Or if there is, it wasn’t at the administrator’s request. And I think that Andy Pasztor should have done a little more digging before running his original story.
I think that all these rumors and leaks are just guerilla warfare by Ares/Constellation dead enders. And the end is growing near. If you look at the Senate Authorization language, it essentially buys into the new policy, for all intents and purposes.
The astronaut office has provided their view of the transition to commercial crew. I have some heartburn with it:
As commercial providers become integrated with NASA flight operations, questions pertaining to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) versus NASA certifications and standards arise. Currently, FAA (Office of Space Transportation) standards are only designed to protect the public from over-flight hazards associated with a launch. In contrast, NASA’s Human-Rating Requirements (HRR) for Space Systems (NPR 8705.2B) and Flight Rules have evolved over decades and are set in place to protect both the flight crew on board the vehicle and the public. It is anticipated that NASA and the FAA would collaborate in the future to determine rules and regulations for space control and commercial space vehicle licensing. Even with collaborative efforts amongst licensing agencies that evolve for human space vehicles, the NASA Human-Rating Requirements are the only current benchmark standards and should be used as the controlling document for certifying human rating of crewed spacecraft.
You mean the human-rating requirements that NASA hasn’t designed a vehicle to meet in decades, and had to waive when Orion couldn’t meet them? There needs to be severe pushback against this from the CSF.
One other point. I disagree with this requirement:
While on the ISS, each crewmember requires a path to return to the Earth in the event of a catastrophic station failure or medical emergency. A ready vehicle (lifeboat) attached to the ISS, in lieu of a ground based launch-on-need vehicle is required for ACR. A de-orbit in this ready vehicle must be executed to a targeted ground site capable of post landing support.
These are two different requirements, and may require two different vehicle types — a “lifeboat” and an ambulance. It also ignores the requirement of a non-catastrophic station failure, which might necessitate temporary abandonment, but not a wholesale evacuation all the way to the ground. I’ve always found the designation of “lifeboat” for a vehicle designed to return crew to earth to be a misnomer. A lifeboat is a temporary vehicle to provide protection until the survivors can be picked up by another vessel, not something that takes the Titanic passengers all the way back to Southampton.
There is an intrinsic assumption in this requirement that spaceflight remains expensive and rare, and that there are no other facilities in orbit to which to repair if there are problems on the station. But part of the idea of the new plan is to fix both these problems (or at least the former — I’m not sure much thought has been given to the latter, but cheap regular access makes it easier to solve). So, the notion of simply going somewhere else and waiting out either a repair of the station (if possible) or a rescue vessel from earth doesn’t occur to them, hence the (IMO, ridiculous) requirement that everyone has to go back to earth any time there’s a serious problem.
And it becomes doubly absurd if you insist that the assured return vehicle be an ambulance as well. If you use it for that purpose, it may kill the patient, since the design requirement for a crew return vehicle might assume healthy passengers, and have several gees on entry. In addition, it means that the station will be without a return capability for the rest of the crew, if the vehicles are one-size-fits-all. It would be a huge waste of (say) a six-person vehicle to use it to deliver one sick or injured crewperson. Again, this assumes that either a) there is no capability of getting an ambulance up from earth or b) no ability to so so in time. Now (b) is certainly a possibility for certain emergencies, but should we really let that drive transportation requirements? As I’ve pointed out in the past, the people wintering at McMurdo have no “assured crew return” capability, and when they get sick, they tough it out (including Jerri Nielsen, the woman physician who came down with breast cancer and treated herself until spring — she died last year). Why are astronauts more special than polarnauts? I’m sure that if we wanted to spend a few billion, we could come up with a vehicle that could extract people from the south pole during the winter. Why haven’t we done so?
These requirements are based on old mind sets and architecture assumptions. I think that they need rethinking, as part of a larger set of infrastructure requirements.
[Late afternoon update]
From a high-level government source:
The astronaut office, as well as many other NASA parties, have been making their views known for some time to the COTS team led by Geoff Yoder in ESMD. Industry will also be given an opportunity to provide input.
Allowing the astronauts to provide input is appropriate, as they are a “user”, but they are not in control.
That’s what I assumed. And hoped.
Mark Whittington attempts, and massively fails, to make a space analogy with WW II.
If anything, Constellation was a lot more like Dieppe than Normandy.
More water has been found on the moon. At the north pole this time.
Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 million pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.
You could make a lot of margaritas with that.
[Monday evening update]
Here’s a lot more from Paul Spudis (who more than almost anyone should know).
There’s a new book
Actually, if the Chinese were really racing an Ares I, they’d have nothing to worry about. They should be a little more concerned now, though, assuming they’re racing at all (which they aren’t).
Roger Handberg has a useful history of NASA and its budgets for those who still fantasize that we can (or should) resurrect Apollo.
Dwayne Day has an amusing review of what seems to have been a particularly stupid episode of CSI: Miami. I’ve never actually sat through an entire show (the only reason I’ve ever been able to see for watching it is Emily Procter, and that’s not enough, particularly since she doesn’t have anywhere near the southern accent that much of the hype about her would lead you to believe). Are they all this dumb?
…has died.
For me his most impressive work remains the mural at the Air and Space Museum. But it was just a scratch at the surface of his work. He was a leading chronicler of the first space age. May the new one bring forth new artists as great as it will be, as he was to it.
I admire Walt Cunningham as a hero of Apollo, but it’s hard to do so as a policy analyst. The very title of his opinion piece is nonsense:
We must not discard greatest innovator in history
Presumably he’s talking about NASA, and specifically the human spaceflight program. But in fact, due to risk aversion, it is probably the least innovative technology program going, with “Apollo on Steroids” the most prominent and recent example. I’d wager that we get more innovation out of Silicon Valley in a month than we have from the entire history of the human spaceflight program. He expands in the first paragraph:
Clark Lindsey has some realistic perspective:
After the noise dies away from the hearings on the NASA budget, the harsh reality of NASA’s limited budget is going to sink in with Congress just as it did for the Augustine panel when they started to look at the numbers. Constellation just won’t fit. You can’t fly the ISS, keep all those Shuttle workers employed and proceed with Ares/Orion. Shelby et al will try to save Constellation but the vast majority of the appropriators have much, much higher priorities than NASA and they are not going to boost the agency’s budget just to preserve a $100B+ billion dollar program that the NASA administrator, a blue-ribbon panel, the President and common sense all say is not viable.
He also points to a useful recent precedent:
Despite all that noise and anger and legislative maneuvers, by the end of July the plan was accepted: The F-22: Senate Votes to End Production – TIME – July.22.09. Congress as a whole decided that the negatives were not nearly as bad as claimed and the positives were too good to reject.
If Bolden and the administration push in a similar vigorous and sustained manner for their NASA plan, they will also win. As I’ve noted before, President Obama would no doubt love to battle Congressional members who want to force him to spend tens of billions of dollars on a failed Moon program, especially when most of that opposition consists of supposedly small-government, pro-business, anti-deficit Republicans. (Could just see him in a public forum saying that continuing the Moon program would be “an inexcusable waste of money”.)
I hope that the days of NASA as pork, as opposed to progress, are at least coming to a middle, if not an end. And the ironies continue to abound.