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Posted by: ilbasso Nov 24 2005, 03:46 AM

The Washington Post reports in http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/23/AR2005112301970.html that the current US budget shortfalls may force NASA to cut half of the planned manned spaceflights in the coming years. Excerpts from the Post article:

"A large deficit in NASA's troubled shuttle program threatens to seriously delay and possibly cripple President Bush's space exploration initiative unless the number of planned flights is cut virtually in half or the White House agrees to add billions of dollars to the human spaceflight budget."
...
Under the budgets projected for the next five years, experts outside and within the Bush administration agree, it will be impossible -- by several billion dollars -- to complete the planned shuttle missions and finish the new spacecraft [CEV] by 2012, or maybe even by 2014...Griffin acknowledged as much at a Nov. 3 House Science Committee hearing, saying the plan to finish the space station and retire the shuttle in 2010 faces a "$3 billion to $5 billion" funding shortfall.

A committee document placed the deficit at "nearly $6 billion," and some sources said even that figure could be low. NASA's budget difficulties have also been complicated by having to pay for about $400 million in special projects inserted, mostly by senators, into the agency's 2006 funding.

The sources said the White House is juggling several proposals to close the deficit, but one industry source said, "None of the choices are good -- NASA's in a box."
...
Several sources confirmed that the budget office in the early negotiations proposed stopping shuttle flights altogether. "It sucks money out of the budget, and it's a dead-end program," one source said.

But "that argument's over," another source said. "The political side of the White House said, 'We're keeping it.' If you kill the shuttle right now, it will be heavy lifting for your foreign policy because of the international obligations" around the space station.

A proposal under consideration would keep the full complement of shuttle flights -- 18 to finish the space station and one to service the Hubble Space Telescope -- and let completion of the crew exploration vehicle slip to 2014, if necessary, or even beyond.

"The president said originally there would be a four-year gap, and that's realistic," one source said. "My personal view, though, is whatever date you set . . . it will slip."

Posted by: BruceMoomaw Nov 24 2005, 03:07 PM

Another interpretation that can be placed on this article is that the White House will try to keep both manned programs -- Shuttle/Station and Bush's new manned lunar program -- going by cutting fully $1.2 billion per year out of the UNMANNED space program for at least the next five years. If so, the effect on space science will be devastating.

Posted by: OWW Nov 24 2005, 10:38 PM

[paranoid]
I've often wondered if this is the reason it takes so long for the shuttle to fly again. Maybe they're waiting for the final $-verdict. No sense in repairing things that will never fly again.
I just think it is a ridiculous situation: NASA built the MERs in only two years for $400 million, but during the last three years they threw away a couple of billion to repair some cracks in a piece of foam, and they're still at it! Almost a year, yes a YEAR, between RTF and the next flight? Come on! I'm having trouble believing in such incompetence.
[/paranoid]

Posted by: Colby Nov 26 2005, 12:49 AM

When you put the foam issue as you just did, it doesn't make any since. However, the payload involved isn't simply unmanned hardware, but humans. Also, NASA knows that funding for the Shuttle will most likely be nonexistent if another accident occurs.

As much as I love manned space flight and support the Vision for Space Exploration, I absolutely DESPISE the notion of taking funding from unmanned spaceflight to fund manned spaceflight. An effective space program has to be balanced.

One instance that has recently burned me is the Dawn mission to 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta. Did you know that JPL has been told to stand down with this mission? The solution to NASA's funding shortfalls isn't jiggling the books, but simply receiving more funding from Congress. Unfortunately, there is nothing simple about that.

Posted by: jamescanvin Nov 26 2005, 01:44 AM

The case of Dawn though is not that it hs had money taken away to fund manned spaceflight, but that it's going overbudget. You should read
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1645 about it.

James

Posted by: Toma B Dec 17 2005, 02:18 PM

This is quote from Space.com article about Space Shuttle:

Just have something I would like to add here....
"Underfunding the shuttle is like building half a bridge"..."to nowhere!!!

