Congress, NASA

NASA administrator delay and the battle for the Ares 1

Today’s Houston Chronicle offers a possible explanation regarding why it’s taken the Obama Administration so long to select a new NASA administrator: a battle among businesses and politicians for the future of the Ares 1. On one side are supporters of the Ares 1, including ATK, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, as well as Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL). On the other side are United Launch Alliance, which would like to see the Ares 1 replaced with an EELV-derived vehicle, and its Congressional supporters, which the article claims includes Sens. Mark Udall (D-CO) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) (which appear in the article to be tied to this because they represent states where ULA has facilities, and not, unlike Nelson, of any statements they made.)

33 comments to NASA administrator delay and the battle for the Ares 1

  • sc220

    Someone needs to let Nelson know that its in his interest to have lots of activity at the Cape, regardless of the launch vehicle selected. You get this whether the course is Ares or EELV.

    The Huntsville/Decatur area could benefit substantially by going with an EELV. Surprisingly, Shelby is more astute about this than the rest of the people in the area, including the folks at MSFC. The Decatur rocket plant is way under capacity, and making EELV the flagship for NASA will ramp up the business there.

  • Steve

    Well, Ares is in the works and people have jobs right now on this contract. If the path was changed and an EELV was selected I don’t see how that would change anything with jobs. Most likely the people working Ares would get laid off and the EELV contractor would hire different people. So, if you assume that the manpower would be similar regardless of platform then you might lay off 1,000 people in one location and hire 1,000 people at another location. Obviously Obama does not want anyone losing jobs right now so I don’t see how going with an EELV does anything for jobs, it would just be a wash I think and alot of people laid off in the meantime…Stick with Ares.

  • Cle AeroSpace

    Let’s not forget that the Ares program has supported a whole lot of activity AROUND THE COUNTRY, not just isolated to FL and AL!! Let’s not forget the huge amount of work supporting ARES at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. A shift to EELV based rockets would likely make most of the new work at GRC go away, and cause another huge hit to what is already one of the most depressed areas in the country.
    It is a shame that a decision this large, affecting so many people, comes down to which politician has the most pull with Obama.

  • John Malkin

    Agenda, Agenda, Agenda… Both sides can’t be right. This sounds like the politics that built the Shuttle. Engineers should do the design not politician and CEOs, the same as Generals running a war. I’m so disappointed with this process. We need a third party which doesn’t have any relationships to any of theses companies and the expertise to understand the tradeoffs and time constraints. I know I’m asking too much. This is why we haven’t built a new operational vehicle in 30+ years.

    Will the real Engineers please standup?

  • John,
    That would be easier if this were just an engineering problem. The reality is that it isn’t (and I might add that the same applies with “the generals” and warfighting). This is also a policy issue, and as such letting the engineers decide everything is really the last thing you want. Which vehicle you go with is going to depend just as much on what your policy goals for the program are as they are with the vehicle designs and orbital mechanics. If astronaut safety during just one small portion of the lunar mission (at the expense of others), and keeping government employees and contractors busy are your key policy criteria, then Ares I might make sense. If promoting the development of a thriving commercial spaceflight sector is more important, or having increasing safety, affordability, and capabilities in space…

    You get the idea. Trying to let just the engineers solve this problem is like trying to design a rocket engine using only structural engineering (and not heat transfer or fluid dynamics).

    ~Jon

  • Ross C. Taylor

    We have a third party with expertise…NASA. Instead of no relationships with the companies (which would pretty much exclude anyone with the appropriate expertise), they have relationships with all of the companies thus reducing the tendency for preferential treatment. But more importantly, the decision to go with the Ares architecture was made before contractors were selected and was based on extensive study (ESAS). The real engineers stood up, evaluated many options (including EELV), and chose Ares. Now it is being fought over for political gain.

  • richardb

    Congress has always meddled in Nasa decisions. Do we not have Nasa centers scattered all over the Nation? Didn’t Lyndon Johnson, D-TX insist on Houston as the flight control center back in the 60’s? Ares was sourced, in part, to maintain the shuttle work force at the direction of Congress.

    Given that he’s just thrown 1 trillion USD around at the behest of Congress, a dramatic exhibit of the spoils system, I got to believe he’ll let Congress influence his Nasa pick and future direction. Since Congress has voted for the Ares vision for 3 years, I expect they’ll continue with it and have enough political influence for Obama to continue with it.

