This week marks the 30th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, a time when the surviving members of that crew have been reflecting on the mission and the role of international cooperation in space endeavors. International cooperation is generally perceived as a good thing, with benefits for all involved as well as for foreign policy in general. However, in an essay in this week’s issue of The Space Review, James Oberg cautions from, as former astronauts and cosmonauts often do, from assigning too many benefits from such cooperation. “If they want to think their flight caused the international thaws rather than merely reflected them, they’ve earned the right to their point of view—just as sober historians, practical politicians, and sensible space buffs have the right to gently refuse to believe them,” he writes. Oberg is not against international space cooperation, but does not see it as a panacea for all space policy problems, and can in some cases generate new ones. This will no doubt be an issue of some importance as NASA, the Congress, and others grapple with how much a role should other countries play in the Vision for Space Exploration—assuming they’re interested at all.
Jim Oberg is absolutely right that human spaceflight at NASA is the rooster that claims credit for the sun rising in the morning. It’s the same crowing whether the issue is international cooperation, technology spinoffs like Velcro, space science, or science education.
But I cannot agree with this part:
No, America’s heroes and sufferers do not deserve a blank check of public attention, because public attention always wins you the backing of a credulous faction. Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo’s dad both understand it all too well.
This comment is also notable:
So who at NASA was in charge of safety and mission assurance during this corrupting period? Frederick Gregory! But since Gregory is an astronaut and a hero, he was absolved of any real responsibility. The entire Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel resigned after the Columbia accident, but nobody thought to stick it to Gregory.
That is why it was so logical for Griffin to fire astronauts like Frederick Gregory and Bill Readdy. Whoever replaces them, whether good or bad, can at least be blamed for failure.
There is a serious problem in this section of the essay:
“It can even be argued that the most important lessons learned were harmful. On Shuttle-Mir, NASA watched space crews dodge death on almost a monthly basis and may have subconsciously absorbed the lesson that since nobody had actually died, you could get sloppy with safety reviews and it wouldn’t ever bite you. They should have known better—and for most of its glorious history, NASA did know better—but the gradual degradation of NASA’s “safety culture” that led to the Columbia disaster was developing during the same years as Shuttle-Mir missions were flying. Dodge enough bullets (as the crew of Mir did in those days), they may have figured, and it proves you’re bulletproof forever.”
This is really a false claim. But it is not the first time that Oberg has attempted to implicate the Soviets/Russians in American astronaut deaths. Oberg has previously implied in other forums that the Apollo 1 fire could have been avoided if only the Soviets had been more forthcoming about their own accident:
http://www.jamesoberg.com/usd10.html
“Could knowledge of the Bondarenko fire have prevented the Apollo ) fire and saved the lives of Virgil (“Gus”) Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee? The mere knowledge that a Soviet oxygen-rich fire had killed a cosmonaut might have been enough to forestall an American repetition of the disaster.”
I have serious problems with Oberg’s tendency to blame the Soviets/Russians for accidents that Americans commit. It is a reach, and it looks like scapegoating, or something worse. In both of these cases there were many warning signs that NASA ignored (the Apollo 1 fire was not a total surprise–many people at NASA knew the dangers of pure oxygen environments and there are pre-accident memos demonstrating this).
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board found no evidence that the Shuttle-Mir program in any way contributed to the Columbia accident. Americans allowed those accidents to happen by ignoring evidence of problems with their own programs. It is wrong to try and blame it on foreigners, even via very indirect means.
Oberg’s view of it is cold warriorism. It’s also a dig at Clinton. It’s also a fig leaf for the first 10 years of the space station program.
However, he’s absolutely right that “space handshake diplomacy” is bad diplomacy. Shake hands in space, extend the middle finger on the ground.
Greg, your first comment misrepresents Oberg’s statement regarding crowing roosters and sunrise. The statement refers to the joint U.S.-Soviet mission, not the entirety of the U.S. human spaceflight effort. Oberg asserts, correctly, that these missions simply rode a wave of U.S.-Soviet detente, rather than causing it. That is so obivous to those of us who were conscious adults at the time that it seems remarkable that Oberg would need to point it out.
