Posted on 01/16/2006 9:53:39 AM PST by Paul Ross
Aviation Week & Space Technology
Griffin Tells Astronomers To Lower Expectations
By Frank Morring, Jr.
01/14/2006
LOOKING TO THE STARS
Astronomers in the U.S. can still look forward to a human servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope next year, and perhaps to big observatories on the far side of the Moon some day.
But for the most part, the funding outlook at NASA for space science is tight as the agency shifts its focus to sending humans back to the Moon, meaning near-term priorities like searching for Earth-like planets around other stars will slip, and it will take longer to begin answering new questions like "What is dark energy?"
"NASA simply cannot accomplish everything that was on our plate when I took office last April," Administrator Michael Griffin told the American Astronomical Society (AAS). "In space-based astronomy, as in other areas, we will have to make tough trade-offs between maintaining current missions--of which there are 14 ongoing--and developing new capabilities."
Griffin drew applause when he reminded his audience that he reversed a decision by his predecessor not to send another space shuttle mission to service the Hubble telescope, which continues to produce important new discoveries.
But he cautioned that the final Hubble servicing mission, tentatively scheduled before the end of next year, will be launched only "if at all possible." And he said bluntly that there is no way from an engineering standpoint to mount a robotic servicing mission, as former Administrator Sean O'Keefe opted to do, that could do more than deorbit the telescope safely before it is expected to become uncontrollable.
The fate of the Hubble--and a lot of NASA's other programs--will depend on White House funding decisions due for public release with the Fiscal 2007 budget next month. Griffin conceded, "I do not know in all its details what it will contain," which suggests a debate is still underway within the Bush Administration on how to cover a shortfall of at least $3 billion in the shuttle program (AW&ST Nov. 7, 2005, p. 40).
"By any measure, one would have to say that the growth of science in NASA has been in the 5-7% range, annualized, over the last decade or so, and that's all been great," Griffin said. "We're in a budget environment now where that level of growth can't be maintained, although science at NASA will still have growth."
SOME OF THAT GROWTH will be absorbed by the James Webb Space Telescope, the top space mission in the U.S. National Academies' decadal list of astronomy priorities. Terming the $1.5-billion shortfall in available funding for the mission "under-costing" rather than an overrun, Griffin said his agency has a better handle on the cost of the deep-space infrared observatory. Launch of the Webb telescope has been slipped from 2011 to 2013 to cover the extra cost without hampering its ability to peer back to the earliest galaxies in the Universe, and penetrate closer dust clouds to watch star formation within.
Under questioning from AAS President-elect J. Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas, who collected queries from members, Griffin said the problems with the Webb observatory will force a delay in starting the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) and its successor, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, both National Academies priorities designed to find Earth-like extrasolar planets.
Griffin noted that President Bush's human-exploration directive has raised concerns in all of the communities of scientists who use NASA systems in their work, and vowed to do what he could to keep the disruption to a minimum.
"Our cost estimates for returning astronauts to the Moon are conservatively structured to achieve our goals within budget," he said. "Also, while we certainly are not claiming cost savings that have not been proven, we very much intend to find ways to reduce the cost of the exploration program through improved technology, commercial involvement and international partnerships."
And in the long term, he said under Wheeler's questioning, astronomers may some day find the Moon a better place to conduct their business than Earth orbit or the L-2 Sun-Earth Lagrangian point where the Webb observatory is bound. The Moon's far side offers a much quieter environment for radio telescopes, and many types of sensors could be laid out in arrays on the Moon for higher-resolution imaging than is possible on Earth.
"I would argue strongly with those who assert that human spaceflight is inimical to science," he said. "Our scientific initiatives go hand in hand with our extended reach into the Solar System. It is not our desire to sacrifice present-day scientific efforts for the sake of future benefits to be derived from exploration.
"A stable platform like the Moon offers advantages in the engineering aspects of astronomy that are hard to obtain in space."
His views on using the Moon as an observatory notwithstanding, Griffin ducked a question from Wheeler on whether it would be worthwhile for U.S. astronomers, working through the National Academies, to reconsider their priorities in light of the new possibilities raised by the exploration initiative, or by recent discoveries.
"I think the astronomy community has to decide for itself whether the priorities have changed enough to warrant doing a decadal survey in an off year," Griffin said.
One thing pushing astronomers to change their priorities is the discovery of a mysterious force driving the expansion of the Universe at a rate that appears greater than can be explained by what is visible to telescopes like the Hubble and the most advanced ground-based instruments. The force, dubbed dark energy, was confirmed after the astronomy priorities for this decade were set. A National Academies panel created for the job stopped short of recommending that new priorities be drafted.
INSTEAD, THE PANEL called for "balanced" planning of future astronomy missions, with a greater role for the U.S. Energy Dept. and greater use of Explorer-class space missions. And it cautioned that slips in programs growing out of the exploration initiative could "adversely affect NASA's ability to generate the kind of transformative science that is the hallmark of the past decades."
NASA is already working with the Energy Dept. to draw up a Joint Dark Energy Mission, for which concepts are due in March. Among them is the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (Snap), a two-meter space telescope (see artist's concept) that would continue detailed measurements of the Type Ia supernovae that provided evidence the Universe is expanding more rapidly than thought.
But with the science budget already squeezed, and the possibility of more budget cuts in the offing, it is unlikely that new starts like Snap will be funded, regardless of the science they produce. Indeed, senior astronomers like Wheeler, are worried they won't be able to fund graduate students today who will be called on in the future to make sense of dark energy and other new questions.
