Mike Pence Was Against Ares 5/Orion Before He Was For SLS/Orion
RSC BUDGET OPTIONS 2005 Summary and Explanation of Offsets, Rep. Mike Pence, RSC Chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling, RSC Budget & Spending Task Force Chairman
[Page 6] “Cancel NASA’s New Moon/Mars Initiative 2006: -1,493 5-year savings -11,511 10-year savings -44,042”
[Page 8] “Cancel NASA’s New Moon/Mars Initiative In 2004, the President announced a new initiative to explore the Moon and Mars with the goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020. NASA currently intends to use the savings from phasing out the space shuttle in 2012 to fund this program. Savings: $44 billion over ten years ($11.5 billion over five years)”
Early Retirement for Space Shuttles Unlikely, Lawmakers Say, Space.com (2005)
“A group of Republican lawmakers led by Mike Pence of Indiana last week said the $104 billion to replace the shuttles with a new spaceship and rockets to carry astronauts back to the moon ought to be canceled to help pay to rebuild the hurricane-wrecked Gulf Coast. Key Congressional leaders said there is little political support for either suggestion.”
Ares 5 was a much bigger project than SLS should have been. SLS or another Shuttle derived booster should have been done more easily and much less expensively if it had begun while Shuttle assembly lines were still in operation.
But the real problem all along, and it is no different now than it was in 2006, is that Orion is a dumb configuration for virtually any purpose. Originally this was supposed to have been a replacement for Shuttle, carrying crews to and from ISS before later being used for other purposes. In these roles it was far larger than it needed to be, much too heavy, and wound up relying upon far too many completely new yet old style systems. If you wanted an Apollo mark II sortie vehicle, take an Apollo capsule, strip it of its lunar support systems like the huge SPS engine and fuel tanks, update the electronics, and it could have been built to the Apollo blueprints. Those changes would have opened up interior volume and lightened the vehicle. And Apollo had a 5 and 6 crew capability that was in place for its last 4 missions. It was a bit tight inside in pressurized moon suits, though far less so than Soyuz in Sokols has ever been.
Orion was of course Griffin’s Moon and Mars ship. But the throwback to Apollo, even if it was on steroids, was a mistake. Flags and footprints were never going to be sustainable.
The Orion command module should have been designed as a simple launch and logistics ferry. What would that have looked like? There are 2 in the later stages of development right now, the manned Dragon and the Boeing CST Spaceliner. They’ve been done for remarkably low cost and in a reasonable amount of time. They both provide a reasonable launch escape capability. None of these vehicles, including Orion, are optimized for people to live in for weeks or months. There was never any doubt that if you needed to provide that capability, you would need an habitation module, probably not too dissimilar than some of the modules on ISS that serve the habitation function.
NASA needed to succinctly, concisely and accurately define their plan, and the top level requirements for each stage of the plan and detailed requirements for the first stages of the plan. But there wasn’t a single person in the Constellation organization that had ever done this for any prior program. That was a failure of management. There were plenty of people who knew how to do this who could have been called upon. Not only did they not do this, they specifically excluded the people who knew how to do this. Sorry, but all those flight directors, astronauts, and the ISS element managers who had gotten into that program far too late to have had a role in design, did not have the right stuff for the job. They also emulated the ISS convoluted management scheme with too many people in too many cross cutting activities and operations and not specific responsibilities for particular system functionality, especially when it came to support of the crew. That was how they established Constellation, and the situation did not improve when Constellation converted to the Orion/SLS debacle. So now they have a very expensive set of hardware designed without regard to requirements and without a defined mission.
So Pence’s, the Congress’ and Presidents’ confusion-when the supposed technical experts do not have the required expertise (read that a lack of useable experience) and they fail to lead, that is what happens when you let the politicians lead.
My thought for Orion was to be a servicing vehicle, to support the occasional instances where you need a crew for repair like Hubble or other expensive spacecraft. I think it’s morphed into something else now.
Orion wasn’t designed for servicing, or for a rendezvous with an asteroid for that matter. It has no external cargo bay, no remote manipulator to anchor a satellite, not even an airlock. It was designed to transport six crewmen to the Moon for a reenactment of Apollo, and to provide a payload for the Ares I, which was pushed by Mike Griffin.
“Apollo had a 5 and 6 crew capability that was in place for its last 4 missions” – didn’t know that. Thanks.
On the shifting programatic direction, though, I’d ask a different question, with an example. I was VP of our local synagogue for many years, during which one of my tasks was to implement a database in support of a growing community (school, donations, all sorts of complex things happen).
At the time, dBase was about the only fully relational database out there; an app called Helix was showing promise, but was too immature. So I bought (donated) the computer gear, and we bought the software.
When I decided not to become president, and in fact to retire from involvement, a new VP came into office. He immediately threw out all of the computers and software and start over. He did this because he was not familiar with the system in use, but he did know (something) about the alternative.
In fact, though, he didn’t have a global view of the congregation’s needs. All he saw was “a mess”, and that someone needed to “roll up their shirtsleeves and fix things”.
Isn’t that the attitude we see in Washington? And then they get a few briefings and – damn! – this is hard! And I didn’t know that (fill in the blank)! It is Dunning-Kruger, of course.
My replacement wasn’t a bad guy. He simply succumbed to the idea that he was smart enough to figure anything out. Sound familiar?
So along comes Pence, just another guy with too much authority and not enough patience to really understand the issues. In many ways, that’s the history that swirls around SLS and Orion. and in the end it is a failure of leadership mixed with quite a bit of dick swinging, if you will pardon the analogy.