Precursors to a Paradigm Shift

At some point, when all the different parties come together to discuss the different approaches to the emerging commercial space sectors, the language used needs to be standardized. Words are important and have precise meanings, so until we use a common vocabulary, we can't really claim to be really understanding each other.

As far as I can tell*, NASA does not have the authority to "certify" anything. They do have, however, every right to issue a set of requirements that must be met before they acquire a product or service, but that's a far cry from "certification".

As the appointed regulators of the commercial space transportation industry, the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation doesn't even certify anything. They issue experimental permits, licenses, and safety approvals.

With respect to the emerging commercial space industries, NASA should be a customer and not a regulator, so they might want to avoid using language that might cause confusion.

Ken Davidian

*...and please don't hesitate to tell me if I'm wrong...

I do not believe NASA is a regulatory arm of the government, like the FAA.

In order to protect its personnel, whether workers in the commercial factories, or international liaisons flying on foreign airlines, or astronauts flying into space, NASA should show 'due diligence' and verify that working conditions and vehicles are safe and meet with appropriate licenses and certification. In some cases NASA and other arms of the government warn that certain countries should be avoided or that certain airlines should not be used because of personnel safety issues.

Only if NASA were procuring something; buying hardware, should NASA have to certify it, and then they certify that it meets the specifications, and it is essentially part of a procurement process ensuring the government is getting what it was paying for.

When astronauts flew on Mir, we had our astronauts take a look around and verify the working conditions, and we even took samples of the environment routinely in order to characterize the working environment. We also knew the air was contaminated, fluids were leaking. Some aspects of the vehicle would not have passed NASA requirements, but Mir was the Russian's spacecraft. NASA did not stop flying astronauts there.

NASA does have human [factors] integration standards; some of these are the ones that programs like ISS and Constellation have been accused of bypassing. Basically the programs decided they need not abide by NASA-produced and even JSC-produced standards, but they selected which of the standards they accepted and adopted those in their own documentation. They also changed some from the basic NASA standards.

I suspect that other than ensuring that their employees are reasonably safe, NASA is not the arm of the government that would certify spacecraft safety. More likely its the FAA. A whole group of personnel working under former NASA managers is now in place in the FAA and I think that is what they've been establishing themselves to do.

I think Obama just started a space policy civil war myself. There were far wiser paths to take to have avoided this.

We cant let hopes and dreams of what might happen cloud our perception of what is actually going to change for manned spaceflight at NASA.

The cots program was running alongside Constellation before this. The result of it was unlikely to have space tourists sharing seats with government astronauts. There aren't enough millionaire adventurers to staff a regular flight and big business cares more about launching satellites than people.

If we end up paying similar prices to fly though select vendors and still can't get out of low orbit, the result isn't so much of a paradigm shift as it is a new way to shuffle the paperwork.

Dinerman's article is quite one-sided. He mentioned Beal Aerospace. Dinerman did not mention that Beal did actually get to the point of test-firing the largest privately financed liquid propellant rocket engine (810,000 lbs. thrust) since the F-1. He closed the doors to Beal, reminding that he had previously testified that "... government subsidies to competing launch providers constitutes the private sectors biggest business risk."

Who has been building the spacecraft and launch vehicles that NASA has been using for decades? It's not NASA. Who processes the space shuttle and prepares them for launch? That's done by United Space Alliance. What have formal U.S. space policies and visions over the past 25 years had to say about the place of private enterprise in this business? They've all been very specific about taking the path that it looks like has been proposed with the release of the administration's FY2011 NASA budget.

And I'm writing this with the knowledge that the future of my employment is in question right now, given the proposed new direction. Change can hurt in the short term. But imagine what can happen if we let private enterprise and NASA both focus on what they do best?

There are good signs in the private sector, it's true. Things seem to be going well beyond the X-whatever stage. The Falcon 9 and Dragon are examples, as well as the "Dream Chaser": http://www.spacedev.com/spacedev_advanced_systems.php

My concern is: will these companies meet NASA's needs in the future. They can make money from space tourists, maybe mostly sub-orbital. For that they can charge whatever they need to make a profit. To many wealthy types, the more expensive, the more prestige, the more exclusiveness.

