Space Access Update #135 5/13/14
Copyright 2014 by Space Access Society
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In this Issue:
- 2014 Space
Politics: Changes Coming
Russia, Soyuz, Station Access, and Station Possession
- Soyuz Cutoff Contingency
- Station Loss Contingency
RD-180
Space Launch System
- Where We
Stand: SAS Policy Pointers
- Space Access
Conference
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2014 Space Politics: Changes Coming
Looking at this year's space
policy and politics scene, we're struck by a number of issues that have been
steady and predictable for years now, but that recently look about as stable as
a stack of overage dynamite. Changes,
abrupt changes, are suddenly looking possible, and in some cases inevitable.
Our experience is that it's
best to start thinking about a sensible plan before the stuff hits the fan,
because it's really hard to make good plans in the middle of a stuff-storm. Some thoughts follow.
Russia, Soyuz, Station
Access, and Station Possession
Space policy's priority is falling
back fast for both the US and Russia in the Ukraine crisis. We keep hearing that it would make no sense
for either side to drag ISS into the fray, that the level of mutual
interdependence in operating Station is such that neither party could
practically go it alone - but situations involving clashing emotional
nationalisms all too often in the past have developed logic and momentum of
their own.
We hope that the two leading
parties to Station continue to see reason and cooperate, but hope is not a
policy. The US needs two contingency
plans: One for a cutoff of current US crew access via Soyuz to Station, and one
for a subsequent Russian takeover of the US sections of Station (whether it's
called annexation, or salvage, or any other fig-leaf that may be applied to the
reality that possession is nine points of the law) or loss of Station due to
politically-induced operational problems.
It's worth noting that the
Ukraine crisis may drag on for years, as it would be difficult for the current
Russian government to back off from its recent "near abroad" policies
without severely damaging its domestic standing, possibly to the point of
losing power.
It's also worth noting that
effective preparations for the first (Soyuz cutoff) contingency visibly
underway would make both the first and the second contingency far less likely
to ever take place. If the US were
positioned to respond to a Russian access cutoff by sending up a US crew on US
transport within months, a cutoff's perceived leverage would be considerably
reduced, and its potential to come across as embarrassingly ineffectual greatly
increased.
US international political
reality is that Station - International Space Station - could quickly become a
highly visible symbol of the level of US commitment to the major US allies
involved, Japan, Canada, and most of the countries of Western Europe. If the US allows a situation to develop where
the international partners have to renegotiate Station access with Russia or
lose it entirely, conclusions are likely to be drawn about the reliability of other
US commitments to these allies.
US domestic political reality
is that Station is a significant element of US public pride that also represents
three billion dollars a year in NASA-funded jobs in the states and districts of
a powerful Congressional coalition. NASA
Station management's recent policy of encouraging commercial Station-related
ventures also means this Congressional coalition is growing to include home
states and districts of those commercial ventures.
This NASA/contractor/commercial
workforce is vanishingly unlikely to be simply laid off even if we suddenly
lack a Station for them to support. If
you doubt this, consider that we still have a major part of the old Shuttle NASA/contractor
workforce on the NASA payroll, ten years after Shuttle cancellation was announced
and three years after Shuttle's final flight.
There was no plan beyond
layoff made at the time for most of this Shuttle workforce. (In 20-20 hindsight, a grave political
error.) The political result was that the
Congressional Shuttle coalition has since assigned them multiple expensive
make-work rocket projects.
We need to have a near-term
Station contingency access plan in place and underway ASAP, to minimize chances
of either a Station access cutoff or a complete Station takeover/loss. 2017 is far too late. We also need a much better plan ready for the
current Station workforce than the one Congress implemented post-Shuttle,
should Station push come to Russian shove.
Soyuz Cutoff
Contingency
If the three US Commercial
Crew contractors haven't already been asked by NASA to lay out how much each
could accelerate its first crewed Station flight and what it would take to do
so, they should be, immediately.
Further, given the
international political priorities involved, NASA should instruct these
contractors to factor some interim increased level of acceptable risk into
their proposals to accomplish the mission in a timely manner.
(Note that some parts of the planned
NASA safety certification process may not actually provide additional safety
proportional to the time and expense involved.
See Rand Simberg's new book Safe
Is Not An Option for more on the tradeoffs involved.)
