Tag: SLS

The plundering of NASA

3:30 pm

From one of my readers: The Plundering of NASA: an Expose, How pork barrel politics harm American spaceflight leadership. You can buy the ebook edition here, and the print edition here.

I just finished reading it. Boozer’s introduction and opening two chapters provide one of the best detailed summaries explaining clearly why the United States today cannot launch its own astronauts into space, and why we are threatened with the possibility that we won’t be able to do it for years to come. And while his perspective is mostly from an engineering perspective, he also gives some of the political background behind this situation.

His later chapters are not as effectively written, but the opening is still worth it.

I will give a hint about his thesis: it involves comparing the Space Launch System (SLS) with private commercial space. And SLS does not fare well.

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NASA has revised their plans for the 2017 and 2021 flights of its Orion capsule, making both flights more ambitious.

9:33 am

The competition heats up? NASA has revised their plans for the 2017 and 2021 flights of its Orion capsule, making both flights more ambitious.

[M]anifests have always pointed towards the first SLS/Orion launch being an uncrewed Exploration Mission (EM-1), which was baselined a validation flight that would send Orion on a 7-10 day mission around the Moon.

SLS and Orion would then endure a four year gap – again, mainly due to the advanced 2017 debut relating to ISS crew back up – before repeating a version of EM-1, this time as a CLO (Crewed Lunar Orbit) flight, with four astronauts spending three to four days orbiting our nearest neighbor, as opposed to heading directly home after passing around the Moon – a flight known as Exploration Mission -2 (EM-2).

Much to the surprise of some people deeply involved with SLS and Orion, the order came down from NASA HQ to realign EM-2, based around a 2019 mission tasked with hunting down and capturing an asteroid that would then be placed in the vicinity of the Moon within one to two years. EM-2 is also known as the Asteroid Redirect Crewed Mission (ARCM). [emphasis mine]

It has been my understanding that the plans for the 2017 unmanned test flight have previously described it as sending the Orion capsule into a high several thousand mile orbit, not to the Moon, in order to simulate a re-entry from lunar distances. Making that unmanned mission a lunar orbital mission makes it far more challenging. Similarly, it is incredibly risky to turn the next flight, the first manned flight for Orion, into a duplicate of this mission, or a flight to an asteroid. This will be the first time humans will have ever flown on Orion, and only the second time the capsule has been used. To then send those humans to the Moon or an asteroid seems downright foolish. Even the 1960s NASA, which was quite willing to run risks, would not have attempted such a plan.

It is my guess that the White House has recognized that SLS can’t survive politically with a launch rate once every four years and planned test flights that aren’t very exciting. They are therefore pushing NASA to accelerate the second mission (and first manned flight) from 2021 to 2019, while also making both flights more ambitious and therefore more salable to the public.

Whether this is possible, given NASA’s bloated bureaucracy, is the main question. Moreover, even at this accelerated pace SLS will be competing directly against the private sector, which I expect will continue to do things far faster and, more importantly, far cheaper. Against that competition SLS will be hard put to survive.

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NASA’s Space Launch System, costing billions per year, will only make its second manned flight in 2025.

8:50 am

The competition cools off! NASA’s Space Launch System, costing billions per year, will only make its second manned flight in 2025.

SLS is to make its maiden flight in 2017, when it will carry an empty Orion crew capsule to near-Moon space and back. Another flight would follow in 2021 and, depending on factors both technical and political, could see a crew of astronauts travel to a captured asteroid NASA wants to redirect to a high lunar orbit using a yet-to-be-built robotic spacecraft.

Notionally, SLS would next fly in 2025, giving the rocket a launch rate of once every four years. NASA has been spending about $1.8 billion a year on SLS development, including construction of a rocket test stand in Mississippi, and associated launch infrastructure at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Add in the cost of the rocket’s companion crew capsule, the Lockheed Martin-built Orion, and the tab rises to nearly $3 billion a year. [emphasis mine]

At that launch rate, the NASA’s space effort is slower than China’s, which has a pace that I consider extremely tortoise-like.

But don’t worry, buckos! NASA will be keeping the seats warm in its thousands of government facilities, employing thousands of government workers doing little or nothing.

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The repairs to the cracks in the first Orion capsule have withstood static stress tests.

9:54 am

I’m so glad: The repairs to the cracks in the first Orion capsule have withstood static stress tests.

In addition to the various loads it sustained, the Orion crew module also was pressurized to simulate the effect of the vacuum in space. This simulation allowed engineers to confirm it would hold its pressurization in a vacuum and verify repairs made to superficial cracks in the vehicle’s rear bulkhead caused by previous pressure testing in November.

