Ugh that probably means stay the course is rising as well? Given Lightfoot is a good ole boy of the Alabama ranks. I don’t see how they get Trump to wait until second term for any crew Orion. Commercial crew is a given but not much he can take credit for but carving out something new for HSF with SLS/Orion is beyond the scope of this first Presidential term.
How I will be asked to become the NASA Administrator:
Say you’re a well-qualified candidate for this job (someone other than me) with boundless experience and energy. Say you are hoping to be appointed: “Wow! The NASA Administrator! Yikes!”
And then you read the paper.
You see the treatment meted the Attorney General. And to the press secretary, a devoted Catholic denied a papal audience out of pique. Then others, great and small.
What do you do?
If I were asked to serve (it hasn’t happened yet, but keep reading), I’d wonder if I could keep my Agency below the radar. I would assess my ability – and willingness – to suffer public humiliation in order to drive NASA in the direction I’d always dreamed.
Then, as the insults and slights came, as they surely will, I’d bury my public shame, knowing all the while about sticks and stones. About the importance of serving this great country. About gratitude for the chance. About the opportunity of a lifetime to make a difference. “He’s the President, after all. He’s the boss!”
We now have enough experience that anyone asked to join the government will be going over that scenario very, very carefully. First-tier candidates will demur.
Having concluded that every single person on a list of qualified candidates is, regrettably, committed elsewhere, you start looking for other candidates, folks who love NASA, but don’t really have governmental or administrative experience. But they have heart! And if you are President, you know full well that you need nothing more than your own good sense to do any job in government.
Add to that an agency that will be committed to resisting you at every opportunity, or looking for ways to embrass you. Then add in that they are civil servants with layers and layers of protection from firing that allow them to ignore you.
Suggestion. If you get the job create a new NASA Center on the North Slope of Alaska to study climate change and living on Mars. It will serve you well as a place to transfer those who may lead the resistance against you. It will also give you a couple more Senators to support the NASA budget 🙂
Most of NASA and its community do not support SLS/Orion and are behind the VSE without its 3 flaws added by politics. The resistance is from Congress who specifies ‘must be 70 and 130mT’ and expendable, expensive shuttle derived- most folks have no say in the poor architecture specified by Congress; in particular, the Party of Red, who cast aside depots and then refused to cast aside CxP/Apollo to retain SLS/Orion.
If pointing out poor policy is embarrassing, the so be it. Will folks ever stop spreading propaganda?
“Fake news” is just the “latest” term for the misdirection that has been part of the news industry since it birth. Look how many folks still think it was the Spanish that blew up the Maine or that folks believed the Earth was flat before Columbus “proved” them wrong. Its why you should never trust a single news source and seek out original independent sources.
I experienced a good example of this (the need for multiple sources) around 1990. For some reason, three of the major networks broadcast their evening news programs sequentially. Normally, they were typically in the same time slot. Once, all three covered a speech by President Bush. One said he had been critical of Chinese trade policies; one said he had avoided a strong statement of Chinese trade policy; the third actually got it right, and said he’d sent mixed signals about China. And this was back when the major networks tried not to be too biased. (Pre-internet, their market depended on appealing to viewers with a wide range of opinions.)
Then where is the Resistance to SLS? I see some anonymous posters occasionally claiming that NASA is against the SLS, but no one seems to be as outspoken about it as when Mars research or climate change research is cut. Where is the NASA testimony against it? Indeed, I expect IF the Trump Administration cuts it NASA folks will be testifying its a bad decision…
Also remember, SLS is nothing but Ares V with a new name and Ares V came from NASA, specifically Administrator Griffin. All the common elements, SRB, SME, ET redesigned for in-line instead of a side mounted payload are there.Yes, some details are different, but then Ares V was mostly a paper design and very likely would have evolved in the same direction.
I’m just a contractor, not a NASA employee. But when I hear people talking about launching (unmanned) planetary missions on an SLS, and remind them of Voyager (the original, canceled one), I get some very nasty looks. When very senior people are saying, “everything will be wonderful”, very few people are comfortable standing up and saying, “no they won’t.”
For reference, the original Voyager mission was a massive Mars lander, planned in the late 1960s as part of the Apollo Applications program and to be launched on a Saturn V. It was canceled for reasons which make the SLS-launched planetary mission comparison obvious. A later, descoped version eventually flew as Viking.
In the corporate world firms become great again when someone has the courage to take the axe to get rid of the deadwood they accumulate. This almost never happens with government agencies. The only real exceptions are the military branches, and it usually takes a major event (like Pearl Harbor) to reorganize them.
