Here We Go Again: Do More With Less

Sounds like a logical solution is to offer the first company that can provide transportation services to ISS, upon delivery, a prize and a guaranteed contract for services. Other successful companies within a given period would get less than the first place winner.

The near term need is to protect capabilities for a Shuttle sized launch capacity, eg an SDHLV. That is where the expertise infrastructure and hardware capabilities are today. The SDHLV needs to be sufficiently powerful that it is not in the same class with existing commercial heavy lift launchers.

The idea that we will not need an HLV is wrong. If we are doing anything in the future, we will need the capability. When Saturn V was sized, von Braun asked how much the Apollo would weight. The estimate was 50000 or 60000 lb. That was before the decision to go with LOR and two vehicles: CSM + LM. He designed Saturn V to handle 100000 lb. Apollos typically weighed in excess of 80000 lb.

The deep space, long duration vehicle needs to be designed for in space use. It will launch on the SDHLV. It should be based on the elements and systems of ISS, for which there is a lot of existing hardware, manpower and expertise.

That way you avoid throwing the lunar/Mars/asteroid spaceship away after every mission. You buy a new sortie capability, you buy new launch capacity, and commercial provides earth to orbit capabilities in a model similar to Spacehab in the 90s. You keep a lot of the existing Shuttle/Michoud/MSFC/KSC workforce and expertise intact. You apply the JSC workforce on the new sortie vehicle. Newspace provides the workers that develop the new earth to orbit transport. You eliminate duplication.

The major change from the original Obama plan is that work on the SDHLV and sortie vehicle both starts in the next budget cycle and is not deferred for 5 years.

If this funding is less than what the original Orion/Ares 1 would have required, what makes anyone believe that another capsule and heavy lift booster could be developed for less? Didn't anyone read the Augustine report? Doesn't anyone remember X-33, X-34, NLS, ALS, Spacelifter, X-30 NASP, OSP, SLI, NGLT ? At the same time China unveiled the design for their new LM-5 at the Farnsborough Air Show, claiming heavy lift using new state-of-the-art environmentally friendly engines.

No need for Orion which is duplicative and over sized for the earth to orbit mission, and no more Apollo mission models where we throw everything away on every mission. No need for an Ares 1, which was not going to be ready for Orion due to performance and development issues.

As part of the SDHLV, if it makes sense, upgrade the SRB capabilities. But for the initial SDHLV, its not a hard requirement.

The WH, Senate, and H of R, spending proposal all are about $2B short of what's needed for what they say they want.

Rep Gordon in making the "hard choices" is setting up NASA, and America, for another decade of disappointment.

Given the lackluster US economy a developmental shot in the arm would be worth $21B for three years. Fully funded, Obama's commercial and developmental requests would lead us to a more robust economy and a more inspired generation of youth!

Fund NASA, fund Education!!!

Maybe people will begin to pay attention now that they understand the money budgeted does not meet the program plan.

Its either that, or Congress and the President and NASA Management just simply do not care about what ultimately is developed; Spudis is right in that case; no intent to go anywhere or do anything; its just a way to keep the pork flowing and some people employed; no need for them to be productive.

@William Brown:

We do not need an HLV. The Apollo comparison is invalid because Apollo wanted to launch everything on a single booster. If you are willing to launch the elements separately and if you offload propellant, then you can launch twice the dry mass of the largest piece of the Constellation moon hardware on a single EELV Heavy. And if you want to reuse the MTV, then you are going to need orbital refueling anyway.

An HLV would take away one of the best opportunities to reduce commercial launch prices, something that would lead to a genuine breakthrough. And what exactly would you launch on the HLV and where would the money for those payloads come from? It would be a rocket to nowhere.

