Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

EdwardHeisler · 2017-11-07 14:02:01

Trump space adviser: Blue Origin and SpaceX rockets aren’t really commercial
Scott Pace likens heavy-lift rockets to aircraft carriers.
by Eric Berger - 11/6/2017

In recent months, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, Scott Pace, has worked assiduously behind the scenes to develop a formal space policy for the Trump administration. In a rare interview, published Monday in Scientific American, Pace elaborated on some of the policy decisions he has been helping to make.

In the interview, Pace explained why the Trump administration has chosen to focus on the Moon first for human exploration while relegating Mars to becoming a "horizon goal," effectively putting human missions to the Red Planet decades into the future. Mars was too ambitious, Pace said, and such a goal would have precluded meaningful involvement from the burgeoning US commercial sector as well as international partners. Specific plans for how NASA will return to the Moon should become more concrete within the next year, he added.

Trump’s space leader says SpaceX is outstanding, but… In response to a question about privately developed, heavy-lift boosters, the executive secretary also reiterated his skepticism that such "commercial" rockets developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX could compete with the government's Space Launch System rocket, which is likely to make its maiden flight in 2020.

Read the full article at:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11 … ommercial/

louis · 2017-11-07 14:20:41

Well Mr Pace will have to eat his words at some point...

He seems to be yet another American space policy maker who has no focus.

Space X will prove them all wrong.

EdwardHeisler wrote:

Trump space adviser: Blue Origin and SpaceX rockets aren’t really commercial
Scott Pace likens heavy-lift rockets to aircraft carriers.
by Eric Berger - 11/6/2017
In recent months, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, Scott Pace, has worked assiduously behind the scenes to develop a formal space policy for the Trump administration. In a rare interview, published Monday in Scientific American, Pace elaborated on some of the policy decisions he has been helping to make.
In the interview, Pace explained why the Trump administration has chosen to focus on the Moon first for human exploration while relegating Mars to becoming a "horizon goal," effectively putting human missions to the Red Planet decades into the future. Mars was too ambitious, Pace said, and such a goal would have precluded meaningful involvement from the burgeoning US commercial sector as well as international partners. Specific plans for how NASA will return to the Moon should become more concrete within the next year, he added.
Trump’s space leader says SpaceX is outstanding, but… In response to a question about privately developed, heavy-lift boosters, the executive secretary also reiterated his skepticism that such "commercial" rockets developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX could compete with the government's Space Launch System rocket, which is likely to make its maiden flight in 2020.
Read the full article at:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11 … ommercial/

EdwardHeisler · 2017-11-07 14:40:43

I believe you are right. And it's likely that the new NASA administrator James Bridenstine , if confirmed, will be the waterboy for Trump and the National Space Council.

He probably expects to cash in by helping to award Moon and Space Launch System contracts to favored private companies during his time at NASA. He can enrich himself by serving on several boards of public companies when he leaves NASA. That's how the financial corruption game works in Washington. Kickbacks .... and completely legal after leaving the "public sector" and joining the "private sector" of big business and Wall Street.

That's probably his real focus! Enriching himself.

You scratch their corporate backs and they will give you a b.j. That stands for blue jacket of course!

Last edited by EdwardHeisler (2017-11-07 15:11:58)

EdwardHeisler · 2017-11-07 18:27:00

The following is an excerpt from a Mars Society paper I have submitted.

NASA DOESN’T HAVE A TIMELINE, BUDGET AND PLAN TO SEND HUMANS TO MARS

So what is NASA’s projected budget and timeline for sending humans to Mars? The sad fact is NASA doesn’t have one. In fact, beyond the 2020 Mars rover launch nothing is planned and budgeted to send unmanned missions, much less astronauts, to Mars.

NASA’s plan to send a Mars rover in 2020 to collect soil samples and store them for a follow-up Mars rover sample return mission is a fine idea. However, money has not been budgeted for a sample return mission and may not be approved by the National Space Council.

Greg Williams, NASA’s Human Exploration Administrator, revealed NASA’s plan to possibly land humans on Mars in the late 2030’s or perhaps 2040’s. According to the government the key to Mars is establishing a so-called “deep space gateway”, a new space station in orbit around the Moon! The Moon space station will be used for years as a testing ground for operations and technology to perfect a human mission to Mars. In a decade, around 2027, NASA may orbit some astronauts around the Moon for about a year. While orbiting the Moon at this so-called “gateway” the astronauts will take some very nice color pictures of the lifeless gray Moon.

Mr. Williams further explained that spending a year in orbit around the Moon would give NASA enough knowledge on long term weightlessness so that the astronauts could climb aboard some sort of spaceship he called a “thing”, that would take them in the vicinity of Mars. Williams proudly proclaimed “that we could send this thing, crewed, on a 1,000 day mission to the Mars system and back!

So this new “space thing” would be used to swing by Mars or perhaps even land briefly on a Mars moon! According to the most optimistic timetable that might occur as soon as the late 2030’s, in twenty years!

