Today's Version Of NASA's Future Plans For ISS
NASA Wants to Bring Enterprise to the Space Station
“In its RFI, NASA stressed that that for the moment, it just wants to hear ideas. It doesn’t have a budget to help spur any proposed projects, or plans to release them for public perusal. NASA received 11 submissions “from a broad range of respondents including individuals, small companies and large companies,” Sam Scimemi, division director for the ISS program, said in an e-mail.”
NASA hopes to hand the International Space Station to a commercial owner by mid 2020s, TechCrunch
“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” [NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill] Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit. … NASA didn’t specify any potential buyer, but two commercial entities are about to add significant real estate to the ISS: a new docking adapter is being put in place to support crew shuttle missions from Boeing and SpaceX, both of which are set to start shuttling personnel to the station in 2017.”
Keith’s note: Every time someone from NASA talks about the future of ISS and the #JourneyToMars thing they contradict themselves and further muddy the issue.
1. CASIS is supposed to be doing this commercial stuff already with the U.S. portion of the ISS – NASA doesn’t mention that very often.
2. The ISS is owned by more countries/agencies than just NASA. So how can NASA hand the ISS over to anyone?
3. “Buyer”? NASA is going to sell the ISS? (see #2)
4. Boeing and SpaceX own their visiting spacecraft – “real estate” that comes and goes.
NASA’s Plan For Commercializing Low Earth Orbit Is Still A Mystery, earlier post
NASA: We’re on a #JourneyToMars – But Don’t Ask Us How, earlier post
Dazed and Confused About Space Commerce At NASA, earlier post
A Closer Look At The CASIS “Space Is In It” Endorsement, earlier post
According to NASA’s OIG, the ISS cost $2.9 billion to operate in 2013.
Wayne Hale wrote recently that there were something like 600 people actively engaged in ‘managing’ an STS flight when on orbit, divided into flight operations on the one hand and engineering/science. Without falling into the pit of Dunning-Kruger it’s the sort of thing that makes you just wonder.
Wonder, for instance, if a private company could operate the ISS in a manner proportionately similar to the costs between Atlas and F9 (as in imperfect for instance). Again referring to Wayne’s blog postings, the answer is probably ‘no’ in large part because NASA insists on eschewing performance-based specifications in favor of numbingly obtuse design specs.
I run into this in my business all the time: designers who think they know more about how to build a widget than the guy who’s been building widgets for 30 years. Since I’ve been designing those widgets for 30 years there’s one thing I’ve learned: listen to that guy. He brings a lot to the table.
That’s similar to one of my pet gripes. On far too many occasions I see processes and operational plans “designed” by people who have never actually done the work involved.
This week, I ran into a web page interface to a data base. Apparently, it was designed by people who were given an idealized description of how a particular job was supposed to be done, and put together an interface that works well, if and only if people actually do the job in that idealized way. If they don’t (which is about 90% of the time) the interface becomes totally dysfunctional. Of course, the designers didn’t think of that, since they had never done the job themselves, and didn’t know that no one ends up rigorously following that idealized process.
“Processes and plans designed by people who have never done the kind off work” Now you are discussing ISS.Not only no subsystem manager Engineering expertise, but in 1993Goldin edicted that no one who had previously worked the program could remain in the “new” Space Station program. The CS base on ISS even today has little expertise in the systems. And they also have little expertise in integration processes. One thing they needed to get right was payload integration. Instead of bringing in people from Life Sciences (who had done virtually all IV payload a d crew compartment integration not only for Station but for prior programs too) or people from the Programs, they assigned it to neophyte and to Mission /payload operators. Zero expertise. After 10+ years they were wondering why the issue with 3 to 5 year integration processes? ‘It had never been done more efficiently’ except it had. Shuttle and spacelab experienced the same problems at the outset. Spacehab an d Mir fixed the problems, partially through a learning process, and partly out of necessity. ISS refused to allow anyone into “their” program, and so absolutely no lessons from the past got applied to ISS, which is why even today ISS is still trying to figure out how to operate more efficiently.
