Congress calls SpaceX Falcon 9 launch certification into question, Denver Post
“The June 28 explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station has members of Congress asking NASA and the U.S. Air Force for assurance that SpaceX is qualified to carry military payloads to space. A bipartisan group of 14 U.S. representatives sent a letter saying they have “serious reservations” about SpaceX’s internal investigation process and question whether the “engineering rigor applied will be sufficient to prevent future military launch mishaps.” “We are committed to our nation’s leadership in space, but equally believe we must be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars when it comes to achieving our priorities and goals for spaceflight,” reads the letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden and Air Force secretary Deborah James. The panel asked Bolden and James to outline the oversight responsibilities of NASA and the Air Force, however, some questions raised in the letter have already been addressed in other arenas. On May 28, SpaceX was certified by the Air Force to carry military payloads to space, offering competition to Centennial-based United Launch Alliance for the first time in more than a decade.”
Keith’s note: Clearly none of these politicians understand the process they are questioning. Why aren’t they questioning Orbital ATK’s internal review process? FAA already has oversight over both mishap investigations. So … are they wanting to create new regulations – or are they just ignorant of what regulations are already in place? In addition, SpaceX does its review in a much more rigorous fashion than might otherwise be the case because it is certified by the USAF – as would ULA if/when it loses a rocket. Let’s see if @ToryBruno calls B.S. on this – unless (of course) ULA is behind the letter, that is …

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...

40 replies on “Congressional Oversight or Congressional Ignorance?”

  2. I admit I am ignorant on this so feel free to comment on that ignorance but this does seem different. For example, when there was the OCO anomaly that investigation board was led by NASA and the report was released by NASA. In both cases, a rocket anomaly resulted in the loss of a spacecraft.

    It just struck me as odd that Musk announced the preliminary result, as opposed to someone in the FAA. Even if it were just for the sake of appearances, it would have been better to have waited until the final results are in and then have a press conference with representatives from the FAA. (And I would apply the same standard to Orbital and Antares)

    But, I suppose, in the end, if the root cause is the strut then who cares who led the investigation?

    1. I suspect the difference is in the nature of the contract. In the case of CRS-7, NASA was paying for a transportation service. Specifically the delivery of a certain payload to ISS. They were not, technically, paying for the rocket itself. The rocket and the work to get it onto orbit were a SpaceX responsibility.

      By analogy, if I send an expensive piece of equipment somewhere by FedEx, and the FedEx plane crashes, the accident investigation is up to FedEx and the FAA (well, NTSB). The fact that the plane was carrying my package wouldn’t mean I’d be involved in the investigation.

      OCO was launched under a different sort of contract, where NASA specifically paid for the rocket and the work to get it into orbit. I guess that’s more analogous to me chartering a plane to get cargo somewhere, although the analogy isn’t close to perfect.

  3. PS After reading the actual letter, I want to make it clear that I made my comment solely from wondering about the investigation process. That letter, signed by AL and CO Reps, is clearly dripping with politics. There’s no way that letter would have been written if it were a ULA rocket.

    1. Quite. Four of the 14 signatories, as noted in the Denver Post piece Keith linked, are from Colorado. Five are from Alabama. This is basically the ULA congressional delegation with the Alabama members also doing double duty as part of the SLS congressional delegation. Of the remaining five, one is from a Virginia District very near Wallops Island – part of the Orbital ATK congressional delegation. Another is from northern Utah – part of the Orbital ATK and SLS congressional delegations. A third is from a Washington district at the southern end of Puget Sound – part of both the Boeing and SLS congressional delegations. The remaining two are from districts in Oklahoma and Georgia that, so far as I know have no business interests into whose iron rice bowls SpaceX has elected to piss, but who knows?

      1. Thank you for this, I was going to go through the trouble of tracking down the districts, but I’m glad I checked the comments first. As always, if you want to understand a congresscritter’s position, just look at the jobs in their district.

      2. I don’t get the OK connection, either, but the LM PAC did give Cole (from OK) more money than others on the list for some reason.

