The space subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee will be holding a hearing this Thursday morning (10 am, SR-253) on “Issues Facing the U.S. Space Program after Retirement of the Space Shuttle”. The purpose of the hearing, according to the subcommittee, will be to “address issues related to the retirement of the Space Shuttle, its remaining missions… [NASA’s] plans to compensate should they not fulfill all mission requirements on schedule, and other issues facing NASA when the Space Shuttle is retired.” (Such as, presumably, “The Gap”.) Administrator Mike Griffin is scheduled to testify, along with associate administrators Bill Gerstenmaier and Richard Gilbrech.
All the NASA big guns, what’s up?
There’s no issue paper or prepared questions at the Senate website, so I’m guessing that tomorrow’s hearing will devolve into little more than an opportunity for Sen. Hutchison and Sen. Nelson to beat their chests about the “gap” and demonstrate their support for the Mikulski “miracle”, even though: 1) the “miracle” would do little to actually address the “gap” because it’s too small an amount to accelerate Ares I/Orion significantly and because most of the funding will go to restore NASA science programs; 2) the bill it’s attached to will be vetoed by the President anyway; and 3) NASA’s 2008 funding levels, assuming Congress gets around to passing a second bill, are anyone’s guess after the veto.
That said, if some Senators and/or their staffers actually wanted to ask NASA some hard questions about the remaining Shuttle flights, ISS assembly, and Shuttle replacement vehicles, here’s what I’d argue that they should be asking:
1) Given the Space Shuttle’s demonstrated loss-of-vehicle/loss-of-crew rate, what is the likelihood that NASA will lose another Space Shuttle orbiter and crew before ISS assembly is complete? Is that risk acceptable or unacceptable? Why?
2) How much does the Space Shuttle program cost the taxpayer per year and per month? What percentage of NASA’s annual and monthly budgets do those amounts represent? If the current schedule holds, will all the major international elements of ISS that require Space Shuttle launch be deployed by April 2008? If so, why not terminate ISS assembly at that time, shut down the Space Shuttle program, forgo the additional risks, and redirect the unused 2008-2010 Space Shuttle budget to its replacement vehicles? What will NASA do if the current schedule does not hold and some ISS elements remain unassembled at the end of 2010? What is the impact to other NASA programs if the Space Shuttle program and budget are extended beyond 2010?
3) Part of NASA’s Space Shuttle replacement strategy is the COTS program, where NASA shares costs with industry for the development of new launch and in-space vehicles to service the ISS. The USAF pursued a similar cost-sharing space vehicle development with industry in the recent past, the EELV program, where the USAF spent $1 billion for the development of two launch vehicle families, with commitments to purchase future vehicle flights, if successful. NASA, however, has allocated only $500 million to COTS with no commitments to future vehicle flights, but expects not only two new launch vehicles out of the effort, but also two new in-space vehicles. Given NASA’s smaller contribution to much more aggressive technical goals in COTS, how much industry cost-sharing is required to complete these vehicles? Is it realistic for industry to raise this amount of funding, especially given NASA’s lack of commitment to purchase flights on the resulting vehicles? Why? Are there any precedents? NASA recently had to terminate its development agreement with one of two COTS winners because that entity was unable to raise funding for its private cost-share. What is NASA doing to change COTS funding and/or content and/or future flight purchase commitmets to reduce the probability of another private fundraising failure?
4) The post-Space Shuttle U.S. human space flight gap has grown from three years (2010 to 2013) to five years (2010 to 2015) due to a combination of budgetary and technical issues. But despite the schedule delays, Ares I/Orion technical content is large enough that the budget only provides a 65 percent probability of fielding an operational Ares I/Orion system by 2015, meaning that there is approximately a 1-in-3 chance that the gap will grow even larger, absent any more budgetary or technical issues. Is a five-year gap acceptable? Why? Is the accompanying 1-in-3 risk of the gap growing even larger acceptable? Why? At the 65 percent probability of success, Ares I/Orion development costs through the 2015 operability date are estimated at approximately $20 billion. How much additional funding is necessary to boost that probability to the industry standard of 80 percent? After that, how much additional funding would be needed to accelerate Ares I/Orion operability by one month? Six months? One year? Two years? What is the earliest date that Ares I/Orion operability can be accelerated to, regardless of budget? If no budget increases are in the offing, how can ESAS requirements and Ares I/Orion technical content be reduced to increase the probability of achieving the 2015 operability date or accelerating the operability date? Assuming identical changes to ESAS requirements, are there less costly and more quickly fielded alternatives to Ares I/Orion for ISS resupply and LEO transport? What are the benefits and drawbacks of those alternatives to ISS resupply and LEO transport?
