Two updates to stories in the last few days.
New Glenn and NASA's Mars satellites launch
pulled up to Friday 11/7 in the early afternoon Sunday
at 2:45PM
This story broke this morning, prompting a revision to the previous story saying the launch date would be Sunday but no launch time was available.
A minor side note to this story is that the way the mission's name is shown has changed. Until this morning, its NextSpaceflight listing referred to the mission in all caps: ESCAPADE. Slightly unusual but it's easy to hit Caps Lock on the keyboard and just type the one word. Today's update goes to a weirder spelling: EscaPADE.
The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE) are a dual-spacecraft mission to study ion and sputtered escape from Mars.
The weather looks
darn near ideal, on the Weather Underground 10 day forecast. Winds under
10mph from the East, temperatures in the upper 70s. The only questionable
forecast is the cloud cover. While the chances of rain are under 25%, cloud
cover is 75%. not as good as that Friday forecast. The chances of rain are higher at
around 50% but the cloud coverage is lower all day.
The BIG Talk on Capitol Hill is the Athena program
In followup to last night's post on how awful the Orion lunar capsule is, I received my daily copy of Payload's newsletter. I posted to the comments:
In today's newsletter from Payload there's an item reflecting that Jared Isaacman is back in the running for NASA Administrator and so Politico thinks they're attacking him.
"Jared Isaacman’s confidential manifesto has been acquired by Politico, and calls for NASA to quit climate science, buy more space data from industry, and terminate SLS and Gateway."
I'm completely down with all of that.
This afternoon, the story expanded onto Ars Technica emphasizing a copy leaked to their senior Space correspondent, Eric Berger.
After receiving a copy of this plan from an industry official, I spoke with multiple sources over the weekend to understand what is happening. Based upon this reporting there are clearly multiple layers to the story, which I want to unpack.
In the big picture, this leak appears to be part of a campaign by interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to either hold onto the high-profile job or, at the very least, prejudice the re-nomination of Isaacman to lead the space agency. Additionally, it is also being spread by legacy aerospace contractors who seek to protect their interests from the Trump administration’s goal of controlling spending and leaning into commercial space.
The leaked plan is 62 pages long, and while it isn't presented, probably not easy reading. Berger believes the document is an edited-down version of a more comprehensive “Athena” plan devised by Isaacman and his team earlier this year, after President Trump nominated him to be NASA Administrator.
The Athena plan lays out a blueprint for Isaacman’s tenure at NASA, seeking to return the space agency to “achieving the near impossible,” focusing on leading the world in human space exploration, igniting the space economy, and becoming a force multiplier for science.
It's worth noting that a copy of this “Athena”plan was provided by Isaacman to Sean Duffy as well as his chief of staff, Pete Meachum as a courtesy. To my way of thinking, that reflects an intent to help whomever gets the job.
Tonight, President Trump re-nominated Jared Isaacman to the administrator's position.
You can already sense what this is really all focused on. Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and the other companies living in luxury on cost-plus contracts like SLS, Orion and all the bad examples we see.
In recent weeks, Duffy has been building ties with the space industry, trying to paint Isaacman as someone who would come in and force big changes on NASA and its traditional space contractors. There is also an effort to paint Isaacman as a stooge of Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX. However, the Athena plan, read in full, does not seem to support the conclusion that Isaacman has a pro-SpaceX bias. Instead, Isaacman seems equally bullish on Blue Origin.
Ironically, the plan reflects the priorities of the Trump administration for human space exploration.
The Athena plan seeks to transition away from cost-plus contracts for the Space Launch System rocket and Orion, while looking at repurposing elements of the Gateway for a nuclear-powered tug vehicle. These are all in line with the changes sought in the Trump administration’s proposed budget for NASA.
I don't quite know why Eric Berger chose to use the word "Ironically" in the second paragraph there. One would expect the guy the president nominates would do what the president wants to see done. To me the surprise is that Duffy wants to suck up to the companies that have so royally screwed up Artemis and the rest of the post-shuttle space programs. I can only conclude that he wants them to buy his loyalty, too. Which is too bad. I used to have some respect for him.
Interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy provides remarks at a briefing prior to the Crew 11 launch in August. Image Credit: NASA
EDIT NOV. 5 @ 11:00 AM to add: My first visit to Next Spaceflight this morning shows the EscaPADE launch has been pushed back to Sunday, Nov. 9th, the date I've been reporting since early October, this time with a launch time of 2:45PM.
