Kelly Starks wrote:
>Are you on drugs? I never said anything like that!
>You pulling my leg on this post?
Pulling your leg on this particular issue? Yes. Point of fact you have always said the exact opposite. )

Randy

4. >> “Wouldn’t have to be that way. A RLV could be a lot cheaper
5. >> (hard not to be cheaper then Constellation!), and without the
>>technical issues of Ares-I and Orion could be done faster.”

>Yep you have all those facts and history to back that up too I see ;o)
Well, yeah. And the cost projections of all the potential vendors. Constellation was budgeted at 10-20 times the cost of a commercial RLV, about 2-2.5 times NASA projected cost for a shuttle replacement full RLV, 2.5 Times the adjusted cost of the full shuttle development. Also comparing ELV missiles boosters like from Atlas against rocket planes with simplar delta-V (X-15), you get lower costs for the RLV.

> == CAN’T be “cheaper” as there is no forseeable DIFFERENCE between an RLV and ELV for government use! ==
Well first I mentioned cheaper then Constellation which at $100B in dev costs, is staggeringly expensive compared to anything NASA tried before. The complete adjusted cost of the space race is only 30% more then the Constellation development budget.

Second its assumed ELVs are cheaper because they only need to last ones and don’t need recovery systems, but in practice they are about as complicated, but harder to test and verify.

>>“Not surprizing NASA adn Manned space is gettnig gutted out
>> under a pres who said he felt it was a waste.”

> Oh I’m sure you can even QUOTE where Obama said that too can’t you? ==

Yeah, I could look up the articlers I sent yuo back in ’08 where that was a big issue amoung space advocates.

> == In a way I have to agree with Mike on you’re change
> of attitude, I just have to recall how HORRIBLE you
> always thought the idea of the government giving money
> to commercial space was )

Are you on drugs? I never said anything like that!
You pulling my leg on this post?

Yep you have all those facts and history to back that up too I see ;o)
No, Kelly you can’t “assume” your way out of this one I’m afraid, the actual facts stand in direct contrast to your statement. A GOVERNMENT RLV built to the needs of the government (and lacking your assumptions and bias’ being tacked on that change the facts) CAN’T be “cheaper” as there is no forseeable DIFFERENCE between an RLV and ELV for government use! What there IS is an “economic” argument that clearly favors continued ELV production over limited production of a little used RLV which will NEVER re-coup its development costs.

Lacking some way to “super-boost” the commercial market (which by and of itself a government developed and used RLV is incapable of doing by the nature of being a government program from the start) the “government” is going to be the majority user of any specific space launch system for the forseeable future and therefor will set the requirements for the launch vehicle needed.
The ONLY way to avoid this is to have at least partial government “buy-in” to subsidize commercial development which was the case in aviation and early space commercialization.

Nothing the government does is ever “cheap” but then again that’s NOT the governments job. Constellation, (not “Orion” which is only a single piece of the system) would have cost overall LESS than the Shuttle per launch. Simple math will tell you that, it has tons less processing for preperation and recovery than the STS does for the overall flight rate. It also, (in some ways unfortunatly) also reflects the required needs of NASA far more accuratly than the STS ever did.
But I already know you’re aware of this…

“Not surprizing NASA adn Manned space is gettnig gutted out under a pres who said he felt it was a waste.”
Oh I’m sure you can even QUOTE where Obama said that too can’t you? In a way I have to agree with Mike on you’re change of attitude, I just have to recall how HORRIBLE you always thought the idea of the government giving money to commercial space was )

I just have to keep in mind that you have always felt that it was ONLY the governments place to “do” space travel and manned space flight and how you always quoted the only successful manned space program was Apollo and how by copying everything from John Kenndy’s speech to the “success-at-any-price-and-hang-the-future” attitude that has led “successful” efforts by NASA at every turn to “improve” on the legacy left behind was of course the only possible way to expand mankind into space…
IT has of course been so obvious….

