Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Space

More On The Space Civil War

18 Comments

It’s not just between Mike Griffin and OMB (and the White House?). Now (not that it’s anything new) there is a lot of infighting between JSC and Marshall over Orion and Ares:

Design issues for any new vehicle are to be expected, and correctly represented by the often-used comment of ‘if there weren’t problems, we wouldn’t need engineers.’ However, Orion’s short life on the drawing board has been an unhappy childhood.

The vast majority of Orion’s design changes have been driven by Ares I’s shortcomings – via performance and mass issues – to ably inject the vehicle into orbit. The fact that the Ares I now has several thousand pounds of reserve mass properties negates the suffering it has brought on the vehicle it is designed to serve.

Those penalties Orion had to endure could be seen at the very start of its design process, when the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) reduced in size by 0.5 meters in diameter, soon followed by Orion having its Service Module stripped down in size and mass by around 50 percent.

‘Mass savings’ would become one of the most repeated terms surrounding the Orion project.

One of the problems that the program had (like many) were caused by the intrinsic concept of the Shaft itself. If you’re designing an all-new rocket, it is a “rubber” vehicle in that one can size stages to whatever is necessary to optimize it. But in their determination to use an SRB as a first stage, they put an artificial constraint on vehicle performance. When it was discovered that the four-segment motor wouldn’t work, they went to a different upper stage engine. When this didn’t work, they went to five segments (which meant that it was a whole new engine).

During Apollo, von Braun took requirements from the people designing the mission hardware, and then added a huge margin to it (fifty percent, IIRC), because he didn’t believe them. As it turned out, they ended up needing almost all of the vehicle performance to get to the moon.

This program never had anything like that kind of margin, and now, at PDR 0.5, it’s already almost gone. So now they’re rolling the requirements back on to the Orion, demanding that the payload make up for performance loss by cutting weight, while also (probably, next year) requiring that it add systems to mitigate the fact that the vehicle is going to shake them like a Sherwin Williams machine. This will result in further loss of margin, redundancy and safety.

This is not a typical development path of a successful program. It is emblematic of one about to augur in.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

There Are Lies

27 Comments

…damned lies, and campaign hyperbole:

…we’ve all heard the self-serving myth that pits helpless, meek, high-minded, issue-oriented Democrats against mendacious and mean Republicans, who not only detest America — especially children and small vulnerable creatures — but will lie and cheat to keep all oppressed.

The facts betray a more equitable story. And it starts with Sarah Palin’s assertion that she said “thanks, but no thanks” to the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” and opposed earmarks. This is an elastic political truth.

Technically, she did stop the project after initially supporting it. She has taken earmarks — even lobbied for them while mayor of Wasilla. As governor, though, Palin also vetoed over 300 wasteful projects and made an attempt to reform the process. Her record on earmarks is mixed, but by any measure, it’s far superior to either Democratic candidate.

Moreover, if this Palin claim can be classified as an untruth, Obama can be called a “liar” just as easily.

Take, if you will, the foundational assertion of Obama’s entire campaign that he is the candidate of post-partisan change. Obama, meanwhile, voted with fellow Democrats 96 percent of the time in Washington. And the bipartisan achievement he most often cites, an ethics reform bill, was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate.

Unanimous: “. . . being in complete harmony or accord.”

So, then, “Unity” should be referred to as a poetic truth.

And when much of the media acts as if it is personally offended by a questionable McCain ad accusing Obama of voting for a bill that would have provided sex education to kindergartners, you feel the pain. It was, indeed, a massive stretch.

It reminds me of the Obama ad that accuses McCain of having “voted to cut education funding” and “proposed” the abolishment of the Department of Education despite neither being true. Not much anger at that one. Just a lot of talk about the media’s responsibility to keep candidates honest. And absolutely, journalists have a responsibility to put every single candidate through the wringer.

Every candidate.

