S.3661 – Space Exploration Sustainability Act
S.3661 – Space Exploration Sustainability Act
“SEC. 4. REPORT ON CIS-LUNAR SPACE.
Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall submit to Congress a strategy to achieve the long-term goal of sustainably expanding a human presence beyond low-Earth orbit under section 202(a) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010 (42 U.S.C. 18312(a)) through robust utilization of cis-lunar space.”
IFPTE Letters Opposing S. 3661, the Space Exploration Sustainability Act
“S. 3661 in its current form is a flawed and unbalanced effort to improperly prioritize a few outsourced and offshored activities, while neglecting NASA’s internal core capabilities and other critical needs. It is focused on catering to the demands of the Russian government and on preserving Russian aerospace jobs all the way through the end of this decade, while doing absolutely nothing to protect NASA’s federal workforce.”
Keith’s note: IFPTE is obviously interested in protecting government jobs – simply for the sake of protecting government jobs. They are a union, so that is to be expected. Otherwise, the IFPTE seems to be uninterested in what this legislation is trying to do in terms of American space policy. Indeed, where the IFPTE folks get some of this arm waving and scary hyperbole is just baffling.
HLV/abundant chemical architecture would be re-examined or be included?
Technology development, smaller launch vehicles, IP participation,would likely provide robust exploration programs within the next decade.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS. (2) The Nation’s space program should include endeavors
that balance–
(D) U.S. Government led launch capability development, including the Space Launch System and multi-purpose crew vehicle, and partnerships with commercial and international entities;
SEC. 4. REPORT ON CIS-LUNAR SPACE. (c) Comparison of Architectures.– (1) In general.–The strategy shall include a comparison of architectures that use an expanded and persistent human presence in cis-lunar space and architectures that do not…
(2) Factors.–Factors to be considered in the comparison shall include recurring and non-recurring cost, safety, sustainability, opportunities for international collaboration, enabling of new markets and opportunities for commercial industry, compelling scientific opportunities, flexibility of the architecture to adjust to evolving technologies, and leadership and priorities over time.
New Browser.I have been thinking about a trip to an asteroid.The Moon is much safer.It should cost more.Require more expensive equiptment.Asteroids,just build a big craft.Big enough to carry several backups for life support.Once on the way,there is no turning back.It will take a year to get back.It is just too big of a chance.We are not ready and will not be ready in 10 years.It is too unsafe.The Moon trip is short.There is safety on the Moon,ISS or return to Earth.I no longer support an asteroid mission.IceApe is saying evertyhing is spelled wrong.So excuse my spelling.Anti-X Linux did load from a 8gig. usb drive.Finally got one to work.Even WiFi.Yea!
Saturn13, I mean these comments as constructive criticism. I’d like you to be more effective at getting your message across. If you want other people to take your views seriously, you should consider showing some more courtesy and respect to your readers. In particular:
* Don’t mix random minutia about your life that is unrelated to your message about space policy into your post. Nobody here wants to waste his or her time reading about what browser you use, your OS, WiFi, etc. We are here because we are interested in space policy, not these details of your life.
* Put at least one, and better two, spaces between the period ending one sentence and the start of the next. It may not seem like much, but it makes it faster to parse for readers, because it’s what we’re used to.
* Don’t apologize for your spelling, do something about it. If you know you have difficulty with spelling, use a spell checker, and then don’t waste our time reading an apology.
Ok.You are breaking your own rules.You are commenting on your own personal likes and dislikes.Do you have any comments on my opinion on asteroid flights?It is inefficient to put any more keystrokes down than I have to,since I am not a touch typists.Why double space?You are taking up too much space.Or the ones that use narrow columns.I am not complaining,just pointing out.Since there are 5 likes for your comment I will stick to space from now on.Just constructive criticism.As for getting my point across,I do the best I can.
The moon mission(s) as planned do not develop technology needed to explore Mars, nor are they adequately funded.
Starting with stepping stone crew tended gateway at L2, technologies that can enable longer stays in space can be developed and tested, significantly cheaper than going to the moon.
Higher flight rates will be achieved to L2 than heading to the moon with substantially more crew health data obtained than staying on a 1/6th g surface.
The next stepping stone is an asteroid, which contains all of the technology needed to head to Mars at significantly lower energy/cost, assuming the of course success at L2.
The path is flexible, and could include lunar missions, which would likely start with robotic exploration and ISRU.
Congress gave up on the moon and asteroids and mars a decade ago when
they discarded the cheaper depot centric architecture for a HLV.
