Nasa's New Budget Graph For The Bush Initiative..., ...or, This You Gotta See To Believe Options

[dvandorn]

A few comments...

Bruce and JRehling, most of the "little now" money will be spent on the CEV and its launch vehicle, which are needed to maintain an American manned space presence of *any* kind after the Shuttle fleet is retired. And I'm thinking that the CEV, even with its development costs, will end up costing less in the long run than a re-certification of the Shuttle fleet. Also, it's my impression that the CEV will be overall cheaper to fly than the Shuttle is, which will provide a long-term cost savings. It's actually a move to *lessen* the percentage of the space budget dedicated to maintaining an American manned presence in space.

One good thing about the way the CEV is being designed is that it's a multi-purpose vehicle. Once you have a CEV fleet in operation, you can develop habitat and propulsion modules at your leisure and use the CEV as a taxi to get to and from the "real" mission modules. So, spending the money to develop a CEV *now* won't end up being wasted money -- we'll be able to use the CEV for LEO and ISS operations, even if the LSAM development is delayed or canceled.

As for a majority of Americans not supporting a return to the Moon -- a majority of Americans didn't support the U.S. entry into WWII, either. Until we were attacked. A majority of Americans *do* believe that the Air Force captured a UFO in 1947 and autopsied a bunch of dead gray aliens.

I *guarantee* you that if America were to give up manned spaceflight, it wouldn't be long before a majority of Americans would *insist* that America not be left behind by expanding Chinese and Japanese manned space programs.

And if you think that by killing Shuttle and ISS flights you'll get three planetary flagship missions a year, think again. Funding for unmanned spaceflight would remain the same, if not be cut back a bit, if America got out of the manned space flight business. Cutting funding to one does not mean all that money would get spent on the other.

The main competitor for unmanned spaceflight's funding is NOT manned spaceflight. It's Iraq war spending, Katrina recovery spending, servicing-a-multi-trillion-dollar-national-debt spending, on and on ad nauseum. Killing American manned space flight will *not* significantly increase unmanned spaceflight funding, period. And, with all due respect, you're a fool if you think it will.

Walking away from manned spaceflight is the first step down the path of abandoning *all* significant space exploration. Mark my words.

Oh, and a comment to ljk -- yes, I remember the film Countdown quite well. It was one of the very first films directed by Robert Altman, who went on to direct such classics as M*A*S*H and Nashville. Altman's signature style is already well developed in Countdown, especially his penchant for having his characters talk over each other, like people do in real life.

Countdown was based on a much more well-told version of the story, the novel "The Pilgrim Project' by Hank Searles. That book is based on an actual LSR (Lunar Surface Rendezvous) proposal made in the early 1960s, while NASA was struggling with the "mode decision," how to send men to the Moon. It's a much more plausible scenario, using a Saturn 1B to orbit an Agena/Mercury combination. Actually, the TLI stage consisted of the S-IVB (for stage 1 TLI propulsion), the Agena (for stage 2 TLI propulsion and MCCs), a modified Polaris solid-fuel rocket (to act as a landing brake during the landing phase), a truss with landing legs and small vernier final-phase landing engines, and attached to the truss, a 3-day-duration Mercury capsule.

The flight plan was nearly identical to a Surveyor's -- the stack was aimed directly at a spot on the near side of the Moon, the braking rocket fired at several hundred km altitude, slowed the craft to only a few hundred kph, and the verniers slowed it to a relatively soft landing. If, for any reason, you wanted to abort, there are several opportunities during translunar coast to fire the Agena and/or Polaris perpendicular to the line of flight and place yourself on a free-return trajectory.

The nice character-building catch in Searles' version was that the Mercury/truss combo was *just* too heavy to land. To bring the weight down, they had to slingshot the heat shield away from the spacecraft. So, once you committed to landing, you *had* to land -- you had no way to return to Earth.

Searles' book is also able to get away with basing its main characters on real-life astronauts without specifically naming them. The "old veteran" astronaut, played in the film by Robert Duvall, is never named in the book, but always referred to as "the Colonel." A Marine colonel, in fact. Mercury pioneer. Born in Ohio. The Colonel's original backup was "the Commander." Another Mercury pioneer. Naval aviator. Craggy grin, known for flashing from smiling to icy in milliseconds.