It’s dangerous and probably incorrect to assume that government is populated with deadwood, a point of view resulting chiefly from the political alchemy of Mr. Reagan, who almost single-handedly framed the government as a bogeyman rather than the great instrument it is for helping all of us.
While it is true that there is deadwood in a government as large as ours, it is not helpful to approach the issue with a willy-nilly meat cleaver.
Moreover, comparing the ‘corporate world’ with governmental functions yields very little useful data; the two are entirely dissimilar (allowing for a small amount of overlap, of course).
comparing the ‘corporate world’ with governmental functions yields very little useful data; the two are entirely dissimilar
“No two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign. If the trading spirit of the English East India company renders them very bad sovereigns; the spirit of sovereignty seems to have rendered them equally bad traders.” — Adam Smith, WoN, Ch2.
It is natural (alas) to observe, usually from afar, the difficulty of someone else’s job. The current WH occupant observed that he didn’t need to read because he could just apply his own brainpower.
They dissimilar only in the sense that government agencies are generally not subject to the same forces of competition as private organizations are. As Jim Collins pointed in his classic book “Built to Last” the average corporation only lasts 30-40 years before the weight of accumulated deadwood and inability to compete (lost of focus) pulls them under. It is why private entities are forced to be more efficient.
Government agencies by contrast don’t have the forces of competition and so are able to accumulate much more deadwood, especially since Congress Critters have every incentive to keep the moving flowing to facilities in their districts.
NASA is a good example. It has no competition for its mission of space exploration while Congress Critters will fight to keep its facilities in their districts open. The result is a lot of deadwood and overhead. Does NASA really need all those Centers draining its budget?
Does it make sense to have space missions launched from Florida and then managed from Houston,over a thousand miles away while using a tracking station in New Mexico to communicate from? Does it make sense that the rockets that launch from Florida (Saturn, Shuttle, SLS) were/are designed in northern Alabama and built in California, Louisiana, and Utah?
This is not only expensive and inefficient but has costed the lives of Astronauts. The astronauts killed on the Challenger died because the O-Rings failed. There were O-Rings to fail because the solid rockets were made in Utah and had to be poured in sections to make the trip by railroad to Florida. If they were produced in Florida, or in Louisiana as originally proposed, they would have been in one section with no O-Rings to fail.
And why is NASA still designing rockets? Because it has a staff trained to design rockets that needs something to do. This MAY have been necessary with the Saturn V, but was it really needed with the Shuttle or SLS? The SLS especially exists only to give the folks at Marshall and Stennis something to do. Both Centers should have been closed after Project Apollo. And is Wallops or the WSTF really needed anymore?
If NASA keeps over promising and under delivering (Shuttle, ISS, Constellation, Moon, Mars, Moon, SLS) , it is inevitable. Lightfoot (oh yes I forgot J-2) seems the perfect candidate to continue this process. Way to drain the swamp Donald! Anyone for more collusion with the Russians (in space, of course)?
I think we’ve been thru this discussion before. We do not need a technically trained NASA Administrator. There are plenty of technical people in NASA. The Administrator ought to be politically astute, and ought to have the ear of the President and Administration, and ought to be able to “work” the Congress and other government elements to do the best he/she can for NASA.
Honestly, NASA was derailed ten years ago by a rocket scientist Administrator who felt he knew better than anyone the technical work NASA needed to be engaged in. He overruled everyone on what to do, how to do it, and the design elements it needed to include. And turned out he was totally wrong, building a capsule too large and heavy with a booster that did not have the capability to launch the capsule.
I’m not sure I agree. We don’t need a NASA Administrator who micromanages and overrules people closer to (and more familiar with) the detail work. But you seem to be saying there is only one way to avoid that: Make sure the Administrator is too ignorant of technical issues to be able to micromanage. I think we’d be better off with an Administrator who did understand and could follow the technical details, since he does have to make some informed decisions, but who had enough sense not to overrule people. Of course, requiring common sense may be a highly restrictive job qualification.
No. Bush appointed O’Keefe who selected the spiral architecture and consolidated on the DOD fleet. Oops. Bush appointed Griffin with the pre-determined solution of shuttle derived and ESAS dictated CxP. Folks selected technology based on an artificial need to reach the moon by 2020–there was not much to overrule. Engineers significantly represent Fortune 500 CEOs.
