Shuppiana
Not to be crude and nasty, but ... you don't know the space business.
(1) The current NASA budget for FY2012 is 16.8 billion dollars; next year it is likely to be smaller, by several percent at least.
(2) The portion spent on manned spaceflight (Shuttle, ISS operations, and development of the Orion manned capsule and proposed Saturn-class Space Launch System) runs to about 8 billion. Eliminating the shuttle will reduce this by 5-6 billion, but Orion, SLS and other spacecraft development costs will rise accordingly.
(3) Newt Gingrich is currently being lambasted for suggesting the US build a moon base, which might cost 7 billion a year to operate. His critics find that cost insane.
(4) The NASA budget does not cover DoD and CIA (NSA actually) space programs. Those agencies have sperate budgets for satellites and launchers and operating costs; the total is about 40 to 50 billion dollars a year; the exact details are of course classified.
IOW, NASA consumes 25 to 30% of US government space spending, and this has been the case since about 1970.
IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THESE NUMBERS YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO DISCUSS US SPACE POLICY.
I would like to be polite, but--
Shall I continue?
*********
Carrying on anyhow ...
(5) If you were in charge of NASA. you would not be in charge of NASA. Let me quote from a government report, HR 112–169, COMMERCE, JUSTICE, SCIENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS BILL, 2012 (July 20, 2011)
[PAGE 72]
Planetary Science missions.
The Committee accepts the findings
of the most recent Planetary Science decadal survey... flagship missions, which must be substantially descoped in order to remain within the portfolio. The Committee directs that $4,000,000 of the Outer Planets Flagship (OPF) budget be used to conduct the necessary descoping studies for the decadal survey’s two highest priority flagship missions: Mars Sample Return (MSR) and the Jupiter Europa Orbiter (JEO). The results of these studies shall be transmitted to the Committee as soon as they are complete. The remaining $39,000,000 of OPF funds should be held pending the completion of the descoping analysis ...
Plutonium-238. The bill makes available $10,000,000 from this account, as requested, to restart production of Plutonium-238 (Pu-
238), a radioisotope that is an essential source of electrical power for long-range planetary science missions. The Committee urges NASA to work expeditiously with the Department of Energy to
bring Pu-238 production back online as quickly as possible while simultaneously pursuing Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator technology that will allow NASA to make better, more efficient use of available Pu-238 stocks.
I've summarized a bit. This is from a 150 page report which is itself only a summary of the actual appropriation bill -- the House version of an appropriation bill which at that point had not not been reconciled with the counterpart Senate resolution.
Let me mention, for the sake of a little insider amusement, that NASA has not been able to procure Plutonium-238 for the past few years. Reopening the DOE facility which processes plutonium will cost at least 15 million dollars; NASA is the only customer for this isotope, and DoE is not willing to swallow a $5 million loss. NASA knows this, DoE knows this; the House committee here knows this, but it will not authorize the whole $15 million, apparantly as a matter of principle. Possibly the Russians will sell some of their excess Plutonium-238 to NASA (it's obtained from decommissioning old atomic weapons, I gather), but this can't be counted upon. Several spacecraft being considered for launch in the 2020's will need radioisotope power sources, so this is one of the little things NASA administrators just have to keep in mind.
You get the idea, I trust. NASA Administrators have responsibilties, but not as much power as one might thing. My suspicion is that the average drug store manager actually has more power to shift merchanidise around and handle nuts-and-bolts operations in his store than Charles Bolden -- whom, as we all remember, was given the task as NASA Administrator of making Moslems feel good about their past contributions to science.
OTOH, Charlie Bolden has bureaucrats to keep track of the minor details. Many many bureaucrats, all on his side. And many many buureaucrats at OMB and in the White House and off at the House and Senate who ... might not actually be on his side.
*******
And still more.
(6) If you really expect NASA to operate "in happy partnership with the private sector" you're in need of serious detoxification. I suggest NASA AND THE SPACE INDUSTRY by Joan Lisa Bromberg (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), which covers matters roughly from 1945 to 1993.
