Posted on 02/09/2004 5:31:57 AM PST by snopercod
Edited on 05/07/2004 6:04:12 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
On Jan. 14, President Bush directed NASA to develop an Exploratory Crew Vehicle that would fly to the International Space Station, support construction of a base on the moon, and eventually fly humans to Mars.
To support this bold initiative, he promised $1 billion in new funding for NASA over the next five years, with $11 billion more to be redirected from other NASA programs.
(Excerpt) Read more at floridatoday.com ...
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Debate on Bush space plan has been loaded with falsehoods
BY DWAYNE A. DAY SPECIAL TO FLORIDA TODAY
The announcement of the new national space exploration plan has been accompanied by some sloppy journalism and even sloppier editorializing.
It has been common for various critics of the plan to establish unrealistic strawman arguments that they then demolish in order to try and discredit the plan rather than to debate its merits or shortcomings.
The most common and disingenuous tactic of the plan's opponents has been to claim that a mission to Mars would cost $1 trillion. But the reality is that the people who state this cannot find a single study that supports this figure.
Now Alex Roland's article on this page in last Sunday's FLORIDA TODAY headlined "Bush's space plan a political hoax" adds more inaccurate assertions and poorly researched numbers to the debate.
The article was full of errors, disingenuous arguments, and the inevitable strawman claims.
First, Roland could not even get the name of the newly proposed spacecraft right. It is not the Exploratory Crew Vehicle or the Crew Exploratory Vehicle, as he claimed several times. It is the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which NASA has now announced will be part of a new effort known as Project Constellation.
Roland also asserts that space shuttle development ran absurdly over budget. But this is also untrue. If one turns to page 23 of the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, you will see that NASA completed the shuttle for only 15 percent more than its projected development cost, "a comparatively small cost overrun for so complex a program," the report states.
A little later, Roland makes an apples and oranges comparison of the space station's predicted development costs and the expected actual costs of the space station, which he suggests are $8 billion and $100 billion respectively. But here he makes two errors.
First, Roland does not explicitly acknowledge that he is not comparing the same things. The $8 billion cost first provided in 1984 was before the program was changed in dramatic ways, such as including the Russians and changing the scope of the project. More importantly, that number did not include assembly and operations costs.
So comparing this to the actual costs is akin to comparing the cost of buying a new car to fueling, maintaining and insuring it for 15 years in addition to buying it. Second, the $100 billion cost that Roland cites for the anticipated costs of the International Space Station has been adjusted for inflation, whereas the 1984 cost has not.
Roland is not the first person to do this -- it is a common tactic for space station critics to use -- but he is still being disingenuous. He understates the "promised" cost of the space station in order to exaggerate the difference between it and the actual cost and to once again bash NASA.
But the most egregious strawman claim in the column is that the new Crew Exploration Vehicle will require a rocket "bigger than the Saturn 5 that launched Apollo," which Roland claims will cost $100 billion. This is not a viable argument.
The CEV is intended to be modular, meaning that parts of it could be launched on different vehicles. As students of space history know, in the early 1960s NASA identified several ways of reaching the moon. One of these involved assembling the vehicle in low earth orbit from several launches.
Rather than building a new large vehicle bigger than a Saturn V, NASA or its international partners could simply launch several rockets to assemble the final vehicle in space. Furthermore, the Delta 4 itself can be upgraded to a larger booster capable of placing bigger payloads in orbit. We do not need a mythical super-rocket costing $100 billion.
Finally, Roland writes that the new space plan is merely another means to reprogram existing NASA funds over the next five years to keep the space station program from collapsing. But he provides no evidence for this claim. And considering that money is actually being taken out of the station and shuttle budgets, it appears to be a dubious assertion.
What we need is a careful, informed debate about the new space plan. This should raise some hard questions, such as the wisdom of abandoning efforts to achieve low-cost access to space and whether or not planetary science is going to be crippled at the expense of human spaceflight. But tossing bogus numbers into the debate serves nobody well.
Day served as an investigator for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and is a space policy analyst in Washington, D.C.
I knew something was fishy with the first bit. I'm no rocket scientist (ho ho), but I could figure out that Bush didn't make that stuff up himself. He had to have gone to NASA and said, "if I proposed going to Mars, via a moonbase, what would it take?"
And why would NASA give him a hoax for an answer?
(snicker)--looks like another gripe Roland might have concerns his own inevitable irrelevance.
As Day points out, there are several problems with this. At any rate, it is quite dishonest to judge a proposal by something you insert into it after the fact.
And there is zero reason to imagine that a new launch vehicle needs to cost $100 billion. That is the adjusted cost for the entire moon program over its lifespan, starting when our knowledge of rocketry was far less.
And by all appearances, Bush plans on directing NASA to buy launch services from anyone who will provide them, rather than building another "national launch system" like shuttle.
Well, he had to consult with somebody, and the logical somebody is NASA. Somehow, I don't think Bush and Rove are sitting in the Oval Office with grid pads sketching out their ideas for lunar landers.
It would be really bizarre to announce a gigantic new NASA initiative without talking to NASA, wouldn't it?
Markie Morford couldn't have said it better. Meow.
Duke = No Credibility
Anyone who starts throwing around the Vice President's name and "Haliburton" speaks a private language I'm not interested in learning, and neither is the American public-at-large, thank the Good Lord.
This guy is just another Bush-hater, mad because the President didn't call and get his opinion first.
It does happen, on rare occasion, that a government agency will tell its superiors things that will result in a larger budget even though those things, in a strictly technical sense, might not be entirely true. ;^)
NASA engineers and program managers were in consult with both the White House and Congress from ~May-November 2003, not widely reported though.
I worry about long term plans (e.g. manned to Mars) that we really aren't up to yet. Without a Soviet Union to push us, that's sure to get vague, messy and just plain not happen.
bttt for later ...
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