What do we want from the US Civilian Space Program over the next 40 years?
I am not an American, let me be abundantly clear on that; I live in Canada and was born in Grt. Britain;
Second, this question, while pointing out the USA Space Program, is not restricted to them; I stole it from here;
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=20475.2878
as this was becoming frustrating, at the plethora of opposition to almost any options being put forward that would leverage the Human Space Flight advances in the coming 40 years, in the USA. But I suspect that, as the forum is international in scope and origin, that it reflects the emotional interest of the majority of Space Geeks in the World (Western Civilization)
In my opinion, Ross makes a valid assumption, that either we go with the slow and easy, and go no-where philosophy, or we grab the bull by the horns and push the beast back; what that means to me is utilize every available resource and intellectual advantage to put mankind into Exploration of the Inner Planets in a way that accesses resources and energy to bring us to a new level of civilization;
Human civilization has been around for approximately 90 thousand years depending on your interpretation; and it has only been the past 9 thousand that we have made substantial advances that have brought us to the point of leaving the planet; we are using 16% of our planets resources in Energy, and that is our bank account to get off planet, the easily accessible resources; (the BP oil spill is an example of going after harder to reach resources)
with that preface, how to answer the question at the top of the page;
What CAN we do in the next 40 years given the infrastructure and budgets today??
A lot, and yet not as much as we could; the infrastructure in the US is on life support, and slowly / painfully being dismantled, so that the ISS is supported, with adequate funding for R & D; the US can only find the financial and political capital to fund one and not the other, ISS or HLV;
this is their NASA civil space program, which is 0.06% of their National Budget; if the political capital and Will were available, there were would be adequate funding, but it isn't, and most likely won't be for the duration of the first half of this century; it won't be until later in the century, when persons of adequate background find their way into power and change the direction; in the meantime it is "stagnant quo" as one Congress Woman described it;
So what the Americans do in the next 40 years;
1) continue the experiment of turning to Commercial Space companies to support the ISS; supporting them and seeing that they hit their targets in regard to developing their technologies to deliver cargo and eventually crewed space vehicles; in 15 years they will be in a prime position to walk on their own; Already SpaceX has benefited from it's first test flight of the Falcon 9, but expanding it's launch manifest to beyond 2017, and that is only the beginning; if they can keep their costs down, as promised, and reliability of service, then there is hope that their other plans to develop HLV and BFR engines, with the proceeds; given their history of keeping development costs down, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that by 2030-35 they could be launching Moon Orbit space craft; I use SpaceX as an example only because they are the most visible; there are many more out there in the US (what of the rest of the world's Commercial Space companies, invisible below the horizon) who are prepared and preparing to advance robotic and human space flight; the next 40 years will see great advances by these companies, potentially leap frogging the US civil space authority, unless political interference (ie requirements to support Pork, in return for licensing) holds them back, which is not all that unlikely as the Pork dwindles in the Civil Space Arena;
2) Leveraging the existing Civil Space Infrastructure; this is a hodge podge of companies and design centers; NASA is spread out over the USA not for technological reasons, but to buy support in the government for policy decisions; it began during the cold war and has become institutionalized in government and has resulted in grid lock, which now has expanded beyond the halls of power, into the society as a whole, where political influence has made it impossible to get consensus or compromise; lines of politics are polarized and inflexible; in historical perspective, this is often a precursor to revolution; personal attacks are often resorted to in place of logical argument; conspiracy theories are taken as fact, and the most blatant hyperbola is given credence over reality; ignorance reigns supreme and education is suspect as elitism;
so in a society such as this, (which again, while at the extreme edge, is still representative of many countries in the west) what is likely to happen with the existing Civil Space Infrastructure in the next 40 years;
in the next 15 years:
