A NASA center director has started a blog. It’s too bad there aren’t more Pete Wordens to replace existing NASA center directors. And speaking of Ames, it looks like they just lost a promising program, as a result of politics as usual.
Punish success, reward failure. Does this look like an agency that needs an emergency appropriation? If so, it’s only due to Congressional meddling and pork barreling.
This is why NASA will not get us back to the moon, or open up space.
Heinlein’s work is characterized by ordinary people cobbling together ordinary resources to do extraordinary things–like go to the moon. In Rocket Ship Galileo, three high school students and a nuclear physicist build a moon ship just because they can. It must have seemed possible in 1947, when that book came out. Then in the 1960s, NASA convinced everyone that only massive government programs could send people into space, and stories about people building spaceships in their back yards went by the wayside.
Now, finally, in the 21st century, science fact has caught up with the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. Private citizens are now building space ships for real, in large part because the winning of the Ansari X PRIZE proved it was possible.
The sad thing is that it could have been done much earlier, at least from a technological standpoint. It has been our own attitudes and policies holding us back.
My contribution to the NPRM (which the vendors themselves can’t say):
The 30 expected fatalities of the uninvolved public per million flights standard is too stringent. If six families drive from Austin to Las Cruces round trip across half Texas to go to the Spaceport to watch the dads all take a flight together, together they will expect incur 150 deaths per million flights in auto accidents.
Jon Goff says that we need to step up to the plate and comment on the latest NPRM from FAA-AST on experimental rocket licenses. Well, we don’t need moonbat comments, and it’s possible that the proposed rules are sufficiently reasonable that there is no need for further input from the industry (presumably there was a lot of industry input into their drafting). But there are just a few days left, so go read them, and comment, or forever hold your peace.
That’s how long it’s been since Kennedy’s speech in which he committed the nation to send men to the moon, and return them safely to earth, before the decade was out. A little over eight years later, the job was accomplished, with a dozen men walking on the moon over a period of three and a half years. It’s been over a third of a century since the last footprints were made.
Well, the vehicle isn’t shrinking–it’s growing, actually. But it’s SDLVness is definitely shrinking, as former astronaut Tom Jones points out:
Although it was plagued by development problems in the 1970s, the SSME has amassed more than a million seconds (more than eleven days) of reliable run time during the shuttle
…the government’s total investment in the two rockets has grown from an estimated $17 billion to more than $32 billion since its inception.
It makes one cry, when considering what we could have had instead, if a small fraction of that money been applied to actual cost reductions and reliability improvements (e.g., by putting it up as a market for delivery of water to orbit, or a prize for ten consecutive successful launches). I doubt if any of the cost-per-launch quotes for either Delta or Atlas include amortization of that outrageous welfare program. And now, having wasted all that money, they want to shut down one of them, losing the resiliency that was one of the supposed features of the program.
At least NASA is starting to come to its senses, as the once “Shuttle-derived” heavy lifter slowly morphs into an EELV-derived one, with the RS-68s, so perhaps the investment won’t be for (almost) naught.
…the government’s total investment in the two rockets has grown from an estimated $17 billion to more than $32 billion since its inception.
It makes one cry, when considering what we could have had instead, if a small fraction of that money been applied to actual cost reductions and reliability improvements (e.g., by putting it up as a market for delivery of water to orbit, or a prize for ten consecutive successful launches). I doubt if any of the cost-per-launch quotes for either Delta or Atlas include amortization of that outrageous welfare program. And now, having wasted all that money, they want to shut down one of them, losing the resiliency that was one of the supposed features of the program.
At least NASA is starting to come to its senses, as the once “Shuttle-derived” heavy lifter slowly morphs into an EELV-derived one, with the RS-68s, so perhaps the investment won’t be for (almost) naught.
…the government’s total investment in the two rockets has grown from an estimated $17 billion to more than $32 billion since its inception.
It makes one cry, when considering what we could have had instead, if a small fraction of that money been applied to actual cost reductions and reliability improvements (e.g., by putting it up as a market for delivery of water to orbit, or a prize for ten consecutive successful launches). I doubt if any of the cost-per-launch quotes for either Delta or Atlas include amortization of that outrageous welfare program. And now, having wasted all that money, they want to shut down one of them, losing the resiliency that was one of the supposed features of the program.
At least NASA is starting to come to its senses, as the once “Shuttle-derived” heavy lifter slowly morphs into an EELV-derived one, with the RS-68s, so perhaps the investment won’t be for (almost) naught.