Irene Klotz has been won over by Sarah Palin and Ayn Rand. And the former Democrat is going to be following the campaign from a space perspective. Not sure how much she’s going to have to report. I doubt that it will be a big issue outside of Florida.
Category Archives: Space
Where Did That Number Come From?
I hadn’t seen this before. Mike Griffin is claiming that extending Shuttle will dramatically reduce its reliability:
In April this year, he told a Senate panel: “If one were to do as some have suggested and fly the shuttle for an additional five years — say, two missions a year — the risk would be about one in 12 that we would lose another crew. That’s a high risk ….. [one] I would not choose to accept on behalf of our astronauts.”
So he’s saying that each of those flights has a probability of success of 99.1% (about one in a hundred chance of losing the vehicle). That’s the number that, when taken to the tenth power (the number of flights) comes out to a 92% probability of not losing a vehicle. 99% is slightly better than historical record, based on the two losses of Challenger and Columbia, but I would expect after all the money they spent on resolving foam and other issues that they should have a much safer vehicle now (probably the safest it’s ever been). Is he assuming some kind of reduction in reliability as the system ages or we can’t replace parts over that fiveyear period? I’m curious to know how they came up with it.
Impact Of New Space
There’s an interesting discussion in comments between Clark Lindsey and Dwayne Day (and others, though those are less interesting) on how much progress we have made in achieving the goals of the new private space industry over at Space Transport News.
Clark tends to be a glass-half-full kind of guy. Dr. Day thinks there are a few drops in the bottom, and they’re poisoned.
Sea Versus Space
Dwayne Day has an interesting history comparing undersea exploration technology with space exploration technology.
One other point of coming convergence–the increasing use of underwater suit concepts for space suits (particularly for high-pressure suits that can eliminate the need to prebreathe). Historically, NASA has generally ignored the undersea folks, though there has been a lot of private interaction (Phil Nuytten of Can-Dive has been developing hard suit concepts for decades). It looked like that might be changing with the selection of Oceaneering for the new EMU program, until NASA cancelled the contract and reopened the competition. We’ll see what the future holds, and if Hamilton Sunstrand retains their grip on the agency space-suit budget.
Whistling Past The Graveyard
The Ares graveyard, that is. Mark Whittington once again proudly demonstrates his ignorance about space technology. Some would be embarrassed by it, but never Mark.
Now, I’m not adroit at deciphering the somewhat arcane language of NASA documents, though I’ve read my share of them. But the numbers that Jon quotes is under a column called “Current Analysis” which is to the right of a column called “TPM REQT.” That suggests, just drawing on an ability to read the English language, that the numbers quoted are a snapshot in time and do not reflect where the folks working on Constellation expect to be when the Orion and Ares start flying. Therefore not quite as alarming as Rand, Jon, or the mysterious person who calls himself “Anonymous Space” would like to imply.
You’re right. You are not adroit (though there’s nothing “arcane” about this particular document). Of course it’s a “current analysis.” That’s the only kind of analysis that one can do in the present. When it’s redone in the future, that analysis will be the current analysis. And the current analysis says that the LOC/LOM are nowhere near what was originally promised for the vehicle (just as was the case for the Shuttle). There are no obvious ways to improve it–the hazards that lower it to those numbers are essentially intrinsic to the design, and probably not mitigatible within the mass budget. There is also no obvious way to “expect” something different in the future. This reality is almost certainly the reason that the Preliminary Design Review was delayed into next year.
It should also be noted that, despite the mythology about how “safe” the Saturn/CSM were, we were damned lucky to not lose a crew during Apollo. Had we flown a lot more missions, it’s almost guaranteed that we would have. Had the oxygen tank that exploded in Apollo XIII occurred on the way back, we would have lost the crew, no matter how innovative and responsive ground control was, no matter how many times Gene Kranz declared that failure was not an option. Sometimes, failure happens. And one of the reasons that space costs so much, the way NASA does it, is that when failure isn’t an option, success gets outrageously expensive.
But it gets better:
Putting it another way, it is so of like suggesting that the LOM probability for SpaceX’s Falcon 1 will be %100 just because the first three test flights have all failed to achieve orbit.
No, that is not “putting it another way.” That is saying something entirely different and utterly irrelevant. If he’s attempting to do a Bayesian probability of future Falcon success based on its history, the next flight would have a 75% chance of failure, not a hundred percent. But there’s a big difference between making an empirical estimate from past performance, and an analytical estimate based on a probabilistic risk analysis, the latter of which is where the Orion/Ares LOC/LOM numbers come from. Ares hasn’t flown yet, so it’s absurd to compare it to Falcon’s actual record.
