NASA Technology Going In Reverse?

[gillianren]

seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol

And yet, when you ask the average citizen if they want to increase NASA's budget to make space exploration possible, they'll generally say no.  We like the idea of space travel, but we don't like the idea of spending money on it.  (Well, I like the idea of spending money on it, but no one asks me!)  To get Apollo, or a modern equivalent, back up and running, we'd either have to cut budgets somewhere else or raise taxes, and neither notion is particularly popular.

[Peter B]

Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?

Yes, he made the announcement in January 2004. I remember it well because I happened to be doing a tour of the Johnson Space Center that day, and we watched it on a TV somewhere near the old Mission Control room. IIRC it was the first anniversary of the "Columbia" accident.

After that came the scramble to design a system to go to the Moon, using as much Shuttle-design hardware as possible.

I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.

It's a long way to go to not land...

But having said that, there are a couple of space tourism companies which reckon they'll be sending people around the Moon in a couple of years - price tag around $100 million a seat.

Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.

I think you'll find there are few people more frustrated by humanity's restriction to low earth orbit than space nerds. NASA's post-Apollo dreams involved a space shuttle, a permanent space station, long term missions to the Moon leading to a Moon base, and manned missions to Mars. Had it happened it would have been spectacular. But the problem was that the cost was going to be enormous and they didn't make any serious attempts to lobby the US Congress or the various Presidents until about 1969. By then it was already too late, and they were lucky to salvage the Shuttle out of the budgetary wreckage. As I said earlier, cutting NASA's budget wasn't going to cost anyone too many votes in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

[Peter B]

ya i can see now what you mean by "funding"

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

thats why i strongly believe in private space explorers, nasa is the governments baby who is solely dependent on them for money.....maybe if we can get a good private corp. to do it then its possible we can go (back) to the moon?
what do you guys feel about the Musk Dynasty & SpaceX?

Dynasty? What's dynastic about Elon Musk?

Anyway, as far as SpaceX is concerned, they've berthed two supply missions with the International Space Station, so in my opinion they have the runs on the board.

I'm now looking forward to seeing Falcon Heavy launches and manned flights using the Dragon capsule. FH launches should be awesome, and not much less impressive than Saturn V flights. As for the Dragons, it'll be good to see something other than Soyuz spacecraft carrying people aloft.

[LunarOrbit]

Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?

Yes, he did. And that's the politics of it. One President will make a promise, the next President will undo it. It has been going on for decades. The technology is not the obstacle, the problem is getting the government to follow through on things. Apollo was different because of the cold war. Both parties wanted to follow through because they both agreed that beating the Soviets was an important goal.

I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.

Why go back to the Moon (with astronauts) if you aren't going to land? If you are committed to the Space Shuttle (which wouldn't be capable of a trip to the Moon) then even a flight to lunar orbit would involve developing another spacecraft. Now that the Space Shuttle is retired, development of a spacecraft that is capable of lunar missions can (and has) continue.

Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.

There isn't much dispute about Apollo... not among people who actually understand it. As for the foreseeable future, I agree that NASA might not be going to the Moon any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised if a private corporation like SpaceX did.

[Peter B]

seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol

Actually, I'm not sure about that. Kennedy's challenge was part of a special address to Congress and Bush II's announcement was at a public event at (IIRC) Cape Canaveral. I really don't think space has been part of a Presidential election campaign ever, except for Kennedy twitting the Eisenhower Administration (and thus, by extension, Nixon) about the missile gap in 1960. However I'm not a student of American history, so I could easily be wrong about that.

[gillianren]

Hillary Clinton had an increased NASA budget as one of her campaign promises in 2008.  Of course, she didn't even get her party's nomination . . . .

[Abaddon]

Didn't Bush say he was going back (pity they couldn't send him) and pump money into it?

I find it more counter intuitive that even the early apollo manned trips around the moon have never been repeated, the ones where they never landed.

Let's face it, man has been restricted to low earth orbit since the much disputed apollo missions and will for the foreseeable future.

What would an orbital manned lunar mission prove, exactly? What scientific value would it have?

[ka9q]

thats why i strongly believe in private space explorers, nasa is the governments baby who is solely dependent on them for money.....maybe if we can get a good private corp. to do it then its possible we can go (back) to the moon?

Space exploration by the US (and by every western country) has always been a joint effort of government and industry. And I think it will be for the forseeable future.

We establish governments, among other reasons, to do or at least fund the things that we all agree are important but don't have the inherent profit motive that motivates private corporations. Basic scientific research (with no obvious short-term payoff) and space exploration are among those things. Despite a lot of hype in recent years about space tourism, aside from communications and possibly earth imagery there simply hasn't been a viable commercial market in space travel. And unless there is a revolutionary breakthrough in propulsion, I don't expect this to change.

