I'm a big fan of space. In fact, one of my favorite pastimes is spending hours rummaging through NASA archives on the golden age of human spaceflight, i.e. the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era.
I don't know if many remember, but once NASA had chosen the Space Shuttle as their only man-rated vehicle, they destroyed anything and everything that could remotely challenge it, including the highly successful Saturn booster designs which could lob 130+ tons into earth orbit and had proved their versatility in earth orbit too with the Skylab missions. This design had been largely paid for and could easily be modified for new uses. Of course, once it achieved it's primary mission, Apollo/Saturn just wasn't sexy enough for NASA, so out the door it went. As von Braun put it (I'm quoting from memory), it was as if someone had laid a railroad track through the West and ripped it out after a few trial runs.
The Space Shuttle was fatally compromised by conflicting requirements from both the civilian and military sides, one such compromise being no escape mechanism for the astronauts in the event of a catastrophe. Given the amount of money that's been poured into it, the returns have been abysmally low, coupled with the loss of two crews.
The 100 billion dollar plus space-lab is another boondoggle with dubious returns on equity, unless growing crystals in space for the bazillionth time, or seeing spiders spinning webs in space or yet another ham radio conference with school-kids is considered worth the kind of money spent. Most importantly, it has not addressed what I think is the fundamental problem of sustained human presence in space: a cheap, reliable, replicable life-sustaining system.
The Ares design is one more step in the wrong direction. The earth-orbit-rendezvous model of sending off two rocket stacks to mate in space and head off to the moon and beyond is again a fatal compromise in an era of tight budgeting. Off the top of my head, I can see the immediate problems of sucessfully launching two inter-connected missions days apart and then have them join-up in space. They could probably pull it off when money was no object like in the '60s space race, but not in this era of record deficits and belt-tightening.
And what are we going to do on the moon anyway? There is absolutely nothing compelling there that we should go back for, except for some shrill voices screaming about how the Chinese are going to get there before the U.S. (the U.S. has been there, done that, duh!).
I think NASA should stick to robotic space missions until it comes up with an industrially replicable human transporter and not another prohibitively expensive, hand-made design.
It looks like the Obama team thinking is going in the right direction and telling NASA that eating grits once in a while is good for it. Of course the brahminical NASA sages cannot do with anything less than caviar, as usual.
Read more about it:
Does Obama Want to Ground NASA's Next Moon Mission?
I don't know if many remember, but once NASA had chosen the Space Shuttle as their only man-rated vehicle, they destroyed anything and everything that could remotely challenge it, including the highly successful Saturn booster designs which could lob 130+ tons into earth orbit and had proved their versatility in earth orbit too with the Skylab missions. This design had been largely paid for and could easily be modified for new uses. Of course, once it achieved it's primary mission, Apollo/Saturn just wasn't sexy enough for NASA, so out the door it went. As von Braun put it (I'm quoting from memory), it was as if someone had laid a railroad track through the West and ripped it out after a few trial runs.
The Space Shuttle was fatally compromised by conflicting requirements from both the civilian and military sides, one such compromise being no escape mechanism for the astronauts in the event of a catastrophe. Given the amount of money that's been poured into it, the returns have been abysmally low, coupled with the loss of two crews.
The 100 billion dollar plus space-lab is another boondoggle with dubious returns on equity, unless growing crystals in space for the bazillionth time, or seeing spiders spinning webs in space or yet another ham radio conference with school-kids is considered worth the kind of money spent. Most importantly, it has not addressed what I think is the fundamental problem of sustained human presence in space: a cheap, reliable, replicable life-sustaining system.
The Ares design is one more step in the wrong direction. The earth-orbit-rendezvous model of sending off two rocket stacks to mate in space and head off to the moon and beyond is again a fatal compromise in an era of tight budgeting. Off the top of my head, I can see the immediate problems of sucessfully launching two inter-connected missions days apart and then have them join-up in space. They could probably pull it off when money was no object like in the '60s space race, but not in this era of record deficits and belt-tightening.
And what are we going to do on the moon anyway? There is absolutely nothing compelling there that we should go back for, except for some shrill voices screaming about how the Chinese are going to get there before the U.S. (the U.S. has been there, done that, duh!).
I think NASA should stick to robotic space missions until it comes up with an industrially replicable human transporter and not another prohibitively expensive, hand-made design.
It looks like the Obama team thinking is going in the right direction and telling NASA that eating grits once in a while is good for it. Of course the brahminical NASA sages cannot do with anything less than caviar, as usual.
Read more about it:
Does Obama Want to Ground NASA's Next Moon Mission?
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