Jim Meigs over at Popular Mechanics has some immediate policy suggestions for the new administration. I disagree that the moon isn’t a useful goal — my concern is the horrific expense of the way that NASA proposes to do it, and following Jim’s advice on building a heavy lifter isn’t going to help with that. Whether or not we need heavy lift is one of those assumptions that need to be reexamined. What we need is low-cost lift, not heavy lift, and building a huge rocket won’t provide it.
Category Archives: Space
“Certifying” Space Shuttles
A minor row seems to have broken out in comments at this post, at which an obviously frustrated “Habitat Hermit” thinks he’s living in the twilight zone. It’s an important enough point that it’s worth breaking it out in a separate post. I first responded to his comments on certification thusly:
Certification is very well defined for aviation. You can go look up in a book what is required, per FAA procedures. Such a book has never been written for the Shuttle, and it’s not a simple matter of transferring the procedures from aviation, because Shuttle has many systems that don’t even exist in an aircraft, with no experience of how long they can really safely go without refurbishment or replacement (one of the reasons that it would be extremely premature to put a certification process on the space transport industry). It is not an aircraft, except for a brief period of its mission, and it remains an experimental system.
Estimates of what “recertification” would cost for Shuttle are based on the costs of doing a full OMDP for whichever of the orbiters (Discovery I think) is due for one, and perhaps a lesser one for Endeavor (which is a newer vehicle, and again, where that term isn’t well defined, though I suppose that it could be sort of equivalent to a D check). But no one has ever discussed “certification” of Shuttles, as far as I know, prior to the CAIB, and the CAIB had no special insight into what would be involved in it, other than what they gathered by talking to NASA personnel, who probably had given it little thought. The fact remains that the 2010 date was driven by need to complete ISS, and had nothing to do with when the Shuttles were “due” for “recertification.”
To which he responded:
Your reply amazes me. I do realize that I’m beating a dead horse but I (and everybody else) should continue doing that as long as people try to operate space transportation systems upon the carcass.
The Shuttle components were manufactured to specifications.
Those specifications were whatever NASA deemed sufficient.
Certification obviously means ensuring that the Shuttle components still meet those specifications and requirements (including any later changes) for every part of every Shuttle.
This is not being done in full according to every source I have. No one has come forward with sourced information to the contrary.
This issue is dead simple yet the replies are a buffet of avoiding the topic and arguments made, obfuscation, nonsense, repeating or introducing small pieces of information I would hope would be obvious to most interested bystanders with some knowledge (including me) and in general adding absolutely nothing at all.
In other words you are obviously and most likely consciously arguing against common good practice and minimum standards.
My reply:
Certification obviously means ensuring that the Shuttle components still meet those specifications and requirements (including any later changes) for every part of every Shuttle.
No, that is not what “certification” means (at least for aviation), “obviously” or otherwise. No matter how much you want it to mean that, it doesn’t. The word for that is “verification.” There is no established procedure to certify a Shuttle Orbiter, regardless of how upset that reality makes you. And absent such a defined procedure, the Shuttle cannot be either certified, or recertified.
In other words you are obviously and most likely consciously arguing against common good practice and minimum standards.
No one is arguing, or has argued against that. But that’s not certification, either. Words really do mean things.
The reason that we insist on not misusing the word “certification” is because of the potentially dire implications it would have for the fledgling space transport industry should the FAA take it into its head that spacecraft require it. It would likely strangle it in the cradle.
[Late afternoon update]
I have received an excerpt of a document from a very reliable source at NASA that may shed some light on this subject. Alternatively, it could simply further confuse. Continue reading “Certifying” Space Shuttles
More Thoughts On Boundary Conditions
Clark Lindsey follows up on the previous discussion (with the typical ahistorical nonsense in the comments section about Nixon “scrapping” Apollo):
I think that if, say, Pete Worden had been chosen as NASA chief in 2005, his study would have set boundary conditions much closer that for the HLR than to Griffin’s and come up with a HLR type of architecture. Conditions on Constellation required that it avoid in-space operations at all costs, avoid multiple launches at all costs, and avoid development of any new technologies at all costs. Not surprisingly, all of that ends up costing a whole lot.
