Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The Future of Space Exploration, An Engineer's Perspective

(This was originally posted on boilercamp.us on 4/21/10)


This is certainly a departure from what I normally write about, but as a future aeronautics and astronautics engineer, this topic hits home for me. I also wrote this as a guest blog on Mike Brownstein's blog, Politics and Pucks.
The space industry has been a huge talking point lately. The space shuttle is at the end of its life cycle, and NASA is exploring new options to send satellites to low-Earth orbit and supplies to the International Space Station. The particular option that NASA has been exploring since day one is over-budget and behind schedule. This is mostly due to creating entirely new parts rather than salvaging parts from the space shuttles, as NASA engineers have been very keen to suggest.

So what's going to happen in the next decade? Long story short, NASA will be paying 
SpaceX, a private company, to send supplies to the Space Station and any satellites into low earth orbit that can be done so in an unmanned mission, and will be paying the Russians to send astronauts into orbit. NASA will continue to work on its manned space program, but based on the past five years, my guess is that it's doomed eternally. So, what should happen in the future? In my humble opinion, shut NASA down.

That's right. You heard me. Shut NASA down.

Well, maybe shut down isn't the right phrase. How about reorganize? Yeah. That's better. NASA can still be around, but they will have no part in actually conducting missions. I'd like to think of it more as NASATA - National Aeronautics and Space Advisory and Training Administration.

The current NASA yearly budget is nearly $19 BILLION. There is no way that the government needs to be spending this much money for as feeble a job they are doing. They should just keep a skeleton crew around. Every recognized private space corporation will have NASATA representatives working for them but paid for by the government, some scientists, some with mission control, some with training of crews, et cetera. My best estimate (which is entirely a guess) is around twenty current, functioning private space agencies. If each of these companies gets ten NASATA reps, that's only 200 employees. Throw each of these people $150k per year (which seems reasonable in my book), that's $30 million for payroll.

Simultaneously, there'll be a committee composed of five experts in the aerospace industry as "higher ups." These people will be in charge of biennial competitions. These competitions will offer a prize of $5 billion for whatever the current competition is. Send a crew to the moon for a week and return them safely, send a crew to orbit Mars and return safely, send a capsule to the moon in and back with a total trip time of X hours, et cetera. Give these five bigwigs $300k per year, and add another $1.5 million to the payroll.

This gives the new NASATA a BIENNIAL budget of $5.063 billion, a whopping 87% drop compared to the current NASA budget. Not only will this reduce government spending, but I feel that it will boost the technology level rapidly in terms of space exploration, and it will reduce the cost of space travel. The jobs that are cut by NASA will most certainly be picked up by the private space sector.

We may even have even broken light speed by 2050.

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