I’ve been involved writing specifications for developers here in Naples, where new projects regularly spend >$5M+ in new plantings before the first house is sold. My job is to specify how the materials are to be cared for. The specifications are used in obtaining bids. So far, so good. Makes sense.
But the developers get into an adversarial attitude, not realizing that (1) I cannot document everything and (2) sometimes that guy in the field has some really great ideas and (3) once the contractor is chosen he’s part of the team because (4) he’s been hired for his expertise and (5) while I might have some letters after my name, most of what I write I learned from the guys in the field over the course of many decades.
When I was in grad school the professors went on and on about how we were being prepared to be leaders, about how we had to document everything or it wouldn’t be built correctly. I suppose that’s where it started.
Well if Wayne Hale said that it took 600 people to fly a Shuttle, then you have to wonder where the money was going since at a rate of about $150000 per person, then the number adds up to hundreds of millions of $$, and yet Shuttle was also costing about $3 billion/year.
Notwithstanding CASIS which is totally missing in action, or the international elements,the idea of ‘selling’ ISS reminds me of the decision to operate Shuttle commercially back around 1984. At the time, fortunately the Challenger accident intervened which permitted STSOC to get situated to “take over”.- NASA engineering organizations which had the subsystem management responsibilities throughout the development phase of Shuttle were forced to relinquish their responsibilities-this was the decision which resulted, by the time of Columbia, with no one knowledgeable about the characteristics of the RCC in the nose and leading edge of the Shuttle-the only guy left with knowledge of the TPS said he thought RCC was tougher than tiles-but he had no real idea- and no one in NASA knew any better.
In the wake of the STSOC decision, Wayne Hale and mission operations refused to relinquish responsibility for mission operations so now you had contractors and civil servants working side by side. In many respects this was the demise of the JSC technical organization and promoted MOD to an unrealistic expectation that it was critical to JSC’s function. JSC then became the ops organizatgion because it no longer had much of a technical role. The STSOC decision was great for the retired NASA workers, mainly flight directors and astronauts, who got the big paying STSOC top jobs. But along with reducing the effectiveness of the JSC technical organization the decision increased costs; NASA was simply paying the contractor to operate without insight into how to improve the system or the process.
And, guess what, neither the system nor the process ever improved. They were flying a 35 year old vehicle – it was the equivalent of flying B-52s, but instead of flying B-52 G or H models, NASA was still flying the XB-52 of 1950 after 35 years.
In many respects, ISS is already there. ISS is a very large program office, but really has few technically knowledgeable or experienced personnel. ISS has done their best to minimize dollars going to the JSC technical organization, so mainly JSC engineering is a following function, not a leadership function. And there has been very little development work in the US in the last 2 decades-in fact more often than not ISS gave the technical jobs to the international partners and not within NASA. This is what happens when all the responsibility and all the cash goes to the programs and the institution is forced to operate on a pittance-with which they can barely keep the lawn mowed.
In the meantime the reason ISS costs are so high is because what technical expertise there is in the US resides in Boeing, who does much of the system sustaining engineering and operation today. BTW, the high numbers of ops people and coss is what cannot be afforded to be commercially successful, and besides on a Mars mission they are not going to be able to support when comm times are measured in tens of minutes.
Bill Hill and others might want to find someone else to pay for ISS operations because he and his Headquarters managers think they want to go off and design and build new spaceships. But so far the evidence, based on the last decade, on Constellation, Orion and SLS, is that NASA is not too effective at designing and building spaceships. The real problem in my estimation is that NASA has no idea what they want to design and build spaceships to go and do. If they had Orion and SLS, what would they do with it? another Apollo-like mission? Right now, that is all they are promising. What is the value?
NASA really ought to figure out what its continuing role will be in human space flight? Technology development? Mission control? We are already seeing Space X and others are far more effective in standard nominal ops and also in hardware development. What is NASA’s expertise? International agreements in which they get others to do the job?
