Comments

• echo64@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Terrible headline.

  He (rightly) sees the commercial aspect of space technology to be a deadend, but nasa is spending a huge amount of time and effort working towards enabling it in favour of doing nasa things.

  Instead of saying we should go to the moon because it is there, we’re saying go to the moon to try to generate new revenue streams for the private space industry that really can’t survive without our contracts because of there being no real market or industry to build from.

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  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    He (rightly) sees the commercial aspect of space technology to be a deadend, but nasa is spending a huge amount of time and effort working towards enabling it in favour of doing nasa things.

    I take issue with commercial being a dead end in space. Not only has it been VERY successful, it has saved huge amounts of money over what Griffen was proposing instead. Griffen was advocating for the Constellation program. Lets take just a piece of that where commercial spaceflight is there instead: flying crew to the ISS which we do two times per year.

    The Constellation program would have used the Ares I rocket and the Orion Crew capsule. The estimated flight cost of this configuration was about $1.1 billion together for two flights. source

    The commercial option used instead is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule. The actual flight cost is $176 for the same two flights per year. source

    For the cost of ONE year of NASA Constellation flights to the ISS, the commercial solution pays for 6 1/4 years of flights instead.

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    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Commercial spaceflight for NASA reminds me of when the Postal Service contracted out airmail. From 1918 to 1926, all air mail service was flown by US government pilots, in US government planes. Then they contracted it out to a little airplane company named Boeing.

      I think NASA should absolutely be focused on deep space exploration, and LEO operations. But even if all they do is contract out their launches it would encourage people to reduce launch costs, which I think should be our number two goal after fighting climate change.

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    • Alto@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Because obviously that's what we need, to be encouraging the expansion of capitalism into space.

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    • echo64@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      how is the commercial" avenue supposed to make profit if nasa isn’t funding it. and if it can’t, isn’t it just a government program?

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• mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I know nothing about any of this so take what I say with a grain of salt. That said, let's go over some of the history of Mike Griffin. I went to that article looking for the answer to the question of whether he was much involved with the clusterfuck that was the Shuttle program, which kept killing astronauts through its transparently-lax approach to safety. The answer turned out to be no, which is to his credit. But, what did he do?

  [On] NPR News' Morning Edition, Griffin said: "I have no doubt that global—that a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings -where and when-are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

  Griffin approved the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery for July 2006 to perform the second return-to-flight mission, overriding the NASA Chief Safety and Mission Assurance Officer, Bryan O'Connor. Although O'Connor said there were still unresolved concerns that foam insulation could break off of external fuel tank and damage the orbiter, Griffin characterized the risk as acceptable, arguing that it would be better to test one change at a time.

  Griffin has been criticized by space research organizations such as NASA Ames Research Center life sciences group for shifting portions of NASA's budget from science to human spaceflight. Griffin had stated that he would not shift "one thin dime" of funding from science to human spaceflight, but less than six months later, in February 2006, after NASA Constellation funding did not reach requested levels, NASA revealed a budget that reduced space research funding by about 25%, including indefinite deferrals of planned programs such as the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and the Space Interferometry Mission. The logic was that funding Project Constellation, a presidentially mandated program, was the top priority of the space agency.

  But:

  Subsequent to the findings of the Augustine Committee in 2009 that the Constellation Program could not be executed without substantial increases in funding, on February 1, 2010, President Barack Obama proposed to cancel the program.

  Nope, I'm sure of it... I hate him.

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  • PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The shuttle program was not a “clusuerfuck” that kept killing astronauts. There were 2 accidents, yes, which were obviously horrible tragedies, but the Shuttle program also built ISS and serviced Hubble so that it could keep doing amazing things.

    Shuttle wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was pretty incredible, and because of it we’re still learning new things about everything from astronomy to biology to engineering.

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    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You're absolutely right. I need to be more precise. The shuttle era of NASA was absolutely brilliant scientists and engineers, doing groundbreaking work, supporting a corps of astronauts of unparalleled skill and courage, and all under a management team that was the most godawful bunch of fuckups and incompetents you could possibly imagine. Everyone knew that the shuttle was unsafe, and they kept flying it anyway, until it inevitably led to the totally unnecessary deaths of some astronauts, and then they kept at it under more or less the exact same methodology until it killed some more.

