NASA chief: Apollo engineers who criticize SLS don’t grok modern rocketry, Ars Technica
“Bolden then reiterated that Kraft knew more than him about rockets, but he again qualified this praise: “I have the advantage of a team around me that he didn’t have,” he said. “You have to remember. Most of us forget. I have a very mature leadership team. When Dr. Kraft was in mission control, and when he led the Johnson Space Center, we went to the Moon. Most of the people were 20 years old. They didn’t know anything.”
Keith’s note: Charlie Bolden clearly misses the irony within his insulting characterization about the younger NASA that sent humans to the Moon. If Bolden serves out the end of the current Administration’s term he’ll have been Administrator for 7 1/2 years – virtually the same distance between Mercury 3 and Apollo 11.
Orion has flown once – without a crew. SLS has yet to fly and its schedule often slips to the right faster than actual progress is made. Humans may finally fly on it in 2023 some 19 years after the Bush Administration originally initiated a return by American astronauts to the surface of the Moon. In the 1960s NASA went from zero human spaceflight capability to putting humans on the surface of the Moon in less than half that time.
I’ll bet some of those 20 year old kids could teach Charlie Bolden and his “very mature leadership team” a thing or two.
To paraphrase Gen. George S. Patton; These pencil-pushing idiots like Bolden know about as much about flying as they do about [deleted]
It makes me absolutely sick that the most aggressive risk taking country the world has ever known since antiquity has become this bureaucratic [deleted] hopper. On all fronts.
Call Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I’m serious. He’s my next NASA administrator if I am the Next President of the United States.
Just wondering if you’ve ever met the man personally (Tyson, not Patton).
I have not had the honor, but I am well read on the man and his lectures through the gift of YouTube, PBS and Cosmos.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an awesome public face for science, but I would not want him managing NASA.
I respect your opinion. May I ask why?
I respect him for what he is, which is an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium. But I quite simply do not think that qualifies him to become NASA Administrator. Much of what NASA does is engineering, not science.
Fair enough. Thank you.
You know that Bolden was a Marine pilot who flew A6’s in Vietnam? And a Space Shuttle pilot and commander?
And that’s your preference? You really are an idiot.
I am well aware of Charlie Bolden’s qualifications as a veteran and astronaut. I respect that. But in terms of inspiring the public and public visibility, he is nothing more than a pencil-pushing bureaucrat. Perception is reality. He has no vision. He can’t even definitively tell you when SLS is going to become Man-Rated, if ever!
Would you have objected to Carl Sagan as Administrator of NASA? Because that’s who NGT is to millennials. He is their Carl Sagan. No Bucks, No Buck Rogers. You want astronauts back on the Moon and on to Mars within the next ten years? You hire someone who can inspire the imagination and make the average person understand why it is imperative, *imperative* that America and NASA is going back to the Moon to stay, going to Mars to stay, and reaching for the frontiers that await around Jupiter and Saturn and beyond.
You can have the greatest astronaut, the greatest humanitarian, the greatest scientist that ever lived running NASA, but if you can’t get congress and the American taxpayer to *commit* to space, you’re worthless.
NGT may not be the best administrator, but he can sure as Hell tell you why a penny on every Tax Dollar needs to go to NASA. Like the poet said; No Bucks, No Buck Rogers.
When I read your thread I knew we were in for some fireworks (name calling by responders doesn’t work for me). When you asked why not Tyson I started to think about it, and when you talked about millennial I was going to your side.
I’m not sure. While you could be right about Dr. Tyson’s popularity among younger people my own “read”” is that there’s width in that river but no real depth; and there have been a string of unfortunate tweets documenting poor comprehension science outside his field- evolution, for instance, an admittedly nuanced field, but still.
The NASA Administrator is a very tough job that can’t be filled necessarily by astronauts. It’s basically a management/ political job. I can’t see how star power will improve NASA. The agency has the money it needs; there is much to be learned by looking at what the private sector has done with much much less money (and I am not discounting the arenas in which NASA continues to stun, particularly planetary science).
Why do you want some who is so hostile to space commerce? First thing he would do is cut CCP and double up on funding on SLS. He’s part of the problem with this generation of space experts, not the solution.
