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Commercialization

It Is Time To Hit The NASA Reset Button

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 6, 2018
Filed under
It Is Time To Hit The NASA Reset Button

Gerstenmaier: U.S. Leadership in Space is “Ours to Lose” If Direction Changes Too Many Times, Space Policy Online
“Bill Gerstenmaier, the head of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, said today that the United States is the “partner of choice” for countries wanting to engage in international space cooperation, but that leadership is “ours to lose” if too many changes in direction drive partners away.”
Keith’s note: Sage advice. And of course Gerst is totally faultless when it comes to all of the changes in direction. right? Lets dial back a decade or so. First Gerst was behind the Ares I/V/Orion Constellation thing. Then he was behind the SLS/Orion thing when the Constellation thing was turned upside down. Then he pushed the Journey to Mars thing. Then he jumped in behind the Asteroid Retrieval thing which eventually became the grab the small boulder thing. When no one liked the asteroid thing any more, he picked up the pieces and jumped behind the Deep Space Gateway thing. Then, to pay for the Deep Space gateway thing he jumped behind the commercialize ISS thing (with no one lined up to pay the bills). Then when the Mars thing was fading he pivoted to the Back to the Moon thing but he still wants to walk away from ISS in LEO to build a mini-ISS with no as-yet determined purpose out near the Moon.
Gerst is certainly flexible and adaptable. And he has kept a lot of important things alive that others sought to kill. But consistent in his direction? No. Not surprisingly, year after year he’ll tell you that the Ares V/SLS is the perfect rocket for all of these ever-changing missions and destinations – even if he can never give a consistent cost of what an SLS costs to launch as the schedules continue to slip to the right. Of course he’ll tell you that all of these pivots were all due to White House and/or Congressional direction and re-direction. He’s correct. But behind the scenes in all of those scenarios, Gerst and HEOMD were constantly pitching their ideas to impressionable staffers – always trying to pivot to stay in synch with the space flavor of the month and stay one step ahead of the budget axe to keep the marching army employed. And of course no one has money for any of the payloads that SLS will fly. But its all notional anyway, so why bother with the actual budget thing.
Now, NASA can buy Falcon Heavy launches at 1/5 (or cheaper) the cost of an SLS with roughly 70% of a SLS launch capability online. And more cheap heavy lift is on the way from other suppliers coupled with nimble, small launchers from another suite of suppliers. Gerst is quite correct to warn that constant changes in direction can sour current and potential partners on future projects. But he seems to not see that this very problem he cites has been happening under his watch. Possible partners are now looking to China because China offers them what they want – while NASA offers potential parters what they can have. These two things are not the same.
The old way of exploring space no longer works. If NASA doesn’t everyone else will. In fact, they already are. The agency is stuck in outdated subroutines that run in circles that result in increasingly inefficient output. Its time to hit the reset button.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

36 responses to “It Is Time To Hit The NASA Reset Button”

  1. Keith Vauquelin says:
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    Agree. Nothing more needs to be articulated. Keith Cowing is precisely, and acutely correct in his observation and recommendation.

  2. jsmjr says:
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    There’s something very wrong with the formation of policy if it comes down (in any material way) to meetings with impressionable staffers.

  3. Donald Barker says:
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    Hi Keith, I need to argue with your nomenclature in one small way. Using the term “reset” here implies all NASA ways of business, operations and focus. We need another word or concept that allows NASA to keep the projects alive that it has been working on, e.g., ISS, while supporting them in advancing the next generation of projects and without anything being forsaken (financially). For example, there should have been a Shuttle B, C and D by now similar to the history of aviation (transportation) advancement. The point is that humans don’t and should not stop using what they have when it is still basically working. Beyond the modern throw away culture, we usually use transportation systems, buildings, infrastructure, etc. a long time even though a potentially better replacement could be constructed. Being constrained to a 4 year, insufficient budget is the root of all these problems.

