Is NASA dead

Failure analysis might be useful- but the X-37B can probably do things like that, at least for smaller satellites, without endangering humans.

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany
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Minor correction. Satellite return using the shuttle was done once.............

Dan

Reply to
dcaster

It's certainly time to privatize space travel. It makes sense for government to pioneer it -- particularly in that the biggest reason for the Apollo program was to generate the Best Damn Propaganda Ever. But now that it can be done, I think private industry will find the best balance of risk, money, etc.

Unless it's just private industry latching onto the government tit, for even more inefficiency and bigger payoffs to the suits -- hopefully there'll end up to be at least two providers, and even more hopefully those providers will be doing launches independent of NASA for commercial satellites &c.

Reply to
Tim Wescott

Spacex has been completely coopted. They also aren't putting the "private industry is more efficient" model on display favorably. When asked to price their replacement for the latest Delta, Spacex were more than a third more expensive and their credibility rating was exactly zero in terms of performance.

Not only that, they are sorely lacking in the ten thousand man years of experience and intellectual property that the real space industry has. Anyone that's seen the film of Spacex HLV hardware will tell you that the damned thing nearly ground loops off the pad. Think about a snap roll and that's without a load. The feature that lowers costs will also just destroy whatever payload they stick on the pointy end. Putting a billion dollar assembly on the end of thier stuff isn't insurable or wise. A man rated vehicle from these guys is laughable.

The big competitors today aren't private, unless you consider Japan, Spain, India and Russia "private".

JPL is on the frontier in terms of science and exploration.

Far from "honoring" the current crop of astronauts, they ought to spend the entire duration of thier lives thanking the American public for spending billions of dollars to satisfy their personal wet dreams.

Reply to
John R. Carroll

"No, it is just taking a nap."

NASA, as a political organization, doing things at the behest of Congress, is dead. It might be renewed as an "R&D" operation, leaving the exploitation of "new" technologies to the private sector. And that includes the building of heavy lifters, space stations, extra-planetary habitats - all the big ticket Projects - that turned NASA into a burocratic quagmire.

tschus pyotr

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

I'm smart enough not to want that job, and I've never claimed to have all the answers.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

That's backwards from how things usually work. Usually it's the private sector that does the inventing and developing before offering something to the government sector...

Reply to
CaveLamb

The U.S. regulatory writ does not run that far. While it may well kill off the domestic U.S. rocket industry, the rocket industry, space travel, and the advances in technology this represents are alive and doing very well in the PRC and Russia.

Reply to
F. George McDuffee

Really? Why did Lockheed Martin lease a building from us to manufacture blank PC boards? A few years later it was consolidated with another facility in Texas, when the lease ran out.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

In something like the space program, the timeline for a return is "too long" for a company which has to show improvements every ninety days to keep the stockholders happy. NASA was originally the app;lied idea guys, who would shoot satellites "for research" into the sky, and test out all sorts of thing. And being part of the Government, they would occasionally have military assets involved. Whcih also served as a cover for what the military was doing in space - spy sats, and the like. I'm sure that a lot of tech development occurred at private corps, which then sold it to NASA. X planes, Dyna-soar, etc, were private built but government funded. Much as the Space-X Dragon is. But the model now is (and may have been before the moon race), fixed cost. "We want one of these, for this much money." It doesn't always work out. The R101 Dirigible was built to Government specs, and crashed on it's maiden flight.

tschus pyotr

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

The yearly federal budget cycle with no guarantee the project won't be cut next year to fund new social entitlements isn't much better.

jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Yeah. But the original program was an R&D shop and cover for military applications (satellites). It was also before the Entitlement Mentality set in, which even NASA succumbed to. "Cost plus" contracts to companies in the various important congressional districts.

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

No, NASA was formed from NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) specifically to get to the moon...

"An Act to provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." With this simple preamble, the Congress and the President of the United States created the national Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. NASA's birth was directly related to the pressures of national defense. After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War, a broad contest over the ideologies and allegiances of the nonaligned nations. During this period, space exploration emerged as a major area of contest and became known as the space race.

During the late 1940s, the Department of Defense pursued research and rocketry and upper atmospheric sciences as a means of assuring American leadership in technology. A major step forward came when President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the period, July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958, a cooperative effort to gather scientific data about the Earth. The Soviet Union quickly followed suit, announcing plans to orbit its own satellite.

The Naval Research Laboratory's Project Vanguard was chosen on 9 September 1955 to support the IGY effort, largely because it did not interfere with high-priority ballistic missile development programs. It used the non-military Viking rocket as its basis while an Army proposal to use the Redstone ballistic missile as the launch vehicle waited in the wings. Project Vanguard enjoyed exceptional publicity throughout the second half of 1955, and all of 1956, but the technological demands upon the program were too great and the funding levels too small to ensure success.

A full-scale crisis resulted on October 4, 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite as its IGY entry. This had a "Pearl Harbor" effect on American public opinion, creating an illusion of a technological gap and provided the impetus for increased spending for aerospace endeavors, technical and scientific educational programs, and the chartering of new federal agencies to manage air and space research and development.

More immediately, the United States launched its first Earth satellite on January 31, 1958, when Explorer 1 documented the existence of radiation zones encircling the Earth. Shaped by the Earth's magnetic field, what came to be called the Van Allen Radiation Belt, these zones partially dictate the electrical charges in the atmosphere and the solar radiation that reaches Earth. The U.S. also began a series of scientific missions to the Moon and planets in the latter 1950s and early 1960s. "

Reply to
CaveLamb

A) If Stormin hadn't posted that, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to use cool words like "Ruskies" and "Chicoms."

B) It wouldn't surprise me to learn that some of our weapons include boards made in China as part of the COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) program.

Reply to
rangerssuck

The penalties for exporting US space technology (and other stuff on the USML) without a license are pretty extreme. It's a bonanza for European and Asian companies, though, who would otherwise have FAR less market share than they are now achieving. There are still safeguards, of course, but not as extreme as ITAR. Compliance is the only option, of course, but the system is arguably broken.

"Failure to comply with ITAR can result in civil fines as high as $500,000 per violation, while criminal penalties include fines of up to $1,000,000 and 10 years imprisonment per violation. Under EAR, maximum civil fines can reach $250,000 per violation, while criminal penalties can be as high as $1,000,000 and 20 years imprisonment per violation."

-- sp (D.O. for a corporation)

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

That is why our former White Water president gave the guidance system from our missiles to the Chinese.

His dictionary defines that as Treason-NOT.

Bubba. Not again.

Mart> >

Reply to
Martin Eastburn

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