Sally Ride's Presentation

[radarredux]

If you missed it, Dr. Sally Ride's presentation yesterday for the Augustine Panel appeared to bode well for commercial access to LEO. In general, her budget figures were pretty depressing, but most of the more optimistic scenarios included canceling Ares I ASAP and relying on the commercial sector for delivering crew to LEO.

Some of the points included:
(1) Adding $200 million in FY2011 to incentivize current COTS cargo demonstrations

(2) Adding $2.5 billion over 4 years beginning in FY2011 for help create commercial crew capabilities.

Full slides can be found at:
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/meetings/08_12_meeting.html

 

[docm]

Both excellent ideas.

Going through news reports the big winners could be SpaceX, ULA and the military;

From Bloomberg Link....

“We’d like to get NASA out of the business” of flying people to lower Earth orbit, Ride said.

From CNET

"In the unconstrained budget, Orion and Ares 1 arrive shortly after ISS is deorbited," Ride said. "And then you get human lunar return in 2021."

Assuming NASA is forced to live within the 2010 budget guidelines provided by the Obama administration, the Ares 5 heavy lift moon rocket would not be ready until the 2028 timeframe.

"You get, again, Orion and Ares 1 capability of crew to LEO (low-Earth orbit) a couple of years after ISS is gone, so there's nothing for Ares 1 and Orion to go to," Ride said. "You do get heavy lift (Ares 5) out in 2028, but you'll notice there are no lunar systems that have been developed, there was not enough money to even start the lunar systems.

"So you have a heavy lift vehicle in 2028 but absolutely nothing to put in it to send to the moon. So this says it pretty well. You cannot do this program on this budget. If you want to do something, you have to have the money to do it."

Wall Street Journal Link.....

Another winner could turn out to be the Pentagon, if the White House opts to use billions of dollars in NASA funds to enhance and upgrade the Air Force's existing Delta IV and Atlas V rockets to carry astronauts. The rockets are operated by a joint venture made up of Boeing and Lockheed, and that organization has been pushing hard for such an option.

The Air Force was lukewarm about the concept until the last few months, when Air Force Space Command embraced it, partly as a way to keep a lid on military launch budgets. "As long as (Pentagon officials) get to run the program . . . with other people's money, that's a good thing" for the military, suggested Jeff Greason, a member of the study group and president of startup Xcor Aerospace Inc.

 

[tanstaafl76]

Ares I's carcass is starting to smell.

 

[Boris_Badenov]

The Ares rockets have never really made any sense to me when you consider the immediately available Delta & Atlas series. The can be readied much more quickly than anything that has to altered like Ares 1 & 5. They should just be scrapped & a new plan drawn up using existing rockets & if SpaceX can get F9 going them too.

 

[radarredux]

The Ares rockets have never really made any sense to me when you consider the immediately available Delta & Atlas series.

The Ares combination was certainly partly political in that it protected the current NASA (and contractors) to the greatest extent possible.

The enhancements to the Ares I would also benefit the Ares V, so in theory much of the development costs currently underway for Ares I would have helped Ares V. The Ares V (or some HLV) is really the key to moving beyond LEO.

It seemed like a good idea initially. Most of the components were already human rated, the tooling was already in place, expertise was already in place, etc. It did look like Faster, Sooner, Cheaper, Safer.

Then reality hit. Also, NASA never got the budget it was promised when it developed the Constellation architecture.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Exactly correct. GWB gave lip service to the proposal, but even though Congress increased the funding level (IIRC) it was never even close to what was actually required to accomplish the stated goals.
This is not a surprise. In space exploration, if you underfund a goal for a half decade or so, you are left with far too big a gap to make up without a HUGE infusion of cash...which given the current climate, just ain't gonna happen.

As a pragmatist, I have accepted that I won't live long enough to see us reach either the moon or Mars in my lifetime. It's very sad, but very real

 

[halman]

Unfortunately, I can't find the quote, but I saw in the New York Times the other day that Doctor Ride was trying to find an exploration mission that would fit into the existing NASA mission. She said that, so far, one hadn't been identified, but that the panel was still looking.

The United States is trying to be a leader in space without spending any serious money in the process. This is comparable to trying to win a war on a budget, expecting that the gains that were made in the last fiscal year will still be there in the next fiscal year. Yes, we can build a new rocket on the current budget, but only if we get rid of the International Space Station. So, we get rid of the destination for the rocket before we build the rocket. By the time that the money is available to build a destination, the rocket will be obsolete.

