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The very next dayOPINIONAugust 13, 2013, 7:48 p.m. ET
Robert Zimmerman: No Liftoff for These Space Flights of Fancy
Both parties excel at feigning interest in space exploration for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts.
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By ROBERT ZIMMERMAN
On July 18, the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became all too clear. Forget journeys to the stars. Space exploration is now clearly tethered to the earthly desires of politicians. The result is that America's incoherent space program is unable to accomplish anything except spend money the federal government doesn't have.
We saw the process at work in budget negotiations in the House, where politicians divided along partisan lines in the vote over NASA's budget. The Democrats and NASA were pushing to fund a proposed asteroid mission, whereby an unmanned spacecraft in 2018 would capture an asteroid, and bring it closer to Earth so that astronauts could visit it in 2021. This mission was created by NASA to fulfill President Obama's 2010 commitment that the U.S. send humans to an asteroid by 2025.
Not surprisingly, all 17 Democrats on the House Science committee voted for this budget plan.
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NASA
But the Republicans in Congress don't want NASA to capture an asteroid. They want to reactivate George W. Bush's proposal from 2004 that was canceled by Mr. Obama in 2010. President Bush wanted humans go back to the moon and use that as a springboard for going to Mars. All 22 Republicans on the committee voted against the asteroid mission.
Each party claims that its proposal is the best way for the U.S. to lead the way in exploring the solar system. Neither of these plans will ever get off the launch pad.
The pattern has repeated itself over the past four decades. A president, whether it is Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, makes a Kennedy-like declaration about America's next major goal in space. Sometimes it is building a space station by the end of the decade. Sometimes it is going to the moon by some set date. Sometimes it is going to an asteroid.
Congress and the president use the announcement as a justification for sending pork to their districts, and steer a little money to the project to get it going. When the really big funding is needed to actually build it, however, these politicians chicken out. The way NASA has been designed—by these same politicians, and with numerous facilities in as many congressional districts as possible—makes building anything by NASA ungodly expensive, far more expensive than even our most spendthrift politicians can stomach.
So they cancel it. A new president makes a new declaration and new goal, and the cycle begins anew. The pork rolls out, a new project begins, some money gets spent, and nothing gets built.
That's what happened with President Reagan's space station, Freedom, in the 1980s. After a decade of spending billions on blueprints, the project was unceremoniously canceled by Bill Clinton. Similarly, we spent about $9 billion on President Bush's moon-bound Constellation program, only to have President Obama cancel it. Now we have Mr. Obama's asteroid mission, opposed by Republicans who still want to send Americans to the moon.
Both parties, however, are in agreement about one thing. When President Obama canceled Constellation, Congress stepped forward to demand that NASA continue to build some variation of Constellation's rockets and Orion capsule. Thus we now have the Space Launch System, or SLS, a heavy-lift rocket for launching the Orion capsule and tons of other material beyond Earth orbit, supposedly capable of sending astronauts either to the moon or the asteroids.
Both parties in Congress want SLS because that is the pork for all their space dreams. SLS, costing a minimum of $3 billion per year, also uses as much of the leftover infrastructure of the space shuttle as possible, which means the thousands of NASA employees and contractors who operated the shuttle will continue to have jobs.
This is why Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, both of Utah, were so happy when they helped force Space Launch System approval through Congress back in 2010. The SLS was required to use some version of the space shuttle's solid-rocket boosters—whether this made engineering sense or not—and those boosters were built in Utah. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas) and Bill Nelson (D., Fla.) also celebrated SLS's passage, as the project would maintain otherwise no-longer-needed shuttle jobs at the Johnson Space Center in Texas and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
When it is finished, the Space Launch System is expected to launch only once every four years, with a total cost per launch of about $14 billion. This is only the launch cost—including the annual operating expenses as well as the amortized cost of designing and building the rocket and capsule—and does not include the cost for any missions. Again, that's $14 billion per launch, almost equal to NASA's entire annual budget. And the launches will only happen once every four years.
The good news is that the SLS will never fly. When it comes time to actually finance the actual missions, Congress will once again balk. SLS will get canceled, the next president will step forward and make a new proposal, and the whole pork-laden process of waste will begin anew.
In other words, what both parties are really doing is faking a goal for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts.
