Stoopid Stuff

You Can NOT be Serious

It appears that what NASA really needs is either a whole lot MORE rocket scientists, or a whole lot less. Because in the annals of painting oneself into a figurative corner, the management at NASA has taken not just the cake, but the entire bakery.

There are exactly two vehicles capable of delivering human passengers and crew to the Space Station - The Shuttle and a Russian Soyuz three-man capsule launched using a traditional disposable rocket motor.

For a whole lot of reasons - economic, political, technical and safety related - the Shuttle will be retired after STS-133 is completed in June of 2010. But why should that be a problem? NASA is building the replacement to the Shuttle, Orion, so certainly any project manager worth her salt would have the new replacement vehicle ready at the point where the previous system was being eliminated. Right?

Uh, no. This is NASA, one of the most dysfunctional bureaucracies in the long dysfunctional history of bureaucracies we're talking about, and nothing ever just works in a manner that makes sense. Orion's first flight is scheduled for 2014, leaving almost exactly five years without America being able to independently deliver personnel to the ISS. So after investing 100 Billion dollars and a vast amount of national energy and prestige, America will have to effectively abandon the Space Station immediately upon completion. Of course, the other participating nations including Russia, the ESA and Japan all have arrangements in place to provide crews to man the Station, so really only America will be left behind. Really.

But not to fear! NASA has a plan. (If there was ever a phrase that ought to cause you to grip your wallet tightly and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction, that one is it.) All we've got to do, you see, is order up some Soyuz capsules from the Russians and we'll just use those to send our crews back and forth to the ISS. What could be simpler.

Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that it's not that simple. A number of problems plague this "solution", in fact. First, logistically, it takes three years to build a Soyuz. So if they started now, today, there would still be a minimum six months to a year gap between the last Shuttle flight and the first Soyuz trip. So why hasn't NASA placed their order?

Well, they don't actually have the funds. They need to get the money allocated from Congress. And as you might have expected, there's a problem with that. The "Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act". Until Russia is certified as not assisting any of these nations in building weapons of mass destruction, there are trade sanctions preventing the purchase of Russian rocket technology. Of course, Congress can provide NASA with a waiver and the funds, and that is what NASA is hoping for. And it's not like Congress would actually be concerned about acting in a two-faced, politically inconsistent fashion when it suited their interests to do so, so this actually COULD come to pass.

Of course, Congress is going on recess the end of September, and then there's the whole presidential elections thing, the transition to the new administration, new priorities and mandates, a different way of doing business, a new "100 days" legislative strategy. Along with the 3 or 4 trillion dollars the US does not have just spent preventing a complete financial collapse, it seems somewhat far fetched that the funds to buy Russian Rockets will be made available in the next year or so, anyway.

So, through a combination of embarrassingly poor planning, political manipulation, economic mismanagement and just out and out blundering, the American investment in that technological jewel in the sky, that pinnacle of scientific achievement, the sole focus of the American Space Program for fifteen years, will have on board NO American crewmen for at least five, and likely closer to seven years.

Not just your tax dollars at work, but an example of the quality of management at the top in America today. We let these people run things, and we keep being surprised when things don't run well. We are surprised by Iraq, by Katrina, by Fannie and Freddie, by all of the ridiculous, predictable failures large and small, over and over again.

It's almost like there's a pattern here...

posted by mikey @ 11:16 AM