Nasa Manned Spaceflight Funding, Can NASA afford manned spaceflight? Options

[ilbasso]

The Washington Post reports in this article 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."

[edstrick]

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!>