When In Huntsville Make Sure To Sip The SLS Koolaid
NASA boss Bridenstine ‘100 percent’ behind SLS and Alabama center. AL.com
“NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Wednesday that he supports “100 percent” the agency’s Space Launch System program and the future of Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Bridenstine spoke to reporters in historic Marshall Building 4619 while taking his first tour of NASA’s propulsion center in Huntsville since the Senate confirmed him as administrator in late April.”
How can NASA return to the Moon? By making everything reusable, chief says, Ars Technica
“But if we can take advantage of commercial industry that can develop a reusable rocket, we want them to be successful,” he said after Geyer was done speaking. “We want to partner with companies that are willing to step up and take that challenge. It is not an ‘either/or.’ Right now, our best, closest capability is going to be SLS and Orion, but if 10 years from now, 20 years from now, there’s a commercial capability that’s successful, we’re going to use it. And we want them to be successful. In fact, we’re partnering with those companies today on commercial crew and other things.”
Keith’s note: When you are playing a home game you praise the home team. Curiously, when Bridenstine is not attending a home game he is much more willing to talk about other ways to send things into space than SLS – as was the case recently at JSC. According to sources present, Bridenstine all but cut off JSC director Mark Geyer as he gushed about SLS. Instead Bridenstine, as quoted in the article above, made a point of suggesting that SLS is not the only answer.
What is really interesting is his comment “… if 10 years from now, 20 years from now”. Take a look at NASA’s various notional cartoons about how it wants to do the Moon/Mars thing. Their plans stretch into the 2030s. That certainly falls in the 10-20 year future time frame. So … that would seem to imply that Bridenstine is willing to consider alternatives to using SLS for Moon/Mars. Up until now to suggest such a thing would have been heresy. Now, it depends on what Zip Code the press briefing is being held in.
Bridenstine may be 100% supportive of SLS – but exactly what that means is open to speculation. One thing is for certain: he may sip the SLS Koolaid but he’s not drinking it.
Bridenstine May Not Be Drinking That SLS Koolaid, earlier Post
First, using SLS for exploration isn’t just up to Bridenstine – its the law. Now who knows what will develop in 10 to 20 years if Bezo’s and Musk’s plans to develop big cheap rockets come to fruition. But Musk my be in Chapter11 Tesla hell by then and Bezos could get waylaid by illness; you can’
He’s letting them down easy. Hard to talk a reuse ability and SLS in the same paragraph.
With luck he will just sell out Tesla to the Saudi’s and free himself for more important things like the settlement of Mars.
It’s only the law cause the agency hasn’t done any study on accomplishing SPD-1 to offer congress a new option to codify into law. If the agency came up with a proposal that kept msfc busy with other work like Landers and surface science payloads but leveraged available commercial and international assets to achieve boots on the moon not just for flags and footprints but to live and explore then maybe sls/Orion could be ditched.
Forget about developing landers at MSFC. If crewed landers is what you are thinking of.
There is no point in starting a costly and low payload performance government lander program for the Moon and Mars now. At least not until the SpaceX BFS development appears to falter. Since the BFS can landed about 150 tonnes at either destinations. Also Blue Origin is developing a 6 tonne payload Moon lander.
Also there is no point in developing science payloads at MSFC. It meant you have to divest such development work from JPL and GSFC to a place that never done such work AFAIK.
MSFC will have to find something else to do in the future after the SLS fades away.
Msfc handles all the payload science on the ISS, so as you build up a moon village plenty of potential science payloads to oversee.
I think “handles” is the key word. For the most part, I believe the ISS experiments are not designed or built at Marshall. Someone else (e.g. at an university) does, as well as providing instructions on how astronauts should conduct the experiment. Marshall packages it up and gets it loaded on a flight to ISS, trains the astronauts to conduct the experiments, and supervises execution as part of ISS operations. I’m sure they also design and build some fraction of the experiments, but that isn’t their primary role.
