NASA Authorization Bill: Newt Strikes Back
Just as the pro-SLS Alabama Mafia thinks that it has a stranglehold on @NASA – @NewtGingrich fights back https://t.co/CKrtvBAct6 pic.twitter.com/MS6pPLLdMw
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 10, 2017
Just as the pro-SLS Alabama Mafia thinks that it has a stranglehold on @NASA – @NewtGingrich fights back https://t.co/CKrtvBAct6 pic.twitter.com/MS6pPLLdMw
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 10, 2017
By the way: there was an interesting (albeit largely uninformative) mention of NASA in the White House briefing this morning. Basically, the question was asked re: whether the Administration was planning a major new initiative involving space. The answer was more or less “wait for the budget”, but the fact that the question was asked implies some rumors are circulating…
Going to the Moon? Nope. Going to Mars? Nope. Going to an Asteroid? Nope.
Trump rewarding his base? Yep.
Well we know the budget will be considerably cut since we’ve been told here that we won’t enjoy it.
Then the word will be out Thursday when the budget is released.
http://www.reuters.com/arti…
Trump budget opens new fight among RepublicansSun Mar 12, 2017 | 9:06pm EDT
“When President Donald Trump unveils his budget
for the 2018 fiscal year on Thursday, Rokita will be among many
conservative Republicans cheering proposed cuts to domestic programs
that would pay for a military buildup.”
Ok, well Newt clearly doesn’t read legislation anymore; the bill is an FY17 Authorization – it ends by October!
As for new legislation – to do what? If a commercial company wants to go to the moon, go get a launch license from the FAA and have at it! If Newt wants NASA to do something different, maybe he should take that up with his former colleagues who passed this by unanimous consent – clearly a sign of shaky support!
Its just a small part of the big picture negotiations within a group trading off their special interests and future votes pretending with false news to support national interests. “commercial’ is indeed ‘free’ to head to the moon or mars at great inefficiency.
‘Better to reduce the LV size to 10-20 mT and save the consumer some cash (less taxes to USG launches or less fees for satellite access) by increasing the flight rate. Flying 2-4 common configuration LVs with the goal of reuse can allow incremental improvements with certification via launches of dirt cheap, Class D propellant to provide demonstrated reliability at little financial risk.
Climate change and ACA are the sad losers of the lies which have gone way beyond ‘spin’ which required retention of shuttle and Apollo technology. Go Figure. To infinity and beyond. Infinity is the time scale.
Except for the bit where most Republicans claim they don’t want the government competing with private industry. I would make the argument that over the past few decades government funding of the space shuttle, Titan IV, and the EELVs has put a damper on investments in launch vehicles. What investor in their right mind would want to directly compete with the government?
If not for the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we wouldn’t be seeing any innovation (i.e. reduction in launch costs) in the US. If we want the trend to continue, at the very least we shouldn’t be letting politics decide what engines the ULA Vulcan launch vehicle should use. A the most, NASA shouldn’t be building an all expendable HLV on the taxpayer’s dime.
“If not for the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we wouldn’t be seeing any innovation (i.e. reduction in launch costs) in the US.”
We’d be seeing some. Things like common avionics and ACES were underway before SpaceX became a threat to ULA.
Agreed that ACES was “underway”. But, ACES is not expected to fly until “after approximately 2024” according to a Wikipedia entry. That’s s-l-o-w progress, to be sure.
True, but that’s because it had to be back-burnered. Until the Russian tanks rolled into the Crimea, ACES was supposed to be the next thing for ULA. Then came the RD-0180 backlash and ULA’s search for a new engine took precedence.
Don’t issue dividends one quarter… fund a new engine … problem solved in one. The whole premise of the Russian engines was to buy and THEN build domestically. They knew this could come back and bite them in the a$$ but they CHOSE not to invest in themselves.
Build domestically was predicated on Lockheed-Martin winning the winner-take-all EELV contract. Splitting the EELV contract 60/40 wasn’t enough to justify a domestic RD-0180 production line, so it never happened.
I’m kinda guessing you aren’t in corporate finance or investor relations; thats not how it works; thats not how any of this works!
Actually I do know how it works. It is a decision made to keep investing in R&D and growth or to start paying dividends. Young innovative companies do not start paying dividends as long as they see growth and the control of the company is still in their hands. Once it changes it gets harder and harder to not pay dividends as the corporate board is now generally made up of a different mind set from the original board.