Something for the latest desperate anonymous moron that continues to drive by in comments with its pathetic shrieks of “Liar, liar!” to keep in mind.

Education, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Why I Have A Blog

25 Comments

To get past the gatekeepers.

I put up a(n admittedly semi-snarky) comment at Keith Cowing’s place yesterday, and he chose not to publish it (his comments section is moderated) for whatever reason. His blog, his call.

It was in response to “NASAAstronomer’s” comment that:

…if McCain and Palin win, we’ll be teaching creationism in our science classes, so how likely is it that space science will get funded?

My (unpublished until now) response:

Yes.

Right. I’m sure that will be one of their first acts, to mandate the teaching of creationism in science classes.

Can you explain to me how that works exactly? Will it be an executive order, or what?

This kind of Palin derangement is amazing. Lileks noticed it, too:

Here’s your Sarah Palin overreaction of the day. Presumably she took out the entrails, dried them, and used them to lynch librarians. It’s really obvious, isn’t it? She wants to kill Lady Liberty and all she represents. The plane is included in the picture because she personally shoots polar bears from above, like she’s GOD OR SOMETHING. The comments have the usual reasoned evaluations – she’s a PSYCHO, a LUNATIC. That picture is so sad and so true.

I don’t know if anyone’s stated the obvious yet, but this might be the first time people have become unhinged in advance over a vice-presidential candidate. Not to say some aren’t painting McCain as something the devil blurted out in a distracted moment during his daily conference call with Cheney, but a Veep? It took a while for people to believe that Cheney commissioned private snuff films with runaways dressed up to resemble a portion of the Bill of Rights, but Palin is She-Wolf of the Tundra right off the bat. And god help us she can use email, which means she will control the government. The most Spy ever did with Quayle was stick him in a dunce hat. By the time we reach the election Oliphant will probably draw Palin sodomizing by an oil derrick with guns for arms. I have to confess: I think Palin is an interesting politician, but the people she’s driving batty are much more fascinating.

Imagine twelve years of this.

Yes.

Well, we’ve survived eight years of BDS. I suspect that we’ll pull through a swamp of PDS.

Political Commentary, Space

Bureaucratic War?

1 Comment

Is NASA fighting with OMB?

Lots of great comments here, including the fact that Mike Griffin’s fear mongering about China is at odds with administration policy. Including this great comment from “red””

it would be a good idea for Griffin to consider what kind of response by NASA would be useful to the U.S. in countering the real military and economic space threats from China. It seems to me that ESAS doesn’t help counter these real threats at all.

The kinds of capabilities that NASA could encourage, invent, or improve to counter China’s ASATs, launchers, and satellites are things like:

– operationally responsive space
– small satellites
– Earth observation satellites
– telecommunications satellites
– economical commercial launch vehicles
– commercial suborbital rockets
– improved education in space-related fields
– space infrastructure (e.g.: commercial space stations, tugs, refueling)

It’s possible that, if NASA were contributing more in areas like these (through incentives to U.S. commercial space, research, demos, etc), it would find the budget battles easier to win.

No kidding. Especially the last. And Apollo On Steroids makes no contributions to any of these things.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of comments, “anonymous.space” has a description of what NASA’s “pat on the back” PDR really means:

This past week, Constellation patted itself on the back for getting Ares I through its first preliminary design review (PDR) but glossed over the fact that Ares I still has to conduct a second PDR next summer to address the unresolved mitigation systems for the first stage thrust oscillation issue, with unknown consequences for the rest of the design. See the asterisk on the pre-board recommendation at the bottom of the last page of this presentation.

The Constellation press release and briefing also made no mention of the recent year-long slip in the Orion PDR to next summer. See NASA Watch, NASA Spaceflight, and Flight Global.

So neither the Ares I nor the Orion preliminary design is complete, and one could argue that the Constellation program has been held back a year more than it’s been allowed to pass to the next grade.

