It’s not just between Mike Griffin and OMB (and the White House?). Now (not that it’s anything new) there is a lot of infighting between JSC and Marshall over Orion and Ares:

Design issues for any new vehicle are to be expected, and correctly represented by the often-used comment of ‘if there weren’t problems, we wouldn’t need engineers.’ However, Orion’s short life on the drawing board has been an unhappy childhood.

The vast majority of Orion’s design changes have been driven by Ares I’s shortcomings – via performance and mass issues – to ably inject the vehicle into orbit. The fact that the Ares I now has several thousand pounds of reserve mass properties negates the suffering it has brought on the vehicle it is designed to serve.

Those penalties Orion had to endure could be seen at the very start of its design process, when the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) reduced in size by 0.5 meters in diameter, soon followed by Orion having its Service Module stripped down in size and mass by around 50 percent.

‘Mass savings’ would become one of the most repeated terms surrounding the Orion project.

One of the problems that the program had (like many) were caused by the intrinsic concept of the Shaft itself. If you’re designing an all-new rocket, it is a “rubber” vehicle in that one can size stages to whatever is necessary to optimize it. But in their determination to use an SRB as a first stage, they put an artificial constraint on vehicle performance. When it was discovered that the four-segment motor wouldn’t work, they went to a different upper stage engine. When this didn’t work, they went to five segments (which meant that it was a whole new engine).

During Apollo, von Braun took requirements from the people designing the mission hardware, and then added a huge margin to it (fifty percent, IIRC), because he didn’t believe them. As it turned out, they ended up needing almost all of the vehicle performance to get to the moon.

This program never had anything like that kind of margin, and now, at PDR 0.5, it’s already almost gone. So now they’re rolling the requirements back on to the Orion, demanding that the payload make up for performance loss by cutting weight, while also (probably, next year) requiring that it add systems to mitigate the fact that the vehicle is going to shake them like a Sherwin Williams machine. This will result in further loss of margin, redundancy and safety.

This is not a typical development path of a successful program. It is emblematic of one about to augur in.

Is NASA fighting with OMB?

Lots of great comments here, including the fact that Mike Griffin’s fear mongering about China is at odds with administration policy. Including this great comment from “red””

it would be a good idea for Griffin to consider what kind of response by NASA would be useful to the U.S. in countering the real military and economic space threats from China. It seems to me that ESAS doesn’t help counter these real threats at all.

The kinds of capabilities that NASA could encourage, invent, or improve to counter China’s ASATs, launchers, and satellites are things like:

– operationally responsive space
– small satellites
– Earth observation satellites
– telecommunications satellites
– economical commercial launch vehicles
– commercial suborbital rockets
– improved education in space-related fields
– space infrastructure (e.g.: commercial space stations, tugs, refueling)

It’s possible that, if NASA were contributing more in areas like these (through incentives to U.S. commercial space, research, demos, etc), it would find the budget battles easier to win.

No kidding. Especially the last. And Apollo On Steroids makes no contributions to any of these things.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of comments, “anonymous.space” has a description of what NASA’s “pat on the back” PDR really means:

This past week, Constellation patted itself on the back for getting Ares I through its first preliminary design review (PDR) but glossed over the fact that Ares I still has to conduct a second PDR next summer to address the unresolved mitigation systems for the first stage thrust oscillation issue, with unknown consequences for the rest of the design. See the asterisk on the pre-board recommendation at the bottom of the last page of this presentation.

The Constellation press release and briefing also made no mention of the recent year-long slip in the Orion PDR to next summer. See NASA Watch, NASA Spaceflight, and Flight Global.

So neither the Ares I nor the Orion preliminary design is complete, and one could argue that the Constellation program has been held back a year more than it’s been allowed to pass to the next grade.

More worrisome than the PDR slips are the grades that Ares I received in this partial PDR. The pre-board used a green, yellow/green, yellow, yellow/red, and red grading scheme, which can also be depicted as the more familiar A (4.0), B (3.0), C (2.0), D (1.0), and F (0.0) grading scheme. The pre-board provided ten grades against ten different success criteria from NASA’s program management handbook. The ten grades had the following distribution:

One “Green” (A, 4.0) grade
Two “Yellow/Green” (B, 3.0) grades
Four “Yellow” (C, 2.0) grades
Three “Yellow/Red” (D, 1.0) grades
No “Red” (F, 0.0) grades

So seven of Ares I’s ten grades were a C or a D. Ares I is NASA’s planned primary means of crew launch over the next couple of decades and should define technical excellence. But instead, the project earned a grade point average of 2.1, barely a “gentleman’s C” (or a “gentleman’s yellow”). See the pre-board grades on pages 3-7 of this presentation.