So why doesn't the government do it all? Because western private industry has often proven much more capable than formal governmental bodies at efficiently managing large numbers of people in highly complex projects. But don't forget for one moment that most of the western space industry exists to serve one class of customer -- government -- for both military and scientific purposes.

So the government provides the funding for space exploration and industry provides the goods. And it will be this way for the forseeable future. The only real question is where exactly to draw the line between those functions performed by the government (i.e., NASA) and by their private contractors. Although most of Apollo was done by the contractors, a substantial amount was done within NASA. Many people questioned this, and still do.

So SpaceX represents one of several contemporary experiments in moving the line to put much more of the work on the contractor side.  The idea is that the government should say only that they'll pay Y dollars if and only if a particular service or goal is performed, e.g., delivering X tonnes of cargo to the ISS. Instead of micro-managing all the design details, they only specify what has to be done (and some safety rules) and leave all the details of how to perform it to the private companies.

I had doubts about this approach at first, but SpaceX is starting to change my mind. Maybe this approach isn't such a bad way to do space exploration after all. But don't think for a moment that companies like SpaceX would do it out of the goodness of their hearts if the government weren't paying.
   

[Peter B]

A point to consider here is that companies like SpaceX are making big losses at the moment. To a large extent they're vanity projects funded by people who literally have billions of dollars to spend. Why not indulge a childhood interest?

An interesting comparison is with the Portuguese explorers who sailed along the coast of Africa in the 15th century. They knew that if they could sail around to China, and outflank the Ottomans who controlled the land route, they could make a huge amount of money. Initially, these voyages had no way of making money. They then got lucky when it turned out Africa itself could be a source of income, and that no doubt helped maintain the momentum which allowed them at the end of the century to finally round the Cape of Good Hope and reach India.

So to apply the same example to companies like SpaceX, they're likely to cover some of their costs from government contracts and private satellite launches, and this will allow them to develop ever larger rockets and engines. With any luck, they'll have enough money that in a century or so asteroid mining will be financially viable. If that happens, the Earth's economy may expand massively.

[ka9q]

I simply can't see how asteroid mining will ever be financially viable for supplying users on earth. The costs of lifting the necessary equipment out of the earth's gravity field are just too great until we find some radically new means of propulsion. I like to remind people that the costs of launching something into low earth orbit are roughly comparable to replacing it with solid gold.

For the same reason, mining space resources to supply users who are already in space will be highly desirable for precisely the same reason. So far, the only in-situ space resource to be widely exploited is solar power. Planetary gravity, too, considering use of gravitational slingshots.

[Echnaton]

Until we have something more powerful and cheaper than the shuttle's "steam engines," our economic activity will be earth based.  Much less a safer way to get people back to earth than in the middle of a plasma fireball.

[cjameshuff]

I simply can't see how asteroid mining will ever be financially viable for supplying users on earth. The costs of lifting the necessary equipment out of the earth's gravity field are just too great until we find some radically new means of propulsion. I like to remind people that the costs of launching something into low earth orbit are roughly comparable to replacing it with solid gold.

If you continue the current approach of building everything on Earth and launching it for a single-use mission, it's certainly not viable. You don't need radically new means of propulsion, you need to build up off-planet manufacturing and spread the launch costs over a long operational lifetime. In the long run, it's operational costs that determine how profitable it might be, not launch costs.

However, asteroid mining can start much sooner than that if we find some good targets with large amounts of volatiles. Even with minimal orbital industry, launch costs of mining and processing equipment, robotic servicing/assembly tugs, etc can be amortized over many missions, launch costs of propellant can't be. Selling orbital services made possible by orbital propellant sources could be much more immediately profitable.

[twik]

Fifteen years ago, I claim that I went to Germany for a conference. I've never been back.

So, how has modern air technology "gone backwards," so that I've never returned? Surely, if I went 15 years ago, I'I should be able to go back, right? The fact that my employer has found no reason to send me back, and it's expensive for me to travel on my own has nothing to do with it. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO AIR TRANSPORT TO EUROPE, I SAY?!?!

[raven]

That's a pretty bad analogy I would say. Even if you and your boss can't afford it, others can, enough to make keeping up the infrastructure required to get there economically feasible. If everyone had to build their own plane and fly it themselves, flights would be far less common.
In short, Europe is a destination, the moon is not, just a place whose major appeal is how hard it is to get to.

[Noldi400]

seems like all presidents bring up space exploration to excite the voters at election time lol

Are you saying that politicians pander to the voter?  I'm shocked, shocked at such a revelation.

WHAT?  NO!
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