Calls For Funding NASA Commercial Crew Grow

MarkWhittington writes: As summer starts to give way to fall and the end of the current fiscal year draws nigh, demands that NASA's commercial crew program be fully funded are being heard with greater frequency and urgency. Astronaut Scott Kelly took time off from his year-long sojourn on the International Space Station to entreat Congress to pony up. IO9 was a little more caustic, stating "Dammit, Congress: Just Buy NASA its Own Space Taxi, Already." Monday, Slate became the latest media outlet to take up the cause

The situation is depressingly familiar to those who have followed the fortunes of the space program since the Apollo moon landings. When President Obama started the commercial crew program in 2010, NASA estimated that it would take a certain amount of money to get government funded and commercially operated spacecraft running by 2015. Then the space agency would no longer be dependent on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.

Congress has decided to allocate less money than NASA feels it needed for commercial crew. This situation is not unusual, as Congress often does this to space projects. However, the politics surrounding the creation of the commercial crew program, which featured the abrupt cancellation of the Constellation space exploration program, has exacerbated the conflict between NASA's will and Congress' won't. President Obama did not consult Congress when he cancelled President Bush's return to the moon program. Congress has displeased ever since.

Comments

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[Rei]

Yep, the safety records of Russian systems are not very pretty, particularly in recent years where the whole program keeps going downhill. They've not killed anyone onboard recently, but that's pure luck - they've had plenty of accidents with unmanned Soyuz that could easily have killed the crew, many onboard near-incidents which could have killed the crew, plenty of crew injuries, and the death of ground crew. And the sort of faults they're getting are just humiliating - forget things like "didn't realize that we lost O-ring redundancy at temperatures below 40F", the sort of errors the Russians have been making are along the lines of "installed a sensor upside down and repeatedly whacked it with a big hammer to make it fit" (actual failure cause). And their management is just absurd. After one accident that could have killed the crew on return, they responded by superstitiously banning two women from being on the same spacecraft. "This isn't discrimination. I'm just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behaviour or something else occurs, that's what I'm talking about.'' (the article incorrectly states that the crew was "unharmed", the initial Russian statement, but one of the astronauts had to be hospitalized due to a compressed spinal column)

Re:We had one, it was called the Shuttle.

[Rei]

The problem was that the wrong people realized it. There was a report at Thiokol on the tests that had been suggestive that at such low temperatures the O-rings provided no failure redundancy like they did at warmer temperatures due to the slow "extrusion" time, but the Thiokol people arguing with NASA to delay the launch were unaware of it, and so all they could express was "concerns" that a double O-ring failure might be a risk in those conditions.

There was also a problem with the inadvertent misuse of statistics. One of the elements used to argue for the launch was a graph of O-ring failures vs. temperature which showed no strong trend. However, the graph had only failures on it, not successes. When you add the successes into the chart you can see that the overwhelming majority of launches at warm temperatures had no O-ring failures, while every last low-temperature launch had at least one failure - and STS-51-L was off the chart even colder.

More to the point, the launch also wasn't stupid just from the point of the SRB O-rings, but also because of the risk of ice strike on the orbiter... it was a really awful decision in general, opposed by an awful lot of people. But a lot of it came down to whole chains of people not asserting themselves enough with a good enough case to cause the momentum to stop. Engineers at Rockwell and Thiokol tried to get their managers to stop things, the managers tried to get their representatives at NASA to stop things, the representatives tried to stop the launch... but each time the level of urgency got watered down, and so the people at the top really never got a sense of how strongly the lower-down people felt that the launch should not go on as planned. There never was a manager who was told by a bunch of his people, "You have to stop, it's too dangerous!" responded "Screw you guys, I'm going ahead with it anyway". It was just a lot of people being told "Well, we're rather uncomfortable with this..." but not being given a persuasive enough argument to take to the higher-ups. NASA knows that there is always an element of risk with each launch, and that if they don't accept any risk, they'll never launch anything. But the people making the call never did get same sense of how high the risk was that the engineers had.