There’s a second installment up of Keith Cowing and Frank Sietzen’s history of the decision to reformulate national space policy. It has additional detail on the plan, and indicates that the planned gap between Shuttle end and CEV operations is three years, not four (earliest lunar flight possibly in 2013), to be filled with Russian capability.

Here’s the part that I found interesting, and hasn’t been discussed much.

With a new focus on human exploration, the ISS will now be focused specifically on human physiology and factors needed to flight certify humans for long-duration space travel. Any research failing to contribute to this focus will be dropped from NASA’s space station research plan.

So-called microgravity science investigations into metallurgical and materials sciences will be dropped, as will overtly commercial and fundamental life science research that does not have a human life science linkage.

Other nations will likely continue their own research plans using their resource allocations on the ISS — but the U.S. portion will have a human exploration focus first and foremost. And even that will probably end by the middle of the next decade, with the station possibly taken over by the international partners, or perhaps a commercial concern.

The station has always had incompatible requirements (an inevitable result of the decision to have a single station) and this is one of them. Life sciences cause disturbances that interfere with good-quality microgravity, necessary for the materials research. This decision doesn’t make that problem go away–it just makes it the Europeans’ and Japanese’ problem. We’ll do our treadmill work and exercise, while they get exercised over the poor quality of their lab environment, until we pull out and hand it over to them.

But at least we’re starting to develop a sane policy toward station. Despite all the hype over the years, microgravity research has never panned out in accordance with the hoopla and promises. Perhaps there is still some potential there, but it will await a dedicated station that’s affordable to access on a timely basis. ISS never was that, and perhaps never will be.

Greg Klerkx, who I met at the EZ-Rocket rollout a couple years ago, has a piece in the NYT that resonates with my Fox column this week: The Citizen Astronaut.

Greg also has an interesting-looking book out, that I’ll have to read before finishing mine, so as to avoid redundancy.

You know, correcting Gregg Easterbrook’s malanalysis of space issues could be a full-time job in itself. It’s dismaying that people who should be intelligent enough to otherwise know better glom onto them in order to validate their own unknowledgable preconceptions on the subject. And by the way, it’s no insult to be called unknowledgable on these issues. Few people are, even many in the space industry. To become so requires a huge investment in time and study that few have the time for.

I find it particularly frustrating, because there is so much to legitimately criticize in the recent proposal, NASA, and space policy in general, but the opportunities to do so are drowned out by better known, but far less knowledgable people who rest on their laurels from a few lucky shots against the shuttle a quarter of a century ago.

I don’t really have time, but since he gets entirely too much credibility in the blogosphere and elsewhere, I’ll take apart his latest bit of misinformation.

Just the cost numbers for the Crew Exploration Vehicle alone–forget all the probes, colonies, and other stuff–make Bush’s announcement yesterday an all-time monument to budgetary low-balling. He declared that for the next five years, $12 billion will be devoted to the Moon-Mars initiative. That, the president said, is enough to fund new the Moon probes and development of the ill-named Crew Exploration Vehicle. This figure is utterly ridiculous, a mere fraction of what will be entailed in anything beyond some “paper spacecraft”–engineers’ lingo for studies and Power Point presentations of hardware that never gets built. Boeing expects to spend around $7.5 billion merely to develop the new 7E7 jetliner, which will stay within the atmosphere and use very well-understood engineering. The development cost of the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be several times greater

This paragraph is chock full of nonsense. He’s doing something worse than comparing apples to oranges–he’s comparing space capsules to commercial airliners. There is no way to infer the costs of one from the other–they are totally irrelevant to each other. One carries hundreds of people, has to fly thousands of times, provides its own propulsion, has to meet all requirements of FAA certification. The other is simply a can that carries four people or so, with basic subsystems like a reaction-control system, avionics, life support, with thermal protection and a recovery system if it’s going to do an entry. And in fact, it’s also “well-understood engineering,” and has been since 1968 or so. It may be expensive, but there’s no way to tell by looking at airliners.

The best way to tell is to do a parametric cost analysis on it. It’s basically an upgraded Apollo capsule (and perhaps service module for modest propulsion and additional consumables). We know how much that cost the first time, and it should be easier now, particularly considering the technology advances over the past four decades (e.g., computer microization). If NASA can’t develop that vehicle in a few years for a few billion, it should be disbanded.

The timetable is also a low-ball. Bush declared that the Crew Exploration Vehicle would be tested in 2008, just four years from now. There’s no way on Earth, as it were, this could happen without a cost-no-object crash program to rival Apollo. The Air Force’s new F22 fighter has been in development for 13 years; an entire new spaceship can be developed in four years?

I didn’t hear Bush say that. 2008 was the first robotic probes of the moon in anticipation of a manned return seven years later.

