Congress Continues To Fiddle With Monster Rockets, While Human Spaceflight Burns

It’s been an exciting week on the International Space Station. On Monday, it had to dodge an old upper stage that was in danger of colliding with it. Then, yesterday, a reaction-control thruster unexpectedly fired for half a minute, causing a sudden unplanned shift in the facility’s attitude. Fortunately, the system reacted well overall, and things were restored to normal within a couple hours.

The misfiring thruster was on the Russian Soyuz capsule currently attached to the ISS. This is the vehicle in which it is planned to bring three crew members back to earth later tomorrow morning.

This is just the latest problem with Russian space hardware. The reason that the crew are coming home this month, instead of the originally planned return in May, is that there was a failure of a (Russian) Progress cargo ship at the end of April. As I wrote at PJMedia this past weekend:

This was, sadly, not atypical. Just in the past six years, the Russians have now had sixteen space mission failures, one of which had NASA actually contemplating temporarily abandoning the ISS in 2011. Their industry is beset by strikes, underpaid workers, and the need to rapidly reproduce hardware that in the past would have been acquired from Ukraine, the flow of which has been interrupted by Russia’s ongoing war on that nation. In addition, as reported in a story this past weekend, there is also massive corruption. With each failure, there is a management shakeup, but the underlying systemic quality problems never seem to get fixed.

These most recent failures should be the last straw in demonstrating the immediate need to free the nation’s civil space policy from dependence on the dysfunctional Russian space industry. But Congress continues to misprioritize the budget and the direction to NASA necessary to do so.

The only way to end our dependence on the Russians for access to the ISS is to accelerate the commercial crew program but, every year, Congress refuses to provide it with the funds that NASA requests to just keep it on schedule, let alone accelerate it. In the House appropriation this year, the budget was cut by almost a quarter of a billion dollars, twenty percent below the request of $1.243B. Worse, in the mark up today, the Senate appropriations committee is even worse, cutting the budget by over a third of a billion. This, despite the fact that in hearings in March, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told the committee that, while they could not accelerate the program with additional funding, they could further delay it with cuts. The current schedule is for 2017 for first crew flight. These cuts will likely extend our dependence on Russia into 2018.

Previous concerns with Russian dependence were geopolitical; as I’ve noted in the past, it prevents us from sanctioning them under the Iran/North Korea/Syria Non-Proliferation Act (INKSNA). Under the act, we should not be purchasing goods or services from Russia, because they have been aiding Iran (at least) with missile and nuclear-weapon development for years, but every year or two, Congress has to waive the act in order to purchase more Soyuz rides to get our crew to and from the ISS. But now, we have a new concern: Is the hardware even reliable?

But there is no backup plan. When pressed on it, General Bolden said he “didn’t even want to think about” the eventuality that he couldn’t use Russian services. Here is his quote from the March hearing: “Our backup plan…would be to mutually agree that the space station and space exploration is coming to an end. We would make an orderly evacuation….”

If only we had some sort of…I don’t know…national space agency whose head was paid to think about things like that.

As I wrote this weekend:

Ignoring the self-serving fecklessness with which Congress is dealing with the issue, the real problem is pusillanimity. There was an answer to Chairman Culberson’s question to General Bolden. There is one way, and one way only, to accelerate Commercial Crew and end our dependence on the Russians; and that is, to recognize the importance of human spaceflight, and be more accepting of risk.

The Commercial Crew schedule is driven by NASA’s traditional mission-assurance process, with its lengthy reviews and milestones. This in turn is driven by continual lectures by Congress that “safety is the highest priority.”

But that means that actually accomplishing things in space (such as research on potential life-saving technologies), and ending our dependence on the problematic Russians is actually a lower priority. A different way to phrase that would be, “What we are doing in human spaceflight isn’t very important.” If safety is “the highest priority,” we might as well just stay home.

As is, with their almost flawless mission performance, Falcon/Dragon are probably already safer than anything we flew in the sixties, even with an untested flight-abort system. If it were important, really important, to get someone to the ISS this month, a life-support system could be quickly cobbled together and even allow crew to go on the currently scheduled cargo Dragon.