And while offhand mentions were made, here and there, of Glenn and Shepard as if they were other people (just to keep lawsuits at bay, I'm sure), it was a skillful job of using Glenn and Shepard as characters without requiring their permissions...

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Gentlemen, your excellent responses still support one of my major points: Apollo was indeed conceived, executed and publicly perceived as a race between the West and Communism to land--not stay--on the Moon, and therefore the program completely lost public support after Apollo 11.

While it may be true that had the Soviets accepted a second-place finish and done their own landings Apollo may have lingered on a bit longer, I still doubt that Apollo would have led to a permanent lunar presence because of the reasons and perceptions I have previously described. Additionally, the Cold War had already thawed considerably, the 1967 UN Treaty on Outer Space was already signed, and the US was preoccupied with Vietnam and the other tumultuous social and political events of the 60s.

In this light, I have stopped thinking of Apollo as a lost opportunity and see it instead as a serendipitous burst of pioneering--the right thing done at a sociologically inopportune time for arguably the wrong reasons.

The challenge now is to ensure that MMI is perceived as an effort to establish permanent human presence on the Moon (not just as Apollo Recycled!) and, eventually, Mars so that developmental money is spent wisely on true infrastructure development and sustainable, affordable technology via economies of scale. There is no reason that MMI cannot become just as valid a long-term engine for American technological development as Defense spending; in fact, MMI can provide an even better direct return-on-investment while simultaneously preserving the Defense-critical aerospace technology base during the lean DoD times to come after the current conflicts finally end.

Bottom line: "Framing" issues properly is a critical skill that NASA needs to learn how to do a lot better!

[dvandorn]

Yes, framing the issues is important. That's one reason why NASA *hired* James Cameron (director of such films as Titanic and The Terminator) to help them frame such issues.

Can anyone honestly say that has helped?

This links back to another discussion -- people are motivated by greed and fear, and invariably try and do things the easiest way possible, with the least effort on their parts. If you *really* feel you need a popular upswell of opinion to achieve space flight goals, you need to appeal to the people's fear, greed and/or laziness.

Now, just *how* do you plan to accomplish anything *lasting* if that's how you must frame it, eh?

...*sigh*...

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Yes, framing the issues is important.  That's one reason why NASA *hired* James Cameron (director of such films as Titanic and The Terminator) to help them frame such issues.

Can anyone honestly say that has helped?

This links back to another discussion -- people are motivated by greed and fear, and invariably try and do things the easiest way possible, with the least effort on their parts.  If you *really* feel you need a popular upswell of opinion to achieve space flight goals, you need to appeal to the people's fear, greed and/or laziness.

Now, just *how* do you plan to accomplish anything *lasting* if that's how you must frame it, eh?

...*sigh*...

-the other Doug

"Greed is good".... ...specifically, the vast new market for the aerospace industry that MMI would implicitly provide. MMI would provide lots of well-paying long-term domestic jobs (which is patently in the best interests of the country in these dark days of outsourcing & layoffs), and the technological innovations spun off from all this developmental work would, as always, help to create new industries and economic growth.

In realpolitik terms, the present level of defense spending is unsustainable, and eventually there will be massive pressure to cut it. Naturally, defense-related industries will strongly support any way to preserve their workloads, and MMI is one big potential cash cow for a lot of them once DoD dollars begin to dry up; therefore, it is probable that they will lobby Congress quite vigorously for this program.

Happlily, this umpteenth iteration of the Old Washington Game really can be a win-win for all stakeholders. In addition to all the back-home economic benefits just described, we would actually, finally begin the no-kidding human exploration and colonization of the solar system (shh...it's a secret!)

[ElkGroveDan]

It's also bad for the human spirit to reduce people's prosperity, against their will, for things they don't as a whole want to do.  We've already seen the polls: Gallup reports that the American people would favor a return to the Moon ONLY if the total cost of the program was less than a billion dollars -- which is to say they don't want it at all.  If there's no actual concrete benefit from it, how does this give Congress and the White house the right to cram it down their throats with their own money?.....

Very well said Bruce.

