"THEY CALL IT THE 'SENATE LAUNCH SYSTEM' FOR A REASON — THERE’S LOTS OF PORK AT STAKE" Glenn Reynolds
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“never mind!”
NASA postpones SLS rocket launch, surprising no one. Experimental rockets fail all the time: just ask Elon Musk, but this one must be particularly embarrassing to NASA because the rocket is 10 years overdue, and already 3X above its original $10 billion budget before it’s even left the ground.
Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver published a book earlier this year, Escaping Gravity, that tells the tale of her nearly three decades in US space policy.
Garver played an important and at times controversial role in the history of NASA over the last 15 years, having served as leader of President Obama's transition team on space issues in late 2008 and early 2009, and later as deputy administrator for the space agency until 2013.
At NASA she had a strained relationship with the agency's administrator, Charlie Bolden. Garver pushed for substantial change at the behest of the Obama administration and more investment in the commercial space industry; whereas, Bolden was more supportive of traditional space and represented the views of many people at NASA at the time resistant to change. Bolden and his allies won the battle, ensuring NASA's development of the Space Launch System rocket.
Her book is especially timely, given the anticipated first launch of the SLS rocket on Monday. This is because a lot of her story focuses on the politics surrounding the creation of the large rocket, and one of the book's main antagonists is Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator who is now NASA's administrator and was the rocket's legislative champion.
Further Reading:
The SLS rocket is the worst thing to happen to NASA—but maybe also the best?
(Spoiler alert: there is no “best” here, except for the author’s hope that NASA and its Congressional meddlers will learn a lesson; that’s never gonna happen.)
… NASA's SLS rocket program has been a hot mess almost from the beginning. It has been efficient at precisely one thing, spreading jobs around to large aerospace contractors in the states of key congressional committee leaders. Because of this, lawmakers have overlooked years of delays, a more than doubling in development costs to above $20 billion, and the availability of far cheaper and reusable rockets built by the private sector.
So here we are, nearly a dozen years after that authorization act was signed, and NASA is finally ready to launch the SLS rocket. It took the agency 11 years to go from nothing to the Moon. It has taken 12 years to go from having all the building blocks for a rocket to having it on the launch pad, ready for an uncrewed test flight.
On the less happy side, it remains difficult to celebrate a rocket that, in many ways, is responsible for a lost decade of US space exploration. The financial costs of the program have been enormous. Between the rocket, its ground systems, and the Orion spacecraft launching on top of the stack, NASA has spent tens of billions of dollars. But I would argue that the opportunity costs are higher. For a decade, Congress pushed NASA's exploration focus toward an Apollo-like program, with a massive launch vehicle that is utterly expended, using 1970s technology in its engines, tanks, and boosters.
Effectively, NASA was told to look backward when this country's vibrant commercial space industry was ready to push toward sustainable spaceflight by building big rockets and landing them—or storing propellant in space or building reusable tugs to go back and forth between the Earth and Moon. It's as if Congress told NASA to keep printing newspapers in a world with broadband Internet.
It didn't have to be this way. In fact, a handful of visionary space policy leaders tried to stop the wastefulness but were beaten back by the defense industry and its allies in Congress.
What’s so sad about all this is that NASA has some incredible people working there. I can’t find the link to the article about Gregory Robinson that first caught my eye earlier this summer, and a comprehensive article is behind the NYT cash wall, but here’s another article* Basically, the man was persuaded to take over the hot mess of the James Webb telescope project in 2018, and is credited with pulling it all together against all odds and getting it launched into space, where it is producing spectacular results. The 9th son of 11 children of a sharecropper, Robinson obviously knew how to surmount seemingly impossible conditions.
Sadly, he retired this summer after the telescope took off, and the world’s scientists have turned to more important, crucial issues such as changing the name of the telescope because James Webb was against gays in the 50s and early 60s.
*Excerpt:
The Webb telescope’s journey to the heavens, however, had been anything but easy, with the launch 11 years behind schedule and $9 billion over the original $1 billion budget because of serious technical and management failures that at one point threatened the viability of the entire endeavor.
All of that began to change dramatically in 2018, when NASA appointed Gregory Robinson to head the Webb program, resulting in a significant culture, management and leadership shift for the complex undertaking that has involved more than 10,000 people across 29 states and 14 countries. The project has included NASA scientists, engineers and employees; individuals from the European and the Canadian space agencies; and staff members from Northrop Grumman Space Systems and other corporate partners.
“Greg took the reins of NASA’s flagship mission at a crucial time when, due to lack of progress and embarrassing test failures, confidence and trust in the completion of the project was in question,” said Karen Flynn, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for management. “He displayed tremendous leadership ability to pull a large group together and get the project on track for the 2021 launch.”
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said Robinson gained trust within a leadership team that was badly split and beaten down. Zurbuchen said Robinson also reassured angry members of Congress that the project would get back on track, uncovered problems that could have ended up as huge mistakes, laid out a plan to move forward and created “a supportive but brutally honest culture” that prevented missteps and motivated both NASA employees and the major contractors.
“In my book, Greg is the most effective leader of a mission I have ever seen in the history of NASA,” Zurbuchen said. “He turned the team around and brought the Webb observatory to launch, to a flawless deployment and on track to making history. For me, Greg is a leader who epitomizes excellence.”
The Webb telescope, the successor to the 30-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, is the most powerful and complex space science telescope in history. It is so large that it needed to launch folded up inside a rocket, and over the course of several weeks unfurl various components from its sunshield to its mirrors.
According to NASA, there were more than 300 potential major technical issues to track, with each single point of failure having the potential to doom the entire mission.
With the success of the launch and deployment, the telescope not only will allow astronomers to look farther out in space than ever before but will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe and explore what heretofore had been unexplorable.
As a veteran executive with three-and-a-half decades at NASA, Robinson quickly gained the respect of team leaders and key participants, with his ability to discuss technical issues with the scientists and engineers and ask the right questions, according to Kenneth Sembach, the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
