Today's NASA Hearing Dwells On The Past – Not The Future
Full House Science Committee Hearing – NASA: Past, Present, and Future
Scheduled witnsses:
– [opening statement] Hon. Harrison Schmitt Apollo 17 Astronaut; Former United States Senator
– [opening statement] Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford Gemini VI, Gemini IX, Apollo 10, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project Astronaut; Chairman, NASA International Space Station Advisory Committee
– [opening statement] Dr. Ellen Stofan Former Chief Scientist, NASA
– [opening statement] Mr. Tom Young Past Director, Goddard Spaceflight Center; Past President/COO, Martin Marietta; Past Chairman, SAIC
– [opening statement] Chairman Smith
– [opening statement] Chairman Babin
– [opening statement] Ranking Member Johnson
– [opening statement] Ranking Member Bera
Watch live
Keith’s note: Consider the ages of the witnesses for this hearing: Jack Schmitt, 81; Tom Stafford, 86; Tom Young, 80; and Ellen Stofan, 55. That’s three male octogenarian NASA employees who have been retired for decades and one female who actually still worked for NASA until a few weeks ago. I have the utmost respect for Schmitt, Stafford and Young and their legendary accomplishments. But why does this particular congressional committee constantly look back at what was done half a century ago and yet spend so little time listening to people who still work at NASA? And what about the generation that will actually accomplish the things that NASA will be doing in the decades ahead? Is no one interested in what they think?
This hearing is titled “NASA: Past, Present, and Future”. Based on the witnesses it should have been titled “NASA: Past, Past, Past, and Present. No Future”.
There is no future until SLS is done and dusted. The sad reality is we all have to wait for SLS to implode like a black hole. We also have to hope whatever is left isn’t sucked in.
SLS is sucking the life out everything.
Oh for god’s sakes – such drama for a program that consumes around 10% of NASA’s budget. SLS haters are about as logical as those who used to think the only thing standing between humanity and the stars was the Space Shuttle.
The SLS program is providing an essential heavy lift capability for exploration and space exploration isn’t cheap; its worth noting that the much beloved Saturn V cost about $1B a launch in 1970’s dollars. Thinking that some magic commercial company can do it all for 10 cents on the dollar is absurd.
Saturn V and Apollo were canceled because no one (President, Congress, taxpayers) wanted to keep paying the high cost, though. That doesn’t bode well for the future of SLS.
Perhaps – but its years behind schedule, does not match the full performance of an SLS and also is has LOTS of the turbocrack prone engines. Yes, we did abandon Saturn due to cost but we are richer now and this is being pursued as part of a multi-decade Mars program not a race to the moon that we’d convincingly won prior to cancellation!
The SLS block II is at least a decade and half away yet… so before you start talking about schedules.. keep that in mind. It needs to have support by MULTIPLE administrations and multiple congresses BEFORE it launches.
Even the manned SLS launch is at least half a decade out .. at least… so the current administration is not going to see a launch
Its all tied to the funding stream; Obama was forced by Congress to keep SLS & Orion after he tried to kill them by cancelling Constellation. IF this Administration really wants to do exploration (and who knows what Trump will do), then it can happen sooner. Exploration has been on life support for a decade – it drives up costs and slips out schedules. Having said that, so far, SLS and Orion are looking very likely to make it through yet another change in government – that’s pretty good staying power by any measure.
a bi partisan congress refused to provide funding for the constellation.. that was the Act that was sent to President Obama and he signed into law .. President Obama sent a budget PROPOSAL to congress. President Obama sent a budget proposal not to fund SLS and bi partisan congress voted to appropriate funding for SLS and that is the Act President Obama signed into law.
A president can only SUGGEST to cancel something. If congress decided to appropriate or not appropriate is a different matter. A president has to actually veto a funded bill and have the veto stand to cancel a program.
I am well aware of how legislation works – but I also know how ineffective it is for Congress to try to force a President to do something they disagree with – its a lot like pushing on a rope! The current SLS is a scaled back Ares V based on a 2010 compromise between the Obama White House and Congress on continuing a Heavy lift program. As such, it was underfunded – its development was stretched out – which drives up its cost – and its launch rate was made much lower than reasonable. IF the Trump Administration wants to do a serious human exploration program, they will accelerate its development and launch more often.
so the President didn’t want SLS .. congress said screw you and funded it anyway .. which is EXACTLY what they could have done for the boondoggle constellation. EXCEPT for one thing. the program was falling behind schedule.. for each year of existence of the program it fell another year behind schedule and NON space state congressional members would no longer fund it. So it was scaled down.. one rocket instead of two and repackaged and THAT was able to get votes from the non space state congressional memebers.
