Gerstenmaier Out As HEOMD AA
Leadership Changes in Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Memo
As you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars. In an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.
Effective immediately, Ken Bowersox will serve as Acting Associate Administrator for HEO. Bowersox, who previously served as the Deputy Associate Administrator for HEO, is a retired U.S. Naval Aviator with more than two decades of experience at NASA. He is an accomplished astronaut and a veteran of five space shuttle missions and served as commander on the International Space Station.
Bill Gerstenmaier, who previously served as Associate Administrator for HEO, will be detailed to a new position as special advisor to Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard. I am grateful for Bill’s leadership. He has provided the strategic vision for some of NASA’s most important efforts, including the International Space Station, Commercial Crew Program, the lunar Gateway, Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. We, as a nation, are thankful for his service in advancing America’s priorities and expanding the limits of science, technology, and exploration.
Tom Whitmeyer will serve as the Acting Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development within HEO.
Bill Hill, who previously served as Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development within HEO, will be detailed to a new position as special advisor to Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk. Bill has served NASA and our country well. He has provided years of leadership and expertise in the development of Exploration Systems like the Space Launch System, Orion spacecraft, and Exploration Ground Systems programs. His strategic direction played a key role during the Space Shuttle Program, helping safely complete 22 successful missions.
NASA has always been fortunate to have great talent that has served our country well. As we work to fill these key positions within HEO, we will stay mission focused knowing that exploration will go forward.
Jim Bridenstine
Finally failure has consequences.
Did Administrator Bridenestine just quietly cut another wire holding SLS/Orion/Gateway up?
Wasn’t Gerstenmaier also one of the ones who really, really, didn’t like Commercial Crew?
I believe so, at least early on.
Someone sure hated it and delayed it as long as possible.
I’m inclined to believe Gerstenmaier responded to HEOMD’s problems and prejudices far more than he shaped them. The myriad strings-attached hampering Crew over the years very much reflect fundamental HEOMD organizational prejudices, in my view. If it hadn’t been Gerstenmaier, it would have been someone else, given the longtime lack of any political-level commitment to deep reform.
I watch the JFK Space Summit on line. Based on some of the comments that Administrator Bolden made I gather he was not a fan of COTS/CCP. I suspect the only reason it happened was because Lori Graver went over his head to push it.
COTS began in January 2006, Bolden and Garver came on board three years later. In fact the CRS contracts had already been awarded to SpaceX and Orbital by the time Garver and Bolden arrived. Garver was previously an associate administrator from 1998 to 2001, not sure if she did anything then that could have later helped COTS, although I’m sure she would have if that was even possible back then.
COTS seemed to sort of pop up from under the radar, I am interested in how it really got started and by whom since it was certainly a very radical departure from the normal NASA business as usual. It seemed to continue to fly at somewhat low altitude at first, whether that was due to Gerst quietly allowing it and essentially keeping it lower profile to protect it, or whether even back then he preferred to end it, I don’t know but back then he seemed to support it and like I said in my other comment I’m not sure all other potential associate administrators would have in 2006.
By the time of CCDev Gerst was in a different mindframe as the success of COTS and apparent likelihood of successful CCDev got the political opposition worked up against it. If we want to conclude that Gerstenmaier caved in or sold out or at least bent to pressure I’m sure that is a valid argument. But I am really interested in how something like COTS got started and even had a chance in the NASA environment of 2006 without someone like Lori Garver around at the time. Maybe the cynical answer is that no one thought it would succeed anyway so no need to fight it. That could be, but someone believed in it and got it started but I don’t know who.
COTS traces its roots to what was called alt access to the ISS around 1999-2001. NASA should have something on its history page on it, and you will find info in the NASA Watch Archives. (A great resource on NASA history since 1996). With the replacement of the Orbital Spaceplane Program by Project Constellation alt.access basically became the COTS Program mostly because the Ares I/Orion wouldn’t be able to provide cargo service to the ISS. This was because of the recommendation to separate crew and cargo after the Columbia Accident. Again you should find reports on the NASA history website and in the archives at NASA Watch.
Hope this helps?
As it turns out there is no one program or initiative that led to COTS, rather many initiatives over several years and even decades such as Admiral Steidle’s Concept Exploration and Refinement study contracts, SLI, Alternate Access to Station and many others attempted unsuccessfully over the years to implement various pieces of the puzzle in an attempt to promote the commercial spaceflight industry and transition NASA from being a space services provider to being a space services customer. Only some of these early initiatives were directly related to ISS.
Mike Griffin came in having recent experience running a company that worked with the CIA to identify companies to invest in who were developing technologies that could serve national security interests. Believing that commercial providers would be the primary means of ISS transport post-Shuttle he assigned $500 million to be set aside over the next five years for fixed price awards. He also drafted the guidelines for COTS as we know it such as allowing companies to have overall freedom in their designs, and requiring companies to have “skin in the game” by setting milestones with fixed price payments. As much as it may pain some to admit it because of his later actions with Constellation, no one was standing over Mike Griffin’s shoulder telling him how to implement COTS, although he was certainly standing on the shoulders of giants when he set it in motion.
