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BruceMoomaw
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060...lantis_spa.html :

"Under orders to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, NASA plans to cancel shuttle Atlantis' next scheduled overhaul and mothball the ship in 2008.

"Rather than becoming a museum piece, however, Atlantis will serve as a spare parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour to complete assembly of the International Space Station.

" 'People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done,' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told Kennedy Space Center employees during a televised address on Friday.

" 'We're going to keep (Atlantis) in as near flight-ready condition as we can without putting it through a (modification and overhaul) so we can use those parts,' Hale said.
____________________

Jeffrey Bell has recently finished a piece for "SpaceDaily" proclaiming that the wholesale cancellation of other NASA projects in the FY 2007 budget to keep Shuttle and ISS going is actually just part of Michael Griffin's Machiavellian strategy to get both of the cancelled, by making it clear that they can be saved now only at the cost of a swarm of other projects (including Bush's lunar program) which are now more popular. Certainly that is the overwhelming message being conveyed, whether Griffin planned it that way or not -- I haven't seen a single newspaper editorial yet that favors retaining Shuttle at this point.

(Bell also claims to see other, subtler evidence of this strategy in Griffin's moves over the last few weeks -- and also signs that he definitely plans to throw ISS from the train as well, by just giving it to the Russians half-finished in a few years and paying off the ESA and Japan for their unlaunched space lab modules. These include the fact that he's cancelled work on the unmanned cargo variant of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be necessary to take up replacement Control Moment Gyros to the ISS after the Shuttle is no longer available.)
Richard Trigaux
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 21 2006, 04:05 AM) *
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060...lantis_spa.html :

"Under orders to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, NASA plans to cancel shuttle Atlantis' next scheduled overhaul and mothball the ship in 2008.

"Rather than becoming a museum piece, however, Atlantis will serve as a spare parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour to complete assembly of the International Space Station.

" 'People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done,' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told Kennedy Space Center employees during a televised address on Friday.

" 'We're going to keep (Atlantis) in as near flight-ready condition as we can without putting it through a (modification and overhaul) so we can use those parts,' Hale said.
____________________

Jeffrey Bell has recently finished a piece for "SpaceDaily" proclaiming that the wholesale cancellation of other NASA projects in the FY 2007 budget to keep Shuttle and ISS going is actually just part of Michael Griffin's Machiavellian strategy to get both of the cancelled, by making it clear that they can be saved now only at the cost of a swarm of other projects (including Bush's lunar program) which are now more popular. Certainly that is the overwhelming message being conveyed, whether Griffin planned it that way or not -- I haven't seen a single newspaper editorial yet that favors retaining Shuttle at this point.

(Bell also claims to see other, subtler evidence of this strategy in Griffin's moves over the last few weeks -- and also signs that he definitely plans to throw ISS from the train as well, by just giving it to the Russians half-finished in a few years and paying off the ESA and Japan for their unlaunched space lab modules. These include the fact that he's cancelled work on the unmanned cargo variant of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be necessary to take up replacement Control Moment Gyros to the ISS after the Shuttle is no longer available.)


Bruce,

I am not a hardline opponent to human spaceflight like you, but in the case of the shuttle I must agree that it was a mistake since the beginning (nobody was to blame at that time, we simply did not knew the incredible cost) and that stubbornly clinging to the ISS/shuttle program now can be done only at the cost of any rational space program.

NASA will sooner or later have to develop another way to go in space. This will have a cost, and delaying this step can only increase this cost and further delay all the useful activities. Clearly, maintaining the shuttle program is delaying any other activity, and to this delay we have to add the time to develop another transportation mean.

In Europe we had a hot debate about doing or not the Hermes shuttle. After years of political struggle, the decision was made to do it, with an overal agreement on a budget that everybody was already considering very high, a considerable effort. So industrials began the development of Hermes, but only some month after they came with a bill 50% more than expected. So the decision was taken not to pursue further, and to abandon Hermes. A sad decision certainly, especially for advocates of human spaceflight. But a wise decision, everybody agreed.

So, today, whatever the future plans, the wisest for the NASA, and by far the less expensive, would be to abandon the shuttle right now. Certainly a sad decision, but a necessary one.
djellison
One of Maggie Thatchers few highlights - not involving the UK in Hermes and infact, despite there being a Union Jack in the ISS, as I understand it, we're not involved in Columbus either. We don't spend much on space here, far far far too little, but what we do spend, at least wasnt poured down that particular black hole...

HOWEVER...

I still maintain that the US HAS to complete it's obligation to international partners with ISS. Bush called for international cooperation in the VSE, and he's simply not going to get that if they scew over Japan and Europe with ISS. NASA can do that however it wants - using STS or something else - but it HAS to do it. ITAR makes international cooperation harder now than ever before ( ask the Canadians working on PHX ) - so the US, if it is serious in wanting future involvement with other agencies, HAS to do what it signed up to many many years ago. Reading the excellent 'Titans of Saturn', I'm more convinced of that than ever,

I take little notice of what Bell says, he has an agenda in everything he says and interprets everything to support his agenda, it's hard to take him seriously as a result. He occasionally flags up a good point, but rarely more than that, his article reads more like a forum ranting than a piece of journalism.

The early Atlantis retirement makes a lot of sense, and shows to me that Griffin really does want to get rid of STS as quickly as is reasonably possible.

The scrapping of plans for a cargo CEV shows, perhaps, that he's prepared to take commercial options for shifting smaller loads into orbit (Delta 4, Atlas 5 etc ). An alternate interpretation of that particular piece of evidence.

Doug
BruceMoomaw
"I still maintain that the US HAS to complete it's obligation to international partners with ISS. Bush called for international cooperation in the VSE, and he's simply not going to get that if they scew over Japan and Europe with ISS. NASA can do that however it wants - using STS or something else - but it HAS to do it. ITAR makes international cooperation harder now than ever before ( ask the Canadians working on PHX ) - so the US, if it is serious in wanting future involvement with other agencies, HAS to do what it signed up to many many years ago."

That depends, I think, on whether NASA is willing to cover the costs that the ESA and Japan ran up building their lab modules -- which Bell thinks it can easily do with a small fraction of the money it will save by cancelling Shuttle/ISS. If it does, then -- given the Gordian-knot mess which the entire ISS project has degenerated into -- I think ESA and Japan will be a lot more willing to forgive us for jumping ship on this one. (They would certainly have taken America's cancellation of its half of Ulysses better in 1981 if we'd covered their costs for THAT one -- they lost half of their own planned experiments!)

QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 21 2006, 08:17 AM) *
The scrapping of plans for a cargo CEV shows, perhaps, that he's prepared to take commercial options for shifting smaller loads into orbit (Delta 4, Atlas 5 etc ). An alternate interpretation of that particular piece of evidence.