If these politicians really cared about our country, they could focus instead on doing things that would actually foster the creation of a healthy and robust aerospace industry.
They would go back to the model that Congress used back in the 1920s and 1930s in trying to jump-start the aviation business. Congress didn't dictate what airplanes to build or missions to fly. Congress needed the U.S. mail delivered, and hired airplane companies to deliver it. These companies were then able to use the profits earned from those government contracts to upgrade their airplanes and sell those improved products to others besides the federal government. The result was a robust aviation industry serving millions of private customers, with the needs of the federal government quite trivial in comparison.
Similarly, the federal government needs to get cargo and humans to the international space station. It should buy those services from companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada and Orbital Sciences ORB +0.11% . These companies have already been developing space ships and rockets for one-tenth of the cost of the Space Launch System. For example, the entire cost to develop, build and launch SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket was about the same as NASA spends every year trying to design the Space Launch System. Similarly, Orbital Sciences developed the Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule for as little.
So get the politicians and the bureaucrats out of space exploration. Leave it to these private companies and the citizenry. Not only would we get our rockets and spaceships for a price we can afford, we would end up having a potent private industry in space, competing for business and taking Americans where they want to go, efficiently and freely.
Mr. Zimmerman writes about space history and science at his website, Behind the Black. His 1999 book "Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8" has just been released in an e-book edition.
NASA Audit Warns More Delays, Cost Growth are Possible for Orion
By Dan Leone | Aug. 15, 2013
The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle depicted atop the Space Launch System rocket in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Credit: NASA artist's concept
WASHINGTON — While managers of NASA’s Orion deep-space crew capsule program have made the best of a difficult budget environment, their coping strategy ultimately could cause delays and cost increases, an internal agency audit concluded.
In a report released Aug. 15, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General said there is a price to be paid for developing major systems of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle piecemeal rather than simultaneously.
“We believe it vital that Congress and the public recognize that incremental spacecraft development is not an optimal way to sustain a human space program,” NASA Inspector General Paul Martin wrote in the report. “[D]elaying critical development tasks in complex spaceflight development programs increases the risk of cost and schedule problems and causes development of critical technologies to be deferred to later program phases when integration may be more difficult or the costs of material and labor greater.”
Orion is the crew-carrying piece of NASA’s deep-space transportation system, the first such system the agency has set about building since the Apollo era. Orion’s intended carrier rocket is the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS), an initial variant of which is slated to loft two Orion missions to lunar space in 2017 and 2021. Only the latter mission would be crewed.
Orion and SLS draw heavily on hardware designs for the Moon-bound Constellation program that the White House canceled in 2010. Congress subsequently ordered NASA to build the vehicles using any space shuttle and Constellation contracts that could practically be adapted for the work.
NASA obliged, but with shrinking budgets and a continuing obligation to other programs, such as sending crew and cargo to the international space station, the agency has had to slow-roll some of the Orion and SLS work.
The new report warned that this approach has already delayed tests on critical Orion subsystems and may well delay more. The agency’s watchdog pointed to two particular delays to make its point.
First, the report said Orion’s maiden spaceflight, a stress test for the craft’s heat shields, was delayed from 2013 to September 2014. In that test, Orion will be placed into orbit by a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket and then sent on a steep re-entry trajectory to simulate the stresses the craft would experience on a direct return from lunar orbit.
Second, the report noted that a test of Orion’s launch abort system, which would propel astronauts to safety if something goes wrong during the ascent to space, has been delayed by four years due to budget pressure. The test was originally scheduled for 2015.
The high-altitude test of the abort system, which ATK Aerospace of Magna, Utah, is providing as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, will be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., on a converted Peacekeeper missile stage prepared by Orbital Sciences Corp., Dulles, Va.
Besides these two tests, “NASA has delayed development of life support systems and some avionics due to budget constraints,” the report said.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver got its $6.1 billion Orion prime contract in 2006 and had spent $5.1 billion as of Sept. 30 2012, NASA spokeswoman Rachel Kraft said. The contract runs through September 2014, and NASA and Lockheed Martin are negotiating an extension that would cover work for the capsule’s first flights to lunar space.
