NASA Constellation Briefing Notes

NASA opens themselves up to these controversies. After all, who does the buck stop with for the Aries rocket? Who is designing it? Whose signature is on the top level drawing? Who is the Werner Von Braun for Aries?

The answer is: NO ONE. We could resurrect Von Braun, dust him off and sit him at his old wooden desk and still not be any better off because his position has been eliminated. Everything is strictly design-by-committee today. We have replaced Von Braun with a systems engineering process because one engineer is just like another. It doesn't matter if they have any experience designing rockets. One's just like another. They are all replaceable and interchangeable. Experience counts for nothing. Demonstrated good judgment counts for nothing. We don't care if one person just has a really good gut feeling for designing these things just right. We've got a process. We did a trade study.

Why should the American people believe any of these talking heads and empty suits that are telling them:

"Everything is ok."
"We have everything under control."

Well who the hell are you? How many rockets have you designed? What qualifies you to tell those of us who are footing the bill that "everything is ok?" We have a right to know. It is our money you are spending.

And the fact is, no one is in charge. No one's career as a rocket designer is at stake. The only ones with anything to lose here is us, the US taxpayer. Everyone at NASA, ATK, and all the rest have plausible deniability. Everyone can point a finger at someone else and say "it's their fault". And there we are holding the bag once more, just like we were with all the programs that went before, and all NASA can do is whine about how unfair we are being to them. It is not unfair for the US taxpayer to want someone to be accountable. In fact, it is inexcusable that we've let NASA go for this long with zero accountability.

I am anti-Ares but let's get the facts straight and not spread any BS.
Von Braun wasn't a rocket designer. He was just a team leader and a dynamic speaker. He didn't design the Saturn V. Urban myth. His position does still exist, Director of MSFC

Also, your anti system engineering rants are asinine. System engineering has always existed, it just wasn't called that. Von Braun was big on it. System engineering is what made the Saturn V fly, Corona take pictures and the Atlas and Titan work

I agree with Dfens. However, this problem is bigger than just NASA, it is the government in general and the political environment that makes it impossible to succeed. No one is accountable and no one has true authority to be accountable. If you were made program manager and told to "go do this," and you came back with a sound engineering answer that said it will cost this much and take this long, you would be told to "do it for half that cost in half that time." We are stuck in a rut of setting schedule and cost based on what we think can be sold to Congress.

It does make it doubly hard when we don't have the leadership with the experience to come up with these sound engineering answers. Those in charge are there because they know the right people, not because they are competent. Not to pick on anyone, but take Ralph Roe. He was arguably responsible for Columbia because he was the program manager at the time, understanding the aforementioned limitations on the real authority that position does not have. What was his punishment? He got to head the NASA Engineering Safety Center which was in direct response to a recommendation in the CAIB report on the very accident that happened on his watch!! This is the way it works; punish the whistleblower when they turn out to be right (think Roger Boisjoly from Challenger) and reward the guilty when they fail catastrophically (think Ralph Roe from Columbia).

We recently had a call from each Center to identify your "legendary Systems Engineers" who are your most experienced technical leaders and not a single Engineering Director or Center Director was named. It was all lower-level people who are in the trenches doing the work. I'm not even sure there were any Division Chiefs, certainly not from our Center. Not one single senior individual Agency-wide. Senior technical leadership in this Agency is NON-EXISTENT. I think the new NASA mantra is "success is not an option." I truly cannot see how this Agency can do anything successful anymore. One qualifier, I am talking human spaceflight. Science (and possibly Aeronautics) still seems to have some success, but they are probably not far behind the Code M Centers when it comes to brain rot.

Indeed - At the next available opportunity, would someone please ask Mr. Steve Cook who is the Chief Designer of Ares-1? And for that matter, Ares-5?

Who is the Rutan, the Korolev behind these vehicles?

Those asking who the "Chief Designer" is, do not understand the world as it is today. A von Braun would be subject to all kinds of peer reviews and the design would evolve.

That's EXACTLY how the Ares I and Ares V architecture came about. The "chief designers" briefed the ESAS Panel and got a peer review from some of the best minds in the space community. Some call this "design by committee," but they are the most scrutinized launch vehicles ever and are more robust because of it.

And yes, the design did evolve - for the better - as expensive SSMEs were replaced by commercially-developed RS-68s, and J-2X engines that already had an air-lit capability. Looking at it from a life-cycle standpoint, these changes save $4-5 billion.

I'm as big a fan of Apollo and von Braun as any of you, but don't get stuck in the past.

Every time I see engineering situations, I am struck by this engineering philosophy:

You can have your project:

* Cheaper
* Sooner
* Reliable

Please choose two of the above!

What I'm seeing here with the Ares program is an attempt to do all three at the same time, which in the long run simply doesn't work. Von Braun had the rare luxury of being able to throw out the "cheaper" option and had essentially a blank check thrown his way (within reason) to get "man on the moon by the end of the decade".

Some in the commercial "new space" are attempting to do this by trading off expenses for patience and incremental testing, as they don't have the budget of the federal government to back them up. Cost is the factor they are forced to deal with, and when they rush things they end up finding out the hard way that reliability suffers. You know what I'm talking about here if you've followed some of these start-up groups and those who are involved in the various space prize competitions.

I've also been involved with some engineering efforts where cheaper meant a non-existent budget. You end up with things like Linux when this happens, however it takes dang near forever for anything to get built this way and critics are always railing against whatever you come up with.

Ares is going to be built, and there are billions of dollars that will see that happens. The Space Shuttle flew as well, with billions of dollars thrown its way as well with it also getting continual budget cuts at the wrong times and having reliability suffer as a result.

