Senate panel authorizes money for Mars mission, shuttle replacement | Hacker News Reader

Senate panel authorizes money for Mars mission, shuttle replacement

usatoday.com

100 pointsmcamaj54 comments

The worst part of this news is the continuation of the Space Launch System (SLS), which has cost over seven billion dollars (not including Ares development costs), and is expected to end up costing forty-one billion by 2025, by which time they expect to complete a total of four launches (destination: nowhere important, and probably late).

Vulcan (from ULA), New Glenn (from Blue Origin), and Falcon Heavy (from SpaceX) are all better platforms for space exploration, which could enable science (such as the Europa mission) and travel (to Mars), and cost far less than SLS (in development and $/kg to orbit). NASA should be spending money on missions, not rocket development.

The correct acronym for SLS is Senate Launch System.

Oh, are we planning to launch the Senate into LEO? That seems like a winner of an election-year policy proposal.

Vulcan, New Glenn, and the Falcon Heavy really aren't in the same league as the SLS, at least as far as lifting capacity is concerned.

I think the SLS is an excellent use of NASA's time and money at the moment. They're using proven technology to build a system that they can either:

- fall back on in the event that commercial companies aren't able to deliver something comparable

- still act as a viable launch platform if cheaper alternatives are somehow disabled (e.g. another Falcon failure)

We expect headlines to be "truthy" these days, but this bill does not actually authorize money for any Mars mission. There is no Mars mission. There is policy, and a strategic framework, and a critical decision plan, and a Congressional goal of new propulsion tech and a new spacesuit: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/334...

Great!

> • Expand the full use and life of the space station through 2024 while laying the foundation for use through 2028.

So does that mean ISS is not going to be abandoned by 2024?

Keeping something launched into LEO 1998 in operation for 26+ years seems to be pushing it. Many parts have been replaced over time, but the shell is in a very harsh environment. Hopefully with the modular nature they should be able to let old sections go.

The problem with the International Space Station (ISS) is the ISS. It was an exercise in 80s and 90s design, and you could launch an equally capable science platform at a lower cost than refurbishing the current station.

One of the main reasons why NASA is reluctant to replace the existing station is that they are afraid that the program would get cancelled, and they will be left with no station.

Also the I part of ISS kept the world space research orbiting around NASA. For example Brazil make every single research that requires a station (including vehicles, modules and medical science) use the ISS.

Without the ISS Brazil could for example attempt its own station, or help China instead.

NASA is very powerful, but if everyone help China or Russia instead, it would be bad for USA strategically.

I am not sure that many countries would want to get involved in the Chinese space program, which has always been secretive, and dominated by nationalist goals rather than scientific ones. It seems that the Russians would welcome other participants in their program, though it seems unlikely that Brazil would want to fund what appears to be a struggling and lackluster Russian program.

I am also not sure why a reduction in international collaborators for NASA would be strategically bad for the USA. I am a strong proponent of space exploration, but NASA is not an important part of US military strategy; NASA is mostly a luxury which allows the US to demonstrate its technological supremacy.

> it would be bad for USA strategically

Why?

it would be bad the US ego.

As a NASA employee, I find the phrase "NASA is very powerful" amussing in any context. That said, I think the far more likely outcome of the ISS being abandoned without a replacement would be that most countries would simply not invest at all in space-based research. The Russians just don't have the budget to build a station on their own, and I doubt the Chinese would welcome international collaboration.

> Without the ISS Brazil could for example attempt its own station, or help China instead.

Are you kidding me? Brazil does not even have launch capabilities and may never have. It's "space agency" employs 6 people, including a typist.

"Control" of space isn't a big deal as long as nations respect the no weapons treaty. Afaik it is possible for ground-based weapons to destroy satellites too. I guess a satellite that could find submarines or hidden nuke sites would be useful in peacetime, if you were planning a first strike.

My worry here is that if ISS gets shut down completely without another station being already at least partially in orbit, there won't be enough political will to start another project like that.

Historically, that's probably the most likely outcome. NASA has always faced tough political battles for funding all the way back to the middle of the Apollo program and nowhere has that been more apparent than when NASA was trying to replace one major project with another. If you're interested, John Logsdon's After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program is a fascinating--albeit depressing--book on the politics of NASA funding. It mainly focuses on Apollo and the transition to STS (and covers some of the alternative paths people at NASA wanted to pursue), but I have no doubt whatsoever that many of the same challenges will plague any ISS replacement, whatever it may be.

Here's a nice Logsdon essay on the interaction between NASA and the freshly-elected President Reagan -- https://www.gwu.edu/~spi/assets/docs/The_Survival_Crisis.rev...

