Amidst all the recent sturm und drang associated with NASA’s implementation of the exploration vision, er, policy—be it sour grapes from losing contractors or sincere technical concerns—is a deeper question: why are people so riled up about this in the first place? In an extended article in this week’s issue of The Space Review, Bob Mahoney tries to get at the heart of the passion surrounding this topic. Much of the article delves into the history of NASA and its bold proposals for programs, from Apollo to the shuttle to the space station, but here’s a key passage:
I believe that this underlying, seething dissatisfaction we see boiling in the blogs and bubbling up into the mainstream press is a variation on [Howard] McCurdy’s thesis: reality has fallen far short of expectations. But this time, the expectations aren’t held by folks who had merely sat enthralled by von Braun’s colorful explanations on Disney television. Many in this disappointed crowd have participated in engineering analyses during the past thirty years (all reviewed by the ESAS team), they fully appreciate the political and economic realities constraining our efforts today, and they know that viable, possibly better alternatives exist beyond the three primary modes available to Apollo’s designers four decades ago. Claiming in defense of ESAS that the Apollo team “got it right the first time†rings a bit hollow in the ears of those who have themselves explored many viable alternatives that offer the potential to “make it better,†especially since future long-term outpost-oriented space exploration will be more akin logistically to today’s Antarctica research than to our initial forays to the Moon all those years ago.
In a related (but much shorter) essay, Taylor Dinerman reviews the prospects for space policy in the next administration based on discussion that took place last week at the National Space Forum. He expresses concern that yet another change in direction in NASA’s human spaceflight program imposed by a new president “might be the straw that broke the camel’s back” , threatening the whole concept. The decision point for that future, Dinerman says, citing John Logsdon, will be in the fall of 2009, when the next administration is putting together its FY2011 budget proposal, the first (according to current schedules) of the post-shuttle era.
Ask Barack and Hillary to explain their policies on ESAS
Jeff,
Don’t allow your astute observations about the progress of India’s space program get lost in the mix!
Ryan
Colleagues –
The article by Bob Mahoney is complex, perhaps an opinion about the conflict between reality and expectations could be short-ish?
My opinion is that a main problem is our system for approving funding. Not that I have an alternative to propose! Our political system could only result in funding for a Grand Idea. The US tends to fund things like “Electrify Rural America” or “Defeat The Axis” or other Big projects. The “Beat The Russians To The Moon (as a war substitute)” met that test.
If we said “Let’s spend 15 billion a year to develop needed infrastructure to take us to a neat destination.” people would fall asleep right away.
But that is what we are doing. We just hide that program inside of a Big idea like exploring Mars. The top managers realize that we do not have that technology yet and so they commit us to a project assuming that the ability to accomplish it will develop given funding. And lots of time.
Sort of like Roosevelt sending The Great White Fleet half way around the world, assuming that Congress would appropriate the money to get them back!
The managers know that they may not be around to see the actual goal accomplished (I often wonder if Von Braun actually thought that we could go to the Moon in his lifetime??) but unless they keep the money flowing they KNOW that we will never make it.
I do think that the heatedness of the discussion has many roots – (1) we prefer to argue over PowerPoint presentations rather than actual detailed designs. (2) The President (the final Decider) does not appreciate or value the difficulties in accomplishing his stated goals. (3) The News highlights the most extreme viewpoints since they generate sales.(4) We are more sophisticated consumers of space plans/hardware/destinations.
Oops, too long already.
Charles
Sadly we observe similar issues on the international affairs. What if Iran could act better? You tell Jeff.
Frankly I find much of the vitriol that has been spilled against VSE and Griffin to be childish and rather shameful. The time for this debate is long since over, the contracts have already been awarded. Personally, I think DIRECT is a great plan, that is possibly more economical than Ares, but it wasn’t chosen. Get over it. NASA has stated its reasons for not picking DIRECT (over designed for ISS missions) yet people continue to devote hours upon hours in futile whining about decisions that have already been made years ago. Surely there is a better way for an intelligent engineer to spend their time.
If there was a fatal flaw in Ares the hate would be understandable, but there isn’t. There may be some elements of it that are not as economical as DIRECT, but Ares V can launched huge payloads into space, and Ares I will have low per-launch costs. They can accomplish the mission.