  • Screw You

    Americans are so stupified by thirty years of Reaganesque ideology and educational dogma, that they continue to CHEER ON the SHITIEST ROCKET, payload and mission ever conceived by mankind. Heckuva job in Little Dumbfuckistan, boys. Idiocracy rules.

    If I was your supervisor I would fire your asses and hire somebody who can think boldly enough and act promptly and decisively enough to get the job of opening up the space frontier quickly and definitively. Like some Indians.

    You’re fired. U ra.

  • John Malkin

    Ross articulated my point much better. I was trying to say that politics was leading the process. Well there are a lot of retired rocket experts that would be good on a panel to advise the President. I agree this has been done already but since the NASA administrator is an appointee, we have to do it every 4 years.

  • Screw You

    Americans are so stupified by thirty years of Reaganesque ideology and educational dogma, that they continue to CHEER ON the SHITIEST ROCKET, payload and mission ever conceived by mankind. Heckuva job in Little Dumbfuckistan, boys. Idiocracy rules.

    If I was your supervisor I would fire your asses and hire somebody who can think boldly enough and act promptly and decisively enough to get the job of opening up the space frontier done quickly and definitively – some Indians.

    You’re fired. U ra.

  • Ross, John,
    While I definitely disagree with you, I’m embarrassed to have schmucks like “Screw You” anywhere close to my side. The problem with just trusting ESAS are several fold:

    1-NASA is not an unbiased party in this selection. They benefit from solutions that involve more employment in their centers, regardless of whether they are actually better for the nation or not. It’s incredibly naive to think that a government can act in some sort of platonic ideal of a technocratic society. That sort of thinking might have been more believable 40 years ago, but with all the experience we have with public choice theory?

    2-ESAS has been shown to have many holes in it. Many of their methodologies were flawed, especially in how they treated multi-launch architectures. Sure, you *could* do a multi-launch architecture that incompetently, but you would have to try really hard. Personally, I smell straw.

    3-Their focus on launch ascent safety at the expense of all other legs of the trip seems badly flawed.

    4-The way ESAS did probabilistic risk assessments was very naive–it’s the same method that showed that Falcon I would be the most reliable vehicle ever. When you have a team that hasn’t designed, built, and flown launch vehicles together (like NASA’s current Ares-I team), those numbers aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Sure, you can get some qualitative information out of it, but Mike Griffin should know better than to still be claiming Ares-I is going to be 2x safer from an LOC standpoint, and 8x safer from a LOM standpoint than any vehicle that’s ever flown–there is no evidence whatsoever to believe that.

    I guess I’m just frustrated that NASA really blew this opportunity. But maybe on some level NASA deserves Ares-I. On the good side, it should disabuse anyone still suffering from the misguided opinion that NASA actually knows what it’s doing anymore.

    ~Jon

  • ForceKin

    Just a thought from a non-engineer, but there is a certain arrogance the other way, too: the idea that engineers and technocrats should make the decsions and that the unwashed masses should, like cattle, follow. Politics, patronage and money (the ‘spoils system’ as it has been called here and elsewhere – aka representative democracy) has always been and will always be the *real* determinant of technological development. Lots of things are physically possible but won’t happen if resources aren’t allocated. If the citizenry want to choose the type of vehicle based on the optimal distribution of funding to foster regional development then so be it. You do live in a federation don’t you? Public treasure does get spread around the union doesn’t it? In order to survive across multiple administrations a program should have broad support – and a sustainable transportation infrastructure giving access to lunar and deep space needs long-term funding. You are very sophisticated readers/contributors, but I think young people in engineering programs who have not had your life experience operating in public and private bureaucracies should be required to take courses in history, political theory and public administration.

  • Bob

    Something in that Chronicle article struck me as odd: ‘The space agency has spent $13.6 billion on the rocket so far.’ Has NASA really spent that much money on it (and with so little progress so far)? Seems a bit high…

  • Al Fansome

    Yes, the engineers are the right group to select the “implementation plan”. But this assumes that these same engineers do not ignore clear direction from their boss (the White House) about “policy priorities and goals”.

    Griffin totally ignored the clear direction from the White House that the specific goals were “security, economy and science”.

    We are all know paying for Griffin’s hubris.

