First and Last Men on Moon Testify at Capitol Hill...

[MKSheppard]

Link

Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan oppose Obama's spaceflight plans

By Ed O'Keefe and Marc Kaufman
Wednesday, May 12, 2010; 10:19 PM

The first and last Americans to walk on the moon reiterated opposition to President Obama's plans for the future of human spaceflight on Wednesday, arguing that the president's vision lacks specifics and proper review.

Plans advanced by the Obama administration will end most of NASA's Constellation program and rely on the commercial space industry to ferry future astronauts to the international space station. NASA would shift its focus to building a space capsule that would take astronauts to Mars and beyond.

But Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong and Apollo 17 Commander Eugene A. Cernan dismissed those plans in testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee.

"Nowhere do we find a commitment in dollars to support this national endeavor," Cernan said, adding later that "this budget proposal presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere."

In a rare public appearance, Armstrong questioned Obama's motives.

"A plan that was invisible to so many was likely contrived by a very small group in secret who persuaded the president that this was a unique opportunity to put his stamp on a new and innovative program," Armstrong said. "I believe the president was poorly advised."

White House science adviser John Holdren said the Obama administration "is steadfast in its commitment to space exploration and to the mission of NASA." Holdren later insisted that Obama consulted with him, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and others before making a final decision.

"That doesn't mean that he took everybody's advice," Holdren said.

Armstrong, Cernan and Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell called Obama's plans "devastating" in a letter sent to him last month. Armstrong's visit to Capitol Hill earned special notice; the last time he appeared before Congress was at a House Science Committee hearing on March 11, 1971, according to Senate aides.

Despite opposition from the Apollo commanders, other colleagues -- including Armstrong's crew mate Buzz Aldrin, the first American woman in space, Sally Ride, and numerous other, more recent astronauts -- support Obama's plans. Armstrong, Cernan and Lovell also served in an era when the agency dominated a greater percentage of the federal budget and before the agency's mission added scientific responsibilities. NASA also has added costly safety precautions to missions since the Apollo missions, making it harder to fulfill the wishes of older astronauts.

Obama's plans, which increase NASA's budget at a time when most agencies' budgets are being cut, have irked lawmakers from southern states where most of NASA and its contractors are based. Sen. George LeMieux (R-Fla.) worried that the plans would allow other countries to leapfrog ahead of the United States.

"I do not look forward to explaining to my children why the Chinese are putting their flag on the moon over ours," LeMieux said.

But Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) suggested that home-state concerns would be tempered by a tight federal budget.

"NASA's first mission must be to do what is best for the nation," Rockefeller said.

[MKSheppard]

Q: Concerns about Soyuz?

Armstrong: It's difficult to reject the answer until the commercial vehicles start flying. Soyuz is clearly very safe to return to earth on. Shuttle would continue to be safe for some years. Key on the Ares was it was designed via safety first in mind. Commercial vehicles, we don't know what they have on safety.

Q: Orion lite a good idea?

Armstrong: No, not a good use of that segment of funds in the budget. Expensive vehicle to design and test and late before it would be ready. Not a good configuration like a medical emergancy with immediate return. Orion has poor aerodynamic performance.

[PeZook]

Holy crap, I'm really surprised Armstrong is getting so involved in the whole thing. The guy's been pretty reclusive the last few decades, and was never enthusiastic about public appearances even before he became the Hero Of Humanity.

[SirNitram]

Holy crap, I'm really surprised Armstrong is getting so involved in the whole thing. The guy's been pretty reclusive the last few decades, and was never enthusiastic about public appearances even before he became the Hero Of Humanity.

His retreat from the public eye was largely because got thoroughly sick of things he had signed being hocked for cash and all the forgeries.

Of course, on the polar opposite of Armstrong, Lovell, and Cernan are folks like Buzz Aldrin, supporting this plan, and of course, opposing Ares vocally(That was Buzz. He went farther than I ever went, calling it a fraud in a peice he wrote on HuffPo. I remain on the 'Badly engineered and managed' side.).

I maintain my support for Obama's plan, as a deep space plan is vastly more important than some photo-ops to return to the moon.

[Skylon]

From what I've read it seems Armstrong's main problem with Obama's plan is the lack of any clear vision. While I am all for developing a heavy lift vehicle, it all seems very vague what the heck NASA is expected to do by the Obama administration.

