8 thoughts on “No, Vance Brand”

  1. Well, the SLS will risk very few lives (only slightly more than Jamaica’s manned space program) because it will fly so rarely, if at all.

  3. I’ve been pretty out-of-touch for a while, but can you answer a question, Rand? What does he mean by the cost-accounting review being removed? I agree that the companies should be responsible for price over-runs with fixed price contracts, but a naive reading would think NASA would still want a step to say, “this bid is unreasonably low.” Is it because their cost estimate process over-estimates costs from the commercial sector so much in general?

    1. I can’t tell you what he means. You’d have to ask him.

      But I assume what he means is that because it isn’t cost plus, NASA doesn’t have insight into and auditors scouring over every dollar spent on the program. Because he has no experience with any other type of NASA program.

      And with all respect to astronaut Brand, I suspect that someone else with a dog in the fight wrote this for him, appealing to his patriotism and desire to not see the “destruction of the US manned space program.” Just a guess, though.

  4. Safety was never the problem, just a very disgraceful symptom of an even deeper problem: an organization so mired in bureaucracy and incapable of truth-telling that it gambled with the lives of astronauts and lost, multiple times.

    That lesson apparently was only learned once and rapidly forgotten. I’m not convinced that NASA has yet learned that lesson. So much of NASA manned spaceflight continues to be mired in fantasy and wishful thinking protected by the inability of truth to freely flow up the org chart.

    As I pointed out in the recent post on Challenger the losses of the orbiters should not have come as a surprise to anyone. We almost lost about half a dozen other flights (STS-1, STS-8, STS-9, STS-27, etc.) and saw minor problems of the exact same nature on many other flights as well. We knew the O-rings were a problem yet we continued to fly. We gambled and lost Challenger, and her crew. We knew the APUs were a problem yet we continued to fly. We gambled and didn’t lose any orbiters or crews., we got lucky We knew the issue of foam/ice strikes to the TPS was a problem yet we continued to fly. We gambled and lost Columbia, and her crew.

    We knew bloody well that we were gambling, but NASA was able to bend the truth so convincingly that they got many people, including congress, believing there was no such gambling going on. But you can’t hide such things when crews die and pieces of multi-billion dollar spacecraft rain out of the sky onto the ground.

    The problem isn’t taking risks, that’s part and parcel of daily life, even more so when it comes to participating in furthering the civilizational goal of making human life multiplanetary. The problem is gambling with people’s lives without their informed consent (and gambling with multi-billion dollar hardware without the consent of congress and the electorate). The problem is an organizational culture that eschews truth in favor of pleasing fantasies and bureaucratic inertia. The only way to get safety out of an organization that insists on gambling with astronaut’s lives is by avoiding doing anything, which NASA has certainly been doing a bangup job of lately. With any luck Orion/SLS may stretch on for more than a decade while soaking up tens of billions of dollars without ever putting a single astronaut life at risk.

    Of course, that’s not anyway to run a space program. If you want to do stuff in space you need to send astronauts into space, which inevitably involves sending astronauts into danger. Those dangers can, and should, be significantly mitigated through sound engineering and appropriate risk management techniques but they can never be erased entirely.

    There’s a saying that’s stuck with me, it is: “stack the odds in your favor”. To me that has always seemed like the right way to approach any inherently risky activity. It’s foolish to pretend that we can make shooting frail human bodies into the great void an activity as safe as playing in the ball pit at a mcdonald’s “fun zone”, but we can certainly stack the odds in our favor. When I look at the engineering cultures at, for example, SpaceX vs. NASA I definitely see SpaceX as being more of a “stack the odds in your favor” organization, it’s practically in their DNA. NASA has continually been content with gambling, even with lives, SpaceX is hell-bent on becoming the house, and cheating to win too.

    And yet, between SpaceX and NASA, who is working on a manned spacecraft with abort capability throughout the entire launch profile? And who is not merely making vague long-term plans about half-assed off-Earth exploration but actually has the balls to make Mars colonization one of the top priorities as a future project?

    Risk aversion doesn’t translate directly to risk reduction, not in systems as complex as are involved in manned spaceflight. If you flinch from the risks you’ll just get bitten by them harder than ever. Only by being honest about risk and by seeking endeavors that are worth the risk can progress be made. Every time NASA kills a crew they keep getting told this lesson and they keep refusing to learn it.

    1. This is part of why I like Kerbal Space Program so much; when you fail the explosions are spectacular, and the astronauts are amortal… and after a while, you get so good at every aspect of the launch profile and docking and reentry that you need to deliberately crash in order to get those explosions.

  5. A quote from Vance:

    “It is imperative that NASA successfully rebuild America’s ability to launch astronauts into space and catch up with the Russians and Chinese who routinely launch astronauts to low Earth orbit. ”

    Why is it imperative that a government agency do this? Private enterprise handles ALL transportation, hell you can even buy submarines commercial. The idea only NASA can do this is wrong, what a great first sentence. To continue, How the hell can you call the Chinese human launch manifest routine? Vance needs a dictionary. As for the Russians, they are routinely flying pretty much everyone but themselves. If you read russian newspapers there are a LOT of angry voices over there that feel their space program has turned into a taxi service.

    Okay .. time to go back and read the second sentence…..

    1. If you read russian newspapers there are a LOT of angry voices over there that feel their space program has turned into a taxi service.

      I didn’t know that. I’ll be sure to remember to bring that up next time I hear an American complain that “Obama killed the space program”.

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