NASA without government funding

[2046]

*** Split from another thread. - sN ***

Okay new question.

What about NASA?

The private sector was nowhere near doing anything NASA was able to do with centralized planning. Even state governments and smaller governments could not have accomplished space travel or scientific discovery without government control.

The rewards of the NASA program have been far beyond just flying around in space. It has given jobs to many, triggered a greater scientific understanding of the universe and provided thousands of patents which the private sector makes valuable use of and was the only way to beat the Soviet Union into space.

A similar argument could be made for DARPA and the present day internet.

Edited April 22, 2009 by softwareNerd
Split topic

[K-Mac]

NASA is made up of independent contractors, first of all. I'm from Houston and it was very difficult to find anyone that said they worked for NASA and didn't really work for a private company contracted by NASA.

Second, how do you know what the private sector could've done if most of space travel technology weren't tied up in NASA contracts? Are you not aware of several private sector companies working to get into space on their own?

And finally, some aspects of NASA probably fall under defense (which is a proper role of government)...like a missile defense system...so I'm not so sure the government shouldn't be involved at all. I just think they're involved way too much.

I can't help but wonder how much brains and creativity has been squashed by immoral governments throughout history. If men had been free since the beginning of mankind, I can only imagine how much easier and free our lives would be now.

[softwareNerd]

What about NASA?

Are you familiar with Henry Hazlitt's book "Economics in One Lesson"? If not, I'd strongly suggest it. (It's available online, and paper versions are $10.)

First, the government has no more money than the private sector, unless the government first takes that money away from the private sector. Therefore, if the government can spend $ nnn on something, some private groups clearly could, if the government were to leave the money in those private hands.

Second, is the argument that if the money had stayed in private hands it would never have been spent on NASA-type things. That's debatable. If NASA really did produce values, then people would be ready to pay for those values. This, in turn, would justify private investment in creating those values. What NASA amounts to -- at best -- is the government saying: we know you want to spend your money on other values, but we're going to take it from you and spend it on these (NASA-related) values.

Finally, it is almost certain that a private alternative to NASA would have had better focus, because they've be driven primarily by profit (value-creation), as opposed to values and prestige. Also, within the scope of what they'd have done, they'd likely have done so with a tenth of NASA's budget.

Since you started this thread on the 1930's, consider the famous Tennessee Valley Authority. it is almost certain that if the TVA had not been created by the government, private power companies would have filled the gap. Only, they'd have done so with a time-table and cost that did not rob from Peter to give to Paul (while robing from Paul to give to Peter).

[th3ranger]

I think that thanks to the likes of NASA, humanity is far behind in space flight than where it could be. Let me demonstrate this:

In the 40 or so years of government sponsored space flight almost no further progress has been made in human (or otherwise) spaceflight. If space travel had advanced at the same rate that aviation did you should be able to buy a cheap commercial ticket to mars! Instead, It costs much the same price to put a pound of mass into orbit today as it did in the 1960's!

Fortunately, the private space industry is starting to take off, mainly because there will be no alternative after the shuttles are retired. ISS will still have to be supplied, and some enterprising business people are starting to realize this, I quote:

Musk [the CEO and CTO of SpaceX] said "Long-term plans call for development of a heavy lift product and even a super-heavy, if there is customer demand. We expect that each size increase would result in a meaningful decrease in cost per pound to orbit. For example, dollar cost per pound to orbit dropped from $4,000 to $1,300 ($8,800/kg to $2,900/kg) between Falcon 1 and Falcon 5. Ultimately, I believe $500 per pound ($1,100/kg) or less is very achievable." [11]

SpaceX was founded in June 2002 by PayPal founder Elon Musk who has invested $100 million of his own money as of March 2006. On August 4, 2008 SpaceX accepted a further $20 million investment from the Founders Fund.[1]

SpaceX had 160 employees in November 2005 and more than 500 by July 2008.[2] [3] The launch crew in the Marshall Islands has 25 people with 6 in mission control. This small number, compared to similar space launch companies is part of Musk's design to reduce costs. Musk believes the high prices of other space-launch services are driven in part by unnecessary bureaucracy. He has stated that one of his goals is to improve the cost and reliability of access to space, ultimately by a factor of ten.

In January 2005, SpaceX bought a 10% stake in Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.

On 18 August 2006, SpaceX announced that it has won a NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract to demonstrate cargo delivery to the space station with a possible option for crew transport.