The 600 people “to fly a shuttle” may have been a reference to JUST mission control / mission ops at JSC. A shuttle flights costs to get to the billions a year seen in budgets was this, PLUS making hardware like the external tank, refurbishing hardware like SRBs, refurbing and refilling SRMs, turning around orbiters, making parts for all this, keeping up the facilities and equipment for all this, not forgetting SSME and testing and turnaround there, and launch control (not the same as mission control), and upgrades and sustainment budgets to boot.
This operation beyond JSC went from Michoud to Stennis to California to Marshall to Kennedy to Utah to the Cape to vendors all around the country.
Indeed I should have been clearer in reporting Mr. Hale’s remarks; he was in fact speaking of JSC.
Which fact furthers the question asked by this Monday-morning quarterback: what are 600+ people actually doing? STS at that point was an operational program.
And what did those people do when the birds were on the ground?
There’s been a lot of talk hereabouts about analyzing past projects, wanting to learn from mistakes (albeit with respect to budgets mostly). In my own business it’s a frightful enterprise; nobody wants the exposure of a bad decision (particularly if a client didn’t know at the time the decision was poor). But aeronautics and space has a very different and relentless attitude towards errors that are safety-related. It’s in that spirt I wondered about the huge staff size at JSC.
“nobody wants the exposure of a bad decision (particularly if a client didn’t know at the time the decision was poor).”
Wait a minute … I thought you were talking about the space program here.
Things can pile up to a large number. Let’s say you need people on the job at all times. Working shifts, that means 600 people for 200 jobs. Let’s say there are twenty critical systems that require 24-7 staffing. Now that 600 people is down to 10 people per critical system per shift. That’s starting to sound less crazy.
But I’d say it’s still a problem with single missions and low flight rates. I can easily imagine a major aerospace company like Boeing having hundreds of people on call, 24-7, for urgent problems with various systems on their aircraft. But there are so many of those vehicles in use at any given time, that this isn’t inefficient. If you only have one vehicle in flight at a time, you still need that support available, but you don’t end up with efficient staffing.
Boeing Commercial Aircraft has a major repair team on call 24 hours a day, but SFAIK that’s only about 30 people; they’re just so experienced that each one is certified on a dozen different systems. Every individual airliner is about as complex as the Shuttle and has only a handful of ground personnel who monitor multiple flights. We have to reduce the support manhours needed for human spaceflight, and by quite a lot.
As many have pointed out, at least by implication, commercial airplanes have many decades’ experience while we still haven’t figured out how to build “the” rocket ship.
Thanks for the discussion about STSOC. And yes, I was referring to Mr. Hale’s comments about the JSC staff.
I don’t know if that number included Boeing support. Probably not.
Um, “the only guy left with knowledge of the TPS” was a civil servant. Which kinda nullifies the point of your rant.
It does not nullify it at all. In prior programs, a subsystem manager worked on a system, often starting at inception, and stayed on it through development, continuing throughout the program. Stsoc terminated that technical role particularly of cs and of subsystem managers. Mission ops people paid little to no attention to TPS and especially to RCC since it was a supposed to be a passive system that needed no attention-a fallacy-but MOD controllers often think they know everything when they’ve had no role in development and have tried to learn out of a book produced by others from MOD. Apparently the KSC techs also knew nothing about the RCC. They had found it was thinning and developing pinholes over the years and figured some heat resistant paste in the pinholes might be OK. After all, they had never lost an Orbiter yet because of the problem (normalization of deviance). The one guy out of Engineering left at JSC who was called a “TPS expert”, by the MOD trained flight director, had never worked RCC, only tiles, only years earlier in his career.
You would like to maintain a set of people certified and knowledgeable about the entire system throughout the systems lifetime. Shuttle program management (almost entirely from MOD) did not feel they needed that. They would get by with their MOD flight operators. They were also very chauvinistic about it. Engineering expertise from the technical organization was. Not needed yet they felt they could not relinquish NASA cs operator expertise so they had a double team of cs and contractor who knew how to fly the vehicle (does that mean Wayne Hale could have gotten by with 300?) Yet they had no continuity of subsystem manager expertise out of the Engineering organization.
