Space Access Update #127 7/26/11
Copyright 2011 by Space Access Society
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Contents This Issue:
- House NASA Appropriation Emerges
From Committee Unchanged, Goes On Hold
- Commercial Crew News
- CCDev Plans To Ditch Space Act
Agreements For Traditional Contracting
- ULA Signs No-Cost NASA SAA To "Human-Rate"
Atlas 5
- Space Launch System
Political Developments
- SLS Policy Issues
- MPCV Needs A Ride
- New US Booster Engine Consensus?
- Pratt & Whitney/Rocketdyne
On The Block?
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House NASA Appropriation
Emerges From Committee Unchanged
Then Goes On Hold
The House Commerce, Justice,
and Science FY'12 Appropriation bill emerged from markup by the full House
Appropriations Committee essentially unchanged, at least regarding funding for
the Commercial Crew and Space Technology programs that we're concerned
about. Both were slated for large
increases this year, to get a number of essential new efforts off to a fast
start - both (so far) are funded roughly level with last year.
(Our thanks to everyone who
tried to help fix these in the Committee - we will have a better shot when this
bill eventually goes to the next step of the process, consideration by the full
House for amendments and approval. More
on that in a bit.)
As for the effect of this on
Commercial Crew, NASA Administrator Bolden in recent testimony before the House
Science Committee stated that this level of funding ($312 million, 37% of the
$850 million request) will significantly increase the much-lamented
post-Shuttle "Gap" in US crew launch capabilities. We expect that this will also make it far
more difficult to maintain multiple competing projects. CCDev was Plan B
until Ares/Orion died - now that Commercial is Plan A, more than one competitor
strikes us as essential (and inexpensive, relative to government-run efforts)
insurance.
The Space Technology Program (STP)
meanwhile is funded at $375 million, 37% of the requested $1,024 million. While we haven't seen any statements from
NASA on what projects will suffer, our general understanding is that this
amount will barely support existing efforts and there will be little or no room
for new projects such as propellant depots, advanced space propulsion, reusable
suborbital science, etc.
Our chances of getting
increased funding for Commercial Crew and Space Technology depend in part on
what sort of deal is reached on the Debt Limit.
Our current reading of those tea leaves is that the end result this year
will be a FY'12 Federal budget certainly no larger than FY'11, and quite likely
significantly smaller. This means we'll
have our work cut out for us the remainder of this summer if we want to be
heard over all the other constituencies clamoring for restoration of their
favorite programs.
The next step in this funding
process is likely to be delayed, due to the considerable amount of
Congressional bandwidth the Debt Limit controversy is consuming, and the
contentious nature of Appropriations bills in general in a year the House is
trying for across-the-board cutbacks.
The original plan was to send the CJS (NASA) Appropriation to the full
House in the next week or so, before the traditional August congressional
break. At this point our best info is
that this bill won't hit the House floor before September.
The Senate meanwhile hasn't
done much on any Appropriations so far; they seem to be waiting for the Debt
Limit issue to be settled first.
The Congress as a whole is
currently scheduled to be on "August break" from the second week in
August through the first week in September.
Break start may be delayed a few days to wrap up whatever deal is
reached on the Debt Limit, but roughly speaking, all our Representatives and
Senators will be out of DC for most of next month plus the first week of
September.
What we recommend, for those
of you inclined to actively support our issues, is getting in touch with your
Representative and Senators over the rest of the summer and letting them know
your concerns. (If you can do it without
being disowned, divorced, or causing damaging levels of MEGO, persuade family
and friends to join in.)
There are a variety of
methods possible - letters (keep them short and state clearly what you want in
the first paragraph), local media op-eds and letters
to the editor (national media, if you can), local "townhall"
meetings (if you get to a mike, keep it short and make sure you state your
objective clearly), reception lines, parades, or barbecues (keep it to one line
you can deliver during a production-line handshake), making appointments for
personal meetings with either the boss or a relevant staffer via the home district
offices, and if you're a partisan activist, buttonholing your legislators at
fundraisers. If you're going to donate
anyway, you might as well get listened to!
This matter will likely come
to floor votes of the full House, and while Senate procedures tend to be less
transparent, individual Senators can have considerable influence. The one Representative or Senator you manage
to educate in the coming weeks could end up making the difference.
