Isaacman’s nomination hearing reveals nothing of note
Jared Isaacman
The Senate committee on commerce, science, and transportation has just concluded its hearing on the nomination of Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator. Several take-aways:
First, there was little opposition to Isaacman on either side of the aisle. He will be confirmed easily.
Second, Isaacman was very careful to say nothing that might commit him to keeping all present Artemis programs (such as SLS, Orion, or Gateway) unchanged. He instead made it clear his goal is for NASA to attempt a parallel programs to establish a permanent American presence on both the Moon and Mars. This enthusiasm suggests he sees Starship as the vehicle capable of making those parallel programs possible.
In other words, he kept his options open. His goal is to get the Artemis program functioning more efficiently, and will do whatever is necessary to do so. He repeatedly made it clear that too many of NASA’s projects, including specifically Artemis, are routinely overbudget and behind schedule, and this must be fixed.
At the same time he said his goal is to get Americans back to the Moon ahead of the Chinese, and suggested that the present plan using SLS and Orion is likely the fastest way to do so. The technical issues that might make that program very unsafe for the astronauts however were never mentioned.
We shall see whether Isaacman as administrator will be so sanguine about sending Americans around the Moon within an Orion capsule with a questionable heat shield.
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Jared Isaacman
The Senate committee on commerce, science, and transportation has just concluded its hearing on the nomination of Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator. Several take-aways:
First, there was little opposition to Isaacman on either side of the aisle. He will be confirmed easily.
Second, Isaacman was very careful to say nothing that might commit him to keeping all present Artemis programs (such as SLS, Orion, or Gateway) unchanged. He instead made it clear his goal is for NASA to attempt a parallel programs to establish a permanent American presence on both the Moon and Mars. This enthusiasm suggests he sees Starship as the vehicle capable of making those parallel programs possible.
In other words, he kept his options open. His goal is to get the Artemis program functioning more efficiently, and will do whatever is necessary to do so. He repeatedly made it clear that too many of NASA’s projects, including specifically Artemis, are routinely overbudget and behind schedule, and this must be fixed.
At the same time he said his goal is to get Americans back to the Moon ahead of the Chinese, and suggested that the present plan using SLS and Orion is likely the fastest way to do so. The technical issues that might make that program very unsafe for the astronauts however were never mentioned.
We shall see whether Isaacman as administrator will be so sanguine about sending Americans around the Moon within an Orion capsule with a questionable heat shield.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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c/o Robert Zimmerman
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Lady Macbeth and Howie Mandel just called and warned Jared about washing his hands too many times after shaking hands in DC.
This worries me profoundly, too. Even without the heat shield problem…look, I don’t think this is going to be a very safe system to operate. It launches at a very low cadence. The agency level risk assessment is only 1:75 LOC, which is basically Shuttle-level “safe.” That really should not be acceptable.
But Jared is an outsider, and he is not an engineer. He can get political cover on this by immediately commissioning an outside panel with some good and respected top engineers (with no interest conflicts) to review the heat shield decision in full. And yes, I think Charlie Camarda should be on it.
I agree with you, though, Bob, that Jared didn’t actually commit to very much, but he’ll still be confirmed easily. He came across as intelligent and amiable and not partisan, and Democrats gave him a pretty easy time, on the whole.
He kissed the ring.
Somewhat OT, I wonder about the latest developments on China tariffs, given the strong presence of Tesla there, and the recent revelations concerning the putative generational lead recently demonstrated by Tesla FSD over what many incorrectly assumed were high-quality Chinese versions.
Could the discovery that the BYD (et al) FSD is a poor imitation of the “real McCoy” lend a sense of desperation to Chi’s calculus? It occurs to me that exposing Tesla FSD to the predations of the Chinese “business” system could be a major strategic risk. There could well be an arms race happening that we know nothing about!
Richard M wrote about Orion:
“This worries me profoundly, too. Even without the heat shield problem…look, I don’t think this is going to be a very safe system to operate. It launches at a very low cadence. The agency level risk assessment is only 1:75 LOC, which is basically Shuttle-level “safe.” That really should not be acceptable.”
This illustrates my concern that we are too risk intolerant. If I understand the 1:75 LOC then statistically every 75 missions could result in a mission failure (?) or mission loss (death of crew)(?). Is that correct?
