Category Archives: Space

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Good News, Bad News

3 Comments

The good news is that the editorial board at the WaPo seems to recognize the potential for commercial space in addressing NASA’s needs, much more so than NASA has to date. The bad news is that they remain incoherent on the purpose of sending people into space. They also (like FL Today) seem to think that the problem is simply not enough money:

If the committee’s public comments are any indication, its findings will be grim: NASA’s recent budget cuts render the current manned mission plan impossible. This is not the first time NASA’s plans have suffered from lack of fiscal foresight: Once the international space station is completed next year, the current budget calls for deorbiting it by 2016. Maybe it’s time to take a step back to assess the right role for a manned space program that requires billions of dollars annually — and for what? Certainly, boldly going where no man has gone before is an American creed. But with the advent of increasingly complex and precise instruments, science in space requires less and less input from astronauts. Groundbreaking research can occur without humans — witness the Mars Rover and Hubble telescope. NASA should not have to sacrifice programs that are truly ground-breaking — researching dark matter, black holes and gravitational fields of space objects — to keep the international space station manned and supplied.

So they have a recommendation:

Now that the station is nearly complete, this might be an optimal time to open space to entrepreneurs. Many companies claim they possess the capacity to transport humans and payloads into space; the review committee found their reports convincing enough to suggest that these space entrepreneurs could take over the transport of astronauts and supplies to the space station after the shuttle program ends.

The problem is that they seem to have no vision for space beyond LEO, or a commercial role in it. Partly because they fall into the standard mental trap of thinking the primary purpose of human spaceflight is science. So we still have a lot of persuasion to do. But hey, even if it’s for the wrong reasons, if they have some good advice, why complain? After all, when government occasionally makes a good decision, it’s often for the wrong reasons. You take what you can get.

[Update mid afternoon]

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation piles on. Is Congress listening?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Just Send Money

8 Comments

This FL Today piece supports the ongoing mythology that there’s nothing wrong with NASA that adequate budgets won’t fix, and that the current debacle is all the fault of the Bush administration because they wouldn’t fund their own vision:

NASA last went through an overhaul shortly after former President George W. Bush outlined his “Vision for Space Exploration” in a January 2004 speech.

His plan to send Americans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars has since been widely criticized because he consistently failed to finance it.

There is no discussion of the impact of decisions and choices made by NASA management that contributed to the fiasco. I agree that the Bush administration was at fault, but not because it didn’t fund the program properly. It was at fault because it essentially ignored NASA after hiring Mike Griffin, and refused to rein him in when he completely ignored the Aldridge recommendations and set off on the disastrous Constellation path. Marburger apparently saw what was happening, but didn’t have the clout within the White House to do anything about it.

But you never see anything about that in the papers, even the ones that are supposed to cover this stuff closely, like FL Today. The narrative is always about the money.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’ve added the link, which comes via Clark Lindsey.

[Afternoon update]

Will McLean points out in comments an interview by Eric Berger of Mark Sirengelo of Sierra Nevada and Larry Williams of SpaceX on prospects for commercial support of exploration.

Space

Open NASA

I hadn’t previously been aware of this blog, but it seems to be a group of NASA employees. I can’t vouch for the quality of the postings — some of them seem quite naive. Anyway, I’ll add it to the roll.

Business, Space

Short Dynetics

6 Comments

Steve Cook has made his departure official.

Rocketman called this a few days ago, and as I said in comments on another post, Dynetics‘ loss is Marshall’s gain. Guess he’ll have to be “the next von Braun” in the private sector (to the degree that a government cost-plus contractor is the private sector).

[Late morning update]

Man, the comments over at NASA Watch are brutal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

[Early afternoon update]

Sorry, but you can’t take my investment advice in the post title. I guess it’s not publicly traded. Though if you’re a shareholder/employee, you could look for greener pastures, I guess.

[Update a few minutes later]

I think that this is the most definitive evidence so far that Ares is dead. What (if anything) will replace it is unknown, but I for one do not mourn it. I only mourn the lost years and billions that were wasted on it.

[Saturday afternoon update]

You know, if I were working Ares, my morale would be at rock bottom right now, and it wouldn’t be helped by either Cook’s memo, or Jeff Hanley’s. Notice that in Cook’s memo, here’s all he says about why he’s leaving now:

I have been honored and privileged to work with the best-of-the-best in the aerospace industry over the past 19 years. NASA has graciously allowed me to pursue dreams of exploration that I have had since my passion was ignited watching Apollo 17 land on the moon. That said, my professional goal has long been to spend the first half of my career in public service and the later half in the private sector. On September 14, I will begin phase 2 of my career, as Director of Space Technologies at Dynetics in Huntsville, AL. I look forward to helping the Dynetics team take on the challenges associated with space flight.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there a significant double-dip pension benefit if he’d made it to twenty years? Why leave now? Even assuming that he’s being honest about his “professional goal,” why not stick it out for a few more months?

It seems pretty obvious to me he’s reading the writing on the wall, and getting out while the getting is good, being the second rat down the lines (after Horowitz). And then we have Hanley:

To those who wish to ‘read something into’ Steve’s departure, I say this… The substance of Ares is dependent on no specific individual. It is what the integrated team HAS accomplished and WILL accomplish that matters. And it is in your hands – it remains true that the very BEST expression of the true heart of the Ares team will be the fortitude required to honor Steve’s contribution and excel beyond it.

He must think they’re stupid. This is a complete non-sequitur. Those who are “reading something into” Steve’s departure aren’t reading into it that the program isn’t going to be able to succeed without him. If they’re smart, they’re reading into it the same thing that I am — that the program is in its death throes, with or without him, and he didn’t want to be around when it happened. This was a completely pointless paragraph.

