The comments (125 and counting) in this post over at Space Politics a few days ago have gotten progressively weirder and weirder.
Did you know that New Space is a baby boomer thing? And that it’s a failed paradigm, while the standard procedures of NASA giving out cost-plus government contracts has been a total success, and will get us to the stars any year now?
Me, neither. What is “Someone” smoking? No surprise that he or she posts anonymously.
Anyone out there know what they’re using for comm these days? Do they have a TDRSS system as part of the ISS operations agreement? Or something else? Or both?
[Update about 1 PM EDT]
Via an email from Jim Oberg:
Mir used to have a TDRSS-like system called ‘Luch’, and a dish antenna capable of communicating with the GEO relay satellite is installed on the Service Module now linked to ISS.
But it’s never worked. The old system broke down and wasn’t replaced in the 1990’s. There are one or two payloads already built, at the Reshetnev plant in Krasnoyarsk, but they won’t deliver them until the Russian Space Agency pays cash — and by now, their components have probably exceed their warranties anyway.
The Russians have a voice relay capability through the NASA TDRSS, but can’t relay TV or telemetry, so they conduct how-criticality operations such as dockings or spacewalks only when passing over Russian ground sites. They don’t even have ocean-going tracking ships any more — all sold for scrap [one is in drydock as a museum].
The current state of play, according to Glenn Reynolds. There was a piece on the subject in Sunday’s Boston Globe as well. I wish that Congress would do something about this. It would have a lot bigger effect in the long run than deciding how much to underfund a failed Constellation concept.
It looks like NASA’s not going to abandon the ISS. That seems sensible to me.
I’d like to know where they get the 1/124 number for probability of having to evacuate. But it makes sense, given that they’re already down at least one (and actually, more like two or three) level in the fault tree, that you can accept a lower reliability for the lifeboat. Lifeboats, after all, have traditionally been pretty iffy propositions. It’s not reasonable to demand high reliability of them. That was one of the complaints that I used to have when working on CERV–that the requirements were overspecified for something that was only for use in an emergency.
I’ll be on The Space Show on Sunday afternoon at noon to 1:30 PM PDT, talking about space and politics, and whatever.
Wow.
NASA is actually considering abandoning ISS until they can resolve the safety issues surrounding the Soyuz currently docked there (and in general).
This whole fiasco reveals a fundamental design (in fact conceptual) flaw of the station from the beginning (one that was shared by the Shuttle)–a lack of redundancy and resiliency. NASA had the hubris to think that they could design and build a single vehicle type that could not only have the flexibility to satisfy all of the nation’s (and much of the world’s) needs for transport to and from space, but do so with confidence that it would never have cause to shut down (and remove our ability to access LEO). They learned the foolishness of this notion in 1986, with the Challenger loss.
Similarly, they decided to build a manned space station, that would be all things to all people–microgravity researchers, earth observations, transportation node, hotel–because they didn’t think that they could afford more than one, and so they have no resiliency in their orbital facilities, either. If something goes wrong with the station, everyone has to abandon it, with nowhere to go except back to earth.
Having multiple stations co-orbiting, with an in-space crew transport vehicle (which could serve as a true lifeboat) was never considered, though the cost wouldn’t necessarily have been that much higher had it been planned that way from the beginning (there would have been economies of scale by building multiple facilities from a single basic design). That would have been true orbital infrastructure.
Instead, we have a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) space station supported by a single fragile (and ridiculously expensive) launch system, with only the Russian Soyuz as a backup. And because there is no place nearby to go, if there’s a problem on the station, everyone has to come home, and the crew size is thus limited by the size of the “lifeboat,” (which is a “lifeboat” only in the sense that it is relied on for life–in actuality, it’s much more than that. It’s as if the “lifeboats” of the Titanic had to be capable of delivering their passengers all the way to New York or Southampton).
And now we can’t trust the backup, and we have no lifeboat at all.
Now that the ISS is almost complete, it is capable of supporting the Shuttle orbiter on orbit for much longer periods of time by providing power, so its orbital lifetime is no longer constrained by fuel cell capacity. But it’s still not practical to leave an orbiter there full time, because a) with only three left, we don’t have a big enough fleet to do so without impacting turnaround time for the others and b) we’re not sure how long it’s capable of staying safely without (say) freezing tires or causing other problems, because the vehicle wasn’t designed for indefinite duration in space.