  4. DougSpace says:
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    Keith. I think that you are being unfair to Gerst. He’s been very consistent:
    – First he was for the big government thing.
    – Then he was for the next big government thing.
    – Then he was for the next big government thing.
    – Then he was for the next big government thing.
    – Then he was for the next big government thing.
    – Then he was for the next big government thing.
    – Then he was for turning the big government thing over to commercial companies but supported by big government subsidies.
    – Then he was for the next big government thing.

    If only we would stick with one big government thing then we would finally reach our goal of a few civil servants planting flags and footprints on the Moon or Mars or wherever.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Lots of us were in favor of space as a ‘big government thing’ until someone demonstrated a different way to think.

      • DougSpace says:
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        Unfortunately many support government-primarily for BLEO after it has been amply demonstrated that public-private programs work much better for full-scale transportation of cargo and crew.

  5. Peter says:
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    I can’t think of anything more important than cheerleading how well the funding you received is being spent. If that’s your job I guess that’s what you have to do. Sadly, much of this funding is being thrown in a hole in the Southern clay… the only salvation is somebody was wise enough to open the commercial-sector-floodgates a while back. The gates will not be closed. All we need is one 60-minutes episode to show what a folly this rocket-to-nowhere actually is.

  6. Vladislaw says:
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    Good Note today Keith .. I have always hoped for someone at NASA willing to fall on their sword at a congressional meeting on the hill and tell it like it is .. if you did that .. congress would never ever invite you there again .. but at least you would be on the record…

  7. NArmstrong says:
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    I find Gerstenmaier’s statement odd. What direction does he think we are heading in? A “gateway” that takes us nowhere? Where did that idea even come from? NASA does not seem to be leading anyone anywhere. In fact he has led us for 15 years to try and re-establish an Apollo program that was shown 50 years ago to be unaffordable and the wrong direction.

    Gerstenmaier seems to be the one common thread through the last 15 years. Poor decisions in support of big uncontrolled operations budgets rather than in favor of science and utilization have directly led to the waste of precious and very expensive ISS resources. Too bad he had zero expertise in utilization and felt that was someone else’s job. He ditched Shuttle with no consideration of significant improvements; NASA lost 2 generations of experience and capability in that nondecision-threw it all away. Yet he seems to focus on the smallest, pettiest of functions. The idea that we had to rush off and go somewhere because of the boring nature of missions in orbit? Where does he think the “Gateway” is? It is precisely nowhere.

    He should have gotten behind the effort to put the technical expertise back into the institution rather than keeping it in the program and trying to maintain the operations headcount. Programs ought to focus on programmatic management: mission, budget and schedule. Programs have a short time horizon. Technical implementation needs to be maintained long term.

    I think he has made really poor decisions on personnel, organizations, programs. In too many cases he opted to make no decisions at all. I suspect it is too late now for NASA human space flight.

    The only thing to hang onto is that Congress is willing to keep providing a fairly steady supply of funds; but NASA seems to do less and less with it every day. The real fear now is that there is no leadership and there is no heir apparent.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      The Gateway was originally going to be a station built to keep the boulder company in lunar orbit. It would make it easier for the astronauts to explore the boulder and learn its secrets. Now there is no boulder they are promoting it for its “own” virtues 🙂

  8. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Yes! In my mind NASA’s revelance to the future of humanity ended when President Obama killed Project Constellation. It’s simply a runaway train on a dead end track.

    In a decade the ISS will be gone, the SLS/Orion will be seen as a failure, the $100 billion DSG will still not be built.

    And in a sky full of Bigelow Stations, with BSR and New Glenn’s supporting a private Moon base and space tourism no one will care. The NASA Congress Critters will be laughed at by the rest of Congress and they will pull the plug on NASA. And the public won’t care it did.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      I agree with everything but the very ending. I see NASA eventually, begrudgingly, being directed by Congress to buy as many US commercial services as possible to fly as many US astronauts to these stations and bases as possible. In the eyes of the politicians, it just wouldn’t look right to have “tourists” outnumbering NASA astronauts.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        It will be a real challenge. NASA only has about 48 astronauts, including administrative astronauts. The BFR will carry 150-200 per flight. 🙂

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Only 48? I thought that number would (still) be a lot higher. According to Wikipedia, you are right. It also says the highest number of active astronauts was in the year 2000 when there were 149!

