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SLS and Orion

Is NASA Thinking About Flying Another Orion on Delta IV Heavy? (Update)

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 16, 2017
Filed under , , , ,
Is NASA Thinking About Flying Another Orion on Delta IV Heavy? (Update)

Keith’s 16 May update: According to NASA PAO there is “no Orion program interest in buying another Delta”. That said there have been meetings at NASA where this was openly discussed – since I have spoken to people who have been in those meetings. What constitutes “program interest” means different things to different people. If there is no interest in the topic then why do they talk about it at meetings?
Keith’s 15 May note: Sources within NASA report that there is interest in buying another Delta IV Heavy for an Orion mission. NASA launched the first Orion mission – EFT-1 on a Delta IV Heavy in 2014. Speculation about the interest in another Orion flight on a Delta IV Heavy often surfaces with an expression of doubt with regard to the future viability of SLS and whether it will be used to loft human crews. Some have suggested that Lockheed Martin may propose an Orion variant for a future commercial crew procurement opportunity. Congress has also expressed renewed interest in Orion visits to ISS and put language into the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 addressed “the ability of Orion to meet the needs and the minimum capability requirements described in section 303(b)(3) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010.” NASA was supposed to deliver a report to Congress within 60 days of the bill becoming law – which means that the report is past due. Oh yes: Delta IV Heavy is not human rated – yet. Stay tuned.

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

60 responses to “Is NASA Thinking About Flying Another Orion on Delta IV Heavy? (Update)”

  1. EtOH says:
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    Sweet Jesus. If this actually ends up happening, it sounds like Ares 1-X levels of farce.

    • muomega0 says:
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      The entire architecture forward is based on ‘heritage’ hardware.

      • savuporo says:
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        At some point this heritage stuff becomes slightly ridiculous. Air France isn’t flying around in Montgolfier’s balloons anymore.

  2. passinglurker says:
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    The delta iv can’t lift the full LES, aeroshell, capsule, service module stack can it?

    • EtOH says:
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      If you don’t include the LES, or you include it but don’t load it with fuel (except for the normal separation jets), and you underfill the service module, the Delta IV H would be just barely capable of lobbing the stack to LEO, for whatever that’s worth.

      • Matthew Black says:
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        According to the Delta IV-H users guide; the launcher with RS-68A engines is supposed to be able to place 28 tons (63,000 pounds) into a 28.5 degree orbit and 26 tons into a 51.6 degree inclination orbit. A fully fueled Orion spacecraft is supposed to be 57,000 pounds – 26 tons. It seems that the Delta IV-H with RS-68A engines should just squeak in with this size payload. If they wanted to upgrade the Delta IV-H – probably no money to – but with an MB-60 engine on the upper stage, or switch the main booster stages to aluminum/lithium alloys and stretch the 5 meter upper stage’s propellant tanks a little…

        That would give the desired performance – should increase the Delta IV-H capability to more than 30 tons to a 28.5 degree LEO, even without the MB-60. With the MB-60 and the before-mentioned alum/lithium and prop tank stretch; 33 tons or more to LEO. I should point out though that this still would not be as good as Vulcan/ACES of the Falcon Heavy. Nonetheless – the Delta IV-H is an operational rocket, not a long-delayed or ‘paper rocket’…

        • Giuseppe says:
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          But why should they use a fully fueled SM? They just need enough fuel to do the orbit maneuvers to reach ISS and then for a deorbit burn. It would be significantly less than what’s needed for a lunar mission.

          • Matthew Black says:
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            Yes – do basically what they did for Apollo orbital missions; delete two out of four of the propellant tanks, or at least their contents…

        • EtOH says:
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          That 26 tons is without the LAS, hence my stipulation on not including it. However it also functions as an aerodynamic shroud on ascent so that could be tricky

          • Matthew Black says:
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            You are right – it’s one of the reasons Orion went on a ‘diet’ when the Ares 1 was projected to be less capable than designed. The Delta IV-H upgrades I mentioned are merely part of the documented enhancements proposed by ULA some years ago. Doing even some of them should allow a fully-fueled Orion to get into orbit.

