U.S. President to sign space policy directive Monday | Hacker News Reader

U.S. President to sign space policy directive Monday

spacenews.com

41 pointsdaegloe63 comments

Third president in a row to offer something like this related to the Moon.

Obama: He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars.

Bush: President Bush has unveiled a new vision for space exploration, calling on NASA to "gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own."

In other words - same old unless $ is put in the budget and approved.

Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle. Hardly sustainable. Is there a reason why we can't let NASA be NASA and pursue objectives they want without a butting President or Congress?

I am curious how other countries operate their space programs that gives them some autonomy from voting cycles. You cannot run a space program with budgets and priorities changes every 4 years.

Yes you can and NASA does this today. Otherwise we wouldn’t have any of the mars rovers or the late Cassini Saturn probe.

Cassini-Huygens wasn't purely NASA. The ESA and ISA were heavily involved. The Huygens probe was purely European in origin.

Doesn't really take away from your argument, but it's worth mentioning.

Certainly. Despite those successes however, the political and budget process still has a significant effect on NASA operations. A number of past programs--including unmanned ones--have been cancelled or altered due to those pressures. Others have been killed during budget battles while still in the early planning stages. Even during the Apollo era, NASA has had to very carefully pick its battles. And it's not always successful. But it's not a zero sum game: NASA can achieve major successes, while still being tied down by politics.

Speaking in very broad terms, unmanned missions tend to have a significantly lower public profile up until the moment they reach their destination. Unmanned missions can die during budget battles, but that's usually the extent of things.

Manned missions, on the other hand, have a much higher profile throughout the entire process. They can take longer, are more expensive, and require additional political support from politicians who will in all likelihood not be in office to take credit for the mission's eventual success. There are also far greater PR incentives for an incoming administration to dabble with NASA policy in order to differentiate itself from the previous administration. It's relatively high profile, makes a new POTUS appear "presidential" and forward-thinking, and comes with very little political risk compared to other federal programs they could touch. Explaining that manned spaceflight missions are developed over the course of years, and that bold new policy proclamations are counterproductive is a tricky political argument to make. If someone attacks them for the policy changes, they get to just argue that NASA is still getting money and "working towards the future." Whether the changed goals ever come to fruition is largely secondary.

Which sucks, but it's the nature of long-term programs. JFK pushed NASA to the moon, but even if he hadn't been assassinated, he still wouldn't have been in office to for the moon landing. Nixon never once publicly acknowledged JFK's role. When there was a push to name the Apollo 11 craft after JFK, Nixon's congressional relations assistant Bryce Harlow quipped "we have gone far enough in ‘Kennedyizing’ the mission" while another senior advisor, John Ehrlichman noted "such an action would win us neither friends in Congress nor votes in 1972,” suggesting “fall prey to this and the next step will be renaming the moon because NBC thinks it would be a good idea." H.R. Haldeman killed the proposal, literally double underlining the point (Logsdon 14).

Despite everything that's been thrown in their way, and how election-oriented thinking can impact its missions, NASA has managed to continue pushing scientific boundaries since the beginning. That's damned impressive.

- Logsdon, John. After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program.

The Russian space agency is semi-commercial at this point. The Chinese space agency is run by the military. Not that election cycles would be a problem in either case regardless.

But he real answer as pointed out by the sibling is to use a more academic model like NSF and NIH does, rather than flagship missions. Look at how the Discovery program authorizes planetary probes, for example. That approach could be done for flagship and human missions too.

NASA isn't a high priority budget item.

China is due to do a few interesting things in space over the next couple years. After that priorities are likely to change.

Because without a butting President or Congress creating pork for their constituents, NASA would not exist.

You’re referring to the pork barrel politics analogy. Are you saying NASA programs are the pork in that analogy?

Yes.

NASA was created to fight communists. Now that there are no more communists, NASA continues to exist only as a form of corporate welfare.

Congress cares far more about where NASA sources from, then it does about what NASA does. The science (Which half of Congress doesn't believe in) is just an accidental side effect of keeping aerospace jobs in Georgia, Indiana, Arkansas, etc.

