Wayne Eleazer has an interesting brief history of the US military space program at today's issue of The Space Review. I was working at the Aerospace Corporation when some of the changes described were occurring in the early eighties. Clearly what they're doing now isn't working well, but I'm not sure that just going back to the SPOs is going to help. The problem is, as described, that space hardware (at least as historically developed and procured by the Air Force) is not like airplanes. Until they get some fresh thinking there, and try to make it so, I suspect that their woes will continue.

> The problem is, as described, that space hardware (at least as
> historically developed and procured by the Air Force) is not like
> airplanes. Until they get some fresh thinking there, and try to
> make it so, I suspect that their woes will continue.

To continue that line of thinking, is it possible for such fresh thinking to come from the current space organization?

This is one of the strongest arguments for a new US Space Force. Unfortunately, if a US Space Force were authorized today, it would simply be created from the old organization, with all of the old baggage.

You can't create a new Space Force based around aircraft-like space systems until you have aircraft-like space systems, and you can't develop such systems in the current organization. Catch 22.

The best solution I've heard of is to create an independent Military Space Plane Agency, similar to the Missile Defense Agency, for the sole purpose of developing such systems. Later, it could serve as the acquisition core around which an operational US Space Force could be formed.

There's some disconnect in the Eleazer article. He tries to tie the current space acquisition problems to what he claims is a long-term shift in the way that the USAF manages its space programs and mentions the late 1990s Titan launch failures as part of that trend.

The problem with this is that the linkages don't work--after those major failures, the USAF changed the way it opeates on space launch and since then has had something like 93 straight launch successes. Eleazer claims that the launch problems and the current acquisition problems have the same cause. But if they fixed the launch problem, why are they having problems with satellite acquisition now? Clearly the launch successes and the satellite acquisition failures cannot have the same root causes.

The Titan losses and then the corrective action is not something that the critics of government launch vehicle policy ever address. In effect, the USAF made the decision to spend more on launch assurance because the additional cost of increasing rocket reliability was _less_ than the cost of losing billion dollar satellites. They lost a classified signals intelligence satellite, a missile warning satellite, and a Milstar comsat in a very short period of time--the Milstar alone cost something like $700 million--and said "No more."

This seems to fly in the face of everything that critics of US launch policy claim. For instance, they claim that NASA should adopt a lunar architecture that _allows_ losses at a relatively high rate and should procure backup boosters and payloads. But USAF deliberately rejected that approach in the late 1990s.

And that raises another question--if NASA should accept payload losses, then should the USAF/NRO accept them too? Should the USAF/NRO return to the pre-1998 launch policy approach that allowed those Titan failures? If it is good for the goose, then isn't it good for the gander?

> the USAF changed the way it opeates on space launch and since then has had something like 93 straight launch successes.

Including Delta IVH?

If you count failures as successes, "success" rates are meaningless.

> This seems to fly in the face of everything that critics of US launch policy claim. For instance, they claim
> that NASA should adopt a lunar architecture that _allows_ losses at a relatively high rate and should
> procure backup boosters and payloads.

What "critics" said that?

I haven't heard anyone argue that NASA should allow losses at a relatively high rate.

Reformers have argued for relying on small launchers. That implies a relatively high *number* of losses -- not a relatively high *rate* of losses.

In fact, standard aerospace learning curves would predict a *lower* loss rate with smaller vehicles and more frequent launches.

> And that raises another question--if NASA should accept payload losses, then should the USAF/NRO accept them too?

That's a flawed argument. Buiding new Shuttle-derived heavy lifters does not guarantee zero losses. In fact, a new and relatively untested heavy lifter would have a higher expected loss rate than a more experienced vehicle like Atlas V or Delta IV Medium -- and the consequences of a failure would be much higher.

Although, if you really wanted to mimize the loss rate, you wouldn't using ELVs of any sort. Reusable vehicles can be tested much more thoroughly and can return to base after a systems failure, so that every failure is not automatically a loss of vehicle and payload.

> Should the USAF/NRO return to the pre-1998 launch policy approach that allowed those Titan failures

The current USAF/NRO policy is not to launch payloads on Shuttle-derived heavy lifters. In fact, the USAF and NRO are moving toward smaller satellites and smaller launchers. That's the opposite of what NASA is doing.

IMO, Eleazer's second "shoe", namely all the launch failures of the mid 90s, had little to do with JPO management and tons to do with the fact that a large segment of the experienced engineering talent had been kicked out the door a couple of years prior to that.

As for the present problems, my experience is that these glitches are often a function of the lack of really talented, motivated and knowledgable people.

This state of affairs has been brought on by the lack of projects for people to get experienced on, no company IR&D to the same effect and finally the most talented students are too smart to get involved in an industry that drops half its people into the welfare ranks every 20 years or so.

I agree with K. From what I understand, in the 1990's the career advancement path for junior officers in the USAF was either leave engineering or top out at the Major or Lt. Col level. What this really did is to force out of the service the people with the greatest talent in engineering.

Couple this with a policy, adapted after the gulf war, that the experienced engineers were too expensive and that their experience and wisdom could be captured in software expert systems. This allowed BoLockNor, as the assimilated smaller companies, to offer "incentives" for these guys to retire and then they were replaced with much more junior level people. Engineers become commodities and excellence was sacrified.

Management philosophies played a part in this as well. Instead of ascending the ranks of the engineering profession to greater and greater responsiblity while maintaining their engineering edge, engineers were told that if they wanted to continue career advancement that they had to become "managers" which by the implementation path taken by corporations, removed them from the engineering day to day execution of projects. There was also a trend that the professional management trained individuals were needed to manage engineers. This resulted in a generation of middle management with no BS filter in their management thought processes with the engineers and no real understanding of the implications of their decisions. Remember the engineers strike against Boeing in 98? They were basically shafted then and the rest got the message.

The problem with USAF procurement of spacecraft has a complex set of reasons for where it is today and a difficult path to resolution. The tendency is to add more management layers and more "oversight". This does nothing more than make the problem worse, slow down the engineering process, and ultimately result in an inferior product.