If you missed the Congressional hearings with Norm Augustine today, Alexis Madrigal live blogged them over at Wired. The Congressional questions seemed, by and large, determined to continue to drive the program over a cliff.

Fisked. “Ray” over at Restore the Vision has been going through Mike Griffin’s recent email, point by point (just keep scrolling). A suggestion — “Next” and “Previous” links in each post to allow readers to find them all after finding one. Clark Lindsey (who tipped me off to this) has individual links to points one through five. Here’s the one for point six, which is the most extensive.

[Tuesday morning update]

The fisking is now complete. He’s got eleven posts, and the eleventh one contains links to the previous ones (though it would still be nice to be able to navigate from one to the next and back). The tenth one, on the merits of propellant depots versus heavy lift, seems the most devastating to me:

In fact, heavy lift appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Who needs heavy lift? Apparently not NASA science, the communications satellite industry, DOD, intelligence agencies, NOAA, etc. It seems that the main reason NASA would develop heavy lift is to avoid addressing the real goals of the VSE (science, security, and economic benefits in the context of commercial and international participation).

It is difficult to understand how such an approach can offer an economically favorable alternative. The Ares-5 offers the lowest cost-per-pound for payload to orbit of any presently known heavy-lift launch vehicle design. The mass-specific cost of payload to orbit nearly always improves with increasing launch vehicle scale.

Griffin is saying Ares-5 is the cheapest because it’s the biggest. That’s an absurd law – why not build a rocket 1,000 times bigger at 10,000 times the cost then? The per-kg cost will be miniscule! I think Griffin’s law of scale is easily violated when you consider the possibility of smaller, mass-produced rockets. Exploration, with its serious payload mass requirements, could provide the market for such mass-produced rockets.

Griffin’s scale rule of thumb also ignores development costs. After all, it will be a long time before those tens of billions of dollars of Ares-5 (and related Ares-1) development efforts are amortized, at a maximum flight rate of 2 per year. We already have the EELVs and are already building Falcon 9 and Taurus 2 anyway, so their development cost for a job like fuel launch for exploration is $0. When you consider Ares-5 costs, you also have to consider the possibility that the development effort will fail, and all development costs will be wasted … or the development effort will succeed, but the operations will be so expensive that they are canceled as happened with Apollo, and again the development costs will be wasted.

Is Mike Griffin really as fundamentally ignorant of economics and accounting as his arguments would indicate? This seems to be a prevailing fallacy of heavy-lift proponents — that the only economies of scale come from vehicle size, completely ignoring flight rate, which has a much more profound effect on launch costs, particularly when amortizing a high development cost. As Ray points out, the tens of billions of development cost will never be amortized at the trivial flight rate that a heavy lifter will fly. It makes sense to look at marginal costs for a vehicle whose development costs are sunk, but we are making decisions about how to spend future dollars. And of course, even if the marginal costs are low (as they are with the Shuttle) the average costs remain high, with an expensive fixed infrastructure and low flight rate. Constellation isn’t an improvement over the Shuttle in any significant way other than (possibly) crew safety, and in many ways it’s a step backwards, since it has much less capability.

Mike has it exactly backwards. Depots are not a solution in search of a problem, clever though the phrase might sound. Ray points out the many problems that they solve. It is the costly romance of heavy lift, that some cannot relinquish despite the fact that it has trapped us in LEO for decades, that needs justification.

[Bumped]

NSS has released a response to the Augustine summary:

In response to the release of the Human Space Flight Committee executive summary, the National Space Society’s Vice President of Policy Greg Allision prepared the following statement.

The National Space Society (NSS) welcomes the release of the Summary Report of the Review of U.S. Space Flight Plans Committee, better known as the Augustine Commission. NSS thanks the Commission for its hard work and due diligence, and for a thorough job given the time and resources available to its members.

NSS does question the cost estimates since the Commission did not have the time nor inside resources available to NASA to develop their Constellation cost model. NSS does, however, agree with the Commission that NASA needs and deserves at least $3 Billion more per year in order to accomplish the planned missions. NSS further asserts that NASA should receive this level of funding, as NASA has stimulated the economy like no other agency, stimulated American youth to seek higher education, shored up America’s edge in technology, enhanced our defense, and established American prestige around the world. Even more importantly, this wise investment would enable NASA to take the lead in research and development that could ultimately provide access to energy and resources from space such as space based solar power beamed to Earth, helium-3 for fusion power, platinum group metals for fuel cells that could enable a hydrogen economy, and strategic metals important to our economy and national defense. These programs offer capabilities that can lead to asteroidal resource development and the means to protect the planet from their potential impact. Ultimately this could enable humanity to live in and “green” the cosmos.

NSS supports the development of a family of cargo and crew transportation options to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. We recognize that the development of commercial launch vehicles is integral to extending our economic sphere into the solar system. That said, the foundation of the ARES Flight Systems Development Project that leads to a mission enabling heavy lift launch vehicle can and should be part of the mix. NSS agrees that the Space Shuttle should fly at least until the payloads already built for it have flown, and perhaps longer, depending on national interest and prudence.

NSS agrees that ISS should be extended making the best possible use of the station as it was originally intended for science, technology development, and operations — funding it accordingly. In time, the management and operations of the station can and should transition to other entities as appropriate.

The NSS vision is that NASA should be charged with ever expanding the zone of exploration and development beyond Low Earth Orbit while commercial entities then provide operational services to fill in behind that “bubble” as it expands outward. Together these efforts should ultimately lead to settlement of and expansion through space by humanity.

Emphasis mine. The implication is that we cannot do the “mission” without a heavy lifter (oh, and “Ares” isn’t an acronym, at least in this context). If they really insist on this, the extra three billion a year won’t do the job. I don’t know if they really believe this, or if their arms are being twisted by corporate donors.

NSS has always had a problem of being more of a cheerleader for whatever the iron triangle wants to do than for things that would actually lead to space settlement, largely as a result of its National Space Institute heritage. Von Braun set up NSI as a citizen’s lobbying organization for NASA, and after the merger, the L-5 Society really got absorbed into the NSI borg. It’s almost reflexively assumed that whatever NASA is doing is on a path to space settlement, even though, in almost everything that it’s done since Apollo — Shuttle, Station, now Constellation — there is no plausible path toward that goal with those projects. They are doing nothing to reduce the costs of access, and Ares won’t, either. NASA has essentially given up on that goal. If I were Greg, I’d be getting behind ULA in its innovative ideas, which while still expensive, at least start to develop actual crucial space-faring technologies. Instead, they continue to try to prop up the rotting carcass of Constellation.