So in your opinion there are no benefits or insufficient benefits to justify the government taking an active interest and investing money in ensuring that the US has good continuing access to space that is at least somewhat under our own control? (As opposed to potentially under the control of governments of other, possibly enemy, countries)?

This is a loaded question.

1. I believe that the Department of State's obsession with maintaining the American empire through globe-spanning military dominance is insane.

2. If I did not believe that #1 is insane, yes, I would say that NASA is playing an important role in the US offense industry. (Maybe? Who knows, it's all classified.)

3. Most of the people on HN who strongly support more funding for NASA do so out of either their scientific work, Star Trek romanticism, or both. Military applications rank a distant third.

You're right, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The alternative to NASA being used as a source of pork in budget negotiations isn't an efficient allocation of those funds for NASA science missions minus waste. Instead, the most likely alternative is likely a much smaller NASA or even no NASA, period.

Americans are proud of NASA, but in more of a broad, general sense than anything concrete. That pride doesn't translate very well into increased monetary support. On the contrary, even though every dollar is spent "here on Earth" (there are no orbital superstores, after all), there's still a pervasive attitude that the money is being sent "elsewhere." It's always been this way; just weeks after Apollo 11, a Newsweek poll showed that "56% [of 1,321 Americans with household incomes ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 a year] think the government should be spending less money on space exploration, and only 10% think the government should be spending more money." That was at the height of moon fever, when Americans were giddy with a sense of accomplishment. Give voters a binary choice, and space funding will always lose.

For congress, think of NASA as a big bag of money they'd love to play with. The public sort-of loves NASA enough to give it a thin safety margin, to the extent that no politician wants to be the heartless bastard who snuffed out everybody's childhood dreams, but not enough to give it much additional support. Many members of congress of even agree with NASA's importance in principle. NASA is a big, bold example of American accomplishment and ingenuity. But they've all got their own ideas on how some of NASA's funding could be used elsewhere.

The "pork" aspect, even if it means continuing with SLS development despite not having a clear purpose and mission for it, gives NASA a base of political support that it'd otherwise lack. It might mean less science as a result, but that's not the bargain being offered to NASA. They certainly wouldn't get more money if they could eliminate the pork and other inefficiencies forced on them.

STS and the Space Shuttle were a perfect example of the kind of faustian bargains NASA had to accept. Originally, NASA had no post-Apollo plans because they didn't want to lose focus. It wasn't until 1968 that things changed. Eventually, the post-Apollo plans were limited to STS, and even then, it was the promise of the Space Shuttle being able to perform national-security missions that helped it squeak by. That promise led to some pretty significant design compromises NASA didn't want, but they didn't have any other option. The alternative was no shuttle, not a better shuttle.

NASA exists within a very particular political and budgetary paradigm that is not friendly to it. It's easy to imagine a better NASA. Regrettably, that's not a NASA that's on the table. Instead, we have NASA as it is. It could be better, but it's accomplished a hell of a lot while managing to survive.

If you're at all interested in NASA's early battles after Apollo, I'll recommend (yet again) John Logsdon's books. They're an incredible insight into the challenges the public doesn't really see, and helped me rethink some of my earlier antagonism towards the Space Shuttle and aspects of NASA's manned space program.

My more cynical belief is that the issue is intent - specifically that these moves are not intended to create functioning space programs, but to move money to interested parties and look good in the news.

> Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle.

With adequate funding, it's not that bad. Just build modular ships, probes and landers. You can get more done by custom building, but a generic backbone can resist political changes.

If the focus goes back to robotic exploration, your lander can, at least, carry the robot. The same propulsion system that would take a crew to Mars could take a small probe to Pluto and slow it down so it can enter orbit. Or drop a couple smaller probes on its way out.

The design of the ISS changed as it was being built. We can certainly do the same with a craft that can leave Earth orbit.