$11 billion over 3 years? That will only pay salaries for the NASA and contractor workforce, no money for hardware. The HSF Centers are simply over-bloated with too many people that don't produce an actual product related to rocket development. I know that at KSC, Engineering is less than one third of the workforce, and less than a third of them are involved in design work. So you have less than 200 people out of 2200 that do design, the rest are ops people, project weenies, or business/personnel types. Certainly some of those support people are needed, but they far outnumber the ones doing the technical work that is supposed to get done. Furthermore, the support folks are institutionally funded so when programs cut funding, it is Engineering that takes the hit because they are "matrixed" to the programs. This Agency simply is not about getting technical work done anymore. It is about building empires and a bloated, overpaid workforce. The number of GS-14, GS-15, and SES employees at KSC is nearly 50% of the workforce. We need about $20 billion per year for HSF in order to even have a chance to succeed.

These budgets aren't intended to succeed, or to fail. They're kick-the-can-down-the-road exercises that seem to keep capabilities alive for a few more years so the White House and Congress can revive these issues, hopefully at a point where the budget and political partisanship aren't such constraints. Get ready for another exciting decade of drift!

Not meaning to be an argumentative oursoul, but perhaps these considerations militate against SDHLV:

-The NASA budget MUST shrink in the next few years. Obama has promised to cut the deficit in half in his first term, and his political survival, if even possible, depends on it. The budget is already a squeaker for the SLS (at least, comparing the cheapest SLS there is, Jupiter 130, against what is offered in the Senate bill). I note that our last HLV, Saturn, awesome as it was, got canceled after only 12 launches. If SLS doesn't get canceled because of the budget crunch, many other NASA programs will. Which leads to the second point:

-Where's the money coming from for this in-space vehicle? Such a beastie seems like a pipe-dream. A nice one, tho. Even restricting our dreams to Orion, I see disaster. Much as Ares sucked up the Altair budget, wrecking our chances for the moon in the process, surely we must predict that SLS will eat Orion's lunch too.

-It's not clear that we need HLV if we embrace depots.

-The DoD is going to evolve EELVs all the more. (Have you seen the rocket-back booster proposal? (Way cool!) ) If NASA is to have its own booster system, shouldn't it have as much in common as possible with the DoD's? If we pool the money for NASA's booster with that of DoD, it seems that we'd be able to afford a scalable architecture. A US Energia, perhaps? At least an Angara...

-If we build SDHLV we will get only one or two launches a year, if the budget goes as far South as it has to. If we build our exploration architecture around such a lift capacity, we will get very few missions.

-Waiting to build the HLV is the right thing to do, I think. Wait until we have, or can predict, something to go on top of it. Wait until we can engineer commonality with the EELVs and thus be much more certain of sustainability.

-Here I think I'm speculative, and certainly a bit brutal, since I don't really know whose jobs go away absent SDHLV: Do we really need to protect the expertise of STS' _operational_ capability? Wouldn't it be better to protect and engender the engineering expertise that a well-funded research project would develop?

Please shoot holes in my arguments. I'd love to be wrong...

Thanks
-Jeff

p.s. Right on, Frank.

well..................
under the presidents proposed budget numbers, you could have side mount and commercial crew, commercial crew by 2016 but a side mount with no payload.
$6 billion for side mount.
$4 billion for commercial crew.
So something has to be deferred,the upper stage for the carrier
the payload
Orion deep space
technology demonstrators
Inline SD HLV? this is billions more,it will eat your lunch.

so lets conjure up that theme song from, "cops" but I have changed the words............sing with me!

Inline , inline what you gonna do,...what you gonna do when the GAO comes for you? NASA manager, NASA manager, what you gonna do....what you gonna do when the IG comes for you? ,
Inline, inline what you gonna do , what you gonna do when the OMB comes for you? EELV, EELV what you gonna do , what you gonna do when that low bid does not work for you?
new space , new space what you gonna do , what you gonna do when ISS impacts the ocean, you.
side mount, side mount, what you gonna do, what you gonna do when you launch with out your crew?
congress , congress what you gonna do, what you gonna do when you screw the engineering crew?

Who do I need to talk to ,to get assigned to the Augustine II panel that will be forming in a couple of years!

NASA evaluated the the development cost of various heavy lift vehicles last May based on the development cost of the Sidemount shuttle.

