Why Is Congress Stalling NASA's Commercial Crew Program?
Three reasons to be truly outraged by Congressional stonewalling of commercial crew, Houston Chronicle
“This week NASA Administrator Charles Bolden stepped up his war of words on Congress, saying the space agency had to extend a pricey contract with Russia through 2019 for crew transport due to under-funding of the commercial crew program. You may like Bolden, or dislike him. You may like his boss, President Obama, or you may hate him. You may like NASA’s human exploration plan, or you may have questions about its viability. But you should know this for a fact: Commercial crew, a program allowing SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft and rockets to put U.S. astronauts into orbit, deserves full funding. Here are three reasons why Congressional under-funding of commercial crew is especially duplicitous.”
Simple. SLS is a hungry beast. Why fund the crewed program you can do within the current budget, when you can fund a pork monster that will go nowhere without an unlikely increase in NASA’s budget? Right?
Yeah but what are you gonna do if russkies sell no engines and domestic struts are of subpar grade ?
The problem with the struts can be easily resolved; the design was simple and perfectly adequate for the task. The difficulty was that the science of quality control, as developed by W. Edwards Deming, was not practiced by the manufacturer. There are multiple US manufacturers that are capable of making a component like that and doing it right every time.
Back when the earth’s crust was cooling, I worked with statisitcal process control in the QA/QC group at a food packaging operation (I never want to taste Hamburger Helper again).
Deming was a patron saint. He pointed out that the goal was perpetual improvement, not simply meeting a standard.
There is a likely apocryphal story about an American electronics company ordering transistors from a Deming-trained Japanese semiconductor company. As is normal procedure, the US company carefully set a tolerance standard. The requirement was for 10,000 transistors with 4 defective units max.
When the shipment arrived, there was attached a note saying that the 10K units were in the main package, and altho they don’t know why they were ordered, 4 defective transistors were made and packed in an attached envelope.
The 14 points:
https://youtu.be/tsF-8u-V4j4
Thanks for that blast from the past. There was a time when first and second level managers of one of the heritage Aerospace companies in the LM chain were required to attend a training class with Deming and then bring home and
apply his method. Had the honor of seeing him twice and participating as a willing worker in the red bead experiment.
Here is a video:
1) https://www.youtube.com/wat…
2) https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I fully agree with points 1 and 2 and mostly agree with point 3.
I am a huge SLS supporter but I am mad as h*ll about commercial crew being underfunded. SLS can make it with $1.7 Billion (which is $400 Million more than the President requested) and that other money can be given to commercial crew. Earth Science could also stand to take a temporary haircut to help CC.
I am going to an event that will feature Ted Cruz in a few weeks and I plan on asking (no, begging) him to fight for full funding of commercial crew. This is the perfect issue for the Presidential candidates. They all want to look tough on foreign policy and be pro-American business.
I hope my example of fighting for commercial crew as an SLS supporter will be emulated. We need to stop this petty fighting of commercial vs. NASA, SLS vs. Falcon Heavy, or Orion vs. Dragon. We all need to stick together or space exploration is done.
Let me bring up the question: taking a step back, how much does it truly matter?
I mean the year is 2015… over halfway through it. Commercial Crew will get flying when… sometime in 2017, possibly, or even 2018? And they’re start servicing the ISS once or twice annually through 2024. And not one day more. Because the chances of the ISS getting a life extension past 2024 when Orion/SLS is the primary human spaceflight program is zero in my estimation.
So let’s be clear, in the rush to get Commercial Crew up and going, we’re building something that is, as far as the ISS is concerned, useful for just six or seven years… maybe? Probably around 10 flights to the ISS total? That’s not a lot of usage out of something billions of dollars went into.
Commercial crew is extremely important. It is THE program to send Astronauts to LEO for LEO missions, while Orion takes Astronauts beyond that. They are entirely complementary. But tying Commercial crew, even conceptually, to the ISS, is ridiculous. Commercial crew is much more important than the ISS program. Commercial crew has to outlast a program with an expiration date that is closer to “today” in time, than the Shuttle’s return to flight was.
