Over at Politico, there was a story yesterday about last week’s lone earmark for favored space contractors in the Continuing Resolution for the rest of fiscal 2011, which displays the continuing lack of understanding of space policy issues by the conventional media:
This doesn’t really have much to do with seeing an American on the moon — as they note:
There’s a reason that “critics say” that. It’s because it’s pretty obviously true. Note also that human spaceflight has little to do with science at all, let alone space science. There may or may not be good reasons to do it, but science isn’t, and never has been one of them. They also quote Citizens for Common Sense, who like many, continue to not understand the new policy:
The administration was not “trying to lead NASA out of” human spaceflight, which in fact is “prohibitively expensive” only because Congress, or at least those in Congress who pay much attention to it at all, continues to view it as little more than a jobs program. Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and other new companies, whose focus is on actually opening up space, rather than just getting cost-plus government contracts, have shown that it can be quite affordable. SpaceX has built an entire new company, developed two new rockets, a pressurized capsule, test and manufacturing facilities, and launch pad modifications, for less than the cost of a single Space Shuttle flight.
They were able to do that because they didn’t have to operate under the political constraints of spreading jobs around to various political districts, and could instead focus on their own bottom line and business goals, of developing competitive space launch services. As a result, they are not only lower cost (and by quite a bit) than their American competition at United Launch Alliance and other places, but even the Chinese don’t think they can beat their prices, even with a government-subsidized system.
What the administration proposed last year was for NASA to purchase rides into space from commercial providers via fixed-price contracts (just as it is going to be doing exclusively with the Russians once the Shuttle retires this year, at $63M per seat). This would free them up to focus on doing things beyond low earth orbit, including going to the moon if there is a case to be made for that.
In his efforts to continue steering taxpayer funds to his congressional district in Alabama, Representative Aderholt repeats unsupported mythology about space:
Neither 130-ton rockets or Orion capsules are necessary to lead in space exploration, and the notion that they are is what has actually been holding us back for almost forty years since the end of Apollo. There is nothing magic about 130 tons, except it’s about the same payload as the Saturn V was. The belief that the only way to go back to the moon is to recreate the exact capabilities of Apollo is what I’ve previously described as being a member of the Apollo Cargo Cult. Apollo was done the way it was because we were in a race, it was of national importance to win it, and money was no object. It is not the way that von Braun himself would have done it if he had wanted to do it in a more affordable and sustainable fashion. And there is no evidence, other than comments by some in the program, that China is actually pursuing such a vehicle. Such comments are nothing but an attempt to restoke a moon race in the hope of getting both sides to spend their money foolishly.
Furthermore, even if such a vehicle is needed, then we need two of them, so that we don’t have the risk of shutting down the program for years, as happened twice with Shuttle. SpaceX has shown that it can be done cheaply enough to allow two different types to be built, but only if it is done on a competitive basis, instead of handing out cost-plus contracts to the same companies that have already spent over ten billion dollars over the past five years with little to show for it.
If Congress was truly serious about returning to the moon, the rocket scientists on the Hill would give NASA a date, and a budget, and tell them to come up with a way to make that happen, without telling them which contractors to use, or how big the rockets must be, and how they must be designed. That the latter is their approach tells you that it’s all about the pork, and not about the moon at all.
[Update a few minutes later]
The politics of pork.