On 23 December 2008, SpaceX announced that it had won a Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract (as part of the COTS program) which guarantees NASA missions worth of 1.6 billion dollars for resupplying the International Space Station after the Space Shuttle retires in 2010. [4]

SpaceX announced plans to pursue a manned commercial space program through the end of the decade.[12]

On Friday 18 August 2006, NASA announced that the company was one of two selected to provide crew and cargo resupply demonstration contracts to the International Space Station (ISS) under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. SpaceX will demonstrate crew and cargo resupply using the SpaceX Dragon, a conventional blunt-cone ballistic capsule, which is capable of carrying 7 persons or a mixture of personnel and cargo to and from low Earth orbit.[13] It will be launched atop a Falcon 9 vehicle. The nose cone of the vehicle has a hinged cap, which opens to reveal a standard ISS Common Berthing Mechanism, which allows the Dragon to dock to the U.S. segment of the ISS. NASA's plan calls for SpaceX demonstration flights between 2008 and 2010. SpaceX may receive up to $278 million if it meets all NASA milestones.[14][15][16]

First flight of Dragon is planned for 2009 from Cape Canaveral.

Space X is not the only company planning private space flights:

The development of a larger, more powerful space plane capable of reaching 120km was announced in 2004. It will be named Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo, and is currently under development by The Spaceship Company, a joint venture between Scaled Composites and Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, as part of the Tier 1b program. The Virgin Galactic spaceliner plans to operate a fleet of five of these craft in passenger-carrying private spaceflight service starting no earlier than 2011.[4][5]

The vehicle itself will not be unveiled to the public until just before flight testing starts, expected in late 2009. Following a series of 50 – 100 test flights, the first paying customers are expected to fly aboard the craft in 2011.[6] In August 2005, Virgin Galactic stated that if the upcoming suborbital service with SpaceShipTwo is successful, the follow-up SpaceShipThree will be an orbital craft.[7]

So as you can see, NASA, like all government ventures, is doing a terrible job. Until recently, NASA's failure rate was deplorable. Private industry, if it is not taxed to death by Obama, is about to unleash a space travel revolution. There are literally solid gold asteroids in the asteroid belt (or at least there is no reason there shouldn't be.) It has been proven that Mars has more carbon in it's crust than Earth. Why is that significant? DIAMONDS. BIG ONES. There is very great wealth out there to be taken, even in our own solar system, that could easily recoup the costs of getting up there. These considerations will never occur to a government agency, only a for-profit company. Or for that matter any other useful discoveries. The trickle that has come out of NASA is pathetic compared to the cost of maintaining the agency.

Edited April 20, 2009 by th3ranger

[D'kian]

Okay new question.

What about NASA?

The private sector was nowhere near doing anything NASA was able to do with centralized planning. Even state governments and smaller governments could not have accomplished space travel or scientific discovery without government control.

Essentially you're asking what things would have been like had NASA not been founded. That's simply not possible, but one can speculate.

For starters the reason NASA was set up in the first place involved unifying independent space programs by the Navy and Army. America's first two satellites, Explorer One and Vanguard, were launched respectively by the Army and Navy. What one immediately sees is that there would have been a military space program anyway, NASA or no NASA. Probably the Defense Department would have unified such programs into a military space agency. That would have been a proper government function, considering that various satellites do provide many useful military functions.

Now, as K-Mac pointed out, all of NASA's hardware is contracted to private companies. All military hardware, too. So the big aerospace players that furnished NASA would have supplied the military agency as well. They, in turn, could have offered their services for launching civilian satellites, be they for science, business or any other reason.

Would the military have launched manned spacecraft? Almost certainly, if for no other reasons than the Soviets did. Would they have launched probes to the Moon and other planets? Possibly to the Moon, possibly not elsewhere.

After that the crystal ball gets fuzzy.

But do let's talk about what NASA did:

1) Put people on the Moon. That was as great as achievements can get, more so if you consider the technology available in the 60s. But NASA dropped the Apollo program just as it took its first steps on the Moon. I mean, it was fine to send a few exploratory flights, plant eh flag, bring back sample, but then what? Can you see a private company invest $11 billion (ins 1960s dollars) on a project and then just write it off? No follow up? None?

2) The Space Shuttle. It was meant to lower the cost of entering Low Earth Orbit, and to make space accessible to more people (not restricted to a highly talented, highly trained astronaut corps). Glossing over a long, complicated development history, it wound up raising the price of putting people into orbit (although more people could go up there). Still, at many points during development decisions were made to save on development costs at the expense of higher operating costs. I don't see a for-profit company thinking so short-term.

[D'kian]

I forgot to add:

3) The destruction of two Shuttles. Challenger's death was foretold, anounced and could easily have been prevented by the simple expedient of scrubbing the launch. The flaw in the joint design still should have been fixed, but that particular launch in cold weather should never have taken place. Columbia is even worse. For years NASA knew foam insulation from the external tank was coming loose and it was dangerous. NASA knew there had been impacts that had damaged the heat tiles. After Columbia's last launch, the people at NASA knew there had been a strike, they could ahve at least checked how bad it had been.

Columbia was on a long mission (2 weeks), and could have stayed up several more days. If the extent of the damage had been known, which it could have been, a day or two after the launch, a rescue mission might have been mounted (at least they could have tried). Maybe repairs could even be made. The point is no one even tried to asses the damage, and sugestions to do so were quashed by bureaucrats intent on covering their asses.

