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Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager
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."
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.
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.