Space Policy: Everyone Has A Different Opinion

Sen Hutchison cracks me up. A nation that is centrally planned to "achieve great things when we are committed and dedicated to a singular purpose" is basically socialist.

Also, why didn't she do something about the shuttle and the gap years ago?

I am so sick of congress which has deliberately underfunded NASA since the early 1970s, kept manned expeditions in low earth orbit, and canceled ambitious unmanned expeditions like JIMO acting as if Obama is a villain who destroyed NASA. This has been a problem for almost half a century. If congress does not like it, then they can come up with a plan and fund NASA instead of allowing presidents of both parties and NASA administrators to come up with imaginary underfunded programs which will be funded by an unnamed someone in the distant future.

Obama is not perfect and I don't worship him, but it seems as if he is just being adult about future expenditures and planning accordingly. I would rather have that than the past 40 years of lies which has postponed manned and even ambitious unmanned for a generation.

Again, just more of the same. No one was complaining a few months ago when we were going to have a five year spaceflight gap and an unaffordable replacement architecture for the Shuttle. Now suddenly everyone wants to "save" U.S. human spaceflight. They're all a bunch of hypocrites.

The next couple of months will be interestng.

It has been almost a month since the Presidents 2011 budget has been released. We have heard from every corner of the United States from many people who have an opinion on the future of Human Space Flight as expressed in the 2011 budget.

The one person we have not heard from is President Obama. Given the turmoil and angst and significant redirection that is expressed in his 2011 budget for NASA HSF, I would expect him at some point to say something about why he feels his 2011 budget is the path to take.

It's called leadership. In much the way Kennedy talked about why it was important to go to the moon, and did a lot of selling of it through his public speeches, I would expect Obama to similarly talk about why his budget and his direction is important to the Nation. It's his job to sell it to Congress, not Bolden, not Garver, not blogs, not editorials; though these venues do provide vibrant discussion, it is Obama's plan and no one else s to sell.

But not one peep.

"Now suddenly everyone wants to "save" U.S. human spaceflight. "

Well a few months ago we had a shuttle replacement plan. Now we don't, just some ideas.

It's difficult to escape the feeling that, to most politicians, NASA is just a jobs program. It's quite sad to observe such an absence of vision.

The Vision (aka the Obama-Bolden plan) is the direction NASA should proceed in. It makes sense. It can be supported. It will lead to progress.

Kay Bailey Hutchison's new bill to restart Shuttle would be good and is needed if we are going to properly and fully utilize ISS. It comes awfully late and will require additional funding beyond the existing Bolden budget. It makes far more sense to go with an existing, capable vehicle than to focus on trying to develop a vehicle, Orion, which really does not fill the need at all for nearly a decade, and even then does not replace a Shuttle Orbiter which was optimized to support an ISS.

The key to living the Vision is for NASA to actually focus on developing the Vision into real hardware, and show real leadership in research and development.

The NASA organization, particularly at JSC, is no longer set up for R&D. A serious reorganization is required that focuses programs on their program management functions, and which focuses the technical organizations on supporting R&D as well as missions. The way to fix this is pretty simple; take a look at the organizations, their functions, and the distribution of manpower that were in place 25 years ago. The organization then largely still mirrored the Apollo era, though senior management introduced some changes based on their Apollo lessons, in order to better support the development of Shuttle and Station.

Operations, in all its forms, needs to be minimized. It took over much of human space flight in the last 25 years; particularly in the last 15. Its been 'eating NASA's lunch'. As we saw with Constellation, new development could no longer be adequately supported. Research, design and development are what most of NASA needs to be focused on.

Operations organizations and personnel are needed, but they are just the narrow peak of the pyramid. If NASA does not realign around development, then NASA really serves no useful purpose.

Expertise, experience and leadership need to be re-established in engineering, sciences, mission planning and analysis, and all of the areas NASA depended upon a quarter century ago. They are there to lead the development. That is not their sole focus; they need to support ongoing missions also so they can learn how a successfully developed machine works, but they cannot properly do development if that is not their prime focus.