I know that during the Challenger investigation, Richard Feynman demonstrated that the NASA reliability calculations were flawed and loss of a shuttle was probabilistically higher than NASA calculated. I also remember reading that one justification that the Nixon administration used to cancel Apollos 18,19 and 20 was that recalculation of risk at the end of Apollo indicated that the the risk of mission loss was something like 1 in 30. This allowed the Nixon White House to argue “Why push your luck?”.
Still, is going to the moon and developing greater capability worthy of taking a 1/75 risk or even a 1/30 risk? Just seems like we have lost our collective nerve. This is why I wish the cost of flights could be reduced so that individuals could make their own calculation of risk tolerance.
Agreed. We are far too risk averse.
I am not sure I even buy those LOC numbers.
Orion has parachutes and abort tower
Shuttle could at least glide if the heat shield survived.
Starship is objectively the least safe of these three systems as it stands.
The idea is that it is supposed to rely on high performance not margin.
That was the reasoning behind Osprey. You want to fly in it? Fine.
Recently, we saw a story about how tough Soyuz was. In recent years, we saw R-7 shrug off a lightning strike on Ascent.
Back in the early 80’s, an R-7 withstood a fire long enough for the capsule to get away.
When I see a Soyuz capsule–I see a diving bell, not an big eggshell.
Orion launches on a stage and a half system (SRBs stage zero). The solids peel off to the sides.
The core stays lit for one burn, and the Delta IV upper stage takes it from there.
Orion is a bit wider than Apollo. Frankly–America should have kept Apollo, shuttle or no–so astronauts never had to look like papers on someone else’s ride.
That’s on cost-cutters.
Hello Thomas,
Regarding risk: I am a fan of Rand Simberg’s book on this subject (as many of us here are). There’s an overdue discussion to be had about risk acceptance in human spaceflight.
That said: The context of Artemis forces a different conversation. What I would say is that the program objective has to justify the risk, and there is nothing about Artemis or the larger context in which it exists that justifies that high of a risk for what Artemis is supposed to be.
With Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, we took ENORMOUS risks. NASA never did a formal PRA on the mission, but Chris Kraft, Frank Borman, and Bob Gilruth thought that Apollo 8 only had a 50/50 chance of succeeding — just think about that. But the situation could be viewed as justifying that level of risk. We were in a high stakes public race with the Soviet Union, and there was credible evidence that they were actively pursuing a possible circumlunar flight in December…and anyway, NASA needed a mission like Apollo 8 to happen at that point if they were going to have any chance of making Kennedy’s deadline.
But there is nothing with that kind of urgency today to justify anything remotely like that risk level.
Look, if we suddenly discovered a derelict alien spaceship on the Moon, and suddenly there was a race with the Chinese to go secure it in hopes of acquiring highly advanced technology, OK, yeah, that would probably justify taking on a high risk.
Richard M and All: In discussing risks and Orion/SLS, I think using statistical analysis is misguided. We need instead to focus on what we actually know about the spacecraft and rocket itself.
1. SLS has made just one successful launch. We thus know very little about its overall reliability. Using it again — with humans on board — carries incredible uncertainties. To give some perspective, let me remind everyone that NASA demanded SpaceX fly at least seven Falcon 9 launches without problems before it would approve the rocket for manned flights.
2. Orion has also flown only once, and during that flight had problems in a number of areas. The worst problem was the heat shield upon return. NASA has decided NOT to engineer a real fix to this issue before the next flight — which will be manned — but to improvise a return flight profile it thinks will mitigate the problem.
In other words, Artemis 3 will put humans in a capsule, fly them around the moon, and bring them back to Earth at high speed using a heat shield that remains very questionable.
Worse, the capsule’s environmental system — the systems that will keep the astronauts alive — have never flown on Orion at all. On Artemis 3 NASA proposes using four human beings as guinea pigs for testing those systems for the first time in space.
These facts about the rocket and capsule make statistical analysis meaningless. They instead point to very uncertain engineering with problems that suggests putting humans on this launch system at this point in its development a very foolish act. If a private company attempted to fly people under these circumstances I suspect politicians would want them arrested.
This is not being risk adverse. This is being coldly honest about the engineering involved. The entire system needs more unmanned testing and development and engineering fixes. But the system is too expensive and cumbersome to allow for that kind of program.
And so, our politicians and NASA’s managers are once again doing the same thing they did with Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, putting their political needs above good engineering and safety.