As for your second comment, in which you apparently intend to cast Oberg’s alleged “cold warriorism” as some sort of unfortunate throwback to an unenlightened era…well, I’ll just say that the only two alternatives to cold war were surrender or hot war. It’s hypocritical for people who live in democratic societies to advocate non-opposition to aggressive undemocratic states.
Billg: I didn’t mean my comment as a distortion of what Oberg said. I just think that his metaphor is more broadly true than his narrow interpretation.
Since my own family emigrated from Communist Poland to the West, I am familiar with the Cold War and I really don’t think that the United States was unenlightened. Just like Oberg, I object to suggestions of moral symmetry between the United States and the Soviet Union.
But Oberg’s portrayal of NASA as corrupted by Russian connections certainly is a throwback. As Dwayne Day says, it’s wrong to associate NASA’s safety lapses with the Russians. Communism was a terrible political system, but Russians were and are good at rocketry. And NASA’s real problems are made in America.
I’ve often thought we the winners should have invited one of 2nd place crazy Ivan’s boys to go on Apollo 15, 16, or 17 to bounce on the moon.
We could have been more humble when we won the big Olympic hockey game against Ivan’s boys as well.
Perhaps we can go to Mars together someday, and maybe it will be several big steps for Ivanna Kosmochev, Martha Merrica, Thao Yuangarian, and Peekaboo Arabia, and a less arrogant, tiny, humble step for all Menkind.
Everybody has heard of Godwin’s Law, right? Allow me to posit DDAY’s Law, which is that the longer a discussion on the internet about space continues, the more likely it is that it will lead to bizarre posts like the one above. I also posit that the length of time from serious discussion to bizarre post is not very long.
So who at NASA was in charge of safety and mission assurance during this corrupting period? Frederick Gregory!”
I don’t know this guy personally, but in my experience the biggest impediment to shuttle safety has been the astronauts. They generally have way too much political clout for their level of technical expertise. With regard to safety, specifically, they are over confidant in the crew’s abilities. Although this is a good trait for an astronaut, they are not good traits for an engineer. If you have a safety issue and an astronaut starts stomping all over it, you can be assured of two things. One, the discussion will become more political than technical, and two, the resolution will be something stupid and a note in the flight manual.
Recently a friend of mine was called to sit on an industry review panel for the new shuttle 2000 flight displays. Astronauts designed the display formats with no input from any technical people who do that sort of thing. During the review, one thing that was questioned was the use of something like 40 different colors on the LCD displays. A typical aircraft display uses at most 10 due to the inability of the human eye to differentiate between more than that many at a glance. When this was brought up, they answered to the effect that maybe your standard pilot cannot differentiate 40 colors, but these are ASTRONAUTS. They are that much better.
As far as anyone who sat on the board could tell, there were no changes made to the displays as a result of the review.
Point taken, Greg. I do disagree, however, with your other comments.
It seems to me that the only valid reason to support space travel is to put people there. Machines are just as necessary there as here on this planet, but we build machines to support our endeavours, not the other way around. My position on government versus private funding is this: The private sector will fund only that which is potentially profitable; much that needs to be done in space will not, at last initally, be profitable, so government funding will be appropriate. (One very crude analogy: government funding of Lewis and Clark and subsequent commercial migration to Oregon and California — the wagon trains.)
I don’t read the juxtapostion of cooperation with the Soviets and a change to NASA safety culture as necessarily indicating a cause and effect relationship. That’s what Oberg obviously wants us to take away from that passage, but all he actually did was make the implication and fail to provide evidence.
Space cooperation may not be a panacea for all space policy problems, but it is the only chance we have to put together a manned Moon / Mars exploration mission in a foreseeable future.
There is nothing wrong with being careful in assessing burdens and benefits of international space cooperation – that’s a smart approach for any issue. Has every past international space cooperation effort been smooth? Of course not, we’re all learning that it is not as easy as holding hands.