    I say IGNORED because the ESAS did not measure “goodness” of the various options based on these 3 criteria specified by the White House. Instead Dr. Griffin ignored the White House policy measures, and substituted his own programmatic criteria as the right measures.

    If NASA had measured the options in terms of “economics, science and security” outputs, instead of the program manager criteria, NASA would have gotten a much different result. Griffin knew this.

    Why did Griffin do this? So, he could get the answer he wanted.

    ESAS was set up to be biased from Day One.

    Many at NASA HQ know this. In the first few months of Griffin’s term, at about the time that ESAS was beginning, Griffin allies were heard to tell people in NASA HQ “Griffin already knows the 90% answer. He is just waiting for everybody else to figure it out.”

    The Griffin friends know that Griffin came into the job with the “SRB as LV” answer. Everybody knows about the Planetary Society study. What has not been publicly reported though (yet) is that there is (reportedly) a presentation by Griffin from either the late 1980s or early 1990s that advocates for the Shuttle SRB as the new LV. I have not seen it yet, but two independent sources have mentioned this to me. It all makes sense to me.

    Again, ESAS was biased from Day One.

    FWIW,

    – Al

    PS — I consider the original article to be filled with “speculation”. Logsdon and Pace may be informed speculators, but it is still speculation. As is the speculation by the Houston Chronical reporter that Sen. Shelby is supporting the EELV over the Ares 1.

    “Politics is not rocket science, which is why rocket scientists do not understand politics.”

  • With the way gov’t is printing money and nationalization seems to be the buzz word. What’s the big deal! Go ahead build both systems. I would opt for the Ares first. The fact remains politics and rocket science don’t mix too well.

    Try something new like allowing gov’t owned lift systems to transition to the private sector instead of wasting time and money which gov’t seems to have cornered the market on lately.

  • Al Fansome

    BOB: Something in that Chronicle article struck me as odd: ‘The space agency has spent $13.6 billion on the rocket so far.’

    This statement is obviously incorrect.

    To a first order, this the total amount of money that has been spent (to date) by ESMD. The exact amount is easy to check as NASA’s budget docs are online. For example, the ESMD budget for FY08 is $3.14 Billion.

    Since ESMD is clearly spending money on many projects other than Ares 1 …

    Since the reporter got this wrong, the reader should be wary of trusting other things in the story.

    FWIW,

    – Al

  • I just wrote about this very issue yesterday, before the Chronicle article came out, although it’s not a big stretch to make the connection between the NASA-Pentagon-Ares issue and the delay in appointing a new administrator.

    It’s my thought that the appointment of a general may not be a bad idea. Everyone respects generals and it’s not a given that one would be parochial about using a military vehicle. Plus, two generals (Lew Allen, Pete Worden) have gone on to run NASA centers with great success. Someone at that level may have the clout to stand firm against the powerful interests involved and actually make the right choices for the right reasons.

  • PHILLIP GEORGE

    ESAS Study joke!

    I was a believe before I did alittle bit of research of my own.
    Why did old Admin. say before he was Admin that EELV’s were fine for launching people, but then later say that they were unsafe?

    Why has not NASA release the ALL the Appendixes to the ESAS Study?

    Griffen said the best solution would to have a 1 vircheal 2 launch solution to the moon–but that goes for a tiny vircheal with a hugh vircheal….

    Was not Ares meant to “Simple, Safe and Soon?’ When are we expecting Ares? How much might it cost and when?

    The list goes on and on…Ares needs to be cancelled!!!!

    This list goes on and on…

  • Pro-space Illinoisian

    What is this rubbish? I have a solution -> cancel the Ares program and forget the EELV! Go 100% for COTS and COTS-D. Let the private sector take over and NASA be a paying customer. Yes it is risky but NASA already have blown their chances too many times with X-30, X-33, etc. NASA is only good for robotic exploration, if nothing else…

  • richardb

    Pro-space,
    So designing and building the ISS doesn’t count as an accomplishment for NASA? Flying the shuttle for 28 years with a .98% reliability doesn’t count?
    Perhaps its ground breaking hypersonic program that transitioned hypersonic flight from theory to application?

    You need a little more perspective.

    Also, X-30 and probably the X-33 where political inspirations out of the Oval office, not from Nasa.