Where does Commercial Crew fly after 2024? Oh I know Team ISS would love to fly that thing through 2028, or 2032 or 2063. It’s never going to happen. Congress will never pay $3 billion or more a year for it while simultaneously launching SLS+Orion to lunar orbit or wherver. That’s why Commercial Crew has to be done through while looking at what is the purpose of it beyond the ISS. That’s a question with… well… more questions and no answers.
I think that means a commercial space station. It would be good to know what plans the private sector has for this beyond Bigelow Aerospace’s decade of promises. Or are we just waiting for Elon Musk to save the day again (because keep in mind, Commercial Crew minus SpaceX, is Boeing and the Atlas V, which is to say, a bad joke)? If ISS is just a bridge between nascent commercial crew having a destination to go to between now and whenever such a commercial space station is flying, then that’s terrific. But what’s the point if it’s going to just fly dozen or fewer times to the ISS? There has to be a broader plan.
Oh and by the way… what launch vehicle is CTS-100 flying on again? Is it going to be an Atlas V with those engines that are in decidedly limited supply? Or is it going to be a hysterically expensive Delta IV? And this is better than Russia… how exactly? It’s not. Let’s be clear: by Commercial Crew, we mean SpaceX.
JonathanN3 I think you are living in a dream world. In 2024 the most an Orion would be able to do is a circumlunar flight or maybe a flight out to a Lagrangian point. So what? What can you do with that? Look back at earth? Goresat did that just this week and delivered a fine product. Why send people? Whats the point of repeating Apollo 8, by that time nearly sixty years in the past? Building Orions and SLS will be so expensive that people will demand some kind of a useful mission. Any landers are another 10-15 years beyond 2024. My guess is that ISS will be continued as long as it can be-maybe to 2030-maybe even longer. My only hope is that they find some people to use it effectively-something not happening now. And you’d best hope they continue ISS out into the future or you will have no US/NASA human space flight program at all.
I read Johnathan’s point as referring to the money spent on SLS/Orion, not it’s capability or usefulness. Yes they are spending money on SLS/Orion already but I don’t doubt Jonathan’s prediction that when it becomes operational it will consume NASA’s attention for HSF making it harder to extend what by then will be a twenty-five year old and very expensive program. Especially if as Jonathan posited commercial space station(s) are on the horizon. Also mechanically there is a lot that can potentially go wrong with ISS between now and 2024 that could require additional funding for repairs and/or replacement modules.
Whether we can sustain human presence on ISS I do not know. But if we cannot sustain human presence indefinitely in LEO, on the ISS or a very similar successor, then there is no possibility of sustaining a human presence on the Moon or Mars.
Bingo.
Which is why calls for pre-emptive abandonment of ISS in order to supposedly “free up” money for SLS/L1 base/
L2 base/Moon base/Phobos base/Mars base/etc. are ultimately self-defeating.
The idea that we have to abandon the fruit of all previous space efforts in order to afford the “next thing” – whatever that may be – is lunacy on stilts. If we do not work with the goal of settling space, then, beyond generating peer-reviewed publications and doctoral theses for a few fortunate investigators, there is no long-term point to the work at all.
And we will not settle space if we decide we must leave a ghost town behind us every time we wish to make a step farther out. Thus, space settlement must, as soon as possible, be based on self-sustaining economic value added generated at each place we go in space to stay. It is impossible for space settlement to remain crucially dependent on government expenditures which are not increasing and will not do so in any rationally foreseeable likely future.
Unfortunately this is the same kind of thinking that prematurely ended Shuttle. It was an expensive program that had gone on for 40 years, therefore let’s throw it away and start over with a new neat Apollo throwback spaceship that will take us somewhere. There was a reason Apollo was terminated-we could not afford it-just as we will find we cannot afford Orion/SLS.
Shuttle was by no means perfect, but no serious attempt was ever made to enhance its design for safety, or to increase efficiency and reduce costs. The former, because you had a bunch of “operators” who did not think beyond the next flight, and the latter because you had a bunch of “operators” who did not think beyond maintaining and growing their operations organization.
