...three bad words I wouldn't want to hear after launch:

Unrecoverable Application Error

...

they've been having financial troubles since the Apollo program ended,
because Congress stopped writing them blank checks.

It isn't so much that they were given blank checks, it is that the public lost interest. Sure it was "sexy" up through the first moon landing, but after that, the public got tired of it.

The other thing that hurt was that NASA couln't decide whether it was ain the research business or the transportation business. NASA probably should have focussed almost exclusively on space exploration and research, including a space station, while leaving satellite launches to the private sector. That would have concentrated their resources into work that private industry otherwise probable would not have been doing, like the Hubble telescope and the missions to Mars and beyond.

The space shuttle really hurt too. Its a nice looking machine but it cost ten times as much per pound to send something into orbit than disposable rockets. There was also supposed to be a fleet of 20 of them so there could be more launches, but they were expensive and Congress wouldn't fund them all. Relying on those few ships they did build meant they would be worked harder and be more likely to fail. When they failed, there was one less to do the work. As we have seen since the last one crashed, the space program has been stuck in the mud. If, we had still been building Saturn Vs at one or two per year, the space station could have been put up in one or two launches rather than the 20 + required by the shuttle.

The last problem I will mention is the famous government policy of "cost plus." That means the government pays the rocket companies the cost of building the rocket plus a percentage. As you can guess, those companies are very top heavy with administration, most with more admin than production workers. That's done just to run up costs so the "plus" will pay out more. That was fine during the Cold War and the race to the moon, but it hasn't been practical for the last 20 years.

Well, let's just say that it is a government agency and they are all screwed up. The surest way to ruin the best program is to let the government get involved.

Good post. A fried of mine and I used to discuss the NASA issue at great length, and you mention a lot of issues we used to discuss. My particular pet issues are the lack of funding for NASA, and the way that administrations have long ceased placing enough (IMO etc) emphasis on space travel and exploration. Thus, the lack of sexy, the lack of media attention.

Personally, I'm pretty sure that we've lost all hope when somebody like fucking Britney Spears, et al, is more "important" and known and aspired to by kids than someone like the captain of the latest shuttle mission.

"Mommy, daddy, I want to be a vacuous twit with fake titties and a ton of unwarranted, unjustifiable media attention when I grow up" just doesn't have the same ring as "I want to be an astronaut," but for some reason you don't hear the latter anymore.

...I hear you on that one.

I used to remember when every launch was an event, Mercury, Gemini, the Apollo orbital tests then finally the Moon missions. Hell even the X-plane tests were big stuff back then. Favourite launch announcer: Walter Cronkite

Now shuttle launches and missions are back page news in the 'B' or 'C' sections of most dailies or 20 second vid clips on the evening broadcast. I agree that much of the exploration is best handled by robotic probes which have become highly sophisticated and are a fraction of the cost of sending a manned mission. I have a gallery of images from the Martian surface, Saturn, and from the Hubble (which i consider to be one of the most successful projects even given the "correction" that needed to be made).

I think the Europeans have it right. Band together with your best technological minds & make a system that works.

Getting back to the SR angle, in an upcoming campaign (once Arsenal comes out) I am heading back to the the feeling of those "Right Stuff" days.

Thanks.

NASA has been underfunded for decades now. They could easily triple its budget on just a fraction of the pork barrel spending every year, not to mention all the other waste and fraud. I think the planned mission to Mars was an attempt at getting attention back to the space program, but it was too long term and ambitious. People these days don't have the attention span to wait 20 minutes let alone 20 years for a project. Had the goal been to have a series of new longer duration moon landings, including some to set up small observatories on the far side of the moon, that might have worked.

You are so right about society today. People want their 15 minutes of fame and that's it. A poll not long ago in England showed that over 60% of kids wanted to be stars, well up from 20 years ago. There's a moive out called Idiocracy which takes place in the future where society has been progressively dumbed down by what passes for media today. It was kinda funny, but perhaps too prescient.

Why Arsenal? Or do you mean that you're waiting for the book before you start the campaign? I ask because if Arsenal is slated to have spacey goodness in it, I might get it (wait though, isn't Arsenal rules? hmm). Maybe not. I would like to see more stuff on space in SR, in the vein of YotC's sections on it.

FATAL EXCEPTION ERROR




-karma

Star-Linux? Starux?

Argh! Starbucks! They made it to the 24th too!

Eh...I don't know where the heck you got those numbers.

There was never a plan during the construction period to build 20 shuttles.

As for cost, shuttles paced disposable rockets quite nicely, within a factor of two (not 10). The average US disposable rocket costs about $10,000 per pound to orbit, with some of the newer ones sliding toward $6000/pound. Depending on how you calculate the costs of shuttle flights (total program cost / number of flights, or per flight fly-away cost), the shuttle has cost either $26,000 per pound to orbit or $1,200 per pound.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle...e_program#Costs

Each shuttle launch, taken by itself, is relatively cheap at $60 million per flight, and the shuttle has an exceptional payload capacity not really exceeded since the Saturn and Energia rockets left service. What makes it look expensive is when you factor in the entire annual shuttle budget (which entails supporting an army of personnel, about 10,000 highly paid aerospace workers), but even then, a good flight rate (the dozen or so flights per year anticipated in the early 1980s) would leave the shuttle less expensive than expendables.

But when you lower flight rates to 3-4 per year and then have some years without flights, and add up the total cost of the program per date...yes, the shuttle does look very expensive. It's all in how you cook the books.

I think you overestimate us . The ESA (European Space Agency) has a lot of bureaucratic crap to contend with. Like, every document has to be available at least in three languages, French, German and English.

One great cost saver is the fact that the ESA doesn't support its own human spaceflight program, it's much less expensive to pay the americans or russians for it. There were, of course, numerous plans to build an own spaceshuttle.

The DLR, the german aerospace center, trains europe's astronauts just a few hundred meters from where I am sleeping . I even saw the shuttle enterprise twice, inflight. Of course, since the enterprise never actually got into space, I saw her sitting on her carrier, a modified 747.

I was also a radio amateur, and me and my buddies were actually scheduled to talk to our first astronaut in space (but that sadly didn't happen).

Do you a credible citation for the threats?

The BDB's problem was lack of market. There was no programmatic or commercial interest in putting 500-ton payloads into orbit. The classic BDB, the Seadragon [1] lost funding due to the Vietnam War and NASA cutbacks. Later, potential applications for BDBs like Solar Power Satellite construction never got off the ground.
[1] http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/searagon.htm

You don't need to threaten anyone to kill the BDBs. The government money wasn't there in the 1960s, '70s, and 80s, and the market wasn't there in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.

Do you have a citation for that? Since Challenger (i.e., the last 85 launches or so), the shuttles' payloads have been payloads suited best to the shuttle, like manned experiment missions or very large items (e.g., Hubble and shuttle modules). The only expendables able to launch those payloads are unique in that they have higher launch costs than the shuttle, like the Titan 4 monstrosity.

I mean, really, why does everyone have to think she was a kook because she wore a diaper. She was trained to wear a diaper, she was an astronaut, "Oh please hold the launch a sec, I have to piddle..." Also go check out the variety of diapers availiable from a bridal store. Of all the things that happened I can't believe that America's humor can't get around the simple potty joke and really make fun of the true underlying issues.

too true.

Only if you subscribe the the idea that this is the SR3- forum instead of all SR.

Then all you have to do is not bring it up.