Mike Griffin wrote Marshall a blank check yesterday.

As Keith points out, this doesn’t exactly square with his previous (laudable) statements about having more (needed) competition between centers.

[Afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey isn’t very impressed, either:

MSFC is rewarded for all those successful launch vehicle development projects it carried out in the past couple of decades

Here’s an interesting bit from Will Whitehorn’s (of Virgin Galactic) testimony this morning on the Hill:

Mr. Chairman, let me now turn to the question the Subcommittee asked about what preparations we presently are undertaking for the use of the spaceships we plan to purchase from Mr. Rutan. We are focused on complying fully with the letter and spirit of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004. Scaled Composites will have sole responsibility to certify the spacecraft. However, together, we are engaged in an active dialogue with the Federal Aviation Administration on other aspects of our business.

Emphasis mine.

This does not compute. If he complies with the CSLA, there will be no spacecraft certification–just a launch license. So the question is, was this a deliberate attempt to insert the C-word into the discussion (since Burt has been agitating to do this for some time), or was it simply sloppy usage by someone who doesn’t know better? One would think that company lawyers would vet a submitted Congressional testimony from someone representing a company like this, but it could be that they didn’t realize the significance of it. And in fact, it may have no significance at all, and I’m just being hypersensitive.

Sorry I didn’t notice this earlier, but Clark Lindsey has been live blogging this morning’s commercial space hearing. There seems to be a common (and worthy) theme here–reform ITAR.

[1 PM update]

Keith Cowing has the prepared testimony.

I don’t know if they read this or not, but Virgin Galactic appears to be taking money.

I got the following link in an email confirmed for all to see here.

Go quick. $20,000 refundable deposit only costs about $1200 in interest costs at today’s money market rates. No word if the deposits are transferrable.

Mike Griffin seems to agree with me about Shuttle upgrades:

Asked at his first news conference if he would allow Discovery to fly despite some reservations by the independent Stafford-Covey Commission, which monitors NASA progress on safety recommendations after the Columbia disaster, Griffin replied, “In concept, yes I would.”

…”Advisory groups advise. We need to take our advice very seriously …,” Griffin said. “But at the end of the day, the people wearing government and contractor badges charged with launching the vehicle will be the ones who are responsible and accountable for their actions.”

Jon Berndt has an article in the current issue of the Houston AIAA newsletter on the subject of heavy lift, citing yours truly, among others. (Warning, it’s a three meg PDF). My only quibble is that he misses one of the other problems with a heavy lifter–lack of resiliency. If we develop an exploration architecture that’s dependent on heavy lift, then we should have multiple means of providing it, which means two development programs with inadequate flight rate to amortize the costs.

Along similar lines, Bob Zubrin has a long essay on space policy in The New Atlantis that’s now available on line, with a harsh critique of NASA, including the Bush-era NASA and Sean O’Keefe. Surprisingly, I agree with much of the early part of it (though as always, the tone is a little problematic). I don’t agree with this:

The ESMD plan requires a plethora of additional recurring costs and mission risks for the sole purpose of avoiding the development cost of a big new rocket

Jon Berndt has an article in the current issue of the Houston AIAA newsletter on the subject of heavy lift, citing yours truly, among others. (Warning, it’s a three meg PDF). My only quibble is that he misses one of the other problems with a heavy lifter–lack of resiliency. If we develop an exploration architecture that’s dependent on heavy lift, then we should have multiple means of providing it, which means two development programs with inadequate flight rate to amortize the costs.

Along similar lines, Bob Zubrin has a long essay on space policy in The New Atlantis that’s now available on line, with a harsh critique of NASA, including the Bush-era NASA and Sean O’Keefe. Surprisingly, I agree with much of the early part of it (though as always, the tone is a little problematic). I don’t agree with this:

The ESMD plan requires a plethora of additional recurring costs and mission risks for the sole purpose of avoiding the development cost of a big new rocket

Jon Berndt has an article in the current issue of the Houston AIAA newsletter on the subject of heavy lift, citing yours truly, among others. (Warning, it’s a three meg PDF). My only quibble is that he misses one of the other problems with a heavy lifter–lack of resiliency. If we develop an exploration architecture that’s dependent on heavy lift, then we should have multiple means of providing it, which means two development programs with inadequate flight rate to amortize the costs.

Along similar lines, Bob Zubrin has a long essay on space policy in The New Atlantis that’s now available on line, with a harsh critique of NASA, including the Bush-era NASA and Sean O’Keefe. Surprisingly, I agree with much of the early part of it (though as always, the tone is a little problematic). I don’t agree with this:

The ESMD plan requires a plethora of additional recurring costs and mission risks for the sole purpose of avoiding the development cost of a big new rocket

A commenter at this post writes:

When it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to fly a single Shuttle mission, I fail to see the problem with spending another 10 to fix the wiring.

The first problem is a misunderstanding of Shuttle costs. The marginal cost of a flight is not “hundreds of millions of dollars.” It’s probably somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty million. The average cost is much more, but that’s not a useful number, because it can vary so much with flight rate (for example, when the flight rate is zero, as it has been since February, 2003, the average cost per flight is infinite, regardless of how much we spend on the Shuttle program).

The second problem is that, while ten million dollars may not seem like much in the context of a program that costs billions annually, the fact remains that NASA has a finite budget, and ten million spent on one item is ten million less available to be spent on something else, that might be more important. According to the article that the original post linked to, the odds of an uncommanded thruster firing resulting in a catastrophe are somewhere between one in ten thousand and one in a million (it doesn’t say if that’s on a per-mission basis, or totaled over the next twenty-odd flights). Assuming that those are valid numbers, with any degree of confidence, then the standard way to determine how much we should spend to prevent that event from happening would be to use the expected value of that event (probability times cost). The problem with that, of course, is assessing the value of either the Shuttle fleet, or the ISS, given that current policy recognizes them both as dead ends, in terms of future space policy.

That, in fact, is why I think that the CAIB recommendations should have been revisited after the new policy was announced. If the CAIB had known that the Shuttle was going to be retired at the end of the decade, they may not have recommended some of the more costly (and impractical) fixes for what would then have been recognized as a rapidly depreciating asset.