Administration leaning towards commercial options

"A commercial crew competition program would get a $1B instead of $2.5B as the panel recommends."

I just read it and I think you're missing "additional $2.5 billion" since it said that the other $1.5 billion would come from existing budget line items being canceled.

Posted by Michael Mealling at 08/21/09 22:45:42

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of jobs will be lost if these commercialization fantasies go through which is going to slam the economy even further. Private enterprise is just as, if not more corrupt than any government agency that exists (Wall Street bailouts and military contractors come to mind.) These "self-enlightened" private interests will find a way to gouge the tax-payers through their proxy with NASA just as well as any government program.
Just give NASA the extra 3 billion a year it needs to get back to the Moon on time. 3 billion is pocket change to the government and will keep the economy that much stronger by keeping people employed.

Posted by mouse at 08/21/09 23:21:46

Hi Michael,
Thanks, you're right. I've corrected it.
- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 08/22/09 00:15:18

that is the first insider news I've seen on this topic, this should be reported everywhere, why space.com of all places

Posted by asdads at 08/22/09 00:25:29

Mouse,

You do realize that the extra 3 billion will still go to contractors, in the end?

The difference isn't whether the money will go to contractors or not - the difference is whether it makes the contractors results oriented, and whetehr NASA has to have its own personal market.

Posted by Ferris Valyn at 08/22/09 01:29:50

I imagine they don't like the idea of spending $3 billion to save a program that perennially suffers from massive cost overruns and delays. What are we looking at here? Deep Space on a constrained budget, but without the commercial HLV? That would be quite a letdown if they weren't dangling a $2.5 billion cookie in front of my face.

Posted by Matt Wronkiewicz at 08/22/09 02:11:31

Why would you want a commercial HLV? Depots should be enough. Or are you simply preferring it to an SDLV?

Posted by Martijn Meijering at 08/22/09 03:02:56

Just to put things into the right light - to push the existing baseline plan through AND extend ISS to 2020 (which is politically necessary and makes sense) you need about 65 to 70 billion more in funding for NASA up to 2020.

That's an increase which matters - just look at what Congress fights over right now, healthcare reform. 65-70 billion over the next decade are a non-trivial sum even for health care reform

Posted by Alex at 08/22/09 04:04:51

Just my personal opinion:
All these numbers are tiny compared to the US defense spendings. They actually make the biggest part of the budget. Just to make this clear. A reduction of defense expenses by only a few percent would provide enough money for everything else.
Putting that aside though, going with commercial solutions is still the best option. NASA should do the research to provide baseline technology though such as development of new engine, lifting body and TPS- technology. Commercial companies should get this technology from NASA to aid them in their LV- development.
BTW, looking at the cancelled programmes of the past (on new scientist), I cant help but notice how much less ambitious NASAs projects have become over the last 2 and a half decades and how NASA still fails to deliver even that. This clearly shows that NASA is incapable, be it for political, financial or structural reasons, as an agency to develop LV- architectures. Therefore NASA should not be doing this anymore. Instead commercial entities should take over this task from NASA. This will hopefully lead to less cancelled programmes and wasted money.

Posted by Elmar_M at 08/22/09 05:51:40

Elmar_M, I don't know why you think the defense budget is the biggest item in the budget, but you are way off. Entitlement programs dwarf it. A few percent off the US Defense budget would not be insignificant, but it would not be a panacea to any of our current budget woes. I do agree with your point to get US industry doing the development of our launch vehicles and spacecraft technologies.

Posted by Scott Hamann at 08/22/09 08:03:51

No matter how one slices it this is the axe for NASA man space program, it just fades away quietly over an extended period of time. I would just as soon read an old Colliers magazine as see the endless CGI’s of a hypothetical mars landing in 2050. So perhaps Elon and SpaceX profit by this. The ISS is so damn boring. Manned lunar or asteroid flyby would spice it up a little. I hope Elon has a larger vision for SpaceX than this. As it is it looks like another rat hole to me. Elon's 60 style rocket and capsule does little to spark enthusiasm in general aside from being a fleeting novelty. There will be little interest or support generated for the foreseeable future unless we land on something and/or the public is invited along to share in the experience. For me New Mexico, Burt and reusable technology is where the action is at for the foreseeable future. Reminds me of the fifties X-plane programs, reusable and pushing the envelope. NASA manned program even with commercial involvement is just a boring side show going nowhere on a restrained budget that provides for little in the way of true innovation or discovery.

Posted by Doug at 08/22/09 10:25:22

Martijn, Deep Space without a commercial HLV is disappointing because it's not possible in a constrained funding environment. If we cut corners on the funding, it's going to push the milestones out past 2030, which I think is certain to doom the program. We have a difficult choice to make right now if we want NASA to do manned deep space exploration. We can either boost NASA's funding by billions of $, or we can cut its fixed costs and increase its purchasing power. The initial reports sound like the administration is willing to a little bit of both, but I don't think it's going to be enough.

Posted by Matt Wronkiewicz at 08/22/09 11:21:37

It depends on the exact definition of HLV, but you don't need anything much bigger than D-IV-H. The cheapest EDS would be a modified upper stage and if you're going to modify an EELV upper stage, you might as well go for EELV Phase 1, which gives you 50mT to LEO, which is much more than we need.

If it turns out it is a lot cheaper to add just the EDS modifications without making the upper stage any bigger, then you'd be left with a ~30mT launcher, which is big enough if you have a slightly smaller capsule than Orion.

