…from Senator Hutchison and Congresswoman Kosmas:

One alternative we have proposed would be to slow the flight rate of the remaining space shuttle missions and move those flights into next year and possibly 2012 while manifesting the planned backup flight with an available cargo capability. We can use this time to complete a detailed assessment of the spare and replacement equipment needs and provide for carriage to the space station if our analysis shows limits in other cargo vehicles. This modest measure would not call for increases to the number of shuttle flights, but instead would simply space them so the gap for America to deliver people and critical cargo to the space station under our own power would be narrowed considerably.

There is a tempo to processing the vehicles. If it is exceeded (trying to fly too fast) safety will be compromised. What these people apparently don’t understand is that you can also process too slowly, to the point at which the personnel will lose their edge. On top of that, each flight would end up costing two or three billion dollars. Each.

…from Gene Kranz:

In an interview on the balcony of the U.S Space & Rocket Center near a life-sized model of the Saturn V rockets he launched four times, Kranz said he’s worried about losing unique NASA expertise.

“I believe that our nation cannot afford this kind of an impact,” the 76-year-old Kranz said. “We have the most talented team of people – scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technicians.

“I was there when we started and had to build this kind of a team,” Kranz said. “It took three to five years to get the people in place and get them trained, and we had a very healthy aircraft industry at that time that we could get people from.

“Once you send this team away,” Kranz said, “I think they have totally underestimated the difficulty they’re going to have getting a team capable of designing, building and testing a spacecraft.”

“This team” hasn’t successfully designed, built or tested a spacecraft since the seventies. All it’s done is operate one, at humungous costs. In particular Marshall’s history over the past three decades is a litany of failure. As Mike Griffin said, part of the purpose of Ares was to actually create such a team at Marshall, via on-the-job training. So if you’re worried about a “team” being broken up, that horse was out of the barn long ago.

The Huntsville-designed Saturn V “was a darn well-designed spacecraft,” Kranz said. “I wish we had it today.”

I’ll bet you do. Unfortunately, it too was horrifically expensive. The only reason that we built as many as we did was that it was important to beat the Soviets to the moon. It had little to do with space, per se. And Marshall has done little since to justify its existence, because NASA has become unimportant (space was never important, even during Apollo), and instead merely a jobs program. But ironically, as the Space Frontier Foundation points out to the hypocritical Senator Shelby, it has apparently become too big to fail.

[Update a while later]

An emailer who wishes to remain anonymous writes:

The team Gene remembers was destroyed in 1969-1970, in the first space draw-down. (As I recall ABC made a movie about it called “An American Tragedy.”) The competent technical people left the agency and the incompetent bureaucrats remained behind because it was the only job they could do. Add to that the destruction of US’s industrial base by the EPA and safety-firsters, and the Communist take-over of the educational system, and that explains the rotten mess visible today. I’m surprised we manage to launch anything at all.

Back in the mid eighties, someone at JSC told me that the reason that the space station was such a mess was that it had become a make-work project for deadwood from the Shuttle development program as it wound down. I won’t mention the name, but it was someone high in the organization at that time, and now retired.

I’ve been predicting for weeks that there will be a continuing resolution on the budget, which means that NASA won’t know what their budget for new initiatives is for many months (and long after the start of the fiscal year at the beginning of October. Now AvLeak is reporting that this is looking quite likely, which means the policy chaos will continue into next year, at which point it’s also quite likely that the Republicans (so far no fans of the new plan in the Congress, other than Rohrabacher) will write the new budget at least in the House. What a mess.

Daniel Handlin has a critique of the new space policy, over at The Space Review today. Many, indeed most, of his concerns are valid, though I think that he overstates the concerns of safety and human rating. All of the plausible vehicles — Delta, Atlas, and even Falcon 9, are most of the way there already, and no major changes will be required to any of them, despite all the FUD thrown up by the Ares supporters over the past few years. The new policy isn’t just imperfect — it’s not even particularly good. But then, we’ve never had good space policy, in the entire history since Sputnik, from the standpoint of becoming spacefaring, so it doesn’t have to be very good to be the best we’ve ever had.

Those who have seen me defending it here for the past three months may have had the impression that I think it’s great, but that’s a consequence of a) the fact that whatever its flaws, it’s such a huge improvement over the previous plan that it looks great in comparison and b) the complaints about and attacks on it have been so ridiculously hyperbolic, nonsensical and over the top that any pushback against them is going to look like great praise. It’s sort of like the idiots who thought that I was a big George Bush fan, for no other reason than that I didn’t think that he went into Iraq to steal the oil, or try to get his daddy to love him.

So of course the policy can be improved upon. And the questions about HLV and Orion are valid, but don’t seem to recognize the politics underlying the decisions. This piece, like many space policy analyses, presumes that the goal of the policy is to actually accomplish things in space. And for some policy makers, of course, it is, but that will always be in conflict with the more salient goals — to feed the pork to the most politically connected interests.

The purpose of the (up to) five year delay is not to figure out the best HLV design, or to develop “new technology” for HLVs — as the piece points out, we’re not going to learn much about that. At best, we may develop a new engine to replace the Russian RD-180 used by the Atlas (though this is for national security issues — it certainly won’t save any money). The thing is, if we develop an HLV now, we know that it will be very expensive, because it will be based on Shuttle infrastructure, and if we know anything about Shuttle infrastructure, it is expensive to maintain and operate, even without the orbiter. I can’t know for sure, of course, but I assume that the point of the delay is to kick the HLV can down the road long enough for the policy establishment to finally figure out that we don’t need one to do serious exploration, and that in fact it would hold it back due to its high costs (as it has for decades). It would be nice to make this decision now, but there’s insufficient consensus for it, because too many continue to be members of the Apollo cargo cult. So a bone has to be thrown to Marshall, and a few billion wasted on HLV “technologies.”

With regard to the now-you-don’t-see-it-now-you-do Orion “lifeboat,” that was clearly a sop to Colorado, which (unlike Texas, Utah, or Alabama) the president still hopes to pick up in 2012. But a full restoration would have guaranteed unwillingness on the part of players like Boeing to risk their own money on a new capsule that might have to compete with the government-subsidized one by Lockheed Martin. Making it a lifeboat only was an attempt to alleviate this concern, but it’s probably not enough, because the hardest part of capsule design is entry, and it wouldn’t take much (including internal LM investment) to convert it back to a vehicle to carry crew to orbit (basically, all it would need is an abort system). The challenge is going to be how to fence off its requirements in such a way as to provide some confidence on the part of the other players that they won’t have to compete with it (and it may in the end not be possible to do so). I have some ideas on that, but they’re available only on a paying basis for anyone who wants to hire me as a consultant…

Anyway, yes, the policy could stand a lot of improvement (though it remains vastly superior to what came before it). The question is whether or not it’s possible to get anything better in the current political environment. And my biggest fear is that out of ignorance and kneejerk reaction to anything Obama, the incoming Republican House (and perhaps Senate) will bollix things up even worse.

[Update late morning]

I think he’s way off here:

In some sense, anyone can design a spacecraft on paper. But the decades of institutional memory, expert systems engineering experience, and management skills for large space projects that will be lost by dissolving NASA’s role in spacecraft development can never be recovered.

If such a thing ever existed at NASA in any useful form, it disappeared decades ago. Part of Mike Griffin’s justification for Ares was to recreate it. To the degree that such institutional memory exists, it’s more in the contractors than at NASA. The same contractors who are now going to be putting up crew on their launch systems.

Sort of.

Where have these people been for the past six years? It’s as though they only learned a couple months ago that there was going to be a Shuttle shutdown, and gap.