Congress

A tale of two senators

In an op-ed Friday in the Ogden Standard-Examiner, Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT) attacks the White House’s new direction for NASA, following a line of argument similar to what he presented at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week. This included his belief that the Ares rocket was a tried and tested vehicle:

I was completely shocked at a recent congressional hearing to hear Bolden claim that the reliability of the Ares rocket was “zero.” He has somehow managed to come to the conclusion that the Ares rocket, despite four years of development and a successful test flight, is on equal technological footing with “commercial” rockets that don’t even exist. I have a hard time believing that.

“I don’t buy what the president is selling,” he concluded. “I stand with Utahns in their opposition to Obama’s plan to cancel these critical programs.”

It’s not clear, though, if Utahns stand with him in general. As the Washington Post reports today, Bennett, running for reelection this year, is in jeopardy of losing the Republican nomination at the state convention next weekend. Bennett is in third place, according to a Mason-Dixon poll published earlier this week. Mark Lee, the current frontrunner, could gain the nomination if he gets at least 60 percent of the delegates at the convention; Bennett’s best hope is to come in second with at least 40 percent of the votes, forcing a primary in June.

While Bennett is facing an electoral setback, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has rebounded from hers and is focusing on NASA, the Houston Chronicle noted today. Hutchison, who lost the Republican primary for Texas governor to incumbent Rick Perry two months ago, is now trying to build support for legislation she introduced just after that defeat to study a shuttle extension, including at a hearing later this month by the Senate Commerce Committee. “I think this fight has been a good vehicle for her to get up off the canvas and start counter-punching after her setback back home,” SMU political scientist Cal Jillson told the Chronicle. Whether that fight will be successful, though, remains to be seen.

61 comments to A tale of two senators

  • Artemus

    Bolden’s comments about vehicle reliability were bombastic and self-serving. He said that Ares I, Taurus 2 and Falcon 9 all had reliabilities of zero, because none have flown. He said that only “predictions” of reliability exist.

    Predictions of reliability are all that matter. Past performance certainly factors into such predictions, but when choosing which vehicle to fly, all you have to go on are predictions. The whole engineering enterprise could be summed up as generating an acceptable prediction of success for the next flight. Even if an identical design has flown 100 out of 100 times successfully, there is still a chance of failure.

    If every vehicle that hasn’t flown has an equal “reliability”, then there is no way to distinguish between competing designs. If you use that logic, you might as well fly your payloads on Snoopy’s doghouse; it’s a lot cheaper than any of the rockets Bolden mentioned.

  • Bennett

    Artemus wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 10:47 am

    “Bolden’s comments about vehicle reliability were bombastic and self-serving.”

    Why is that? Since none of the designs have ever flown, his statement is accurate. Note that he didn’t lump Atlas V or Delta IV into this group, which have flown successfully.

    The big difference is that there is no Ares 1 ready to test fly, but a Falcon 9 is waiting for launch clearance. When the SpaceX LV is deemed “reliable” it is a far better LV for the task at hand than the Ares 1 and we save billions of dollars by not developing it further.

  • Mark R. Whittington

    Poor planning on the part of the Obama administration seems to have given Hutchison an opening.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Artemus wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 10:47 am

    Predictions of reliability are all that matter…

    not so fast. Predictions of reliability based on performance are one thing, predictions of reliability based on paper studies are quite another.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    the KBH effort is futile. Slowly but surely the possibilities of restarting shuttle ops are slipping away. Robert G. Oler

  • Vladislaw

    What was the predicited reliablity of the STS? LOC was supposed to be 1 – 1000?

    I don’t know how reliable the predictions are.

  • Eric Sterner

    Bolden’s comments are kind of silly. You might as well say that its reliability rating is 100%, since it has never failed. (OK, you braniacs on the bulletin board, what is 0 divided by 0? Zero, or infinite? This IR major wants to know.) It’s a poor way of making a valid point: much of Ares performance/reliability/ops cost etc. is theoretical, whereas we have real world data on Delta and Atlas, both of which have very good numbers of late. Of course, neither version is crew-rated, so the changes to the rockets would necessitate theoretical modeling of reliability until you had a lot of flight history behind you and could update the models. Lo and behold, those models would use a methodology similar (but not equivalent) to the models used for Ares. In any event, Bolden’s comments strike me as little more than a cheap shot at a rocket he’s trying to cancel, but about at the level of sophistication to be expected from our political system.

    I don’t understand why Hutchison keeps wasting her time, energy, political capital, and reputation on pushing the shuttle boulder up that hill. It’s not going to happen and it’s distracting her from a more strategic battle on the future of the space program.

  • HotShotX

    Bolden’s comment stands. Neither the Taurus II, Falcon 9, nor Ares I have flown.

    Sen. Bennett’s comment about “commercial rockets not even existing” seems rather ignorant, as he clearly is ignoring the fact that the Falcon 9 is currently awaiting launch in roughly 10 days. Will it succeed? I don’t know, lets runs down the checklist, shall we?

    Commercial? – Check.
    Rocket? – Check. (It is deemed a rocket unless it explodes, then it is deemed a bomb.)
    Exist? – Check.

