Rick Tumlinson has some useful suggestions for NASA, and the government. I doubt if they’ll follow them.

T/SPACE is finding the paperwork involved in performing a NASA contract too onerous:

“NASA wants 40 to 50 monthly reports on what you’re doing,” David Gump, president of the Transformational Space consortium told New Scientist on Monday. And while “we could build a great Crew Exploration Vehicle”, Gump says, the consortium cannot comply with the reports and studies NASA stipulates to monitor the project.

This is one of the reasons that space hardware costs so much. In order to perform a government contract, you have to bear the overhead of the contract specialists, accounting people, etc., above and beyond that necessary to just build the hardware. In addition, all of the status reports and reviews tend to chew up a lot of the time of the engineers and managers who are preparing them rather than doing engineering.

In theory, T/SPACE could hire the necessary additional staff in order to meet the contractual requirements, but it dramatically changes the corporate culture to do so. I can understand their reluctance. And as a result, it’s almost inevitable that the two CEV contracts will go to two of the usual suspects, with the usual high costs.

Thus shall it be until we develop a robust commercial space industry.

[Evening update]

Keith Cowing has a different take on it:

Yawn. When the going gets tough, blame it all on paperwork.

Jack Benny used to say about a fellow comedian that “nobody knew what a cramp looked like until Fred Allen was born.” Well, along those lines, Jeff Foust can now point at a physical instantiation of a budgetary earmark.

Taylor Dinerman has a piece on heavy lifters in this week’s issue of The Space Review that I find a little frustrating, on several levels.

I get heartburn right out of the gate:

The consensus is that the Vision for Space Exploration requires a new heavy-lift launch vehicle

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Robert Zimmerman has a disturbing (though not surprising, at least to me) piece at Space Daily, which reports that NASA did no analysis in support of its original decision to cancel the planned Shuttle flight to repair Hubble, and ignored more viable options in favor of its misguided robotic gambit:

NASA historian Steven Dick gave a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, in which he described the process by which that decision was made and revealed that, in fact, no formal risk analysis had been completed.

Dick had interviewed all of the NASA officials who had been involved in the decision to cancel the shuttle mission to the Hubble, a discussion that came to a head in December 2003 when those officials had been working on NASA’s fiscal year 2005 budget.

According to Dick’s interviews, risk was the major factor in the discussion, but the officials decided a formal risk analysis was unnecessary. Instead, Dick noted, “The decision was made (by O’Keefe) based on what he perceived was the risk.”

In other words, O’Keefe canceled the Hubble mission solely on his gut feeling of the situation. So, the only way NASA can provide the House Science Committee’s requested copy of that risk analysis from December 2003 is to recreate it after the fact.

I had always suspected this. I think that Sean O’Keefe was good for the agency, in terms of starting to get the books straightened out (a task that’s by no means complete), and starting to restructure it for the end of the Cold War, but I also think that he lost his nerve after having to stand on the tarmac and tell those families that their loved ones weren’t coming home two years ago. He simply didn’t want to have to risk doing that again. And that’s fine, but if so, he was no longer the man for the job, and perhaps didn’t step down soon enough, because it clearly adversely influenced the decision he made a year later. Spaceflight is inherently risky, and if we can’t accept that, as either a NASA administrator or a nation, then we have no business doing it.

And as Zimmerman concludes, that’s really what’s so disturbing about that decision, in terms of its potential implications for the future:

For NASA and the American space program, this increasingly untenable position is beginning to have a serious political cost. By refusing to reconsider their decision and reinstate the shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, NASA is undercutting its ability to persuade Congress to give it money to build spacecraft to fly humans back to the moon.

As Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., noted during those same science committee hearings, “If we’re unwilling to take the risks to go to Hubble, then what does that say about (our willingness to mount) a moon and eventual Mars mission?”

Or as Boehlert remarked, “In a budget as excruciatingly tight as this one, NASA probably should not get as much as the president has proposed.”

Unless President George W. Bush appoints a new NASA administrator with the courage to reverse the Hubble decision, he is going to find it increasingly difficult to persuade Congress – or anyone else, for that matter – that NASA has the wherewithal to handle his ambitious space initiative.

But it goes beyond the risk aversion. If the story is true, the changing stories and lack of data after the fact bring back memories of the Goldin years, in which some said that NASA stood for “Never A Straight Answer.” That was something that O’Keefe was supposed to fix, not contribute to, and it may take a further investigation with some mea culpas and credible recommendations for avoiding this sort of thing in the future, in order for NASA to gain the confidence needed, from both Congress and the public that still wonders why it’s about to lose one of the few NASA programs with genuine widespread support.

A group has been formed to save Star Trek, the latest version of which, Enterprise, has just been canceled. Here’s what I found interesting, though:

We are in the commercial space flight industry and would like to testify that at least one out of two of all the actual entrepreneurs involved in this industry has been inspired by Star Trek; and we are not only good at watching TV sci-fi , we are also good at writing checks, big checks. The people airing this kind of TV have a responsibility; inspiration. Star Trek has inspired us, and particularly Enterprise, with its superb theme song that tells so much about our struggle to move space travel forward and closer to the public, this inspiration is so self evident, that Virgin Galactic has ordered a 5-sub orbital ship fleet from Scaled Composites, a 100 million dollar investment, and the first one being built is going to be christened

Here’s some more on Esther Dyson’s overpriced space entrepreneur conference:

“Nobody’s holding a space conference, so I decided to do one,” she said in an interview. “It’s not that there aren’t space conferences, but nothing as tacky and commercial as we want to be.”

So it wasn’t just hype on the web site. She really is clueless about what’s been going on in this field. This is both disappointing, coming from Freeman’s (for whom my respect is boundless) daughter, and annoying. A lot of us have been in the trenches trying to make this stuff happen for years, even decades. We’ve overpaid our dues, and now we get to deal with an Esther-come-lately.

And she can’t even be bothered to focus on the subject at hand:

The conference, which costs $1,492 to attend, is also aimed at taking on a topic of more immediate potential – a concept called “air taxi.” A growing number of entrepreneurs are looking at using relatively small, inexpensive airplanes to revive and expand the short-hop commuter industry, ferrying people to and from small airports.

That’s an interesting subject, but it has little to do with space technology, and all it will due is further dilute the utility of this one-day conference. I said I’d like to go if I could afford the time and the money, but now I’m thinking that even if I did, I’d get little out of it.