Boiled down, there's an on-going war between government and industry. NASA wants to boss the aerospace firms around; it's the client, after all,the main customer. it's got the Experts, and the firms just have barely literate new hires and itinerent engineers ("aero braceros"). The firms resent this attitude; after 50 years of dealing with space, their expert engineers are just as good as NASA's if not better, and anyhow, NASA's made enough mistakes on it its own, it hasn't designed anything that works for years, it's just totally obsessed by operations, its people have no analytic capabilities, and the space agency should just shut up, tell industry in simple language what it wants with a minimum of paperwork and supervision and let the magnificent free enterprise system provide NASA with something appropriate to its needs-- as defined by industry. (Need I mention that the less direct supervision industrial firms receive, the higher the fees they can charge their government customers?)
Pretty much things were polite and business-like up to shuttle times in the early 1970's, (I would say "gentlemanly", but the NASA rep who visited my crew every 6 months was a lady) but contraction of the industry since then has made this issue virulent.
Maybe it's better in the field. On the intenet, there are a lot of professed aerospace engineers and former engineers who thoroughly despise each and every NASA administrator, each NASA Program Office, and each NASA employee they've been unfortunate enough to encounter. In their view, NASA employees should do absolutely nothing but sit quietly in their cubicles and sign checks when industry executives tell NASA to sign checks.
You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that these young engineers are Libertarians to a man. They hate just about everything Barack Obama has proposed, with the odd exception of his space program, which they love because it kicks old line NASA in the gut and promises to reward real capitalists like Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Walt Anderson (Space Adventures) and other New Space entrepeneurs as richly as they deserve. Just like Ayn Rand said things would be!
Are we having FUN here, or what?
***********
Now let's get to the meat.
(7) WE KNOW HOW TO BRING DOWN SPACE LAUNCH COSTS.
Let me repeat: WE KNOW HOW TO BRING DOWN SPACE LAUNCH COSTS. We simply can't do it under current circumstances, but that's a different issue.
Truthfully, there are many reasons reducing cost is tough, too many for me to recite, so I'll point you off to Peter Taylor's WHY ARE LAUNCH COSTS SO HIGH? website. (http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/launch.htm) Everybody who wants to talk about launch costs should read Taylor. He's thought more about this than you have for one, and for another this is a God-given opportunity to encounter someone really bright whom you never would have heard of without the internet. You should thank me actually, but thank Taylor first, and Tim Berners-Lee and Vannevar Bush and Nobert Weiner and ... other fine people you can find out about on the internet, I'm not that insistant.
Anyhow (I assume you've returned from Taylor), you might reflect that over the years, human beings have learned to transport themselves about on shanks' mares, oxen, asses, onagers, llamas, and horses, with or without the luxury of saddles and stirrups and reins, chariots, wagons, cork and wooden rafts, galleys, sailing ships, steam ships, battleships, yachts, nuclear submarines, locomotives and trains and trolley cars, balloons and dirigibles and blimps, automobiles, NASCAR and Formula I racers, ice cream trucks and semi-trailers, roller skates, go carts, unicycles, bicycles, tricycles, pennyfarthings, armored assault vehicles, helicopters, biplanes, commercial jet transports, supersonic fighters, bombers, aerial tankers, ICBMs, and a variety of unmanned drones, and the only consistant failure has been the wings of a prayer. Which item in this list suggests space launch vehicles must be beyond our understanding?
So, simply put, to reduce launch costs, we need experience. We need numbers. Think of a WW II aircraft plant, with 30 thousand workers milling about trying to put planes together ASAP. What do you have? Anarchy and confusion and no production!
What do you need first? Foremen. Guys who already have skills, who can teach them to journeymen and apprentices. Assess the abilities of your workers, give authority to those who deserve it -- and overnight, your plane production rate goes up ten-fold. Move some stuff around in your factory. Put the output conveyer belts of the engine assembly line near the wing-fuselage mating point. Knock a hole in the wall so mechanics can move completed engines around without having to leave and reenter the building. Instead of moving engines one at a time on hand carts, put them on a wagon behind a miniature tractor and move four at a time.
