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Let's Play Stump The NASA Administrator

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 4, 2014
Filed under ,

Keith’s note: In a NASA FY 2015 press event today I noted the Inspiration Mars/Mars 2021 Flyby congressional hearing last week and how Dennis Tito is asking NASA to pay for a SLS/Orion mission to Mars. Based on the Inspiration Mars 2021 mission date, and all existing SLS/Orion plans, Tito’s plan would require the very first SLS/Orion flight with humans to go on this mission to Mars. I asked Bolden if, as Administrator, he’d approve such a mission – one that would require such a mission on the very first flight. Bolden simply refused to answer and babbled on instead about other things that had nothing to do with the question. It is hard to tell if Bolden did not understand the question, did not want to answer the question, or did not know how to answer the question.

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

22 responses to “Let's Play Stump The NASA Administrator”

  1. rb1957 says:
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    there was a TV show in Australia, back in the day, an Ozzie version of “Yes, Minister”. Whenever a press type asked the politican a question the answer was something like “there you go asking direct questions! how can we make any progress if you keep asking direct questions?”

  2. Guido Meyer says:
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    He didn’t answer any questions. He was asked several times about the Europa mission (cost, flagship, discovery, why not Titan or Io), and he just ignored that. Is he just not familiar with those “details”? Thankfully Elizabeth Robinson stepped in after a while.

    • Anonymous says:
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      Can this NASA administrator speak his mind in public without fear or favor? Or is Charlie Bolden just not a good communicator?

  3. Richard H. Shores says:
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    Keith, I think the three reasons Bolden did not answer your question that you stated pretty much sums it up.

  4. BeanCounterFromDownUnder says:
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    David Weaver ‘yes he’s here to take your questions.’ er, yes but not to answer them. More disengagement from NASA.
    We’ve another description of people like this in Oz, they’re ‘nongs’.

  5. muomega0 says:
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    Cowing: Would you ever approve of a Inspirational Mars Mission with SLS/Orion in 2021 around Mars to Venus
    Bolden: “We all agree that SLS is critical for deep space exploration. And i think we all agree that it is the primary vehicle for ascent for humans in our selected pathway to Mars. It allows us to focus our efforts on going to deep space while we here at home focus on enabling our commercial partners to develop a capability to take our astronauts to low earth orbit. It is critical to get full funding for the commercial crew program”

    ASAP minutes Jan 2014:
    http://oiir.hq.nasa.gov/asa
    For long duration missions like Mars….”They currently estimate that with what we know today, these long term missions could increase the chance of fatal cancer anywhere from 5 to 21percent above baseline . This number needs to be considered before a decision is made to go forward with these types of missions. …..The conundrum we want to avoid is spending billions on a planetary mission and then concluding that a risk as high as a one in five risk of death from the single radiation hazard is unacceptable.” The shielding is about 2 g/cm2. Reducing the risk requires at least a ten fold increase in the shielding mass (about 20 mT), which negates the one launch approach. No mention of risks to retinas, the brain, the central nervous system, or the possibility of Alzheimer’s. Is GCR more or less critical than SLS and funded?

    A single shot SLS is 130 mT divided by 6 is a 22 mT LV. Two trips per year to the moon is a 2×120,000 kg divided by 10 is a 24 mT LV. The US and the world has excess LVs and capacity however. The only study that eliminated the multiple launch architecture that saves 10s of billions of dollars was the 2005 ESAS study with many flaws including the inflated docking risk “with the goal to eliminate all 3 launch solutions”.

    But electric propulsion is now being (under) funded at the expense of the cryogenic storage/depot effort to save these 10s of billions.

    Orion has a 11.5 km/s heat shield, but to return from an asteroid or Mars it requires an advanced 12.9 km/s heat shield or more propellant to slow it down. What happened to the BEO capability? Was this in the budget?

    Mars DRM 5 sent Orion and the DSH to Mars with the same 2 g/cm2 shielding, even though it violates NASA Standard 3001.
    http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373
    And they say NASA does not take risks!

    We all agree or i think all agree that SLS and Orion are critical, right?

    • kcowing says:
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      I asked him a simple question. He refused to answer.

      • muomega0 says:
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        No he did answer and its quoted.

        • kcowing says:
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          No he did not and his own people have admitted this to me. You are imagining an answer he did not give.

        • Guido Meyer says:
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          He really did not. He didn’t even address the topic. The first two (!) reporters asked questions about the Europa mission, and he didn’t even talk about that topic, His way of “answering” questions from reporters reminded me of “general secretaries” of parties in former Eastern Europe who just didn’t care what the question was.

        • Anonymous says:
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          I listened to the audio. I agree with KC here. Bolden rambled tangentially but never came close to answering the question.

    • Vladislaw says:
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      “We all agree that SLS is critical for deep space exploration” – Bolden

      No, actually we all do NOT agree SLS is critical, there is a huge amount of people who belive it is actually preventing us from doing any real exploration because it is eating the budget.