The previous arguments against the safety of Commercial Crew rested on a comparison with the “reliable” Soyuz. Recent events suggest that argument no longer applies. We have no “safe” ways to head to the high frontier, and frontiers have never been safe. We have only two realistic options at this point. Abandon the ISS in which we have invested so much, for so many years, or recognize its importance and act accordingly.

But space, and accomplishing things in space, is never important to Congress, nor (apparently) is reining in the Russian bear.

What do they want instead? In the same budget in which they slash funding for commercial crew, they want to increase the budget for the Space Launch System (aka “Senate” Launch System) by a third above NASA’s request, to around $2B. As I pointed out at Ricochet Monday:

As with all else with SLS, this is programmatically insane. As I note in the video for my new Kickstarter project, adding that money to the budget will do nothing to accelerate the program, and no program manager knows what to do with a sudden half a billion dollars in the budget. Assuming this nonsense doesn’t get fixed in a conference with the Senate appropriators, it will probably be spent in the states and districts of the committee members, as desired, but in a very wasteful way.

Of course, the likelihood of fixing it just plummeted with today’s Senate mark up. And the most frustrating thing is that the vehicle is not even needed to go to Mars. The purpose of the aforementioned Kickstarter (more than half the funds have been raised, with a little less than half the time remaining, hint, hint), is to show more cost effective ways to do human spaceflight, if only Congress gives up its infatuation with unnecessary “monster” rockets. But it will likely take a new administration (as it did the last time) to set a more useful course for the nation’s space agency. It will also take a White House and Congress, that take space seriously. But based on history, we shouldn’t hold our breath.

I would note that, in light of all this, there is an update to yesterday’s Space Access Society’s legislative alert:

This is an urgent followup to yesterday’s Commercial Crew Funding Alert.

This morning’s Senate Appropriations CJS Subcommittee markup of the bill that funds (among others) NASA for the fiscal year starting this October did not go well for Commercial Crew. The program was cut a further $100 million from the House Appropriation of $1 billion, itself a $244 million cut from NASA’s request.

There is reportedly an amendment in the works for tomorrow’s full Senate Appropriations Committee markup to plus up the overall NASA budget by $500 million, $300 million of that to go to Commercial Crew.

This amendment is a long shot. If it is to have any chance at all tomorrow, a significant show of constituent support is needed.

That means you need to care enough to take ten minutes to do this:

If one of your Senators is on the Appropriations Committee (check the list) and you haven’t already contacted them, we ask you urgently to contact them before Thursday morning via one of the methods described at the alert.

If your Senators aren’t on the Committee, it still can be helpful to contact them. Senators do talk to each other about what they’re hearing from back home, and even if it doesn’t affect tomorrow’s markup, it can help whenever the next step takes place, consideration of the bill by the full Senate.

Thanks for your time, and good luck to us all.

Yes.

[Update a while later]

Senator “Monster Rocket” Nelson responds.

[Thursday-morning update]

Full appropriations committee marked up the bill this morning, no amendments for NASA. Only way to fix this now is on the Senate floor. But at least the Soyuz had a successful landing this morning.

[Bumped]

39 thoughts on “Congress Continues To Fiddle With Monster Rockets, While Human Spaceflight Burns”

  1. If an American astronaut were to stand up, he or she could make a difference right now by refusing to ride down in the Soyuz. Let him or her ride down in a cargo Dragon.

    It might end a career, but it might be worth it.

  2. “We would make an orderly evacuation….”

    I wonder how they would make an orderly evacuation if Russia decided to bar Americans from flying on Soyuz for some reason, like deteriorating relations.

    1. Easy, they’d just exit the station in space suits and be dead inside of a day. That’s orderly, isn’t it?

      They wouldn’t be able to ride down in a Dragon cargo capsule in such a situation; the fact it lacks a functional launch abort system means they could never get the paperwork completed in time.