Politically, he has to say those things…especially in Alabama. I’m still encouraged that we have a NASA Administrator who “gets” the potential of commercial space.
I was recently at a resort in Mexico where as it happened I had a chance to talk with a couple of SLS engineers (Denver). They report widespread disillusionment with SLS and the realization that SLS is a dead end. Asked if it would fly: Once. Maybe.
Asked which mission was most important over a 30 year career? New Horizons.
A big problem is NASA overhead – and over direction – which drives costs up. Once the shuttle ended Civil servants needed new charge numbers for their timecards and this was the only game in town. The problem isn’t SLS as a concept (and no, I don’t believe there will be a commercial market for heavy lift for decades) its how NASA is organized to do things.
Do you mean nothing wrong with the concept of a NASA heavy lift launch vehicle, or the concept of SLS itself? I could see your point about the former, but I have a hard time seeing it about the details of SLS. Those were drive by using existing infrastructure and technology, and the specific talents of those people looking for a new charge number.
Yeah, but see, that’s the deal. We need SHLV for Mars. New Glenn is not a SHLV and BFR is simply not at an advanced state of development. We can’t blame Congress for wanting to keep the one SHLV that’s probable (i.e. SLS) rather than let go of it in hopes that the highly ambitious BFR will become a reality.
Same with Bridenstine. The way I see it, he supports the SLS 100% until a commercial, SHLV alternative reaches a level of development where he can confidently switch his support 100% to that. I think that we should push for the acceptance of a tipping point criteria which I would put at the first time that a BFS returns from orbit and safely lands. Reach that goal and I think that the full BFR is simply a matter of time & money.
It isn’t clear to me that SLS (or any new launch vehicle) is necessary for a manned Mars mission. It’s probably necessary if you want to avoid on-orbit assembly, and definitely necessary if you want to minimize on-orbit propellent transfer. But even a Block 2 SLS wouldn’t get a mission to Mars on its own. Nor can the BFR concept (that requires half a dozen tanker flights.)
Despite the talk about developing the necessary technology before settling on a specific architecture for a Mars mission, SLS does exactly that. Or at least, statements about superheavy lift being necessary are assuming a family of similar architectures.
It would be interesting to see what could be done with multiple Falcon Heavy launches, on-orbit propellent transfer and assembly (or better, limiting that to docking multiple elements) and significantly improved electric propulsion. Those are also potentially enabling technologies, and NASA isn’t investing in them to the extent it’s investing in superheavy lift.
BFR and Glenn are not flying yet, but both are well considered and robust designs and considerably more practical than SLS in terms of operaitonal cost. Musk has land in LA for a new factory for the BF and has proposed a location at KSC for new servicing facilities. The Raptor has undergone extensive tests in a slightly subscale version and a flight version is being assembled. https://www.geekwire.com/20…
Meanwhile, the Blue Origin factory for building the Glenn at KSC is in the final stages of construction, and the BE-4 has been extensively tested as well.
“It would be interesting to see what could be done with multiple Falcon Heavy launches,”
Zubrin took a pass at just such an architecture recently (this past summer, I think) but he did it in the context of the Moon. It was generally positive. Yes, Mars is a different best but he does talk in some depth about the refueling issues.
I’ll see if I can find it (very poor internet connection here).
I’d say New Horizons & Cassini are neck and neck.
In the last 30 years (as Mr. Spencer specified)? That’s going back to 1988. I guess I’m biased towards Cassini, but within those decades, we’ve had Magellan, Galileo, Kepler, Rosetta, all the Mars missions, and quite a bit more. I’d be hard pressed to pick out one or two.
Not too surprised to hear that. I’ve heard similar comments from people involved. I still don’t think Congress will let SLS die soon. I think it won’t change until both New Glenn and BFR are flying regularly. It will become too obvious to everyone else in Congress that SLS is a dead end path and then SLS will be finally canceled. I think we’ll get 6 to 8 SLS flights by then. I hope the cancellation comes before the Advanced SRM development starts.