Doug


Bell says -- and I haven't double-checked this yet -- that there is no other cargo-carrier satellite big enough to carry replacement CMGs.

He has told me in an E-mail tonight, though, that he doesn't regard the scrapping of Atlantis as corroborative evidence that Griffin is planning to zap Shuttle/ISS:

"No real news here. Space Cadet chat groups had figured this out long ago. Clearly there is no point in starting a 2-yr overhaul of Atlantis in 2008 when the system is closing down in 2010.

"And stripping an Orbiter for parts isn't new either -- parts are constantly swapped between the Orbiters. This isn't a pointer to an early Shuttle termination."
djellison
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 21 2006, 09:24 AM) *
Bell says -- and I haven't double-checked this yet -- that there is no other cargo-carrier satellite big enough to carry replacement CMGs.


They are 281kg. I assume by 'big enough' he means dimensions, not lifting capacity. And even so, it's not a dimensions issue - it's simply that the russian docking ports are smaller than a CMG. There is no external cargo stowage capacity on LV's - that's the problem.

What we don't have is a US unmanned ISS vehicle. There is an ESA one in the works, and a Russian one that's is very very relaible. There is no doubt that a means could be found to carry many CMG's to ISS using one of those vehicles. Similarly, it would not be the work of billions of dollars to build a simple unmanned bus that operates like progress, to have externally stowed cargo to launch via a EELV. It really isnt a big technical challenge.

What Bell is saying is that they are going to intentionally launch the next shuttle knowing that it will shed foam and thus he is alledging that NASA is knowingly and intentionally endangering the lives of astronauts. It's not just idiotic, it's sick. He's sensationalising in the extreme to draw attention to himself, that's all.


Doug
edstrick
One big lesson of the post-Columbia "test" flight and post-flight research was confirmation that there are two essentially different foam loss mechanisms. <There could be more but there's 2 main ones>

There is a *LOT* of "popcorning"... small foam bits shed semi-randomly from the tank at high altitude in near vaccuum. They could see it on the radar with the new high-sensativity instrumentation. This stuff's simply no problem. There's not enough air to sweep it past the shuttle with enough speed that impacts have the force to do damage.

The other foam loss, cryo-pumping, apparently with chill-formed liquid air trapped in small cracks and voids in the foam, then heated during ascent and blowing foam chunks off, is the biggie, and they had 2 remaining sources of foam loss last flight. Identified. Fixed. There may be others, I suspect there will be, but we've probably gotten the biggies.

Bell has good points, but too much of it is a pure rant. Hard to sort the foaming bits from the stuff that makes sense.
Richard Trigaux
Without entering into the "gordian-knot mess", I would say that the cost of today situation is the result of decisions which were taken 10 to 20 years ago. Lack of prevision, stubbornely ignoring warnings, refusing to come back once engaged into a dead way... The bill increases as a power of passing time.

There is a constant trend for politicians to make bear the costs of their decisions by the future generations. But now WE are their future generation...

As I said further, the cancellation of the Hermes shuttle project by Europe was certainly a sad decision, but at least we are getting out of this at NO COST and with all our freedom.
PhilCo126
As we already mentioned in the 2nd BIS book on the International Space Station, a down-sized ISS will do fine, just get the major components up there and scrap the STS shuttle program ( NASA might not survive another shuttle disaster ! )...
It looks NASA is going in the right direction ... turning attention to the new crew vehicles and launchers...
On to Mars !
MahFL
Its going to take much much longer than anyone thinks to land a human on Mars, my guess not before 2050.
pancam.gif
Richard Trigaux
When I think back twenty years ago, when the shuttle program was starting, all the hope we invested in it: cheap, easy, safe access to space, going in orbit as easily as we go in holidays, send up there tourists, scientists, artists, space stations, large science facilities, factories... and where we are now...
NASA is not the culprit: all the other shuttle programs were canceled, and space remains expensive, dangerous and difficult. There will perhaps not be a PRACTICAL space station and flight to Mars before several decades, and, unless something really new is discovered, there will never be easy cheap access to space.

In facts the idea of the space shuttle came not from scientists and not from engineers, it came from science fiction. And we all tried to realize a scifi dream. Sometimes it is a good idea. Sometimes not. Let us search for something else for an easy access to space. Starting with what we know to do. Large aircraft or huge baloon at high altitude, perhaps? Would a very large aircraft such an A380 be able to hauld a rocket stage at high altitude? Certainly yes, but how large? For small satellites perhaps.
dilo
QUOTE (Richard Trigaux @ Feb 21 2006, 06:34 PM) *
...In facts the idea of the space shuttle came not from scientists and not from engineers, it came from science fiction. And we all tried to realize a scifi dream. Sometimes it is a good idea. Sometimes not....

Agree, Richard. And I'm worried by this fact, because I'm convinced that also the new USA exploration program is something like this. Recently, I hear "expert" saying it will be easier (and cheaper) to launch satellites and spacecrafts from the moon, and make astronomical observations from it's "dark side". But a scientist, or even a space enthusiast, undertsands that this is not true: a base on the moon will be very hard to make and will cost a lot, making very difficult to pay back construction expenses (ISS should teach us something!); and best place to observe universe is far from any celestial body!
And yes, I share with MahFL the impression that we will not see a man on Mars in our lifespan. sad.gif But we have MER images! biggrin.gif
Bob Shaw
QUOTE (Richard Trigaux @ Feb 21 2006, 05:34 PM) *
In facts the idea of the space shuttle came not from scientists and not from engineers, it came from science fiction.


Richard:

No, I don't really think so!

The 'spaceplane' concept came largely from German engineer Dr. Eugen Sänger who researched many rocketry technologies, such as regeneratively cooled liquid-fueled engines. After WWII, Bell Aircraft Corporation undertook the BOMI and ROBO studies of round the world spaceplanes, which appeared to offer many advantages of artillery-derived rockets. From these seeds came a whole range of spaceplane projects, and science fiction merely reiterated the concepts - remember that Arthur C Clarke was active in the BIS before he wrote fiction!

http://www.luft46.com/misc/sanger.html

Bob Shaw
BruceMoomaw
While I will agree that it's insane (even given NASA's past actions) to say that Griffin would DELIBERATELY pass up an opportunity to minimize the dangers of more falling Shuttle foam before the next launch, there's another possibility: we may very well have no choice but to do so if we want to keep the ISS going at all.

The best weblog page on the ISS ( http://www.geocities.com/i_s_s_alpha ) says flatly that the only possible carrier right now for the Control Moment Gyros, except for the Shuttle, is Japan's HEV cargo carrier -- which won't be ready until 2009. (Europe's cargo carrier module can't do it.) NASA released a solicitation for "Commercial Orbital Transportation Services" carriers that might be able to do the job in October, with the proposals due this May -- so how long will it be before one of those can possibly fly? Surely 2008 at the absolute earliest.

