For those who have been following the foofaraw about Shuttle extension, and the supposed “conflict” between what Lori Garver has said versus John Shannon (Shuttle program manager), he has responded in comments over at Space Politics. Part of the issue is nomenclature, and what Shuttle “extension” really means. If by that you mean continue operations into the future at the current flight rate, there’s not enough money in the world to do so, so Lori is correct in that regard. If you mean instead to not shut down the program, and waste lots of money keeping the standing army in place, and hope that they don’t lose their edge, while you’re waiting two or three years to get tanks produced again, then yes, you could “extend” the Shuttle, but I’d call that more something like, hibernate and resurrect it. Either way, there is no way to avoid reliance on the Russians in the near term (and the same would have been true with the Program of Record). Once the decision was made to shut down tank production a couple years ago, the die was cast. And there is no real conflict between what the Deputy Administrator and Shuttle PM are saying.

I would note that opponents of the decision have decided to make Lori the focal point of their anger, and will grab any cudgel that comes to hand to beat her, imagining somehow that if they can just dispose of their newfound enemy, that the realities of the budgetary situation will go away, and that all will be well in Aresland again. As they have been for years, they are in denial.

[Update late morning, in fact, after the one that follows this, so I don’t screw up the flow over the fold]

It occurs to me that there’s an aspect of Shuttle extension (or continuation, or whatever) that hasn’t been discussed. One of the reasons to shut down Shuttle in 2010 was to save money that could be then diverted to VSE. But another one (and particularly after Constellation was born) was to free up pads 39A and B to be converted for Ares operations (plus to make other KSC facilities available). If Ares isn’t being developed, the urgency to get the Shuttles off the pads goes away. I’m not sure that’s sufficient reason to keep flying it, but it’s one more issue to be considered. I continue to think that continuing to fly Shuttle is a huge opportunity cost of the available budget, and that if Congress wants to do so without increasing the budget, they’ll have to decide what they want to give up. To give up the best near-term and nearest-term alternative (commercial) would be a travesty.

[Update a few minutes later]

There are a lot of comments to wade through there, so I hope Jeff won’t mind if I just repost the Shannon comment here to make it easier to find and relink (it would help if he had Space Politics set up to provide individual permalinks for comments, as I do here).

First of all, it sounds like most of you were unable to see the entire press conference on Tuesday. NASA has a “Program Overview” press conference with the Program Managers prior to each flight. Reporters take this opportunity to ask questions about the future direction of the Space Shuttle and ISS programs. This is followed by mission briefings by the Flight Directors, the EVA team, and finally the Crew. I also understand that the audio of the reporter’s questions was not being aired so you may have missed what was being asked. Bill Harwood has a more complete write-up on SpaceflightNow.com if you are interested in seeing a more complete account of the discussion. This should answer the “Why was Shannon talking to reporters” comments.

One of the first questions I was asked concerned the proposed Senate Bill from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and whether the proposed shuttle extension was feasible. I explained that we had kicked-off a vendor study to verify that our vendors could support the actions outlined in the bill. This study has shown that bringing vendors back would not be an issue. As you can imagine, at our current flight rate we maintain close contact with current and previous vendors to make sure that they are available in the event of any issues (for testing, manufacturing expertise, replacement parts, etc). So, from a vendor standpoint it is technically feasible to restart production for a shuttle extension.

However, even though the vendors would be available, I have also been on record as opposing extension for the following three reasons:

1.) The Space Shuttle is “overqualified” for the task of simply taking logistics and crews to the ISS. The Space Shuttle has unique capabilities and I have said many times that “once the ISS is completed, and the last HST servicing mission is complete, the Space Shuttle has completed its mission”.

2.) As I said to Dr. Sally Ride during our Augustine discussions – do not make me re-hire workers that have been laid-off in order to work for three years and build six tanks. The production layoffs have been brutal emotional events. Hiring workers back so that we could go through the whole cycle again in two years is completely wrong (In fact- I described it as “having to rip the band-aid off twice). However – if we could use that workforce/contracts/infrastructure in a follow-on Heavy-lift program it would be a reasonable investment. Without that follow-on program I would strongly counsel against extension.

