This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Artemis

NASA's Moon 2024 Plans Have No Margin For Error

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 6, 2019
Filed under , , ,
NASA's Moon 2024 Plans Have No Margin For Error

With Gerstenmaier gone, decision to fly NASA astronauts may be more contentious, Ars Technica
“SpaceX has already flown an uncrewed demonstration mission of its Dragon spacecraft. Boeing is likely to follow suit this fall with its own Starliner capsule, possibly as early as September. Then each company will have a critical test of its spacecraft’s abort system, and then a chance to work through any final technical issues. But once that’s done, one or both of the vehicles could be ready to launch astronauts from Florida by early 2020. “Here’s where losing Gerstenmaier is going to hurt,” said Wayne Hale, former space shuttle program manager and an adviser to NASA. “Bill was recognized by everybody as being technically well grounded and very astute. He was known to listen carefully, and to make his judgments based on good technical reasons.”
Keith’s note: The new management team selected to run HEOMD is going to have to hit the ground running. Key decisions about SLS will need to be made within weeks of their arrival in their new positions. To be certain the rest of the program is already in place preparing for these events. However, NASA has been directed to suddenly compress a program intended to do something in 2028 into a plan that is going to do that same thing in 2024. Planning for all of this has to go exactly right and hinges upon continued and coordinated political support (funding). And whether that political support will even be there all depends on the run up to – and the outcome of – one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history. This is going to be rather sporty.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

50 responses to “NASA's Moon 2024 Plans Have No Margin For Error”

  1. Daniel Woodard says:
    0
    0

    Tell me again why we need to put boots on the Moon in 2024?

    • Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
      0
      0

      Cause if you don’t hold the agency to a near term goal the bureaucracy expands to fill the void the old laid back 2028 plan was probably really 2030 or later with no one holding their feet to the fire.

    • MarcNBarrett says:
      0
      0

      Because the President is already taking it for granted that he will be reelected and wants a big splash by NASA before the end of his second term.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      Honestly, I think near-term goals make sense. Mr. Trump’s 2024 deadline for a lunar landing may not. But doing something significant in the near future makes sense to me. Otherwise we will have a new President giving new matching orders, and we end up back at square one all over again.

    • ed2291 says:
      0
      0

      A near term goal with Space X and Bigelow setting up camps for temporary (not permanent!) occupation on the moon makes sense as a near term goal we can meet. NASA’s plan is nonsense. Humans have not been out of low earth orbit since 1973 and without near term goals that is unlikely to change unless Space X does it.

    • Vladislaw says:
      0
      0

      so Cadet Bone Spur can say no one knows more about space..

      https://www.youtube.com/wat

    • james w barnard says:
      0
      0

      Oh, right! Let’s drag it out some more. What are we waiting for? Our astronauts having to apply to the Chinese embassy on the rim of Shackleton Crater for a visa to land near there? Why, if another president gets in there, he might postpone it until the 75th anniversary of Apollo 11! Meantime, SpaceX will probably its own astronauts there in plenty of time to welcome NASA astronauts, taikonauts, et al.
      Cancel SLS and Gateway and let SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Bigelow take over.
      Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!

    • Not Invented Here says:
      0
      0

      It’s what Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal said, the deadline is to inject a sense of urgency, that’s how Elon Musk runs SpaceX, read his CBS interview about Zeno’s paradox. Basically if you plan for 2024 you can probably get there by 2028, but if you plan for 2028, you won’t get there until 2036.

      And this sense of urgency has done a world of good in NASA:
      1. Gateway got descoped, no longer a mini-ISS around the Moon
      2. CLPS small lunar lander contracts awarded, with more in the works
      3. Launching Orion on Falcon Heavy got studied, didn’t get go ahead but it is now on record that launching Orion on FH is feasible
      4. Pretty much all the lunar launches are now planning to use commercial heavy lift, because SLS can barely have enough core stage to make the 2024 date.
      5. Human lander contract no longer has NASA integrating the elements, the contractors will provide the entire lander as a service just like CRS/Commercial Crew, using any design they want.

      • chuckc192000 says:
        0
        0

        No. The 2024 deadline may have had the side effects of the things you mentioned, but the -reason- behind the date change is simply to massage Trump’s ego.

        • Granit says:
          0
          0

          Who cares? The benefits vastly outweigh whatever negative you think satisfying a president’s ego has (they all have huge ego’s and personnel motives).

