Paul Spudis has a tale of two visions. It’s pretty clear that (as I pointed out in my New Atlantis piece) if the administration had been serious about the VSE, they shouldn’t have given it to NASA as the lead:
Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, man’s future in space is too important to be left to NASA. After President Reagan proposed the creation of a national missile defense system in 1983, it became clear that the U.S. Air Force was not properly organized or motivated—and so a new agency was created to pursue the president’s vision. The new agency, today called the Missile Defense Agency, was very innovative and made great progress because it could focus on its one goal. Along those lines, the Bush administration might have done well to establish an Office of Space Development (with “exploration” being merely a means to an end) that could draw on other federal resources—not just NASA, but the Departments of Defense and Energy—as well as the private sector.
I don’t understand why Mike Griffin was given so much freedom to pervert it by the White House, and if Marburger didn’t complain, or if his complaints were ignored. Unfortunately, as I note throughout the piece, space isn’t important, and once the administration had a new plan and new administrator, they seem to have pretty much ignored it.
[Wednesday morning update]
There’s an interesting discussion on the topic going on in comments between Paul, Frank Sietzen and others over at NASA Watch. I’m inferring from it that Marburger was pretty marginalized within the White House, which would seem to correlate well with an external view of events since the VSE was announced.
[Bumped]
I would question how much political support Marburger’s vision ever had in Washington outside of the original core group that crafted it.
I believe Ross Tierney’s comment is accurate history:
Marburger’s vision is certainly appealing and yet neither then – nor now – does there seem to be sufficient political clout behind it to forge a national consensus to follow through with that vision.
= = =
The “real” behind the scenes story (IMHO) involves why and how Admiral Steidle was pushed out of NASA with nary a voice of protest from the White House or Congress.
And the upcoming A-Team report could help reveal whether those same hidden “powers that be” remain influential today.
“The “real” behind the scenes story (IMHO) involves why and how Admiral Steidle was pushed out of NASA with nary a voice of protest from the White House or Congress.”
There’s no Shuttle political conspiracy or much of a story to tell. Griffin visited Steidle at NASA HQ., when Griffin was still at APL. In his usual style, Griffin insulted Steidle’s intelligence during the conversation, and Steidle showed Griffin the way out.
Steidle was part of the Senior Executive Service (SES). New department and agency heads can reassign (but not fire) their SESers after 120 days in office. 120 days after becoming NASA Administrator, Griffin got his payback and reassigned Steidle to an unacceptable post. (Griffin and other NASA Administrators have done the same thing to a lot of other NASA SESers for more or less substantive reasons.) Steidle chose to leave the agency instead. He has taught aeronautical and aerospace engineering at the Naval Academy ever since.
Although they had very different approaches to human space flight, the substance of that debate, unfortunately, had little to do Griffin giving Steidle the boot.
Marburger is generally right the NASA diverged from the VSE over time, but he got some of the initial details wrong. Mars was never a human space flight focus for O’Keefe — he just wanted the robotic program included in the VSE. And Grunsfeld was never part of NASA’s negotiating team with the White House.
FWIW…
> There’s no Shuttle political conspiracy or much of a story to tell. Griffin visited Steidle at NASA HQ., when Griffin was still at APL. In his usual style, Griffin insulted Steidle’s intelligence during the conversation, and Steidle showed Griffin the way out.
Is there a citation for this somewhere? I don’t doubt it’s true, but a citation would be handy for the future.
Mars was never a human space flight focus for O’Keefe — he just wanted the robotic program included in the VSE. And Grunsfeld was never part of NASA’s negotiating team with the White House.
Neither Marburger nor I claim this. It was the agency collectively (largely through the Decadal Planning activity, a Dan Goldin legacy) that became obsessed with manned Mars as the next big agency goal. O’Keefe also wanted to end Shuttle as too dangerous and transition beyond LEO missions.
The Steidle affair is a bit more complicated. After O’Keefe announced his departure, the WH found it difficult to identify an Administrator. At the same time, there was concern that NASA was floundering on the implementation of the VSE; Steidle’s “spiral development” looked suspiciously like endless development with no spaceflight (e.g., the “roadmapping” exercises). Griffin was brought in to “fix things.” But after he came aboard, the WH became preoccupied with other issues (Iraq and the WOT). Their attitude was that the Vision policy was written out in plain language and NASA’s job was to implement it. Unfortunately, in government, sometimes plain language isn’t enough.
Steidle’s “spiral development” looked suspiciously like endless development with no spaceflight (e.g., the “roadmapping” exercises).
