"The next test flight is not expected until 2018 because of limited NASA budgets, and Orion will not carry astronauts until 2021 at the earliest."
So while I don't want to downplay the technical achievement, it is politics, not technology, that remains the limiting factor at NASA. :-(
It's someone doing good PR that gets it boiled down to "limited NASA budgets."
It is just like software, actually.
Very true. However, 9 women and 1 man are more likely to give you a baby in 9 months that 1 women and 1 man.
I'm sure NASA could speed up the overall project if they had more resources by doing lots of things in parallel. NASA went from having unmanned ICBMs to putting a man on the moon in under a decade when they were given enormous funding.
The second part here is also important, of course. Just pouring more money onto a problem isn't necessarily going to help if e.g. there is more focus on political turf wars than there is on the actual technical challenge.
Orion is a multi-billion dollar project. SLS (which will eventually be the launcher for Orion, should they ever plan a full design for a mission that uses it) is also a multi-billion dollar project. Orion has a budget of about $1 billion per year, SLS nearly $2 billion. So we're spending a crapton of money on these projects. But because of they way they are being managed and run they are hugely expensive compared to the work involved.
Sadly, NASA manned spaceflight is mostly a jobs program now, and has been for a long time. The unmanned spaceflight part of NASA is still capable of executing on ambitious projects, the manned part more or less just sort of stumbles in the general direction of a goal with the hope that a lot of money will fall out of congress along the way (which it usually does).
Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA.
I recall when NASA needed to fix the Hubble telescope and the Air Force had TWO extra space telescopes in storage!
Imagine if all the money in a Monopoly box were real.
And sure, it'd be nice if we spent more money on space, but that doesn't excuse the huge problems at NASA et al. There is a gap of perhaps an order of magnitude in capabilities between what we are doing and what would be possible if we gave space exploration a higher priority in terms of expenditures. But there is a gap of perhaps 1 to 2 orders of magnitude in capabilities between what NASA is doing and what would be possible if NASA manned spaceflight were run better and smarter.
As an example, the Shuttle program spent around $5 billion a year consistently for nearly 30 years. In that time the major achievement of all that work was to put up the ISS. The ISS is nice now that the expense to put it up is just a sunk cost, but it was in no way worth how much it cost, nor was anything the Shuttle did worth the cost of the program. Ultimately every Shuttle launch ended up costing about as much as a Saturn V launch (and that's a Saturn V launch back at the start of the program, more likely later launches would have become cheaper due to various economies of scale and process improvements). So we had 30 years of operating a hugely expensive low Earth orbit spacecraft instead of 30 years and over 100 launches of a heavy lift rocket capable of sending payloads beyond Earth orbit. We could have had hundreds of people living and working in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars by now, but instead we got the Shuttle and ISS. Some of the fault there comes is due to congress, but there's no excusing the people at NASA from making and committing to these decisions.
So that $5 billion a year employing N zillion people became the real goal, not what it was ostensibly about.
I've had several highly intelligent & competent friends opt to not work at NASA because the salary was 66% of competing offers where they would still be doing cools things. With some more money, NASA could have competitive salaries to attract more talent.
In large part a lot of the blame for that falls on LBJ and the way he pushed the Apollo program through congress. LBJ was a consummate politician and he used every political horse trading trick in the book to make Apollo happen, largely by siting manufacturing and staffing in powerful congressional districts, funneling funding to those areas. A situation that has continued to exist through the present day and is a huge driver for the shape of NASA manned spaceflight (it is the entire reason the SLS exists, for example).
Yes, they're all retiring. All the up and coming talent is going elsewhere because they don't have to deal with mountains of paperwork to buy $50 worth of parts.
Exactly. NASA wasn't doing anything along these lines until they got their budget cut and some competition. I'm guessing mostly the budget cut because they were too busy spending lots of money in someones district to do anything different. Finally someone said "just stop that '70s stuff" and now we're getting somewhere. BTW I know the SLS makes a lot of reuse of shuttle launch hardware, but it is still a change.
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