The November test revealed insufficient margin in an area of the bulkhead that was unable to withstand the stress of pressurization. Armed with data from that test, engineers were able to reinforce the design to ensure structural integrity and validate the fix during this week’s test. [emphasis mine]

I love how this NASA press release describes the cracking of the capsule bulkhead during the November testing, indicated in bold. “Insufficient margin”, eh?

Normally I am very forgiving when things fail during engineering tests, but for the bulkhead of this capsule to crack during these tests was actually pretty shameful, considering the decades of engineering work previously done in the building of space capsules and submarines. Things can certainly go wrong when you build something new, but I don’t see anything particularly revolutionary about Orion’s design. Lots of things might fail, but making sure the bulkhead could withstand the normal and well known stresses of spaceflight should not have been one of those things. The bulkhead failure suggests to me some sloppy engineering work took place in Orion’s initial design.

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The Tortoise and the Hare

9:02 am

The tortoise and the hare.

Smith looks at the published construction and flight timelines for the government’s Space Launch System and the private company Golden Spike, and finds something I’ve been noting for several years, there is a new space race going on. And I think private space will win it.

Another perspective — the one I have — is that this creates a new Space Race.

In the starting gate at High Bay 3 is the SLS, a program larded by Congressional pork, dubbed the Senate Launch System by its critics. Many observers believe that it will one day fall to innate political and bureaucratic flaws, as did Constellation before it.

In the other starting gate at High Bay 1 is Golden Spike — all talk so far, but the pieces seem to be falling into place to make the company a viable lunar option. Add to the mix the May 23 teleconference discussing the NASA agreement that allows Bigelow Aerospace to ally NewSpace companies into a possible commercial cislunar program. The report hasn’t been released yet, but it’s logical to assume that Golden Spike is one of those companies.

As with all space programs — government or commercial, crewed or unmanned — these timelines should be viewed with the greatest of skepticism.

But we’re starting to see all the pieces fall into place for the great Space Race of the 21st Century. To the victor goes access to the Final Frontier.

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“The SLS program should be canceled now to free up approximately $10 billion programmed for this decade.”

9:38 am

“The SLS program should be canceled now to free up approximately $10 billion programmed for this decade.”

I’m both glad and not surprised that some heavy hitters are beginning to say this. As I noted last year, as the commercial space program begins to show success the politics will increasingly favor it over the very expensive and not very productive NASA-built Space Launch System.

Be prepared for SLS to steadily lose political support in the coming years.

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Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.

11:07 am

Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.

Engineers have designed a “doubler” to place over the cracks to ensure the craft can sustain loads from pressure, launch and landing. Geyer said two of the structural aids, similar to devices regularly used on airplanes, could be added to the spacecraft. “We’ve come up with a great plan to basically bridge over those cracks to distribute the load so we don’t see any issues on orbit,” Geyer said.

How reassuring.

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Cracks have been found in the first Orion capsule intended to fly in space.

8:01 pm

Government space marches on! Cracks have been found in the first Orion capsule intended to fly in space.

The cracks were discovered during a proof pressure test the week of Nov. 5. Proof testing, in which a pressure vessel is subject to stresses greater than those it is expected to encounter during routine use, is one of the many preflight tests NASA is performing on Orion to certify the craft is safe for astronauts, agency spokeswoman Rachel Kraft said. “The cracks are in three adjacent, radial ribs of this integrally machined, aluminum bulkhead,” Kraft wrote in an email. “This hardware will be repaired and will not need to be remanufactured.”

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“Long-term budget pressures on NASA mount.”

12:07 pm

Why SLS will surely die: “Long-term budget pressures on NASA mount.”

Whether the cheaper, more efficient, and competitive commercial space program will survive remains unknown. It could be that our brilliant Congress, which wants SLS, will keep that very expensive program alive just long enough to choke the life out of the commercial space program. Then, with the government part of private space dead from lack of support, they will suddenly be faced with the gigantic bill from the NASA-built SLS and will, as they have done repeatedly during the past four decades, blanch at paying the actually construction and launch costs, and will kill that too.

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At the AIAA meeting this week in Pasadena, NASA officials admitted that the Space Launch System (SLS) will likely cost half a billion dollars per launch

7:43 pm

It’s only money! At the AIAA meeting this week in Pasadena, NASA officials admitted that the Space Launch System (SLS) will likely cost half a billion dollars per launch.

That means that after only two flights this rocket will have cost about the same as the entire manned commercial program, from which three different space companies are building three different methods for getting humans into space. After three missions it will cost more, and after four missions it will have cost double. And this is assuming that the half billion dollar “target” number ends up correct.

We can’t afford this. We never could, which is why the Saturn 5 rocket was abandoned, and why the shuttle never fulfilled its stated goal of lowering the cost of access to space and after thirty years was abandoned as well. Instead, we have got to find a cheaper way to do this, and to my mind, competition and private enterprise is the only hope.