And the CMGs have proven very fragile. Quoting last Sept. 5's Aviation Week: "The CMGs are too large to fit through the Progress vehicle hatch, so the Shuttle is the only option for replacing them. The combination of their ability to save propellant and their apparent fragility makes CMGs the long pole in the tent for continued Station viability without Shuttle support.

" 'If we went down to one CMG we couldn't last very long, says Mark Ferring, lead ISS flight director during the EVAs [on last year's Shuttle flight]. That's the thing that we had to get done.'

"NASA is already looking for smaller, lighter gyros to use on the Station after it retires the Shuttle. But for now, the only option available to the Station program is getting the most use out of the current model. Controllers were surprised when CMG-1 failed -- the victim of a bearing failure that gave only a few hours' of warning -- and they still don't have a full understanding of the breakdown. As soon as the spacewalkers restored power to CMG-2, ISS controllers took CMG-3 offline for attitude control because it was showing unusual vibrations and current pulls, although they let it continue to spin. Engineers at NASA and L-3 Communications, which supplied the CMGs, were eager to get a look at the original CMG-1 in the hope it would hold clues to the cause of its bearing failure. Noguchi and Robinson carefully bolted it into the aft end of Discovery's payload bay for the trip home.

" 'Bringing one back is actually one of the biggest priority things that we have on this flight, not just installing a new one, but getting the one that's failed on the ground so we can do analysis on it', Ferring says."

So. If they get down to only two working CMGs on the ISS again and they don't have a flying Shuttle before 2008, they are up Excrement Waterway -- they will have no way to prevent the sudden reduction of the ISS at any moment to only one CMG, after which it "can't last very long". For this reason alone, NASA may very well have to fly Shuttles again as soon as possible even if they don't -- or can't -- solve the foam problem. Unless, that is, they're prepared to dump the ISS at any moment.

As for Griffin's Jan. 19 interview with the Orlando Sentinel that Bell mentions ( http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_spac...griffin_af.html ), he makes it pretty clear that --while he hopes they've solved the problem of big pieces of foam falling off -- he is by no means confident of it:

"Orlando Sentinel: What is the likelihood of making May?

"Griffin: We don’t know. I think you’ve been covering this long enough to understand that in order to even find out, you have to set a date and then you have to start working toward that date. We know what our processing flow is. We’re not going to make it up on the fly and the process flow either makes May or it doesn’t. But on the other hand, if we don’t set a date and try for it, we know we won’t make one. So that’s the plan. In brief summary to the question, yes, we think we understand the mechanism. Yes, we have mitigation based on that understanding of the mechanism. And we think we’ll get back to flying in late spring or early summer. We believe things will go well after that and we’ll be on our way to completing the [international space] station.

"Orlando Sentinel: What happens if on the next mission, STS-121, things don’t go well and you see big pieces of foam come off the tank again that are in excess of your design restrictions?

"Griffin: I can’t get into that kind of speculation. Obviously, it would be a major hiccup and we would have to deal with it.

"Orlando Sentinel: Could the program survive that politically?

"Griffin: I just don’t even know. I’m not going to speculate. I just can’t. There are too many branch paths. Right now, we are devoting our resources to flying and flying well. That’s how you have to think."

In a situation like that, if YOU were Griffin, wouldn't YOU be eager to get rid of this whole thing at the slightest opportunity? It's not only a white elephant; it's a dangerous rogue white elephant. Griffin, contrary to Bell, surely isn't deliberately making the next Shuttle flight more dangerous than it needs to be -- but it is unavoidably extremely dangerous; he knows it; and I think at the slightest indication that the foam problem hasn't been completely solved he will seize the opportunity to say it's time to kill Shuttle-ISS completely.
gpurcell
Look, the simplest explanation for the official announcement for retiring Atlantis NOW is that it significantly degrades the option of trying to continue flying the shuttles post-2010. Griffin wants two solutions:

1) Develop CEV
2) Stop manned spaceflight

without option

3) Keep the shuttles staggering along until the next disaster.

The problem with option three is that it is, year-on-year, cheaper then option one...but it does, however, inevitably lead to option 2!
Richard Trigaux
QUOTE (gpurcell @ Feb 22 2006, 08:01 AM) *
Look, the simplest explanation for the official announcement for retiring Atlantis NOW is that it significantly degrades the option of trying to continue flying the shuttles post-2010. Griffin wants two solutions:

1) Develop CEV
2) Stop manned spaceflight

without option

3) Keep the shuttles staggering along until the next disaster.

The problem with option three is that it is, year-on-year, cheaper then option one...but it does, however, inevitably lead to option 2!



Yes this is the problem: they think "what is the cost this year " or "what is the cost during the time I am the responsible" and not "what is the overal cost of the program, spin-off and inconveniences included".


sad.gif
dilo
QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Feb 21 2006, 11:32 PM) *
The 'spaceplane' concept came largely from German engineer Dr. Eugen Sänger who researched many rocketry technologies, such as regeneratively cooled liquid-fueled engines.

Perhaps slightly OT, I knew the Sanger project and I remember also a modern spaceplane project called "Sanger", in honor of this projectist. In the image I saw, it was a beautiful, very aveniristic model but I cannot find any info on that. Someone can help?
edstrick
We have to remember that the IDEA of a space shuttle is a good one. The one we got is a bad one.

Shuttle was supposed to 1.) provide access to and from space and serve as a work platform in orbit. 2.) Fly frequently. 3.) Fly Cheaply. 4.) Fly Safely.

It is about 80% successful at #1. Fails #'s 2 and 3 by 10x each, and Fails #4 by 100 to 10,000 or more times (depending on which early reliability claims you pick)

Why? 1.) We'd never built any reusable spacecraft or launch vehicles. Building shuttle right would have been like building a DC-3 Goonybird in 1925 instead of 1935.
2.) We had to enlist all possible customers to get the political support for the $ to build it, so it was designed to satisfy every one's hypothetical needs (especially the military's). The design was over-constrained by trying to please everybody.
3.) We tried to build it on the cheap.

Any of those 3 things inevitably would have compromised what we got compared with what we wanted. Together, they turned a great idea into a 35 year disaster.

From orbit insertion to atmosphere interface, the shuttle is wondererful. The rest of the time it's a disaster, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
PhilCo126
After 25 years of Space Transportation System (STS) it looks like NASA is going to use ATLANTIS for spare parts wink.gif
BruceMoomaw
An excellent case can be made that the basic concept of the Shuttle was disastrously dumb-ass from the very beginning -- and Robert Truax made it in his January 1999 "Aerospace America" article, "The Future of Earth-to-Orbit Propulsion" ( http://www.teamprincipia.com/space/eto1.php ), which has been one of my Holy Tracts ever since I read it. Truax's most important point is that putting wings on a reusable LEO vehicle -- as opposed to a 2-stage vehicle in which the first stage parachutes into the ocean, and the second stage may or not be reusable -- is a breathtakingly idiotic notion from the start. Wings cut the vehicle's orbital payload by 2/3 (Griffin himself has memorably described the Shuttle as "a 100-ton shroud for a 30-ton payload"); they require absolute stability during reentry (whereas a capsule virtually stabilizes itself); they make a crash during the final landing vastly more likely; and they tremendously complicate any manned abort-and-escape (to the point of making it frequently impossible, as on the current Shuttle). They make sense on a vehicle that spends all its time moving horizontally through the atmosphere -- NOT on one that goes up through and then comes down through the atmosphere as fast as it reasonably can.