There's not much the president can do about that since it's up to Congress to allocate the funds. House terms are only two years long, and if you allocate funds to this kind of thing you have nothing to show for it in the next election cycle unless the project brings jobs to your district.

That's absolutely not true, especially when the president and congress are of the same party. The President has the veto so congress and the president have to come to an agreement to pass a budget.

In theory, sure. But Congress packs everything into one bill and puts it on the president's desk. Realistically, he can't not sign it without paying an enormous political price.

Here is Obama's space fact sheet

https://web.archive.org/web/20081107061417/https://barackoba...

    Human spaceflight is important to America’s political, economic, technological,
    and scientific leadership. Barack Obama will support renewed human exploration
    beyond low earth orbit. He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the 
    Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more 
    distant destinations, including Mars.
    
    - pg 3 paragraph 4

I'm not criticizing Obama or Bush or Trump.

It's Congress. I'm sure every president since Nixon wants to go back to the Moon.

But again it's Congress. Allocate the $ and we will go back. Hopefully this time it's for real. I'm not holding my breath.

We'll see.

I didn't think you were criticizing, I just find the source material and the homogeneity of their promises interesting.

Gotcha. I always get excited when they do this but have to remind myself that Congress has to come up with the $. Here's hoping.

Congress came up with the money. And forced NASA to spend it on the SLS to ensure we'd never explore deep space.

I'm not sure we can cut taxes and go to the moon. Unfortunately most Americans want low taxes over much anything else including their own healthcare. It's good for your health not to hold your breath.

Obama explicitly stopped an effort to get to the Moon with a massively ignorant “been there, done that” (exact quote!) attitude. If he signed legislation authorizing it, it was due to being part of a huge authorization bill for which space policy is not important enough to quibble over.

The brief history is that NASA has a legacy of not taking cost effective routes to exploration and rather preferring the too expensive to sustain Apollo model. The first George Bush gave a directive to get to Mars. The massive program that they came up with would have bankrupted the economy. Congress instead forbade NASA from spending any money towards people to Mars.

Clinton took the focus away from destinations and supported the ISS as a post-cold war olive branch to Russia.

George W Bush lifted that ban and gave the same goal towards boots on Mars with explicit direction to pursue a commercial space settlement approach that through cost sharing and reuse would have kept total cost reasonable and bootstrapped a self sufficient extraterrestrial economy. That directive was ignored and we got what NASA literally described as “Apollo on steroids”.

Obama killed that albatross without a replacement or any intention of providing one other than giving them permission to do something like visit an asteroid, as pointless an exercise as that would be, just so long as it could be done within a frozen budget, meaning minimal if any tech development (a directive to do tech development and a budget was provided, but it was substitutive not additional and eventually gutted anyway). Congress overruled and started giving their own directions for NASA, including the pork driven SLS that serves no purpose really.

Now Trump seems to be sending the pendulum back in the humans to Moon, Mars, and beyond direction. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets unwound by a democratic successor.

If this seems rather political, it is only the mundane politics of traditional party bases and campaign contributions. There is a lot of overlap between NASA and defense contractors, typically republican supporting, and they stand to benefit directly from an Apollo like approach. Lots of waste to profit off of in the traditional NASA model. The saddest story for me is that George W Bush actually seemed to care and DIDN’T authorize the traditional republican battlestar galactica approach but rather tried to direct NASA towards the SpaceX model of lean efficient reusable commercial tech, not government programs. But he was ignored by a zealous NASA administrator with a “NASA glory days” obsession and congressional pork. Space Policy isn’t exactly what the president should be focusing on, especially with two wars going on at the time, so presidents tend to get their directives used by others with opposing agendas.

Edit: down voters explain yourselves? I mention political parties only because the answer to the question involves politics. I tried to be explicitly non partisan about it. I worked at NASA during the second Bush and Obama years and saw directly the internal policy considerations as they were made. The above constitutes my high level summary of that.

>It’ll be interesting to see how it gets unwound by a democratic successor.

