Briefs: Sirangelo discusses Orion; Sally Ride interview

Ride "copped out" she is an example of new NASA "can't do". If it looks difficult or challenging just abandon and seek the easy way. This new ideology seems to have infected NASA and some of the new space companies.

It appears to me that Augustine panel was suspiciously quick to drop Constellation or to look at ways to carry on with a commercially based VSE program. A ULA white paper released shortly after Augustine panels "Flex Path" demonstrated a commercially based solution that carried on with the VSE and stayed within the existing budget. I have lost all respect for Ride following her involvement with the politicized Augustine debacle. A debacle that has gutted NASA and flung it into a perpetual state of stymied unfocused detached programs.

Posted by Doug at 07/31/10 11:37:04

Clark - It's a mischaracterization to state that the Augustine Committee recommended cancellation of Constellation or of any option covered in its report.

"The Committee was asked to review the program of record and offer prospective alternatives, not to recommend a specific future course for the human spaceflight program." (Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee report, page 19.)

-Joe

Posted by Joe Williams at 07/31/10 12:51:24

both of your are ignorant or in denial

unfortunately you will never catch up because that would require you to watch hours of archived hearings

Posted by donnie at 07/31/10 14:35:06

Re: Doug

Don't shoot the messenger. NASA was in a totally desolate state years before the augustine commission.

Any organization that can come up with an engineering nightmare like the Ares I is deeply broken.

MSFC has not developed a successful launch vehicle in my lifetime. Giving them more money to reward their failures won't work.

Posted by anonymous at 07/31/10 15:16:39

@donnie

What the Augustine Committee had to say in its report regarding the program of record is that it would need more funding and time to execute (see page 15, with more details starting on page 80). The report does not go so far as to recommend cancellation of the program. It's left as an exercise to the reader to reach his or her own conclusions.

With regards to cancellation, whether mentioned in the hearings or not, is not relevant. The hearings represented the fact-finding and work-in-progress of the committee, not its final position. The final product of the committee is its report, consisting of options, not any one recommendation.

Here's a link to it in case you haven't read it.
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/396...

Posted by Joe Williams at 07/31/10 16:11:45

"It's a mischaracterization to state that the Augustine Committee recommended cancellation of Constellation or of any option covered in its report."

You're correct that they did not explicitly recommend a specific path and instead laid out a set of options from which the administration could further pick and choose. However, none of those options included a viable Constellation program.

Option 1 is Constellation plus deorbiting the ISS in 2016, which no Congress and no President would ever accept. It states that the POR would not get to the Moon till the 2030s "if ever" and that the Ares I/Orion would not fly till after the ISS was gone.

Option 1 was included just as the worse case yardstick by which to compare the more viable options.

When none of your options include a viable Constellation, I characterize that as accepting the reality of, if not recommending, its cancellation. (Canceling the program, of course, does not mean pieces of it like Orion might not be kept or modified.)

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 07/31/10 16:26:27

joe, reading between the lines is usually only an exercise for high school students...

Posted by donnie at 07/31/10 18:18:45

As much as I enjoyed watching the Augustine committee, they didn't actually produce anything except bad news. Option 1, bad news. Option 2, bad news. All the other options: need at least $3B/year more please. If they had spent less time talking about "a program worthy of a great nation" and more time talking about what NASA could be doing with the money they've got, maybe the report would have been acceptable to Congress.

Posted by Trent Waddington at 07/31/10 21:24:14

OK i'll bite on this, Clark, have any of the Augustine Committee members said why there was no option to continue the POR and continue the ISS? Sorry but I don't have the time or mental energy to research this myself.

Based on just the Option 3 section of that report it seems to be the milestone dates for new systems would be pushed out, assuming only modest budget growth like is recommended. This seems like a reasonable option to lay on the table. It's up to the President to decide if it's worth waiting some extra time for the new systems.

I have no idea how far out they would be pushed but on the face of it but doubt it would be out at infinity. An extra decade?

For the record I am all for going with EELV class to LEO, developing in space reusable assets, and NASA contracting for LEO delivery of cargo, crew, and fuel. Seems to me the most efficient way to go, and would give the most stimulus for extending our economic activities to LEO and eventually beyond.

Posted by Joe Silva at 07/31/10 21:35:27

"Clark, have any of the Augustine Committee members said why there was no option to continue the POR and continue the ISS?"

It's all clearly laid out in their report. The Augustine panel was given a funding profile for NASA HSF for the next decade that totaled $100B between 2011 to 2020 and basically told to find what would fit within that amount of money. No viable Constellation program with the ISS fits it.