          • fcrary says:
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            It might be surprising, but think of the flight opportunities. Astronauts are in the program because they want to fly in space. We’re averaging, what, four or five astronauts on ISS per year? (I think it’s two six-month tours with two or three US astronauts per rotation.) If there are 48 astronauts, that means an average of about ten years before one of them gets a flight assignment. That’s a long time to wait.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Yes, it’s not surprising a number have left joining firms like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace, VG.

          • fcrary says:
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            I once met someone with a fairly good idea for a rocket plane. Mitch Burnside Clapp was a Air Force pilot who wanted to be an astronaut. But he decided the only way he’d get a chance was to come with his own, non-government way of getting astronauts into space.

            I wonder what happened to him. The idea was about launching a rocket plane with near-empty tanks then doing an airborne refueling, before pushing button and rocketing off to orbit. It looked good one paper. But the idea never really got off paper.

            But Mitch is probably an early example of what you mean. With low flight opportunities, an astronaut who wants a flight opportunity will either stay with NASA and be amazingly patient, give up, or start thinking about non-NASA flight opportunities.

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            Agreed. Fight opportunities with NASA are rare and the future doesn’t look like that will change much if SLS/Orion remain the future ride to space for NASA astronauts.

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            True. Without commercial crew, we’re limited to about 5 flight opportunities per year on Soyuz to ISS, which is only 10% of the astronauts on flight status. Yet, NASA keeps recruiting new astronaut classes despite this limitation.

            Commercial crew will expand that a bit by adding one additional permanent crew member to ISS. I suppose if there is extra room, some astronauts could fly to ISS and return with he prior crew (i.e. visiting ISS for a week or two like many space shuttle crew members did). So, being generous, we might double the flight opportunities per year to 10, which is 20% of the astronauts on flight status. Which means if you’re new, you might wait 5 years to visit ISS for a week or two then wait another 5 years for an ISS crew rotation. That’s three years beyond the 2025 date that the ISS program will end, at least for the US.

            Beyond 2025, maybe Deep Space Gateway flights start becoming available, but Orion has a limit of 4 crew members and SLS will have a limit of at most two flights per year, which is 8 flight opportunities total. So, flight opportunities are still looking grim 10+ years out.

            I’ve heard the argument along the lines “if we don’t keep training new astronauts, we’ll forget how to train new astronauts”. While there is some truth to that, it also seems a bit daft to keep training lots of new astronauts when the future flight opportunities look pretty grim for at least the next 10+ years, IMHO.

            So, if I were a NASA astronaut, I’d be very supportive of commercial crew to the point of supporting expanding their capability to DSG and beyond. Doing so would greatly increase the chances that I would get to fly more than once in my entire astronaut career.

  9. sunman42 says:
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    Doesn’t mean he’s not right. Unfortunately, we haven’t had a direction for human spaceflight in NASA, a “next thing,” that persisted from administration to administration, or even within an administration, since 1972.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      The space shuttle program enjoyed consistent funding for decades. The problem was that it was so expensive, it ate up most of the manned spaceflight funding. Then along came SSF/ISS, which again has enjoyed consistent funding for decades. The problem is that it is so expensive, it ate up the remainder of the manned spaceflight funding. Then the space shuttle was cancelled and replaced with CEV/Ares I/Ares V/Orion/SLS which has enjoyed consistent funding for many years, but not yet decades. The problem is that it is so expensive, it ate up the remainder of the manned spaceflight funding.

