Gingrich promises moon base

[ComradeClaus]

Could the design be lightened w/ newer materials? like carbon composites?

The design goes back decades & could benefit from recent breakthroughs in material science.

[Simon_Jester]

...Claus?

Suffice to say that OTRAG is not necessarily the cure for all rocket problems. It wasn't a bad idea, but it was never envisioned as anything other than a cheap 'truck' to get things into orbit and use mass production techniques to bring unit cost down. Trying to use it in place of all kinds of other rockets in the world is simply foolish, especially for someone who can't do the math.

[Grumman]

We can't get the technology if we don't spend the money on R&D and go on missions that push the envelope.

Spend money on R&D, sure, but the limiting factor to make it worthwhile isn't something that can be resolved by completing missions.

I wonder if a concrete Chinese plan to set up a moon base by 2025-30 (with bonus Russian participation) would panic Washington into a crash course lunar program? Xenophobia and paranoia do have positive effects, once in a blue moon.

It's only a positive effect if you believe that another manned lunar program is already worth the cost, and that you just need to convince the rest of America to chip in. I do not.

[ComradeClaus]

...Claus?

Suffice to say that OTRAG is not necessarily the cure for all rocket problems. It wasn't a bad idea, but it was never envisioned as anything other than a cheap 'truck' to get things into orbit and use mass production techniques to bring unit cost down. Trying to use it in place of all kinds of other rockets in the world is simply foolish, especially for someone who can't do the math.

it would still be nice to see it used wherever it could be of use, considering how expensive any space mission tends to be. Even if it can't replace the classic heavy lifters.

[PeZook]

An incredible launch rate for a fairly large rocket.

But then, the Russians were always very productive & driven, even on a shoestring budget.

..."blue moon", heh

Since when is the R-7 series a "fairly large rocket"? It's tiny. It gets a lot of launches because it's used both for satellites, Soyuz and Progress flights to low orbit, but it couldn't do anything even tangentially related to a lunar mission.

For EOR, you need at least a medium booster like the Falcon Heavy, Delta IV or Ariane.

The thing is, we wouldn't even need that long to design the base and systems. NASA has been designing this stuff for over 40 years, I'm betting the plans and blueprints we need are already on a shelf somewhere in Houston.

As Simon wrote, there's a difference between a diagram of a lunar base and a blueprint that can be used to actually make all the parts and assemble them into something that works. And making those blueprints and the tooling and testing the prototypes etc. is where all the money goes.

[Civil War Man]

He doesn't need to raise taxes or even the NASA budget because he expects 90% of the costs to be funded privately. Didn't you get the memo that government is bad and shouldn't do anything except wage war.
And just to make things even more fun, he expects six or seven launches per day.

Because if there's one thing the private sector loves, it's throwing money at a project that is guaranteed to cost a shitload of money but will only produce a profit in a slim margin of scenarios.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I think it's because, CAD or no CAD, they still require a certain momentum to actually go anywhere: CAD ain't magic, and in order to start doing designs and gathering data etc. you still need a project to actually go beyond the concept/wooden mock-up stage, and that requires funding since CAD is still done by an engineer who wants to get paid.

Yes, and while we have much better modeling capabilities than we did 40 years ago, the engineer sitting at his desk while his computer is doing all the hard work is going to have to do something to justify the $150 - $200 (I'm not making this up) per hour the government is spending on him. And the money being spent on his section manager, and his engineering program manager, the manager in the program office interfacing between his company and Uncle Sam, his cost accounting manager, his department manager, the manager of the Space Flight Directorate (or whatever the organization above his department calls itself,) the vice presidents of engineering, space science, and defense, and the president of the defense/space sciences branch . . . plus all their admins, secretaries, and the weenies running the company's Six Sigma, Scrum, or other "efficiency improvement" flavor-of-the-week programs that don't involve firing three or four layers of redundant middle management.