The current program has no lander, no service module, nor any funding to head to the moon, other than a uncrewed flyby in 2021, which as you have stated, is a quite safe certification step in the process, but not high return on science. With ISS, its uncertain enough crew would be available to support lunar too given the budget and lack of technology.
The glimmer of light is that while jobs in one portion of the sector may be lost, if the funding remains the same, the same number will be created in the US, unlike just shutting down shop and sending them overseas.
muomega0,
I like the logic in your post. I’d just like to add a couple of thoughts, if I may.
First, like others, you’ve nominated an asteroid as a valid stepping stone. I agree, but I think it’s important that we specify an asteroid with specific characteristics, since they’re not all the same. Catching a NEO as it gets close to Earth orbit is a different task/mission than meeting up with an asteroid in a circular orbit that stays out between Mars and Jupiter. The time you could stay on the asteroid would be very different as well.
Second, since we’re including both an asteroid and ISRU, it might be worth considering a comet instead of an asteroid, if we can possibly find one in an orbit with a long (time) perigee. I say this because, initially, we’re probably more interested in volatiles than metals and rock. Robotics on a short-period comet is another option to consider.
Rhetorical question: Did Congress really give up on the Moon, asteroids and Mars, or did they simply not understand the requirements until after they’d already committed the country to something they mistakenly thought could do anything?
Steve
It’s really quite sickening that this union is so vehemently opposed to a bill because it talks about commercial crew and NASA’s own internally-developed vehicles both being important.
This union is trying to kill a program that very clearly will be far more effective for the money than any recent internal NASA program because it threatens the jobs of the union’s members.
Commercial crew is only getting a small fraction of all the money going into human spaceflight at NASA, yet even that is opposed by the union.
The right thing to do would be to kill SLS, put most of this union’s members out of their jobs, and spend the money on more fixed-cost, pay-for-performance contracts that are open to any organization and that put all financial risk on the organizations getting the money. It’s obvious to any impartial observer.
Chris,
While I support your thoughts on fixing the way that NASA contracting with commercial companies is done, we do need to take a moment to understand the full ramifications of going to that model.
If we as a nation put all of the financial risk on the organizations getting the money, and they fail, then we run the risk of losing a capability that we as a nation have enjoyed for so long: assured access to space. While we have no human access to space at the moment, several companies (Boeing/ULA, SpaceX, and SNC) are working to close this gap and I believe they will (and effectively!). Let us not forget that we had a similar gap in the 70’s; that did not sink the space program then and it will not sink it now.
Having assured access to space is not a trivial thing to discuss and we shouldn’t take it for granted. Right now, the DOD has assured access to space in the form of the EELV program and they pay to maintain this capability. Billionaires with a real passion for space like Musk have only come around once in the history of the global space programs. Aside from people like him, and absent any real commercial HSF opportunity, which is a long way off, this will always be a government subsidized industry to maintain that assured access. Do not underestimate it and do not take it for granted. The DOD does not take this for granted which is why they are much more reluctant to go with a service provider that has yet to fully prove their technical and financial solvency.
In my personal opinion, I believe that NASA is working to the right approach here, or at least on the right track. Commercialize what is “easy” (as many of you know, nothing in rocketry is really easy, only trivialized): space taxis to the ISS and other LEO type missions of the non-national security variety while NASA works with its commercial partners to develop the next class of launch vehicles to go BEO that are eventually commercialized themselves (Not that SLS is necessarily meant to be fully commercialized….. but it maybe should be).
While many of us are leery of the US government and its power, we must recognize that without it, none of this is even possible. We must work to find the right balance to move forward using the best technical solutions at the correct price point without risking our position in the global space industry.
Ditto, pretty much.
Hi hcxc,
I agree with your point about government funding being necessary now and for the foreseeable future for human spaceflight.
I also agree with you about the commercial programs doing the “easy” work of going to and from LEO.
But I disagree with you on two points. The first point on which I disagree is the assumption that we need a new class of launch vehicles to go BEO. If we had huge budgets for human spaceflight (I wish we did), huge launchers would be the way to go. Hight flight rates would make very heavy lift the most cost-effective way to get large amounts of cargo to orbit.
But since we don’t have huge space budgets, and we don’t have any prospect of getting them in the near future, I think building very heavy lift is folly. We’ll blow our whole budget on SLS and have little left to put anything on SLS. A far more effective way to use our current budgets, I believe, is to make do with smaller, cheaper launch vehicles and use propellant depots, in-orbit assembly, etc. to have a robust BEO program without very heavy lift.
