OIG Is Looking Into NASA's ISS Crew Transport Plans
OIG announces an audit that will examine NASA’s plans for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station.
— NASA OIG (@NASAOIG) February 14, 2019
OIG announces an audit that will examine NASA’s plans for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station.
— NASA OIG (@NASAOIG) February 14, 2019
Looks like more bureacrats to the party 🙂
Most, if not all, OIG investigations of anything other than corruption are triggered by Congressional requests. You don’t think that perhaps this one comes after a friendly later to the IG from someone representing Alabama, say?
Future news release:
“Senator Shelby calls for NASA OIG budget increase”.
Maybe they’ll come to the conclusion that SLS/Orion is a waste of taxpayers’ money, and recommend Congress cancel it (yeah, right…that’ll happen), Of course, by 2028, NASA astronauts will probably be welcomed at Musk Base, Moon, by private astronauts…or Chinese taikonauts!
Thay certainly will be if SLS/Orion is cancelled The US could have had astronauts on the moon in 2020 had constellation not been cancel’d
Cancelation isn’t the only thing that stopped it. Chronic underfunding was its primary problem and the direct cause of the cancelation.
B^S.
Pie in the sky. The numbers never added up. CxP needed funding numbers that were never going to happen.
You had four very powerful Senators in Shelby, Mikulski, Hutchison, and Nelson pushing this. You had so many congressmen pushing – the bottom line was just too steep and we should have gone a different DIRECTion.
BS alert…
Constellation fell behind one year for each year the program ran… the first launch of Humans was not going to be until AFTER the ISS was deorbited at the end of 2014. So we would have been launching the Ares I and capsule to LEO for almost a decade before the Ares V was completed no earlier than 2028 and the Altair lander would not receive any funding until after the completion of the Ares V. So the altair would not fly until about 2033.
The Constellation program was a pay as you go .. it would have NEVER hit Luna with a lander before 2033.
NASA’s own internal studies showed that.You know … the ones Griffin refused to release until congress said release them or else.. even President Obama’s way would have been faster .. LOL
“Internal NASA Studies Show Cheaper and Faster Alternatives to The Space Launch System”
“Rohrabacher noted “When NASA proposed on-orbit fuel depots in this Administration’s original plan for human space exploration, they said this game-changing technology could make the difference between exploring space and falling short. Then the depots dropped out of the conversation, and NASA has yet to provide any supporting documents explaining the change,” says Rohrabacher.”
Well, despite what NASA may or may not have been telling Rep. Rohrabacher about its internal evaluations regarding the merits of alternate architectures that did not use the SLS (and those that incorporated fuel depots), the agency had actually been rather busy studying those very topics.
And guess what: the conclusions that NASA arrived at during these studies are in direct contrast to what the agency had been telling Congress, the media, and anyone else who would listen.
This presentation “Propellant Depot Requirements Study – Status Report – HAT Technical Interchange Meeting – July 21, 2011” is a distilled version of a study buried deep inside of NASA. The study compared and contrasted an SLS/SEP architecture with one based on propellant depots for human lunar and asteroid missions. Not only was the fuel depot mission architecture shown to be less expensive, fitting within expected budgets, it also gets humans beyond low Earth orbit a decade before the SLS architecture could.
Moreover, supposed constraints on the availability of commercial launch alternatives often mentioned by SLS proponents, was debunked. In addition, clear integration and performance advantages to the use of commercial launchers Vs SLS was repeatedly touted as being desirable: “breaking costs into smaller, less-monolithic amounts allows great flexibility in meeting smaller and changing budget profiles.”
In a time when space sector jobs are an issue this alternative architecture to the use of the SLS would create real jobs and get humans beyond low Earth orbit years sooner than what the Senate demands be done via the pork filled route.”
http://www.spaceref.com/new…
Concur. There was a lot of right wing good ole boy pork barreler wheeling and dealing with CxP.
JMHO
Constellation wasn’t really cancelled. Ares V transmogrified into SLS.