No, New Glenn competes with Falcon Heavy and Vulcan. (It has less payload to LEO than FH, but slightly higher throw BEO in 3-stage mode.) If Congress can support SLS in the face of FH, they can do so against NG.
However, once BFR exists, NG is just as dead as every other launcher. There is no “New Glenn and BFR” there is only
ZuulBFR.Not quite. BFR needs to do more than fly to make New Glenn or Falcon Heavy obsolete. It has to have the advertised payload capacity, cost (unit and per flight), time and maintenance requirements between flights, and lifetime (number of flights before major maintenance and number of flights before retirement.) One important part of the plan is to use a BFR for smaller payloads, even if it means flying at well under half of a BFR’s capability. That only makes sense if it really does turn out to be as cheap and reusable as advertised.
I’m particularly concerned with the number of flights without major maintenance and total flights before retirement. Multiple flights of the same vehicle isn’t exactly common, and the BFR second stage would be coming back all the way from orbit (which is much more stress than the first stage Falcon reentries.) There isn’t a whole lot of experience to base a claim of
They have never put a Falcon 9 (or Heavy) through more than two cycles, and that’s a returning from a suborbital trajectory. But that’s probably the most similar vehicle we have experience with.
X-37B has done two flights (plus one in progress) of two vehicles. Those flights were at least two years apart (for the same vehicle, and they may not have been pushing it) and we know nothing about maintenance required between flights.
The Space Shuttle orbiters managed 9 to 39 cycles before loss or retirement. Major maintenance was required between each flight (to put it mildly.) The less said about the cost and time required to turn it around, the better.
Given that, I’m skeptical about accurately predicting how often, quickly or easily a BFR can be cycled. It’s quite possible it won’t be as good as the current claims (which are probably the best estimates possible, while still not being very reliable estimates.) It’s also possible that Falcon Heavy and New Glenn will still have a very viable market. SLS is a different matter. Even if the BFR costs, time between flights and number of cycles are an order of magnitude worse than predicted, that would still be an order of magnitude better than SLS.
Musk suggests that BFR can get down below the price of an Falcon 1 launch. If they are an order of magnitude more expensive than that… which seems like a reasonable margin on my part… then there will be only BFR, and maybe some smallsat launchers serving a diminishing market.
That the cost of manufacture reputedly being thrown around by Musk&co is $400m-and-change per launch-pair. Call if half a $billion. Hence flying it as an expendable would still be cheaper per-launch than the Shuttle, cheaper per-launch than SLS. Around the launch price of Delta-IV. And cheaper per-kg than most everything else in the market. And thus would only require a small savings from re-use to beat every launcher over 10t-to-LEO on per-launch price.
BFR can fail, sure; but I don’t think it can “succeed-fail” like the Shuttle. If the manufacturing costs exceed half a billion per vehicle, SpaceX probably couldn’t afford to develop it, so it wouldn’t be developed. Therefore if it exists at all, it must be within a reasonable margin of its promises.
I’m not assuming that BFR will fly for what Musk said. I’m assuming that if BFR flies, it will be at double or triple the intended price. And that will destroy every other launcher in the market. But even at an order of magnitude more than promised, it will dominate the fattest parts of the market, leaving only niches for everyone else.
You are forgetting the New Armstrong from Blue Origin.
So tell me anything about New Armstrong other than its name. A single thing.
Since Bezos stated that the New Glenn is going to be their smallest orbital capable system. The New Armstrong will have to be more capable than the New Glenn.
Also funding for developing the New Armstrong will be assure and stable at $1B annually minimum. That is what Bezos sell in Amazon stocks annually to funded Blue Origin.
Finally the New Armstrong and other Blue Origin launchers can have a negative return on investment as long as it increases the Blue Origin market share. Just like Amazon.
Do we even know for sure that it’s a launcher and not the lunar-side part of NG’s architecture? I mean seriously, we have no information. It’s not even a paper-rocket. It’s literally just a name and wild speculation.
