How to Avoid Repeating the Debacle That Was the Space Shuttle
discovermagazine.com
discovermagazine.com
That core problem is misalignment of incentives. Or in short, politics. When you've got a public budget and your goals are political ones, you're going to pursue a specific set of capabilities and policies that help your political career. This is true from the President all the way down to the lowest level of managers at NASA. I think the real cost, and thus tragedy, of this era is the thousands upon thousands of good engineers who were sucked up into NASA because they believed in the dream of human space flight, and were never able to accomplish much over the courses of their careers.
The solution to this problem is very simple: No government agency with control over space. Outsource everything. If government wants to fund scientific research or exploration, great- give grants to institutions that then have effectively complete autonomy. For instance, JPL, could be a separate institute with little connection to government other than primarily getting its funding from the government. If politicians want to send a probe to Mars, let JPL be the master contractor, where JPL hires the scientists, while subcontracting out the design, development and production to private entities.
SpaceX is much more efficient getting to space, cost wise and reliability wise (I believe) than NASA ever has been, and they are using (IIRC) a discarded russian design, off the shelf as the basis for their system (though certainly they've done a lot of engineering work.)
The commercial space industry in the USA has suffered under the government control over all things space since the beginning. I remember when Richard Branson-- the founder of Virgin Galactic, and the one who funded the design and development of SpaceShipTwo was prevented from seeing the design he'd paid for because he was a british national!
In fact, I'm certain that the only reason Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic were successful is that their "launch" requires only a runway, and thus they can easily do it from just about any country. Previously, NASA and the FAA has made it very difficult for private entities to pursue space access, by denying them the necessary permits to do testing.
After the X prize was won, when commercial operation plans were announced, there was a flurry of congressional noise about regulating the space industry ("for safety" of course.) I think the only reason that died down is that there is literally nothing stopping Virgin Galactic from flying off and launching from a newly crated "space port" in, say, Panama. (Well, except that the government apparently considers their designs "National Security Secrets".)
It is time to dismantle NASA. Let the capitalists pursue profit in space, and government can get whatever it needs launched (or built) by the same contractors under whatever terms the government wants-- but at much lower costs.
Blackwater.
However, since there is a lot of interesting exploration and science that NASA could continue to do that no profit incentive exists for (deep space probes, space telescopes, etc.), so recommending the complete dismantlement of NASA goes too far.
NASA should fund commercial launch providers and buy launch services, and focus its substantial budgets on some really exciting exploration.
Launching things into orbit is a solved problem, no need to solve it again. There is an infinity of unsolved problems NASA could attack once they get over their fixation with building new rockets.
Demonstrating the capability of private industry is SpaceX, who spent $250M in NASA funds to develop and fly a large launch vehicle and a capsule. (econgeeker's details are wrong but the low cost is correct, and Orbital is the firm that is using Russian technology)
$250M is nothing compared with the $20000M NASA planned to spend on its launch vehicle and capsule program.
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Launchers_Access_to_Space/SEMEUB...
A lot of the historical "voyages of discovery" were financed by rich people looking for glory, newspapers looking for exclusive stories, and companies looking for good PR.
And I would like to see the cost comparisons, but I'd bet that just as pan-oceanic trips were an order of magnitude more expensive than explorations before, space journeys (especially manned), would require an exceptional economic incentive to be at all viable.
OK, you can privatize that. But the same problems will apply. Look at Australia's military acquisitions. Every vehicle we buy costs 10X the MOTS price, because there's always a requirement "modifications for Australian conditions". The private operators read this as "complete idiots in command", and charge accordingly. A privatized space sector would work the same way - stupid government orders will get stupid prices.
PS: Feathers don't burn up on rentry but bricks do. The shuttle was far to close to a brick to get back without a lot of trauma.
That would push the costs down by a factor of ten, at least. For man-rated space flight!
What is the NASA track record for big projects that push costs down?
(Didn't Burt Rutan have some story of when he built some high altitude air plane on an order -- and the NASA space suit integration team was larger than the team to design and build the aircraft?)
