http://oiir.hq.nasa.gov/asap/documents/ASAP_Public_Meeting_Minutes_3rd-Qtr-2013.pdf

NASA AEROSPACE SAFETY ADVISORY PANEL
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington, DC 20546
VADM Joseph W. Dyer USN (Ret.), Chair
July 29, 2013

[snip]

EM-1, the uncrewed mission, is scheduled to fly in December 2017, and it is moving along.

EM-2 will be the first crewed flight, currently scheduled for 2021. This is the mission that the ASAP had questions about — specifically, a first crewed flight with the first time the ECLSS and other systems would be on board and concerns about how to mitigate risk.

Mr. Hill illustrated how the Program is addressing the risks, describing several models on how they would do that.

There is one approach that includes a 30-hour high elliptical orbit (HEO) for checkout before committing to a trans-lunar return. The Program is still exploring this approach. They are also considering combining the first crewed-flight mission with an asteroid mission. This would complicate the mission considerably, and a number of things would need to be resolved. The Program team is in the process of figuring out what will work.

The ASAP was satisfied that there are activities directed at characterizing and mitigating the risks associated with the first crewed flight, EM-2, and that the first-flight risk would be potentially reduced through the 30-hour checkout proposal. This appears to be a more prudent way to go. The mission planning team will start meeting on July 30 to assess what the mission would look like and options going forward.

Orlando Sentinel article:

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2013-09-06/news/os-nasa-sls-garver-20130906_1_space-launch-system-core-stage-orion-capsule

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzTVLIEUBYs

Even though it’s 22 years ago, it could just as easily be today.

To begin with, only a couple of House members show up. The time is dominated by then-Rep. Barbara Boxer, who was the subcommittee chair. Representing the minority was Christopher Cox, who went on chair the Securities and Exchange Commission under President George W. Bush.

Three groups of panelists spoke. For me, the second-hour panelists were the most interesting. Five scientists, and four of them were opposed to not only a space station but human spaceflight in general. Only one, Dr. Robert Bayuzick from Vanderbilt, made a case for long-term human research on an orbiting space platform.

The final hour was dedicated to Boxer beating up Adm. Richard Truly, who was the NASA Administrator.

I think the video is instructive because it’s a clear demonstration of why a government human spaceflight program will always struggle to be viable. Most members of Congress don’t care unless it affects their district. Boxer kept grilling Truly about the true cost of operating a space station; Truly didn’t seem capable of justifying the expense, much less knowing what the expense would be. He did several times make the point that certain things NASA was doing were ordered by Congress and inefficient, that Congress dictated actions NASA didn’t support.

With the exception of Dr. Bayuzick, no one attempted to articulate tangible benefits from microgravity research. He knew, because he was doing it; he’d flown experiments on the Shuttle. Truly, Cox and some others could only cite intangibles like man-was-meant-to-explore.

The big difference between now and then is that now we have an emerging commercial space market. In the hearing, it was suggested that the private sector would never assume the risk on its own without government support. That’s what happened with commercial cargo and crew, but as we’ve seen there are strictly private ventures like Blue Origin and Bigelow and Virgin Galactic and XCOR and Golden Spike that are going their own way.

Anyway, if you have no life like me you might find this interesting. We all know that Freedom fell flat on its face. This was known in 1991, but like many NASA programs it died a long lingering death.

I still believe that will each passing year as commercial progresses you will see the pork premium chopped out of NASA until utlizing commercial options WILL be the option.

I understand that.

“But the production and engineering contractors (USA’s parents, ATK, etc.) have been “saved” by SLS and MPCV and have moved to those “existent” projects (if not vehicles). And as long as there is some promise, however slim, that those projects will produce vehicles, Congressional incumbents will cling to these projects.”

Here is where I think the problem lies. As I am sure you know there was no design capabilities to perform a task of this magnitude at NASA, civil servants and contractors included. Now. Production? Well I can’t see where they are producing anything so these production types are most likely charging to some engineering design account of some sort. Engineering contractors? What are they engineering? I mean really, maybe MPCV has some semblance of engineering/production and how limited are those capabilities? Suffice to look at the vehicle – what vehicle you might ask but that is a different story, slightly. The fact of the matter is that there is no production to speak of on SLS, some engineering possibly. On MPCV some limited production and engineering. None of those justify a total budget of even a low side $2.5B. Billions!!!! Now if I recall correctly the shuttle workforce requires $200M a month which is $2.4B a year. How odd? Right. And that is without any production and very little engineering. Go figure.