And even more worrisome than the PDR slips and grades are the areas in which the project is earning its lowest grades. Among areas in which Ares I earned a yellow/red (or D) grade and the accompanying technical problems were:

The preliminary design meets the requirements at an acceptable level of risk:
– Induced environments are high and cause challenges, including pyro shock to avionics and acoustic environments on reaction and roll control systems.

– No formal process for control of models and analysis.

– Areas of known failure still need to be worked, including liftoff clearances.

Definition of the technical interfaces is consistent with the overall level of technical maturity and provides an acceptable level of risk:

– Process for producing and resolving issues between Level 2 and Level 3 interface requirement documents and interface control documents is unclear, including the roles and responsibilities of managers and integrators and the approval process for identifying the baseline and making changes to it.

– Numerous known disconnects and “TBDs” in the interface requirement documents, including an eight inch difference between the first stage and ground system and assumption of extended nozzle performance not incorporated in actual first and ground system designs.

See the pre-board grades on pages 4-5 of this presentation.

So, in addition to the unknowns associated with the unresolved thrust oscillation system for Ares I:

– the vehicle’s electronics can’t survive the shocks induced during stage separation;

– the vehicle’s control systems will be shaken apart and unable to keep the rocket flying straight;

– the vehicle is going to hit the ground support structure on liftoff;

– the project is assuming performance from advanced rocket nozzles that don’t fit within the vehicle’s dimensions;

– the project can’t even get the height of the rocket and its ground support to match; and

– there’s no good modeling, analytical, or requirements control necessary to resolve any of these issues.

And the real kicker from the press conference was the revelation that Constellation manager Jeff Hanley only has 2,000-3,000 pounds of performance reserve left at the program level and that Ares I manager Steve Cook has no margin left to contribute to unresolved future problems like thrust oscillation impacts to Orion. See, again, NASA Watch.

We know from prior presentations that Orion’s mass margin is down to practically zero (286 kilograms or 572 pounds) for ISS missions and is negative (-859 kilograms or -1,718 pounds) for lunar missions. See p. 25, 33, and 37 in this presentation.

When added to Hanley’s margins, that means that the entire Ares I/Orion system is down to ~2,500-3,500 pounds of mass margin for the ISS mission and ~300-1,300 pounds of mass margin for the lunar mission. That’s between seven and less than one percent mass margin against Orion’s 48,000 pound total mass. Typical mass margin at the PDR stage should be on the order of 20-25 percent, about triple the best-case assessment here. Ares I/Orion still has seven years of design and development to go and at best has only one-third of the mass margin it should have at this stage.

Even worse, those Orion mass margins don’t account for the mass threats still to be allocated in next year’s Orion PDR. In the presentation above, the 90th percentile mass threats for the ISS and lunar missions are separately about 900 kilograms or 2,000 pounds. That reduces the total Ares I/Orion mass margin to between -1,700 and 1,500 pounds. That’s a negative (negative!) three percent mass margin on the lunar mission and only a positive three percent mass margin on the ISS mission, at least seven times less margin than what the program needs at this point in time.

Instead of worrying about $60 million Soyuz purchases and extending existing Shuttle jobs, Weldon and his staff need to be worrying about the $20 billion Ares I/Orion program and whether it can ever technically close and replace some of those Shuttle jobs.

Some have attempted to excuse this by saying, “well, every big space program has teething issues.” True. Two responses.

First, many of them die from them (e.g., X-33).

Second, I don’t know of any comparable program that had essentially zero margin at PDR (and I’m not aware of any that required multiple PDRs or “PDR do-overs”) that survived them. Perhaps someone more familiar with history can enlighten me.

This screwed up:

After trying unsuccessfully for years to build its own radar satellite, the Pentagon is now turning to its allies for help and has been presented with a plan that would see it buy a clone of Canada’s highly successful Radarsat-2 spacecraft.

The U.S. Defence Department asked for and received information this week from a number of foreign satellite consortiums on how they could help the Pentagon meet its surveillance needs for the future.

Isn’t there anybody here who knows how to play this game?

An interview with Tom Jones on the subject, over at Popular Mechanics. Note that he doesn’t point out that no one ordered Mike Griffin to develop Ares, which is the biggest reason that Orion is delayed and that NASA doesn’t have enough funding. He also has too much faith in Orion flying before something else (particularly given the Ares problems). I’m sure we could put up a capsule on an Atlas long before 2014, whether Dragon or something else, if we made it a priority.

As I’ve noted in the past, we’re going to have to decide how much ISS is worth to us. Chair Force Engineer thinks that we’re going to bite the bullet and buy more Soyuzs from the Russians:

Besides the reliance on Soyuz, there are myriad other ways in which ISS cannot survive unless the US and Russia cooperate. The various modules are too interconnected, and neither country can operate their contributions to the station without the other country playing along. It’s conceivable that Russia could afford to build Soyuz without American money, by selling the American slots to space tourists. But a Russian-led ISS would still require use of American space modules.