Orion, the gateway and SLS are all symbiotic. They all need to stay or they all need to go. Getting rid of one while keeping the others simply will not work without a major change in plans. They all exist to justify each other. Well, possibly one could descale the gateway a bit. But basically the savings are an all or nothing. Cutting all of them is unlikely. Hardware has been built. It is too much money to cut, too many vested interests. The Trump administration will want some sort of real achievement on their watch and it would cause too much delay for that. There is a chance Trump could have it all axed in favor of Musk’s Mars plans, underfunded of course. This would be in a grand cost saving gesture, as a way to justify far more painful cuts in other areas But that is unlikely. On the starship side – I don’t see any way it to be ready to land on the moon in Trump’s term. Probably it will be years after he’s out, if then. Many great people in history have done great things and then failed when they bit off more than they could chew, and Musk’s lander plans seem to me to bear the marks of that. A quick and dirty flags and footprints lander is possible in a few years, but it would be a major risk. That won’t be done unless someone might get there first. Full stop.
Richard M wrote: “The context of Artemis forces a different conversation. What I would say is that the program objective has to justify the risk, and there is nothing about Artemis or the larger context in which it exists that justifies that high of a risk for what Artemis is supposed to be.
”
If we aren’t making progress, then what is the point of taking risks?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXbdJ3kyVyU (7 Minutes, “The Deal,” Bill Whittle)
3:38: “The reason that we have cheap, affordable, and safe air transportation today and no space transportation whatsoever is simply because we were serious about air travel, serious enough to pay the price in blood and money, and we’re not serious about space. My friend and noted space expert Rand Sinberg summed it up perfectly when he said ‘we’ll know we’re serious about space travel when we have entire cemeteries full of dead astronauts who lost their lives showing us how to do it right,’ just like Gann’s generation did. Because that’s the deal. That’s what it costs.”
4:17: “As with civil aviation, we learned from these events, that wishful thinking is a poor substitute for good engineering. So we went back and fixed the engineering, but we lost the stomach for it, because we didn’t go anywhere or do anything new. Part of the deal, you see, is that you pay in blood for progress. If there’s no progress, what’s the point?”
“You see, either you live for something, something worth dying for, or you just rot on the installment plan. That’s the deal.”
So, is Artemis providing progress? What do we get if we beat the Chinese to the Moon? What do we lose if we don’t? Does Artemis help us progress into our local cislunar space? Does Artemis help us progress into the solar system?
Richard M,
An independent commission of inquiry into Orion’s heat shield situation would, by itself, provide only marginal political cover for any notional adverse decision by Isaacman anent Artemis 2 as it is currently planned. What would provide far more political cover would be major progress by SpaceX on Starship. As the saying goes, you can’t beat something with nothing. The SLS-Orion stack for Artemis 2 is something. Not a very good something as you and I both know, but it’s there. In order to politically cover a decision to call off Artemis 2, a Starship-based alternative needs to be demonstrated before Artemis 2 is scheduled to fly.
The “minimum viable product” here would be a Block 2 Starship with a docking port on its nose – covered by a Dragon-like hinged cap – and a heat shield capable of withstanding a direct return to Earth at lunar return velocity. Send such a thing on a lunar free-return trajectory and recover it before Artemis 2 is scheduled to fly and there would be a second something with which to challenge the SLS-Orion something.
Of course this would also require SpaceX to prove out propellant depot and tanker versions of Starship first. I would like to see the flight of the Earth-to-lunar-orbit-and-back-to-Earth test article done using propellant brought up to the prototype depot by the tanker(s) involved in the test campaign for those Starship variants to save time.
That would be a lot for SpaceX to get done in roughly a year’s time – especially given what I hope will be its central role in getting Golden Dome operational – but it may be the only path forward that includes foregoing Artemis 2 in its currently intended form without incurring major political damage.
Under this scenario, Artemis 2, as presently planned, would be abandoned and its name taken by an all-SpaceX initial lunar landing mission using a fully fitted-out crewed version of the previously described test article along with the Starship-based HLS. This revamped Artemis 2 would fly in place of the SLS-Orion-based Artemis 3.
Robert Zimmerman,
A good summary of NASA’s decades of safety derelictions and double standards.
Jeff Wright,
Macbeth and Mandel. Heh.
Whose ring?
Orion’s abort tower says “bye-bye” about 2-1/2 minutes into ascent. It’s there to cover the period when the SRBs are thrusting. After that, Orion has about the same abort capability as Starship. Lacking SRBs, it’s entirely reasonable that Starship also lacks an abort tower that’s there on Orion solely to cover the possibility of SRB misbehavior.