More worrisome than the PDR slips are the grades that Ares I received in this partial PDR. The pre-board used a green, yellow/green, yellow, yellow/red, and red grading scheme, which can also be depicted as the more familiar A (4.0), B (3.0), C (2.0), D (1.0), and F (0.0) grading scheme. The pre-board provided ten grades against ten different success criteria from NASA’s program management handbook. The ten grades had the following distribution:

One “Green” (A, 4.0) grade
Two “Yellow/Green” (B, 3.0) grades
Four “Yellow” (C, 2.0) grades
Three “Yellow/Red” (D, 1.0) grades
No “Red” (F, 0.0) grades

So seven of Ares I’s ten grades were a C or a D. Ares I is NASA’s planned primary means of crew launch over the next couple of decades and should define technical excellence. But instead, the project earned a grade point average of 2.1, barely a “gentleman’s C” (or a “gentleman’s yellow”). See the pre-board grades on pages 3-7 of this presentation.

And even more worrisome than the PDR slips and grades are the areas in which the project is earning its lowest grades. Among areas in which Ares I earned a yellow/red (or D) grade and the accompanying technical problems were:

The preliminary design meets the requirements at an acceptable level of risk:
– Induced environments are high and cause challenges, including pyro shock to avionics and acoustic environments on reaction and roll control systems.

– No formal process for control of models and analysis.

– Areas of known failure still need to be worked, including liftoff clearances.

Definition of the technical interfaces is consistent with the overall level of technical maturity and provides an acceptable level of risk:

– Process for producing and resolving issues between Level 2 and Level 3 interface requirement documents and interface control documents is unclear, including the roles and responsibilities of managers and integrators and the approval process for identifying the baseline and making changes to it.

– Numerous known disconnects and “TBDs” in the interface requirement documents, including an eight inch difference between the first stage and ground system and assumption of extended nozzle performance not incorporated in actual first and ground system designs.

See the pre-board grades on pages 4-5 of this presentation.

So, in addition to the unknowns associated with the unresolved thrust oscillation system for Ares I:

– the vehicle’s electronics can’t survive the shocks induced during stage separation;

– the vehicle’s control systems will be shaken apart and unable to keep the rocket flying straight;

– the vehicle is going to hit the ground support structure on liftoff;

– the project is assuming performance from advanced rocket nozzles that don’t fit within the vehicle’s dimensions;

– the project can’t even get the height of the rocket and its ground support to match; and

– there’s no good modeling, analytical, or requirements control necessary to resolve any of these issues.

And the real kicker from the press conference was the revelation that Constellation manager Jeff Hanley only has 2,000-3,000 pounds of performance reserve left at the program level and that Ares I manager Steve Cook has no margin left to contribute to unresolved future problems like thrust oscillation impacts to Orion. See, again, NASA Watch.

We know from prior presentations that Orion’s mass margin is down to practically zero (286 kilograms or 572 pounds) for ISS missions and is negative (-859 kilograms or -1,718 pounds) for lunar missions. See p. 25, 33, and 37 in this presentation.

When added to Hanley’s margins, that means that the entire Ares I/Orion system is down to ~2,500-3,500 pounds of mass margin for the ISS mission and ~300-1,300 pounds of mass margin for the lunar mission. That’s between seven and less than one percent mass margin against Orion’s 48,000 pound total mass. Typical mass margin at the PDR stage should be on the order of 20-25 percent, about triple the best-case assessment here. Ares I/Orion still has seven years of design and development to go and at best has only one-third of the mass margin it should have at this stage.

Even worse, those Orion mass margins don’t account for the mass threats still to be allocated in next year’s Orion PDR. In the presentation above, the 90th percentile mass threats for the ISS and lunar missions are separately about 900 kilograms or 2,000 pounds. That reduces the total Ares I/Orion mass margin to between -1,700 and 1,500 pounds. That’s a negative (negative!) three percent mass margin on the lunar mission and only a positive three percent mass margin on the ISS mission, at least seven times less margin than what the program needs at this point in time.

