There are a lot of comments over this post at Space Politics (over a quarter of a kilocomment, at last count) from last week. As is often the case, they are rife with reading miscomprehension and straw men — I guess people only read, or hear, what they want to read or hear. Hint: just for the record, I don’t think that anything NASA does to go back to the moon is intrinsically Apollo redux. I think that Apollo redux is Apollo redux.
But what’s fascinating is, finally, an implicit admission by some of the most vociferous opponents of the new policy that they had no concept of what it actually was, and that their opposition to it was based entirely on the (politically stupid) decision by the White House to make a big effing deal out of the fact that we aren’t going back to the moon as the first destination (allowing people not paying attention to nuttily spin this into the notion that we weren’t going back at all or were ending the American human spaceflight program). (I should note, though, that there are also some people like the troll “amightybreakingwind” who seem to sincerely believe that Constellation was the greatest concept ever conceived by the human mind, and continue to hold out hope for its resurrection).
But Ferris Valyn managed to finally elicit the truth after posing the question: if the policy had been rolled out simply as a faster-cheaper-better way to get back to the moon (and yes, despite the false lessons of the nineties, there really are faster, cheaper, better ways to do space than NASA has been doing them), would you have supported it? And the answer, in more than one case, was essentially “yes.” Which is interesting, of course, because that’s exactly what it is.
But as I noted over there, it remains frustrating that so many people are basing their opinions about the new direction totally on emotion, determined to remain ignorant of what it actually is, and primarily based on the speech of a president whose every statement comes with an expiration date, and who is likely a one-termer, so it doesn’t matter where he says we’re going to go first or ever in space. It is a tragedy, from a policy standpoint, that it was this politically incompetent White House that came up with the smartest space policy in the history of the program, in terms of finally opening up space (not that that’s a high bar), because it poisoned the well in selling it, particularly with the incoming Congress.
It’s going to take a lot of work to undo the policy damage, but I’m hoping that I’ll be properly funded soon to start to try.
If we can get (mostly) private, low-cost access to space and develop a robust manned presence outside of LEO, they can call the spaceships Obaminators for all I care.
I hope the GOP focuses on things like fighting the healthcare nonsense or other economy-restricting, socialistic problems. Taking steps to impede the development of a private, manned spaceflight industry would be stupid, and it also goes against any concept of being pro-free markets and limited government. Not that the GOP is really either of those things, of course.
By the way, did you notice that Hit & Run didn’t even mention the Dragon/Falcon 9 launch last week? I was quite surprised, given the significance of the launch. Granted, there’s still a lot of NASA (and, hence, government) money involved, but getting Dragon and the Falcon boosters ready for prime time also means private customers will start coming to the plate. Like Bigelow.
One of the things the Musk highlighted in last week’s press conference is the help that NASA provided in developing the PICA-X heat shield. I’m glad to hear it and in fact, that’s exactly the kind of thing NASA should be doing. Looking back to NASA’s predecessor, NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics), they developed and operated infrastructure like large wind tunnels and made them available to American aircraft companies. NACA researchers did pioneering work on important areas like drag reduction (e.g. NACA cowl for radial engines, area rule for transsonic and supersonic aircraft, laminar flow airfoils, etc) and made them available to industry. NACA didn’t try to operate its own airline or build its own aircraft other than technology test beds.
NASA did pioneering work on the PICA heat shield technology and assisted SpaceX with developing the PICA-X technology. I’m pretty sure that SpaceX used NASA facilities to test their heat shields, saving the company the expense of building, validating, and operating those facilities on their own. This kind of thing should be a bigger part of NASA’s future. Indeed, developing technologies was a big part of Obama’s space policy announced earlier this year which is why I supporte it even though I can’t stand Obama. The current notion of developing a heavy lift booster with no payloads and no mission (the Heavy Lift Vehicle to Nowhere – HLVN) is a classic government boondoggle that will hinder space exploration and exploitation for years to come.
I fully expect that NASA will be building/commissioning all sorts of boondoggly crap, but I can live with that if the government cooperates with or, at least, stays the heck out of the way of these private initiatives. After all, the government is going to continue to waste hundreds of billions on God knows what, regardless of which party is in power.