      Do you see a pattern? The problem isn’t that NASA can’t support a single “direction” for more than a few years. The problem is that it has consistently funded bloated cost-plus contracts to execute that “direction” resulting in the entire manned spaceflight budget being consumed by one or two massive programs at a time.

      The solution is to ditch as many cost-plus contracts as possible and use “commercial” style contracts with multiple suppliers as NASA has done with both commercial cargo and commercial crew. These programs cost a tiny fraction of a single bloated cost-plus program and provide multiple suppliers.

      The clear direction should be to kill SLS and procure commercial launch. If larger vehicles are needed, fund them just like commercial cargo and commercial crew. Two (or more) winners competing against each other and being paid for meeting milestones, not “cost-plus”.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        While the commercial style contracts help, the addition of too many management constraints from NASA can undermine them. The most significant from my perspective was the decision by NASA to equire extensive qualification for the SpaceX land recovery system but not to permit SpaceX to qualify it during station resupply missions.

  10. Richard Malcolm says:
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    Now, NASA can buy Falcon Heavy launches at 1/5 (or cheaper) the cost of an SLS

    1/5?

    Much more like 1/10, even if you you add in the usual NASA requirement stocking stuffers.

    And if you amortize taxpayer development cost, it’s more like 1/30th.

  11. Jeff2Space says:
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    Based on his reasoning, we need to ditch SLS sooner rather than later. Changes are easier to make early on in a project. The writing is on the wall for SLS, it’s a dead launch vehicle walking.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      Let’s keep in mind that SLS is, in many ways, much more capable than FH. And while many FH deficiencies, such as lower payload (at least foreseeably) may be ameliorated with additional launches, the penalty of load division and on-orbit assembly are not trivial.

      And, as far as I know, FH has no third stage with the abilities needed for deep space launches (again, yes, with some reservations, but still).

      I’m not an SLS fanboy. But I do favor precision and credit where it is due.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        Nothing that NASA is planning to do requires SLS. Deep Space Gateway can be done with existing EELVs (Falcon Heavy included). The SpaceX website doesn’t list “payload to Moon”, but it does list payload to Mars as 16,800 kg (37,040 lb). For reference, the mass of Unity (ISS node) with its two mating adapters was 11,612 kilograms (25,600 lb).

        We don’t need SLS to assemble Deep Space Gateway. By the time DSG is “complete”, both SpaceX and Blue Origin ought to have their truly heavy launch vehicles flying (BFR/BFS and New Armstrong).

        That and if NASA dropped SLS and worked instead on LEO fuel depot technology, the capacity of any of the above launch vehicles to the moon increases greatly after “topping off the tanks” in LEO. No complex orbital assembly required, just “refueling”.

        There is more than one way to moon. SLS is the completely expendable “one shot” way with at most a twice per year flight rate. A far more sustainable and higher flight rate system involves reuse of both launch vehicle components and in orbit refueling.

  12. Michael Spencer says:
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    Many see this pattern and conclude correctly that these programs were wrong-headed in the first place.

    But others simply conclude that “Hey! space is expensive! And really, really hard, too!”

  13. Michael Spencer says:
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    Wouldn’t we expect Mr. Gerstenmaier to behave in this way? To favor the policy directed from above? (Yea, I know, here’s pretty much at the top, but still). Certainly I don’t know if he voices opposition during policy discussions; but once policy is set he is obligated to carry it out, no?

    Wouldn’t the *way* he carries out policy be a fairer way to assess him? Operations is his job after all.

    • fcrary says:
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      Once someone has set the policy, I’d expect people working at lower levels to do their best to carry it out. But I think it’s a bit much to say that job requires them to become cheerleaders for the policy. Expecting someone to say, “This is the job we have to do, let’s figure out how to do it,” is a reasonable expectation. Expecting someone to lie and say, “I think this is a fantastically great, absolutely brilliant idea,” seems unreasonable to me. So if someone’s doing that sort of cheerleading, I’m inclined to think it’s on their own initiative, not just responsibly executing the orders they’ve been given.

