8 thoughts on “That Strange Congressional Hearing On Wednesday”

  1. The other is that Congress doesn’t understand a flight-test program.

    Understatement of the week.

    The other is that Congress doesn’t understand a flight-test program.
    …
    But the whole point of a test program is to fly things, and break them, to discover how to change the design so it doesn’t break for that reason again. This is the exact opposite of NASA’s cautious philosophy of analyzing for a long period of time to ensure that everything goes well on a first attempt.

    Well, NASA was plenty content to let the ICBM contractors blow up THEIR rockets for use with Mercury-Atlas and Gemini-Titan, oh and some startup building something called DragonCrew-Falcon9. That’s one way of trying to insure everything goes well on the first attempt….

    1. Corrections:

      …and some startup building something called CrewDragon-Falcon9.

      That’s one way of trying to insure everything goes well on the “first” attempt…

  2. I’ll just re-post here what I wrote over at SpaceTech Analytics:

    A bunch of bought dogs yapping on cue. Plus DeFazio who tends toward gratuitous yappiness whether anyone pays him for it or not. That tendency has, no doubt, been strengthened by his narrowest re-election victory in decades last year and his knowledge that reapportionment is probably not going to be his friend and that his most recent opponent may well be back for a rematch in 2022.

    Monteith, for his part, was correct to downplay the SpaceX “license violation” kerfuffle because it seems, at bottom, to have been a matter of dueling mathematical models with SpaceX’s having a far closer resemblance to reality than the FAA’s – something I suspect the FAA now knows full-well and isn’t interested in having unreasonably noised about.

    There is also, to be sure, at least a modest additional element of self-interest in Monteith’s refusal to follow what the sub-committee chair obviously assumed would be the hearing’s “narrative” – i.e., SpaceX bad. If the FAA joins the opportunists and errand boys of Congress in piling on SpaceX, his own office will have far less to do and won’t be able to credibly call for more funding and a larger headcount to handle licensing of all the launches SpaceX does in its role as the runaway leader of the U.S. space launch market.

    1. “Monteith, for his part, was correct to downplay the SpaceX “license violation” kerfuffle because it seems, at bottom, to have been a matter of dueling mathematical models with SpaceX’s having a far closer resemblance to reality than the FAA’s…”

      I watched the hearing, and didn’t know until then (because I wasn’t interested) that SpaceX’s license violation was over Distant Focus Overpressure (DFO). It’s a real phenomenon which can cause blast waves from an explosion to propagate far beyond what one might expect. DFO restrictions delay launch from Vandenberg all the time, due to its combined geography and atmospherics. It’s even a problem at Wallops with the Ares launch vehicle. Given the atmospheric conditions in Boca Chica the day of that launch, I would have made the same call AST did had I still been there as Chief Engineer.

      One of the reasons for that is that I experience DFO occasionally. We live in Manassas, Virginia. Every so often, my windows will be rattled, and sometimes my walls will be shaken by tremendous booms. It took me a while to track down the source, which is the Quantico Marine Base. We live many miles away from there, but sometimes during live fire exercises, the shock waves get all the way to our house, sometimes very forcefully.

      Quantico publishes a schedule of its live fire events on its website, and cautions the public that sometimes atmospheric conditions can cause the booms to travel unexpectedly long distances. They’re right about that.

      AST uses (through a contractor, IIRC) a program called BLAST DFO to determine whether there is going to be a problem with a given launch. I don’t know of anyone else who has a similar capability – if SpaceX even had an analysis done, it would have been with the same program. I don’t think they had a different one.

      BLAST DFO is a very old FORTRAN program, whose inner workings are probably unknown. It was “anchored” with a very large amount of data collect by (IIRC) the Navy. But I doubt anyone really knows much about it. About the time I left AST, I suggested that we coordinate with Quantico, and place acoustic instrumentation both on their range and at various locations around Northern Virginia to update our DFO models.

      AST’s budget doesn’t permit such things, and the greater FAA simply ignores R&D requests regarding commercial space. But I would think SpaceX would be able to spring for the cash to do it. It would be in its interests, certainly.

      I always advocated that AST use its “encourage, facilitate, and promote” remit to encourage, facilitate, and promote major commercial launch campaigns from both coasts all around the big US holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think the airlines would crush the FAA’s resistance to providing adequate R&D resources if that were to happen.

      2. Software development is a SpaceX core competency. It develops its own code for nearly everything including CAE.

        It famously advanced the state of the simulation art anent parachutes, for example, as part of its Crew Dragon 2 development process. And that was anent a technology for which it expected to make no further use.

        If BLAST DFO is as superannuated as you say, it would be perfectly consistent for SpaceX to have developed their own modern equivalent. SpaceX, after all, wishes to conduct both test operations of Starship and Super Heavy from Boca Chica and to do far more extensive routine operations of both from off-shore platforms that may still be near enough to shore to constitute a potential problem under certain conditions.

        So I find the dueling simulations story entirely credible.

  3. Would NASA be able to test SLS like SpaceX tests Starship if SLS was cheaper or is it cultural? As a single use launcher, would work on SH/SS be almost done? How many problems have SpaceX solved on the coming down part of things that prevent a potential catastrophic failure on the going up part of things?

  4. Reading between the lines with regards to the FAA defense of SpaceX, is it possible they see SpaceX as the only viable player that will significantly expand the role of their bureaucracy into space in the coming decade or two? If so, it would be it would not be in the FAA’s interest to nip that bud at this time. At least that’s the way I would play it if I were them.

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