NASA contracts may not be as profitable. Even if NASA has strict requirements for a vehicle contract, a private company can just say "No thanks", if they can make more money from joy-riding tycoons. And we would have put them in that position with our $6B.

There are serious jobs to be done in cis-lunar space. NASA needs to have guaranteed delivery of an acceptable workhorse crew-vehicle, or maybe the job can go to DARPA.

Newt Gingrich is the true thought leader of the conservative movement. Most of the criticism of the current Administration centers on budget and deficit spending, Gingrich centerpieces.

That being said, Gingrich's support of Obama's space policy is seismic, at least with regards to NASA's future. In all likelihood, the die has been cast. If the Republicans regain the Presidency in 2012, the new direction of NASA will be maintained or even accelerated.

My advice to people is to get used to it. Griffin's Soviet Design Bureau model for NASA is incompatible with the values of our nation. It needs to be relegated to the past.

Safety regulation is the FAA's AST responsibility, not NASA. NASA has it's own internal safety ratings but as pointed out they are not a regulatory agency.

Flash001 - a true commercial spaceflight operator would simply order a second vehicle for your joy-riding tycoons and make money from both groups.

Obama's plan and Newt's support are the way forward. If NASA ever wants to go beyond LEO they need to do it in concert with the US private sector and international partners.

Nobody in their right mind should be against commercial space. With that having been said, there should be nobody in their right mind against constellation or a constellation-ish program.

The two programs need to run concurrently. Commercial space needs to be able to do the LEO missions, to free up availability for NASA to do beyond LEO missions.

Now, here for me is the meat and potatoes arguement of why Obama's plan is dead wrong:

The main things I took out of the new plan is: ISS, commercial, game changing technology, HLV, climate change, education/outreach.

The ISS is being extended to 2020. From what I've seen, it looks like the quickest commercial guys will be ready 2014ish. By the time you get their rockets man rated, tested and approved by nasa and the astronauts to go, we're talking what? 2017ish? And that's assuming all goes well without any more problems. So at this point, NASA is pinning their hopes on some companies for what, 3 years of activity? When you look at the math this way, it just seems to make a hell of a lot more sense to just man rate an atlas or delta and just be done with it.

Now, onto game changing stuff. This is good. Research is always good. But. There comes a practicality point. Do you keep putting off buying a computer every year because you keep telling yourself that some new fancy or faster device is coming out next year? Or do you just accept at some point that you need a computer to do something and there's nothing you can do if something better comes out the next day. Its the same thing with what Bolden was talking about. VASIMIR, nuclear propulsion...warp drive. Are they being worked on? Yes (ok, maybe the warp drive isn't). Are they proven? No. Have they been tested on a production scale? No. Can they in the near future? No. Are they man rated? Hell no. It would be like saying that the next generation of cars will be 100% efficient, but that noone can drive or buy a car until that car is invented. You do what you can with what you have now, while working to the future, and then use those future innovations when they're working

Climate change: Last I checked, NASA was not NOAA. If Obama wants to study climate change, write the damn check to NOAA. I don't go to a Ford dealership if I want to buy a Toyota.

HLV: The main outcome of Augustine was not that constellation wouldn't work. It just needed more money. For that matter, ANY program needed more money. Whether Constellation was the best program of them (in reference to DIRECT or sidemount) is a matter of debate, but the fact is that is the furthest program along in terms of physical reality. Now, the case can be made that constellation was hopelessly flawed and broken. Ok. If that was the case, why cancel everything outright with no definitive plan on a new HLV. Why not announce that we were going with Direct or sidemount?

The real answer here is purely political, because an HLV is not going to be put in motion under this administration. When Obama originally started running for President, his original stated plans were to delay/cancel Constellation to fund his climate change and educational initiatives. Then someone on his campaign realized he'd never get the I4 corrider here in Florida to support that. So he did an about face in front of a bunch of union supporters in Titusville saying he fully supported manned space flight, wanted to close the gap, and keep jobs. Now that he's been elected, he's gone back to his original plans. VSE, despite the funding problems and delays, was a vision. It had a clear goal by a clear time. The new plan is a muddling of ideas and plans, with no real idea of when we'll do it, and the estimated timeframe is shifting further and further to the future. Its far easier to completely kill off a program when its muddled and can't be explained to the public. Nancy Pelosi's come out and said outright that manned spaceflight isn't worth it. Barney Frank was on 60 Minutes a couple years ago on their piece talking about going back to the moon and mars, and outright said it wasn't worth it.