NASA should then be directed
to select the proposal giving best odds of earliest emergency access capability
and implement it on an expedited basis, to include a return to the streamlined
"Other Transactional Authority" program management used to such good
effect in Commercial Cargo and the initial stages of Commercial Crew. At least one of the other competitors should also
be kept moving forward, albeit likely on a resource-reduced basis.
This interim access
capability need not be actually used, absent a Soyuz cutoff. Its existence will in fact reduce the chances
of any such cutoff. However, producing
the interim capability will likely also shorten the path to full certified US
crew capability.
Station Loss
Contingency
As for what the current US
Station workforce should be told to do if we lose the current Station (whether
via overt takeover or due to politically-caused operational problems) the
obvious answer is, build, launch, assemble and operate a new and better (and if
done properly many times cheaper than ISS's $100
billion-plus cost) space station, ASAP.
The politically obvious but
very bad way to do this would be to order NASA to design a whole new Station
from scratch for launch on the SLS. The
Congressional Shuttle/SLS coalition will likely push hard for this. Acceding to this would guarantee the new
Station would, in tandem with SLS, take far too long and cost far too much. It would also raise the probability of complete
project failure far too high, given that the organization currently tasked with
SLS hasn't flown a successful new rocket in over thirty years.
Given the US national and
international priorities involved, we recommend that the considerable risks of
tying a new Station to SLS be avoided.
Politically, replacing Station
would need to happen reasonably near current budgets for domestic reasons,
while also happening fast enough to unmistakably demonstrate both US resolve
and continuing US technological superiority for the international audience. It would be no bad thing to produce a
peaceful reminder of the old lesson that if you get the US mad it just inspires
us to extraordinary accomplishment.
The only practical way to
meet both these goals would be for NASA to combine creative use of existing
surplus Station hardware with expansion on the leveraging of US commercial
capabilities already pioneered in the Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew
programs.
Specifically, NASA should add
US commercial space habitat modules to the New Station mix, while renewing and
expanding on the streamlined "Other Transactional Authority" cooperative
commercial program management used to such good effect in Commercial Cargo and the
initial stages of Commercial Crew.
This would give the US the
best possible chance of rebounding from such a crisis with a demonstration of
US public/private creativity at its best.
Given that the political repercussions of such a crisis could carry on
for an extended period, such a demonstration could well be a significant factor
in a positive long-term resolution of the crisis, as well as a positive legacy
for those who set this response in motion.
RD-180
ULA is in an interesting
position. The better of their two EELV
program launchers, Atlas 5 (all other things equal, A5 carries somewhat more
and costs somewhat less than Delta 4) uses a Russian-built engine, the
RD-180. A very good Russian engine - nothing
in current US production can match its performance in the application.
Back in the late nineties,
Atlas 5's US engine contractor got a smoking deal on a contract for a batch of
100 RD-180's at just under $10 million each.
(Roughly comparable US engines cost several times that.) About half that batch has already been flown,
and another two years' worth have been purchased and stored in the US as
insurance against exactly the sort of political crisis currently brewing.
Originally the plan was to
build RD-180's in the US at some point after getting the program underway with
Russian engines. EELV was, after all,
primarily a program to ensure redundant means of space access for US national
security payloads. Rights to build the
engines, along with detailed technical info, were included in the original
deal.
But the US ended up flying a
lot fewer EELV's than originally hoped. And building the RD-180 in the US turned out
to be technically harder than expected. More
expensive too - the US-built engines would have cost several times the
initial-contract Russian ones.
So nobody wanted to pay the
estimated $1 billion to set up a US RD-180 production line as long as the
Russians were (mostly) behaving. Absent
a crisis, the US government apparently had other things it would rather do with
the money, while ULA was hardly going to spend that much of their own cash to
increase their per-engine cost.
Obviously, things have
changed. ULA would still (rightly) be in
trouble with their stockholders if they spent a billion stockholder dollars to
effectively double or triple ULA’s per-RD-180 cost. This
collision between national security and international politics is a government
problem, and the government needs to pay for the solution.
There are two major US Government
options.
One would be to decide that
SpaceX is a sure enough thing at this point that DOD can 100% count on them to
provide the other half of US national security launch redundancy when the
stored RD-180's run out in a couple of years and ULA falls back to only having
Delta 4. We won't debate here the technical
merits or politics of this policy. Suffice
it to say that current indications are that the government is not yet ready to
take this leap.
