21 thoughts on “Hostages To Russia”

  1. He is? Griffin set up a perfectly good program that would have given the US independent access to LEO around 2012. It was called COTS-D. Congress dragged their feet on funding it. They did partially in FY09, but the then acting NASA administrator Chris Scolese diverted those funds because he saw them as insufficient to get started – even though it was a 3 year milestone-based contract, and more than a third of the required funding was provided. When the stimulus funds came in FY10 the exact same argument was made and most of that funding was redirected to Ares I. After that, the commercial crew program morphed into a decade long “competition” of acronyms and paperwork.

    It’s pretty disingenuous to blame Griffin for the actions taken by his successors.

    1. I think that Griffin’s rhetoric and attitude in the transition made it easier for Congress to kill off COTS-D and contributed to the general mess. That’s not to take away blame from the administration, of course. But Griffin didn’t help. I didn’t seem him out there advocating for either COTS-D or CCDev (and in fact, he was never a big COTS fan — it was pushed on him by the Bush White House, according to a former NASA insider).

      1. Congress funds what Congress wants to fund. It’s amazing that he got COTS and CRS funded. Getting half funding for COTS-D was almost a touchdown in the final minutes, really. It’s a shame he didn’t have the authority to strike the ball. (Or some other football metaphor that I barely understand.) The point really is that Griffin is the wrong guy to blame. He was the biggest champion of a simple “show us you can fly crew and we’ll fly crew” program. His vision was almost entirely the opposite the current ramshackle paperwork exercise that we have for commercial crew today, and he’s right to oppose that and decry the results. Heck, he’s not just right, it is his right to complain about that. If the idiots who came after had even a 10th as much spine as Griffin had the Russians would be begging the US for rides by now.

        2. I mean really, Trent, either you are badly misinformed or you are just lying through your teeth as a Griffin groupie and a Musk hater.

          Wright: You mentioned cargo, but how did you feel about the crew?

          Griffin: The crew was not something we were funding early on. In our plan, there was a contractual provision which we called COTS D—meaning the D step after A, B, and C—where we could activate a crew provision at our option if we wanted to later. In our view, activating a crew provision would come only after substantial, even enormous progress had been made on cargo. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk. We set the COTS agreements up initially to allow for money to be invested in crew development. But in our plan we certainly weren’t going to invest in crew development until cargo capability had been amply demonstrated.

          Griffin HATED COTS D. He really did not have a lot to do with COTS either, it was mandated by law.

          1. How do you come to your conclusion from what was quoted?

            What did I say that contradicts what you quoted? If anything, he’s agreeing with me.

            Also, who the fuck are you?

          2. He is a commenter … the point is to debate the actual written words, not sling swear words and name calling. I mean really… who the fuck are you? That advances the debate? It doesn’t matter who the person is, that is the whole point of debating what is written and not about personalities.

      1. Umm.. I was “there” as much as anyone else on the Internet is. It’s all on the public record and Griffin has spoken on the subject a number of times. What do you think I got wrong?

        Also, you anonymous fucking coward, type your name in the box.

        1. That’s called watching from the sidelines. Some of us were in the trenches.

          Again, you are basically stating something that is not true, Griffin was out of his office at NASA well before COTS-D would have been relevant. You can’t make these things happen just by throwing money at the problem. You have to get out there and make the proposals, convince the principles, get the money and then design the hardware and then start bending and welding. and that’s just the start of it. You don’t even have a credible nugget of an idea to start with. You have shown me that you have very few of those qualities or abilities. It’s easy to make these kinds of retroactive declarations from your armchair in Australia, but US Americans have to get out there and actually do the work. If you are so hot on this get your ass over here and participate, or go and get a job at Rocket Lab or something. I have not seen even a single credible cheerleading article from you for years now, just escalating levels of SpaceX and NewSpace bashing and shoulda, woulda coulda on the space cadet forums. The truth hurts, doesn’t it.

          2. The truth is I’m deep in the space cadet trenches in a country where I am moving forward with ideas and work in the field, not some guy sitting in an armchair on the other side of the world wishing things would have happened differently for some other people and then complaining about it on some crank blog somewhere.

  2. This “being hostage to Russia” thing is a serious issue at the moment, one that NASA (and congress!) are about to rectify via, very possibly, giving the Boeing CST-100 the commercial crew contract. Okay, CST-100 is just a powerpoint capsule (no significant hardware built or tested, in spite of receiving the largest funding on the three contenders) but, give ’em the contract, a few billion, and a few years, and it’ll be ready to plant on top of an Atlas 5!

    That’ll show those darn Russians that we don’t need their Soyuz or RD-180 engines, right?
    What could possibly go wrong?