Although the main program goals were now
set, what was not at all clear was how to legally implement this new untested strategy. NASA had to come up with a new procurement structure for something that wasn’t exactly a procurement. A legal team was created and they came up with the novel method of combining the Space Act Agreement structure with the OTA (Other Transaction Authority) clause that was part of the original NASA charter. They apparently got it right because it held up to the legal challenges against COTS that came later.
However there were still a couple more unanticipated puzzle pieces that had to be filled in. First was that it wasn’t quite so easy as NASA saying to commercial companies “go build us a rocket that we can pay you to use”. Smaller and newer companies like SpaceX needed the NASA oversight and experience base that the previous contract methods would have provided. Creative methods were developed to provide this assistance. Elon Musk on many occasions has given what seems to be heartfelt thanks for this.
The final puzzle piece was that NASA managers and engineers who previously selected contractors based solely on technical capability, now had to also consider the fund raising capability of potential COTS partners since the partners would have to raise most of the money themselves. The team had to become educated in business and finance. Dennis Stone recommend that the COTS team should seek the guidance of a venture capitalist which is what they did.
The program was so radical and so dependent on commercial companies coming through with successful projects mostly on their own that it was by no means a sure bet. But it worked and I think space historians will be talking about the importance of COTS for a long time.
He missed a few steps… but I’ll fill them in for alcohol.
I thought it started because of this?
Commercial Space Act of 1998, Title II – P.L. 105-303
TITLE II–FEDERAL ACQUISITION OF SPACE TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
Sec. 201. Requirement to procure commercial space transportation services.
Sec. 202. Acquisition of commercial space transportation services.
TITLE II–FEDERAL ACQUISITION OF SPACE TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
(a) In General.–Except as otherwise provided in this section, the Federal Government shall acquire space transportation services from United States commercial providers whenever such services are required in the course of its activities. To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers.
(b) Exceptions.–The Federal Government shall not be required to acquire space transportation services under subsection (a) if, on a case-by-case basis, the Administrator or, in the case of a national security issue, the Secretary of the Air Force, determines that–
(1) a payload requires the unique capabilities of the Space Shuttle;
(2) cost effective space transportation services that meet specific mission requirements would not be reasonably available from United States commercial providers when required;
(3) the use of space transportation services from United States commercial providers poses an unacceptable risk of loss of a unique scientific opportunity;
(4) the use of space transportation services from United States commercial providers is inconsistent with national security objectives;
(5) the use of space transportation services from United States commercial providers is inconsistent with international agreements for international collaborative efforts relating to science and technology;
(6) it is more cost effective to transport a payload in conjunction with a test or demonstration of a space transportation vehicle owned by the Federal Government; or
(7) a payload can make use of the available cargo space on a Space Shuttle mission as a secondary payload, and such payload is consistent with the requirements of research, development, demonstration, scientific, commercial, and educational programs authorized by the Administrator. Nothing in this section shall prevent the Administrator from planning or negotiating agreements with foreign entities for the launch of Federal Government payloads for international collaborative efforts relating to science and technology.
(c) Delayed Effect.–Subsection (a) shall not apply to space transportation services and space transportation vehicles acquired or owned by the Federal Government before the date of the enactment of this Act, or with respect to which a contract for such acquisition or ownership has been entered into before such date.
(d) Historical Purposes.–This section shall not be construed to prohibit the Federal Government from acquiring, owning, or maintaining space transportation vehicles solely for historical display purposes.
SEC. 202. ACQUISITION OF COMMERCIAL SPACE TRANSPORTATION SERVICES.
(b) Safety Standards.–Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the Federal Government from requiring compliance with applicable safety standards.
https://www.nasa.gov/office…
Actually, another provision of that same law had more to do with it.
Buy me several rounds of Baileys over crushed ice and I’ll tell you the story.
Sounds like it would be a good book to read, before the true history is lost. With good lessons to learn.
A lot of those someones were in Congress, not just within NASA. Look at how they gutted Commercial Crew funding in its first five years.
That has been Lori Garver’s claim, asserted most recently on Thursday on Twitter.
He seems to have softened on it the last few years, but to what extent is not quite clear.
Could be. I also think that Gerstenmaier was not 100% behind the Moon-or-bust 2024 plan. Heck, I don’t think he was 25% behind it.
Nobody should be behind it. It’s looney-tunes.
Well, certainly expecting HEOMD to accomplish it on a business-as-usual basis is loony-tunes.
Thanks Gerstenmaier.
You think this is quiet? What would you call loud? Air raid sirens going off in Huntsville?
So Gerst was given direction and he disagreed, and Sox was willing to go along? This must have something to do with meeting the 2024 deadline.
I think it’s an extremely safe guess that this has to do with the 2024 deadline. But I don’t necessarily think the directions and disagreement were over the 2024 deadline. Rather, I suspect it was over how to meet it. The plan HEO came up with was, essentially, no different than their old one, just with a sizable budget increase to speed it up. I don’t think that’s what the Administrator and his bosses were asking for.