But based on the tone of the article, the author does not seem to fully grasp that one country, even as big as the United States, could not fiscally handle something as big as a manned Mars mission. At least not unless launch costs come down substantially. The American public, which really does not like to pay taxes, only tolerated the expense of the Apollo program because the concept of space race was “sold” well.
Also, it just seems illogical, if not downright stupid, not to rely on space expertise developed by other countries (like Russia) or scientific knowledge of many other nations (Europe, Japan, China, etc). Putting together such a mission will require cutting edge science and engineering – might as well go get it.
Dfens: Jim Oberg also had an article somewhere in which he sourly reported that the astronauts often lord it over the engineers at NASA. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it yesterday; if someone can point me to an article that fits this description, that would be useful.
I do know that the famous report by Larry Kuznetz, in which he denounced current medical research on weightlessness as voodoo science, is also relevant. (But it didn’t stop Bush and O’Keefe from making it a raison d’etre of the space station.) A big part of the problem, according to Kuznetz, is that the weightlessness research — if you can still call it research — is arranged for the convenience of the astronauts, not the medical researchers. So it sounds like the astronauts are a royal class who lord it over everyone at NASA, scientists as well as engineers.
And managers too, I suspect. Besides Gregory and Readdy at NASA itself (and before them Truly and maybe others), I see that United Space Alliance is run by two astronauts and a Marine Corps pilot. Evidently, the space shuttle is a hero factory. That is poison for any organization.
Gene: “… one country, even as big as the United States, could not fiscally handle something as big as a manned Mars mission.”
The US can easily afford a manned mission to Mars on its’ own. A manned Mars expedition could likely be accomplished within current to slightly higher funding levels sustained over the next 20 years. That is to say with a budget of 16-20 billion dollars per year NASA could land a man on Mars by 2025, if that was the desire of the US. We’re only talking about a total cost over that 20 year period of something around a half trillion dollars, about what DOD spends in ONE YEAR. And what if it cost twice that amount; the mythical one trillion dollar figure? Spread over 20-30 years that is still a fraction of what a number of federal departments spend in the same time frame.
So it’s obvious that the US can afford a manned Mars mission alone, financially at least. Politically it would be more difficult, mainly because of those voices crying that is so much more financially expensive to do than it actually would be. The cries of “we can’t afford it alone” then become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
Also the very assumption by many that an international space effort would be cheaper is one that has not proven out in actual experience; IE the ISS experience being evidentiary that the opposite could very well be true.
Space cooperation may not be a panacea for all space policy problems, but it is the only chance we have to put together a manned Moon / Mars exploration mission in a foreseeable future…
…based on the tone of the article, the author does not seem to fully grasp that one country, even as big as the United States, could not fiscally handle something as big as a manned Mars mission.
Maybe he doesn’t “grasp” these statements because they aren’t true?
The notion that we can’t afford to return to the Moon or go to Mars by ourselves is utter nonsense, and continuing to repeat it doesn’t make it any less so. Whether we should do so, of course, is an entirely different issue.
It would probably be amazing what we could afford once we got the cost per lb to LEO down below $10K, like we once could when we had a real space program.
When I worked on space station I would sometimes use the help of Frank Culbertson regarding safety issues. He seemed pretty level headed. Most of the rest were out there. They’d roam around with their gang of minions. Their lackeys were even more annoying than the astronauts themselves. Calling me and telling me so-an-so was coming to see me and I was supposed to do this and that for them. I knew just what I wanted to do for them. And isn’t our space program just so darn much better off now that it is an official astronaut cult? Not like the old days when it was run by those stupid engineers.
The United States as a country probably could afford a manned mission to Mars. But that’s irrelevant, because the United States government can’t. The government has a structural deficit and therefore can’t afford a lot of things that it ought to be able to afford. It’s the same principle as personal debt: Many people in debt “can’t afford” a $30 dinner or a $300 bicycle, even though in proportion to their finances it ought to be fine. It’s bankruptcy in the midst of plenty, a fate which the starve-the-beast faction in Washington doesn’t particularly mind.
That said, I agree that in a starve-the-beast budgetary climate, international partnerships are no solution either. If you’re in debt, then sharing expenses is a recipe for irritating your friends. As we see it unfold in the case of the space station.