      /snark

        1. ech said; “Arizona, a functioning abort system would not be needed to bring crew down……”

          Yup… I know, and that was part of my point. I was being snarky. 🙂

  3. These cuts are entirely consistent with Congress’ oft expressed view that NASA should just pick one provider and give them all the money. In their view, Orion is the backup.

    This ‘competition’ thing seems to make their heads explode.

      1. Crying out in the wilderness again Trent? You are so right. Like me, you will be ignored. Sad isn’t it?

        Govt. is the problem.

        1. We ignore your comment because it’s full of emotion, but devoid of ideas or facts. As a result it doesn’t add anything to the discussion.
          Keep in mind not everyone constantly refreshes the discussion to jump on new posts. Reasoned arguments take time.
          I tried to write a reasoned rebuttal to Trent’s post. If you have anything else to counter my ideas feel free to reply.

          1. Govt. involvement is anti competition in all cases. That’s an emotional assertion. Now for facts.

            Govt. redistributes money by threat of force. Govt. picks winners and losers. Except the winners they pick are often those that can’t win on their own which means the money given to those is wasted.

            When govt. accidentally gives money to winners, they often do all they can to screw that up.

            That anyone can suggest that govt. fosters competition (which can only be asserted by a narrow vision that ignores the greater reality) proves a disregard for facts and reality.

            We need more outrage, not less.

            Trent can deal with your rebuttal. I’ve already seen your reasoned argument before you’ve written it.

      2. It’s called redundancy. For some things, it pays to have a backup system. In the case of human space launch, we saw all to well what happens when there’s only a single provider and it suffers an accident. Following both the Challenger and Columbia accidents, the Shuttle was grounded for over 2 years.

        When the Air Force was pushing the development of EELV, they wanted two separate launcher families so that a failure by one wouldn’t stop all launches. The competition was supposed to be between the two providers on who would get the most launches. It could work out that way with Commercial Crew as well – the better vendor gets more launches.

        1. Exactly.

          Multiple sources gives you redundancy and a real market of suppliers. When you only have one, that contractor has you over a barrel. That contractor also has fewer incentives to seek cost reductions.

          Imagine if NASA had chosen only Orbital Sciences for cargo delivery. Where would we be now?

          Much more to the point, multiple contractors means a growing space industrial sector, which can do lots of things besides supply your government space station.

      3. They have already competed against several other companies to be chosen as the ones to take their concepts to completion.
        They are only guaranteed a minimal amount of missions.
        Once those are done, they will go back to competing against each other for new missions.
        I don’t see how you can call that anything but straight up competition.
        Do you have any insight on how else a company would do something similar?

        1. That they compete in a limited sense is not the argument.

          If two runners run in a race, that’s competition. When a third party decides who gets to run and how much baggage each must carry, then it is not.

          Boeing has said they would not compete at all without NASA money. Sierra Nevada continues to compete as well as they can w/o NASA money. You may describe this as competition, but it’s a very distorted subset at best.

  4. Rand, you said:

    “Under the act, we should not be purchasing goods or services from Russia, because they have been aiding Iran (at least) with missile and nuclear-weapon development for years.”

    But under that standard, shouldn’t Congress withhold funding from Obama and Kerry?

    1. Don’t be silly. At present there is some Detente with Iran because of the whole situation regarding ISIL but it is nothing more than that.

      The US government is certainly not helping them with nuclear weapons development. There is just some defrosting in relations that is all.
      Heck I don’t know what’s the big deal of having normalized relations with Iran. The US is an ally of Pakistan and the relationship certainly has a lot of problems. Pakistan has tense relations with India while Iran presently has normalized relations with all its neighbors. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Pakistan funded and supported Al-Qaeda in the past.

      The only reason not to have normalized relations with Iran is Israel. Nothing else.

      1. “The only reason not to have normalized relations with Iran is Israel. Nothing else.”

        As long as you forget the last 35 years of history between Iran and industrial society around the world, … then sure. Iran heads the US State Dept. terrorist support list because it deserves to be there, as a result of its own actions. When you look at translations of internal speeches by Khomeinei and Khameinei to their supporters for those 35 years it is obvious that The Great Satan did not win its standing because of the Little Satan.

