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supersix2 · 04-22-2010, 09:08 PM

I'm glad someone started this post, I've thought about starting one but never got around to it. As an employee of the space industry in the US I'm glad to see the support.

I have the perspective of a "rank and file" employee that gets to see the day to day operations of human spaceflight. So I'd like to share/possibly rant about a few of my views especially with respect to the new vision for NASA as laid out by the president.

First, I generally agree with a lot of the stuff the President outlined in his April 15th speech. NASA needs to invest in new technologies to ensure we have the ability to sustain people in space for extended durations, we need a heavy lift launch vehicle capable of sending more mass to low earth orbit (LEO), and we need to be able to perfect techniques such as on orbit refueling. All this stuff will allow us to go further and faster into space. I think this is the revitalization NASA needs.

I disagree with the President on two points he made.

1. Private industry is ready to shoulder the responsibility to fly crew and cargo to LEO and service the International Space Station (ISS). Right now no commercial enterprise has successfully demonstrated their ability to send cargo let alone humans to LEO (satellites on Delta and Atlas rockets don't count since they are not truly commercial). I think Americans should be upset that their tax dollars are going to be subsidizing unproven companies in the hopes that one of them will be successful and able to fly cargo and crew to the ISS before the 2020 targeted end date for the ISS program. Also, at this time the government is really the only customer to sending crew and cargo to LEO since the government is the only entity with a space station at this point. Even SpaceX "cheaper" rocket still will cost an estimated $20 million per seat for a person to get to LEO. Virgin Galatic with SpaceShipTwo I think is somewhere around $200,000 per seat but that's only a suborbital flight with ~6 minutes of weightlessness. To put this into perspective we are currently paying the Russians $55 million per seat on the Soyuz and a typical Shuttle mission carrying 7 crew with several thousand pounds of cargo is between $500 - $800 million. Right now the commercial sector is projecting to be at best an order of magnitude cheaper, but still to expensive for even the average millionaire to afford. And this is only their estimate after a total of 0 successful missions. The Space Shuttle promised to much cheaper back when it was conceived...but we see how long that lasted. Bottom line, as a person who works "in the trenches" of the space program I don't think that the commercial sector is anywhere close to being able to provide a cargo/crew transport service in the time frame we need them and at a cost that is worth the risk we are taking on them being successful.

2. When Obama stated "We've been to the moon before and there is no value to returning," that really irked me. I agree that if we just plan to land on the moon for a few days and bring back some rocks like we did on Apollo..there is no point in going back to the Moon. However if we were to commit ourselves to building a robust space infrastructure that included an orbiting Lunar space station and a Lunar surface station the amount of science we could perform and technology we could develop would be staggering. There have been numerous projects NASA was running that were able to extra hydrogen and oxygen from lunar soil. If you can extract hydrogen and oxygen from Lunar dust you've got air to breathe, fuel for rockets, and fuel for electricity and water producing fuel cells. Instead he spouted the same "been there before" crap that I'm sick of hearing. We've been going to LEO for the past 50 years and we are still learning new things about operating there every day. Instead the plan is to simply visit destinations such as asteroids, Lagrange points, and maybe even Mars, to simply say "yea we've been to those places." And while I'm all for human exploration of Mars, I think a more valuable long term goal would be to create a robust space architecture of permanently inhabiting space. Doing this would create a larger market for commercial space industry because now they can supply a service to ferry supplies and resources to and from the Lunar space stations. It's much more long term than ferrying cargo and possibly crew to and from the ISS until 2020.

There is merit to his plan, but ultimately it falls short of real space exploration, science, and technology development...and that is what disappoints me the most.

04-22-2010, 09:08 PM	#12 (permalink)
supersix2 Insane Location: Houston	I'm glad someone started this post, I've thought about starting one but never got around to it. As an employee of the space industry in the US I'm glad to see the support. I have the perspective of a "rank and file" employee that gets to see the day to day operations of human spaceflight. So I'd like to share/possibly rant about a few of my views especially with respect to the new vision for NASA as laid out by the president. First, I generally agree with a lot of the stuff the President outlined in his April 15th speech. NASA needs to invest in new technologies to ensure we have the ability to sustain people in space for extended durations, we need a heavy lift launch vehicle capable of sending more mass to low earth orbit (LEO), and we need to be able to perfect techniques such as on orbit refueling. All this stuff will allow us to go further and faster into space. I think this is the revitalization NASA needs. I disagree with the President on two points he made. 1. Private industry is ready to shoulder the responsibility to fly crew and cargo to LEO and service the International Space Station (ISS). Right now no commercial enterprise has successfully demonstrated their ability to send cargo let alone humans to LEO (satellites on Delta and Atlas rockets don't count since they are not truly commercial). I think Americans should be upset that their tax dollars are going to be subsidizing unproven companies in the hopes that one of them will be successful and able to fly cargo and crew to the ISS before the 2020 targeted end date for the ISS program. Also, at this time the government is really the only customer to sending crew and cargo to LEO since the government is the only entity with a space station at this point. Even SpaceX "cheaper" rocket still will cost an estimated $20 million per seat for a person to get to LEO. Virgin Galatic with SpaceShipTwo I think is somewhere around $200,000 per seat but that's only a suborbital flight with ~6 minutes of weightlessness. To put this into perspective we are currently paying the Russians $55 million per seat on the Soyuz and a typical Shuttle mission carrying 7 crew with several thousand pounds of cargo is between $500 - $800 million. Right now the commercial sector is projecting to be at best an order of magnitude cheaper, but still to expensive for even the average millionaire to afford. And this is only their estimate after a total of 0 successful missions. The Space Shuttle promised to much cheaper back when it was conceived...but we see how long that lasted. Bottom line, as a person who works "in the trenches" of the space program I don't think that the commercial sector is anywhere close to being able to provide a cargo/crew transport service in the time frame we need them and at a cost that is worth the risk we are taking on them being successful. 2. When Obama stated "We've been to the moon before and there is no value to returning," that really irked me. I agree that if we just plan to land on the moon for a few days and bring back some rocks like we did on Apollo..there is no point in going back to the Moon. However if we were to commit ourselves to building a robust space infrastructure that included an orbiting Lunar space station and a Lunar surface station the amount of science we could perform and technology we could develop would be staggering. There have been numerous projects NASA was running that were able to extra hydrogen and oxygen from lunar soil. If you can extract hydrogen and oxygen from Lunar dust you've got air to breathe, fuel for rockets, and fuel for electricity and water producing fuel cells. Instead he spouted the same "been there before" crap that I'm sick of hearing. We've been going to LEO for the past 50 years and we are still learning new things about operating there every day. Instead the plan is to simply visit destinations such as asteroids, Lagrange points, and maybe even Mars, to simply say "yea we've been to those places." And while I'm all for human exploration of Mars, I think a more valuable long term goal would be to create a robust space architecture of permanently inhabiting space. Doing this would create a larger market for commercial space industry because now they can supply a service to ferry supplies and resources to and from the Lunar space stations. It's much more long term than ferrying cargo and possibly crew to and from the ISS until 2020. There is merit to his plan, but ultimately it falls short of real space exploration, science, and technology development...and that is what disappoints me the most.