A couple articles of note from this week’s issue of The Space Review:
- I wrote an essay about the short- and long-term impacts of Hurricane Katrina on NASA. Of particular concern (beyond the obvious, significant humanitarian relief work) is how much of an additional delay this will cause for the shuttle program, which before the storm was already the subject of scrutiny by some. Also, will Congress look to NASA’s budget to help contribute to the tens of billions of dollars needed to pay for relief and reconstruction? Only time will tell.
- Taylor Dinerman questions the current approach the Defense Department is taking to the TSAT communications satellite program. TSAT promises to provide the huge amounts of bandwidth that military planners crave, but Congress has been skeptical about the technical maturity of the effort; no surprise given the problems encountered by many other military space procurements (SBIRS, FIA, etc.). Dinerman also questions just how much bandwidth the military really needs (does it really need to transfer gigabits of data between the theater and offices in the US?)
Couldn’t one make this same case to argue for NASA using EELV’s instead of a new five sgment Solid Rocket Booster first stage? And also for NASA using EELV’s to send large-ish size robot explorers to the Moon before sending humans, using the same launch system architecture?
TSAT: unobtainium urgently needed
by Taylor Dinerman
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
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If the space systems procurement people want to rebuild some confidence in the project, they might want to consider rethinking what they mean when they say “risk reduction”. If they are actually dealing with elements that have a high technology readiness level (TRL) then they should not have too much trouble making their case to the relevant Congressional committees. If not, then they should not try and improve the TRLs by simply throwing money at the problem. They should instead be looking at ways to effectively test system elements before they find themselves committed to a program that might end up costing $20 billion or more.
There is a good case for flying a couple of precursor missions…
If the Air Force can show that they have made parts of the system work in space, then they may find that Congress will be willing to support the project. …
I don’t see why they don’t start on the 5 segment solid booster now. They need to have something for the NASA engineers to do. They won’t have any launches to support for at least another year. What’s the down side? Oh wait, I know what the down side is, they may go into this at a low level of effort and it may get finished before it has time to be thoroughly milked. It’s all so complicated now.
Here’s a thought: NASA cancels the Space Shuttle program, donates half the savings until 2010 for hurricane rebuilding and the other half goes to the Moon-Mars initiative.
…as for TSAT, the problem with all these programs (and GAO will attest to this) is that they proceed too far with systems that rely on immature technology, then have to develop and mature it in the expensive later stages of the project, which pushes the project way over budget and behind schedule.
Why does this happen? Underinvestment in R&D; lack of remaining R&D capacity.
DOD needs to move some of that production budget back into AFOSR, DARPA etc. otherwise they will find themselves spending hundreds of billions on ‘gapfillers’ of all kinds over the next decade or two.
Ooooh Kevin, you are so-o-o saintly and politically correct. I’ll bet that you are from a privileged background as well as a student at an extremely prestigious university in Pasadena. This is a U. which has, as you have boasted, more brainpower than NASA.
You should feel guilty, guilty, guilty all the time, Kevin. You yourself are a walking exemplar of inequality. All that IQ concentrated in the elite such as yourself, whereas less fortunate folks in other parts of the country seem to have less. Maybe you ought to donate half your brain to de po’ folk … at MSFC in Huntsville. That would help equalize things.
Is that really necessary?
Kevin, I think your ideas would work if it were really a matter of these programs biting off more than they could chew. Generally they succeed just enough to ensure several program slides with budget increases in the out years and meaningless but immediate cuts. Then, once the program is defined as over, they get follow on contracts to make the thing actually work, although at a much reduced capacity from what was promised. It is a matter of maximizing the amount of money squeezed out of the taxpayer for a given program. Learned helplessness, if you will. Trying to make sense of it any other way is an exercise in futility. Trust me, I know.
There are ongoing hearings into problems with DOD acquision of space systems as part of the Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment Project (DAPA):
http://www.dapaproject.org/documents.asp
In particular, the GAO gave a report entitled “DEFENSE ACQUISITIONS. Assessments of Selected Major Weapon Programs” in March 2005:
http://www.nasites.com/cmprojects/projects/1188/docs/GAO-05-301%20Def%20Acq%20Assmt%20of%20Select%20MW%20Programs.pdf
Turning to page 6: “We found that successful programs take steps to gather knowledge that confirms that their technologies are mature, their designs stable, and their production processes are in control. Separating technology development from product development is important to this effort. Successful programs make a science and technology organization, rather than the program or product development manager, responsible for maturing technologies.”
…
“Most of the programs we reviewed proceeded with lower levels of knowledge at critical junctures and attained key elements of product knowledge later in development than specified in DOD policy, which resulted in cost increases and schedule delays.”
Turning to the TSAT review on page 115:
“Technology Maturity
The TSAT program is in the risk reduction and design development phase, with only one of its seven critical technologies mature. The program is being developed in two increments—six of the technologies are associated with the first increment and all seven are associated with the second increment.
Of the six technologies associated with the first increment, only one technology—the packet processing payloads—is mature. The other five—communication-on-the-move nulling antenna, dynamic bandwidth and resource allocation technologies, protected bandwidth efficient modulation waveforms, information assurance, and single access laser communications—are scheduled to reach maturity in early 2006, about 2 years after the start of development. The single access laser communications has no backup technology, and according to program officials, any delay in maturing this technology will cause the expected first satellite launch date to slip beyond 2012.
The seventh critical technology, the multi-access laser communications, is part of the second increment. It will not reach maturity until the production decision for the last four operational satellites in 2008, about 4 years after the planned start of development.”