I didn't want to get into it really, but lets also face facts. Jobs are key to this. Its why you have a decent sized congressional delegation opposing this move. The job estimates currently being thrown out are losses of 12000 at KSC alone. Bolden was talking a few hundred jobs to improve KSC/CCAFS and about 1200 jobs potentially from commercial guys, assuming they hire from KSC and just don't bus their own people in. That math doesn't quite add up. There's also the number that for every KSC job lost, 1.8 jobs (or whatever the number is) are lost in the retail sector in the surrounding area. That's not even accounting for the expected increase in crime and such. It may not be as much, but I'm sure JSC, MSFC, Stennis and others are going to be hard hit as well, and their surrounding areas. Bolden keeps talking game changing technologies...from a KSC perspective, we are not a research facility. We are an operations facility. Almost everything we do goes to getting something ready to launch to space. No forseeable manned spaceflight in our eyes means no KSC.

That's just the specified NASA centers, though. What about all the outside contractors? The ones all over the country on Orion or Ares? What about the small businesses that manufacture piece parts, chemicals, sandpaper, electronic parts etc etc. In a time when the headlines and everyone are screaming "Where are the jobs, we need more jobs!", in one fell swoop, the administration is killing more jobs than it has ever created. And yet, they can somehow legitimize giving billions of dollars to help rich people buy cars so that the auto industry can have a one month boost in sales.

The state that Obama's plan leaves us at: No internal way to get to space. No defined timeline to get back to beyond LEO. And we're studying the weather.

And lastly, and I just have to say this, but at the KSC all hands, Bolden stated that the reason we can't extend shuttle is because each shuttle launch is like putting a bullet in a gun and putting it to your head and squeezing the trigger. If that's the case, why are we still flying shuttle? He also stated in an example we couldn't build a russian rocket engine after many years because Russia had artisans and craftsmen put the final touches on their hardware That was a direct slap in the face to all KSC workers, and we were all none too happy when he said it.

It will be years until SpaceX gets anyone in space. A 10 year manned space gap makes no sense.

It was going to be even longer with Ares I and Constellation. This program was underfunded and becoming another Forever Program. As soon as Constellation hit the reset button, going from a 4-segment/SSM-based Ares-I to a 5-segment/J-2X, some adult supervision should have yelled 'time out.' I remember when Horowitz announced this change, and not a comment was uttered. By then, Mike "Colonel Kurtz" Griffin had already taken NASA up the river and far from reality.

Akear, you keep saying things about how mediocre SpaceX is, and how private industry is so far behind NASA -- you seem awfully focused on one company. There are actually two companies working on COTS: the other is Orbital Sciences, who also worked as a contractor on CxP. Furthermore, COTS is not explicitly involved in anything manned, despite Musk's intention to have a manned version of Dragon.

The CCDev contract, which is explicitly related to manned spaceflight has been given to such inexperienced, new companies as... Boeing. Also don't forget that its funding development of a second orbital vehicle through Sierra Nevada. This sounds like avoiding the eggs in one basket issue.

Commercial space is not a monolith representing SpaceX solely. And of course this is neglecting the fact that F9 is likely to launch in the next few months as the *final vehicle*, and Ares 1 would not have been ready till 2017-2018 by the most optimistic estimates, giving a nearly 10-year gap anyway.

If you're really concerned that these groups don't have the expertise, might I suggest you consider applying to whatever company or group suits your skills and interests best and see how you can contribute. Knowledge and capabilities are attached to the people, not the organization. The proposed budget merely seeks to change the incentive structure.

"If you're really concerned that these groups don't have the expertise, might I suggest you consider applying to whatever company or group suits your skills and interests best and see how you can contribute."

Yes, I'm sure many companies would love to hire someone displaying his level of ignorance.

I supported Constellation but this program looks fine to me. NASA has been underfunding R&D, we all know that, and this is an opportunity to reboot whitout the immediate financing burden of operations. It's a historic opportunity in a way.

And it may well work. We'll see.