5) The decision to proceed with Ares I development was predicated on the high levels of reliability and safety that derived from its Space Shuttle heritage. But the current Ares I design is very different from the Space Shuttle systems it was originally based upon. The Shuttle SRB is a four-segment solid rocket, while Ares I uses a five-segment solid rocket. The Shuttle SRB stack has rigidity in flight because it attaches to the Space Shuttle stack, while the Ares I stack suffers from a lack of rigidity because it flies alone. The SRB is also recoverable, allowing critical engineering data trend analysis, while Ares I may have to be expendable, removing the ability to track trends that impact reliability and safety. Ares I also now employs a new J-2X upper-stage engine with limited Apollo, not Space Shuttle, heritage. What has been the quantitative impacts to Ares I’s reliability and safety resulting these and other changes since ESAS? How do Ares I’s current projected reliability and safety now compare to existing and alternative launch vehicles for ISS resupply and LEO transport?
6) To meet Ares I performance limits and ESAS requirements, the Orion project is currently considering a number of design changes to reduce the vehicle’s mass. Many of these proposed changes will reduce Orion’s reliability and safety, including: reductions from double- to single- or zero-fault tolerant systems; water landing limitations; and radiation shielding removal, among others. What are the quantitative impacts to Orion’s reliability and safety resulting from these changes? What changes could be made to ESAS requirements to reduce Orion’s mass without impacting Orion’s reliability and safety? Can Orion be made light enough to fly on existing or alternative launch vehicles other than Ares I without impacting Orion’s reliability and safety?
Again, I don’t expect anything like the questions above to be posed to the “Three G’s” (Griffin, Gerst, and Gilbrech). And some of them are more appropriate for staffers to ask NASA in correspondence and briefings, rather than in a hearing. But it sure would be interesting to hear/see the answers if someone in Congress finally started asking questions like these.
FWIW…
I suspect that should the committee ask these particularly loaded (though perhaps because of that typical) questions for a Congressional hearing, NASA will have answers that will not satisfy Mr. Anonymous since those answers will not add up to, “Everything we’re doing is idiotic and doomed to fail.”
Question 3 is particularly interesting. It has been gospel from the New Space folks that small, entrepeneurial companies like SpaceX and even Rp/K can do more with less money than the big, bloated, bureaucratic corporations like Boeing and LockMart. The implication of Question 3 is that this is not so after all.
anonymous: it must be hard to sustain a Vision with your eyes wide open like that.
A fine dissection.
Questions that I would like to see asked are (not that I expect them to be asked, and some are similar to anonymous’ questions):
What plans exist to address the logistics shortfall (identified recently in a study where Tommy Holloway, retired senior NASA technical manager, was a prime participant) to Station? Even with a heavy lift vehicle (Shuttle) flying there is not enough available lift to bring up the identified science samples, replacement parts, hardware, etc needed on Station. Are we going to cut back further on crew activities? When our only heavy lift vehicle retires, can we get any needed Control Moment Gyros, computers, other ORUs up to Station?
When the Shuttle retires we will be dependent on the Russians to get astronauts up to Station. Do we have an agreement signed that locks in a price per flight, or are we at risk that they may arbitrarily raise the price?
Charles
Any way you look at it, a high performance high energy cryogenic upper stage sitting atop a single large solid rocket booster is idiotic, almost, but not quite, as idiotic as first considering using a ground started SSME in an upper stage.
How’s this pass your idiocy test : using Merlin 1C powered Falcon 1 stages as booster augmentation for ground started SSME stages in SSTO spaceflight.
Anonymous: The USAF pursued a similar cost-sharing space vehicle development with industry in the recent past, the EELV program, where the USAF spent $1 billion for the development of two launch vehicle families, with commitments to purchase future vehicle flights, if successful.
At best, this was only a partial success as it produced one vehicle that appears not to be economically viable and one that may be, but only marginally so.
— Donald
“I suspect that should the committee ask these particularly loaded… questions”
I’d be interested in hearing what specifically Mr. Whittington finds “loaded” about these questions. They may be tough, but they’re all pretty open-ended. Summarizing:
1) Are the risks of continuing to fly Shuttle acceptable or not and why?
2) At what logical points can ISS assembly be cut short before 2010? Given the budget savings and avoided risks, why not cut ISS assembly short? What happens if NASA cannot complete ISS assembly by 2010?
3) Does COTS content match the funding resources and flight purchase commitments made to it? If not, what is being done to fix that?