If the US having an
affordable practical future in space matters to you, go for it! You'll likely have to be persistent, maybe even
exercise a bit of ingenuity, to get your point delivered effectively, as it
seems likely that you'll be competing with more-than-average public desire for
Congressional attention this year. We
have faith in you - what our movement may lack in numbers we more than make up
for in smarts.
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Commercial Crew News
CCDev Plans To Ditch Space Act
Agreements For Traditional Contracting
We are deeply troubled (but
not surprised) by the announcement NASA's Commercial Crew Program made last
week. (It's officially CCP now, but we
may keep calling it CCDev occasionally for
familiarity's sake.) Briefly, CCP said
they plan to abandon the (successful) CCDev program
practice of using highly flexible Space Act Agreements (SAA's)
to work with the commercial partners.
They plan to switch over to contracts under the standard Federal
Acquisition Regulations ("The FARs") for
the remainder of the program. The reason
they gave was that SAA's don't give them sufficient
control over the details of the commercial crew launch projects, nor sufficient
authority to order changes in mid-project.
Our short response: Excessive
NASA bureaucratic control over project details, plus NASA's bureaucratic tendency
to mandate mid-project changes with no consideration for cost and schedule
effects, are major parts of why big NASA projects so consistently run years (if
not decades) late and cost ten or more times the commercial equivalents.
(This cost difference is
consistent enough that it has become embedded in government project costing
models. See reports from earlier this
summer of a NASA study on the commercial SpaceX
Falcon 9 booster development. This study
used a standard government costing model to predict Falcon 9 project costs to
date of $4 billion if done under standard government contracting
practices. The actual
government-verified cost of the commercial Falcon 9 development to date,
including its smaller Falcon 1 precursor, was $390 million.)
Our short response,
continued: We feel sufficiently strongly
about this that if the Commercial Crew Program does not end up modifying this
position, we will seriously consider switching from supporting additional Commercial
Crew funding to actively opposing any CCP funding at all, since at that point
we believe the program will have become more damaging to the emergence of a US
commercial space transport industry than no program at all.
Some of our colleagues have
been urging us to support them in asking Congress to mandate continued use of
minimal-interference SAA's by the Commercial Crew
Program. We advised caution in
interfering with the program details in this manner, but this announcement has gone
a long way toward changing our minds on the point.
We mentioned not being
surprised. In fact, we've been expecting
this development for years. There is a
long NASA tradition of programs starting far enough under the radar to avoid
the usual bureaucratic bloat, succeeding wildly on a relative shoestring, then
being adopted by the permanent bureaucracy and "helped" to death by
the imposition of all the usual bureaucratic practices, prejudices, and
agendas.
(In this case, imposed by the
NASA Human Spaceflight bureaucracy, HSF for short, AKA the Shuttle-Industrial
Complex, the mummified remains of the army that did Apollo, with enough red
tape to wrap a supertanker, and enough old prejudices and hidden agendas to then
sink it. Not to mention several billion
dollars a year in fixed overhead to support their thousands of civil servants
and tens of thousands of contractors.
The key thing to understand about major NASA HSF projects is that they
cost billions a year just to keep the lights on - results, if any, will come
from whatever loose change is left, as filtered through the truly byzantine structure that has accreted over the last forty
years.)
CCDev's forerunner, the COTS program (Commercial Orbital
Transport to Station, AKA Commercial Cargo) was started with a low profile, and
ran under hands-off SAA's. The COTS commercial partners had extensive
access to NASA expertise, but were allowed to use their own best judgment as to
how to solve problems. NASA specified
the goals, but could not and did not control internal project details.
The result was that COTS
succeeded, for less than NASA HSF usually spends on preliminary studies and
viewgraphs, to the point that there are now two US commercial Station cargo providers
on the verge of entering service, both due to fly their first test missions to
Station by this winter.
However, COTS had been
noticed enough by 2006 that "COTS Part D", the optional followon to carry crew as well, was decisively sidetracked. (We expect COTS-D's likely success would not
have shown the then-still-alive Constellation program in a good light.)
Constellation collapsed
anyway, of course, and due to the liquidation of COTS-D we're now still years
away from a US commercial crew capability.
