TXA to Hutchison: End the SLS Pork, Fund Commercial Space
TXA PR — Austin, TX, AUG 30, 2011 – The Texas Space Alliance (TXA) urged Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and the rest of the Texas Congressional delegation to give their full support to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher’s call for transferring funding to American spacecraft companies and end plans for a giant “pork” rocket being promoted by the Senator and others. On Wednesday, 24 Aug 2011, Rep. Rohrabacher (R-CA) boldly called for an emergency funding transfer of NASA’s unobligated funds into their commercial crew program in response to the failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket to deliver a Progress supply freighter to the International Space Station (ISS).
“This funding transfer will rapidly accelerate the progress of American companies currently developing innovative crew and cargo transport vehicles here in the United States – all of which are based in or have significant and expanding operations in Texas,” said TXA’s Rick Tumlinson. “These companies; SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and Blue Origin are leading a revolution, and they need to see our legislators fighting for them – not against them.”
The TXA believes Congress should cancel plans for what many are now calling the Senate Launch System (SLS), a $38 billion dollar earmark to produce a giant government rocket not due to fly until 2021 – if ever. SLS would cannibalize funds previously intended for other projects, including many based at Johnson Space Center. It would also gut the aforementioned commercial crew programs intended to create a new US commercial space fleet to carry astronauts to the space station rather than outsourcing the job to Russian government vehicles.
“While it is well meant attempt to save jobs, it seems doomed to fail in the end – something our workers, space program and taxpayers cannot afford…literally.” said TXA’s Wayne Rast. “SLS may even starve the space station – a Houston based program – eat exploration technology dollars that would be spent right here, and force our Texas-based Astronaut corps to fly to space on Russian rockets. SLS would be better off de-funded so that money can be spent on true American innovation and progress. Let’s keep our Texas workforce on the leading edge of tomorrow, and build that future in Texas.”
Concluded Tumlinson: “Senator Hutchison, you and others can continue to force funding for dead-end white collar “jobs” programs like SLS down NASA’s throat and continue exporting US jobs to Russia or you can support space exploration and our own private companies – who will preserve American leadership on the frontier, lead to the birth of a Texas NewSpace industry and progress for the state and for the nation. The people of Texas are watching.”
The Texas Space Alliance is a non-profit 501(c)(4) organization of Texans who believe our frontier heritage and pioneering spirit make the Lone Star State the obvious home for the opening of the next frontier in space. We are fighting for Texas to move urgently and decisively to become a Space State, home to a new space industry including manufacturing, research and space flight, with Texas as a center of space exploration and science for the world.
For more information on this issue, the TXA, our Texas Space Plan, or to become a personal or corporate member, please see the Texas Space Alliance website at: https://Texasspacealliance.org
12 responses to “TXA to Hutchison: End the SLS Pork, Fund Commercial Space”
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The problem is that the SLS program is not the pork. NASA is supposed to be focusing its resources on beyond LEO programs and building beyond LEO transportation systems.
Continuing the $3 billion a year ISS program as work-fare for the emerging private spaceflight companies is the real pork. There’s nothing wrong the government helping to get a new, mutually beneficial, private spaceflight industry off the ground as long as that industry in the long run is not dependent on the government and tax payer dollars for its existence.
Marcel, the plan is for NASA to turn over orbital transport to the private sector first. That would allow it to focus on BEO missions. That means putting the appropriate resources into that program for the next five years or so, funding Orion as a backup, and providing a lower level of funding for SLS. Congress has reversed those priorities in a way that guarantees we’ll be relying on Soyuz for far too long. Why would anyone want that?
And what precisely are you suggesting for ISS? We should dump it? Unrealistic. Commercialize it? Not fully possible. It has value beyond serving as a destination for commercial crew.
Good statement from TXA.
ISS is just starting to be used properly as a scientific platform for long duration flights and space based industries such as satelite refuelling. The more ecconomic its operation the more that can be done. The sooner comercial crew works the sooner you get tourist space stations and private scientific reasurch. The higher the flight rate the lower the fixed costs per flight so costs come down. As the costs come down more uses for space are found and flight rates increase and the cost to orbit reduces.
Private space is developing new bigger cheaper rockets and this opens the door for multi part spacecraft built in orbit for much less than building an super big rocket and launching a single large spacecraft. loog at the options from new space, Red Dragon, or Dragon and a habitation module to go deep space?
We just call SLS the Social Launch System 😉
Marcel, whatever your opinion on priorities may be there is a fundamental problem you have to consider: without ISS there is no _current_ destination for commercial LEO. Without a destination to go, nobody will build a transportation system for it (or will take many years longer) and without a transportation system no new destinations will be built. Just take a look back at Bigelow’s America’s Space Price for a demonstration of that problem.
It is not “pork”, it is a pretty useful and sensible investment in the future.
SLS isn’t, at least not on any metric that I can think of.
SLS isn’t a “beyond LEO transportation system” either, that would be something along the line of Nautilus-X – and you don’t really need SLS for that.
@Doug Messier
Spending $3 billion dollars plus a year supporting the ISS program for Commercial Crew beyond 2015 won’t give NASA much money for beyond LEO programs. $12 billion over the next four years should be enough to finish experiments aboard the ISS so that NASA can focus all of its manned spaceflight related funds for beyond LEO missions and development and for purchasing the next generation of Bigelow space stations as LEO way stations and Lagrange point storm shelters.
Private space programs need to focus on space tourism and launching commercial satellites into orbit and not trying to integrate themselves into big government programs in order to have continuous access to tax payer dollars.
