…from Gene Kranz:
In an interview on the balcony of the U.S Space & Rocket Center near a life-sized model of the Saturn V rockets he launched four times, Kranz said he’s worried about losing unique NASA expertise.
“I believe that our nation cannot afford this kind of an impact,” the 76-year-old Kranz said. “We have the most talented team of people – scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technicians.
“I was there when we started and had to build this kind of a team,” Kranz said. “It took three to five years to get the people in place and get them trained, and we had a very healthy aircraft industry at that time that we could get people from.
“Once you send this team away,” Kranz said, “I think they have totally underestimated the difficulty they’re going to have getting a team capable of designing, building and testing a spacecraft.”
“This team” hasn’t successfully designed, built or tested a spacecraft since the seventies. All it’s done is operate one, at humungous costs. In particular Marshall’s history over the past three decades is a litany of failure. As Mike Griffin said, part of the purpose of Ares was to actually create such a team at Marshall, via on-the-job training. So if you’re worried about a “team” being broken up, that horse was out of the barn long ago.
The Huntsville-designed Saturn V “was a darn well-designed spacecraft,” Kranz said. “I wish we had it today.”
I’ll bet you do. Unfortunately, it too was horrifically expensive. The only reason that we built as many as we did was that it was important to beat the Soviets to the moon. It had little to do with space, per se. And Marshall has done little since to justify its existence, because NASA has become unimportant (space was never important, even during Apollo), and instead merely a jobs program. But ironically, as the Space Frontier Foundation points out to the hypocritical Senator Shelby, it has apparently become too big to fail.
[Update a while later]
An emailer who wishes to remain anonymous writes:
The team Gene remembers was destroyed in 1969-1970, in the first space draw-down. (As I recall ABC made a movie about it called “An American Tragedy.”) The competent technical people left the agency and the incompetent bureaucrats remained behind because it was the only job they could do. Add to that the destruction of US’s industrial base by the EPA and safety-firsters, and the Communist take-over of the educational system, and that explains the rotten mess visible today. I’m surprised we manage to launch anything at all.
Back in the mid eighties, someone at JSC told me that the reason that the space station was such a mess was that it had become a make-work project for deadwood from the Shuttle development program as it wound down. I won’t mention the name, but it was someone high in the organization at that time, and now retired.
I understand the nostalgia that Kranz is feeling. It was a very special time for the program and the country. It makes a certain amount of sense why he (and Armstrong and Cernan among others) would want to recapture that era. For them, it was the best years of their lives.
Times have changed though, and one era’s national priority is not another’s. Apollo was the answer to a very specific question: how do you go from barely being able to put a man in orbit, to going to the moon, in less than ten years, without any major technological breakthroughs? The question today is very different: how do you create a sustainable human presence in space? That is a question Apollo (on or off steroids) can not answer.
IMO the Saturn V technology was great technology, which could have been repurposed for smaller vehicles instead of being dumped overboard. However I think people are overemphasizing NASA here. Even the Saturn V was ultimately designed and built by private US aerospace contractors for the US government.
AFAIK the NASA centers mostly did system level design (e.g. Von Braun’s group) or handled launch operations. Not particular engine or stage or whatever designs. So it is hardly surprising, to me at least, to see NASA fail at trying to do it.
The time line of government aerospace technology in terms of big contracts per unit time have been unsustainable since the end of Apollo. Today, there’s a small core of people who do R&D or expert consulting. Virtually nobody goes from the creation of one large project to another similar large project, unless there’s 10 or more years between them.
This means that the industry “know how” is something that mostly has to be re-invented from scratch each time and is therefore extremely inefficient and expensive.
Now consider SpaceX. They started with a small group and have kept that group working on each iterative small program and building up an experienced team of experts. If they are able to continue without some disaster, they will begin emulating companies like Boeing and Lockheed at the beginning of the aviation era.
Gene Kranz was prescient about one thing: Apollo 13 was NASA’s finest hour. However, the corollary is that everything after that has been no-quite-so-fine. Is there anyone left at NASA who has as much experience with designing, building, and testing rockets as, say, Paul Breed or John Carmack?
Back in the mid eighties, someone at JSC told me that the reason that the space station was such a mess was that it had become a make-work project for deadwood from the Shuttle development program as it wound down.
I’ve read that. Then shuttle-Mir became the residence for the dead wood — both for NASA and the former Soviet program. IIRC, that played a roll in Krantz’s decision to get the Hell out of NASA.
My takeaway from the interview is this, “My concern is this might possibly be the epitaph for the manned space program for the next decade“. IOW, kicking the can down the road isn’t working anymore. I know that I’ve watched that can get kicked down the road throughout most of my life and the result is it’s only just barely recognizable as a can now. It may be that Krantz sees something similar.