Here is a look at Lockheed’s model
http://www.dividend.com/div…
The difference is that ULA had abandoned the cost-competitive commercial market. Selling only to the government, it had little incentive to reduce cost. Musk brought commercial satellite launch services back to the US after a gap of years. He competed for and launched Chinese satellites from American soil. That’s innovation.
Well its hard to argue with that – though its not that the US Air Force didn’t try with EELV – even though the Atlas V and Delta IV rockets that resulted are only somewhat cheaper – and nowhere near competitive internationally.
In the end, much as the government might like to get launch costs down, its much more focused on reliability. If you save 50% on a launch – which might be 10% of the cost of a unique mission like the Curiosity Rover or a really expensive spy satellite – it doesn’t make sense if you have a higher risk that you might lose the payload – you probably can’t justify the investment let along the Congressional oversight hearings. (for the record, both EELVs are at 100% reliability after over 100 launches; SpaceX is at ~93% after 30 lunches). SpaceX rockets mostly launch commercial satellites – which can be insured and ordered off active production lines; even for the NASA ISS Resupply missions they fly, there’s an Orbital Cygnus backup and, in the end, EELVs as backups. Musk and Bezos need to be low cost to compete commercially and to achieve their dreams of going to Mars or the moon; NASA would like to be cheaper but in the end, it’s wallet is a lot fatter – even though its not very reachable.
A mission like Curiosity only costs a couple billion because the launch opportunities are rate and expensive. As a result, a great deal of effort and money goes into assuring high reliability. Lower launch costs enable more frequency flight opportunities and the option of flying cheaper, lower reliability missions.
In any case, you can’t say any system has a 100% reliability. If it’s 100 successes and zero failures, then the reliability is probably over 99.3%. That is, with a 99.3% reliability there is a 50% change of having a 100 to zero track record.
For Curiosity, launch costs were 10% or less of the full program budget through launch. For JWST, more like 2%. Launch is _not_ the reason why these things are expensive, and Mars flight opportunities come around only so often regardless if your launch cost 10 or 20% less.
Flight opportunities have nothing to do with launch windows. Given current pad availability and launch windows, we could launch three or four Mars missions every 26 months. Of course, we can’t afford to. Launch windows to other destinations (Venus, Jupiter, etc.) are happen more often. The limit is money not orbital dynamics.
In any case, I disagree: Launch costs are the reason these missions are so expensive. They are the main reason we fly those big missions rather than lots of small ones.
If someone suggested flying a $25 million Mars mission, the costs would be the other way around (90% launch cost, 10% payload.) It would be an incredibly limited payload, but it would be possible. But, at that point, someone would say this is incredibly inefficient. For 10% more money, you could double the capabilities of the payload. If the payload was 50% of the total cost, spending 10% more would just enhance the payload by 20%. That might still be a good idea, but perhaps not enough to convince people to spend 10% more. Efficiency says you want to have fly a payload which costs a few times the cost of launching it (plus other fixed costs, like DSN coverage.)
If launch costs went down by a factor of five, it would make sense to fly $100 million to $500 million missions, instead of $500 to $2500 million ones. We can have a separate discussion about the scientific value of one Curiosity-class rover versus five Spirit/Opportunity-class ones. But the fact is that launch costs currently make the single, large missions more attractive based on cost efficiency.
I don’t think you can make a coherent argument based on this. MOM reportedly cost $60M and got to Mars fine. Curiosity was vastly more expensive not because launch, but because developing it’s capabilities is complex and took a lot of highly specialist, highly paid labor hours. There are no shortcuts around that, regardless of what the launch costs are
Let me try again. A rover as complex and reliable as Curiosity (not to mention fitting so much into what, by the standards of terrestrial work, is a tiny package) will certainly cost a few billion. But why would you want to do that?
If you didn’t think it Mars missions were a rare opportunity, would you necessarily want one big mission, rather than several smaller one? If you did want a big mission, would you want that high reliability? If you thought there would be an opportunity to try again on the next launch window, and the difference between 70% and 90% reliability was a factor of a few in cost, does designing to high reliability make sense? For that matter, why would you put a meteorology package and an in situ resource experiment on a rover? They would be better off on fixed landers (ideally separate ones) but if it’s the only opportunity to get to the martian surface, they go on the rover (and drive up its costs in the process.)
