Space Access Update #126 7/8/11
Copyright 2011 by Space Access Society
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Contents This Issue:
- Political Action Alert:
Support Funding For NASA's Future - Commercial Crew & Space Technology
- Shuttle: Looking Back, And
Forward
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Political Action Alert 7/8/11
Support Funding For NASA's Future: Commercial Crew
& Space Technology
Action Summary:
Contact your Representative's
DC office Monday July 11th during east coast business hours if possible (by
midday Tuesday at the latest) and ask them to tell the House Appropriations
Committee leadership to support full funding for the NASA Commercial Crew and
Space Technology programs. Spend this
weekend persuading as many of your friends, family, and acquaintances as you
can to make the call too - numbers count!
(Scroll down to the "Background" sections for more on why
these and why now, and "Action Details" for specifics on how to
proceed.)
Background:
The Fiscal Year 2012
Congressional budget process is underway.
(The budget process will be ongoing for the next few months, since FY'12
begins this coming October 1st.) All budget
"appropriations" bills (where they write the actual checks) start
this process in the House Appropriations Committee, generally in whatever
Subcommittee covers the specific budget area.
In this case, NASA is funded by the House Appropriations Committee's
Commerce-Justice-Science Subcommittee.
Yesterday this CJS Subcommittee finalized its "markup"
(rewrite) of the White House FY'12 NASA budget proposal. These first-round results were not good.
(See yesterday's Update #125
at http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau125.html for details. Briefly, the Subcommittee markup funded both
Space Technology and Commercial Crew at less than half what's wanted - Space
Technology got $375 million out of a requested $1.024 billion, and we now know
Commercial Crew got just over $300 million out of a requested $850 million.)
The next critical step in the
FY'12 NASA budget process will be the full Appropriations Committee markup of
this bill, scheduled for next Wednesday morning July 13th. This markup will be our first real
opportunity to influence the contents of the bill. This is why we need you to call your
Congressman by Tuesday midday at latest, so there's time for them to pass word
on to the Appropriations Committee leaders.
We need as many of you as
possible to call - numbers count. There
are lots of cuts coming this year, and the ones who protest the loudest, IE
generate the most calls, are the ones who may get some of their funding
back. You don't have to worry about
having great sales skills to make this call, you just need to get the appropriate
staffer (or their voicemail) on the line, then state what you want clearly
enough that your call ends up counted in the proper column. If you possibly can, get others to call
too. Numbers very much matter here.
Talking Points: Why These Programs?
NASA Commercial Crew Program:
- With Shuttle retired, America will totally
depend on Russia to launch our astronauts to the Space Station, paying them hundreds
of millions of dollars every year. And Russia keeps raising their prices… up 175% in just six years,
to over $60 million a seat and climbing.
- Full
funding at $850 million will allow Commercial Crew to support the fastest possible
development of multiple competing safe affordable US-made vehicles.
- Commercial Crew will
create high-tech, high-paying jobs right here, right now.
- Commercial Crew is the
quickest, cheapest way to close the Gap in U.S. human spaceflight and get
maximum use out of our hundred billion dollar Space Station.
- Fully funding Commercial
Crew will let multiple US crew vehicles fly...
..restoring US
leadership in space.
..creating
competition which lowers costs and drives innovation.
..providing multiple
backups for better safety and less risk of delay.
NASA Space Technology
Program:
- Basic space technology
development has been neglected in the US for decades.
- NASA is still stuck with
space technology developed in the 1970s.
- Fully funding Space
Technology at 1,024 million will allow NASA to start making up for lost time
across a wide range of high-payoff technologies.
- We're barely ahead of
Russia and China at this point. America
must invest in new technology to regain our world technological leadership.
- New technologies like
propellant depots and high-efficiency propulsion will dramatically lower the
cost of sending astronauts further into the solar system.
- Developing new space
technologies will also enable new US commercial space industries, creating even
more US jobs and economic return from our space program.