You don't really need anything much larger than the 5m Delta upper stage as an EDS, provided you do L1/L2 rendez-vous with your SEL-2/NEO/Phobos transfer vehicle, which could even be reusable since propulsive braking back to L1/L2 is perfectly feasible. In fact, you don't even need cryogenic depots, hypergolic ones would be good enough. And you can even go a step below that: hypergolic in-flight refueling of your transfer vehicle. It could double as a depot, rescue vehicle, mini space station. Later on it could evolve into a fully reusable moon/Mars lander, makeshift surface hab, maybe even a pressurised rover.

Posted by Martijn Meijering at 08/22/09 11:36:17

This is just finally admitting the reality of the NASA manned space program, as it was being run -- expensive, wasteful, pointless. And jobs being lost? Why do we, the taxpayers, owe these workers permanent employment? If what they are doing is not worth the money spent, let them move on in the face of career disruption like millions of private citizens do every year.

Posted by Paul at 08/22/09 12:03:17

"Defense spending or entitlements or whatever dwarfs the NASA budget, so why complain about a few more measly billion" is not a well thought out complaint. If one thief stole your car, you would still be upset with the next one stealing your television. Add sufficient zeros and we have the same situation with NASA.

Posted by john hare at 08/22/09 14:21:04

It isn't the NASA rank and file workers that can be blamed for the lack of a manned space program. There is a pool of incredibly talented scientists and engineers working for NASA. It is more of a management and focus problem. To transfer vehicle development and operations to the private sector will create many more jobs and open up opportunities for more people that are not candidates to work for NASA, but are brilliant engineers in their own right, just lacking an advanced degree. By outsourcing, NASA gains the ability to choose the appropriate spacecraft/LV for the mission without having to develop one that is mission specific at tremendous taxpayer expense only to be cancelled half way through. SpaceX is the first private company to gain notoriety, but it isn't the only company actively developing LV hardware. Several other firms will be coming on-line in the next several years with LV's driving costs down through good ol' American competition.

By requiring NASA to outsource launch services, more private sector companies will be able to provide launch services. In the New Space community it is difficult to write a business model at this time that would attract the investment required since there isn't an established market to base financial models on. Financial models for New Space companies have to be somewhat "creative" at this juncture. I have had discussions with several business people that are working very hard to develop real models in what is certainly a high risk field. Most current New Space companies are either self funded by well to do founders, mostly from the computer/internet community, or are blessed with angel investors that are very keen on space and mankind's future in it. Having governments as anchor customers will allow the private companies the ability to create new commercial and educational products and services at a dramatically lower cost. Also, with contracts in hand, access to more capital investment will become much easier. This will also lower the cost of capital to these new companies allowing for even more aggressive pricing of services.

It is past time to get back in to space in a real way. Formulating the business models and eliminating the exclusive domains of government agencies will speed up the process considerably. The hardware is coming along nicely.

Posted by Ken Brown at 08/22/09 15:35:11

Ok, maybe I should have said the biggest part of the US discretionary spendings.
This year these are roughly 664 billion USD.
This is according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Of course I disregarded the mandatory spendings when I said "budget". I apologize.

Posted by Elmar_M at 08/22/09 15:40:52

I should also add, that even including the mandatory spendings, the defense budget is only and barely surpassed by social security spending (695 billion).
But you are right, I was not precise in my choice of words.

Posted by Elmar_M at 08/22/09 15:44:17

This is great if true. NASA needs to change its ways, all this has been long overdue.

I'll be very satisfied once Ares 1 is dead and COTS 2 or whatever it will be called is confirmed.

NASA management has failed us for the last time I hope.

Posted by josh at 08/22/09 18:05:22

Posted by Doug this could be the start of a true space age.

Look NASA has had it with its human spaceflight programs. All the "give NASA more money" people assume that they could actually "do it" on the money talked about...and there is not a scintilla of evidence that this is correct.

who cares what space advocates think is boring...think making money in space....now that is exciting

Robert Oler

Posted by Robert Oler at 08/22/09 23:48:11

Let's see. For 20 years New Space advocates have worked to twist and kill NASA programs like X-33, X-34, OSP, etc. In that period they have kept up a constant stream of propaganda against the NASA manned space program as run by a bunch on "incompetent" government employees. They now use this long stream of propaganda as "proof" NASA is not capable of building a replacement system for the Shuttle and must depend on New Space companies who have NEVER placed even a monkey in orbit let alone a human.

Talk about policy spinning!

WOW - what a set-up for a train wreck. And 5 years from now everyone will wake up from this insanity and wonder what they were thinking of... And wishing for Ares I/Orion.

I am glad I am retired and able to watch from the sidelines.

Posted by Spacer at 08/23/09 18:19:18

Spacer are you saying NewSpace is the reason for NASA's failures? That NewSpace is the reason NASA hasn't been able to build a replacement system for the Shuttle?

Do you have any idea how small NewSpace is relatively to NASA? How recent the term is? Sure there's some overlap with alt.space which has been around longer (since the early nineties). And some of the few people that form these two groups have been around even longer, but these are small groups of people who have little or no allegiance to each other and more often than not don't even share a common cause except "space" in the broadest sense of the word.

No, NASA's banana peels are 100% "made at NASA".

And what is this propaganda that you speak of? NASA's track record? The willingness to try other approaches? Critical voices?

Posted by Habitat Hermit at 08/23/09 20:32:04

Actually it was NASAs own politics that killed some of its more promising programes (e.g. DC-X). The newspace people has no hand in that. Heck I was a reader and (rarely) commented on alt.space back in the days and from what I remember the notion that NASA is incapable started with the X33 and the budget overruns there. The X33 was to ambitious and NASA wanted to many things from one LV. Again these decisions were purely done by NASA. Noone in the alt.space comunity had any say in that. It was also NASAs decision to cancel the project after massive(!) cost overruns by Lockmart and massive (!) failures to meet design goals. Whether these goals were always reasonable is another question all together though.

Posted by Elmar_M at 08/23/09 20:43:49

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