The other option then is for
DOD to pay for expedited setting up of US production of RD-180 or a new-design
functional equivalent.
We recommend against going
for a new-design replacement - given only two years of RD-180's in stock, time
is of the essence. Debugging new
high-performance rocket engines historically takes a lot of time. US-built RD-180's will also need some
debugging, but at least there's already a known stable working configuration to
aim for. There is also a sad recent history
of US new-engine programs that have spent years and hundreds of millions to
come up with nothing flyable. Walk
before you run.
We recommend US RD-180 clone production
be contracted for via an expedited competitive process that allows use of Other
Transactional Authority to bypass the expensive, time-consuming standard
government procurement system, analogous to our Station access and Station
replacement recommendations.
And finally, given that the
government would be paying for setting this up, US production RD-180's should
be available to any US launch company, not just ULA.
Space Launch System
The conflict in our other
recently-heating potential crisis is purely domestic, but not all that much
less intense. Unfortunately, some of the
issues involved have come to be seen in light of the deep partisan divide prevailing
elsewhere. Unfortunate, in that from our
determinedly non-partisan point of view, this perception of NASA-policy
partisanship is largely in error. Both
good policies and bad in this matter have come from both sides of the aisle.
A brief dip into history may
clear up some of the confusion.
The White House NASA
exploration policy changes of 2004 and 2010 attempted to resolve a long-term
problem: NASA's overall budget has been
essentially flat for most of the decades since the post-Apollo cutbacks. Shuttle ended up costing well north of a
billion dollars each for the handful of missions it could fly per year, in
large part due to post-Apollo structural problems at NASA. NASA nevertheless eventually managed to build Station using Shuttle, taking decades
and costing over a hundred billion dollars because of a mix of these continuing
structural problems and Shuttle's limitations.
At that point, NASA was
stuck. Once Station was established,
operating it and Shuttle ate up pretty much the entire NASA "human
exploration" budget. There was no
money for any further exploration, nor was there likely to be. Since Apollo, the majority of the American
voting public thinks space is cool and doesn't sweat the details, but does
think that what we're currently spending is about right. All attempts to nudge NASA funding back up
toward (historically unique) much higher Apollo levels have gone nowhere. One thing Congress knows is the voting public,
and the public just isn't sufficiently invested.
The White House policy solution
in 2004 was to schedule Shuttle's retirement and begin preparing to switch to
supporting Station with existing US expendable boosters - at the time, mainly the
somewhat-cheaper-than-Shuttle EELV's. This would have freed up some funding for new
exploration, also to be based on existing expendables.
Shuttle's retirement was set,
but as we've seen the plan didn't have enough in it for the Congressional
Shuttle coalition. Next thing you know,
Admiral Steidle's EELV-based "spiral development"
exploration plan was out, and Mike Griffin's NASA-designed big boosters
"Constellation" was in, with the new Ares 1 and Ares 5 rockets to be
built by essentially the NASA/contractor Shuttle team. (Ares boosters were to be used not just for
exploration but also for routine Station support missions.)
Constellation inevitably
collapsed because with the Shuttle team mostly still on the payroll there was
still no money for developing actual exploration missions. Worse, those post-Apollo NASA structural problems
had not gotten better over time. Ares 1
and Ares 5 development costs were rising to the point where it was unlikely
they'd even fly within expected funding, never mind that we couldn't afford to
develop exploration payloads for them.
Meanwhile a plan to shut down
Station to free up funding for Constellation didn't go far at all. Station has a Congressional coalition behind
it too, one arguably stronger than that of Shuttle/Ares/SLS. (Station funding probably still wouldn't have
covered the fast-growing Constellation tab in any case.)
So, a second White House
tried again in 2010 to lay off much of the Shuttle team by canceling
Constellation, keeping some long-term Heavy-Lift booster propulsion technology
work going, while redirecting the rest of the funding toward developing exploration
technology and missions to be flown on commercial boosters.
The Heavy-Lift technology
project was in hindsight too small a consolation prize. The Congressional Shuttle coalition almost
immediately stepped in to revive Ares 5 under a new name, "Space Launch
System", once again effectively no-bidding it to the old NASA/contractor
Shuttle team. (Ares 1 was quietly
allowed to die, since it had become
clear that it had vibration problems so bad that the only thing it could ever
deliver to space would be puree of astronaut.)
