OIG Report on NASA's Journey To Nowhere
NASA OIG: NASA’s Plans for Human Exploration Beyond Low Earth Orbit
“NASA’s initial exploration missions on its Journey to Mars – EM-1 and EM-2 – face multiple cost and technical challenges that likely will affect their planned launch dates. Moreover, although the Agency’s combined investment for development of the SLS, Orion, and GSDO programs will reach approximately $23 billion by the end of fiscal year 2018, the programs’ average monetary reserves for the years leading up to EM-1 are much lower than the 10 to 30 percent recommended by Marshall Space Flight Center guidance. Low monetary reserves limit the programs’ flexibility to cover increased costs or delays resulting from unexpected design complexity, incomplete requirements, or technology uncertainties. Moreover, software development and verification efforts for all three programs are behind schedule to meet a November 2018 EM-1 launch. Finally, NASA does not have a life-cycle cost estimate or integrated schedule for EM-2, which makes it difficult for Agency officials and external stakeholders to understand the full costs of EM-2 or gauge the validity of launch date assumptions.”
I think the title says it all. In the wake of the Columbia accident, without strategizing at all, NASA managers decided they were wasting time in Earth orbit, because they were not accomplishing anything there, and instead they need their mission operations pals working on real missions to go somewhere. Their goal became to go somewhere. Really anywhere would do; they were not choosy. Moon…Mars…asteroid..whatever. They had no end goal in mind, they simply wanted to fly exciting missions. In hand at the time they had some tremendous capabilities: a heavy lift vehicle which could relatively easily be modified for tasks beyond Shuttle; elements of a long duration system that might have carried people to planetary distances; an experienced workforce. NASA managers chose not to use any of these assets. They decided to reinvent the proverbial wheel with Apollo revisited-actually they called it Apollo on steroids. Only problem was they did not have the budget to re-establish or to refly Apollo, and they forgot that in the end Apollo was not sustainable and was not supported. So where are we today? No manned launch capability; no heavy lift capability for at least another half decade. No manned spacecraft for at least half a decade. Still no goal, but then that was not an issue, because after all, they simply wanted to fly and to go somewhere. So the idea that the IG is complaining that they are spending a lot of money and they have inadequate reserves; no need to worry IG. If anyone from NASA is going to go anyplace they will probably be riding in a Space-X or Boeing spaceship.
“No reserves”- I think what Mr. Armstrong say is pretty true. However, in a sense, the reserves have become the Orion and the SLS. There are other vehicles closer to flight. If Space-X gets the manned Dragon flying in a year or two, and especially if the Boeing Starliner and Sierra Nevada Dreamchaser fly, then Orion is not needed at all. If Space-X proves reusability (and they are well on their way to it), then all other launch vehicle strategies are archaic and obsolete. Maybe we will need a big heavy lifter, but SLS would require a major redesign. Any way you look at it, is NASA efficiently spending the taxpayers’ dollars?
As stated, “they were not accomplishing anything there,” and “their goal became to go somewhere. Really anywhere would do; they were not choosy,” and “they had no end goal in mind,” has not changed and will most likely not change anytime soon. And because of this, anything that they decide to do will be completely unsustainable, expensive and short lived. A continuation of the “ONE OFF” space program we have always had, with no discernible growth or answer to the question of WHY do anything. I think I wrote a paper about this a couple years ago. Oh well.
Your quick summary is leaving out at least one very important historical/political detail: ‘NASA managers’ didn’t do the deciding; they were instructed by the White House to terminate STS (and ISS a few years later) and head outward, first to the Moon (so as to be able to exploit its resources & use it as a testbed) and then beyond, eventually to Mars. And while it is true that NASA’s eventual response became the too-expensive disposable-hardware grossly inelegant Apollo on Steroids scheme, NASA’s initial response to the WH’s original vision didn’t start out that way. SOMEBODY arrived and made some changes.
It was not quite as simple as you say. The Administration said they would keep STS flying at least until ISS was completed and that it would not be shut down until a replacement was ready. Initially the idea was for a replacement Shuttle, probably a winged flying vehicle, probably a mini-Shuttle. There was considerable furor when NASA began to take steps to shut STS down when no replacement was on the horizon and many of us began a campaign going to NASA management as well as to leading Congressional representatives to defer the shut down. NASA was taking steps to shut down Shuttle because they wanted a new vehicle, and a new effort and because their contractors were pushing for a new program for new funding to a new set of companies. NASA managers were fully in league with the Shuttle shut down effort. While many said to fix the Shuttle and at the least, use the Shuttle and its manpower as the basis for a new launch vehicle like Shuttle C, I fully believe one technical reason the NASA managers wanted to do away with Shuttle was because of NIH-they had not had a role in designing or bullding Shuttle-that was a prior generation; the current managers were afraid of Shuttle and were afraid they might not be able to make it safer. The generation that had designed and built Shuttle, at the same time said that it would be a lot easier and less expensive to modify an already existing vehicle. Initially, under O’Keefe, there were architecture teams looking at what direction the program ought to go, but when Griffith came in, that all went by the wayside as did the idea of a Shuttle replacement, and instead they went in the direction of reestablishing Apollo. I think a lot of this also has to do with the fact that by this time, operations, that is, Flight Operations-Astronauts, and Mission Operations-Flight Director, had taken over the program, and they were afraid because none of them had ever designed or built anything. Engineering management had been marginalized to have little role in managing the program. The operations types all wanted to head off on new adventures. I liken it to the 1920s in aviation. There were the barnstormers, who mainly wanted to put on a good show and gain fame, and there were the industry tycoons who wanted to develop a new industry: aviation and airlines. The crowd managing NASA and human space flight were of the former variety-a bunch of barnstormers who were looking for immediate excitement and personal gain and not for long term industry growth.