To think a NASA admin has that level of control is very naive. If the nation wants to return to HSF Exploration, having a leaders who can truly trade technical merits and economics is likely the only way {name your destination} will not always be 20 years away like that last 50 yrs. Climate deniers need not apply.
Ares I, Ares V, and SLS were not truly “shuttle derived”. They used some bits of technology that came from the shuttle, but they were truly new designs. Five segment SRB != four segment shuttle SRB. Ares I upper stage was a completely new design which would have used a new engine (J-2X was not the same as J-2). Ares V and SLS weren’t shuttle derived either. None of the tooling used to build shuttle ETs was kept, so the designs were new as well. And the cherry on top of the sundae is that the reusable SSMEs on the shuttle are becoming “cost reduced”, expendable, RS-25Es.
As one of my mentors was told by his mentor, “Things that are different, just aren’t the same”. This is completely applicable to Ares I, Ares V, and SLS. They’re *not* shuttle derived.
Now, there was a fairly big push coming from inside NASA to build a truly shuttle derived HLV called DIRECT. DIRECT would have reused as much shuttle tooling as possible, minimizing the modifications needed to create an inline HLV from shuttle hardware. This was never supported by upper management.
No, they are shuttle derived, but the changes made them ‘new’, hence the need to be re-certified regardless of the decades of heritage. LV vehicle design/costs are driven by its engines-Solids, SSMEs were retained/modified.
Direct was fatally flawed. Advocating for Direct was a key way to kill shuttle derived and many did not recognize this 😉 Its astonishing that SLS is even being considered today.
Direct did not save operational costs as it created a nonsensical approach: launching a 8 mT capsule + LAS on a 70+mT LV for LEO at 0.5 to 1B/ea. Hence the need for commercial crew. This simple fact was the reason the 1.5 LV Ares I + Ares V was created: Direct required a LEO launcher for crew. ESAS did not state this “LV 24/25″/Direct. Even with the high EELV costs, they were cheaper to LEO.
Ugh that probably means stay the course is rising as well? Given Lightfoot is a good ole boy of the Alabama ranks. I don’t see how they get Trump to wait until second term for any crew Orion. Commercial crew is a given but not much he can take credit for but carving out something new for HSF with SLS/Orion is beyond the scope of this first Presidential term.
How I will be asked to become the NASA Administrator:
Say you’re a well-qualified candidate for this job (someone other than me) with boundless experience and energy. Say you are hoping to be appointed: “Wow! The NASA Administrator! Yikes!”
And then you read the paper.
You see the treatment meted the Attorney General. And to the press secretary, a devoted Catholic denied a papal audience out of pique. Then others, great and small.
What do you do?
If I were asked to serve (it hasn’t happened yet, but keep reading), I’d wonder if I could keep my Agency below the radar. I would assess my ability – and willingness – to suffer public humiliation in order to drive NASA in the direction I’d always dreamed.
Then, as the insults and slights came, as they surely will, I’d bury my public shame, knowing all the while about sticks and stones. About the importance of serving this great country. About gratitude for the chance. About the opportunity of a lifetime to make a difference. “He’s the President, after all. He’s the boss!”
We now have enough experience that anyone asked to join the government will be going over that scenario very, very carefully. First-tier candidates will demur.
Having concluded that every single person on a list of qualified candidates is, regrettably, committed elsewhere, you start looking for other candidates, folks who love NASA, but don’t really have governmental or administrative experience. But they have heart! And if you are President, you know full well that you need nothing more than your own good sense to do any job in government.
And that’s how I will be asked to serve.
Is that the phone ringing?
Gotta go!
That is exactly why I applied still waiting on the call. I am not worried about slings and arrows
Add to that an agency that will be committed to resisting you at every opportunity, or looking for ways to embrass you. Then add in that they are civil servants with layers and layers of protection from firing that allow them to ignore you.
Suggestion. If you get the job create a new NASA Center on the North Slope of Alaska to study climate change and living on Mars. It will serve you well as a place to transfer those who may lead the resistance against you. It will also give you a couple more Senators to support the NASA budget 🙂
Most of NASA and its community do not support SLS/Orion and are behind the VSE without its 3 flaws added by politics. The resistance is from Congress who specifies ‘must be 70 and 130mT’ and expendable, expensive shuttle derived- most folks have no say in the poor architecture specified by Congress; in particular, the Party of Red, who cast aside depots and then refused to cast aside CxP/Apollo to retain SLS/Orion.
If pointing out poor policy is embarrassing, the so be it.
Will folks ever stop spreading propaganda?
“Will folks ever stop spreading propaganda?”
No.