3.) Money. There is a base cost with flying the shuttle. I described it as $200 million a month, in reality that is for more than two flights a year and we could accomplish the flight rate in the Congressional bill for less than that, but if you only fly two flights per year the “per flight” cost is high. This fiscal year (2010) we are flying six flights for about $2.8B, or a little less than $500 million per flight. A pretty decent deal. However, we are upside down on fixed versus variable costs due to our unique infrastructure requirements (ever try to rent an arcjet?), so taking total budget divided by number of flights is very misleading. I have often said that the first flight of the shuttle in any given year is $3 billion, all of the rest are free. That is about as accurate as any other method.
I understand completely both sides of the discussion on whether to extend or not. On one hand it is important to reinvigorate the nation’s R&D base, it has been neglected for too long. On the other – we have a significant investment in infrastructure and corporate knowledge that will be very difficult to rebuild/recapture down the road. One of the most compelling arguments to keep ISS was that we had invested a lot to get our current capability, it would be a crime to walk away from it. There is a parallel there…

The Administration wants to reinvigorate the R&D base and encourage commercial development of Space – how do you argue against that? Congress wants to maintain our current leadership in Space and get the most out of our current investments – also a worthy point of view. I definitely feel caught in the middle…

As Bill said in his article: “Shannon did not say whether he personally favored an extension, telling reporters “we just provide the data, and we’ll let the nation go off and decide what they would like this team to go do.” This is really true. I feel it is very important to just provide the facts. We were asked by different members of Congress for data, and we provide them to the best of our ability. As you can tell, I have mixed emotions about the pros and cons of this discussion.

The other comment that struck me as interesting was the “took taxpayer money to start designing sidemount”. This is not true. We were asked during the transition team meetings to provide alternative crewed and uncrewed options that had been studied over the years – and there have been a lot of them. We did update the design, costs and schedules for a modified Shuttle-C to the transition team. When the Augustine committee asked for a similar study – we all debated who would go up and talk about the alternatives. I encourage you to go back and listen to those briefings- Mike Hawes stated that this was a study that we were asked for, and I started out the discussion by stating that I supported Constellation, however we were aware that it had not been funded properly and that we were pulling together previous studies to provide alternatives. (My personal opinion is that we should have done a “Shuttle-C” early in the program, because we could have tested new technologies on an uncrewed vehicle and hence made the entire system safer. We also could have debated the merits of manned vs. unmanned for each mission to make a conscious decision on whether a mission was worth the crew risk).

So, I will continue to provide requested data while our elected leadership debates options. There has been no discussion of quashing or disciplining anyone over providing this data. I think the NASA leadership has been very open and responsive to all of these requests, and I am proud to be part of the team.

The last point I would clarify is what we will do as a shuttle team if there is no extension. As I told the reporters Tuesday: “But it’s a money discussion,” he said. “If we don’t have the resources to do that (extend) and to continue to logistically supply the space station (with shuttle), then I understand that, it’s the path we’ve been on and we’ll take this team and try our hardest to seed them out to either the commercial sector or into whatever NASA is going to do next to bring those lessons learned … to try and make the next program as successful as possible.”

He follows up over there in response to other questions as well, in which (among other things) he explains why he is not contradicting Lori, nor she him.

[Early afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has the ideal solution, which would save the cost of recreating the tank production and second-tier contractors:

1. Workforce A assembles the Orbiter, ET, and SRBs in the VAB and rolls the package out to the pad.
2. Workforce B, working nights, rolls the Shuttle back to the VAB, disassembles it and puts the orbiter on the runway.
3. Repeat
This is the perfect NASA space transportation system – lots of employees, lots of activity at KSC, and none of that dangerous rocket flying stuff. Gee, they might even reach the one “flight” a week rate predicted for the Shuttle back in the early 70s…

They could increase employment even further by removing the engines from the crawler, and have hundreds of people pull the vehicle to and from the pad with ropes, like the Jews building the pyramids.