Ah… Which plans? Commercial Crew in general, the current schedule for Commercial Crew or the new plan to buy a couple more seats on a Soyuz (or an option on them) in late 2019 or early 2020, just in case? Or is OIG just examining whether or not NASA actually has a plan and contingency plans if there is a problem?
Guess NASA is not that confident that American industry will produce a safe alternative to the Russian Soyuz…
https://govtribe.com/opport…
PROCUREMENT OF CREW TRANSPORTATION AND RESCUE SERVICES FROM ROSCOSMOS
Sounds like prudence to me. Until there is substantial flight experience with the commercial crew vehicles, NASA has no way to estimate a risk of failure.
You mean like with the Space Shuttle and no escape or using SRB’s?
They had no way to measure risk with that and had no problems flying people right out of the box.
I’ve never understood that decision, other than knowing that agency-wide NASA was doing something called “management for success,” which actually meant taking unexamined risks, at the time, to try to keep development costs down. Maybe someone even older than I am knows.
The Falcon and Atlas will each have at least 50 successful flights before the first human launch. By the demonstrated reliability criteria for space launch vehicles thisis more than enough to identify all significant deterministic failure modes and correct the design to eliminate them.
The SLS will only have one unmanned launch, and there was a serious attempt to add a crew on that one.
You’re assuming that anything that comes out of the WH these days is serious. 😉
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but the launch vehicle reliability is only part of the entire launch stack reliability for which NASA requires something like 98.5% success estimate for unmanned launches. I don’t know what the requirement is for human-carrying launches, but I assume it’s higher.
I would think the recent Soyuz order, even though it’s not firm yet, is starting to cause some worry in many circles. Here it is 2019 already and not only are astronauts still not flying to ISS on U.S. vehicles, we haven’t even had the first uncrewed orbital test flight from either company. Any problems found during the unpiloted or crewed test flights could mean yet more delay, adding another year potentially. It doesn’t even take that long of a delay to push things into 2020, thus NASA has been forced to start thinking Soyuz yet again.
Hopefully at least one of the two companies will have smooth test flights and be able to start fulfilling their contract by the end of this year. But I certainly can understand OIG being concerned and wanting to feel more comfortable about what is going on, what the plans are, and what can realistically be expected.
Unfortunately since it is a NASA program they are moving at the speed of NASA…
Smh…
I’m not sure what OIG thinks they can find that isn’t already known. SpaceX at least appears to be ready to launch although they still have an inflight abort to go. The reasons for the delay are not clear at least to me. The shutdown did not affect SpaceX internal operations but delayed the NASA review process. If there is going to be an anomaly it will be found in the launch, not the OIG investigation, and the sooner we get to that failure the sooner the design or procedure can be corrected.
I love how you all always speculate its NASA’s fault…
All we have is speculation right now. Demo 1 has been stacked and performed a successful hot fire test. Since it’s not crewed, what exactly is the hold up at this point? No one, outside of NASA, really knows for sure.
I heard the worry is that it uses four chutes instead of the traditional three used by Apollo, Orion and CST-100. I guess there is more risk with four instead of three…
OIG: “well Boeing .. everything looks good”
Boeing “don’t you need to look at the capsule or any paperword?”
OIG .. “no you are good to go”
===
OIG: “okay spacex we need to vet every employee since you started 15 years ago, we will need every blue print for every nut and bolt starting with the Falcon1 .. then we will need… “
Let’s not be too pessimistic. For all we know, they could be investigating reports about NASA employees dragging their feet.
Which would be a “good thing”. Demo 1 was already stacked and did a successful hot fire test. Begs the question what are we waiting for exactly? Why not simply fly it and gather the engineering data?
I don’t like the logic, but I can tell you what some members of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said last year. They had two or three concerns they wanted SpaceX to resolve. If doing so involves changing anything, they felt it would have to happen before DM1. Otherwise, DM1 would not be a test of the final design, would therefore be invalid and would have to be repeated. Let me repeate that I don’t like that logic.
Agreed on not liking the logic. Besides the use of four parachutes, instead of three, I’d be curious to know what those concerns are. Hopefully we’ll see articles on this topic after the fact, because I’ve seen very little specifics to date.