Kuperberg: “The United States as a country probably could afford a manned mission to Mars. But that’s irrelevant, because the United States government can’t.”
Double talk.
By that “rational” we also can’t afford DOD, HUD, Health and Human Services… the list goes on, yet those federal agencys consume more dollars in a year than NASA in a decade.
But that’s exactly the point, Cecil. These other expenses, in the face of tax cuts, are the reason that the federal government can’t afford anything new.
Greg: you’ve made my point quite nicely. The question is not only whether the amount will be too big for the U.S. to handle in the abstract, but whether it could do so within the current budget climate (tax cuts, competing budget priorities, etc).
Cecile: comparing projected costs to what other agencies spend is useless. I don’t think it is realistic to expect the federal government to abolish one or two of its agencies, just to free up the $$ for the mission. It might be nice, but not realistic.
Also, while I agree with you that ISS experience has not been a smooth one, I think it’s way too early to close the book on international cooperation in space exploration.
Overall, as I stated earlier, while international cooperation is not going to solve all problems, it is a viable option and should definitely be considered.
So Greg you’re saying that of all the billions upon billions of dollars the US federal government spends, about 2 and a half TRILLION dollars (in a 12 TRILLION dollar economy,) the less than 1 percent that goes to NASA is going to “break the bank”?
Gene: “I think it’s way too early to close the book on international cooperation in space exploration.”
I never said it was time to close the book on international space cooperation, neither is it time to declare that international cooperation is the only way. Because it most certainly is not the “only” way.
Personally I think it is ridiculous to talk about what it will cost. It will cost whatever the taxpayer will bear. That has been proven time and time again. The Apollo program was admittedly a “throw money at it” affair, and yet today, NASA’s budget is about the same as it was then, but what they produce is much less.
Does it make sense that the US worker would become more productive over the past 30 years in every other industry except aerospace? The computer in most people’s houses is more powerful than a supercomputer in the Apollo days. We have 3D CAD, finite element stress analysis, computational fluid dynamics, numerically controlled mills and lathes, aluminum alloys are cheaper, high grade fasteners are cheaper, plastics are cheaper and better and can be reinforced with fibers that didn’t even exist then.
All these things should be enhancing productivity. It should by any reasonable measure take less time and less money to build a rocket and put a man on the Moon or Mars for that matter. Instead we argue about how many TRILLIONS of dollars it will cost and whether or not there is enough money in the civilized world to accomplish such a project?
You are arguing based on the false premise that any of this makes sense. It will cost whatever the taxpayer will bear. Period. If the taxpayer starts demanding it cost less, it will. Costs, in that case, will go down until the numbers start to make sense and begin to be driven by legitimate market forces. Things are so far off now; I’d hesitate to even guess where that price point would be.
Dfens: I’m sure that the United States is more efficient at rocketry than it was 30 years ago. But manned missions to Mars and permanent stations on the moon are both much harder than the Apollo program. Simply repeating the Apollo moon landing, while easier than before, is pointless. (I see no purpose to the others either, but at least they would be novel.) Your comment is like wondering why, if technology is so much better than it was 30 years ago, most people still drive cars and don’t fly planes. Sure, technology is better, but it’s not enough better.
You are almost right that the VSE will cost whatever the taxpayer will bear. It will cost whatever the budget will bear. Most taxpayers don’t really understand the nature of the budget’s problems. What do you think will happen if they try to do something hard with a “go as you can pay” formula? It will be a slow wild-goose chase.
You are not really right about the history of NASA’s budget, which is charted here. In constant dollars, its budget is only half of what it once was. Moreover, the NASA of today is more diversified than the NASA of the 1960s. That is a “problem” that some of the commenters here want to solve: they want to pile all of the eggs back into one basket.
Kuperberg: “In constant dollars, its budget is only half of what it once was.”
Only if you choose to read it that way. What was it Mark Twain said about statistics?
The average NASA budget 1958-1973 (formation of NASA through Apollo 17) according to the figures in the chart you link to above comes to a little more than 13 billion in 1996 dollars.