[ljk4-1]

It's also bad for the human spirit to reduce people's prosperity, against their will, for things they don't as a whole want to do.  We've already seen the polls: Gallup reports that the American people would favor a return to the Moon ONLY if the total cost of the program was less than a billion dollars -- which is to say they don't want it at all.  If there's no actual concrete benefit from it, how does this give Congress and the White house the right to cram it down their throats with their own money?  Particularly, I may add, when we can "explore" without the gigantic added expense of lugging out own bodies along -- and the people as a whole seem quite content with THAT kind of space exploration.

Let's just keep in mind that we are talking about a manned return to the Moon, which -- however interesting it may be to geologists -- is an utterly barren, monotonous desert that most people find boring as hell, which is why interest in the Apollo program vanished the moment Apollo 11 was over.  If you're going to explore something like that, the way to do it is as cheaply as possible, with machines.

My questions are: Who are the people they polled and do they have any concept of how much it takes to run an actual space program - plus the fact that NASA takes so little of the federal budget or their taxes.

What's one of the few things people remember from the 1960s: The Moon landings. Not all the whining against it or the things that were problems then but are dusty memories in history books now.

[dvandorn]

One of the problems in using the argument "people don't want it" is that we are, by and large, talking about people who are massively uninformed on the subject.

For example, when polled, a majority of people state that they believe the NASA budget is larger than the HHS (Health and Human Services) budget, when NASA's budget is something like 1/100th of HHS's.

Also, the line I hear repeatedly from people who criticize NASA funding is that "we should be spending that money right here, on Earth!"

Ummm... the *entire* NASA budget is spent paying workers, running facilities and procuring materiel -- almost all of that within the U.S. That money IS spent here on Earth.

If people were simply informed of the actual facts, I'd have an urge to trust their judgment. But as it stands, I do not accede to the opinions of an uninformed majority...

-the other Doug

[ljk4-1]

One of the problems in using the argument "people don't want it" is that we are, by and large, talking about people who are massively uninformed on the subject.

For example, when polled, a majority of people state that they believe the NASA budget is larger than the HHS (Health and Human Services) budget, when NASA's budget is something like 1/100th of HHS's.

Also, the line I hear repeatedly from people who criticize NASA funding is that "we should be spending that money right here, on Earth!"

Ummm... the *entire* NASA budget is spent paying workers, running facilities and procuring materiel -- almost all of that within the U.S.  That money IS spent here on Earth.

If people were simply informed of the actual facts, I'd have an urge to trust their judgment.  But as it stands, I do not accede to the opinions of an uninformed majority...

-the other Doug

As Harlan Ellison once said, everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion.

[ljk4-1]

A few comments...

Bruce and JRehling, most of the "little now" money will be spent on the CEV and its launch vehicle, which are needed to maintain an American manned space presence of *any* kind after the Shuttle fleet is retired.  And I'm thinking that the CEV, even with its development costs, will end up costing less in the long run than a re-certification of the Shuttle fleet.  Also, it's my impression that the CEV will be overall cheaper to fly than the Shuttle is, which will provide a long-term cost savings.  It's actually a move to *lessen* the percentage of the space budget dedicated to maintaining an American manned presence in space.

One good thing about the way the CEV is being designed is that it's a multi-purpose vehicle.  Once you have a CEV fleet in operation, you can develop habitat and propulsion modules at your leisure and use the CEV as a taxi to get to and from the "real" mission modules.  So, spending the money to develop a CEV *now* won't end up being wasted money -- we'll be able to use the CEV for LEO and ISS operations, even if the LSAM development is delayed or canceled.

As for a majority of Americans not supporting a return to the Moon -- a majority of Americans didn't support the U.S. entry into WWII, either.  Until we were attacked.  A majority of Americans *do* believe that the Air Force captured a UFO in 1947 and autopsied a bunch of dead gray aliens.

I *guarantee* you that if America were to give up manned spaceflight, it wouldn't be long before a majority of Americans would *insist* that America not be left behind by expanding Chinese and Japanese manned space programs.

And if you think that by killing Shuttle and ISS flights you'll get three planetary flagship missions a year, think again.  Funding for unmanned spaceflight would remain the same, if not be cut back a bit, if America got out of the manned space flight business.  Cutting funding to one does not mean all that money would get spent on the other.

The main competitor for unmanned spaceflight's funding is NOT manned spaceflight.  It's Iraq war spending, Katrina recovery spending, servicing-a-multi-trillion-dollar-national-debt spending, on and on ad nauseum.  Killing American manned space flight will *not* significantly increase unmanned spaceflight funding, period.  And, with all due respect, you're a fool if you think it will.

