Nasa to be under Pentagon Control?Follow

Congratulations, you have officially doomed us all. I hope you are all happy now.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aGMy_XFWN_VY&refer=home

Obama Moves to Counter China With Pentagon-NASA Link (Update1)

By Demian McLean

Jan. 2 (Bloomberg) -- President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China.

Obama’s transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency’s planned launch vehicle, which isn’t slated to fly until 2015, according to people who’ve discussed the idea with the Obama team.

The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising over China’s space ambitions because of what is perceived as an eventual threat to U.S. defense satellites, the lofty battlefield eyes of the military.

“The Obama administration will have all those issues on the table,” said Neal Lane, who served as President Bill Clinton’s science adviser and wrote recently that Obama must make early decisions critical to retaining U.S. space dominance. “The foreign affairs and national security implications have to be considered.”

China, which destroyed one of its aging satellites in a surprise missile test in 2007, is making strides in its spaceflight program. The military-run effort carried out a first spacewalk in September and aims to land a robotic rover on the moon in 2012, with a human mission several years later.

A Level of Proficiency

“If China puts a man on the moon, that in itself isn’t necessarily a threat to the U.S.,” said Dean Cheng, a senior Asia analyst with CNA Corp., an Alexandria, Virginia-based national-security research firm. “But it would suggest that China had reached a level of proficiency in space comparable to that of the United States.”

Obama has said the Pentagon’s space program -- which spent about $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, almost a third more than NASA’s budget -- could be tapped to speed the civilian agency toward its goals as the recession pressures federal spending.

NASA faces a five-year gap between the retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 and the first launch of Orion, the six- person craft that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station and eventually the moon. Obama has said he would like to narrow that gap, during which the U.S. will pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the station.

NASA Resistance

The Obama team has asked NASA officials about the costs and savings of scrapping the agency’s new Ares I rocket, which is being developed by Chicago-based Boeing Co. and Minneapolis- based Alliant Techsystems Inc.

NASA chief Michael Griffin opposes the idea and told Obama’s transition team leader, Lori Garver, that her colleagues lack the engineering background to evaluate rocket options, agency spokesman Chris Shank said.

“The NASA review team is just asking questions; no decisions have been made,” said Nick Shapiro, a transition spokesman for Obama. The team will pass its finding on to presidential appointees, said Shapiro.

At the Pentagon, there may be support for combining launch vehicles. While NASA hasn’t recently approached the Pentagon about using its Delta IV and Atlas V rockets, building them for manned missions could allow for cost sharing, said Steven Huybrechts, the director of space programs and policy in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is staying on into the new administration.

The Delta IV and Atlas V are built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp., and typically are used to carry satellites.

Already Developed

“No one really has a firm idea what NASA’s cost savings might be, but the military’s launch vehicles are basically developed,” said John Logsdon, a policy expert at Washington’s National Air and Space Museum who has conferred with Obama’s transition advisers. “You don’t have to build them from scratch.”

Meanwhile, Chinese state-owned companies already are assembling heavy-lift rockets that could reach the moon, with a first launch scheduled for 2013. All that would be left to build for a manned mission is an Apollo-style lunar lander, said Griffin, who visited the Chinese space program in 2006.

Moon Landing

Griffin said in July that he believes China will be able to put people on the moon before the U.S. goes back in 2020. The last Apollo mission left the lunar surface in 1972.

“The moon landing is an extremely challenging and sophisticated task, and it is also a strategically important technological field,” Wang Zhaoyao, a spokesman for China’s space program, said in September, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

China plans to dock two spacecraft in orbit in 2010, a skill required for a lunar mission.

“An automated rendezvous does all sorts of things for your missile accuracy and anti-satellite programs,” said John Sheldon, a visiting professor of advanced air and space studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. “The manned effort is about prestige, but it’s also a good way of testing technologies that have defense applications.”

China’s investments in anti-satellite warfare and in “cyberwarfare,” ballistic missiles and other weaponry “could threaten the United States’ primary means to project its power and help its allies in the Pacific: bases, air and sea assets, and the networks that support them,” Gates wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

Anti-Satellite Warfare

China is designing satellites that, once launched, could catch up with and destroy U.S. spy and communication satellites, said a Nov. 20 report to Congress from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. China’s State Council Information Office declined to comment on the nation’s anti- satellite or manned programs.

To boost cooperation between NASA and the Pentagon, Obama has promised to revive the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which oversaw the entire space arena for four presidents, most actively from 1958 to 1973.

The move would build ties between agencies with different cultures and agendas.

