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New White House R&D Focus Does Not Include Mention of Space

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 17, 2017
Filed under
https://media2.spaceref.com/news/2017/priority.wordcloud.jpg

FY 2019 Administration Research and Development Priorities, OMB
Keith’s update: The only space-related priority is missile defense. That’s it. Look at the word cloud (larger image) of the things this document says. It should be obvious what this Administration’s focus is – and is not.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

27 responses to “New White House R&D Focus Does Not Include Mention of Space”

  1. Richard Brezinski says:
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    Well after the previous NW post on the NASA Chief Technologists not knowing whether anyone is serious about space, I’d have to say that this Administration probably concurs. Of course given NASA’s performance in recent years, I don’t think anybody in the Agency knows for sure what they are doing or where they ought to be going.

    I know a lot of people like to blame the President. But if NASA does not know where it ought to go, why should anyone else?

  2. ThomasLMatula says:
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    This announcement focuses on research in the industries that are important to the economy.

    The era of Apollo and the Space Shuttle is over. Today NASA is only a nickel and dime R&D operation compared to rest of the economy and has become a laggard in most areas like robotics, IT, AI, biotech. It’s focus on searching for ET and sending humans to Mars, as NASA is doing it, holds little potential for breakthrough research. Why waste money on it?

    • Richard Brezinski says:
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      I have to agree. In fact not only is NASA not keeping up in some areas, like Biotech, NASA decided several years ago to opt out. At one time Biotech, and the BTS payload was supposed to be a major area for research on ISS. NASA shut the BTS payload and the Biotech research program down after investing heavily in it for decades. Where did the money go? It wasn’t a lot of money, but they decided to invest in the ISS. So put the money into ISS and its prime contractor. So now we have an ISS; little science to do on it. NASA ran off many other experimenters by making the payload integration process so convoluted, difficult, time consuming and expensive. So everybody loses, except for, of course, the ISS prime contractor who has earned more than a hundred billion on a facility that goes largely unused.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Hard to deny the effect of space related tech on the economy a whole.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Yes, but the impact, as I noted above, came from the Apollo And Shuttle Eras when NASA was pushing the frontiers of technology. In the ISS Era NASA stopped pushing those frontiers. The SLS Era, if it comes looks to be no better in terms of tech spinoffs than the ISS era. After Challenger, and especially after Columbia NASA lost the nerve to push frontiers. Look at SLS/Orion. They are nothing more than a very expensive recreation of the Saturn V/CSM without the LEM. What radical new technology will it provide the economy?

        • Michael Spencer says:
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          I wondered about that, at least peripherally, in another thread. To some extent, I mean, aren’t many of the problems that stood between 1958 and the 1969 landing already resolved?

          Put differently: the big breakthroughs that supposedly flowed to the general population as a result of tech research that enabled Saturn are no longer available because we know how to do it. Building another Saturn, even one as modern as surely SLS will be, is putting a finer edge on old tech.

          Or not.

          I’m hampered by my own shallow appreciation of the technical differences between S5 and SLS. An uninformed observer sees one a 1950 Chevy and the other a 2018 Tesla- both have four rubber wheels, a steering wheel, and a pointy-end but they are entirely different beasts.

          Surely that’s the case with S5 and SLS; still, the Chevy and the Tesla have much more in common than either had to horses.

          • fcrary says:
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            Maybe not a 1950 Chevy and a Tesla. Their fuel and engines are fundamentally different, and that’s not the case for Saturn V and SLS. How about a 1950 Chevy and a self-driving, 201x Honda Civic? Mileage, emissions and automation are totally different; navigation is by GPS and mobile internet connections (not a paper map in the glove compartment), etc. But they are both four-wheeled vehicles with Otto-cycle internal combustion engines and friction-based braking.

    • Zafflebif says:
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      If this is true, why not give the $19B NASA budget to SpaceX and other newspace ventures?

      This would have the dual benefits of increasing output/excitement tenfold and also liberating all the NASA workers so that they can contribute elsewhere in the economy.

      • Richard Brezinski says:
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        Most of NASA’s money goes to its contractors. Something over 85%. There might be a role for the government. Maybe they need to figure out what it is? There is nothing wrong with the NASA workers-they are highly trained, highly educated, very capable. But a lot more of the money needs to be used a lot more effectively. Maybe the problem is with management and the contractors?

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          Yes, the contractors and NASA personnel are very capable, which makes all the more tragic they are spending their time on the high tech equalvalent of “make work” (SLS/Orion) to keep the pork flowing to a few Congressional Districts.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Part of this seems to be the current state of government/contractor relations and the culture. The military has the same sorts of problems as NASA when it comes to big development projects. These days, there is lots of money spent with no tolerance for failure.