If you really want to fix NASA put Lori Graver in as Administrator and make Peter Worden her second in command. The fur would fly but the NASA that emerges would be functional again.
Yep. I forgot about his hostility to commercial space.
I’ve long admired Ms. Garver, but why would she would leave what has to be a well-paid job for <$200k at NASA?
The answer is: because she can, because it’s NASA, because it’s there, because she’s long frustrated, because she wants to make a difference. But still.
CCP depends on Government Subsidies, does it not? Henry Ford did not build the Model T and invent the assembly line because Washington thought he was too big to fail. My point is if Space X, Blue Origin, Virgin are good enough, they’ll build a better spacecraft that’s commercially viable. Boeing is not going anywhere. They invented the B-52 and the 747, I think they can build a man-rated Spacecraft. NASA’s focus should be on advancing frontiers and blazing trails for commercial ventures to follow. They’ve done that with LEO, Satellites and Lunar Missions. Even Mars to a lesser extent. NGT has a vision for NASA and knows exactly why it exists. Now, you can put anybody else in that job other than NGT that you like, but first and foremost that person must have NGT’s ability to have the vision, inspiration and ability to effectively communicate and sell the White House, Congress and the American People on that vision.
Why would a famous person take on a job in which he is nearly sure to fail?
Dr. Tyson has a BA from Harvard, an MA From Texas and another from Columbia, where he also earned his doctorate in Astrophysics. He’s also the greatest ambassador of Space exploration and NASA since Carl Sagan and Gene Roddenberry. I’d give him a puncher’s chance of succeeding.
I believe Kraft was quite accurate in his assessment of SLS. The design incorporates elements that make its overall operating cost too high to allow a meaningful exploration program to be flown with this vehicle within the expected budget. These design elements include:
1. The large segmented solid fuel boosters; Shuttle experience demonstrates that they require expensive and hazardous operations to manufacture, ship, assemble and process, and create risks which cannot be easily mitigated.
2. The requirement, dictated by the massive weight of the SRBs, to utilize the VAB, MLPs, and crawlers, which despite modifications are many decades old and have high overhead and maintenance costs.
3. The LH2-fueled core stage, which requires larger fuel tanks and larger engines than RP-1 or methane. Hydrogen has an excellent Isp and has an advantage for upper stages, but this is of little benefit if it is burned at low altitudes where thrust, not Isp, is the limiting resource.
4. The decision to continue to utilize the RS-25, a relatively expensive engine designed for extensive reuse, in an expendable application.
5. The absence of commercial customers to spread the development cost, at least in part dictated by the extreme size of SLS.
6. The weight of the Orion capsule was permitted to increase to a value which exceeded the capacity of the originally planned airbags, making it impossible to recover the spacecraft on land.
Nice rundown, to which other issues could be added.
Sadly, SLS and FH, while apparently comparable, really are not the same thing, although they can loft similar mass. As you point out, SLS took the worst of our experience, while FH developed the best, including a new paradigm (reusability).
More to the point though are the $$ to orbit.
I have to dispute point 6. Orion started out even larger and heavier. Its diameter was reduced 3 times during the course of the design process. The program manager knew, at the outset, that it was overweight and that “new technology” would be required to bring the mass within limits. He was waiting for a miracle which never appeared. That is not the way to design a spacecraft. You are supposed to start out with accurately estimated values, plus maintain a reserve for growth. In Orion’s case they were working the other way.-very poor management process, the result of inexperience and immaturity.
0. VSE goal of reuse, Mars, Space Challenges ignored in the design=>Orion can’t reach asteroid, even on SLS.
The capsule was ~9.3mT in ESAS and with the 3 diameter changes increased ~1mt to ~10.3mT.
The issue was that the ESAS LAS mass increased from the incorrectly stated 4.3mT to about 10mT when the ‘shutdown’ of SRMs was included in the calculation. Congress and parts of NASA knew in 2005 that 25mT Ares I could not loft Orion+10mT LAS + SM=29 mT.
And no one would loft a 10mT + 10mT LAS on a 100mT LV with solids, especially at 2B+/launch. Oops, Congress supports SLS/Orion, the elephants in the room. Apparently truth in testimony is optional.