We thoroughly expect that if CCP is allowed to be run as anything like a
traditional NASA HSF massive-elbow-joggling project, we'll return to the NASA
HSF Constellation standard: The "Gap" will expand at one year per
year. We also expect that any commercial
vendors foolish enough to take part will find themselves requirements-changed
into bankruptcy, or if they have deep enough pockets to survive, they'll be rendered
commercially irrelevant by the huge operating expenses NASA HSF's
supervision-intensive approach will impose.
See http://commercialcrew.nasa.gov/page.cfm?ID=32
for the presentation slides and video of the event. The audience responses starting around 42
minutes into the video are very much worth hearing - representatives of a
number of the interested commercial parties were there, and were extremely
unhappy with this proposed change.
Public responses to all this, by the way, are due by August 3rd - next
Wednesday.
ULA Signs No-Cost NASA SAA To "Human-Rate" Atlas
5
In a related matter, there's
more than meets the eye to ULA's recently announced
no-cost Space Act Agreement with NASA to look at what might be required to
"Human-Rate" ULA's Atlas 5 booster. Given that three different Commercial Crew
participants are talking about using Atlas 5 to launch their crew vehicles,
progress on getting this booster officially accepted by NASA as suitable for
carrying NASA astronauts is important to Commercial Crew, and to ULA's future sales.
(Carriage of non-NASA commercial passengers is a separate matter; FAA
AST oversees that.)
The background is, there has
been a tension between ULA and the NASA Human Spaceflight Establishment (HSF, AKA
the Shuttle-Industrial Complex) over "Human-Rating" ULA's boosters for years.
ULA's position is that their boosters are already built to
launch national-priority payloads as reliably as possible; launching people
basically requires a review of booster systems for any crew-specific issues
plus addition of an Emergency Detection System or EDS, a computer that would
monitor key booster systems and warn a crew capsule of major booster problems
in time for the capsule to fire its escape rockets and get away safely.
The NASA HSF position has
been that "Human-Rating" requires extensive NASA HSF involvement in
every detail of the booster design, with systems redesigned to meet HSF
standards as demanded. This would be, we
expect, an extremely expensive and time-consuming process, resulting in an
extensively redesigned booster that would almost certainly cost more to
produce, and that might or might not actually be any more reliable.
(It must be understood that NASA
"Human-Rating" is not any sort of fixed clear unambiguous
standard. It is a disorganized and wildly
miscellaneous collection of methods, practices, guesses, and prejudices on
improving expendable booster reliability that goes back fifty years, to the
days when NASA was first trying to re-engineer 85% reliable military missiles into
99% reliability before using them to fly astronaut-heroes on national TV.)
(Essentially,
"Human-Rating" for decades has been whatever NASA's Human Spaceflight
establishment said it was. Specific
requirements were regularly waived when they conflicted with short-term
expedience. Notably so for minimum SRB operating
temperature and for External Tank foam-shedding in the Shuttle program... NASA HSF claims about the safety benefits of
their applying "Human-Rating" to commercial vehicles must be
considered in light of NASA Human-Rating's actual post-Apollo track record: Twice
in 135 missions, everybody died.)
ULA, already struggling to
cut costs and sell enough boosters to make money, wasn't thrilled with this
prospect. They would either have to pay
to run two separate production lines for very different versions, or
consolidate production on the new "improved" more expensive NASA
versions. Nor was ULA's
main existing customer, the Defense Department, happy with the likely cost and
operations impacts of having NASA redesign DOD's main boosters. ULA dug in their heels.
This Space Act Agreement
represents the latest move in the chess match.
ULA gets a chance to develop their EDS on their own dime while
selectively drawing on NASA expertise to examine Atlas 5 for "Human-Rating"
suitability in great detail. This will force NASA HSF to justify why any
given existing Atlas 5 feature might not qualify as "Human-Ratable", at
a time when there's still no obligation on ULA's part
to actually change anything. This should
go a long way toward forcing NASA HSF to pin down actual concrete
halfway-reasonable Human-Rating standards.