I tend to think that in this political culture, the best we can hope for is at least a partial return of NASA to its NACA roots, with it still messing around in space science, various booster programs, and maybe retaining some role in supporting the military programs. Though I suspect the military is about done with relying on NASA for much of anything.
so many people are basing their opinions about the new direction totally on emotion, determined to remain ignorant of what it actually is
I don’t think it’s ignorance Rand. Some of the long term posters are simply misrepresenting both the facts and their own motivations.
In my experience, a lot of conservatives hear the phrase “Obama Space Policy” and their brains disengage.
It’s similar to liberals with “Bush Tax Cuts”.
Pro Lib, what is “hit & run”?
Larry, I still haven’t heard the whole story on why Orion isn’t using PICA — no snark, just curious about the tradeoffs.
It’s Reason’s blog. They usually post on pretty much anything with market and/or political ramifications, and, historically, have been technophilic. It’s a curious omission, but it’s probably due to the current staff being less interested in space issues right now. Not to mention, of course, that economics and politics are bigger concerns during a recession.
I’ve had friendly exchanges with Feris before. He’s extraordinarily optimistic about the prospects for orbital development and agnostic about destinations beyond. But is it really that much of a surprise that most of the opposition to Obamaspace was generated by the abandonment of VSE?
I would argue that, other than Moon First, the new direction is much less an abandonment of VSE than a return to it.
@Rand:
And you’d be right, insofar as Constellation meant failing to meet the primary and two secondary objectives.
“it remains frustrating that so many people are basing their opinions about the new direction totally on emotion”
All decisions, other than trivial math problems or observations, are based on emotion. For instance, if we heard that a man killed another man, without further information, most of us would react negatively towards the killer. But if we heard a man shot an intruder in his home who threatened his family, our reaction (assuming we aren’t the British police) would be quite different.
It’s not even worth your time to get frustrated at people who react without proactively getting all the necessary information. Everyone has many conflicting priorities, and there isn’t time to pursue them all to satisfaction. It’s a logical thing to do to rely on the proponents of an argument to make the best possible argument; and judge it solely on that proposal. (And most people don’t have the expertise to draw conclusions from a proposal not clearly written in the proposal)
So getting made at the above is like getting mad at employees for leaving for a better paying job, or customers who go to competitors for a better price. This is to be expected and simply taken into account.
Your frustration should be solely directed at the derps in the Administration who made a good policy decision but were utterly inept in selling it to the public.
By the way, did you notice that Hit & Run didn’t even mention the Dragon/Falcon 9 launch last week? I was quite surprised, given the significance of the launch.
I have it on excellent authority that Reason will have a piece on it this week.
Ah, thanks. It did occur to me that they’d come in with something later, but I’m still surprised at the no-mention on the day of the launch. Maybe one of the writers is doing a big piece on the topic.
Or maybe they have a double-secret guest author?
Bob-1 Says:
December 13th, 2010 at 8:51 am
Pro Lib, what is “hit & run”?
Larry, I still haven’t heard the whole story on why Orion isn’t using PICA — no snark, just curious about the tradeoffs.
I don’t know. There are always tradeoffs when evaluating competing technologies. Perhaps LM thinks PICA is unproven and they’re being conservative. Perhaps they believe it offers no advantage or costs too much. From what I’ve read, SpaceX believes PICA-X (their implementation of the PICA technology) will be usable for many flights. They want to reuse the Dragon capsules. If reusability isn’t required of Orion – and I don’t think that’s a requirement – then perhaps PICA offers too few advantages over the traditional heat shield technology
I just don’t know.
Oh, I didn’t mean to pester you personally Larry, I was just thinking about your comment on NASA’s development of PICA, and how it was odd that the commercial capsule ended up using it and the NASA-supervised capsule didn’t.
This is semi-off-topic, but benign and somewhat related to Reason & Space.
Last night I read a SF story by NASA scientist Geoffrey Landis But that, secondarily, is about the intersection of libertarian ideals and the economics of space habitats. Primarily, it is about nuclear thermal rockets — Landis says in his afterward that he wanted to write a story that described them accurately. But I think his treatment of the socio-economics of space habitats might be interesting to Rand and his readers. Even if you don’t agree with his conclusions, you might enjoy thinking about why things would work out differently than the scenario Landis describes.