YOUR COSTS WILL GO DOWN. All these tiny little insignificant improvements your genius accountants never though to mention, all these stupid tricks suggested by imbecile immigrants too stupid to spell their own last names, THEY SAVE YOU MONEY. And when you build your next aircraft plant you try to incorporate every good idea you rcan emember, and you pray to God the workmen will go on saving your ass, because this is how you get on the blessed Learning Curve and with the Good Lord's Help the costs go down and down while production goes up and up and ohmigod! it does not end, or at least not till the last of the Nazis has been smote as surely and as fatally as God meant Nazis to be smote....
*********
You know how many airplanes the US made in WWII? 300 thousand. 300,000 metal-skinned planes totally different from the canvas-clad biplanes of prior years, with much of the labor being old men and young women because the men who properly should have been building those aircraft were being fitted into the Army and the Navy and the Coast Guard and even the fledgling US Air Force. The Russians built half of our numbers, the British a bit less. The Ac\xis Powers -- Germans and Japanese and Italians -- all together produced only 200 thousand planes, most of them smaller, only some more capable.
Remember who won that war, in large part by superior airpower? The numbers give a clue. Do you really suppose no one on God's Green Earth ever concerned themselves with something as stupid and trivial as aircraft production rates during that war? In Franklin Delano Roosevelt's math-mad, technocratic, by-the-numbers proletarian elitist society, do you not suppose engineers and economists and statisticians stared at production figures every week and tried to garner out what the numbers all meant?
People wrote books about this sort of thing. After the war, they went to universities as professors and taught this stuff to graduate students. It was a kind of magic at midcentury ... and I suppose, like a lot of magic, over time it had to fail. Memory faded, and the wizards died of old age, and the practioners who remained moved on to other arcane arts -- FORTRAN and Monte Carlo methods and faith in Moore's Law and Windows 98.
(1) The current NASA budget for FY2012 is 16.8 billion dollars; next year it is likely to be smaller, by several percent at least.
(2) The portion spent on manned spaceflight (Shuttle, ISS operations, and development of the Orion manned capsule and proposed Saturn-class Space Launch System) runs to about 8 billion. Eliminating the shuttle will reduce this by 5-6 billion, but Orion, SLS and other spacecraft development costs will rise accordingly.
(3) Newt Gingrich is currently being lambasted for suggesting the US build a moon base, which might cost 7 billion a year to operate. His critics find that cost insane.
(4) The NASA budget does not cover DoD and CIA (NSA actually) space programs. Those agencies have sperate budgets for satellites and launchers and operating costs; the total is about 40 to 50 billion dollars a year; the exact details are of course classified.
IOW, NASA consumes 25 to 30% of US government space spending, and this has been the case since about 1970.
IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THESE NUMBERS YOU ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO DISCUSS US SPACE POLICY.
I would like to be polite, but--
Shall I continue?
*********
Carrying on anyhow ...
(5) If you were in charge of NASA. you would not be in charge of NASA. Let me quote from a government report, HR 112–169, COMMERCE, JUSTICE, SCIENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS BILL, 2012 (July 20, 2011)
[PAGE 72]
Planetary Science missions.
The Committee accepts the findings
of the most recent Planetary Science decadal survey... flagship missions, which must be substantially descoped in order to remain within the portfolio. The Committee directs that $4,000,000 of the Outer Planets Flagship (OPF) budget be used to conduct the necessary descoping studies for the decadal survey’s two highest priority flagship missions: Mars Sample Return (MSR) and the Jupiter Europa Orbiter (JEO). The results of these studies shall be transmitted to the Committee as soon as they are complete. The remaining $39,000,000 of OPF funds should be held pending the completion of the descoping analysis ...