That said, Orion/Ares had serious problems and buried themselves. This mess is not totally Obama's fault. A good deal of the blame falls upon the space policies of Clinton and Bush II.

[Big Phil]

If I understand it correctly, Obama scrapped Bush the Lesser's shitty plan that was a few years away from implementation in favor of his own pie in the sky plan with some future implementation time to be determined later.

It sounds to me like both options were pretty lame, although I would have preferred that we go with the plan we've got rather than throwing it away entirely.

[Uraniun235]

A bit tangential but not quite worthy of its own thread: can someone explain why NASA is being tasked with monitoring climate change? I thought that's what NOAA was for.


Anyway, here's Scott Horowitz' take on the issue. Yes, he's biased. I'd be interested in seeing sources which contradict his claims.

"A Trajectory to Nowhere" by Scott "Doc" Horowitz
by Susan Holden Martin, MBA — last modified 2010-05-05 16:50

Scott "Doc" Horowitz, PH.D. (Colonel, USAF, RET.), CEO of Doc's Aerospace, is a former NASA astronaut and former NASA Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. His opinion regarding the debate surrounding the recent changes proposed by the Obama administration appears below.

There is quite a bit of discourse over the future of NASA’s space exploration program. As one who has participated in the shuttle program and the space exploration program, and spent a good deal of time in the 64 square mile logic-free zone (Washington DC), I would like to try and clarify some of the myths surrounding the current debate.

Myth 1: The current debate is about technical and programmatic issues with NASA’s Constellation Program.

The current debate has nothing to do with technical/programmatic issues, it is completely politically motivated and being driven by a few people in the current administration, e.g., Lori Garver, NASA Deputy Administrator, Jim Kohlenberger, Office of Science and Technology Policy Chief of Staff, and Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the Office of Management and Budget. Their objective is to cancel the “Bush” program and punish the states (Alabama, Texas) that “didn’t vote for us anyway”.

Myth 2: The Constellation Program is on an “unsustainable trajectory”.

This of course is the administration’s entire platform (excuse) for wanting to cancel the Constellation Program. They used a simple 3-step process to create this catch-phrase:

1. Immediately reduce the Constellation budget by 20% in the FY 2010 budget when the new administration took office.

2. Gather a commission to study the program populated with as few people that know anything about real development programs as possible, and have agendas aligned with the desired outcome.

3. Produce a report with “options”, but insufficient data to support recommendations and pick the ones that cancel the current program even though there is no data supporting any “sustainable” alternatives.

So what the Augustine Commission found out was that the Constellation Program was underfunded (didn’t need a commission to tell us that), but more importantly, it was well-managed and capable of dealing with technical issues expected in a program of this magnitude. In fact Norm Augustine testified before Congress that:

“We did review the program, its management. We believe it to be soundly managed… We saw no problems that appear to be unsolvable given the proper engineering talent, the attention, and the funds to solve them.”

The Commission also used data provided to them by the Aerospace Corporation to come to the conclusion that the Constellation Program was on an “unsustainable trajectory”. The Commission took the budget estimates for the Constellation Program and added 50% to the costs. While this may be appropriate for a brand new program in the early formulation stages, this is completely inappropriate for a program that has passed its early milestones and has a very detailed basis of estimate appropriate for having completed its Preliminary Design Review (PDR). So the combination of a reduced budget (FY 2010) and an inflated cost estimate produced the desired result (the program would take forever to complete). The fact is, that with the FY 2011 top-line budget submit (the best top-line budget NASA has had since the inception of Constellation) there are plenty of funds available for NASA to complete Ares I/Orion by 2015 and to return astronauts to the moon by 2022 using the Ares V as a first step to moving further out into the solar system (NEOs, Mars, LeGrange Points, etc.) The president’s FY 2011 NASA budget request doesn’t save the taxpayers any money, in fact it increases NASA’s budget and proposes to spend it on technology development projects, robotic missions, and increased earth-science missions. While these are worthy endeavors, they are not “sustainable”. Every time NASA has gone down the “technology development” path without a clearly defined mission to focus “technology development”, the result has been the same: no operational system gets developed, and NASA’s top-line budget becomes a target for OMB and Congress and gets reduced by 25%.