Well, now we not only do not have the capabilities of a Shuttle, we do not even have the most basic capability of launching anyone into space. Good work to all those Constellation crazies!
Yes right or wrong it would be the same type of thinking. By the way the Shuttle was upgraded extensively during its lifetime and in fact a program call SLEP (Service Life Extension Program) was already in the planning stages prior to the Columbia accident. However the Columbia accident resulted in CAIB recommending that the Shuttle be recertified by 2010 (they gave it that long so that ISS could be completed). The Bush administration decided in 2004 to retire the Shuttle in 2010, so SLEP and recertification never happened. Of course the Shuttle flew until 2011 after NASA got permission to complete the final scheduled flights to complete the station.
A serious attempt to improve shuttle safety, increase efficiency, and reduce costs would have involved replacing the SRBs with liquid flyback boosters. This, unfortunately, would have been politically unacceptable. As evidence for this, SRBs are still baselined for SLS, despite their painfully obvious drawbacks.
Part of the problem with any government funded launch system is politics.
Dragon 2 and CST-100 will (hopefully) have proven themselves over that time. When ISS is done, these spacecraft will be available to fly other manned missions at far lower cost than SLS/Orion will ever be able to fly.
Some of us have hopes that manned spaceflight won’t always be so expensive that only governments can fund and launch missions. And a passenger on a Soyuz doesn’t count in my book, because the government paid for the mission. A paid Soyuz passenger does little to open up spaceflight beyond governments.
I would be interested in knowing a little more about how Bolden and his minions have presented to and conversed with Congress to let them know what is at stake, what the issues are, and why the program needs their support. From what I can tell of Bolden and others in top NASA positions today and for the last several years, they don’t appear to successfully work the Congress, and are more inclined to whine and cry after the fact that they did not get what they needed. One more illustration of the lack of NASA leadership.
NASA has become a creature of Congress and Congress doesn’t want leadership from agency heads. They want subservience. This Bolden have given them until now. Congress has apparently gone too far this time, so Bolden is forced to call them out in public. He knows better than to think they would listen to him otherwise.
I agree. Bolden has begun showing some spine in these hearings and giving Congress the facts, whether they like it or not.
Its not so much whether they like the facts or not, its whether they give a damn about those facts. They have other priorities that do not necessarily align with the Public Good.
Uh, I don’t know where you’ve been but NASA leadership has been repeatedly telling Congress not to short commercial crew on funding (While Congress has been ignoring them). Its weird how you take Congress’ side over NASA’s. I’m not sure what more NASA could of done.
Watch any of numerous Congressional hearings. Bolden and other NASA reps do their best to present the facts, but Congress only hears what it wants to.
Bolden and his bunch should be working with the Congressional members of the critical Congressional panels and supporters a chief problem under the current Administration is their refusal to work with and talk with Congressional members. If all Bolden does is present in a hearing, then that is one reason why he is failing. Lockheed Martin’s lobbying efforts in support of Orion may be another reason.
I’ve been asking the same question. I see what is said in public at hearing but the real work is done with staff.
And it is fair to point out that Mr. Obama doesn’t really play nice with congress- I mean on a personal level.
I wonder how it’s possible to run a country if people don’t talk.
Point 1 is legitimate but many people may not believe CC is the solution to the problem. Point 2 is red herring. Point 3 is a curious one because I never heard a NASA program that runs a surplus. If that happens, can NASA just redirect the surplus to fund CC?
Why do you feel point 2 is a red herring? If Congress doesn’t want the DOD to be dependent on Russia, why would they want NASA to be in that position?
You assumed NASA and DOD should always be in the same position, which is not the case fortunately. Otherwise there would be no such thing as civil space.
Funding is done via legislation and NASA can’t ignore the text of that legislation and thus can’t divert funds. That’s a good thing in general because it cuts off a lot of avenues for corruption.