LOL, and you’re a MATH professor?
>>”…it is ridiculous to talk about what it will cost. It will cost whatever the taxpayer will bear.”
The vast majority of taxpayers had no idea what Apollo cost and have no idea what NASA costs today. It has been shown repeatedly that taxpayers are largely ignorant about how the government spends their taxes. Decisions about spending are political decisions made after inside-the-Beltway contests between politicians and professional lobbyists and special interest groups. All of them, frankly, grossly exaggerate the projected costs of projects they oppose. The best current example is the $1 trillion ticket to Mars notion, which originated as a purely fictional number in an early anti-VSE polemic.
>>”…today, NASA’s budget is about the same as it was then, but what they produce is much less.”
Account for inflation and comparison with NASA’s Apollo-era budget take on a new color. Besides, if NASA had been hamstrung in the 1960’s with the misguided political mandate to “cooperate with a bunch of other countries, who’s to say how much the Apollo program would have cost? If ISS is any example, the cost would have skyrocketed as NASA was forced to spend money rejigging designs, keeping bankrupt partners afloat, etc. ISS is prima facie evidence that kind of cooperation is a waste of money.
I don’t know how to measure what NASA produces. That’s a bogus yardstick for an organization that cannot determine what it produces and lacks compete control of how its money is spent. NASA takes its orders from politicians, none of whom are interested in its production rate. Government agencies like NASA may not be the most efficient enablers of space travel, but judging their performace by private sector standards is not appropriate. They aren’t allowed to play in that game.
>>”…we argue about how many TRILLIONS of dollars it will cost and whether or not there is enough money in the civilized world to accomplish such a project?”
The only people who “argue” about such things are the people who foisted that trillion dollar canard on the rest of us. Repeat a lie often enough…well, you all know the rest.
Greg, I was thinking of the Mike Griffin statement that NASA’s budget for the last 16 years was about the same as that for the first 16 years. Thanks for the link to the chart though. It is excellent data, and obviously from looking at it the peak spending during Apollo was quite high. It was, as I said, an acknowledged “throw money at it” program.
As for our being more efficient at rocketry after 30 years, you would be hard pressed to find any evidence. Launch costs are in orbit before the candle is lit, which would be ok if we were getting better reliability, safety, or performance for the money, but we all know that is not the case. Bill asks how we measure what NASA produces. They produce shuttle launches that cost $10K/lb to LEO (in ~’97 dollars, as stated by Dan Goldin). They’ve produced a $100B space station that took many times longer and cost many times more than it should have. Do you feel like you are getting a good deal?
I worked on space station. I know how the money was wasted. Year after year there was either a crisis or a budget “cut” that would require the program to be rebaselined and rephased. Each of these exercises shut down progress on the design for 6 months to the entire year. No laws were broken, but each time this happened your tax dollars were wasted. Each time this happened the capabilities of the station decreased and the final cost increased. Each time this happened, the cost overruns from the previous year was erased and the contractors got profit for every hour they billed.
You think this won’t happen on the next NASA program? Why would it not? What has changed about the way NASA does business? That is why I say, it will cost whatever the taxpayer will pay. I can say this, as demoralizing as it was to get the international “partners” involved in space station, at least their involvement did provide some added incentive to stop dragging the program out indefinitely.
In the absence of any major NASA programs that have shown any real cost performance, how can you argue about what the next one will cost? It will cost what it will cost. The program will siphon off as much cash as their political clout will allow them to get their hands on without any significant concern over value. That’s the way it has been. That’s the way it will continue to be.
Much of this arguing over what it will cost in the media is really just some trial balloons being floated to see what the taxpayers’ pain threshold is for VSE. Why argue the merits of one vs. the other when none of them are realistic?
Dfens: “It is excellent data, and obviously from looking at it the peak spending during Apollo was quite high.”
The data clearly shows that the average NASA budget from the formation of the agency in 1958 through the last moon landing in 1973 was “only” 13 billion a year in constant 1996 dollars. That includes building the VAB, numerous launch pads, Johnson Space Center, a world wide tracking network, designing 4 separate spacecraft from scratch, modifying the Atlas and Titan to carry men, designing the Saturn I series, the Saturn V etc. etc. The only “quite high” years were 1965-1968; the remaining years in that period were roughly equal to or in some case much lower than 80’s-90’s NASA budget.
