Paul

My point was that while I’m not sure that Congress is going to up and remove that requirement, most of the people in Congress who would cry foul if NASA took the caveat and didn’t go the SDLV route are gone, or now apathetic.

~Jon

You can agree or disagree as to whether they _should_ be trying to meet that requirement, but try they are and Direct is a pretty good response to that requirement.

Regarding whether keeping the shuttle hardware to keep the shuttle workforce employed is a good idea, well, while you might be right that there is an institutional lag and that the shuttle and it’s workforce needn’t be retained (for all kinds of likely true reasons), the key point is that both Congress & NASA are part of that lag. And they’re the ones buying a new program. Whether they’re right or wrong, if they believe that keeping the workforce is a key requirement, then it is, at least as far as any new program that they are buying is concerned.

Finally, and I mean no disrespect, Harlan, but neither Direct nor the two Jupiter vehilces can be considered “radical”. They are quite conservative extrapolations of mostly existing hardware. They are not the most efficient nor the best way to get to orbit or the Moon, they are a relatively straght-forward extension & rearrangement of existing capabilities for a new task.

Comparatively, EELVs & a prop depot are far more radical and something like a VASIMIR tug for cislunar ops is pure “2001″ stuff. Both of these are exceptionally rational approaches to the real problems of sustainably operating between the Earth and the Moon, but compared to a J-120, they’re tin-foil hat crazy.

Paul

~Jon

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOvrNO0OJ41g&refer=worldwide

A lot of the article is a rehash of the NASA transition team debacle, but the notion that the new administration would combine AF and NASA efforts and interests in order to accelerate America’s return to the Moon is either intriguing or baffling, depending on one’s point of view. Also, how serious, in the short term, is the ascendant China’s space program as compared to American (or Russian) plans?

I have the feeling that “recognition lag” is at least partly an illusion. Political leaders in Britain and France may well have realized that things had changed after World War II, but held to the “Great Power” rhetoric in order to reassure their constituencies.

( The source, by the way, was Leon Kadar’s piece for The American Conservative, here: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/01/02/recognizing-the-recognition-lag/ )

Observers, especially present-day ones like Kadar, would not necessarily be able to see beyond the rhetoric to what the leadership really understood about the situation.

With respect to America’s aerospace industry, it’s clear that its decline was recognized years ago. Recall AW&ST’s series of articles on the “Crisis in Aerospace.” So I hesitate to say that even NASA leadership fails to recognize what’s happening. It may be more of a “confession lag.”

(OT: Does anyone else wonder at the timing of the release of the recent report on the Columbia Tragedy? That’s not the sort of thing it would take a competent engineer five years to figure out.)

Of course bureaucratic inertia plays a part — as does a valid concern about keeping up morale and workmanship. Both would suffer during a too-abrupt transition, with potentially devastating impact on the country at large.

But I agree that political support for human space exploration has been declining for years. And I expect that NASA will look very different at the end of Obama’s presidency.

A lot sooner than NASA could build a new HLV. I seem to recall Dallas Bienhoff suggesting 4-5 years for Boeing’s approach. And LM has some that could also be implemented quickly if the money were there. If you do it in a way to try and encourage it to be fielded commercially, it could take a bit longer. But anyway you slice it, it would be ready long before NASA was ready to go back to the moon–it isn’t the gating factor.

Regarding the global commercial spaceflight situation…buying Russian isn’t that great of a solution anymore, since the prices are continuing to go up, and were never that good at all. The shear fact that people have been buying tickets at the prices involved is quite amazing to me, and there’s every reason to believe that there is elasticity in that market.

As to why there aren’t foreign NewSpace launchers…I think its a complicated question, and you know it. Commercial space just really hasn’t taken root much outside of the US (with a few notable exceptions). Is that because there isn’t demand, and no interest? Or is it for other cultural, historical, and economic reasons? My bet though is that if you start seeing enough success with US personal spaceflight firms, that you’ll eventually start seeing similar ventures oversees as well.

~Jon