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Commercialization

SLS Spurred The Private Sector By Being A Bad Example

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 11, 2021
Filed under ,
SLS Spurred The Private Sector By Being A Bad Example

Artemis will accelerate the commercial space sector , Space News
“As the first flight of Artemis moves ever closer from Kennedy Space Center, critics continue to raise questions around the cost of the U.S. return to the moon by pointing to private sector alternatives as more expeditious and less resource intensive. Somehow lost in this critique is that the private sector is, in fact, the workforce behind all of NASA’s design and manufacturing of launch vehicles and crew modules. That was true in the 1960s for Apollo and remains true today for Artemis.”
Keith’s note: This op ed by Christian Zur, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is one of those industry apologist word salads that includes history, buzz words, and rabbit holes that have nothing to do with the intended topic and distracts from the point he is trying to make.
He starts with fallacies such as “After all, since the retirement of the Saturn V rocket, no nation nor company had even built a vehicle capable of delivering astronauts back to cislunar orbit. Until the Space Launch System, that is.” Um … Falcon Heavy can do that easily. It has already flown. SLS has not.
Zur then goes on to somehow equate a large NASA workforce, some World War II contracts and some other government programs that sparked the semi-conductor industry. OK, so space stuff drives innovation. Guess what: he is right: and the innovation now resides mostly in the private sector when launch services that rival NASA’s can be bought – off the shelf – now – for vastly cheaper than what has been sunk into SLS – or what the per-use cost of each mission on SLS would be.
Artemis did indeed accelerate activity in the private sector by offering private sector a role. SLS also accelerated the capability of the private sector – but it did so by providing a wonderful example of what not to do ever again – starting with the building of a government-designed mega-rocket that is too expensive to operate – and then making it the choke point in a human exploration program that has chronic whiplash from 2 decades switching back and forth from one destination to another.
SLS is not the inovation we got from NASA rocket science investments. Falcon rockets are.
George Abbey: Time To Reconsider The Need For SLS, earlier post

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

17 responses to “SLS Spurred The Private Sector By Being A Bad Example”

  1. Vladislaw says:
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    “Somehow lost in this critique is that the private sector is, in fact, the workforce behind all of NASA’s design and manufacturing of launch vehicles and crew modules. “

    Somehow lost by the author is “how” and “why” in doing development projects. In an era of pre spaceflight the contracting methods used were the cost plus, fixed fee FAR contracting. For hardware that has never existed before and does not have a commercial customer other than the government that method worked for that time period.

    Fast forward 50 YEARS. Spaceflight isn’t new so the cost plus fixed fee, sole sourced FAR development contracts are not needed. All the author had to do is study the COTS program (commercial orbital transportation services) NASA utilized for acquiring commercial cargo hardware and services. This utilized SAA’s (space act agreements) that were based on mile stones and fixed price contracts. The firm had to complete each milestone on their own dime FIRST, this insured the company had their own skin in the game. Only on the completion of the milestone were they paid and then paid at a fixed price. As NASA later confirmed, they were able to acquire these services 10 times cheaper than doing it using the cost plus model

    If the Nation’s goal was to put NASA lunar researchers on the surface of Luna, then it should have been done with the most cost effective way possible. That would have been to buy the service. That was not case because for a lot of members of congress it is not about exploration or opening up new markets in the space frontier or even the development of new bleeding edge technology. As Kay Bailey Hutchinson put it in a committee meeting when discussing other ways to move forward she said “This is a jobs program”.

    And there we have it. Years behind schedule and billions over budget, the SLS has precisely accomplished what it was set out to do and that is to create jobs and keep those people at those jobs for as long as possible. Productivity and actually launching has never been the priority.

    • kcowing says:
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      Exactly.

    • Robert Horn says:
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      Equally important is a change of ethos. The early years had the ethos of “build it, try it, fail, learn, and try again.” The Corona program survived 12 failures before their first successful spy satellite operation.

      NASA has changed from risk utilizing to risk averse. SpaceX has returned to a more risk utilizing strategy.

      • Tom Billings says:
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        More specifically, NASA was *forced* to adopt an ethos that would never risk embarrassing their Patrons, on Congress’ budget committees.

      • Richard Malcolm says:
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        NASA has changed from risk utilizing to risk averse.

        Certainly in its human spaceflight program, at any rate.

    • Richard Malcolm says:
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      Well said, Vlad.

  2. Bob Mahoney says:
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    Well put, Keith. And V’s comment nicely reinforces it. SLS in theory is a shuttle-derived HLLV. On a power point slide it superficially made sense to use the most of what we had already developed. But it’s 35 years too late, and the specific implementation–including all-one-shot hardware–only makes it less sensible. Perhaps if we had invested in evolving shuttle with flyback liquid boosters, etc, over the years as so many proposals suggested…an SLS would have made even more sense.