I wouldn’t exactly complain about Falcon Heavy being behind schedule while touting SLS, which is now first flight mid-2019 and counting! And the turbopump crack situation was identified by SpaceX itself and is being worked (who else brings back intact engines to be inspected post-flight anyway?) We may be a richer nation now, but we have enormously more debt, far greater mandatory spending costs such as welfare (even before Obamacare and Trump’s variant on it), and an aging population that Social Security can’t keep up with, so that money will have to come from… you guessed it, the rest of the budget. Space funding has fallen from 6% of discretionary spending in the time of Apollo to less than 1% today with essentially no chance of that increasing significantly.
Well, yes, all of what you say is true, of course. The subject has been discussed here ad nauseam.
But what you leave out is the presence of a much cheaper competitor capable of achieving very similar throw weights. The goal is fine. Everyone agrees on that. And without FH, SLS would find wide support.
It’s a different world.
See my response to Brian Thorn but also ask yourself this; should our nation’s space exploration program be based on the promises of a rather eccentric billionaire who has multiple high stakes bets on the table (Tesla, Gigafactory, SpaceX, LEO mega constellations), any one of which could put him in bankruptcy unable to come through? And don’t forget the recent WSJ revelation that the privately held SpaceX is not exactly a lucrative enterprise. For that matter, what if he just has a fatal coronary?
If Falcon 9 ever meets its planned objectives, maybe we should have that discussion but for now, don’t forget the first rule of wing walking – never give up what you’ve got in hand until you have a firm grasp on the next.
What do you have against guys that create BILLIONS in wealth, not only for themselves but millions of investors and high tech jobs?
Also Jeff Bezo’s is working on heavy lift. You failed to mention that billionaire.
Again, If Blue Origin meets its objectives, maybe we should have that discussion but for now, don’t forget the first rule of wing walking – never give up what you’ve got in hand until you have a firm grasp on the next.
As for guys who create BILLIONS in wealth – what about the guys who create TRILLIONS – the companies like Boeing, LocKheed Martin, etc that employ hundreds of thousands of people (and for Boeing that’s mostly for commercial aircraft); why is it the only jobs and value creation that matters has to be tied to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?
That’s the beauty of a LV independent architecture based on reuse: NASA only requires LVs 10 to 20mT in capacity.
200mT/yr divided by 2 to 4 providers results in LVs in the 10 to 20mT class. LVs need payloads.
Larger capacity would reduce the number of flights (SLS just 2, 1 provider). 1-2B for SLS, 0.5B(?) for FH but with the possibility of reuse. How about Vulcan, or (your LV here)? If FH is an honest price, how does competition with expendable LVs reduce $ ..it does not.
If the country wants to go commercial we go commercial. In for a farthing, in for a pound, as they say.
And if SX fails, and if there’s money to be made, others will follow.
Therein lies the rub – where is the money to be made if not contracting for the government? Look at “commercial crew” – most of the development money is coming from NASA!
Again not a new comment. Commercial space is alive and will do very well without the occasional flight to ISS; keeping the now-countless GEO zone populated at the very least.
And FH and BFR, nor SLS, are needed for that mission.
Commercial space IS indeed very vibrant and growing and that’s very important and exciting. But its LEO/GEO market driven (Communications & imagery) – there is no foreseeable beyond Earth orbit market except for supporting government missions. Even if Falcon 9 and New Glenn succeed technically, that does not mea they will be a financial success that will make sense to continue indefinitely.
That is true. In fact there’s no market whatsoever anywhere in space. Which is why I wonder about these talks of ‘settling’ Luna or Mars or whatever. Noting beyond GEO, assuming current or foreseeable tech, will be anything more than a scientific outpost.
Is that important? Of course it is. But we mustn’t delude ourselves. Until the real riches of the solar system are discovered and exploited- and the will require profitable mining and manufacturing in the asteroids belt- nothing aside from Antartica-like research stations can happen.
Musk can bray all he wants about a Mars settlement. It is not going to work without exploitable and exportable goods that generate profit.
Imagine this: imagine SX moves, say, 10,000 people to Mars. Or 500. Or 100. Then, because the ‘colony’ has nothing to sustain itslf- nothing to generate the currency needed to buy things it cannot manufacture- the colony goes bust. What then? It happened in North America in the early days and a lot of folks died. So we’d have a situation where perhaps thousands are stranded on Mars?