        • passinglurker says:
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          But why would they upgrade delta IV when ULA is looking to retire it? and how long would it take to perform these upgrades?

          • Matthew Black says:
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            As you say – chances are they wont bother. Most resources are likely to go into the Vulcan launcher.

          • rktsci says:
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            ULA did a paper on man-rating Atlas and Delta. IIRC, the cost was several hundred million, mostly for avionics and a few other minor changes. The avionics was to provide a box that monitored the booster and gave an abort signal if things went pear shaped,

          • passinglurker says:
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            You’d need more than man rating for a delta to lift a manned orion though

      • Ben Russell-Gough says:
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        Modify LC-37B with flame trenches for solid strap-ons? Or fast-track Atlas-VH and launch from LC-41 instead?

        Or (and this would be ambitious) build a C/T platform for Delta-IVH+ with solids and launch from LC-39B?

        • Zed_WEASEL says:
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          No need to modified LC-37 to upgraded the Delta IV Heavy. Since there is a current option to add 6 solid motor boosters to the launcher.

          The Delta IV Heavy launching from LC-39B will be very expensive and takes a long time. to implement.. Will need to build new mobile launch platform, duplicate the ground support equipment set from LC-37 & outfitting a bay in the VAB for the Delta IV Heavy. For that amount of money. A new clean sheet design launch vehicle might be a better option. Never mind that a commercial option will be available in the near future.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            A new clean sheet design launch vehicle might be a better option.

            So true.

            And it’s obvious – now – but a statement like that would have been ridiculed a decade ago.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            I agree about LC-37 already accepting SRBs, in fact they are already used on the medium version of the Delta IV. Your comment about a clean sheet design is ironic. DIV was a clean sheet design, and it did look good on paper. Unfortunately the processing time on the pad was longer than expected, partly as the SRBs and payload are loaded there, and the use of low-density hydrogen as a booster fuel made the booster much larger than it would have been with RP-1.

  3. Mark Thompson says:
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    With all this talk about rockets being man rated by NASA, I was looking for stories on when NASA certified the Soyuz but could not find any, even with Google and Bing. Does anyone know when this occurred?

    • Zed_WEASEL says:
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      And you won’t. The Soyuz is certified by Russians as man rated since it is a Russian launch vehicle.

    • Ben Russell-Gough says:
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      I can’t see the Russians letting a team of American government technical experts go over one of their space launchers. No, they just accepted whatever certifications that Roscosmos gave them.

      • fcrary says:
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        That isn’t exactly the point. NASA can take the Russian specifications and certifactions​ at face value. But NASA has requirements about what satisfies their criteria for “man-rated”. Did NASA take Russian-provided specifications and certifications, compare them to the NASA requirements and formally find that the Soyuz launch vehicle and capsule satisfied those requirements? If so, when? If not, why are American service providers being held to a different standard?

        • Ben Russell-Gough says:
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          Soyuz had the advantage of being ‘the only game in town’. NASA had to take whatever they were offered and like it or just loose crew access to ISS.

          • Mark Thompson says:
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            Then lose crew access to space. If NASA is precluded from using Russian rockets and subsidizing their takeover of Ukraine and the ongoing Syria holocaust, will they choose losing crew access to ISS or giving US rockets the same waiver they give the Russians.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            The Shenzou has had a pretty good record for reliability, as has the LM-2F. And despite occasional building of islands in the South China Sea, China has not invaded anyone in decades. Maybe we should invite them to join us on the ISS.

          • Ben Russell-Gough says:
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            They will choose not treating the various suppliers in the same way. Because they can.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          The space shuttle was never man-rated by current standards. Also, whenever it flew it did so with several safety waivers which essentially said that it was still o.k. to fly even though they were breaking their own rules.

          NASA writes the rules, but it also writes its own waivers. Convenient, no?

