NEWS - Bush May Announce Return To Moon At Kitty Hawk - Space Daily

Better to build a low cost to orbit manned launcher and then get us out of LEO,
no doubt less expensive than the alternatives too.

"Herb Schaltegger" wrote in message
...
Forgive me if I sound cynical but how ****ing stupid is that quote? ".
. . forcing NASA to get serious . . ." PLEASE! NASA is an
administrative agency under the Executive Branch of government. How
about some good, old-fashioned top-down management from, say, the
President?

The President is almost irrelevant to the process.

Simply setting some stupid policy goal ("Hey,
let's go to the moon!") and then walking away while NASA twists in the
wind for the duration of another ten year, never-get-done project
(SSF-Alpha-ISS, anyone?) is NOT good leadership.

Again, *ideas* and even management is not the problem. Congress is the
problem. NASA and the President oversells a program, Congress slightly
underfunds it to begin with, then, after unrecoverable money has already
been spent on design, cuts the budget, thus ****ing away much of the money
that has already been spent (but which still counts as part of the new
budget), and forcing still more money to be spent on a redesign. If Congress
ponied up the full, total project cost and placed it in an independent,
blind trust fund, where the money will be doled out to NASA according to the
mutually agreed upon plan and which could be recovered by Congress only by
completely cancelling the project, and where Congress makes it clear that
there will be *no* more money allocated period (which means that insurance
needs to be taken out to cover accidents), then we'd see some stability.
NASA would have an incentive to provide realistic proposals, and wouldn't
fear having the money yanked out from under them, while Congress wouldn't
have to worry about continually budgeting for ongoing projects since it
would be done and over with. I don't see Congress giving up that layer of
micromanagement. This is the "**** or get off the pot" budget method. The
pot of money is there, NASA knows exactly what it has to work with, and
Congress can't touch the money unless NASA fails to deliver. The
construction industry expecially works on the "draw" method- when certain
milestones are hit, the contractor gets a certain percentage of the money to
continue- and there's no reason why NASA or a lot of other government
projects can't work under the same method. If it's time for a draw, the
money needs to be there, and there is no money unless the milestone has been
reached. If the customer changes the contract, there is a charge. In this
case, if Congress changes the project, then it needs to pony up more money,
not only for the changes to the project, but an additional fee just for
making a change. If a milestone isn't reached when scheduled, Congress has
the option of continuing the project or cancelling it.

Grand pronouncements are not the solution. Can anyone say "Space Exploration
Initiative"? No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
--
If you have had problems with Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC),
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"George William Herbert" wrote in message
...
First, the veterans who died and/or have retired had to figure it
out the hard way the first time, and got it right, and left us
scads of documentation on both right and wrong things.

Reminds me of Larry Niven's Moties- population pressure periodically forces
them to bomb themselves back to the stone age- but they carefully preserve
museums with the necessary technical knowledge so that they don't have to
start from scratch.
--
If you have had problems with Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC),
please contact shredder at bellsouth dot net. There may be a class-action
lawsuit
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On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 23:24:10 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote:

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 16:50:54 -0600, in a place far, far away, Herb
Schaltegger made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

In article ,
(Rusty B) wrote:

According to Space Lift Washington, President Bush may
announce at Kitty Hawk a return to manned lunar exploration but
without any specific massive new funding, forcing NASA to get serious
about what it wants to do with it considerable human spaceflight
assets and decades of experience.

Forgive me if I sound cynical but how ****ing stupid is that quote? ".
. . forcing NASA to get serious . . ." PLEASE!

In addition, just what "considerable human spaceflight assets" does
NASA have that are helpful for going to the moon? And the agency
doesn't have "decades of experience." Organizations don't have
experience--people do, and many of the veterans are dead or retired.

Well ***IF*** a return to the Moon program WAS started, couldn't these
men and women return to NASA as consultants and advisers to pass on
their experience, or do some work on the program, old skilled people
don't loose their skills so easily?


Christopher
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Kites rise highest against
the wind - not with it."
Winston Churchill

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 06:23:59 GMT, "G.Beat"
wrote:


"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 03:38:47 GMT, in a place far, far away, "G.Beat"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

If he was serious about space, he would have started 3 years ago.
(Florida, Texas and California economies -- how many electoral votes is
that?)