They determined that the Ares I/V architecture cost 1.8 times that of the Sidemount to develop; a hydrocarbon HLV cost 1.6 times that of the Sidemount and an inline shuttle derived HLV cost 1.3 times that of the Sidemount.

So any directly shuttle derived HLV should be substantially cheaper than the Ares I/V architecture.

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BzLX4wxxT-QNMmE1NTdjOWItYWE1ZS00NTBmLWJmNzItOWJmNGVlMjkwOTdj&hl=en

Marcel F. Williams

"Days before the compromise was announced, NASA chief Charlie Bolden and Deputy Lori Garver told its two champions -- U.S. Sens. Bill Nelson, D-Florida and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas -- that NASA could not finish the proposed new rocket before 2020"

It depends on what rocket you're talking about. According to NASA, the Ares I/V architecture takes the longest to develop at around 2019. A hydrocarbon rocket could be ready by 2018; an inline SD-HLV could be ready by 2017; and the Sidemount could be ready by 2015. Dreaming about an HLV which is what the administration wants to do would take-- forever!

Marcel F. Williams

and sadly even side mount precludes commercial crew and or technology demonstrators at the same time.
what to do?
pay for commercial crew first.
side mount cargo only post 2016.
Orion lite now with commercial crew.
Commercial crew means CBC's and any future EELV's heavy are human rated (commercial crew on Atlas or Delta)(2020 +)
only one technology demonstrator by 2016 you pick!
inflatable or fuel depot.

DOD pays the freight on ACES upper stage, shares with side mount carrier.
bonds and loans pay for commercial crew/fuel depot/ACES/inflatables but government must pay for services!

Wouldn't that be Augustine III?

well...
there must be a political compromise it seems, and Direct is at least $ 2 billion more to develop then side mount.
we could have gone with EELV super heavy( less then 80 MT to LEO) now before 2016, combined with EELV commercial crew.This was an Augustine recommendation.

NASA has decayed into a political pork joke.

The programs are not "underfunded", they are simply horribly managed and bloated. Look at what SpaceX has done with peanuts.

The only good thing about the Senate compromise is that the commercial funding has been partially retained and there is hope that organizations outside of NASA will create new and enabling technologies to explore space. We do have this hope at least!

Ambitious undergraduate and graduate students interested in actually *ADVANCING* the human exploration of space: seek employment outside of NASA, unless you want senators designing your rockets.

Someone, please tell me that this isn't just back to square one with a different target vehicle and no real objective. Not to mention an insanely compressed schedule.

Ares I was initially supposed to be shuttle derived. Where was the advantage after it was all said and done other than selling it to Congress?

Why do we have to do this all over again when the process has been demonstrated to be flawed. What's going to be different this time?

And what happened to all the "new program" cheerleaders? All that great stuff you folks were preening over just evaporated, if I'm not mistaken.

Possum, don't forget they are allegedly gutting the ESC. And BTW, those 2000 non-design people at KSC's job is to get in the way of the designers. 10 to 1 is the accepted normal ratio.

> I note that our last HLV, Saturn, awesome as it was, got canceled after only 12 launches.

Even worse. I had to learn from Jeff Greason that Saturn V was actually put to sleep in 1968. They knew it was unaffordable and cancelled it before the first man ever touched the moon.

The HLV myth since then has crippled NASA and wasted billions...

William Brown is correct - building a reusable, exoatmospheric spacecraft that is only designed to operate to and from LEO for BEO missions is the way to go. Throwaway hardware got us where we had to go in hurry during the Apollo program but today the challenge of regular travel BEO is going to need proficiency, redundancy and reliability. Christopher Kraft and I have provided the House and Senate committees with the plan to develop a reusable, modular Planetary Transport Vehicle (PTV). The reusable, modular, refuelable PTV system in LEO can use the Space Shuttles and its derivatives to provide the backbone of earth launch capability to the LEO PTV depot. A primary PTV and back-up PTV would be docked in a tandem configuration for BEO travel to provide redundancy safety for moon flights and long duration Mars missions. Reusable PTV spacecraft will provide a robust manifest requirement at a LEO PTV depot for fuel, supplies, hardware replacement and crews for continued Shuttle missions and commercial operators and shared hardware/financial participation with ISS partners. Reusable PTV spacecraft will provide an innovative way to continue American leadership in space travel with a faster, less expensive, more reliable space transport system for manned spaceflight beyond Earth orbit. Stay tuned.