The one problem with many, small missions is that fixed costs make them inefficient. Below $500 million or so, fixed costs like the launch become significant. A stand-alone meteorology station makes scientific sense. Doing it right would involve a mast to put the instrument a few meters above the surface (impractical for a rover) and not landing in a geologically, astrobiologically interesting place with a microclimate (Gale crater.) That could be done for under $250 million plus launch costs. But when you add in current launch costs, it doesn’t make sense. That’s just one of many examples of good, small missions which aren’t viable at current launch costs.
The problem is, developing a sophisticated Mars rover is expensive and you’re not likely to ever want enough of them to drive down costs significantly. Look at the B-2; very complex but limited to 20 aircraft, each one was hugely expensive; the F-35 is also very complex but we are building thousands so costs, while still high, do come down. No matter what the launch cost, we will never build enough of a complex space exploration vehicle to make launch THE cost driver; can you imagine 20 Curiosity rovers? It wouldn’t move the needle though it would overtax JPL and the Deep Space Network and drive up those costs too!
I’ll agree with your reliability math but not your payload analysis; any time you build ONE VW-bug sized rover powered by an RTG packed full of unique instruments and capabilities, it’s gonna cost a lot – they aren’t going to build one for $100M and say, lets just launch a bunch and accept failures; its not possible.
Why isn’t it possible? Do you agree that, if someone was willing to accept a 30% chance of failure (the current rate for CubeSats), a large Mars rover with lots of good instrument would cost much less than $2.5 billion? Probably not $100 million, but perhaps $500 million. If so, and neglecting launch costs, it would be possible to fly five for the same price, and have a good chance of at least three working (3.5 on average). That’s a major improvement over one working. Add in a $500 million launch cost, and that same math isn’t nearly as favorable (2.1 on average). Add in a $100 million launch cost and it is (3.03 on average).
Just a couple of corrections – Authorization Acts are permanent. Appropriations Act change from year to year (or not depending if we get a CR (continuing resolution) and may change authorization act direction.
NASA gets Congressional direction from two sets of people – the authorizers and the appropriators – authorizers tells us what to do and appropriators tell us what to do with our money. NASA has to reconcile those two masters. Typically appropriators have the last bite and over the last seven years they have had a lot of authority as to what NASA spends on what programs.
Over the last six years, NASA has been operating under the 2010 NASA Authorization Act – with further direction contained in appropriations.
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/64…
When the President signs this Authorization Act it will be the first new authorization legislation that NASA has had since 2010.
And FAA doesn’t currently have authority to license anything other than launch and reentry. If you want to go to the moon you have to go through an undefined interagency process coordinated by the FAA. No license authority yet.
While I am generally an enthusiastic fan of the former Speaker (had the opportunity to hear him speak in a side venue at the SVP annual meeting a few years ago), that picture may be the funniest image you’ve ever crafted, Keith. It brings to mind Marlon Brando in Superman… Guffawing OL.
The more I look at this, the more ridiculous it seems – who the hell cares what Gingrich thinks anymore? He’s a gas bag who makes as much as he can by being a commentator and a political speaker at events – this art work captures it perfectly; pay bo attention to that gas bag on the stage!
Oh lots of people listen to him. We live in a world where the Speaker is considered a really smart wonk, after all, and where unruly hair was elected to 1600.
In this environment all that matters is the size of your megaphone.
Don’t mistake bloviating for influence just because Trump won; he tapped into a national discontent with the party in power to narrowly win; a huge majority wish he’d knock off his tweeting. Newt ran for President in 2012 and humiliated himself – especially when he mused about making a lunar colony the 51st state – he got no traction. When it looked like he might be a contender for a Trump Administration position (which was always doubtful), he pulled himself from consideration publicly, favoring bloviating to actually getting things done. He’s the saddest kind of has been – he doesn’t even realize he’s irrelevant. Of course, if 10 – 5% of the public listens to him, he’ll have an audience but no clout. This will be further demonstrated when the NASA transition act becomes law.
Not only is Space World quite divided over architecture, missions and targets; it also has few supporters, and even those are parochial.
Take support where it’s found. And say ‘thank you’.
Well so much for the nonsense that Gingrich matters or that SLS/Orion are about to be cancelled: President Trump just signed the NASA Transition Authorization Act