        1. I’ll confess that I had some LockMart thoughts about the Georgia guy myself. I decided not to broach them in my initial comment because, looking at the guy’s district map, it’s on the opposite side of the whole Atlanta metroplex from the big LM plant in Marietta. I discounted the likelihood of very many of his constituents being employed there. But you have now demonstrated I might have been too charitable. I was a bit weary by that point and let matters stand with finding pretty clear anti-SpaceX motivations for 12 of the 14 signatories to the letter. Good job on indeed finding some LockMart fingerprints on the 13th guy.

      3. Just got back from a long (but not long enuff) vacation…

        Tom Cole has a boeing connection:
        Boeing to Transfer Jobs to Oklahoma City
        Sep 30, 2014 Issues: Military & Veterans

        Washington, D.C. – Congressman Tom Cole (OK-04) released the following statement after Boeing announced the planned transfer of approximately 900 engineering and defense-related jobs to its Oklahoma City facility near Tinker Air Force Base. These jobs are related to the company’s restructuring of its Boeing Defense, Space & Security Unit and will include work on the KC-46A Tanker.

        “I am pleased that Boeing recognizes the value and benefit of bringing jobs to Oklahoma,” said Cole. “The transfer of these jobs speaks strongly to our quality workforce and business environment, but it is also a credit to the state’s leadership capability and potential in the defense industry.”

        BTW – duheagle, I left town in the middle of a nice conversation on political realignment of country with the Southern Strategy. If we can fit it into some future topic somehow, I would like to continue the topic again. Lets watch for a mention of elections or similar in a blog post so it will stay at least in the topic neighborhood.

        1. And Yale S. does the digging and makes it an even 14 out of 14 signers with constituent pecuniary interests in scuppering SpaceX! Nicely played!

          As for the politics thing, I too am reluctant to just bust a partisan move on sites that aren’t, in the main, about politics. I do so as a response on space blogs/news sites only when some egregious bit of left-wingery is offered up and the Amen chorus chimes in.

          Even then, I tend to let a lot go by. Our host Keith, for example, is obviously of the opinion that (1) Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change is Holy Writ and (2) that all Republicans are Young Earth Creationists. If I bit back every time these memes came up, I’d get very little else done.

          It’s a pity Jeff Foust had to shut down his Space Politics blog when he took the job with Space News. Space Politics was the perfect place to have explicitly political backs-and-forths. I’m certainly open to suggestions on alternative venues.

          1. 1) It may not be Holy Writ (no room for supernatural stuff) but, in a scientific sense, it is real.
            2) Only a minority believe in a young earth, but most Republicans do believe that humans are less then 10k years old and are of supernatural origin!

            http://content.gallup.com/o…

            people from all parties do have creationist wings. better to say that republican politicians tend to pander more to various flavors of creationism..

            as to the political talk, that last extended conversation left many points hanging due to my vacation and i tend to really, really not like to leave things unanswered. there was much more to be said, but the blog post rolled into the black hole. BTW – since you conversed at length with me, then the implication is that I engaged in an ” egregious bit of left-wingery”.
            While I most certainly am a progressive (“left-winger”), it is a bit annoying to be considered as purveying egregious views.
            Egregious is now defined as “outstandingly and remarkably bad”, and other derogatory definitions.
            Now if you are using it in the original positive sense (pre-1550’s) from the Latin egregius meaning “illustrious”, then that’s another thing.

          2. ‘Egregious’ is also used in a playfully taunting manner, Yale. Hard to tell in a text-only environment.

            Thanks for those numbers on exactly who thinks we are supernaturally created. It’s telling.

          3. I think I was primed by his prior usage of Bull Connor and George Wallace as being democrats to try to make a point in an earlier discussion.

          4. Sorry to be away for awhile. Real life intrudes occasionally.

            No idea if you’ll ever see this, Yale, but here’s my take on Global Warming/Climate Change and Creationism:

            Climate change is certainly real. Both local climates and the overall planetary climate are in a constant state of flux with a near infinitude of drivers. Human activity does not appear to figure importantly among them.

            “Global Warming” – which I gather has now been consigned to the memory hole by the lords of political correctness – is of particularly dubious provenance. Certainly the simple-minded notion that rising atmospheric CO2 levels act as some kind of straightforward control knob for global average surface temperatures is belied by the near two-decade-long pause in the prior warming trend in which we now find ourselves. CO2 continues to rise but the world doesn’t get warmer.