If we could develop such a thing in four years the first time on an Apollo budget, why couldn’t we affordably do it again in ten years (first flight is supposed to be 2014) on a less urgent basis?

[Update]

Commenter Duncan Young says that Gregg is right on this point, but that doesn’t make him right that it can’t be done. As I said, it’s perfectly feasible to develop and test a capsule, and associated service module, in four years, particularly since we already know how to do it, and have done it before. Apollo was a crash program, but the capsule itself wasn’t really a long pole. As an aside, this is probably the only major development that will have to occur during Bush’s term of office.

[/Update]

It may be that we can’t, but Gregg certainly offers no coherent reasons why we can’t, except with another absurd comparison–to a multi-mission fighter that’s gotten into a lot of political problems with interservice rivalries, and which again, fly hundreds of sorties and have to be maintainable by high-school grads.

And I don’t know what Gregg means by “spaceship,” unless it’s a way of intimidating his readership into thinking that he’s one of them there “rocket scientists,” and knows what he’s talking about. If he means a “ship” that flies in space, there’s nothing inherently expensive or difficult about that.

It’s just a capsule. It’s not a launcher.

But if, as Bush declared, it will be capable both of flying back and forth to the space station and of flying to the Moon, we’re talking quite a machine.

You mean, like the Apollo capsule, which was capable of both flying back and forth to the moon, and to Skylab (and to meet a Soyuz)?

Quite a machine. How ever will we do it?

Alternatively, a smarter approach might be to construct one spaceship that always stays in space, looping back and forth between Earth and Moon; people, supplies, and fuel would be launched to meet the ship in Earth-orbit, but the ship itself would never come down. (This was a Werner von Braun idea.) That would mean design, engineering, and construction of a type of flying machine that has never existed before. Development of the space shuttle cost between $50 billion and $100 billion in current dollars, depending on whose estimate you believe. The idea that something more challenging, the first-ever true spaceship, can be developed for $12 billion is bunkum.

I hesitate to call ideas loopy, but this one is literally. He says that it would be smarter, then he says it would “mean design, engineering, and construction of a type of flying machine that has never existed before.” He’s criticizing a plan that doesn’t require that as being unaffordable and requiring decades, and then proposing one that’s undefined and has never been done before as somehow “smarter.” On what planet?

Again, this is not a Shuttle. This is not an airliner. It’s not a fighter jet.

It’s a supersized Apollo capsule. We have an existence proof that we know how to build them. It will be easier now than it was forty years ago, honest. If we need a separate lander to get down to the lunar surface, we know how to build those, too. It’s even possible to develop things in parallel, though I suspect that only the capsule will be required for the 2008 date, so they have something to replace the Shuttle capability for crew transfer in 2010.

And what’s going to put this Crew Exploration Vehicle into orbit? No rocket that exists in the world today is capable of lifting the Apollo capsule and Moon lander of the late 1960s. Unless the Moon-bound twenty-first-century Crew Exploration Vehicle is going to be significantly smaller than the Apollo of a generation ago–carrying just one person and no supplies–a new, very large rocket will be required.

No, Gregg, we have acquired no experience with docking vehicles, or orbital mating over the past four decades. It’s inconceivable that we could launch a capsule on one flight of a Delta or Atlas, and a service module on another flight, and hook them up in LEO. We have to redevelop Saturn.

And of course, even if one is truly unknowledgable enough to believe that, we could develop a Shuttle-derived launch vehicle with Saturn-like capability in about four years for a billion or three (though that’s a separate budget than the one for the Crew Exploration Vehicle). We’ve known how to do that since the eighties. We haven’t done it because there’s been no need, not because it can’t be done, or because it’s unaffordable.

We shouldn’t expect George W. Bush himself to know that $12 billion is not enough to develop a spaceship. We should expect the people around Bush, and at the top of NASA, to know this. And apparently they are either astonishingly ill-informed and na

In response to today’s Fox News column (it’s a reprise of this post from last night, with a new title), I got a couple emails from a Richard Lasher, who, judging by his email address, works for the government of the state of ten thousand lakes. Unfortunately, he’s no Lileks:

I do not support ANY form of HUMAN space initiative. There is nothing we can “discover” that is worth just 1 human life! We should require a 500 year moratorium on space initiatives. The funds, resources, and energy should be devoted to solving REAL problems, here on Earth! If, after the 500 years, we are not extinct, do not live in caves, or only have pre-industrial age
technology, then we should ask, “Are there any problems on Earth yet to solve?”, and finding NONE, then consider space exploration.