Starship will rely for safety on a high flight cadence that keeps the launch troops well-practiced and the ability to look over the recovered hardware after each mission to spot small problems that can be prevented from becoming big ones. Performance and margin are there, to be sure, but are not the key foundation elements of future Starship safety.
Osprey is irrelevant to the discussion. All military aircraft are more dangerous than their civilian counterparts. That will likely always be true. Combat troops are in a risky line of work anyway.
The real issue is whether the Osprey is safer than the helicopters it replaced. It seems to be. Ospreys have crashed 17 times. Four of these occurred in testing. Some of the 13 operational crashes may have been in combat but I could find no breakdown on this. Even assuming all operational Osprey crashes were due to flaws in the aircraft or pilot error, the CH-53 has at least 23 such. CH-46s and CH-47s have also racked up at least a dozen non-combat crashes each.
I don’t see the relevance of your remarks about the R-7 and Soyuz.
I also don’t see the relevance of recapping the SLS-Orion ascent profile without noting that the Orion launch abort system is absent for most of it.
Keeping Apollos in production without anything to launch them with would have just been stupid. If you want to blame “cost-cutters” for something real, the engineering compromises made to Shuttle to keep it within the allowed budget seem a far more reasonable target.
Doubting Thomas,
There’s a difference between excessive timidity and a disinclination to be doing “Jackass”-style stunts just for grins. Spaceflight is inherently dangerous enough without looking to fly people atop wonky heat shields and untested upper stages of dubious quality.
Especially if the main reason is to “beat the Chinese.” If the PRC can plant its own bump-and-run quickly abandoned campsite on the Moon by 2028 and not kill anyone in the process, well, good for them. I’m dubious the PRC will actually try that soon. And, if they do, I’m even more dubious they will succeed.
We can do better by our astronauts than SLS-Orion and we should.
Cloudy,
You’re right that SLS-Orion and Gateway are joined at the hips – an unholy trinity in my view. But cancelling them is certainly doable if a suitable alternative is available. I think it can be in the form of Starship. The international aspect of Gateway is not a show-stopper. The Euros and – especially the Japanese – would dump Gateway in a hot minute if their nationals could walk on the lunar surface sooner and in greater quantity than via SLS-Orion-Gateway.
I think you seriously underestimate Musk and overestimate what he has “bitten off.”
Edward,
So, is Artemis providing progress? Sure. And if we get smart and cut the SLS, Orion and Gateway boat anchors, we could make a lot more progress and do it a lot faster.
What do we get if we beat the Chinese to the Moon? Modest bragging rights. We have, after all, been there before.
What do we lose if we don’t? At a minimum, our notional bragging rights from the answer to the previous question. At worst, we lose a crew of astronauts through not taking time to properly test the hardware we put them on – assuming SLS and Orion stay in the picture.
Does Artemis help us progress into our local cislunar space? Sure. That’s pretty much the point of the exercise. How quickly we progress, of course, is pretty much proportional to how much we continue to rely on SLS, Orion and Gateway – more reliance, less progress.
Does Artemis help us progress into the solar system? It can. SLS, Orion and Gateway will be of no use to such a project, but their more rational replacements – especially Starship – certainly can be.
Could not have said it better myself, Bob.
This is just one more reason to cancel all of it. Today.
P.S. Our friend VSECOTSPE made another relevant (and alarming) point in support of this the other day at the NSF forums, which I just noticed:
“The Defense Contract Management Agency has issued more than 70 Level I and II Corrective Action Requests to Boeing for EUS work. That’s a very high number, and per the NASA IG report on this, they threaten flight safety. Correcting this should never have required an IG report, and NASA senior management let this go on (or was ignorant) for so long with EUS that we should have concerns about Boeing build quality across SLS. (We should also have concerns about Boeing build quality across SLS given the company’s ongoing flight safety issues on other systems like Starliner and 737 MAX, but that’s a separate issue.)
“Again, like low LOC figures and low flight rates, poor build quality is an unnecessary risk. There’s no pressing need today to put astronauts on systems with compromised build quality.”
He’s right.
Hi Dick,
An excellent point (of course).
This is where the Flight 7 and Flight 8 setbacks really hurt.
