This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Terrible headline.
He (rightly) sees the commercial aspect of space technology to be a deadend, but nasa is spending a huge amount of time and effort working towards enabling it in favour of doing nasa things.
Instead of saying we should go to the moon because it is there, we're saying go to the moon to try to generate new revenue streams for the private space industry that really can't survive without our contracts because of there being no real market or industry to build from.
He (rightly) sees the commercial aspect of space technology to be a deadend, but nasa is spending a huge amount of time and effort working towards enabling it in favour of doing nasa things.
I take issue with commercial being a dead end in space. Not only has commercial spaceflight been VERY successful for NASA, it has saved huge amounts of money over what Griffin was proposing instead. Griffin was advocating for the Constellation program. Lets take just a piece of that where commercial spaceflight is there instead: flying crew to the ISS which we do two times per year.
The Constellation program would have used the Ares I rocket and the Orion Crew capsule. The estimated flight cost of this configuration was about $1.1 billion together for two flights. source
The commercial option used instead is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule. The actual flight cost is $176 for the same two flights per year. source
Commercial spaceflight for NASA reminds me of when the Postal Service contracted out airmail. From 1918 to 1926, all air mail service was flown by US government pilots, in US government planes. Then they contracted it out to a little airplane company named Boeing.
I think NASA should absolutely be focused on deep space exploration, and LEO operations. But even if all they do is contract out their launches it would encourage people to reduce launch costs, which I think should be our number two goal after fighting climate change.
Because obviously that's what we need, to be encouraging the expansion of capitalism into space.
Tim Curry's gonna have an aneurysm.
how is the "commercial" avenue supposed to make profit if nasa isn't funding it. and if it can't, isn't it just a government program?
the dead end of commercial space is that it can only function as a factor of government work. it's not a viable industry by itself.
you can see this tale play out time and time again in other industries that have had the same problem, it doesn't end well, it ends badly.
how is the “commercial” avenue supposed to make profit if nasa isn’t funding it. and if it can’t, isn’t it just a government program?
NASA is not the only entity that send things into orbit.
the dead end of commercial space is that it can only function as a factor of government work. it’s not a viable industry by itself.
SpaceX does not seems to only rely on government orders.
True, NASA helped (well, it is an understatment) SpaceX, but now it could capitalize on it if the costs are the one @partial_accumen@lemmy.world pointed out.
the dead end of commercial space is that it can only function as a factor of government work. it’s not a viable industry by itself.
The alternative to this LEO space work is that taxpayers pay 6.25 times as much for the same service. Where is the logic in that?
you can see this tale play out time and time again in other industries that have had the same problem, it doesn’t end well, it ends badly.
I disagree with your assessment that it is an inevitability. However, lets assume for a moment you're right and it ends in bankruptcy for SpaceX. In the time it will have operated it will have:
If commercial space company SpaceX went out of business tomorrow, we'd still be better off than had NASA ever contracted with them.
also you don’t need to do the big text
I know nothing about any of this so take what I say with a grain of salt. That said, let's go over some of the history of Mike Griffin. I went to that article looking for the answer to the question of whether he was much involved with the clusterfuck that was the Shuttle program, which kept killing astronauts through its transparently-lax approach to safety. The answer turned out to be no, which is to his credit. But, what did he do?
[On] June 1, 2007, on NPR News' Morning Edition, Griffin said: "I have no doubt that global—that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings -where and when-are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."
Griffin approved the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery for July 2006 to perform the second return-to-flight mission, overriding the NASA Chief Safety and Mission Assurance Officer, Bryan O'Connor. Although O'Connor said there were still unresolved concerns that foam insulation could break off of external fuel tank and damage the orbiter, Griffin characterized the risk as acceptable, arguing that it would be better to test one change at a time.
Griffin has been criticized by space research organizations such as NASA Ames Research Center life sciences group for shifting portions of NASA's budget from science to human spaceflight. Griffin had stated that he would not shift "one thin dime" of funding from science to human spaceflight, but less than six months later, in February 2006, after NASA Constellation funding did not reach requested levels, NASA revealed a budget that reduced space research funding by about 25%, including indefinite deferrals of planned programs such as the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and the Space Interferometry Mission. The logic was that funding Project Constellation, a presidentially mandated program, was the top priority of the space agency.
Subsequent to the findings of the Augustine Committee in 2009 that the Constellation Program could not be executed without substantial increases in funding, on February 1, 2010, President Barack Obama proposed to cancel the program.
Nope, I'm sure of it... I hate him.
The shuttle program was not a “clusuerfuck” that kept killing astronauts. There were 2 accidents, yes, which were obviously horrible tragedies, but the Shuttle program also built ISS and serviced Hubble so that it could keep doing amazing things.
Shuttle wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was pretty incredible, and because of it we’re still learning new things about everything from astronomy to biology to engineering.
But yes, Griffin is absolutely a piece of shit.
You're absolutely right. I need to be more precise. The shuttle era of NASA was absolutely brilliant scientists and engineers, doing groundbreaking work, supporting a corps of astronauts of unparalleled skill and courage, and all under a management team that was the most godawful bunch of fuckups and incompetents you could possibly imagine. Everyone knew that the shuttle was unsafe, and they kept flying it anyway, until it inevitably led to the totally unnecessary deaths of some astronauts, and then they kept at it under more or less the exact same methodology until it killed some more.