Posted by: ermar Dec 31 2005, 04:02 AM

The New York Times lays out http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/opinion/31sat1.html?hp on NASA funding:

"NASA needs some $3 billion more than previously projected to fly an additional 18 shuttle flights to complete the station and a 19th to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Unless the White House or Congress sees fit to pony up the needed money in coming fiscal years, NASA will have to make deep cuts in some programs.

The agency got a big lift from Congress this month when large bipartisan majorities passed an authorization bill that instructed NASA to engage in a broad range of activities and suggested that NASA be given increased funds, reaching a total of $17.9 billion in fiscal year 2007 and $18.7 billion in fiscal year 2008...

But authorization bills do not actually provide money. The real test will come when President Bush submits his budget proposal for fiscal year 2007 in February, and Congressional appropriations committees decide how much money they are willing to put up...

From our perspective, the costly shuttle and the space-station complex look more expendable than pathfinding robotic probes of the solar system and a transition to new manned space vehicles."

Posted by: David Jan 1 2006, 01:31 AM

Let's suppose (and I don't suppose this is actually going to happen) that Congress turned around to NASA and said "Right now, we're going to cut all of your manned spaceflight budget down to the minimum you need to shut down the shuttle and withdraw from the ISS. Then you space boys go back to the drawing board and come back to us with a realistic statement of what you actually can do, assuming a static budget, and a clear statement of what you think the mission of manned spaceflight actually is and how your expenditures fulfil that mission."

What would Griffin & Co. come up with in that event?

Posted by: djellison Jan 1 2006, 01:46 AM

Problem is, Bush went "Lets go back to the moon and stuff" and NASA went "OK". then 2 years later go "Right - it's going to cost 4 x more than you're willing to give us"

What they SHOULD have done is say "you're getting X...what can you do with it?"

Posted by: mars loon Jan 1 2006, 03:03 AM

DAWN is not that much overbudget. Its a great mission that is being held hostage to NASA buget cuts. DAWN is nearly complete and can fly an exciting science mission in 2006 if the funding and manpower is restored. The Discovery cost cap has just been increased and DAWN is within that cap. Also, Lets not forgot that the MER's were also overbudget. anyway, this has been extensively thrashed out in that thread cited above.

I agree that we need a balanced program of manned and unmanned. While I strongly support the return to the moon, I think it is TERRIBLE that the unmanned mission budget is being severly cut to support VSE. SEE also Craig Covaults editorial in the 14 Nov 2005 Aviation Week for more perspective
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1075

NASA needs a significant budget increase NOW and the latest news is that Griffin is seeking a 9% increase. Time will tell if he gets it. Otherwise the RIF's will start very soon and NASA science missions will be decimated and everyone loses.

about the NY Times, they did not explicitely endorse a NASA budget increase as the early part of the editorial implied. they just laid out the choices if NASA does not get the increase.

ken

Posted by: edstrick Jan 1 2006, 07:29 AM

djellison: "Problem is, Bush went "Lets go back to the moon and stuff" and NASA went "OK". ....."

I'm getting awfully tired of comments like this from space-literate people as opposed to expecting it from morons in the mass media and the general public.

http://www.thespacereview.com has a big chunk of the real backstory, together with stuff in Sitzen and Cowing's "New Moon Rising" book, excerpts of which are probably still on Cowing's NASA Watch website.

"Forging a vision: NASA’s Decadal Planning Team and the origins of the Vision for Space Exploration"
Long before President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration nearly two years ago, NASA has been quietly working on its own ideas for future human exploration of the solar system. Dwayne Day and Jeff Foust outline the history of those efforts and the influence they may have had on the creation of the VSE.
Monday, December 19, 2005

The real fact is that a "rebellion in the ranks" had been fermenting for a long time within NASA, with increasingly less-grudging support from first Goldin and then O'Keefe. The Columbia Catastrophe forced the issue to the front burner by demonstrating that the shuttle wasn't and could never be made what it should have been: Economical, Frequent and Safe access to and from space. The fact staring them in the face was that Shuttle had to be retired sooner than later and we'd either have to abandon manned spaceflight, or build new spacecraft for a new mission instead of forever going in circles. My impression without re-reviewing and reading the history of the initiative was that Bush was presented a series of options with recommendations as why some were bad options and others were better, all of the latter being variations on what was finally picked, with more or less push toward Moon and/or Mars in the different options.