There has got to be real, competent, experienced and outspoken managers at the helm. They need to be able to think on their own and decide and direct how to support the goals. Consensus management in which logic defers to the will of the majority, most of whom do not have the proper grounding in technical implementation, is not what is required.

If serious management changes are not introduced then NASA will not succeed and NASA human space flight will die, just as surely as Constellation has died.

Inadequate, inexperienced, poorly trained and silent management and leadership has been NASA's problem for a long time. NASA will not be able to achieve greatness again unless it overcomes this problem. It will not even survive.

Actually, though there are not a lot of us, some of us have been yelling for about 3-4 years. NASA leadership did their best to silence us. Some of us had to leave to go to other government organizations, to industry, to universities, but some of us have been speaking up for a long time. Others chose just to let NASA fall on its own sword.

A lot of the mainstream did not want to hear us. Remember Jeff Hanley's words a couple years: 'we'll show them, we'll get the job done'. Sorry, some of us knew years ago that it was not going to happen.

Ed Griffith: "I am so sick of congress which has deliberately underfunded NASA";

NASA shares a large part of the guilt for having misused or inadequately used the funding it did get. Look at how slow and how little progress was made with $10 billion on Constellation.

What good is a plan that doesn't work?

Actually, though there are not a lot of us, some of us have been yelling for about 3-4 years. NASA leadership did their best to silence us.

Many of us knew how ridiculous the ESAS approach was, and we commented regularly about it in blogs (e.g., spacepolitics.com, NASAWatch). The current redirection is no surprise at all, especially given the increasingly bleak fiscal environment in our country.

That 'socialism' you're talking about help to create the internet, the first nuclear reactors, the first satellites, put men on the Moon, and, by the way, built a military that kept us from being enslaved by NAZI Germany and the Empire of Japan and later by an adversary that wanted to completely end capitalism.

So thanks to the fertilizer of socialism, capitalism in America has been able to thrive! Government programs like NASA help our economy to grow!

Marcel F. Williams

The suggestion that ISS needs shuttle to continue is ridiculous.

Does the reader think ISS operators are incompetent? Does the politician think the reader is incompetent?

@Libby: "The NASA organization, particularly at JSC, is no longer set up for R&D"

While there are pockets of folks doing R&D and development at JSC, indeed it is an operations culture.

So, if JSC does not have the mettle to lead the new Obama R&D thrust, where in the Agency would that leadership be provided from?

Ed Griffith has provided a very good post above and I completely agree with everything he said except for this one sentence: "Obama is not perfect and I don't worship him, but it seems as if he is just being adult about future expenditures and planning accordingly."

What seems to be missing here is Obama's intent for the space program. At a time when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now says that Obama's policies will increase the federal deficit $9.7 TRILLION over the next ten years (that's only 2 years longer than two full terms for Obama), NASA is the one federal budget that has to take it on the chin? Obama has handed out $25-100 BILLION to financial institutions, industry, etc., like it was candy. In some cases, not ever expecting to get this money back. And yet NASA was never treated like this, even after the Augustine Commission said NASA needed more money. The 'extra' money that Obama likes to tout that he's requesting for the agency is immediately carved out of the pie for private industry. So, really, NASA's budget hasn't really been increased at all.

This isn't being 'adult' about the budget situation...Obama is putting into practice his lack of support for the space program. He doesn't believe in it (even though we were promised by him during the campaign that he'd close the gap). This was a lie - and most people who work the space program knew this. He's now put together a budget proposal that has no plan behind it. Bolden and company have to now try and find a way to make this plan look good.

As to the comments on Congress, this is dead on. For ANY congressional member to now be upset about a lack of access to space is totally hypocritical. Resistance should have been noted the day Bush put this plan in place and yet they stayed strangely silent. Congress has once again f'd this up and they have no one to blame but themselves. And we should hold them accountable.

Someone please expain to me where they are going to get all these research type people for the new program? Research work is a completely different mindset for someone to understand. Engineers aren't scientists and vice-versa. NASA will need scientists and a lot of them. They don't grow on trees in this country.

I think there are three separate answers.