After what happened last time I prefer to count my chickens after they're inaugurated

Didn't down-vote (or upvote for that matter), but I think this might be glossing over some details. My understanding is that Constellation was ridiculously over-budget, behind schedule and there was no reasonable way it would accomplish it's stated mission without a massive influx of cash. The Augustine Committee results were pretty damning. There's no way the program would have made it to the moon, let alone mars. Keeping Constellation running would have been a classic sunk-cost problem.

That said, while Constellation was canned, large components of it were/are reused by the Space Launch System (SLS), including the Orion crew capsule and Aries I/V rockets. So in reality Constellation lives on as SLS, albeit with a much more vague goal now. Cynics could argue it's even more of a jobs program than Constellation was.

As an aside, what'd you do at NASA? I'm super jealous! Thanks for taking the time to share your summary of the events, I largely agreed with what you wrote :)

Program support for planetary science at the HQ level. Great place to work in the sense that I imagine Google to be — I was never the smartest person in the room.

Here is Bush's promise:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040116071139/https://www.white...

    Third, America will return to the Moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020 
    and use it as a stepping stone for more ambitious missions. A series of
    robotic missions to the Moon, similar to the Spirit Rover that is sending
    remarkable images back to Earth from Mars, will explore the lunar surface
    beginning no later than 2008 to research and prepare for future human
    exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, humans will conduct extended
    lunar missions as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for
    increasingly extended periods.
    
    - Third bullet under President Bush's Vision for U.S. Space Exploration

NASA actually has enough money.

SpaceX Falcon 9 FT (mostly re-usable) 50,000 lbs to low earth orbit (LEO) Cost: Substantially less than $62M with re-usablity

SpaceX Falcon Heavy (mostly re-usable) 140,000 lbs to LEO Cost: $90M

Blue Origin New Glenn (mostly re-usable) 100,000 lbs to LEO Cost: expected under $100M.

SpaceX BFR (fully re-usable) 330,000 lbs to LEO Cost: Expected less than Falcon 9

NASA SLS (Space Launch System) (disposable, destroyed every launch) Block 1 (2020): 150,000 lbs to LEO

Block 1B (2022): 230,000 lbs to LEO

Block 2 (2029): 290,000 lbs to LEO

Cost: $500M+ per launch $1B+ a year in operational costs (for 1-2 launches a year) $20B+ in developmental costs

NASA is blowing at least $3B a year paying Boeing and other contractors to build the SLS when far cheaper alternatives are either available or imminent. The cost of your Lunar or Mars exploration program is directly determined by your launch costs, and Congress has forced NASA to choose the most expensive possible launch system. Because it's built in Alabama. Using commercial launch capacity to operate the manned space program would not only free up billions a year, but accelerate it (the SLS won't be carrying humans until mid 2022 at the earliest).

$3B a year could pay for a half dozen to a dozen Falcon Heavy manned launches a year with capsules, support, everything, starting in late 2019. They could be used to assemble lunar and mars size transit ships in orbit, and actually send people to the moon and mars before 2022. It could also pay for as many as six huge interplanetary robotic probes, every year. We could re-visit every planet yearly with ever more capable scientific instruments. Or a combination of the manned and robotic plans.

But instead, the huge flow of money keeps the congressional delegation in Alabama secure in their seats, while crushing the dream of any actual NASA manned space program to the moon or mars ever. The SLS has missed every schedule date, and it's really unlikely congress is going to fully fund the program when the SLS is working. And the SLS spending is gutting actually super cost effective robotic probe spending.

Even if funded, NASA's plan never has more than 2 launches per year, and it's first Mars launch is planned for 2033. If nothing else ever slips.

Your numbers are not quite right because you're mixing up the "let's expend the rocket" payload with the "let's not expend the rocket" prices for F9 and FH.

Nope, the F9 expendable price was $63M before it was ever re-usable. They just haven't cut prices from re-usability (yet). The FH price is actually unclear, but it appears it won't have an expendable version. It's got too much payload capacity as re-usable.