I’m sure you’re right this is was what people thought (and your quotation marks indicates you disagree with them), but things like that are so frustrating. Not doing endless development without spaceflight is exactly the strength of spiral development. Look what Griffin’s “fix” brought us: endless development and no spaceflight.
Look what Griffin’s “fix” brought us: endless development and no spaceflight.
Irony is so ironic!
How much Congressional buy-in was there to Marburger’s articulation of the VSE?
Not in terms of Authorization Acts – recall that Congress has formally approved BOTH the original VSE and ESAS – but behind the scenes.
As I recall, one of the key points from the Aldridge Commission was the need for sustainability after transitions in political power and given the nature of politics, “the White House said” is not a helpful argument after someone new moves in.
I return to Ross Tierney’s observation that behind the scenes there were a great many interests not happy with the elimination of everything STS and if that were the core desired objective, then President Bush should never have allowed Orbiter to return to flight after Columbia.
Going forward from today, I would assert that the most promising route to implement a vision of using lunar resources is to advocate that objective in a “launcher neutral” manner — DIRECT, the “not shuttle C” sidemount or EELV.
How much Congressional buy-in was there to Marburger’s articulation of the VSE?
Who really knows? Some were definitely on-board with it (e.g., Rohrabacher) but most members don’t think deeply upon NASA programs and goals, if they think about them at all.
Going forward from today, I would assert that the most promising route to implement a vision of using lunar resources is to advocate that objective in a “launcher neutral” manner — DIRECT, the “not shuttle C” sidemount or EELV.
I don’t disagree with this, but it’s irrelevant to the critical issue: WHY are we going to the Moon and WHAT will we do there? I contend that the VSE gave NASA the answer to that question — to learn how to use lunar resources and create a sustainable, permanent space faring infrastructure. But I further contend that the agency has chosen to ignore that answer.
I don’t disagree with this, but it’s irrelevant to the critical issue: WHY are we going to the Moon and WHAT will we do there? I contend that the VSE gave NASA the answer to that question — to learn how to use lunar resources and create a sustainable, permanent space faring infrastructure. But I further contend that the agency has chosen to ignore that answer.
And yet, as the Aldridge Commission concluded, to be politically sustainable, there must be “buy-in” to that vision throughout all levels and amongst a sufficient number of stakeholders – – Congress, NASA’s management, aerospace contractors, the public and so forth.
This may well be true, “the VSE gave NASA the answer to the [why] question” however that articulation of the VSE was never backed up with the political muscle needed to turn a document – a vision – into reality.
Having the right answer as to “WHY” only matters if you can persuade enough powerful people to help implement that answer.
Paul, how do you feel about NEO ISRU and Phobos/Deimos ISRU? For robotic precursors it may not make all that much difference compared to the moon. The moon may be much closer in travel time, but you’re not likely to have quick turnarounds anyway.
I’m all for asteroidal ISRU, including multiple exploratory robotic missions to characterize their prospects. But the Moon is both close and well-characterized in terms of composition and physical state. I believe it to be an important location to begin to learn how to use off-planet resources. Moreover, we can begin this process on the Moon using robotic missions (low time-lag for teleoperations).
interesting, I had a discussion about the time delay with someone on nasaspaceflight.com. I had proposed L1 telepresence operations on the moon as one potential early activity at a gateway station with the time delay as a factor. The time delay is much shorter than from the Earth, especially if things have to go through TDRS, which for reasons I don’t know sometimes gives delays over 6s, much more than what you would expect from just the speed of light and distance to the moon. He argued all operations from L1 could be done better from the Earth. I wasn’t convinced, since the time delay from L1 is at the upper end of what’s possible for telerobotic surgery, so it might be possible to do remote repairs this way. I’m not saying there’s definitely a niche, but there might be.
What’s your opinion on this? Is there any role for L1/LLO telerobotics or could you simply do everything you want from Earth?
Off topic, but robotic ISRU doesnt care about travel time, it does care about signal roundtrip time. Phobos/Deimos are too far for anything substantial.
O’Keefe/Steidle started down a path that would have scrapped everything Shuttle-related. All of the Senators and House Reps covering the territories of MSFC, JSC, KSC, MAF, Stennis and a few other places all hated that idea and took the first opportunity they could to replace those guys with someone who promised to protect the jobs and budgets in their regions by switching to a solution “supposedly” Shuttle-derived.
there is nothing to really support the above contention. As one of the participants in the CE&R, H&RT, and the planning sessions that went on for a while, there was nothing implied out there to kill STS (besides the rough 2010 date) or the station.