Actually, to quote his entire list of condemnations:

"Many flawed design choices were made in arriving at the Shuttle's final configuration:

"(1) Wings and landing gear are the heaviest of all possible methods of recovery.

"(2) Parallel staging is less efficient than tandem. More importantly, it also prevents the upper-stage engine from being optimized for vacuum operation. [He details this at some length, pointing out that it's particularly true for hydrogen-fueled engines.]

"(3) Use of two boosters doubles the probability of catastrophic failure. Multiple main engines increase probability of catastrophic failure by a factor of three, even though they may reduce the probability of noncatastrophic failure.

"(4) Opting for segmented booster cases increases the probability of case failure by unnecessarily complicating case design. Monolithic cases were proposed but rejected because Thiokol, a Utah company with no access to water transportation, had to propose a take-apart design.

"(5) Putting a crew on the first flight requires a very high reliability based on ground tests alone. A more sensible procedure would have been to fly the vehicle unmanned for cargo missions until an adequate degree of reliability could be demonstrated, as was done with the Saturn V (the Soviets, incidentally, did fly their shuttle Buran, for the first and only time, without a crew).

"(6) Use of solid propellants in the boosters minimizes the savings that can be had through recovery and reuse. Pressure-fed liquid-propellant boosters, as initially recommended by NASA-Marshall, would have required little more than a wash-down and refueling before reuse. Solids require disassembly and return to the factory, along with replacement of many parts. The cost of solid propellants runs about $7/lb vs. an average of about 10 cents for liquids.

"(7) Throwing away the largest part of the system, the main fuel tank, adds about $50 million to the cost per flight.

"(8) People and cargo should never be mixed. Payloads to be transported to orbit, even for missions requiring a human presence, are 95% 'stuff' and at most only 5% 'meat.' The provisions and safety requirements for the latter cost an order of magnitude more than for the former. Mixing the two burdens cargo flights with the same elaborate safety measures required for people."
________________________________

Some of Truax's arguments are open to question -- in particular, his belief that rockets should not only be recovered in but also launched from the ocean, and his belief that pressure-fed stages are better than turbopumps. (He got five approving letters from engineers in the April issue of the magazine, but also one detailed critique of that particular idea by an engineer who had worked on pressure-fed boosters and found out the hard way that they must be heavy and thus inefficient.) It may also be workable and economically effective to use the same booster for people and cargo, provided that any manned capsule is equipped with an escape rocket (which by itself will massively increase the safety of any manned mission, without having to go through the phenomenal expense of man-rating the booster to the degree that's necessary for the Shuttle).

And he was saying all this, loudly, in the 1970s, proposing an alternative to Shuttle called "Sea Dragon" that would have had these traits.
dvandorn
And you can add to Truax's comments the comment, made in the mid-90's by one of the main NASA designers of the Shuttle system, that they "got exactly the system (they) wanted." He went on to say that the designers knew exactly how infrequently this Shuttle would be able to fly, and how expensive it would be, and that's exactly the system they wanted. (If someone could recall the designer's name for me, that would be appreciated -- I just don't recall it at the moment.)

I seriously disagree with some of Truax's comments, and I also believe that his comments were designed solely to attack a competing concept -- i.e., he, Truax, was looking at getting a few billion dollars from the government in his *own* pockets, which motivated him to make some unsubstantiable attack statements. Obviously, his attacks didn't work, probably because everyone at the time realized that he had an axe to grind on this particular issue.

However, I take *strong* exception to the statement earlier in the thread that eliminating manned space flight is one of Griffin's goals. I dare anyone to produce a statement by Griffin that supports this. I also put up against it the fact that Griffin put a Shuttle servicing mission of Hubble back on the schedule, even after O'Keefe and his minions had killed it.

Once again, I will say it -- eliminate manned spaceflight from the U.S. budget, and you'll be left with Russia, ESA and JAXA for *all* of your unmanned probes. Congress will *never* see the sense of continuing unmanned exploration unless there is also a manned space presence; they will see bowing out of manned spaceflight as a statement of our intention to abandon space exploration entirely. If you sell the first, the second will follow automatically. So, if you want to see American unmanned spaceflight brought to a complete halt, go ahead and lobby for an end to American manned spaceflight.

Pardon me if I don't join y'all in that.

-the other Doug
mcaplinger
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 22 2006, 03:21 AM) *
An excellent case can be made that the basic concept of the Shuttle was disastrously dumb-ass from the very beginning -- and Robert Truax made it in his January 1999 "Aerospace America" article...


Regardless of the merits of Truax's technical points, the first rule of aerospace is that paper studies like his Sea Dragon are worthless by themselves. Until you have actually built, tested, and flown a system multiple times, you are only extrapolating based on incomplete data how it will perform, how well, and how cost-effectively. Talk is cheap, and aerospace is riddled with large and embarrassing failures based on ideas that seemed great on paper.

There's no shortage of people who trash the Shuttle with 20-20 hindsight, but the engineers who designed and built it did the best job they could under the technical and budgetary constraints at the time, and it's quite an achievement in that light. Within the limits of statistical error, its failure rate matches pretty well with the original honest assessment of 1 in 100 flights. If you want higher reliability than that, you'd better be prepared to pay for it, in money or capability or something.
Bill Harris
It will be an endless debate of whether or not the Space Shuttle is/was a good idea or not. Nonetheless, it has been a part of the US space program for two decades and it stands on it's own, good or bad.

However, my view is that it should not have been the _sole_ vehicle for US manned spaceflight and LEO cargo. We should have developed and utilized a "Gemini/Apollo/Soyuz" vehicle for routine manned launches, and an unmanned cargo ship for cargo. What we ended up doing with the Shuttle is equivalent to a young family selling it's Toyota sedan and buying a Winnebago RV as it's sole transportation.

The Shuttle program has been wonderful, but tunnel-visioned.

--Bill
Bob Shaw
QUOTE (dilo @ Feb 22 2006, 08:46 AM) *
Perhaps slightly OT, I knew the Sanger project and I remember also a modern spaceplane project called "Sanger", in honor of this projectist. In the image I saw, it was a beautiful, very aveniristic model but I cannot find any info on that. Someone can help?