To be sur eprivate companies ahve endured failure, too. SpaceX lost three Falcon I rockets before going into orbit, for example. To be sure, also, rocketry is a risky business (a rocket can be fairly described as being propelled by a slow, controlled explosion; if anything goes out of control things explode). The Soviets/Russians have had their share of failures and fatalities, too. LIke air travel, accidents will happen. They can be minimized but not eliminated altogether. Still, NASA was remiss by not taking every precaution when it came to manned flights. And foam is still breaking off from the Shuttle's ET.

[2046]

Thanks for the input.

[Grames]

Thanks for the input.

The current global warming craze is mostly the doing of James Hansen, NASA employee doing Good Work™ for the government on your behalf.

[RussK]

Central planning had quite a lot of influence in guiding space technology to where it is now. It's true that in order to finance their activities the government must expropriate the wealth of its citizens, or print money for that purpose. So although the private sector had the ability to fund all of the functions of NASA, it took the creation of NASA with its central planning to propel the space industry and technology to where it's at now. Obviously, the expropriation of production, and the central planning for non-military purposes is wrong; however, there's no doubt in my mind that without NASA, manned space travel would be primitive to non-existent. Personally, I could care less about manned space travel as something that should be strived for and funded so fervently in our day and age, but in the future it may be more practical; and if the free market is the standard to be used, that practicality would be the determining factor for the growth and improvement of new technology. In that light, it's my opinion that NASA has harmed the development of the space industry and technology by promoting and funding manned space travel, instead of scrapping it and putting full focus on non-manned, satellite launch and repair technology--which is what the private sector would almost certainly be exclusively focused on and concerned with--for government and military satellites. Doing that would bolster the already existing private contractors who develop such things for NASA, and if NASA's role was removed from non-government purposes, it would create new leaders in, and somewhat change the industry, if not create a real industry.

[prosperity]

Fortunately, the private space industry is starting to take off, mainly because there will be no alternative after the shuttles are retired. ISS will still have to be supplied, and some enterprising business people are starting to realize this, I quote:

My grandfather was telling me about this guy who designed and built a spacecraft that left the Earth's orbit and then came back down to Earth again, with no heat shield. It was basically a shuttlecock shaped kind of thing that spun like those little "helicopter" seeds that fall off those tipu trees and was able to "float" back to Earth rather slowly. Not sure where he got this info from, but I'd love to see something like that. From what I understand, it cost a LOT less than the space shuttles that NASA has built for them.

[Steve D'Ippolito]

Not sure if you might be refering to the Rutan SpaceShipOne design here. But the real problem is not that the craft is 100 miles or more above the ground and needs a way to "fall" gently. (The Rutan design certainly solves this, but SpaceShipOne does not go into orbit, it just goes up, then comes back down.)

The problem is that a craft in orbit is moving at over five miles a second, 100 miles or more above the ground. This velocity must be gotten rid of somehow. Without doing so the instant the craft gets into significant atmosphere, no matter how gently it drops to get there, it will be moving at that speed and you will get friction. The blades of the helicopter seed style design would probably get ripped or burned off instantly. One could theoretically kill all of the velocity by using a rocket aimed into the direction of travel, but that would take almost as much rocket fuel as it took to get the satellite up there in the first place. Then you would need to multiply the size of the launch rocket by some ridiculously large number in order to boost not just the mass of the payload, but the mass of the whole original rocket and fuel into orbit. If we had to do this, we would probably never have put a man--or anything else we wanted to recover--into space.

The NASA (and Soviet/Russian) method is to use the force of friction with the atmosphere to do the braking--first the orbit must be lowered so as to get into thicker atmosphere (using a *much* smaller amount of rocket fuel!) and then atmospheric friction takes care of the rest. As you know this heats the spacecraft up tremendously, hence the need for a heat shield that in the case of the shuttle (hopefully!) won't burn up. For earlier spacecraft the shield could be allowed to be consumed, at least to the point where it could not be re-used.

For the Apollo missions the re-entry speed was over 7 miles per second, by the way--the spacecraft was not in orbit, it was arriving from deep space and was therefore moving at *at least* escape velocity.

[Grames]

The Rotary Rocket Corp had built a prototype of the Roton One. The rotary blades were for decelerating only, and of a special design. The craft got its name from the rotating annular aerospike engine which was its main propulsion.

[Steve D'Ippolito]

The Rotary Rocket Corp had built a prototype of the Roton One. The rotary blades were for decelerating only, and of a special design. The craft got its name from the rotating annular aerospike engine which was its main propulsion.

It looks to me like they were planning to use a very different kind of heat shield and use the blades only for hovering and coming in to land, post decelleration.

[Grames]

It looks to me like they were planning to use a very different kind of heat shield and use the blades only for hovering and coming in to land, post decelleration.

Yes, post main deceleration, after they were sub-sonic at least if not slower. The heat shield would have been an active barrier of steam emitted in a layer across the bottom surface.