America and Russia are left in a situation where it’s unlikely that either will abandon the ISS, even though both nations are mired in growing mistrust. If I had to make a bet, I would say that the US and Russia will learn to grin and bear it, operating ISS jointly until 2017. When Congress looks rationally at its options, it will realize that it will have to begrudgingly buy more Soyuz if it still wants to participate in ISS.

Sometimes, I think that expecting Congress to “look rationally at its options” is asking too much. Particularly when it’s robbing money from the NASA budget to provide foreign aid to Ethiopia. Sure, why not? It’s not like NASA’s spending the money very usefully, anyway. It just proves my oft-made point that space isn’t politically important.

Anyway, as I said in my Pajamas piece, this is a policy disaster long in the making, and the chickens are finally coming home to roost. It was naive in the extreme at the end of the Cold War to assume that we and Russia would be BFFs and enter into such an inextricable long-term relationship. Now it’s like a very dysfunctional marriage that is being held together only out of concern for the children. Without ISS, the divorce would be swift, I suspect.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of apt metaphors, Clark Lindsey has one for the Ares program:

Yellow and red grades notwithstanding, it has always seemed extremely unlikely to me that Ares I would fail to fly when NASA has so many billions of dollars available to spend on it. However, since I believe the whole Ares I/V program to be a stupendous waste, if technical problems did arise that led to its cancellation, I’d consider it a boon for US space development. If the brakes fail and a huge truck starts to careen down a hill, it’s a blessing if the thing blows a tire instead and flops over into a ditch with relatively little damage to people and property. Unfortunately, it appears that Ares will keep rolling no matter what.

Actually, I wouldn’t necessarily bet on that. There may be “change” coming to NASA next year, regardless of who wins the election.

I was going to have some comments about the administrator’s leaked email, but haven’t had the time. Fortunately, over in comments at Space politics, “anonymous.space” picks up my slack:

He didn’t mean for it to be shown to the outside world, but the revisionism, hypocrisy, and self-adulation in Griffin’s email is pretty shocking, even this late into the ESAS/Constellation debacle. It’s either that, or he’s been lying about his real positions for a long time. Griffin wrote:

“Exactly as I predicted, events have unfolded in a way that makes it clear how unwise it was for the US to adopt a policy of deliberate dependence on another power for access to the ISS.”

Griffin never predicted this. Instead, Griffin repeatedly stated that the VSE — including its 2010 date for Shuttle retirement — and the accompanying NASA Authorization Act of 2005 provide the nation with its best civil space policy in decades. In fact, Griffin said so as recently as January 2008 in an STA speech:

“I consider this to be the best civil space policy to be enunciated by a president, and the best Authorization Act to be approved by the Congress, since the 1960s.”

See here.

In fact, just before becoming NASA Administrator, Griffin even _led_ a study that argued as one of its central conclusions/recommendations that the Space Shuttle could and should be retired after ISS assembly reached the stage of “U.S. Core Complete”, certainly no later than 2010.

See here.

If Griffin was really so prescient as to predict the situation that NASA’s human space flight programs are in now, then he should have spoken up years ago instead of repeatedly signing onto studies and policies that are flawed according to the argument in his email. In fact, it would have been wrong for him to have lobbied for the job of NASA Administrator to begin with if he really thought that the President’s policy was so compromised.

Griffin should resign immediately and apologize if his email reflects what he’s actually believed all these years. If not, and his email represents how Griffin has recently changed his views, then Griffin should admit that he was wrong to sign onto the policy, argue that the policy needs to be revised, and resign if it is not revised in a manner that he can support.

Griffin also wrote:

“In a rational world, we would have been allowed to pick a Shuttle retirement date to be consistent with Ares/Orion availability”

Griffin is confused about both chronology and causality in this statement. The Shuttle retirement date came first — as a recommendation about Shuttle operability and certification in the CAIB report and then as policy in the VSE. The replacement for Shuttle (originally CEV in the VSE and then Ares/Orion in ESAS) came second and was supposed to have a schedule that was responsive to that Shuttle retirement date.

In a rational world, a rational NASA Administrator would have picked a rational Shuttle replacement that could be developed rapidly and fielded soon after the 2010 deadline for Shuttle retirement using the available budgetary and technical resources. Instead, Griffin chose an Ares/Orion system that is so technically compromised that it can’t complete even its preliminary design review before the end of the Bush II Administration and is so costly that it can’t be flown operationally within the available budget until 2015 (and even that date has only a limited chance of being met).

Gemini took less than four years to develop and fly. In the same amount of time, Ares I/Orion will not complete its preliminary design review. That is not rational.