I was actually impressed by this report. Is OIG reading NASAWatch?
The report places a heavy emphasis on the need to control costs and make greater use of commercial providers in BEO plans. Here’s part of the summary:
“To increase the fidelity, accountability, and transparency of NASA’s human exploration goals beyond low Earth orbit, we recommended the Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations (1) complete an integrated master schedule for the SLS, Orion, and GSDO programs for the EM-2 mission; (2) establish more rigorous cost and schedule estimates for the SLS and associated GSDO infrastructure for EM-2; (3) establish objectives, need-by dates for key systems, and phase transition mission dates to flesh out its Journey to Mars framework; and (4) include cost as a factor in NASA’s Journey to Mars feasibility studies when assessing various potential missions and systems. To improve cost savings efforts, we recommended the Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations (5) design a strategy for collaborating with international space agencies in their cislunar space exploration efforts with a focus on advancing key systems and capabilities needed for Mars exploration, and (6) incorporate into analyses of space flight system architectures the potential for utilization of private launch vehicles for transportation of payloads.”
Well, jeepers! One would think that those items – at least #1 – would have been part of the rationale for SLS so many moons ago.
Reading the rest of it, and the enumerations you cite here, I’m either laughing out loud or, given the date, crying in my beer.
Item 6 could be the most important. A direct comparison between SLS and “commercial” launch vehicles could be revealing. But if we ever see it I will be surprised.
Even to the federal government a billion dollars is a lot of money, especially on a throwaway rocket.
Unlike you, though, to me SLS appears doomed. And the liberal in me wonders about the careers and families of so many engineers and technicians who have given a decade or more of their productive years on this ill-conceived project.
But to the point: As I think about SLS I keep coming back to the idea of recoverability. How is it that NASA thought recoverable rockets so out of reach, yet Musk and Bezos saw the same as sine non qua?
One wishes here for more detail on the history of the idea. When did recoverability become something less than a dream?
I suspect experience with DC-X may have biased NASA against the idea. It wasn’t a stunning success, and probably because it was overambitious. It was a development towards (or prototype for) not only reusability, but single stage to orbit, using hydrogen/oxygen fuel, non-propulsive (and nose-first) reentry with a wide cross-track during reentry. Of course, the state of the art in autonomous landing (and the underlying computer technology) was twenty years less mature than it is today.
NASA does tend to go for order of magnitude improvements rather than incremental improvements in performance. That rarely works and can give the impression that the underlying concepts are a bad idea. SpaceX, with the Falcon 1 and 9, took a much more gradual approach. They didn’t try reuse until they had a working launch vehicle. Blue Origin, with New Shepard and New Glenn, didn’t try getting to orbit until they had reusability worked out.
Everyone talks about how the composite LH2 tanks on the X-33 failed. No one remembers that at the very same time reusable composite LH2 tanks on the DC-X worked! The DC-X program failed because it was seriously undefinanced, because of lack of understanding of its potential value, not for SSTO but for developing and testing new technology, particularly landing with propulsive lift only.
There was no money to modify the prototype so that the landing gear could be retracted without disconnecting and reconnecting the pressure line to the pneumatic actuators, and one fatigued technician doing the job failed to reconnect one of the lines, so one of the gear failed to extend on landing and the vehicle tipped over and blew up.
Bezos apparently was able to hire some of the personnel from the DC-X program and use some of the technology and experience in the New Shepherd design. Note that the landing gear on the NS extend and retract just before every launch. Apparently the DC-X experience suggested that the lifting body aeroshell was not practical while propulsive landing was.
DC-X proved VTVL was viable for a liquid fueled rocket powered vehicle/stage. But then NASA, in in its infinite wisdom, did not pick a VTVL follow-on for X-33. Why? Partly because there were clearly a number of managers within NASA that believed that “wheels on a runway” for the landing mode was the only right answer. So, they picked a VTHL X-33. Not only that, they picked the VTHL proposal that was the most complex and technically challenging.
Want a project to fail? Pick the most complex and technically challenging bid.
Comparisons of that sort are easy to rig. You just make sure your list of “requirements” includes things your favorite design is uniquely capable of. Or leave off capabilities your favorite design doesn’t do well.
So, the $23 billion plus dollar program doesn’t have enough “monetary reserves” leading up to EM-1. Smells like schedule slippage is quite likely, because there will always be something unexpected pop up. Without reserves to deal with the unexpected, schedule slippage is then unavoidable.