Marco:

Try looking at:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saegerii.htm

Bob Shaw
BruceMoomaw
QUOTE (mcaplinger @ Feb 22 2006, 04:03 PM) *
Regardless of the merits of Truax's technical points, the first rule of aerospace is that paper studies like his Sea Dragon are worthless by themselves. Until you have actually built, tested, and flown a system multiple times, you are only extrapolating based on incomplete data how it will perform, how well, and how cost-effectively. Talk is cheap, and aerospace is riddled with large and embarrassing failures based on ideas that seemed great on paper.

There's no shortage of people who trash the Shuttle with 20-20 hindsight, but the engineers who designed and built it did the best job they could under the technical and budgetary constraints at the time, and it's quite an achievement in that light. Within the limits of statistical error, its failure rate matches pretty well with the original honest assessment of 1 in 100 flights. If you want higher reliability than that, you'd better be prepared to pay for it, in money or capability or something.


The trouble with Shuttle is not its reliability rate -- a failure rate of less than 2% does compare well with any unmanned booster. The trouble, as should be obvious, is everything ELSE about it: its disastrously low cost-effectiveness per kg of payload carried, and, oh yes, the fact that when it fails it usually kills people, which another type of booster would not. (Had the Shuttle been a CEV-type design -- that is, a reusable booster carrying a capsule with an escape rocket -- it would have killed NOBODY by this point. The Columbia accident would never have occurred; in the case of Challenger the escape system, if designed with even minimal competence, would have detected the leak and rocketed the crew to safety about 15 seconds before the explosion.)

In fact, these flaws -- basic to its fundamental design -- WERE clear to a lot of people at the time besides Truax, which is why NASA had to lie about the Shuttle to a degree that would have made Baron Munchausen blush to get it through Congress. Robert Thompson -- the program manager at the time -- actually guffawed while he was telling CAIB about the size and absurdity of the claims NASA was successfully feeding to Congress at the time: "Hell, anybody with any sense knew we'd never fly that often." He thought it was a terrific joke.

And the responsibility for the crime (which is not too strong a word for it) lies not with engineers frantically trying to do the best they could with such an absurd design -- it lies with the leadership of NASA, who deliberately, from the very start, set out to create a massively expensive and unjustified program to try and keep the agency's funding level as close to the bloated levels of the Moon Race as they possibly could, and who were willing to tell absolutely any lie necessary to achieve that goal. As Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth said during his frantic but futile attempt to keep Reagan from swallowing NASA's similar outrageous lies about the cost and utility of the Station: "Every government agency lies part of the time, but NASA is the only one I know that does so most of the time." (He could have added that the reason for this is simply that it has far more reason to lie than any other government agency, because its total spending level has made far less sense than that of any other agency since the historical freak of the Moon Race ended.)

The one piece of actual new news in Thompson's testimony was his revelation that President Nixon, instead of being another victim of NASA's scam, was in on it from the start. He knew that the Democratic Congress would never approve what he and NASA really wanted -- a super-expensive Shuttle/Station program -- so he collaborated with NASA's lies about the supposed economy of the Shuttle as a cargo carrier, in order to increase the chances that Congress would agree to pony up the additional money for the Station before the end of his second term. Watergate put a stop to that plan; but NASA kept it in mind, and finally successfully staged part 2 of their Master Plan by exploiting the gullibility first of Reagan, and then of Al Gore.
BruceMoomaw
You can find an overall summary of Thompson's CAIB testimony in my May 2003 "SpaceDaily" article: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03p1.html . When I get another few minutes free, I'll locate the URL of the transcript of all his testimony.
BruceMoomaw
QUOTE (dvandorn @ Feb 22 2006, 03:43 PM) *
Once again, I will say it -- eliminate manned spaceflight from the U.S. budget, and you'll be left with Russia, ESA and JAXA for *all* of your unmanned probes. Congress will *never* see the sense of continuing unmanned exploration unless there is also a manned space presence; they will see bowing out of manned spaceflight as a statement of our intention to abandon space exploration entirely. If you sell the first, the second will follow automatically. So, if you want to see American unmanned spaceflight brought to a complete halt, go ahead and lobby for an end to American manned spaceflight.

-the other Doug

_______________________________

Why? ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA have fairly big unmanned space programs without much if any manned component. Why should Congress be unwilling to follow suit? (Especially given the continued existence of its very large Space Pork Faction, who would be eager to keep total space spending as high as possible and would therefore certainly support an enlarged unmanned program to partially compensate.)

What is true is that we might very well end up with a shrunken unmanned space program, along the lines of ESA (although probably not nearly that small, for the reason given above). So what? The right question is not what I and the rest of you in this little group get a kick out of watching -- the right question is the extent to which space exploration really is justifiable, on practical, rational and moral grounds, as opposed to other uses for the money. To the extent that it has practical benefits, it should compete on an equal platform with other governmental spending on engineering projects and scientific research. To the extent that it's a form of public entertainment, the public should decide how much of their taxes they want spent for that purpose.
AlexBlackwell
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 01:29 AM) *
Why? ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA have fairly big unmanned space programs without much if any manned component. Why should Congress be unwilling to follow suit?

Because the vast if not overwhelming majority of their consituents don't care what "ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA" do.
lyford
QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 22 2006, 05:38 PM) *
Because the vast if not overwhelming majority of their consituents don't care what "ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA" do.

I would wager the vast majority of them would not even know what ESA and JAXA are...... mad.gif
mcaplinger
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 22 2006, 05:00 PM) *
Had the Shuttle been a CEV-type design -- that is, a reusable booster carrying a capsule with an escape rocket -- it would have killed NOBODY by this point. The Columbia accident would never have occurred...


No doubt this explains why the Russians have never lost people on Soyuz flights. (Well, no: four people dead in two entry accidents. Would you argue that the US would never have accidents like those? We came fairly close to losing the US crew of Apollo-Soyuz to an accident similar to Soyuz 11.)

Forgive my lack of confidence in your ability to flawlessly predict these alternate-history outcomes. And I'm not sure what this CEV-type vehicle would have been doing; certainly neither DOD nor NASA had any interest in such a thing in the time frame we're discussing. For that matter, I'm not sure what the current CEV is supposed to be doing either smile.gif
BruceMoomaw
QUOTE (mcaplinger @ Feb 23 2006, 03:47 AM) *
No doubt this explains why the Russians have never lost people on Soyuz flights. (Well, no: four people dead in two entry accidents. Would you argue that the US would never have accidents like those? We came fairly close to losing the US crew of Apollo-Soyuz to an accident similar to Soyuz 11.)