How can any sane person argue with the logic?
People “complain” that the current budget lacks “clearly defined goals and a timetable” and for the most part they are correct in that assesment. But the assesment itself is badly flawed and even worse based on a false paradigm and a self-inflated lie if one looks close enough.
The majority of people seem to lack the ability to see how the current budget makes a rather fundemental change in policy, and in breaking with a “tradition” that has generally FAILED more than helped the cause of manned space flight actually probably gives us the very best hope we’ve had since JFK managed to ‘side-track’ the space program in the first place.

I was rather surprised, (and more than a bit dismayed actually) when the Presidents speech on the 15th was “compared” to the one given by John F. Kennedy which set the United States to putting a man on the moon and returning him safetly to the Earth by the end of the 1960s.
On the face of it the two message could not be more fundamentally different, yet having re-read the speech and the original given for the proposed NASA budget I finally was able to see that was EXACTLY the reason the two speeches ARE significant and important! John Kennedy’s speech challenged America to pull itself up above its failures and set a goal for NASA, the government, and the American people that would force them to rise above themselves and challenge our economic, political, and technological limits to achieve. MORE importantly however, it set a specified goal with a short timetable leading America into a path of unsustainable space exploration that ultimatly achieved the challanges set before us but nothing more. Leaving America at a political, economic, and technical dead-end that can easily be regulated to less than a “footnote” in human history.
(It is surprising at how the idea that “since” Neil Armstrong was the firt person to set foot on the Moon it will be remembered forever, yet historically this is rarely true. Who was the fist person to set foot on the North American continent? Who “discovered” America? Surely history has recorded the name someplace but it is lost to us, because it has been FAR overshadowed by someone else who was at the tip of exploitation and settlement rather than having actually “discovered” the America’s. In our arrogence we’d like to THINK that Neil Armstrong ranks “up” there with C. Columbus but in reality Yuri Gargarin is more celebrated as an explorer anywhere outside the United States. Something we should remember more often than we do.)

Kennedy’s speech has been held up as THE standard which was needed to “motivate” and “inspire” both the public and government to aspire to new heights and face new challenges but in fact failed motivate or inspire beyond a short-llived “success-at-any-price” space program that was abandoned as soon as it was expediant to do so. In fact this “false” fact of the NEED for “defined-goals-and-timetables” specifically directed ONLY towards a GOVERNMENT space program has directly resulted in two failed attempts at repitition:
President George H. Bush’s “Space Exploration Initiative” speech on July 20th, 1989 (http://history.nasa.gov/seisummary.htm) and the speech by his son President George W. Bush setting forth his “Vision for Space Exploration” (http://history.nasa.gov/SEP%20Press%20Release.htm)

Both set forth goals and timetables to be met, both called on firm commitments to support NASA expansion beyond Earth orbit and both failed to gain public and (more importantly) Congressional support and therefor the financial and political support needed to succeed in meeting those goals and commitments.

Yet Kennedy’s speech more than anything else set the US on a direct path to our current situation of limited horizons and even more limited goals. Rather than having a slow but steady progress in capability as happened with aviation the American space program was artificially accelerated beyond levels it could sustain in order to “beat” an idealogical foe who had used prior American complacincy and hubris in order to score propaganda points during the Cold War. The synergy of circumstances that lead to the Kennedy speech and the Apollo program are never going to happen again and we’ve SEEN this mode fail without those circumstances, yet it is held as some sort of “truth” that IF we have a “vision” handed down from on-high (oh yes, and an opponent to “fight” against, oh and maybe a little bitty massive “Cold-War” going on) the American space program will be victorious!

Well maybe a we’d have to have won a massive global war… And have suffered another “Pearl-Harbor” type “surpise attack” by those viscious “Commies” where we managed to fight them to a standstill… And then begin a massive economic, cultural, and political shift from “peace” to “war” as we realize we might be technically, (which in “American-speak” means we’re also politically and as a civilization) less advanced because try as we might OUT efforts to equal or exceed those damn Commies keeps coming up in failure!
So maybe just a FEW things…

So… Let us “maybe” review again how this is somehow a “truth” of manned space flight? )

Randy

Wouldn’t have to be that way. A RLV could be a lot cheaper (hard not to be cheaper then Constellation!), and without the technical issues of Ares-I and Orion could be done faster.