The other point on which I disagree with you is whether having NASA do a lot of the work in-house makes sense for the “hard” things. I just don’t believe the evidence supports the idea that only NASA has the ability to build deep space craft or super-heavy-lift or anything else. I think opening it up to competitive, fixed-price, pay-for-performance commercial contracting will be far more effective than having NASA do it in house. NASA is a very badly broken organization. All the incentives are set up wrong.
NASA hasn’t designed a successful new launch vehicle since the 1970s. Nearly all the NASA employees and contractors of today weren’t around when the last launch vehicle was being designed. NASA has more recent experience building parts of the ISS, which has some relevance to deep space spacecraft, but none to SLS. But there will be many more challenges in building a deep-space architecture that ISS experience isn’t relevant to. And anyway most of the ISS engineering was done in the 1990s, and many of those who did it are no longer at NASA anyway. If we converted over to a very lean NASA with commercial companies doing the work for deep space systems, the commercial companies could hire up the people from NASA who really do have critical expertise, and allow them to work in an organization where they can be more effective. The remaining lean NASA could consult with and monitor the progress of the commercial competitors, as they have done with COTS, CCDev, and CiCap.
Chris,
Thank you for your reply. I really welcome these kinds of discussions.
For your (and everyone else’s) reference, I do not work for NASA or the DOD, but rather a NASA commercial contractor that receives funding to do launch vehicle work. In that sense, I have skin in the game and am biased…. just not from a NASA/DOD perspective.
That being said, I agree with both of your points to some degree and want to further discuss them.
First: Yes, we do not have large space budgets and we may not be able to afford the development of a large HLV.
My personal opinion is that this is line of thinking is in and of itself folly as fueling depots will only get you so far and they generally restrict spacecraft movement (after all, if you have to refuel, then you can only launch at a time where you can both rendezvous with both the depot and your final destination). This shrinks launch windows to the point where (like Mars missions), we can only launch once every 8 or so years. An HLV eliminates some of that and gives us the flexibility to launch at specific times within those windows and may actually increase launch rate. I haven’t done any trade studies myself, so this is purely intuitive speculation.
The second, and probably most complicated, is the role of NASA and the DOD in development of launch vehicles. My point was never to have NASA or the DOD do engineering for vehicles in-house (commercial companies rule!)…. but rather it is that these two parts of the government need to understand that their role is a supporting role for industry that also subsidizes the commercial companies that supply them.
SpaceX, Boeing/ULA, and SNC will never survive without this government support. Conversely, the same space agencies would not exist without commercial support. Both sides secretly (or maybe publicly) hate that the other exists, which is what causes costs to rise and schedule to lengthen. Competition is key to keeping costs down and schedules short, but putting all the risk on these companies only sets them up for financial failure. Again, balance is required. To achieve this, definition of roles is also required.
Let us not forget that 10 years ago, the DOD thought that having both Lockheed and Boeing in the game was too much cost for the EELV and they basically forced their consolidation into ULA. Similar things are happening with Aerojet/PWR at the moment. The government (rightly or wrongly) wants one steady supplier because the reality is that this is NOT a real commercial industry and having that assured access to space through a highly regulated and therefore a high cost supplier is preferable to higher risk options. There needs to balance, but not necessarily at the risk of massive civil servant downsizing. There also needs to be “fair” rules where the heritage supplies operate under the same FAR that the new guys do. Right now, that is not necessarily that case.
The biggest, and probably most prominent example is that the DOD is eating their shirt (and maybe pounding their shoe :)) on F-35 because Lockheed is the only real company left that can build the damn things…. and it turns out, they aren’t very good at it anymore. We need to keep this national capability lest we start designing spacecraft that deprive their pilots of oxygen when they really need it.
[fuel depot architecture]
“This shrinks launch windows to the point where (like Mars missions), we can only launch once every 8 or so years.”
I suspect you have to twist your mission parameters pretty unrealistically to achieve that level of restriction. However, this generation of technology is not going to get humans to Mars, so why use this as a comparative criteria? SLS is certainly not going to launch humans to Mars, neither is the first generation of fuel depots.
“An HLV eliminates some of that and gives us the flexibility to launch at specific times within those windows and may actually increase launch rate.”
How can it increase the launch rate if it doesn’t leave any funding for missions. And you don’t have funding for missions if you build SLS.
So the choice is, SLS without missions, or medium lift, commercial crew and $2.7b/yr for missions.
Unless you can get more funding (or transfer funding from cancelling ISS/JWST/etc) to allow SLS with the extra funding for missions; but even then, to be realistic, you should then compare with medium lift, commercial crew, with $2.7b/yr and the extra funding for missions.
There’s no realistic scenario where SLS increases the missions NASA can fly.