Apollo took seven years to develop and fly (to the Moon). In the same amount of time, Ares I/Orion will still be (at least) three years from flying (to the ISS). That is not rational.

Griffin also wrote:

“We would have been asked to deploy Ares/Orion as early as possible (rather than “not later than 2014″) and we would have been provided the necessary budget to make it so.”

Griffin is just making up history with this statement. NASA was never asked to “deploy Ares/Orion” at all. Rather, the VSE directed NASA to develop a Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV, which eventually becameOrion), and provided a budget that supported CEV development. The VSE never directed NASA to develop a new launch vehicle that duplicated the nation’s military and commercial capabilities with yet another medium- to intermediate-lift launcher (Ares), and the budget never supported such a development. Ares I needlessly busted the VSE budget box from day one, requiring the termination of billions of dollars of ISS research and exploration technology development just to start its design activities.

And why does anyone have to ask Griffin to deploy a Shuttle replacement as early as possible when the VSE gives him the flexibility to develop a replacement anytime before 2014? Is the NASA Administrator really so unambitious and lacking in initiative that, instead of being given a deadline (which he’s blown by a year anyway), he also has to be told by the White House to execute a critical replacement program as rapidly as possible?

And then Griffin wrote:

“… for OSTP and OMB, retiring the Shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision.”

First, for the head of any federal agency to use the term “jihad” in written reference to the White House offices that set policy for and fund their agency – especially when the same White House has been leading a seven-year war against Islamic extremism – demonstrates such extremely poor judgement that it brings into question whether that agency head is still fit to serve.

Second, the 2010 date for Shuttle retirement was effectively set by the CAIB’s expert judgment about and extensive investigation into the vehicle’s operational and certification issues. OSTP and OMB (and NASA under the prior Administrator) simply reiterated the 2010 date in the VSE. If Griffin wants to challenge the 2010 Shuttle retirement date, then he needs to challenge the engineering and program management analysis and expertise of the 13-member CAIB and its 32 staff, not OSTP and OMB. OSTP and OMB read and followed the CAIB report on this issue. Apparently Griffin did not and has not.

The only things OSTP and OMB are guilty of is not fulfilling all of the White House’s funding commitments to the VSE and not stopping Ares I/Orion at the outset when those projects busted the budget, or later when they ran into insurmountable technical issues and schedule delays that made them programmatically and politically useless.

Griffin also wrote:

“Further, they [OSTP and OMB] actively do not want the ISS to be sustained, and have done everything possible to ensure that it would not be.”

For the same NASA Administrator who wiped out billions of dollars of ISS research and who referred to the ISS as a “mistake” in the press to criticize White House offices about their lack of support for the ISS is the height of hypocrisy. See (add http://www):

.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-09-27-nasa-griffin-interview_x.htm):

Griffin needs to stop flailing in the political winds, make up his mind, and stick with a consistent position on the value (or lack thereof) of the ISS.

Finally, and this is a technical nit compared to the issues above, but towards the end, Griffin also wrote:

“The argument that we need to get Shuttle out of the way so that conversion of the VAB/MAF for Constellation can proceed is similarly specious.”

This totally misses the point. The VAB and MAF are just really huge shells that NASA can build anything in. It’s the launch and rocket test infrastructure (the pads, the mobile launcher platform, and test stands) that the Shuttle and Constellation system share, and which Constellation has to make modifications to, that will interminably slow Constellation development if Shuttle continues to make use of those facilities.

My kingdom for a rational NASA Administrator who reads and follows policy direction, develops programs within their allotted budgets, encourages and listens to independent technical advice, and has the capacity to admit when the current plan is fubar and adjust course in a timely manner.

Maybe in the next administration, regardless of who wins. But don’t bet on it. The only area in which I disagree with these comments concerns the Shuttle retirement date. As I noted in a later comment over there:

“…why did they pick 2010? What is magic about that date (particularly when no one really knows what ‘certification’ means)?

I had always assumed that the CAIB thought that the Shuttle should be retired ASAP, and that if it wasn’t, it would have to be ‘recertified’ for longer life (ignoring the issue that the term was undefined). But ASAP meant no sooner than ISS completion, which (I think even then) was scheduled for 2010 (at least after the Columbia loss and standown). Hence the date (it doesn’t hurt that it’s a round number).

The Shuttle doesn’t suddenly become less safe to fly in 2011, or even 2012. If there is a degradation, it is a gradual one, not a binary condition, and there is no obvious ‘knee in the curve.’ The date was driven by non-Shuttle considerations, IMO. If someone on the CAIB (e.g., Dr. Day) knows otherwise, I’d be interested to know that.”

And if Mike Griffin is now frustrated, and wants to know who to blame, he’ll see him the next time he shaves.