But in the case of Techsat21, when AF tried to do the necessary research they found that the tech development exceeded the R&D capacity of AFRL et. al. You must be the judge of whether or not such a project was so ambitious that it should have exceeded their R&D capacity.
Most likely, about 15 years into the development of this system there will be a commercial equivalent and some bright USAF guy will say, “hey why don’t we just use the commercial system?” The program will end, your money will be spent, and this will all have been for nothing.
The fact of the matter is, those of us who work in aerospace are not idiots, despite all appearance to the contrary; we know how things should be done, with or without the GAO; and we know things won’t be done the smart way so we muddle through and try to make the best we can out of a bad situation. I mean, I read things like you have cited and I roll my eyes as I think, “well duh? Thank goodness these people have such a firm grasp of the obvious.” To date, all I’ve ever seen any of these defense acquisition reform programs do is make things much worse, not better.
They’ve given us integrated product teams to replace those nasty old matrix organizations (that worked), bogged us down in requirements hell, taken away our military standards documents (only to have them sold back to us as “commercial standards” by beltway bandits later), lobbied for contractors being reimbursed for development and later for them to be paid profit for the same, gave us COTS and MCOTS (now there’s a euphemistic acronym for rape: commercial off the shelf). They’ve reformed acquisition to the point where if there weren’t so many good and well motivated people in this business it would be a total black hole, sucking in money with no instead of only few visible results.
In reality, there is only one reform we need. We need a profit incentive for success. Give us that, and the industry will turn around. Absent such motivation, the industry will conceive and evolve ever more innovative ways to fail, because it pays better than success.
That’s depressing.
Setting aside what remains of the aerospace industry, what about the R&D side of the problem? …all those programs in universities and government research labs. I’m not talking about vehicles, but the new technologies — laser comms, phased array anennas, waveforms — the key components?
And with regard to canceling the Shuttle, I’m quite serious.
Oberg is reporting that thing won’t be flying until late 2006, if that. That would push the price for the next flight up towards the $12Bn we paid for the last flight.
Congress will be looking unusually hard for things to cut. If I had my way I’d cut much of the $200Bn+ Future Combat Systems program. But, the Shuttle is a highly visible but failing boondoggle right now, everybody knows it, and I would rather NASA seize the initiative and salvage at least half the Shuttle budget to keep the Moon Mars initiative going, otherwise the Shuttle and the Moon Mars initiative could both be dead and gone by this time next year.
It seems to me that years ago we would have launched some small prototype vehicles in each one of those high risk technology areas prior to integrating them into one big satellite. Now days, if you want to do big dollar development the place to do it is in a big dollar program with lots of political clout. The political clout ensures the flow of money stays very high. Unfortunately the flow of money does not guarantee success.
This is somewhat like F-22. Most of the “high tech” aspects of F-22 could have been developed on and for other aircraft. The stealth aspect is not critical for most of them. Instead of doing things in a more cost effective way, like developing these technologies in separate programs, they all glob together because they know the big program will have big clout and big funding.
That’s another reason why I advocate NASA and the DoD not paying profit for development. There would be more incentive to break these big programs down and do technology development in smaller, more cost and technical risk effective programs. No one but the US government could afford these hundreds of billions in development costs and dragging things out for decades. Contractors would have incentive to do things in smaller, more efficient chunks. They would have incentive to finish sooner instead of later, and have a reason to try to make the customer happy with the results. The happier they are, the more product the DoD or NASA buys, the more profit the company makes. In retrospect, what a huge mistake we made going away from that method of doing business.
[ … This is somewhat like F-22. Most of the “high tech” aspects of F-22 could have been developed on and for other aircraft. The stealth aspect is not critical for most of them. Instead of doing things in a more cost effective way, like developing these technologies in separate programs, they all glob together because they know the big program will have big clout and big funding. ]
Dfens, you and I both know that the industry likes to glob together technology funding for one aircraft that, funding for equipment that could be common and shared by other aircraft.
Why do this? So that the contractors can charge the DOD two or three times for the same thing.
An example: I worked for the old Hughes Aircraft. Hughes, since acquired by Raytheon, designed and built radars for the F-14, F-15, and F-18. These were similar radars. However, there was very little official commonality of the radar sets.
As far as I could find out, these three radar sets were officially three different programs with different labor charge numbers. Hughes engineers were strictly told not to do any cross-charging, even though there was some unofficial knowledge sharing because all the radar engineers for these three programs were housed in the same building.
In the strict sense, some of this knowledge sharing could have been construed as security violations.
I think Raytheon and North-Grum are getting away with the same monkeyshines with the F-22 and F-35. I case you haven’t noticed, the F-35 is basically a downsized, single engine version of the F-22. Is the F-35 radar set a separate program with its own program office administrative structure? Ummm-hmmm.
That doesn’t even burn me up as much as the billion dollar programs to update the F-22 avionics system. We’re in the middle of a war, that piece of junk has been under construction for over 20 years, it has never fired a shot in anger, and it’s avionics system is obsolete before the first airplane has been made operational. I also would like to know why a single dime is being spent on the avionics system of the F-35, radar included. The level of waste is obscene.
I read an article several months ago where the program director of F-35 was trashing the F-22. The funny thing is, he used to be the program manager for F-22. Lockheed doesn’t even seem to be pretending to want to build the F-22 any more. Why build it? They’ve already sucked down the good, low risk, development money. If they produce the airplane, there’s a risk they might run into production problems. Better to make no risk development money.
When I was on space station, many of us wondered how Hamilton Standard got away with charging NASA twice for virtually the same toilet. They were making one for station and the other for the shuttle. I guess Congress later started asking the same question.