        The Khomeinists, just like ISIS, see the US as the biggest roadblock to reviving a worldwide imperial Caliphate, with all its old pretensions. The Iranians do not hate Israel because of what they do to Palestinians, whom they despise like other Arabs are despised historically among Persians. Like the leaders of each of the other waves of reaction against industrial society, they hate Jews primarily because Jews have a higher rate of participation in the worldwide networks of industrial society than any other ethnic group, bar none.

        “The US is an ally of Pakistan and the relationship certainly has a lot of problems. Pakistan has tense relations with India while Iran presently has normalized relations with all its neighbors. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Pakistan funded and supported Al-Qaeda in the past. ”

        Pakistan is a formal US ally, only because of the anti-western stance of India during WW III (aka, The Cold War). The Pakistani factions we introduced to members of the Saudi Royal family after the USSR invaded Afghanistan turned into Caliphate revivalists themselves during that Afghan insurgency. After the 1989 Treaty pulled us out of Afghanistan, they began building the Taliban, using their control of the Pakistani ISI, and continuing Saudi monies from Caliphate sympathizers among the Royal Princes.

        Those hating Jewish leadership in industrial society here in the US are not directly helping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but relegate them to a minor concern, because they *want* opponents to industrial society around the world to prosper. They are themselves anti-industrial in the basics, while supporting whatever crony businessmen they can gather from the technical fields. This includes the opponents of the Israelis. They have no belief in Israel as a canary in the coal mine that is WW IV, because they don’t believe that a Caliphate is all *that* bad a thing. This is natural for people who see imperialism coming only *from* industrial society, instead of the anti-industrial agrarian cultures where imperialism originated, which naturally oppose industrial society.

        “Heck I don’t know what’s the big deal of having normalized relations with Iran.”

        The same thing that was wrong with normalizing relations with Stalin 6 years before he helped Hitler kickoff WW II.

        1. If they hadn’t normalized relations with Stalin before WWII and allowed the Soviet Union to buy western technology for their buildup then Hitler and the axis might have actually won WWII. For all I know, without the technology exports, the Soviet Union would even have lost their pre-WWII war with Japan and would have suffered offensives from both West and East by Axis they could not defend from. So yes I think it was a good idea to thaw relations with the Soviet Union pre-WWII.

          1. Unless you think an emboldened Imperial Japan with access to Siberian oil during WWII would have been a good idea.

          2. The Russian did lose to Japan (1905?)

            Why pick Stalin in your example? Hitler admired Britain and would have been happy to normalize relation with them.

            That you think the mullahs are better than Hitler is the shocker. Give the mullahs time and they’ll show you that Hitler was a piker.

      2. The saddest thing about Iran is that it’s people would be strong allies if we properly dealt with it’s government. This would allow other progress in the region.

          1. Then there was the second brief window in 2009, during which we cold-shouldered the people wanting to remove the Khomeinists.

    2. The only way Iran’s relations with Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Saudi Arabia could be considered normal is if normalcy is war – with guns and artillery and whatnot.

  5. Well at least Nelson defended Commercial Crew funding and made a good argument about it.

    I hope they won’t decrease the funding. If it wasn’t for these constant cuts and interference with Commercial Crew we could have probably had a manned transportation capability to the ISS by now.

    1. As a lifelong conservative, and 21-year Republican/libertarian, I found it sad to see the Democrat making sense, while the Republican is merely in it for pork.

      1. “As a lifelong conservative, and 21-year Republican/libertarian, I found it sad to see the Democrat making sense, while the Republican is merely in it for pork.”

        It’s *not* a Rep/Dem thing. It’s LBJ-wannabes. Shelby acted the same way before 1995, when he was a Democrat, as he acts today, as a Republican. Their first desire is to be able to campaign on “Look what *Ahhh* brought *you*!!

        In 1995 Shelby jumped ship from a sinking Dem brand, and boarded a rising Rep brand, with no real change in *him*. Broad tents are *hard* to seal against rats!

