – the thought of what it could have done if upgraded keeps haunting me.
>== Even now, with all of these changes, I don’t see NASA doing anything
> approaching a “build a little, test a little, learn from our mistakes and make
> a new version” approach ==
Yeah – adn really by now, they have proven over and over they just can’t manage development projects anymore.
1. > Coastal Ron Says:
> March 2nd, 2010 at 8:15 am
> Kelly Stark said==
Starks
>> “As for aerospace, its pretty much gone. about 95% of the big aero
>> firms shut down or sold out. More then 99% of the second tier ones are gone.”
> I don’t know where you get your facts from, ==
Av week and looking at the names no longer in the business. Think of the number of big aero firms that could do a major or cutting edge project say 30 40 years ago, but now are gone, merged and largely elimnated, or reduced to nothing. Ryan, Fairchild, North American, Rockwell, MacDonnell, Douglas, Grumman, etc etc. Now theres Boeing, L/M, kind of Northrup. 3 outt of the 40 or so you could point to in the ‘70’s. And supposedly the second tier support companies were hurt even worse as the main firms insourced to try to avoid laying off their staffs.
>== Need a fighter or helicopter? Yep, made in the U.S.
But the bulk of the fighter and helo companies in the US went out of busness, and by not exporting some of our top fighters were pushing other nations to develop their own fighter companies to compete. Like India and Russia combining to make the new Sukoiy(?) that is expected to exceed the F-22 in most factors.
> But back to Rand’s overall topic.
> The new NASA directive will actually support more manufacturing
> being done in the U.S. because it encourages a wider variety of products
> and services from U.S. companies. == Build a bigger market for launch services, =
Thats the problem, NASA isn’t talking about expanding the market, or buying more services from commercial firms, but contracting the market and buying much less then currently.