NASA Technologist Unsure of Whether We're All Serious About Space
Yes, it really has taken NASA 11 years to develop a parachute, Ars Technica
“After the Jacobs tour, I put this question to [NASA Acting Chief Technologist Douglas] Terrier. He did not flinch. “I think it’s a very fair question,” he said. “I think it’s a very fair debate to ask if we as a nation are serious about this, and making it a priority. What we’ve enjoyed is a very constant level of support, but it’s certainly not the Apollo or Manhattan-type project to crank this thing out in seven years.” That is not to say that NASA, or its large contractor base, is less able than it was in the 1960s. Far from it, Terrier said. “I think it’s important to realize that the team and the technology and manufacturing base is very capable of doing that, the moment someone flicks that switch. The speed at which we’re moving is not limited by the capability of NASA or the contractors; it is limited by the resources and, frankly, the political emphasis.”
Keith’s update: Of course no one at NASA will entertain the counter argument that NASA has been dragging its feet while the real world passes it by. Just sayin’
I think he is right on.
This is consistent with my interpretation of NASA funding history since Reagan or even Carter. If not going back to Nixon building the Space Shuttle instrad of a human Mars mission.
People like space. They just don’t want to pay more for it.
Seriously?
Apollo established the poor-me NASA mindset that we see today. Mr. Musk must be laughing his ass off at this kind of thinking: reusable rockets-from scratch!- and a new motor too, all for $1B.
So please, NASA. Cry me a f***ing river.
If you want it done by NASA, it comes with a government bill.
Talking about commercial space, Musk just delayed his Dragon 2018 missin by two years.
Yes, INSIGHT was delayed two years, but that was because the French had problems with the most important science instrument. They couldn’t deliver it on time.
A government bill? One that multiplies the cost of a projector by perhaps 60 times (SLS vs F9, and there being a lot of qualifiers).
And Insight delays? SLS is the mother of all delays.
Here is hoping Falcon Heavy is successful. It’s a lot bigger than Falcon 9, so is a better comparison to SLS than Falcon 9. If everything goes well, we should see a Falcon Heavy test flight this year. Even if it’s not successful, SpaceX will identify the issue, address it, and move forward. Tolerating failures during development actually encourages innovation and reduces costs in the long run.
Failures during development is something that SLS isn’t allowing. Its whole development philosophy is contorted due to NASA’s current management philosophy for large projects, resulting in costs that are far higher than they need to be.
“Its whole development philosophy is contorted due to NASA’s current management philosophy”
Is that the answer to the question “Why is SLS so expensive and taking so long?” NASA management philosophy?
I get it. I get that the issue is complicated. But I also get that sometimes things that are actually fairly simple are obfuscated for effect. Dr. Einstein’s six year old is not amused.
“Current management philosophy” may sound like obfuscation, but I don’t know what else to call it. Sometimes I feel like I’m not even speaking the same language when I talk to someone who’s spent decades following that approach and mindset.
As a tangible example, consider a conversation I had about risk acceptance at a small satellite conference earlier this year. The topic was using automation and on-spacecraft decision making to reduce telecommunications requirements and operational costs. When someone suggested this during a panel discussion, a person from (if memory serves) NASA/Ames said it was worth trying, but you’d have to build in a option for manual control as well. You couldn’t count on the automated system working. (That, by the way, eliminates most of the cost savings.) I suggested just accepting some risk of failure or suboptimal performance. He said he _would_ be accepting risk, by having an automated system with less than 100% reliability at all.
The whole idea that I meant an intentional risk of mission failure, not a risk of having to use a backup system, was simply alien to his entire way of thinking. The idea I was trying to communicate was completely incomprehensible to him. That’s the sort of thing that goes into a “management culture” or an “organizational culture.” Certain underlying assumptions which are so deeply and unconsciously ingrained that doing something different isn’t considered a bad idea; it’s so far from people’s way of thinking that it’s not even considered at all.
Jeff Bezos has sized his heavy launcher for 45mt to LEO with a single hull design, and it seems likely that Musk will shrink the MCT to something similar and adapt it for commercial launch. Falcon Heavy is not an unreasonable design but it is more complex and expensive than the Glenn and Musk will need something simpler and less expensive to compete.
NASA has a lot of people who could develop useful new technologies. They just don’t get any support right now.
Arguably it’s Congress and NASA management that’s not supporting the development of useful new (launch) technologies. The money is there, it’s just not being spend wisely. NASA shouldn’t be in the launch vehicle business anymore. This should have been crystal clear after the space shuttle program and was partly clear in the law. But there was a loophole in the law big enough to drive Ares/SLS straight through (the NASA unique capabilities clause). Sigh.
Ummm…we could have built liquid flyback booster if not for the dang politics.
