NASA Is Not Going To Get Many More Chances
Want to honor George H.W. Bush? Send astronauts to Mars, Washington Post
“The new president was offering NASA, which at the time lacked a clear mission for its human spaceflight program, a lifeline, guaranteeing his support for an assertive Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). But the fiscal realities of the late 1980s, when budget deficits had exploded, required the organization to think in a new way. NASA, however, wasn’t up to the job. Rather than thinking innovatively and offering new ideas for reaching the moon and Mars, the agency simply recycled concepts that had been dominant within the space program since its earliest days. Its plan included the construction of a substantial in-orbit infrastructure, where massive spacecraft for lunar and Mars exploration would be assembled before departing for their final destinations. Each alternative pathway identified by a study team required enormous capital expenditures. Over a 30-year implementation period, this initiative would have cost more than $500 billion. This would have required more than doubling the agency’s budget. The tone-deafness of NASA’s plan shocked the National Space Council. NSC Executive Secretary Mark Albrecht called it “the biggest ‘F’ flunk, you could ever get in government. .?.?. It was just so fabulously unaffordable, it showed no imagination.” The report quickly turned Capitol Hill against the space agency, with one key congressional aide stating that SEI was dead on arrival.”
Keith’s note: NASA is heading down this path again. Uninspiring plans that rely on budgets that simply will not be there. Two Presidents named Bush pushed NASA to send humans back to the Moon and then on to Mars. 30 years after the first and 15 years after the second Bush proclamations, we still have not gone to either location. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …”
Full SEI report
Leadership will not be demonstrated by our government. NASA’s days are over. Private sector will step into the void filled by a top down lack of anything remotely resembling leadership or budgets. Sorry, NASA – your best days are behind you. Time to put the old horse down.
Not sure if you are right – and I hope your prognostication is off target – but if it does come to pass we can say with certainty that the Agency shot itself – with a gun and ammo designed I-house by administrators and managers.
Until then, let’s postpone the wake. Sure, there’s competition, but we are in very early rounds of a 12 round championship event.
This is so true. Keith Cowing nails it again! The best NASA can do or hope for now is to follow in Space X’s wake. Instead NASA is investigating Boeing and Space X because Musk legally smoked marijuana. That Space X’s first manned demo flight has been delayed because of NASA “paperwork” is disgraceful.
Well, it could be different this time, depending on a lot of factors, probably chief among them Bridenstine’s actions (and his influence with congress). For instance, NASA could partner with SpaceX and possibly Blue Origin and go for mars and the moon, maybe both! NASA has lots of institutional knowledge that both companies can and will build on. Since two companies seem on the verge of heavy lift, with reusable, and thus affordable, rockets, NASA could divert its focus to ground operations. Forget the Lunar Orbital Platform (and save a bunch of money that they can invest in more focused things), and instead liaise with both companies on what they can provide, and then go with that! Am I hopeful? Yes! Am I expecting this to happen? No, unfortunately. But maybe NASA will be forced (by events and budgets) to move this way in a few years.
Part of that is already negated by the fact that Bridenstine apparently ordered the investigation into SpaceX’ and Boeing’s work culture under Congressional pressure, probably from certain key senators within the GOP’s senate faction. That doesn’t bode well for the Administrator’s influence on Congress. I think the White House may have more leverage here.
It isn’t paperwork.
Space X said it was paperwork and NASA has neither replied nor specified any reason to delay the launch. This constant delay is why no human has been beyond low earth orbit since the early 1970s.
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel isn’t exactly NASA, just an external group NASA is required to listen to. But there were some quotes from them in the press after their last meeting. They were very clear about the certification process being more than paperwork. In fact, they sounded a little upset and defensive about the suggestion that it was. It might be more accurate to say the certification process involves a number of things which may not really be necessary and may not really improve safety.
I was at the Case for Mars conferences before and after the Space Exploration Initiative (well, one just after and one three years later.) The contrast was interesting. At the Case for Mars IV, there was very little industry involvement, and a great deal of discussion about costs and how to keep them within sane limits. At Case for Mars V, there was a heavy presence from industry and the presentations from industry focused on all the great things they could do, without really saying much about what it would cost. Case for Mars VI, the last one of those conferences, once it was clear SEI wouldn’t be a cash cow, was much more like the first one I attended.
That’s why relying on “commercial” and “industry” is a bad idea. They only show up when there is easy money.
Look at SpaceX. While Elon Musk might have a vision, big money only started rolling in after he started gaining multiple commsat launches a year. Before that it was mostly the US Government, his own money and then a few smaller amounts given by people hoping for very big returns on fairly small investments.
No, it is why the “old space” companies and NASA centers are a bad idea, when it comes to handling future missions. SpaceX wasn’t involved in any of the Case for Mars conference and implying they were is fraudulent. And inarticulate and inaccurate claims about SpaceX funding don’t make your views look any better.
Stop. Elon himself has told you that he couldn’t have done it without the NASA money he got.
What “it”? I was talking about how the aerospace industry reacted to the Space Exploration Initiative, and their presence at the Case for Mars conferences. That was about a decade before SpaceX was founded. Mr. Musk was still in grad school back then.
Whatever “it” he’s done, and only been able to do with NASA as an anchor tenant, isn’t relevant to events around 1990. I said that, at that time, the aerospace industry treated SEI as a potential cash cow. Someone said this proves we can’t trust SpaceX. How does that make any sense?