“In fact, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that these projects are broken, Congressional incumbents will hang on tooth and nail — witness the Orion/Ares I fiasco, Augustine, and Constellation’s morphing into MPCV/SLS. Their budgets may continue to decline slowly, their technical problems multiply, and their schedules move to the right, but MPCV/SLS aren’t going away through contractor retirements.”

The budget will decline as people retire. It would be fun to have the numbers of people working on Shuttle then on Constellation then on MPCV/SLS and look at the budget. Estimates would not not be all that hard considering an approximate $200/hr labor rate.

“It will take a White House with more fortitude than the Obama Administration demonstrated during Constellation’s termination to bury these zombies.”

Never going to happen especially in times of crisis. The lay-offs will occur slowly except for those that are directly working on launches since they have nothing to launch.

Speculation? Yep. So we shall see.

“But do we build orbiting fuel depots which work with a single type of rocket for a single type of mission … or general purpose refueling stations for spacecraft of all nations?”

Why do you always try to limit the amount of options?

To answer this, just take a clue from what we do on Earth. Whatever the first propellant is that we decide to store in space first, it will have a refueling probe that could be standard, or could be unique. That’s up to the operator to decide, but I would bet that they would make it as useful as possible.

As to whether China would use it, that’s over-thinking the problem. That type of situation here on Earth is handled up front with contracts, which define what the customer wants and what the supplier will supply. The options are endless – again, just like they are here on Earth.

“Have we solved the boil-off problem, so liquid hydrogen can be stored without significant loss, or are the depots empty most of the time, being filled up only just before a particular mission needs them.”

For LH2 ULA thinks the boil-off problem can be mitigated so that it’s pretty low, and that low amount can be used for station keeping (which would need propellant anyways). I think that’s the hardest one to store in space.

As to mission needs, since boil-off rates can be calculated, getting the right amount of propellant to the right place just becomes a planning exercise.

“And must we build depots before restarting manned flights to the Moon and elsewhere…”

That was the FY11 NASA plan that Congress dumped. Since you have to decide at the beginning when building space hardware if it’s going to be refuelable or not, yes you do have to commit to it up front.

“…or will it be necessary to start flying beyond LEO on a regular basis to convince Congress or other funders that fuel depots will make economic sense?”

The ISS is proof that refuelable spacecraft are a good idea, but it’s impossible to predict what it will take to keep Congress from meddling too much with engineering decisions at NASA.

Yeah, Apollo 7 tested life support systems for 260-odd hours. That an order of magnitude longer than EM-2 will test MPCV’s life support systems before risking crew lives in a lunar mission. The MPCV project is performing 10% of the on-orbit life support testing that Apollo performed. And Apollo was a race-driven, all-up, risky approach to engineering development.

Yep, no unusual or unnecessary risks to missions or astronaut lives being taken to keep these monster employment, er, development projects within their ever declining budgets. No, sir. No risks at all.

(And the ASAP had to remind the NASA to conduct at least a little on-orbit life support testing before undertaking a lunar mission? How dumb can you get?)

No doubt. Totally agree. SLS especially was designed to keep the old Shuttle workforce employed and therefore not angrily voting out incumbents in Congress. That’s why Shelby, Hatch, Nelson, et al. mandated that it use the systems and contracts (ET, SSMEs, SRBs, etc.) from Shuttle.

“And since there is no work for them on non existent vehicles they are retiring.”

This is where we disagree. All or practically all of the dislocations in the contractors (USA, etc.) that _operated_ Shuttle have taken place. But the production and engineering contractors (USA’s parents, ATK, etc.) have been “saved” by SLS and MPCV and have moved to those “existent” projects (if not vehicles). And as long as there is some promise, however slim, that those projects will produce vehicles, Congressional incumbents will cling to these projects.

In fact, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that these projects are broken, Congressional incumbents will hang on tooth and nail — witness the Orion/Ares I fiasco, Augustine, and Constellation’s morphing into MPCV/SLS. Their budgets may continue to decline slowly, their technical problems multiply, and their schedules move to the right, but MPCV/SLS aren’t going away through contractor retirements. It will take a White House with more fortitude than the Obama Administration demonstrated during Constellation’s termination to bury these zombies.

Compare and contrast:

Apollo 7 (October 11–22, 1968) was the first manned mission of Project Apollo… It was a C type mission – an eleven-day Earth-orbital mission…

It flew in Earth orbit so the crew could check life-support, propulsion, and control systems…

Also, there’s kind of an open question how similar other MPCV systems will be between EM-1 and, four years later, EM-2. Oh, and there’s the service modules — it’s not clear to me how locked in EM-2 is to a euroSM.