          • fcrary says:
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            Very convenient, and at a much lower level, I’ve done it myself. At the level of requirements for scientific instruments, a scientist might write a requirement for 1 meter resolution images. He might really mean, “anything worse than 5 meters would be worthless but better than 0.2 meters isn’t necessary.” If it turns out 2 meters is the practical limit, it really is convenient for that scientist to say, “ok, good enough.”

            The important part, and the real trick, is to make sure the requirements remain consistent with the original intent and goals. I’m not sure if that’s the case when it comes to NASA man-rating of launch vehicles.

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            In the case of the space shuttle, it was things like tiles being damaged on *every* flight due to foam shedding from the ET. It really wasn’t supposed to do that, but NASA decided it was a “maintenance problem” more than anything else and wrote a waiver. Unfortunately, this decision ultimately resulted in the loss of Columbia and its crew since the foam shedding problem was not given the high priority that it should have gotten.

          • fcrary says:
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            Did they really have foam-related tile damage on every flight? My memory of the CAIB report is damage on every flight, but not necessarily from foam. In most cases, the cause couldn’t be identified. For the rest, the majority were foam-related. But, yes. Columbia was lost to the same logic which, in the case of Challenger and as Feynman put it, could also be used to prove Russian roulette is an practice. (We did it n times before and nothing bad happened.)

    • Mark Thompson says:
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      I don’t believe that the Soviet Union, which was the name of the country when the rocket was built, even certified rockets as man rated. Cosmonauts were required to fly on whatever rocket the communist government told them to.
      As far as the Delta IV why can’t NASA just rely on whatever certifications ULA gives them. I trust ULA and its parents much more than the old Soviet Union of yesterday or even Russia’s current space program with all of its quality control problems.
      My point is that NASA is being overly critical for U.S. vendors while it accepts unknowable risks to use Russian rockets.

      • Neal Aldin says:
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        Yea, if you might recall, Vostok was developed as a spy satellite in which they could pull out the camera pod and insert a man in an ejection seat. When Kruschev decided he wanted to one-up the American 2 man Gemini program, he told Korolev to put 3 men in a capsule and put them into orbit. There were protests. Vostok was not designed to land with a man (or woman) inside, and with 3 on-board there was no place for the ejection seat. The chief protester, Feoktistov, was the lead designer of the Vostok. He was told the vehicle had better be safe for 3, since he would be one of the cosmonauts taking the trip. Voskhod 1 was launched with 3 cosmonauts on board in October 12, 1964. Konstantin Feoktistov was one of the 3 cosmonauts on board. The mission went great and all 3 returned home safely. Obviously the system was man-rated (despite the fact they sat in one another’s laps and there was no room for pressure suits).

        What is the point of another Orion launch on a Delta? NASA wants to show they are doing something, making progress, without actually having the ‘real thing’ in hand for awhile. Seems to me that was the same reason they launched Ares 1, and the same reason they launched the last Orion on a Delta. The real issue here, besides the waste of money, is the waste of time and manpower, since the Orion on the Delta or on the Ares is not the real thing, so they have to take people from working on the real thing to have them work on the fake thing.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      At the time, James Oberg wrote a lot about this. Take a look at his website as he may have some info there (or at least pointers to books he’s written).

      Anyone who has followed the Soyuz program since then knows that there have been a few close calls with Soyuz and a few with its close, unmanned, cousin Progress.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        Yep. I’ve mention the http://spacerockethistory.com podcast and website before, but it’s worth repeating for those, like me, who enjoy deep-diving into early history.

        The podcasts are usually very good, with supporting materials on the website.

      • Mark Thompson says:
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        Jeff, I guess no one noticed my comment was in the category of sarcasm. But c’est la vie.
        On the topic of James Oberg, I am a huge fan. If you have any recommended books, please share.

  4. savuporo says:
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    Lockheed using a Orion derivative for commercial transport is .. fair commercial market ? Subsidised to the tune of billions of dollars ..