NG has such level of funding, supposedly, and will not be flying for some time. Therefore it won’t compete with FH, unless Bezos is subsidising the majority of every launch.
Even if NA is a BFR-scale launcher, it’s a long way in the future. Say a decade. Which would be ridiculously fast by BO standards. Hence $10b for development, ignoring sunk costs to date. Therefore it won’t be cheap to operate, just on amortised costs alone, therefore it won’t be competitive with BFR, therefore my original point stands.
If BFR flies, nothing else exists outside of tiny niches.
If Mr. Bezos is personally funding development, and does not expect to recover the development cost, those costs are not an issue. But I agree that we know so little about New Armstrong that speculation are rather pointless.
That’s especially interesting since, to the best of my knowledge, no Denver (or Colorado) based companies are/were involved in both SLS and New Horizons. Unless the engineers you talked to used to work for a different company, they’re saying a mission they were not involved in is more significant that their own company’s projects.
Looks like Ball has/had a SLS contract…
Really? I can’t find anything about it on their web page. They were involved in the Ralph instrument on New Horizons, but I didn’t know they had anything to do with SLS. (Which, in a way, is embarrassing. I live across the street from their Boulder office so I ought to know more about what my neighbors are doing…)
Isn’t most of the Lockheed Orion effort based in Colorado? I suspect there are more than a few people working SLS associated with Lockheed.
Lockheed is definitely involved in SLS and/or Orion, and the relevant facilities are just south of Denver. But LMA was not involved in the New Horizon mission. I was wondering about who in Denver or Colorado could have been involved with both SLS and New Horizons.
LMA provided the Atlas V for PNH. ULA is providing the ICPS (Delta IV Heavy Upperstage) for SLS. LMA Atlas became part of ULA.
That is the connection. It wasn’t that hard to figure out.
That’s a bit of a stretch. Simply being the launch service provider isn’t the same as designing, building or operating the spacecraft. You might as well say SpaceX is involved in the X-37B program.
No, it is not a stretch. Being the launch service provider of a first time nuclear powered planetary spacecraft with a third stage on a vehicle that flown less than 10 times is not the same as a repeating payload.
If you don’t make Senator Shelby and the Huntsville folks happy you won’t get to be NASA Administrator for long.
That said maybe he should suggest transferring MSFC to the U.S. Space Force and return it to its roots when it was designing Moon Bases for the U.S. Army and the rockets to build the facilities.
https://armyhistory.org/sol…
It would get NASA out of the rocket design business, leaving it to the space commerce firms, and give the Space Development Agency of the U.S. Space Force a number of experience astronautical engineers and a design facility. Add in U.S. Space Force headquarters and academy will enable Huntsville to claim a victory while NASA will be able to refocus on deep space exploration instead of launch systems.
>If you don’t make Senator Shelby and the Huntsville folks
>happy you won’t get to be NASA Administrator for long.
Like what happened with Okeefe?
Fascinating article about the Army Moon base, they were thinking of in situ “Oxygen and water would be extracted from the natural environment of the Moon.” But timeline was very ambitious. However it looked like a jumpstart of Apollo, instead of two Army men landing in 1965, it was a civilian and air force officer landing in 1969. Instead following of 12 men in 1966 to supervise a task force, Apollo 11 was followed by 10 men over a period of three years (would have been 12 if Apollo 13 landed).
Great idea!
Remember, at one time, sixty, fifty years ago, and right up through Shuttle, forty years ago, NASA was the preeminent aerospace design organization in the US. Based on their more recent performance since around the time of Challenger, it looks like they have lost that ability, and apparently none of the people they have put into leadership positions have been able to demonstrate any improvement. It looks like they are clueless how to get out of this situation so maybe new space DDT&E organizations, whether it be the Space Force, or Space X, or Boeing or Lockheed working for profits, is the only way for the US to recover, NASA is just wasting a lot of taxpayer dollars.