On page 83, they say that the "Unconstrained" POR (i.e. essentially what Griffin had laid out, including the deorbiting of the ISS in 2015 and human lunar return by early 2020s) would cost $145B. The Unconstrained POR and keeping the ISS flying would cost $159B.

The panel thus considered these as only "reference options" since they greatly exceed the budget guidance. They also do "not consider them to be programmatically competitive with the Integrated Options discussed below."

They also looked at the POR with and without the ISS but constrained to the 2010 budget level. These stretch out development of systems for decades. The panel considered these options to be "not viable" for beyond LEO exploration.

They then go on to cheat a bit and use a budget that gradually increases up to $3B extra per year above the guideline and use that for the other options that they present.

This includes the Option 3, that you mention, which gives it more money but still requires stretching out of Constellation. However, it de-orbits the ISS in 2015. That is a non-starter with the President, the Congress and the public. It's unrealistic, to say the least, to expect that the country would give NASA a $100B mulligan on the ISS and would say, "That's OK, go ahead and dump it. We'll trust you to do the next decades-long, multi-hundred billion dollar program competently."

So regardless of how they configure it, they find Constellation to be unaffordable and unworkable.

The Administration's budget plan would not grow the budget as quickly as in the panel's "less constrained" options. Instead it delays starting HLV development till 2015 and cancels Orion in addition to Ares I.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 08/01/10 00:03:36

Thanks Clark, interesting projections.

Uh, so if there was an immediate $3B increase it would give an extra $57B over 2011-2020 (inclusive). That would pretty much pay for POR + ISS.

Surely ATK, Sen. Shelby, and Rep. Gordon can talk to their friends, get enough votes for that measly $3B. ;-)

Posted by Joe Silva at 08/01/10 02:30:43

They never should have done the $3B/year extra.. There's a video or two where Augustine says "thankfully I got permission to plan for an increased budget, otherwise it would have just been impossible", and that really was the death knell of the report. When they were called before the House to explain the report the first thing that was asked was "why should we change all this if it's just to replace one underfunded program with another?" and Augustine said something along the lines of "if you want my opinion, don't change *anything* if you're unwilling to fund it to the required level". And that's the end of that.

Whereas if they had bit the bullet and decided what to *cut* to get at the required funding to do A Space Program Worthy Of A Crazy Congress they might have had some chance of redirecting something more than scraps to some programs that will actually make a difference.

As it is, I just wish the sausage factory would finish so we can get back to ignoring NASA.

Posted by Trent Waddington at 08/01/10 06:11:49

"Uh, so if there was an immediate $3B increase it would give an extra $57B over 2011-2020 (inclusive)."

Even Augustine didn't ask for an immediate $3B increase. The later Augustine Committee options involve a gradual increase that gets to $3B over a few years, and that is then maintained with inflation-level increases.

Augustine didn't bother asking for more than that because they'd be "laughed off the stage", as they put it.

Actually the amount they did ask for was also unrealistic. There wasn't much of a chance the Administration or Congress would go for it.

There was a big increase is the budget, but it wasn't that big. Also, keep in mind that NASA's budget increase happened at the same time the budget repaired some items that had been raided by Constellation, like Earth observations, general (not specific to exploration) Space Technology, and Aeronautics. So, the subject of the report, HSF, doesn't really see much of an increase at all. Therefore, we're in a situation similar to options 1 and 2.

The FY2011 NASA budget proposal deals with this realistically by giving NASA some jobs that can fit in that budget. It's a little bit different from option 2 (ISS and lunar on a constrained budget), and a little bit different from option 5B (Flexible Path with EELV-based HLV) - sort of a mix of the 2.

Unfortunately, Congress wants to try to fit option 5C, Directly Shuttle Derived + refueling (Senate) or a Flexible Path/ISS variant of option 3, Ares I/V/Orion with commercial crew killed (House), on a budget that is closer to the constrained options 1 and 2.

That's exactly what Augustine Committee warns about in the first 2 sentences of the Executive Summary:

"The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources."

Posted by red at 08/01/10 06:50:43

What I still don't understand is why Gabrielle Giffords isn't "carrying the water" for the Obama administration on this bill and hasn't had "sit down" discussions in the White House about this topic.

The only answer to that is Obama really doesn't care and hasn't done that kind of major support for "his" legislation plan for spaceflight. There may be some other issues at play, and certainly her chairmanship position wasn't considered a "key" leadership role when those positions were handed out. Still, it is Representative Giffords who controls the agenda of that sub-committee with oversight on NASA appropriations, and ultimately controls the "spin" on how this discussion will play out in Congress.