  5. Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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    Oh for the love of Pete why are we still sinking money into this vehicle that is going to be used at most once a year to send folks for a 30 day stay to a station smaller than Skylab. $32B by the 50th anniversary of boots on the Moon and still waiting for just a recreation of Apollo 8. How did we get here? How did such a malaise set in at the agency to put forward such uninspired plans of a tiny gateway that is manned 30 days out of 365 just to attempt to justify the budgetary albatrosses that are SLS and Orion. When did we loose our ambition and big dreams to truly be a spacefaring nation? Now we are going to try and lift this on a Delta to do what? Try and go to the ISS? First crewed test flight will probably occur right before ISS deorbits so the Orion crew can turn out the lights and send her into the ocean I guess.

    Born too late for Apollo and looks like way too early for the next chapter of exploration.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Easy, Mike Griffin put his thumb on the scales when he picked Ares I plus Ares V plus CEV as the space transportation system for Constellation (CEV was supposed to be far too heavy to launch on EELVs, thus sealing the deal). When the Obama Administration cancelled Constellation (as a huge waste of money), Congress mandated SLS/Orion which wasn’t much cheaper.

      And here we are.

      • tutiger87 says:
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        How did we get Ares 1?

        I’m waiting for one of you well informed space folks to write that book about the ATK mafia….

        • fcrary says:
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          I’d recommend waiting another decade or two. Candid details and facts generally don’t come out before the principal players are either retired or dead. Good histories don’t come out while honesty can harm people’s careers or reputations.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Mike Griffin, before he became NASA Administrator, already had the notional idea for Ares I and Ares V since something quite similar showed up in presentations he had given. It really was his little pet project.

          The political support for keeping the pork flowing to ATK was an added “bonus”. The argument to keep ATK profitable is that it is necessary in order to maintain their solid rocket booster manufacturing capability, which will no doubt be needed in the future for “next generation” ICBMs. So, we’re essentially using NASA funding to keep the military industrial complex happy.

        • rktsci says:
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          The Ares I design was picked over the objections of the safety team assigned to look at options. As I understand it, EELV (this predates Falcon) was the preferred vehicle. NASA HQ changed the scoring so Ares I came out on top.

    • tutiger87 says:
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      That last paragraph is the story of my NASA career…smh
      A generation of us wasted…

  6. Ben Russell-Gough says:
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    Purely FWIW, a crewed EFT-2 to LEO might be a worthwhile expenditure and may haul the EM-2 schedule somewhat leftwards. Assuming that they can build enough Orion CMs and ESMs to meet such an aggressive schedule. Optimistically, it might mean first crewed flight as early as 2020 (although that’s highly optimistic).

    In any event (and firmly IMO), some kind of program rejigging to get crewed experience in actual flying hardware before you throw them out to EML2, around 5 days from home, would probably be wise.

  7. Jeff2Space says:
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    Oh hell no. Delta IV Heavy only looks “inexpensive” when compared with SLS.

    Oh hell no #2 is sending Orion to ISS, which would be in direct competition with the much cheaper commercial crew vehicles which are likely to start flying before Orion’s first test flight anyway.

    This is a desperate move to try to save SLS/Orion from its ulatimate cancellation due to its high cost.

  8. fcrary says:
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    In this case, I suspect “no program interest” means the program manager hasn’t been convinced the idea is worth investing significant resources. Talking about an idea at a meeting is one thing; paying someone to do a serious trade study on the subject is another. Which is probably a good thing, since this isn’t exactly an idea worth considering.

  9. Daniel Woodard says:
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    In the Exploration Systems Architecture Study the Delta was rejected as LV for the Orion because it was not man-rated, and could not be man-rated without an expensive redesign of the second stage to bring it up to the 1.4 load factor required for manned vehicles. In reality this rationale was a bit dubious, since the 1.4 load factor was predicated on the Shuttle elements of 1) reusability and thus fatigue and structural deterioration, and 2) the highly inadvisable plan to fly humans on the very first flight, when loads were uncertain.; The Delta has already carried the Orion, although IIRC it lacked some heavy systems like the LAS. The ESAS selected instead the Ares I, which lacked the required performance. Isn’t it time NASA entertained a full and open debate on the way forward? Strategy must change because we have no choice. The only question is when.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      Isn’t the interim upper stage on EM-1 essentially the Delta IV upper stage? This didn’t seem to be a showstopper when NASA looked at flying a crew on SLS. The showstopper was the money required and the schedule slip it would have caused.