Dfens: The NASA that you describe is strictly the human spaceflight program. The other NASA, the unmanned program, is doing a lot of interesting things. I still suspect that NASA’s unmanned launches are cheaper than 30 years ago in a fair comparison. It would be nice to hear from an industry analyst (for example someone who works for Futron
) about the trend in unmanned launch costs over the past 30 years.
But you are surely right about the space station. After all, you worked on it. Except that the space station was never a good deal. When a program is bad from the beginning, it is no surprise to see it go from bad to worse.
Just to point out, NASA is not alone in its waisting of money. I have worked on various DOD programs over the years and all of them have similar problems. Some as bad as ISS, some not. I imagine all procurement projects in the federal government suffer these problems.
DSchrimpsher’s Law: The longer comments on a Space Politic’s post go, the closer they approach the debate of either “Human vs. Robot” and “How bad does ISS really suck”
Thanks for the good observations, Cecil. It’s amazing when you think about all that happened during those first years of NASA. I think comparing the integral under the curve over a significant period of time is perfectly valid since that is the price tag we ultimately pay.
I don’t know much about the unmanned missions. I worked a little on Galileo and Magellan, but from the booster perspective. I do know that big airplane programs similarly will siphon as much funding as their political clout will allow. On one program the program director said in an “all hands” meeting that the USAF was threatening to fully fund the program for the current year, preventing us from being able to write off overruns from the last. This was their negotiating position to get concessions from us.
The problem is the way these programs are run. NASA hires contractors to write hundreds of thousands of requirements, and then hires thousands of engineers to monitor the contractor’s performance relative to those requirements.
All these people translate into money, power, and prestige for the NASA program managers. When the contractor fails to perform (as they always do), the program manager is backed into a corner. They can’t cancel the program because it would mean losing their money, power, and prestige. It would also mean a lot of people they care personally for would lose their jobs.
Instead of doing the right thing for the taxpayer, they, and the thousands who work for them, become the apologists for the non-performing contractor. The price of the contract goes up and the schedule slides to the right, which essentially rewards the contractor for incompetence and ensures they will be incompetent the next time too. It’s just like giving a dog a treat for urinating in the house. The dog doesn’t feel bad because you gave him a treat and go outside from now on. He continues the behavior that got him the treat.
I read this in Defense Daily yesterday: “After over a decade of acquisition reform that emphasized, ‘faster, better, cheaper,’ the head of Air Force Materiel Command is joining a growing chorus of voices who argue that things may have gone too far. Citing unrealistic cost schedules, ‘atrophied’ program management, and unrealistic requirements, Air Force Gen. Gregory Martin told an audience yesterday the service needs to return to the type of procurement oversight last seen in the 1970s and 1980s.” Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
Gene: “I don’t think it is realistic to expect the federal government to abolish one or two of its agencies, just to free up the $$ for the mission. It might be nice, but not realistic.”
Who said anything about abolishing any federal department to fund NASA, much less “one or two of its agencies”? It is absurd to suggest that is even a remote possibility of being needed to fund NASA. NASA operates on a tiny fraction of what several other agencies are funded; NASA could (does) get by on the “table scraps” of DOD and HHS. The Department of Agriculture spends more on studying climate change than the entire NASA budget!
Greg, here is a paper on launch costs from Futron.
I saw that Futron paper; it’s why I asked. It has some interesting charts, but it doesn’t specifically address LEO launch cost trends since 1960 or 1970. It does suggest that GSO has gotten cheaper since 1990.
“All these people translate into money, power, and prestige for the NASA program managers.”
Stephen B. Johnson’s _The USAF and the Culture of Innovation_ and _The Secret of Apollo_ are valuable to anyone interested in these issues. He traces the evolution of systems engineering and systems management through 1950s military missile development into civilian space, and shows how they were *demanded* by an inherently complex and costly technology… at least if you wanted to improve on the typical 50% failure rates for new systems in the 1950s.