Duffy also wants to bring NASA, a separate organization, under the tender wings of the DOT. So instead of allowing NASA to become lean and mean and productive, Duffy wants to increase his empire of bureaucracy and rampant regulations and contracts full of graft and failure.
ReplyDeleteGee, President Trump, when are you going to fire Mr. Duffy for being anti-everything that the Trump Admin stands for?
At this point, if they shut down NASA I'd have only one concern: the deep space science world. Things like keeping the Voyagers running (and they only have like two or three years left to live anyway), and the five or 10 missions that are on the way to their destinations. Should JPL and JHUAPL (more?) get paid for by other institutions? Is NASA doing something or just being a "middleman" that does some setup that gets charged to us taxpayers instead of the actual customers?
DeleteDoes it make sense that the big name colleges (Harvard - cough, cough) have multi-billion dollar savings and when they want something done in space, taxpayers pay for it?
Going to the moon as a national goal is fine, but just "footprints and flags" leads to the horrific waste we've seen with SLS and Orion. I don't have any kind of feel for how that should be organized. The priority should be getting the space-based, free market economy going. Tourism? Like Blue Origin's suborbital flights, but maybe to LEO and eventually the moon? Manufacturing in zero G should be private sector all the way. Ditto for the research being done on the ISS.
Duffy has good hair, which Dilbert told us was all the qualification an executive needed.
ReplyDeleteIsaacman believes tax-funded science can do good things. But we already know that's uncompetitive because it hides from disruption.
The Trump administration is about tough talk, not about results. Gee whatever did they do with the DOGE results? The layoffs have been about removing Democrat pork, not about removing all pork.
The deep space science world should get a Patreon account like everybody else, and they'll do fine.
Universities deserve the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for the same reasons as last time.
FWIW, my interpretation of "Trump administration is about tough talk, not about results" is rather different. The biggest example is, " Gee whatever did they do with the DOGE results? The layoffs have been about removing Democrat pork, not about removing all pork."
DeleteThe problem is that doing things with the DOGE results had to go through the budget process, which means it had to go through Congress, which means the Democrats voted on it, too. Which lead to what we see now. I'm not saying that the DOGE cuts are the cause of the shutdown, I'm saying the root cause is the nearly perfect 50/50 split in congress. Any of those cuts that had to go through the budget process were easily blocked. The reason there's a shutdown now (if we can believe this) is Chuck Schumer is deathly afraid of AOC running for his senate seat and forcing him out of the money stream.
There are plenty of Republicans that trade, "I'll vote for your pork if you vote for mine." One person, like Trump, can't do enough. Several Red State Republicans backed the horrific waste of SLS because it fed into jobs in their districts, which feeds into getting them elected.
One president can't be the savior. There was one savior and he died around 2000 years ago.
Congress didn't pass any laws whose clear intent from the words written was to launder money to aid either political party. Therefore the President doesn't have to help execute and produce that result. What DOGE uncovered was fraud, not legislative intent the president disagrees with.
DeleteTake for example NASA. The sales pitch says its doing a bunch of cool rocket stuff. When the track record shows it not doing that, it is in the President's job description to fix it until it does what Congress says it should do.
The progress is worse than I could have imagined back in 1995, and yet costs more. Doing nothing at a price tag of $30 billion. The perfect congressional program.
ReplyDeleteThe Trump communications have a Reagan vibe to me, where the speeches by the sitting President are framed as if the President were an outside critic, when actually he is the person authorized to fix the problems. As if, it's not the President's job to make Good triumph over Evil, but rather it's the job of Good to be sanctified by being victimized by Evil. How many movies have you seen where the hero puts all the evildoing street thugs, and their protector evildoer city officials, into prison in the first twenty minutes, then spends the rest of the movie enjoying the high trust country he's defended, taking their kids for ice cream leaving the house and car doors unlocked? No, in Hollywood movies the hero 'restores the balance of Good and Evil', where Good's stated goal is to ensure the universe stays 50% Evil so Good can keep being tortured by it. We don't have cultural portrayals of Good, we have cultural portrayals of Victim calling itself Good. In this sick culture, to be moral the President has to be Charlie Brown and walk into Congress' trap every time. Given this President shows no interest in saving money, I expect the purchasing power of Social Security to be wiped out by hyperinflation.
ReplyDeleteIn preparation for that, wouldn't you like to be in the position of making money selling SDR HT kits to ham experimenters, kits with smart phone levels of unused CPU and memory in which to experiment with digital stuff? Doesn't have to be cheap and doesn't have to be miniaturized. Picture a 5 Watt bag phone which takes DeWalt batteries and talks to a 100 Watt NVIS repeater in the car.