Robert G. Oler

As I (and others) have pointed out the entire notion of safety and Ares is really the last card that supporters of a government run program have to offer…nothing else “works” (ie cost/schedule/etc).

aside from that, the notion of NASA human spaceflight being the “safety” gurus is almost laughable.

What competence NASA had in human spaceflight it lost somewhere between STS 1 and Challenger.

Oddly it is not the hardware which let them down…it was the management. And Management is summation of all safety in just about all organizations particularly in human spaceflight.

Robert G. Oler

Yup.

Isn’t it depressing? Because the best way to lose few people is to do nothing at all…

There is risk-aversion by NASA, which is one thing, and risk aversion by Congress, which is another. The agency is risk averse because if they screw up it makes them look incompetent. Congress is risk averse because, as you say, it just isn’t that important. Congress could tell NASA to go ahead and boldly reach out, with due regard for crew safety. But that’s not what Congress is doing. Their metric for success is how few people we lose.

NASA does have some mechanisms, and there are whole organizations charged with doing so; but your general point is taken. That is why one of the basic NASA reforms that are needed is almost back-to-the-future; more of a NACA-style enterprise that has the explicit job of nurturing, serving, and even creating competitive space industries. The way NACA generally did it, the prime mode of work was not by contract to one winner in each area; it was more generating entire technical databases freely available to U.S. industry (among doing other things, some of them non-technical).

For example, there have been discussions in recent weeks between U.S. space companies (including entrepreneurial) and engineers from the NASA Centers, USAF, and FAA, as to how the government can help the creation of an economically-sustainable commercial reusable launch vehicle industry. One of the common messages more than one company gave is that there is a real need to conducted integrated technology demonstration vehicles – simply put, X-vehicles – again, since that is very difficult for individual companies to do. But even in doing these vehicles, they can be done in the ‘wrong’ way: If NASA continues its old cost-plus, pick-a-winner contracting ways, there will undoubtedly continue to be impediments to the free dissemination of information to help the industry as a whole. If the government owns the X-vehicle, though, as a demo and test facility, it can (more) freely make the results available to advance industry.

If American industry is to maintain – and in an increasing number of cases, regain – its competitive lead in space, NASA’s basic way of doing business is in need of basic reforms.