Finally some common sense, intelligence and leadership coming to the forefront. How long we have had to wait for this.

The LEO PTV depot needs to be at or co-orbiting with ISS so that we do not need to build another 500 ton facility for housing crews as they prepare to deploy and then return to earth. Its not the ideal orbit. Maybe we can use VASIMR to reduce the inclination over time.

As hydrocarbon tankers for refueling, of course Russian Progress and FGB-type modules already provide this capability.

It is unfortunate that NASA management did not get their act together, decide on a deliberate, forthright, honest, and logical way to proceed, and then get Administration and Congressional buy in, right from the start. Instead it looks like NASA leadership threw their hands up and said, lets let the political winds blow as they will and we'll get whatever we get - or nothing at all.

Big difference between today's leadership and the leaders of the 60s, 70s and even 80s, all of whom were pretty successful at getting what they were going after.

Maybe that is why we need to reenlist Chris.

Einstein had a saying that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

We've just witnessed a striking display of insanity from congress.

In addition they've helped to ensure that the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans have a good shot at succeeding at taking the lead in new commercial space industries which could easily be the new "black gold" for this millennium.

Undermine and throw stones and roadblocks at US commercial space, while dictating a political HLV design that even in the very, very unlikely case ever becomes operational will be exceedingly expensive and ill suited for LEO operations??? Who's side are these guys on?

Just plain insanity...

And you might want to start bushing up on your French, Russian or Chinese.

That piece is spot on. It's like groundhog's day. Sad.

right on zucchini. NASA can't build this rocket, or any other, over any amount of time with all the money in the world. They're simply incapable of doing it anymore. What I wanna know is: when this attempt fails will Congress finally wake up?

This is sad but NASA had its heyday a long, long time ago on a wholly different planet we're on today. Most of what's wrong is that NASA became a low priority govt. jobs program. Since this can't be fixed I'm just going to root for unmanned probes and Virgin with a little sprinkling of SpaceX.

"I know that at KSC, Engineering is less than one third of the workforce, and less than a third of them are involved in design work. So you have less than 200 people out of 2200 that do design"

Well KSC is not a NASA design center, its largely an ops/host role center, so I would not expect alot of design engineers there anyway. Besides, the Center's design expertise is in ground infrastructure anyway, and you don't really need an army of design engineers to evaluate, award, and oversee infrastructure and GSE design/construction contracts (besides, even in the case of GSE alot of the time the spacecraft/launch vehicle guys design/build their own and deliver it w/ the flight h/w for KSC personnel to operate anyway). However, your post does beg the question: what do these workforce profiles look like at the HSF design Centers ? i.e., JSC and MSFC.

"If we pool the money for NASA's booster with that of DoD, it seems that we'd be able to afford a scalable architecture. "

Are you serious? This is the part of the debate that baffles me every single time. Do people on this site know that the DoD's budget is on average $786 billion. $786 billion per year.

Pool NASA's budget with DoD? Cut NASA's budget? Make hard decisions? Good heavens people, if you want to clean up the budget, go after
The real money. NASA's budget is a blip.

> Well KSC is not a NASA design center, its largely an ops/host role center

Then how is a new rocket 7 years away going to preserve that workforce? Will the ops people be paid to wait?

If any of you have a dream to see the Earth from space, then SUPPORT COMMERCIAL HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT. Don't kid yourself to think governments and NASA, especially, will let you and your kids vacationing in space. It is not going to happen, unless your kids are NASA astronauts with the right stuffs.

If you are not thrilled with the commercial companies, then what you have to do is to put 1 cent in your piggy bank a day and send this money to NASA at the end of the year. If you can get 99 million Americans to follow you, then your kids can travel to space in your lifetime. Direct funding to NASA from the public is the only way.

