He (rightly) sees the commercial aspect of space technology to be a deadend, but nasa is spending a huge amount of time and effort working towards enabling it in favour of doing nasa things.
I take issue with commercial being a dead end in space. Not only has commercial spaceflight been VERY successful for NASA, it has saved huge amounts of money over what Griffin was proposing instead. Griffin was advocating for the Constellation program. Lets take just a piece of that where commercial spaceflight is there instead: flying crew to the ISS which we do two times per year.
The Constellation program would have used the Ares I rocket and the Orion Crew capsule. The estimated flight cost of this configuration was about $1.1 billion together for two flights. source
The commercial option used instead is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule. The actual flight cost is $176 for the same two flights per year. source
For the cost of ONE year of NASA Constellation flights to the ISS, the commercial solution pays for 6 1/4 years of flights instead.
Commercial spaceflight for NASA reminds me of when the Postal Service contracted out airmail. From 1918 to 1926, all air mail service was flown by US government pilots, in US government planes. Then they contracted it out to a little airplane company named Boeing.
I think NASA should absolutely be focused on deep space exploration, and LEO operations. But even if all they do is contract out their launches it would encourage people to reduce launch costs, which I think should be our number two goal after fighting climate change.
Because obviously that’s what we need, to be encouraging the expansion of capitalism into space.
If you feel that strongly about the negative consequences of spaceflight, you should dispose of the computer or mobile device you’re using to post this on. Those are products of the commercialization of miniaturization needed to be small and light enough for the Lunar Lander to take humans to the moon. source
You wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite, now would you?
EDIT: I made a bad assumption about the poster, and apologized in a follow up post. I’m not going to remove my mistaken post so the context is not lost
I take issue with commercial being a dead end in space. Not only has commercial spaceflight been VERY successful for NASA, it has saved huge amounts of money over what Griffin was proposing instead. Griffin was advocating for the Constellation program. Lets take just a piece of that where commercial spaceflight is there instead: flying crew to the ISS which we do two times per year.
The Constellation program would have used the Ares I rocket and the Orion Crew capsule. The estimated flight cost of this configuration was about $1.1 billion together for two flights. source
The commercial option used instead is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule. The actual flight cost is $176 for the same two flights per year. source
For the cost of ONE year of NASA Constellation flights to the ISS, the commercial solution pays for 6 1/4 years of flights instead.
Commercial spaceflight for NASA reminds me of when the Postal Service contracted out airmail. From 1918 to 1926, all air mail service was flown by US government pilots, in US government planes. Then they contracted it out to a little airplane company named Boeing.
I think NASA should absolutely be focused on deep space exploration, and LEO operations. But even if all they do is contract out their launches it would encourage people to reduce launch costs, which I think should be our number two goal after fighting climate change.
Because obviously that’s what we need, to be encouraging the expansion of capitalism into space.
Tim Curry’s gonna have an aneurysm.
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If you feel that strongly about the negative consequences of spaceflight, you should dispose of the computer or mobile device you’re using to post this on. Those are products of the commercialization of miniaturization needed to be small and light enough for the Lunar Lander to take humans to the moon. source
You wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite, now would you?
EDIT: I made a bad assumption about the poster, and apologized in a follow up post. I’m not going to remove my mistaken post so the context is not lost
I love space exploration. It’s absolutely something we as a species should be doing. We just shouldn’t be doing it for the motives of profit.
But sure, put things in my mouth asshat