      So, yea, the “man rating” thing for the EELVs was always “a bit dubious”. I’m not a huge fan of ULA, but they’ve had a very long history of successful launches for both Atlas V and Delta IV. Just based on that, I wouldn’t have hesitated to put a capsule with astronauts in it on top of either of their EELVs.

      Also, the term “man rating” means whatever NASA wants it to mean. And for vehicles NASA “owns” it also means they get to write all the wavers they want (just look at the shuttle).

      But, the reality is that certifying Atlas V or Delta IV for human spaceflight shouldn’t have been as hard as certifying Redstone, Atlas, or Titan II. All of which was done in the 1960s without a lot of whining about how hard or expensive it was going to be.

      • fcrary says:
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        You just provoked me to download and skim NPR 8705.2B, NASA’s official document on man-rating spacecraft. Thank you for wasting half an hour of my life.

        It officially exempts the Shuttle, ISS and Soyuz, on the grounds that they predate the formal process and were man-rated by their own processes.

        Overall, it is devoid of technical content or details. It is all about managing the process of man-rating, not about what the standards are. (That is relegated to bits and pieces of a number of referenced documents.)

        It contains joys such as a requirement to allow astronauts to override flight software. Followed by a clause saying, in effect, “unless that’s a bad idea, but the process requires talking about it.”

        Fire extinguishers are used as an example of an unacceptable way to make a system fault tolerant, since a bad fire might be too much for them to handle and, anyway, a fault tolerant system shouldn’t​ let things get to the point where one is needed.

        I know some aspects of man-rating are inherently difficult, especially after a launch vehicle is already designed. (E.g. maximum safe acceleration and vibration.) But I have to wonder how much of the cost is salaries for all the managers at all the officially mandated meetings.

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          Unfortunately man-rating is accomplished by analysis, i.e. here’s a checklist, do this and it will be man-rated. Actual flight experience is essentially irrelevant. Unfortunately the reality is that analysis is not effective at predicting the reliability of an untested launch vehicle because it assumes that failures are random events and failure modes and rates are known and constant. In reality, most launch vehicle failures are deterministic (nonrandom) events, due to unanticipated failure modes, and failure rates change with every launch early in a program as modifications are made (if the program is well managed) after every discovery of a new failure mode.

          • fcrary says:
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            Actually, sometimes it’s even worse than what you describe. Most spacecraft and launch vehicles failures are cascades. It’s not a matter of a single part failing. It’s one failing which causes or allows another to fail, which causes a problem for a third, etc.

            Mars Climate Orbiter wasn’t lost due to an Imperial-to-metric unit conversion error. It was that, and a decision not to do optical navigation, and a decision not to worry about discrepancies in orbital determination, and none of that would have happened if the spacecraft had had two, rather than one, solar panel. Similarly, Ariane 501 wasn’t just a software bug. It was a string of errors which included a software bug.

            Unfortunately, most risk analysis focuses on single point failures. It’s great to eliminate single point failures. But that doesn’t actually make something absolutely reliable or safe. That takes real experience and, to be honest, breaking things.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Yeah, it’s a management process document for sure. But like you said it clearly exempts the space shuttle since it had its own “man rating” process.

          Like I said, it’s NASA who gets to decide what “man rating” means, by writing documents like NPR 8705.2B which defines the process to follow. Buried in there is the requirement that the “Human-Rating Certification
          Package” will contain:

          “A list of all requested waivers and
          exceptions of NPR 8705.2 certification
          (Chapter 2) and technical (Chapter 3)
          requirements, with justification and
          disposition, and access to the waivers and
          exceptions.”