Thanks. Looks more like congress micromanaging NASA than wanting to get anything done. It is not clear if such measure cuts off corruption or not. Actually, a flexible system that allows a low level of corruption can improve efficiency and productivity.
BOEING AND LOCKHEED MARTIN
are the two power rmongers
SLS is pure pork. Funding it while cutting commercial crew is that
special sort of Congressional madness. Write your Senators and
Representative and tell them to stop it:
http://whoismyrepresentativ…
Found this
“Congress changed funding language so NASA couldn’t use Space Act Agreements in the final phases of CCP. Congress didn’t want NASA to have any options in procuring American Commercial Crew vehicles. Otherwise, the 2 companies would’ve had to spend more private funds.”
Is this true?
Source?
That was a person’s comment. I’m asking if any one knows anything about it.
Gene Cernan will be on FNC within the next hour to discuss this.
Joe, I missed seeing this. Can you tell us what Cernan had to say?
See my reply to Cessna.
(Replied in wrong place)
Item 2
2. But wait, Congress has told the Department of Defense to NOT buy from Russia.
Why did congress tell the DOD they can’t use Russian engines?
Because Russia said we were not allowed to use Russian engines for defense missions.
Did Russia threaten to cut us for from their space tech if we continued to use their engines for DOD?
Seems MR. PUTIN is calling the shots here, not the Senate or Congress.
Russia saying USA can’t use RD-180s
http://spaceflightnow.com/n…
I actually find your comment to be border-line offensive. Is this a space enthusiast site (focusing on NASA issues) , or a forum for personal, political screeds? I seem to recall a recent admonition by Keith to refrain from this type of partisan crap.
“Tell you the truth, never have a feared for this nation’s future as now.”
This is what is called a lack of perspective.
This country faces severe problems. It has always faced severe problems. It will always face severe problems.
There are always some people convinced that the particular time in which they are living is the worst… that the particular time in which their life happens to fall is the one where the collapse will come.
This feeling is not a reflection on the time, it is a reflection of their personality.
We are not in a nuclear cold war. We are not in a global fight against fascist dictatorship.
We do not currently have the number of racist laws, segregation, and other forms of systemic discrimination that we did 50, 30, 20 or even 5 years ago. For people who lived before now and who were affected by those unjust laws the present may be in their opinion FAR better than the past.
Those who were unaffected by those legalized forms of bigotry may have the luxury of looking back on those times as “the good old days.”
It’s almost laughable – we are the strongest, richest nation on earth… the strongest, richest, most powerful nation the earth has ever SEEN… and some of the people living the most privileged and safe lives in human history are terrified out of their wits.
Of course… when you’re at the top, you may just have nowhere to go but down… so maybe pessimism is not completely unwarranted. Nobody can stay on top forever.
Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way
No more political attacks or rants. Just deleted a dozen of them. From now on the authors are going to be deleted too. I have warned all of you multiple times. Stay on topic and stop with the gratuitous attacks.
It wasn’t all I had hoped for but there were some good points.
He went after Obama for canceling CxP. He said that if we hadn’t canceled it we would have had access to ISS through Orion/Ares I.
He also went after the private companies for not putting more skin in the game. He talked about how important it is to inspire the next generation. One point that he made that I thought was important was that you should approach space from both an exploration and an exploitation perspective.
He said it is perfectly fine to exploit space resources but that we shouldn’t neglect space exploration and that it is the exploration of space that really provides the inspiration factor. The anchor was very pro-space and was not happy about us giving more money to the Russians.
He didn’t really go after Congress that much which disappointed me.
(Keith, feel free to delete or edit this post if it crosses the boundary)
Joe wrote:
He went after Obama for canceling CxP
I was a fan of Cernan’s back in the Gemini days, and had a chance to meet him in the ’60s. Somehow, somewhere he has drifted into strange world’s of Obama-hate and ‘birtherism” and his views (seen during his various appearances on Roger Ailes Fox channels) must be taken with more than a few grains of salt due to his active participation with the opposition party.
