Good News

I hadn’t noticed this from last Thursday:

According to insiders, the White House is looking at four options, each of which would scrap Ares I, dramatically revise Constellation and start new programs allowing commercial space companies to carry humans to the space station. All would be blocked by the latest move by Congress.

Emphasis mine. If the insiders are right, we’re approaching the end of our long national space-policy nightmare. Oh, and as for Congress blocking it? They can do that, I suppose, but it won’t save Ares I. It will just keep any other option from being implemented. NASA (via the administration) will decide what its new plans are. Congress can oppose them, but it can’t force a different direction. And most of Congress, other than the Alabama delegation, doesn’t give a damn.

[Update a while later]

Bobby Block has the latest on the battle at the Orlando Sentinel. This is interesting (if a little depressing):

Last week, Boeing executives, including the company’s vice president for Space Exploration Vice President and General Manager, Brewster Shaw, a former astronaut, called on their employees “to share their excitement and commitment to human space flight — and the Constellation project and Ares program — with their elected officials” through a company-assisted letter-writing effort.

It is the first time that a company has called on its workforce to try to fight to save NASA’s embattled Constellation moon rocket program.

“Now more than ever, it is extremely important that everyone become involved in this conversation,” Shaw wrote in a message to employees last Thursday.

What they’re trying to save, of course, are the upper stage and avionics ring contracts. My question is, how seriously would they expect a Congressperson to take a letter from someone whose contract is at stake? It’s one thing to get a letter from an uninvolved but interested citizen — it’s another to get one from a Boeing employee. I’d be inclined to ignore it myself, particularly given the knowledge that it was at the behest of management. I’m not sure this is a great PR play.

Of course, it could be that they’re just following orders:

Gabrielle Giffords, the head of the House subcommittee with NASA oversight and the wife of NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, says she urged aerospace leaders to get their employees to write the President over the summer, but said only six letters were written.

…Boeing spokesman Ed Memi said that the company recently decided that a big push to back Constellation by its employees was a good move now.

Well, we can see why…

[Bumped]

25 thoughts on “Good News”

  1. It will be interesting to see if there are plans for Shuttle extension. If not, then most of the KSC & Shuttle workforce will be laid off very soon. That would be a major strategic shift. After that the Texas and Florida delegations would have much less reason not to gang up on MSFC. Divide et impera!

  2. It’s certainly consistent with the administration’s well known allergy to even saying “Ares”.

  3. >My question is, how seriously would they expect
    >a Congressperson to take a letter from someone
    >whose contract is at stake?
    >

    Really, what else would a congressmen care about but jobs in their district ?

  4. > I was referring to a Congressperson in general, not the
    > one who also had a stake in the jobs.

    The rest would have no reason to care at all – unless the congressmen with jobs no the line would offer them a trade for something.

  5. I’m not sure you’re right about Ares being scrapped no matter what. I can’t remember the name of the bill, but one was passed in the 1970’s limiting the Executive Branch’s ability to not spend allocated money. Previously, they couldn’t spend money that was allocated for something else but they could refuse to do something that Congress had put in the budget. Now, they have to spend all of the money allocated to a task, and they can’t spend it on anything other than the task for which it was allocated; violation of the Separation of Powers be damned. If Congress allocates money to NASA for the purposes of supporting Ares, the Executive Branch has to spend it on Ares.

  6. I’m not sure you’re right about Ares being scrapped no matter what. I can’t remember the name of the bill, but one was passed in the 1970’s limiting the Executive Branch’s ability to not spend allocated money.

    Let me put it this way. At some point, the White House (assuming that it cares at all about getting its own policy implemented) will have to remind Congress, as Augustine pointed out, that it is not providing enough money to do Constellation, unless it cannibalizes everything else that NASA is doing. If it wants to keep Ares alive, it’s going to have to come up with more money, or see other things (including ISS) die. Congress could add the $3B+ that is required, which would be above the request, but this appropriations bill doesn’t do that. Also at some point, Congress will actually notice what it did, as Clark points out. It’s easy to insert feel-good language by a few key players, but (as Clark notes) once the new policy is announced, it will get serious scrutiny from congressmembers who don’t give a damn about keeping Ares alive.