But again, it doesn't make much difference. SpaceX will definitely put a pound of cargo in orbit for less than 1/10th the cost of the SLS and may as little as 1/20th the cost.

In any rational world, you'd rather launch your space vehicle in two parts and mate them in orbit than spend over 10x as much to launch your vehicle already assembled. But in reality, the SLS won't be able to launch interplanetary space vehicles in a single launch. Like Apollo, even their Lunar transports will need some in-space assembly.

And if BFR is actually built and fully re-usable, the cost for 300,000+ lb payloads is going to be less than the cost of a Falcon 9.

The current price list for F9 on the SpaceX website is $62mm for up to 5.5 mT to GTO. The expendable performance is 8.3 mT up to GTO. The price for that launch is not given, but it's likely more than the FH $90mm up-to-8.0 mT to GTO launch price. And again, FH doesn't have a price given for > 8.0 mT to GTO. http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities.

I totally agree that it doesn't make much difference to your argument. However, it wouldn't cost you anything to say the actual numbers published by SpaceX on their website.

Politics aside. American people need a new dream to strive for. Without major infrastructure construction going on, people will soon find them living in the past in a few year. Whether to go back to "Moon" is not important but we need to go to "Somewhere".

Something to strive for? Perhaps eliminating poverty, or malnutrition? We don't need to go to the moon for that, we just need to go south of Market Street.

If those goals are too pedestrian, we could also aim for shifting our economy to a closed-loop ecologically-sensitive system. It would be far more useful then going to the moon - it would pay farm more technological, and social dividends, and it is the best ROI step that we could take to ensure our continued survival as a civilized species.

But perhaps these goals are beyond our capabilities...

There are other ways to keep people from living in the past other than say, going to the moon.

* High speed internet service everywhere in the country.

* Cheap access to telemedicine to help those that can't get to a doctor.

* High speed rail

(etc)

I'd love to see a usable intercity passenger rail system of any kind. We could build out a low speed network for a fraction of the HSR cost and then up the speed on routes where it makes sense on a piecemeal basis.

High speed rail doesn't work that way. You have to build it as high speed from the get-go, as there are dozens of non-trivial requirements which must be met around the infrastructure in order for it to work.

It would be like building four lane arterial road through your city and thinking you could just "up the speed" later on and suddenly have an interchange-access highway.

I understand you'd have to lay new track when you wanted to add HSR. The point is you have an existing network people can use to get to your HSR endpoints.

Laying the track isn't the hard part. The hard parts are securing right-of-way; eliminating grades, curves, and level crossings; and keeping the track-way secure from people, livestock, wildlife, and adverse weather.

Right... which is what I meant by "laying the track". If it was just a question of putting down rails it wouldn't be very expensive.

Not for plain old steel-on-ties rails, no. It's far easier to upgrade the rails than the right-of-way.

You might as well bury dark fiber somewhere in there, no matter what else you do. Use one strand for signaling, and lease the rest to backhauler telecoms.

What is wrong with airplanes?

High speed rail makes sense on the coasts. Making a train from New York City to Boston is a good idea (guess what, we have one, and it is the only Amtrak route that is profitable). However a high speed train from New York to LA would be a trip far too long for people to willingly take.

The point is don't try to make a solution fit all needs. Rail in the US is the best in the world in large part because it doesn't deal with humans. This allows efficiency that you can't get when dealing with people. (people don't like sitting in a siding for an hour waiting for an oncoming trail so you have to build more track...)

Frankly, airplanes suck. You spend endless time in security lines, get packed in like sardines during the flight, and have stringent restrictions on what kind of luggage you can take, how large it is, and how heavy.

Why do people assume HSR will not have TSA lines? All it will take is one credible threat. Indeed, given the inevitability of a threat emerging, it seems obvious that a TSA line will be part of the model from day one.

People will probably end up "packed like sardines" on HSR as well, as HSR will inevitably have to be made to be economical.

The economics are different for trains, though. The economic benefits of shrinking seat sizes are far smaller. And no, the TSA line is not inevitable.

