Fwd: Space Notebook: NASA goals, budget called a ‘fraud’

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: August 3, 2014 5:09:24 PM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Space Notebook: NASA goals, budget called a 'fraud'

Florida Today

 

Space Notebook: NASA goals, budget called a 'fraud'

6:46 p.m. EDT August 2, 2014

 

Add an august group, including Mars scientists, a former astronaut, a former shuttle program director and top aerospace executives, to the list of independent experts who believe NASA's human exploration strategy is doomed to fail, at least as currently funded.

 

One member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) went so far as to call the strategy a "fraud."

 

Meeting at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia last week, the 13-member council issued a recommendation declaring that "the mismatch between NASA's aspirations for human spaceflight and its budget for human spaceflight is the most serious problem facing the agency."

 

The council said NASA should identify the minimum path necessary to reach its stated goal of Mars in the 2030s, and determine how it would proceed if continued flat budgets aren't sufficient.

 

NASA is now spending $3 billion a year to develop the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule for crew launches from Kennedy Space Center on deep space exploration missions.

 

The system's first crewed mission is planned around 2021. By the mid-'20s, NASA wants to send astronauts to an asteroid that has been robotically relocated near the moon.

 

The council recommendation's "mismatch" wording echoed blunt comments by member Tom Young, a former director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and retired Lockheed Martin executive, who said NASA lacks an executable exploration strategy.

 

Unless the council said as much, he said, "I really think collectively we are perpetuating a fraud."

 

He worried NASA is on a path to spend perhaps $160 billion over the next two decades but end up no closer to Mars.

 

For the same funding, he said, NASA could fly 20 James Webb Space Telescopes — the successor to Hubble, targeted for launch in 2018 — or 60 Curiosity Mars rovers, missions producing or likely to produce scientific breakthroughs.

 

The council recognized that NASA's near-term focus on an asteroid and longer-term goal of Mars respond to current national space policy and congressional guidance — policies the NAC is not empowered to change.

 

But its recommendation concluded that unless NASA gets more money, cuts costs or changes its goal, it "runs the risk of squandering precious national resources on a laudable but unachievable goal."

 

No costs divulged

 

How much will a Mars mission cost? NASA's not going there.

 

"We think it's too early to do that," Greg Williams, deputy associate administrator of the agency's Human Exploration and Operations directorate, told the NASA Advisory Council last week. "We're still trying to get SLS and Orion and those capabilities firmly ensconced and established, and then take on the next bite. If we try and swallow the whole thing right now, the system will choke on it."

 

Without a funding estimate, some on the council said, there is no real program to get to Mars, only an aspiration.

 

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said the agency is laying out a strategy, but it's up to Congress and the President to commit resources for a Mars mission, which hasn't happened yet.

 

"We think it will require increases in the budget," he said. "I'm not sure that anybody right now knows what those increases are. I don't think anybody would try to deceive anybody that you're going to do it on flat-lined budget."

 

Council member Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and SpaceX executive who is now a consultant, said NASA is developing a strategy as best it can under the circumstances.

 

"There's probably some fear that if they lay out too big a number, they won't even get the opportunity to lay out the strategy," he said. "And I think that's really smart based on history."

 

He asked for agreement on what NASA is doing right, and the council approved a finding that endorsed aspects of the exploration strategy, including Mars as a "horizon" goal, its flexibility and opportunities for international partnership and near-term missions to advance capabilities.

 

Orbit Mars next

 

Forty-five years after men landed on the moon, NASA recently celebrated the Apollo 11 anniversary and promoted "America's next giant leap," including a planned human mission to Mars by the 2030s.

 

Agency officials clarified to some on the NASA Advisory Council, however, that the next leap won't initially mean boots on the ground.

 

The 2030s mission, assumed to cost tens of billions of dollars, would only orbit the Red Planet.

 

While developing a rocket and capsule, NASA currently has no money to develop landers and other systems that would allow astronauts to live and work on the surface of Mars or even the moon.

 

That's a big reason why NASA is pursuing the mission known as the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM.

 

But that mission, too, drew harsh criticism from some on the advisory panel.

 

Tom Young said the intent of the asteroid mission President Obama requested was to go to a far-away asteroid in its "native orbit," not one artificially moved close to us, and that ARM would not accelerate progress to Mars.

 

"It really dumbs down NASA," he said. "NASA is better than this, in my view."

 

Bowersox said it took him a while but he's warmed up to the mission as having exciting potential to practice exploration techniques in a relatively accessible place.

 

The council recommended NASA perform an independent cost analysis of the mission.

 

SLS rate is slow

 

Another NASA Advisory Council concern is the low projected flight rate of NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which is targeting first launches from KSC in 2017 and 2021 and then anticipating one flight every other year.

 

Such a low rate will make it difficult to maintain suppliers and a skilled launch team, potentially increasing safety risks.

 

NASA last week pitched the SLS as a launcher for planetary science missions that might help fill out the manifest.

 

On the plus side, the big, Saturn V-class rocket could easily support larger spacecraft and reduce by years the time it takes to reach outer planets, thus accelerating return of science data.

 

On the downside, it will be more expensive than anything else available.

 

Agency officials said they hoped to get the cost below $500 million.

 

Cost-sharing between NASA's human exploration and science budgets could potentially facilitate such missions.

 

But the plan also raised concerns about NASA competing with the private sector for launch services.

 

Curiosity recalled

 

Wednesday marks the two-year anniversary of NASA's Curiosity rover landing safely on Mars.

 

After a famed "seven minutes of terror" during which the rover hurtled through the Martian atmosphere and was lowered to the surface by an innovative "sky crane" system, the rover touched down at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time on Aug. 6.

 

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