My regular readers will know that I consider NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) to be less than useless, repeatedly showing strong biases that allow it to miss major safety issues while causing headaches where no safety problems exist. Those biases consistently favor NASA and the older big space companies while attacking the new space companies like SpaceX.
This week the panel held its quarterly public meeting, and illustrated their uselessness and bias once again. Suddenly they have noticed that ISS has a serious chronic air leak problem due to the stress fractures in the Russian Zvezda module. They also came to the brilliant discovery that ISS is big, and that its de-orbit will have to be done carefully.
Oh my! Will wonders never cease!? These facts have only been documented at length and frequently by numerous inspector general reports and NASA updates over the past half decade. NASA has in fact contracted SpaceX to build a specialized de-orbit spacecraft, larger than a Dragon capsule, to dock with the station and conduct the de-orbit.
NASA didn’t need this safety panel to tell it the obvious.
Meanwhile, the panel suddenly decided it must chime in on budget issues and the possibility of there being major cuts at NASA, something that is entirely outside its area of responsibility. And to no one’s surprise it announced that budget cuts are bad!
Nor did the panelists see any safety issues with putting astronauts in an Orion capsule and flying them around the Moon on the next Artemis launch, even though NASA and its inspector general have both determined that the capsule’s heat shield is unreliable. The panel also had no problem with flying humans in this capsule the very first time its environmental system is tested.
To these political hacks, they see “we see no showstoppers at this time” for this SLS/Orion manned mission.
Instead, as always, the panel focused its criticism and concerns on SpaceX and Starship, labeling its development “the biggest risk” in NASA’s program to get Americans back to the Moon.
The most hilarious aspect of the panelists’ public comments is that they had nothing to say about Boeing’s Starliner, a pattern the panel has followed since Boeing and SpaceX got contracts a decade ago to transport astronauts to and from ISS. Consistently the panel has seen phantom safety risks with SpaceX — where none existed — while ignoring or completely missing Boeing myriad failures. That pattern continues.
NASA does face budget cuts. It would certainly help the agency if every dime wasted on this panel could be funneled into more useful purposes.
