NAC Meeting This Week
NASA Advisory Council Meeting
“Tuesday, December 1, 2015, 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.; Wednesday, December 2, 2015, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.; Thursday, December 3, 2015, 9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m., Local Time.”
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Keith’s 1:00 pm ET note: I just dialed in to NAC telecon at JSC. The agenda says that it starts at 1:00 pm. The agenda does not say ET or CT. But the Federal Register notice uses local times. That said, the operator says that it starts in 30 minutes i.e. 1:30 ET /12:30 CT. In other words they are going to be meeting for 30 minutes before anyone from the public knows that they are meeting. Stealth sessions are not supposed to happen – and FACA guidelines are being violated if this is true.
Keith’s 1:40 pm ET note: I dialed in and the operator connected me. Now there’s bad jazz from the 70s playing – but no telecon per the prior operator’s comments. Someone at JSC has an agenda up on Webex that says 1:00 start time. Of course, when the telecon starts half of the participants will not speak into their microphones or identify themselves. Or they will stand so far away from a mic as to be unheard. Typical NASA telecon coordination. SNAFU.
Every time one of these ‘telecons’ pops up, I feel like I’ve travelled back in time to the ’70s.
Decent video connections and streams (or audio, if you must) are not hard to set up and provide enormous benefits in productivity and outreach.
Does NASA not have anyone on staff (or contracted) who has skills in this area? The general impression I get is that there is no one in charge of this and no one at the upper reaches who is aware of A) how crappy this is and the wasted opportunities it causes and B) how easy it would be to fix with a modest investment in people and infrastructure.
The people in the room are completely unaware of the quality of the teleconference. On a JPL project, I noticed a dramatic improvement once people started calling in from their offices even though the conference room was just down the hall. That was when they started noticing things like side conversations near a mike, speakers facing away from the mike to point at a screen (which no one on the phone could see), etc. I’ve also noticed that some managers place high value on physical presence, and may feel anyone who can’t be there in person doesn’t really care about the meeting. That’s hardly a universal attitude, but some people do think that way.
Other organizations hold high quality telecons with inexpensive commercial equipment. NASA has always had difficulty with things as simple as “open mikes” which cannot be located and blurry slides that cannot be read. Obviously in a telecon it should be possible for everyone to know who is speaking, and communication should be “push-to-talk” except for the speaker.
Both
Gerstenmeyer and Scimemi seem to be equating ISS in 2015 to Shuttle around
1985. They are both anxious to turn LEO (and ISS?) over to the private sector.
Remember
how turning Shuttle over to be operated by industry (STSOC) was going to save
the government so much money and be so much more efficient. It didn’t happen.
USA/STSOC knew how to make money from the government and they excelled at it,
and Shuttle never improved; in fact I would go so far as to say it got worse.
And at the same time all the NASA technical people were turned into contract managers
with little genuine technical experience. Gerstenmeyer and Scimemi need to be careful
what they wish for. And, by the way, despite the fact Shuttle was STSOC operated,
it still came out of NASA’s budget.
In fact
the astronaut who kept speaking up about how astronauts needed to go to LEO to
try out their space legs before going on lunar or Mars trips, sounds a lot like
the Mission Operations Directorate at JSC around 1986-87. Engineering, life
sciences and other organizations supporting Shuttle were all forced to give up their
subsystem management functions, but when it came to JSC MOD they refused. So
the program operated for 20years with a half NASA/MOD, half STSOC ops team-not
efficient.
As far as
NASA getting out of the LEO business, not sure why they think that will or
should come to pass. Of course Gerstenmayer and others want to build and fly
new things and go to new places. But if you look at other industries like power
and atomic energy, NASA could become the owner/operator of the ISS national
orbital lab-oh wait, that is the current status. As an owner/operator it is probably a lot more
efficient to maintain one large station rather than dozens of smaller ones,
which is what they were talking about. If they are suggesting that Boeing or
another contractor come in with a recommendation for taking over the operation
from NASA, see paragraph 1.
As far as
the discussion about LEO commerce, one thing I never heard today was that the
greatest barrier to payloads flying on ISS is still the lengthy, inconsistent
and uncertain integration process for flying anything to ISS. This is a major
cost driver. That is a problem that is clearly on Gerstenmeyer’s and Scememi’s
plate to fix, and yet no indication they even recognize the issue.
The same industries are still potentially interested today that were
potentially interested 30 years ago. But industry is not interested unless (1)
the industry is reasonably certain that whatever they are working on is going
to fly in a reasonable time; (2) industry is not going to pay today’s exorbitant costs associated with transportation
or operation.
As far as no large station in earth orbit in the future, remember almost
everyone, including the 1970s Outlook for Space committee and the MSFC late 70s
station proposals called for smaller stations and in some cases only man-tended
stations. JSC’s operations group led the charge for a full size, big station. For
several years now NASA has been telling us that the size station we have now is
about what is needed for a crew of 6, which is about the size crew you need to
do anything at all-in fact with a crew of 6, about 5 of them are busy just
maintaining and operating the system. Even if you have a man-tended
mini-station, you probably want a manned station near-by to be able to do the servicing.
If it is simply an unmanned platform flying on its own, then that is called a robotic
satellite and shoudn’t enter into this discussion.
Scememi
seemingly had a good understanding or he was told, that in order to do things,
you have to have a plan, you have to present it in a coherent manner and in the
case of Congress and the US government, you have to actually ask them for what
you want. So as far as Keith’s comment
that the Congress thwarts every NASA attempt, has NASA presented a coherent
plan? I’ve not heard it and today’s presentation could probably best be called ‘thoughts
about a plan’; it wasn’t the plan.
It was funny that CASIS barely came up today. As Keith has
pointed out previously, CASIS does not seem to have any expertise in technical
aspects of integration or operation, and they also seem to have few industry
ties for developing new commerce in LEO. I think their role is doling out
government money. So far it seems to be a one way flow. So what is their role?
Scimemi seemed to say that architectures for lunar or Mars missions suggest
that you do not want to start from earth orbit or return to earth orbit. That
might be true if all your spaceships are single use throwaways in which all you
return to earth with is a used up Orion command module. I’d be interested in
seeing a comparison with other architectures that might want crews or Martian
samples returning to earth orbit rather than to earth, or that might want to
return a spacecraft to a parking orbit and use a minimal cost return to earth capability-probably
something like a Dragon capsule.
Of course, they never turned everything over to STSOC. Flight directors and shuttle crews were always NASA, as were approximately half the flight controllers.