    Therefore, Sen. Bennett needs a reality check.

    Secondly, neither the Taurus II nor the Ares I has flown, period. If you want to argue that the Ares I-X was a *real* flight of the Ares I, then you have to accept that the Taurus II has flown as many times as the Taurus XL has (6 out of 8), the Falcon 9 has flown as many times as the Falcon 1 (2 out of 5), and the Ares I has flown successfully 262 out of 264 times.

    Two for every shuttle flight.

    ~HotShotX
    P.S.: But we don’t count like that, because they are different rockets, different designs.

  • I’m pretty sure that both Atlas V and Delta 4 are existing. With reliability records. I also hope that Senator Bennett is looking for a new job come next weekend.

  • Ben Joshua

    The senators from Utah and Texas are posturing for the home crowd, plain and simple. Politicians do that, from both major parties.

    The FY2011 budget represents a hefty, complex transition. Pain and political posturing are always woven in, no matter how smoothly or awkwardly managed the transition.

    Shuttle cancellation was decided years ago. The vector on that is pretty wide now.
    (The cost to re-assemble the shuttle industrial base is huge, and becomes larger each month.)

    Senator Bennett may or may not know the extent to which a shuttle SRB and Ares-1 are different. There are plenty of voters, however, who see the Ares-1 powerpoint slides, or TV news animations, and think, “Oh. You put an Orion on top of an SRB, and off you go.” They would be shocked to find out the development budget and schedule, and something called an “upper stage” that needs to happen.

    No doubt this is a wrenching change. Best case, NASA is freed up to develop next generation technology, in propulsion, robotics, life support and the rest. BEO is not around the corner with either plan, but advanced technology makes it more of a sure thing.

    This change has been building to a tipping point for a very long time. To see how long, just read through the Apollo Applications Program study on a Venus flyby, using Apollo / S-IVB adaptations. Shuttle / ISS have had a lot of “gee whiz wow” moments (as well as tragic moments), but NASA planners had a very different direction in mind with AAP, back in the late 60s and early 70s.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Eric Sterner wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 1:04 pm

    KBH is doing what she is doing because it plays well with the home crowd, most of which dont have a clue of the difficulties of her position…so when the effort flames out she can say “I tried”.

    As for the safety margin on Constellation…why not take cheap shots at it…it is a house of cards

    Robert G. Oler

  • By the way, I thought I saw an article over here similar to one at TSR that was dispelling any China factor in the world’s lunar program outlook. That would be surprising to me, since we know China has 3 major missions to the moon this decade, with thier manned program’s emblem have footprints going across the moon. Someone had mentioned that being interested in and listening to the space officials of China is like being interested in and listening to the rocket scientists of the vfr in Germany before Hitler suddenly gave them some other plans and activities. And really, its like in America, where sudden policy shifts can come from above, as we are seeing. Of course we love the people (and especially the students) of China, but why listen to a totalitarian, repressive government with such a strange porpaganda agency? Anyway, we know that nations will be going to the moon, and competition is often a great thing.

  • The Ares 1-X proves a lot and shouldn’t be so endlessly attacked. It proves out the power and potential of the complete Ares 1 booster. Falcon 9 thrust for eventual flight…130,000 lbs. Ares 1 full up complete booster flight thrust…3.6 MILLION LBS.

    Falcon vs. Ares1X is kind of like Bambi vs Godzilla. That’s why Burt Rutan has stated that he has had hesitations about the disbanding of NASA hsf to put us back at the level of (Mercury/) Gemini, which is the current level of, as he said, “the commercial guys.” And Falcon 9 has suffered continuous delays one after another.

    But I’m sure we’re all hoping for a great SpaceX success, and maybe Spacex will end up being the crew liftng portion of The Return to the moon!

  • someguy

    Kelly wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 7:23 pm:

    “Falcon 9 thrust for eventual flight…130,000 lbs. Ares 1 full up complete booster flight thrust…3.6 MILLION LBS.”

    I don’t think you are making a correct comparison. That’s 130.000 lbs per Merlin engine . Falcon 9 has 9 such engines, so Falcon 9 would be more around 1.17 million lbs (130,000 x 9).

    So, I don’t think it is as Bambi/Godzilla as you think it is. And there’s always Falcon 9 Heavy.

  • The Ares 1-X proves a lot and shouldn’t be so endlessly attacked. It proves out the power and potential of the complete Ares 1 booster.

    No, it didn’t. It only had four segments.

    Falcon vs. Ares1X is kind of like Bambi vs Godzilla. That’s why Burt Rutan has stated that he has had hesitations about the disbanding of NASA hsf to put us back at the level of (Mercury/) Gemini, which is the current level of, as he said, “the commercial guys.”

    Burt was taken out of context (he was referring to the ability of commercial to get humans beyond LEO, not to LEO), but people keep repeating this lie. And no one is disbanding NASA human spaceflight.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 7:23 pm

    The Ares 1-X proves a lot and shouldn’t be so endlessly attacked. It proves out the power and potential of the complete Ares 1 booster. Falcon 9 thrust for eventual flight…130,000 lbs. Ares 1 full up complete booster flight thrust…3.6 MILLION LBS.

