Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Space

Half A Century Of NASA

3 Comments

I have some fiftieth birthday thoughts over at Pajamas Media.

[Early afternoon update]

Well, this is annoying. A screwed-up history from Time magazine:

NASA was actually founded in 1915 and at the time was known as the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics — or NACA. Its job was to keep the nation abreast of the latest developments in the then-nascent technology of powered flight. NACA was established with good intentions but operated mostly as a bureaucratic backwater, a government body that couldn’t hope to keep up with a rapidly evolving private industry. In 1957, however, all that changed. That was the year the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik, the first Earth satellite — and in the process, scared the daylights out of the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower acted quickly, dusting off NACA and renaming it NASA — for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On October 1, 1958, the new agency officially went into business.

No, NASA was not NACA, or “founded in 1915.” NACA was a completely different kind of animal. It had nothing to do with space, and it was not an operational organization. It was a basic research outfit, and viewed the aviation industry as its customer, providing data and resources that allowed them to build better airplanes.

Sadly, once it was absorbed into the borg of the new space and aeronautics agency fifty years ago, it lost that focus, and the new entity largely saw itself as the customer, and the space industry as its contractors. Many argue that we need to return to a NACA philosophy for space, but it’s extremely misleading and confusing to state that NASA is NACA, and that its history goes back over ninety years. In fact, it is false.

He also doesn’t really explain why JSC is in Houston. Yes, Johnson was happy to have the mission control center in Texas, but Texas is a big state, and there are no particular geographical requirements for mission control (unlike, e.g., a launch site). It could as easily have been in Dallas or elsewhere. It was established in Houston because Rice University donated a lot of land for it.

Space

This Will Screw Up The Schedule

7 Comments

I just got an email indicating that the Hubble mission has been delayed until February. So they’ve got two orbiters sitting on the pad, neither of which is configured for an ISS mission. Will they be able to accelerate the next planned one, or does this mean more delays for ISS completion (and Shuttle retirement, assuming that they go ahead with it)?

Popular Culture, Space

Just A Fad

11 Comments

Many continue to disbelieve (with no obvious basis) that there really is a market for people who want to go into space; that it is “just a fad,” and that after a while, folks will get bored and the demand will disappear. I of course think that’s nonsense, and that word of mouth of the experience will only increase interest in it as more and more people hear about it, and want to try it themselves. Any astronaut will tell you that it was a, if not the peak experience of their lives.

Well, Space Adventures has announced today that Charles Simonyi, who flew with them previously, is going to spend millions do it again.

Man, that first time must have really sucked.

[Update mid morning]

Clark Lindsey has the press release.

Space

More SpaceX Thoughts

11 Comments

Jeff Foust has a piece on yesterday’s successful launch of the Falcon 1, and contrasts it with the successful landing of the first Chinese EVA mission:

SpaceX is moving on to launching real satellites, starting with RazakSAT, a Malaysian remote sensing satellite scheduled for launch on a Falcon 1 early next year; the first Falcon 9 launch is now planned for the second quarter of 2009. “We look forward to doing a lot of Falcon 1 launches and a lot of Falcon 9 launches and continuously improving until the point where we’re the world’s leading provider of space launch,” Musk said.

Sunday’s launch was not the only space milestone in the last week. On Thursday China launched its third manned mission, Shenzhou 7, on a 68-hour mission that featured the first Chinese spacewalk. The launch, EVA, and landing all captured headlines around the world, and has generated far more attention than the SpaceX launch likely will.

In the long run, though, it may be the SpaceX launch that is more influential. China is following the same path forged nearly five decades ago by the United States and the former Soviet Union: a government-run human spaceflight program that is as much for national prestige as for anything else. Several other countries, including India, Europe, and Japan, may follow in the next decade and beyond. It’s a tried-and-true paradigm, but one that has done little to date to open space for new applications and new audiences.

SpaceX, and other NewSpace ventures like it, carry the promise of dramatically changing the space industry with low-cost orbital and suborbital launch options that open up new and potentially lucrative new markets. That promise, though, has remained just that–a promise, not a reality–since SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize four years ago. Sunday’s launch was perhaps the biggest milestone since then in demonstrating what NewSpace can offer.

Clark Lindsey has a lot of links to other commentary.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

More Cost-Plus Contracting Thoughts

19 Comments

In comments at the previous post on this subject, Karl Hallowell comments:

It’s not government’s job to suck up risk for a contractor. As I see it, if contractors really were giving their best cost estimates, then they’re regularly overestimate prices not consistently underestimate them.

The other commenters who seem to think that designing a brand new UAV, or the first successful hit to kill missile (SRHIT/ERINT/PAC-3, not the dead end HOE), or an autonomous helicopter (all things I’ve been heavily involved with) is something that can and should be done on a fixed-price contract (after all, one bridge is like any other, right?) . . . it can maybe be done, but only if you’re willing to let system development take a lot longer.

I don’t know who posted this, but it’s unrealistic.

Let’s give an example of how the real world works in salvaging ships on the high seas:

Salvage work has long been viewed as a form of legal piracy. The insurers of a disabled ship with valuable cargo will offer from 10 to 70 percent of the value of the ship and its cargo to anyone who can save it. If the salvage effort fails, they don’t pay a dime. It’s a risky business: As ships have gotten bigger and cargo more valuable, the expertise and resources required to mount a salvage effort have steadily increased. When a job went bad in 2004, Titan ended up with little more than the ship’s bell as a souvenir. Around the company’s headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, it’s known as the $11.6 million bell.

Exactly the scenario where it is claimed that fixed price contracts can’t work. Huge risk, lots of uncertainty, time pressure. A similar example is oil well firefighters. As I see it, there’s almost no circumstances when government needs to help the contractor with risk. The money, paid when the job is done right, does that. If it’s not enough, then nobody takes the contract. Simple as that.

Yes. The reason that cost-plus contracts are preferred by government is that government, by its nature, has an aversion to profit. It’s the same sort of economic ignorance that drives things like idiotic “anti-gouging” laws, and it results in the same false economy for the citizens and taxpayers.

The problem isn’t that companies are unwilling to bid fixed price on high-tech ventures. The problem is that, in order to do so, they have to build enough profit into the bid to make it worth the risk. But the government views any profit over the standard one in cost-plus contracts (generally less than ten percent) as “obscene,” and to allow a company to make more profit than that from a taxpayer-funded project is a “ripoff.” So instead, they cap the profit, and reimburse costs, while also having to put into place an onerous oversight process, in terms of cost accounting and periodic customer reviews, that dramatically increases cost to the taxpayer, probably far beyond what they would be if they simply let it out fixed price and ignored the profit. I would argue that instead of the current model of cost-plus, lowest bidder, an acceptance of bid based on the technical merits of the proposal, history and quality of the bidding team, even if the bid cost is higher, will ultimately result in lower costs to the government (and taxpayer).

As I understand it, this is the battle that XCOR (hardly a risk-averse company, at least from a business standpoint) has been waging with NASA for years. XCOR wants to bid fixed price, and accept the risk (and the profits if they can hit their internal cost targets), while NASA wants them to be a cost-plus contractor, with all of the attendant increases in costs, and changes in corporate culture implied by that status.

This is the debate that will have to occur if John McCain wants to make any headway in his stated desire Friday night to get rid of cost-plus contracts. Unfortunately, he’s not in a very good philosophical position to argue his case, because he’s one of those economic simpletons in Washington who think that making money is ignoble, and that profits are evil, particularly when they’re so high as to be “obscene.”