justanyone's Journal: My Spaceflight Priorities

I had dreams when I was younger, of being involved in the space program. Of course, these extended to being an astronaut myself. Any kid could dream of that, it's glamourous, challenging, exciting, and has lots of 'gee whiz!' factors.

I outgrew that mentality gradually as I became aware that I did not have "The Right Stuff". I was not going to be a military pilot; I had good grades but not the constant A+'s that made for being an astronaut. But, I still dreamed of going to work for a company that made stuff for the space program, of participating in some way in what I believed (and do believe) is a noble endeavor.

I watch NASA now and cringe at the loss of vision that is so evident in the people fighting over its budget priorities.

When I dream of where we should be, in a world where I was the U.S. President, or a powerful senator, or some other position of great power over the space program, this is my dream of the future that should be:

- NASA commissions the purchase of 3 separate launch platforms, from different companies, specifying only payload size, and buying from the lowest bidder on a delivered-to-orbit cost basis. Bidders would be required to furnish an insurance surety bond covering the cost of the payload in case of loss.

- NASA would purchase berths-in-orbit from a contractor who would independently build and operate a space station there.

- NASA would purchase pictures and data of various extraterrestrial bodies (moon, other planets, sun, etc.) on a per-pixel cost basis, and would put out RFP's for such pictures, to be provided by companies willing to build devices to acquire this data.

- After we've purchased and acquired several dozen person-years of on-orbit research, we RFP (request for purchase) the Mars Direct plan for the on-mars delivery of a set of spacecraft, researchers, et al.

As a general observation, it seems that if we (as U.S. citizens) want something very complex that has never been done before, requiring loads of highly technical knowledge to do it, we can reliably call on NASA to provide such things. However, if we want something (or a set of somethings) that has to perform repeatedly over a wide range of conditions, requires a fair amount of maintenance, etc., this should be contracted out.

Our goals should be:
- A space station with 10+ crewmembers available to do experiments;
- A base, working towards self-sufficiency, on the Moon;
- A base, working towards self-sufficiency, on Mars;
- A set of probes, along an increasingly standardized design, with cameras and other scientific instruments, that we send to various destinations (Saturn, Jupiter, etc.);
- A set of tests of new engines using new propulsion techniques like VASIMIR, etc.
- A set of earth-orbiting observatories that monitoring earth for global warming and other data.

There's a lot of worthwhile science to be done, and we're not getting our money's worth, it seems.

My ultimate goal is to have a set of self-sufficient settlements on other worlds and in space. I believe that only by living among the stars can we best understand and preserve our own planet.

Of course, this is a wild-eyed dream. NASA is being funded in a way so as to carefully distribute pork to congress's most important districts, not so as to get the best results for the money. Changing NASA is profoundly dependent on changing the political funding problems first. As if I know how to do that... Ug.