After some bitter brawling, a
truce was declared in the 2011 budget.
NASA HQ would go along with developing SLS, and Congress would fund some
modest NASA exploration technology work and partially fund Commercial
Crew. (Commercial Crew's first mission
has slipped from 2015 to 2017 due to this partial funding plus ongoing Congressional
SLS coalition pressure to do Commercial Crew more traditional-NASA inefficiently.)
That brings us up to the
present, where this truce is starting to look shaky.
Is the White House trying to
kill SLS again? No, the 2011 truce is
holding from that side. The White House as
usual requested a modest reduction for SLS ($1.732 billion, down 10% from last
year's $1.918 billion) in the full knowledge Congress would top it back
up. The White House also requested $848
million for Commercial Crew, in the full knowledge Congress would again whittle
it back down (though now perhaps not so much after all, given the need to deal
with the sudden political unreliability of Soyuz.)
What has been happening is
that the SLS coalition has begun to get a lot less subtle about sniping at
other NASA programs they'd like to plunder for funding, that they see as a
threat, or both. Station is foremost
among these, to the point where the Administrator of NASA had to make clear this
spring at a Congressional hearing that without Station, he could not use SLS,
as without Station there'd be no practical way to develop and test long-duration
deep space systems to fly on SLS.
In terms of practical
politics, SLS trying to kill Station would (oversimplified) involve the Alabama
Congressional delegation colliding head-on with their colleagues from
Texas. Alabama didn't win back when the
Huntsville NASA center tried to grab overall management of not-yet-then-built
Station from Houston. Texas has not
grown smaller or less influential since.
More recently, the Constellation coalition had no luck killing Station
either, so this spring's push is puzzling.
The SLS Congressional coalition
also last year began a serious push to cancellation-proof SLS, to essentially
make it illegal for NASA to terminate the program. This push was fig-leafed by also including
Station on the protected list, but Station didn't need the protection and the
bill's original sponsor is from Huntsville; nobody was fooled.
(The SLS anti-cancellation provisions
are currently watered down to requiring 120 days notice, which we can live
with, but we're keeping an eye on the issue.
Any actual cancellation-proofing is terribly bad policy, if for no other
reason than if it's passed, everyone else in Congress will want to protect their
favorite programs that way also.)
There are other signs in the
current House NASA Authorization that the SLS Coalition may be worried about SLS's future. The
bill contains a quite reasonable instruction that NASA come up with an overall
Exploration roadmap with Mars at the far end, with few restrictions on how to
get there. Save one: NASA is instructed
that SLS (and the Orion capsule being developed to fly on it) shall be deemed
essential to the roadmap.
This is not something that
would need mandating in law if SLS actually was essential. In fact, any serious program to reach Mars
must involve building up missions from multiple launches, since SLS at its
eventual largest still won't come close to putting up a practical Mars mission
in one go. At which point, it makes
sense (to us at least) to use commercial boosters that may have to fly more often
with smaller mission pieces, but that will definitely do so at far lower overall
cost.
(Regarding SLS costs, there
was a 2011 NASA study that compared a new commercial booster's development cost
with a standard NASA cost-model estimate for the same booster done as a
traditional NASA in-house project. The in-house
project cost estimate came in ten times higher than the actual commercial
development cost. Moreover, a GAO study
from about the same time said that NASA's final costs for a dozen recent major
in-house projects averaged 55% higher than its initial estimates. IE, by NASA's and GAO's numbers, doing SLS
in-house will likely cost NASA ten to fifteen times more than buying a
commercial equivalent. Any modest program
economies of scale that might arguably accompany SLS being larger than
currently-planned commercial boosters are in our view far outweighed by this
massive SLS in-house NASA diseconomy.)
And, one final SLS oddity,
the current House NASA Authorization still mandates that SLS/Orion be built
capable of doing Station crew rotation missions, including doing Station
lifeboat duty. This is the approximate
equivalent of using an 18-wheeler to drop the kids off at school - moreover, an
18-wheeler custom-built to Formula 1 race car specs. This and "cost-effective" aren't in
the same universe.