As Keith posted a few years back:
Cernan on Obama:
“I don’t think he fully understands what traditional America is all about, because he didn’t literally grow up here,” the Apollo 17 commander told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto. “I don’t think that I could convince him why this is important. I don’t know that he wants America to be first. I don’t know that he doesn’t want us to play on a more level playing field. I don’t know that he doesn’t care if Russia or China gets to the Moon and we’re dragging tailbone.” … Cernan also said he has “been offered an opportunity to be part of” the GOP convention in Tampa.”
Keith’s note: President Obama was born in Hawaii (a U.S. state, by the way) and has lived in the United States for his entire life except for 1967-71. Between 1966 and 1969 Mitt Romney lived in France. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone and spent much of his youth living abroad. So what? As for what the phrase “traditional America is all about” means, perhaps Cernan will enlighten us as to what he’s implying if/when he participates in the Republican national convention.
Cernan also said, “No, I don’t. I don’t think he understands what America and what the traditions have been, and what being the leader of the free world has meant to the people of this country.
When legislators “give” money to SLS, they are taking it out of one pocket and inserting it into another. That is because the industries that support the development of SLS pay for that representation. More money for SLS, more money for campaign funds next election cycle.
SpaceX on the other hand, and Commercial Crew by extension, spends much less money, therefore it is not as helpful to as many workers, therefore it is less important to legislators for funding.
This highlights the reason why we need Commercial Crew in the first place. New Space has some older players participating in it, but the momentum is toward flying instead of spending.
The Senate and the House want SLS to fly first and to serve as the launch vehicle for ISS resupply. It is a pipe dream, but if Commercial Crew dies the death of a thousand cuts (and the delays and fixed expense cost overruns that go with them) then they can say that SLS saved the day after New Space “failed”.
Has any of the congressional legislation related to the SLS mentioned its use for ISS resupply??
That sounds like an expensive option for ISS resupply.
It needs to fly at least once per year to maintain the infrastructure that builds and operates it. Flying it more often than that spreads those overhead costs across more launches, reducing the expense per launch. Each deep space destination requires some other spacecraft to go with SLS/Orion (who wants to live for 4 or more months on Orion?). Can you picture in your mind a destination, and accompanying exploration spacecraft, per year? The purpose that Congress set out to achieve was to pay people to build and fly rockets. Can Congress afford l, under today’s budget constraints, a moon colony to justify enough launches to shoot that thing off once per year? The only way is to call it a “backup” for orbital crew and supply, and then to starve out the other options. That’s part of the reason why they whine about NASA developing multiple providers.
Yeah, I get the reasoning they use in Congress’ alternate reality bubble, but the stupidity of it never ceases to amaze (if amaze means to dumbfound) me.
If only Congress (and by extension, us the voters and campaign contributors) supported ideas based on their benefits to the country, instead of concerns of lesser, more selfish scope. Anyone who bothered to see things that way would see that dramatically cheaper access to space opens up more business opportunities. Multiple providers pricing on the order of $500-$800 per pound to launch to LEO, with one year or less lead times, would quickly increase the space-related workforce demand to four or five times what it is currently nation-wide…still focusing on the space states but spread out across all the states. Most of those would be upper middle class jobs.
It would also become an export market. The country’s very infrastructure would be entangled in everything space related and would make the US the solid world space leader, instead of just NASA. Once one or more seriously profitable space products are found (beyond just communications and research), it would expand our political influence far more proactively than military might could and maybe even make our embargos mean something again. Each individual Senator, being a part of the Government of a more important country, would be far more powerful than they are now.
Why is congress Stalling NASA’s Commercial Crew Program
Short answer
SLS
Wow, talk about an active topic. On another forum NewSpace discussions are quite plentiful with lots of opinions from costs, capabilities, and egos. A general question I have can it be scaled up to multiple flights per month (or week)? Or occasional flight rate we have now but simply contractor operated?
Shame congress wouldn’t support a return to the moon like this.
http://cislunarone.com
But I guess this is what the SLS, Boeing Lockheed Martin States fear most?