Bolden: "Jeff does exactly what I ask him to do"

This is exactly how Marine superiors act when a subordinate goes over the edge...after they have taken them to the woodshed and before they are canned.

Robert G. Oler

"...what the president wants us to do and aggressively going forward."

And there is the critical failure of the whole thing.

What Obama wants isn't going forward at all.

Bolden struggles every single place he speaks trying to articulate how quitting is really going forward.

I'm glad and all that we are trying so hard not to "compete with commercial space". Killing off any rocket that competes with them and so on. But people a while back looked around and saw that medium lift WAS commercial space, so that presumably most profitable niche was left open.

Not competing with commercial space is one thing. Not competing with commercial space marketing is entirely another. I can imagine the possibility of the day after the Falcon-27 first successful launch when someone casually mentions that the Falcon-63 is on the drawing board. What then?

NASA is a big agency. It has to look at every potential outcome in this situation. It's unlikely that congress will go along with the President's space policy as stated so it is the agency's best interest to have someone examine what a scaled-back Constellation program would look like if they were to mandate it's continuation. It would not be unusual for the agency to use the Constellation program manager as the lead for examining a modified program.
The NASA Administrator's comments should be taken at face value. Of course that would imply there was a shred of integrity in the Administrator, which I would expect given my prior history with former marines. We'll see if this is the case.

I hope you are right. I hope Bolden is getting ready to clean house. JSC has turned into a rouge center where senior managers ride roughshod over anybody or anything that get in their lane. Many have aligned with the politicians and businesses who oppose Bolden's plan. Some think Bolden's speech last week was "clear as mud"...which translates to it is not in their best interest. I wish Bolden luck in implementing his plan, since he has a lot of senior managers at the HSF centers working against him. While many of JSC's senior managers need to go, let's not forget about the Center Director who is presiding over his own private circus.

Jeff Hanley is doing his job. Congress mandates that Constellation cannot be cut long before Obama screwed things up. Obama's political decision to cut Constellation has left the agency adrift in no where land without direction. Hanley and the rest of the 36,000 folks in Constellation should continue the Congressional mandate until Congress defunds it. Bolden seems to want to follow a plan that has no structure, no definitive goals which he believes Congress will ultimately fund fully because Obama thinks so. If Congress didn't fund Constellation correctly what makes them think they will fund the Obama vision correctly?

Things sure are going to get interesting come November. I wonder if this "plan without a plan" for HSF has an alternative plan for what happens if Republicans win a majority of seats in either chamber of Congress? My prediction is that Congress will not do squat on NASA with regard to Obama's plan before the election. They will be consumed with the illegal immigration fiasco up until then because it will be a "signature issue" for Dems to try and secure their normal Hispanic majority vote. If Repubs win any one chamber I predict Obama's vision of NASA will be dead. If the Dems retain both chambers it MAY have a chance.

"If Congress didn't fund Constellation correctly what makes them think they will fund the Obama vision correctly?"

Quoted for EMPHASIS.

Anyone who believes that this budget is going to slide through congress without cuts is sadly, sadly mistaken. I can see where the 2011 budget gets to congress and gets cut right back down, only then we won't have the Constellation program or any other program for that matter. COTS will again be adrift and the dream of "commercial space" will be a memory.

I can actually see a scenario where president Obama submits his expanded NASA budget and then gets to blame the congress for not implementing his "vision", at which point he no longer is to blame for the evisceration of NASA and can go on and use the funds elsewhere, EXACTLY as he originally stated in 2008.

Bill

Bill

Anyone remember Baghdad Bob? This seems like like yet another assertion that doesn't match the observed data.

My understanding is that one of the major reasons behind FlexPath (which is sort of the inspiration behind Obama's plan, for better or for worse) is that since it presents several different possible goals, you get around the problem of having a large, monolithic project with a single destination (such as Constellation) which makes an easy target for Congressional budget cuts. That's the theory, anyway. Whether it will work in practice or not remains to be seen.

space minion replied to comment from Robert Oler | May 1, 2010 11:19 AM | Reply
I hope you are right. I hope Bolden is getting ready to clean house.

Clean house? That can't happen without a RIF act passed by the Congress. Some Civil Servants might get moved into other positions but the boots on the ground (contractors) are the ones about to get cleaned out to the tune of 6,000+ jobs at JSC.