      For example, in the Air Force, each new generation of aircraft is more expensive than the one before, so we can only afford them in fewer and fewer numbers. In WW-II the US built 19,256 B-24 bombers (considered a “heavy” bomber at the time). Today’s Air Force built only 21 operational B-2 bombers. That’s three orders of magnitude less!

      Also, innovation requires a certain amount of tolerance for failures. For example, there have been a couple of Falcon 9 failures, but it’s also the cheapest launch vehicle in its class and the only one in its class that’s flown with “used” first stages.

      Elon Musk – “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

    • DP Huntsman says:
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      No, NASA is not focusing “on searching for ET”; that’s a silly statement, since the real amount is close to $0 out of $19b. And I would maintain that NASA is not focusing on “sending humans to Mars”, either. The big booster and capsule projects that are so draining the agency from doing advanced R&D technology development, etc., will not get us to Mars; certainly, not to stay. For one, we will not be able to afford to own and operate them.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        LOL Then why is the focus on Mars and Europa where there may be life? And let’s not forget Kepler. I agree the SLS/Orion won’t get us to Mars, but Mars is the justification for both. And NASA talks about its Journey to Mars in its future plans.

        If what you said was true NASA would be exploring the Moon and Venus, both of which offer better prospects for both technical and economic benefits. But NASA basically does its best to pretend they don’t exist.

        • Richard Brezinski says:
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          Orion and SLS are an unfortunate outcome of a crazed Administrator and his AA support thinking that Congress would support such a program. They got us started in the wrong direction.

          Then once it became apparent no one was going to Mars for half a century, the NASA Administration offered no alternatives. They had no plan and no program and also do not have the know how.

          Congress wanted to keep spending money and so they said ‘carry on’, regardless of the fact that it will take us no where.

          It is a good lesson in how NASA ought to be able to formulate a cogent plan and how not to play politics.

  3. ThomasLMatula says:
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    In the late 1970’s NASA was at a crossroads. They could focus on space settlement or space science as the justification for their future. The Shuttle could have been the start of something great or a dead end.

    The agency collectively decided to focus on space science as the future, turning the Shuttle into a dead end, and NASA with it. That is why NASA is no longer considered relevant for advancing breakthrough technologies for industry.

    • fcrary says:
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      I don’t see that. Given the post-Apollo budget, there was no way to build the infrastructure needed for “space settlement”. They could have built a more efficient shuttle, or one focused entirely on getting people (and supplies) into space. But it still wouldn’t have amounted to “settlement.” If the agency decided, consciously or unconsciously, to focus on science, I think that was because they didn’t have viable alternatives.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Not infrastructure, technology/knowledge. Two very different things.

        • fcrary says:
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          Which is even harder to get funded. People, congressmen included, usually have a preference for buying things they can touch. A product or a vehicle is easier to get funded than infrastructure, which is a bit more nebulous (a bridge is nice and touchable, but whether it benefits interstate commerce or someone visiting his family isn’t as clear.) The benefits of technology development and knowledge are even more abstract. Science for the sake of science at least can generate some gee-wiz interest. But better thermal protection systems when there aren’t any plans for a new spacecraft? Just because we’ll probably want to build one eventually? That’s a real hard sell. I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea; just that getting people to invest in that sort of thing is tough.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            No, it’s not that hard a sell, it was what the NACA and the early NASA did so well with its original X-Planes. Simple demonstrators, not flagship projects like the X-33 which broke every rule for what made X-Planes. So yes, there would be hardware.

            There also be science eye-candy for the public by leveraging economies of scales for missions. Instead of just a pair of Mars rover (Opportunity & Spirit) NASA should have sent 20 or more once we knew the design worked. When you send that many you are able to take more risks in the landing sites, sending them to more interesting locations (Mons Olymics? The Mariner Valley?) since the impact of losing one is much less. You also have the opportunity to upgrade the design based on experience. Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter are good examples.

    • Paul451 says:
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      What crap. Once the overly expensive, overly fragile, too-expensive-to-fly Shuttle was flying, NASA sold Reagan on using it to build a giant space-station, including an external vehicle assembly module for BEO missions. They sold Bush on using the giant space station to return to the moon “to stay” and then send humans to Mars. They sold Bush II on the same idea, with fuel-production on the moon being the apparent selling-point.