Also note that the horrendous current and next-few-years cost overruns would be ocurring whether we do the whole initiative or just build a minimal station-access-vehicle.

Posted by: djellison Jan 1 2006, 11:44 AM

It's been doing so since it was formed. That's its job.

But it takes all the studies to find out exactly how to do these things instead of speculating about them. They cant spend money doing anything more than the formative speculation until they get a nod to go ahead and do it. Those studies take time, and it's not till you've done them that you can go "right - this is the cost"

There's no way in hell it's going to get the goahead now. A 4x increase in NASA budget isnt going to happen. The public will not support it. If they DO - I will be utterly utterly astonished.

Clearly NASA were not given the chance to find out exactly how much this program is going to cost before GWB signed them up for it, because if they had, if they'd have said "Sure, but it'll cots 4x what you give us now" then GWB would never had signed them up for it .....would he?

Problem is - what CAN Nasa do on it's current budget? It can retire off the shuttle, just about, but it has to be replaced with something, and it cant do that without spending a lot of money, money it doesnt have whilst the shuttle still exists.

On reflection, it's sort of obvious. It takes all it's current money to run the Shuttle, so how in hells name were they ever going to develop something to replace it, whilst still flying STS? This isnt the huge-budget-Apollo days when Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft were all developed within a decade. Nasa does not have the money, and looking at how much they honestly think it's going to cost them, they're not GOING to have the money to co-develop new vehicles, whilst retiring STS at the same time. STS has to go first, and thus we'll get a big gap.

So this poses the question.... what now?

The entire situation is more up in the air now that it's ever been.

Doug

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jan 1 2006, 02:27 PM

In my view, the Shuttle programme's woes hark back to the very start of the whole process of development - and funding. The Space Task Group plan which Spiro Agnew presented (in 1971?) to Richard M Nixon was, in it's own way, much like the current Bush initiative - a coherent, calculated and costed scheme for the exploration of the near environs of the Earth. And that was it's downfall. Nixon came back, not with a commitment, but with cuts. Political support for NASA was in free fall, and Nixon chose to back just one element of the STG architecture: Shuttle. In the era of the US disaster known as Vietnam, this was perhaps justifiable, and put the best possible gloss on things.

All the other parts were put on the back burner. No Space Tug, no Station, no more flights to the Moon. As for Mars, no way. And the Shuttle option chosen was the cheapest-to-build, dearest-to-run version. And still it was called STS - the Space Transportation System, despite having nowhere to go other than, er, 'up'. Followed by 'down'...

Shuttle was never meant to be anything other than a first stab at a reuseable vehicle. It used 1970s technology, and it was *good* - it lasted a helluva long time, much longer than anyone planned for (but is now suffering from it's age, which makes it less and less economic - things like brittle wiring looms, structural areas which may or may not be corroding or suffering from metal fatigue, all that sort of stuff which goes to create 'Hanger Queens'). It's in exactly the same hole as Concorde, with an ever-more-fragile vehicle taking up a disproprtionate amount of effort to keep it flying. Columbia's destruction exactly mirrors the Concorde crash at Paris in it's effects. And, again, the RTF exactly mimics the experience of the UK Nimrod AEW - over cost, decades late, and built also for a mission which ended when the Soviet Union fell.

NASA folk aren't daft. They know all this. They love their old steam engine, though, and are very proud of it, even though at heart they know it has to go, and really shouldn't even fly again. What's needed is a sea-change, a paradigm shift.