So the bottom line is, pretty much from the mid-management level up will all remain in place. We have been told by the center director "Not one CS job is at stake".

SF

When 'commercial entities' use government dollars to fund their development, they're not commercial entities any more than NASA's current ...err former cadre of commerical contractors.

How did "Jeff Hanley Openly Defies White House Policy" ever become a story? Like I said before he's just doing his job as it's written in the 2010 budget. People that write these stories (and the ones who spread them) should go a little more towards fact reporting and a little less sensationalism.

rest of the 36,000 folks in Constellation should continue ....

yikes.

A supercarrier with her airgroup has about 5000-6000 people on board. are you claiming that the Constellation program is taking the equivalent of either 6 or 7 of the flattops?

there are only 12 of the CVN's in the fleet...unless this is a typo...what do all those people do?

Robert G. Oler

"I hope you are right. I hope Bolden is getting ready to clean house. JSC has turned into a rouge center where senior managers ride roughshod over anybody or anything that get in their lane."

I don't know about other divisions, but the one I am in (I am not a civil servant) I don't see this 'roughshod' stuff.

I was at the lunch associated with the Houston section of the AIAA Technical Symposium on Friday....
Mike Coats was the lunch speaker, he did no wining at all, said JSC was ready to put it's shoulder to the wheel. He pointed out one thing , need a plan soon, RFP's have to be let and it can take , lord only knows how long to get contracts into place.

Interesting to see Mr. Coats acknowledge that turning the program around will take time, at least partly due to the process of issuing RFPs and other procurement activities (defining procurement strategies, forming source boards, etc.). As a benchmark, recall that all of the Ares I contracts were awarded in Dec 2007, two years after the ESAS was complete. And that was in a time where there was focus at most levels inside NASA.

With no contracts in place, and the program (Constellation) thy was to receive most of the shuttle closeout hardware cancelled, NASA may have a hard time spending all of its money next year.

Athens the risk of a bad pun, I hope we haven't trade Constellation procurement for Procurement constipation. I know that would cause great consternation.

So how did Hanley go from gifted mission control payload officer in 1992, to losing that special intuition for Columbia as a Flight director and then to CxP bumblemania, any ideas?

Still, even after hundreds of hours of practicing far-fetched disaster scenarios, real missions occasionally serve up surprises. One frequently cited by flight directors is the March 1992 STS-49 mission to rescue.......

Engelauf remembers Jeff Hanley, then a mission control payload officer responsible for the vehicle’s cargo, poring over the shuttle’s wiring diagrams. “He was sitting in front of me with these long, fold-out drawings tracing through the entire system,” says Engelauf. Hanley had a hunch: The arming and firing circuits could have been wired backward. “Instead of arming the A circuit and firing the B circuit, Hanley wanted to arm the B circuit and fire the A circuit. So we read the instructions up to the crew and I remember you could cut the tension and suspense with a knife as we counted down…three…two…one…fire… and sure enough, the satellite left the payload bay.”

Intuition like Hanley’s amounts to a sixth sense, says Gene Kranz, the legendary.......

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/the_ground.html?c=y&page=2

November 6, 2000
'A few things have fallen through the cracks'Thursday they had to eat their first meal without forks, spoons or knives that they couldn't locate. A food warmer that was supposed to take 30 minutes to install consumed hours of their time when they could not find a cable.

The problem, said Jeff Hanley, lead flight director for the NASA portion of the mission, is "a few things have fallen through the cracks."

Not literally, of course, nothing falls in the weightlessness of space, but the written procedures the crew carried with them into orbit have not been entirely reliable.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/11/06/iss.update.reut/index.html

When Jeff Hanley talks about how the Great Oz and supercomputers at NASA show that Ares-I is 3x safer than commercial launch vehicles, I wonder if he’s ever going to release their analyses for actually commercial crew vehicles, or if he’s being accidentally or intentionally dishonest.

Nels Anderson
You’re right. I was applying unmanned logic to a manned vehicle. If there are people aboard, then there’s a large safety advantage to.......

http://selenianboondocks.com/2009/12/comment-on-brett-alexanders-congressional-testimony/