Forgive my lack of confidence in your ability to flawlessly predict these alternate-history outcomes. And I'm not sure what this CEV-type vehicle would have been doing; certainly neither DOD nor NASA had any interest in such a thing in the time frame we're discussing. For that matter, I'm not sure what the current CEV is supposed to be doing either smile.gif


"Flawless prediction" has nothing to do with it. The types of accidents that happened on Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were the result of the incredibly shoddy design and assembly techniques used by the Soviets, as opposed to the US -- and those kinds of accidents, and ALL the kinds of dangerous accidents suffered by US capsule missions, are the sorts of things that could also have happened on a Shuttle. I never said that capsules equipped with escape rockets are totally safe; I said that they are by their basic nature much safer than a large winged craft, and the fact that neither fatal Shuttle accident would have happened on a capsule vehicle is further proof of that.

You are, of course, right that NASA had no interest in that kind of vehicle in that time frame -- because, and only because, there wasn't enough taxpayer-provided money in it. As for the DoD, see my article for one other fascinating little tidbit from Thompson's testimony:

"We then [after Nixon's secret decision] undertook obviously to build the Shuttle first, and then a modular, zero-gravity space station second...As the thing evolved, we started with the Shuttle, and the requirements for the Shuttle were driven 99 percent by what we wanted to do to support the space station. It also happened to give the Air Force the kind of payload volume and the kind of capability they wanted, although they really wanted to be at higher orbits for their work.

"So the Air Force came in and said, 'We will plan to use the Shuttle, and we will also take on the task of building the Interim Upper Stage, which was part of the low-Earth-orbital infrastructure. So NASA embarked on the Shuttle. It wasn't necessary to commit to a space station at that time because the Shuttle had to be built and operational before you commit to the space station, and the President at that time -- Nixon -- had other things on his mind. He didn't get up and make a great big speech about low-Earth-orbital infrastructure.' "

Thus we have further confirmation that the Air Force didn't demand that specific design for the Shuttle; NASA told them that it was a magic Dr. Feelgood elixir for all the Air Force's needs (and so safe, too -- only a 1 in 100,000 chance of a launch accident!); and so the Air Force agreed to go along, although even after that sales job it wasn't really what they wanted. By 1985 -- before the Challenger accident -- they had already realized that NASA had royally screwed them; the vehicle wasn't even remotely as capable and cheap as NASA had promised it would be, and their own estimates gave it a 1 in 56 chance of launch failure. So, thank God, by mid-1985 they had already demanded that the Titan production line be started up again -- and if they hadn't done that, the Challenger disaster would have had much worse consequences for this country than it actually had.

As for what the current CEV is "supposed to be doing": why, it's supposed to be doing exactly what Shuttle and Station were always supposed to do -- siphon massive amounts of taxpayer money into NASA and into the Space Pork Complex. Like them, it has no other real purpose. But at least it's safer and more economical than they are, and it has the potential to gradually evolve into future types of manned vehicles that might someday actually be useful for something.

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 23 2006, 01:38 AM) *
Because the vast if not overwhelming majority of their constituents don't care what "ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA" do.



Of course, the same thing is true of the vast majority of European and Japanese citizens. Lo and behold, their nations have fair-sized space programs anyway. So I repeat: why wouldn't the US? Are we supposed to believe that the US government and its citizens are THAT idiotically addicted to purposeless manned space flights?

Incidentally, the Huygens and Hayabusa missions seem to have attracted considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens, without a single astronaut being involved -- just as the Voyager, Hubble and MER missions did here.
BruceMoomaw
QUOTE (dvandorn @ Feb 22 2006, 03:43 PM) *
However, I take *strong* exception to the statement earlier in the thread that eliminating manned space flight is one of Griffin's goals. I dare anyone to produce a statement by Griffin that supports this. I also put up against it the fact that Griffin put a Shuttle servicing mission of Hubble back on the schedule, even after O'Keefe and his minions had killed it.


-the other Doug


Neither I nor Bell said that Griffin intends to "eliminate manned space flight" as a whole for now -- although, like Freeman Dyson, I would have no objection to that happening for the next several decades. What I and Bell said was that we have every reason to think that Griffin despises Shuttle/Station, and would jump at any opportunity to kill it. And that is beyond question -- Griffin has written precisely that, in public reports that he issued before being picked as NASA Administrator.

As for his supporting a Hubble repair mission for Shuttle: that, I imagine, is a separate issue, based on his assumption that if we're going to retain the damned thing anyway as part of what he sees as the unjustifiable ISS project, we might as well use it for ONE thing that might perhaps be worthwhile (especially since, actually having technical training, he instantly realized how harebrained O'Keefe's proposed robotic Hubble repair mission was). Whether if -- after the cancellation of ISS -- he'd try to fly one last Shuttle mission just to repair Hubble (as Robert Zubrin proposes in "Space News") is uncertain; but I imagine we'll never get the chance to find out. When they finally are zapped, Shuttle will get the ax first, then ISS will.
dilo
QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Feb 22 2006, 11:55 PM) *
Marco:

Try looking at:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saegerii.htm

Bob Shaw

Thank you very much, Bob.
Stephen
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 04:52 AM) *
Neither I nor Bell said that Griffin intends to "eliminate manned space flight" as a whole for now -- although, like Freeman Dyson, I would have no objection to that happening for the next several decades.

With all due respect, if NASA's manned spaceflight were ever to be "eliminated...for the next several decades" that abolition may well turn out to be pretty much permanent, whether that was intended to be so at the time or not.

Abolishing manned spaceflight would not just mean sending the shuttles off to museums (or the breakers yards) and pensioning off a few astronauts. It would also impact on the associated infrastructure, personnel, and industrial capacity. Allowing those to wither away would mean that if and when somebody did want to put manned space flight put back on the national agenda again they may well have to be rebuilt from scratch.

For example, what do you do with the VAB at KSC? Put it in mothballs, demolish it, sell it to land developers for transformation into condominiums, or leave it to slowly rot away as another of the KSC's collection of antique lawn ornaments? smile.gif

What would happen to manned spaceflight's funding? Does it go to the unmanned program or will Congress use much of it to fund better welfare, more hospitals, and tax cuts for American voters? Conversely, where will the funding come from to start it up again? From widows and orphans, the terminally ill, and American taxpayers? More likely it will be at least partly funded by cuts to the unmanned program, even if it received not a penny from the original disbandment of the manned program. That in turn is not likely to endear the return of manned space flight to the American science community.

BTW, if you want an example of a country which abolished a space program (albeit not a manned one) and now finds it pretty much impossible to put it back together again check out what happened to Australia's.

======
Stephen
AlexBlackwell
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 04:37 AM) *
Of course, the same thing is true of the vast majority of European and Japanese citizens. Lo and behold, their nations have fair-sized space programs anyway. So I repeat: why wouldn't the US? Are we supposed to believe that the US government and its citizens are THAT idiotically addicted to purposeless manned space flights?

Incidentally, the Huygens and Hayabusa missions seem to have attracted considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens, without a single astronaut being involved -- just as the Voyager, Hubble and MER missions did here.