I still get goosebumps from some of the old Apollo-era legends like SCE to AUX or scratching marks in the window to compute the landing navigation by hand. The 1980s-era NASA administrators inherited a engineering organization that was basically able to do the impossible, and was the envy of the entire world, and they basically started running it with the mentality "as long as nothing went wrong this time it's not a problem. How can we get it a little cheaper or faster for the next one?"
Mike Mullane goes into a lot of good detail about it in "Riding Rockets." Basically, the nature of the program was such that all the astronauts knew it was just a matter of time until one of the shuttles malfunctioned in deadly and preventable fashion, and they wished it wasn't so but that was the bargain they made to be able to go to space. He said his only worry was that he'd do something dumb, or panic on the radio, and there would be this recording of him losing his shit that was his final legacy. He said as long as he could keep himself together if something did go wrong that would kill him, and he got to get to space, he was alright with that.
He was actually on one flight that would have blown up, absolutely guaranteed, but something else went wrong and they scrubbed the mission and all got back out of the shuttle and went home. They found the problem afterwards while they were refitting for the flight after that. But if they'd launched he'd be dead. He talks about his friends who did die in the accidents, and his anger and frustration at the management failures that led to them so inevitably. Space flight is dangerous anyway, but if you approach it without caution and respect, people die who don't need to. Some of them were his friends, and it's impossible to read him talking about it without getting angry at the system that made it that way.
So yeah, I was wrong in pointing the finger at NASA as a whole, you're 100% right. NASA management though can get fucked. I don't know if it's better now, but I'm pretty confident in saying that this particular guy is one of the fuckers who's part of the movement that was and is making it bad. So fuck him. As far as my brief Wikipedia research has led me is to conclude that he's a part of the problem.
Edit: https://spaceagechronicle.com/schirra-proved-astronauts-can-successfully-control-a-spacecraft/
I’ve read the book - it’s excellent and heartbreaking. The pendulum of safety swings back and forth - Columbia was 17 years after Challenger. Granted, we aren’t flying it anymore, but in terms of human spaceflight at NASA it’s been 21 years since Columbia. Everyone is hypervigilant and risk averse for a time as the lessons that were learned are still being discovered and people want to know how to avoid doing that thing again.
But over time, memories fade, people come and go, knowledge is lost and forgotten. And now with commercial space - “move fast and break things” if you will - they don’t like government or regulations or being told no.
So IMO, it’s just a matter of time until something else goes terribly wrong. For all of NASA’s faults, they did take the time to learn both culturally within the organization and technically (I can personally attest to this). They paused the program for a couple of years after both Shuttle accidents to learn how and why they failed.
That’s important and I’m not optimistic that those hoping to profit off of human spaceflight will be inclined to do the same when they fuck up.
Yeah. I can't even remember what I was reading recently about how they were going to open up some new avenue of commercial space travel, and I remember thinking: Oh, so it's gonna be like Mt. Everest. You're gonna go and there are gonna be dead spacecraft with bodies inside, because they're not being careful enough for it to be rare that things go wrong. And you're just gonna go past 'em to get where you're going.
I'm not even necessarily saying it's a bad thing, as long as the people signing up know what they're getting into. But it's different from how I imagined it.
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Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Michael Douglas Griffin (born November 1, 1949) is an American physicist and aerospace engineer who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering from 2018 to 2020. He previously served as Deputy of Technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and as Administrator of NASA from April 13, 2005, to January 20, 2009. As NASA Administrator Griffin oversaw such areas as private spaceflight, future human spaceflight to Mars, and the fate of the Hubble telescope. While he describes himself as a "simple aerospace engineer from a small town", Griffin has held several high-profile political appointments. In 2007 he was included in the TIME 100, the magazine's list of the 100 most influential people.
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Are you his Huckleberry?
goddamn this is the dumbest move NASA could possibly make. let's jump 20 years of actual progress back AND stick with the most expensive and complicated solution.
This is the guy who pitched the Constellation program so he really doesn’t have room to talk.
He is not wrong
Peak spaceflight and exploration in human history? Better roll it back, we wouldn't want to make too much scientific progress
Discover? For the sake of knowing? But what about money? I'm about sick of Mammon's dick being in everything.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Essentially, Griffin told the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, NASA could not afford to faff around with a complex, partly commercial plan to put humans back on the Moon, with an eye toward long-term settlement.
The House members in attendance never pressed Griffin for details about this plan, but they are outlined in his written testimony.
In Griffin’s case, he would return the country to the cozy confines of 2008, just before the era of commercial space took off and when he was at the height of his power before being removed as NASA administrator.
"The straightforward approach outlined here could put US-led expeditions on the Moon beginning in 2029, given bold action by Congress and expeditious decision-making and firm contractor direction by NASA," he concluded.
And if it were built through the cost-plus acquisition strategy outlined by Griffin, it undoubtedly would cost $10 to $20 billion and take a decade based on past performance.
A reasonable estimate of Griffin's plan, based on contractor performance with Orion (in development since 2005) and the SLS rocket, is that if NASA's budget roughly doubled, humans might land on the Moon by the late 2030s.
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