NASA vs. Virgin

[JasonFontaine]

Virgin Galactic should be commended to attempt to make space flight available to the masses. However - let's make something clear.

Virgin is a profit-driven entity. They are the KBR to the sky. In comparison, their craft is no more than a kite when compared to the Shuttle. So, you have a profit-driven business that gets all kinds of public support.

On the other hand, NASA launches a ship roughly the size of a 10 story building atop a controlled nuclear explosion with 7 Astronauts. They are building an International Space Station in cooperation with international partners in the name of science.

Do you see a disconnect?

NASA requires less than 1% of the overall budget - and the ROI is somewhere in the range of 6:1...much better than many federal agencies. If you compare Virgin's budget with NASA's - it would be close in scope if scaled to size (they are still losing money).

For the life of me, I still cannot see the reasoning behind such disdain for NASA? Many of NASA's problems are a result of the funding issues.

Am I wrong? Seriously - I cannot understand why we cannot put more pressure on our elected officials to "fix" NASA monetarily for a change. We shouldn't have a 4 year gap between vehicles. Think of it this way - for what we've been spending in Iraq - in just 2 MONTHS - it would pay for NASA's entire budget for the year!

Comments? Really - I do not understand....

Thanks

 

[Eagle]

I don't know. It feels like NASA is drained of energy and creativity. Other than RC cars on Mars and Shuttle missions there's little shown. The media is bad b/c you never hear of any cool experiments or fun things going on up there.

NASA does cool stuff, but is pretty terrible at telling everyone about a lot of it.

What does make me sad about the Orion is that it is a step backwards from the shuttle. Really they should make a Shuttle V2 with as many improvements over the old as they can think (especially in recoverability and maintenance).

Virgin on the other hand, is 'officially' only developing suborbital tourism, which is likely to make a handsome profit. However, I would not be surprised to see them offer suborbital travel between large cities a few years after (if the price is right).

 

[Kaito]

I would hope to see suborbital travel in a few years.
New York to Beijing in 45 minutes sounds pretty good to me :thumbsup:

Problem is its so dang...inefficient to get us up there. I dont know about you, but i dont think burning over 2 millions pounds of fuel to reach orbit isn't very fuel efficient. What we need is something like the delta glider: single-stage to orbit.

Whether or not suborbital travel becomes popular depends on whether or not we can figure out better ways to launch ourselves.

~Kaito

 

[Eagle]

Problem is its so dang...inefficient to get us up there. I dont know about you, but i dont think burning over 2 millions pounds of fuel to reach orbit isn't very fuel efficient. What we need is something like the delta glider: single-stage to orbit.

Fuel is the inexpensive part of a rocket. Even cheaper if your fuel isn't cryogenic. Replacing the rest of the hardware is the difficulty.

Space Ship One only carried a little more than 5,000 lbs of fuel. When you air launch about 20% of the total fuel mass can be reduced. So really, it may end up that suborbital flights don't use much more fuel than a transcontinental flight.

 

[GregBurch]

For the life of me, I still cannot see the reasoning behind such disdain for NASA? Many of NASA's problems are a result of the funding issues.

Am I wrong? Seriously - I cannot understand why we cannot put more pressure on our elected officials to "fix" NASA monetarily for a change. We shouldn't have a 4 year gap between vehicles. Think of it this way - for what we've been spending in Iraq - in just 2 MONTHS - it would pay for NASA's entire budget for the year!

Yes, you're wrong. (You asked...) Seriously NASA's problems are absolutely not the result of "funding problems." NASA has wasted enormous sums of money over the last 30 years. Think of all the promising programs that have been begun, developed to a high degree, and then thrown in the garbage. Two that come immediately to mind are the X-38 and the aerospike engine. NASA's had plenty of money. In most instances, they just don't spend it well.

Now, is all of this just "NASA's fault?" No. In large part, it's a function of the political process itself. The annual funding cycle in Congress mandates that a program that sounds sexy and will create jobs will get a chunk of cash in the beginning, but then as time goes by, the microscopic attention span of the reptiles in Congress is distracted by the next sound bite on CNN, and money is moved around to the next "crisis" or "good deed" the next year. So NASA is put into the role of the junkie, always looking for a fix from a pusher who's also an addict.

But -- functionally -- you cannot separate NASA from the political process from which it gets its money -- the two are just different parts of a single feedback system. NASA provides photo-ops and pork to politicians, and politicians provide the bucks. "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

The simple fact is that large elements of the space endeavor are deeply incompatible with the basic political premise behind NASA. You can't build a robust space infrastructure funded by the neurotic annual political budget process.