As for costs. We’ll Orion was going to cost several times as much per launch then shuttle. No clud what Commercial Crew Transport will cost in 2015, but given NASA has budgeted $6 B for NASA to faciiltate its development over the next 5 years — likely not cheap!

In the U.S., we have had several major shifts in our space program since the end of Apollo, and it might be this long-term instability in our human spaceflight goals and program that leads some to believe that the U.S. isn’t making significant progress.

(Ok, the ACTUAL two biggest and/or loudest “anti-budget-arguements” are really that the proposed budget destroys our ability to defend ourselves by cutting the Minuteman missile system, and that it lack earmarks which are going to cost “millions” of Utahan’s thier jobs…???? Ok, I guess I can let those ones go becauese it’s nothing anyone around here hasn’t come to expect from Bishop and Bennett )

The actual issue of the loss of workforce for NASA and others involved in the STS ARE real and NEED to be addressed because even if/when NASA gets around to re-building KSC etc, the loss of the capability to build STS components and to re-build those components into a variaty of launch vehicles that NASA needs but have no commercial equivilent (yet) is going to cause a “gap” need and capability that the President has already cited as being needed.
(How else are you going to launch “spare” ISS modules to build a mutli-flight capable Orbital Transfer Vehicle? )

Not going to get into it in THIS post, (:::grin::::) but there seems to be a distinct inability in a lot of people to understand that what is GOOD and especailly “politically-doable” for NASA is not and can never BE the same thing as what is “assumed” to be needed for turning American into a “spacefaring-nation” or even building a robust space transportation infastructure.
For example IF the President had directed that NASA design and field a fully-reusable two-stage-to-orbit system by 2015 does anyone doubt that we’d have either seen another “failed” launch system cancled or an expansive, rarely used launch system deployed that was unaffordable and unsustainable outside of a government budget? Yet that is the very thing people seem to be arguing FOR even as they say it’s not…

My biggest “fear” is that politically Congress can delay any implimintation of the budget simply by doing nothing at all which makes actually MORE sense than trying to find a compromise or actually proposing a counter-budget. IIRC, Congress has until July to offer an ‘opposing’ counter-budget and till August/September to re-submit the Presidents budget with modifications, but everything is SUPPOSED to be in place by October-1st as the start of the new Fiscal year. But I think everyone can remember the years where the Federal Budget wasn’t actually APPROVED by all parties and IN-PLACE till well after the physical ‘new-year’ and all the issues THAT caused.

Unfortunatly it makes a LOT of political sense for Congress-critters of BOTH parties to delay any budget decision until AFTER November. Politically the “opposition” to the proposed NASA budget can be used to off-set somewhat negative voter feelings about passage of the Health-Care act, (no I DON’T really want to get into that here, thanks ;o) just as late-term opposition to Bush’s policy’s were used as a show of “non-conformity” and a means to “distance” ones self for purely political reasons during the LAST mid-term elections.

Which will leave ANY plans by NASA for continuation of STS related systems and/or expansion of funding in any other areas reliant on what monies can be ‘saved’ from the cancelation of the Constellations program. However, since Constellation has pretty much SPENT its yearly (let alone quarterly) budget, and Congress had never “approved” any spending increases in the FY-2010 NASA budget there isn’t a whole lot of ‘money’ actually available to do anything with.

Randy

Many think that this administration is leading America to decline, and they conflate the more modest space program into those concerns, and I think they are wrong in doing so. Any administration in today’s economic and budget climate would want to have some variant of the Obama proposals, I think. My variant would include reviving the Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator program, TAN nozzle research, along with other more aggressive and ambitious launch vehicle propulsion R&D, a more ambitious X-37 program and scramjet program, and more funding for researching and testing more powerful propellants (nanoalumin/water, Quadricyclane, other near-term HEDM concepts) and nanotube reinforced launch vehicle fuselages.