Plutonium-238. The bill makes available $10,000,000 from this account, as requested, to restart production of Plutonium-238 (Pu-
238), a radioisotope that is an essential source of electrical power for long-range planetary science missions. The Committee urges NASA to work expeditiously with the Department of Energy to
bring Pu-238 production back online as quickly as possible while simultaneously pursuing Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator technology that will allow NASA to make better, more efficient use of available Pu-238 stocks.
I've summarized a bit. This is from a 150 page report which is itself only a summary of the actual appropriation bill -- the House version of an appropriation bill which at that point had not not been reconciled with the counterpart Senate resolution.
Let me mention, for the sake of a little insider amusement, that NASA has not been able to procure Plutonium-238 for the past few years. Reopening the DOE facility which processes plutonium will cost at least 15 million dollars; NASA is the only customer for this isotope, and DoE is not willing to swallow a $5 million loss. NASA knows this, DoE knows this; the House committee here knows this, but it will not authorize the whole $15 million, apparantly as a matter of principle. Possibly the Russians will sell some of their excess Plutonium-238 to NASA (it's obtained from decommissioning old atomic weapons, I gather), but this can't be counted upon. Several spacecraft being considered for launch in the 2020's will need radioisotope power sources, so this is one of the little things NASA administrators just have to keep in mind.
You get the idea, I trust. NASA Administrators have responsibilties, but not as much power as one might thing. My suspicion is that the average drug store manager actually has more power to shift merchanidise around and handle nuts-and-bolts operations in his store than Charles Bolden -- whom, as we all remember, was given the task as NASA Administrator of making Moslems feel good about their past contributions to science.
OTOH, Charlie Bolden has bureaucrats to keep track of the minor details. Many many bureaucrats, all on his side. And many many buureaucrats at OMB and in the White House and off at the House and Senate who ... might not actually be on his side.
*******
And still more.
(6) If you really expect NASA to operate "in happy partnership with the private sector" you're in need of serious detoxification. I suggest NASA AND THE SPACE INDUSTRY by Joan Lisa Bromberg (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), which covers matters roughly from 1945 to 1993.
Boiled down, there's an on-going war between government and industry. NASA wants to boss the aerospace firms around; it's the client, after all,the main customer. it's got the Experts, and the firms just have barely literate new hires and itinerent engineers ("aero braceros"). The firms resent this attitude; after 50 years of dealing with space, their expert engineers are just as good as NASA's if not better, and anyhow, NASA's made enough mistakes on it its own, it hasn't designed anything that works for years, it's just totally obsessed by operations, its people have no analytic capabilities, and the space agency should just shut up, tell industry in simple language what it wants with a minimum of paperwork and supervision and let the magnificent free enterprise system provide NASA with something appropriate to its needs-- as defined by industry. (Need I mention that the less direct supervision industrial firms receive, the higher the fees they can charge their government customers?)
Pretty much things were polite and business-like up to shuttle times in the early 1970's, (I would say "gentlemanly", but the NASA rep who visited my crew every 6 months was a lady) but contraction of the industry since then has made this issue virulent.
Maybe it's better in the field. On the intenet, there are a lot of professed aerospace engineers and former engineers who thoroughly despise each and every NASA administrator, each NASA Program Office, and each NASA employee they've been unfortunate enough to encounter. In their view, NASA employees should do absolutely nothing but sit quietly in their cubicles and sign checks when industry executives tell NASA to sign checks.
You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that these young engineers are Libertarians to a man. They hate just about everything Barack Obama has proposed, with the odd exception of his space program, which they love because it kicks old line NASA in the gut and promises to reward real capitalists like Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Walt Anderson (Space Adventures) and other New Space entrepeneurs as richly as they deserve. Just like Ayn Rand said things would be!
Are we having FUN here, or what?
***********
Now let's get to the meat.
(7) WE KNOW HOW TO BRING DOWN SPACE LAUNCH COSTS.
Let me repeat: WE KNOW HOW TO BRING DOWN SPACE LAUNCH COSTS. We simply can't do it under current circumstances, but that's a different issue.