They have no idea how the NASA annual budget compares to say operation of a nuclear aircraft carrier. People seem to put up with the latter+its escort screen despite any credible threat that it counters, especially once it is equipped with even more expensive F/35s. It’s a crime that NASA is forced to waste so much of its “paltry” budget on Congressional boondoggles.
Not everyone likes putting up with the latter. The US spends more on the military than the next 10 or so countries combined. It’s just as wasteful as NASA.
Dammit. What a load of crap.
This is the agency’s biggest problem. The whole agency is waiting for someone to give them a job. And you can piss and moan about Congress and Presidents until the cows come home, this state has persisted for 45 years. People who work at NASA today are not the people who built Apollo, they aren’t even the people who were trained by the people who built Apollo. How many generations are we supposed to wait until this stops being their excuse?
They receive nearly $20 billion each year. Around a third of the entire civilian R&D budget. More than $180 billion over the last decade.
If you can’t run a space program on $180 billion per decade, you are incompetent. If you don’t think that’s “serious”, you are stupid.
Agreed. One need only look at SLS/Orion to see the current example of a bloated NASA mega-project that is producing little to no usable results. It’s going to be far too expensive and fly far too infrequently to me of much use in an “operational” sense.
I like to use the 11 years of 1958 -1969. From no agency to boots on the moon. With slide rules and computers the size of houses but less power than the phone in your pocket they built 4 classes of spacecraft, a big rocket and flew 22 manned flights along with countless more test flights of hardware all doing things for the first time.
PAO and others like to spin it as we had all this money back then that is why we did it faster, I don’t buy it. We have all this past knowledge of 50 years of human spaceflight and computers that can simulate millions of permutations in less time than Shepard’s Mercury Flight. While spaceflight may not be a public priority doesn’t mean we can’t achieve great things. We built a castle in the sky with 16 other countries putting pieces together that were meeting for the first time in space in less time than what it going to take to certify just the CPAS parachutes.
17 years NASA, 17 long drawn out years and what is the latest estimate $40B from Orion contractor award to EM-2 spent on SLS/Orion/KSC GO just to recreate Apollo 8 style mission 55 years later. for shame how do they sleep at night trying to justify and tell the public that a snail’s pace is perfectly acceptable.
Look at a graph of NASA funding over the years (adjusted for inflation). Because of the Space Race (a proxy war with the Soviet Union), NASA was able to run many programs in parallel. The high levels of funding NASA enjoyed back then were an aberration, not the norm. Furthermore, those levels of funding are never coming back. So yes, that’s one challenge NASA faces.
Another challenge is that NASA is getting funding for large mega-projects that are not pushing the state of the art in manned spaceflight in meaningful ways (i.e. reducing costs and/or increasing flight rates). Programs like SLS/Orion are little more than pork to the Congress which is funding it. We’re spending tens of billions of dollars on SLS/Orion knowing it’s not going to fly very often nor is it going to be very safe to fly (due to its abysmally low projected flight rate).
A final challenge NASA faces is that it is a mature organization that has become quite risk averse. The mantra “failure is not an option” originally came from trying to save the Apollo 13 crew’s lives and was never meant to apply to every single NASA project. Technology development programs necessarily experience failures because you don’t know what you don’t know (in other words, the unknown unknowns are the ones that bite you). The current climate is all but eliminating meaningful innovation (again, that would reduce mission costs and/or increase flight rate) in programs like SLS/Orion.
DOD suffers from this as well. Defense systems are hideously expensive these days and result in precious few deployable resources (i.e. only 21 B-2 bombers were built compared to the 19,256 B-24 bombers built during WW-II). So this malady is not unique to NASA at all and has something to do with the current government/contractor relationships.
Space Cadets can dream about more Buck Rogers, but meanwhile the real NASA science centers in California and Maryland get a hell of a lot done through their projects, contractors, and scientist teams.
Technically, JPL isn’t a NASA center.
It is officially a NASA center, just that most workers there are contractors through Caltech and not civil service. In Maryland, APL isn’t a NASA center and GSFC has plenty of contractors. The point is that the science projects at these and other centers are funded and managed from the top by NASA and return great science and technology value per dollar compared to other parts of the budget.
If JPL is a NASA center, why did the 2014 Discovery AO say things like “…it presumes that project management is assigned to a NASA Center or JPL…’? Can we agree that JPL’s status is somewhat different from that of GSFC or ARC?
I’d also say NASA get even better science and technology value per dollar from their contracts and grants to universities. Of course, I’m biased about that. But I could list off a number of very successful missions (E.g. Kepler or MAVEN) which had relatively limited involvement from NASA centers.
Projects like Cassini having been carrying NASA’s reputation for decades, far out-performing the money spent, even on flagship missions.
