Category Archives: Space

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Another Blow To The Space Policy Myths

6 Comments

Some people have been counting on the CAIB to support their nonsensical assertions about safety of government versus commercial vehicles. Well, they’re out of luck:

Our view is that NASA’s new direction can be a) just as safe, if not more safe, than government-controlled alternatives b) will achieve higher safety than that of the Space Shuttle, and c) is directly in line with the recommendations of the CAIB.

Just one more nail in the coffin of space policy mythology. There may be good arguments against the new plan, but for the most part, for the past few months, most of the ones I’ve seen have been both tragic and hilarious in their illogic and non-factuality.

[Update a few minutes later]

In reading the whole thing, I think they’re being far too kind (though I understand that they have to be diplomatic):

Second, the CAIB recommended that future launch systems should “separate crew from cargo” as much as possible. This statement is sometimes taken out of context. What it does mean is that human lives should not be risked on flights that can be performed without people; the new plan to procure separate crew and cargo transportation services clearly is consistent with the CAIB’s recommendation. But the recommendation does not disallow the use of a cargo launch system to also fly, on separate missions, astronaut flights. Indeed, the fact that Atlas V and Delta IV are flying satellites right now, including extremely high-value satellites, has helped to prove out their reliability. And the many satellite and cargo missions that Falcon 9 is planned to fly will also produce the same beneficial result.

This is a very important point. First, that people have always misunderstood the “separate crew and cargo” lesson. To the degree it ever made any sense at all (we don’t do it for trucks, or airplanes), it never meant to have different vehicle designs for crew versus cargo. And one of the craziest notions that the Ares defenders had was that it would be “designed” to be so safe that crew could fly on it on its second flight, whereas rockets with a proven record of dozens of consecutive successful flights under their belts were somehow less “safe” than one with only one flight. As the CSF pointed out today:

The demonstrated track records of commercial vehicles, combined with numerous upcoming manifested flights, means that the family of commercial vehicles already has, and will continue to have, a much stronger track record than other vehicles such as Ares I. The Atlas family of rockets has had over 90 consecutive successes including 21 consecutive successes for Atlas V, and additional unmanned flights will occur over the next few years before any astronaut flights begin. Similarly, many flights of the Delta and Falcon vehicles have already occurred or will occur before astronauts would be placed onboard. Astronauts will not be flying on vehicles that lack a solid track record.

By contrast, NASA was planning to place astronauts on just the second full-up orbital flight of the Ares I system. Ares I would have many fewer test flights than Atlas V, Falcon 9, or Delta IV. Furthermore, the first crewed flight of Ares I will not occur until the year 2017 as determined by the Augustine Committee. Thus, at the planned rate of two Ares I flights per year, it would take the Ares I rocket until at least the year 2025 to match the demonstrated reliability that the Atlas V rocket already has today. That is, the commercial rocket has a fifteen-year head start on safety.

Demonstrated reliability through multiple actual flights to orbit is crucial because paper calculations have historically been insufficient to capture the majority of failure modes that affect real, flying vehicles—especially new vehicles flying their first few missions. As the Augustine Committee stated, “The often-used Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) … is not as useful a guide as to whether a new launch vehicle will fail during operations, especially during its early flights.” Demonstrated reliability is crucial.

And it’s something that would have taken decades for Ares to develop, given its horrific costs and low flight rate.

And then it’s nice to see people with these credentials dispense with this nonsense:

It has been suggested by some that only a NASA-led effort can provide the safety assurance required to commit to launching government astronauts into space. We must note that much of the CAIB report was an indictment of NASA’s safety culture, not a defense of its uniqueness. The report (p. 97) notes that “at NASA’s urging, the nation committed to build an amazing, if compromised, vehicle called the Space Shuttle. When the agency did this, it accepted the bargain to operate and maintain the vehicle in the safest possible way.” The report then adds, “The Board is not convinced that NASA has completely lived up to the bargain.”

To put it mildly. And there’s no reason that it would be any different in the future. The institutional incentives haven’t changed, and never will, with a government-run program. Private industry has a very strong motivation not to kill people — it could put them out of business. Government agencies, on the other hand, tend to be rewarded for failure.