You know, Bruce, for someone who claims a political science degree, you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant of Realpolitik as it applies to space programs. Often, comparative rationality, whatever that means, has absolutely nothing to do with political decision making. No doubt there are a few U.S. senators or representatives who make political decisions on a "logical" basis, but the vast majority are guided by parochial concerns. For instance, if a Member of Congress has a company in his/her district that manufactures components for manned space flight, then that fact will trump anything related to, say, whatever "considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens" have about their respective space programs.

Frankly, I think your argument is a typical case of oversimplification. There are enough differences (political, cultural, historical, etc.) among the various space-faring countries of the world that drawing direct comparisons is, at best, problematic. At worst, it's simple hand waving.
The Messenger
QUOTE (Richard Trigaux @ Feb 22 2006, 12:47 AM) *
Yes this is the problem: they think "what is the cost this year " or "what is the cost during the time I am the responsible" and not "what is the overal cost of the program, spin-off and inconveniences included".
sad.gif

Last Summer, twice I had cynical space camp kids ask what was the point of the ISS - and it shocked me, how much they disdain the shuttle: Anything flying before they were born isn't high tech.

Post shuttle babies are voters now, and will soon be populating congress.

What good is the ISS? I avoided the question and launched into a discussion about Cassini, and all the questions that are yet to be answered.
ljk4-1
QUOTE (The Messenger @ Feb 23 2006, 12:44 PM) *
Last Summer, twice I had cynical space camp kids ask what was the point of the ISS - and it shocked me, how much they disdain the shuttle: Anything flying before they were born isn't high tech.

Post shuttle babies are voters now, and will soon be populating congress.

What good is the ISS? I avoided the question and launched into a discussion about Cassini, and all the questions that are yet to be answered.


Fear not - their children will disdain their current technology
because they didn't have quantum teleporters:

Quantum teleporter creates laser beam clones

NewScientist.com news service Feb. 21, 2006

*************************

Quantum physicists have moved
beyond teleporting individual
photons to imitating a classic
science-fiction scenario -- a
teleportation machine that generates
two near-identical copies of the...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedire...sID=5325&m=7610
BruceMoomaw
QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 23 2006, 04:12 PM) *
You know, Bruce, for someone who claims a political science degree, you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant of Realpolitik as it applies to space programs. Often, comparative rationality, whatever that means, has absolutely nothing to do with political decision making. No doubt there are a few U.S. senators or representatives who make political decisions on a "logical" basis, but the vast majority are guided by parochial concerns. For instance, if a Member of Congress has a company in his/her district that manufactures components for manned space flight, then that fact will trump anything related to, say, whatever "considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens" have about their respective space programs.


Alex, that is exactly what I said earlier in this thread -- if by some (desirable) miracle, the US manned space program WAS shut down, the huge size of this country's existing Space Pork Complex would cause us to have a considerably bigger unmanned program than Europe and Japan have. NOT a smaller one, as dvandorn suggested.

I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.
AlexBlackwell
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 01:55 AM) *
Alex, that is exactly what I said earlier in this thread -- if by some (desirable) miracle, the US manned space program WAS shut down, the huge size of this country's existing Space Pork Complex would cause us to have a considerably bigger unmanned program than Europe and Japan have. NOT a smaller one, as dvandorn suggested.

I just don't buy that. You and I depart company in believing that a "considerably bigger unmanned program" is a logical result of a shrunken (or "shut down") manned space program in this country. Until I see hard evidence (not hand waving assertions) that U.S. politicians would naturally follow your scenario, I'll remain skeptical.
BruceMoomaw
You've just said yourself that American politicians are eager to keep the level of space spending flowing to their particular districts big. Most aerospace firms involved with manned spaceflight are also involved in a major way with the unmanned variety, or could very easily switch to it. Give me one reason why they WOULDN'T have a very strong tendency to demand a compensatory rise in unmanned spending if manned spending declined -- and why their puppets in Congress wouldn't go along.

But then -- to repeat -- that's not the real phenomenon we may be on the verge of seeing, which instead involves the elimination of Shuttle-Station and simultaneous compensatory rises in both unmanned space spending AND Bush's new manned program.
RNeuhaus
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 08:55 PM) *
I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.

I think that the next biggest goberment money glut is the conversion of any oil energy to a non-pollutant energy. That would be the top priority since without this program, the Earth will go with a crazy weather.

Rodolfo
dvandorn
Watch it, Rodolfo -- if you worked for NASA, this U.S. administration would be trying to censor you for mentioning anything about "crazy weather"...

How in the WORLD can anyone take this administration seriously when they think they can play politics with science, if science happens to reveal something that's *inconvenient* for them? Sorry to get a touch political, here -- but this is a case where a group IN POWER is trying to silence science with politics and doublespeak. And it threatens us all.

-the other Doug
BruceMoomaw
If I may make a smart-alecky crack, the world has been "going with a crazy weather" for a very long time now.

But R. Neuhaus actually does have a relevant point to make. Thanks to man-made global warming (which now seems extremely likely), the human race may well be faced in the coming decades (or centuries!) with an extremely ugly choice: either impoverish itself or cook itself. Any hope we have of squirming off the horns of that dilemma lies in discovering new technologies for CO2-free but cheap energy production, energy conservation, and pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere ("sequestration") cheaply. If ever there was a cause fit for another Manhattan Project, this is it. And if the scientific and technological spending we need for such work cuts into space spending, we had damn well better cut away.

Most space spending, that is. We need to know as much as possible about the extent to which the problem actually is likely to be serious -- and that means climate-monitoring satellites. (It wasn't until ERBS was put in orbit in 1984 that we could even answer such a basic question as whether Earth's current cloud cover is cooling or further heating the planet!) Last year this [extremely bad word] administration made a major effort even to cut that research -- even though there's a small chance that it will end up telling us that the danger really is a false alarm and that we need not carry out major anti-warming efforts. Thanks to an uncharacteristic determination by Congress not to be pushed around on that subject, the White House finally backed off, and climate-research space spending hasn't been significantly cut this year -- but its efforts last year have managed to delay several very important missions on this subject by a year or so. Meanwhile, space spending as a whole is being rediverted from this sort of thing to such tripe as Shuttle/Station, the manned lunar program, and even (dare I say it?) a lot of unmanned space research whose actual practical importance to humanity is infinitely smaller.
djellison
So what you're saying is that NASA should be doing NOAA's job?

Doug
AlexBlackwell
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM) *
You've just said yourself that American politicians are eager to keep the level of space spending flowing to their particular districts big. Most aerospace firms involved with manned spaceflight are also involved in a major way with the unmanned variety, or could very easily switch to it. Give me one reason why they WOULDN'T have a very strong tendency to demand a compensatory rise in unmanned spending if manned spending declined -- and why their puppets in Congress wouldn't go along.