Space is important to local economies, but not *state* economies.
Particularly in some of the largest states in the nation...

Very true .... as I watch some of the factories (subcontractors) that
produced Apollo
and Gemini components - close or be shipped to China.
They should have a good space program ... we sold enough of the parts

FWIW I've read that the Chinese rockets are based on American
hardware, and the head of their program was educated in America,
during the McCarthyism period he was given the elbow by the then
administration,and went back to China with his American paid-fore
knowledge and experience, and started from scratch on their space
program.


[Hah ... reminds me of the M*A*S*H episode of shipping a Jeep from Korea to
US one part at a
time .... very educational episode ... ]

gb



Christopher
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
"Kites rise highest against
the wind - not with it."
Winston Churchill

Pat Flannery writes:

And if Halliburton and the Carlyle Group can get involved in space
exploration, the president and vice president will be 100% behind the
"free market" aspects of the plan as to assigning contracts.

Pat

Hey, who was it who was saying that we'd know the politicians are
actually getting serious about space when they stop giving space
station contracts to Boeing and start giving them to Brown and
Root (parent company of Halliburton) instead?

--
Phil Fraering "Oh, so now Mike's the nut, Roger's the good
one, and I'm the bad guy?"

(Rusty B) wrote in message . com...

................According to Space Lift Washington, President Bush may
announce at Kitty Hawk a return to manned lunar exploration

Full text of article at this URL:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beyondleo-03a.html

To me, this looks and smells like a purposeful leak for vetting
purposes. Reading from the article:

"According to sources familiar with the White House review, the
current plan-**subject to change at any time the sources say**-is
for a final recommendation to the president by November 30th ... "

"As of late October, sources indicate that a central recommendation
is **likely, but not certainly** to be resumption of manned lunar
flights ..."

Perhaps the White House, thinking ahead a few years, decided it
didn't want China to be exploring the moon (unmanned probably)
all by itself. Maybe an unmanned exploration program will
suffice, maybe not. There would be one nagging concern: the
new KT-series rocket China is developing will be the world's
most powerful rocket...

- Ed Kyle

And if Halliburton and the Carlyle Group can get involved in space
exploration, the president and vice president will be 100% behind the
"free market" aspects of the plan as to assigning contracts.

Pat

And then the bulk of the new money will be promised for the out years, and
the first years funding will be delayed until FY 05, and then it will turn
out that some of the "new funding" will actually be earmarked for
reimbursing FEMA, and then ...

The Bush Administration seems to apply bistromathics to everything.

Pat Flannery wrote:

George William Herbert wrote:


One hypothetical approach here would be to start a major
set of initiatives now, and set specific long term goals,
and then assuming Bush (43) gets re-elected, for there to
be a major bloodbath among the non-perfomers about oh say
6 months into his second term. Something like that...




The thing that's missing from all this is a rational reason to return to
the Moon- it's lifeless, and we already know a fair amount about its
geology; we can't afford a permanent manned lunar base because of the
supply problem that such an endeavor would pose, and spending billions
of dollars to get some more rocks is a vast waste of money. At least
with Mars, we would get an inherently more interesting place to visit.

Pat

We certainly can't afford to build a lunar base with expendable HLLV's,
but then we can't afford to do Mars that way either. Develop a system
that will make going to Mars affordable and we will be able to afford a
lunar base too. Spending at least a year or two building a lunar base
would give us experience with our Mars systems in as realistic an
environment as possible and allow us to get the bugs out of the
hardware. I can't immagine that we would commit to a 2 1/2 years long
Mars round trip without that experience.

Pat Flannery wrote:

The thing that's missing from all this is a rational reason to return to
the Moon- it's lifeless,

We don't yet have any data to suggest that Mars is any better in this regard.

and we already know a fair amount about its
geology;

I would have thought that the discovery of lunar ice decades after the end of
Apollo would have brought home the point to everybody that we still know
precious little about the moon. Who know what other surprises may still lie in
store?

At least
with Mars, we would get an inherently more interesting place to visit.

That's a statement of personal opinion.

My view is that the moon and the NEAs are more interesting because it's barely
possible they represent locations for economic exploitation which might have
returns to the terrestrial economy.

--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the
best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the
Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely.
Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is
"somewhere else entirely."

Gerard O'Neill - "The High Frontier"