  • John Malkin

    The problem is congress kept cutting the money for these replacement programs. I would say previous admins of NASA blew it since they didn’t convince Congress to fund development of a replacement for Shuttle. Any kind of replacement including COTS… And Presidents, the Congress, Committees, Subcommittees blew it because they didn’t have a long term plan. Now we are between a rock and hard place and COTS is too risky (short term) for the Nation IF we want to satisfy our obligations to our International partners.

    I don’t believe that EELV could be ready before Ares. And I don’t think anyone meant to say that EELV was disastrously dangerous and sure death for any astronauts. However look at the Challenger disaster and the fact that the SRBs kept going after the external tank blew up. They even continued upward until the auto-destruct. Personally, I would rather ride on top of an SRB than any of the current EELV configurations.

  • John,
    “I don’t believe that EELV could be ready before Ares.”

    Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just your opinion? Because so far, Ares-I availability has been slipping at about one year per year of calendar time. Also, a lot depends on how exactly you use EELVs. If you have NASA make extensive modifications to them, and make them able to be an exact stand-in for Ares-I, then yeah that could take a while. They still have a leg-up on Ares-I in that they’re actually flying, and the teams that made them have built successful launch vehicles within the past 30 years. But, going EELV would be much better if NASA did it more like how they do unmanned launches–create a spec, do competitive bids for flights on a periodic basis, and let the EELVs (and any other new entrants like SpaceX) bid on how they want to meet the requirements.

    “And I don’t think anyone meant to say that EELV was disastrously dangerous and sure death for any astronauts. However look at the Challenger disaster and the fact that the SRBs kept going after the external tank blew up. They even continued upward until the auto-destruct. Personally, I would rather ride on top of an SRB than any of the current EELV configurations.”

    That’s actually part of the problem. There’s no way to shut off an SRB, even if for safety purposes you want to. There’s a reason why they assume that the LAS for the stick would only save the crew in 80% of the LOM cases, while for the EELVs they assume a 90% survival rate. Having a big, high thrust, high acceleration stage, pushing you through a much higher max-Q at much lower altitudes, that you have no way to stop short of detonating a linear shaped-charge, makes the launch escape environment significantly worse.

    ~Jon

  • Tom D

    It’s looking increasingly likely that Ares 1 will not be canceled, if only due to inertia. I’m not thrilled by this, but what comes next? Will the rest of the Constellation programs continue forward as well? Development of the new CSSS spacesuit is starting, but to the best of my understanding Ares 5 and Altair are just study contracts so far. What if Ares 5 is canceled? Could NASA still go to the moon? Could they send a manned mission to an asteroid?

  • Vladislaw

    “What has not been publicly reported though (yet) is that there is (reportedly) a presentation by Griffin from either the late 1980s or early 1990s that advocates for the Shuttle SRB as the new LV.”-Al Fansome

    I believe you are refering to First Lunar Outpost (FLO) [opens a new window]

    Actually, in 1992, the shuttle had been flying for over 10 years and Griffen actually didn’t want to use RSRB’s at all. F1 engines for the core and the strap on boosters were also liquid rockets with F1’s.

    That was one of my first comments about the current design, why the switch to the SRB’s and was it the military that didn’t want to abandon the large solid rocket motor industry capability and or the Utah vote.. Just never made sense to me why he would switch.

  • Commenter

    It’s looking increasingly likely that Ares 1 will not be canceled, if only due to inertia….

    However could you possibly have come to this conclusion? If anything, the pressure is mounting to stop the train wreck in a making, or at the very least pause and reassess the difference options. I hear more and more every day about various groups coming forward to challenge the current direction. Besides, Ares I is not as far along as NASA would have you believe. The program is still sloshing through various versions and derivatives of PDR, which right away should tell you that something is indeed rotten in Denmark.

  • richardb

    “I hear more and more every day about various groups coming forward to challenge the current direction. ”

    Which groups?

    I am in no position to judge the merits with Ares I so I have no opinion. What does bother me is people in Direct claiming that serious people in Nasa or the government wished to stand up against Ares I but the Griffin Nasa would punish them. Well he’s gone. Lets here the unvarnished truth from people that will put their names out there with their criticisms, If its as badly botched as some say, this should be a short and sweet burial of Ares I.