I think they had three issues. One was the load-and-go fueling. NASA is now ok with that, but ASAP (a poor acronym, by the way) is an independent and outside aadvisory panel. They still weren’t 100% happy with the idea. That may have changed. The statements I saw were from several months ago. The parachute was another issue, and that was presented as a “convince us it’s safe or redesign it” thing. Not a problem as such, just an insistence on more evidence that everything was fine. The third issue wasn’t mentioned in the reports I saw.
Didn’t they still have an issue with the carbon fiber over wrap on the helium tanks?
Yes, but as I understand it that’s tied together with load-and-go fueling. If they fill all the tanks before the astronauts get to the pad, the helium and COPV thing could go wrong again (despite the fixed design and process) and the astronauts would be safe. If the astronauts get in before the tanks are filled, then something going wrong, that would be a safety issue. I think SpaceX came up with a compromise, and I think it involved filling the helium tank, some checks to make sure everything is fine, boarding the astronauts and then pumping in the oxygen. NASA has said they are ok with that, but as of last summer, the advisory panel still needed some convincing.
I always believed it was more dangerous to be around a rocket that is fueled than an empty one. After all there is nothing to protect the crew or astronauts if something goes wrong. On the other hand, if the astronauts are strapped in the abort system should enable them to be launched to safety if something happens.
In fact the astronauts spend almost as much time unprotected as the closeout crew, until they are sealed in the capsule. And I assume LAS is not activated until the swing-arm has been retracted, for protection of the closeout crew. The closeout crew spends some additional minutes exiting the pad area, but otherwise the risk for both is fairly equal.
However they also have to assign a risk value to fueling with the astronauts on board, by looking at past history, as well as booster design. Presumably the risk of an explosion is higher during fueling than after, the question is how much higher. Also factoring in the possibility that LAS fails to activate in time, or that even if it does the possibility of the crew not surviving the abort for various reasons.
The decision that then has to be made is whether the additional risk to the astronauts of being on board during fueling is offset by the reduced risk to both astronauts and closeout crew by boarding prior to fueling. My guess is yes but in the end, like many safety decisions where the answer is not clear-cut, it will be based on how the math works out.
I don’t think that’s entirely correct. You’re describing an approach to selecting the safest option. I believe the criteria is keeping risk below some fraction of a percent level NASA specified. As I’ve seen it described, selecting the less safe option would be acceptable as long as the overall risk remained below that limit.
That may be NASA’s position but maybe not how an advisory panel might look at it. Similar to the difference of opinion between NASA and OIG about the performance of CASIS. NASA measures CASIS based only on the cooperative agreement between the two, whereas OIG is using other metrics.
That’s certainly my impression from the reports and interviews I’ve read. I suspect it’s also one of the reasons for the delays in commercial crew. SpaceX and Boeing have been designing, building and testing to satisfy the requirements in their contract. As I understand it, advisory panels are not involved in contract negotiations nor in setting the terms of requests for proposals.
It seems like we’ve got SpaceX, Boeing and NASA trying to do things according to the contract, and ASAP saying (or at least implying) they aren’t really happy about the terms of the contract. That’s a really awkward situation, and one NASA or the government in general will have to sort out if NASA wants to continue on the path of contracting out for transportation services.
By the way, the analogy to the OIG isn’t perfect. The OIG is part of NASA, while the ASAP is an independent, outside advisory panel NASA is required to listen to.
It is scheduled for its first flight in early March, NASA approving…
Meanwhile work races ahead on the NASA free Starship. It’s possible in a year or two America will have a third alternative to send Americans into space from American soil, lots of Americans, if not necessarily NASA astronauts.
What??? I’m shocked!!!
I’d like to believe the OIG is going to dig into exactly how NASA has been dragging its feet on SpaceX to delay their CC flight. My guess, however, is that this is yet another front in the bureaucratic war that is being waged against SpaceX.
All sorts of conclusions offered in these comments, but the actual announcement supports how many of them?
We do not know what we do not know.