I still say this whole debate is more a reflection of the support that Obama has among members of his own political party. I don't know how much of the Obama proposal came from Lori Garver (from what I understand.... quite a bit), but missing the support of Representative Giffords was a major mistake. The original proposal never had a real champion, and only now does the "compromise" bill have one in the form of Senator Bill Nelson.

Posted by Robert Horning at 08/01/10 08:42:15

"Surely ATK, Sen. Shelby, and Rep. Gordon can talk to their friends, get enough votes for that measly $3B."

No, as Red says, there is zero chance of getting more for NASA's annual budget than the President's modest increase. In the years before the financial crisis, Mikulski and Hutchison failed repeatedly to get a billion dollar boost to the NASA budget. With the gigantic deficit/debt crisis now on hand, it is impossible.

Regardless of the fact that NASA is a small fraction of the total budget, all discretionary programs are under increasing budget pressure. There is no way to reduce the entitlement programs that are creating the budget crisis if people can point to increases in something considered a luxury like space exploration.

Note that despite the strong push-back in Congress against the President's plan, neither the House nor the Senate bills increase the total budget from the $19B set by the President.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 08/01/10 10:05:48

Robert

I question whether Giffords would've ever supported this proposed budget. If you look at her pre-release comments, when they were still analyzing the Augustine report, its totally clear she had no intention of doing any changes to Constellation. Getting her support probably would've been an exercise in futility.

How, change that from Giffords to Bart Gordon, who could've provided an opposing viewpoint, and I agree.

Posted by Ferris Valyn at 08/01/10 10:08:54

"They never should have done the $3B/year extra.."

In the public meetings, Bo Bejmuk argued that they should just push for a big budget boost for NASA. Others responded that the report would then be totally ignored. So they compromised in having options with no increase and with a $3B increase.

I wish they had had included one non-increase option that maximized what could be accomplished with no HLV. However, the combination of HLV bias plus the "maintain the workforce" attitude among most of the members prevented this.

"...that really was the death knell of the report."

I disagree that this report died. It had far more impact than most such reports. It set the basis for the Administration's budget plan. While the House committees tried their best to ignore it, the Senate committees would never have canceled Ares I or given any money at all to commercial crew without it.

"When they were called before the House..."

I don't see any House hearing where Augustine or other panel members testified. Augustine did testify at a Senate hearing along with three opponents of the President's budget.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 08/01/10 10:28:25

"...don't understand is why Gabrielle Giffords isn't "carrying the water" for the Obama administration on this bill ..."

Generally, there is no such thing as party discipline for either Democrats or Republicans except on really high profile issues and only then when the votes are close. Even on the health bill, for example, the votes against it were bi-partisan, not the votes for it.

Space simply is not that important to anyone outside a relatively small number of people. Discretionary spending involves dozens, if not hundreds, of programs (e.g. farm supports, Veterans programs, multiple environmental issues, the Park Service, etc.) all of which have very noisy supporters, many in numbers far bigger than those yelling about the space program.

In that situation, there is only so much an Administration can do to pressure individual members of Congress on a particular issue like space. As Ferris indicates, Giffords was dead set against the changes to Constellation from the beginning. She apparently has convinced Gordon to follow her lead.

I'm sure the Administration had contacts with her but I doubt even a major effort to pressure her would have had any effect. The blatant way she biased the witness panels against the plan shows that she intended to undermine it as much as possible.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 08/01/10 10:51:26

Clark

If memory serves me correctly, there was a hearing with Augustine and Ed Crawley, back in the fall, when the report first came out (and WELL before the budget was proposed)

Posted by Ferris Valyn at 08/01/10 12:18:47

OK, now that you mention it, I vaguely remember that. I was considering only the hearings on the budget.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 08/01/10 13:29:01

Whether the bulk of NASA's HSF budget is poured into Ares I or the Nelson Rocket is largely irrelevant. If the conclusion of the Augustine committee had been that although NASA is on an unsustainable path there's not much they can do about it without more funding (which is basically what the report said) then maintaining the status quo while throwing some study promises to the DIRECT crowd would have been sufficient to get COTS-D funded by now.

However, should the technology program get sufficient funding I'll call the whole thing a win. And that's kinda sad.

Posted by Trent Waddington at 08/01/10 17:25:49

"In that situation, there is only so much an Administration can do to pressure individual members of Congress on a particular issue like space. As Ferris indicates, Giffords was dead set against the changes to Constellation from the beginning. She apparently has convinced Gordon to follow her lead."

At the very least, the White House should have been in very direct negotiations with Giffords over this issue. If she is so dead set against commercial spaceflight as is suggested, she certainly should have been involved deeply in the process of getting the legislation written in the first place.

What I'm complaining about here is the "go it alone" process that seems to have happened here, and this is something that presumably is all a huge surprise that the support in Congress wasn't there in the first place.

