Space policy roundup – Sept.1.13

“Legendary” Chris Kraft,  the first NASA manned spaceflight director, lays into the SLS mess again: Sunday conversation: NASA veteran Chris Kraft upfront with criticism – Houston Chronicle

A sampling of his comments:

  • “The problem with the SLS is that it’s so big that makes it very expensive. It’s very expensive to design, it’s very expensive to develop. When they actually begin to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire.”
  • “Then there are the operating costs of that beast, which will eat NASA alive if they get there. They’re not going to be able to fly it more than once a year, if that, because they don’t have the budget to do it.”
  • Russian rockets achieve high reliability and cost-effectiveness with a high flight rate. “And that’s something the SLS will never have. Never. Because you can’t afford to launch it that many times.”
  • There’s nothing magic about the SLS payload capability. You will eventually need to put far more than that into space anyway so learn to use multiple launches now. NASA needs “an assembly capability, a fuel depot capability and the capability to have people operating there sort of as a Cape Canaveral in the sky.”

These are all common sense remarks that many critics of the SLS/Orion program have been saying since it was hatched in 2010 by a cabal of Congresspersons with NASA centers and/or major NASA contractors in their states (i.e. the only people in Congress who pay attention to space policy). Unfortunately, the program remains a gigantic money-burning fiasco hidden in plain sight because the MSM can’t judge a technical issue like space launch and so few high profile space luminaries point out what a bare-naked boondoggle it is.

More space policy related items:

Update: Scott Pace of GWU talked about space policy on the Space Show yesterday: Dr. Scott Pace, Sunday, 9-1-13 – Thespaceshow’s Blog