Seriously, I used to be bullish about space before I started working for the same industry the United States gives most of its space work to. Yeah, sure, we could have moon bases and erect American phalluses on Mars, but we have an awful lot of middle-management bloat that I'm not sure was present in the '60s.

[Simon_Jester]

Speculatively, this is a labor displacement- we no longer have people working in many blue-collar jobs, and the excess people have to go somewhere. So some of them get dumped into middle management: generating paperwork means there's a "need" for more people working to fill it, in ways that can't easily be gotten rid of by firing half the workers and making the other half work twice as hard.

"But if you fire me, who will do total quality guarantee insurance for the vice-president of circular-filing?" seems to work better on modern American CEOs than "but if you fire me, who will design the circuit board?"

[Skgoa]

That seems to be a big problem in america - or at least when looking at companies that get government contracts. There is so much documentation*, red tape, auditing... And this, partly answers Shep's question: mega-projects used to be easier because people had more lee-way. E.g. nowadays no supplier of NASA could get away with using surfers to apply coatings. And most space vehicles from back then would be deemed too unsafe to fly. Just look at that crazy human-rating certificating process NASA has. Or laws that say "you have to launch X no later than Y and it has to reuse shuttle parts."

* Our satelite project had a whole binder full of highly detailed documentation. For a "spacecraft" that consists of one ARM9 board, a sensor, an antenna, a couple of solar cells and a 10x10x10 cm aluminum box. I don't want to know how many libraries the Shuttle's documentation could fill.

We can't get the technology if we don't spend the money on R&D and go on missions that push the envelope.

Spend money on R&D, sure, but the limiting factor to make it worthwhile isn't something that can be resolved by completing missions.

Uhm, you kinda have to test things to see if they work. You can't just go "research space tech level 6" and unlock lunar bases. You have to build prototypes and intermediary versions to even find out what problems you will have to solve, in the first place. Also, going on missions necessitates R&D that you would have had to pay for anyways. So doing an intermediary mission - öike going to an NEO - is actually a very helpful step.

[MKSheppard]

Seriously, I used to be bullish about space before I started working for the same industry the United States gives most of its space work to. Yeah, sure, we could have moon bases and erect American phalluses on Mars, but we have an awful lot of middle-management bloat that I'm not sure was present in the '60s.

I actually found this in an interview with George Mueller from back in 1999 that's on the JSC oral history site:

BERGEN: And you were able to make those changes so that that communication was
possible. Some people said that you had a lot of management freedom when you were in
your position at NASA. Do you agree with that?

MUELLER: Oh, yes, indeed, much more so than is currently possible anywhere in the
government, that [is] in the public sector. The only programs that have that kind of
management freedom now—and that's pretty limited—are the black programs.

BERGEN: Why do you think you had the freedom that you had?

MUELLER: Because President [John F.] Kennedy said, "We're going to land on the Moon by
the end of this decade," and no one wanted to be accused of interfering with that.

....

BERGEN: Were there any other personnel changes that you made, that you felt were
significant?

MUELLER: Quite a few. In fact, one of the things I did was to, early on, the centers had been
providing people to our systems staff at headquarters, and many of them, a fair number of
them, maybe twenty, were misapplied. So I went back to the center directors and said,
"Look. These guys aren't going to be able to contribute to the program. I'm going to give
them back to you." And that created quite a bit of a controversy and, in fact, eventually led
to the formation of headquarters unions, because at that time there were no unions at
headquarters.

These people were not as competent as we needed. You know, if you are going to
run a program, [you’ve] got to have the best people in the organization working in that
program office. These [people] didn't quite measure up. But it was an interesting
experience.

BERGEN: It sounds like it. When you first came in—

MUELLER: It also turned out, the centers really didn't want them back. [Laughter]

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that the same bloat of mismanagement and bureaucracy goes into the private sector, too- it just takes different forms, with more quality consultants and less tenure.

So it's not as simple as having the freedom to fire people.