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This is a proof of concept for a scheme to send rich people into space for thrill rides. We should not be wasting money on it. Let the rich fund their own research.
I totally disagree.
As a conservative - not to be confused with a libertarian - the proper role of government is to fund basic research when it comes to the sciences. However, having government conduct this work itself is shockingly expensive, time consuming, inefficient, ineffective and wasteful.
This is the beginning of a transition from having our government build rockets for human exploration of space, to having them put those projects out for bid, with the government just providing the specs and a level of oversight. This is going to be waaaay better.
For example, NASA has been working on a similar system to launch humans into space which goes back to the Bush Administration in 2004. Here is a link to the announcement for that program:
When Obama took office in 2009, he recrafted all of that under his own banner and claimed it as his own. Attribute it to whatever president anyone likes, NASA has been working on this for 16 years now and they still have not finished it yet. Also, the amount of money that NASA has spent on this has been truly astonishing.
Absurd.
These people at NASA may have been miracle workers back in the 1960's and 1970's, but that is clearly no longer the case. Now they are very likely getting ready to have their lunch eaten right in front of them and the whole world by Elon Musk and SpaceX, if they succeed in launching this manned mission from Florida today.
We do not need or want our government doing this sort of work. Regulating it and sponsoring it to some degree? Sure. But the work should be left to the commercial sector, and they should be made to compete for these projects. It will make all of them better at this. And that will make us better at this.
As a conservative - not to be confused with a libertarian - the proper role of government is to fund basic research when it comes to the sciences. However, having government conduct this work itself is shockingly expensive, time consuming, inefficient, ineffective and wasteful.
This is the beginning of a transition from having our government build rockets for human exploration of space, to having them put those projects out for bid, with the government just providing the specs and a level of oversight. This is going to be waaaay better.
For example, NASA has been working on a similar system to launch humans into space which goes back to the Bush Administration in 2004. Here is a link to the announcement for that program:
When Obama took office in 2009, he recrafted all of that under his own banner and claimed it as his own. Attribute it to whatever president anyone likes, NASA has been working on this for 16 years now and they still have not finished it yet. Also, the amount of money that NASA has spent on this has been truly astonishing.
Absurd.
These people at NASA may have been miracle workers back in the 1960's and 1970's, but that is clearly no longer the case. Now they are very likely getting ready to have their lunch eaten right in front of them and the whole world by Elon Musk and SpaceX, if they succeed in launching this manned mission from Florida today.
We do not need or want our government doing this sort of work. Regulating it and sponsoring it to some degree? Sure. But the work should be left to the commercial sector, and they should be made to compete for these projects. It will make all of them better at this. And that will make us better at this.
Also times have changed. In the 60's R & D in aviation, technology was primarily all government.
Now we have a solid private sector conducting this work. I doubt we will see much innovation from 'NASA' itself this time around. It will be private sector selling it to govt......
And for what purpose.
I do think that there is some concern for security, etc. but I'm not sure what can be done legitimately at an 'international space station'.........so I'm confused as to what the goals are.
For example, NASA has been working on a similar system to launch humans into space which goes back to the Bush Administration in 2004. Here is a link to the announcement for that program:
When Obama took office in 2009, he recrafted all of that under his own banner and claimed it as his own. Attribute it to whatever president anyone likes, NASA has been working on this for 16 years now and they still have not finished it yet. Also, the amount of money that NASA has spent on this has been truly astonishing.
I may quibble with that version of events. The Obama administration cancelled Constellation, to the accompaniment of much Republican wailing and gnashing of teeth. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act laid the foundation for the development of the current NASA boondoggle, the SLS, and once the Senate had gotten their mitts on that act, we were looking at Constellation v2.0 - predictably overpriced and delayed, but with the pork going to the right companies (Thiokol, Rocketdyne, Boeing et al.)
Senator Shelby has arguably done more to delay the return of manned US capability than any one single person. But man, did he provide Alabama with government cheese or what?
And FTR, the Commercial Crew Program - the one we'll hopefully see come to fruition today - was a 2010 initiative.
Then it turned out that Boeing's replacement will be more expensive per trip, but let's not get into all that.
No, I think we should get into all that.