      • Paul451 says:
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        Expecting someone to lie and say, “I think this is a fantastically great, absolutely brilliant idea,” seems unreasonable to me.

        You mentioned that following a meeting on, I think it was, the Icy Worlds mission, you floated the idea of using a heavy launch to save money by avoiding the hideously expensive mass-shaving that goes into every mission. (An idea I’ve flogged to death, so you know I agree with you.)

        If instead the program goes the normal way of trying to shoe-horn as many instruments into the mass-budget as possible — and expensively shaving every gram of mass to meet that mass-budget — drastically increasing the cost of the program.

        Now suppose the program gets funded. You get put in charge of the instrument coordination science team, and are asked to speak before Congress to defend the program. You are asked if the program is being sensible with its funding. What do you say?

        Your answer needs to be “Yes, absolutely. This is the best possible program that we can achieve within the budget. The only issue is uncertainty in future budgets, and IMO the program probably needs a little more funding now to build up a reserve against future political uncertainty.” And when that politician starts picking specific examples of dumb design choices, you will come up with reasons to defend every since choice.

        If that’s not the answer your bosses expect to hear from you, you would never be allowed into that position. Which means you would never be put into a senior role where you are likely to be called up by Congress.

        By elimination, then, we know that every single senior person at NASA will always give the answer they are expected to give. If they couldn’t be relied on, they wouldn’t be in that role.

        Therefore I never assume senior people are being honest.

        • fcrary says:
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          Well, since I spent part of yesterday arguing against this sort of cheerleading for your project, and doing so with convoluted and poor logic if that’s necessary, I guess this I’m either in the right or wrong mood to reply…

          First of all, for technical accuracy, that was a report about the Ice Giant study at a meeting with a broader scope. The speaker said that, if they used a heavy launch vehicle, they could send so large a payload that they couldn’t afford to build it.

          If I were asking questions of the sort you describe, I actually would speak my mind. I’d be polite about. If a project didn’t do things in the way I’d like, I’d probably we had a number of options. They all had strengths and weaknesses, and we had to pick one. And, if my favorite option wasn’t picked, I’d say most people disagreed with me, so we’re going with what most of the people involved think is the best option.

          That does mean I’m not the management poster child they would want answering questions from a congressional committee. And you are correct to say that managers know that and would probably never put me in a position where I would be expected to do so.

          In any case, I think people working the existing system need to be careful about this sort of thing. If you everything you report to the people supervising your work is totally upbeat, and logic-free self congratulation, you will throw away your credibility. No one in their right mind would think everything is actually 100% perfect. So claiming it is doesn’t make you a reliable source of information.

          Worse, when you do run into a snag, you now get to explain why. If you’ve spent years saying everything on your project is going perfectly, and then you have to say there’s a problem and you’ll need extra funding, that will not be received well.

          At a more ethical level, this sort of thing (expecting everyone to only say positive things to more senior supervisors) is a known way to destroy space shuttles and cause nuclear accidents. The whole point of hearings, reviews, and other sorts of oversight is to make sure no one slips up. If you just lie by saying everything is great, then that whole process becomes a farce.

          It also wastes even more money. How much does one day of a congressional hearing cost? If there is no real information conveyed in the process, what’s the point? Unless people actually do say what they think and mean, as opposed to just cheerleading for their projects or organization, isn’t that turning the process into a way to spend money to no good purpose?

          • Paul451 says:
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            I wasn’t describing something which “should be”, but which “is.

            Unless people actually do say what they think and mean, as opposed to just cheerleading for their projects or organization, isn’t that turning the process into a way to spend money to no good purpose?

            Yes. I wasn’t describing something I liked, just what is.

            Hence,

            So if someone’s doing that sort of cheerleading, I’m inclined to think it’s on their own initiative

            …is naive.

            “Icy Worlds”, “Ice Giants”.

            I meant the latter. I forgot that the former is JPL’s name for studies of ice-moons.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        A judgement call, case by case, I suppose.