Lockheed received a stopgap contract to begin that work back in February. Negotiations on a final contract extension are expected to wrap up sometime this year, Kraft said. She declined to provide the value of the stopgap contract.
The White House requested about $1 billion for Orion in 2014, an amount that House appropriators matched in a spending bill now awaiting a floor vote. Senate appropriators, who ignored the effect of across-the-board sequestration cuts that are still in effect, provided $1.2 billion for Orion.
Meanwhile, although Martin’s report focused on Orion, it also reiterated an oft-repeated point: The money NASA has said it will spend on SLS, Orion and associated ground systems is not enough to stage a mission to any extraterrestrial surface.
“Given the time and money necessary to develop landers and associated systems, it is unlikely that NASA would be able to conduct any surface exploration missions until the late 2020s at the earliest,” the report says. “NASA astronauts will be limited to orbital missions using” Orion.
One such mission, proposed by the White House, is the Asteroid Redirect Mission, in which NASA would send a robotic craft to capture a small asteroid and deliver it to lunar orbit. Astronauts aboard Orion would then visit the asteroid to collect samples while testing the spacecraft’s performance in an environment far from the Earth.
The mission has not generated much enthusiasm in Congress. Legislation drafted in the House would bar NASA from spending any money on the mission, while a companion bill in the Senate is silent on the matter.
two fails and now spaceX goes sideways... as planedAugust 15, 2013
Star of NASA Planet Hunting Falls Idle With Broken Parts
By DENNIS OVERBYE
NASA said Thursday that its celebrated planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, which broke down in May when a reaction wheel that controls its pointing failed, could not be fixed and would never again search for planets around other stars.
The disappointing news brings to an end, for now, one phase of the most romantic of space dreams, the search for other Earths among the exoplanets of the Milky Way. NASA has already asked astronomers for ideas on how to use the hobbled spacecraft, whose telescope is in perfect shape.
Even as they mourned the end of Kepler, astronomers said its legacy would continue as they worked their way through a trove of data the spacecraft has gathered.
At last count, Kepler had discovered 3,548 possible planets, and 135 of them — some smaller than the Earth — have been validated by other observations, including earthbound telescopes. But hundreds or thousands more are in the pipeline, said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif., Kepler’s originator and principal investigator.
“The most exciting discoveries are going to come in the next few years as we search through this data,” Mr. Borucki said on Thursday in a telephone news conference. “In the next few years we’re going to be able to answer the questions that inspired Kepler: Are Earthlike planets common or rare in the galaxy?”
Kepler was launched into an orbit around the Sun in March 2009. Its official mission was to determine the fraction of stars in the galaxy that harbor Earthlike planets by carrying out a survey of some 150,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, looking for the dips in starlight caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of their suns.
Three dips, or transits, are considered the criteria for a planet candidate, which means the Earth or a planet in a similar orbit that was habitable would take three years to show up. Accordingly, Kepler was designed to operate for four years, but other sunlike stars turned out to be more jittery in their output than expected, making the detection of Earth analogues more difficult. Since astronomers could learn a lot more from Kepler if it went on collecting data, the decision was made last year to extend the spacecraft’s mission for three more years, until 2016.
So far Kepler’s mission has cost $600 million, and its budget for the 2013 fiscal year is about $18 million.
Among its finds were a planet nicknamed Tatooine, after the “Star Wars” planet with two suns, otherwise known as Kepler 16b, the first one found that orbits two stars at once. Another was the so-called Styrofoam planet, which is again half as large as Jupiter but so puffed up by the heat of its star that it is only one-tenth as dense.
The closest Kepler has come to finding another Earth was in April, when the team discovered a pair of planets about half again as big as the Earth orbiting a yellow star, now known as Kepler 62, that is 1,200 light years away. Both planets reside in the “Goldilocks” zone where temperatures should be lukewarm and suitable for liquid water and thus life as we imagine it.
By then, however, Kepler was already in trouble.
In order to do its job of precisely monitoring starlight, Kepler has to keep pointing accurately enough so that each star in the field of view stays on the same pixel in the detector, equivalent to pinpointing a soccer ball in Central Park as seen from San Francisco.
Kepler was launched with four reaction wheels, essentially gyroscopes, of which three are needed to keep it pointed. Last summer, one wheel showed signs of too much friction and was shut down. A second wheel failed in May, putting the spacecraft into safe mode and jeopardizing the exoplanet search.