  7. “Sounds like Sen. Shelby is getting desperate.”

    I think the phrase you are looking for is “Getting Medieval.”

    Mind, one wonders what the reaction will be, besides groaning about how much of a creep Shelby is?

  8. One of the big ironies of the situation is that _both_ EELV vehicles are now built at a plant in Decatur, a short drive down the road from Huntsville. They worked hard to keep either of those from being able to compete with Ares in spite of the massive cost differential between the two vehicles… and made sure Constellation was way too heavy to fit on anything as small as a Delta IV.

    The end result is that the perceived choice, nationally, is between a too-expensive capsule and launcher combination that probably wouldn’t have been built in Alabama anyway and a capsule and launcher combination that will be built primarily CA and Colorado and tested in Texas.

    They had launch vehicles that _if_ mass produced could have competed with Falcon and made sure they were excluded from consideration in favor of the fly-once-a-year, built-in-New-Orleans-and-Utah stick.

    What state does Sen. Shelby represent again?

  9. I can see the current government wanting to kill “Bush’s rocket” along with everything else associated with the former president. But I can’t see it supporting anything that would allow spaceflight independent of Government financial support and control. So if the administration wants to use ‘private’ rockets, it’ll be private only so far as the rockets being designed and built by ‘private’ businesses beholden to government for their bread and butter. In the same sense as the private sector creating wealth, then the government deciding what to do with the wealth.

  10. I can see the current government wanting to kill “Bush’s rocket” along with everything else associated with the former president. But I can’t see it supporting anything that would allow spaceflight independent of Government financial support and control.

    Look again.

    “Some of the most exciting companies in America today go by the names of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Bigelow Aerospace, Masten, Flag Suit, and Ad Astra…. What these companies, and others, are doing is nothing short of inspirational. Today, we at NASA are devising ways to work with these companies and others who will come. I urge you, and all other investors, to take notice. Space may someday soon become the new thing in investing.”– Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden

    That’s quite a change from Mike Griffin who repeatedly said it was “not NASA’s job” to help private companies get into space (despite what NASA’s charter says).

  11. [i]I’m not sure you’re right about Ares being scrapped no matter what. I can’t remember the name of the bill, but one was passed in the 1970’s limiting the Executive Branch’s ability to not spend allocated money.[/i]

    Instituted, IIRC, after Congress several times allocated money to begin production of the F-12B, the operational fighter version of the Lockheed SR-71, and Secretary of Defense MacNamara refused to spend it. He wanted NORAD to use an interceptor version of his pet F-111 instead.

    MacNamara ultimately solved the problem by ordering Lockheed to destroy all the production tooling for the SR-71. Congress was ticked about that, which lead to the bill in question.

  12. Uh oh. I see reason to greatly fear the space policy that is about to emerge from the Obama administration. It is very much beginning to look like the tail of foreign relations is going to wag the dog of space exploration. Just as Clinton did during his term of office when the Space Station was reduced to a means to buy off underemployed Russian aerospace capacity.

    Excerpt from linked story…

    The budget situation is one reason the White House is seeking foreign partners as alternatives to Constellation, as well as the possibility of using NASA as a form of “soft power” on the global stage.

    In his speech to industry officials, Bolden said that Obama told him to use NASA as a way to reach out to new partners, including China, one of only three countries that have launched astronauts into space. The others are the U.S. and Russia.

    “We are going to reach out to what I call nontraditional partners. And I can say that with confidence because the president has told me to do that,” said Bolden, who has said little about the agency’s future since taking office nearly six months ago.

    “There are not a lot of things I can tell you with certainty. But I can tell you, he said, ‘Do that.’ “

  13. I also seem to recall a lot of teeth-pulling to get DARPA to spend funding explicitly allocated by Congress on DC-X development and testing, toward the end of their involvement with it…

  14. The budget situation is one reason the White House is seeking foreign partners as alternatives to Constellation, as well as the possibility of using NASA as a form of “soft power” on the global stage.

