| | So far I've been pretty pleased with what has been reported about NASA's new Moon-to-Mars plan. Bear in Mind, we've been getting these grandiose studies/commissions/plans for decades now, so it's easy to get a little jaded. Nevertheless, I like what I see for a number of reasons:
1. The plan doesn't depend on any big spike in funding. The $104 billion price tag seems high (it is; everything NASA does is), but it would apparently require only a modest NASA budget increase, and might be do-able within current spending (I hope I've got that right).
2. NASA is going back to how the Germans built rockets, by assembling pieces in intelligent ways. To be fair, the folks at Marshall and elsewhere have been trying to do this for a long time with shuttle hardware, that is to build a heavy-lift unmanned shuttle derivative (Shuttle-C), which was desperately needed for ISS, back when it was called Freedom (before a lot of you guys were born).
3. The press is focusing on the manned capsule, which is important, but the heavy-lift capability is really key. There's all kinds of options that open up for exploration when you have a big booster (which we haven't since 1973).
4. NASA is finally admitting they made a mistake going with the shuttle design, or at least repenting of it. Going to a capsule design is important because capsules can be efficiently flown outside of LEO (all that extra weight of the wings is bad getting to LEO, but totally unfeasible to carry beyond it). Capsules also do away with one of the biggest problems of the shuttle design, abort modes, most of which (primarily RTLS, Return to Launch Site) have fortunately not had a chance to be validated.
5. The shuttle program is being broken down into smaller parts, which means there may not be such a unified anti-manned-space contingent out there anymore, with a giant shuttle program constantly vying against science, aeronautics and everything else NASA does for funding.
I may think of some more things later but this approach fixes a lot of the poorly-understood (by the public) drawbacks of the shuttle architecture. Of course, I wish NASA could learn to do things a lot more economically, but right now I think they need to focus on the doing; the entire budget's a waste if they don't actually do anything. When they are doing things, then they can be improved on down the line, and hopefully will, if the overall program is well thought-out. |
| | Posted 9/21/2005 1:01 AM - 291 Views - 4 eProps - 1 Comment
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