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As I was listening/watching last night's Presidential Address to the Congress of the United States, President Trump mentioned something that I had not been thinking about: our Nations 250th Birthday. He also mentioned in passing, the possibility of footprints on the ground on another planet. I suspect he isn't referring to the Moon, either. What finer way for us to truly celebrate this momentous date than by memorializing the birth of our nation, than by a Mars Landing? Funny how things seem to coincide in time with a National ability? That's obviously outside NASA's present timeline, but not that of SpaceX!
I see this date, 4 July 2026, as a great goal and an opportunity to galvanize the political will in order to undertake such an endeavor. Yes, Political Will has a way of evaporating, as demonstrated by the last administration's cancellation of the Constellation Project. OK, maybe it wasn't a great idea, and lacked sufficient funding to get it done. But...after floundering around in LEO for the past 40 years, we finally have a rallying point for exertion of a new statement of Political Will. Or DO we?
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If President Trump proposed it, you can be sure that the Democrats will oppose it, no matter what was proposed. The only political will that still exists in this country is fighting over public policies implemented or merely proposed by the opposing political party.
NASA will continue to over-pay for under-delivery, or no-delivery in the case of SLS. If the STS program was unaffordable, you can bet your last dollar that SLS will be equally unaffordable since the same contractors that ran STS into the ground are hard at work running SLS into the ground, although to be fair it has yet to leave the ground. NASA had 40 years to do something worthy of risking human lives over and humans have explored virtually nothing in that time period apart from declining astronaut health as a result of living in microgravity.
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A landing on July 4, 2026 is not possible because Mars is at opposition with Earth on 16 January 2025 and 19 February 2027, and no time in between. A landing usually takes place 3 to 4 months after opposition.
Space X is aiming for 2027, but setbacks and delays are inevitable. I suspect 2031 is a good guess, though.
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I wasn't proposing a landing ON the 4th, but trying to at least make it in 2026. There is a Hohmann transfer window in 2024, so there could be a on-Mars celebration of our nations 250th birthday.
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If President Trump proposed it, you can be sure that the Democrats will oppose it, no matter what was proposed. The only political will that still exists in this country is fighting over public policies implemented or merely proposed by the opposing political party.
NASA will continue to over-pay for under-delivery, or no-delivery in the case of SLS. If the STS program was unaffordable, you can bet your last dollar that SLS will be equally unaffordable since the same contractors that ran STS into the ground are hard at work running SLS into the ground, although to be fair it has yet to leave the ground. NASA had 40 years to do something worthy of risking human lives over and humans have explored virtually nothing in that time period apart from declining astronaut health as a result of living in microgravity.
Who's to say they'll be in any position to stop it? The Democrats, after all, couldn't save slavery! Wasn't it sometime around 200 years ago that the Federalist Party died?
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Please leave the politics in the politics thread. It has no place in this one!
The "political will" in the title of this thread refers to failings of both parties over the last 4 decades.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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I'm with GW on this issue, guys! When I speak of Political Will, it simply refers to the willingness to spend the $$$$ necessary to accomplish the goals established by scientists.
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In its infancy, NASA was a small organization that could do things fairly rapidly, taking risks to get the job done. That's how we got from 1958's "put a man into space" to the first manned moon landing in 1969, starting from a presidential call in 1961. That's 11 years, slightly less than three presidential terms. That's 2 years under Eisenhower, 3 under JFK, and 6 more under LBJ (who was the real enthusiast) to get it all done.
By the mid-to-late 1960's NASA had grown greatly and started to become unwieldy. Today it is a gigantic organization that tries desperately hard to be everything to everyone, and ends up getting little done because of congressional pork politics being used for its mandates for what to do (something I consider utterly brain-dead stupid). That means a whole lot more time goes by without actually doing anything (one well-known exception is JPL and the probe program, which so far has escaped the bulk, although not all, of the congressional meddling).
Combine slowness with extreme risk aversity, and add in the fact that NO president since LBJ has been a space enthusiast, and you can understand why we have done nothing since the 1970's, except lose technical capability by attrition, as people age and die without passing-on the engineering art that they know.
Maybe SLS/Orion can be flown around the moon with a crew in 2018. Or maybe it will be Spacex with its crew Dragon/Falcon-Heavy in 2018 that "gets there first". I don't think Mr. Trump actually cares which it is, as long as (1) one of them does it, and (2) he as president doesn't have to spend massively to get it done. A little, OK. Massive, no. He already has an insoluble problem with his promise of ~$1T? for infrastructure.
That's actually precious little political will toward human spaceflight to the moon, much less beyond, and he as president is only one person. The tea party-dominated GOP has little interest in spending on anything, they've demonstrated that quite effectively for some years now. Same for the Democrats, actually, if you look at things like space or defense.