“Whether such cooperation would succeed remains to be seen,” said Scott Pace, a former NASA official who heads the Washington-based Space Policy Institute. “But the questions are exactly the ones the Obama team needs to ask.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Demian McLean in Washington at dmclean8@bloomberg.net.

Claiming total ignorance of the situation, explain why this dooms anyone/thing.

I was under the impression that the space program always had a defense slant to it -- witness the space race with the USSR and the tapping of the Air Force for space crews, the use of the Navy in recovery, etc etc.

The main reason I personally am concerned is because they want to cut funding entirely for the Space shuttle and the Orion program, and rely entirely on the much smaller military Atlas rocket. This will effectivly mean we will have almost no heavy lift capability for several years. This will pretty much doom the ISS program, and is not a real solution. Plus, by putting Nasa under the military, it opens up Nasa's entire budget to be reappropriated and redistributed to other military programs. This will have the effect of killing much of the civil science that Nasa currently performs, and will lead to more classified programs and data that the aerospace engineering community won't be able to see without a security clearance. Plus you are adding a whole nother layer of beurocracy to the mix, less efficient purchasing and contracts, less freedom to persue non military goals, like climate studies.

Essentially, if this goes through, Obama puts space science back at least 10 years, if not more.

Well, I can't comment on that. But, if the goal is to get into space faster and beat the Chinese menace, doesn't it make sense that they wouldn't be doing it in a completely counter-productive way, jokes about the government aside?I didn't get that from the phrase...It sounds as though this is for purposes of getting the guys into space and not an entire folding of NASA under the Pentagon.

Again, I'm not even going to try to speak as an expert here. I'm just commenting on what I'm reading.

What we really need is a permanent anchor in space. Something large enough that we could actually start using it as a beachhead for expansion in space. There are billions of high metal content rocks in space, why not mine them in space, refine them in space, and build things out of them in space. Once we can do that, we can truly begin to build on a large scale. To get there, we need a very large lift capacity from earth to space. We don't really ahve the material technology to make anything like a "skyhook" space teather yet, which would be the ideal solution for cheap surface to orbit mass transfer, but we do have the technology to build a larger, safer launch vehicle.

The goal isn't speed. Unless the chinese decide to head to mars, there is no need to beat them anywhere else. We have already been. The goal is space infrastrucrure, and to get there we need a large shuttile type solution. it should be a dual stage to orbit design, similar to Spaceship one and white night in concept, but far larger. People forget the problems that abound with capsule re-entry. You have 0 control. With a shutle, even with the loss of Columbia, you have a far greater safety margin, and that is what, 40 year old technology? We have had designs on the books for years that would be suitable. The problem with the shuttle currently is ti is vulnerable to wing strikes. by launching froma mothership of some sort you eliminate that problem and gain a huge lifting capacity. We can make much larger ceramic tiles these days than we could back when the shuttle was designed, so a new craft would not have the same issues.

Instead, the Obama proposal is to use smaller, existing rockets and forgo any new technology development. if we eliminate the ISS, we might be able to maintain most of our existing infrastructure with those rockets, but we lose the ability to launch larger satilites. We also lose the ability to service satilites in orbit.

Any solution that calls for a capsule as the primary crew quarters is wrong. The orian program http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/ was just slightly less wrong than going back to Atlas rockets.

I posted this before. The Space Elevator.

edit - finicky smilies!

Edited, Jan 4th 2009 3:25am by Elinda

Space Communists?

The world is doomed.

What we really need is a permanent anchor in space. Something large enough that we could actually start using it as a beachhead for expansion in space.

Arguable. What isn't is that isn't a great time politically to expand spending on NASA, regardless of what the best thing to do may be.

While it may not be a good time to spend more money, I don't think scrapping existing projects meant to do it correctly, in favor of cheaper ways to get it done first, is a correct way to go about doing it.

I don't see the problem, really. The Shuttle is at the end of it's lifespan, using military lifting capacity as a bridge to the next generation vehicle isn't a crazy idea.

It's the diminished lifting capacity. That, and the shuttle fleet really isn't end of life. Yes, the wing strikes are a risk, but they are on the same order of other risks associated with spaceflight. The older ones could do with a rebuild and a new wing box, but they still are better than an uncontrollable rentry in a capsule.

A (an?) yuhangyuan.

At about 1/4 of the cost of the bailout package, that's quite a steal.

180 Billion so that I could use a Fisher Space Pen every day. Worth every penny.

Edited, Jan 6th 2009 12:48pm by baelnic