Action Details:
- If you don't already know your
Representative's name, political party and DC office phone number, grab an old
utility bill and look them up via your 9-digit zipcode
at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/findyourreps.xpd.
- Call their DC office. (Be calm and polite throughout, please - the
idea is to have your opinion heard, not to vent frustrations or make enemies.)
- Tell whoever answers the phone that you're
from the Representative's district, and you'd like to speak to the person who
handles NASA appropriations issues. Ask
for that staffer's voicemail if they're not available. (If you're given a choice between a NASA
person and an Appropriations person, go with Appropriations.)
- Politely tell that staffer your name, that
you live in the Congressman/woman's district, and that you support full funding
for NASA's Commercial Crew and Space Technology programs.
- Then , if your Representative is a
Republican, ask that they pass on your requests to Hal Rogers (R, Kentucky,
Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.)
- If your Representative is a Democrat, ask
that they pass on your requests to Norm Dicks (D, Washington State, Ranking
Minority Member of the House Appropriations Committee.)
- If your Representative happens to *be* Hal
Rogers or Norm Dicks, congratulations!
Ask the staffer to pass on your request to the Congressman.
- If the staffer has any questions, answer
them as best you can, then politely ring off.
(One specific question they may ask, given the set ceiling on overall
available funding for this bill, is "what's your offset?" IE, what should they cut to get the money for
your programs? If, and *only* if, they
ask you this, tell them you think Space Launch System could be cut back to a
long-term research and study program without any great harm.)
- If you have any feedback for us after your
call - things that worked, things that didn't, interesting information - drop
us a note at space.access@space-access.org.
Wrapup
The things we care about at
NASA - Commercial Crew & Cargo, Commercial Reusable Suborbital,
Space/Exploration Technology, Propellant Depots, etc, all things that bear on
lower cost space transportation for the future - are being cut back. If we take things for granted, those cutbacks
could easily become outright cancellations.
Phone calls from you and your friends could make the difference.
Thanks!
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Shuttle: Looking Back, And Forward
The last ever Shuttle mission
is now safely in orbit. It seems a good
time to briefly look at how Shuttle came to be, what Shuttle was and was not,
and what all this says about NASA's next move.
The key to understanding
Shuttle is understanding the circumstances it was developed under. Apollo's triumph had just been achieved via a
massive, maximum-priority crash program.
Once President Kennedy made the "before the decade is out"
call, in order to make the tight schedule, the Apollo mission was broken down
into the simplest possible pieces, and NASA was expanded many times over to
overwhelm each piece with talent and resources.
At the Moon program's peak, it employed over 30,000 people at NASA and
many times that in industry, for a NASA budget that peaked at over 35 billion (current)
dollars per year, all to put a pair of people on the Moon for a day or two six
times. Efficiency and low operating
costs simply weren't Apollo priorities.
By the 1970's, Apollo had
achieved its dual political purposes: Internationally, the US (peacefully)
demonstrated to the world that in terms of sheer technological muscle it could
massively out-compete the Soviet Union.
And nationally, Apollo paid for then-VP LBJ's
wrangling of Congressional funding support by reindustrializing a broad belt of
the US South, scattering new centers of high-tech industry across a
then-economically backwards stretch of the country.
Post-Apollo, two timeless
truths took over: No large government organization ever voluntarily reduces its
size. And Congressional funders always want to know, "what has your
organization done for us lately?"
The central thing to understand about Shuttle is that NASA ended up
developing it with 2/3rds of its Apollo staff but only 1/3rd of its Apollo
funding. The results were, to say the
least, uneven.
On the plus side, Shuttle was
extremely versatile. It had to be, given
that it was the only new space transport NASA was likely to get for a while,
and given that it also needed to at least nominally cover military and
commercial missions to help justify its funding. The wide range of capabilities incorporated
into Shuttle was a major factor in the wide variety of space missions Shuttle
was eventually able to fly, which led directly to the wide ranging national space
operations experience base that (we think) is the program's major positive
legacy.
