01 09 06 NASA, Orion And Great Leaps Backwards
Yesterday NASA announced that Lockheed-Martin had won the competition for the shuttle 'replacement' vehicle and future moon/Mars orbiter/lander with an estimated cost of $7.5 billion through 2019 for eight ships. Prior to this the GAO estimated NASA had spent close to $5 billion since the Challenger disaster to find a suitable replacement for the aging shuttle fleet. At this point it seems reasonable to question the judgement and expertise of both NASA and their chosen contractor. One of the never built replacements was the recent Lockheed-Martin X-33 space plane concept for which NASA paid $900 million and got a failure "for technical reasons". Lockheed claims they are much more confident about the Orion vehicle, a second design after NASA rejected a prior submission which was too similar to the failed X-33. "We're not shooting as far... I'd say it (Orion) is within reach" according to Lockheed Martin Vice President John Karas. Hmmmm... what is wrong with this picture folks? Could it be that the estimated first test flight date is September 2014 with a possible trip back to the moon in 2019 ? That the vehicle is to be build by a company the taxpayer has already sunk nearly $1 billion in for a ship whose design was scrapped?On September 12, 1962 John. F. Kennedy spoke at Rice Stadium in what is now called "The Moon Speech":
Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nationšs own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.On July 20, 1969 - less than seven years later, Apollo 11 was on the moon and American astronauts were walking its surface. 6 years, 10 months and 8 days it took this nation to go from nothing to walking on the moon. And yet in 2006, fully 37 years later, the best NASA can do is announce with great fanfare that it will take them not only 8 years to field a new vehicle, but a minimum of 13 before they could hope to be back on the moon. This is in no uncertain terms a disgrace. Not only have we apparently lost all prior knowledge of space flight to the moon (after seven years of planning and seven flights), it seems everything done with the shuttle and ISS has little, if any, bearing on continued space flight yet alone returning to the moon.
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We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
We have always been a proponent of virtually all things space - Pioneer, Apollo, Viking, Voyager, etc. yet it is abundantly clear from the past 20 years that NASA's expertise lies not in manned flight but in planetary exploration. The politics and bureaucracy appear to prevent any manned operations on a timely and efficient basis and what skill we had is now collecting social security or dead. The NASA of today is not even a ghost of the NASA that launched the Saturn V.
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