Depots and HLV
“My personal opinion
is” “I haven’t done any trade studies
myself, so this is purely intuitive speculation.”
“we can only launch
once every 8 or so years.” “An HLV
eliminates some of that”
Completely false.
Boiloff is the second highest cost driver for chemical architectures, behind costs for IMLEO.
70 to 80% of the mass if fuel, which could be launched at any schedule rate independent of the hardware. So for a 100,000 kg mission to the moon, the propellant could be delivered ahead of time, one/two launch is needed to fuel and go.–exactly the same as HLV!
Staging for Mars is worse. Ares V required 5, oops no 6 launches to meet the 450 mT mission, the extra launch added because of boiloff.
Opinion versus trades with real data and valid assumptions. Politics vs engineering. Will it ever end?
What is next: that the hardware is at low TRL and not ready so NASA can ‘explore sooner’? it only took 10 years or so for J2X, to name just one, off the shelf piece of hardware.
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You may be surprised to see that how expertise ebbs and falls over the years in all sectors: government, industry, and academia, despite assertions.
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Depots with smaller LVs will start to provide a sustainable architecture. EP is needed for Mars.
HLV is only needed for colonization–its the cart before the horse.
muomega0,
This raises an issue that’s missing from the above discussion (although Chris almost had it) and pretty much every other similar discussion I’ve seen. Most of us seem to agree that moving to more reasonable contract types — like SAA as opposed to cost-plus — makes a lot of sense. But every contract is unique and there’s one aspect that seems to be missed, at least in these discussions.
When a commercial company (any commercial company) designs and builds a “product” for NASA use (or any other gov agency), who owns the design and the design drawings? Who owns the specialized technologies and processes developed for the program?
If company A gets NASA money, on top of their own money, to design and build a “product” for NASA, and company A retains all the rights to it, they can then sell that product to anybody, which is fine by me, since that’s in line with NASA’s Charter. However, it also means that company A can jack up the price to NASA (like Soyuz), modify or discontinue the product, and becomes the sole source for the product.
I don’t know the details in NASA’s SAAs, but they should (if they don’t) either provide for NASA to be the owner of the designs, processes and all rights, or at the very least contract for price limits, and a minimum guarantee of service and availability for a contracted period of time, all with conditional options for extension. This, with reasonable numbers filled in, I think would make the SAA contract mode so much more favorable to NASA and the taxpayers (without being unreasonable to the aerospace companies) that even Congress would be hard pressed to claim that cost-plus was necessary.
We need to stop thinking in terms of one-off contracts/products.
Steve
The combined forces of the western world can just about keep 6 human beings in low Earth orbit and this bill wants NASA to produce a strategy for a sustainable presence in cis-lunar space – BY DOING MORE OF THE SAME!
No chance of Jeff Greason being the next NASA Administrator I suppose.
“while maintaining to the maximum extent possible its internal core functional capabilities in order to continue to perform the broad range of missions across its Science, Aeronautics, Technology, Human Spaceflight, and Education portfolios”
This is exactly the problem! Entirely to many portfolios, missions, and egos for it to actually accomplish any one of them. Until NASA becomes more focused it will be nothing more than a money pit for the aerospace lobby and their pet politicians.
In general, what’s the problem if US industry uses the capabilities
developed by NASA and other US agencies that have a stake in space to develop
even better capabilities and the means to expand exploration ? If a space
economy develops and thrives that’s a good thing. Unions probably don’t have a place in this
model.
Looking at NASA, those parts that are open to innovation,
collaboration, partnerships and new ways of doing business will lead and
thrive. Those parts that are stuck in
the past or are searching for justification not to change will wither and be
left behind.
As for the Russians, we won’t have to worry about paying them for services that we develop.
Craven grasping of unions to protect jobs while ignoring the broader economic interest of taxpayers isn’t different from the grasping of any of us for public (read instead “other peoples”) money on anything in space or otherwise. It immoral for a massive state to collect hundreds of billions of dollars – representing trillions of man-days of labor – from it’s citizenry and engaging in a continuous fight over who gets it like looters at a mall. At least the unions have rationalized their looting – the rest of us don’t even realize what we are doing – we just think it’s right because we vote for it.
Len,
We can say that the unions are simply doing what their job requires them to do. However, the same can be said of tax collectors and bank robbers. I’ve always been anti-union myself, but as a preference, not a a question of right or wrong. The problem I have with some unions, including IFPTE, is that they focus exclusively on a small set of goals and pretend that all other considerations simply don’t exist. In a game that is basically built around compromise, this attitude always leads to dissatisfied people.
Steve