It’s true that folks will pay $500,000 for a trip. I would, given the right circumstances and the promise of a return trip. But that’s just a pyramid scheme without a way to find new revenue- and revenue generated on the red planet.
Yea verily – agreed!
I mostly agree, but some jobs are very portable. A software engineer, for example, can write code as easily on Mars as in San Jose. If he were willing to accept a very austere lifestyle in exchange for living on Mars, he’d have a few hundred thousand a year, or more, if he’s good, to spend on importing supplies from Earth. Whether that is enough depends on transportation costs. Whether or not there are enough people willing and able to do that is unclear.
The very first cogent idea I’ve heard in support of a self-sustaining off-world presence. You’d think it would have occurred to me as I work all over the world with my MacBook.
On some level the traditional notion of a human settlement must be modified to fit this small sliver of folks who can work in such a manner. But what about everybody else? How do they generate personal income living on Mars?
There were those ‘telecommuters’ living in unexplored North America, too, people employed and paid by England or France; but these jobs didn’t last very long. The very first thing every colony did was plant food.The second thing? Look for exports.
It would be interesting to find out how many people could, realistically, work remotely. Current telecommuting either does or could includes a fairly wide number of jobs. But it also involves teleconferences and face-to-face meetings (sometimes weekly, sometimes less.) None of that would be viable for someone telecommuting from Mars.
I would assume anyone living and working on Mars in this manner would also be paying for local services. He’d be paying rent to someone who did maintenance on habitats, etc. That’s no different from terrestrial colonies, where most of the locals were providing services (like growing food) for others without being directly involved in import/export occupations.
But I agree: This is an awful thin revenue stream for a viable settlement.
Musk I think does not care about profit, beyond the point that $ allows him to fulfill his dream of Mars
True enough – but that gets back to my earlier post – he has lots of HUGE bets that could go south and ruin him financially. Just because you have a dream, doesn’t mean you can pay for it!
about half of NASA’s budget is for the first A in NASA. Space gets about half. So the three billion a year for SLS/Orion represents closer to 30% not 10%.
That “essential” heavy lift was not essential according to NASA’s INTERNAL studies.
“Well, despite what NASA may or may not have been telling Rep. Rohrabacher about its internal evaluations regarding the merits of alternate architectures that did not use the SLS (and those that incorporated fuel depots), the agency had actually been rather busy studying those very topics.
And guess what: the conclusions that NASA arrived at during these studies are in direct contrast to what the agency had been telling Congress, the media, and anyone else who would listen.
This presentation “Propellant Depot Requirements Study – Status Report – HAT Technical Interchange Meeting – July 21, 2011” is a distilled version of a study buried deep inside of NASA. The study compared and contrasted an SLS/SEP architecture with one based on propellant depots for human lunar and asteroid missions. Not only was the fuel depot mission architecture shown to be less expensive, fitting within expected budgets, it also gets humans beyond low Earth orbit a decade before the SLS architecture could.
Moreover, supposed constraints on the availability of commercial launch alternatives often mentioned by SLS proponents, was debunked. In addition, clear integration and performance advantages to the use of commercial launchers Vs SLS was repeatedly touted as being desirable: “breaking costs into smaller, less-monolithic amounts allows great flexibility in meeting smaller and changing budget profiles.””
http://www.spaceref.com/new…
Even if we ignore what NASA stated internally, when it was first proposed ULA said they could do heavy lift for 8 billion. Boeing said 6,9 billion, lockheed Martian said 6 billion and SpaceX said 2.5 billion.
ALL FOUR could have been funded for LESS than the run out costs of SLS.
“about half of NASA’s budget is for the first A in NASA. Space gets about half.”
Not even close.
In FY16, the first A (aeronautics) got $571 million. Space Science and manned space got $14 billion.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/…
Vladislaw… Aeronautics gets about 3-4 percent of NASA’s budget. Not 1/2. Not even close. Sorry. BEO exploration gets about $4b, ISS-related gets about $4b, and Science gets most (but not all) of the rest. Aeronautics and Space Tech both get <<$1 billion each.
The first numbers I found (which were the FY2016 request) also included $2.8 billion for “Safety, Security and Mission Services”, some of which is “Center Management and Operations.” I assume some NASA center operations money goes to aeronautics. Also, some of the science goes to things like computational fluid dynamics, which have aeronautical applications. I’d agree aeronautics is probably under 10% of NASA’s budget, but there is a little more money spent on it that the 3-4% the line item implies.