            The climate models that say otherwise are wrong. All of these models assume that most of the predicted warming is to come from greater atmospheric concentrations of water vapor from evaporation triggered by rising CO2. Actual measurements, by satellites and otherwise, show this not to be happening. The increased CO2 is pretty definitely human-caused, but the rest of the formal Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis has been embarrassingly falsified.

            Earth gets warmer or colder for all sorts of reasons, but humans burning fossil fuels doesn’t appear to be among the important ones. Climate alarmists have, in essence, claimed to be able to tease a clear “signal” out of the very high general level of “background noise” in climate-related data and their claims haven’t stood up.

            Ditto for alleged ocean acidification and “hidden heat” in the ocean depths, alleged increases in extreme weather events, alleged melting of the polar ice caps, alleged collapses of the polar bear population, et-freaking-cetera. There isn’t a bit of truth to any of this.

            As to Creationism, the interesting thing is that 41% of Democrats join 58% of Republicans in believing humanity is of extremely recent – and divine – origin and less than one in five supposedly hardheaded Democrat rationalists believe in Godless Darwinism.

            The reason the numbers look like this is not hard to figure out. Republicans certainly count many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in their ranks, but, on a percentage basis, the Democrats do nearly as well.

            Essentially the entire U.S. black population, for example, is evangelical or fundamentalist. An increasing number of Hispanics are as well, but even the sizable majority of Hispanics who still hew to their ancestral Roman Catholicism are biblical literalists when it comes to evolution. Any Democrat who doubts this should simply chat up a high school biology teacher who plies his or her trade in a major metro area such as NYC or L.A.

            Asians, who also tend to be more Democratic than Republican, have quite a variety of religious backgrounds, but none of these is particularly fertile ground upon which to germinate a belief in Darwin’s magnum opus.

            It is the well-educated and atheistic in both parties that constitute most of the unalloyed believers in evolution. Contrary to widespread left-wing belief, Democrats are not, on average, better educated than Republicans, but more of them are atheists. Even among Democrats, atheism is a decidedly minority view, though it is normative among elite Democrats in media and academe.

            Just for the record, I am both an atheist and a believer in evolution, though I am also a conservative Republican. That makes me, statistically, a rare bird, but only modestly rarer than my left-wing opposite numbers.

            Simply because a larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats believes in either soft- or hard-core creationism, though, is hardly dispositive of the question as to which party is the more rational or scientifically-minded. Consider:

            Despite leading in percentage of those who at least pay lip service to belief in evolution, for instance, there appear to be far fewer Democrats who believe in the actual effects of evolution, especially on human beings.

            Many Democrats reject the notion that racial and ethnic groups vary in their average intelligence quotients, for example, despite abundant peer-reviewed scientific studies that demonstrate otherwise. Further, there are many Democrats who believe this whole area of scientific inquiry is illegitimate and even evil. To the modern Left, it seems, there are, indeed, Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

            Continuing in this vein, it is a bedrock principle of left-feminism that gender roles are socially determined and that there is no important difference between male and female brains. Again, there is abundant peer-reviewed science that says otherwise and none that backs up this exclusively left-wing belief.

            I could go on for days citing additional examples of how the self-described “reality-based community” is, on the contrary, a noisome slough of superstitious nonsense.

    2. “Boeing said it will make Oklahoma City its headquarters for aircraft modernization. The latest project will be the third in Boeing’s local “campus” and be home to employees in engineering, research and development and support staff.

      In exchange for millions of dollars in state economic incentives (and $6 million in job creation incentives from the city), Boeing plans an expansion that’s estimated to have an economic impact of nearly $638 million, with jobs paying an average of $90,000 per year.”

  5. I THINK AL AND CO Reps clearly out to attack SpaceX discredit them convince NASA and AIR FORCE to decertify them from launching there payloads and satellites. Protect ULA monopoly with NASA and AIR FORCE launching payloads and satellites.

  6. Tory Bruno from ULA could have said I disavow any involvement in writing A bipartisan group of 14 U.S. representatives sent a letter saying
    they have “serious reservations” about SpaceX’s internal investigation
    process and question whether the “engineering rigor applied will be
    sufficient to prevent future military launch mishaps.” Made clear his view on SpaceX Falcon 9 CRS-7 Launch failure.