Forgive me if I don't defer to your "expertise" in this matter but, in my opinion, you're just waving your arms, as usual.

I have yet to see evidence that shrinking a country's manned space program automatically results in a commensurate increase in its unmanned space exploration efforts. The two examples that you offer in your ahistorical "analysis" (Europe and Japan) are irrelevant. Neither have ever had any real type of manned space program to begin with (other than flying "guest astronauts/cosmonauts"). And it's no surprise that your cherry-picking left out Russia. Its current manned space program has severely contracted; indeed, it's a shell of what it once was. So, under your theory Russia should have a booming unmanned space effort as a result, right? In fact, the former Soviet Union's unmanned space exploration efforts flourished at the same time as did its manned space exploration program.

And so did the U.S. programs.

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM) *
But then -- to repeat ...

This statement (or variations thereof) seems to be a mantra with you. Perhaps you could adopt it as a signature line, preferably IN ALL CAPS SHOUTING MODE.
djellison
We all know that Bruce is just someone who has to criticise. Nothing sneaks under the radar with him. Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 year previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along.

I've said it before, and I'm NOT going to say it again Bruce - if you want to exercise your habbit for unjustified ranting, do it elsewhere. Alex, myself and others had to put up with it for too long elsewhere, and I wont let the same mistake happen here. I'm posting this publicly so everyone can be a witness to it.

Doug
AlexBlackwell
QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 24 2006, 05:00 PM) *
We all know that Bruce is just someone who has to criticise. Nothing sneaks under the radar with him. Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 year previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along.

I've said it before, and I'm NOT going to say it again Bruce - if you want to exercise your habbit for unjustified ranting, do it elsewhere.

Doug, far be it from me to tell you how to run your own discussion group (and you're doing a great job, by the way), but in no way am I trying to run Bruce off. I've been debating with him online for, I believe, over six years now, and I have fairly thick skin. I agree that his style can be a little irksome, okay more than a little irksome, but I don't see anything approaching "L'affaire Moomaw" over in Yahoo! Groups planetary_sciences.

P.S. I totally agree with your first paragraph above biggrin.gif
djellison
You have to be stern and strict with him or he wont learn....

smile.gif

Doug
Richard Trigaux
QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 05:02 PM) *
But R. Neuhaus actually does have a relevant point to make. Thanks to man-made global warming (which now seems extremely likely), the human race may well be faced in the coming decades (or centuries!) with an extremely ugly choice: either impoverish itself or cook itself. Any hope we have of squirming off the horns of that dilemma lies in discovering new technologies for CO2-free but cheap energy production, energy conservation, and pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere ("sequestration") cheaply. ....


Although this is not the topic of this thread, I think important to correct what is said here. We have a third alternative: becoming less dumb, less arrogant, and heed what ecologists and scientist are shouting since now 30 years: there are solutions to the greenhouse problem, without reverting to a Middle Age life level or democracy level: -energy savings in home heating -train transportation (containers) -helio-geothermy -cogeneration -Atkinson cycle car engines -less car commuting -saving methane escaping from oil wells -cracking oil, methane and sour gas to make hydrogen, and put back the soot or carbon dioxyd in the wells -aerothermic plants -solar plants used to crack water and make hydrogen at 950°C (process developped by the french CEA using SO2 as a catalist)... No need to "discovering" anything, no sci-fi projects or pharaonic funding, just some imagination... and some political will.
BruceMoomaw
At the risk of getting thrown out of this group by Doug for actually replying to Alex:

Of course the ESA and Japan are irrelevant to my argument, since they never had a manned space program to begin with and so there is no way they can be used to judge whether a nation that shrinks its manned space program will expand its unmanned space program to compensate. But Russia is also totally irrelevant, since their economy collapsed utterly and forced them to virtually end their space program completely -- EXCEPT for their involvement with the Station, which they use quite openly and unashamedly as a parasitic way of sucking money out of the US government. Without that freakish parasitic setup (enabled by Goldin and Al Gore), they would have ended their manned space program totally as well. Thus they too provide no conceivable guide to how the US Congress would respond to a shrinkage of the US unmanned program.

Which means -- to repeat (sorry, Alex, but repetition seems to be necessary) -- that the only guide we have to how Congress would react is that very clue you yourself mentioned: the space program as a whole is supported by Congress primarily as pork and patronage, and so if the manned portion of it was by some miracle ended, the Space Pork Contingent in Congress would probably try to expand the unmanned space program to compensate for that loss. My reasoning in this case is not exactly complex.

But then -- to repeat again -- this whole issue is irrevelant to what may be about to happen in any case: to keep Shuttle/Station going, Griffin has had to pull $2 billion out of the unmanned program AND $1.5 billion out of Bush's manned lunar program, and he himself has already made it clear in writing, in the reports he co-wrote just before becoming NASA Administator, that he would dearly love to cancel Shuttle/Station at the slightest opportunity, after which (if and when it happens) both the unmanned program AND the manned lunar program would have that money restored to them.
BruceMoomaw
QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 24 2006, 05:00 PM) *
Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 years previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along.


The only thing I can say in reply to that is that you're wrong on all three points. If I thought I knew what was going to happen in advance in regard to the space program, I would never have been interested in it in the first place, dammit.

What is true is that I have been OCCASIONALLY correct in predicting that the design of the space program was wrong and needed to be corrected -- which is itself not exactly controversial. On the subject of the idiocy of Shuttle/Station, I've been no more than one of a large swarm of people who have been pointing out the glaringly obvious for over 15 years now; and on the subject of the idiocy of the manned space program as a whole at this point in our history I'm only one member of a crowd that is almost equally big (and includes Freeman Dyson, whose arguments on the subject strike me as bulletproof).

On smaller issues I am SOMETIMES correct -- as with the possibility of a much cheaper design for the Pluto probe than Dan Goldin was blatting about as supposedly necessary in 2000. (I found out a few months after publishing my article on that subject that -- as I had always assumed -- a hell of a lot of engineers had come up with the same excruciatingly obvious idea. What I HADN'T known was that Goldin was shutting them up by threatening to cut off all their NASA grants if they opened their mouths on the subject, because his line about a Pluto probe supposedly requiring expensive new technology was actually a deliberate lie on his part to force cancellation of any Pluto mission just because he personally didn't want one: "Nobody gives a damn about Pluto", as he told one aide. So Simon and I -- entirely unintentionally -- ended up belling the cat by running that article; after we'd put it out, he couldn't keep the idea hushed up any more.)

But I'm wrong with metronomic frequency -- and if I wasn't, I would never, from my childhood on, have found space exploration unpredictable enough (in both its scientific revelations and its historical developments) to be interesting in the first place. It's precisely, and only, when I AM wrong in predicting something that things get interesting for me.
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