Trump Space People Are Confused About ISS
Why private space labs should start on the International Space Station, opinion, Politico
“With this in mind, the Trump Administration wisely requested $150 million for this coming year to enable and mature commercial capabilities in low earth orbit (LEO). The Trump Administration was also smart enough not to dictate in any specific detail how this money will be spent. They are welcoming ideas from industry, and it will be the job of new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to make the final decision in the coming months.”
Keith’s note: Wait a minute: while he lauds the potential for possible commercial uses of ISS as a reason to keep it operational NASA Trump appointee Jeff Waksman (who was fired earlier this year) forgot to mention that it is the Trump Administration that wants NASA stop funding ISS after 2024. So they are creating the problem that he seems to be trying to solve. He also omits mention of the fact that the White House wants the entire cost of ISS to be paid for by commercial entities after 2024 but does not explain where that money will come from. Yet he talks about using SLS to launch new ISS components. I am not sure anyone at NASA is talking about $1 billion SLS launch fees to put new modules on the ISS. I think Waksman is trying to say that the ISS has a lot of potential. He’s quite right. I’m just not sure he knows how to tap that potential.
More Trump Staff Changes at NASA HQ (Update), earlier post
The ISS has had a lot of “potential” for years, but some how it never seems to live up to it, just as the Shuttle never was able to live up to its potential. As for the funding stopping for ISS, like the Shuttle, that will only happen after a major failure that forces it to be abandoned makes it clear everyone it is time to move on.
Well, that’s a bit out there. As far as I can tell, he’s talking about a private company adding a commercial laboratory module to ISS. He seems to assume ISS will continue to operate into the 2030s and that the rest of ISS would supply commercial module with power, life support, etc. That, he argues would make adding a commercial lab module economically viable. He also gives the operating costs of ISS at $3.5 billion per year, and says it would take a SLS to add a new module to ISS (a Block 2, at that…) I think I see a few holes in his reasoning.
The “need” for SLS to deliver ISS components is a giggle given Anatoly Zak/RussianSpaceWeb’s report that JAXA and ESA are considering Falcon Heavy for LOP-G components.
My father was a career civilian employee of the U.S. Army. We lived in Dugway, Utah and for a while in Vicenza Italy…and the buildings where he worked were the same in both places..long hallways of shiny waxed floors and offices separated by tall cinder-block walls. I basically grew up walking in and around buildings where you could film a WWII movie. They shined those floors daily…I know because in my late teens that was my job.
Compare that with modern, carpeted, partitioned, commercial office spaces.
The ISS was built on the legacy, and the knowledge base, derived from lessons learned with Skylab, Mir, and the Space Shuttle. Its design was set based on improvements to those, fairly short-lived models. By the time Commercial Space Stations start to become a thing, we will be sneaking up on a quarter of a century operating the ISS. Those who build the modern, commercialised space station modules will have been designing from the ground up with access to the vast knowledge base and lessons learned from the ISS experience…and much newer technology.
Those facilities, and their upkeep and operations, will not resemble the ISS, and those who have to fund them and make them profitable will not want to operate ISS space station designs.
And unlike Federal office workers in old WWII buildings…they won’t have to.
It’s interesting that you mentioned Skylab. The opinion piece made a point of comparing the pressurized volume of ISS (which he gave as 388 cubic meters, although I think it’s more) with the Shuttle and an Apollo command module. Skylab had a pressurized volume of 350 cubic meters and Mir (in its final configuration) was similar. So even if he’s off by a factor of three about ISS, ISS, Skylab and Mir are in the same league. A big difference is that ISS makes much more efficient use of that pressurized volume, largely based learning from past space stations.
But I’m less confident about future, commercial stations learning from ISS experience. First, ISS was completed in 2011. The design and development work goes back to the mid 1990s (at least, more if you count design work for older incarnations.) If those lessons learned haven’t been written down by now, then most of them may have been forgotten and the people who once knew may be retired or dead. Second, NASA lessons learned documents tend to be pretty inaccessible to people outside NASA (or even at a different NASA center) and not terribly well organized or indexed. It is not a simple matter of someone at Bigelow googling “What did NASA learn from ISS about cooking meals in space?” Finding out might be more work than someone figuring it out on his own.
Hopefully with the availability of the two commercial crew systems Bigelow Aerospace will finally be able to deploy a B330 and start the learning process. Also I am not sure why he is using the SLS as the baseline vehicle for replacing modules marginally delivered by the Shuttle when the FH could handle the job.
His statement on NASA forcing Russia to get rid of Mir was interesting. My understanding was that when the Russians used private money from Mircorp to visit it they found it beyond salvage and were glad they were able to do a successful deorbit of it.
BTW a quick check on Wikipedia, hopefully accurate, shows that the pressurized volume of Skylab was 351.6 cubic meters, Mir was 350 cubic meters, ISS is 931.57 cubic meters, and a B330 module is of course 330 cubic meters. So yes, he does look to be off by a factor of 3.