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The outfitting of the first Orion capsule, scheduled to take seventeen months, has begun.

9:46 am

The outfitting of the first Orion capsule, scheduled to take seventeen months, has begun.

The article also notes that about 400 Lockheed Martin employees will participate in this work.

I might very well be wrong, but this seems to be a very long time and a very large workforce for “turning what is a shell of a structure into a real spaceship.” I wonder if the work is being stretched out, partly to delay its completion to better match up with the long timeline of the heavy lift rocket, and partly to keep these jobs alive and feed the pork to some congressional districts.

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NASA today unveiled for the press the Orion capsule scheduled for the program’s first test flight in 2014.

9:35 pm

NASA today unveiled for the press the Orion capsule scheduled for the program’s first test flight in 2014.

Today’s unveiling was essentially a PR event designed to boost political support for the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion capsule program. And though we should definitely give kudos to Lockheed Martin for its progress on Orion, it is also important to note that the building of this capsule took 8 years and about $6.5 billion. And it won’t go into space for still another two years at best. Compare that to SpaceX’s Dragon, which took about four years from concept to launch, with a cost of about $1 billion.

It is this contrast that is worrying the political supporters of SLS and Orion. Consider for example this quote from the above article:

But the Orion schedule assumes steady funding by Congress, which is an open question given the current debate over federal budget deficits, taxes and a general push to reduce federal spending. “We have to be concerned about that because we are in an era of government spending where you have to do more with a limited amount,” Nelson said. “That, of course, is going to be one of the main things we’re going to have to look at in the future.” [emphasis mine]

Nelson has been a big backer of SLS from the moment Congress decided to force it down NASA’s throat. It is very clear from his comments above however that he recognizes the political difficulties that this very expensive program faces.

As I’ve said before, I expect SLS to die sometime in the next three years. Faced with a ungodly federal deficit, the next Congress is going to look for ways to save money and — assuming the commercial space companies like SpaceX continue to have success — Congress will see this program as one of those ways.

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NASA has delayed the first test flight of Orion’s launch abort system by two years to 2017.

9:08 am

NASA has delayed the first test flight of Orion’s launch abort system by two years to 2017.

NASA officials have been warning since last year that work on Orion would be slowed to keep pace with the development of SLS and its launch infrastructure. The agency has proposed trimming Orion’s $1.2 billion budget back to $1 billion for 2013. With the high-altitude abort test facing at least a budget-driven delay, the Langley team has proposed conducting one or more less-expensive tests in its place. Ortiz said conducting a hot-fire test in 2015 or 2016 would “keep the [launch abort system] project moving forward and help alleviate risk.”

I predict that Dragon will not only test its launch abort system first, it will have humans flying on it before Orion. And Dragon will do this for a fraction of the total cost that Orion and SLS spend per year. I also predict that when Dragon does this, Congress will finally begin noticing this disparity, and SLS will die unlaunched.

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Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Virginia) has backed down and modified the language he had inserted in the NASA budget bill that would have limited the number of commercial space companies NASA could subsidize.

3:59 pm

Good news: Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Virginia) has backed down and modified the language he had inserted in the NASA budget bill that would have limited the number of commercial space companies NASA could subsidize.

From Clark Lindsey:

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) , who is Chairman on the Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations committee, put language into the recent House budget for NASA that requiree NASA to down-select immediately to one primary contractor in the commercial crew program. This would obviously eliminate competition on price and rule out redundancy in case one system is grounded. He has now relented and is willing to allow for “2.5 (two full and one partial) CCiCAP awards”.

As I wrote earlier, the success of Dragon is putting strong political pressure on Congress to support the independent commercial space companies over the NASA-built and very expensive Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress had mandated. Expect to see more elected officials back down in the coming year, with the eventually elimination of SLS from the budget.

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The Space Launch System is a threat to JSC, Texas jobs

9:23 am

An op-ed in Houston: “The Space Launch System is a threat to JSC, Texas jobs.”

It appears that even some NASA employees are beginning to see the madness of spending billions on a launch system that will likely only fly one mission almost a decade from now. And it will seem even more mad to more people should Dragon and Cygnus prove successful in the coming year.

To put it bluntly, the long term politics are very much hostile to SLS. It is going to die, if only because the federal government is bankrupt and can’t afford it. I just wish our elected officials had the brains to realize this now rather than three years down the road.

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Assuming it gets the necessary funds, Boeing anticipates flight tests of its CST-100 reusable manned capsule in 2016.

10:11 am

More news from commercial space: Assuming it gets the necessary funds, Boeing anticipates flight tests of its CST-100 reusable manned capsule by 2016.