    One good thing about this is that it would cement the future of the ISS, which means there would be no money for Ares. If Richard Shelby succeeds in seeing through the dismantling of the Shuttle workforce and if Obama succeeds in getting NASA to buy commercial crew rotation services then commercial space will be in a much stronger position than it has been to date.

  15. He seems to employ the sunk cost fallacy a lot. Just because we have “assets” doesn’t mean it’s better to use them rather than scrap them. The Shuttle in particular is in a bad situation. There’s only three of them. If, as most Shuttle extension ideas seem to imply, we go into a very low launch frequency regime (two flights a year), then not only do we have a launch vehicle with very high cost per launch, but also a vehicle entering a mode of operation which is inherently far less safe than current.

    My view is that any launch vehicle operating twice a year for an extended period of time, no matter who is running it, is going to have a failure rate of much greater than 1 in 100. I would bet on 1 in 20, myself, for the last few flights.

    Second, we don’t have a plan to use the capabilities of the Shuttle. For example, we don’t need it to maintain the ISS contrary to Kraft’s assertion. The only true benefit of the Shuttle with respect to the ISS is increased downmass, but we don’t have a significant use for that downmass.

    COTS is further along than Ares and it costs less. We also have the EELVs which could already fly payloads to the ISS. Finally, is it really to our advantage to employ tens of thousands of skilled workers in NASA makework programs, when they could be doing more in private industry? I don’t think so.

  16. The big problem between Ares and EELV or SpaceX is the former hasn’t enough political support to get the funding (I.E. Congress are choking on the price tag) and is a technical nightmare. EELV or SpaceX doesn’t spend enough, or employ enough folks in NASA districts, to get enough political support to get the funding (I.E. Congress is not seeing enough benefit to justify the program).

  17. The only true benefit of the Shuttle with respect to the ISS is increased downmass, but we don’t have a significant use for that downmass.

    Actually, Shuttle can carry seven crew, at probably less cost per flight than Ares I, even at only two flights a year. The amazing thing is that continuing Shuttle makes a lot more sense than developing Ares at this point. You could even design an Orion that would fit into the payload bay.

  18. Don’t be misunderstanding the nature of the fight here. What’s at issue is MSFC’s continued existence as NASA’s main space launcher development center. Canceling Ares would leave Marshall vulnerable to major cutbacks or even closing. EELV production in Decatur really doesn’t address that issue – the vast majority of the federal civil servants and contractors at the core of Huntsville’s economy would be irrelevant to EELV production. Killing Ares would be a major threat to Huntsville’s economy.

    Now, given MSFC’s abysmal launcher development track record since Von Braun left the scene, there is a case to be made that NASA can no longer afford to spend billions a year on maintaining the bloated ghost of his old rocket shop. But that case has been makable for twenty years, and MSFC is still there. Do not underestimate the level of political knifefighting involved in an actual final shutdown of Ares in favor of commercial boosters. And do not be surprised if the beast keeps rising from the (apparent) grave again and again.

    Mind, this White House’s (and Congress’s) politics might actually lead to a stake through Marshall’s heart. If so, it’ll depend a lot more on Congressional horsetrading and how the local voters have been leaning than on the technical merits of Ares vs EELV. There’s a lot of actual talent scattered through MSFC, and they’d do OK as long as they’re flexible enough to adapt. Adapt, not just to different towns, but to the very different mindset of building rockets on deadline for money… But given the overall budget problems of the nation, Huntsville likely won’t be the only federal enclave taking a big hit before it’s over.

  19. > ..The amazing thing is that continuing Shuttle makes
    > a lot more sense than developing Ares at this point.
    > You could even design an Orion that would fit into
    > the payload bay.
    >

    Not that amazing considering the Ares-I dev program is rivaling teh inflation adjusted cost of the shuttle dev program, and Orion is budgeted at 20% more then the orbiter dev costs. Ares-I/Orion program costs per flight is looking to exceed $8B a flight – and folks are openly questioning if you maintain and operate ISS without Shuttle.

    Yup, NASA is spending as must as the Apollo program, to field a shuttle reaction that’s laughable.

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