Other countries that deal with terrorism operate train systems without people groping your privates. Yet another problem with airplanes is a tiny bomb can cause explosive decompression. That's not a worry with trains - you're not going to kill 300 people with a bomb you can hide in your underwear.

Explosive decompression is a myth. Been debunked many times, including a commercial flight that landed after a large part of the top came off (I think some people blew out - but this is a failure that isn't unique to planes so I won't count it).

We have the TSA because people are afraid, and we don't travel by plane enough to care.

> Why do people assume HSR will not have TSA lines?

Because in places where HSR does currently exist, there are no significant security lines.

Trains have fundamental safety advantages compared to planes, so the payoff of an attack is less.

Airplanes are an extremely energy inefficient means of transportation. Lots of carbon emissions. It doesn't strike me as the transportation of the future.

Actually they do surprisingly well. They are better than all but the most efficient cars (other than maybe Tesla you cannot buy them in the US) for getting a single person across the country. Any since people are time sensitive most peopl are willing to pay the price.

It seems Americans like to compete against someone. I don't think improving infrastructure will be motivating. It needs to be something where they can win.

Most people like to compete to varying degrees. You see it in: video games, sports, science, business, relationships, driving, lifestyle choices, and so on.

As nations are made up of people, nations also like to compete with other nations. It's not even remotely unique to the US. You've seen it persistently across eg Europe for the last thousand years, from small to large nations.

> people will soon find them living in the past

Sorry, but all that MAGA stuff is pretty much this, but based on an imaginary past that never was.

If anyone is into Space and Politics/Policy, the Planetary Society has semi-recently started doing monthly "Space Policy Edition" episodes. Here's the most recent:

http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/201...

They dig deep into the current political landscape and how that affects current and future funding of various projects at NASA. Recently they started doing interviews with people which is usually quite interesting too.

Baby Boomers giving up on space exploration will be one of their many, great embarrassments.

This generation's list isn't short, either. While progress continues to be made on many fronts, quite a few things stick out like a sore thumb over the last 40 years: tax cuts that pay for themselves, Clinton's impeachment (from either side's viewpoint), dot-com bubble, tax cuts that pay for themselves, Iraq, massive deficits, great recession, insane partisan gridlock, tax cuts that pay for themselves.

I think our money might be better spent on multiple machine only missions that accomplish some difficult task through automation on the surface of the moon. For the cost of sending a few people we could probably pay for machine only missions that build structures, drill functional water wells and grow food.

Those kind of things would prepare us for future colonies off this planet wherever they might be. And we'd gain a lot of value in important emerging industries that could be quickly applied to great benefit here.

I don't see any mention of funding in this article. Any such directive is ineffective without a commitment towards increasing funding for NASA over the short and long term.

The President doesn't fund things; the Congress does (which is part of the reason that the way Americans look at their president as a kind of elected king is just so weird: he's simply the guy charged with executing the laws as they are written, not the guy charged with writing them).

The President's ability to veto and the vice-president's tie breaking vote on the Senate give the President a great deal of potential to affect the legislation that Congress passes. The President could certainly make a commitment to increased funding for NASA by threatening to veto any spending bill that doesn't boost NASA's funding.

NASA already has enough funding to do lunar and mars manned missions now.

Instead they've decided to build the SLS, which is a huge pork filled gift to the state of Alabama and contractors like Boeing. The SLS will cost over $10,000 per lb of cargo to lift things into orbit, and that doesn't count it's $20B+ in development costs. With development and annual infrastructure operating costs, the first 10 launches of the SLS are going to cost well over $30B.

The Falcon Heavy's first launch is January, two years ahead of the SLS. It's cost per pound of cargo is going to be close to $500/lb. And it's just the first of a series of privately developed heavy lift launch vehicles under development (Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin New Glenn, BFR, etc), all of which will be at least 10x less expensive than the SLS because none of them are going to be burned up and tossed in the ocean after every flight!

Given the highly controversial nature of Trump's executive orders, often escalating into violence, I thought that this was a tabs-versus-spaces thing.

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