Don't count on the House and Senate to support very much at all in the way of space travel. They're more likely to try and kill some of things we are still doing, such as the Earth observation satellite program, for fear it might produce more evidence of anthropogenic climate change. That's a GOP ideology thing where political belief trumps science (if you'll forgive my use of the word "trump" that way). Left or right, I hate it when ideology trumps science. "Alternate facts" is newspeak for lies.
So, my advice is don't hold your breath waiting for government-led efforts to expand beyond what we're doing right now. I doubt you'll see a significant acceleration of SLS/Orion, either. Boeing and Lockheed Martin make more money by delay. Why would they want to speed it up?
Instead, pin your hopes on the private interests to get lunar and asteroid mining off the ground, and maybe some limited space tourism going. That might shame the politicians (of BOTH parties) into actually doing something. They (BOTH parties) have no incentive to do anything in space otherwise, and we (again BOTH parties) seem to be stupid enough to keep re-electing them. Doesn't look to me like that stupidity will change.
The only break in that dismal outlook is that China or some other country might fly a man to the moon. That will start a new pointless flags-and-footprints space race, but I guess it beats no space travel at all. At least by a microscopic amount.
The other break in the dismal picture would be if a private entity were to land a man on the moon. That would not start a space race, because no other country "beat them", meaning the US government. But it might inspire some other private concerns to do similar things.
If we go down that road, it'll likely be moon first, then asteroid mining, then maybe Mars. Maybe. Mars and main belt asteroids are hard with men because of the long flight times (months to a year or so one way). Mars is harder than the asteroids with men, because you gotta have a lander.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-03-02 14:26:46)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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GW,
The Earth observing satellites are producing data that doesn't agree with the death and destruction global warming (now climate change) model that certain unscrupulous people use to scare gullible Americans. I'm all for continuing to observe the climate of the Earth from space to continue piling new data on the mountain of existing data that disagrees with the climate models predicting catastrophe in order to refute this Chicken Little nonsense.
Given the amount of money already squandered on Orion and SLS, we could have either fed and clothed a lot of hungry American children or just ordered SpaceX to get us to the moon with "X" dollars in "Y" amount of time, or we wouldn't pay them. At the very least, we would have had a functional spacecraft to send Americans into space by now.
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kbd512-
I haven't been around here long enough to know whether or not there's a Global Warming?/Climate Change? thread around?
Anyway, I'm in complete agreement with your statements in that regard. I'll say no more here in order to not arouse the ire of the moderators. There's a long and sordid history of the University of East Anglia "doctoring data," in order to make it fit the desired hypothesis.
If we can start a thread discussing this I have LOTS of input here!
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I don't think we need much political will now. If the economics work out right, we can send things and people into space for profit, we just need to get government out of the way The SLS is a dinosaur, a relic of the Apollo era, he era of the throw away booster, and era that is almost at an end, due to certain technological developments such as landing boosters and reusing them. This should make space travel cheaper and less reliant an appropriations from the government. If we can reuse boosters, it would make more sense to build large ones if we can get more than one use out of them. If we can cut down on the loss of hardware, we can reduce the costs to get into space, and thereby send larger things into space as well. This makes a manned mission to Mars more feasible. A lunar base could be financed almost entirely by private funds, with perhaps a little government encouragement. The era of big space cost plus contractors is almost over! The SLS may be obsolete by the time it is finally built, because it has taken so long to get to this point, and the World has moved on. To recoup some of the losses from building a giant expendable booster at government expense, I say we use it to mount an unmanned mission to the outer planets before it becomes obsolete. I think a robust mission to the moon Titan might be just the thing, or we haven't had any Neptune or Uranus orbiters, maybe its time we give those two outer gas giants some more attention. How about a Galileo of Cassini style orbiter mission to Uranus and Neptune? You think the SLS could be used for that?
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Oldfart1939,
What I'm trying to illustrate here is the type of thinking that retards development of our capabilities. I may do it in a crass way that ruffles feathers, but if ruffling feathers is required to to get people to step back and take a look at the big picture, then so be it. A good number of policies and plans that we've implemented in modern times are patently absurd and require no deep thinking to determine what is so painfully obvious.
If our scientists, the people we entrust to provide basic information about the world we live in, automatically throw out any data that doesn't agree with their personal beliefs or the results that the people who provide funding to them want to see, then you're fundamentally at odds with the world around you and the natural world doesn't change how it works to cater to anyone's personal belief system.