A commitment to steady progress, with technology which isn't frozen in time, is what's made Soyuz such a prize. An iterative development from the early 1960s vehicle has given us what amounts to a cheap and off-the-shelf vehicle, available for sale to the highest bidder. It does what it does, and then some. It's a manned vehicle, a delivery vehicle, even a space tug. And it's already Lunar-capable.

If NASA can make the (painful) transition, then things may proceed. Otherwise, it's back to not-really-quite-enough business as usual. In which case, ESA, the Russians and the Chinese may well make a move. Not to mention India, and, of course, Japan. All these nations have been quietly setting the building blocks in place for all sorts of fun and games: Soyuz or Kliper launches from French Guiana, anyone? And there's the private sector, too. Not the sub-orbital crowd, but Mr Musk (who's already been contracted to launch the Nautilus TransHab-derived prototype space habitat) and a few others. NASA as enabler, perhaps? A new FAA for space? It's a prospect which is certainly in the wings, too, with University-led outsourcing (or just their plain consumption of NASA Centers).

Time will tell.

Shuttle was a triumph.

Past tense.

Bob Shaw

Posted by: dvandorn Jan 2 2006, 12:43 AM

The NASA budget, corrected for inflation, has changed very, very little in the past 20 years. Some minor ups and downs, sure, but a relatively flat funding rate.

Whoever advised GWB on his decision to propose a return to the Moon and a manned Mars mission *had* to have known that this would require a budget increase of at *least* 4x what NASA gets per year now. That's what Presidential advisors are for -- to have at least a decent clue as to how much a given new initiative in *any* federal spending program is going to cost.

Bush *had* to have known, at least approximately, what NASA was going to ask for in re funding to make his Vision a reality. Perhaps he simply felt that he had so much political capital built up that he could get whatever he asked for from Congress, for whatever reason. I think perhaps that was an overly optimistic assessment of his own position...

-the other Doug

Posted by: dvandorn Jan 2 2006, 12:46 AM

Thank you for a fair and honest appraisal of the Shuttle program, Bob. Too many of us here are far to anxious to kill off manned spaceflight, under the delusion that doing so would result in an extra three or four unmanned flagship missions per year. Thanks for speaking out for the factual situation in re manned spaceflight, and in re the Shuttle program.

-the other Doug

Posted by: mcaplinger Jan 2 2006, 03:03 AM

Do you have hard numbers on how much over budget they are, and what the budget of the Office of Space Science is to support overruns? I wouldn't be eager to see other science programs be raided to fund Dawn overruns, but that's what would likely happen.

I don't have any inside knowledge, but I don't think that a mission that was solid and under control would be told to stand down. Based on the available information, Dawn has had some serious developmental problems, and fairly or not there is some skepticism outside the project that the spacecraft is going to work. NASA is supposed to release the results of an independent evaluation at the end of this month, and I hope we see then what the issues are.

Posted by: nprev Jan 2 2006, 05:38 AM

Agreed. If anything, the end of US manned spaceflight would in all likelihood have a negative impact on UMSF.

I can just see some Congressional representative picking up that ball & running with it during an election year..."we saved $XX billion per year by cutting the manned flights & nobody cared, let's save some more & cut out these expensive robots to Mars that only them weirdo liberal science types that believe in evolution care about! Ain't none of them in my district...besides, we need that money for more dairy subsidies!"

Far-fetched? I only wish that it were....

Posted by: edstrick Jan 2 2006, 06:37 AM

I'm in about 90% agreement with Bob Shaw's two long posts a couple days ago, and most of the rest would be quibbles.

The current situation is somewhere between 1 to 1.5 billion dollars not in the budget that's needed to finish shuttle flights and get the bare minimally useful level of station assembly, and get the crew launch vehicle and crew exploration vehicle development ready for funding ramping up as the last 1 to 2 years of shuttle operations funding starts to really tail off. <ghods that's a run-on sentence!>

Griffin's whole point is once we can get rid of the albatross that's hanging around our necks and eating billions whether it flies or not, and transfer station supply activities to potentially much cheaper commercial providers..... then we can get into a pay-as-we-go basis at budget levels only modestly above current levels (corrected for inflation).