Krantz may be of the Old Guard and the Old Guard will inevitably pine for the good old days, but that doesn’t mean that everything they have to say is invalidated by that. I think Armstrong and Krantz have some idea of the politics surrounding NASA and can, and do, contribute something more than nostalgia to the debate. On the other side, Aldrin, who you’ve praised before for contributing so much to private space, has spent a lot of time and effort becoming a celebrity (should we call him “Twinkle Toes” now?) and at this point, if Obama proposed sending a manned mission to Europa “before the decade is out”, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Aldrin praising the idea as a “bold new venture” or some such thing.
Oldness encourages the vice of entrenched thinking, but the experience inherent to oldness can be virtuous.
I remember reading an article in Aviation Week from sometime around 1984 about designing the space station. The article mentioned a concern the design team had identified. It seems they calculated that each astronaut needed several pounds of water per day to do laundry. The total figure was so high that it meant they would have to fly a dedicated Shuttle water hauling mission every few months just to be able to do laundry. When I read that, I said to myself, “We are so screwed.”
> The competent technical people left the agency an
> the incompetent bureaucrats remained behind because
> it was the only job they could do.
I used to work in Kranz’s department, and was basically told that at the end of Apollo, the top 10%, the real movers/shakers/geniuses that had made the place really work, had quit to find something more challenging and that wasn’t going to cut their salaries. The bottom 80% who did what it took to build the top 10%’s vision were laid off. So basically you had a agency run by folks who were the top 10% assistants and go-fer’s. Then when the agency staffed back up for shuttle they all got high ranking executive jobs at NASA.
Many things at NASA made a lot more sense after I heard that.
When guys like these speak of nostalgia for the good ol’ days of real engineering and get ‘er done go for it-ness, it is because they are completely out of tune with today’s NewSpace revolution.
When guys like these speak of nostalgia for the good ol’ days of real engineering and get ‘er done go for it-ness, it is because they are completely out of tune with today’s NewSpace revolution.
And when NewSpace completely disregards what they have to say it demonstrates tone-deafness regarding the weight of politics that sits on top of NASA.
New Space is standing on the shoulders of giants, and they know that. Most of these smaller players have NASA veterans in key positions, and that’s not for show, it’s because of the quality of people they were to make it into NASA.
Regardless of the industry, whether it be steel making, cars, or computers, there is always going to be a changing of the guard as new products and new companies come along. Apple is a good example of a company that burst onto the scene, then slowly faded until it found it’s niche and became popular again.
Now that we are 50 years into manned space flight, the technology that is required to put stuff into space is trickling down to 3rd world countries. It should not be too surprising that people are starting to finally figure out how to create a company that lowers the cost to access space for both cargo and crew. For now I’m talking about SpaceX, but there are plenty of other entrepreneurs that are jockeying to be the next SpaceX for their niche. This is what we need to support, and NASA will benefit greatly from the cost benefits these new firms can offer.
Commercial launchers offer the ability for NASA to do more with the same funds. Imagine using the Falcon 9 Heavy (~$150M) instead of the Delta IV Heavy ($254M) for a Moon rover mission – what could you build with $100M? This is what NASA people should be excited about, the ability to do more with the same amount of funding. I respect the NASA veterans for what they were able to accomplish, but times have changed, and there is a new paradigm in town (for better or worse).
> Starless Says:
> May 5th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
==
> And when NewSpace completely disregards what they have
> to say it demonstrates tone-deafness regarding the
> weight of politics that sits on top of NASA.
I’ve been seeing a amazing lot of that in the arguments relating to the Obama proposal for comercial crew. The “of course comercials will be much cheaper, and with flights costing a fraction as much NASA can do vastly more in space.” Completly ignornig the way NASA gets budgets for programs, and a almost religious faith that not only will new space get the contracts, but they will be able to dramatically drop costs as aposed to the other commercials over the past decades, and those lower costs will allow expanded manned space exploration..
“Completly ignornig the way NASA gets budgets for programs”
The way NASA gets its budget is very artificial compared to the marketplace. That means it has to be actively kept that way year after year – and that the process can be changed.
Look at what happens with a round of army base closures: it is unpopular in a few congressional districts, but most of the country doesn’t even notice. How many people outside a few congressional districts would change their vote in upcoming elections if Marshall, Michoud, and JSC were closed?
> Ed Minchau Says:
>May 6th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
>> “Completly ignornig the way NASA gets budgets
>> for programs”
> The way NASA gets its budget is very artificial compared
> to the marketplace. That means it has to be actively kept
> that way year after year – and that the process can be
> changed.
??
No, the way NASA gets its buget is due to federal politics. Changnig the political direction and priorities of DC, and by extension the nation, is a seriously – perhaps one could say historically – major undertaking.
>=
> How many people outside a few congressional districts
> would change their vote in upcoming elections if Marshall,
> Michoud, and JSC were closed?
true, which is the danger NASA lives under. Since it does little of interest to the nation as a whole (other then it being cool to have a agency thats sent people to the moon, and sending them to space) all it has to offer is pork in enough districts to get a program supported.