      I still get goosebumps from some of the old Apollo-era legends like SCE to AUX or scratching marks in the window to compute the landing navigation by hand. The 1980s-era NASA administrators inherited a engineering organization that was basically able to do the impossible, and was the envy of the entire world, and they basically started running it with the mentality "as long as nothing went wrong this time it's not a problem. How can we get it a little cheaper or faster for the next one?"

      Mike Mullane goes into a lot of good detail about it in "Riding Rockets." Basically, the nature of the program was such that all the astronauts knew it was just a matter of time until one of the shuttles malfunctioned in deadly and preventable fashion, and they really didn't care. He said his only worry was that he'd do something dumb, or panic on the radio, and there would be this recording of him losing his shit that was his final legacy. He said as long as he could keep himself together if something did go wrong that would kill him, and he got to get to space, he was alright with that.

      He was actually on one flight that would have blown up, absolutely guaranteed, but something else went wrong and they scrubbed the mission and all got back out of the shuttle and went home. They found the problem afterwards while they were refitting for the flight after that. But if they'd launched he'd be dead. He talks about his friends who did die in the accidents, and his anger and frustration at the management failures that led to them so inevitably. Space flight is dangerous anyway, but if you approach it without caution and respect, people die who don't need to. Some of them were his friends, and it's impossible to read him talking about it without getting angry at the system that made it that way.

      So yeah, I was wrong in pointing the finger at NASA as a whole, you're 100% right. NASA management though can get fucked. I don't know if it's better now, but I'm pretty confident in saying that this particular guy is one of the fuckers who's part of the movement that was and is making it bad. So fuck him. As far as my brief Wikipedia research has led me is to conclude that he's a part of the problem.

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  • wikibot@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

    Michael Douglas Griffin (born November 1, 1949) is an American physicist and aerospace engineer who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering from 2018 to 2020. He previously served as Deputy of Technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and as Administrator of NASA from April 13, 2005, to January 20, 2009. As NASA Administrator Griffin oversaw such areas as private spaceflight, future human spaceflight to Mars, and the fate of the Hubble telescope. While he describes himself as a “simple aerospace engineer from a small town”, Griffin has held several high-profile political appointments. In 2007 he was included in the TIME 100, the magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people.

    ^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^‘optout’.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^

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  • Buffaloaf@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Are you his Huckleberry?

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• mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  goddamn this is the dumbest move NASA could possibly make. let’s jump 20 years of actual progress back AND stick with the most expensive and complicated solution.

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• Rixster@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  He is not wrong

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• PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is the guy who pitched the Constellation program so he really doesn’t have room to talk.

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• Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Peak spaceflight and exploration in human history? Better roll it back, we wouldn’t want to make too much scientific progress

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• Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Discover? For the sake of knowing? But what about money? I’m about sick of Mammon’s dick being in everything.

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  Essentially, Griffin told the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, NASA could not afford to faff around with a complex, partly commercial plan to put humans back on the Moon, with an eye toward long-term settlement.

  The House members in attendance never pressed Griffin for details about this plan, but they are outlined in his written testimony.

  In Griffin’s case, he would return the country to the cozy confines of 2008, just before the era of commercial space took off and when he was at the height of his power before being removed as NASA administrator.

  “The straightforward approach outlined here could put US-led expeditions on the Moon beginning in 2029, given bold action by Congress and expeditious decision-making and firm contractor direction by NASA,” he concluded.

  And if it were built through the cost-plus acquisition strategy outlined by Griffin, it undoubtedly would cost $10 to $20 billion and take a decade based on past performance.

  A reasonable estimate of Griffin’s plan, based on contractor performance with Orion (in development since 2005) and the SLS rocket, is that if NASA’s budget roughly doubled, humans might land on the Moon by the late 2030s.

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  The original article contains 641 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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