Agreed.
However, I think their 2028 plan was nothing more than a bit of science fiction. Enough sizzle to get the money flowing. But the inevitable delays and cost overruns would lead to another cancellation from the winner of the 2024 election.
Sad to see Gerst go. He’s been a very competent, thoughtful leader. Don’t know that much about Bowersox, other than he was an astronaut.
$20 billion dollars spent with basically nothing to show for it, a nonsense launch architecture, and systematic failure in management of the SLS program as detailed by the latest OIG report. All under his watch.
Much of NASA’s launch architecture is politically-driven and not necessarily what is the most efficient for the mission. That was true for Shuttle, ARES, and now SLS – not sure about Apollo. Moreover, the development costs of new launch systems is always difficult to accurately estimate and generally exceeds up-front estimates. This was true of Apollo and the Shuttle, as well as more recent systems.
But it really shouldn’t be true of recent systems. The justifiable uncertainty in cost is about doing things which are new and different. Everything about Apollo and the Shuttle was new and different. (Well, I include the later Mercury missions and Gemini as a prelude to Apollo, and development work required for Apollo.) There is nothing novel and revolutionary about SLS or Orion. So I’m not buying that excuse for schedule and budget overruns.
The entire POINT of SLS was “Safe, Simple, Soon!”
Well, let’s hope they manage one out of three.
I think Apollo’s actual design decisions were most efficient for the mission – of course, the mission was as clearly spelled out as you could ask for, and it had to be done on a tight deadline, and that drove a lot of ruthless efficiency.
Procurement, on the other hand, was not terribly efficient, being parcelled out into as many congressional districts as possible. This drove up the actual costs of the program, as it has subsequent programs of record. But neither the Kennedy/Johnson administrations nor most of Congress cared about the costs, only about the deadline. “Waste anything but time.”
NASA and Gerst were scr3wed twice by Boeing: SLS and its Commercial Cew effort. The second one must be very bitter to Gerst – he gave the highest of the three bidders, Boeing, a contract, in expectation Boeing would be flying significantly before SpaceX or Sierra Nevada, due to Boeing’s expertise.
I’m still mildly boggled that “Boeing’s expertise” was successfully sold WRT Crew. This has to qualify for some sort of Extreme Marketing Chutzpah award. At the time those contracts were decided, it had been how many years since Boeing’s last capsule was designed? Forty or so? Even farther removed than that really, since it wasn’t Boeing, it was a company that Boeing had bought. The chances of Boeing still having any of the actual expertise involved on staff actually still remembering anything much useful were, uh, small.
I don’t think that’s the sort of expertise that was an issue, and I don’t think their selection was about getting the job done on time (or sooner than SpaceX.) All of the reluctance within NASA (and the ASAP) has been about their having a process and way of doing things which they are very confident in. The way SpaceX does things is different, and some people lacked confidence in that. (To put it mildly.) Boeing has tons of experience in managing many, many projects according to those conventional and traditional practices. I think their selection for commercial crew was to make sure that _someone_ would be doing it in the way NASA would, if they were doing it themselves.
Criticizing Boeing marketing blather aside, I agree entirely. Boeing’s selection was primarily because their stock in trade is doing exactly what the government customer wants, the way it wants it (and charging accordingly.)
The logical conclusion of course being that Boeing’s CCrew problems are in some large part a reflection on this customer asking for the wrong things done in the wrong way.
I’d also say that some large part of SpaceX’s CCrew problems are a result of this customer *insisting* on wrong things done in wrong ways. But that’s a different argument…
Um…Maybe Congress should bear the blame for inadequate leadership and saddling the Agency with SLS?
Maybe Sox having been embedded in Space X has something to do it it? I think Gerstenmaier was overdue-he probably should have been let go after his poor decisions on premature termination of Shuttle, and on the management he stuck with on Orion, SLS and JSC despite their poor performance. He was a nice guy, but did not look deeper than personal friendships when making personnel selections. I think a lot of his technical decisions were politically motivated rather than technically astute, which is why Orion cannot do the job and Gateway is looking for a job to do.
Gerst wasnt responsible for the termination of Shuttle. Where did you get that idea from?
Agree. I believe NASA was directed to terminate the Shuttle by the Bush Administration.
NASA had no choice but to stick with those programs. Congress made sure of that.
Personally, I don’t think the Shuttle program ended prematurely. If anything, it should have ended sooner. The problem was the utter lack of motion producing a next-generation or replacement vehicle. _That_ should have been up and flying in the 1990s.
Not for lack of trying. They gambled on VentureStar, wasted more than a decade on it, and then cancelled it (in fairness, it wouldn’t have worked at the time).
But even worst was the decision to dump the Orbital Spaceplane Program for Project Constellation which really creates this mess. The OSP was going to produce a crew vehicle for launch on the Atlas V to provide access to the station by 2008. BTW the Boeing CST-100 on the Atlas V looks very much like their entry into the OSP.
I’d forgotten about that. They finally got it right with spaceplane ideas (small space-plane for crew and small cargo flights, atop an existing expendable launcher), and then tossed that for Orion and spent the next decade flying up on Soyuz.
