“It’s time to remove US government from space operations”
Published: 28 October, 2009, 22:08
Edited: 26 December, 2009, 14:55
NASA's Ares 1-X rocket lifts off from launch pad 39-b at the Kennedy Space Center October 28, 2009 in Cape Canaveral, Florida (AFP Photo / Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
(20.4Mb) embed videoTAGS: Space, SciTech, Vehicles
The US’s new Ares 1 rocket is a big technical achievement, but it’s unclear whether it’s worth spending billions of dollars for a government vehicle that won’t be ready until 2017, space expert Jeff Manber told RT.
The International Space Station would be coming down a few years after the rocket is ready, he added.
On Wednesday, NASA's newest rocket, the Ares 1-X, finally blasted off after several delays over the past two days. It's the next generation of spacecraft, and is supposed to replace the space shuttle for trips to the International Space Station, exploration of the Moon, Mars and even further beyond.
According to Manber, “Today was the best of times and the worst of times.”
“We had a successful launch today – that’s wonderful,” he said. “Everybody in the space business loves a successful launch. But where are we going? The White House hasn’t yet given the green light to this program.”
“It’s a bit of a sneaky move on the part of NASA to do this test launch today and say, ‘Look, everything is fine. Just give us the money and we will go ahead and develop this program fully,’” he said.
Last week members of the US Human Space Flight Plans Committee, the Augustine Commission, issued a report delivering its conclusions on the US space program – namely, investment in the Ares 1 rocket.
“It recommended that we move commercially and let American companies develop the ability to fly humans to the space station,” Manber said. “The private sector does things quicker, more efficiently, more robust and we just have to stop relying on the government."
28.10.2009, 19:10
4 comments
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Bingo Bianca. Government does this best. The NASA Ares program should be funded and accelerated if possible.
Epsilon, Nuclear reactors on rockets are dicey; if the rocket blows up during a launch with a nuclear reactor, the result is a massive amount of radioactive fallout. For this reason, it is very controversial when NASA, or Russia or anyone else, launches nuclear powered space probes into space. If I remember correctly, Russia's Soyuz craft, which are their manned low-orbit space vehicles, have a better safety record than NASA's space shuttles (kind of like Mac compared to Windows). But still, the fact of the matter is that nuclear craft have hurt people in the past. In fact, I just realized I have a pretty good story about this. Years ago, my father told me about a guy he knew who was hiking in the middle of nowhere in Canada, who was staying in a long abandoned log cabin next to a moderate sized lake. It had taken him, and other members of his small backpacking group, weeks of hiking through the wilderness to get there. While they were there an object crashed into the lake. The next thing they knew helicopters and government employees with lead suits arrived, and the hikers got treated for radiation poisoning and flown out of the area. I don't know if that object was Russian or American, but I think it manifests the point in a cool way. Apparently Greenpeace is already against this new Russian spaceship you speak of.
To Bianca and others tounting the virtues of NASA as state enterprise in space exploration: from it's inception, NASA has heavily relied upon the commercial sector in developing ALL of its major space programs, be it Pioneer, Mercury, Apollo, Voyager, Space Shuttle, Hubble,...you name it. Without substantial participation of private companies none of these would have been successful, because of cost reasons. There is competition on specifications AND price whenever a request for tender has been is launched by NASA. The true problem lies with project risk management on both the commercial as well as the public side, and in this respect both have usually had successes and failures. It is just the nature of things when something new is created that nobody knows the eventual outcome beforehand. That the commercial sector is vastly superior, though clearly not perfect, in meeting deadlines, driving effieciency up and thus keeping costs down, has been proven time after time. This is why, e.g., the "capitalist" automobile indutry thrives despite the crises while the state-owned or state-controlled (in terms of being prevented from radical measures that are neccesary to make them competitive) Russian manufacturers are just ailing and "surviving" on public subsidies. The same holds for all other industry sectors, most notably those involved in high-tech, where the market and competition rules. Hence the question is not one of the general approach (public versus private), but of the instruments and methods how to achieve success, namely transparency, openness and pragmatism. In these respects the past and current model of NASA's space programs has certainly room for improvement, in terms of preventing it from ideologically based decisions ("do we really need man on Mars?"), moving targets (ever-changing program specifications that drive costs up) and corruption (lack of intransparency in the dealings between NASA and the privatze sector).