Given that Atlas 5 has flown
safely 26 times in a row, well beyond the demonstrated-success standard NASA
used to certify Soyuz as astronaut-safe (after the Russians told NASA HSF to
bugger off when they wanted to crawl all over Soyuz design details) it will be
interesting to see what Atlas 5 issues HSF can come up with. We won't rule out the possibility that they
might even come up with a useful improvement or two - there really is a lot of
genuine expertise embedded in the NASA HSF morass. But we expect the net result will be that ULA
will end up in a far better position to resist future NASA HSF pressure to let
them insert themselves deeply into ULA's internal
processes before NASA astronauts launch on an Atlas 5.
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Space Launch System Political Developments
SLS Policy Issues
We've been of mixed mind how
actively we should oppose SLS for a while now.
On the one hand, it is indisputably a huge piece of earmarked pork. Further, there's a strong likelihood that SLS
will never fly at all for the proposed funding under the implicit political requirement
of being managed by as much of the current NASA HSF booster establishment as
can possibly be kept on the payroll.
Finally, SLS's Congressional sponsors remain
prone to trimming back actual useful NASA projects like Commercial Crew
(fingers crossed CCP gets over their HSF-inspired micromanagement compulsion)
and Space Technology Program to pay for minor plus-ups of the SLS porkfest.
Plus, attacking SLS all-out
would be really, really satisfying. We'd
certainly enjoy it, and we have reason to believe we'd mobilize considerable
additional grass-roots support, because face it, a lot of you would enjoy it as
well.
There are two boringly
unsatisfying reasons why we've mostly limited ourselves to pointing out SLS's absurdities without actively trying to defund it.
One is that any effort spent defunding the beast would probably be wasted effort as far
as our overall goals go. Money taken
from SLS most likely would just vanish from the NASA budget altogether, rather
than being transferred to things we think useful. Better to apply what firepower we have to
direct support of what we do like (even if that's not nearly as much righteous
fun.)
The other reason is somewhat
debatable. Some of our colleagues are
convinced that if we do attack SLS effectively, SLS supporters will retaliate
against our preferred NASA projects.
We're not entirely sure they aren't already doing all the harm they can,
but it's a moot point as long as we're still holding off for the first reason,
so we don't worry too much about who's right on this one.
In recent weeks however,
we've found a new reason to tell the truth about SLS but otherwise leave it
alone: SLS is likely to soon take hits below the waterline that have nothing to
do with us. The torpedoes have already been
launched, and we might as well hold our fire till they hit and we see how
effective they are.
What are we talking about
here? In his Congressional testimony the
other week, NASA Administrator Bolden was pressed hard about when he might
officially announce the least-bad SLS configuration he is widely reported to
have settled on, so NASA can start moving ahead on the project. His answer was that he has no choice but to
wait until the results from two outside studies of likely SLS cost come back:
One by the respected consulting firm Booz Allen, and
the other by Office of Management and Budget, OMB, who just happen to work
directly for Bolden's boss in the White House.
You may recall that late last
winter, NASA HQ tried to tell Congress that there is no way SLS can fly as
mandated by Congress. Given the
configuration and management Congress insists on and the budget they set, SLS
will certainly not fly anywhere near the 2016 deadline they call for (and may not
fly ever.) Nor, if it does eventually
fly, will it be affordable to use.
Congress rejected this NASA
report and told Bolden to make it all fit regardless. The still-unreleased SLS plan is presumably
his best effort, but we would be surprised if even an ex-astronaut US Marine
General can fit twenty gallons of Congressional mandate into what's still only
a ten-gallon bucket.
We would be even more
surprised if either Booz Allen or OMB come back with significantly
different conclusions than last winter's NASA SLS report. The large mismatch between the problem as
defined by Congress and the capabilities and track record of the agency that's
supposed to solve it is pretty clear at this point.
The question then becomes,
will the pro-SLS faction in Congress try to ignore these two new reality checks
also? That's the way to bet. But when the new cost reports come back
sometime later this year, it may be the best chance we'll get to see SLS scaled
back to what it should be - a new general-purpose booster main engine
development effort, plus an ongoing heavy-lift technology and configuration
study. At some point a few years from
now when we actually know what we need for heavy lift, those will put us in a
far better position to produce it affordably and quickly.
MPCV Needs A Ride
In related news, the NASA
program to continue development of Constellation's "Orion" deep-space
capsule (now called MPCV, for Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) has a dilemma. The first MPCV could be ready for an unmanned
test flight as early as 2013, but the latest word from Administrator Bolden is
that the earliest SLS would be able to launch such a test is 2017 (with first
manned SLS flight two or more years later.)