There’s an alternate future where instead of the Space Shuttle, we got something like that. A small reusable space-plane atop an expendable booster, with the rest of the funding spent on a research space station it could fly to. Both might have been up and running by 1980 if they’d gone that way.
That would be an alternate reality where NASA did not have to oversell the Shuttle to get funding and support from Congress and the President. In our reality, NASA probably couldn’t have gotten funding for a small spaceplane. They had to promise something which would do everything. In the process they generated so many requirements that the result vehicle was, well, suboptimal for anything.
Yep. NASA needed the support of DOD for the space shuttle program. And that meant taking on their obscene requirements for payload mass, payload bay size, cross range (for a one orbit mission landing near the launch site), and polar orbits.
Unfortunately, by the end of the program, I don’t think the space shuttle fully lived up to any of the DOD requirements except for the payload bay size.
Well, the payload size was also driven by a requirement to replace _all_ expendable launch vehicles, so they had to handle big communications satellites plus their kick stages. And I think the Shuttle did have all the DoD capabilities. The cross range was there, the ability to launch to polar orbits was there. They just never used those capabilities. Which sort of makes you wonder what the whole point was.
Maybe, but I’ve read essays claiming that it was a serious proposal from then-deputy NASA Administrator George Low and had the support of the OMB in general, versus the Shuttle advocates. What ultimately decided it was that Caspar Weinberger was a Shuttle supporter, so the administration put its efforts behind the Shuttle in the early 1970s.
Maybe, but I’ve read essays claiming that it was a serious proposal from then-deputy NASA Administrator George Low and had the support of the OMB in general, versus the Shuttle advocates.
Are you thinking of the proposal of Alexander Flax’s 1971 committee/?
X-33 was doomed from the start because out of the three X-33 proposals, NASA picked the one which was absolutely the most technically challenging, which was the proposal which was VentureStar. It’s really no surprise it failed. Either of the other two proposals would have had a much better chance of actually flying.
Unfortunately, when X-33 failed, NASA blamed it on the technology, not on their choice of proposal. Even worse, they basically said that the technology for truly reusable launch vehicles didn’t exist!
Thank Elon Musk for luring some of the best and brightest engineers to work for SpaceX on proving that reusable launch vehicles are absolutely possible.
While we’re blaming people, let’s not forget LMA’s wink-wink nudge-nudge about how they’re the Skunk Works and had experience with large, oddly shaped carbon composite tanks from work for “other government agencies.” I really wish people would stop buying a pig in a poke, whenever someone claims experience from black projects.
Yep. I remember Goldin bragging about choosing the most technically risky proposal. Particularly galling when DC-X was actually a thing.
Chose the wrong contractor, too.
Not true. X-33 initial research began in 1994/5 and X-33 was cancelled after the H2 tank failed in 2000. Six years. Great cooperative agreement, pay-for-results contract mechanism.
Most of a decade, then.
The tank was the main reason they cancelled, but it had other problems, too. It was coming in over mass, and that’s bad news for an SSTO space-plane – they have low payload fractions to begin with.
I’m a bit worried. Most of the ‘leaders’ he put in place, which are the managers of all the big programs and some of the big centers deferred to Gerstenmaier for any big decisions. I wonder who will be in charge now?
It’s a tough situation to be sure.
Wow… surprising in some ways, not surprising in others. This will shake things up.
Well, it’s become clear that HEOMD as-is is some mix of unwilling and unable to carry out the stated Artemis mission in any timely manner.
But I don’t expect that just replacing Gerstenmaier as head of HEOMD will make much real difference. The problems there have been baked deep into the organizational framework over decades. Actually improving matters will take basic structural changes, including outright bypassing of some of the most dysfunctional bits.
It will be interesting to see if any such deeper changes follow this move.
My sympathy, by the way, to all the competent people embedded in the dysfunction. (Like chocolate chips in a concrete cookie…) May you someday be freed to accomplish great things.
Sometimes it works out. I know, in the case of Cassini operations, the original, official process had some real flaws. Someone (who probably should remain nameless) started doing unofficial things to shortcut the problems and streamline the process. That person would have gotten into a lot of trouble with management, if they’d found out too soon. By about five years at Saturn, management gradually did catch on and, since it demonstrably worked, turned those unofficial and highly unauthorized steps into part of the official and authorized process.
And twenty years from now, those now-official pirate procedures will have bureaucratically evolved into new impediments that a future generation will have to find new workarounds for.
Ah, the circle of (bureaucratic) life!
Yes, but in twenty years, I can comfortably retire and become a grumpy old man. By then, there will be a whole new generation of angry young men (and women) to fight the system.
Yup. No permanent solutions. We fix what we can well enough to get by for a time, try to pass on some bits of wisdom to the next generation, then hope for the best.
His deputy was also replaced. But that means a whole lot depends on Mr. Bowersox and Mr. Whitmeyer. I don’t know much about either of them, but, yes, they’ve got a tough job ahead of them. The sort of deep changes you mention are necessary and making them isn’t going to be easy. On the other hand, replacing the two people at the top of HEO is a pretty clear message that business as usual won’t do. Nor will saying the way to speed things up is business as usual with increased funding.
Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard wasn’t this guy a staffer for Shelby for like 10 years before coming to NASA?
Sen. Ted Stevens. Different Appropriations Chair.
Sorry, I wrote that vaguely. It’s the Deputy Associate Administrator for HEO, Bill Hill, who’s been replaced. Dr. Morhard is the Deputy Administrator of NASA as a whole, and as far as I know his job hasn’t changed. (It’s a JD, by the way, not a real doctor or even a PhD.)
You are spot on about the HEOMD culture. It has been rudderless for decades. I feel this management shakeup is only the tip of the iceberg and Bridenstine’s rear end is in the hot seat to either get things moving or out the door he goes.
Bill Gerstenmaier presided over one of the most complex periods in NASA human spaceflight, complex both technically and politically. To put it in perspective he began his tenure as Associate Administrator for Space Operations just three days after Eileen Collins landed Discovery in the STS-114 Return to Flight mission.
To what extent he is to be credited or blamed for things is more than I can fathom, but my one takeaway is that he seemed to genuinely believe in and support COTS from the very beginning, and SpaceX in particular. I’m not sure others in his position necessarily would have in January 2006 when COTS began just five months after he assumed his new role.
I disagree somewhat with “he seemed to genuinely believe in and support COTS from the very beginning”. This didn’t seem to ring true with respect to commercial crew. And yes, I’ve got a cite for that:
https://twitter.com/Lori_Ga…
Yes, that was a very interesting response from Garver in what it does not say.
i said COTS and SpaceX in 2006.
“a bridge too far.” Ouch. I wonder if that was intentional. If so, I wonder if it was aimed at Mr. Trump or Mr. Bridenstine. I think the comparison to Gen. Montgomery probably fits Mr. Trump better, but that’s still harsh.
Neither, I’d say. It’s a very carefully worded tweet from someone skilled with words.
“His reign on NASA human spaceflight has been long,” former deputy NASA administrator Lori Garver said of Gerstenmaier. “While this gave some people comfort, it has been a challenge for those wanting to advance change.”
That’s…not an endorsement.
https://qz.com/1664077/nasa…
Well commercial crew hasn’t done anything yet.
He deserved better.
I have mixed feelings about this. Considering how rudderless the Orion/SLS program has been (especially SLS), someone has to take the blame, don’t they?
Yes.. Congress.
Congress doesn’t work in a vacuum. Their staffers work with the staffers at NASA. If what Congress wants to do is impractical than the NASA staffers, and their leaders, should speak up, or accept responsibility for letting Congress go down the wrong pathway.
Agencies also feed ideas to staffers. Someone at NASA fed ideas to Shelby.
Which, actually, is a bit of a condemnation of senior NASA management. If your subordinate are lobbying Congress behind your back, something isn’t right. Of course, it happens. I’ve heard rumors that the whole Europa Lander thing started with some engineers from southern California having a conversation with Mr. Culberson. But things like that are definitely not a good sign.
Like that’s really how it works.
Congress is going to Congress, because they have their own interests. Like Sen. Shelby.
Of course that’s how it works. Congressmen have their interests, other Congressmen have different interests, and government agencies have their own as well. The whole process works best when someone is smart enough to find a plan which satisfies all those interests at once (or, more realistically, as many as possible.)
Senator Shelby doesn’t care about SLS. He cares very deeply about plenty of money being spent on things Marshall Space Flight Center can do. Ok. NASA has smart people on staff. People who are good at designing complex systems which satisfy all sorts of odd requirements. If they don’t have enough, or they aren’t in the right positions, that’s a NASA management problem. So just add where the money gets spent to the list of requirements. After all, “build it in Alabama” isn’t any more of an arbitrary requirement than “do it by 2024.”
They should be able to design a human exploration plan that satisfies those requirements. The NASA administrator and associate administrator take that to Senator Shelby, and quietly convince him those billions going to MSFC ought to be spent on X instead of SLS. That’s how things get done, not by simply following orders. And maybe that’s why Mr. Webb was a very successful administrator while astronauts with a military background haven’t been.
Gerstenmaier. Congress gave him what amounts to a lay up. Build a rocket with from preexisting parts and here’s a bottomless pit of money to do it.
Gerstenmaier never once complained and defended to project to the hilt.
That part wasn’t as easy as everyone who knows little about how space vehicles thought it was. You can’t just slap stuff together.
Well, you can slap stuff together. But not any random collection of stuff. If it’s designed with the right interface, and the idea of being used for multiple applications, lots of spacecraft components can be mixed and matched fairly easily. The problem is that, if those components weren’t designed with that in mind, trying to do that turns out to be harder than starting from scratch. And at a very high, “big picture” level, you can’t really tell if a given, new combination is going to be fairly easy or a complete mess.
Yes, they could have opted for putting it together as the Shuttle C and sent the crew up on an Atlas V. Multiple launches, but less development time and more money to spend on the orbital elements, like a lunar lander or spacecraft for extended deep crewed space flights to asteroids.