Then there are those such as the Mars society that want us to abandon the moon and go straight to Mars. While I can sympathize with the impatience, the logic of taking advantage of the Moon’s small gravity well for infrastructure development to facilitate sustained presence is space is absolutely the right course for a government institution (the only institution that has the up-front money to fund such infrastructure) like NASA to take. Skipping the moon infrastructure phase will result in a repeat of Apollo with sortie missions and little else.
If there was a fatal flaw in Ares the hate would be understandable
Nobody brought ‘hate’ into the argument except you. The ‘hate’ is all yours.
Ares is fundamentally flawed. The contracts already let are irrelevant. It may be tough for people like you to get over it, but you’ll just have to get used to it. Nothing is going to change the physics of a large payload of an inline SRB, and nothing is going to change the fact that the second stage, the stage that should by all rights be the first stage, doesn’t even make it to orbit, and is tossed away like so much money. Ares hasn’t got a chance.
Charles:
Point taken on length & complexity.
Next time I’ll be sure to summarize it all in a few bullets to ensure that the NASA folks can follow along…
Bob
“Nobody brought ‘hate’ into the argument except you. The ‘hate’ is all yours.”
What. The hate is all mine? Where have you been? The vitriol thrown at the Ares project and Griffin (both on this site and at Nasaspaceflight) has been long and loud and well documented. Your attempt to spin that into some kind of moral high ground is laughable.
“Ares hasn’t got a chance.”
I’ll remember this on launch day.
Excellent article by Bob Mahoney I couldn’t find even one thing wrong with it. See I’m not that hard to convince
Anders,
While the VSE policy is not perfect it is the wisest national space policy ever. Also let’s not confuse the VSE policy with the current VSE implementation plan. No real study was ever done. Mike had the solution in hand before he was even confirmed. He said this on his first day when asked what he planned to do. His answer was to read the Planetary Society paper he helped write. ESAS was a tool used to support and flesh out the conclusions in that paper. It’s no more complicated than that.
At his confirmation hearing Mike said he was the smartest NASA administrator ever. So it’s no big surprise that he would think any advice that conflicted with what he knew to be true would be considered anything more than a big waste of his time. It’s a behavior pattern we have experienced over and over again since he was confirmed at all levels in the NASA organization.
I for one think the NASA administrator should only get involved in engineering when a solution conflicts with the authorization directives or there is a need to break a dead lock between separate approaches to the same objective that both adhere to that policy. It shouldn’t be a big surprise for anyone keeping track of things. Bottomline: I believe the American people deserve a little better plan for the +100 Billion dollar asking price of the VSE. Which starts with a plan that brings forward the best ideas we can get our hands on from whatever source.
There are a number of fatal flaws with the Ares-I only one is finally public after it was well understood by the engineers below Steve over two years ago. Bad news and honesty is not welcomed no matter how high up you are in the program just ask Skip. Starting to see a pattern yet? Skip was wrong because Mike is always right. Jeff nearly got it as well after he dared to move the schedule into closer alignment with what is actually happening on the ground.
On raw performance, the Jupiter-244 can place heavier payloads in orbit at a lower cost than the Ares-V should we need to. The Ares-V’s lower than optimal Thrust to Lift ratio at takeoff results in a poor split in the deltaV between the first and second cryogenic stages. Ironically, Dr Griffin’s and Dr French’s “Space Vehicle Design†text book does a good job of explaining why the Ares-V is not an efficient design from a rocket scientist standpoint.
As chance would have it the Jupiter is a more optimal rocket configuration for the RS-68 engine used on Delta. At the same time the Jupiter just so happens to be a true direct derivate of the STS that also avoids the serious programmatic problems identified in the GAO report on Ares-I.
NASA engineers had this all figured out over twenty years before the Ares-I/V pseudo STS derivate approach even showed up. Of course at that time we still had a few SaturnV engineers on the payroll. We just dusted off their experienced conclusions and brought them forward to today.
Speaking of today, the Ares-V won’t be built in this current funding environment because its price tag makes the Ares-I look cheap by comparison and look how easy it is to get that funded in what will seem like the milk and honey days of the VSE as we go forward. Assuming NASA engineers can find a way to harden Orion and the upper stage enough to take vibration levels of the Ares-I, vibration levels we would never require an unmanned system to take, we’ll wind up with a launch system nine years from now that is less capable and more expensive than what we can buy today. Any guesses on how long the Ares-I will last in that cost vs. value environment?