  • GMG

    I think the Obama administration is trying to look at the broader picture, somthing Griffin refused to do. From an overall long term government cost perspective, it makes sense to fund one set of launch vehicles for NASA and the military, not two. Using the already developed Delta IV and Atlas V for both military and civilian missions, manned and unmanned, will be less expensive in the long run. Higher volume = lower cost per flight.

    I’d also like to see the Shuttle C concept revived as a heavy lift alternative to the Ares V. Not as grand, but a lot more sensible in these days of tight budgets and other priorities. Maybe the military would want to use it too.

  • richardb

    GMG, how can you say Griffin didn’t look at “the broader picture”? He had ESAS guidance endorsed by the President and Congress. ESAS is the only long term road map Nasa ever had.

    Given the completely different requirements of the military compared to Nasa, I think it would be an interesting conversation on forcing them to use the same launchers. Isn’t the military aiming for ORS, ie fast replenishment of much smaller satellites using much smaller launchers than even EELV? The last time the military and Nasa took your advice, the Shuttle was given cross range capabilities that Nasa didn’t want, the military never used and added cost and complexity to the shuttle.

    Shuttle C, wasn’t that buried decades ago? Why dredge it up now? Why not resurrect the Saturn V?

    Finally, did you have a straight face as you typed “overall long term government cost perspective”? After Obama and Congress just rewarded themselves and supporters with well over 1 trillion dollars(counting interest payments) of nearly pure pork? That alone made your post a howler.

  • Given the completely different requirements of the military compared to Nasa, I think it would be an interesting conversation on forcing them to use the same launchers.

    Their requirements are the same — to get hardware into orbit reliably.

    Isn’t the military aiming for ORS, ie fast replenishment of much smaller satellites using much smaller launchers than even EELV?

    In theory, but not in practice.

    The last time the military and Nasa took your advice, the Shuttle was given cross range capabilities that Nasa didn’t want, the military never used and added cost and complexity to the shuttle.

    It’s always a profound logical error to draw a grand conclusion from a single data point. This is called the fallacy of hasty generalization.

  • richardb

    Rand Simberg, the military doesn’t launch people to live and work in space. Nasa does. That’s a fundamental difference.

    Rand its always a profound logical error to ignore history in pursuit of your own agenda. Someone is advocating a marriage of Nasa and DOD. There is history between the two and in one very large case where Nasa’s manned requirements where blended with the military’s unmanned requirements, we got higher cost, weight and complexity and then a divorce. That one data point started in the early 70’s and is still flying in 2009.

    So you’re saying move along, nothing of interest there. That strikes me as a fallacy in pure form.

  • That’s a fundamental difference.

    It’s not a sufficient difference to justify Ares I.

    Rand its always a profound logical error to ignore history in pursuit of your own agenda.

    I agree, not that it’s relevant to anything that I wrote.

    Someone is advocating a marriage of Nasa and DOD.

    No one is doing so. That was just <a href=”http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/media-botches-story-on-obamas-nasa-plans/” target=”_ “clueless reporting. And it’s NASA, not “Nasa.”

    There is history between the two and in one very large case where Nasa’s manned requirements where blended with the military’s unmanned requirements, we got higher cost, weight and complexity and then a divorce. That one data point started in the early 70’s and is still flying in 2009.

    Yes, that is all true. Yet your logical fallacy remains.

    So you’re saying move along, nothing of interest there.

    No, I’m not saying that at all. In addition to being illogical, you seem to have a problem with reading comprehension.

  • Sorry, screwed up the HTML. That should be “That was just clueless reporting.”

  • TQ

    There’s a very good reason to dredge up the Shuttle C, and that ‘s because it is a ‘quick and dirty’ heavy launch system with minimal R&D cost that recycles a vastly larger amount of actual, existing and functional STS infrastructure than Ares I-V…if NASA had given Shuttle C a green-light immediately after Columbia, the agency would have saved itself many of the current engineering woes associated with Constellation.

    YES, I know the performance specs are not as dazzling as Ares, and YES, you would need multiple launches for a moonshot along with a man-rated Atlas V or Delta, but Shuttle C is, simply by its inherent design, MUCH closer to reality than Ares. Its a far more pragmatic start, a foundation with which to build superior, DIRECT-style heavy launchers. You can even keep Ares V R&D going for the long-term and still have Shuttle C.

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