the Constellation program as it existed in 2009 is dead and the Shuttle program is to be torn down by hook or by crook; the brain trust that is NASA and it's various centers will be disbanded, to go where ever they can survive; and the ISS supported as long as it is capable of staying aloft, supported by Commercial Space Industries, until it becomes top heavy in upkeep costs; R & D will be performed as much as it can be afforded, and some progress will be seen, but it will not be developed into an exploration infrastructure, which is what is needed for a robust space program; it is a program on life support; the grand plans from FY2011, will be defunded in 2016, as too expensive, and other government priorities will take center stage; the progress of Commercial Space will be touted as the new way to explore and by default Exploration will be taken over by them in the short term; ISS will be the show piece to say that the US is still in space;
in the remaining 25 years:
Deep Breath, this is a hard prediction, as it depends on whether or not Civil Space in the US exists in 15 years as anything more than an R & D resource; doing one off demonstration projects, like propellant depot testing, not actual propellant depot infrastructure in LEO, L-points or LLO; the technology that is found to work, will be handed off to Commercial Space for a fraction of it's costs and left to them to decided what to cherry pick to use in their Space Exploration Architectures;
I make that Architectures, plural because I believe that once the economic reason for being is found amongst the commercial entities, there will be competition like the days of the opening up of North America; the next 40 years may see the seed of that exploration;
Commercial Space will have the edge, and will be in position to develop the Human Space Flight exploration flexible path; not the one we know of today, from the Augustine Committee; but one developed from their capabilities, proven over the next 15 years;
1) there will be a HLV built when it is realized that one is required for economical launching of MASS / VOLUME pieces of Space Modules, Space Infrastructure, and Space Craft; ROI will be seen as needing to be amortized over decades and not years for the rest of the century; 50 years instead of 5 to 10; their will be several variants of HLV and possibly a SHLV towards the end of the 40 years
1b) After the 15-20 years of The Gap, new Space Craft will be created from plans that are now gathering dust; Tugs for moving objects in Space will be developed and utilized to move Space Station Modules from LEO to HEO, and beyond; Lunar Landers will be reusable, lasting 5-10 years; a variety of Earth Return Vehicles will have come into existence; some will be capsules, while there will also be Space Planes, capable of Sub-orbital flight and insertion into LEO; it will start small, but by 2050, it is probable that a commercial case may be made for people and cargo will ride to space in freighters and taxis, returning on a semi regular basis;
2) A new era of Space Station development will begin in the next 15 years, as test articles are flown to the ISS, and later to other points around the planet; between 2025 and 2050, there will be several new ISS and Commercial Space Stations positioned around the Inner Planets; other Nations will have their own space stations positioned in LEO, but with the lead time the US has in this field, it will be the US Commercial Space Stations that will be first to BEO;
3) light weight modules will be developed from the modules that make up the space stations, and become the core infrastructure on the Lunar surface, and the Martian Moons; there may be an attempt late, about 2045, to land one on an Asteroid, as a precursor mission to asteroid mining;
4) we WON'T have landed a person on Mars by 2050; while NASA has it in it's FY2011 budget as THE GOAL of exploration, unless there is a compelling reason, such as a Space Race to get a Man to Mars, there is no societal, political, or technological reason or will, to do it; we will put robotic outposts on the surface and repeat the Rovers and Orbital Observatories or Stations (similar to ones around Earth, but for a short duration stay, about the last 5 years of the 40 year term); it will be in the latter half of the century that humans set up a colony on Mars, after testing out the infrastructure on the Moon, around Mars and in Space between the inner planets;
5) we will have a human go to an Asteroid, as a demonstration mission, and example of a Mars type mission in duration, by 2030 and repeated 2-3 times; this after several more Engineering missions similar to the one that the Japanese just completed; Robotic In Space Resource Utilization mission will be attempted to an Asteroid by 2045-50; but in the end, it will be manned ISRU, in the second half of the century that will be common place, simply because repair of machinery that if disabled, will cost millions of dollars to the people who own the rights;
6) which brings up an interesting problem, who will own the rights to the resources of the Solar System; if an unlimited source of energy in space were discovered, with the potential to make every man, woman and child, free of the economic system we now exist under, would it be made available or would the finder/producer, be in a position to determine market terms; this is no idle question; today we have mining companies extracting minerals in places as varied as Alberta Tar Sands, and Nigerian Oil Fields, where there, the ability of the people who live on the land to gain any of the wealth created is proportional to the greed of the people who govern them; in the next 40 years it is possible that some form of Space Resource Agreement will have to be struck with the worlds governments, otherwise there will be civil unrest like has not been seen since the Dark Ages;
