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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 11 2017, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-small-orbit-for-man dept.

Buzz Aldrin has said that NASA should stop spending $3.5 billion per year on the International Space Station and relinquish low Earth orbit activities to private companies, such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Boeing, Bigelow Aerospace, and Axiom Space. This would allow for the funding of "cyclers" to enable a base on the moon and eventually a permanent presence on Mars:

http://www.space.com/36787-buzz-aldrin-retire-international-space-station-for-mars.html

Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" — spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth. "The foundation of human transportation is the cycler," the 87-year-old former astronaut said. "Very rugged, so it'll last 30 years or so; no external moving parts."

Step two involves the international spaceflight community coming together to build cyclers that ply cislunar space, taking people on trips to the moon and back. Such spacecraft, and the activities they enable, would allow the construction of a crewed lunar base, where humanity could learn and test the techniques required for Mars colonization, such as how to manufacture propellant from local resources, Aldrin said. Then would come Earth-Mars cyclers, which Aldrin described as "an evolutionary development" of the prior cyclers.

[...] NASA officials have repeatedly said that the ISS is a key part of the agency's "Journey to Mars" vision, which aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.

Is the ISS a key part of the "Journey to Mars" or a key roadblock?


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12 2017, @02:24AM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 12 2017, @02:24AM (#508434)

    NASA pork = jobs, so, no, pork doesn't get cut, it just ages on the budget.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12 2017, @05:37AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 12 2017, @05:37AM (#508499) Journal
    I don't buy here that a NASA with balls could be forced to take on so much pork. Pork isn't irresistible. Instead, the bureaucracies, including NASA, are packed with people who don't care and don't have an interest in keeping out pork spending.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 12 2017, @11:41AM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 12 2017, @11:41AM (#508564)

      If pork is all that's on the table, that's what you eat.

      The "core" NASA people, the ones who care about the mission, who know the rocket science, who make real things happen, also happen to be less politically inclined and less politically capable than your average agency. They've got some people who can "do politics," but they're not well integrated into the program.

      So, you could say they don't care - I say that the people who care aren't good at making a difference.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12 2017, @05:53PM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 12 2017, @05:53PM (#508755) Journal

        If pork is all that's on the table, that's what you eat.

        There have been way too many times when NASA has gone out of its way to enforce the status quo.

        For example, SpaceX probably couldn't be founded much sooner than it was and still have a market to sell to. Before 1984, the Space Shuttle had a monopoly on all US-based launches. And in the late 1980s, a launch cartel had sprung up with a series of launch vehicles (the Pegasus rocket, Delta II, Atlas II, Titan III, and Space Shuttle, each with their own identifiable monopoly on a niche of launch market, segregated mostly by payload size and mass, but in the case of the Atlas II and Titan III, by non-military/military payload. NASA was the key element of control for this cartel because outside of US military and intelligence, they were the largest consumer of launch services in the world, and exclusively shopped US.

        It was only when the US military deliberately created competition with the Evolutionary Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program in the late 1990s that the conditions for SpaceX came about. The company was founded a few years later in 2002.

        Another example of this is what happened to E'Prime Aerospace in the mid 1990s. They were refurbishing MX missiles for use as launch vehicles. There were hundreds of these missiles being decommissioned. But the US signed a nuclear treaty which conveniently forbade use of these missiles for commercial payloads, destroying E'Prime's business model completely and this latest threat to the cartel system. Orbital Sciences, one of the cartel members, later picked up this business model, using these MX missiles for launching military payloads. Quite the peculiar oversight of this treaty, isn't it?

        The "core" NASA people, the ones who care about the mission, who know the rocket science, who make real things happen, also happen to be less politically inclined and less politically capable than your average agency.

        Good use of scare quotes. They aren't core, but rather a necessary evil. NASA does have to maintain appearances, so they do need someone who can actually do the jobs NASA is tasked with. No different than many marketing-oriented businesses.

        So, you could say they don't care - I say that the people who care aren't good at making a difference.

        My view is that people who care and are competent are kept out of NASA. It upsets the feeding trough to have these people present.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 13 2017, @02:16AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday May 13 2017, @02:16AM (#508956)

          > It upsets the feeding trough to have these people present.

          Oh so very true, and the people who are at the head of the bread line know how to keep it coming and work hard to do just that.

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