Category Archives: Space

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Chicken And Egg

15 Comments

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).

Political Commentary, Space

Not Rolling Dice

28 Comments

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.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Good Luck With That

1 Comment

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.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Enough With The “Military Rockets” Already

19 Comments

Andy Pasztor makes the same mistake as Bloomberg and many others have in this WSJ piece about the potential new administrator:

One of the first big questions confronting NASA is whether the new team will embrace the Bush administration’s concept of building a new fleet of space shuttle-derived rockets to reach the orbiting International Space Station and return to the moon. In the past few weeks, there have been increasing calls by outsiders to scrap some of those plans in favor of using existing military rockets.

The Atlas and Delta are not “military rockets.”

They are commercial launch vehicles, developed partly with a subsidy from the Air Force. Anyone can fly on them who has the money, and they are built and operated by commercial contractors. They fly out of a military range, but almost all commercial vehicles do. There is nothing “military” about them. Why can’t people get this straight?

History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

A Nice Space History Find

1 Comment

After I mentioned the story about Bob Frosch wanting to run NOAA instead of NASA (something that I’d heard at the time, but had never really verified, even after meeting and spending quite a bit of time with Frosch in the early nineties), I decided to dig into it to see if it was true or apocryphal. Which resulted in finding this transcript of a very long but interesting interview with him, that contains a lot of interesting Carter-era NASA history.

It confirms that NOAA was his first pick, and he expected to get it, but was edged out by someone more politically connected (I didn’t bother to find out who it was — the NOAA history site didn’t make it very easy to figure it out). The first question on the table for the incoming Carter administration was whether or not to cancel Shuttle, which they didn’t seem to understand, and Frosch’s first task was to figure it out, because they were looking for places to cut for the president’s own programs. In the end (obviously) it wasn’t cancelled, but the planned fleet was cut from seven to five (and really four, because Enterprise never flew). Had they built the full seven, it would have cost a couple billion more at the time, and we’d have five (or possibly four, because we might not have replaced Challenger) now instead of three, and eking another few years out of it might look a lot more attractive.

But this part struck me as kind of funny, given the rumors that have been flying about Obama’s plans:

Frosch:…there was another question that came, not so much from the President, but began to come from OMB and Frank Press, which is important to reorganization. It is: why does NASA have so many centers? Why don’t you close a few centers? You know, it’s a perpetual question. It tended always to focus on Huntsville, largely because they were the engine place, and the mentality of a lot of OMB and political types is a very short-term mentality; and so, they were saying, “Gee, we’re almost through with the development of the Shuttle engines. Obviously, you don’t need Huntsville. After you finish the engines, you dispose of Huntsville.” You can decrease the number of people. And remember, the President came in saying there were too many bureaucrats; you’ve got to decrease the number of bureaucrats. There was a lot of pressure — “What are you going to close?” In fact, there was a rumor around NASA that the reason I had been selected was because, as I told you, in the Navy job I actually closed something. Okay, so that was mixed up in this whole organizational guestion.
DeVorkin:
That rumor wasn’t well founded, was it?
Frosch:
No, no: as far as I know, it had nothing to do with it. Nobody was thinking about that at all. Oh, there were funny rumors, that since Lovelace and Frosch had both had experience in the Pentagon, the whole place was going to be swallowed up by the Pentagon. In fact, there were people running around at one stage, saying we were brought in to militarize NASA. It was very peculiar, but the only thing you do about these things is you ignore them (laughs), very straightforward. So, we launched, among other things, into “what are we going to do about reorganization?”

The more things change…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Pots And Kettles

3 Comments

…in which Keith Cowing accuses me of being “snarky” (in comments). Guess his irony meter is on the fritz. Oh, well, can’t complain. I’ve been getting steady hittage off it for the last hour or so.

Anyway, with regard to the pick for White House liaison to NASA, I’d just like to see something more to his qualifications than that he raised money for Obama (and of course, his sexual orientation is entirely irrelevant, at least to me).