  3. If a true emergency came up and Russia froze us out of putting people in orbit, just how fast could the Space-X Dragon be fitted to haul a couple people up and maybe 1 or two more back? Forget years of testing…how fast could it be rigged and flown given a minimum of testing?

    1. Gregg, the short answer to your question, if we’re talking cargo Dragon here, and NASA was willing to be sensible regarding safety (fly without a launch abort system – after all, Shuttle didn’t have one either) is something under a week.

      The existing Dragon already has minimal life support and more importantly, thermal management.
      The Co2 scrubber capacity may not be sufficient for two astronauts, so might nned to be supplemented with an additional lithium hydroxide canister (use duct tape, like they did on Apollo 13 when needing to use CSM canisters in the LEM, where they would not fit). An additional O2 bottle might be needed as well. Installing these might take a day, testing them might take another.

      You might also want the ability to control (in an emergency) the craft from aboard, in which case you’d need a laptop PC with the correct cable and plug to interface with the flight control system (it’s made to be accessed this way while on the ground, so this requires no changes to Dragon. This would also give you a bare-bones comms system.

      Toilet facilities? Use bags, like on Apollo and everything before it.

      What’s left? Seats. Dragon already has the attach points on the deck that could be used for this.
      Three options;
      #1, bend some aluminum pipe into shape and sling canvas over it. This would take a day or two at most.
      #2, just use a couple of the seats from Dragon 2.
      #3, have NASA design, approve, and make the seats. This would take a few years, plus cost billions.

      Okay, now your crew-modified Dragon can fly two astronauts, and do so inside of a week (the processing of the F9 LV would be more the limiting factor). But, your pad is not crew-assessable. The quick and dirty solution is to put the crew in then raise the rocket just a few of hours before launch (this can be done with the F9.). Emergency egress? Buy some commercial zip-line rigs from a sporting goods store.

      Assuming you have an F9 ready to launch, I’m willing to bet they could get crew to ISS (and back down later) inside of a week of being given the order if we had to, and were willing to take a few minor risks.

      I also think that, as a nation, we’re far too feckless to actually do something like this; we’d give up ISS and suffer both the loss and humiliation first.

  4. We should be worried about the international terror threat coming out of the Caliphate State, and instead we are inserting ourselves into a local conflict relating to sectarian friction between Orthodox and Catholic Christians?

    The reasons for the RD-180 or whatever the rocket engine model number are 1) reaping a peace dividend of East-West cooperation on space, 2) a confidence-building measure of promoting commercial ties to overcome a generation of distrust from the Cold War, and 3) keeping the rocket scientists in the East gamefully employed that they would not end up in the Persian Strategic Rocket Forces . . . or worse.

    With the ascendency of ISIS and the building mistrust between the U.S., Russia, and Israel, three countries with aligned security interests against the Present Danger, being shut out of RD-180 is the least of our problems right now.

    1. Yup, the entire idea of partnering with the Russians like this was to create mutual dependency that would bring our two countries closer together and to prevent proliferation. Most people assumed that Russia would always be dependent on us but circumstances changed. Relying on Russian engines and access to the ISS is a failure of political leadership from presidents and congress, failure of our patriotic defense industry, and a failure of NASA’s to live up to the image of super human eggheads that they have for themselves.

      IMO, it wasn’t a mistake to engage Russia this way but the post-shuttle transition has been terribly mismanaged by most parties involved. This is just a temporary situation but the gap could have been much shorter and ULA could have put in more effort to reproduce those engines.

      As terrible it would be to lose access to the ISS or run out of RD-180’s, Russia really has us over the barrel in Afghanistan.

    2. I think the RD-180 and NK-33 engine deals were a good idea. The point was to get the schematics and the know how to manufacture technology we did not have in the West. The Russians were strapped for cash back then so it was a win-win deal. The big mistake was not applying that purchased R&D and manufacture it 100% in the US for the future. That was the problem here. It was in the contract, the DoD specified it as a requirement in the EELV contract, and Lockheed-Martin in a stupid penny wise pound foolish beancounter move derailed it because it was cheaper to continue buying it for the Russians. Things is they may not be in the market anymore now.

      There were plenty of other technologies that migrated from the Soviet Block like gas centrifuge technology quite successfully. Just because the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and was backwards in sectors like digital computers it does not mean they did not have some areas of their own where they excelled and metallurgy and applications of metallurgy was one of these. Both for the high speed rotating steel gas centrifuges for uranium separation and both for the metallurgy in the RD-180 engines. They also had more experience with building large titanium structures like their Alfa submarine class which also had lead-cooled nuclear fast reactors another technology we could have imported in the West.

      The US was smart enough to do Operation Paperclip after WWII ended. Just because the enemy lost the war it did not mean they did not have a cache of technology ready to exploit after the war ended. The same thing happened with the Cold War but the effort to retrieve and reuse such technology now were way, way more retarded.

Comments are closed.