I don't think so. Those 7 people need all the "junk" up there too. it's their living quarters, their food, their science experiments, etc.
Maybe you launch it separately. But don't forget about the cost of that.
(NASA is not noted for going factors of ten less than normal costs.)
PS: The space shuttle's never left the R&D stage. Practicly every flight change some significant internal system. If they had simply said "these are good enough" then the program would have been far cheaper.
Sigh. To repeat a trivial point for the third time...
You have the opinion that NASA after 1970 could do any large project and push costs down by a factor of ten.
If a serious argument could be made, then one of the NASA fan boys would have posted it...
So if there was some need for thousands of people to be sent into space per year then NASA could design and operate a fairly low cost per launch system. However, once they started operating highly capable but delicate system added to the fact there was little value in sending more than a token number of people into space in a given year then costs are going to spiral out of control even if the desgin was reasonable.
PS: I have even heard the argument that NASA benefited from the amount of spectacle involved in the shuttle program. If they had built something that looked and operated like a 747 nobody would have cared but build something that takes thousands of controlled explosions and then sit’s on a huge ball of fire into space and wow you must be doing something important.
For the second time to you (4th time overall) -- uh... no. That account is less than two weeks old. I am probably being trolled.
Anyway, you might think that government organizations are always full of bloat but compare the SSA with your 401k and you will find they are vary low overhead. The problem with government organizations is they tend to make really big a stupid decisions for political reasons, aka if SSA had invested in a mix of stocks and bonds vs. US treasury bonds people would be talking about how over funded it was right now. Instead the SSA “surplus” was used to subsidize government borrowing and treated as yet another agency.
PS: I have 64 Karma on a 2 week old act that may suggest something about my activities. If you actually have something meaningful to say feel free to support your argument, but right now I am feeling trolled.
A link re the Shuttle: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/lunch-wi...
Bye.
Now run the numbers for a version of that a reasonable person would actually be willing to live in for a full year and perhaps he would be willing to discuss it. However, a moon base is probably both cheaper and safer.
I don't entirely agree. With a space program that "looked and operated like a 747" - assuming you mean a relatively routine and reliable spaceplane where the launches are less of a spectacle - you'd get a lot of people and hardware in space, and people would have cared about that.
I guess it's harder to get people excited about results than about spectacles, but it can be done, and it lasts longer.
It's like being asked to design a 20 seater minivan. Then discovering your only customers are Mormon families on the school run and the Army - then trying to build something that fits both their requirements.
Then being told that it must use a engine built in Hawaii and be assembled in Alaska.
The agency, contractor or multiple contractors should be asked to produce a number of prototypes over a period of time. What design of reusable spacecraft is the most effective, safe and economical? Who knows? No one has ever done this before! Let's design a process to find out. We shouldn't just punt and cross our fingers.
The common counter argument is that this approach is too expensive but in practice experience shows it's much more expensive not to.
Because that has worked so well with defense contracting.
All you end up with is 1-2 corporations with the knowledge necessary to compete on space projects, and contracts that alternate back and forth between the two, and a budget that includes not only money to go to space but also money to fund a set of corporate executives and corporate lobbying and corporate private jets and so on.
Highest paid person at NASA - about $200,000/year (flies coach)
Highest paid person at Lockheed - about $50,000,000/year (doesn't even count the corporate jets)
A great many things the government does follow a similar over-promising, under-delivering pattern. The notion that perception is reality and a loss of confidence is the worst thing that can ever happen conspire to stifle public questioning.
We see it with Afghanistan, stimulus spending, TARP. As justifications don't pan out, something else is used to justify things.
Of course, the real root cause is that those paying for things are far removed from the decision making process. If voters individually decided whether they were going to be taxed $500 a year for continuing the shuttle or $100 a year for returning to disposable rockets, this program would have been killed long ago.
But everything is put in one big pot and dollars borrowed to conceal the actual ultimate pain. There are so many deceptive aspects to how this operates, its difficult to describe or even grasp.
If that is correct, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much with such limited resources?
