Some thoughts from Jim Oberg.
This slow-motion policy train wreck has been going on for years. Decades, in fact. We knew back in 1986 that we needed a more robust transportation architecture, but we trusted NASA to fix it when it just wasn’t up to the job, and never will be. Jobs have always been more important than space, and that will remain the case until space becomes important again, as it was briefly in the early sixties. The only way out is to promote competition and market development in the private sector, which is finally starting to happen with the new policy, if Congress doesn’t screw it up (again). What is so frustrating is that if we’d had sensible plans for the VSE five years ago, and Bush hadn’t allowed Mike Griffin to copulate with the chihuahua for this past half decade, we’d be very close to not having a gap at all.
[Update a while later]
In that two-year-old PJM piece that I linked last night, I just noticed this bit of prescience:
In hindsight, if the goal of Apollo had been to open up the space frontier, rather than a crash program to send half a dozen astronauts to the lunar surface, it would have been better to state as a goal that we would establish an affordable and sustainable transportation infrastructure to and from the moon. As it happens, that was in fact what George W. Bush proposed four and a half years ago in the Vision for Space Exploration, but NASA apparently missed the memo. But that never was the goal of Apollo. The goal of Apollo was to simply prove that a democratic socialist state enterprise was technologically superior to a totalitarian one. Once we had beaten the Soviets to the moon, it was mission accomplished, and no need to go back. The remaining missions after Apollo XI were simply programmatic inertia, using up the hardware after the production was shut down in 1967, when it became clear that we were going to win.
The problem was that, as already noted, Apollo cost a lot of money. So much so that after landing only six crews, we flew the last mission thirty-six years ago, and shelved the technology that enabled us to achieve it, because it wasn’t providing an economic return commensurate with the cost to the taxpayer. In fact, it spurred a new use of the phrase among frustrated space enthusiasts. Since 1972, they’ve been able to ask “If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we send a man to the moon?” The answer is that we couldn’t afford to continue to do so, at least not the way we’d been doing it (which is a reason why NASA’s plan to redo Apollo, pretty much the same way, will likely not be sustainable, either). To use Apollo as a model for the provision of our most vital commodity — energy — would be economically ruinous.
Emphasis mine. Did I call it, or what?
I was thinking I’d never heard that before, and I was right.
OTOH, I was amazed this from yesterday was also unique. One advantage to the existence of Mr. Griffin; he motivates Mr. Simberg to wax eloquently in unique ways.
> The saddest secret of Russia’s space program is
> the aging workforce, retiring or dying off at their posts.
> These critical experts are only partially being replaced
> by new employees willing to work for laughably low
> wages because they are devoted to the ideal of
> spaceflight. Even recent cosmonaut recruitment
> efforts actually had to actively seek candidates for
> the job — there simply weren’t enough qualified
> applicants mailing in their forms.
Sounds like the Russian space program is dying to.
> — (which is a reason why NASA’s plan to redo Apollo,
> pretty much the same way, will likely not be sustainable, either).
Treue – but no big shock.
Oddly I’ve had folks argue viemently that Apollo on Steroids was sustainable, since sustainable merely means it has enough congressional support to get funding votes.
…. not the definition I’ld prefer..
The big question I am beginning to wonder is, if Saudi Arabia can contain a big oil spill like this, why can’t the United States?
Sounds like the Russian space program is dying to.
No doubt the Russian space program is dying to. Unfortunately, like the rest of Russia, it’s also dying too.
> Phil Says:
> The big question I am beginning to wonder is, if Saudi
> Arabia can contain a big oil spill like this, why can’t the
> United States?
They hired the international firms that do that sort of thing — in the US the prez would need to wave the US law forbidding non US UNIONIZED citizens from working ships off US shores. Same one Bush waved off after Katrina – Obama won’t, and the firms and nations that offered to help were told to stay away.
Our reliance on the Russians has had one positive spin-off: it completely shot to hell the argument that “human rating” a manned vehicle for NASA standards is all but impossible (unless it’s Ares).
AIAA held a roundtable on “human rating” recently, in Washington DC. I attended, as did representatives of all of the space launch companies — all but one of whom were astronauts. Bryan O’Connor, NASA’s lead for astronaut safety, unexpectedly (to me) introduced the topic of how NASA came to accept Soyuz as acceptable for U.S. crews.