It is now obvious that there has been a shift in the political ground since November regarding Artemis. Trump’s NASA transition team, it is said, was urging cancelling SLS and Orion right out of the gate. But the Starship RUD’s this year hurt their case. Because the Senate really, really, really wants to beat China back to the Moon, and now it looks less likely to them that Starship can step into that role in time for that. So now you see this browbeating yesterday (and, apparently, in lots of his private meetings on the Hill last week) of Jared Isaacman to keep Artemis II and IIII as is, and Jared in turn seeming to concede the point, albeit with obvious reluctance. You see this new Senate NASA authorization bill explicitly writing “support for the full development of capabilities of the Space Launch System” (link below — see Sec. 203). And so on,
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/3/commerce-committee-leaders-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-reinforce-u-s-space-leadership#:~:text=The%20NASA%20Transition%20Authorization%20Act%20of%202025%20would%3A,the%20next%20generation%20of%20spacesuits.
I think this is terrible policy all around, but we’ve been doing terrible policy for NASA human spaceflight for over 50 years, so I can’t say it is not a familiar feeling.
All we can hope for is that Starship gets back on track in its test flights this spring and summer, and this can help build momentum again for terminating SLS and Orion at the first opportunity. But the Boca Chica guys need to rack up some wins.
Richard M: These issues on the new SLS upper stage are disturbing, to say the least.
I think the whole situation, as demonstrated by that pack of Senators during Isaacman’s hearing, deserves a longer essay later today.
Hello Bob,
Looking forward to it!
I dug out that report that VSECOTPSE was referring to. It is here:
https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ig-24-015.pdf
Not sure how I missed this at the time.
To Mr. Eagleson
I do not believe keeping Apollo capsules is stupid at all–and bringing Soyuz history into the mix is not irrelevant.
Which is more likely to fail:
A car model in production for many years with bugs worked out?
Or a brand new import–from China, say?
Richard M thinks Griffin was the worst Chief–I think he was the best.
Mike is more of a fighter than Jared and for that reason alone–I want him to be NASA Chief–for life.
Keeping American dominance in space means NO MORE of these starts and stops when new administrations come in.
Therefore all NASA Chief Administrator positions should for life–like the Supreme Court.
All Chief Administrator candidates MUST be engineers, and have a history of pro-BEO advocacy. No Greens allowed. The Chief Administrator picks his own replacement
Moreover, NASA should have 1% of the budget per Constitutional Amendment–spent at the sole discretion of the Chief Administrator (Elon like power). This means Congress has no oversight yes—but I see that as a good.
Rand Paul might not be able to cut NASA–but neither will a Maxine Waters or an Obama type either.
The most important aspect of my plan is that it ensures continuity of infrastructure–and insulates space professionals from zealots of any stripe.
In exchange for such a solid foundation, NewSpace should also be free from regulation–with NASA having no power to regulate private spaceflight.
Richard M: Thank you. I have added this link to my essay posted today.
Hello Jeff,
“Richard M thinks Griffin was the worst Chief–I think he was the best.”
No, I would give that honor to Tom Paine or Richard Truly. Hard to say — it’s a tossup, Griffin was bad, but he did give us COTS and the final Hubble servicing mission, even if a bit reluctantly….
Dick Eagleson,
“At worst, we lose a crew of astronauts through not taking time to properly test the hardware we put them on – assuming SLS and Orion stay in the picture.”
Those were intended to be rhetorical questions to help judge whether Artemis was worth the risk, and for that question I had intended for the thought to be “what if we cancel Artemis and allow the Chinese to get there without us in a race?” Instead, your answer put reality into the discussion, because the risk taken may end up with the loss of our astronauts, yet no reward at the end.
If Congress is determined to beat the Chinese back to the Moon, then our discussions about SLS are moot, at least for several months. Congress will keep Artemis as-is unless a better and faster way back to the Moon is available.
So, with Congress’s interrogation of Isaacman concentrating so hard on assuring the continuation of SLS and Artemis, I wonder what the Congressional hearings will be like if we lose our astronauts in pursuit of the Moon this time. Apollo 1’s hearing was brutal.
Richard M,
All you say is quite true. The ball is definitely in Starbase’s court. SpaceX needs to put some fresh points on the board and step up the pace of testing.
I’m reasonably optimistic anent the latter as Orbital Pad B looks as though it could be operational by late spring or early summer and SpaceX is also about to start reusing recovered Super Heavies. Both should have very tonic effects on test flight cadence. By late this year it is even likely that the Starship pad at LC-39A will be ready – another potential bump to cadence using Starship components barged in from Starbase. It’s hardly certain, of course, but SpaceX may still be able to have a usable Starship-based alternative to the SLS-Orion stack before Artemis II’s current “not later than” launch month of April 2026.