      And each time, NASA either grotesquely under-quoted on the price, or expected Congress to give them Apollo-level funding. Or higher. Supposedly they priced Bush I’s plan at half a trillion.

      As I ranted in the previous thread, NASA has spent the last forty years stuck in a holding pattern waiting until someone throws giant piles of money at them. The whole internal management culture is “we’re ready, once someone throws the switch”, rather than “this is reality, this is our budget, it’s not going to get better and it might get worse, how do we achieve goals like moon/Mars on this budget?” Because it doesn’t matter what the goal is if the agency continues to act like Apollo-era budgets are coming back, any year now.

      [edit: The only reason why “science” dominates their actual achievements is that when a science mission goes grossly over budget, it wastes a billion or two. You can have several of those each decade. When HSF goes over budget, it wastes tens of billions. You can only afford one of those every twenty years.]

      • fcrary says:
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        I’ve seen the same sort of approach in planetary science. At meetings like OPAG (Outer Planets Assessment Group), you can hear lots of discussion about all the great things we could do with a Flagship mission, and some discussion of how limiting the constraints of Discovery missions are. I’ve even heard people seriously talking about what we could do if an SLS launch for a planetary mission was available every three to five years. And I got funny looks when I asked who thought that was realistic and where the money would come from. I was told someone had made a presentation at a previous meeting, saying that it might be possible, and everyone wanted to talk about what we could do if it were.

        At last spring’s Planetary Science Vision 2050 workshop, one of the organizers stood up at the start of the second day and criticized the presentations he’d heard on the first day. He said we weren’t supposed to be worrying about how to accomplish the science or whether an idea or mission concept was realistic within a likely budget, he wanted us to simply talk about all the great science goals and objectives.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        The Shuttle was fragile because material science was not up to the task. Treating it as a beginning rather than a end meant NASA would have invested in much more material science research. Advances in material science research is always rewarded with spinoffs to other areas of transportation. NASA never seriously invested in a replaced, the X-33/X-34 and NASP were underfunded jokes. The failure of X-33?was because material science didn’t have the tech to build the fuel tanks for it. Instead SSTO and space planes NASA went back to capsules.

        But a space settlement would focused research on more than material science research. It would have focused on robotic research, space resources research, biotech research, all areas that would have generated spinoffs before long before any habitat was built, and placing us several years ahead in those fields of where we are now.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I’ve been thinking about this since you posted it— namely the dichotomy between “science” (broadly speaking) and “space settlement.”

      And I don’t think I recall any discussion that was quite in those terms. It’s true that I’m fairly new to space policy, having afflicted myself with following NASA 15 years ago or so.

      Still— even in the STS glory days – and they were glorious! – the deep space missions were the birthright of ISS.

      STS was to have enabled the settlement programs that we all want.The loss of STS was, in some ways, the loss of a child; the parent slipping into a decades-long depression and self examination.

      If anything, the death of space settlement came with the failure of STS to become the low cost transport that we thought it would be, that we needed then, and that we need now. We thought, wrongly, that hurling a 737 into space made a lot of sense. Yes, we were wrong, but NASA gets a huge up-vote from me for having made the effort, failure or not.

  4. Daniel Woodard says:
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    I agree with the idea that government should invest in new technologies with the potential to benefit the country, although the list of examples is rather superficial. NASA should do that, and I would be happy to see a change in that direction. Practical commercial spaceflight has such potential.

    But civil aviation, America’s largest export industry, is not even mentioned. Indeed, NASA centers and researchers should be given the resources to use their unique capabilities and facilities to pursue a broad spectrum of R&D of clear benefit to the nation, even when it does not have a “NASA customer”. Giving all the resources to the “programs”, to accomplish their otherworldly “missions”, is not a recipe for R&D of practical benefit to America.

    • mfwright says:
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      Your comment reminded looking at the number of people that ride in airplanes and the number of people that ride in spaceships. Then see how much is spent on aeronautics and how much is spent on human spaceflight. Just saying.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        I do see, from time to time, pieces in “Wired” or even “Aviation Now,” stories about NASA looking at new ways to reduce transonic noise, or even research into supersonic transport, or the like. Not much, though.

      • fcrary says:
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        I’m not quite sure where you are going. The number of passengers doesn’t reflect the money going into aeronautical research. It reflects the money spent on using the results of past aeronautical research. Maybe that was your point.

        In any case, aviation safety statistics are also a but of a shock compared to spaceflight. I knew the two were quire different, but… The global average from 2002 to 2011 was 0.6 fatalities per _million_ flights. The Space Shuttle had a rate of 0.104 fatalities per _flight_, about six million times higher.