Don’t we have enough problems to solve? Drugs, Terrorists, HIV, SARS, children (American and worldwide) going to bed sick and hungry, an army (700,000 – 1 Million) of illegal aliens entering the U.S. every year, worldwide social issues of poverty, genocide, labor laws, environmental, and human rights issues need to be solved BEFORE “The World” should spend money on space exploration! To do otherwise is OBSCENE”. What’s the hurry? Our Sun won’t destroy the Earth for several Billion years. Perhaps, if we survive for another million years we will have learned compassion (greed will no longer be a “GOD”) and how to use the resources of the Earth to the benefit of ALL mankind, not just the rich, not just the multi-national corporations, not the warlords supported by drug money, or corrupt governments.

A few minutes later, thinking that the first one hadn’t gone through, he sent another gem (he’s apparently not familiar with the concept of a “sent” folder that allows one to resend emails). To wit (or in this case, lackwit):

I hope you got the text from my previous e-mail… It was really “good stuff” ;-}

My system prematurely sent the e-mail.

In Short. Stop human space initiatives, and focus on the real problems that we have here on Earth for the next 500 years and then see if space exploration should be a priority. What can we learn from human space travel that is worth just 1 human life? We can’t go far enough to escape the Sun’s destruction of the Earth is several billion years.

Who cares if the Earth is 13.57678765533445809987654345 Billion or Trillion years old? What can you do with than information? Who cares if the Universe was created by a “Big Bang” or a “Big Implosion”, or the result of some “String thing”? What can you do with that information? Nothing! Who cares if Mars ever had water or Microbes? There is no surface water there now! Do we plan to import subterranean water from Mars, if there is any? NO!!!! So What, if there are live microbes on Mars? Who is to say that WE did not put them there by crashing into Mars on previous landing attempts? If there are microbe fossils, WHO CARES? That would say, “We are not alone in the Universe”, if you equate human life to that of a microbe. It might be the same microbe that “got life started” on Earth, and even IF you could prove it, WHO CARES?

Space exploration is a shiny trinket, but we need to solve the tough problems here on Earth first!

“God help us” if we find anything of value on the Moon! We could have WW3 over that future resource!

It’s a treasure trove of idiocy, complete with cranky idiosynchratic capitalization and lots of exclamation marks!! So we know it’s really important, and must be true!!!!

It’s not really worth fisking, and I’m busy today, but I thought I’d throw out some chum to the sharks in the comments section. I may get around to addressing it later if the mood strikes and I find some time.

[Update]

Here’s another one, though not quite as bad, in an email with the subject “mars fantasy”:

Every one is so positive about this new space program that was proposed by our president.

Balderdash! Are these people crazy? The war on terror is till continuing and will continue through our lifetime. Along with a huge national debt which is wrongly considered by neo-conservatives to be inconsequential. One accident in several years and we change everything around. Did anyone not think the space program to be dangerous? Loss of life was to be expected and will still happen in the new program.

The Mars mission had been proposed by Lyndon Larouche many years ago. It was to cost in the neighborhood of one trillion dollars. At the time his idea was ignored and he was considered to be a nut case. Isn’t he now in jail?

The present approach is correct. The space shuttle is needed to put satellites in orbit, take them from orbit, and perform repairs. As well as for the construction of a space station; which will be necessary sooner or later. A prime example of the need for the space shuttle is the Hubble telescope which was a Major Triumph of the space program. Sadly I just learned that it has been admitted by these people that elimination of the space shuttle would mean that there would not be any more missions to the space telescope. And probably the enhanced space telescope would be canceled also. The news said that the telescope would degrade gradually and that this was very unfortunate. I call this ignorant; big time. Telescopes above the Earth’s atmosphere are a part of the effort to explore space.

I have just read a book on the history of astronomy that was published in 1957. In that book it was mentioned that Dr. Werner Von Braun had a plan for going to the moon and Mars. It consisted of a space station at 1,000 miles above the Earth that would be used for the refueling, repair and construction of vehicles for traveling to the planets. He is said to consider that travel to the planets would be a simple task once the space station was in operation. Do we have anyone of the stature of Dr. Von Braun today or is every government agency staffed by party hacks that have not been educated in technical matters. Not to mention the numerous commissions.

I am ashamed of what the present administration has done. Are there no serious dissenters?

Gotta like a guy who uses the word “balderdash.”

Even ignoring the mistaken notion that we can’t walk and chew gum, or kill terrorists and explore the solar system at the same time, among the many other problems with this is, of course, the “poisoning the well” fallacy. Just because some reprehensible person advocates a position doesn’t discredit the position. Hitler was militantly anti-smoking. I wonder if Michael thinks that therefore we should be even more firmly in favor of it?

Laughing Wolf thinks that there may be a method to Dubya’s madness in not mentioning private enterprise in tonight’s speech (beyond the fact that he gave the speech at NASA HQ). Here’s hoping he’s right, but even if it isn’t the president’s intent, it may be the effect, which is just as good if it works out.