I’ve used the NASA response to SEI as a case study for how a bureaucracy can mess up a proposed initiative. It’s like they just went to ever corner of NASA, asked for their wish list, then cobbled it together into a “plan.” If SEI had ONLY led to in-orbit refueling capacity and the development of an Earth-Moon infrastructure we’d be 20 years ahead in the exploration of the solar system. Instead we got a ridiculous Battlestar Galactica plan that, to this day, influences people’s ideas of the cost of going to Mars.
Yes, Bush Jr pushed us back towards Mars…and also go us into the mess we are in now.
People forget, Delta IV and Atlas V were the commercially available rockets back when VSE was announced. The plan being put in place by the ever budget conscious Sean O’keefe relied on those and whatever other commercially available rockets might come later. (A no-bid contract was given for CRS of ISS to Kistler under O’keefe). Mike Griffin wasn’t having any of it. He wanted Apollo 2.0. He wanted big rockets launching big things. SLI and it’s reusable tech in development? Nope! Reusable meant Shuttle to him and “NASA had to get beyond LEO”. Big Ole Disposable Rockets for a county that was no longer willing to spend Big Ole Disposable Income on it.
Bush appointed Griffin, gave him free reign and he ran NASA into the ground.
NASA became a bureaucracy and bureaucracies full of career bureaucrats are rarely ever to respond to such challenges because they are no longer able to be creative and responsive.
In the bureaucratic mindset going to the Moon requires big rockets because you are only able to launch 4-6 times a year. And big rockets had been used for Project Apollo. And the way NASA does things, with it constant reviews and re-reviews driven by its micromanagement culture it takes forever to develop those big rockets since you have to pay salaries to thousands working on it each year the costs become unaffordable.
I don’t think NASA cratered SEI because of bureaucratic sclerosis. I think, rather, you had a bunch of people from the Apollo days who were just waiting for the next Apollo to be announced. So when SEI was proposed they decided to solve going to Mars the way they went to Apollo–by overwhelming technical challenges through throwing money at it. I’d argue the nitpick management you are describing has all developed since that time as the Apollo staff, and now most of the Shuttle staff, have retired and your core workforce is no longer composed of people who were active during true development projects.
I don’t know whether the funding would have materialized even if they had a good, more affordable plan, but NASA definitely didn’t help. NASA leadership seemed to think that the Gravy Train had showed up, and so they could appease everyone in the crewed spaceflight area regardless of the cost. What they should have said was “Is there a way to get humans on Mars in ten years with less than $5 billion/year in spending?”.
It wasn’t just NASA. The major aerospace companies also went into a feeding frenzy, and scientists outside NASA also contributed (e.g. claiming a Mars mission would be impossible without massive funding for their favorite science project, such as cosmic ray studies.) The Space Exploration Initiative was the first real, presidential directive to do something big since Apollo.
The Shuttle had a limited budget and grudging support; the space station (then Freedom) was a presidential directive, but Mr. Reagan was pretty vague about the scope and budget. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, was talking about a permanent presence on the Moon _and_ manned missions to Mars. Those were things which “everyone knew” would require Apollo-like funding. A whole lot of people really thought Mr. Bush was making that sort of commitment and they wanted to cash in on it.
That was a serious misread of the political climate on their part. They should have known better, too – this was not the era of Apollo with great funding to spend in competition with the Soviets, and there were people in Congress who had been there during the Space Race.
It did feel a little surreal. The Jupiter Icy Moon Orbiter felt the same way. But the industry presence at the Case of Mars conferences was especially odd. Those were organized by the “Mars underground”, who had spent the past decade coming up with clever ideas doing manned Mars missions on a viable budget. Largely on their own time and with their own money. Then SEI appeared, and suddenly their next conference has twice as many people, and the all the new people are from big companies advocating big, expensive approaches.
Maybe they couldn’t resist suddenly being important enough to merit all these new guests with big sponsors. Did the expensive plans at least get a bunch of push-back in questions after talks?
It’s been a long time, and that was just the second one of those meetings I’d been to. Think the old Mars underground didn’t know what to make of it. I remember being more like surprise and incomprehension. I don’t remember any specifics, but it was like people asking if, maybe, that would be the hard way to do it, and getting answers about space being hard. There were definitely two different groups at that meeting, and I’m not sure they were speaking the same language.
“”Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …””
Congress has no shame, Keith.
O’keefe understood there will not be a huge influx of cash from congress (he is a ***bean counter*** who knows about funding) which is why he campaigned for exploration plans using existing launchers. Also Shuttle was to end, and that probably was a non-starter for many elected officials seeing loss of funding in their district. Griffin assumed money will appear, it did not. Also note major topic of the time was Gulf War II (VSE disappeared from public view).
I’m thinking this whole “exploring space” is a fantasy. Lots of people talk about this for centuries but nothing happened. There was the Apollo program which all of sudden we are now venturing into the cosmos. In reality it was all about beating the Soviets to the moon. Kind of like another futuristic promise of mining the oceans beginning with Glomar Explorer led by a billionaire (bzzt, it was really a CIA project to raise a Soviet sub). So far after decades and we still debate exploring space with one grand plan after another (but only change is the color of the carpet).
Perhaps the challenge is to create something of economic gain or conquest like what motivated ocean going ships. So far the “exploring space” concept hasn’t resonated with societies in general.
It’s very possible that the Trump Administration is NASA’s last hope as I haven’t see any evidence that the new generation of Democrats are into space. They seem too focused on “social justice” and climate change to care about space exploration, other than by robots. But we will see more when the House Committees on space start holding hearings and the primary season starts.
You are darn right they don’t have much time left to do something. Are they planning to do anything at all? I am tired of waiting.