Here's a column from FloridaToday.com that recommends that NASA do exactly that: find ways to be more innovative and get more exploration done using existing resources.
It's probably obvious to most readers that robots offer that opportunity: robotic space operations are MUCH cheaper and safer than the same operations done by astronauts.
Some parts of NASA seem to be getting that. Goddard Space Flight Center is leading an initiative to put a servicing station in geosynchronous orbit. Some earlier concepts to do that were manned, but I presume we are now talking about robotic operations there. Good thing, given how intense the radiation levels in GEO are.
Another initiative, to assemble a telescope at the Space Station using robotics, doesn't look like it will be funded this year. But hopefully the planning will go on.
What could put all this into high gear would be a COMMERCIAL initiative for robotic servicing of GEO spacecraft. There's a good business case for it, as laid out in this MIT master's thesis . (Truth in advertising: I was the sponsor.) When you keep spacecraft in GEO operating longer, whether by refueling them or by simply allowing their fuel to deplete, everyone wins. The satellite operator derives revenue for a longer time; the servicing provider gets a fee for the refueling or disposal service.
It's time to put that business plan into action!
"Doing more with less" - isn't that what NASA has been doing for ages now? It has a tiny budget and yet it constantly gets criticized to "do more with less". The R&D budget for a typical DoD project, which is supposed to only last a few years, is far more than a typical 10-year+ NASA mission. Considering that many NASA missions greatly exceed their life-expectancy, NASA has the best ROI in the government. Yet it still needs to "do more with less". I mean seriously, soon engineers are going to be building rockets with stolen office paperclips and duct tape because that is all the resources they will have left.
ReplyDelete(This is Deb, BTW.)
Deb, you are absolutely right. What we should be shooting for is to do more with MORE: adding private sector resources to the entire space enterprise, creating a true public-private partnership. NASA has done a great job with its resources, but to this point it's been NASA-only resources. Those are always going to diminish, as Jeff Greason points out in his ISDC 2011 talk (look it up on YouTube). Only by getting away from the government-only approach to space are we really going to see a flourishing exploration and settlement effort. Elon Musk put his own money into SpaceX, and NASA is leveraging that heavily.
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