Walking away from manned spaceflight is the first step down the path of abandoning *all* significant space exploration.  Mark my words.

-the other Doug

As much as I think that by the time we currently plan on sending humans to Mars (the 2030s, right?), robotics and computers will have advanced to where human astronauts would be incidental and perhaps even a hundrance to the mission's scientific success, I have to agree with The Other Doug that for now the public is mainly going to support manned space exploration, not machines. Especially the part of the general public that is footing the bills for space.

What we can hope for is that enough of a space infrastructure will be created that we cannot abandon continued space exploration.

Scientists griped about Apollo taking away resources and science, but we got over 800 pounds of Moon samples. Had we relied only on robots back then, we'd be lucky to have maybe 800 grams. Look at how little the Soviet Luna probes returned to Earth.

But if NASA ever wants to get the focus and support on cheaper robot missions, they should try harder to aim at what the public wants, at least on surface matters. As just one example of what I mean, the Mars Rovers should have been named Wilbur and Orville. It would have "personalized" them more for people. We space supporters know that robot probes have their own personalities, to say nothing of all the actual humans behind their successes, but the public just thinks of them as machines (though children tend to anthropomorphize them).

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

One of the problems in using the argument "people don't want it" is that we are, by and large, talking about people who are massively uninformed on the subject.

For example, when polled, a majority of people state that they believe the NASA budget is larger than the HHS (Health and Human Services) budget, when NASA's budget is something like 1/100th of HHS's.

Also, the line I hear repeatedly from people who criticize NASA funding is that "we should be spending that money right here, on Earth!"

Ummm... the *entire* NASA budget is spent paying workers, running facilities and procuring materiel -- almost all of that within the U.S.  That money IS spent here on Earth.

If people were simply informed of the actual facts, I'd have an urge to trust their judgment.  But as it stands, I do not accede to the opinions of an uninformed majority...

-the other Doug

First, of course uninformed opinion should be ignored on matters of CONCRETE benefit to a nation -- that's what we pay our legislators to analyze, after all. But if you're going to advocate manned space exploration solely on vague "spiritual" or "aesthetic" grounds, then you obviously have an obligation to obey the will of the people directly on how much of their tax money they want to spend on it.

Second, people know perfectly well that the money on the space program is spent "on Earth" -- they mean that it should be spent on material things existing on Earth to benefit people on Earth.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

LJK 4-1: "As much as I think that by the time we currently plan on sending humans to Mars (the 2030s, right?), robotics and computers will have advanced to where human astronauts would be incidental and perhaps even a hindrance to the mission's scientific success, I have to agree with The Other Doug that for now the public is mainly going to support manned space exploration, not machines. Especially the part of the general public that is footing the bills for space."

Don't count on it. Notice that the things in space exploration that have really riveted the public's interest -- Voyager, Hubble, the MERs -- have been UNMANNED programs? They've riveted the public's interest because they involve exploration, and the revelation of entirely new sights and facts about the universe -- despite the fact that those revelations have come from our sending our eyes and minds to new places without lugging our bodies along for the ride. That technology is one which this generation is privileged to be the first to be able to use -- Jefferson would have given his eyeteeth to mount the Lewis and Clark expedition by cheaper robot, and Isabella would have been even happier if she could have tested Columbus' theory that way.

By contrast, the public has been bored cross-eyed about manned space travel ever since Apollo 11; the only things that have waked them up have been thefirst flight of the Shuttle (simply because it was such a spectacular new technology), the first American woman in space (although not the first black, for some reason) -- and of course, the disasters. From the viewpoint of cost-effectriveness, the public finds unmanned space exploration far more interesting per dollar spent on it than manned exploration -- and even the first man on Mars isn't going to change that fact very much. You can only do that for the first time once, too. (How many people remember the second team to climb Mt. Everest? Not I.)

"Scientists griped about Apollo taking away resources and science, but we got over 800 pounds of Moon samples. Had we relied only on robots back then, we'd be lucky to have maybe 800 grams. Look at how little the Soviet Luna probes returned to Earth."