Failing that, however, the only path to rationality anent Artemis II would be for Isaacman to become a profile in courage. The past record of astronaut Administrators is not encouraging in that regard but there is the crucial matter of Isaacman never having been a NASA astronaut. Never having been a NASA “company man” could make all the difference.
Let us hope Elon and company can spare Mr. Isaacman the necessity of being Horatio at the Bridge.
Jeff Wright,
You seem to be in a contest with publiusr over in the comment threads at Space News for the title of Most Militantly Nostalgic Space Cadet.
I was 6 when Sputnik 1 was launched. The entire Space Race took place during my elementary, junior high and high school years. Those were heady times. But the Apollo Command and Service Modules were not some sort of apex of spacecraft design. Among other shortcomings, they were single-use articles, like the rockets that launched them.
Any company attempting literal replication of an Apollo CSM these days would be up against the same problems GM would face if it attempted a fresh run of, say, 1965 Impalas. The biggest such problem would be that parts are hard to get. And it would be far easier to source mid-1960s carburetor tech, say, than to get any core memory planes for latter-day Apollo computers. Core memory, in case you are not an old crock like me who actually learned programming on machines that used it, is not a semiconductor so much as a textile – teensy ferrite rings threaded on wires. By hand. By women looking at their workpieces through binocular microscopes. The stuff cost dollars per byte even back in the 60s. I say here’s to the Good Old Days – and may they never come back.
I do owe you at least a partial apology for calling your references to Soyuz irrelevant. Soyuz has been in service almost six decades but, as recent experience demonstrates, it still has bugs to be worked out. Thus your reference to Soyuz in your previous comment is directly relevant to refuting an assertion about Apollo in your current comment. Compared to Soyuz, Apollo barely flew at all. Both the Apollo 1 fire and the Apollo 13 near-disaster – following a substantial redesign of the vehicle after said fire – suggest that even the redesigned Apollo was hardly bug-free.
One hardly knows how to react to your fantasies about Constitutional amendments and life-tenure for NASA Administrators except to say I would sooner expect to see actual witches flying on actual brooms than I would expect to see any of your – unique – notions implemented. I will note that not even the Catholic Pope gets to appoint his own successor.
Your most fundamental error here, of course, is your assumption that human spacefaring will always be a government – and, specifically, NASA – led undertaking. We see that becoming less and less true by the day. The future of spacefaring will be a mostly private enterprise affair. NASA, and its coterie of legacy contractors, have been found increasingly wanting as time has passed. SLS-Orion-Gateway are the best they have been able to do. None of these things have any future. Reinforcing NASA’s insularity and giving it immunity to outside control would simply guarantee the completion of its descent into total irrelevance.
Edward,
Not a pretty picture is it? One can only hope SpaceX can provide a credible SLS-Orion alternative in the next year. That is hardly a slam dunk but, as Elon might say, it is a possible outcome.
If Artemis II flies as planned one can only hope that that old saw about God protecting drunks, fools and the United States of America still applies. Should we not be so fortunate, the resulting hearings can be reliably expected to be an orgy of arse-covering and blame-shifting. At least we would be spared the smarmy bloviations of Walter Mondale – he being dead and all.
With Mondale being from Minnesota and the equally late William Proxmire being from Wisconsin, one has to wonder exactly what it is in the water up that way that makes their legislators so hostile to NASA. I was born and raised one state over in Michigan, but none of our guys ever made a habit out of grandstanding against space exploration. T’is a puzzlement.
Remember that Elon doesn’t have shareholders to answer to, exactly.
A NASA Chief Administrator should have the same leeway that Elon has.
Not having a Congressmen to answer to is the same freedom Elon has to ignore bean-counters.
The reason NASA has been spinning its wheels is precisely because each new administration has it start all over
I think many folks just have this religion about government being innately better or worse than private initiative.
If I am a Congresscritter and I vote against funding technology for your new widget–that is neither better nor worse than you getting told “no” by a venture capitalist.
In both cases, your work as an engineer/entrepreneur is blocked by an outside element.
The Manhattan Project is proof that government can be effective. Theranos is proof private initiative can be misleading.
What I want to do is bring “the Rickover effect” to spaceflight.
Nothing is more important than spaceflight mastery. Jefferson, if you will recall could “sooner believe learned men from Harvard would lie, than he could believe that stones from heaven.