The obvious question is, what do the MPCV people do for the four years
between 2013 and 2017? Maintain their Facebook pages? (And
who pays for them to do that?)
So the MPCV project has been
pushing for authority to buy a copy of the existing Delta 4 Heavy to fly their
first test capsule. So far, no luck at
all. The SLS factions in Congress and in
NASA really don't want to see that happen, because once MPCV flies on a Delta
4H, the obvious question becomes, why do we need SLS at all? For the price of SLS, we could buy a ridiculous
number of Delta 4H's (or once it's available, the even larger and cheaper
Falcon Heavy) to lift deep space upper-stages plus propellant for D4H-launched MPCV's to dock with then fly their missions.
Can't have that idea catching
on. So MPCV for now has a totally
political 4-year "Gap" all their own.
- New US Booster Engine Consensus?
Someone pointed out to us
that the USAF Reusable Booster System (RBS) program recently put out an RFI
(Request For Information, the first step toward an eventual buy) for a
high-efficiency LOX-kerosene booster engine with thrust in the range 300,000 to
500,000 lbs. The engine has to be based
on an existing engine; it can't be a new development.
This pretty much narrows it
down to an upgraded, US-produced version of the Aerojet
AJ-26, their designation for refurbished Russian NK-33's. The NK-33 was originally developed for the
Russian Moon program, and is currently supported by Aerojet
for use in Orbital Science's Taurus II COTS booster.
This ties in interestingly
with the recent talk from NASA about eventually competing a LOX-kerosene
booster engine for SLS, and from Aerojet about
possibly building such an engine in Alabama.
A government booster engine consensus may finally be coming together.
The US has not had its own
world-class liquid-fuel booster engine for a long time - the choice of solids
for Shuttle short-circuited NASA development of such, and while the USAF has
pursued a high-performance million-pound booster engine for decades, nothing
has ever come of it.
Pratt & Whitney's RD-180
is a high-performance 860,000 lb thrust LOX-kerosene engine, but it's also a
Russian import. P&W owns the rights
to build the RD-180 in the US, but never has - our understanding is that
setting up production here would multiply RD-180 costs several times over. (For what it's worth, persistent rumor has it
that certain aspects of the RD-180 technology that the Russians never turned
over to us are difficult enough that we're not sure we could duplicate them at
any reasonable price.)
For the longest time, the
accepted theory in the US was that the ideal number of booster engines is one -
less to go wrong. Hence the quest for a new
high-efficiency million-pound engine - that's roughly the installed thrust of a
number of existing medium-lift booster core stages.
We see an interesting
sidelight to the new interest in an engine with one-third to one-half that
thrust level: The consensus on minimizing the number of booster engines may be
shifting. Speculation follows... Small multiples of first-stage engines may be
seen as less of a risk due to modern fault-detection making it easier to simply
not launch if one engine has a problem.
Another, more interesting speculative
possibility is that for higher-thrust applications, such as a liquid SRB
replacement, or an eventual USAF RBS heavy flyback
first stage, or (heaven forbid) a *practical* new government heavy lift
booster, having enough smaller engines to tolerate an engine-out at liftoff may
be coming back as a concept. Might the
(9-engine) Falcon 9's success to date have affected thinking on this? Hard to say for sure at this point.
Pratt & Whitney/Rocketdyne On
The Block?
And in possibly related news,
the Wall Street Journal reports that parent company United Technologies is
thinking about selling their Pratt & Whitney/Rocketdyne
rocket propulsion organization, now that business is ramping down
post-Shuttle. Their apparent acing-out
by Aerojet for big kerosene booster engines aside,
this could be a sign that they're not ready to bet a lot on the SLS ever being
a major market for them. (SLS in its
latest incarnation would use a new version of P&W's
Shuttle Main Engine plus a large P&W J-2X upper stage engine.)
That, plus ULA's growing resistance to P&W RL-10 upper stage
engine price increases, may have convinced United Technologies there's no
future for them in rockets. We'll see.
And that should be enough to
think about for one Update. Remember, if
you think we know what we're talking about, go sell your local Congressional
delegation on that outlook also.
Meanwhile, have a great summer!
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________________________________________________________________________
Space Access Society
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"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein