A few days ago, John Mankins left a comment at NASAWatch on the need for R&T up front to reduce program costs and risks. He extends that comment in a brief essay at today’s issue of The Space Review.

There is always a balance between how little new technology to incorporate into a program to minimize development schedule budget and risk, and how much to incorporate to see significant cost reductions or performance improvement in operations. Because governments tend to be short sighted in budget allocations (this year’s budget is always the most important, and future ones are discounted almost to zero beyond a few years, when few current politicians, particularly in the White House, expect to be around to suffer the political consequences), the natural tendency of NASA is to skimp on things in development (including technology development) that can save costs in the long haul. The most notable example of this is the Shuttle, in which the original estimated development budget was halved, at the cost of outrageous operational costs (and reduced safety), which is why the program is finally, after almost three decades of operation, being ended. But other examples are the lack of significant improvement in EVA equipment (an expense always deferred during ISS, despite its potential for improved station designs and decreased ops costs), and of course, orbital propellant storage and transfer.

Of course, the real key to making good decisions (even assuming that the politics can be prevented from intruding) is to have a grand overall goal toward which the entire space policy apparatus should be aiming. This has been lacking since…well…forever.

There was an interesting comment over at Rockets’n’Such this past weekend (number 16, since I can’t link individual comments):

There is no rational technical reason that ARES I need be built. It has no special capability above what already exists and is inferior in most aspects to the Atlas and Delta fleets. The already known vibration shock and thermal environments on Atlas/Delta as well as higher overall performance will also enable more rapid convergence on the Orion vehicle design which is trapped in an endless loop of redesigns due to the inadequacy of the ARES I. This should allow a more rapid transition to first flight and eliminates the need for pointless show and tell flight demonstrations. The LAS can be grossly simplified, propulsion systems drastically downsized, onboard systems enhanced and system capability expanded to address near term needs without absurd design compromises.

This is an important point. Most people don’t realize how many of the problems of Ares/Orion are synergistic: when you’re developing two new systems that have to interoperate, design issues from one have an impact on the other. Weight growth in Orion requires additional performance in the Ares, vibration problems in Ares imply a need for mitigation measures in the Orion that result in more weight, etc.

Yes, von Braun solved this in Apollo. How?

First, he had an essentially unlimited budget, something that NASA knew would not be the case before they started initial concepts. Second, he didn’t believe estimates of CSM mass provided by Houston, and built a huge amount of margin into the design of the Saturn V, a luxury that wasn’t available to the Ares concept, given the (arbitrary) decision to base it on an existing (sort of) first stage. As it happened, he ended up needing all of it.

One could see an attempt by NASA to fix this early on, when they went from the four to five segment version of the SRB, making the supposedly “off-the-shelf” first stage an essentially new vehicle (hence the unexpected resonance issues with the longer organ pipe and deeper tones/lower frequencies). As the commenter noted, going with an existing and flown vehicle that is a known quantity (e.g., EELV) confines the development issues to the Orion itself, vastly simplifying the process and reducing program cost and schedule risk. Also, if more performance is needed, there is already a good and well-understood conceptual history at ULA for growth versions, which are much less problematic with liquids than solids.

The wholesale modifications to the CX 39 systems can be halted or delayed until ARES V demands it. Given the lack of real scientific motivation for going to the moon and the near complete lack of tools for long term habitation this would seem to be delayed for at least a decade. Effectively this means the retirement of obsolete crawlers, pads, recovery systems and decaying infrastructure with a significant reduction in ongoing maintenance costs. The development of the J2, ARES I upperstage, 5 segment solid, new avionics as well as vibration suppression can also be halted. This is worth billions in savings and has no near-term impact to flight operations.

In the meantime NASA should learn to nurture the existing space industry by placing realistic contracts for launch services that enable a predictable business environment and encourage private investment beyond the whims of a few billionaires. This alone is a prime task for NASA and one that will challenge them immensely. But with industry as a full team member and not just a half-assed wrench turner executing sophomoric government designs NASA will gain the leverage to actually consider programs more ambitious than ISS. NASA should be tasked with demonstrating that they can economically support an ISS that does significant science while fixing broken hardware, enhancing capabilities and building international support. If NASA cannot support ISS for a predictable sum over a period of years then they cannot claim the abilities required to support lunar operations.