Not Simple, Not Soon
…and not safe. Nice catch by Jon Goff that no one else seems to have picked up on:
Basically, unless this source is bogus, or I’m completely misreading things, it’s saying that even NASA admits that their odds of losing a crew or a mission using the Constellation architecture are far worse then they had originally claimed. In fact, at least for ISS missions, we’re talking almost an order of magnitude worse. For ISS, they’re claiming a LOC (probability of losing the crew on any given flight) of 1 in 231, with a LOM (loss of mission) of 1 in 19! If I’m reading this right, that means they expect right now that about 5% of missions to the space station will end up not making it to the station. For lunar missions, the LOC number is 1 in 170, and the LOM number is 1 in 9! That means of every multi-billion dollar mission, they’ve got an almost 11% chance of it being a failure. While some of these numbers have been improving, others have been getting worse.
In other words, it appears that NASA is admitting that the Ares-1 is not going to be any safer than an EELV/EELV derived launcher would’ve been, and in fact may be less reliable.
I’ve never drunk the koolaid that Ares/Orion was going to be more safe than Shuttle (or any previous system). Part of the problem is that (particularly with all of the vibration issues) they’re being forced to put systems in that introduce new failure modes. The other is that in their determination to have a crew escape system (as I’ve mentioned before), they are adding hazards on a nominal mission.
There is only one way to get a safe launch system. We have to build vehicles that we can fly repeatedly, develop operational experience, and wring the bugs out of, just as we’ve done with every other type of transportation to date. When every flight is a first flight that has to fully perform, you’re always going to have a high risk of problems. Unfortunately, NASA decided to do Apollo again instead of solve the space transportation problem.
And along those lines, I should say that I fully agree with Jon:
Quite frankly, I’d almost rather see a gap than try filling it with a kludge like keeping the shuttle flying. The fundamental problem is that even though “commercial” companies like Boeing and LM and Orbital (and hopefully SpaceX if they can get their act together) have been providing the majority of US spacelift for the past two decades, there is no commercial supplier of manned orbital spaceflight in the US. That’s the bigger problem, IMO than the fact that NASA can’t access a space station that it really doesn’t have much use for.
I’d rather see more focus on how NASA and DoD can help encourage and grow a strong and thriving commercial spaceflight (manned and unmanned) sector than how NASA can fix its broken internal spaceflight problems. Once the US actually gets to the point where it has a thriving manned orbital spaceflight sector, there won’t be any gaps again in the future. A strong commercial spaceflight sector with a weak NASA is still a lot better than a strong NASA and a weak commercial spaceflight sector.
Unfortunately, absent a real crisis, the politics seem determined to not encourage that to happen. And the ISS crisis, if it is perceived as one, is likely to cause a panic that still won’t cause it to happen, though it may still result in something better than ESAS (not that we could do much worse).
Land For Sale
John Tierney on lunar and martian property rights.
Reading The Writing On The Wall?
Mike Griffin has kicked off a study to consider Shuttle extension for five years.
The problem, not mentioned by the article, is that this doesn’t close the gap, unless Ares is abandoned. Shuttle and Ares use the same launch infrastructure, and as long as Shuttle flies, pads and crawler cannot be modified for it. Nor does it allow us to permanently crew the station without Soyuz.
The only real solution (assuming that we want to pay the high costs of continuing Shuttle) is to put a capsule on something else (e.g., Atlas, or Falcon 9 if it ever flies), soon. Maybe Orion, maybe Dragon, maybe something else, but it looks like the Stick is on life support. In fact, as “anonymous.space” says over at Space Politics, it’s already dead. It’s just that Griffin and others have been doing CPR on the body to keep the coroner from getting to it.
What a fiasco.
So What About Space Policy?
Traditionally, the veep has had responsibility for space policy, as something to do besides waiting for the president to die and break ties in the Senate.
When it comes to space, she’s got no track record at all, but an Alaskan would bring an interesting perspective to free enterprise and entrepreneurship.
Too Late?
Wayne Hale explains why we should shut down the Shuttle.
Everything he says is true–much of the infrastructure and support contractors for the system are already gone. That’s why it will be very expensive to resurrect them to the degree necessary to fly past 2010. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but as I wrote in my PJM piece, we have to decide how much ISS is worth to us. And if we want to keep the option open, and as least costly as possible, we need to stop terminating those suppliers and destroying tooling immediately. It’s probably a prudent thing to do, until the next president can make a decision.