There's an awful lot during the pre-design stage <we're in that now> that can minimise later hardware costs per flight and operations costs per flight. Then once you start the real design work, every thing is in the details. I have no nope that Lockmart/Boeing big boys can unlearn their bad habits enough, but they can probably do a lot better then they have if managed properly from the customer's end.

(The EELV's are a vast improvent on both ends of the problem compared with Titan IV's and a modest improvement over Delta 2 and Atlas 1b and 2's, but not what they should have been.)

Ultimately, a cost limited flight rate depends on the cost of the hardware per flight, the cost of the staffing needed on a permanent basis to be able to fly at all, and the cost of the extra staffing to add more than the minimal number of flights per year. That middle one is where shuttle eats us alive, coming and going. The "Standing Army" problem, it's called.

We should be able to do the Griffin/Bush program for about a 50% increase in NASA's budget (continuing inflation corrected) over current levels, and that 50% includes the current shuttle-station gap of some 1 to 1.5 billion. NOT a 4x boost. That's the same arm-waving fiscal fantasy as the "Trillion dollars" quote that floated all over the mass media after the exploration vision announcement 2 years ago. That was extensively followed up on on The Space Review web site and was a combination of rabbit-out-of-the-hat numbers, tipsy arm-waving, and malice, and the perpetrators of the then widely repeated "as if authorative" number have never fessed up or retracted it (fat lot of good that would do).

<enough ranting for now!>

Posted by: djellison Jan 2 2006, 11:33 AM

BUT - were we not told that it was going to cost about as much, growing a bit for inflation, as their current budget? I think we'd all have gone "huh" if GW had stood up there and gone "Scrap Shuttle, Back to Moon, $20B a year"

Manned Spaceflight is important long term, I share SS's desire to see Bootprints in this wheeltracks. I'm just not sure how we need to progress right now. ISS has to be finished to maintain any relationship between NASA and JAXA & ESA. You cant expect them to be involved in any future manned spaceflight programs if they get screwed over with the ISS. So that means we need STS to finish ISS which could easily be another 8 years. And with current funding, you cant expect to develop anything new while STS still flies. So we'll end up with a finished ISS and no way of getting to it except Soyuz whilst the SRB launchers + CEV is developed and that's going to be no less, imho, than 5 years. So we're talking > 2019 for CEV first flight. Then another 5 years for the lunar vehicle so perhaps 2024 for the lunar return.

Let's face it - this isnt the '60's any more. Developing a new spacecraft requires 25,000 middle managers, 14.5 miles of paperwork and wastes SOOoo much time.

ARhghg - I dont know what the hell they're going to do once the governmental bigwigs stop laughing at that budget graph. Why say 4x if it's not their best guess? Surely they know it'll just get thrown back in their faces. So what are they trying to do? Are they lying and infact it'll only cost, say, 1.5x, or are they genuine about that figure?

Doug

Posted by: Bob Shaw Jan 2 2006, 11:59 AM

Doug:

The international ISS partners, bar Russia, have already been badly let down by the US. They built their kit, made their plans, and... ...nothing much. They too have, if not standing armies, then certainly a few battalions, and there's now a real move towards launching some of that kit aboard Proton. And I'll be amazed if ESA hasn't done some in-house stuff on the prospects of the ATV as an unpressurised delivery tug for already-built ISS components. Why should ESA, JAXA or the rest ever trust NASA again? NASA is like a recovering alcoholic, and we should cherish every day that NASA remains sober, while always being prepared for the day that NASA again falls of the waggon. It doesn't mean that anyone should extend NASA any credit, though!