So the requirement for an SRB cascaded into a very large LAS that caused the vehicle mass to exceed ARES-1 capability. IIRC this was not considered in the ESAS comparison between the Ares and the (then) primary alternative, the Delta IV Heavy. Of course when the Delta IV launched the Orion it did not have the ~15MT service module, but it did have the 10.3MT LAS, which maybe it didn’t need.
Then administrator Griffin had a “vision” for a launch architecture which included both Ares I and Ares V even before he became NASA Administrator. Sometimes “vision” is a bad thing.
True and true but I would point out that the diameter of Saturn was increased three times during design development as the upper stages came to final form.
The Orion team has designed and are building a fabulous system. The fact that is’t splashdown is fatal, though, and it’s just a hell of a shame, plain and simple.
When the Apollo and Saturn configurations were being defined, Manned Spacecraft Center said that Apollo would weigh 60000 pounds but that they would carry a margin of another 20000 pounds. Von Braun said he would therefore design a system with a 100000 pound capacity.
Orion, we must remember was being designed at the outset not only for land landing using a deployable heatshield and for reuasability, but also to carry a crew of no less than 7 (anticipated ISS crew size). Along with doing away with land landings and reusability they had to strip the internal capacity and they will carry a crew of 4 or less.
While it might be a shame, it comes back to poor management.
Griffin didn’t want the new capsule flying on EELVs. The mandate that it be so large came from the very top in order to justify the existence of Ares I.
A good point.
So what you are saying is that the characteristics of the Orion were politically dictated-not technically; which I guess comes back to the point that the mature technical experts that Bolden relies on mainly have political experience-not technical.
Personally I do not accept this excuse. We train and hire the engineer/technical specialists for their technical expertise. If they were being given political dictates, they should have been willing to tell engineering truth to power. They apparently didn’t (actually I know of one who did and who was summarily dismissed and sent back to the ISS program from Constellation.
Fact was the estimates were so poor all around, with both the capacity of Ares-1 and the mass of Orion being so far off, that it may have doomed the entire NASA HSF program.
The whole “Direct” movement online was a very public, online response to the Ares I plus Ares V insanity. The problem really wasn’t with the engineers. The problem was the many layers of management between the engineers and Mike Griffin. When the “big boss” makes a decision, middle management follows it, or they suffer the consequences.
Does he really believe these things he is saying? Where is “Rocket Boy” now? The fairly tale blog about Griffen characterized as the emperor with no clothes would also be relevant now. Does Bolden really believe this? Is he actually unaware that his Foustian “deal” with the devil (the Senate) is going to successfully move is off the planet? Von Braun was MSFC director back then and now we have the guy who directed a $2B a year rocket program that will take 10 years to fly once and another 5 for a second!
Great points and thanks for reaching back into history- one of my favorites. There is a lot to learn about the history of NASA, a lot more than “If we can put a man on the moon…”
I can’t over-recommend http://www.spacerockethistory.com and the associated podcasts enough. Great perspective. He’s up to 150± weekly podcasts now.
“I’ll bet some of those 20 year old kids could teach Charlie Bolden and his “very mature leadership team” a thing or two.”
Maybe, but they’d need to leave SpaceX first.
NASA has become the place where our space programs go to die.
As an aside, I have to wonder why they just don’t go back to the Saturn V. My eye was caught by this number:
“The Saturn V could carry 300,000 pounds, far more than even the Falcon Heavy is scheduled to carry, for about $6,500 per pound of payload, in 2016 dollars, according to a CBO report. “
$6.5K is pretty good. What’s wrong with that? (Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/Sc…
For Saturn V, the payload to LEO was estimated at 261,000 pounds. As for cost, that all depends on how you account for its costs. But, according to Wikipedia, cost per launch was $185 million in ’69 to ’71 dollars, which is about $1.1 billion per launch in 2016 dollars (according to http://www.usinflationcalcu…. So that works out to a cost per pound to LEO of about $4200.
Falcon Heavy is supposed to put 117,000 lb to LEO at a cost of something like $90 million (according to their website), which is about $800 per pound to LEO, so Falcon Heavy should win *big* over Saturn V by the metric of cost per lb to LEO.