NASA could definitely be run better but let's compare apples to apples. I'm sure any given engineer at SpaceX has a computer on his desk superior to the entire world's computational capacity at the time the shuttle was designed.
People are not comparing SpaceX of today to NASA of 30 years ago.
They're comparing contemporary NASA to contemporary SpaceX and finding NASA is lacking.
They didn't have to include secret USAF, CIA, AAA etc requirements in the design.
They had a simple goal - get payload to LEO cheaply - not a nebulous goal of 'make America look good in space'
They did have to build components. Want to know why the shuttle (actually all space missions) took off in florida, were controlled in Alabama, and landed in California. Senators from Alabama, California, and Florida wrote their tender that way.
There is secret then there is ITAR. A lot of astromechanics, guidance and tracking is still under the control of the DOD. They'd have a hard time not going through them.
Goals, just like the, now, International Space Station have a ways of changing. The US thought they could build a permanently manned space station by themselves and even that proved too much.
Besides, you are incorrect: Atlantis just landed back in Florida, as did most of the shuttles. CA was just the backup landing site, and they often waited a day for weather in Florida to be good rather than land in CA to avoid the hassle of transporting the shuttle cross-country.
According to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Landing_Facility, the runway was too good at its job and ended up breaking landing gear. So they spent 6 years sanding it down. But when I was a kid and asked why they landed all the way over there, someone at NASA told me it was the unpredictable Florida weather.
Its obvious that even software development is bloated beyond belief with no pressure to actually be responsible with the people's money.
From what I can observe, there are plenty of people that believe what politicians say. And that's a far more dangerous thing than listening to all the conflicting superficial voices of the media. There are just as many voices in the media that claim more government is the answer to every problem as say more government is bad.
Government is perfectly efficient at spending money on its pet projects and pet people. 100% of the money go to them.
But what the people who pay for this massive mess care about is what matters.
Of course there are portions of government programs that aren't working right. Like all things. I know mostly the healthcare world, so I'll draw an example from there:
Medicare uses about 3-5% of its money on overhead. Private insurers use between 15-30%. The insurance company has really well designed brochures, snappy sales pitches, and coverage that varies in quality so broadly that it is unbelievable. On the whole medicare is far more responsible with the money it receives, and provides significantly more efficient service.
How does this jibe with the world view you are presenting?
It makes an easy argument for "debacle," but omits the difficult "how to avoid" part.
That said, I do hope, now that the program is gone and the cheer-leading apparatus can (hopefully) no longer feed on it, that the program can come to be analyzed with reference to its poor safety, limited capability, high cost, and needless complexity, rather than with reference to nostalgia and whatever other reality-distortion field that was present that allowed it to receive so little critical attention in the popular mind.
The author definitely has an axe to grind. "Failure" is a qualitative assessment, though it's objectively true that the program underperformed on the bases listed above.
Is it really that wrong to try and get kids excited about engineering and science?
Though how we could ever expect federal government programs be efficient and cost-effective is beyond me, when the work is being done by the governmental agency itself.
We're much better at using governmental funds (which I still think are taken largely by theft) via agencies like DARPA, which operate through private industry and the educational establishments.
I don't share your faith that this is a recipe for efficiency, as both Boeing and Lockheed regularly lobby congress for wasteful spending (however, usually for defense, not NASA).
Of course there is a wide array of subcontractors involved in NASA projects. I don't think anyone who accuses NASA of being inefficient thinks that NASA workers do all the manufacturing, etc.
http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_n...
"This country was bounded to the West by a desert. One day a telescope built on one of the country's mountains revealed what looked like sea far away beyond the desert which would have to be crossed in order to discover if there was habitable land on the coast. So the politicians got together and established a government agency to send some people through the desert. They called it the National Agricultural Frontier Administration, NAFA for short, and charged it with a dramatic task to demonstrate the vigour of the nation: it would carry out a 'mission' to send people right through the desert to the West coast of the continent and bring them back safely, within a decade."
The first time it appears in the Wayback Machine is in December 2002. http://web.archive.org/web/20021217044832/http://www.spacefu...