You can't.

If what you want is shallow fireworks -- or programs cheap enough to sneak under the wire of annual budget "crises" -- then NASA's your game. If what you want is long term commitment to building a robust space infrastructure, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

 

[Zatnikitelman]

Yea, the big difference between a suborbital hop, is that they'd be basically single impulse burns instead of the long continuous burn a jet engine has to provide through the lower atmosphere.

 

[Keatah]

The more findamental problem is materials and propulsion sciences. We need to have energy sources like depicted in sci-fi. Because without that we are stuck in the "Steam-Era" of spaceflight. Stuff needs to happen much quicker too. Like getting to mars in a weekend and the moon, in say what, like 4 or 5 hours? Don't ask me how, but for the interest level you're talking about - that's what needs to happen.. Anything slower and human noise and distractive abberation factors come into play. Like what soap opera is on and what sports team is in 1st place. All nonproductive time-wasting nonsense when compared to spaceflight.

 

[Urwumpe]

keatah: I don't think we are ready for the next step, though we already have new propulsion systems - we have still lot's of space for development upwards in classic chemical drives, which we still don't use.

 

[Moonwalker]

It is not possible to compare NASA with Virgin Galactic. It's two totally different things.

Talking about NASA, I can not understand why there is so much wailing concerning the gap after STS. The world has already seen an even bigger gap between Skylab and STS. Space flight shouldn't be and isn't taskwork or to continue to operate oldtimers even beyond their second deadline. Finishing ISS and then conentrating on Ares is the best NASA can do. The ISS will be supportet well after 2010 even without US launches. NASA will have spend the biggest ammount of money on it anyway (about 100 billion USD).

"Now it is time to take longer strides..."

 

[Nickmick95]

When It comes to traveling sub-orbital w/out using barely any fuel, I have to throw my support to the Space Elevator.

After you get to the very top climb aboard a spacecraft and do a de-orbit burn

 

[Notebook]

...

 

[Thunder Chicken]

In a parallel universe, there is this entity called the Department of Energy which sponsors a lot of research into the various aspects of power generation. It, in itself, is not in the business of making power, but facilitating the ability for other organizations to do so.

This *should* be the role of NASA with regard to spaceflight. The only problem is that, for the last 50 years, the whole of the U.S. space program was under NASA. Only recently are we seeing the commercial interests coming into play, mostly thanks to the pathfinding accomplished by NASA. I am hoping that NASA can finally step back into this role and provide a strong foundation for others to make the launches.

 

[spcefrk]

NASA has fallen into a poor choice of management techniques in which they feel they have the supreme authority on technical ability. If you want to make a Crew Return Vehicle with NASA dollars, NASA will do a lot of the legwork technically. They push it on you. The problem is that NASA, though it's a technical powerhouse, doesn't necessarily have the best Aero guys, or the best Propulsion guys. They might work at Lockheed or Boeing Rocketdyne. So whether NASA actually has the premier skill necessary or not, they're going to design things in-house.

The X-33 was the most recognizable victim of this. NASA designed a graphite composite tank -- in a strange shape unoptimized for holding cryogenic propellant and failed to perform adequate thermal analysis. LM warned NASA their composite tank would fail when it was introduced to cry-fuels. They had a redesigned tank drawn up, but NASA continued with the in-house design. We all know the tank failed.

The X-38 is the most recent victim of this -- they wanted to save cost on the design, so they went with an X-24-derived fuselage so they could use the same aerodynamic data. The problem is that it had to fit in the shuttle bay. So they had to change the geometry -- namely the leading edge sweep which wholly invalidated all of the X-24 aerodynamic data (X-38 shape =/= X-24 shape). All because NASA wanted to keep the work in-house.

The X-33 had a lot of problems, most of which could have been overcome. But what was ignored entirely was the proposition that a fully-reusable TSTO could be more cost-effective than a fully-reusable SSTO. Rutan remembered it, NASA ignored it consciously by aiming for SSTO or nothing pushing for the next big leap in technology (which to their credit had been a working strategy in the past).

I'm confident, we need to let the NASA-leadership retire and let new blood in to put it back to it's past glory and operate more like a DARPA/FAA for aerospaceflight.

 

[thomasantony]

One thing I think that NASA has done badly is that they fund some great thing for sometime, then pull out before it can achieve anything, but not before millions have been poured into it. All these research projects should be given some kind of guaranteed funding for a specified time period, with specific goals, that cannot be just cut when the Congress decides its boring.

 

[Piet Barber]

How NASA Funding differs from Prize Funding. Interesting presentation.