Bolden’s “very mature leadership team” are mature because they have been on the government dole for a long time; not because they have any serious experience or accomplishments. .
I feel as you probably do that NASA is management heavy (and I am no expert). But to decrement the efforts of these employees is to miss the mark. It’s the boss that deserves the scorn, and the boss ultimately is in the mirror.
(on the other hand I do interact with County employees all the time and they irritate the hell out of me, so there’s that).
I do not say this lightly. Where I am coming from is that I see lots of managers put in positions of authority-authority over funding, authority over other personnel, authority over contracts, authority over products, most of whom have never actually had a hand in the kind of work they now are responsible for managing. I also see a lot of people who have the appropriate experience and who should have been placed in the leadership positions, and who have (1) never been sought by the senior management for the pertinent positions and (2) they are not given the jobs even if they are open to applications. Most of these people, and we are talking top echelon managers, have no idea what and whom they do not know.
For instance, lets consider one narrow area; between the ISS program and commercial crew and commercial cargo and commercial payloads, you will hear incessantly from the current management that this is new and we are just now learning how to do it and its something NASA has never done before; none of this is true. It is true for the individuals they have put in charge of these projects – these ;leaders can hardly lead because they are oblivious to what has been done in the past, So those people are learning on the job. But for those who worked commercial programs leading up to Shuttle, on Shuttle, on commercial launch systems, NASA Commercial Development Centers, etc, commercial space has been developing for 40 years. There were dozens of people available to come in and move these areas rapidly along. If the associate admnistrators or program managers had bothered to look for the experience they would have found it. Instead that mature senior leadership Bolden refers to put their buddies in charge and so neither his senior leaders or managers are in much of a position to advise about anything.
These new and inexperienced people start the learning process all over again. That is great-in ten or fifteen years perhaps NASA will have regained the experience they’ve now trashed. In the meantime NASA has a lot of people on the job who’s direct pertinent experience is not used. NASA’s senior managers are the poorest, most ineffective bunch I have ever seen.
Commercialization is one narrow area I used as an example. You can look at the same thing in development of individual systems, requirements management, payload integration, international programs…. a variety of areas. The idea that any astronaut who is a friend of Charlie’s can be brought in to lead an area they’ve never worked in, makes for a very inefficient and ineffective organization.
By comparison with the Apollo generation, George Mueller when he was brought in to lead the nation to the moon went out of his way, to the Secretary of Defense, and to different companies and different agencies looking for appropriate experience in the key areas. He got many of the top Apollo managers in this way. So Bolden’s idea that the current program has senior experienced managers guiding NASA, while the Apollo generation had only no-nothing 20 year olds, is totally false. Bolden himself and many in his top levels of command have been responsible for the lack of senior experienced leadership. By comparison, the Apollo generations had decades of directly pertinent experience in very analogous positions.
But you see, in today’s NASA there’s no urgency to accomplish things, no driving commitment to meet a specific deadline.
It’s just a bureaucracy moving at its own pace, one that “maintains an even strain” (if that), and it will continue thus so long as there are senior employees moving toward retirement. It will get things done, but if you’re in a hurry — forget it.
Thus, always and forever, world without end.
Completing a core program is a high risk event. What if you don’t sell the follow-on? Safer not to finish the one you are on.
In my business land developers come to me when they are looking at a piece of raw land. They ask me to prepare density studies, sometimes actual layouts (lots, lakes, golf courses, the usual).
More often (very much more often) than not these are never built. From my perspective this is not entirely bad as not only do I get paid, but any mistakes or judgement errors made by me or my team are- well, buried.
What a country.
A lot of people, including apparently Charlie Bolden, take this 20 year old thing seriously.
Take a look at some of the managers of Apollo in the 1960s. Reading from “Doing the Impossible”, the biography of George Mueller. Mueller himself was mid-40s to early 50s during Apollo, with 30 years R&D and engineering experience and a PhD. Von Braun, who led the Saturn Program, was older, 50s to early 60s, during Apollo, also a PhD, and many of his ‘Germans’, most also managers, were even older, all with 35+ years experience in system development and management.