Oh you mean like OSP talked about? But the mopes in Congress killed it.
I’m really waiting for one of you so-called space experts to write a book on the ATK mafia and its effect on space policy.
There is only so much that you can blame on Gerst given the SLS/Orion shackles that Congress has placed on HEO. While Bridenstein can reassign mis-aligned agency executives to attempt to accelerate exploration, and simultaneously initiate performance-based contracts with nimble NewSpace Jedi’s competing for CLPS, the bulk of funds appropriated to HEO (Northern Alabama Space Agency) must be spent per the orders of Darth Shelby.
Please. A high level bureaucrat with the experience of Gerst is no helpless ingenue in politics.
Mind, Congress insisted that NASA *do* SLS/Orion, but NASA largely chose *how* to do it. Within the overall geographic distribution of funding Congress required, NASA had a lot more flexibility than they ever used. Instead they did the same old thing all over again, piously hoping for a different result…
So what would you suggest, given that a large payment to ATC in Utah be made, engines be bought from a company in CA, a large contract to Mississippi be let, and a host of other contracts be signed to as set rather specific co’s and locales?
Where is Northrop Grumman’s Antares built?
I had to look it up, and I almost don’t believe it. Russia and Ukraine. The first stage engines are from Energomash, and the first stage itself is from Yuzhnoye. The second stage is a Castor 30, and they come from Utah. The import/export licensing must be a true joy.
Also the Cygnus cargo supply vessel that rides on Antares is from Italy. The final assembly is in the United States, AND the real kicker, it appears to be almost as cost effective as SpaceX supply missions.
Long story short, the idea that all those different companies and locales involved in SLS mean practically nothing when it comes problems with the project.
Cygnus has a substantially larger cargo capacity because it does not have cargo return capability.
Or you could say Dragon has significantly less cargo capacity because it has return capability. Cygnus has much greater pressurized volume (950 cu ft) for cargo than Dragon (350 cu ft.) Dragon runs out of pressurized cargo volume before it runs out of cargo mass capability because it has cargo return capability. Dragon’s trunk helps, but the majority of NASA’s cargo need is pressurized. (Cygnus has an unpressurized cargo element in work if NASA needs/wants it.)
Cynus (at least version 2.0) is a nifty cargo vehicle, with ample volume and upmass. I don’t want to poo-pooh it.
On the other hand, Dragon provides ample downmass, the only downmass NASA has, really, since there is little space in Soyuz for returning things to Earth, let alone in a timely fashion. Cost effectiveness calculations of Dragon and Cygnus must take this into account.
But in another, deeper, sense, NASA got far more for its money from its contract with SpaceX, because it ended up getting a heavy lift commercial space company that has taken over the competitive global launch market – whereas Antares is utterly useless for anything but launching Cygnus to ISS – it will vanish the moment its COTS contracts are over. And building up that kind of domestic commercial space industry was always lurking at the back of COTS.
I think Antares could be used for other launch services, not sure of the technological limitations.
I do know NG is testing out the current Cygnus as an orbiting autonomous laboratory with a six month duration.
There is no reason for SpaceX to give money away to NASA, which is why they charge NASA just a bit less than their only competition for cargo to ISS.
This isn’t a new problem, nor one unique to the United States. Actually, for ESA, having to spend the right amount in the right place isn’t an unspoken rule. It’s actually official policy. If 28% of their budget comes from France, they have to spend 28% of their budget in France. They seem to manage reasonably well.
NASA could have made Orion smaller, so it didn’t require such a large launch vehicle. They could have made SLS smaller, and developed in space, cryogenic fuel transfer. They could have built the Orion Service Module in the US. They could have done any number of thing.
In fact, they could even have bypassed a number of Congressmen. The only reason that most of those earmarks and requirements get into appropriations bills is that most Congressmen don’t really care. Now what if a number of otherwise uninterested Congressmen were told of a NASA plan that would not only work, but would involve spending money in their States and districts rather than Senator Shelby’s? Congressmen play those sorts of games against each other all the time. Why do you think the senior officials in the executive branch can’t or shouldn’t do the same?
They did make a lightweight Orion; it’s the Starliner. It has essentially the same mold lines and crew capacity, it even uses the airbags originally designed for Orion. For some reason the Orion is just a lot heavier.
Starliner is not Orion-Lite. Lockheed did offer an Orion-Lite for Commercial Crew but was not selected.
Starliner is 15 feet in diameter. Orion is 16.6 feet in diameter. Orion is designed for 21 days independent operation. Starliner can only go 60 hours on its own.
More to the point, they come from different companies. Orion is being built by Lockheed Martin spacecraft, and Starliner is made by Boeing. While ULA is a collaboration, they compete with each other over most things. I can’t see LMA handing over Orion blueprints to Boeing.
I can’t fault Congress. I think nobody from NASA ever testified in the appropriate Congressional committees that SLS was wrong.
Oh you think the committee would actually call a witness that would tell them SLS is wrong?