So as a result of flawed decisions made decades ago, NASA is in a real quandary. They can leave the crew up there, and cross their fingers that a) nothing goes wrong that requires an emergency return and b) that if the return is required, the Soyuz will work properly. Or they can abandon the station until they resolve the Soyuz issues (something over which they have absolutely no control, and will have to trust the Russians).
Sucks to be them.
[Update a few minutes later]
Not that it solves this immediate problem, but Flight Global has a conceptual rendering of a European crew transportation system (presumably based on the ATV) that could (in theory) be available within a decade.
[Another update]
Here’s more on ATV evolution, over at today’s issue of The Space Review.
[One more thought, at 11 AM EDT]
NASA doesn’t seem to have learned the lesson of Shuttle and ISS, because Constellation has exactly the same problem–a single vehicle type for each phase of the mission. If Altair is grounded, we can’t land on the moon. If the EDS has problems, we can’t get into a trans-lunar orbit. If something goes wrong with Orion, or Ares, the program is grounded. Why aren’t there Congressional hearings, or language in an authorization bill, about that?
There’s a lot of good discussion (and some not-so-good discussion) of the NASA Authorization bill over at Space Politics, here, here and here. I haven’t read the whole thing, and frankly, it’s hard for me to get motivated to invest much time or thought in it, because it’s just an authorization bill. Most of the time, they never even get passed, and even when they do, they’re pretty meaningless, because the only one that really counts is the appropriations bill, where the money gets handed out. Authorization, when it exists at all, simply serves as a sense of the Congress (and more generally, just as a sense of the relevant Congressional committee). But to that degree, it does provide a useful insight into where appropriations might lead, and potential future policy, particularly in the next administration.
Thomas James writes that NASA is (with little fanfare) disposing of the tooling to build Shuttle Orbiters.
This doesn’t make it impossible to build new ones–the blueprints probably remain available, and new tooling could be built in theory, but it dramatically raises the (already ridiculously high) costs of building any replacement vehicles. Even if we were to continue to fly the Shuttle, we will do so with a three-vehicle fleet, so we would never get a flight rate higher than the current one (which is the highest it’s been this year since we lost Columbia). Until we lost another one, anyway.
This really is a point of no return.
“We became our own customers.”
I don’t understand why he doesn’t see that that’s exactly the problem with ESAS.
[Update in the afternoon–sorry, I’ve been housepainting again, in a race against the approaching summer, when it will be too blasted hot in southern Florida for such things]
I recall that Max Hunter said something very similar, I would guess about twenty years ago at a small workshop on launch vehicle design issues that I attended. He said that the big difference between NACA and NASA was that the former saw industry as its customer, whereas NASA saw it as (at best) a supplier. This was a consequence of going from a pure R&D agency to one with an operational mission (put a man on the moon). It has never recovered.
Gregg Easterbrook thinks that NASA should be saving the planet from errant asteroids, instead of building a moon base. He can’t avoid the usual straw man, of course, which makes much of the rest of his whining about moon bases suspect:
As anyone with an aerospace engineering background well knows, stopping at the moon, as Bush was suggesting, actually would be an impediment to Mars travel, because huge amounts of fuel would be wasted landing on the moon and then blasting off again.
Bush only “suggested” that to people who miss the point of the program. No one is proposing that every, or even any, mission to Mars touch base on the moon before going on to the Red Planet. The point was that the moon might be a useful resource for making Mars missions more cost effective, particularly if we can find water there, and deliver it as propellant to some staging point, such as L-1, which isn’t particularly out of the way en route to Mars. In addition, learning how to build a base on the moon, only three days away, is valuable experience to wring the bugs out of a Martian base, which is months away, despite the different environments.