They had access to most, but not all, information on the system. They could ask questions, and get most of them answered. But they had absolutely no way to change any aspect of the design and operation that they didn’t agree with. But on the basis of far less insight, and absolutely none of the oversight, they would have for U.S. vehicles, NASA nevertheless “got comfortable” with flying astronauts on Soyuz.
Every single one of the industry representatives expressed familiarity with that process, and with human rating in general. Except, that is, for the ATK representative, who was a total dud. Huh….
What I find interesting is that the BP spill is not even the largest that occurred in the Gulf. The largest was the Ixtoc rig blowout and spill in 1979. It ran wild for 10 months, until Red Adair tamed it, and put 140 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, about 6 times as much as the current one. The oil covered a good portion of northern Mexico and south Texas.
But of course that was before CNN and the Internet, so you didn’t have 7/24 news coverage, a grand standing President, and endless blogs hyping it 🙂 Instead the professionals were just allowed to do their job. Such has the world changed since then.
As for Soyuz, lets hope Murphy is asleep and nothing happens until commercial crew kicks in. The alternative, the loss of the ISS because of lack of access, is too depressing to think about.
> Thomas Matula Says:
> June 16th, 2010 at 11:00 am
> What I find interesting is that the BP spill is not even
> the largest that occurred in the Gulf. The largest was
> the Ixtoc rig blowout and spill in 1979. It ran wild for
> 10 months, until Red Adair tamed it, and put 140 million
> gallons of oil into the Gulf, about 6 times as much as
> the current one.===
And the company in charge of that platform changed there name and are the same guys who were runing the BP platform. [ no joke ]
8[
>== As for Soyuz, lets hope Murphy is asleep and nothing
> happens until commercial crew kicks in. The alternative,
> the loss of the ISS because of lack of access, is too
> depressing to think about.
??
Thats how we lost our last station – SkyLab — about 5 weeks after the Ixtoc rig blowout.
?
I hope this is a coicidence.
Actually not that surprising as the number of firms specializing in those types of wells is limited. And is far fewer today as many of them have merged together. And 31 years between major accidents isn’t a bad record given the large number of wells in the Gulf. And it does appears to be the classic case of over confidence resulting in a relaxation of procedures, basically inviting Mr. Murphy in to party.
> And 31 years between major accidents isn’t a bad record
> given the large number of wells in the Gulf. And it does
> appears to be the classic case of over confidence
> resulting in a relaxation of procedures ==
Yeah, the “but it never caused any problems before, so….”
Sounds like NASA with the shuttles.
Does anybody have a link to a good explanation of what happened at the BP well, with an engineering POV for a curious layman?
I think what we need is not to stop drilling, which some of our (in the public, not this blog) more hysterical commentators are calling for, but rather design the wells so that they fail safely.
I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting BP didn’t think about safety, but that something happened that was not planned for.
@Thomas Matula: Thanks, I didn’t know about Ixtoc.
> Does anybody have a link to a good explanation of what
> happened at the BP well, with an engineering POV for a
> curious layman?
Discovery channel did a show on it – so they likely have a online article or vid.
Bottom line – the blow out preventor didn’t engage after several other things went wrong. Several other things led to the initial accident – the preventor failing caused the big spill.
Kelly,
Yes, most accidents are the result of a chain of causation, usually things that are ignored because of over confidence and the belief they are not important. Challenger and Columbia are good examples.
And yes, BP may well fit into this. I heard on a news report, but couldn’t confirm it, that one reason the blow out prevention system didn’t engage was the cable to it was damaged. Normally this is not a problem since it would have a sonar activated backup system, but supposedly the driller decided not to include it to save $500K. Again, I don’t know if the story is true, but if it is confirmed it will be a classic example of the costs of bean counting on a project like this. i.e save 500K, lose 20 plus billion dollars.
And to bring it around to space again, this was also one of the motives for NASA going to cost plus in the late 1950’s, so contractors would not be tempted to save a few dollars by deciding a backup system was not cost/effective. Yes, you may only need it one time out of 10,000, but when you need it….
>== this was also one of the motives for NASA going to cost
> plus in the late 1950’s, so contractors would not be
> tempted to save a few dollars by deciding a backup
> system was not cost/effective. ==
I doubt that was a factor for NASA, they weern’t big on worrying about redundancy in the 50’s adn ’60’s (and sadly started downgrading it again on Constellation). The big this pushing toward cost plus, is if no ones ever built what your asking for, no ones sure what it will cost – so its eiather cost plus, or they have to allow insane margins in their bid costs.
Really, it was cost plus – or no one would bid to build your ships!!