http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4344512.html
“”Is Obama’s just-released NASA budget the “death march for the future of U.S. human space flight,” as Senator Richard Shelby proclaims on his website today? Or is it in fact a new beginning for the space agency?
Obama’s proposed 2011 budget actually increases NASA’s budget by $6 billion. What has Shelby and others up in arms is Obama’s plan to axe the big-ticket return-to-the-moon program, launched without adequate funding by his predecessor. Nine billion dollars in the hole and counting, the Constellation program has been busy trying to reclaim NASA’s glory days with an inherently flawed design.
The design relies on an elongated version of the solid rocket booster that doomed Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. Solid rocket boosters cannot be shut down in an emergency and this segmented version relies on what amounts to giant washers to keep hot gases in, adding multiple points of failure compared with a liquid-fuel design. As shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane said in his book Riding Rockets, “At the most fundamental level, modern solid rocket boosters are no different from the first rockets launched by the Chinese thousands of years ago—after ignition they have to work because nothing can be done if they don’t. And, typically, when they do not work, the failure mode is catastrophic.”
The new budget calls for a course correction—for putting money back into the kind of basic research NASA does best, keeping the space station going through at least 2020, and hiring private contractors for crew and cargo flights. It’s a boon to private space flight companies such as SpaceX but an anathema to politicians who want to keep riding a very lucrative gravy train building paper spaceships. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said today during a commercial space telecon organized in response to the budget request, “There are certain members of congress who cannot be swayed by any rational argument. They simply want the answer to be that funding continues in their district independent of any sound basis for it.”
I would argue that the new direction is not just the best option for NASA, but the only one. NASA already has no choice but to rely on the Russians for rides to the International Space Station after the shuttle retires this year. It’s an embarrassment. Obama’s budget will open the door to homegrown solutions for crew and cargo delivery to the space station, while providing much needed research funding for the development of next-gen technologies such as heavy-lift rockets and on-orbit refueling depots.
It’s a step that’s long overdue, though not one without peril. The private sector will have some very big shoes to fill, without the track record to prove that it’s up to the job. And can it succeed without succumbing to the kind of bloat that has eaten our defense budget alive? Working with the government tends to increase the amount of paperwork and oversight, along with the bureaucracy required to handle that extra workload, so it’s a legitimate concern. But, after all, the goal is to reduce the cost of reaching space. It has become clear to the right people, including many engineers and managers at NASA, that the traditional way of doing things hasn’t been working. NASA and the White House have every incentive to keep out of the way of the private contracts as much as possible.
A bigger danger is that NASA could become the only customer for the fledgling spaceflight companies, making them de facto arms of the government, with all the attendant problems, and keeping them at the mercy of changing political winds. That’s one reason Robert Bigelow, CEO of Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing commercial space stations, shuns government financing. “We don’t have NASA currently on our radar screen as a client,” he said during today’s telecon.
These bold moves are sure to touch off a battle in Congress. Constellation won’t die an easy death. But in its place, NASA will have the kind of clear direction along with the budget and a reasonable timeline for getting there that it has lacked for 40 years. NASA will maintain the space station—finally to be completed this year and ready for use as a fully-functional research outpost—with the help of the private sector, and conduct the research, robotic and otherwise, for pushing beyond low Earth orbit. JFK’s let’s-go-to-the-moon-in-this-decade battle cry it isn’t. But in some ways it’s even more exciting, because it points the way to truly sustainable development in space.
(Michael Belfiore is the author of Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space.)””
That sums it up very nicely. This is the only thing Obama has done that I completely agree with. If NASA can be saved it will have to divest itself of the manned program and return to it’s roots as an agent of exploration.