GAO: NASA Commercial Crew Program: Significant Work Remains to Begin Operational Missions to the Space Station
“NASA will have fewer astronauts on the ISS in 2020 unless the Boeing and SpaceX spacecraft are ready to fly missions, but significant work remains for both. NASA has few back-up options if delays continue and will have only one astronaut on the U.S. side by April 2020. Most of this astronaut’s time will be spent on maintenance activities rather than on research and development.
To fly as soon as possible, NASA has been planning to complete its reviews of the contractors’ systems under aggressive time frames. This approach is risky because it assumes the contractors will complete multiple activities on time. Boeing and SpaceX must conduct additional test flights, train astronauts, and get a license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
FAA licenses cover the contractors’ launch and reentry activities. FAA may grant waivers for changes to the license that do not jeopardize public safety. For example, FAA may grant waivers for changes in launch trajectory. NASA needs to know when such changes have been made in case they affect the crew. While NASA and FAA have coordinated on launch licensing for years, they have not yet decided how they will communicate about waivers. As a result, NASA may not have all the information it needs for launch decisions.”

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

15 replies on “GAO Cites Problems And Risks With NASA Commercial Crew Program”

  1. NASA facing crewed spaceflight schedule pressures is not a good thing.

    To remind folks…..this is from the CAIB report, post Columbia Accident investigation:

    … “despite all the post-Challenger changes at NASA and
    the agency’s notable achievements since, the causes of the institutional
    failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed”

    I wonder if the institutional failures responsible for Challenger/Columbia have been addressed/transformed. Lets hope so.

    1. If you look a little closer, and read between the lines, the CAIB report is even harsher on NASA’s institutional culture. Dr. Ride, who was on both the Rogers commission and the CAIB, was really appalled. She found a very polite way to say, “How f***ing stupid are you? The same idiotic decision making process, _twice_? And after we told you it was stupid?” Those are, of course, my words paraphrasing what I think she meant. The words she used were much more polite, but I think the intent was similar.

      I hope SpaceX will be different. An accident could kill the company, and they won’t have any bureaucracy to hide behind. So they have a real, vested interest in doing things right.

  2. What additional test flights? SpaceX DM2 is slated to have crew on board. Now Boeing is another matter, but SpaceX has successfully completed all of its flights. Sounds like NASA is moving the goal posts again.

    1. DM-2 is technically still a test flight and a prerequisite for beginning operational flights. Although on the surface it might seem like what’s the difference especially if the crew winds up staying for a longer duration on ISS like they are apparently considering. But I would think there are a lot of contractual differences between a test flight and an operational flight, not to mention a whole different set of paperwork involved since a test flight is satisfying different organizational requirements than an operational flight.

      And in theory there could be different repercussions if a problem is found during DM-2 that needs to be corrected before the next flight, compared to a similar problem being found on an operational flight. Again on the surface it would seem to be the same, as either way the problem needs to be fixed. But a problem on DM-2 would likely mean additional i’s to dot and t’s to cross before they can give the go-ahead for operational flights.

      1. Well hopefully NASA will be able to finish the analysis of the Max Q Abort test and sign off on SpaceX’s DM2. Then move on to the operational flights.

        As for Boeing, they need to get their act together and figure out how to prevent the problems they have had on both of their test flights (pad abort & DM1). Now given that history I could see NASA having them do over the DM1 so they at least get some hardware to the ISS before putting astronauts aboard.

      2. That’s technically correct, but also a bit disturbing. The whole idea that a vehicle can called “operational” after a couple of test flights is appalling. People complain about the 737 Max certification being inadequate. But two and a half flights, with only one carrying people? Even the Shuttle was better tested before being declared operational. Let’s not fool ourselves. Dragon 2 is an ordinary, routine ship. There will be accidents, and pretending otherwise will simply make those accidents hurt more.

    1. Don’t underestimate the challenge of mere “paperwork”. ?

      “We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”

      Dr. Wernher von Braun, 1958

    2. Only when the weight of the paper equals the weight of the launch vehicle and spacecraft can you fly!

      1. I recently heard a nasty statistic. Someone did the math and claimed that the cost of an SLS launch, converted into one dollar bills, weighs more than an SLS can launch into orbit.

          1. A dollar bill weighs exactly one gram. I know this because in my previous job we used an electronic scale that was accurate to 0.1 grams, which of course in some contexts is not that precise, but for most people they can’t easily comprehend even that level of accuracy. So what I used to do is toss a dollar bill (any denomination actually) onto the scale and it would always register as 1.0 grams. I would then explain that if we were to tear off a tenth of the bill it would weigh 0.1 grams. That usually got the point across.

            Now I don’t know the weight of a dollar bill beyond that precision, but using 1.0 grams, a million one dollar bills would in fact weigh 1,000 kg.

            Unrelated but I remember seeing a children’s book once titled “One million dots” or something like that, which as the title implies had a million dots spread over how ever many pages the book was. But it also had interesting tidbits along the way at certain numbers of dots to help visualize those amounts, like the number of miles to the Moon, that sort of thing. It’s actually pretty impressive when you visually see how much a million of something is.

          2. That’s one reason why many scientists actually don’t use millions and billions. It’s too hard to get your head around. I’m much more comfortable thinking of Jupiter as 5.2 times as far from the Sun than the Earth, not that it’s 777 million kilometers from the Sun. I think I’ve dragged a suitcase through about a Miranda radius worth of airport corridors. And saying JWST is going to cost about as much as 95 F-35 fighter aircraft probably gets the message across more clearly than saying $9.6 billion.

        2. That reminds me that when Reagan proposed the Space Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars), someone in the Bloom County comic strip proposed that they weave billions of one dollar bills into a big net that could be launched into space to catch incoming ICBMs.

      2. I’m afraid I just remembered another disturbing detail. The PI for one of the instruments on the Cassini mission had a photograph of a truck full of filing cabinets. They were filled with all the documentation and paperwork required for his instrument’s design reviews. It was easily an order of magnitude more mass and volume than the instrument itself.

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