That’s not entirely fair, at least from my vantage point of a non-technician. At the scientist/engineer/technician level, NASA is, as far as I can tell, and from a very ‘outside’ POV, populated by the best and brightest who are hobbled in ways not present in private industry. So many things go into the things NASA does, many of those things not present or present at much lower levels in private industry, starting at a fairly deep “management” process.
And of course there’s the whole congress critter issue.
As I read here, and elsewhere, NASA is still the coolest place on the planet for youngsters to work. Must be a reason?
Up until about the time of Challenger wich was simultaneous with the STSOC USA contract taking over Shuttle engineering and operations, the NASA engineers directly managed much of the systems, the hardware, the missions, and there was a lot of continuity of expertise from earlier programs. A lot of that changed in the late 1980s. Why did the decide to change? That was orchestrated by some former high level NASA managers who were ready to retire and take corporate pay and benefits; nice if you could get it but basically they sold out most of NASA’s human space flight program personnel. And I suspect that while NASA can still attract good people based on past reputation, I cannot help but feel those young people have to be watching the activity at SPace X, Boeing and even the internationals with envy and have to feel frustrated in not directly hands on managing a lot of the effort as NASA used to do. In fact ISS carried this further, giving the responsibility for designing, developing and manufacturing much of the ISS spacecraft (and now the Orion) to foreign countries. And much of the NASA management did not care, saying after all that they were the “operations” organization. So we better hope that Mr. Musk and his contemporaries can make good on their promises.
That is just plain stupid. The DOD does not need MSFC nor be saddled with it. The Space Force does not need a DDTE organization. It already exists. Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles AFB would be the core DDTE group as it is now. Add in the Navy’s SPAWAR and Army’s SMDC and parts of the Air Force lab system and there you have it.
Also, NASA is more than MSFC and even JSC. NASA’s unmanned space system centers are doing just fine.
Bridenstrine did say about ten days ago that there is one reason SLS might be needed, and that is that currently, if it is developed and another vehicle, the BFR is not, then it would be the only vehicle in its weight lifting capacity. But, of course, SLS is NOT yet developed, and BFR appears to be well along in development.
Everyone, including Bridenstine, need to remember that Mark Geyer and his mentor Gerstenmaier were both directly responsible for the Constellation/Orion/SLS debacle. They made all the wrong choices at all the wrong times leading to the premature shut down of Shuttle, the oversized non reusability of the current system, and together with their Lockheed managers, the delayed schedules and overrun costs. And if you look at their backgrounds prior to Çonstellation/Orion/SLS you would have to wonder why anyone ever thought they would know anything about designing, building or managing anything, particularly the next phase of US human spaceflight. Those two are pretty much the reason the US has not had a launch capability for the last 7 years and won’t have any capability until Space X or Boeing fly. Geyer was gushing about SLS because it is the only thing he knows. You might think someone from JSC might know better but there is no reason to expect it. Remember, Geyer’s only prior experience was FGB, which was a Boeing (poorly managed) integration effort of an already designed and built Russian spacecraft. Gerstenmaier did not even have that much experience. It is amazing to me that after 20 year in which the two managed to bring the US program to its knees that they still survive. They represent NASAs level of competence.
I still remember the day Geyer told Augustine that Orion would be flying with crew by 2011, not before the Shuttle had shut down but not too long afterward. Sally Ride, on the Augustine committee, responded that their analyses showed 2018 was a more likely and realistic date. Well 2018 has come and gone; what is the current plan; a crewed Orion mission in 2022 or 2023? A “safe, simple, soon solution, retro-capsule, that will have taken 20 years? Remember, Shuttle, a far larger and far more complex vehicle was done on a severely constrained budget in less than 10 years.
I wonder if reason Orion is taking so long is because much of the infrastructure (facilities that provide support for the actual flight components) on worker bee level has been reduced? Simply trying to buy stuff difficult as just about every purchase has to be reviewed to make sure no Chinese spyware installed. I feel we are like those of Soviet Russia struggling to beat the Americans to the Moon because they didn’t have a Ace Hardware store on every corner like we used to.