As someone once said, when failure is not an option, success gets pretty damned expensive.
Boundary Conditions
Chair Force Engineer has a useful post on the assumptions that go into the various choices of lunar architecture, an issue on which I kvetch on at least a weekly basis, because NASA steadfastly refuses to show its work. He delves into Ares vs Direct issues much more deeply than I ever bother to do, because, frankly, both approaches are flawed. I don’t have a vehicle-design dog in the fight. I like to argue at a higher level, which is, what is our institutional approach to becoming spacefaring: NASA develops its own vehicles for its own limited needs, or the federal space establishment encourages a private space industry off of which NASA can leverage to accomplish not only its own goals, but those of others?
But for those who like to design launch systems, and get down into those weeds, CFE offers some interesting contrasts between Direct and NASA’s current approach. I generally agree with his conclusion (as far as it goes):
I would like for the next NASA Administrator to call time-out and order a re-evaluation of crew and cargo launch strategies that takes development costs into account with infrastructure and operational costs for the expected duration of Project Constellation (from now until at least 2025.) The agency should look at permutations of all realistic crew launch & cargo launch designs. Examine Ares I, Jupiter 120, Atlas V Heavy, Delta IV Heavy, and Wide-Body Atlas for crew launch. Take a gander at Ares V, Jupiter 232, and a side-mount Shuttle Derived Vehicle similar to Shuttle-C. Take a realistic look at the assumptions which are driving the Orion capsule weight (especially the amount of volume available to each crew member) and the number of man-days the Altair lander is expected to support on the lunar surface.
But there are a lot more fundamental assumptions that have to be examined. For instance, if we focus a small fraction of the billions being spent on developing unneeded launch systems instead on orbital infrastructure (EVA equipment, docking protocols and hardware, mating interfaces, tugs, etc.) and utilize innovative approaches like Bigelow’s facilities for habitat, how much would we do with existing launch systems, and future (small) space transports that could drive down costs? It would be an interesting exercise, and one that NASA has never engaged in (because the insanely wrong lesson it learned from ISS was to avoid orbital operations and assembly) to challenge them to come up with a way to get to the moon with existing launch systems. Because that is the route to becoming spacefaring.
[Update a few minutes later]
One other thought, and one that I tried (unsuccessfully) to inject into the CE&R results that we were submitting to NASA back before Mike became administrator. NASA should consider marginal costs per mission, and average costs per mission (including amortization of development costs), and let that drive them toward architectures that are scalable to much more activity. From that standpoint, ESAS is an utter disaster.
Sucking Hind Tit
Al Fansome has some numbers to show where the Obama administration puts space in terms of federal R&D priority (scroll down to the eleventh comment):
I reviewed the stimulus package for the science & tech agencies. I have listed them by order of amount received in the stimulus bill.
DOE receives $43.9 Billion (for energy related projects.)
NIH receives $4.6 Billion.
National Telecommunications & Information Administration receives $3.8 Billion.
NSF receives $2.5 Billion.
NOAA receives $1 Billion.
NASA receives $600 million.
NIST receives $500 million.
Now you may think “well at least NASA got more than somebody.”
But wait, the President’s budget request for NIST for FY2009 was $678 million.
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/budget_2009.htmThe NIST stimulus package of $500M is 74% of its FY2009 budget request.
FWIW,
– Al
PS — This is completely depressing.
I’m certainly not surprised. I keep telling people that civil space isn’t important. This is just more proof of that.
Chicken And Egg
Which comes first, the car or the road?
“They’ve all looked at it from the perspective of how to build the car. We looked at it from the perspective of how to run an entire country without oil. You’ve got to put the infrastructure ahead of the cars.” The venture is coordinating with some car manufacturers who plan to create electric vehicles to ensure that the infrastructure will be utilized.
We have the same problem in space. No one is building vehicles designed to use gas stations in space because the gas stations don’t exist. No one is building the gas stations because there are no vehicles designed to use them. This is a place where government could lead by making it policy that this is the future of space transportation, and establishing standards (just as in the eighties, it was the flawed policy that everything would be flown on Shuttle, and that payloads had to meet its payload-integration requirements).
