First Rant

Hello folks,

I scan the news everyday to see what is coming and going on in space exploration. Today the answer is "not much". This is thanks to a new white house budget proposal that would completely put the breaks on project constellation, a project formed with the goal of returning us to the moon by 2020. It appears that this is not going to happen.

Now as always my hat is off to NASA. They have caught the short end of a flailing stick ever since the the last of the Saturn V rockets were mothballed by a short sighted Nixon. It is amazing to see the successes that NASA has been able to produce amid ridiculous requirements and changes foisted on them yearly by a fickle government.

I am not saying that the new plan of fostering commercial alternatives, international partnerships and new technologies is a bad plan. It can be quite exciting. The major flaw with it, however, is that we already have a plan. A plan that was going to take sixteen years to realize. That plan was not perfect either, it came at the expense of fostering private industry as a stand-alone option, but it was still doable and even laudable. What is more, we are already part way done.

NASA needs a goal, a tangible and measurable goal. They need the freedom to accomplish the goal that they are assigned before being set haring after the next shiny target. In 2004 George Bush gave them one, a base on the moon. The new mandate seems to be that NASA needs to return to it's status as a cash cow.

On the flip side I am happy for companies, like Spacex, Orbital Sciences, Bigelow Aerospace, and the Boeing Company. I would be happy to see them branch into orbital crew services, but NASA does not need a budget increase to accomplish that. Not if Constellation is getting killed. SpaceX needs $300 - $400 million to develop and test a launch escape system. Boeing would probably need $1billion. This of course if they are given a COTS like contract structure that passes some risk to the company.

I expect we will get some kind of mixed bag of policies once Congress sinks there teeth into the budget. They will try to find a way to maintain a bloated shuttle workforce during a time when there is no shuttle. I hope that the result is less messy than it looks like right now. Most of all I hope that one day NASA gets some kind of autonomy and goal protection between changing administrations.