Regarding Sally Ride, I remember on one of those Augustine II committee briefings she said we had this great system called Apollo but we threw it away and started from scratch. Sally then said we have this great Shuttle system which we are going to throw away and start from scratch.
“They made all the wrong choices at all the wrong times”
This is an easy argument to make – I’ve made it myself. But keep in mind the notion that parts/processes from STS were deemed an essential part of any path forward. This seemed oh-so-smart at the time as NASA is widely criticized for inability to reiterate, insisting on ‘clean sheet’ projects.
As it turned out, though, and as we all know: insisting on reuse of STS parts hasn’t turned out so well. At the very least it has tied us to some very old tech.
Aside; and it’s *such* a good example of how government works, sometimes. It’s almost as if there’s someone at the switch consciously making passive aggressive decisions.
What I mean: there was/is a lot to learn from STS, but more care in deciding where the lessons actually lie needs to be taken.
I think it would have been a good idea to use Shuttle elements in the unmanned heavy lift derivative, which was always intended going back to the early Shuttle design phase in the early 1970s, and it would have doubly made sense to maintain the manufacturing lines keeping Shuttle flying albeit on a less frequent schedule, as the new unmanned heavy lifter came online, and there were several versions of heavy lift that could have been much more easily supported including Shuttle C. What they did wrong was to entirely shut the Shuttle down and try to build a super rocket that no longer used most Shuttle derived components, for which they never had a budget (one reason they had to entirely shut Shuttle down) and then when they figured out it was not coming together on nearly the ambitious schedule they had imagined, they downsized back to a vehicle that was supposed to be much more of a derivative. Not to mention a lot of the problem is with Orion, which is too large, too massive when they could have far more easily done an Apollo CSM II with upgraded and seriously reduced volume and mass electronics. But remember theyh never laid out how the missions were going to work and the fact they would need a separate habitation element and so they tried to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the Orion which never made sense for a vehicle that started out to be a rescue pod for ISS. It was poor planning, poor requirements definition, nonexistent mission definition..I have to agree with Mr Aldin’s statement; these folks went off half cocked and even now they have not given a very good definition for what this Gatgewauy is all about, which Mr. Morhard’s statement makes light of. How can you design our vehicle without hardly being able to envision the mission for which its being built?…
Except they didn’t reuse STS parts. The SRBs are different, the SSME is being redesigned and recertified as the RS-25E, the core stage is not an ET, and last, but not least, the space shuttle didn’t have an RL-10 powered upper stage. These things are so different in the details I don’t see how the claim keeps getting made that SLS uses STS parts, because it simply doesn’t.
The above differences mean that tooling, MLPs, VAB work platforms, and etc. *all* had to change. This is just further evidence that STS parts weren’t directly reused.
If NASA had chosen to keep the SRBs and the ET exactly the same and develop a side mount cargo pod powered by three SSMEs (with recoverable SSME section), then that would have been reusing STS parts. But they didn’t.
Jeff: I think that’s part of my point, really, that the attempt to use parts/processes didn’t work because the original parts were too tightly programed for a specific use; and that even slight ‘jiggering’ was problematic.
(A story was told back in grad school about a student attempting to use existing infrastructure in the design of a plaza- in this case, a sidewalk. But the sidewalk was about 4′ from necessary were the revisions to make sense. “Well, just move it”, the hapless student is said to have suggested; “it’s only four feet.”
I hope the similarity is clear to others as it is to me.)
Or something. As I’ve said, I’m very much an outsider, and appreciate informed correction.
I suspect I’m being overly pedantic, but while SLS is based on shuttle technology, it’s actually an entirely new design loosely based on shuttle era technology. It’s as much derived from the space shuttle as a 2019 Ford Mustang is derived from a 1969 Ford Mustang. They may look similar, at fist glance, but they don’t have much at all in common.