There really isn’t any need to orbit our Moon for one year in a space station to determine the biological and psychological impact of long term space flight on astronauts. We can and have used the International Space Station for those tests. That’s what we and Russians have been doing for decades!

Astronaut Peggy Whitson recently returned from a 288 day mission on the ISS. And she set a record for the most time in space by an American with 665 days accrued.

So why is NASA proposing yet another long detour away from Mars? NASA’s director of human spaceflight, William Gerstenmaier, explained that NASA simply can’t afford to send humans to land on Mars on its budget pointing out that “we don’t have the surface systems available for Mars “due to budget constraints”.

Casey Dreier, the director of space policy at the Planetary Society lamented “in a practical sense the Mars community will be facing tough times ahead with a dearth of missions for at least the next decade, if not more.” He was only talking about NASA, not private ventures like Space X or government and private sponsored space agencies and companies in China, India, Russia Europe, Africa or the Middle East.

So here is the bottom line. NASA is not proposing an Apollo like program to explore Mars. For now, it’s just a nice concept which might be implanted in the 2030’s, 2040’s or sometime before the beginning of the 22nd Century. NASA has no funding or commitment for more rover type Mars missions after 2020. NASA has no funding or commitment to retrieve soil samples stored by the 2020 rover. NASA has no funding or plans for new state of the art communications and high resolution observation Mars satellites that are needed to conduct a serious exploration of Mars.

SpaceNut · 2017-11-07 18:36:26

Well Pence, Trump and the National Space Council have got a problem with what they consider commercial versus industrial versus government versus military grade definitions but I would go withthis story about space x New Commercial Rocket Ready to Do NASA's Heavy Lifting to which Nasa had to back out of a reuseable capsule design and never had a reuseable first stage so that pretty much nails the difference. By definition then the starting of a Commercial Off the shelf aka COT's is not what Nasa is and never will be.

I am not expecting much from this first redu of the council let alone direction for going anywhere other than in LEO circles.....

The big dinosaur of Nasa is lumbering at such a slow steady pace that it seems that we will never go to Mars let alone the Moon.

We need the nimble fleet of foot companies that Space x embodies....

EdwardHeisler · 2017-11-07 20:47:06

Scott Pace falsely claims that a NASA goal of going to Mars "would have precluded meaningful involvement from the burgeoning US commercial sector as well as international partners." !!!????

Is Mr. Pace unaware of Elon Musk and SpaceX's commercial activities and plans regarding Mars exploration or is Pace just pretending to be ignorant?

There is a great deal of interest in going to Mars among major foreign government space organizations. Perhaps Mr. Pace is illiterate on such matters and that being the case should not hold any position in the National Space Council except perhaps cleaning their restrooms.

Has Mr. Pace heard of a country called China?

An editorial in the May 3, 2017 issue of the South China Morning Post called for U.S. and China cooperation in space exploration stating: “there is every reason why China and the United States should work together in space. As the leading space powers, they are best placed to shape the rules that will be needed to cope with the ever-increasingly crowded cosmos. The two nations should be, and need to be, cooperating. But their scientists and astronauts working together is only one element; the more crowded space gets, the greater the need for management to deal with disputes, debris and the threat of weapons. Investors will want predictability. China and the US can help formulate and shape regulations. But that will be difficult if they have no experience of collaboration.”

Zhou Jianping, chief designer of the China Manned Space Program at the China Manned Space Agency, put out the welcome mat for international participation in China’s building of a new international space station. They are not excluding NASA, but NASA will exclude itself from participation if the ban remains in place! China has signed space station cooperation agreements with Russia and the European Space Agency. Construction of the space station will begin next year and it may be ready for full operations in 2022.

Former NASA administrator Charles Bolden has called for U.S. collaboration with China and other nations to build the new space station and to get human explorers on Mars. Bolden wrote: “Working with China and other nations to build a bigger and better space station would be a great option. Instead to two space stations, we would have one truly international station with the most brilliant scientists around the world working together. That kind of collaboration would speed up tech development, we could start working together at a much faster pace than we are right now. We’ll need a new generation of space tech to get to Mars.”

Professor Zong Qiugang, an astrophysicist at Peking University’s Institute of Space Physics and Applied Technology who has worked with NASA, the European and Japanese space agencies and the China National Space Administration said: “if we are going to Mars, to send the first human visitors there will go beyond the capability of any single nation."

Last edited by EdwardHeisler (2017-11-07 20:51:34)

GW Johnson · 2017-11-07 20:49:34

I hate to say that I told you all so, but I did! Didn't I?

GW

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#1 2017-11-07 14:02:01

Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

#2 2017-11-07 14:20:41

Re: Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

#3 2017-11-07 14:40:43

Re: Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

#4 2017-11-07 18:27:00

Re: Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

#5 2017-11-07 18:36:26

Re: Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

#6 2017-11-07 20:47:06

Re: Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

#7 2017-11-07 20:49:34

Re: Trump's Decision To Dump NASA's "Journey to Mars" Plan Exposed!

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