Nelson: Don't Look to the CR to Fix Anything

While our government bickers over "Don't ask, don't tell" and other petty squabbles that can wait, Rome is burning. The Nation's skilled aerospace workforce is being laid off week by week. The people needed to build Orion, heavy lift and other spacecraft and vehicles will be gone...G-O-N-E...gone. You think it's expensive now, wait until we try with an inexperienced workforce. Behind schedule and over budget will be the symptoms. The house and Senate need to WAKE UP and save our nation's space program. What will it take, a giant Chinese flag on the moon visible from earth?

I don't mean to sound callused, but the people NASA is losing these days are operations people, not design people. The workforce that is being laid off has no experience in design and development. Of course, in 6 to 10 years we will need their operations skills once again. No one noticed when NASA decimated its design workforce in the late '80s and early '90s in lieu of building an ops empire. Now we need design experience and it is nowhere to be found. The few that have it are not in charge and not able to educate a vast operations workforce with no design experience.

China is decades from landing a man on the Moon. I wouldn't be surprised if US commercial space beat the Chinese back to the Moon.

Most of the civil servants in Constellation were already pretty inexperienced at least in their respective areas. The program is very dependent on the contractors, and they are the ones getting laid off now.

Money will be tight so it is best to focus on Boeing's CST, Dragon and the NASA developed deep space vehicle and SDHLV. Orion is not needed. If Orion were kept, besides being redundant it would need a complete redesign either to fit on existing ELVs or to make use of the lift capability of the SDHLV. Either way, its starting much of the design over.

Possum is absolutely correct. And this is not a swipe at ops people. They are necessary, and ops engineering is simply a different skill from that required to do design configuration and analysis.

Prior to the CEV downselect, I (part of the NGC/Boeing team) was called in to help a group that was floundering with launch vehicle control architecture trade studies they had to do. I had to show them how one defines alternate trade configurations such that each config stresses a different design priority as the primary concern and balances the other concerns. Looking at the configs they had set up, I could see they were going to be hard to distinguish in a quantitative manner. Furthermore, I had to show them how to setup performance-based, quantitative trade study scoring schemes that could be defended against allegations of favoritism (of a particular configuration or contractor). Of course, such things can never overcome a manager who has their "pet design" for which they are prepared to do whatever they can to make sure it wins (cough-Griffin-cough). However, design practices like these are not voodoo magic, nor are they little-known. But it does take someone who has done them before and understands the basic principles of achieving a design that closes on its requirements to do it effectively and correctly.

I wish I could agree with you possum but I know a few design/analysis folks working as NASA contractors who hired on specifically for Ares and are right now looking for jobs as a bunch of them have already got notices. Meanwhile Congress is taking its sweet time with getting a NASA funding bill together. I don't think they appreciate that the damage being done to NASA right now by this delay is unprecedented and will make future programs much more difficult and much more expensive to execute. They've had MONTHS to sort this out and they've gotten little accomplished. This is completely unacceptable.

The last thing NASA needs is design people. Plenty of design experience in the contractor work force. NASA's problem is that it thinks it needs to design everything itself. Even the ops folks suffer from the not invented here mentality although they are trying to fix it due to budget constraints. Nasa needs to take a cue from DOD and set the ops requirements for what they need and let the contractors come up with the best design. NASA needs a small core of experienced engineers who can assess the feasability of the proposals (since contractors would never over sell their proposal to win the contract!)and experienced operators who can translate the technical to the operational to determine if the proposal is functional operationally as well. If NASA looses its operational experience then the US is really out of luck because it doesn't exist anywhere else as far as manned space flight goes.

> Orion is not needed.

The beautiful thing about Orion is that the minute it is cancelled Lockheed Martin can implement their backup plan to turn it into a commercial capsule. Imagine how well they could do without NASA on their back so much.

"No one noticed when NASA decimated its design workforce in the late '80s and early '90s in lieu of building an ops empire. Now we need design experience and it is nowhere to be found. The few that have it are not in charge and not able to educate a vast operations workforce with no design experience."