Change is required.
Change to what ?
Back to an organization that more resembles the organization and personnel distribution of 25 years ago.

Who is going to instigate that change ?

Senior management has to come to the realization that change is needed and are going to have to initiate it. That includes the senior people at NASA Headquarters, and the senior management at JSC. By the way almost all of these individuals came from the JSC operations.

Who will be placed in the new leadership positions ?
The best individual they can find for each position. Each position needs to be honestly competed and selected.

There are individuals who have experience, education, and demonstrated ability in engineering, design, development, requirements or whatever the criteria is for the specific position.

I don't know, RC. The figures I've seen elsewhere seem pretty well thought-out. Without shuttle, there is about a 40-50% upmass shortfall to the ISS that will need to be filled by unmanned cargo ships, of which the only ones currently available are HTV, ATV (current flight rate 1 every 2 years) and Progress. Additionally, remember that NASA intends to increase utilisation of ISS, not reduce it, in the post-shuttle era.

Production of cargo vehicles would need to be really ramped up if NASA intends to utilise ISS to the full. Before anyone mentions the CRS providers... how much cargo did Cygnus and Dragon fly to the ISS last year? What about this year or next?

Don't get me wrong, I think that, ultimately, commercial space providers will be a key to increasing LEO utilisation. However, right now and possibly not until as late as 2013/14, they cannot help in ISS utilisation. Simply put, until a vehicle arrives (robot or crewed) that can replace the shuttle's upmass capability to the ISS, shuttle extension is necessary simply to maintain the ISS.

"Does the reader think ISS operators are incompetent?"

No, but I do believe that they have been told, in the grand old bureaucratic tradition, that they must fit the facts around the policy, not the other way round, lest they find themselves promoted sideways to the Paperclip Geometry Compliance division.

I have no doubt that ISSP and the international partners will do their best, but the best may not be enough. We may see a forcible downsizing of the crew back down to 3 before the first CRS flights simply because the current crew of 6 is unsupportable.

Marcel-

I agree with you. I just like to point it out when people from the GOP act like socialists!

Williams,
Your argument holds no water and your points are discredited.
The internet is now commercially managed
The most of the world's nuclear reactors are in commercial power stations.
More satellites are built and operated by commercial companies and launch by commercial launch vehicles.
It is now time for the gov't to let go of manned space launch.

The military is a gov't activity and is not relevant to this discussion. However, the military did chose to go the commercial space launch route in the initial EEVL procurement.

"What good is a plan that doesn't work?"

Other than the biased anti Constellation crowd here, who said that Constellation wouldn't work? The Augustine report said it would work although it was underfunded and would take longer.

"Who will be placed in the new leadership positions ?

The best individual they can find for each position. Each position needs to be honestly competed and selected."

Not everyone needs to be a researcher, but they should have applicable knowledge and experience for the position.

There are individuals who have experience, education, and demonstrated ability in engineering, design, development, requirements; whatever the criteria is for the specific position.

It means seeking people with the right experience from wherever they can be found whether that is internal to a NASA center, or within the NASA and contractor community, or from outside.

It does not help to take an individual who had never done systems engineering or integration, and place that individual in a position as the manager of SE&I. Or someone who had never been in a program or project management position, and suddenly they are the manager over the entire program. Someone who has a track record of never having developed, established or met project or program requirements, and suddenly they are the manager responsible for program requirements establishment and verification.

Do they have experience in systems engineering, design, integration, testing?....

It means that when you need someone to relate to the public, you find someone with a history and experience and education in communications, education, marketing or similar areas. Have they ever written, done media production, do they know what is required of the job, can they relate ?....

When wholesale decisions are made, like, 'lets take all of these senior flight directors and we'll put them in charge'. Or like, 'these ex-astronauts need jobs; we'll make one the head of public relations and the other the head of system architecture'.

If the attitude is, 'astronauts, flight directors, they're bright people, they'll figure it out', while the positions require some specific technical knowledge or ability, then you have a problem.

If people are being placed and the questions are not being asked, or if they're asked and the answer comes back, 'doesn't matter, we just need to put these people in some leadership position, somewhere, anywhere', then the positions are not being competed and the best individual for the job is not being found.

When the entire organization has been formed in this manner, then you are playing Russian roulette with the program.

I totally agree on your comments regarding managing large schale development projects at NASA. The problem is that NASA doesn't do enough developement programs to actually give it's personal the experience it needs to lead that type of effort nor do they provide them the training. Working in devlopment programs from my active duty days I was required to complete several DAWIA courses before I could even work as a project officer. Positions of greater responsibility required you to have completed more courses and acquired actual experience in certain fields before becoming eligible to fill those positions. NASA needs to identify it's rising stars at a young age (mid 30's) and then help them manage their careers so they get the experience they need to be eligible for leading major development projects. They also need to get formal schooling as well like the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF). So until NASA gets serious about managing it's human captial (completely non existent beyond burcreatic traing)they will need to go outside the agency to get people who actually have the experience and knowledge to do this, probably from the military.

I disagree the JSC has an ops culture. Perhaps relative to other centers it looks like an ops culture but compared to the military or airlines it looks like more of a R&D organization than an ops orgnaization. ISS was designed to be technically perfect, not easy or low cost to operate and even today most decisions on how to resolve technical issues with the vehicle ignore or completely discount the operations cost that goes into their decision.

Actually for routine support the unmanned vehicles can meet the needs of a six person crew the problem comes when you need to fly large spares to replace failed components and the restrictions on potential payloads.

...who said that Constellation wouldn't work? The Augustine report said it would work although it was underfunded and would take longer.
Therefore it wouldn't work.
(a) we're in a recession, so there's no money.
(b) the gap was/is beyond the bounds of sensibility. You cannot say the plan works when the first element isn't ready until it's obsolete (due to ISS decommissioning) and the second element isn't done until a generation of engineers has retired.
I do not know whether the Obama plan fixes these problems, but I am pretty sure the program of record couldn't.

It's really aggravating that Sen. Hutchison manages to get so many facts wrong in just the pull-quote that Keith gave us. She should know the history better -- that the problems she's complaining about were set in place by Bush and Griffin, starting 5-6 years ago. Where was she then? I guess it's just crotch-kicking Texas politics -- it doesn't have to be right, just "truthy" and effective.

If President Obama has his way, the U.S. will retire the space shuttle program later this year, just as the International Space Station is finally complete and without a viable alternative to take its place.
...as though Obama had ANYTHING to do with this. He could hardly have un-cancelled STS if he'd started trying on the afternoon of Inauguration Day.

Now that it is complete, the Obama budget plan ensures that we will no longer have easy access to it.
...as though Obama had anything to do with this either. The program of record was showing a HSF gap of 4-6 years, i.e. 100% reliance on Russia to serve our interests on ISS. So this lack of easy access is not a new feature of the 2010 Obama plan.

I have introduced legislation allowing NASA to extend the shuttle's service while work continues on development of the next generation of space vehicle.
She knows (a) the STS program is already closed down enough that it's practically impossible to add more flights, and (b) we could never afford to do these two things *well* simultaneously. That's why Bush and Griffin originally proposed cancelling STS flights by 2010 -- to free up funds for the most expensive phase of CxP development, allowing (in theory) flat funding of NASA. Is this the right time to double our funding for HSF? If so, why not 4 years ago? Where was she then? The only step that makes sense is extending STS funding into 2011 to allow all scheduled flights to be completed safely.

Unless we make every effort to close the gap in U.S. human spaceflight, we will have no choice but to face the reality that we will be totally dependent on Russia for access to space.
Too late, sweetie. WAY too late. (Eye roll)

"please expain to me where they are going to get all these research type people for the new program? Research work is a completely different mindset for someone to understand. Engineers aren't scientists and vice-versa."

Well, yes and no (but good point to raise). The thing is that in R+D, the big numbers (both cost and head-count) arrive when you go past dreaming up new ideas, and try them out (i.e. the 'D' part). E.g. look at how much money got spent on R+D programs like the X-33 - they dropped more than $1B on that one. And for building anything past tiny lab-scale stuff, you need engineers...