        1. That maybe ‘explains’ Sen. Shelby, what of all the others in the GOP, House and Senate? It does indeed seem to be largely a Dem vs. Rep split, and if that’s so then what does it imply about what the GOP members really stand for vs. what they say are conservative principles.

    2. with Commercial Crew we could have probably had a manned transportation capability to the ISS by now.

      Who is “we”?

      “Those of us who live in Houston, work in the Astronaut Office at JSC, and are sufficiently skilled at office to get a flight”?

      Or have you bought into the New Space fantasy that CCDev is going to enable thousands of people to live and work aboard ISS?

      1. The West. Yes I expect that if SpaceX develops their manned capsules and Bigelows develops his orbital modules a commercial space station is only a question of “when” not “if”.

        It might start as a private section of ISS or as a wholly separate space station. I would like if the ISS partners (namely the US) allowed a private segment in the ISS. But I don’t know if that will happen if if the wholly private space station will happen first.

        1. I can tell you what will happen first. SpaceX’s CRS-8 launch to ISS, scheduled for September, is carrying Bigelow’s BEAM.

  6. One wonders if the US crew will be evacuated in an orderly fashion at the point of one of the guns the Russians have on their Soyuz, and the ISS will become the RSS. SMH. If I didn’t know that the stupidity of TPTB was truly bottomless, I’d wonder if that wasn’t part of some evil plan.

    1. We aught to work for that. Give the I.S.S. to Russia and fund Bigelow’s Alpha station!

      Replace a $150b with $500m. Replace 30 years with 2.

      Then use that to dismantle any organization that funded the I.S.S. in the first place (like SLS/Orion.)

      1. Unfortunately I would not be surprised if they just axed all manned space altogether. It wouldn’t be the first time this happened. No I think the right way is to test as many of these components on the ISS using as possible and decrease the amount of private R&D expenditure required for it to happen. Then it will happen regardless of an ISS or not.

        I believe the ISS will be an interim development. Eventually the Russians may leave it for a joint space station with the Chinese or their own smaller scale space station. This was always going to be a transitory development. Most countries entered the ISS originally as a cost-cutting exercise. The original plans were always to have one space station per major space faring nation/block. If private companies like Bigelow offer this at a low cost once ISS gets closer to end of life he should find himself a lot of business.

        1. Unfortunately I would not be surprised if they just axed all manned space altogether. It wouldn’t be the first time this happened.

          Actually, it would be.

          1. True, Rand, though their “shaping” has blocked large portions of what needs to be done to settle the Solar System. Relevant congressional committee members ignored or even encouraged the whispering campaigns against private space developments by NASA factions from 1979-2004. While doing that, they actually tagged a NASA appropriation in the middle 1980s with an outright ban on spending a single dime on crewed Mars missions. When the inflatables technology being developed at JSC was incautiously justified on the basis of Mars missions, it was axed by Congress.

            The congressional institution has at all times with regards to spaceflight acted with regard to minimizing political costs while maximizing political profits. As you have noted so often, Space is *not* politically profitable outside NASA Center districts.

        2. I would not be surprised if they just axed all manned space altogether.

          You confuse “all manned spaceflight” with “NASA spaceflight.”

          Do you think there are no men who don’t work for NASA? (To say nothing of women.)

          the right way is to test as many of these components on the ISS using as possible and decrease the amount of private R&D expenditure required for it to happen.

          Seriously? Why do people believe that continuing to rely on ISS, rather than commercial platforms, decreases the amount of private investment required? I would really like to see the cost/benefit trade that proves it.

          If private companies like Bigelow offer this at a low cost once ISS gets closer to end of life he should find himself a lot of business.

          Except that the New Space strategy is to continue extending the life of ISS forever, regardless of cost, so that it *never* reaches end of life.

          1. Except that the New Space strategy is to continue extending the life of ISS forever, regardless of cost, so that it *never* reaches end of life.

            Good luck with that. The Russians wanted to do that with Mir but there were just so many problems. Its just like any house it needs MAJOR renovations every 20-30 years which cost about as much as doing it all over again.

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