Proud and sad to be an American today!

[zaitcev]

Yet, strangely, even the most recent plans for a Mars mission depend on an Earth departure, with all the problems that carries. Why is that?

I didn't look into Mars expedition architectures closely enough to comment. I only heard that Mars Direct underwent a dramatic change with the advent of Falcon Heavy, and Bob Zubrin received some mocking for it. I think Red Dragon does, in fact, pre-stages on a propellant stage. However, it is not really an architecture. Really, I have no clue about any of them. I think that the essential task now is to create a viable space economy in the cislunar space, and the future Mars mission architecture will fall out of that. It's compleltely pointless to try and get ahead of ourselves on the topic.

 

[zaitcev]

Bottom line: Once the core talent of NASA is scattered, it will be extremely difficult to reassemble. As we can now no longer go to the moon, soon we will be unable to build another shuttle, simply through intellectual decay inside NASA.

It is a problem, but we are a bit late to hoard the oldtimers. There was a whole generation at NASA - from diploma to pension - who never built anything worthwhile. Mike Griffin admitted that Ares I was in part to be a "rocket with training wheels" to give all the supposed NASA talent a real rocket to build before they could be trusted with the real deal, Ares V (known now as "SLS"). The low quality of NASA talent contributed quite a bit to that disaster, along with be bureaucratic sclerosis, lack of both technical and programmatic leadership, etc.

On the other hand, talent is people. Preserving the talent is not like hoarding bullion. Elon Musk found Tom Mueller being bored out his skull in TRW. At SpaceX, Tom designed the engine that launched Dragon into orbit. If he stayed inside the NASA contracting chain, we would never hear anything about it and he'd just disappear into the void with everyone else.

 

[Henning]

Did you just confuse Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk? It's Elon who's innaugurating the commercial cargo service to ISS at the end of this month, and promises to open commercial passenger service in 3 years.

Branson was the first to promise commercial passenger service to space that I remember. I am glad there is competition. I have not been particularly following it, but I'd take an operators and/or fabricators job for either/ any of them. I've even been practicing on Angry Birds Space.