Russia has, almost by chance, done quite well. They 'persuaded' NASA to fund them when there was no cash in their system at all, and have survived until now. The Russians are once again seriously talking about adding modules of their own to the ISS, and they have a decent little earner in the meantime as truck-drivers for NASA (more accurately, as Pizza-delivery guys on mopeds - Shuttle was the truck!). Add in a few space tourists, perhaps a lob round the Moon or two, and they're not far off being self-financing.

I wish all this were not so (and don't start me on Hubble!).

Bob Shaw

Posted by: djellison Jan 2 2006, 12:16 PM

I totally agree. NASA has to be seen to do everything it can to fullfill its obligations to them.

Put it this way. You hire a decorator to do your front room. You give him the new flooring, the paint. You come to see the finished work only to have the decorator hand you the unopened paint and the flooring and run out the door screaming. Would you use him again?


Doug

Posted by: dvandorn Jan 2 2006, 12:41 PM

The problem with that scenario, Doug, is that NASA is under a brick-wall deadline to retire the Shuttle fleet. Under their own rules, which had been stated *before* the loss of Columbia, if we're going to continue flying the Shuttle past 2010, the entire system (orbiters, ETs and SRBs, launch pads, ground support equipment, etc.) must be re-certified.

The re-certification process could involve the major rebuilding of various systems, and would definitely involve grounding the fleet for at least two to three years, while every orbiter and every piece of equipment is taken apart, evaluated, fixed up and put back together.

The alternative to this process, according to the NASA experts who fly the Shuttle, is either retiring the system entirely or expecting a *much* higher loss rate if the system is kept operational without such a re-certification.

NASA is *not* pushing for a Shuttle re-certification project. And Congress is very unlikely to vote for one if NASA is telling them it's the least attractive option. So, odds are *very* high it won't happen.

So -- the basis of the issue is that either the CEV gets flying by the end of the decade, or American manned space flight ends in 2010 and does not resume until the CEV *is* flying. The option of just flying Shuttles until 2014 and *then* beginning CEV development literally does not exist.

Now, just because CEV has *one* end goal of being a (relatively minor) component of a manned Mars mission does *not* mean that the loss at a later date of funding for such a Mars mission makes CEV development "money down the drain." CEV lets America continue ISS operations, and CEV-related development (such as heavier Shuttle-derived boosters, automated unmannned rendezvous and docking systems, and hibernation-mode operation of the CEV itself) will, by between 2012 and 2014, give the U.S. a set of capabilities quite similar to what the Shuttle fleet offers -- and at a (hopefully) lower operating cost.

I *do* believe that NASA is going to have to demonstrate an ability to operate CEV-based ISS missions at *significantly* lower cost than comparable Shuttle missions before Congress will fund actual hardware development for the LSAM, super-heavy boosters, and other elements of a renewed manned lunar program. And, following that, NASA will have to demonstrate an ability to fly manned lunar missions within a set cost cap before Congress will give them money to develop manned Mars hadrware.

And... as for *anyone* being surprised that NASA would need additional funds for mounting a manned Mars mission, all one has to do is look at the funding levels required for the various Mars mission plans out there today. The absolute cheapest is Zubrin's Mars Direct, and *that* one would cost a minimum of $100 billion in 1990 dollars. NASA's own Mars Reference Mission, as updated just a few years ago, calls for a minimum funding level over the course of the project of more than $400 billion! So, just because GWB told NASA to go to Mars on a *fraction* of $12 billion a year doesn't mean anyone, including GWB, had any reason to expect it could actually be done...

-the other Doug

Posted by: djellison Jan 2 2006, 12:56 PM

Does anyone realistically expect the ISS to be finished in 4 years? I cant believe that for a minute to be honest. I'd be happy to be suprised and see it happen, but I doubt it.




So what on earth was the point in the announcement then? Was it intentionally just a big fat lie? Who was he trying to kid? Himself? Congress? The US Public? To what end? Of course, he'll be out of Office just about the time when the bomb bursts. I guess his Dad did it, Regan did it - it must be written on the back of the Oval Office Toilet "dont forget to propose a new direction for space exploration without being prepared to pay for it"

Doug