    1. Bruno is a stand-up guy as his many comments and tweets have shown. He’s taken exactly the correct posture on this.

      Besides, he’s having too much fun watching the carnage!

      1. I have to disagree with that. My experience is that Bruno is a master of shading and distortion, but with a boyish sincere grin on his face. (for example, see his cloud of BS relating to ULA launch costs) After shaking hands with him, I would count my fingers.

        1. Point taken, Yale. The guy is charming and a forceful advocate for his company. I expect no less, even though I disagree with him.

          1. I find him quite entertaining, but he must be in total ulcer mode. ULA is in screaming free-fall and tap-dancing won’t save it.
            I would not want his job.
            I wish him the best of luck in helping keep multiple US launch companies alive, but I suspect that Boeing and LM are going to pull the plug on ULA in 3 or 4 years

          2. I did see that he has sold an atlas v launch to echostar (dish neteork). Congrats on that. I wonder what the terms were?

  7. Something fun to do a Friday afternoon:

    1. Go here for the Lockheed Martin Employees Political Action Committee: http://www.fec.gov/fecviewe…
    2. Select “Contributions to Committees”
    3. Download the CSV file.
    4. Search for the Representatives on the letter.

    Coffman: $1K
    Forbes: $7K
    Aderholt: $1K
    Bishop: $2K
    Cole: $6K
    etc.

    Yeah, shocking, right? But it does make me wonder how much it works out by the hour for a letter like this! (BTW, Tory Bruno is not one of the contributors to the PAC according to the records.)

  8. In the movie the Matrix, Neo learns of the illusion that the Matrix is, and cost, the toll, it has on humanity. The Mr. Smith Character does not want Neo to see what’s really going on, and is designed to protect the illusion/status quo of the Matrix.

    Space X is Neo. ULA (and the letter) is Mr. Smith attempting to stop LEO.

    It is indeed dangerous to ‘step outside the box’, ‘step outside the Matrix’, as Space X is finding out. The world has plenty of Mr. Smiths in it.

  10. If they are professional the DOD will verify that the problem is corrected but will NOT delay certification. Having competing providers (not simply alternative vehicles) will be a major positive change.

  11. Actually happy to report that I got to answer the first “Coming to Jesus” moment with SLS. A congressman from Illinois asked me why SLS is starting to slow down?

    I had to take him back to 2006 and CxP but walked him through it all. His face said it all. Showing him things like this:

    http://www.nasa.gov/sites/d…

    Made him think. It is all we can do – make them think. Everyone knows its the SLS Titanic. 2015 is the first crunch year – wait til 2016 – hell – how is Michoud doing lately? Hey, don’t blame me… #justaskin

    1. how is Michoud doing lately?

      Still trying to fix that big-ass welding machine that was built out of alignment the last I heard.

  12. “FAA already has oversight over both mishap investigations. So … are they wanting to create new regulations – “

    No indication that they are. FAA has regulatory authority over whether or not the rocket is allowed to fly. That does not seem to be what this letter is about. The Air Force and NASA still have oversight responsibility to assure that they are making responsible procurements of launch services for their respective missions. This letter is clearly a request to expound on the latter with respect to the CRS-7 investigation. Whatever else one may read into it, this letter does not constitute an attempt to alter regulatory authority.

    1. so if a NASA employee dies in a accident involving a Ford Pickup truck does NASA still have oversight responsibility to assure that they are making responsible procurements of automobile services for their respective activities?

      1. I have wondered how many nasa employees have lost their lives driving to and from work and wondered why they haven’t been called hero’s.

  13. Trump made his billions in real estate development, a notoriously corrupt business, and he did it in NYC, one of most notoriously corrupt cities in the United States.

    So I’m going to say, “No.”

    1. I’ve been working in the real estate development business as a consultant at the highest levels and I have never ever seen or heard of corruption. I take issue with your characterization. My experience is limited to the counties of southern and central Florida, but projects have been as large as 30,000 acres.

      Development is high risk, requiring large amounts of capital. And as a capitalist, judging from your pervious comments, you’d know that.

Comments are closed.