    • David McRobert says:
      0
      0

      Because a new president will struggle to cancel it in time vs Congress and it actually is a goal that will fail but fail much further down the road than a goal that will have two or three administrations to overcome.

    • rb1957 says:
      0
      0

      How is this any different to Kennedy’s goal ?

      • Daniel Woodard says:
        0
        0

        Kennedy could potentially have been in office until 1968, and could have set that as the goal of the landing. He did not. I agree that a goal is important, but unless the goal is sustainability the lunar base will probably not be sustainable.

    • Michael Spencer says:
      0
      0

      Because choosing a direction, and doing it, is better than sitting on our asses for another damn decade bitching about whose plan is better.

    • SouthwestExGOP says:
      0
      0

      It is a billion dollar campaign rally for Mike Pence.

    • Granit says:
      0
      0

      To save money. The faster it’s done, the less money is spent, and the value to the American taxpayer is higher, and the moral of NASA is greater.

  2. Nick K says:
    0
    0

    Put Gerst in charge of safety. But while he is extremely cautious he seemed to lack when it came to solutions. I am thinking of Shuttle. Shuttle should have been fixed. Instead we shut it down and threw it away. Orion and SLS, delay, delay, delay, increased dollars by the billions and no apparent signs to fix the cause.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      No, the Shuttle should not have been fixed. It should have been shut down and replaced by a new launch vehicle, one with design based on what we learned from the Shuttle. Despite all the claims, the Shuttle was an experimental test vehicle.

      • Nick K says:
        0
        0

        Whether fixing the existing or starting on a new version, this should have been done starting before the old one was shut down. Instead under Gerst they shut it down, shut down all the suppliers, laid everyone off, caused a lot of hurt in the industry and to the people and then two years later started trying to build an old school rocket using some Shuttle pieces, reopening the supplier lines…

        • Not Invented Here says:
          0
          0

          Pretty sure the shutdown is above Gerst’s paygrade, it’s all Mike Griffin’s doing.

      • Steve Pemberton says:
        0
        0

        As an example the X-1 through X-1E variants flew for twelve years combined. X-15 flew for nine years. Shuttle if it had been just a test vehicle probably would have likely flown for only a few years. But it was intended to be an operational vehicle, and even when it became obvious within a few years that it wasn’t suited for that role, there was no replacement available and it had to keep flying probably two decades longer than it should have. No fault of the Shuttle, it was asked to do too much for too long and did probably as much as was possible under those circumstances.

        • fcrary says:
          0
          0

          I don’t quite see it that way. It did not, or should not, have become obvious that the Shuttle was not an operational vehicle, and it certainly shouldn’t have taken a few years of flight for people to figure that out. Given how new and different it was from past launch vehicles (or any sort of vehicle) that should have been obvious back in 1971. It should never have even been conceived of as anything but experimental.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
            0
            0

            Large parts of NASA still believe that “failure tolerance” is a substitute for establishing reliability through testing. This leads to a completely misplaced reliance on redundancy in systems where the primary failure modes are deterministic, i.e. launch vehicles where the total operating lifetime is measured in minutes. Redundancy is useful only in systems where failures are stochastic, i.e. systems that operate for long periods and large numbers of cycles. Ironically the planetary (i.e. unmanned) program recognizes that analysis is not equivalent to reliability and successfully flies systems with little or no redundancy but high reliability.

          • Steve Pemberton says:
            0
            0

            Oh I don’t disagree, and I’m sure many people inside the program realized it, I’m talking about how it was perceived at the time by most people, the media, Congress, the public. Prior to Challenger the program still had pressure on it to deliver on the promises of frequent launches which is part of the schedule pressure that led to Challenger. I’m not excusing Challenger because of that I’m just saying that was the schedule pressure that was on it, after Challenger that schedule pressure pretty much went away as everyone who didn’t already realize it before was now aware that the Shuttle would never be the operational vehicle that it was intended to be.

            I’m pretty sure they would not have done the whole teacher in space program if they thought of it as a test vehicle. After Challenger that program was cancelled. Christa McAuliffe’s backup Barbara Morgan only got to fly later because she went through the entire astronaut selection and training process to become a Mission Specialist.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
        0
        0

        Yes! What was sad was that when Rockwell proposed a Shuttle II for the X-33 program, a design based on what it had learned from 20 years of Shuttle flights NASA didn’t even give it a second look. Instead NASA went after the shiny and very risky Lockheed design, which failed because of the huge technical risk.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
        0
        0

        Until the Shuttle aerospace development programs used an evolutionary approach, with a succession of prototypes test flown before production design was finalized. Ironically the Apollo/Saturn program led to the believe that systems engineering and design analysis could substitute for experience. The Shuttle was the only major vehicle for which the operational design was finalized at a time when there was no flight experience.