Most importantly NASA should get back to basic research to produce new technologies and tools that enable US industry to lead. The death of most of these technology programs at the hands of the Emperor was a stupid and shameful act. This work is less costly than giant single-purpose rocket ships and confers far greater economic benefit.

If NASA wants to go to the moon they better start with the crew landing and staying for months. Anything less is a waste of time. They should focus on what tools are required to make this a reality. The ESAS architecture is wholly incapable of meeting this need. But there are solutions that do enable this and at reasonable cost. They just don’t look like Apollo on steroids.

Emphasis mine. One of the problems with having space dominated by a government program is that failure tends to be rewarded, and success punished — if you save money on a program, and don’t use all your budget, it is generally cut the next year. And the excuses for failure generally are that there were insufficient funds, so failed programs get the money that the successful ones saved. Mickey Kaus has some (non-space) related thoughts (scroll a little — his permalinks remain quirky) on the parallels between the failure to prevent the carnage in India, and the failure to educate children here (is he really old enough to have been at Hyannisport when JFK was alive? He must have been a kid).

Anyway, worthwhile reading for the space transition team.

[Early afternoon update]

Paul Spudis (who has a comment on this post) has some nice things to say about ten years of ISS over at Air & Space today:

I contend that ISS is useful for future lunar and planetary exploration. For one thing, building and operating a million-pound spacecraft for over a decade has surely taught us something about spacefaring. One of the most remarkable facts about ISS is that it went from drawing board (more accurately, from computer-aided design bits) to working hardware in space, without numerous prototypes and precursors, and it worked the first time it was turned on. By any standard, that is a remarkable achievement. We have learned how to assemble and operate complex spacecraft in orbit, in many cases solving deployment problems and coaxing balky equipment into operation, as exemplified by the recent experience of Don Pettit and Mike Fincke with the renowned urine conversion machine. Assembling complex machines and making them work in space is a key skill of any spacefaring society. Building and operating ISS over the last decade has taught us much about that skill.

The station could be made even more important and relevant to future operations in space. A key requirement of routine operations in cislunar space is the ability to manage, handle and transfer rocket fuel, particularly the difficult to manage cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen. We could begin to acquire real experience working with these materials at ISS – transfer a quantity of water, crack it into its component hydrogen and oxygen using solar-generated electricity on orbit, and experiment with different methods of handling, conversion and storage of these materials. None of this requires a new module, but some specialized equipment could allow us to experiment with cryogenic fuel in microgravity, mastering a skill of vital importance to future operations in space and on the Moon.

I agree that we learned many useful lessons from ISS (unfortunately, the biggest, and falsest lesson that many seem to have learned is that we should avoid orbital construction and not build space facilities — thinking that is partly responsible for the current flawed heavy-lift ESAS approach). But using the ISS for orbital propellant technology development might potentially conflict with other research on station, if it involves disturbances, or concerns about explosive potential in the event of a mishap. This is worth looking into, but it’s not a simple issue.

First, over at the Gray Lady, he has an editorial on NASA’s cost-overrun culture:

…the Mars Science Laboratory is only the latest symptom of a NASA culture that has lost control of spending. The cost of the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the storied Hubble, has increased from initial estimates near $1 billion to almost $5 billion. NASA’s next two weather satellites, built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have now inflated to over $3.5 billion each! The list goes on: N.P.P., S.D.O., LISA Pathfinder, Constellation and more. You don’t have to know what the abbreviations and acronyms mean to get it: Our space program is running inefficiently, and without sufficient regard to cost performance. In NASA’s science directorate alone, an internal accounting in 2007 found over $5 billion in increases since 2003.

As Allen Thompson points out in comments over at Space Politics, one could simply substitute names and nyms of (black) programs here, and write exactly the same piece about NRO. But I’m not sure that I’d agree with Dr. Stern’s characterization that it is a NASA culture that has “lost control of spending.” Was there ever any golden age in which the NASA culture had control of spending? After all, the agency was born in the panic of the Cold War, and developed a cost-(plus)-is-no-object mentality from its very beginning. The operative saying during Apollo was “waste anything but time.” Sure, there have been occasional instances of programs coming in under schedule and within budget, but as Dr. Stern points out, the managers of those programs are often punished by having their programs slashed to cover overruns.