4) Is a 5-year gap in U.S. civil human space flight with a 1-in-3 probability of not meeting that schedule acceptable and why? If not, how much will it cost to accelerate Ares I/Orion and increase the probability of meeting the schedule? If additional dollars are not forthcoming, how can Ares I/Orion be descoped to accelerate the schedule? Are there less costly and more quickly fielded alternatives to Ares I/Orion and what are their benefits and drawbacks?
5) Given Ares I’s increasing divergence from Shuttle heritage systems and other design changes, what are the updated reliability and safety figures for Ares I? How do these figures compare to alternative launch vehicles?
6) What are the reliability and safety impacts of the various mass-saving changes being considered for Orion? Are there changes to Orion requirements or alternative launch vehicles that would allow Orion to fly without making changes that impact reliability and safety?
I just read Griffin’s testimony from the hearing and would point out that it does not address any of these topics in the slightest. Of course, he wasn’t asked these question, but that’s the point. If Congress cares about the answers to these very legitimate questions about NASA human space flight program risks, costs, and alternatives, then they have to be asked, even if they appear “loaded” to supporters of the current programs. The best way to ensure the success of NASA’s human space flight programs (or to govern or manage any endeavour) is to ask the tough questions and adjust accordingly. Defensive cheerleading only perpetuates problems; it does not resolve them.
“NASA will have answers that will not satisfy Mr. Anonymous since those answers will not add up to, “Everything we’re doing is idiotic and doomed to fail.'”
Absolutely not. These questions are tough and they challenge basic assumptions that the agency has made since Griffin came on board and ESAS was completed. But nowhere do they imply that everything NASA does is “idiotic”. At a minimum, all these questions deal with NASA’s human space flight programs, so they imply nothing about NASA’s science and aeronautics programs. And even within human space flight, just off the top of my head, I would commend Griffin & Co. for shrinking the ISS assembly manifest to a much more achievable number of STS flights. Clearly, I do not think that everything Griffin or NASA does is “idiotic”.
If NASA came back with good answers to these questions that did not fundamentally change NASA’s current course in human space flight — why certain STS and ISS risks are acceptable, how COTS is being fixed, how Ares I/Orion can be substantially accelerated without major budget increases or requirements impacts, and why all the Ares I/Orion redesigns are having little or no impact on reliability and safety — I would certainly sit up and listen.
If Mr. Whittington thinks that these tough yet legitimate questions will make NASA’s human space flight programs appear “idiotic”, then maybe it’s a reflection of his own concerns about what the answers to these questions might be and what the implications of those answers might be for the current programs.
“It has been gospel from the New Space folks that small, entrepeneurial companies like SpaceX and even Rp/K can do more with less money than the big, bloated, bureaucratic corporations like Boeing and LockMart.”
It’s a question of degree. Can “newspace” be twice as efficient as “oldspace”? Probably. Four to eight times as efficient? Probably not.
The problem with COTS is the extreme mismatch between the technical content and resources allocated to it. Again, the USAF EELV program spent $1 billion to get two launch vehicles in a cost-sharing arrangement (with “oldspace” companies). NASA COTS is spending $500 million in an attempt to get four vehicles (two launch vehicles and two in-space vehicles). That makes COTS at least a factor of four more difficult than EELV. And it’s arguably six to eight times as difficult, as those in-space vehicles must rendezvous with ISS and withstand Earth reentry. Whether “oldspace” or “newspace,” NASA is simply expecting way too much for way too few dollars. It has nothing to do with corporate culture and everything to do with program formulation. NASA either needs to bring more resources to the game or spread the remaining dollars over fewer performers and/or vehicles. RpK’s failings aside, if NASA does not do so, only a self-funding company like Space-X can play this game (and they’re the only such orbital company right now). External investors, whether they’re oldspace stockholders and corporate boards or newspace angel investors and venture capitalists, will continue to shy away as RpK’s investors did.
FWIW…
“anonymous: it must be hard to sustain a Vision with your eyes wide open like that.”
On the contrary, to sustain something as ambitious and technically involved as the Vision, leadership must keep their eyes glued open.
“A fine dissection.”
Thanks much, Mr. Davis.
“Are we going to cut back further on crew activities [when STS is retired]…?
Do we have an agreement signed [with the Ruskies] that locks in a price per flight, or are we at risk that they may arbitrarily raise the price?…”
Also a good set of questions from Charles.
“At best, this was only a partial success as it produced one vehicle that appears not to be economically viable and one that may be, but only marginally so.”
