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Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager

Posted by kdawson on from the not-so-fast dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican, have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to 'examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives' to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has yet to agree to the president's proposed policy, and has inserted a clause into this year's budget legislation that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The Constellation manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by the NASA administrator and other NASA officials. But he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors."

12 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Can you imagine... by RockMFR · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can you imagine if the Congress of the 1950s had, instead of funding the Apollo program, wanted to fund production of the Wright Flyer?

    1. Re:Can you imagine... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

      Then the Apollo program really would have been filmed in Hollywood studios.

      Hey, scratch that. I now have definitive proof that the Moon landings were not filmed in a studio. The films were shown on TV; free of charge.

      If Hollywood faked the Moon landings, they would have had DRM stuff on all of it. And if anyone said the word "Moon", the MPAA would have been all over it.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
  2. Bicker bicker bicker... by durrr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Senators thinking too much of their sponsors and pets in addition to the perpetual conflict over the imaginary difference in US parties(republicans/democrats) is the reason why we're not going anywhere. The congress is a fucking kindergarten full of uneducated, dishonest and selfish man-babies who feel entitled to have everything their way, and if they have to face critique they'll cry until your ears bleed or you let them have it their way.
    Perhaps when India or China start their mars missions congress will sober up.

  3. Not to sound like a tinfoil hat... by beaverdownunder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... but why is it so hard/expensive to repeat something that was done several times 40 years ago using comparatively horribly primitive technology? Somehow I expect this to all 'go away'. Not everything in the world is a conspiracy, but not everything isn't, either. Hello, NASA -- what gives?

    1. Re:Not to sound like a tinfoil hat... by durrr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because a certain president found the space program dull and boring and decided to funnel all the NASA money into warfare instead, because the latter is so much more exciting and something we need more of. And when you let something stagnate for 30 years, chances are you'll have a bloody hard time getting it going again, especially when all the people and expertise have moved on and away.

    2. Re:Not to sound like a tinfoil hat... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      think about it this way:

      Remember when, as a kid, you balanced a ruler on your finger? Launching a rocket is just like that--only the ruler is human beings and the finger is a (hopefully) controlled explosion.

      If your system isn't PERFECT, people die.

      Now, that's just a normal rocket. We've done those before. But to send humans to the Moon, you've got to launch a larger mass than to get just to the Space Station. Much larger. And you have to bring enough fuel with you (more mass) to carefully brake yourself as you get into lunar orbit. And you have to bring enough fuel with you to carefully brake yourself as you get down to the Moon's surface. And you have to bring enough fuel with you to launch off of the Moon's surface again. AND you have to bring enough fuel with you to get back out of lunar orbit and pointed back at the moon. AND you have to bring fuel tanks and rocket engines for each one of those steps, too. Plus food and clothing and toilets for your humans. All of that has to be lifted in the original rocket.

      This still doesn't get at your question, though. We did it in the 60's, why can't we do it now? Well, lots of reasons. Primarily, we were trying to do it in a way that was less expensive to operate than the Saturn Vs--that program was cancelled because it was so expensive. Most of the technology, and all of the parts, are obsolete, so we couldn't just go with another Saturn V. Also, it takes $Billions to do this, so we have to satisfy all of our "stakeholders," which meant that we had to try to do it using Shuttle parts, because if you make a bunch of people suddenly unemployed, senators get upset. So it would be (arguably) better to launch with an all-liquid system, but we had to cobble together rockets out of the Shuttle parts. Well, performance-wise, they're slightly worse but safety-wise they're slightly better, so it's all good. But then it turned out that there were technical problems to using Shuttle parts when they're not attached to the Shuttle's stack--see the first point about balancing a ruler; if it's not perfect, things go dramatically wrong. So the design had engineering problems that had to be fixed. It takes time and money to fix those problems, and the program fell behind and went over budget.

      Meanwhile, congress SAID they supported NASA in a broad, bi-partisan fashion--and they did, they tried to give NASA more money...but Bush, who started the program, cut the budget. Every single God-damned year. When you start a complex program and give it less money than it is asking for, you cause more problems than just the dollar amounts represent. Work gets done out of order due to the financial constraints. This means people have to make assumptions about the work that should have been done already, but isn't. That means that some of those assumptions will be wrong. That means that some of that work will have to be re-done, and that means more time and money.