  3. MAGA_Ken says:
    0
    0

    However, NASA has been directed to suddenly compress a program intended to do something in 2028 into a plan that is going to do that same thing in 2024
    —–

    That’s not exactly correct. NASA issued a solicitation on Dec 13, 2018 for the following:

    This BAA Appendix addresses the development of human lunar landing capabilities. NASA is planning three demonstration missions to the lunar surface, with the first crewed human lunar landing targeted for the third mission.

    This NextSTEP-2 Appendix E will include a NASA reference human lander architecture configuration. The full architecture will include a Descent Element, Ascent Element, Transfer Vehicle, Refueling Element, and Surface Suit. NASA plans to launch the first demonstration mission in 2024. The minimum objective of this mission is to demonstrate a lunar surface landing with one or more Descent Elements capable of supporting a future human lander that includes both Descent Element and Ascent Element.

    So NASA was planning to land a human rated lander in 2024

    • SouthwestExGOP says:
      0
      0

      MAGA_Ken You should step back and listen while the adults talk. That BAA would have possibly landed a precursor to a Descent Element – but would not have included an Ascent Element. The Descent Element might have been human rated after the data from the 2024 landing had been digested – and after other components had been tested. And any fixes incorporated.

      That BAA says that a human rated Descent Element could have flown after the 2024 test but it did not say when.

      • MAGA_Ken says:
        0
        0

        You are correct but it does state that as the minimum objective. However, any reasonable manager would ask if you can make human rated hardware to land on the Moon by 2024 why can’t you make the other hardware in the same timeframe?

        As to the 2028 “plan” to land human beings on the lunar surface, if anyone believed that would happen, I have some swamp land in Arizona to sell him.

        NASA also had a plan to launch SLS EM-1 by November 2018 at one point.

        https://www.nasaspaceflight

        • SouthwestExGOP says:
          0
          0

          Why can’t you make other hardware at the same time? Congress needs to send budget which they never have.

          People like ThomasLMatula accuse “bureaucrats” when they do what Congress tells them to do, with the budget that Congress appropriates.

          Now I also think that SpaceX and commercial companies will have far better focus but I also bemoan the fact that this is very expensive and the government is the only one willing to spend that kind of money. Sigh. They spend it very slowly.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
            0
            0

            No. Bureaucrats are suppose to help guide the ship of state by working with legislature and executive branches. It’s a cop out to claim they are “just following orders.” If that is all they feel they do at NASA then it’s even more dysfunctional as an organization than it appears.

          • SouthwestExGOP says:
            0
            0

            One thing we see in action is that ThomasLMatula wants to blame “bureaucrats” for something (anything?) – why doesn’t he address the original point that NASA was certainly not going to land a human rated lander in 2024. He referred to “this goal” but was that the Descent module in 2024 or the human rated lander sometime?

          • ThomasLMatula says:
            0
            0

            Bureaucracy is simply how a modern government functions. It is neither a positive or negative but simply how it is, and what makes government agencies and large traditional corporations different from startups like SpaceX. Bureaucracy of course has its strengths and its weakness. One strength is continually between political changes, as is seen with SLS/Orion/Gateway.

            One weakness however is the inability of rapid adaption to new goals. The new NASA goal of returning astronauts to the Moon is an example.

            Clearly it requires a human lander. But that requires them to rapidly embrace and adapt to the new goal. That is unlikely. That is why I see SpaceX as the only real hope of achieving the goal of returning Americans to the Moon.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
            0
            0

            In this case the difficulty is that without a sustainable business plan a Moon landing will be another one-off like Apollo. I remember the plans NASA had for continuing human spaceflight indefinitely on the Apollo model. The money was not there. SpaceX put America back in the space launch business, after five years without a single commercial launch from US soil, not by landing its boosters, as spectacular as that is, but by recognizing that commercial (as opposed to government) space launch demand has high price elasticity and therefore reducing the cost of launch services is critical to a sustainable business.

          • Paul F. Dietz says:
            0
            0

            Has SpaceX demonstrated the launch market has high elasticity, or have they demonstrated that if one cuts prices enough one can grab existing traffic from other launch providers?