          So yes, NASA not only writes the “man rating” requirements (following the process in NPR 8705.2B), but they also get to write the waivers as an explicit part of the process.

          • fcrary says:
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            I’m not too concerned about waving requirements, or having them waived by the same people who wrote them. Nor do I think “NASA” is monolithic. The real problem is keeping things consistent with the actual goals.

            If I wrote the requirement, I’d be the one who understood what it was supposed to do, and therefore the most logical person to say it doesn’t apply to a specific case. So the author being able to wave their own requirement isn’t inherently a bad idea.

            Of course, that person could be under pressure (e.g. schedule or budget) and waive the requirement for a bad reason. Much as I hate an emphasis on formal process, regulating a little bit of common sense can’t hurt. Before waiving a requirement, it makes sense to talk it over and get a second pair of eyes consider the decision. I don’t see a problem with making that an official rule.

            The real problem is that this whole thing assumes that (1) the people making the decisions actually understand the technical details and (2) the people reviewing or giving the second opinion are, in a meaningful way, independent and different from the people asking for a waiver.

            In another post, you mentioned the Columbia accident. In that case, the people involved did not have a clear understanding of the technical issues. (A part of the CAIB investigation even highlighted how Microsoft was to blame; Powerpoint almost enforces a vague, qualitative style with ambiguous sentence fragments. That is the absolutely wrong way to convey technical information.)

            In addition, the decisions to treat foam (or FOD in general) as a maintenance rather than a safety issue were not really subject to independent review. The “outside” eyes were actually the same people who would be in charge of the next mission, so they were subject to the same schedule pressure. Dr. Ride, by the way, had some especially caustic to say about this process. She was also on the Rogers commission on the Challenger accident. Essentially the same flawed processes were pointed out then, and nothing really changed.

            For the current man-rating standards, the independence of the review is a real problem. It places the authority at the top, in the hands of the NASA Administrator. So anyone reviewing the decisions to waive a requirement is reviewing his boss’ decisions.

            I know it isn’t easy, but if you don’t handle this right, what’s the point? You just spend a whole lot of time and money, with people sitting around in meetings and checking off boxes on how they followed an official process, but without actually accomplishing the goals that process supposed to achieve.

            Of course, getting it right does require a sizable amount of technical knowledge and good judgement on the part of everyone involved. It’s almost like expecting those people to be rocket scientists.

  10. A_J_Cook says:
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    Until they figure this out, maybe ULA could buy a Falcon Heavy to stand in for the Delta, and Lockheed could purchase a Dragon Crew capsule to stand in for Orion!

  11. Saturn1300 says:
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    The study was for any launcher that was not SLS. Some cheap ones that should be available are FH and O-ATK carbon launcher. FH this year and Black Knight in ’19. BO sometime. It will be an interesting report. I hope it includes Orion Lite. That was on an Atlas. It will not be needed though, the 2 they have now will work fine. Congress never gave NASA any money to do this. NASA says that SLS can carry crew and cargo at the same time. They will never use the 70 ton capacity. There is no place to put cargo. To launch crew they might use no or less segments on the solids. That will be a big fairing for cargo only. Or a high speed flight to Mars or Jupiter. SLS 2nd stage will have less thrust than FH though and SPaceX says 140,000lbs to LEO for FH. Very close to B1 SLS, at a billion $ a flight. But that is what Shuttle was and it flew every 2 months. So we can afford SLS.

  12. ExNASA says:
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    I find it interesting that all the shade is thrown towards SLS. Last time I checked, Orion is behind schedule for manned flight moreso than SLS, even with the latest delays. ???

    • rktsci says:
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      A good chunk of Orion’s delay is due to two factors:
      – the delay in SLS meant that systems not needed for the test flight were pushed back, i.e. all but minimal work on life support was stopped along with all the other equipment to support human presence.
      – the decision to have the Europeans provide the Service Module in exchange for releasing them from their cargo mission obligations to ISS has thrown a spanner in the timeline. Sources tell me that the ESA has been slow and hard to work with.