The story is “Outsider’s Chance”, it is in Landis’ collection Impact Parameter which you can buy by clicking on Rand’s Amazon link above, and the individual story is also available for $0.69 here:
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b295/Outsiders-Chance/Geoffrey-A-Landis/?si=0
Somehow I think Ferris Valyn would like it more than Mark Wittington, but maybe you would like it too.
Ignore the first instance of the word “But” from the above comment, and it will read better.
Bob, here’s a brief article about the Orion heat shield selection.
To protect the spacecraft and its crew from such severe conditions, the Orion Project Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston identified a team to develop the thermal protection system, or TPS, heat shield. For more than three years, NASA’s Orion Thermal Protection System Advanced Development Project considered eight different candidate materials, including the two final candidates, Avcoat and Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, or PICA, both of which have proven successful in previous space missions.
Avcoat was used for the Apollo capsule heat shield and on select regions of the space shuttle orbiter in its earliest flights. It was put back into production for the study. It is made of silica fibers with an epoxy-novalic resin filled in a fiberglass-phenolic honeycomb and is manufactured directly onto the heat shield substructure and attached as a unit to the crew module during spacecraft assembly. PICA, which is manufactured in blocks and attached to the vehicle after fabrication, was used on Stardust, NASA’s first robotic space mission dedicated solely to exploring a comet, and the first sample return mission since Apollo.
“NASA made a significant technology development effort, conducted thousands of tests, and tapped into the facilities, talents and resources across the agency to understand how these materials would perform on Orion’s five-meter wide heat shield,” said James Reuther, the project manager of the study at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. “We manufactured full-scale demonstrations to prove they could be efficiently and reliably produced for Orion.”
Ames led the study in cooperation with experts from across the agency. Engineers performed rigorous thermal, structural and environmental testing on both candidate materials. The team then compared the materials based on mass, thermal and structural performance, life cycle costs, manufacturability, reliability and certification challenges. NASA, working with Orion prime contractor Lockheed Martin, recommended Avcoat as the more robust, reliable and mature system.
“The biggest challenge with Avcoat has been reviving the technology to manufacture the material such that its performance is similar to what was demonstrated during the Apollo missions,” said John Kowal, Orion’s thermal protection system manager at Johnson. “Once that had been accomplished, the system evaluations clearly indicated that Avcoat was the preferred system.”
While not mentioned, there may have been factors that we don’t know about that drove the decision. For example, remember the discussion last year about the vibration characteristics of the Ares I? Perhaps Avcoat has superior vibration resistance to PICA. SpaceX uses liquid fueled boosters that would give a much smoother ride. That, combined with their plans to reuse the Dragon capsules could make PICA-X the preferred solution. From what I’ve read, Avcoat would likely require replacing the heat shield after each use. I just don’t know.
> From what I’ve read, Avcoat would likely require replacing the heat shield after each use.
This was a key feature, according to an unnamed Senator.
Yours,
Tom
Ahh Rand, watch as these assholes go and conveniently “forget” that they had this revelation and say that you just misunderstood them.
But seeing as we’re making personal revelations, no-one seemed to notice when my opinion changed from “going back to the Moon is a 25 year proposition for NASA and they should be focusing on deep space instead” to “maybe if NASA wasn’t so horrible they could get back to the Moon in under 5 years”. Which, admittedly, is much the same thing.
It’s hard to critique the selection of heat shield material without access to the detailed engineering requirements or the test results. I note that Orion was designed to be able to withstand atmospheric entry at a considerably higher entry velocity than Dragon (it was supposed to be able to do a direct return from Mars). Clearly PICA is fine for a small aeroshell, even at high entry speed, but I don’t know what the comparison of test results for the heat materials are for a large aeroshell under the requisite conditions.
On the other hand, PICA was selected for the MSL heat shield, which will be the largest entry heat-sheld ever flown (larger than Apollo). So, once this gets flown, it will be chalk up a pretty impressive win for PICA.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/news/press_releases/2009/0616ssMSLHeatShield.html
http://news.softpedia.com/news/039-Curiosity-039-Gets-New-Heat-Shield-114770.shtml
–but, again, without knowing the engineering requirement or the cost figures, it’s impossible to second guess.