The other extreme would have been something like Shuttle-C (side mounted payload with 3 SSMEs underneath) which was studied many many times over the years. The chief advantage of “side mount” was that the SRBs and the ET were used as-is. The “side mount” cargo attachment points to the ET mimicked the shuttle. All the tooling and facilities used for SRBs and the ET could have been used as-is with zero changes necessary. That would have meant less cost and a much sooner first flight.
But, one disadvantage of a “side mount” HLV was that it was not very suitable for crew launches. So for crew, NASA would have been wise to choose to launch on Atlas V (like Boeing’s Starliner will do) or perhaps on Delta IV. The other disadvantage of “side mount” was that it wasn’t “optimal” in terms of its payload. Better is the enemy of good enough.
Unfortunately Mike Griffin, then NASA Administrator, went in pursuit of an HLV that would be “better” than “side mount”. This meant that NASA essentially started from scratch with Ares I and Ares V proposing to reuse very little actual shuttle parts or infrastructure. That morphed into SLS when Ares was cancelled. But by then it was really too late to make a truly shuttle derived HLV as much of the infrastructure (like tooling that made the ET) had already been destroyed.
The 2019 versus 1969 Ford Mustang comparison is a bit of a stretch. For one thing, former uses fuel injectors and the later uses a carburetor. That’s fundamentally different technology. The differences between the Shuttle and SLS are more like the early, fairly clunky forms of fuel injection and the sort of pretty sophisticated, computer controlled fuel injection they use today.
Shuttle C was envisioned from the outset as a heavy cargo version of Shuttle. All the elements were available with he exception of a pod to carry SSMEs and an unmanned cargo carrier. It could have carried 250,000 lb to orbit. No new technology was required. No upgrades were needed. A boost protect cover over somthing like the Orion capsule riding side of t he ET would have protected it from ice or foam. We now see how well NASAs bigger plans have worked out. I think one of Mr. Augustine’s laws was that better was the enemy of good enough. Dr. Griffin, Mr. Gerstenmaier, and Mr. Geyer apparently did not learn that lesson.
I agree the student was naive. It would be just as easy to move the sidewalk ten feet. Just write it into the statement of work.
NASA takes great pride in its ability to assemble a 1300 ton Shuttle on a 3700 ton launch platform, and then use a 3000 ton caterpillar treaded crawler to transport the entire assembly 3.5 miles. On the one hand, this is a phenomenal feat. On the other, in the long run it is much too expensive to be practical. But it was carried over for half a century from Apollo to Shuttle to SLS.
NASA could learn from your perspective managing complex development projects for customers with practical needs and limited funds, but it is not obvious who would be both willing to listen and able to change the system. The success of Commercial Cargo and Crew has been the best illustration we could hope for, but even this has not convinced everyone.
Bridenstine may be 100% supportive of SLS – but exactly what that means
is open to speculation. One thing is for certain: he may sip the SLS
Koolaid but he’s not drinking it.
None of those that died at Jonestown sipped. Men, women, children mostly black. Is drinking the Koolaid a racist joke? If not the reference hurts a lot. I still have an image in my mind of all those bodies piled on one another in their brightly colored clothes. Horrible.
Perhaps you are an alien transmitter(Star Trek) making us relive that mass killing over and over again. But Voyager moved out of range. I might have to just read SpacRef. It takes days for that memory to fade. Your warning may be true, but I do not think under our Constitution anything could be done to stop Jim Jones. The Congressman was only going to check on his daughter. That caused Jones to murder everyone. If you are worried about Buzz, those people that took him over needs to be checked out. A cult maybe.
I don’t think the phrase “drinking the Koolaid” was intended to have racist implications. I had been thinking it was a bit insensitive, since it is a reference to the largest mass murder of Americans prior to 9/11. But I had to look it up before confirming your statement that most of the victims were African-American. I don’t think that is a widely known or remembered fact. So wouldn’t complain beyond saying the phrase is insensitive. (And probably inaccurate, since it is likely that the victims did not drink the poison willingly.)