      “And i think we all agree that it is the primary vehicle for ascent for humans in our selected pathway to Mars.”

      No I think we all agree this is the congressional vehicle to keep people working in their district.

      And no Bolden was asked if he would ever approve a Inspirational Mars Mission with SLS/Orion in 2021 around Mars to Venus.
      So he didn’t say if he approved of the IMM plan, Didn’t say anything about if 2021 date was even doable and then didn’t say what NASA thought of the venus mars combo and finally didn’t say anything about just a flyby…
      Bolden could have said No, No, No to a flyby and No to venus… would have cleared it up.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        “We all agree that SLS is critical for deep space exploration” – Bolden

        I wonder if a different question from Keith might have gotten to the much larger point. Rather than wasting a rare opportunity on this flaw-in-the-pan Tito idea, what about questioning the aforementioned assumption, something like:

        “General Bolton, do you feel that the case has been made for SLS in light of Commercial Space’s forthcoming FH? Aside from the Congressional mandate, how is SLS a better way forward than FH?”

        Or: “In your longterm planning, General, do you anticipate an increase in NASA’s available funds commensurate with the costs of operating and flying SLS? If not, how do the operational costs of the SLS affect other programs?”

        • BeanCounterFromDownUnder says:
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          FH doesn’t have the throw mass of SLS assuming it ever flies of course but a Raptor powered F9 will eat it. I reckon around about 2016/17.

          • Paul451 says:
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            One launch of SLS, conservative $500m. (Up to $1.5b). Payload 70 tonnes to LEO, say 20-25 tonnes to MTO.

            FH, unconservative $150m. (Listed at $110m). So 3 FH launches for $450m. Payload 150 tonnes, Say 40-45 tonnes to MTO.

            FH wins.

            Theoretically then, you could cancel SLS, spend some of the freed up funding over the next seven years ($21b) on a dedicated new flexible booster-stage which would launch on one of the three FH launches. (This booster could also put heavy defence payloads into GEO. And launch unmanned deep-space mission from a single FH launch. Etc etc. Just change the size of the fuel tanks and, if necessary, number of engines. Something modular and clever.) The rest of the $21b would buy mission hardware, 40 tonnes of deep-space habs, service modules, landers, etc, so that you can do something useful the moment you start flying.

            Or…

            Say $1.5b actually buys one SLS-70 and one SLS-130 in… 2024… or 2030… or whenever. Payload maybe 200 tonnes to LEO equivalent, including crew and capsule. (About 60 tonnes to MTO.)

            Or nine FH launches and one F9-Dragon launch for $1.5b. Payload 450 tonnes plus crew and capsule. (Say 110-120 tonnes to MTO.)

            Plus you have freed up $30 billion by 2024 to develop mission hardware to fill that 100 tonnes. ($48b by 2030.)

            FH wins.

            Comparing 1 SLS with 1 FH is strangely common, but misses the whole point of FH, and underplays the major flaw in SLS. Cost. You have a fairly fixed budget, what can you buy with it? How do you get the most bang for your buck? SLS does not win.

            If SLS cost $2-3 billion and 3-5 years to develop, and $150-200m per launch, I’d be all over it. But it doesn’t.

            Surely any beancounter understands that?

  6. Rocky J says:
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    Hey guys! Free pie charts over at NW blog post – http://nasawatch.com/archiv

  7. Robert Clark says:
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    I get as a political appointee Bolden, has to tread carefully for what he says publicly. But I sure hope behind the scenes he is asking Obama to pressure Congress to reinstate full funding to commercial crew, if not increase it. Since I am not in politics I can be more blunt: Congress looks increasingly more foolish by delaying commercial crew. This only has the effect of increasing the time the U.S. has to be dependent on Putin’s “good graces” for space access. At this point, I can’t believe that anyone, not even anyone in Congess, can regard that as a good thing.
    SpaceX says they can do a manned test launch by 2015 with funding. This is what NASA should be aiming for, obtaining the funding to insure that happens.

    Bob Clark

  8. Anonymous says:
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    Sad. An engineering and scientific organization that gets more and more
    traumatized every year over any math with dollar signs on it.

    Notice that in recent years the detail in the budget releases keeps going down as well. Just checked the website for the budget documents. The large multi-MB pdf is not been loaded yet? Notice too that recent years documents only plan or “enacted” for previous years, vs. “actuals” like it used to, so it seems no one is even bothering to update by March the column for what was “actually” spent the previous year.

    Just sad.

  9. Veeger says:
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    Stump the Administrator, not that hard and definitely not that fun He rarely answers questions, in this case Keith is right, he talked all around the question. Sad part, he gets better advice than that but he listens to the wrong people about how to engage the media. I believe he would be more respected, more credible if he answered a question, took a position. I really don’t think he has much to tip toe around, the White House does not really care about NASA, if they did he would have been gone long ago