    Falcon 9 wont get off the ground with 130K of thrust…nice try but you need to do some research.

    As for the Ares 1x same problem do some more research and learn some things

    Robert G. Oler

  • Anyone who thinks SpaceX is going to launch in 10 days is just as ignorant as these politicians. “No Earlier Than” does not tell you when a rocket will launch, it tells you when a rocket will *not* launch.. and representatives from the company, including Gwynne Shotwell have said a launch towards the end of May, or the start of June are more *likely*. But they may just delay another 3 months too.

    I’m a big fan of SpaceX but facts are facts.. don’t go propagating false expectations.

  • Set it straight

    People can say the same about you RGO. You don’t listen to anyone that works for Ares and knows what Ares IX really is. It goes in one ear and out your %^& as something different.

  • Studying Both Sides

    Wow, that was rude. Both sides have valid points. However, to dismiss one for another isn’t logical without knowing and comparing all facts.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Set it straight wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 9:05 pm

    People can say the same about you RGO. You don’t listen to anyone that works for Ares and knows what Ares IX really is.

    when you can point out something technical about the rocket that I got wrong let me know.

    you are happy to believe that the 1X launch was worth 1/2 billion give or take a million or two…but it is hard to make believe that 1X was a full up test of 1

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Trent Waddington wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 8:35 pm

    I wouldnt be surprised either way. The big deal is if they can get the FTS working and approved.

    If it is three months away and the FTS is not the reason then they have some problems that they are not shelling…on the other hand I wouldnt be surprised if they just buttoned up and gave it a go.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Aerospace Engineer

    Concerning the Ares 1-X program and Ares 1, according to logic displayed on this blog, the Saturn 1B was useless because it wasn’t a Saturn 5.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Aerospace Engineer wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 10:21 pm

    Concerning the Ares 1-X program and Ares 1, according to logic displayed on this blog, the Saturn 1B was useless because it wasn’t a Saturn 5…

    I missed it…they are now going to launch people on the 1X? is this the new NASA suborbital vehicle?

    Robert G. Oler

  • Sorry about the underdone thrust value, I think I was thinking of the only flown one, the Falcon 1.

    But I don’t know, I feel that the endless massive attacks on Ares are part of some huge negative spin. I was just looking at the great blog archives of the NASA workers on the moving forward of the Ares 1X, about building up to an exciting new launch. Maybe your cost figures of 1 or 2 billion are just like Augustine’s terrible statements saying 6 billion per Ares launch (which included tons of other things) right? Which makes me think sometimes of accusations of big intentional distortion against Constellation. I remember the Houston Chronicle after the launch, “NASA shoots for new era” was less than 4 inches on the left of the front page, while ‘Phillips Conoco has new less is more plan’ took up 10″ with bold type on the right. Anyway, you’re including all the design, the development, the pad in your Ares 1X figure, right? Things that are part of the start up. And now I’m thinking more about how we have billions into it, and will have to pay billions to break all the contracts, and about the fact that, yes the new NASA proposals could end up ending our hsf program as the 15 years go along, thus eventually giving everything away to commercial investors efforts, and about this possible intentional ulterior side of the proposals to give things to these new investors, and also thinking about the pro-Ares community. But I’m not going to think about that much more because I’ll end up flavoring people’s views of the upcoming wechoosethemoon.info (my views in no way express or represent the site). But to think it was an exciting new rocket.

    I don’t care if the 5th segment was there, that’s not something massive to work, and I sure don’t care about a nick on whatever part that was and other maeningless glitches — that’s what a test is for.

    So, about the figures on Falcon VS Ares 1X. Alright, nitpick my details! Lets put it this way. Falcon 9 – if it finally launches –and we certainly can’t throw in Falcon 9 Heavy unless you want to do Ares V — but here are the figures…

    The way tons of internet detractors kept hacking and assaulting it, we figured the upper stage would have been out of styrofoam. It was thick steel.

    Falcon 9 optimistic payload about 56,000 lbs.
    Ares 1X FLOWN payload about 180,000 LBS.

  • Aerospace Engineer

    The first four Saturn 1B launches were unmanned – and were used to test Saturn Apollo hardware. It was a stepping stone to Saturn 5, much as Ares 1-X is a stepping stone to Ares 1.

    But since Ares 1-X isn’t Ares 1, it’s no good. And while we’re trashing Ares 1-X, Ares 1, Ares 5, and Orion, let’s just trash the whole NASA human spaceflight program, replace it with buzzwords and unproven bit players and declare victory.

    Brilliant!

  • Bennett

    Kelly wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 10:29 pm

    “Ares 1X FLOWN payload about 180,000 LBS.”

    90 Tons? The 1-X lifted 90 Tons?

    According to NASA “In addition to the vehicle’s primary mission — carrying crews of four to six astronauts to Earth orbit — Ares I may also use its 25-ton payload capacity to deliver resources and supplies to the International Space Station.”

    Okay, correct me, but isn’t 25 tons 50,000 lbs?

  • Robert G. Oler

    Aerospace Engineer wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 10:37 pm

    this is clearly a case of apples to oranges…and it is not even close.