Zuccini says "NASA has decayed into a political pork joke." Absolutley spot on!! The saddest part, and most accurate, about all this is that NASA is in fact really is "incapable" of building anything ontime and on budget - just simply incapable. So now, as taxpayers, we will be paying for dead weight at JSC, et al (centers). NASA is a jobs factory, always had been, and nothing will change that fact - Which leads us to an inescapable reality that commercial ventures and other nations will be leading in space not NASA. NASA, Congres, and WH just wasting precious resources on jobfare not on advancing our National space interests and relinquishing our country's leadership in space technology and space exploration.

NASA doesn't build rockets. Their private vendors like Boeing and Lockheed build rockets for them. Boeing was one of the strongest advocates for building a new heavy lift vehicle.

But if you think companies like Boeing and Lockheed can't build rockets anymore then I think you're wrong!

Marcel F. Williams

"does beg the question: what do these workforce profiles look like at the HSF design Centers ? i.e., JSC and MSFC.

You have hit at one of NASA's key problems. If you take a look at almost everyone in a senior management role, they almost all came out of the operations areas, essentially no one has ever doen any kind of DDT&E. Earlier stages, like concept development and trade studies-they have never even heard of.

This happened partly because ops is where the action was for the last 10-15 yrs and partly because the operations people got a lot of undue credit because of some otherwise pretty innocuous public expose's in the mid-90s; things like the movie Apollo 13. Its not that the ops group did not deserve any credit, but just as much credit was due to the less heralded engineering and other organizations that designed, built, tested, and verified the hardware; most people have never heard about these others. Instead as the ops people gained strength, they wrecked much of the remainder of the infrastructure.

Now you have a lot of inexperience portraying themselves as managers (ISS even produced a humorous movie a couple years ago showing their managers acting like managers); mainly they hold interminable meetings and forums and discussions and punt on decisions; there are no strategic visionaries and no decision makers, which is precisely why there is no workable plan today and why Constellation and Orion got so bogged down in the last five years. They were trying to manage by consensus. It did not matter whether the consensus was/wasn't grounded in physics and reality.

So now Lockheed will work hard on an Orion that is so large and massive it won't have a launch vehicle for another decade. With luck Boeing and Space-X will bypass Orion and NASA will have wasted a lot of money for a system they will not need. In the meantime there had been some hope for new technologies, but with the latest plan and funding profile these will not happen. The only thing you should bet on, through private investment, is that one of the commercial providers will come through within about 5 years.

I guess nobody has read or else do not believe the 700 page SD HLV assesment,except for The Senate NASA commitee. It says a side mount can be done for 7.8 billion. 2.7 billion to first flight in FY '15. 80 tons to LEO,45 to ISS,30 Geo. They give Moon flights,NEO,Mars.They would go to a NEO in'19.The whole program is mapped out. Sounds good. This is what the Senate has approved it looks like to me. I do not understand why these reporters do not think this will work.

Again newpapoose, you don't know what you are talking about. Ares I was designed by NASA and it is doing the system engineering. That is the issue and any HLV will be does the same way

If NASA can do Sidemount from start to first launch for $2.7 bilion,that would be amazing.A new HLV for that price? It has to be the best deal ever. That would leave funds for commercial and a whole lot of other things.2.7 out 100 billion over 5 years.NASA can afford that.

Here we go again. Boeing and Lockheed will not even try to build a rocket for less then double the cost and half the performance of the contract. Cost-plus is how they do business, and nothing less. Why do you think the EELV's cost so much.

As far as HLV goes, once again Congress screws NASA because NASA management screwed themselves. Instead of trying to figure out how to Trim the dead beats out of the workforce, Reduce cost, and Increase productive, They allowed the same porky workforce to try once again to build some clobbered together POS just so it can be canceled in the future.

The best thing that can happen to NASA is for NASA to be canceled. word.