This Ares-I cost vs. value environment will also be characterized by an Orion so heavy (due to vibration hardening) that it can’t be used for the lunar mission, that is placed into orbit with nearly empty tanks (the same ones that need to be full so we can get back from the Moon) so it can be lifted by the Ares-I, all while costing five times more than an EELV that can actually place Orion smoothly into orbit with full tanks the astronauts will need to get back from the Moon in the first place (important safety tip).
Before we can return to the Moon we will need to ditch the Ares-I as part of the lunar archeticure, using an EELV to put Orion into orbit. After that we will then need to spend another 20 Billion to build just the Ares-V at the same time our country is going through the highest pressure on its discretionary spending since World War II.
My guess is we just sit back and watch this “hoping for the best” train unfold, the Ares-I will be canceled after a few flights and we’ll send Orion to the ISS using EELV’s and ditch the VSE altogether because we can’t afford the Ares-V.
Then it will be a more cost effective repeat of the last thirty years until we have a catastrophic failure of an aging ISS killing all crew members. At which point a new generation will ask the very same questions this one asked after Columbia. What are we accomplishing in manned space exploration that is worth the blood and treasure we are expending?
The VSE policy is fine it’s the implementation of VSE as dictated by the 90 day study ESAS study that is wrong. Fix ESAS and you fix VSE.
And please frame your responses in the form of counter points to the facts that I present. Bad news is never pleasant and almost always comes across as a bit negative even when it is the truth. I’m sorry if I haven’t found a better way to sugar coat this maybe you would be better at it?
Now do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill?
Anders, I have one question
What were you smoking when you made that comment, and why aren’t you sharing with the rest of the class?
Griffin appears to be more and more on the defensive these days.
Answering questions about the flaws in Ares 1 on national television is not what he needs to be doing. It is a sign of impending failure.
Making accusations against U.S. companies on national TV is not how you inspire people and sell the program. It is TOTALLY off message. These words from Griffin just make it more likely that the White House and Congress will pay more attention to the issues surrounding Ares 1.
The more Griffin fights back on Ares 1, the worse off he will be.
Furthermore, I am thinking that a lot of people inside NASA believe that Ares 1 is the wrong approach — but they don’t dare say anything (if they want their job).
It is commonly known that Griffin will be gone soon after January 20, 2009. Everybody is waiting for that day, and some like Shelby are counting the days. The day he is gone, ALL the internal NASA critics of Ares 1 — who have been hiding to date — will come out of the woodwork.
After that, Ares 1 will not be around that much longer.
– Al
“Politics is not rocket science, which is why rocket scientists don’t understand politics.”
What. The hate is all mine?
There you go again. Man, you’re just full of ‘hate’.
Where have you been?
The question rather, should be ‘What have you been doing?’ I’ve been busy analyzing launch vehicle architectures and space program architectures and committing them to print, in the form of a COTS proposal. Tell us, what exactly have you doing, except throwing ‘hate’ around on the internet?
The vitriol thrown at the Ares project and Griffin
Well deserved vitriol is not ‘hate’. It’s well deserved ‘criticism’ backed up by well analyzed and highly credible ‘alternatives’. What is your alternative, except more of the same of this :
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
How do you explain a launch vehicle that is five years late, billions of dollars over budget, and doesn’t work? Clearly vitriol is inadequate.
Extreme laughter is the only solution. We’re laughing at you, not with you.
The space program architecture itself is ‘laughable’. We’re all laughing our as%es off, which is as far from ‘hate’ as one can get. You aren’t laughing?
[…] commenter in a post yesterday requested that I “don’t allow your astute observations about the progress of India’s […]
Excellent job, Bob. It helps a lot to begin, as you do, with a genuine historical curiosity — what happened and why? — rather than the stance of too many space fans: “we know we could and should have the whole Von Braun-2001-O’Neill package by now; the only question is who deserves most of the blame.”
In that connection, perhaps one reason for the vehemence now is simply all the practice at second-guessing the community has built up since the end of Apollo. If you’ve spent so long focusing on where we’d be if Saturn production hadn’t been halted… if STS designers hadn’t made mistake X early on, or ISS planners mistake Y, or X-33 designers mistake Z… then you’ll be psychologically primed to unload all that “if only” energy on perceived mistakes in ESAS.
In other words, among the reasons the Constellation architectural choice got a reception very different from that of the LOR architectural choice in 1961-62 is simply that we remember the LOR choice. As T.S. Eliot wrote in another connection, “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are what we know.”