    Saturn 1B flew in an era where nothing like that had flown before. NASA never had really built a rocket, the J-2 had never flown and while the bundle that is the 1B had flown separately they had never flown together.

    At the end of the testing was a viable booster that went on to on its own config do a lot of human flying.

    1X was parts masquerading as a rocket. The SRB’s have flown, the quidance system was nothing related to the 1, the second stage and “payload” was all inert and the rocket has no future in any config to fly humans. The 1 uses a completely different SRB…

    Worse the entire effort took about 1/2 billion dollars. One might could argue that was worth a full up test…a 5 segment SRB with the right nozzle on it, a J2 (even a straight J2) with something “shaped” like the Orion…go into orbit using flight avionics.

    Yeah I could see that being a valuable test. Otherwise it was just an expensive stunt that yielded some data.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Kelly wrote @ May 1st, 2010 at 10:29 pm

    we have spent billions on Ares and it will take billions to shut it down, but it will take tens of billions to continue.

    Ares 1X had no payload. at least in the sense of the word…its all on the bottom of the Atlantic as reef material Robert G. Oler

  • Curtis Quick

    Kelly,

    You are also forgetting that Ares 1X was a suborbital rocket. Falcon 9 is designed to go to orbit. Thta is an enormous difference! The cost to develop Ares 1 so far has been approximately $9 billion. The cost for building and launching Ares 1X was approximately $450 million. These number are magnitudes greater than SpaceX has spent on developing the falcon program and building individual rockets. It is not so much the capability of the rocket that comes into question here; really it is the capability of an organization to build a system to LEO that is affordable. SpaceX could fail ten times in a row and still spend ten times less what was spent developing Ares 1. Even if Ares1 was possible and worked great, it would be too expensive to operate.

    Honestly, to win the space game (to open the market wide to develop the infrastructure for a space-based future) we need to have a launch development and operation workforce in the hundreds, not thousands for any given system. We simply cannot afford so many working on a rocket as NASA spends on Ares 1. At this cost, even success is failure.

    Curtis Quick

  • Ben Joshua

    With the loss of Constellation, the loss of jobs and the loss of a NASA / contracter way of doing things, it is understandable that people would shift from a satisfying, secure life to a fearful, reactive state of mind. The change is, after all, a big one.

    Remember the stages of grief? Expect to see –

    Shock / Pain / Denial
    Anger
    Negotiating (Plan B, Ares IV, shuttle extension, SDV, deep-sixing ISS, Ares “elements”)
    Depression
    And finally, acceptance, and getting on with things

    Constellation true believers will feel justified in their reaction until “plan 2011” begins to bear fruit.

    I hope the FY 2011 plan represents a move away from endless cost-plus development, toward efforts to reduce the cost of launch, advanced tech and actual flight articles demonstrating capability.

    When we see –

    commercial providers supplying ISS,
    sub-orbital providers flying ticket-paying customers,
    a robotic probe arrive at Mars in weeks instead of months (might be awhile),
    and two or three new ways for astronauts to take that 9 minute lift into orbit,
    and make their way to ISS or Bigelow,

    then we can start to calm down and make our own way back to the same team. Of course there will always be politics, what-ifs, if-onlys and shoulda, woulda, coulda. Personally, I feel nostalgia for what Apollo might have turned into, had it continued to evolve, back in the 70s. That was then. Plan 2011 is now, and has real possibilities. I hope some of them are realized.

  • Constellation true believers will feel justified in their reaction until “plan 2011” begins to bear fruit.

    True.

    However, what if “Plan 2011″ does not bear fruit?

  • However, what if “Plan 2011″ does not bear fruit?

    Irrelevant. Even if FY2010 continues via CR, Constellation will never be funded properly and will die a slow, painful death.

    NASA’s portion of FY2011 might die as well, but it has a better chance of surviving than not. What is continuously ignored on these spaceflight blogs is that there are more states with no connections to NASA than states with and their votes will be in the majority.

    I’m with Mr. Oler all the way on this.

  • Bennett

    With all due respect Bill, we have to get folks to understand that “Moon 2020″ was a pipe dream. The NASA plan had Ares V lifting Altair and the modules for the lunar base up to geo to join up with Orion.

    Ares 1 wasn’t going to be ready to fly until 2017-18 and Ares 5 until 2025-30. And this would have taken all of NASAs budget, even the funds to develop and build Altair.

    Moon 2020 is dead, and it wasn’t President Obama that killed it.

    Believe me, I would love it if Ares 1 was ready to fly, with Ares 5 a few years from flight. No one would be talking of switching direction, we would be cheering. But cost-plus NASA, as it has been for 30 years, simply doesn’t work. It’s time to let ULA, Space-X, and Orbital take up the duties of LEO.

    Do you think NASA can’t do the job of Flex Path? Why would you have so little faith in what is a great resource of science and technology development? Let’s get on with putting together the technology to really have a HSF program.

  • Al Fansome

    While we like to focus on the small segment of opposition — coming from (at most) 5 states — more people are figuring out the upside part of the opportunity.

    I was struck by the conclusion of a FLORIDA Today article.