Other missions proposed to
justify SLS don't make a whole lot more sense:
- NASA HQ's proposed Asteroid Rendezvous
Mission, ARM, would bring a 20-foot space rock back via robotic capture to
within the very limited two-week range of a single-launch SLS/Orion
mission. ARM at least has the virtue of
(probably) being within SLS/Orion's capabilities, but nobody seems impressed
enough with this mission so far to pay for it.
(The people who actually study asteroids for a living would far rather
spend a fraction of the money on multiple smaller asteroid probes that would
give them far more data.)
- The current Congressional mission favorite
is a Mars 2021 crewed flyby mission, which would have a very high coolness
factor. The problem is it's far beyond
the capabilities of the Orion spacecraft, and quite probably also beyond what
SLS would be able to do by then. It
would take what is currently planned as the very first crewed Orion test flight
and send it on a 500-day no-bailout round trip to Mars. What could go wrong?
Meanwhile, the latest GAO
report on SLS costs says they can't begin to estimate SLS life-cycle cost
because SLS management is refusing to give GAO data on how much the program's
various planned options and enhancements might cost.
Our conclusion from all this
is, the SLS coalition is very worried.
Given the stonewalling of GAO, plus the fatal cost-growth history of
Constellation, we wouldn't be at all surprised if they already know something about
SLS costs that we only strongly suspect.
Namely, that it's very likely SLS is fast headed the way of
Constellation: Not enough money to build and fly the incredibly expensive
NASA-developed rockets, let alone to develop useful missions to fly on them.
Worried enough to push even
harder to loot parts of NASA that are actually doing useful missions, to push
even harder to come up with any plausible mission at all for SLS, and to push
even harder to hobble other parts of NASA that threaten to make it unmistakably
obvious that it's been a long time since SLS's
management has been in the same county as the best we have at developing new
rockets.
Especially with the Russian
crisis ongoing, the SLS coalition may have an opportunity to slip more really
bad policy into law. They should be
watched closely.
Meanwhile, it's time to start
thinking about - and perhaps quietly negotiating - what deal the SLS
Congressional coalition would accept for a final SLS shutdown. We would be open to a significant part of the
NASA funding currently flowing to Coalition districts continuing, as a matter
of political realism. The last offer was
for perhaps a third of current SLS funding levels for Heavy Lift propulsion technology
work. We could live with sweetening this
a bit with some new work for the old districts.
We would NOT be in favor of
any new work sent their way happening under unreconstructed SLS organizational structures. As a
matter of principle there should be some reasonable chance of the American
public getting worthwhile space exploration results for their NASA money.
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Where We Stand: SAS Policy Pointers
We're overdue to write up a
new policy summary. We are for Radically
Cheaper Space Transportation as being good for the country (not to mention
necessary for the future of the species), yes - but how do we propose to get
there from here? The current SAS Policy Summary
dates was last revised in early 2006. It
still gives the basic outline of our policies and goals but is a bit dated on
programmatic details. (Though we are
very pleased that some of our advice there has since been at least partially
implemented.)
Space Access Update #124
gives a relatively recent summary of where we stand on Commercial Crew - we're
for it, as long as it's not captured by the bureaucrats and rendered useless -
and Space Launch System (SLS) - we're against it, as a white-collar welfare
waste of extremely limited space funding, an awkwardly large and vastly
overpriced rocket in desperate search of some practical mission.
For more of the reasoning
behind these positions, see SAU #128.
And for our still-current
position on how to let NASA do useful exploration despite flat budgets as far
as the eye can see, there's SAU #132 "Fixing
The Problem".
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Space Access Conference
A Word From The Executive
Director
In a normal year, I'd be recovering
from putting together and managing our annual Space Access conference. Not, unfortunately, this year. I'll have more to say soon about the reasons
for that (short version: time and money issues, plus deep personal reluctance
to ask for help) and about how in future we hope to be able to resume doing the
conference.
For now, I'd like to thank
everyone who's written with expressions of support, offers of help, and ideas,
and ask for your continued patience on responses. I discovered very quickly after making the
announcement that I wasn't able to be as calm and objective in discussing this
as I might have hoped, so I shelved the matter temporarily and concentrated on
dealing with other stacked-up issues.
Some of the suggestions are quite good, and at this point I'm far more
optimistic about being able to both carry on and make improvements than I was
at the end of last year. More on all that
soon.
Henry Vanderbilt
Executive Director
Space Access Society
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"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein