A Peek Inside Mike Griffin's Alternate Universe
Obama campaign could trip over space policy, Houston Chronicle
Mike’s alternate universe fantasy: “Access to space should have been a campaign issue in every election since Nixon cancelled Apollo in the 1970s,” added Griffin, an adviser to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.”
Vs reality: “You’d have to distort reality to make that a partisan issue in the fall campaign,” insists John Logsdon, a space historian and veteran of the Columbia accident board who helped Obama develop his policies. “We are where we are because of decisions by the last two presidents and both parties in Congress. This should not be a campaign issue.”
Actually, review the record; Logsdon was one of the leading proponents of cancellation of the Shuttle, and called it a mistake long before Griffin came along back when he was part of the CAIB. He seems to want to create an alternate history about how Shuttle’s configuration was established and how Shuttle was developed. He has gotten a lot wrong about his pronouncements about Shuttle, just as he got a lot wrong about the Kennedy Apollo decision. In the case of Apollo he did not yet have all of the Kennedy tapes and records so he had an excuse. In the case of Shuttle he had access to the records and the people if he had bothered to review the records or talk to the people.
Intelligent people would have tried to improve Shuttle and reduce its costs, not throw away the knowledge and the hardware. What Logsdon and Griffin have both advocated, reversion to one-off capsules and huge rockets that will never be affordable, is exactly what has gotten us into the situation we are in today and from which American human space flight may very well never recover.
Campaign issue?? Maybe not, it does not seem to be on any of the politician’s horizons except for Newt. All the more reason these two well educated but stupid technocrats should have thought more seriously before they put us into the predicament we are in today. The goal should have been to work more efficiently, more effectively, and more safely, not to stupidly throw away everything we have worked towards for the last fifty years. Make no mistake about it, these two fools put us into the current situation, not the last two Administrations and Congresses. NASA budget was reasonably stable since Apollo, declining some only in the last few years but still not declining significantly. All of the Presidents, including W Bush, told NASA to expect no significant increases and to plan accordingly. About a half of a per cent is what NASA can expect. We have now thrown away all of our prior investments without the substantial increases it could take to replace the assets.
Good luck to us. Griffin and Logsdon did us in and we may never recover.
“Intelligent people would have tried to improve Shuttle and reduce its costs,”
Yeah, in 1986. Not 2006. By 2006 all that “knowledge” was already long gone except ops.
Owning a 25 year old car doesn’t mean you know how to make better cars. Operating a 25 year old plane doesn’t teach you how to build better planes. Why would owning and operating three 25 year old orbiters mean you can build a better launcher?
Owning a 25 year old car doesn’t mean you know how to make better cars. Operating a 25 year old plane doesn’t teach you how to build better planes. Why would owning and operating three 25 year old orbiters mean you can build a better launcher?
Not a good analogy. There were many things that could have been done to improve the operability of the Shuttle airframe. There was a study completed on this at about the time that Columbia went down.
Replace all the hydraulic system with electromechanical actuation devices. That would have the additional benefit of getting rid of the hydrazine powered APU’s which had always been a problem.
Replace the Bi-prop OMS system with a LOX/Methane OMS system. Would get rid of a major systems pain in the rear for reprocessing.
Replace the entire attitude control system with LOX/Methane thrusters.
Just those improvements would probably have cut the time to process an orbiter in half, cut the total weight of the orbiter, and improved orbital performance.
Add the capability for a solar array on the orbiter. This was studied as far back as 1977 and would have enabled the implementation of a closed loop fuel cell system that would have increased the amount of time an orbiter could stay on orbit by several weeks. Indeed you probably could have gotten to the point of having an STS be the crew rescue vehicle at the station AND this would have increased the utility of the station dramatically with the addition of the 15 x 60 ft cargo bay and its RMS. This would have also provided a darn sight more habitable are as well.
The total cost of the STS system is a function of its operational fraction. With those improvements the STS operational fraction would have reached unity, enabling an amazing capability for oribital operations, assembly, telescopes, and other missions.
By “operational fraction”, are you referring to the amount of time spent on-orbit vs the amount spent being refurbished?
“Indeed you probably could have gotten to the point of having an STS be the crew rescue vehicle at the station”
Hmmm, with a couple of second-gen orbiters in orbit at any given time, a shared docking and power structure, returnable modules in the cargo-bay. Would you have needed a “space station” per se?
Would you have needed a “space station” per se? Interesting question but lets turn it around a bit. With that kind of capability just think what we could have done with orbital assembly……
And yes, operational fraction is exactly that. If a STS was in orbit (one of the three) 365 days per year for $4 billion a year that ends up with a very attractive total system cost.
There are thousands of changes to have refined Shuttle, some of which had the potential to lower the cost footprint (E.g. reusable liquid boosters), increased safety, lowered turnaround cost/time, … on and on.
So why weren’t they ever done? Because in the eyes of Congress, Shuttle was done, and they were gonna reign it in (translation – those who already were making it go were already spoken for) and then eventually shut it down. Then, the game starts anew with SDLV, with some even making more than before.
The end of Shuttle started before Challenger, and I suggest people go back and read all the testimony around the CELV decision to get back launch vehicles for the military to displace Shuttle – much of those selfsame decisions have driven Shuttle conclusion.
No one wanted to get trapped by endless Shuttle, yet no one wanted to depend on its residual lifetime to amortize new flight systems costs over. They got used to flying it out “as is”.
The United States hasn’t had a real pioneering manned space program since the end of Apollo. Since that time, the politicians have been afraid to do more with American astronauts than send them around in circles above the Earth. American astronauts during the Shuttle program were merely used as symbols of American technological superiority. Now we don’t even have the symbols!
Fortunately, Congress showed great wisdom in funding the SLS program. And the President has shown wisdom in strongly supporting the Commercial crew efforts. Combined, these two programs should eventually open up a new pioneering era for America’s public and private space efforts.
But the President and Congress still need to commit this nation towards the next logical step in space by establishing a permanent human presence on the lunar surface. And there’s no logical reason why this can’t be done within the current NASA budget by simply prioritizing such lunar ambitions. The $3 billion a year spent on the ISS, a structure that we no longer have the ability to even travel to anymore, could easily get us back to the Moon by 2020.
Marcel F. Williams
Mike’s alternate universe fantasy: “Access to space should have been a campaign issue in every election since Nixon cancelled Apollo in the 1970s,
A limited viewpoint like this is what got us into this mess in the first place. First of all, Nixon did not cancel Apollo, the production of the Saturn V was terminated in April of 1968 as a deficit reduction measure by the LBJ administration and congress. I guess they figured that if we did not make it to the landing with that first production run we were not going to.
The production and infrastructure of the Saturn V and the Apollo system was unsustainable unless we were at that time going to go forward with the economic development of the solar system. I would agree with Dr. Griffin if he had made that argument, but it is clear from his tenure as NASA administrator and from the Constellation program that this was never one of his considerations.
His goal was and is to build a rocket bigger than Von Braun’s and send it to Mars. This is why Constellation was more or less a touch and go mission to the Moon with most of the efforts in the DRM’s pointed to Mars.
A Constellation architecture to Mars as was developed for his last DRM by definition is nothing more than flags and footprints on another celestial body. His name would be remembered in history alongside of Von Braun and Imhotep but what good would it bring this nation and the world.
Watching Bolden announce the cancellation of the Constellation program in the middle of the worst economic recession the US has seen since the 30’s (resulting in thousands of layoffs for folks who thought they would transition to Cx from Shuttle) and then not providing a plan for what NASA would work on for 2 more months, and then backtracking on cancelling the MCPV certainly made US space policy a campaign item for me.
The merits of the President’s original plan are debatable – the way in which it was rolled out was inexcusable.
I suspect there may be some current and former space industry folks in Fla that feel the same way but we’ll find out in Nov.
Even worse, Paul451. IMHO the shuttle was two sticks of dynamite strapped to a hydrogen bomb. Inherently unimprovable without going back to the pre-DOD NASA design of a smaller vehicle with less wings and boosted by a piloted mothership.
The shuttle’s record is actually amazing and testimony to what highly dedicated people and brave crews with the “right stuff” can do even with a committee-designed ship.
However, I must admit that in spite of my sickness at our abandoment of a human space flight program that I do not miss the sick feeling of dread in my stomach everytime I heard the words “Throttle up…”
“The shuttle’s record is actually amazing and testimony to what highly dedicated people and brave crews with the “right stuff” can do even with a committee-designed ship.”
Any criticism I have for the shuttle, and the decisions made before and during the program doesn’t diminish what they achieved. Without any experience at building a space plane, with reduce funding, and with conflicting goals, they built a 100 ton semi-reusable space plane, on a completely novel side-mounted 130 ton to orbit launch system, on their first try.
What saddens me is wondering what could have been had those guys had taken the incremental development practice of Mercury and Gemini (and the decade pre-Mercury), and applied it to space planes and reusability.
“Inherently unimprovable”
I disagree. You just look at the steps you skipped the first time, then find a useful, efficient way to transition back through those steps, relearning your craft which adds new flexibility to the existing system purely as a side-effect. The problem is the assumption that the next program has to be bigger/bolder than the last one. JWST, MSL, NASP/etc, and Constellation. Not the “next step” but the “next leap”. The effect being that you ignore what you’ve learned and start from scratch each time.
In my mind, the step before flying the actual 100 ton orbiter is to test the shuttle stack with an unmanned cargo system. The step before that is to fly it with a dummy payload. The step before that is a smaller, crew only, orbiter on a scaled down stack that tests some of the things to be used on the full version, such as a reusable main engine, novel heat shields, etc. The step before that is a 3 or 4-man space plane launched on an expendable, to test competing designs and gain experience with reusability. And so on.
So to get from the STS to its successor, you need to redo those steps, except you are going backwards, adapting them to develop new capacity and add flexibility to the existing systems. This time you learn how to build space planes, in general, not just STS. And I believe that the savings inherent in incremental development would mean that it wouldn’t have been more expensive than the money spent on STS and its proposed replacements (NASP/etc) over the following 20 years, and certainly would have left NASA is a vastly better position to build a shuttle mkII.
But again, that’s starting in 1986 not 2006. Starting when the STS development experience is fresh and the workforce young.
To start from where NASA is today, you have to accept not just 30 years lost, but 30 years of decay of knowledge and experience. You’re really going all the way back to pre-Mercury. Either you do it all again, or, to short cut the process, you want to find the commercial players with the most experience at developing new small systems and develop a business case for them to scale up. IMO, that means making New Space and COTS/CCDev as the core of NASA HSF. And that means NASA HSF never again specifies a design for a launcher or capsule, only a capacity.
Very well said!
I disagree with the comment by damallette that Shuttle was “two sticks of dynamite strapped to a hydrogen bomb”. When you deal with high performance solid or liquids, rockets, you are dealing with potential bombs. It is not going to be any different in the future. I also disagree with his statement about a fly-back mothership. With the 60s-70s technology, the Shuttle as it was designed was cutting edge/state of the art and if it had been any more sophisticated then it would have been far more difficult to get it flying.
The design could always have been improved upon. The mistake was not putting sufficient time and money into making incremental changes and improvements throughout its operational life. That is the result of mismanagement.
One point left out was that beginning in 1971, a Shuttle Orbiter was built and flying in 1977. We are talking abut five years from not even a concept, to a real vehicle.
Unfortunately beginning with people the Shuttle program managers after the first one, Bob Thompson, in 1984 or 85 they started putting people with only ops backgrounds and no engineering design and development experience in charge. What they got was an ops focus and no engineering design or development. As in the cases of Challenger and Columbia, those ops guys thought they could operationally mitigate design requirements. They did not succeed. And notice how the costs never came down. Those ops guys kept putting more money into their existing systems and operational concepts. No reason why their costs should not have been coming down the whole time. They were taking the American taxpayers to the cleaners.
When you apply that kind of background to a new program, like
Constellation, they wasted more money and time and after five years did not even have a good set of requirements-they still don’t and now they are at year 7.
You are right Paul, trying to relearn the lessons of the 100 series fighters, the X-planes, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, is what it would take to get the kinds of knowledge that went into designing and building Shuttle. Unfortunately, when I see the inexperience of today’s NASA managers, I see waste; I see lack of faith or trust in a bureaucratic system gone awry; I see inability. I see a bunch of people promoted to a level well beyond their competence. What I do not see is the ability to design, build or fly much of anything.
Brian, and Paul, my commentary about the shuttle “bomb” was poorly phrased. I should have stuck to the fundamentals. I was just trying to say that it could have been far safer and less expensive as well if it had been designed without undue pressure.
It’s very diffifult for me to speak of it as I became physically ill and went home from work the day of Challenger, and then had the further “luck” to remember to go outside my just north of DFW home to watch Columbia reenter. I sank to my knees on the lawn as I realized what I was seeing…
‘nuf, if not too much. said about that.
I will constantly state that I have zero qualifications to make engineering suggestions and will make every effort to avoid doing so.
What I WILL say is that I support every effort in human space flight as though our future depended on it, because it does.
Lives will be lost, but I recall the time in the 50s when lives were lost routinely and virtually without note by those who were willing to push the envelope. I’d gladly board a shuttle, or almost anything, to at least taste the fabric of space and our future before I die.
I wish to contest a single line:
“It is not going to be any different in the future.”
We shall see. Such predictions have fallen over my lifetime with incredible rapidity. If it can be imagined, it can be realized.
Dave
🙂
I sure hope Stratolaunch reopens the door to safer cheaper ways to LEO. I’m haunted by that memery of the x-15 air force tv program I saw.
log in
Vaguaries of email and my poor communications skills…
What I meant by “inherently unimprovable” was that the shuttle as built was too complex and big to ever be the “Ace Trucking Company” as one of the first pilots reported it after launch no matter what we did.
I think I made it clear I have enormous respect for those who made this thing work and those who flew it.
But we could have learned from it and built a better one. i am not a rocket scientist and do not play one on TV, so I will try to refrain from sketching “better ideas.’ I am sure there are many here that have concepts much more realistic than anything a layman like myself could dream up. However, one does not have to be an engineer to recognize we did not achieve the original goal of low cost, weekly, routine launches.
Watching Elon Musk, Rutan’s group, and others who’ve picked up the baton I am far more heartened now that a couple of years ago. These guys are dreamers with the difference that they also understand there is money to be made out there.