This story is part of the on-going lobbying effort to convince the Luddites in Congress to subsidize the new commercial space companies. To get some context, even if Congress gives NASA all of the money it has requested for this program, the annual cost will still be less than a third of the NASA-built Space Launch System, and will get us four different ways to get humans and cargo into orbit, and do it in far less time.

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Pick a destination already!

9:46 am

A report issued today illustrates once again to me that those running our space program in both Congress and the Obama administration have a profound lack of common sense or basic intelligence:

The NASA Advisory Council (NAC) – a body that provides the NASA Administrator with counsel and advice on programs and issues of importance to the Agency – has insisted a human exploration plan, or at least a destination, should be selected as soon as possible.

This request specifically applies to the Space Launch System (SLS), the heavy-lift rocket mandated by Congress that will use the Orion capsule. SLS is also the same rocket system that is costing the taxpayers $3 billion per year, and is expected to cost between $18 to $60 billion total by the time it flies its first operational mission in about nine years. The advisory council also noted that

While the vehicle hardware development is now moving forward at full speed, specific destinations – or a roadmap – is still lacking from NASA’s exploration plan.

It took nine different committees plus a central committee formed from the original nine committees to come to this Earth-shattering conclusion.

To put it in plain English, Congress and the Obama administration have committed billions of taxpayer dollars to the construction of a rocket and manned capsule without ever putting much thought into the specific mission they want to send that rocket and capsule on.
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Stupidity on display

8:38 pm

In hearings Wednesday, several members of Congress suggested that NASA force the new competing commercial space companies to combine their efforts in order to save money.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden during a March 21 hearing on the agency’s 2013 budget the same question he asked of the White House’s chief science adviser last month: would NASA’s partnership with commercial companies to develop astronaut transports be cheaper if the companies competing for NASA funds combined their efforts into a single “all for one and one for all” project?

Similarly, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) made the same stupid argument in her continuing effort to keep the funding of the Space Launch System, the rocket-formerly-called-Constellation, as high as possible, at the cost of cutting everything else in NASA if necessary.

If you needed any evidence that members of Congress are ignorant idiots, you only need read the comments of these elected officials at these hearings to get your proof. Wolf or Hutchison as well as several others from both parties very clearly haven’t the slightest idea what these various space companies are building. Nor do they have the faintest notion of the difficulties entailed in building these manned space vessels.
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Explaining the limits of the Congressionally mandated Space Launch System

8:36 pm

Explaining the limits of the Congressionally mandated Space Launch System.

In trying to explain why SLS can never function as a crew ferry for ISS, I think Muncy also illustrates why the whole system makes no sense and is really a complete waste of money. Consider this:

SLS’s first uncrewed test flight would be in December 2017, with the first crewed mission nearly four years later, in late 2021. Even worse, NASA’s plan showed that Orion and SLS would be able to fly only one exploration mission every two (or more) years.

We are spending a lot of money for very little results.

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Using its Space Launch System and Orion capsule, NASA is aiming for an unmanned test flight around the Moon in December 2017.

8:56 pm

Using its Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion capsule, NASA is aiming for an unmanned test flight around the Moon in December 2017.

Two important tidbits revealed by this article: First, the first test flight of Orion will use a Delta 4 Heavy rocket. Two, NASA hopes to have its heavy lift SLS rocket ready for the 2017 mission.

Forgive me for being cynical, but I will believe the second tidbit only when it happens.

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ATK prepares for another test firing of its five-segment solid rocket motor.

9:31 am

ATK prepares for another test firing of its five-segment solid rocket motor.

The qualification campaign, led by rocket-builder ATK, will prove the solid-fueled motor is ready to help propel the Space Launch System from Earth on two test flights in 2017 and 2021.

Though obviously funded out of the Space Launch System program (SLS), there is no guarantee at this moment that ATK’s solid rocket will be used in these test flights. NASA has said that they are considering all options for picking the launch rocket.

In a sense, we are now seeing a side benefit produced by relying on independent and competing private companies to get into space. It has placed pressure on NASA and the companies building SLS to perform. Unlike in the past, when failure to produce a new rocket or spaceship meant that NASA would simply propose a new concept and start again, now failure will mean that someone else might get the work. The result: SLS might actually get built, for less money and faster.

Though I don’t see how NASA can possibly cut the costs down to compete with these private companies, their effort might succeed enough for Congress to keep the money spigots open until the rocket gets built.

Even as I say this I remain skeptical. Considering the federal budget situation, the politics of the upcoming election, and the strong possibility that private companies will successfully provide that launch capability at a tenth the cost, I expect that sometime in the next two or three years Congress will finally balk at SLS’s cost, and eliminate it.

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