    “Senior administration officials liken the shift to commercial crew transportation to the guaranteed airmail contracts the government awarded in the 1920s to stimulate growth of the airline industry.

    Musk likens it to the development of the Transcontinental Railroad, which connected rail lines between the Atlantic and the Pacific for the first time. That opened up the American West.

    Still others say the Obama plan will lead to a day — some time in the 21st century — when everybody can fly.

    “Over time, this is going to open up space to large numbers of people,” said Miles O’Brien, former CNN science and technology correspondent and a member of the NASA Advisory Council.

    “We’ve only had 500 people go into space in 50 years. That’s not enough. We should be doing 500 a month, or 500 a week. And that’s never going to happen if we don’t break this tyranny of government control of space,” O’Brien said. “NASA needs to step aside a little here and let the commercial sector flourish.”

    It is not necessarily a big deal when early adopters big ideas like Newt and Dana get it. But when Obama gets it, and Miles gets it too, something big is happening.

    It looks like even Florida Today may be getting it. That is a big deal.

    The future looks bright.

    FWIW,

    – Al

  • Robert G. Oler

    Bill White wrote @ May 2nd, 2010 at 8:58 am

    However, what if “Plan 2011″ does not bear fruit?..

    then we can all go and start enjoying some other part of national policy to argue about.

    What supporters of the POR dont get is that, in my view, the national human space effort with it, is dying. Mike Griffin said this about the POR

    “”I wonder about that sometimes because Apollo made me pretty proud to be an American. That drive has sustained a couple of generations of space professionals. So, today we have a space policy choice confronting us. Do we want to do innovative, game-changing technologies? Or, do we want to do something that might look a little bit like Apollo?'”

    the problem is that the “we” that might want to redo Apollo is not the nation. On another thread someone is trying to bring back JFK’s speech and thinking that everyone would rally around it like they did in 1962.

    The reality is that the American people dont give a tinkers damn about going back to the Moon…and as the effort has exploded in cost, it might excite space professionals because it keeps them employed but the rest of the American people only will care more and more about the cost…they wont bear it.

    We have to come up with some effort that the American people can look at and say “this is important” and “this bears fruit worth the cost” and “we can see the results of this in a short time”…

    if the new program cannot work then as the budget situation gets worse and worse human space flight at 10 million dollars a day per person doing the equivalent of blowing soap bubbles in space…is going to die.

    Robert G. Oler

  • What I want are additional choices.

    While I would voice an emphatic “No!” to Griffin’s version of Constellation (Ares 1 and Ares V as proposed by Griffin),

    FY2011 as drafted won’t bear much fruit, either. At least IMHO.

    The “airmail” analogies are particularly silly since air mail was created to replace a pre-existing substantial postal system based on the railroads. And based on the fabled Pony Express before that.

    Space and the transcontinental railway analogy? Also silly. Prior to the invention of the railroad, large numbers of people were already traveling to/from California and the US East Coast. The railroads were built to satisfy an existing demand, not create demand where none existed.

    Kill the PoR? Cancel Ares1 & AresV?

    Yes, I support that.

    Extend ISS to 2020? Well, okay.

    But let us make sure we have sufficient assured logistics to ISS to allow full utilization rather than throwing some dice and then praying that all-commercial will get the job done.

  • amightywind

    One of the most shameful aspects of the Obamaspace proposal is that it is a direct political assault on red state America. But after the healthcare cramdown red state America has decided ‘no more’ for Obama leftist radicalism. Sadly NASA is caught in the middle. In four years of normal program development Ares I/Orion would be nearly complete. Now we will be faced with a costly and time consuming restart in 2012, and no progress until then, unless congress can seize the program back now from Garver and Holdren!

  • Robert G. Oler

    Bill White wrote @ May 2nd, 2010 at 10:41 am

    Bill. with all due respect the airmail contract in my view is appropriate.

    I am pretty uncomfortable with any analogies on spaceflight to almost any other thing in American history because in reality its very very different. Settling the West is not settling space.

    But where the analogy works for me, is that the current effort is an attempt to break a government “dam” that has grown in human spaceflight.

    Imagine it is July 20, 1969 and after a Tear filled Walter Cronkite and Wally S regain themselves, you or I come from the future and they look at us and ask us to describe what happened. Do you think that they would believe that today human spaceflight in the US is still a government entitlement, that there is essentially NO private effort in human spaceflight; that government policy has not only been concentrated on keeping “government alive” it has in fact focused on squashing any attempt to build private infrastructure.

    I was a child but alive and watching when that happened and the future “to me” looked more like Pan Am taking Heywood Floyd to a lunar base…today the best we would hope for is that he would be one of six or eight who get to go to the Moon maybe in two decades after spending another 100 billion or so dollars.

    The concept of pushing NASA aside and allowing innovation and ingenuity to start is essential

    Robert G. Oler

  • amightywind

    Holy smokes! I knew the new NASA leadership was corrupt, but…

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471204575210102614943536.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

    He cannot survive. The fed worker bloated salary/benefits controversy will be a huge election year issue. Look for federal salaries to be releveled and pensions to become self-directed with the next congress.