Bottom line: it’s tempting to lump together and condemn all bureaucracy, paperwork, etc. (and idealize a lean, mean team a la Lockheed’s Skunk Works or Scaled Composites). Has NASA suffered from cost-plus follies and departmental turf-building and CYA-for-Congress? Absolutely — but they’re not the whole story by any means.
“The Department of Agriculture spends more on studying climate change than the entire NASA budget”
Earth to Cecil: If you think the entire world (let alone the US, let alone the DoA) spends >$16B a year studying climate change, you need to get out more.
Greg, I thought you probably had seen it, but wanted to make sure. On page 4 they attribute most of the cost decreases to the following:
“This pricing trend can be explained in large part by increased competition in the commercial launch industry, notably the introduction of the Chinese Long March and the Russian Proton launch vehicles to the market in the early and mid 1990s, respectively. These vehicles were aggressively priced compared to their Western counterparts, creating downward pressure on prices for the overall launch market.”
Like you, I had hoped it would go back farther in time.
Ah, Systems Engineering, the great savior of aerospace. Let’s say I want to buy a toilet. I go to a company that builds toilets and pay to have them write a specification. In it they specify that it has to hold water, have certain valves, a seat, a lid, but they don’t actually say it has to flush, thinking how could it meet all those requirements and not? I contract that toilet maker to build one to my specification they wrote for me, and lo and behold it does not flush. I still have to pay the full contracted price for that toilet because it meets the specification. I am also told they can make my toilet flush, but it will require a modification to the contract and specification, which will double the price. If I were a Systems Engineer, I would think that’s the smart way to buy a toilet.
Reader: “Earth to Cecil: If you think the entire world (let alone the US, let alone the DoA) spends >$16B a year studying climate change, you need to get out more.”
Hehehehe, you’re right! I was typing in Word and pasting here, and I lost/transposed something. That was last night, and now I have no idea what was lost.
At any rate, the DOA has a larger budget than NASA. Being the son of a farmer, I wonder where all that money goes? My father never seen a dime of it in 50 years of farming. Not directly at least.
“Bottom line: it’s tempting to lump together and condemn all bureaucracy, paperwork, etc. (and idealize a lean, mean team a la Lockheed’s Skunk Works or Scaled Composites). Has NASA suffered from cost-plus follies and departmental turf-building and CYA-for-Congress? Absolutely — but they’re not the whole story by any means.”
I _strongly_ agree with this, especially its wider implications. I think the genious of the American system is not “free enterprize” which, by-and-large, we don’t practice and don’t really believe in. What the United States invented during development of the National Highway and Freeway systems, commercial aviation, the ICBM, and the wider Apollo project (including Mercury and Gemini) was the unique (until Airbus) ability to combine government and private endeavors to relatively efficiently execute massive technological projects in a way that was stronger than either separately. Apollo combined private and semi-private companies all over the nation under government management to create the parts for an intricate machine, all of which successfully worked together. Until recently, no other country on Earth has been able to do that, and no other country has experienced our economic success. Each of these major projects could not have been achieved as efficiently without government and the private sector working together; having no markets at the time they were implemented, none of them would have been achieved by truly commercial interests without stong government support. Each of them resulted in major US industries.
Assuming that what I’ve said above is true, I believe that the major threat to our contry’s future in space (and in industry in general) is the slavash ideological fantasy that the government does not have a major role in US industrial success.
Oh yes, I forgot to add packet switching and the Internet to my list. . . .
— Donald
There you have it. All those in favor of changing our country’s initials to USSA, raise your right hands (if you know what’s good for you)!
Of course, some would say it is a tribute to the strength of the capitalist core of our economy that we can withstand all the “help” the government gives us and not go broke. Even so, there are some things we are realistically going to look for our federal government to provide, like defense and most likely leading edge space exploration. It seems obvious to me (as a capitalist) that the more capitalist principles we can bring to bear in these areas, the better return we can expect on our tax dollars. And as for me, I’ll be buying my next toilet at Lowe’s.