Robert Gilruth, 50-60 yrs old with 35 years experience and a masters in aeronautical engineering with considerable R&D and management experience. Chris Kraft, who was one of the younger managers in operations, was 38 yrs old and 20 years experience.
So they were hiring a lot of 20+ year olds out of college, but those were the working level. This idea that Bolden espouses about none of the people leading Apollo having any experience-Bolden needs to get some schooling because he obviously has little knowledge of the real situation.
If Bolden wanted to do his program some good, he would take a close look at how his senior managers have actually been selected. I am quite sure he would find that most were placed due to friendships, particularly amongst those in the astronaut corp-Bolden himself is routinely guilty of this and flight control. Applicable experience has had just about nothing to do with job placement of top managers. In a bureaucracy that is called cronyism.
Now, you want to know why we are on a mission to Mars that has no plan, no serious goal, no defined system? Bolden’s very mature leadership team is just about useless.
One thing about the Mercury – Apollo NASA: during Gemini/Apollo how many Deputy Division Chiefs did they have? How many deputies did they have for various levels of the organization? How many Special Assistants? I would guess few if any. The NASA (and many large organizations) have many more people working on “studies” and management initiatives and review panels and all sorts of activity that do not directly contribute to the goals of the organization. Some of this is appropriate but large organizations will always get clogged with non-productive people.
It would be interesting to see how efficient the organization is – comparing SpaceX and NASA.
Actually, Charles, I think if you take a look at the org charts you’ll see more, not fewer managers, In addition to the current directorates, division and branches, there were sections that were largely done away with in the 1980s and 90s.
While you are right that there were a lot of studies ongoing, this was a key part of the maturing of the engineer/technologists; the neophytes were usually assigned to work on studies to learn the organization, guiding documentation, and system requirements and dependencies. Often these studies focused on advanced future programs.
So while you are thinking this has something to do with efficiency, fact was that the technical staff had significant technical training. By comparison, today most of the technical staff have been trained to do nothing more than have some level of contract oversight.
After an apprenticeship, the technologists would be put into project management for ongoing real hardware development.
Only if they completed those two stages were they eligible to compete for technical project management or to move into organizational program management positions.
A significant difference was that the technical organization worked technically to support the programs.
Beginning with Shuttle, prior to 1988, and continuing with Station prior to 1993, the technical organizations technically managed the design and development of the program subsystems. At that time you did not make a transition into the program office unless and until you had several years of technical experience in the technical organizations. After 86 in shuttle and after 93 in Station, the programs tried to take over the technical “management” using people who had little to no technical experience. they thought they would be able to more closely control costs and schedules. They did not succeed. Shuttle became more expensive to operate and Station missed its launch milestones by five or more years and by tens of billions of dollars. Those changes left NASA human space flight with a lot of inexperience.
If you look at virtually any manager in place in human space flight today, you will find almost none have ever been involved in hands-on technical management of anything.
So Bolden’s comment about depending upon mature and experienced management-experienced at what?
Littrow I have worked on JSC (in MOD, Space Station Program Ofc, etc) – when I worked in MOD in the early 1980s we had Section Heads but they all did both management and technical work. The idea of “flattening” an organization is a good one but some managers can also contribute technically.
And how many “Deputies” were there in the (for instance) Gemini days? I was not there.
Following this discussion by those actually working at the Agency, I am reminded that jobs often appear easier than they are. In fact, modern psychology notes that the less a person knows about a process the easier a person thinks that process really is. Called Dunning-Kruger it’s easily observed once you know what to look for. It’s why movies where the flight attendant lands the 747 while talked down from the ground seems believable. It isn’t.
A current candidate with Presidential ambitions loves to shout that “they just don’t know what they are doing!”, referring to American leadership. It’s a fine example of the DK effect and obviously not true.
Similarly, I wonder if I could run NASA? Why not? I’m smart and I love me some rockets!! why, I’d get me some smart people to give me advice and I’d make executive decisions.
Or, we could just let the smart people do the job.
How would you measure efficiency of the organization? Pounds to orbit/annum vs cost/annum? I’m not certain whether numbers of NASA civil servants would play a role in calculating this number since the numbers of civil servants and their costs (salaries) are pretty small by comparison with the contract costs.