  • Robert G. Oler wrote @ May 2nd, 2010 at 10:55 am

    But where the analogy works for me, is that the current effort is an attempt to break a government “dam” that has grown in human spaceflight.

    An attempt? Yes, indeed. But one which will fail because it seeks to incorporate NewSpace into NASA.

    What NASA needs is a genuine competitor. A non-NASA competitor.

    Archimedes famously said “Give me a place to stand and I shall move the world.”

    Breaking the NASA monospony is indeed a vital undertaking however there may not be a place to stand within the United States that provides sufficient leverage to achieve the goal we both desire.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Bill White wrote @ May 2nd, 2010 at 11:16 am

    Bill. I dont think that NASA HSF needs a competitor…I think that NASA HSF needs to die…just completely go away because I dont think that it has any merit whatsoever.

    Anything that consumes 6 billion or so a year, to keep single digits of people in orbit but tens of thousands employed keeping those single digits in orbit but does nothing that produces value for that cost is valueless.

    I really have a harder and harder time seeing how those who support the POR can in this environment advocate tying up the money but also the talent in doing well nothing.

    I advocate spending that 6 billion or so on HSF…but I have seen ways that 10 billion spent wisely changes our energy equation enormously.

    We are I think coming to a time when we are going to have to make enormously difficult choices about every penny spent on the federal government AND what that government does. I dont see how Constellation survives in any form.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Vladislaw

    Robert wrote:

    “you are happy to believe that the 1X launch was worth 1/2 billion give or take a million or two…but it is hard to make believe that 1X was a full up test of 1″

    What is so amazing and never mentioned, the full up Ares I was supposed to cost 120 million per launch, how was the test 4 times the amount of the full run up, hell half the Ares Ix was dummy hardward and plywood.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Vladislaw wrote @ May 2nd, 2010 at 11:55 am

    good point.

    if the 120 number could be met even with the qualifiers attached to it (marginal cost etc) to mimic Ed Boland “I will eat my hat”.

    NASA is really never a straight answer when it comes to the cost of anything. In the commercial world (or even the military one) cost are cost…but when you get to NASA no. Take the shuttle…only at NASA would someone do as John Shannon did here come on and say “the shuttle cost X.Y billion for the first one and then you get X number after that for free”.

    This is one problem with letting NASA manage vehicles carrying humans right now…they never can give a straight answer about the cost. In reality they probably dont actually know them.

    But Ares was on track to doing what every NASA project in HSF has done since Apollo…get more not less expensive.

    again nice point

    Robert G. Oler

  • The Man

    direct political assault on red state America. But after the healthcare cramdown red state America has decided ‘no more’ for Obama leftist radicalism. Sadly NASA is caught in the middle.

    That is indeed a might wind coming out your rear.

    NASA created these problems, Obama is simply solving them.

  • Ben Joshua

    What if “Plan 2011″ does not bear fruit?

    This question pre-supposes that Constellation surely would have borne fruit, despite its unsustainability, on more fronts than you can shake a dozen sticks at.

    Snark aside, the question has been asked before.

    X-15 folks, who had their own pretty good ideas about piloting a vehicle into orbit, half-expected an Atlas to explode during the Mercury program.

    Some of the anti-LOR folks thought it was just plain nuts to try and operate two discrete spacecraft in lunar orbit.

    I hope the new way forward, however wrenching at the moment, brings with it some pluses:

    One advantage of FY 2011 is, instead of gambling “all-in” on one mammoth long term development, several initiatives will be funded, raising the probability of success, and seeding a new space economy.

    Several commercial cargo / crew efforts are now underway. At least three advanced propulsion ideas are being researched, offering an eventual shorter transit to Mars, short-handed as 7 weeks instead of 7 months. Robotic probes are better funded (yes, they count as exploration and pathfinding vehicles too, and get great press!).

    A key advantage, is that non-HSF centers and contractors will no longer be “budg-gutted” to pay for a mammoth program that lacks sufficient funding and political support on its own.

    I hope the new way forward, however wrenching at the moment, brings us far less of:

    NASA telling us we need one, centralized, expensive way to orbit for a few people, and if it suffers a major failure, there will be a year and a half of down time while it gets fixed, and that’s just the way of things.

    Each new mammoth program actually INCREASING the cost per pound to orbit (What’s that about?).

    NASA sacrificing a big chunk of its mission (advancing space technology and getting it into the hands of the commercial sector), for ponderous efforts to regain the Apollo glory days and sustain the NASA / contractor fiefdom, a private club funded by taxes.

    Finally, 2011 is in large part setting the stage. Apollo did not evolve, and shuttle has been at once magnificent, lethal and expensive. Perhaps flexible path is also sustainable path, finally.

  • Rhyolite

    “Apollo did not evolve”

    Good point. It’s one that I have had in mind for a while.

    Shuttle didn’t evolve either.

    In fact, it’s is very difficult to evolve an any massive all-of-your-eggs-in-one-basket system. Apollo and Shuttle were so massive that even the most modest evolutionary steps were prohibitively expensive. Moreover, because they were the only games in town, there was no incentive and considerable risk aversion to doing anything different.