@Marcus Zottl
Commercial spaceflight companies shouldn’t be focusing on big government programs. They should be focusing on space tourism. While private spaceflight companies will have to wait for the SLS to launch the largest Bigelow space stations (BA 2100) which will weigh 65 tonnes plus and will require 8 meter farings, private industry still has the capacity to launch smaller Bigelow space stations such as the Sundancer or the BA 330. So they don’t need the ISS to give them purpose.
Any manned interplanetary vehicle will require several hundred tonnes of hydrogen, water, or polyethylene mass shielding in order to protect astronaut’s brains from several months of exposure to the deleterious effects of heavy nuclei. Pictures that I’ve seen of the Nautius-X don’t even come close to being adequately shielded.
Marcel, I think you’re getting some of this backward. Bigelow is all ready to go with his private stations. What he needs is a commercial transport industry. He can’t afford to fund that himself. The government is not going to support the commercial industry either unless its needs are met by supply ISS.
The cost of station is an issue, but I can’t see NASA abandoning before 2020. Once commercial crew development is done, then there will be money freed up for BEO work. Also, I’m not convinced that SLS as envisioned is the right way to go if you’re worried about costs. The operating expenses may be too high.
@ Marcel F. Williams
You can’t just simply take ISS costs and say that it is all just to fund commercial LEO transport. There are still a lot of things we need to learn in space to make a long duration deep space mission realistically achievable (radiation shielding as you pointed out, VASIMR, how about emergency medical procedures like surgery in zero-g (you can’t fly back home in a few hours to fix it) and many many more). The ISS is actually the only place right now where we can try a lot of those things. If you stop funding ISS the only thing you will accomplish is to further delay any new BEO missions even more.
So saying that all those costs are just to fund commercial space isn’t only wrong, I think it is almost a lie. How did you even come up with those numbers? There isn’t even a budget for that time frame yet.
Oh and as far as I can remember: NASA “agreed” to continue ISS through 2020, but it wasn’t them who came up with that idea, it was the Russians and ESA.
But to be honest: I wish the international partners would increase their spending on ISS, because if NASA has to spend less on ISS, then maybe that part of the budget will be less of an issue in discussions about the future.
btw, a prediction: SLS in its current incarnation (aka Frankenstein’s Ares-Direct Monster) will either never fly at all, or if it actually gets built, then there will be at most like ~3 flights before all get’s shut down (again…) because it isn’t affordable to do anything with that kind of booster, because from a current standpoint it is imho totally unrealistic that a government space program will ever again get to Apollo like funding levels that would be needed.
Doug, I hope this site will still be running a few years from now so I can dig up this statement and see if I was right 😉
@Doug Messier
I’m a strong supporter of using tax payer money to help develop the Commercial Crew industry for enterprises that are not dependent on government for their survival. However, I’m not a supporter of spending $3 billion a year on the ISS as a make-work program for the Commercial Crew industry. Plus there’s not enough manned flights from the US side to the ISS (4 or 5 flights per year) to support more than one company.
There are about 100,000 people on the planet that could afford a $25 million tourist flight to a Bigelow space station. Even if only 0.1% of that number bought a ticket every year, that would be 100 paying passengers per year which could mean about 30 or 40 tourism flights per year (enough to support several private companies).
Additionally there are probably billions of people around the world who would be willing to risk a few dollars every year through a space lotto system for a chance to travel to a commercial space station.
The SLS should be a remarkable family of shuttle derived rocket configurations using the LOX/LH2 core vehicle, upper stage, and SRBs. Boeing has a crew concept that just uses the LOX/LH2 core vehicle with the Orion to achieve orbit. Other configurations using an upper stage could also transport humans anywhere within cis-lunar space without the need for SRBs. But with four 5-segment SRBs and an upper stage, the SLS might come close to being able to lift nearly 200 tonnes into orbit. The SLS is going to be a remarkable machine with a large variety of uses.
@Marcus Zottl
The ISS was supposed to be decommissioned in by 2016 in order for the funds to be used for the Constellation program. Now that there is no Constellation program, NASA is suddenly continuing its 30 year long LEO programs for still another decade. And there’s even talk about continuing it even beyond 2020. Sorry but there is no way we’re getting $3 billion worth of tremendous science out of the ISS every year. No way!
Since the ISS only rarely encounters the heavy nuclei that could damage the human brain beyond the Earth’s magnetosphere, its really not a good laboratory for studying interplanetary radiation shielding.
For interplanetary journeys, we’re also going to need a space station that can either rotate to produce artificial gravity or that has an internal area large enough to accommodate portable high G centrifuges. The ISS can do neither.
Vasmir rockets and light sails for manned interplanetary travel are probably best deployed at the Lagrange points and not at LEO.
Annual recurring cost for the SLS will depend on how frequently its used. The Obama plan calls for extremely– infrequent– beyond LEO missions punctuated by several years where there are no beyond LEO missions at all. Such a plan would make SLS flights extremely expensive and would pretty much be unsustainable.
However, if you want to use the SLS to build a lunar base, then that’s probably going to require four to six fights per year. NASA has calculated that such a frequency would cost less than $500 million per flight ($2 billion to $3 billion per year)– not including payload. Annual recurring cost would be even lower if the SLS was also used to deploy commercial and government BA-2100 space stations into orbit, deploy cheap space depot fuel into orbit for commercial companies that want to travel within cis-lunar space, deploy large light sails to the Lagrange points, deploy large space telescopes to the Lagrange points and to deploy large space solar power plants to GEO.
And annual recurring cost might fall dramatically for the SLS core vehicle without SRBs if Boeing uses it for the space tourism industry.
Marcel, ISS is not going to be decommissioned by 2016. None of the partners wants to do that. The Obama Administration doesn’t want to do that. And if a Republican is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2013, he or she isn’t going to want to shut down a program that employs all those people in Texas.