But post-Apollo Shuttle
development funding was pared to the bone, and many of the tradeoffs made to
minimize development cost inevitably raised operating costs. Given the high staff levels on hand, solving
problems by throwing people at them wherever possible was inevitable, which
also raised operating costs. Also, to
get its commendable versatility Shuttle had to push available 1970's technology
right to the bleeding edge, which meant many of its components had very little
safety margin.
This resulted in a fragile
and not very safe vehicle, with two total losses in 135 flights. This also sharply limited Shuttle flight
rate, since for safety many Shuttle systems had to be torn down, inspected, and
rebuilt after every flight. (We note in
passing that the odds of coming back in a box after one Shuttle mission were
roughly comparable to those for a year's tour in Iraq or Afghanistan during the
hotter parts of those wars. We have
nothing but admiration for the people who knowingly stepped up to fly the
missions (and do the tours) regardless.)
So Shuttle ended up expensive
to operate and with a very low flight rate, which sharply limited its overall
utility to the nation. 135 missions may
sound like a lot, but over thirty years, it's 4.5 missions per year - enough to
gain precious experience, but not enough to support major space
operations. (There is a case to be made
that Station taking almost twenty years and over a hundred billion dollars to
complete was in significant part a result of Shuttle's limitations.) As for costs, there are many
politically-generated lower numbers out there, but the one we trust is the
overall Shuttle program cost in current dollars (near $200 billion) divided by
the total missions flown (135) for a total cost per mission of close to one and
a half billion dollars.
In sum, Shuttle was useful in
greatly broadening the national space operations experience base, but at a high
cost, both in money and in foregone opportunities. The combination of Shuttle's high ongoing
operating costs and the lukewarm funding support (generated by its limited
capability to support large new missions) led to an entire generation of NASA
neither producing much new technology (technology money was routinely siphoned
off to pay for overruns in the "more important" programs) nor
succeeding in most of its attempts to take on large new missions.
In particular, Shuttle's
institutionalization of the Apollo manpower-intensive project model meant that
new NASA initiatives were inherently handicapped from the start by a pernicious
combination of high built-in overhead costs and (as time passed) over-bureaucratized
project management that led to decades of failure. This process recently culminated in the
ghastly meltdown of Constellation - not the first time NASA has spent years and
billions for nothing, but certainly the worst.
We see the ending of Shuttle
(and the implied shutdown of much of what has been called the
Shuttle-Industrial Complex) as a priceless once-in-a-generation opportunity to
remake and revive NASA as a smaller, far more nimble and useful
organization. We do not know how to
usefully reform NASA's massively seized-up fifty year-old post-Shuttle
bureaucracy. Sympathize as we might with
the individuals involved, laying the bulk of it off while cherry-picking core
knowledge and talent for new replacement space technology and exploration
organizations seems to us the only practical way to break NASA out of its
current death-spiral of ever higher costs and ever longer delays.
The implications of the
Augustine Commission Report were clear, for those with eyes to see. NASA can no longer go on as it has since
Apollo. The logical end of that process
is in sight: Many billions per year spent on projects whose flight dates recede
at one year per year forever.
We'll conclude by saying that
Congress's current attempt to keep as much of the Shuttle-Industrial Complex on
the payroll as possible, tasking it to build and operate the large new Space
Launch System booster while funding it at a level barely sufficient to keep the
lights on in that massively inefficient organization, will at best lead to a
repeat of Shuttle's problems and another generation spent on hold. At best - more likely it will destroy NASA,
given that over the decades since Apollo NASA's "best and brightest" have
both thinned out considerably and also gradually become mired up to their
eyebrows in a swamp of bureaucratic mediocrity.
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purpose is to promote radical reductions in the cost of reaching space.
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Space Access Society
space.access@space-access.org
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein