For this baby boomer who grew up in the Cold War, the world has gone bizzaro. Here is Jeffrey Manber on Russian TV defending the capability of commercial companies to design and fly manned rockets and disputing Alabama politicians who are attacking such companies and claiming that only a government agency can do such things. The irony is manifest when Jeffrey notes that said agency will be paying a Russian company to launch its astronauts.
Heads are exploding all over the place.
…from Stephen Fleming. Goodby space program, hello space industry.
[Tuesday morning update]
Michael Belfiore, at Popular Mechanics:
I would argue that the new direction is not just the best option for NASA, but the only one. NASA already has no choice but to rely on the Russians for rides to the International Space Station after the shuttle retires this year. It’s an embarrassment. Obama’s budget will open the door to homegrown solutions for crew and cargo delivery to the space station, while providing much needed research funding for the development of next-gen technologies such as heavy-lift rockets and on-orbit refueling depots.
It’s a step that’s long overdue, though not one without peril. The private sector will have some very big shoes to fill, without the track record to prove that it’s up to the job. And can it succeed without succumbing to the kind of bloat that has eaten our defense budget alive? Working with the government tends to increase the amount of paperwork and oversight, along with the bureaucracy required to handle that extra workload, so it’s a legitimate concern. But, after all, the goal is to reduce the cost of reaching space. It has become clear to the right people, including many engineers and managers at NASA, that the traditional way of doing things hasn’t been working. NASA and the White House have every incentive to keep out of the way of the private contracts as much as possible.
We’ll see if that’s enough.
ATK is unhappy with the plans to cancel Ares.
Alan Boyle has a report on today’s events, and it looks like Bill Nelson is finding his way into the real world, even if other Senators aren’t.
Clark Lindsey took notes. I liked this:
/– How to deal with safety questions on Capitol Hill?
Bigelow: As a client, safety of the lifters is extremely important. We are going to expect well used and understood systems.
Anderson: NASA had astronauts flying on Ares I on its second flight. The commercial rockets will have flown many times before they every carry crews.
Musk: Southwest might have half the ticket price of a competitor yet no one thinks they are doing that by cutting on safety. Southwest’s safety record is one of the best.
Of all the lies, damned lies and statistics in this ongoing debate, the subject of safety has been the most meretricious.
Good stuff, all.
Clark also has as round up of all of the rapid-fire shoddy reporting on today’s announcements.
Bad science, and bad politics. But other than that, the warm-monger agenda was great.
…but in light of both recent and ancient history, should anyone be surprised by this?
Since Nancy Pelosi took over as Speaker in 2006, she’s rung up millions in military travel expenses to commute between San Francisco and Washington.
Worse still, she also appears to have requisitioned entire flights for the personal use of her children and grandchildren. That is, unaccompanied by any member of Congress, her kids, in-laws and grandchildren are utilizing entire military passenger jets for their routine travel needs.
Going through airport security and sitting in cattlecars is for the little people. Besides, she was doing it for the children. And the grandchildren.
I don’t want her to resign over this, though. I want her to remain the leader of the Democrats for years and years.
Isn’t it always the way with NASA?
This is poignant on at least two levels. If you accept the anthropomorphizing, it’s like something out of Catch-22.
Did Ben Nelson kill ObamaCare?
Of course, it’s not really heroic when you accomplish a great deed inadvertently, for venal reasons.
You know, I can think of very few people in whose opinions I have less interest right now, with the possible exception of Mike Griffin, than Scott Horowitz. The sad thing is, he probably actually believes this:
To help address the safety and reliability issues, SAIC was commissioned to evaluate the potential hazards of the first stage solid and the overall reliability of the vehicle. The SAIC study (SAICNY05-04-1F) showed that a worst-case scenario of a catastrophic case burst of the first stage (extremely unlikely) would result in a maximum overpressure at the crew capsule of approzimately 1 psi. This overpressure is well within the design characteristics of the capsule. SAIC also conducted an initial Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) evaluation of the reliability of the launch vehicle and estimated a launch vehicle failure rate (LOV) of 1 in 483 and a loss of crew rate (LOC) of 1 in 3,145 at the mean of the estimated uncertainty distribution. Recent NASA PRA estimates for the current configuration predict a LOC of approximately 1 in 2,500. This compares to the LOC for Shuttle of 1 in 88.
“1 in 3,145”?
Really? Not “1 in 3,144” or “1 in 3,146”? And did they include all of the TBD gimcrackery that was going to be incorporated to keep the vehicle from shaking itself and Orion apart?
And how many centuries did he expect this vehicle, that would cost billions of dollars each flight, to fly in order to determine whether the genius rocket scientists at SAIC got the numbers right?
It would have a little more credibility if he had at least said one in three thousand (though not a lot), and not made the elementary first-year physics student’s mistake of overprecision.
But you don’t get safety by doing PRAs. If we learned anything from the Shuttle, we sure as hell should have learned that. You get safety from flying. A lot.
But the other thing that is disturbing are the requirements:
Do not compromise crew safety for cost, performance, or schedule
This requirement, taken to its logical conclusion, would keep us on the planet forever. Don’t compromise it for cost? OK, then it becomes unaffordable because we can’t compromise “safety.” Don’t compromise for performance? OK, then the job doesn’t get done. Don’t compromise for schedule? So when do we fly?
This was a system of the astronauts, by the astronauts, for the astronauts. Which says to me, we need a different kind of astronaut, one who takes their job, and its purpose, seriously.
Life, and engineering are compromises. If safety becomes the ultimate value, then you might as well stay in bed (assuming that someone doesn’t decide to pump poison into your bedroom, or a meteroid doesn’t come crashing through the roof). And the irony, of course (again, as we should have learned from the Shuttle) is that you don’t get safety by spending billions in the attempt. The only way to get some level of safety is to do something a lot, make mistakes, and learn from them. In fact, if Shuttle were still a fully-operational program, with new parts being produced, and a reasonable flight rate, it would be safer now than at any time in its history, because we learned a lot from Challenger and Columbia. But it’s not, and we can’t afford to fly it enough to make it truly safe.
The lesson here is that if you want safety, don’t avoid reusables — reuse them, a lot. But the nonsensical lesson that many (including the CAIB) seemed to take away from Columbia, in addition to unrealistic safety requirements, is that we should return to throwing away the vehicle so that each flight is a first flight, and then put a heavy, expensive escape system on it when it fails anyway.
People with such an attitude are fundamentally unserious about space. The unwillingness to risk the lives of astronauts says that what we are trying to accomplish in space is unimportant. As long as that is the case, it will remain unaffordable, and we will accomplish little. Today’s announcement is, I hope a first step toward a more sane, and realistic approach to human spaceflight.