Could you please provide references for why it’s essential? Or at least cost estimates comparing heavy lift vehicles we can afford to launch once every never vs. a larger number of launches of existing, commercial ELVs (or ones with recoverable first stages) and assembly in LEO?
Since I don’t work for NASA or a contractor, I don’t have resources to do a full up architecture analysis but just consider the complex integrated elements needed for a Mars or moon mission – a large outfitted habitat to either bury or put into a cave/lava tube, or a space nuclear power reactor (sans fuel rods) for power & propulsion or a complex integrated Mars lander with a capability of putting four or five astronauts on the surface and sustaining them until surface base is operational – big complicate items that need to work together. There likely won’t be many of them – most mass will be propellant and consumables and commercial rockets and in-space assembly or storage will be fine for those launches.
Nobody knows what the real cost numbers will be for the final heavy lift commercial vehicles – its too soon to tell. At this same stage in their development, the Shuttle ad the EELVs sure looked pretty affordable.
Hierarchies, like NASA, expand their capabilities at the margins, and 10 percent is *very* large as a margin, undoing most other capability growth. SLS looms even larger when it grows NASA in a direction that is financially unsustainable since the budget it requires is, and will be, politically unsustainable. What heavy lift can accomplish can be done also by several developing technologies, few of which will employ the numbers of voters that monster rockets will, the true reason for SLS existing.
Belatedly, but I’m surprised no-one called you one this,
The SLS/Orion program consumes nearly 20% of NASA’s overall budget. A fifth of NASA’s budget wasted on a program with no purpose. A program which even a defender like you can only justify if you make up a list of things that NASA can’t afford to develop… because of the cost of SLS/Orion.
For example…
A program cancelled to channel funds to Constellation, along with much of the tech-dev budget and a quarter of the science budget. The resurrection of which is prevented by SLS/Orion. (Remember, the expansion of tech-dev was one of the key plants of Obama’s proposed 2010 budget.)
First, I stand by my 10%; Orion can, as demonstrated by the EFT-1 mission, be launched by another rocket.
Second, the problem isn’t that SLS and Orion are killing off everything else nor that they do not have a purpose – they are both elements of a human exploration architecture. The real problem is that NASA’s budget is too low for a real human exploration program. Until NASA gets more money, we’re kidding ourselves when we talk about a path to Mars – or even the moon. And as you can tell from my comments, I don’t believe that commercial pixie dust will make everything more cheap and affordable within the current top line although I am sure that commercial propellant depots, consumables deliveries, etc. will happen and play a part.
Developing these two exploration elements now only makes sense if it is followed by subsequent developments once their development is complete and the development resources are freed up; when ISS is ended – most likely in 2028 unless a means can be found to turn it into a facility where NASA won’t get stuck with all or most of the bill – will also free up resources for development. But, in the end, as Augustine said in his Constellation review, without more resources exploration progress will be excruciatingly slow. Is this how I think it should be – hell no but I’d rather see slow gradual progress in building an exploration architecture than no progress at all.
US should require 10 to 20 mT LV with path to complete reuse
– NASA requires ~ 10mT LV for cargo and supplies to ISS
o to address part of the Crew Health Grand Challenge.
– Missions to Mars every other year ~400mT (200mT/yr)
– 4 launches of a single 50mT LV meets the high end
o OK, but low for demonstrated reliability o sole source
o 5-10 launches: 2 providers; 2-5 launches: 4 providers
– Flight rate decreases costs (further reduced with reuse)
===> US needs LVs in the 10 to 20mT with goal of resuse
– Inefficient SLS core design dictated highly elliptical L1 orbits
o L2 is superior in many ways, staging in LEO first
– HLV compromises the architecture and every path forward
o Capacity destroys #1 Economic Access to Space
Launching dirt cheap, Class D propellant in common configurations provides demonstrated reliability, no $ risk.
Not everything is about launch vehicles!!
Keith’s point is a great one — these folks are not the best to contribute to the discussion about NASA’s future. We can respect and revere them, but we should not be relying on them to set our direction.
When I watch a certain smarmy 31 year old from the White House espouse policy with th righteousness of a preacher I wonder if a little age and experience wouldn’t round off the edges.
Keith…..perhaps congress looks back 50 years, because all we are doing is reimagining.50 year old technology
Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford totally by passes commercial crew… like it didn’t even happen.
this guy … we tried going small .. it just doesn’t work… oh? We have tried using fuel depots?
Dr. Ellen Stofan – she mentioned climate change… wonder if she will be asked any questions..
johnson .. silly question and waste of time.