U.S. President to sign space policy directive Monday

http://spacenews.com/president-to-sign-space-policy-directive-monday/

by daegloe • 9 years ago

41 63 9 years ago

shkkmo2• 9 years ago

I don't see any mention of funding in this article. Any such directive is ineffective without a commitment towards increasing funding for NASA over the short and long term.

zeveb• 9 years ago

The President doesn't fund things; the Congress does (which is part of the reason that the way Americans look at their president as a kind of elected king is just so weird: he's simply the guy charged with executing the laws as they are written, not the guy charged with writing them).

shkkmo2• 9 years ago

The President's ability to veto and the vice-president's tie breaking vote on the Senate give the President a great deal of potential to affect the legislation that Congress passes. The President could certainly make a commitment to increased funding for NASA by threatening to veto any spending bill that doesn't boost NASA's funding.

valuearb4• 9 years ago

NASA already has enough funding to do lunar and mars manned missions now.

Instead they've decided to build the SLS, which is a huge pork filled gift to the state of Alabama and contractors like Boeing. The SLS will cost over $10,000 per lb of cargo to lift things into orbit, and that doesn't count it's $20B+ in development costs. With development and annual infrastructure operating costs, the first 10 launches of the SLS are going to cost well over $30B.

The Falcon Heavy's first launch is January, two years ahead of the SLS. It's cost per pound of cargo is going to be close to $500/lb. And it's just the first of a series of privately developed heavy lift launch vehicles under development (Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin New Glenn, BFR, etc), all of which will be at least 10x less expensive than the SLS because none of them are going to be burned up and tossed in the ocean after every flight!

vermontdevil3• 9 years ago

Third president in a row to offer something like this related to the Moon.

Obama: He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant destinations, including Mars.

Bush: President Bush has unveiled a new vision for space exploration, calling on NASA to "gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own."

In other words - same old unless $ is put in the budget and approved.

azemetre• 9 years ago

Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle. Hardly sustainable. Is there a reason why we can't let NASA be NASA and pursue objectives they want without a butting President or Congress?

dmode• 9 years ago

I am curious how other countries operate their space programs that gives them some autonomy from voting cycles. You cannot run a space program with budgets and priorities changes every 4 years.

hux_• 9 years ago

NASA isn't a high priority budget item.

China is due to do a few interesting things in space over the next couple years. After that priorities are likely to change.

vkou4• 9 years ago

Because without a butting President or Congress creating pork for their constituents, NASA would not exist.

TaylorAlexander• 9 years ago

My more cynical belief is that the issue is intent - specifically that these moves are not intended to create functioning space programs, but to move money to interested parties and look good in the news.

rbanffy2• 9 years ago

Seems like the issue is that Washington changes the mission directive every voting cycle.

With adequate funding, it's not that bad. Just build modular ships, probes and landers. You can get more done by custom building, but a generic backbone can resist political changes.

If the focus goes back to robotic exploration, your lander can, at least, carry the robot. The same propulsion system that would take a crew to Mars could take a small probe to Pluto and slow it down so it can enter orbit. Or drop a couple smaller probes on its way out.

The design of the ISS changed as it was being built. We can certainly do the same with a craft that can leave Earth orbit.

gozur887• 9 years ago

There's not much the president can do about that since it's up to Congress to allocate the funds. House terms are only two years long, and if you allocate funds to this kind of thing you have nothing to show for it in the next election cycle unless the project brings jobs to your district.

guelo• 9 years ago

That's absolutely not true, especially when the president and congress are of the same party. The President has the veto so congress and the president have to come to an agreement to pass a budget.

giantsloth3• 9 years ago

Here is Obama's space fact sheet

https://web.archive.org/web/20081107061417/https://barackoba...

    Human spaceflight is important to America’s political, economic, technological,
    and scientific leadership. Barack Obama will support renewed human exploration
    beyond low earth orbit. He endorses the goal of sending human missions to the 
    Moon by 2020, as a precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more 
    distant destinations, including Mars.
    
    - pg 3 paragraph 4

vermontdevil3• 9 years ago

I'm not criticizing Obama or Bush or Trump.

It's Congress. I'm sure every president since Nixon wants to go back to the Moon.

But again it's Congress. Allocate the $ and we will go back. Hopefully this time it's for real. I'm not holding my breath.

We'll see.

garmaine3• 9 years ago

Obama explicitly stopped an effort to get to the Moon with a massively ignorant “been there, done that” (exact quote!) attitude. If he signed legislation authorizing it, it was due to being part of a huge authorization bill for which space policy is not important enough to quibble over.