Myth 3: The Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS) is capable of safely transporting our astronauts to the ISS sooner and for significantly less money than the government developed system.

Safety: Basically, the Augustine Commission chose to ignore all of the data that showed that Ares I/Orion were significantly safer than any other alternatives. The Valador report commissioned by NASA to support the Augustine Commission stated: “[t]he Ares I launch vehicle… is clearly the safest launch vehicle option, and the only one having the potential to meet a target of 1 in 1000 probability of LOC (Loss of Crew).” “The simplicity of the Ares I design makes the mature Ares I clearly superior to all other vehicles, no matter what choice of quantification method…” It also determined the Probability of a Loss of Crew (LOC) for the Ares I rocket is 1 in 1,918, which is more than ten times better than the Space Shuttle and over twice as good as any other alternative even with “human-rating” modifications.

Schedule: I am a big fan of commercial space. I “wrote the check” to RpK and SpaceX for $500M to provide seed money that initiated COTS. Unfortunately, RpK failed to meet their milestones and had their Space Act Agreement terminated. The original SpaceX manifest included six test flights of the Falcon 9 rocket to be completed by September 2009. Currently their first test flight is scheduled for May 2010 (this rocket stuff is more difficult than it looks). All of the reviews of alternative methods to deliver a crewed capsule to ISS estimate that the earliest operational date would be 2016.

Cost: The COTS providers (Orbital and SpaceX) were awarded firm fixed price contracts totaling $3.5B to deliver approximately 40MT of cargo to the ISS. This, plus the $500M already invested in COTS, results in a cost of $100,000/kilo ($45,000/lb) to deliver cargo to ISS. If the Ares I/Orion were flown at a similar rate (6 flights/year) the fully-burdened government cost for delivering cargo to ISS would be about $70,000/kilo ($32,000/lb)! While it is my hope that the “commercial” providers will be able to reduce costs and stimulate the market place, to date there is no data to indicate that this is the case, and as I have learned over the years “hope is not a management tool”. As hard as it is to make a business case for transporting cargo to orbit, making the case for transporting humans is even more difficult. In fact the White House advisor on Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren, testified that there was no real research or verification done on the viability of the approach for the commercial market to sustain America's space future. The only source this administration can cite is a 2002 Futron study that has proven to be overly optimistic. This study was based on a survey of affluent individuals that predicted that 33 commercial passengers would have flown by 2010 (only 8 tourists have paid Russia $20M each to date) and as many as 60 passengers per year would be flying in 2021.

In summary, this administration has been trying to come up with a plan for the last year and a half and after hearing all of the testimonies and reviewing all of the facts, it has become obvious to me (and to Congress) that the leadership team at NASA has decided that they simply do not want to do Constellation, at any cost, and are willing to cede US leadership in space. The facts show the current real program is safer, more affordable, timelier, and making better progress towards our nation’s exploration goals, than this faith-based initiative “trajectory to nowhere” the current administration is trying to sell us.

Scott “Doc” Horowitz

President/CEO Doc’s Aerospace

Former NASA Astronaut and Exploration Associate Administrator

[CaptainChewbacca]

A bit tangential but not quite worthy of its own thread: can someone explain why NASA is being tasked with monitoring climate change? I thought that's what NOAA was for.

NOAA doesn't have its' own satellites, and NASA can process data a lot faster.

[Skylon]

If I understand it correctly, Obama scrapped Bush the Lesser's shitty plan that was a few years away from implementation in favor of his own pie in the sky plan with some future implementation time to be determined later.

It sounds to me like both options were pretty lame, although I would have preferred that we go with the plan we've got rather than throwing it away entirely.

That's the thing. Obama's plan flies in the face of basically anything that was proposed. Constellation for all its problems looked like it was headed towards delivering a manned spacecraft (albeit, later and not as capable as promised). The Augustine Commission came up with a wide range of options, from switching Orion over to an existing launch vehicle (Delta IV Heavy or Atlas), using a shuttle-derived launch vehicle, or even flying shuttle longer. All of these plans also encouraged the use of commercial access to ISS (SpaceX has been working towards handling ISS resupply via unmanned cargo ships for some time), however it was never a "ditch all everything and hope for these under-dog companies to pull it off."