      So, there you have it--why NASA can't do again what it did 40+ years ago: the physics are nightmarishly difficult, there were engineering difficulties (imagine that), there were constraints about how the system could be built due to congressional politics, and the president didn't support us with enough money. End of story.

    3. Re:Not to sound like a tinfoil hat... by Nyeerrmm · · Score: 3, Informative

      Two reasons:
      1. The technology hasn't improved that much (there just isn't that much room to improve rocket technology)
      2. The budget has been cut to a quarter of what it was in the 60s

      We could probably repeat Apollo at about half of what it cost the first time, but its expensive just to operate that architecture. Constellation would have suffered the same issue -- as an Augustine commission member said, if we were given a fully usable system right now, we would still have to cancel it under the current budget constraints, because we couldn't afford to operate it.

      Apollo was ideal for its time and goals. It got there quick, and it got there spectacularly, and they had money to burn due to external geopolitical factors. However, NASA thought that level of funding would go on forever and never had a good scale-back option. In order to do more than a mission to LEO under the current budget we need to rethink how an exploration system should look - small cheap manned launchers, on-orbit construction, and a focus on permanence. While these things may take longer, and be a little more expensive to build, we can do it piecemeal, and it will ultimately be far more sustainable.

    4. Re:Not to sound like a tinfoil hat... by darrenm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What I have a hard time understanding is how NASA (the Americans) made it look so easy to complete six manned moon landings in a 3 year period 40 years ago, but nobody (neither NASA or any other country) has been able to do it since. By easy I mean banging them out every few months without incident/deaths.

      You can't tell me during the high flying economic times, when people were going to go into orbit with their dog just for fun, that countries like Russia or China haven't wanted to be known as the second country to make it to the moon, or the first country to land three people on the surface of the moon during a mission, etc.

      It's like 1972 happened and then every country on earth forgot that the moon existed, with respect to manned lunar missions.

      I'm not saying it's easy, or cheap, but if NASA could do it 41 years ago why hasn't anybody stepped up to the plate?

  4. Congress needs to do more than complain by davmoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If Congress wants the US space program to be top notch and succeed, then they need to *fully* fund it. Its "put up or shut up" time. Either give them the money to go to the moon, or close down the program.

    --
    I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
  5. Constellation was a joke by voss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They wouldnt have been able to put up a manned version until 2018. The Ares I was unnecessary, you can use
    Delta IV or Atlas V already proven rockets plus the Falcon 9 launching next month.

    The Ares V heavy lift rocket could be done faster,cheaper and more reliably by a shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle
    such as the Direct 3.0 , the tooling is already in place for Directs version using the existing shuttle tooling.

    1. Re:Constellation was a joke by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The Delta IV and Atlas V rockets are proven for cargo. To get a rocket 'man rated', i.e. ready for a human to launch in, requires vastly different engineering.

      No it doesn't. The cost of 'man-rating' the Delta and Atlas would be under a billion dollars; it's primarily a matter of trajectory changes to allow safe aborts, and allowing an abort to orbit after an engine failure.

      After all, the shuttle is 'man rated' and kills its crew about 2.5% of the time, so it's a pretty damn low bar to pass; any current expendable with a launch escape system would be safer..

  6. Unfair? Maybe. Overdue? Definitely. by code_rage · · Score: 5, Informative

    Best short summary: Norm Augustine's testimony to Congress http://legislative.nasa.gov/hearings/5-12-10%20AUGUSTINE.pdf

    "...the mismatch of ends and means coupled with technical problems that were encountered on the Ares I program were such that during its first four years the program slipped between three and five years...". Read that again. After four years of development and billions of $, the objective was no closer than it was at the start of the program. I could cut NASA some slack on that if they were attempting to develop new technology, but the Ares I program was largely based on well-understood technology and an existing industrial production base.

    The Program Manager does not set the budget and he was not delivered the budget that was estimated for the job. So maybe the dismissal was unfair. But the PM's job is explicitly to develop the program within the actual (not wished for) triangle of resources, schedule and performance. If the delivered resources are so inadequate that the completion date never gets closer, then something else needs to change - this is the PM's job.