Political Commentary, Space

Bolden Goes Under The Bus

17 Comments

Despite the confusing double negative in the caption, White House spokesbuffoon Robert Gibbs is denying that the White House tasked the NASA administrator with Muslim outreach.

[Update a while later]

Keith Cowing is far too credulous of the White House spokesbuffoon. If I have to choose between the credibility of a decorated Marine General, or the guy who said he never heard any anti-semitism in twenty years of holding down one of Jeremiah Wright’s pews, I know who I believe.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Which Senator?

51 Comments

…will save the space program from a Shuttle-derived parasite eating up all the technology funding?

This bill, however, will probably not get very far. Note Jim Muncy’s comment to the NASA Watch item:

Fortunately, most authorization bills can’t proceed in the Senate without unanimous consent. Which means one Senator can stop this monstrosity.

We continually hear about how “The” Congress is opposed to the Administration’s plan for NASA. However, most all of the vocal opposition to the plan has come from a limited number of Congresspersons protecting Constellation related projects in their states and districts. They deliberately biased the hearing witness panels to eliminate voices of independent support for the administration’s plan.

I’m thinking maybe Sam Brownback.

As a commenter somewhere (maybe over at Space Politics?) said, the key to settling space isn’t going farther now — it’s reducing the cost of access and making it routine. Commercial crew will do that for LEO, and the new technology development programs will do it for beyond. And heavy lift, particularly a Shuttle-derived version, will just continue to delay the day that we become spacefaring, as the falsely perceived need for it has done for forty years.

[Update a few minutes later]

What is Bill Nelson thinking?

A draft of the bill, obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, was presented to NASA last week by the committee, chaired by Florida Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. So far the White House has not commented on the bill, but several Florida Space Coast leaders have expressed concern about its impact here.

Of particular concern is the fact that Nelson — Florida’s main space supporter — would take away billions of dollars from commercial rocket and technology development that over the next decade would have diversified the aerospace industry in Florida and provided KSC with new jobs and prestige.

…Frank DiBello, the president of Space Florida, the state’s aerospace development body, is not pleased. “We don’t want to sacrifice Florida seed corn for an increased R&D role to be politically expedient and save jobs for Utah and other states,” DiBello told a Brevard County jobs-development meeting Saturday.

“The Senate bill kills outright the promise of a real R&D opportunity for KSC. It’s not good for Florida. I don’t know who Bill Nelson is listening to, but it’s not his constituents,” DiBello said.

Of course, the question itself is generous in its assumption that there is any cognition at all going on here. Bill Nelson has never struck me as the sharpest tack in a drawer of pretty dull ones, and this is just more evidence of it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Just The Facts

8 Comments

The debate over the new space policy has been taking place in pretty much a logic-free and fact-free environment, at least on the part of those who oppose it. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation has released a fact sheet to dispel all of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), much of it nonsensical, that opponents have been tossing up for months. Clark Lindsey has an HTML version.

I found it a little amusing that they counted Jake Garn as an “astronaut.” I doubt if many of the astronauts consider him (or Bill Nelson) one.

Business, Space

The Long Fall Of Rocketplane

19 Comments

Some thoughts on the lessons of space investing, from Jeff Foust.

Fortunately, the situation that Jeff describes is starting to change. I think that VCs are starting to get interested now. The situation at NASA, where the agency is openly supportive of commercial (as opposed to the past, in which it was hostile, and often told investors doing due diligence not to waste their money) is one factor that may be helping.

Political Commentary, Space

Comment Du Jour

22 Comments

From John Kavanaugh:

“…capable of lifting at least 75 metric tons — should be largely derived from shuttle systems and likely would use solid rocket boosters…”

Space launch design by committee.

I can’t imagine the Pentagon’s reaction if the Senate Armed Services Committee specified that the Joint Strike Fighter must be derived from F-16 heritage hardware, must use a low bypass turbofan that requires JP-6 jet fuel and must have a minimum pounds-specific weapons capacity – and don’t even think about dividing that minimum amount of armaments across more than one aircraft!