          • MAGA_Ken says:
            0
            0

            The SLS or SLS-like system was on the NASA drawing board for years. The only reason Congress wrote it into law was to prevent it from being jerked around. Yes, there was pork but everyone at NASA was saying it was the cheaper, faster option.

            But even it was just a pork project, without a doubt NASA bureaucrats completely mismanaged it.

        • fcrary says:
          0
          0

          I’m not sure how well you could develop multiple parts of the lander in parallel. It certainly couldn’t be the same people doing both jobs, and quite possibly, not even the same company. That means defining important characteristics of the vehicles (mass, moments of inertia, maximum acceleration and torque on the docking collar, etc.) before the vehicles are actually designed. The people designing the descent stage need to know things like that about the ascent stage, before they can start work. And once they start work, the people working on the ascent stage can’t change their minds to solve a problem. Those are solvable problems, but they soak up time, effort and money.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
        0
        0

        The adults know that the NASA of today will never achieve this goal and that the bureaucrats will just focus on running out the clock until a new Administration takes office, a new NASA Administrator is named and it’s free to focus again on the age old goal of Mars next.

        That is why all of the smart money is on Elon Musk and expects that although Americans will likely return to the Moon in the near future they probably won’t be getting their paycheck from NASA. ?

  4. Keith Vauquelin says:
    0
    0

    History repeats itself. Who knows what corners are already being cut. I run a business based on a principal of assured successful performance, using mission-critical planning and execution to achieve the desired results.

    Each time I sense a rush to get some thing done, I stop progress until the situation is effectively resolved or task is completed. I really dislike my opinion regarding 2024, but I really sense a disaster is in the making, now.

  5. Zathras1 says:
    0
    0

    All this discussion as to the purpose of the 2024 milestone is beside the point if Congress doesn’t allocate the required funding to NASA. No bucks, no Buck Rodgers.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
      0
      0

      Rodgers’ real first name was Anthony. With the Susan B Anthony dollars we could also say No Anthonys, no Anthony Rodgers.

  6. jasondugas says:
    0
    0

    Don’t worry this will all go away when the program is canceled by the next administration

  7. Michael Spencer says:
    0
    0

    I’ve been a professional design consultant for nearly 40 years, and have learned one, abiding truth:

    Nothing happens without a deadline.

    Clients will ask for something using terms like ‘soon’, or ‘as you think’; but they might as well as say never. Want something done? I never leave a meeting without a date.

    • SouthwestExGOP says:
      0
      0

      Michael Spencer will now demand that NASA be directed to land in 2023 – to give us an extra year to do research. Maybe he will want the direction to be 2022? Those could be deadlines.

      The purpose of this exercise is to show that dates should be set with some plan or reason – what was wrong with that 2028 deadline? Did it not work for the Pence For President campaign?

      • Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
        0
        0

        The 2028 plan had no impetus behind it. It was a mirage like all the going to Mars and moon dates before it, just some arbitrary date picked by the agency to ride out several adminstration changes and just keep the workforce anemically moving along.

      • Granit says:
        0
        0

        2028 was based on a funding profile; it was a goal, not a deadline.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      You may (or may not) be amazed by the fraction of scientific research which gets done in the two weeks before major conferences. But I’m not totally sure about the deadline in question. A lunar landing by 2024 may be too ambitions. It certainly is, if the approach is to take NASA’s previous plan and rush it.

      I’d prefer deadlines in both 2020 and 2024, not for the election year politics, but to secure accomplishments before a new administration takes over the White House. But those deadlines have to be for something which is both significant and achievable. I’m just not sure what that would be.

  8. ThomasLMatula says:
    0
    0

    Meanwhile there are reports that next week’s Starhopper’s flight to 200 meters will be its last one. Then the Starship MK1 with three Raptors comes up to bat. While Washington policy wonks argue the Gorilla is flexing it’s muscles and getting really to get Old Space’s attention. ?

    Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Starship made it to orbit before the SLS even did it’s green test? ?

    • Terry Stetler says:
      0
      0

      Starship getting to orbit, even as a no-payload SSTO, should really rattle cages from Houston to Huntsville, and DC. Add that monster booster + tanker flights and….

      On the Starship front: Starship Mk-1 got a little taller today, a perhaps one more ring section to go, and a 200+ foot crane has shown up.

      Stacking time?