BTW the BFR will have a pressurized volume of 825 cubic meters according to the Wikipedia page – making it potentially an instant space station almost the size of the ISS 🙂
Mr. Waksman did write “habitable space” not “pressurized volume.” If he’d shown more care with other details, I might wonder if he was discounting space the astronauts can’t use. Equipment racks, storage space, etc. make the “habitable space” different from the “pressurized volume.” But I can’t believe that’s the difference between 390 and 930 cubic meters.
It does, however, raise a question about BFR (if and when, and assuming it flies as described.) An nine-meter diameter is quite a bit for one story. It would make more sense to have that as three stories, but that would cost volume to floors, ceilings and space for conduits and cabling between them. You probably would also want to divide the floors into separate rooms, which takes away more habitable volume. I wonder how much that amounts to? For terrestrial buildings, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 25%.
It may well be as I recall reading on Wikipedia there would be 40 cabins on the Mars version for the settlers to stay during the journey. The point to point and tourist version will probably be full of seats like an airliner and be more open. But really it is all guess work until the operational versions of the BFR are flying.
Of more interest…using that booster to lift future spacecraft modules built by other companies, each the size of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport, to LEO and other orbits. The core BE330 is built to the Atlas fairing size (right?) And then expanded from there. A future Bigelow station module, built to a nine meter fairing, would expand to many times the habitable volume of the ISS, placed in orbit in a single launch.
We’ll add that to the list of things that SLS will never do. 😉
Actually Vulcan. Yep that’s right, it’s being built to an imaginary rocket with no final ICD or anything! All of the theoretical numbers floating around there now are what the B330 is being built to.
“It is not a simple matter of someone at Bigelow googling, “What did NASA learn from ISS about cooking meals in space?” Finding out might be more work than someone figuring it out on his own.
Correct, but it is, eventually, a matter of some NASA employee/s who know how to navigate that criptic database retiring from NASA into a job at Bigelow. We already know that there are many such at other spacecraft manufacturers like Lockheed and Boeing.
Not necessarily. Some of those documents are only available to people at a NASA center (or affiliated with it.) The retired employee who is now working for Bigelow wouldn’t have access anymore. The justification I’ve heard (and believe, to a large extent) is that some of the lessons learned are from contractors and involve proprietary information, or could be subject to ITAR/export controls. The budget usually doesn’t cover having someone go through it all, item by item, and deciding what can and can not be released to the whole world.
Having worked at Bigelow, all of the lessons learned documents and all the former NASA employees could be out there readily available for someone at Bigelow to use and neither would be. Why? Arrogance (among other things). He thinks he can do it all himself because, you know, all those years of real estate experience taught him how to build space stations. Their attitudes towards NASA is quite sad because they pay them and the experts in the entire industry no respect for past accomplishments (and failures that led to successes). They believe they can throw money at a problem versus doing it right the first time and relying on the experts from the industry that live and breathe this stuff. That’s part of the reason why they’ve only flown 3 things in space over 17 years; two just added to the orbital debris problem and one is technically a payload used as a storage shell that provides zero insight because it has no electronics/C&DH/C&W inside it so the flight controllers really hate it.
I was just using Bigelow as an example. If you think they aren’t interested in NASA lessons learned, then insert the name of some other private company who might want to build a space station.
But when it comes to not being interested in what other people have done, the way you describe Bigelow wouldn’t make them unique. That “Not Invented Here” syndrome is common at NASA centers and in the aerospace industry. I’ve even run into a problem where one division of a major aerospace company wouldn’t, didn’t or couldn’t get information about what another division of the _same_ company had previously done. (Apparently because they had been competing companies a couple decades earlier, and hadn’t exactly lost that us-and-them attitude after a merger.)
Many have assigned to NASA the “not invented here” syndrome; having no direct experience I can only read it with interest.
On the other hand, and while many will shriek with horror while shouting “Not SpaceX again”, here’s something I observe about SX: they are very openly appreciative of NASA. Elon goes out of his way to repeat “we are not worthy”, whenever he can. He’s clear about the whole standing on the shoulders of giants thing.
But.
What they have done is actually learn by observing what has worked and not worked at NASA. For instance: this week NASA is proudly driving the huge rocket carrier about. SX has a much cheaper solution. And the examples are legion: fuel and go being one of the latest examples. Super cooling fuels. Building everything in house. And of course landing the damn boosters.
I would agree with this. Maybe that’s why they leaped forward as quickly as they did? Maybe not but they don’t just ignore what work has been done regardless of who did it. It’s funny that NASA often does this to themselves…
Interesting. I knew that proprietary details and ITAR were restrictions to sharing what is publically described as public domain information. I did not know that those restrictions were…”a problem”. Commercial entities that deal with sensitive and/or cutting-edge tech have to deal with those same issues…even when sharing internally…but it doesn’t stop important things from happening.