This is the same thing that we did with the space shuttle. We built a vehicle which would be capable of building a space station, and then we refused to put up the money to build the space station, making the space shuttle relatively worthless. The only way that this kind of funding would have worked would be if we had mothballed the shuttles as soon as they were completed, so that we could gradually accumulate the money to build a space station without the space craft needed to build it aging.

If we build the Ares-1, we will have no use for it for years. The only way that we can have a place for the Ares to go is to put the money needed to build the Ares into keeping the space station in operation. Dr. Ride seems to be about to tell the Obama administration the sorry truth: Without more money, there will be NO manned space exploration by the United States in a few years.

What is truly heart rending is that the amount of money required to enable the continuation of manned exploration off planet is minuscule compared to so many other government projects. But there is still a lot of confusion as to exactly how much we are actually spending on space exploration, as is illustrated by the comment made by Congressman Bill Posey, (R-FL) He said he asked the Augustine committee “to think outside the arbitrary budget numbers placed on NASA - $18.8 billion out of a total $3.6 trillion budget, less than half a percent of the federal budget.” But the space exploration budget is less than half of that 18.8 billion dollars.

NASA has many projects underway, most of which have nothing to do with space exploration. If space exploration is important to this nation, it should consider an organization which has only one responsibility, off planet exploration. If space exploration is not important to this nation, we should stop wasting money by pretending to explore space.

 

[halman]

As a pragmatist, I have accepted that I won't live long enough to see us reach either the moon or Mars in my lifetime. It's very sad, but very real

Had it not been for the Apollo program, you probably would not feel that way. It is possible that humans might have been about to embark for the Moon for the first time about now, but that is not certain. The pace of space exploration was very slow until Kennedy made a meaningless step on the ladder to the Cosmos the final destination for two generations. Misled by the unsustainable progress of the 1960's, space enthusiasts came to believe that they were destined to see the Moon and Mars first hand.

Being creatures evolved on a planet's surface, we equate traveling to other worlds to be the most important goal of space exploration. But we are currently involved in the single most critical learning experience we will ever face in leaving our planet: how to survive in the true environment of the Cosmos. The International Space Station is by far and away the key to our future, for it is the venue where we are discovering how to survive in SPACE. The great industrial revolution which is our future will be enacted in SPACE, not on any celestial body. The resources that we need, the energy to use those resources, the carefully engineered environments where we will process those resources with that energy, all lie in SPACE.

Sacrificing the International Space Station to speed our return to the Moon or to facilitate sending humans to Mars would be the most shortsighted, stupid thing that we could do. Yes, those places will be important in our future, but not nearly as important as the industrial processes, the medical knowledge, and the understanding of the true nature of the Cosmos that we will gain from that outpost in the true environment of where we live. Planets are an aberration, infinitesimal motes of matter drifting in SPACE. We must master living and working in SPACE before we consider traveling to the neighboring dust motes of the other planets.

We must free our minds from our planetary prejudice, and truly see the potential that exists in SPACE. We can create any environment we desire, without having to remake someplace that already exists, by building habitats in orbit around our star or one of its children. Perhaps that lacks the romance of planetfall on Mars, but romance will not be what pays for our off planet enterprises. Space is a place, in and of itself, a destination more important for the future of humanity than any world will ever be.

 

[neutrino78x]

We must free our minds from our planetary prejudice, and truly see the potential that exists in SPACE. We can create any environment we desire, without having to remake someplace that already exists, by building habitats in orbit around our star or one of its children. Perhaps that lacks the romance of planetfall on Mars, but romance will not be what pays for our off planet enterprises. Space is a place, in and of itself, a destination more important for the future of humanity than any world will ever be.

I completely agreed with you in the SpaceX thread, but I don't agree with this. More resources are required to construct something in space than to construct something on a planet. With Mars, or even the Moon, the land is already there, you just have to put buildings there. It is especially true of Mars, because you have an atmosphere, metals, etc., readily available.

I think it is egregious that Robert Zubrin was not on this comission. The "Mars Direct" they were talking about in the Augustine comission is NOT the "Mars Direct" that Zubrin speaks of in his book. Zubrin's Mars Direct means no on-orbit assembly, just go directly to Mars. Send a robotic Earth Return Vehicle craft first that makes the return fuel for the humans, then send the humans with only the fuel to go to Mars, and they go back home using the fuel generated in the robotic craft.

The only new technology needed for Zubrin's Mars Direct is a heavy lift booster. No reason you could not use SpaceX's planned heavy lift booster.

--Brian