Either Obama and his advisors in the White House know practically nothing about getting legislation passed, or this has been a deliberate script on his part for a variety of political reasons for how this whole program has been presented. I can buy that, so far as Obama didn't really care to get much passed for spaceflight and wants to get some of the other members of congress (notably Senator Shelby and the delegations of Alabama, Florida, and Utah) looking like idiots and the "bad guys" on this issue.

Much more is going on "behind the scenes" here and hopefully it should be acknowledged that the committee meetings are not really where the legislation is getting written.

"Generally, there is no such thing as party discipline for either Democrats or Republicans except on really high profile issues and only then when the votes are close."

Again, this shows the political weakness of Obama more than anything else. Having Obama show up and endorse you for re-election is now something more of a kiss of death at the voting booth. That hasn't always been the case with previous presidents (although it was also mostly true of Bush too.) Obama also isn't nearly the fundraiser that Bill Clinton became, which is another major tool for party discipline... and something that for good or ill George W. Bush was also good at doing.

Yes, I know that space policy is a very back-burner issue that gets "C-section" coverage in the Washington Post and other publications or news outlets. That makes Obama's attitude toward this even more suspect and that questioning why those few members of congress who do care about this issue aren't being dealt with on a more direct fashion.

Perhaps this was a political ploy to flush out the supporters and enemies of Obama. If so, it has done a relatively good job of that. Obama had little to lose and much to gain by getting an army of "new space" volunteers and geek blogs saying "Go Obama"! The large space contracting firms now know they can buy off the current administration, and status quo is being restored after a fashion.

Posted by Robert Horning at 08/01/10 17:26:19

Robert - Its worth asking how much is it the Whitehouse, and how much is it Bolden? Because isn't it possible that the mess is as much a result of Bolden's planning/management, much like it was with Griffin & ESAS?

Posted by Ferris Valyn at 08/01/10 21:11:12

"It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources."

Only if one totally ignores a multitude of existing well researched technologies.

The options put forth by the Augustine panel were very limited in scope of technologies employed. They were slanted to favor SpaceX as Obama clearly had a hard on for Musk and his "green" electric car. Obama gave Musk millions to save the fledgling Tesla based company. Then Obama employed the Augustine panel and Garver to white wash the VSE (yes constellation was a Griffin fiasco that needed to go but a commercial VSE was still valid and ULA white paper proves it)tipping the scales in Musk favor and adopting a policy that would gut NASA. Exactly what Obama/Garver had preached since day one. Obama assumed he could ram the new plan through "Chicago" style. But the porkers proved to be hard liners to the bitter end. And no attempt was made to appeased the porkers up front. The whole thing becomes a political fiasco leaving NASA in the grip of total KAOS. Now a HLV poker emerges "with no clear destination" other than to support the aerospace pork industry. And some commercial crumbs fall through much of which SpaceX hogs up.

Looks very dim to me. Looks like a repeat of the last forty years only instead of flying a runway landing vehicle to the ISS we will be flying fed funded splash down capsules.

What hope remains lies in the crumbs.

Posted by Doug at 08/01/10 22:30:09

Sierra Nevada Corp Dream Chaser lifting body. Poised to offer pin point runway landing return to point of origin and RLV commercial CATS capability. Yet we chose to ignore and retain splash down capsule 20th century technology to LEO access. Truly if we continue to ignore more enabling technologies then we do not deserve a RLV CATS LEO based system. We deserve to set and rot in limited mid 20th century stymied LEO access forever.

Posted by Doug at 08/01/10 22:54:19

"Its worth asking how much is it the Whitehouse, and how much is it Bolden? Because isn't it possible that the mess is as much a result of Bolden's planning/management, much like it was with Griffin & ESAS?"

I have strong reason to believe that most of the current approach has been engineered by Lori Garver, and possibly John Holdren as well. If they are the ones responsible for the current mess, perhaps I can agree there. Holdren's hand in this at least indicates some sort of significant involvement from the West Wing, which really gets back to the involvement (or lack thereof) from Obama himself.

Is this leaving Bolden out of the loop? No, I'm not saying that, but from those I've talked with seem to indicate that Bolden isn't exactly the "mastermind" behind the whole thing either in the same way that Griffin ran NASA as a private fiefdom. It also has been the modus operandi to depend heavily on "czars" or "special assistants to the president" to be actually running things and leaving the agency heads more as titular heads with no real authority on anything other than routine day to day operations. This is something that several members of congress have already been complaining about in other contexts, so it certainly wouldn't be surprising to see it happening with space policy either.

Posted by Robert Horning at 08/03/10 20:10:06

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