Just another example that NASA’s enablers in Congress could care less about results-driven spaceflight. This is just a jobs program.

The committee should stop pretending that we’re all fools and just legislate honestly: NASA funding must deliver a minimum jobs quota in Texas, Alabama and Florida – or else.

That’s what this Congressional rocket design is all about anyway.

That’s the way it will be as long as it’s a government-funded program in a democracy.

I should add that while this congressional “compromise” is going to waste a good bit of money, it’s not “restoring the Program of Record.” All that remains of Constellation is Orion, and that existed before Constellation, except it was called the Crew Exploration Vehicle.

Political Commentary, Space

More On Mecca In Space

32 Comments

From Charles Lane:

Last time I checked, the Constitution expressly forbid the establishment of religion. How can it be consistent with that mandate and the deeply held political and cultural values that it expresses for the U.S. government to “reach out” to another government because the people it rules are mostly of a particular faith?

To be sure, the U.S. government has an interest in good relations with all the people of the world, regardless of their religion. We have, perhaps, a particular interest in combating hostility toward our country and its people among the Muslim faithful, because much terrorism is rooted in extreme Islamist ideology.

But does it follow that the U.S. government should seek cooperation on space projects with the government of a particular country explicitly because its people are mostly Muslim?
Doesn’t this put us in the position of categorizing nations by religion as opposed to other characteristics, such as whether they are democratic? We did not pursue space partnerships with Europe because it was “Christian” or Israel because it was Jewish, did we?

There are two risks here. The first is to encourage Islamic identity politics in states that already consider themselves Islamic — Pakistan comes to mind. The second is to discourage those prospective space partners that do not accept the label of “Muslim” or “Muslim-majority” that the administration seems so eager to pin on them.

And Charles Krauthammer:

Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama’s modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence — yet not of his own country’s.

This was such a stupid completely unforced error, driven by moronic political correctness in the White House. They can’t utter the word “Muslim” when one shoots up an Army base while calling himself a soldier of Allah, but they can pervert NASA in its name. It’s a tragedy that one of the smartest space policies we’ve ever had has come from one of the most idiotic and incompetent administrations, poisoning the well for it. Lori Garver, Bobby Braun and others have to be pulling their hair in frustration.

Political Commentary, Space

On The Fence

4 Comments

Bob Zimmerman likes the new space policy, but doesn’t trust the administration to execute it. Well, neither do I. But that’s no reason to oppose the policy itself. As I wrote in April:

Many don’t trust President Obama to execute this policy along these lines. Neither do I, necessarily. But I’d rather have good policy poorly executed than poor policy well executed. The execution can always be improved later. Do I believe that Obama really cares as much about human spaceflight as he said in his speech at the Cape? No, and I think that’s a good thing. I think he sees NASA as a problem he inherited from George W. Bush, and in that, he is right for once. He assigned to the problem people who do care about getting humans into space and, like Bush, he now wants to move on to other matters. Really, we should fear the day he gets interested in spaceflight; that will be the day that private enterprise is no longer trusted to conduct it. Let’s hope that day never comes. In the meantime, remember that when government does the right thing, it doesn’t matter whether it’s done for the wrong reason. Whatever the motivations behind it, this is a much more visionary space policy than we’ve ever had before.

Nothing has happened in the interim to cause me to change my mind.

And Bob is unrealistic here:

From a political perspective, I might have believed the sincerity of the Obama administration proposal, including the decision to cancel Constellation, had they simultaneously announced that they would extend the shuttle program a few years until the new private companies could get up to speed. Such a compromise would have gone over well in Congress, as it would have eased the job losses. It would have eliminated the need to rely on the Russians to reach orbit. It would eased the transition from the government manned program to the private manned program. And it would have demonstrated that the administration really does consider manned space exploration important. The result: the administration would have probably had little problem selling the proposal to Congress, thereby increasing the chances that the money would have been there to fund the development of the new private rockets and spacecraft.