That is why the SpaceX launch today is so wonderful, in my view. It upsets this whole military-industrial complex mindset that has infected the space program until now. Those people take a million dollar project and turn it into a billion dollar project. This is a spectacularly corrupt use of our tax dollars.
To be fair, this sort of mindset appears to be endemic across our federal government spending apparatus, as demonstrated by the recent multi-trillion pork-fest, justified as part of a much needed society wide panic as a result of the supposed devastation and doom that was threatened upon us from the corona-virus.
Nevertheless, we need to pull out collective heads out of our rumps and start handling our resources in a much smarter way. This launch today is a brief glimmer of sunlight through the cloud-cover of bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency that is our federal government. They appear here today to be doing something right for a change.
Hopefully, this will cause Boeing to make its program more efficient and more cost-effective, as it surely can be with the help provided by a little bit of competitive pressure, provided here by SpaceX, with a hat-tip to NASA and Congress for reforming this process in a way that has enabled this launch today to occur, and future competition from commercial launch companies to eventually take over these duties.
I doubt we will see much innovation from 'NASA' itself this time around.
Agreed. NASA shouldn't be putting together a rocket with 1970s RS-25 engines, what's the point?
They should be coming up with some exotic ion drive or solar sails or electromagnetic radiation shielding, 75% of which won't work or explode. JPL is where the old-school NASA thinking is still around - they're the guys putting a helicopter drone on Mars, and that's the NASA of old.
Hopefully, this will cause Boeing to make its program more efficient and more cost-effective, as it surely can be with the help provided by a little bit of competitive pressure, provided here by SpaceX, with a hat-tip to NASA and Congress for reforming this process in a way that has enabled this launch today to occur, and future competition from commercial launch companies to eventually take over these duties.
I may quibble with that version of events. The Obama administration cancelled Constellation, to the accompaniment of much Republican wailing and gnashing of teeth. The 2010 NASA Authorization Act laid the foundation for the development of the current NASA boondoggle, the SLS, and once the Senate had gotten their mitts on that act, we were looking at Constellation v2.0 - predictably overpriced and delayed, but with the pork going to the right companies (Thiokol, Rocketdyne, Boeing et al.)
Senator Shelby has arguably done more to delay the return of manned US capability than any one single person. But man, did he provide Alabama with government cheese or what?
And FTR, the Commercial Crew Program - the one we'll hopefully see come to fruition today - was a 2010 initiative.
The research and development done by NASA on this manned launch vehicle under Bush was not just deleted and shredded when Obama came into office. The work for a new launch vehicle was NASA's and that was largely based on their effort to develop the best and most successful technologies and processes that they could. Again, they did not just start from scratch on all of that again, just because his holiness Barack Obama was inaugurated and decided to bless and afix his name to this effort.
Regardless, it really does not matter which president(s) were in office when NASA was working on this project. What is important is that they have wasted truly immense amounts of money in this effort, to basically build a more advanced version of the Apollo rockets that launched humans to space and the moon in the 1960's and 1070's.
And they STILL have not been able to finish this project after 16 years consistently working towards this broad goal. THAT is what everyone should be observing here, along with the realization that it is time for NASA to retire from doing this sort of work.
Wednesday is looking like a watershed moment in history. The scheduled afternoon launch of a SpaceX Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 4:33 p.m. would mark the first time a privately owned vehicle takes astronauts into orbit.
Elon Musk, the billionaire space entrepreneur and chief executive of Tesla Inc., founded SpaceX in 2002. If the launch succeeds — bad weather could push it to Saturday — it would be the company’s crowning achievement to date. Musk’s hope is to enable the colonization of Mars. Delivering two astronauts to the International Space Station suggests that his grand ambition might be more than a pipe dream.
In these wilderness years, the U.S. gradually forged a new space exploration relationship between the government and the private sector. In 2004, two years after Musk founded SpaceX, a presidential commission concluded that business should play a larger role than it ever had. “In NASA decisions, the preferred choice for operational activities must be competitively awarded contracts with private and nonprofit organizations,” the commission wrote.
It also defined a more limited role for the U.S. space agency. “NASA's role must be limited to only those areas where there is irrefutable demonstration that only government can perform the proposed activity,” it said.
It appears there are thunderstorms rolling into Kennedy during that time.
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