And Cassini is quite definitely a JPL project. But most of the scientific instruments aren’t. Depending on how you count it, only four or five of the spacecraft’s 12 instruments were built by JPL or a NASA center (GSFC, specifically.) There is some vagueness there, since most of the instruments had parts built in different places (e.g. VIMS is mostly a JPL instrument, with parts from ASI, CNRS and IAS in Europe.) Some of those instruments have separately selected science teams who handle instrument operations. I think it’s fair to say the Cassini science payload was largely developed at universities and other institutions, outside of NASA but funded by NASA contracts, or by international partners.
That exposition is far down in the weeds, much too far for Joe Citizen, for whom Cassini = NASA.
The point remaining, of course, that peripheral projects stand in for what NASA is thought to be doing.
Actually, my point was about efficiency (or at least, your comment made me realize that was my point…)
It seems that, as far as NASA work is concerned, the higher a project’s profile, the less efficient it is.
Consider a $5 or $10 billion project to build the next-generation space telescope. That’s enough money that congressmen start caring where it is build (i.e. in their State and district) and possible insist on splitting the work between institutions in different districts (even if that’s inefficient and technically unjustified.) People are spending a decade or more working on it, and their careers may depend on success. If something goes badly wrong, it’s front-page, international news and project managers get to testify before congressional committees. That gets the project into a “too big to fail” regime, and triggers processes and practices which can easily double cost to reduce reduce the odds of failure by five or ten percent. For human spaceflight, all that is even more applicable.
In contrast, consider a $5 or $10 million small satellite to study the ionosphere. That’s not enough to get congressional interest. If it fails, it might look bad on the PI’s next performance review and the lack of the results might hurt his chances of promotion. But it isn’t like a professor would get tenure revoked over something like that. A few graduate students would have to adjust their thesis topic and/or spend a few more years in graduate school. Press coverage of a failure would be pretty negligible and limited to trade journals. Overall, that lets the low-profile projects get away from inefficient practices designed to reduce risk at all costs.
Define ‘real’.
It is very obvious by looking at the likes of Space X or Sierra Nevada that a lot can be done by a very small workforce in a very short time period. NASA in its old age and bureaucracy has become very wasteful. It has far too many people looking over one anothers’ shoulders, not doing anything. People who have done things and accomplished things are often cast aside. Too many managers -they are not leaders- have no accomplishments to their names and it leads one to question how they got to where they are in the program-politics? Personally after 40 years I have lost respect for NASA and its management. If you want to get anything done, go somewhere else because as this guy epitomizes, NASA won’t get the job done.
Then it appears that NASA is doing exactly as instructed by Congress.
Congress is one problem but as Mr. Brezinski points out NASA management is probably the larger problem.Congress may produce bad goals but NASA management produces bad results. If Space X or most of new-space companies was given the mandate and budget NASA has to build SLS, don’t you think they would be farther along? It would be interesting to compare the org charts and regulation handbooks from the late 50’s to todays.
What regulation handbooks from the 1950s? Very little in terms of process and procedures were written down. I’m all for reducing the current level of formal management process and requirements, but going back to the way things we’re done in the 1950s would be a bit much, even by my standards.
They had literally rooms filed with engineers with slide rulers..
They also had rooms full of problems to solve.
But didn’t many of the problems need solving only once? Is it not the case that the state of rocket science in 1974 was, say, perhaps >80% of what it is today? And that further improvements would simply polish the apple? That we knew then as we know now how to build rockets. And that anyone sufficiently motivated can build a new engine, and a new reusable rocket, and do it for a single payment that approximates 5% of NASA’s annual largess?
Still, NASA waits.
As aging movie star waiting for the role that will once again propel her to former glory, NASA waits. Surrounded by sycophants constantly whispering in her ear, the old star dreams of glory: “You were really something! If only people knew! You could do it again! You still have it in you!”
Meanwhile, late in each February, our aging movie star watches new faces grabbing that impossible award, walking down the red carpet—the carpet she once walked, alone!— all of them brilliant in the roles that were once hers, and hers alone.
They make it look easy. That’s the part that really hurts.
NASA waits. She waits for the headlines, waits for the fame, sure in her heart that she is ready. If only someone would call upon her! Surely it will come again? Doesn’t everything come around again? Won’t we see “NASA” emblazoned across every newspaper again?
As many have pointed out in another thread regarding the current Chief Technologist, NASA waits to reignite those glory days, not realizing it’s a new day, that 80% of $18B would be a fair apportionment for further rocket science? (Please don’t hit me too hard on these numbers, which I’m using as hyperbole). If she wanted proof she need only look west. To Hawthorne, California.
They are farther along!
and where does NASA management come from? The senate will only install someone as Administrator that will cater to them, not the President. Griffin was the senate’s choice not the Bush Administration. Bolden was not President Obama’s choice it was Sen. Nelson’s. The senate confirms who will hire the down line managers they want.