A few decades ago, we had two scientists here named Pons and Fleischmann. Their only discernible motivation behind their nuclear energy research was giving humanity a better, cleaner, and virtually limitless source of energy to use. When they publicized their discovery, they were derided by the scientific community. Two major universities with nuclear physics programs attempted to replicate their findings. The universities in question were only able to replicate their results around 40% of the time. Instead of saying to themselves, gee whiz, something most be going on here if nearly half the time watts produced by the reaction is greater than the watts put into the reaction, they buried the analyses of the transmutation of elements (the form of evidence that scientists equate to proof of a nuclear reaction), discounted the heat output as some sort of experimental error, and declared cold fusion a hoax. These replicators were the same people who wanted funding for their hot fusion experiments, but let's attribute motivation only to what the data showed or their inability to measure watts in and watts out. If your physicists can't properly measure watts in and watts out, up to 40% of the time, are they really the people you want an opinion from as to what constitutes a hoax? If our scientists only perform experiments properly a little more than half of the time, then we have a serious problem with our educational system that should be addressed post-haste.
Thereafter, Pons and Fleischmann were forced to leave our country in order to continue their work, as if somehow something that other scientists at other universities were able to replicate at least 40% of the time was some sort of hoax that invalidated all of their work and made them charlatans to their cause. The takeaway from that should have been that human belief systems were used to overpower experimental results that did not comport with the belief system.
If their work was taken seriously by our scientific community, there is every reason to believe that our homes and motor vehicles would have their own energy supply units run on ordinary tap water. If a mere pencil eraser full of tap water produces the same amount energy as 38 barrels of oil, then we can afford to wait for hot fusion as long as is necessary. The success of either hot or cold fusion technology does not invalidate the other technology or justify stopping technological advancement. There is no such thing as a technological panacea. Every piece of technology has a purpose it is optimal for.
Tying this back to our space program, arguably the most encompassing scientific endeavor humans have undertaken, if the same type of logic is applied to the space program that is clearly applied elsewhere, then we have fundamental issues that can't be explained away as a result of politics or bureaucracy alone. That's what I think is broken, and broken in a profound way, in both our space program and the world in general. If the results of an experiment don't comport with a belief system, then throw out the results, declare experimental error, and ostracize the scientists for having the audacity to produce an experimental result which they could never definitively have known ahead of time, and refuse to consider the implications of the data or learn from past mistakes.
We know that any spacecraft development program that requires a new rocket is fundamentally a new rocket development program. We know that running a spacecraft and rocket development program concurrently tends to create delays and cost overruns as a result of simple human mistakes that are typically difficult to prevent and costly to correct. We know that we have finite resources allocated to development programs and that more resources will not generally be allocated simply because mistakes were made. After the number of times we've gone through this same process before, with the same resultant delays and cost overruns, was there ever any reason to believe the result would be different this time around? Either nobody from NASA had the honesty to tell Congress that what they wanted wouldn't work very well or NASA / Congress / both are ignorant of past mistakes or refuse to learn from past mistakes (stupidity or magical thinking). There's no other plausible explanation as to why SLS and Orion have become another STS program with a nearly identical set of problems.
A few things are pretty certain. We haven't sent a spacecraft carrying humans to low Earth orbit since we ended the STS program, Orion and SLS are turning out to be every bit as unaffordable as the STS program was, and NASA hasn't received more funding from Congress to repeat past mistakes. If it seems like we've been here before, it may be because we already have. We keep doing the same things and expecting different results.
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kbd512-
Check out a new thread I started this morning in the Free Chat section, entitled When Science becomes Perverted by Politics. I posted my thoughts on "Global Warming" there. Just trying to allow this thread to move forward without seeing any animosity develop.
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Scientists make mistakes all the time. The good ones own up to it, the bad ones don't. Because only bad news (or sex) sells, usually we only hear about the bad ones.
I remember Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann and their cold fusion announcement quite well. I thought they were poorly treated. Something was going on, but it proved hard to replicate in the usual ways that these things are done. That doesn't prove anything about cold fusion one way or the other, but I think too many thought it did.
Same sort of thing happened to a small team at NASA (and I don't remember the names anymore) regarding the finding of bacterial fossils inside the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite from Mars. They also suffered bad treatment by the science establishment over that. Yet, the more we see from these probes on Mars, the more it looks like they might not have been wrong.
These are two egregious cases of errors in judgement from the science establishment. Yet there is a very long history of that, dating back to the very beginnings of what we now call science. That this sort of thing should still occur should surprise no one. What disappoints me about that is a continuing lack of trying to address it.
As for NASA and SLS / Orion: these are pork-barrel political plums for the giants of the corporate welfare state, foisted by congress upon NASA. Top management at NASA either goes along with the charade, or gets replaced. The rest of NASA's workforce must play along or be fired. Honestly, I'm surprised anybody actually wants to work there anymore.
This crap comes from a political system that no longer values what's right over what's politically advantageous, at all. Although that priority was always weak: it's why we've had scads of venal politicians, but very few statesmen, ever since the colonial days.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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There's something called "Integrity," which seems to be in short supply.
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FAA Tells SpaceX What It Needs To Do To Launch Starship
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