Instead of worrying about $60 million Soyuz purchases and extending existing Shuttle jobs, Weldon and his staff need to be worrying about the $20 billion Ares I/Orion program and whether it can ever technically close and replace some of those Shuttle jobs.

Some have attempted to excuse this by saying, “well, every big space program has teething issues.” True. Two responses.

First, many of them die from them (e.g., X-33).

Second, I don’t know of any comparable program that had essentially zero margin at PDR (and I’m not aware of any that required multiple PDRs or “PDR do-overs”) that survived them. Perhaps someone more familiar with history can enlighten me.

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

Where Is The Pencil Czar?

24 Comments

George Will has more on economic ignorance:

The indignant student, who had first gone to Home Depot for a flashlight, says it “didn’t try to rip us off.” It was, however, out of flashlights. Ruth suggests that the reason Big Box had flashlights was that its prices were high. If prices were left at regular levels, the people who would have got the flashlights would have been those who got to the store first. With the higher prices, “someone who had candles at home decided to do without the flashlight and left it there for you on the shelf.” Neither Home Depot nor the student who was angry at Big Box had benefited from Home Depot’s price restraint.

Capitalism, Ruth reminds him, is a profit and loss system.Corfam–Du Pont’s fake leather that made awful shoes in the 1960s–and the Edsel quickly vanished. But, Ruth notes, “the post office and ethanol subsidies and agricultural price supports and mediocre public schools live forever.” They are insulated from market forces; they are created, in defiance of those forces, by government, which can disregard prices, which means disregarding the rational allocation of resources. To disrupt markets is to tamper with the unseen source of the harmony that is all around us.

The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation–the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize–is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.

Yes, an exaggeration that is reinforced by the propaganda inculcated into people by government schools.

Political Commentary

Meet The New Change

9 Comments

…same as the old change.

I’ve been amused, or at least bemused, for many months that Barack Obama has gotten away with pretending that his stale, failed collectivist policies represent something “new.” So has Michael Ledeen:

Once upon a time, Obama’s vision of “change”-which is based on class structure and top-down collective enterprises-was not only contemporary but exciting. It inspired a generation of Americans to create the welfare state. But then the welfare state aged, and now, in the wild-west world of globalization, instant communication, the blogosphere and so forth, it is very old hat. The ideas are still hanging around, however.

Bill Clinton understood that, and since he wasn’t really committed to any particular political agenda aside from his own success, he was able to grab many of his opponents’ ideas and use them. I remember poor Bob Dole complaining that Clinton was stealing his ideas, and he was right.

Obama doesn’t get that, I suspect because he really believes those old, now-failed ideas. He can’t bring himself to say that the collectivist projects of the sort he promoted in Chicago are bad for the poor, although when pressed he ootches toward more sensible positions (as when, in Saddleback, he confessed that he had probably been a bit too negative about welfare reform). We’ve all noticed that Obama keeps moving toward McCain’s positions on many issues, even on the basic one: the war.

If you hold ideas that no longer work (and indeed don’t even explain anything contemporary), it’s hard to conduct an inspirational political campaign, and Obama, like almost all the other Democrats, is stuck with the knowledge that he’s going to lose most of the policy debates. But he still wants to win. And the only way he CAN win is to destroy his opponents, which is the strategy the left is pursuing, ever more frantically.

Of course, I would be more amused if so many people didn’t seem to fall for the schtick. But fortunately, it looks like a sufficient number are on to him that he won’t get to implement his “change.” As Bill Whittle wrote, Sarah took away his glamour, and now John McCain is purloining his “change” mantra, which was never much, but it was all that he had left.

[Update a few minutes later]

It occurs to me that one of the reasons that young people are susceptible to Barack Obama’s “change” hokum is that they have no sense of history. To them, all is new, and only George Bush’s policies are old.