Congressional reaction to the SLS announcement
According to Spacepolitics.com, Congress folks saying nice things about the SLS was the norm since yesterday’s press event, except for that Grinch Rohrabacher-
Most members of Congress—with one notable exception—spoke approvingly of NASA’s announcement Wednesday of the design of the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket, even if they also expressed some frustration that the decision took too long to make or a perceived lack of vision for NASA’s human spaceflight programs.
For example, the key senators involved in promoting the SLS, Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), joined colleagues in praising the announcement. “This is the biggest thing for space exploration in decades,” Nelson said. “Because of the delays in announcing this design, it is imperative that we work with NASA to assure that the new Space Launch System is pursued without further losses of time and efficiency, while relying on NASA’s world-class engineers and designers to continue U.S. leadership in space exploration,” said Hutchison.
Another senator vocal on NASA issues, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), was cautiously pleased with the announcement. Citing a lack of details in the announcement, he said, “I will continue to monitor this situation very closely…
There ya go. It seems like this Congress can’t agree on anything..but with space exploration, we can get them to agree that we need to get ready to go somewhere we can’t agree on right now.
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At least Dana Rohrabacher got it right. It’s easy to agree that its a good thing after you’ve stuffed your face with corn dogs at the Congressional buffet.
Yeah, but does Rohrabacher get it right? Suppose, for the sake of the argument, he had converted more than half the House and half the Senate to his views. Would COTS actually be moving along faster? I don’t think so. We’d have no SLS, no CxP, no Direct 3 or any other heavy booster on hand or in development. Would we actually be sending up propellant depots and linking up payloads from multiple Delta and Atlas launches to send astronauts beyond low earth orbit? Now right now, certainly. Maybe in ten years, after COTS has proven itself and ISS is near the end of its life and some future Administration is looking for some task to assign to NASA? Well maybe. Gosh, wouldn’t this be ever so wonderful!
A second point: I don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for a rocket which basically duplicates the performance of a Saturn-5 fifty years on, but I think I can see some of the reasons for Congress’ present satisfaction. The main thing is that this launcher meets a Congressional mandate. I.e., the critics who have been snarking about a “Senate Launch System” were onto something, but failed to see matters clearly. Congress as a body hasn’t been especially assertive in space policy issues since 1957; it usually rubber stamps an administration request or engages in minor fiscal fiddling, so this new behavior is signficant.
Another thing is that this rocket is conspicuously not competing with COTS, or anything that might be expected to come out of COTS in the near future. It isn’t from the same Altas-Delta stable that launches most AF spacecraft; it isn’t a rival or successor to Proton or Ariane or Long March. Granted, there’s a bunch of criticism for precisely the same point — that SLS really ought to be replaced by Space-X’s Falcon Heavy or an uprated Atlas or whatever — but I suspect a Congresscritter could argue back that it’s important that these all these schemes for improved launchers ought to be kept seperate; that with SLS on its way at last, Elon Musk can now concentrate on his share of COTS without complicating matters by trying to turn Falcon into a moon rocket, that enthusiasts for propellant depots now have the time and opportunity to test the concept methodically; that space tourism operators will benefit by being clearly differentiated from operations in orbital space, etc. etc.
I’m not saying I buy all this, or even much of it, but I can imagine people who would, and It’d not surprise me to find some of them in Congress.
Mike,
NASA has been on the wrong approach for years. Rohrabacher conveyed that our national space program has been in a holding pattern for far to long because of imbedded monopolies. The next practical step should be along the lines of building a reusable exploration vehicle using current ISS tech. You need a medium HLV with a reusable booster for that, not a 130t behemoth to impress the public or Congress just to make a sale. It time to move forward.
John — The US space program has been in a holding pattern for 40 years because (a) there’s no point to a manned space program that doesn’t lead to colonization and (b) it’s politically impossible to create a space program aimed at colonization. This is not going to change for a while, and I’m coming to the conclusion that space colonization will NEVER be possible for the USA because the USA will always be trapped by international politics.
Forget the frigging economics. You want to talk about spaceflight economics, you’re talking about billions of dollars in a economy that deals with trillions. You’re talking about fractions of a percent, and the economics don’t matter nearly as much as the politics.
To be less abstract, The USA can’t put up a base on the moon and start mining minerals not found on earth because 17 different south American and African countries have millions of people who will have conniptions at the notion that evial Yankees are exloiting natural resources on the moon.
To be even less abstract, if you’re a random Chilean, YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW that you are poor because rich Yankee businessmen own ALL the copper mines in Chile and have extracted ALL the wealth from those mines and. deep in your gut, YOU KNOW that letting Yankee businessmen exploit the moon is going to screw over a zillion people who are not Yankees, and you are going to INSIST that your government will do everything within its power to twart Yankee exploiters. Because that’s just the sensible and reasonable and moderate position to take on something as potentially important as destroying the moon.
That’s what kills US spaceflight, as I see it. We can’t conquer the space frontier and simultaneously be loved by all the non-spacefaring nations of earth, and the USA is very much … concerned … with being loved by other nations. So we’ll never be able to claim the planets. Interestingly, China and other non-Western nations are probably immune to this kind of reaction.
Wow – mike, I am duly impressed, although very much not in a good way. The conspiracy is part of a giant group that doesn’t allow us to colonize space, because other people are poor, and so they won’t let us go into space.
Wow, in so many ways wow.
Ferris — What I’m saying is that a lot of Responsible People in the US Government, over the years, have voluntarily imposed limits of different sorts on US sovereignity in space, some of them sensibly (e.g., broadcast satellite spacing in Clarke orbits), and others …. not so sensibly.
Nice people who knew this outer space shit was comic book material agreed during the Johnson Administration to the Outer Space Treaty so the USA could continue to bomb North Viet Nam without protest from the United Nations. Other nice people working for Richard Nixon promised consideration of the Moon Treaty so we could carry on with the much more important issue of bombing Cambodia… and then dropped the Moon Treaty when the US decided to bail out of the Viet Nam War. And while we aren’t bombing Cambodia anymore and paying ransom to neutral states to make nice about our behavior … Guess What? Guess F****** What?
Also, to broaden your education, you might wander down the halls to the Anthropology Department and find a prof or grad student or two with Latin American experience and start chatting about Globalization and the efforts poorer countries make to pay depts to US and European banks and other good stuff. Ask them to sing about how we Yanquis are universally loved.
It’d be silly to call this “conspiracy.” It’s just people doing stuff, afer all. That we see Patterns and Consequences and such like is just our after-the-fact recognition of cause and effect.
Going from abstract to concrete, do you think preserving the right for future American businessmen to mine Helium-3 on the Moon is the first thing on Hilary Clinton’s mind each morning when she goes to work? Or even the 100th? And if not Hilary, not anybody queueing up at Obama’s desk for orders, who exactly in the US government is working for space entrepreneuers? With what kind of success?