It’s no longer possible to “extend” the Shuttle program. The last ET was rolled out of the plant in Michaud this week, and it would take years and billions to resurrect the second- and third-tier contractors for the parts needed to continue to fly. Not to mention the risk of losing another orbiter, at which point you’ve invested billions to keep it flying when the fleet is no longer of a viable size.

As Clark says, there was a reason that Mike Griffin wanted to get rid of the Shuttle and ISS — they eat up all the available budget. Even if you could continue to fly at a reasonable cost, Congress doesn’t give a damn about private rockets — they just want their pork. If they could keep Shuttle going, and ISS, they’d be happy to just continue making no progress, because they just don’t care, as long as the jobs and symbolism remained intact.

I have to say, though, that I’m still skeptical that Congress will even get an authorization bill out this year, regardless of what the Gray Lady says. The House has yet to speak, and they have to reconcile in conference. And I think that on the south side of the Hill, Dana Rohrabacher may have some influence on doing something sensible. Gabby Giffords wants to save Ares/Orion, but that’s not in the cards, and I think there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to compromise with the Senate. I don’t think that there will be any serious space policy making until next calendar year, when the new Congress comes in (very likely a Republican House). We have to be doing battleground preparation for that now.

[Update early afternoon]

Clark Lindsey has the budget numbers:

As you can see for 2010, Space Shuttle took up about a third of that $10B. Now that it has slipped into 2011, that category rises from about a billion back to around three billion. There will be about four billion for the HLV, Orion, commercial cargo, commercial crew, flagship technology demos, etc. (There are some HSF related tech projects in the Space Technology category (pdf).) If the Senate forces a full scale HLV and Orion programs, that leaves nothing much for those initiatives that will lead to lower cost spaceflight for NASA in the future.

And remember, these are just authorizers. Even if they want to up the budget, they can’t — that happens in appropriations, and that number is already pretty much set. So if they persist in this, all they’re doing is eating the seed corn, and locking us into continued high costs, and no progress, for years.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Foust has more on the Senate authorization activity. As “Major Tom” points out in comments, those hoping for a Restoration don’t realize how weak authorization committees are:

he devil is in the details. I doubt the authorization language would require any real programmatic changes to NASA’s FY11 budget. For example, it’s hard to see the authorization bill specifying a particular HLV design or heritage or a particular level of HLV design decision in 2011. In response to authorization language dictating an HLV design decision in 2011, NASA could simply state that the HLV will employ a LOX/kerosene engine and have at least 50mT of lift and leave the level of specificity at that until more informed and detailed decisions can be made in a few years. Similarly, with authorization language dictating a deep space Orion variant, NASA could argue that it is pursuing such a “Block 1″ variant by developing the “Block 0″ CRV. Or use the language as justification to recompete Orion to create something more affordable within the resources provided by the appropriators, who didn’t provide additional funding for Constellation, ESMD, or NASA overall. (The devil is also in the budget.)

Of course, unlike appropriations bills, which combine NASA’s budget with funding for other departments and agencies, it’s easy to derail or veto standalone authorization bills. If the Administration doesn’t like what it sees in the authorization bill, it’s relatively easy for NASA legislative affairs to raise issue after isse until the bill dies in subcommittee or committee, and the appropriators are forced to act. Or for the White House to simply veto the bill outright if it gets that far.

Yup.

Actually, given the incompetence of this administration, I supposed they could get rolled by the Congress. Then I remember that we’re talking about people like Bill Nelson, here.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Et Tu, Cal?

10 Comments

The latest foolishness about the new space policy from an ostensible conservative comes from Cal Thomas. The nonsense begins with almost the opening sentence:

Silly me. I thought America’s unparalleled space program (before the present administration began dismantling it) was a triumph of American ingenuity, technology, vision and boldness.

If you thought that, you weren’t paying attention. There was nothing “ingenious,” “visionary” or “bold” about Constellation and Apollo on Steroids. It was warmed-over technology from decades in the past, and it was obscenely expensive. If it were the only way to do the job, it might have been worth the money, but I don’t think so, even then. The new policy is much more innovative and visionary, and yes, bold, than the old one, regardless of one’s opinion of the president.