I would have had much more respect for him if he’d just thanked Cook for his service, and left it at that, or even said something like “I understand that many of you are justly concerned with the future of the program. We all understand that there may be changes coming soon, perhaps major, over which we no longer have any control. Whatever happens, you can all take pride in the work that you’ve done to make this program a success, and we will strive to ensure that your hard and excellent work is recognized in future activities, whatever they may be.” But that would be too honest for NASA management.

[Bumped]

Space

Cost Estimates

8 Comments

I agree with Bob Zubrin that the numbers coming out of Aerospace on development costs are highly suspect:

Following retirement of the Shuttle, Aerospace’s cost estimates have ground operations cost triple to $900 million by 2012, and then continue to rise to $1.8 billion by 2022. This sixfold rise in ground operations cost would be difficult to explain in any case, but in the absurdity of this instance is outstanding since during the entire ten year 2012-2022 period in question, there are NO heavy lift flights at all for the ground operations to support. In other words, the Aerospace Corp’s estimates have NASA’s ground operations costs rising sixfold over Shuttle flight support requirements, spending $15 billion over ten years, in order to launch nothing.

Rather than basing their projections on actual grounded estimates of development costs for different types of hardware, what the Aerospace Corporation appears to have done is to regard each program element as an “activity” which each need to be funded continuously at multi-billion levels per year. The program is then arranged so that no flights beyond LEO can take place before around 2023. So, with a budget of about $3 billion per year (equivalent to 30,000 employees on payroll) the Ares 5 development program is allowed to run for 12 years, bringing development costs to the spectacular $36 billion level. Why, in this day an age, a launch vehicle development program needs to run 12 years (or require 30,000 people) is left unexplained. In contrast, the Saturn V development, done at a time when much more still needed to be learned about launch systems, took only 4 years to complete (Contract awarded in 1962, first flight in 1966.) Summing up all such activities the net result is a program which costs $14 to $20 billion per year (140,000 to 200,000 employees) and which does nothing at all for a decade.

I disagree with this, though:

Americans want and deserve a space program that is actually going somewhere. In order for that to happen, a radically different methodology to that being accepted by Augustine Committee needs to be employed. Rather, a real goal, worthy of spending serious money on, if necessary, needs to be selected. That goal can only be humans to Mars. Then a minimum cost, minimum complexity, and, critically, fastest schedule plan needs to be selected to achieve that goal. In order to minimize schedule and cost, such a plan should avoid advanced propulsion, on-orbit assembly, or other futuristic ideas, and instead get the job done in the manner of the Mars Direct and Semi-Direct missions by employing a strategy of direct transportation to Mars of required payloads using an upper stage mounted on the heavy lift launcher.

I don’t agree that the goal “can only be humans on Mars,” at least as the focus for the program, though it may be a useful long-term ultimate one, as the Augustine panel has stated. And the notion that on-orbit assembly is a “futuristic technology” is quite amusing, seeing that we’ve been doing it with ISS for over a decade.

[Update late afternoon]

There are a lot of good comments by “Red” over at Space Transport News. Also, I would add that while I consider the numbers suspect, this isn’t meant to be a criticism of Aerospace or its methodology so much as the NASA inputs and assumptions.

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

A Brief History

6 Comments

…of NASA’s resistance to commercial competition, in a comment (number 31) over at Space Politics by Al Fansome:

For the last 25 years, NASA has had to be brought KICKING & SCREAMING every step of the way — into a partnership with commercial industry. It has been resisted by the NASA iron triangle (NASA + contractors + Center politicians).

* The DOT was given the legal authority by Congress in the 1980s to regulate commercial space transportation over the objections of the traditional status quo space powers.

* Commercial payloads were taken off of the Shuttle after Challenger by the Reagan Administration over the active opposition of the then NASA Administrator (Fletcher).

* The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 — which was the first law mandating that NASA buy commercial space transportation services — was passed by Congress over the objections of NASA.

* Instead of partnering with the American Rocket Company in the late 1980s, NASA MSFC created a competing hybrid rocket R&D program in an attempt to put AMROC out of business. (They succeeded.)

* The Congress passed the Commercial Space Act of 1998 that mandated that NASA should purchase ISS cargo resupply services. NASA resisted that mandate for 6 years — until Columbia happened and the Bush Administration created the Commercial/Crew Cargo services budget as part of the VSE in 2004. In December 2008, over 10 years after CSA98 passed, NASA finally signed an ISS cargo services delivery contract.

* NASA is still resisting doing commercial crew — which was part of the original official VSE plan (it was the CREW/cargo services program in the VSE). It has taken a national commission of space experts — reporting to the White House — to unequivocably recommend (its in all the options) that NASA institute a commercial crew (instead of Ares 1).

* NASA could have instituted “propellant depots” as part of the national strategy years ago. Why were propellant depots so obvious to the Augustine Commission as a key enable for our national goals in space, but ignored by the traditional NASA bureaucracy?

It is not because the NASA bureaucracy is dumb. I assert the reason is that creating a depot based architecture is not in the “bureaucratic interest” of NASA, as it outsources a large portion of the supply chain for exploration to commercial providers.

Prediction — NASA will resist creating propellant depots to the extent it is given the means to do so.

I think it’s a safe prediction. Those means have to be restricted. Though at least, this time, I think that we have top NASA administration on the right side.

[Early afternoon update]

He left out the saga of the Industrial Space Facility.