At JSC the ops takeover began in earnest in the mid-90s when Ops began taking over facilities and functions they'd never done previously and drove many of the engineering workforce out of positions of authority. You are 100% correct-the people in charge now across the entirety of the organization have never done design or development. There are some of us left but usually we are not working where we are needed. All I can do is shudder when I see the poor development decisions that are made.

The Constellation debacle is the result. If people want to be angry about lay-offs and no manned capability for the foreseeable future-likely another eight years until Boeing or Space-X offerings are available, you need look no further than the management that is in place today. You can complain about Congress or the President. You can complain about funding. Funding was established and stable for the last decade. Its up to NASA to lead the technical design. This problem began right here at home in the program.

Possum, you are dead wrong. I am an aerospace engineer at a NASA center. I don't do ops, none of my friends do ops, nobody I know does ops. I have friends and colleagues getting laid off left and right, or are finding new jobs and jumping ship. Don't you remember this summer at MSFC alone there was hundreds of layoffs of design/analysis/integration people. This happened across the Agency. I know of 50 more layoffs at the end of September (again, not ops people) and I know of more coming based on what the CR contains.

Possum and Ex-Navy and others,

Your comments could not be more incorrect.

First I'd like to clarify that the vast majority of the design experience does lie in the contractor workforce. In addition, many, many people are being laid off and it is NOT nearly as simple or as clean as some would like to portray and placing people in neat little boxes of "design" or "operations". The reason is simple, that the two need to co-exist concurrently and folks that try to make very clean breaks along these lines perhaps do not understand the whole picture.

While it is true that many of the technicians, etc in Florida will be let go that could be considered "ops", it certainly does not stop there and engineering personnel across the board in Shuttle and Constellation Programs will be laid off. What this does, and forgive me but your comments did sound a bit callus, is translate to a very large net loss for NASA - across the board in both "design" and "operations" if one must call them that - in hard-wons skills, knowledge and experience.

Finally, I must say that using DOD as an example of good requirements management and saying NASA needs to move in that direction is not....a good example. NASA, and the DOD, suffer at this time for what is known as "requirements creep". This creep is just as responsible for cost and schedule growth as anything and I have personally seen many projects go down because of this. In the end, all contractor personnel can be let loose and take away that experience but until NASA changes its requirement management process, and how it levies these requirements, it will not matter.

The design people responsible for ares1, orion ,
ares5 under a shuttle derived budget need
to pack there bags thanks for playing.

not true at all, the FY11 marks are leading to significant reductions at LM and other contractors working design of Orion. sure the KSC and MOD ops folks are getting laid off as part of the shuttle program ending, but there are also many folks in Cx due to the budget.

The lines of demarcation between operations and engineering/design/development are real. Constellation, with most of its leadership selected from the corps of Flight Directors and astronauts points out the issue most pointedly though the same happened in Shuttle beginning 25 years ago, and in ISS in the last 15 years.

Yes, we need good experience in engineering, and in DDT&E, and in requirements management, and in integration, and in operations. We do not need any one of these trying to subjugate the others; it has come down to simple empire building by a few at the expense of the ranks, the program, and the taxpayer.

For the future, if there is going to be a future, what is needed is a wholesale change to the organizational structure and to personnel/professional development to ensure this never is permitted to happen again.

I sympathize completely with those people who are losing their jobs, especially those who have been at them for many years. Many of us who are not NASA personnel (civies or contractors) have been down this same road and have had to start over again. It's never easy, but you do what you've gotta do to provide for your family.

At the risk of sounding overly callused, I don't think Sen. Nelson, or any of his cohorts, really care about this aspect of it; they seem to view everything (even the benefits to their constituents) in terms of money; dollars and cents, period.

If you want to give them a collective kick in the [insert body part(s) here] and try to get them moving, I'd try to find a way to (honestly) calculate the amount of money each state, company, agency, etc. is losing every day that they delay. And, of course, those loses will project into the future for a considerable period, because nothing will turn around to the new order in a single day.

I myself have no idea how this can be done, but I'm guessing that there are a lot of people close to problems who could make a strong case in terms of wasted funds. Talk their language -- money.

Steve