Gentlemen let’s face facts. The NASA budget is at its lowest percentage as compared to the entire federal budget since 1960! That is President Eisenhower for god’s sakes. I never thought I would say this, but it almost makes me wistful for the good old days of William Jefferson Clinton, when the NASA budget was 7/10 of 1%. Unless the New Spacers and Neanderthals like me settle our differences, and work electively to urge the politicians to adequately fund NASA, no one is going anywhere soon; not NASA, not Space X, not Orbital, not Boeing, and not Lockheed. Poor old Gus was right, "no bucks… no Buck Rodgers". I know you guys all think you’ve discovered a new kind of business algebra that is going to alter the vagaries of technology and the realities of physics, but I think you're wrong. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. And space is a relentless enemy. You guys see yourselves as a modern day Steven Jobs in the garage and ready to bring about a revolution in technology. The only difference is if he got it wrong no one died. I believe we are at the point of decision. If we wish to advance and become a space faring civilization, it's going to take investment. Real investment. Everybody talks about enormous fixed costs. It takes infrastructure to build a space faring civilization. We need research centers, a 21st century launch complex, robotic missions of exploration and scientific discovery, a heavy lift vehicle, and a BEO spacecraft. Oh and yes, the only stepping stone that makes any sense at all is the Moon. I suspect we can't do any of that on 0.49% of the current federal budget. I doubt the answer is to turn it over to McDonald's, or General Motors, or British Petroleum because it’s just too tuff for the government to do. OMG! The main difference that I can see between the old NASA that accomplished things and the new NASA that you guys all seem to hate is MONEY!!!! If you want nice fresh oats, then pay for nice fresh oats. If you don't mind oats that have been through the horse once, that comes a little cheaper. So, we should all stop bickering or worrying about whose going to get in on the ground floor for the Space X /IPO, take the Senate compromise language and push hard for a real increase in the funding, funding, funding. Because if we can't do that, we might as well turn out the lights, and we can all go home.

"Cost-plus is how they do business, and nothing less. Why do you think the EELV's cost so much. "

More clueless posts. Poster doesn't know what he is talking about. The EELV's were developed with mostly Boeing and LM money. The USAF contributed 500 million to each and each company added 1.5 to 2.5 Billion. EELV's are bought under FFP contracts.

Les,

They way it works now is the more you pay for the oats, the more times it's been through the horse.

The Senate version is not perfect but far more reasonable. The House wants to keep staggering along with business-as-usual until the whole thing collapses, again. We’ve already blown $9 billion on a make-work program with no results.

You guys who are afraid of China: do you think NASA can be better Communists than the Red Chinese? We need to go with our strengths. Space transportation and exploitation will work better under private enterprise than it has under NASA’s version of government monopoly socialism.

The already struggling business case for ULA relies on US-government payloads that by law are not allowed to opt for foreign launchers. This is only going to get worse for ULA as far cheaper U.S. competitors build up reliability and also start bidding on DoD/government payloads.

"We do not need an HLV. The Apollo comparison is invalid because Apollo wanted to launch everything on a single booster. If you are willing to launch the elements separately and if you offload propellant, then you can launch twice the dry mass of the largest piece of the Constellation moon hardware on a single EELV Heavy. And if you want to reuse the MTV, then you are going to need orbital refueling anyway.

An HLV would take away one of the best opportunities to reduce commercial launch prices, something that would lead to a genuine breakthrough. And what exactly would you launch on the HLV and where would the money for those payloads come from? It would be a rocket to nowhere.
"

It would take 5-6 ELV-Heavy (AND launched in very short sequence) to do the job of a single Ares-V. You can't just 'offload propellant' and, by magic, solve the problem with an 'orbital propellant manufacturing facility' (unless you're planning to create matter out of nothing, of course). Whether you manufacture the H2 and O2 on Earth, or in LEO using solar energy to hydrolize water (launched to LEO using ELVs ... small detail), you'll still need to launch to LEO the exact same mass to use as propellant.

30T class ELVs are not a viable replacement of an HLV. The Atlas and Delta-derived launchers evaluated for CxP were much larger, and far more capable, than the current ELV-Heavy options.