Not Rolling Dice
I’ve commented in the past (even recently) that risk estimates of continuing to fly the Shuttle are overblown. There are good arguments to retire the system, but the risk of losing the crew isn’t one of them, both because they aren’t as high as people are saying, and because losing another crew wouldn’t be the end of the world. As I’ve said repeatedly, if we’re not willing to risk human lives on spaceflight, then it’s probably not worth doing. Anyway, Dick Covey, former astronaut and head of USA, apparently agrees with me (at least about the risk numbers):
The often-quoted PRA numbers do not factor in the continuous improvement in the vehicle and operations — of which there have been numerous and significant changes — or the quality and performance of the team that makes it work.
PRA estimates alone should never be used to reach a go/no-go determination on flying one, two or 10 more missions. PRA is intended primarily to provide an analytical yardstick for making sound engineering decisions about the development of a system and whether incremental changes in a system would improve or degrade relative safety.
Applying statistical probability techniques to the space shuttle PRA number to determine the risk of flying multiple missions implies a randomness in safe shuttle operations that does not exist, and belies the real approach to risk identification and management that defines the current space shuttle program.
The shuttle currently operates at the highest level of safety in its history. It is not without risk, but that risk is better understood and mitigated now than at any time in shuttle history.
Absolutely. The Shuttle has never been safer than it is today. Mike Griffin has just been using the PRA numbers to scare Congress into retiring the system so he could free up the funds for the Scotty rocket.
And this nonsense about needing “recertification” (whatever that means — it was never “certified” in the first place) in 2010 is just that. The CAIB never really provided any basis for this date. It’s an arbitrary one that just happened to coincide with the planned completion of ISS, so it seemed like a good marker for the decision as to whether or not to continue to program. We don’t really know if the vehicles need an OMDP, or mini or nano OMDP. We would just have to continue to inspect as we fly.
AWOL
It’s been a year now since Jesse Londin’s most recent post at Space Law Probe. Anyone know what happened?
Good Luck With That
Jim Pinkerton thinks that space development should be at the center of Obama’s stimulus plan.
The problem is that, as “anonymous.space” points out, it isn’t particularly stimulating in the short run:
Unfortunately, departments and agencies with large portions of their budgets dedicated to multi-year development projects — like NASA and DoD — are extremely poor prospects for near-term economic stimulus funding. Congress appropriates the vast majority of NASA’s $17 billion budget as two-year funding, meaning that NASA has two years to get the funding on contract or otherwise awarded. NASA has an even longer period of time to spend the funding — i.e., obtain a receipt from the contractor and pay them. If the White House and Congress want to see federal funding pumped into the economy in early to mid-2009, NASA would be a very poor choice of vehicle for that funding (as much as I wish it were otherwise). Funding appropriated for NASA in 2009 would not really be flowing until 2010-12.
Space projects are about the farthest thing from shovel ready. And there’s a lot of up-front effort that has to go in to how to properly spend the money.
I met Pinkerton at a free-market space symposium sponsored by Cato about a decade ago. He was (and remains) very enthusiastic about space, but very skeptical about private space.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Over in the same comment thread as the one from “anonymous.space,” Charles in Houston has a great stimulus idea:
OK, I can’t help myself!!! I have to at least fire off a controversial and pointlessly realistic posting on the NASA As Stimulus idea!!!
Why not create a few more NASA centers? We have created lots of jobs by opening the Shared Services Center and the Independent Verification center and some other center that I forgot about and maintaining a whole host of overlapping Centers for years. Why not open a few more in Detroit and hire a bunch of auto workers to do something or the other?? You would build parking lots and visitor’s centers and attract tourists – all NASA facilities attract tourists like picnics attract ants.
He might be able to get John Conyers’ support for that one.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the original version of the Pinkerton piece at Fox News, which is much easier on the eyes to read. The Lifeboat Foundation really needs a site redesign.
How To Become Spacefaring
Jon Goff and Ferris Valyn have some useful policy suggestions to implement their goal.