No commercial entity today would ever build ISS as configured, why would they be interested in owning it or operating it without government funding? If Bigelow modules prove themselves, the interior space of ISS can be more than replaced with just three B330’s, and they wouldn’t be 20-30 years old. Meanwhile, the entire solar array will need replacing in 2024. The oldest segments are already past their design life of 15 years, and solar array technology is constantly improving. So come 2024, exactly what components of ISS won’t be viewed as woefully obsolete? I don’t see a commercial future for ISS under any reasonable circumstances.
They wouldn’t build a space station configured like ISS because building ISS showed us better ways.
Not sure this is an accurate statement. If you have a launch and operational capability like the Shuttle we had, I don’t think you’d do a station too differently. If you have heavy lift and can launch a large diameter station, then that is a different story.
In 1970, NASA was faced with loss of Saturn launch capability. Shuttle was a workhorse with very advanced capabilities. As has been shown, it was able both to launch and to do most of the assembly of the ISS. Shuttle’s size was optimum for the size modules used. The modular design made it pretty straightforward. By comparison, similarly sized and mass modules are those used by the Russians-FGB and SM-they are archaic, static, and not adaptable for new functions or outfitting.
Shuttle’s termination was due more to lack of NASA leadership improving on the vehicle-not just at the end of its life, but for all 35 years of the program including not making it safer or more efficient to operate. That is a direct result of lack of vision and no leadership. The Shuttle managers were happy to just keep flying the same vehicle; in the end they decided it was more than they could handle and they stopped and shifted to something very different and far less capable.
While I appreciate the close match between STS’ capabilities and ISS configuration, my point is that over the course of more than 40 years (since design began) certainly we have learned something about building a space station?
Again,. what would be done differently?
So far all space station have been metal cylinders. That includes all the Salyuts, Mir, Skylab, ISS, and TianGong, That is because for a pressure vessel you prefer a simple shape-spheres are better for some things, like equalizing pressure in all directions, but at the volume we are talking about, spheres are not practical for launching. Fabric inflatables are an idea-not a new idea-von Braun talked about it in the 50s and several manufacturers tried to build prototype inflatables in the 60s and the Transhab idea that became the Bigelow module came for plans for inflating lunar outposts. Bigelow is a newer version of an inflatable, but we are just now beginning to prove the concept and it is not proven yet. So after 40 years we were not ready to progress to an inflatable fabric module. So we are still stuck with metal cylinders.
The cylinders and their interfaces and the types of modules and nodes were all designed for modularity. They can be moved around, added to, or lose an element along the way. All of that has come to pass.in the last 30 years.
The size of the modules was thought carefully about in advance to make sure they were large enough for people and equipment. Design studies looked at how many people and how much equipment. The center core station idea (the design used for Bigelow) did not work because there was inadequate space for equipment and people could not see around the equipment. The passageway adjacent to the walls was too narrow.
The design of the interior, the modular racks, gives a lot of latitude in how to organize the interior, where to put things, how to get things up or down.
Might it have been better to build at the integrate module level-apparently not-without Shuttle we no longer have an easy way to get modules up or down, yet racks can still be carried.
So how would it be done differently, and better, now versus in 1986? I’d love to hear someone’s idea but so far I haven’t.
A good comparison is the airliner fuselage. Howard Hughes designed one of the last propliners-the Lockheed Constellation. It was beautiful, but the fuselage was a complex cross section and it was not easy to change the dimensions from one airplane to another. Boeing pioneered the use of the common cross section fuselage. When the airlines wanted it a bit bigger to fit an additional row of seats, they split the fuselage down the middle and widened it. Every version of Boeing airliner starting with the 707, 727, 737 until the wide bodies, used the same fuselage cross section. They could make them longer or shorter. They are still in use today, 60 years after their first use on the C-135 and 707. The 15 ft cylindrical module is a standard. The Shuttles were sized to accommodate that diameter long before the interior design of the ISS was defined. And like Boeing’s fuselages, the module cylinders, even though built by several different contractors, were customized to different lengths. The racks are a standard. they were optimized to be able to be carried, moved back and forth, permit access inside the modules, moved from one manufacturers module to another,..so maybe at some point in the future there will be a new standard, but I don’t think today, 30+ years after the system was designed, that anything better has been designed. So from the standpoint of the module and rack architecture, I think NASA JSC did a great job. Too bad they dissolved the organization that did that work, many years ago.