Astronomers began to sing dirges. Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, dashed off a poem, which said, in part, “Let jet airplanes circle at night overhead/ Sky-writing over Cygnus: Kepler is dead.”
NASA engineers spent several months trying to resurrect Kepler’s pointing ability. “We had very little hope it was actually going to be recoverable,” said Charles Sobeck, a Kepler deputy project manager, who compared the problem to a stuck wheel on a supermarket shopping cart.
They managed to get both faulty reaction wheels spinning again, but with too much friction. Last week, when they tried to make the spacecraft point, it went into safe mode after a few hours, making it clear that Kepler’s planet-hunting days were over.
“I believe they left no stone unturned,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics, in the news conference announcing the end of the rescue effort.
NASA is now pondering ways in which the telescope can be used with two reaction wheels. In one mode, stars would drift across the detector “like a lost nomadic tribe migrating across the Sahara,” in the words of Dr. Marcy.
Letters looking for ideas have gone out to astronomers, and NASA might eventually convene a review panel to consider future Kepler operations in competition with other science projects, Dr. Hertz said.
Meanwhile, astronomers continue to pore over the flood of data that is still in the Kepler pipeline. Mr. Borucki — speaking with the relentless optimism of a man who spent 20 years getting Kepler designed, approved and into space — said that Kepler could still perform its prime directive of measuring the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy, albeit with poorer statistical certainty than he would have liked. It would take about three more years of data analysis, he said.
“We’re going have to dig down hard to find those planets — we know we can do it,” Mr. Borucki said.
When he conceived the mission 20 years ago, he said, no one knew if there were any planets out there in the galaxy. “Now at the completion,” he said, “we know our galaxy is filled to the brim with planets. When you look up at the sky and see it filled with stars, most of those stars have planets.”
[video=youtube_share;khiKFItXN1Y]http://youtu.be/khiKFItXN1Y[/video]Latest SpaceX Rocket Test Successfully Goes Sideways
By KENNETH CHANG
Imagine taking a 10-story building, launching it, angling it so that it shifts 330 feet to the side as it rises 820 feet into the air – and then landing it on the same spot it started.
That is essentially what the rocket scientists at Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, the company commonly known as SpaceX, did on Tuesday in their latest effort to develop a rocket that can be used again and again. Currently rockets are used just once, with the first stage disintegrating as it falls back to Earth. This bothers Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, who likens it to building a 747, flying it cross-country and then throwing it away.
A reusable rocket would make it less expensive to get to orbit, but generating the energy needed to lift off from Earth and accelerate to 17,500 miles per hour — the speed needed to stay in orbit — is a major challenge. NASA’s space shuttles partially solved that problem with reusable orbiters and rocket boosters, but the result was so complicated and fragile that it ended up costing more money than throwaway rockets would have.
In 2010, on the first two flights of its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX attempted to use parachutes to recover the first stage, without success. Mr. Musk then changed strategies. Instead of parachutes, the rocket engines on the first stage would fire again after separating from the second stage, and the first stage would fly back to the launching pad.
To execute this strategy, SpaceX built a test vehicle called the Grasshopper, which it started testing late last year, with each flight a bit higher and more challenging than the last. The latest flight demonstrated more pronounced steering maneuvers in moving to the side. The launching took place at SpaceX’s testing site in Central Texas.
It was reminiscent of flights two decades ago of an earlier reusable spacecraft called the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, which was built by McDonnell Douglas. First financed by the defense department, for servicing of orbiting space weapons, and then by NASA, the DC-X made a dozen flights between 1993 and 1996. A landing strut failure and a fire on the last flight badly damaged the rocket, and NASA decided not to build another. Veterans from that program are gathering in New Mexico this weekend for a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the first DC-X flight.
Delta Clipper Experimental Advanced (DCXA) Reusable Launch Vehicle
SpaceX is still a long way from what it needs for a practical reusable rocket. On a Falcon 9 flight, the first stage separates at an altitude of about 50 miles, hundreds of miles from the launching pad while traveling thousands of miles per hour. The first stage would have to slow down, turn around, re-enter the lower atmosphere and retrace its trajectory before setting back down.