    Ares I and V would be in exactly the same position. Assuming they ever flew, they would stop evolving the minute the initial developmental funds dried up and the money shifted to operations. There would never be enough money and incentive to push them any further. They would turn into more technological dead ends.

    An architecture based on multiple commercially operated medium launch vehicles (MLV) has a much better chance of evolving over time. The cost of upgrading a medium lift launch vehicle is much smaller for a heavy lift launch vehicle and, more importantly, there would be strong incentives for doing so. Competing commercial operators will always have their eyes on the next recompete and will always be looking for how they can undercut each other. It will be risky for a provider to to NOT evolve their design. On a programmatic basis, there should also be less risk aversion to evolving designs because if one provider fails to deliver, then another provider could pick up the slack.

    I think the space community is too often enamored with the grand plan or the silver bullet for making space access affordable. I think space access would progress faster if the focus was on the conditions (e.g. competition) and incentives that would bring about slow but steady improvements rather than great-leap-forward schemes.

  • Al Fansome

    STERNER: Bolden’s comments are kind of silly. You might as well say that its reliability rating is 100%, since it has never failed. (OK, you braniacs on the bulletin board, what is 0 divided by 0? Zero, or infinite? This IR major wants to know.)

    I agree that Bolden’s comment on this issue was silly.

    When Members of Congress bring up “safety” I don’t understand why Bolden compared the Ares 1 vs. Taurus II vs. Falcon 9. That is a WEAK argument.

    Why didn’t Bolden respond that with the proven reliability record of the Atlas V and Delta IV — based a long string of successful flights — and point out that many of the leading Commercial Crew firms have communicated they intend to use those EELVs?

    I am starting to wonder whether Bolden wants to win this policy debate.

    Some data about Bolden **appears** to show a pattern, which bugs me. The pattern looks something like the following.

    * Bolden is Sen. Nelson’s guy (Nelson forced Bolden on the WH).

    * Nelson is pushing more Ares 1-X test flights. (Would Nelson really do this without checking with Bolden? I highly doubt it.)

    * Bolden pushed a Plan B (but got caught, and came up with cover story)

    * Bolden is not organizing a NASA campaign to win this policy debate on behalf of the President. Goldin would have organized the entire NASA team to win this debate. Remember how Golden won the ISS policy/political fight. He organized a war room … Goldin was all out for it. Bolden is not doing this.

    * But Bolden supports what Hanley is doing, e.g., he is letting Hanley organize a guerrilla campaign to undercut the President and the White House.

    * Bolden has not fired ANY of the team that created/managed the previous approach.

    * Bolden has not made, and is not making, the strongest argument (e.g., proven track record of EELVs) on commercial crew.

    As I said this data is bothering me.

    STERNER: It’s a poor way of making a valid point: much of Ares performance/reliability/ops cost etc. is theoretical, whereas we have real world data on Delta and Atlas, both of which have very good numbers of late.

    Totally agree.

    STERNER: Of course, neither version is crew-rated, so the changes to the rockets would necessitate theoretical modeling of reliability until you had a lot of flight history behind you and could update the models.

    According to Mike Griffin the changes we need to make to the EELVs would be minimal … namely the addition of a crew escape system.

    Griffin specifically testified to Congress on May 8, 2003 that:

    GRIFFIN: What, precisely, are the precautions that we would take to safeguard a human crew that we would deliberately omit when launching, say, a billion-dollar Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission? The answer is, of course, “none”. While we appropriately value human life very highly, the investment we make in most unmanned missions is quite sufficient to capture our full attention. Logically, therefore, launch system reliability is treated by all parties as a priority of the highest order, irrespective of the nature of the payload, manned or unmanned. While there is no EELV flight experience as yet, these modern versions of the Atlas and Delta should be as inherently reliable as their predecessors. Their specified design reliability is 98%, a value typical of that demonstrated by the best expendable vehicles. If this is achieved, and I believe that it will be, and given a separate escape system with an assumed reliability of even 90%, the fatal accident rate would be 1 in 500 launches, substantially better than for the Shuttle.

    I agree with Griffin on this issue.

    I will only add that Mike made this public statement before the EELVs started launching. In the last 7 years they have produced a wonderful track record, and have PROVEN they are highly reliable LVs.

    What are the latest numbers? Anyone?

    FWIW,

    – Al

  • According to Mike Griffin the changes we need to make to the EELVs would be minimal … namely the addition of a crew escape system.

    Also Failure On-Set Detection. ULA has a CCDev contract to do with for the Atlas (not sure about Delta).

  • Al Fansome

    Rand,

    I think of “Failure On-Set Detection” as part of the crew escape system.

    FWIW,

    – Al

  • Depends on your definition, I guess. If you think of it as the hardware necessary to get away from the launch vehicle, then FOSD isn’t part of it, because that’s integral to the vehicle.

  • My point is that the two are independent of each other. You can have FOSD with no escape system, and you can have an escape system without FOSD. They aren’t an integrated system, and ULA can put FOSD into the vehicles without needing any insight into what the abort system(s) look like.

  • JD

    It’s not clear, though, if Utahns stand with [Bennett] in general.

    Jeff, I’m somewhat surprised…no, I’m stunned, that you would delve into Utah Republican politics and get it so wrong so quickly.

