I was not entirely, or even mostly, joking at Space Access this year
when I suggested tasking Marshall with developing a nuclear-thermal
upper stage.
* Marshall *wil**l* get at least $2 billion a year in funding, which
probably means $4 billion or more total for a Marshall-led flagship
program
* Marshall is not stupid enough to accept as its One Big Program
something that obviously isn't on anyone's critical path and is thus
vulnerable to cancellation
* A nuclear-thermal upper stage could soak up that much money while
employing the sort of expertise Marshall is known for
* It's easy to sell nuclear-thermal as being vital to manned deep
space exploration, and if it works it would be genuinely quite useful
* Psst, don't tell anyone, but if Marshall doesn't come through we can
get on quite well without it.
Opening it up to high-energy power and propulsion generally is better
still. But those are I think the constraints we have to satisfy. How
to sell Congress and the new administration on it, that's tough.
John Schilling
john.schilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(661) 718-0955
On 11/9/2016 10:21 AM, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
On 11/9/2016 10:22 AM, Robert Steinke wrote:
Henry, Is there any political coalition actually pushing for your hint
about changing from heavy lift to deep-space power and propulsion
without changing the current geographic distribution of funding? How do
you see it getting implemented?
It's a concept, not a coalition. I've been thinking about it for months, but this is the first time it's been run out in public. If enough people see it and say to themselves "that makes sense", then it might become a coalition. That's how these things work.
I'm going to re-append it, for context. Trimming back the extraneous depths of a thread is all well and good, but it can be easily overdone...
Henry
On 11/9/2016 9:14 AM, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
The key here is that two-thirds of Americans are at least mildly
favorably disposed toward space.
But keep in mind that anything this incoming Administration decides
to do in space will have to be executed within some fairly hard
limits:
- Strong Congressional regional coalitions supporting the current
geographic distribution of funding.
- Limited Executive bandwidth for space. As in all US
administrations for decades now, whatever their intentions, they'll
have far larger and more pressing problems than space on their plate
competing for their limited time and political clout.
- NASA's status as a sprawling multi-centered "mature federal
bureaucracy" with all the massive inertia and resistance to change
that implies.
That said, I do see a practical path for positive change through
these obstacles. In fact, I need to be writing about that (with
considerably more care than I put into arocket posts) for the day
job.
Meanwhile, a hint: The current geographic distribution of funding
does not necessarily imply the current geographic distribution of
tasks.
That's probably too subtle... Clue-By-Four: NASA really doesn't need
to be working on heavy-lift launch in-house. It's not 1962 - we have
a commercial sector with multiple players able to take that on, at
least two of them already working on that.
On the other hand, granted the strong near-term prospect of a
thriving near-Earth space economy based on chemical rockets, one
obvious next national technological requirement is for high-energy
deep-space power and propulsion.
Which is exactly the sort of task a sprawling multi-state federal
R&D establishment might usefully be pointed at. It's too expensive
and too long-term for the commercial players. NASA meanwhile has for
a long time been too focused on its own short-term agendas to do more
than nibble around the edges of this national medium-to-long-term
need.
So, my modest proposal: JSC et al continue running Station
(stations?) in support of near-Earth commerce, in parallel with an
increased emphasis on long-term life-sustainment research (rad
shielding, of course, but also human variable-G work dammit) while
MSFC et al begin shifting focus from heavy lift launch to high-energy
deep-space power and propulsion.
Henry