Truthfully, there are many reasons reducing cost is tough, too many for me to recite, so I'll point you off to Peter Taylor's WHY ARE LAUNCH COSTS SO HIGH? website. (http://home.earthlink.net/~peter.a.taylor/launch.htm) Everybody who wants to talk about launch costs should read Taylor. He's thought more about this than you have for one, and for another this is a God-given opportunity to encounter someone really bright whom you never would have heard of without the internet. You should thank me actually, but thank Taylor first, and Tim Berners-Lee and Vannevar Bush and Nobert Weiner and ... other fine people you can find out about on the internet, I'm not that insistant.
Anyhow (I assume you've returned from Taylor), you might reflect that over the years, human beings have learned to transport themselves about on shanks' mares, oxen, asses, onagers, llamas, and horses, with or without the luxury of saddles and stirrups and reins, chariots, wagons, cork and wooden rafts, galleys, sailing ships, steam ships, battleships, yachts, nuclear submarines, locomotives and trains and trolley cars, balloons and dirigibles and blimps, automobiles, NASCAR and Formula I racers, ice cream trucks and semi-trailers, roller skates, go carts, unicycles, bicycles, tricycles, pennyfarthings, armored assault vehicles, helicopters, biplanes, commercial jet transports, supersonic fighters, bombers, aerial tankers, ICBMs, and a variety of unmanned drones, and the only consistant failure has been the wings of a prayer. Which item in this list suggests space launch vehicles must be beyond our understanding?
So, simply put, to reduce launch costs, we need experience. We need numbers. Think of a WW II aircraft plant, with 30 thousand workers milling about trying to put planes together ASAP. What do you have? Anarchy and confusion and no production!
What do you need first? Foremen. Guys who already have skills, who can teach them to journeymen and apprentices. Assess the abilities of your workers, give authority to those who deserve it -- and overnight, your plane production rate goes up ten-fold. Move some stuff around in your factory. Put the output conveyer belts of the engine assembly line near the wing-fuselage mating point. Knock a hole in the wall so mechanics can move completed engines around without having to leave and reenter the building. Instead of moving engines one at a time on hand carts, put them on a wagon behind a miniature tractor and move four at a time.
YOUR COSTS WILL GO DOWN. All these tiny little insignificant improvements your genius accountants never though to mention, all these stupid tricks suggested by imbecile immigrants too stupid to spell their own last names, THEY SAVE YOU MONEY. And when you build your next aircraft plant you try to incorporate every good idea you rcan emember, and you pray to God the workmen will go on saving your ass, because this is how you get on the blessed Learning Curve and with the Good Lord's Help the costs go down and down while production goes up and up and ohmigod! it does not end, or at least not till the last of the Nazis has been smote as surely and as fatally as God meant Nazis to be smote....
*********
You know how many airplanes the US made in WWII? 300 thousand. 300,000 metal-skinned planes totally different from the canvas-clad biplanes of prior years, with much of the labor being old men and young women because the men who properly should have been building those aircraft were being fitted into the Army and the Navy and the Coast Guard and even the fledgling US Air Force. The Russians built half of our numbers, the British a bit less. The Ac\xis Powers -- Germans and Japanese and Italians -- all together produced only 200 thousand planes, most of them smaller, only some more capable.
Remember who won that war, in large part by superior airpower? The numbers give a clue. Do you really suppose no one on God's Green Earth ever concerned themselves with something as stupid and trivial as aircraft production rates during that war? In Franklin Delano Roosevelt's math-mad, technocratic, by-the-numbers proletarian elitist society, do you not suppose engineers and economists and statisticians stared at production figures every week and tried to garner out what the numbers all meant?
People wrote books about this sort of thing. After the war, they went to universities as professors and taught this stuff to graduate students. It was a kind of magic at midcentury ... and I suppose, like a lot of magic, over time it had to fail. Memory faded, and the wizards died of old age, and the practioners who remained moved on to other arcane arts -- FORTRAN and Monte Carlo methods and faith in Moore's Law and Windows 98.
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