No, there is not now, and never has been a cost-conscious culture at NASA, for all the reasons that he describes. And this is the biggest one:

Congress should turn from the self-serving protection of local NASA jobs to an ethic of responsible government that delivers results.

Yes, it should. Well said. And with all the hope and change in the air, I’m sure that this will be the year that it finally happens.

OK, you can all stop laughing now. My sides hurt, too.

Unfortunately, that is not going to happen until space accomplishments become much more nationally important than they currently are, from a political standpoint. For most on the Hill, the NASA budget is first and foremost a jobs program for their states or districts. We can’t even control this kind of pork barrelery on the Defense budget (including NRO), which is actually a real federal responsibility, with lives at stake if we fail. Why should we think that we can fix it for civil space? Only when we are no longer reliant on federal budgets will we start to make serious progress, and get more efficiency in the program.

Speaking of which, Dr. Stern also has a piece in The Space Review on how NASA can make itself more relevant to the populace and its representatives in DC:

The coming new year presents an opportunity to reemphasize the immediate societal and economic returns NASA generates, so that no one asks, “How do space efforts make a tangible difference in my life?”

The new administration could accomplish this by combining NASA’s space exploration portfolio with new and innovative initiatives that address hazards to society, make new applications of space, and foster new industries.

Such new initiatives should include dramatically amplifying our capability to monitor the changing Earth in every form, from climate change to land use to the mitigation of natural disasters. Such an effort should also accelerate much needed innovation in aircraft and airspace system technologies that would save fuel, save travelers time, and regain American leadership in the commercial aerospace sector. And it should take greater responsibility for mitigating the potential hazards associated with solar storms and asteroid impacts.

So, too, a more relevant NASA should be charged to ignite the entrepreneurial human suborbital and orbital spaceflight industry. This nascent commercial enterprise promises to revolutionize how humans use spaceflight and how spaceflight benefits the private sector economy as fundamentally as the advent of satellites affected the communications industry.

As he notes, this needn’t mean a larger NASA budget–just a better-spent one. I particularly like the last graf above, obviously. I don’t agree, though, that it is NASA’s job to monitor the earth. It’s an important job, but it’s not really in NASA’s existing charter, and I fear that if it takes on this responsibility, it will further dilute the efforts on where its focus should be, which is looking outward, not down. It should be left to the agency that is actually responsible for such things (or at least part of them, and expanding its purview wouldn’t be as much of a stretch)–NOAA. If, for administrative reasons, NOAA is viewed as incapable of developing earth-sensing birds (though they couldn’t do much worse than NASA and NRO have recently), NASA could still manage this activity as a “contractor,” but it shouldn’t come out of their budget–it should be funded by Commerce.

Anyway, I think that we could do a lot worse than Dr. Stern as the next NASA administrator. We certainly done a lot worse.

[Early afternoon update]

The NYT piece is being discussed at NASAWatch, where John Mankins has a useful comment.

Talk at NASA about “human rating” an Ares V?

The decision to undertake the study reverses a major decision NASA took after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and subsequent accident investigation, that crew and cargo would be launched on separate vehicles. The Ares I, with its solid rocket booster first-stage and the new upper stage powered by the J-2X engine, was selected to orbit the Orion crew exploration vehicle.

That decision never made as much sense as everyone thought it did. It was one of the false lessons “learned” from Shuttle. And, as always, it raises the issue of what “human rating” really means. Generally, given the way the requirements often end up getting waived for NASA’s own vehicles, but not for other players, like the “Visiting Vehicle” rules for ISS, it’s simply an arbitrary barrier to entry for commercial providers.

[Monday morning update]

I should clarify that this discussion is about launch only. For in-space operations, it does make sense to separate passengers from cargo, and it probably makes sense to have robotic freighters as well, due to the long trip times and lack of need to handle emergencies with crew.