Or the Constellation architecture really IS a dog.
But seriously, I don’t think that sharpening our fangs all these years is the sole cause for the intensity of it all, but it likely is playing its part.
I personally think it’s mostly pure frustration. That which “is” just ain’t living up to what so many of us have been hoping for all these decades, at a point where we really thought “the big plan” might have had a chance.
This hope had been reinforced by our witnessing what the folks under O’Keefe were doing initially after the announcement of the Vision: focusing on key technologies or new approaches (Prometheus being one example; the fly-off for CEV being another) that could leverage our ability to open up the solar system to regular, human exploration. Many got the sense that strong, foundational work was getting done in a way that broke with the past. ESAS and how it was handled seem to have brought back the old way, and all that targeted technology development appears to have gone away.
At the very least, NASA’s current exploration work is not being presented as anything extraordinary; NASA has almost gone out of its way to make it look ho-hum. While I don’t think NASA needs to feel obligated to excite the public, they don’t have to go out of their way to bore them!
Probably still not brief enough for you, eh Charles?
Or the Constellation architecture really IS a dog.
It really is a ‘dog’.
at a point where we really thought “the big plan†might have had a chance.
Nobody in their senses intact ever thought George W. Bush’s big plan (VSE) ever had a chance. Anybody with any brains at all could see that they killed a perfectly good SLI for a ridiculous OSP, and that things deteriorated fairly quickly after that. Anybody with any brains at all knows that propulsion is the key to everything here, and that basically we’re back to Mercury days.
COTS will be wildly successful, and VSE, ESAS and Constellation will be horrible failures. It’s all written in stone now. The problem lies with the post mortem. Will it continue to be abject failure at NASA, and at the highest levels of our scientific institutions, and of our government itself, or will they suddenly come to their senses and realize that they’ve all been deprived of a post Sputnik education, and are just now enjoying the damages that have been wrought with their fundamental abilities to think clearly and logically.
I expect further outright folly and tragedy with this government in its throes.
From the article:
“Whence comes this rich passion that is fueling these vehement exchanges? Why are so many people getting so emotional over something that should be settled matter-of-factly with a straightforward technical assessment?”
I would say it’s because a certain organization and it’s present leader is seemingly unwilling to let the “straightforward technical assessment” happen.
What is the response from the “critics of the critics” to that? Let’s hear it, how is the above notion clearly and provenly wrong?
On the larger debate I’m a complete nobody and not afraid to say it but exactly what does the “critics of the critics” have except invoking NASA?
To me it sounds like they’re only in effect saying “you’re not NASA” or “NASA knows best” to the critics of ESAS and expecting that to be magically impressive. I’m no engineer but I know that’s the logical fallacies of ad hominem and argumentum ad verecundiam –quite underwhelming.
If every critic of ESAS only transplanted a Bush Derangement Syndrome onto Griffin’s NASA then sure the “arguments” would cancel out and one would be left with nothing but two groups of loudmouths, but most of the critics of ESAS I know of does not match such a description at all (no matter what they think of the Bush administration or politics in general).
Let me for the sake of argument assume that Ares I is technically feasible without completely changing the aims it’s intended for. Great but unless one also assumes that neither EELVs nor Direct v2.0 can achieve something comparatively similar or better for billions less then even solving any and all technical hurdles for Ares I is a moot point because I haven’t seen any refutations by the “critics of the critics” on how Atlas V avoids black zones or refutations of Direct v2.0. Nothing even close to the issues the critics of ESAS have raised and nothing remotely similar in detail.
I’m prepared to change my mind but not if fallacies (or worse) is all they’ve got.
I’m no engineer
Indeed you aren’t. So, I’ve hired some real NASA rocket engineers to come here and help us with the subject and to get their opinion on the matter.
Mr. Wernher von Braun, thank you for joining us tonight, we were wondering, if you had to choose between the Ares I or the Atlas V, what would you recommend?
Huh? Are you nuts?
Ok. Mr Krafft Ehricke, we’re so happy you could join us, could you be so kind as to tell us, if you had to choose between the Ares I and Delta IV Medium, which would be your choice, a launcher many years and many billions of dollars away, that might not actually work in the end, or an already existent underutilized hydrogen launcher with a brand new factory?
Huh, Are you crazy?
The experts have spoken. Just think of all the money they could have saved us on our rocket insurance, with just a single phone call from the afterlife.