Also remember, someone’s propaganda is another person’s truth. Or as the saying goes, the winners write the history, not the losers.
These days with charges of ‘fake news’, coupled with falsely equivalences one must look very hard at the preconceptions brought when reading the news.
“Fake news” is just the “latest” term for the misdirection that has been part of the news industry since it birth. Look how many folks still think it was the Spanish that blew up the Maine or that folks believed the Earth was flat before Columbus “proved” them wrong. Its why you should never trust a single news source and seek out original independent sources.
I experienced a good example of this (the need for multiple sources) around 1990. For some reason, three of the major networks broadcast their evening news programs sequentially. Normally, they were typically in the same time slot. Once, all three covered a speech by President Bush. One said he had been critical of Chinese trade policies; one said he had avoided a strong statement of Chinese trade policy; the third actually got it right, and said he’d sent mixed signals about China. And this was back when the major networks tried not to be too biased. (Pre-internet, their market depended on appealing to viewers with a wide range of opinions.)
Then where is the Resistance to SLS? I see some anonymous posters occasionally claiming that NASA is against the SLS, but no one seems to be as outspoken about it as when Mars research or climate change research is cut. Where is the NASA testimony against it? Indeed, I expect IF the Trump Administration cuts it NASA folks will be testifying its a bad decision…
Also remember, SLS is nothing but Ares V with a new name and Ares V came from NASA, specifically Administrator Griffin. All the common elements, SRB, SME, ET redesigned for in-line instead of a side mounted payload are there.Yes, some details are different, but then Ares V was mostly a paper design and very likely would have evolved in the same direction.
I’m just a contractor, not a NASA employee. But when I hear people talking about launching (unmanned) planetary missions on an SLS, and remind them of Voyager (the original, canceled one), I get some very nasty looks. When very senior people are saying, “everything will be wonderful”, very few people are comfortable standing up and saying, “no they won’t.”
For reference, the original Voyager mission was a massive Mars lander, planned in the late 1960s as part of the Apollo Applications program and to be launched on a Saturn V. It was canceled for reasons which make the SLS-launched planetary mission comparison obvious. A later, descoped version eventually flew as Viking.
It will also give me a place to hide!
As to embarrassment: I mean I am very outgoing, after all, and I do want to make NASA great again. And like my Boss, I know I can trust my own brain.
So, what’s not to like?
In the corporate world firms become great again when someone has the courage to take the axe to get rid of the deadwood they accumulate. This almost never happens with government agencies. The only real exceptions are the military branches, and it usually takes a major event (like Pearl Harbor) to reorganize them.
It’s dangerous and probably incorrect to assume that government is populated with deadwood, a point of view resulting chiefly from the political alchemy of Mr. Reagan, who almost single-handedly framed the government as a bogeyman rather than the great instrument it is for helping all of us.
While it is true that there is deadwood in a government as large as ours, it is not helpful to approach the issue with a willy-nilly meat cleaver.
Moreover, comparing the ‘corporate world’ with governmental functions yields very little useful data; the two are entirely dissimilar (allowing for a small amount of overlap, of course).
“No two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign. If the trading spirit of the English East India company renders them very bad sovereigns; the spirit of sovereignty seems to have rendered them equally bad traders.” — Adam Smith, WoN, Ch2.
It is natural (alas) to observe, usually from afar, the difficulty of someone else’s job. The current WH occupant observed that he didn’t need to read because he could just apply his own brainpower.
And yet they created the modern business world…
They dissimilar only in the sense that government agencies are generally not subject to the same forces of competition as private organizations are. As Jim Collins pointed in his classic book “Built to Last” the average corporation only lasts 30-40 years before the weight of accumulated deadwood and inability to compete (lost of focus) pulls them under. It is why private entities are forced to be more efficient.
Government agencies by contrast don’t have the forces of competition and so are able to accumulate much more deadwood, especially since Congress Critters have every incentive to keep the moving flowing to facilities in their districts.
NASA is a good example. It has no competition for its mission of space exploration while Congress Critters will fight to keep its facilities in their districts open. The result is a lot of deadwood and overhead. Does NASA really need all those Centers draining its budget?
Does it make sense to have space missions launched from Florida and then managed from Houston,over a thousand miles away while using a tracking station in New Mexico to communicate from? Does it make sense that the rockets that launch from Florida (Saturn, Shuttle, SLS) were/are designed in northern Alabama and built in California, Louisiana, and Utah?