    But that’s the alternate history that never happened. The technical path and the primary govt-funded jobs path diverged long ago, and here we are.

  3. Bad Horse says:
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    The problem with SLS is leadership and accountability. SLS provides no new technology, introduces no new capability for the commercial launch vehicle market and is a drain on government funding that could be used for crewed exploration. NASA needs to stop following the Apollo model.
    Its 2021 not 1960 or 1969. NASA should be directed by congress to only buy rides. Help industry, don’t compete with it. NASA no longer has the capability to lead, design or build a launch vehicle. Why should it? 50+ years after Apollo 11 the capability is with industry. Just as it should be!

  4. Nick K says:
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    Something not to be lost sight of is the competition from NASA itself. 60+ years ago NASA conducted research, wrote up the research, and supported commercial companies in support of American competitiveness. NASA tried for a short time to design and build their own spaceships and rockets but quickly found that they could not compete with US industry at the large scale. Then NASA turned to planning and integrating the missions and managing operations at the launch sites and in mission control. Successful efforts like the commercial Spacehab and more recently commercial cargo and crew showed that all of these functions could be done more expeditiously and far less expensively by commercial interests. No doubt NASA probably has a continuing role; NASA should decide on a continuing role, and stop trying to compete with industry in any functions industry is capable of performing.

    • Alan Ladwig says:
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      And one “continuing role” should be a focus on advanced and cutting edge technologies to help the commercial sector maintain an edge.

      • Bob Mahoney says:
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        Which echoes the now-perennial question: is it time to re-organize NASA along lines that make more sense for today? NACA was thus focused (per what Mr. Ladwig highlights) at its inception, but in time (surely by the 50s) its activities had begun oozing out of cracks in its initial edifice. The 1958 reorganization made expedient sense, but through NASA’s efforts (in parallel with industry) the landscape/ airscape/ spacescape have changed dramatically.

        (1) Do we need a National Space Exploration Agency to focus on the execution of solar system & beyond exploration? Must we, really, maintain a US govt Mission Control? Is it—really—the government’s business to conduct such exploration?

        (2) Do we need a National Advisory Committee on Astronautics (focused on Mr. Ladwig’s suggested role) alongside a reinstitution of the original NACA (aeronautics) focused on its original role?

        (3) Do we need a beefed-up NOAA to take over NASA’s contribution to Earth-focused planetary science & policy?

        I don’t know the answers and I’m rarely one to encourage the multiplication of government organizations, but I continue to ponder such options because far too often NASA’s organization/bureaucracy (to use, unfortunately, a sometimes pejorative term) seems to interfere with NASA executing its assigned tasks…as so often highlighted here on nasawatch.

        NASA derived a certain ‘freshness/enthusiasm/morale’ boost when it was created in 1958 on the foundation of the NACA. Could such a reorg today benefit similarly?

        • Nick K says:
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          I agree that a thorough and careful investigation is needed to formulate any reorganization. They need to be very careful about who they select to conduct the investigation because for the last 20 years in human space flight and exploration they have taken first astronauts (flight operations) and later mission control (mission operations) and placed them in charge of virtually every function. Now you have ‘scientists’ who came out of operations and who have no science background. Top level design engineers who have never designed anything except mission procedures. If you put the people in charge today in the role of investigator, planner or organizer, I am sure you will get a distinctly different answer than the one that is needed.

          • fcrary says:
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            “Now you have ‘scientists’ who came out of operations and who have no science background.”

            Could you name one such person? I can’t and I’m a planetary scientist who has spend the quarter century working closely with NASA missions. I’ve seen many scientists who are now basically managers, and very far from their original, scientific background. And many scientists who are now working on things pretty distant from what they worked on as graduate students. But I can’t think of a single NASA scientist with _no_ science background. Or any without a PhD in some field of science.

            I’m also unclear on why you make a distinction between science and operations. For scientific spacecraft, operations is all about getting the spacecraft and its instruments to make measurements. Which is an inherent part of scientific research. Your comment almost sounds like a claim that a person who collects samples in the field, to be analyzed by someone else in a laboratory, isn’t really a geologist. Just a Post hole Digger, rather than a PhD. That isn’t the case.

          • Nick K says:
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            The issues are in human space flight.

          • Bob Mahoney says:
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            You have sung this song before, but I’m not sure it is a pertinent sound track for this worthwhile recurring question. Workforce & resources allocation across the government—and to what tasks they ought be assigned in the first place—is a larger matter than your ‘Operations vs Design experience’ concern.

  5. Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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    In what upside world has SLS and Orion spurned commercial sector? While nasa is trying to do new things with the lunar payload services and lunar lander and their milestone driven procurement is far different than the bloated cost plus that has burned through billions over the last decade and a half. CLP, next step han and HLS give the companies freedom to meet the mission without a highly constrained build to print of the sls and Orion way