Yep -- but, thanks to modern technology, geological samples are like Bryllcream: a very little dab'll do ya, and the marginal scientific benefit of returning big amounts (especially from a single site) drops off very rapidly. Had we spent 5% of the money we spent on Apollo, we could probably have returned a pound or so of lunar samples from each of 20 or more places on the Moon, and the total science return would have been far greater. (As far back as 1961, by the way, the US had designed a Surveyor mission that could have returned 1 pound of lunar material to Earth. The clumbering inefficiency of Soviet technology has clouded this issue -- and even they finished up quite nicely with a 2-meter core sample.)

[nprev]

I absolutely understand and agree with the premise that unmanned missions do better science faster, cheaper, and safer, Bruce, but I think that we are comparing apples and oranges when we compare manned interplanetary exploration to UMSF. The goals are completely different; the challenge right now is to make sure that manned flight goals are also relevant.

I and probably some of the other posters here am of the opinion that extraterrestrial colonization should be a primary goal of space exploration. Aside from the philosophical and spiritual arguments for this that we're all quite familiar with, I frankly admit that I see a survivalist aspect to the issue that is even more important.

We can't count on the Earth being habitable for mankind over the long term, and the greatest danger of technological and/or political accidents causing this to happen will probably peak over the next few hundred years. The "best-case" bad scenario would be a really long, really deep new Dark Age, and the worst of course would be extinction.

Obviously, one or preferably more self-sufficient off-planet colonies would at least preserve technological civilization in the latter scenario, and of course the species itself would be capable of surviving a terrestrial catastrophe thereby; therefore, colonizing space seems quite prudent. However, the clock may be ticking. Aside from the possibility of near-term catastrophic events, it's also quite possible that we may not be able to afford to start concerted manned space exploration twenty or thirty years from now and maybe never again after that if it turns out that all of the Earth's resources and economic power must be used exclusively to support an increasingly large and energy-hungry population...which again would imply an eventual collapse of technological civilization very much like the Moties in Niven & Pournelle's The Mote In God's Eye.

In this light, MMI and its hoped-for follow-on of actual colonization may well be our only chance to provide a true insurance policy for the future of the species; I sincerely hope that's never true, but it sure would be comforting to have it in place. We've spent the better part of two million years getting to where we are today; it would be monumentally foolish to throw it all away out of a lack of foresight.

[The Messenger]

Perhaps a good compromise would be a obscenely expensive robotic development program, where adaptive robotics would be used to demonstate some of the manned attributes - specifically a toolbox equipped, wrench swinging robotic that could fix a high gain antenna boom, or make an agile adaptation to the unexpectedly rough terrain of Itokowa.

Using bullets and mousetraps to capture samples, fixed camera platforms, and near-sighted probes have badly weakened the science returns from robotic missions, while the bloated cost of the ISS, and shuttle failures have stained the manned program.

We need a good planetary science program, not handicapped toys and space tourists growing seeds in microgravity.

[dvandorn]

Exactly! I hear so much talk about how the ISS is totally useless, scientifically -- and yet, I hear the same people say that there's no reason for people to go back to the Moon because it only interests "a few geologists."

You can't have it both ways! If you want manned spaceflight to do science, don't denigrate real scientific missions because they don't interest anyone except scientists!

Particle accelerators don't excite the public imagination, either, and it's a sure thing that the Katrina victims could use Fermilab's budget right now -- anyone think we ought to shut down Fermilab and go with computer modeling for all future subatomic research?

I didn't think so.

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

You completely miss the point about the ISS -- which is that the very same experiments it conducts could be carried out, tremendously more cheaply, using unmanned satellites. My God, most of the experiments being "done" by the crew right now are remote-controlled from Earth -- and a great many will be so controlled even if the thing ever gets a full crew. There are NONE of them that require on-the-spot human supervision, or that can't on balance be done far more cheaply on unmanned sats. (The cost of keeping humans on site to repair malfunctioning experiments is enormously greater -- by about two orders of magnitude -- than that of simply reflying automated experiments that break down in orbit.)

The same thing is true of all lunar surface experiments, since remote-controlled teleoperation is quite feasible given a radio signal time lag of only 2 seconds total. It's only when you go on to worlds farther away that remote-controlled experimentation becomes difficult -- but it's also at that point that the cost of putting humans on the spot skyrockets by at least another order of magnitude, which means that in those cases you had damned well better have an adequate scientific justification for such gigantic expenditures.