"We're all holding our breath, waiting to see what the budget's going to be," Wheeler said. "The budget for NASA is probably not going up. The budget for the science division is almost certainly not going up. The question is whether it will go down."
Oh, I don't know.... Looming asteroid collision, worldwide famine, nuclear winter, invasion of the body snatchers, ... The possibilities are limited only by the imagination, I'm sure.
The thing with Las Vegas is that he won't accept outside investment. He will need a lot more than his $ half billion to get anyplace. He is one that ought to get behind the withdrawal from the 1967 Treaty and get into real money.
C'mon, it's all for the common defense (against little green men and/or the end of planet earth).
>>But it is, of course, appropriate for the governemnt to be in that business.
> not really
Yes, really. Unless you like the idea of the United States being defeated because our military is massively out of date?
> I read the constitution just the other day and I couldn't find anything about research
I couldn't see anything in there about freeways, interstates or highways, either, nor the FAA opr FDA. I presume you don't use them.
Try Section 8 Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
Try again. Those are for the postal system... not for *you,* you red Marxist statist Gore-monger you.
And where's that FDA and FAA in the Constitution? Where are federal speed limits in the Constitution? Where was developing the ARPAnet in the Constitution?
I suspect you do have a problem with us free enterprise space types too.
Right now the access is relatively primitive...and essentially overwhelmingly risky. Squashing flat normal economic incentives. There are several ways to deal with that. Governmentally encourage (via credits or outright subsidization of) research into economical space access alternatives or a governmental monopoly on space access...(the only entity which can routinely afford the flights and/or the liability issues)...which is what we are stuck with now.
And no amount of uncomprehending griping by you is likely to stop this "wasteful" governmental predilection to go into space.
You likely don't like ANY role for governmental encouragement.
I.e., you likely still grump about the wasteful voyages of Christopher Columbus, or the hideously costly Louisiana Purchase, and the dastardly expensive Seward's Folly in purchasing Alaska...the boon-doggles of the Transcontinental Railways, etc.
I get so tired of hearing the space heads (my term for those who share the delusion that somehow rocks and dirt on another planet are somehow more valuable than rocks and dirt here) keep trotting out these same old non-sequitors. There is absolutely no comparison due to the accessibility difference. 15th century technology was enough to get to the new world. If it cost $100,000,000 a pound to get something back from Louisiana/Alaska etc. Do you seriously think anyone would have bought it? Unless you have a secret miraculous way to get there and back, a heap of rocks and dust 240,000 miles away or 27,000,000 miles away or a billion miles away is no where near as valuable as a heap of rocks and dust anywhere on earth. Less valuable, because here you have air to breathe while you look at your rocks and dust.
I suspect you do have a problem with us free enterprise space types too.
Not at all. Your money and the money of those you con into investing in your delusions is your to do with as you want - If you want to burn it, stuff it up a wild hog's ass or invest it in a "space company" have at it.
There is a good analysis of the reusable rockets vs. space elevator debate by Jordan Kare over at
http://web.archive.org/web/20031204105315/http://www.isr.us/spaceelevatorconference/presentations.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20031204105315/http://www.isr.us/spaceelevatorconference/pdf/Kare/Workshop2_kare.pdf
It is completely reasonable that a fully reusable LOX/hydrocarbon "space truck" - using off-the-shelf engines like the NK43 and RD-0124 - could deliver payloads to LEO for about $50,000 per ton, and could fly as often as eight times a day.
There is a good opinion of why the costs of reaching orbit have not gone down after almost 50 years over at:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.policy/msg/72844bd6b7977af3
Here is the important quote from the usenet posting:
Because, by the nature of the early adopters of rocketry, the people historically in the business of rocket-building have found it most profitable to adopt the business model of Rolls Royce.
No, worse than that. Rolls Royce directly benefits if it can reduce the actual *cost* of a car, so long as it does not reduce performance or prestige or any of the other things that let it charge a high *price* for the machine. So it will quietly pursue modest cost reduction, and pocket the difference as profit, and maybe we can hope for a price war between Rolls and Bentley some time down the road.
The major customers for rocketry mandate a perverse pricing structure in which every reduction in cost translates directly to a *reduction* in profit for the builder. Rocket builders serving traditional markets benefit from building the most expensive rockets they can get away with.
Rocket builders trying to pursue cost reductions and low-cost business strategies, are trying to do something that has never been done before in spite of people arguing for its desirability, and find their efforts confounded not just by the actual difficulty of doing something new, but by foolish arguments of the form, "X hasn't been done before in spite of arguments for its desirability, therefore there must be some reason why X cannot be done..."
> you've decided that anyone who disagrees with your delusion is a liar
Amazing. Is this how you deal with *everybody* who points out the flaws in your arguements?
Yep. You proved my points. You do have a problem. These are just not issues of scale, try as you may to deny it.
Only if your point is that space exploration is a waste of money. Tell me what industrial value mars rocks have.
You never heard of a country violating a treaty?
The claim is made every day. The 1967 Treaty stands solid: no private property rights to celestial bodies are possible.
So in other words, the U.S. doesn't 'own' space as was implied earlier, and if we don't keep an eye on the Chinese, et al, we could put our nation at great risk.
That's what I've been saying all along.
The signatories to the Treaty have by their signatures asserted ownership over all of outer space to the end of the Hubble volume and everywhere beyond.
So once again, how does one insure the treaty is being adhered to? We all know treaties get broken.
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