While some of us went on suicide watch as a result of the endless meetings, there was some pretty good sausage being made there.
There are a couple of things that were known. Steidle/Okeefe had already decided that heavy lift was out (any Ares type system) AS IT WAS TOO EXPENSIVE. MSFC tried to push this on Steidle from day one and it was rejected. This is why the CE&R studies played out the way that they did.
“‘Mars was never a human space flight focus for O’Keefe — he just wanted the robotic program included in the VSE. And Grunsfeld was never part of NASA’s negotiating team with the White House.’
Neither Marburger nor I claim this.”
But that is what you claim on your Air & Space blog, in the second sentence of the second paragraph of the Aug. 11 entry. Here’s the passage again:
“NASA (led by former Administrator Sean O’Keefe, Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld and an internal study group within the agency) wanted a manned Mars mission…”
If that’s not what Marburger said, then the blog entry should be corrected.
“Steidle’s ‘spiral development’ looked suspiciously like endless development with no spaceflight (e.g., the “roadmapping” exercises)”
ESMD spiral development and the agency-wide roadmapping exercises had little to do with each other. In fact, Steidle opposed and tried to keep his organization at arms-length from the roadmapping exercises.
FWIW…
“‘> There’s no Shuttle political conspiracy or much of a story to tell. Griffin visited Steidle at NASA HQ., when Griffin was still at APL. In his usual style, Griffin insulted Steidle’s intelligence during the conversation, and Steidle showed Griffin the way out.’
Is there a citation for this somewhere? I don’t doubt it’s true, but a citation would be handy for the future.”
Sorry, as far as I know, no. You had to be there or close to someone who was there.
Major Tom,
But that is what you claim on your Air & Space blog, in the second sentence of the second paragraph of the Aug. 11 entry. Here’s the passage again:
NASA (led by former Administrator Sean O’Keefe, Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld and an internal study group within the agency) wanted a manned Mars mission…”
Check it again — I said “NASA…wanted the Mars mission” and that it was “(led by O’Keefe…..)” My previous sentence stands.
ESMD spiral development and the agency-wide roadmapping exercises had little to do with each other. In fact, Steidle opposed and tried to keep his organization at arms-length from the roadmapping exercises.
He didn’t particularly succeed in this as he co-chaired the “lunar” roadmapping group. I remember this reasonably well because I was on that committee.
Dennis, you write:
There are a couple of things that were known. Steidle/Okeefe had already decided that heavy lift was out (any Ares type system) AS IT WAS TOO EXPENSIVE.
If true, what aspects of the STS system would have been retained? Any?
Your comment appears to confirm Ross Tierney’s comment:
O’Keefe/Steidle started down a path that would have scrapped everything Shuttle-related. All of the Senators and House Reps covering the territories of MSFC, JSC, KSC, MAF, Stennis and a few other places all hated that idea and took the first opportunity they could to replace those guys with someone who promised to protect the jobs and budgets in their regions by switching to a solution “supposedly” Shuttle-derived.
Again, IF scrapping everything STS related is necessary to achieve an affordable program THEN the decision to return Orbiter to flight was a huge blunder that cannot be easily undone, today.
Another historical question is why wasn’t Admiral Steidle named as Sean O’Keefe’s replacement?
I can imagine a great many sensible and plausible reasons for why that did not happen, however, a detailed historical explanation as to why that did not happen could be crucial to an understanding of where we are today.
“Another historical question is why wasn’t Admiral Steidle named as Sean O’Keefe’s replacement?”
Steidle was under consideration at one point, but I don’t have any insight as to why he wasn’t picked or Griffin was picked over him.
FWIW…
Initial reports from today’s A-Team meeting appear to indicate a strong emphasis on depots AND an acknowledged need for lift larger than current EELV.
Ares 1 / Ares V remains the program of record however it appears the choices the A-Team will report out include Ares V-lite (the SSME classic version not unlike the Jupiter 25x with 5 segment RSRM)
or
side mount not shuttle C and/or DIRECT
or
EELV derived heavy lift.
= = =
As Dennis wrote:
There are a couple of things that were known. Steidle/O’Keefe had already decided that heavy lift was out (any Ares type system) AS IT WAS TOO EXPENSIVE.
Well, that decision seems to not be sticking, and launcher wars could be doing more to undermine ISRU visions than anything else. Being against heavy lift could also be why Steidle was not chosen to replace O’Keefe.
Depots now appear to be seen as “launcher neutral” by the A-Team and are expressly being touted as a way to leverage medium large HLLV.
ISRU advocates (IMHO) need to be “launcher neutral” as well.