That's serious revenue and job creation brought back to our country.
Posted on 02/01/2018 9:37:01 AM PST by Voption
The bureaucrats in Washington really have little interest in safety, but instead are more focused in putting their thumbs on the scale in order to specifically harm the commercial space companies -- especially SpaceX's. One report in particular, by NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), was especially hostile to these private efforts, even as it remained completely unconcerned about similar but far worse safety issues that exist with NASA's government-built and competing SLS and Orion programs.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
NASA has long since favored layers of fidgeters over competent engineers.
Triples the cost and doubles the timelines.
Part of the reason there will be no manned flights to Mars.
Buncha leftists built some rockets with government hand outs while pretending to be 100% private and now they want MORE of a pass? Yeah guess what, they are having a hard time make it safe enough for man rating. Screw you spacex, follow the rules everyone else does now that your leftist buddies aren’t in power any more.
All true.
The shambling legions of government bureaucrats have now produced seven years without a human qualified space transportation capability in the U.S.
The shuttle stopped flying in 2011. It is now 2018.
I recall watching Al Shephard launch in 1961, and then Neil Armstrong stepping out of the LEM just 8 years later onto the lunar surface.
In the same amount of time the modern NASA has accomplished exactly on flight of their gold plated capsule, and that was unmanned.
SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Blue Origin all have credible man rated designs in various stages of flight readiness. They will all be flying soon. Or at least be ready: NASA will be the gating factor as to whether some of them go.
But some are being built by guys who don’t need to wait for NASA funding, and they will leave the bureaucrats in the dust.
Apollo 1 fire.
Challenger disaster.
Columbia disaster.
All preventable with better designs or better management.
Should NASA be in charge of safety?
...even as it remained completely unconcerned about similar but far worse safety issues that exist with NASA’s government-built and competing SLS and Orion programs.
...
The private companies should be accountable for safety, but NASA is in no position to be claiming superiority.
“seven years without a human qualified space transportation capability in the U.S.”
I think that’s even worse than the gap between the last Apollo flight (Apollo-Soyuz) and the first Shuttle: 1975-1981.
And no humans are going to climb into an Orion capsule anytime soon.
Nope. Orion will be another gov program: kick out the schedule, re-baseline it, change managers...repeat over and over until the program does a name change to hide the lack of progress.
Contractors love it, they just keep sending those invoices.
Jeff Bezos could out-fund NASA with what would amount to sofa-cushion change to him.
Besides the purse-strings however, what federal regulations govern manned space flight? I’m thinking of the Burt Rutan designed suborbital spacecraft about 10 years ago for example. Did they need government permission? Would SpaceX need permission for its stated plan to send two paying customers on a circumlunar flight?
I like your passion!
I do have big problems with Tesla & Solar City, but I can’t argue with the success of SpaceX, even with some measure of cronyism going on. (Musk is not the Poster Boy for free-market capitalism, and/but, I tend not to be as much of a purist in this realm, as I ordinarily might be.)
That being said, I definitely hear you! I tend to think it’s a bit more nuanced.(but hear you!)
Nonetheless— You might like Zimmerman’s take. He’s one of the few free-marketers covering Space.
They need a significant RIF to get lean again and a "BRAC" to eliminate a few under-utilized NASA Centers.
Senator Shelby of Alabama chairs the Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee responsible for NASA funding. His name continues to be associated in opposition with any private space operations which will thin the pork appropriated to NASA’s projects.
Whoops.
I meant to reply to you. (I hear you!)
Great comments by everyone btw. (I’m just not familiar with this format.)
Buncha leftists built some rockets with government hand outs while pretending to be 100% private
I might give you Tesla for government handouts, but what handouts has SpaceX gotten. Besides getting paid for putting government payloads into orbit rather than using Russian rockets.
Apollo 1 fire due to poor priorities by management.
Challenger disaster due to meddling in design choices to keep military solid fuel rocketry vendors viable from a financial stand-point. Insufficient units were needed by the military alone to keep hot cast fuel stacked section production open. Congressional pressure was applied to use the military vendors rather than develop cryogenic liquid fueled booster designs. NASA management ignored an engineering based protest to delay that day’s launch.
Columbia disaster origin relates to an environmental based mandate to change a urethane insulation formulation—to eliminate chlorofluorocarbon 11 components of the application mixture. This change resulted in insulation voids which prevented proper adherence to the large fuel tank skin surface. Moisture condensation upon the underlying metal surface with subsequent freezing, lead to large chunks falling off in flight.
Did you know that there was another Shuttle already rolled out to the pad that could have been used to rescue the Columbia crew?
Management didn’t want to be bothered to look for damage after being told it was most likely there.
This is the way all of our government works, including the military. The politicians and the Generals at the top are not there to protect, help, or advance our country anymore. Since the 1960s the engineers and scientists who wanted to make things happen were weeded out for the more bureaucratic types that plod along and are reluctant to either take chances or change things if necessary.
We went from Project Mercury to Apollo in less than a decade . We had entire ICBM weapons systems placed on full Alert in two years or less from the time of Congressional approval and funding. The B-52's initial design was done on a napkin in a motel room over the course of one weekend and that aircraft is still the backbone of our bomber force to this day. Now, we can't create anything in less than a decade or more.
I fully understand that the extremely high technology we use today is much more complicated but it is the government bureaucratic stasis that has created the spot we are in today.
That's serious revenue and job creation brought back to our country.
would have almost no presence...
Challenger disaster. was not a matter of design or management but environmental and political correctness.
NASA has a history since the early 60s of picking projects that are politically correct, expensive, and drawn out by years and decades, usually going nowhere (other than the aborted Apollo program).
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