Just to be clear with Mr. Robertson, this is not the point I’m trying to make. I’m arguing that, based on the ratio of USAF dollars to technical content in the EELV program, there is a big mismatch between COTS content and NASA dollars being put into COTS, which makes it unattractive to investors. That’s different from EELV, where the program proved attractive enough to Boeing and LockMart investors, in the form of their corporate boards. EELV succeeded in developing operational vehicles using private cost-sharing arrangements, even if market conditions changed to the point that one or both vehicles was no longer competitive in the commercial market. My point is that we can’t yet worry about or discuss the latter with respect to COTS, because NASA has yet to set up the correct conditions for the former (self-funded billionaires like Musk aside, and even there, without a bigger NASA contribution, I’m not sure Dragon will make it even if Falcon 9 does).
FWIW…
My own vision has been blurred ever since I saw the 1/2004 VSE budget “sand chart” and thought through the assumptions behind it (the fiscal/political assumptions as well as the technical ones).
They were tears of laughter at the time, but not for long.
“My own vision has been blurred ever since I saw the 1/2004 VSE budget “sand chart†and thought through the assumptions behind it (the fiscal/political assumptions as well as the technical ones).”
If I were king of the world, I also might pick different interim VSE goals for NASA’s human space flight programs than human lunar return. But that said, I’d argue that the VSE and sand chart were implementable as is. The funding curves in the sand chart for the human lunar return elements added up to the same dollars, adjusted for inflation, as spent on Apollo. Admittedly, those dollars were spread over a longer period of time, but the timeframe for the first human lunar landing set by the policy — no later than 2020 — was consistent with that budget. Given that NASA now has a much larger technical and industrial base to build off of than in the 1960s, a human lunar return should have been very achievable with bucks and years to spare. The problems came with ESAS, where Griffin mandated requirements that went well beyond Apollo’s capabilities (e.g., 4 crew instead of 2) and selected vehicles that did little to build off the technical and industrial base that had developed over the past 40-odd years. It’s shouldn’t be surprising that doing more than Apollo did, while also unnecessarily reinventing the ETO wheel, is going to cost more than Apollo did. Griffin then compounded the budgetary problem by not holding the Shuttle program’s feet to the fire with regard to shutdown savings.
FWIW…
1) The likelihood that another orbiter will be lost before the completion of the ISS approaches 1 (based on past failure rates, the age of the fleet, the tempo of flights required to finish the ISS by 2010, and the failure to solve the foam-shedding issue). Whether that is acceptable depends on one’s assessment of the utility of the ISS.
2) ISS assembly will be shut down when it loses another orbiter, no matter how far along the construction has gone.
3) the funding for COTS doesn’t matter as much as does the flight purchase commitments. If there is a market for orbital flights – that is, if potential investors can see a guarantee from NASA that it will buy X orbital flights per year – then private investors will pony up the cash for development. If NASA is under no obligation to buy any flights, ever, from private industry, then the only ones willing to finance development will be those willing to turn a large fortune into a small one.
4) is a 5-year gap acceptable as compared to a 3-year gap? That depends on what one wants to accomplish in those extra two years. If it is simply ISS resupply, then guaranteeing that market to the COTS program would reduce that gap drastically, because investors would see a chance at a profit and would thus invest in vehicle development.
5) I’d be interested in seeing an objective side-by-side comparison of Orion and DIRECT.
6) good questions to which i have no answer.
I’d argue that the VSE and sand chart were implementable as is… the same dollars, adjusted for inflation, as spent on Apollo
Apollo had a short timeline and a crisp “get ‘em there and back alive” mandate. Cold War urgency drove an organization in large part created for the mission.
In principle, VSE’s longer timeline and less specific mandate permitted more deliberate and leaner planning; in practice it left room for the scope creep and “reinventing the ETO wheel” that you cite.
In principle, the rolling reallocation under modest increase depicted in the sand chart was good management; in practice, it ran into the pushback (pullback?) of STS/ISS constituencies that you cite.
Goal orientation… well, I look at the Huntsville times in March 2005: “President Bush on Friday picked [Griffin]. By Friday afternoon, U.S. Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Huntsville, was bending the new administrator’s ear on behalf of [MSFC]… ‘I welcomed him to the position and quickly reminded him that we’ve got some tough issues that we need to settle…’ ” As I said at the time, Sen. Hutchinson (R-JSC) and Sen. Nelson (D-KSC) had probably already weighed in.
I’m not claiming to have foreseen the last 46 months in detail, or beating the tired drum of “good NASA back in the day, bad NASA now.” And I’m certainly not accusing you of naivete. I’m offering a dispassionate observation, along the sociological lines of Howard McCurdy et al, that it’s inevitably tougher to re-orient an established organization than to orient a new one.
Short version: Nothing fails like success