Of course that is precisely why Ares is being built in the first place, isn't it? The Shuttle simply can't deal with the demands that NASA needs for manned spaceflight and a replacement vehicle is needed? Otherwise, it wouldn't be an issue of what the status of Ares would be, but rather what the name of the next Shuttle to be pulled off the assembly line would be called.

Billions of dollars haven't and can't fix the shuttle, so why is the Ares any different?

People are throwing a lot of _inappropriate_ complaints at Ares I.

I see this suggestion that they're cheaping it again from Possum. Oftentimes it comes with the suggestion that they're cutting costs now at the expense of operating costs later.

But in every case it's someone suggesting that NASA drop Ares-I for something "half as cheap" at the expense of later operating costs, as if NASA can just sit on the money and spend it later.

The switch to the J-2X is a perfect example of them taking a hit _now_ that will save them money _later_. On a fixed annual budget, it will mean the capacity to do more flights a year. It will _encourage_ the thing's use.

Remember the Shuttle. 20 years form now, _nobody_ will care how much it cost to design if it's blindingly expensive to operate, choking any attempts to develop something better.

The whole reason we have this gap is the Shuttle's _operating costs_ prohibit replacing it.

Let's not beg congress to repeat this because some website with shiny graphics told us to.

"I asked Jeff Hanley if he thought it was proper to state in NASA staff meetings that he thought that the manner in which the Orlando Sentinel reported things had to do with the way they run their company and current business climate".

THIS is the question you ask the Constellation manager when you are given the chance????? Obviously designed to do nothing more than embarass him. You need to change the tagline of your blogsite: You will learn NOTHING here.

Editor's note: Mr. Hanley needs little help from me to embarrass himself.

First, I'm going to address this business of "Systems Engineering"! Those who rail against systems engineers have NO CLUE as to the intent of their function! That includes a LOT OF MANAGERS who are NOT engineers, or who have been so far removed from engineering while they pursued
"management" that they couldn't screw in a light bulb if their lives (or those of the astronauts) depended on it!

The idea of systems engineering is to have people with enough background in MANY disciplines to be able to ask the SPECIALISTS in those many disciplinces the right questions, so that an integrated design can be formulated.

The fact is that a lot of these managers do NOT have an engineering background, and do not know where systems engineers SHOULD fit in the scheme of things, and so misuse them. The other fact is that many managers of engineers in this country have had the attitude that engineers are failed managers, or they wouldn't be engineers! As a result, the managers don't listen to the engineers when they speak! If this weren't true we wouldn't have had Challenger and Columbia (or Apollo 1 for that matter)!

As to Wernher von Braun not being a rocket designer, he certainly WAS during the early days of the Verein fur Rahmshefahrt! He also held a PhD in physics. That he became an ENGINEERING manager was due to his expertise in multiple disciplines by the time he came over here after WWII.

As far as the rest of these rants are concerned, I don't know what happened at the PDR, as I wasn't there! But there is enough "smoke" from various people (other than the Orlando Sentinel) so that I would think there might be some "fire" there. It may be that a "Delta-PDR" will be held to work off some of the "Review Item Discrepancies" (RIDs) BEFORE the Critical Design Review.

I frankly don't like the Ares I design very much! It reminds me of "Vanguard-on-steroids". It may be that it can be brought to fruition, though I have my doubts.

There is also the question of what the next President and, almost more importantly, what the next Congress will do to the Constellation program! The whole question could become moot!

Somebody,

How do you go from "the Ares program is an attempt to do all three at the same time" to "Ares is going to be built, and there are billions of dollars that will see that happens."

So what is it? Is it cheaper or not?

You cannot simultaneously complain about the development cost and complain they're trying to cheap it up.

I saw first hand what NASA and their contractors did when they had plenty of money to spend. I saw it when I worked on space station. Every year we would work 6 months then rephase the program for 6 months. Every year station capabilities would be lost and the cost would skyrocket. Every year they'd find some asinine reason to scrap all the work we'd done and make us do it over again. Every damn year.

Enjoy your design-by-committee rocket. It might work, it might not. Regardless of whether it works or how much it costs the US taxpayer has a right to hold someone accountable for its design. It is our money and it is well past time our "civil servants" and their contractor toadies learned that lesson. I marvel at every day you are allowed to get away with the current scam. Because that's what it is, a scam. There is nothing to recommend the way NASA builds rockets now.

In reply to Dfens:

I worked Space Station Program from 1991 - 1998 which included Space Station Freedom, Space Station Aplha and all the other versions. NASA was only 33.3% to blame. The others were MacDac (the prime) and Congress who kept jerking around with the funding. Remember Zimmer and Roe and their attempts to kill Space Station every year they were in Congress?

I also worked Space Shuttle Program and Constellation (at Level 2) Program and can tell you that the same spread of blame exists. Each Center is its own fiefdom including the primes and subs that support them.

P.S. systems engineering works when employed properly.

Space station had the same fundamental problem as Shuttle and Aries. When you pay for process, you get lots and lots of process. When you pay for results, you get results. Systems engineering is all about process, which is why aerospace loves it. It's engineering for morons.

Which would you rather have, a 3D CAD model and drawing of a rocket, or 5 trillion "shall statements" describing the design in exhaustive detail? Only a Byzantine fool would pick the "shall statements", and if you are that stupid, there's a place for you in aerospace management. Because stupid pays the bills. The stupider we are, the longer the design drags out, the more money we make. That's what shuttle was about, that's what station was about, that's what Aries is about. No rocket science there.

The idea that Ares is designed to be a money hog is foolish, would you say that about Apollo?

Right now Constellation needs all the help it can get, if it doesn't work then we're left with NOTHING! I for one do not want to use the shuttle one day longer than we need.

Instead of finding ways to derail the program and increase your own ego, why don't we find ways to improve it and move it along faster and smoother?