The brief history is that NASA has a legacy of not taking cost effective routes to exploration and rather preferring the too expensive to sustain Apollo model. The first George Bush gave a directive to get to Mars. The massive program that they came up with would have bankrupted the economy. Congress instead forbade NASA from spending any money towards people to Mars.

Clinton took the focus away from destinations and supported the ISS as a post-cold war olive branch to Russia.

George W Bush lifted that ban and gave the same goal towards boots on Mars with explicit direction to pursue a commercial space settlement approach that through cost sharing and reuse would have kept total cost reasonable and bootstrapped a self sufficient extraterrestrial economy. That directive was ignored and we got what NASA literally described as “Apollo on steroids”.

Obama killed that albatross without a replacement or any intention of providing one other than giving them permission to do something like visit an asteroid, as pointless an exercise as that would be, just so long as it could be done within a frozen budget, meaning minimal if any tech development (a directive to do tech development and a budget was provided, but it was substitutive not additional and eventually gutted anyway). Congress overruled and started giving their own directions for NASA, including the pork driven SLS that serves no purpose really.

Now Trump seems to be sending the pendulum back in the humans to Moon, Mars, and beyond direction. It’ll be interesting to see how it gets unwound by a democratic successor.

If this seems rather political, it is only the mundane politics of traditional party bases and campaign contributions. There is a lot of overlap between NASA and defense contractors, typically republican supporting, and they stand to benefit directly from an Apollo like approach. Lots of waste to profit off of in the traditional NASA model. The saddest story for me is that George W Bush actually seemed to care and DIDN’T authorize the traditional republican battlestar galactica approach but rather tried to direct NASA towards the SpaceX model of lean efficient reusable commercial tech, not government programs. But he was ignored by a zealous NASA administrator with a “NASA glory days” obsession and congressional pork. Space Policy isn’t exactly what the president should be focusing on, especially with two wars going on at the time, so presidents tend to get their directives used by others with opposing agendas.

Edit: down voters explain yourselves? I mention political parties only because the answer to the question involves politics. I tried to be explicitly non partisan about it. I worked at NASA during the second Bush and Obama years and saw directly the internal policy considerations as they were made. The above constitutes my high level summary of that.

dsfyu404ed• 9 years ago

It’ll be interesting to see how it gets unwound by a democratic successor.

After what happened last time I prefer to count my chickens after they're inaugurated

polyfractal2• 9 years ago

Didn't down-vote (or upvote for that matter), but I think this might be glossing over some details. My understanding is that Constellation was ridiculously over-budget, behind schedule and there was no reasonable way it would accomplish it's stated mission without a massive influx of cash. The Augustine Committee results were pretty damning. There's no way the program would have made it to the moon, let alone mars. Keeping Constellation running would have been a classic sunk-cost problem.

That said, while Constellation was canned, large components of it were/are reused by the Space Launch System (SLS), including the Orion crew capsule and Aries I/V rockets. So in reality Constellation lives on as SLS, albeit with a much more vague goal now. Cynics could argue it's even more of a jobs program than Constellation was.

As an aside, what'd you do at NASA? I'm super jealous! Thanks for taking the time to share your summary of the events, I largely agreed with what you wrote :)

giantsloth3• 9 years ago

Here is Bush's promise:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040116071139/https://www.white...

    Third, America will return to the Moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020 
    and use it as a stepping stone for more ambitious missions. A series of
    robotic missions to the Moon, similar to the Spirit Rover that is sending
    remarkable images back to Earth from Mars, will explore the lunar surface
    beginning no later than 2008 to research and prepare for future human
    exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, humans will conduct extended
    lunar missions as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for
    increasingly extended periods.
    
    - Third bullet under President Bush's Vision for U.S. Space Exploration

valuearb4• 9 years ago

NASA actually has enough money.

SpaceX Falcon 9 FT (mostly re-usable) 50,000 lbs to low earth orbit (LEO) Cost: Substantially less than $62M with re-usablity

SpaceX Falcon Heavy (mostly re-usable) 140,000 lbs to LEO Cost: $90M

Blue Origin New Glenn (mostly re-usable) 100,000 lbs to LEO Cost: expected under $100M.

SpaceX BFR (fully re-usable) 330,000 lbs to LEO Cost: Expected less than Falcon 9

NASA SLS (Space Launch System) (disposable, destroyed every launch) Block 1 (2020): 150,000 lbs to LEO

Block 1B (2022): 230,000 lbs to LEO

Block 2 (2029): 290,000 lbs to LEO

Cost: $500M+ per launch $1B+ a year in operational costs (for 1-2 launches a year) $20B+ in developmental costs

NASA is blowing at least $3B a year paying Boeing and other contractors to build the SLS when far cheaper alternatives are either available or imminent. The cost of your Lunar or Mars exploration program is directly determined by your launch costs, and Congress has forced NASA to choose the most expensive possible launch system. Because it's built in Alabama. Using commercial launch capacity to operate the manned space program would not only free up billions a year, but accelerate it (the SLS won't be carrying humans until mid 2022 at the earliest).