I get how engineering- well, physics- is driving the sphere. And I didn’t know about Boeing.
The ‘chase in the center’ concept makes so much obvious sense; even connecting expanding modules is simplified. But I didn’t think about the space left over for hatches, and I confess I was surprised by the diameter of the center chase compared to the diameter of the module and i suppose it could be reduced over time.
Like many I suppose I’m still stuck with Bonnestal’s lovely paintings in my mind- or indeed the nation of 2001, which even so is merely a slightly distended tube. More to the point many wonder why there’s not more research into facilities that spin. The obvious answer is pretty simple- they would be gargantuan.
You could build a realisticly sized, spinning station if you used tethers. About 50 m between a hub and cylinders at either end ought to do. But that usually isn’t considered desirable enough for the added risk and complexity. If someone did so, I suspect the current module size and interior layout would need to change.
“IF Bigelow modules prove themselves”
Mass of the fabric layers compared to an aluminum shell is higher. Durability is a concern.
Assuming the fabric works out, then the Bigelow inflatables might be able to provide a lot of pressurized volume.
But there are a lot of other issues like utility runs, places to mount and attach hardware, maintenance of the interior (and exterior) against contamination and microbial growth, and atomic oxygen, the logistics of outfitting, even crew mobility in a volume where they cannot reach walls or structures.
The logistics and efficiency of trying to fill and maintain such a large volume. If the hardware is launched in pressurized cans, then is it efficient to take the hardware out to mount in the inflatable ball?
There are lots of questions and issues.
It can be likened to the Airbus 380; Airbus thought everyone would want the huge volume and passenger capacity, but it turned out not to be too efficient and they have stopped building 380s.
I don’t think there are as many issues as you’re suggesting. These modules aren’t going to be hollow, there’s a structural core running through the middle to supply utility connections, attach partitions to, etc. Several good pictures of a mockup from 2014 here: http://www.airlinereporter….
Genesis I and II showed no issues maintaining pressure after years in orbit, and now BEAM is in place to continue gathering more data on that front. After all, just because they’re “fabric” doesn’t mean they’re porous.
As for launching hardware, transferring of equipment from the cargo vehicle already occurs. I’m not sure why the delivery target being an inflatable would change anything. Equipment can be mounted on ISPRs and delivered as a unit in any vessel with a CBM. They were designed specifically to support this kind of transfer.
When the agency is serious about a post ISS plan, look for a special, well funded group to be formed, RFIs to go out, industry input and conferences to be held, and budgets to be broken out publicly from an as-is to a series of to-be scenarios. Until then, yeah, totally agree, lots of fluff comments that just further muddy the issue.
The real question is if there will even be an ISS then. It has already lasted longer than MIR even though many of its critical modules are based on MIR designs. Given all the complexity of it I think NASA should consider themselves lucky if it survives long enough to serve as a destination for commercial crew and doesn’t cause any fatalities when it does finally fail and the drop it into the ocean.
But really, turning it over to a commercial firm then makes about as much sense as selling off war wore B-17’s to start an airline.
“Many of its critical modules” is actually just one, Zvezda. Zarya’s not particularly critical.
Most of the US side is Freedom heritage which was designed with 30 years in mind.
War-worn B-17s didn’t go to airlines, but Lancasters did, as the Lancastrian with BOAC. So did hundreds of C-47s/DC-3s. Lots of B-25s and A-26s were converted into executive aircraft.
The ISS is more like a city than an airplane. New systems and modules can be added and old systems removed, The pressure hull is not going to wear out. In any case NASA cannot “sell” an international program.