But ignoring that, the real problem is that he doesn’t seem to understand NASA’s role:
After the presentation, NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, came into the room. I asked him why there had been no discussion of space rocks. He said, “We don’t make up our goals. Congress has not instructed us to provide Earth defense. I administer the policy set by Congress and the White House, and that policy calls for a focus on return to the moon. Congress and the White House do not ask me what I think.” I asked what NASA’s priorities would be if he did set the goals. “The same. Our priorities are correct now,” he answered. “We are on the right path. We need to go back to the moon. We don’t need a near-Earth-objects program.” In a public address about a month later, Griffin said that the moon-base plan was “the finest policy framework for United States civil space activities that I have seen in 40 years.”
Actually, Congress has asked NASA to pay more attention to space rocks. In 2005, Congress instructed the agency to mount a sophisticated search of the proximate heavens for asteroids and comets, specifically requesting that NASA locate all near-Earth objects 140 meters or larger that are less than 1.3 astronomical units from the sun–roughly out to the orbit of Mars. Last year, NASA gave Congress its reply: an advanced search of the sort Congress was requesting would cost about $1 billion, and the agency had no intention of diverting funds from existing projects, especially the moon-base initiative.
Now, I disagree with Mike that we don’t need an NEO program–I think we do. But unlike Gregg, I wouldn’t put NASA in charge of it. And if Congress wants to fund NASA to look for space rocks, it’s going to have to tell NASA not to do the other things that it wants to do, or fund it. Also, this was a little verbal gymnastics on Gregg’s part. Mike said that Congress had not instructed NASA to defend the earth, which is true, and the fact that they asked NASA to look for hazardous objects doesn’t change that fact in any way, despite his sleight-of-hand at the keyboard. Looking for objects is one thing–actually physically manipulating them is a different thing entirely. It’s like the difference between the CIA and the military. The former provides intelligence, the latter acts on it.
The Space Act (almost fifty years old now) does not grant NASA the responsibility to protect the planet, even with subsequent amendments. It is simply not its job. Moreover, no federal agency has that job, and as Gregg points out, if the US military were to take it on, there would be widespread suspicion on the part of the rest of the planet, and it would open us up to tremendous liability if something went wrong (not that there would necessarily be any lawyers around to care).
And is it really the job of the military? Again, as Gregg points out, this is a natural problem, not an enemy. If ET, or Marvin the Martian presented a threat, it would make sense to get the Air Force (or if we had one, Space Force) involved, because that is a willful enemy to be engaged, which is what we have a military for.
But as I’ve written before (six years ago–geez, where does the time go?), the only historical analogue (at least in the US) we have for planetary defense is the management of flooding by the Army Corps of Engineers. This is a predictable (though not as predictable as an asteroid or comet strike) natural disaster, at least statistically, and one that can be managed by building dams, which is largely what they do.
Now, I’m not proposing that the ACE be put in charge of defending the planet, but that thought isn’t much more frightening than putting NASA in charge of it. Yes, Gregg, we could lobby to get Congress to amend the Space Act to put it in the agency’s portfolio, but do you really think that would be a good idea? NASA is fifty years old this year, and bureaucratically, it acts much older than that. You don’t want to take an existing agency, with too much on its plate, and too little resources with which to do it (and yes, much of what it’s doing it shouldn’t be doing, but that’s a different discussion) and give it such an important, even existential task. It worked fine in the sixties, because it was a young, new agency with a focus on a single goal (though it managed to accomplish a lot of other things along the way in terms of planetary exploration–Tom Paine once told me that there was so much going on during Apollo that NASA did a lot of great things that it didn’t even know it was doing).
No.
I’ve often said that if the president really thought that the VSE was important, he would have taken a policy lead from the Strategic Missile Defense program in the eighties, in which an entirely new entity was established to carry it out (SDIO, now BMDO), because it would otherwise get bogged down in blue-suit politics in the Air Force.
I agree that we should be doing much more about this threat than we are, but just because NASA is ostensibly a space agency doesn’t mean that they should be in charge of it. I would establish a planetary defense agency, which had that as its sole charter. It might ask for (and occasionally get) cooperation from NASA, but it would do the same with the Air Force, and it would put out contracts to the private sector, and it would coordinate with COPUOS and encourage other nations to establish such entities to enter into cooperative agreements. If you ask NASA to do it, it will just become one more boondoggle, or it will get buried in the agency’s other priorities. Either way, if it’s important, you don’t want a sclerotic agency, long past its sell-by date, to be in charge.