Do you drive a car on the freeway? Fly in a passenger airplane? Then, sir, you are a card-carrying member of the USSA, whether you care to admit it or not.
— Donald
“If I were a Systems Engineer, I would think that’s the smart way to buy a toilet.”
Cute nonsense. Johnson’s point is that when a system gets so complex that no person or small group can possibly keep it all in focus at once, you damn well better have *some* set of procedures to ensure that interfaces do indeed interface, that Sub-Team 22 indeed tells Sub-Team 45 about that little change in the nitrogen bleed valve setting, etc. etc. etc. I don’t care if you call it systems engineering or oogabooga, it’s what makes the difference between making a Machine that Does Something Really Cool and making numerous copies that do it reliably under real-world schedules and budgets.
But if it’s important to you to talk about toilets instead of space technologies, by all means get it out of your system.
“…ideological fantasy that the government does not have a major role in US industrial success.”
The general ideological shift since Reagan and Thatcher has fostered a faith that government is always the problem, and free enterprise is always the solution, which can be just as blinding as the previous pendulum swing — the 1930-1970 “Got a problem? Here’s a federal program!”
Hence the hyper-optimism in much of the alt.space rhetoric. The earth’s gravity well is still deep… chemical propellants are still limited in energy content… engine materials can still tolerate only so much heat… and that nasty rocket equation is still there… but somehow the Magic Mojo of the Market will transform everything.
For some reason it has failed to produce a profitable supersonic transport (or even a supersonic bomber any air force in the world finds affordable), but don’t worry — Scaled Composites will be rolling out a Mach 15 scramjet mothership the size of Nellis AFB any day now.
What Scaled Composites, et al, _might_ produce a decade or two down the road is a commercial sub-orbital transport.
While the “free market” ideologues may not live in anything like the real world that history has given us, conversely, I try very hard not to underestimate the power of the market place. Within it’s limits, it is there and it is extremely powerful. The government may have given us the Internet, but the market gave it to thee and me. The British East India Company may have provided the defense and transport, but it was Twinings, et al, that brought home the tea. The Air Force gave us large jet transports, but Boeing created the 707. NASA may be building the Space Station, but, if it is to succeed, it is the alt.space crowd that will supply it and may yet make something useful of it (like they came close to doing with Mir).
Let Europe waste their R&D trying to make hyperthyroid 747s and a supersonic transport using yesterday’s turbojet technology. Mr. Bush is correct to steer NASA clear of all that and provide the markets for the alt.space community to do their thing. Any turbojet supersonic transport will be left in a museum if surborbial transport can succeed in moving packages or passengers contininent to continent in a few hours. . . .
— Donald
“The Air Force gave us large jet transports, but Boeing created the 707.”
My father was an American Airlines exec, and by age 9 I was poring over every issue of Aviation Week he brought home. When they inaugurated 707 service from Boston to San Francisco, he got me out of school to attend the launch party at Logan.
It was the first 707 I’d seen in the aluminum, and making a connection to another shape I’d been seeing in AW for years, I said, “That looks just like a KC-135.” It was some years before I understood his reply:
“That’s right. Boeing aren’t fools, and neither is C.R. Smith…”
Well, look at that. We have flushed out the elusive PowerPoint rangers. No doubt they work on things much more complex than they can imagine. Certainly more complex than some old clunker SR-71. If only Kelly Johnson had PowerPoint and 10,000 requirements to track. Think of the work he could have done.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 3D CAD model is worth 1,000,000 “shall” statements. It amazes me, instead of modeling avionics systems on these remarkable PCs we have, we sit like medieval Benedictine monks writing damn useless “shall” statements. It is not the fault of the systems “engineers” themselves, I suppose. Just one more way management can get in the way of real work being done. After all, completing a program competently and on time doesn’t pay nearly as well as dragging it out beyond all reason and time.
I can’t imagine why they use engineers in systems “engineering”. I would think more properly they’d hire accountants, or perhaps street people. The job is not the least bit technical. There again, I suppose you can’t charge $200/hr for someone who you dragged out from under a bridge. At least it would be more humane.