    Bennett’s troubles reside only within the state GOP. The Tea Party candidates (nuts) are challenging any Republican who does not yield to the Tea Party’s brand of conservatism. And Bennett, though conservative perhaps to many, is not to Utah Republicans.

    If Bennett clears the state GOP, he does well in state-wide polls and should win re-election handily. If Bennett looses, the conservative who will win will continue his policies opposing Obama’s space plans for one reason–without Ares I, Northern Utah will loose its largest employer and be hammered economically. Either way, Utah will not be in the President’s space plan corner.

  • Ares I-X! Ares I-X!

    Ha! I said it!

    I know how much that bugs Oler, but I had to write it twice because he only reads the posts here with his LEFT eye.

  • The Tea Party candidates (nuts) are challenging any Republican who does not yield to the Tea Party’s brand of conservatism.

    You mean people who believe in the Constitution, and that maybe we shouldn’t be spending our way into oblivion? Yeah, what a bunch of crazy extremists.

    I agree that whoever Bennett’s replacement is will defend ATK, if the program is still politically viable. But he’ll provide much better policy in general.

  • Martijn Meijering

    ULA has a CCDev contract to do with for the Atlas (not sure about Delta).

    I think I read somewhere that it was meant to work for both and even be applicable to other launch vehicles.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Max Peck wrote @ May 3rd, 2010 at 7:15 pm

    no problem Max I am “Bi ocular” when it comes to reading.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Fred Cink

    Al Fansome, if you were asking for latest numbers of launch successes…. The last Atlas failure was an old Atlas I in Mar93. Since then…AtlasII, III, and V have recorded 90 straight successes, the latest was the X-37 last week. That beats the crap out of the shuttle WITH OUT all the added equipment, manpower and money to support STS crew safety. (’cause you can’t use the term “man rated” here!!) Three B52 drop tests and one unmanned test flight of a finished dreamchaser to ISS and I’d ride an Atlas V without any mods. Bolden or the President needs to make this the #1 short term priority to get going on the road to commercial access.

  • As a former industrial engineer, I have serious questions about the NASA approach to reliability. It is based largely on a single administrative reqirement, “failure tolerance”. All systems are reliable because all systems have to be designed to tolerate failure. As I have repeatedly pointed out, Challenger alone refutes this. It had a primary O-ring, and if it failed, there was a back-up O-ring. The fallacy is that this only applies to random failures, and most launch failures are deterministic, since there is almost no time for wear and similar random processes to occur. In classic fashion, a deterministic failure caused both O-rings to fail simultaneously.

    It’s a basic principle of “real” systems engineering that if you don’t have accurate failure rate data on a system, you cannot establish a requirement for redundancy. If the system is reliable, you don’t need redundancy. If the system is unreliable, but you can identify the failure modes and correct the problem that dcauses the failure, then this is almost always cheaper and more reliable than making the system redundant. Conversely, if the system is not reliable, how do you know if one backup is sufficient? If you cannot identify the failure modes, how do you know the backup will prevent the failure? Nevertheless even today there are engineers happily throwing redundant systems into the Orion with reliability numbers that are pulled from vaguely similar equipment in different industries, or are simply guesswork, under the simplistic and superficial belief that redundancy is equivalent to reliability.

    In the case of Shuttle, the figure of 1/100,000 was taken not from testing or systems analysis but from a specification. Yet when NASA management wanted to kill the Shuttle they came up with a failure rate of 1/76, roughly the historical rate, which was also nonsense because of course the only historical failure modes had been eliminated by design changes. And I’ve persoally seen the Constellation availability spec used as an estimate of actual reliability under the assumption that it must be accurate because the contractor would be required to meet it! The discussed requirement for a static load factor of 1.4 (vs the 1.25 that was the DOD spec for the Delta IV) is similarly nonsensical. The 1.4 factor was intended to account for inaccurate calculations in the pre-computer days and wear and tear from 100 mission cycles in the Shuttle.

    I would caution against the assumption that NASA has any particular expertise in the subject of reliability.

    Here’s a reference with some real data: Space Launch Vehicle Reliability

  • common sense

    @ vulture4 wrote @ May 4th, 2010 at 10:01 pm

    This method you describe is not only applied to reliability but to the whole spectrum of engineering. The root cause is the lack of proper funding to perform the necessary job. With “this” amount of money we can do the entire job, with 1/10th (or sometime worse!) this amount we can check who has already done a similar job and “extrapolate”

    Oh well…

  • Money is always limited, but most space vehicle programs have billions available. A responsible project manager must identify what can be done with the resources available. Cutting corners on reliability testing of components for a spacecraft or aircraft is a poor decision.

    In the case of Shuttle, the central problem was the lack of true development prototypes. Many design decisions would have been made differently if engineers had hands-on flight experience with the new design concepts before critical decisions were made. This was the motivation behind the technology demonstrator rogram, the X-33, X-34, DC-X and X-37. But the problems that caused the loss of Challenger and Columbia were immediately corrected, and considerable improvements in other systems have been made over the years. The unfolding tragedy is the incipient loss of person-centuries of hands-on experience with reusable spacecraft.

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