Sometimes commercial entities use ITAR as an excuse not to release information they ought to (even if they could call it proprietary, blaming ITAR makes them look better.) Keith might want to comment about government agencies doing the same sort of thing. I believe he’s got plenty of experience with Freedom of Information Act filings.
But it can be a problem without any intent to conceal or limit access to information. For a project’s lessons learned, they have a requirement to do so as part of phase F (closeout), and they have a budget and schedule to do so. Sometimes the requirement doesn’t say anything about putting it in a publicly available data base, and the budget and schedule don’t include dealing with ITAR and proprietary issues. In that case, it will probably end up in a Center- or NASA-internal database. (And, yes, there are running jokes about the final scene in the movie, _Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark_.)
I grew up on Oahu- Schofield Barracks Army Base. Your comment reminds me of the Quonset huts that were so beloved by the Army. We were only a little more than a decade out of WWII when I was a kid (b 1949) in Hawaii.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Waksman went from physics graduate student to congressional aid to the “beachhead” (as in a hostile invasion?) team at NASA in a matter of months. https://www.linkedin.com/in… so its not clear how much opportunity he had to gain insights. His statement that the ISS cannot be maintained because the Shuttle has been retired is naive, and his claim that SLS will save ISS is irrational. Maybe he needs to spend a little time at the Cape.
Nevertheless I agree with is basic point that the continued paradigm that the ISS is vital and human spaceflight in LEO is only beginning to explore its potential. The ISS, with its four rack configuration in cylindrical 5m modules, provides many times the usable equpment space of Skylab or Mir even for comparable volume. Unlike MIR the basic systems are fairly accessible and although the ISS is replete with systems that could use improvement, it has almost unlimited modification and expansion capability and potentially unlimited lifetime. Its nominal LVLH orbital attitude is ideal for Earth and space observation, and its compromise high inclination orbit allows observation of almost all inhabited parts of the Earth.
How does this not make sense? There are many unknowns before anybody is willing to buy into the ISS; doesn’t this help answer some questions?
Some things, like free accommodation of a new, commercial module, are going a bit far. As Bigelow and SpaceX have found out, just satisfying people that it’s ok to dock something with ISS isn’t trivial, nor building up to those standards cheap. So it wouldn’t really be free or even cheap, as article the implied.
The article also implied that NASA would be doing so indefinitely, and that NASA would continue to pay that $3.5 billion per year. Funding beyond 2024 is debatable, and the article didn’t talk about this being a transition to commercially funded operations.
Overall, I guess there might something to the idea of subsidizing experiments by potential investors (future commercial operators.) Quite a bit of money is made by offering free trial periods. But the schedule is awfully tight. If Congress or the President really wants commercial funding to take over after 2024, I can’t see it.
Just soliciting bids, selecting them, and getting the contracts in place could easily take a year. With international partners involved, three years wouldn’t shock me. So the private companies would need to know what they were going to do and why it would be a good investment by 2021 or 2022. Offering to fly free experiments (let along whole modules) would eat up a year or so on soliciting proposals and making selections. Developing and building the experiments would probably take another year (or more.) At that point, we’re pretty close to zero time to conduct the experiments and evaluate the results.
While all of this is true, I wonder how much of that $3.5 billion a year is truly necessary. That is, how many NASA employees are using ISS as their cost center even though they’re not truly necessary to keep ISS operating.
That gets very blurry. What do you mean by “truly necessary” to keep ISS operating? You probably mean more than the bare-bones minimum to keep the lights on and support absolutely essential maintenance. But where, between that and everything NASA is currently paying people to do, would you draw the line? People who simply want to justify billing their time to a big project can (and do) get pretty creative, when it comes to explaining why there really are on the “must have” side of that line.
And you occasionally see managers doing it for them. I know of one or two cases (not concerning ISS) where the institution really, really needed someone for one project but not for another couple years. Since you can’t expect someone to go on unpaid leave for a couple of years, the managers had to invent reasons why that person could make an absolutely necessary contribution to another well-funded project. (And one which had been doing just fine without that contribution for years…)
So, does the sort of thing you suggest happen? Sure. Could the real costs for supporting ISS be less than that $3.5 billion? Probably. But separating the wheat from the chaff would take very hard work by the managers, and the managers don’t have a strong motive to do so (or have a motive _not_ to do so.)
When you’re asking congress for billions of dollars, you generally need to convince congressmen you’re going to accomplish something impressive. (The same is true of presidents.) When those results don’t materialize, you can make excuses about limited budgets. Or, conversely, you can use the impressive and difficult goals as a justification for budget overruns. After all, everyone knows space is hard.
With private investors, that’s a little dangerous. They are more likely to pay attention to the bottom line and someone’s track record of delivering. There are also laws about how much you can exaggerate the strengths, and downplay the weaknesses, of your proposal. But flashy claims and promising something impressive is still important.