That would be an ideal outcome. The ISS is a huge resource sink compared to the kinds of unmanned probes that could be launched at a fraction of its budget.

consider this: one full-size bigelow inflatable module has more volume than the 1/3 of ISS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B330.

three launches to get a bigger ISS. think about it.

But will it last long enough, will it be reliable? If so, great, take it.

Oh please. Sure, they'll authorize money for some big things right now, then in a year or two they'll change their minds (after new people are elected) and pull the plug on it. They've done it over and over.

The only way the US can get anything done in space exploration is if it can be fully funded and completed in less than 2 years. So a little probe here and there is completely doable, but a Space Shuttle replacement or manned Mars mission or any other big project is a complete no-go. It won't ever happen.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted for this. Congressional waffling, presidents wanting to make their own mark on space policy, etc. have all done this many times.

Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program

The current president killed Constellation, it wasn't Congress. The next president is likely to kill SLS, or perhaps just 'limit' it, so that SLS preserves the jobs, but loses the missions.

Congress was one of two scenarios I mentioned. The other, "presidents wanting to make their own mark on space policy", is exactly what Constellation was - both in its inception, and its cancellation.

Some people call SLS the senate launch system [1] because it's a blatant jobs program. It'll be inefficient and overprized project to deliver stuff that the private sector could handle much better.

[1] http://www.competitivespace.org/issues/the-senate-launch-sys...

"Some people" in this care are the Competitive Space Task Force, a "coalition of leading conservative and libertarian thinkers from organizations committed to creating a free and competitive market for U.S. spaceflight". As one would expect from an organization with that particular point of view, they believe the SLS is a complete boondoggle and private industry should do the work.

I wish there were a more neutral source of information. The best I have found is Wikipedia, which obviously has its own limitations. Bill Nye is for it, the Planetary Society was against it, but is no longer against it.

I don't know. Why it is necessary for US taxpayers to pay for this OR subsidize companies like SpaceX is a mystery to me. Spend the money on something that will have a greater impact on the lives of those paying the bill.

NASA paid SpaceX & OSC in advance to produce cost-effective vehicles that NASA then bought. Paying in advance to create new products like this is a standard commercial transaction, and it saved NASA a lot of money compared to buying what was already available, according to NASA.

Sounds like you don't want to fund space at all, but that's a different discussion.

It's not even unique. NASA didn't even build the F-5 rocket engines that sent men to the Moon; Rocketdyne did. That's the way government contracting has pretty much always worked. The government typically does a bunch of R&D work, and works with commercial companies to actually build things, especially in quantity.

At least they want to fund the Commercial Crew project. Space-X should have sent a manned Dragon capsule to the ISS by now. There seems to be political pressure to hold them back until ULA can catch up.

(Space-X now claims they know why they had a pad explosion. They're saying "breach in the helium system".[1] But what caused that? What part has to be changed? This just came out a few hours ago, so the details are lacking.)

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13031308/spacex-falcon-9-r...

the truth is that the crew dragon has significant issues still: http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/09/04/spacex-crew-dragon-ch...

Word on the street (read r/SpaceX) is it was caused by a failing COPV.

What is COPV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_overwrapped_pressure...

> There seems to be political pressure to hold them back until ULA can catch up.

Source? SpaceX is innovating phenomenally quickly, especially in this industry. Nothing really seems to be holding them back at the moment.

Perhaps I'm a bit cynical, but space exploration strikes me as a waste of money and energy. The universe is clearly no good for space travel, otherwise we would witness aliens visiting us. It's empty and hostile. This planet is the only realistic long-term home. Sure, space stuff gets kids into science, but I wonder how many more kids we would get into science by investing billions of dollars in education instead. We know enough about space for now. We've sent robots to Mars and the photos show it's just dust.

Right now we need to solve sustainability, global warming, super bugs, cancer, aging, friendly AI, pollution, global cooperation etc. Space can wait.

> We've sent robots to Mars and the photos show it's just dust.

We sent boats into the Atlantic, it turns out it's just water. Guess there's no point looking any farther.

Yes, I think the same about deep sea exploration.

Ya, because who needs to know about exotic microbes living in extreme conditions at the bottom of the ocean. /s

It's almost certainly irrelevant for our survival, but it's also not expensive enough for me to care.

It turns out that one really good way to solve issues like sustainability is to set a bunch of really smart folks about the difficult task of creating a sustainable ecosystem without any outside help (e.g. an atmosphere). The payoff is a set of technologies, tools, and experiences that can be used in more abundant ecosystems (e.g. planet-side). This "spinoff" effect is very well understood and documented.

Have you read this letter of note?

