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]

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.

[djellison]

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.

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

[Bob Shaw]

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