This is not only expensive and inefficient but has costed the lives of Astronauts. The astronauts killed on the Challenger died because the O-Rings failed. There were O-Rings to fail because the solid rockets were made in Utah and had to be poured in sections to make the trip by railroad to Florida. If they were produced in Florida, or in Louisiana as originally proposed, they would have been in one section with no O-Rings to fail.
And why is NASA still designing rockets? Because it has a staff trained to design rockets that needs something to do. This MAY have been necessary with the Saturn V, but was it really needed with the Shuttle or SLS? The SLS especially exists only to give the folks at Marshall and Stennis something to do. Both Centers should have been closed after Project Apollo. And is Wallops or the WSTF really needed anymore?
More of the same and you can begin to make a real case for the breakup of NASA as the Commercial folks continue to embarass the agency.
Hopefully that will be something the new NSC will look at doing.
I have the same positive sense about NSC. But we have all been disappointed so many times.
If NASA keeps over promising and under delivering (Shuttle, ISS, Constellation, Moon, Mars, Moon, SLS) , it is inevitable. Lightfoot (oh yes I forgot J-2) seems the perfect candidate to continue this process. Way to drain the swamp Donald! Anyone for more collusion with the Russians (in space, of course)?
I think we’ve been thru this discussion before. We do not need a technically trained NASA Administrator. There are plenty of technical people in NASA. The Administrator ought to be politically astute, and ought to have the ear of the President and Administration, and ought to be able to “work” the Congress and other government elements to do the best he/she can for NASA.
Honestly, NASA was derailed ten years ago by a rocket scientist Administrator who felt he knew better than anyone the technical work NASA needed to be engaged in. He overruled everyone on what to do, how to do it, and the design elements it needed to include. And turned out he was totally wrong, building a capsule too large and heavy with a booster that did not have the capability to launch the capsule.
I’m not sure I agree. We don’t need a NASA Administrator who micromanages and overrules people closer to (and more familiar with) the detail work. But you seem to be saying there is only one way to avoid that: Make sure the Administrator is too ignorant of technical issues to be able to micromanage. I think we’d be better off with an Administrator who did understand and could follow the technical details, since he does have to make some informed decisions, but who had enough sense not to overrule people. Of course, requiring common sense may be a highly restrictive job qualification.
No. Bush appointed O’Keefe who selected the spiral architecture and consolidated on the DOD fleet. Oops. Bush appointed Griffin with the pre-determined solution of shuttle derived and ESAS dictated CxP. Folks selected technology based on an artificial need to reach the moon by 2020–there was not much to overrule. Engineers significantly represent Fortune 500 CEOs.
To think a NASA admin has that level of control is very naive. If the nation wants to return to HSF Exploration, having a leaders who can truly trade technical merits and economics is likely the only way {name your destination} will not always be 20 years away like that last 50 yrs. Climate deniers need not apply.
Ares I, Ares V, and SLS were not truly “shuttle derived”. They used some bits of technology that came from the shuttle, but they were truly new designs. Five segment SRB != four segment shuttle SRB. Ares I upper stage was a completely new design which would have used a new engine (J-2X was not the same as J-2). Ares V and SLS weren’t shuttle derived either. None of the tooling used to build shuttle ETs was kept, so the designs were new as well. And the cherry on top of the sundae is that the reusable SSMEs on the shuttle are becoming “cost reduced”, expendable, RS-25Es.
As one of my mentors was told by his mentor, “Things that are different, just aren’t the same”. This is completely applicable to Ares I, Ares V, and SLS. They’re *not* shuttle derived.
Now, there was a fairly big push coming from inside NASA to build a truly shuttle derived HLV called DIRECT. DIRECT would have reused as much shuttle tooling as possible, minimizing the modifications needed to create an inline HLV from shuttle hardware. This was never supported by upper management.
No, they are shuttle derived, but the changes made them ‘new’, hence the need to be re-certified regardless of the decades of heritage. LV vehicle design/costs are driven by its engines-Solids, SSMEs were retained/modified.
Direct was fatally flawed. Advocating for Direct was a key way to kill shuttle derived and many did not recognize this 😉 Its astonishing that SLS is even being considered today.
Direct did not save operational costs as it created a nonsensical approach: launching a 8 mT capsule + LAS on a 70+mT LV for LEO at 0.5 to 1B/ea. Hence the need for commercial crew. This simple fact was the reason the 1.5 LV Ares I + Ares V was created: Direct required a LEO launcher for crew. ESAS did not state this “LV 24/25″/Direct. Even with the high EELV costs, they were cheaper to LEO.