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Investments in space programs are investments in sustainability, global cooperation. Knowing how to seal a person in a box for months tells us what a human actually consumes. working together on joint scientific ventures brings foriegn peoples closer. This leaves out all the other cool inventions like GPS that space travel has enable thus far that improve are ability to do everything better.

This is just a repackaging of the purely economic investment observation of space programs. The government spending dollars on space has resulted in a many more dollars (or the same dollar spent many more times) on related economic interests. For example: Improved ways to track weather lead to reduced costs of flights, lead to more airline tickets purchased, lead to more travel, lead to more business trips leads to business happening.

Each step in the thread of such and example the effect gets smaller but because there are so many hard problems and so much science gets done that there are many threads.

I used to have a bicycle that I rode to work that was made using an aluminum foam that NASA developed and licensed out to companies that wanted to make light but stiff metal frames. In this case Fuji a Japanese company making racing bikes. Without it for that 3 year period I didn't have a license I would not have had job.

Luckily for all you cynics, NASA has a page made just for you! Just go to https://spinoff.nasa.gov and marvel at the literally thousands of technologies that have filtered down to society for a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Hydro/aeroponics, artificial limbs, roads, baby formula, firefighter gear, airplanes, cordless vacuums, water purification, solar cells, GPS, and simulation software is but a tiny list of the things made possible or greatly improved by NASA research and funding.

No other organization on this planet has done more to bring different scientists together with ample funding and an inspirational mandate. Biologists, physicist, material scientists, engineers, and even sociologists have come together under one roof resulting in a dizzying list of technologies that would have taken much longer to hit the market or never made at all. NASA is a multidisciplinary research and technology powerhouse unrivaled in human history. Space is just what brought everyone together.

But maybe I'm biased ;)

But would NASA out-perform a research university with the same budget, tasked with addressing the aforementioned problem/solutions directly rather than incidentally?

Yes. NASA is drastically different from an academic institution and the difference in administrative culture alone allows it to be a more effective multidisciplinary research organization working on everything from pure science to industrial ready technologies. For example, Black and Decker developed the first cordless vacuum after their engineers got an idea while working on cordless drills with NASA in the same research center where they were working on Apollo 11+ and photovoltaics. Universities are simply not made for this purpose, since they focus on basic research and education.

Furthermore, much of NASA's success is due to the mix of scientists from different fields, universities, and business working on one problem. When the best of the best come together, it results in a cross polinatiom of ideas. It's not just being in the same building or sharing a cafeteria while working on disparate grants, but a day to day sharing of knowledge to tackle a single problem.

This is a really well-informed comment and I wanted to say something else in support of it.

A Caltech scientist who had worked with DOE and NASA labs made an offhand comment about the kind of work that those labs are suited to do that stuck with me - he said they should be trying to solve problems that are "national lab hard" - kind of a play on NP-hard.

What he meant is that these environments are suited to solving complex cross-discipline engineering/science problems ("make the right measurements to understand the climate system", or "find the processes and materials to make air travel safer", or "put a huge infrared telescope in space").

These are not problems that are suited to a university research structure. They don't get solved with $300K/year grants, small collections of discipline-focused PIs, and transient grad students.

Think of how many prerequisite advancements are needed for deploying GPS. Now task a team with developing only GPS but not anything that might enable safer launches or better solar cells in space. They eventually develop a GPS solution but in order for it to be as good as what we got they would need to be part of a group full of interdisciplinary teams that would look allot like NASA.

Or if you prefer a programming analogy, what if all software teams only built what they were explicitly tasked for and could not collaborate on the tools used. Managers _might_ get their deliverables faster but I suspect by not developing tools incidentally we leave out future productivity gains.

Nasa doesn't have publish-or-perish.

What happened to Venus is a pretty good motivator for sustainability and limiting global warming, no?

How about the Earth-observing satellites that are monitoring key environmental variables (http://oco2.jpl.nasa.gov), or the exoplanet spectroscopy studies that will see how common different atmospheres are (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/habex/) ?

Those pesky observations are why planetary science funding got cut.

I'm a researcher who works on fighting antimicrobial resistant bacteria.

The reason I got into science is because space is cool. Also, we've sent robots to Mars and the photos show it's just dust...and maybe water.

> Perhaps I'm a bit cynical, but space exploration strikes me as a waste of money and energy.

Yes, because the "defense" budget is a much better use of resources. The NASA budget is a rounding error in comparison.

There is enough money. Money dedicated to space exploration is well spent.

> We know enough about space for now

Says who? Perhaps you need to do some more research.

> There is enough money. Money dedicated to space exploration is well spent.

How do you figure? We have plenty to research on earth for a fraction the cost. What makes you say space exploration will give a better return?

Are you suggesting that we should just stay here, forever?

Our curious nature has always led us to explore the next frontier, historically speaking.

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