$3B a year could pay for a half dozen to a dozen Falcon Heavy manned launches a year with capsules, support, everything, starting in late 2019. They could be used to assemble lunar and mars size transit ships in orbit, and actually send people to the moon and mars before 2022. It could also pay for as many as six huge interplanetary robotic probes, every year. We could re-visit every planet yearly with ever more capable scientific instruments. Or a combination of the manned and robotic plans.

But instead, the huge flow of money keeps the congressional delegation in Alabama secure in their seats, while crushing the dream of any actual NASA manned space program to the moon or mars ever. The SLS has missed every schedule date, and it's really unlikely congress is going to fully fund the program when the SLS is working. And the SLS spending is gutting actually super cost effective robotic probe spending.

Even if funded, NASA's plan never has more than 2 launches per year, and it's first Mars launch is planned for 2033. If nothing else ever slips.

greglindahl2• 9 years ago

Your numbers are not quite right because you're mixing up the "let's expend the rocket" payload with the "let's not expend the rocket" prices for F9 and FH.

polyfractal2• 9 years ago

If anyone is into Space and Politics/Policy, the Planetary Society has semi-recently started doing monthly "Space Policy Edition" episodes. Here's the most recent:

http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/201...

They dig deep into the current political landscape and how that affects current and future funding of various projects at NASA. Recently they started doing interviews with people which is usually quite interesting too.

azurezyq• 9 years ago

Politics aside. American people need a new dream to strive for. Without major infrastructure construction going on, people will soon find them living in the past in a few year. Whether to go back to "Moon" is not important but we need to go to "Somewhere".

vkou4• 9 years ago

Something to strive for? Perhaps eliminating poverty, or malnutrition? We don't need to go to the moon for that, we just need to go south of Market Street.

If those goals are too pedestrian, we could also aim for shifting our economy to a closed-loop ecologically-sensitive system. It would be far more useful then going to the moon - it would pay farm more technological, and social dividends, and it is the best ROI step that we could take to ensure our continued survival as a civilized species.

But perhaps these goals are beyond our capabilities...

bb88• 9 years ago

There are other ways to keep people from living in the past other than say, going to the moon.

* High speed internet service everywhere in the country.

* Cheap access to telemedicine to help those that can't get to a doctor.

* High speed rail

(etc)

gozur887• 9 years ago

I'd love to see a usable intercity passenger rail system of any kind. We could build out a low speed network for a fraction of the HSR cost and then up the speed on routes where it makes sense on a piecemeal basis.

maxxxxx• 9 years ago

It seems Americans like to compete against someone. I don't think improving infrastructure will be motivating. It needs to be something where they can win.

adventured• 9 years ago

Most people like to compete to varying degrees. You see it in: video games, sports, science, business, relationships, driving, lifestyle choices, and so on.

As nations are made up of people, nations also like to compete with other nations. It's not even remotely unique to the US. You've seen it persistently across eg Europe for the last thousand years, from small to large nations.

rbanffy2• 9 years ago

people will soon find them living in the past

Sorry, but all that MAGA stuff is pretty much this, but based on an imaginary past that never was.

antaviana• 9 years ago

Given the highly controversial nature of Trump's executive orders, often escalating into violence, I thought that this was a tabs-versus-spaces thing.

JustAnotherPat• 9 years ago

Baby Boomers giving up on space exploration will be one of their many, great embarrassments.

berbec• 9 years ago

This generation's list isn't short, either. While progress continues to be made on many fronts, quite a few things stick out like a sore thumb over the last 40 years: tax cuts that pay for themselves, Clinton's impeachment (from either side's viewpoint), dot-com bubble, tax cuts that pay for themselves, Iraq, massive deficits, great recession, insane partisan gridlock, tax cuts that pay for themselves.

DubiousPusher• 9 years ago

I think our money might be better spent on multiple machine only missions that accomplish some difficult task through automation on the surface of the moon. For the cost of sending a few people we could probably pay for machine only missions that build structures, drill functional water wells and grow food.

Those kind of things would prepare us for future colonies off this planet wherever they might be. And we'd gain a lot of value in important emerging industries that could be quickly applied to great benefit here.

U.S. President to sign space policy directive Monday

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