Urwumpe
Not funny anymore
- Joined
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I included that plans, but you know, no plan survives the first contact with the enemy.
Its still two (and a half) years to that, Orion is getting worked on, but the aspect that will delay it is actually funding. It currently gets about half of the funding needed for the development, even if you would strap things down and reduce it to a "Dragon plus", instead of a "Apollo reloaded". It is unlikely that more funding will go to the MPCV, especially if the private efforts in the COTS business really work out in their time schedule. Contrary to NASA, they have their funding plans for their projects rock solid, and only little financial uncertainty. NASA is making their recent announcements on hope. Hope that the funding will get raised for those projects that have a concept. But I would say, we all know that more money for NASA is just as impossible as congress permitting NASA any useful cost saving plans (Since they would cost maximal 8000 jobs in the whole USA, not accounting jobs created by the private spaceflight efforts).
So, only by funding, the project would need twice as long, as NASA plans. In 2013, there could be a orbital boilerplate done, but still nothing that resembles the real capsule, since a lot of the subsystems would still be deep in the testing phase with limited funding. In 2012 is a big election, and we all know that such elections also mean changes to NASA.
The MPCV will not be cancelled, because it would be unthinkable and not negotiable for the old-school NASA managers and their political supports. NASA without a manned spaceflight project? Rather the project would be, like the Space Shuttle successors, kept alive and funded with minimal money (which is still a lot), with the project label changing with every presidential election.
If SpaceX hits their milestones this year, the situation would be even worse for NASA: There would be a valid native US spacecraft around, that is better than Russian spacecraft, and only needs little money for getting the final changes towards manned crews done. And this spacecraft could even happily use existing NASA research as base for those parts that are missing. It would be pretty hard to sell why you need to redirect a few billion USD every year for the MPCV, if the capsule will actually never be used (by lack of funding) for those long-range exploration missions, that it is designed for.
You will have a capsule, that simply sits around in a hangar waiting for being used one day for new NASA glory. Which will never come, unless hell freezes over and NASA managers realize that simply begging for a little less money for a comfortable life without heavy fighting for spaceflight is not getting NASA anywhere except on the graveyard of history.
The only way out of this downward trend would not be a Orion test flight in 2013, that has as much engineering worth as the Ares I-X flight. I believe, the only option would be a major change inside NASA and those parts of the US spaceflight industry that grew fat on taxes in the past decades. NASA would have stop developing into a parallel society of spaceflight, and stop developing redundancies for being only virtually independent of private companies (in reality, Boeing, ATK and LockMart currently happily dictate NASA programs). NASA would have to build on private spaceflight for reaching further away. If the MPCV should have any worth, it would need to start beyond LEO and beyond what private companies with access to a public library, the AIAA electronic library and NASAs many technical report servers could do.
And NASA would also have to adopt the pace that private companies use in their development programs. Of course NASA has a different task as those private companies and NASAs research is way more basic and high risk as theirs. But there is also a too relaxed attitude to controlling progress and dealing with known problems. Which you always get eventually if people have ensured funding and no risk to really loose their jobs for doing such poor work. NASA rewards good and bad engineers the same way. And that is not really useful, because the old days of highly motivated and highly skilled NASA engineers are over, unless something happens inside NASA. The brand "NASA" has gotten a lot of damage since 1986.
Any complaints about that strategical analysis?
I know it reads pretty dark and depressive, but really: NASA is today back at the schedules of 2002. Remember ESAS?