If Gerstenmaier thought SLS was not worth it, he never said anything to that effect in front of Congress.
I keep hearing Congress forced SLS on NASA. As far as I can ascertain NASA was in complete agreement that they needed SLS.
I thought I remember congress telling NASA “You will build an X ton rocket and you will complete it by Y”. On paper anyway the only way to do that was to essentially continue the Ares V program with some modifications, thus the moniker ever after “Senate Launch System”. I also seem to remember Bolden making some remarks trying to push back against it.
Well, let’s not overstate that. Sections 302-305 of the Authorization Act of 2010 were fairly explicit in directing NASA in how it was to go about building its heavy lifter – and what resources it was required to use to build it. “In developing the Space Launch System pursuant to section 302 and the multi-purpose crew vehicle pursuant to section 303, the Administrator shall, to the extent practicable utilize—(1) existing contracts, investments, workforce, industrial base, and capabilities from the Space Shuttle and Orion and Ares 1 projects…”
And then it goes on to specify what all those things have to be.
NASA still had to make some choices, but at the end of the day, Congress was requiring it to build an in-house heavy lifter with specific capabilities, and use most of the existing Shuttle and Constellation infrastructure, technology, and contractors to do it. There is a lot of blame to go around on this.
You’re acting like NASA was passive in this. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those provisions were being fed to Congress from Gerst and others in human spaceflight.
And who exactly do you think wrote that language….
Who was at the helm when the decision was made to size Orion so that existing launch vehicles could not lift it? Who was at the helm when the big rocket to launch the heavy Orion blew through schedules and failed to achieve enough design performance to put Orion anywhere useful? Who came up with the stupid ARM mission that was then designed to give something Orion to do? Who re-tasked ARM elements after its cancellation to be a worthless “Gateway” to nowhere? Who failed to invest in something as basic as a suit that can be used on the Moon? And who has been working in the shadows for a decade to cast FUD on commercial crew?
And yet on my Twitter feed it is nothing but people talking about what a loss this is. Would that we could suffer more such losses.
IMHO, at least from the outside of NASA, it appeared that the oversizing of Orion to not fit on EELVs came from the very top, then NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. He used it as justification for Ares I which was to develop some of the necessary parts for Ares V (e.g. the five segment SRBs). He really, really wanted Ares V.
Yes, but Gerst was in charge for the decision to continue development of it after Ares I was ended . Deciding to launch Orion on SLS was a truly terrible decision.
Section 303 of the 2010 law actually requires Orion to be used with the SLS. —”The Administrator shall continue the development of a multi-purpose crew vehicle to be available as soon as practicable, and no later than for use with the Space Launch System. The vehicle shall continue to advance development of the human safety features, designs, and systems
in the Orion project.”
And who had that provision put in there? Gerst.
After reading the law, all Congress was doing was locking in certain high level design characteristics (almost certainly at the request of NASA administrators) and certain contractors (almost certainly at the request of those contractors).
Even then there were a lot of “to the extent practicable” statements to give NASA some leeway.
I got this email from Bridenstine twice for some reason.
I said weeks ago that Gerstenmaier would be gone. His notional plan that was leaked looked to me to be inappropriate for a 2024 return.
In case no one has noticed, NASA human space flight is in shambles. They are lucky they have an ISS designed and built long before any of the people now in charge, but the people now in charge are using it poorly. Some of that stems from people like Gerstenmiaer moving dollars from utilization to NASA contractors, so utilization had been at best slow, let alone the poor choice of CASIS personnel who knew nothing about utilization. So they spent hundreds of billions $$ and three decades and have a great facility that is largely unused. Zero effort was made to fix problems with Shuttle. They shut that down and NASA and its contractor has wasted a decade on Constellation and Orion-they talk about flying to the Moon in 5 years but theyll be lucky if the first Orion flies by then. And that was the safe simple soon solution. Gerst thought it was a great idea to use ATV as the basis of the Orion SM. So did they get money back from Lockheed? Instead they got an underpowered CSM and that meant they could only go to this high halo orbit out in the middle of nowhere which compromises any ideas about landing on the Moon. 25 years ago NASA had a lot of capable experienced engineers. Most of those people had their jobs eliminated in order to promote mission ops engineers who had and still have no idea how to design a spaceship. NASA needs a major change in management; it is long overdue.
Gerst thought it was a great idea to use ATV as the basis of the Orion SM.
Well, in part, I think Gerst thought that farming the SM out to the Europeans would provide his program with greater political protection. Even the original Orion SM propulsion was pretty underpowered, being based on AJ’s Shuttle OMS engine, with only 7,500 lbf, versus the Apollo SPS’s 20,500 lbf.
Thrust is less significant than total energy. Apollo’s SPS was relatively high thrust. What Orion needs are much bigger fuel tanks and more fuel.
Actually, thrust makes a difference at this level. Maneuvers tend to become inefficient (higher delta v required) unless they are relatively short. Ideally, they should be much shorter than an orbital period. Orion can only manage 1 m/s^2, compared to a bit over 3 m/s^2 for the Apollo CSM, and that’s really not enough. If you added more fuel to Orion without bumping up the thrust, you’d just make this problem worse.
Apparently you do not understand the rocket equation. It has nothing to do with acceleration rate. It has everything to do with velocity.
True only if you are maneuvering in deep space far from any significant gravity well. In a gravity well, things get complicated and the rate at which you can alter velocity can very much matter.
You need sufficient thrust to get off the surface. Think of it like Shuttle-it needed SRBs to get it airborne and going fast enough so its SSMEs could sustain it for the time it needed to get to orbital velocity. But it had essentially nothing to do with ‘efficiency’. Efficiency was in the form of the energy of its propellants so they could weigh less, fit in a smaller less massive tank, and provide adequate energy to reach orbital velocity; but efficiency had little to do with the thrust of the engines. In the case of the Apollo LM, the fueled ascent stage had a mass of 4700 kg (10000 lb), 780 kg (1700 lb) on the moon. Ascent engine thrust was 16000n (3500 LB), a ratio of about 2:1. It had to do with the time it took to reach orbital velocity and the G force on the astronauts and the LM structure.
No, let’s take this to an absurd extreme, just to make the point. The SSMEs needed to accelerate the Shuttle to orbital velocity before it fell back down. That means they needed to have enough thrust. In effect, they were riding at or near the top of a suborbital trajectory, and had a fraction of the ballistic time of flight to accelerate up to orbital velocity. That’s not fighting gravity to get off the ground. It’s a time limit on the burn’s duration.
As far as efficiency is concerned, I think you are applying a very narrow definition. I’m not using it in a thermodynamic sense. I’m using it to mean when and how a maneuver is conducted. If you do it the right way, the required delta v to make the desired change to the orbit is minimized. Minimizing delta v also minimized the amount of propellent required to do the job. That’s more efficient.
I could quibble about that. In deep space (solar orbit) the maneuvers still need to be short compared to the orbital period. But now it’s the orbit around the Sun, which is of order a year. That’s not an issue for chemical propulsion, but for electric propulsion is can be a big deal. Past missions like Deep Space 1 and Dawn have tried to keep the acceleration “high” enough that the thrust arcs are only a month or two long.
I’m quite familiar with the rocket equation. But I think you are missing an important part. What determines the delta v you plug into the rocket equation? The calculations you’ve probably seen assume impulsive maneuvers, that is, ones which are so short compared to the orbital period that they are effective instantaneous. And that this instantaneous maneuver happens at the optimal point along the orbit.
If the burn isn’t that short (typically over 5 or 10% of the orbital period), then a lot of it happens off that optimal point along the orbit. That drives up the delta v required for a desired change in the orbit. And that means thrust does matter. In some cases, simply adding fuel might even hurt. If it drives up the duration of the burns too much, and therefore drives up the delta v, it could actually decrease the final mass (and decrease the payload mass even more, since the larger fuel tank is part of that final mass…)
Not at all correct. So what you are saying is you need huge powerful engines but no fuel. That is not at all correct. The thrust has nothing to do with efficiency and nothing to do with the energy. Higher thrust gets you off the ground faster but will not get you to the orbit you need unless you have the total amount of energy that is required.
Anywhere near a planet, you need adequate amounts of both propellant and thrust.
No, of course you need fuel. But, even in orbit, the delta v to go from one orbit to another isn’t fixed. It depends on several things, and one is the duration of the maneuver compared to the orbital period. If the burn isn’t small (hopefully very small) compared to the orbital period, the maneuver will require more delta v to accomplish the same thing.
Take the Chandrayaan-2 mission, since it’s due to launch in a few hours. That’s the Indian lunar mission, and it’s launched into a low, eccentric orbit. I think the apogee is only a few thousand kilometers. That’s the best their launch vehicle can do, and from there, the spacecraft has to use its own rocket to raise apoapsis up to the orbit of the Moon. The best way to do that is a burn at perigee. That gives the largest increase in apoapsis for a given delta v.
Unfortunately, Chandrayaan-2 can’t do that. It doesn’t have enough thrust to do that big a burn right at perigee. It could do a long burn over a large arc, and center that on perigee. But most of the maneuver would be vaguely close to perigee, not at perigee. That would be significantly higher delta v. So they are going to do a series of perigee burns. They do a short, optimal one right at perigee. That raises apogee, but not all the way to the Moon. Then they go through a whole orbit, and do another small, short periapsis burn which raises apogee a bit more. They repeat that half a dozen times until apogee is at the Moon’s orbit.
Making the burns short really is enough of a difference in delta v to make that worthwhile. But you can’t do that with astronauts. Chandrayaan-2 is going to take a few months to get to the Moon, and pass through the radiation belts many times. For human spaceflight, you need enough acceleration (and therefor thrust) to keep the burns short and not incur a large increase in delta v.
Just three days ago ArsTechnia had an interview with Buzz Aldrin:
https://arstechnica.com/sci…
Buzz certainly has the ear of Trump, I suspect he has said similar things to him but probably much more frank in his assessment of NASA direction.