
Nasa head of human spaceflight resigns days before 'historic' space mission - bookofjoe
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/20/nasa-head-of-human-spaceflight-doug-loverro-suddenly-resigns-days-before-historic-space-mission
======
_Microft
Eric Berger, the author of this article [0] on this departure is a very good
source for space news. You might want to check his Twitter feed [1], there is
more about this.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasas-human-
spacefli...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/nasas-human-spaceflight-
chief-just-resigned-and-the-timing-couldnt-be-worse/)

[1] [https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/](https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/)

~~~
hackerbabz
Commenters on there think he was forced out for not selecting Boeing as one of
the lunar mission providers.

~~~
growlist
This seems to clearly demonstrate that NASA's reason for existing is pork,
with space an afterthought. Sad.

~~~
tengbretson
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy was developed on a budget roughly equal to 10 days worth
of NASA's annual funding.

~~~
TYPE_FASTER
NASA's budget also includes astronaut training, educational outreach, and a
ton of other programs. There's a categorical breakout of the NASA budget here:
[https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2021_...](https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2021_summary_budget_brief.pdf)

~~~
mturmon
To mention a few more, the NASA budget includes human operations (ISS), and
the entire science enterprise (Earth, Planetary, Astrophysics) - things
including Hubble, JWST, Curiosity.

------
nabla9
> It had nothing to do with commercial crew,” he said. “It had to do with
> moving fast on Artemis, and I don’t want to characterize it in any more
> detail than that.” Artemis is NASA’s program to return people to the moon.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/19/nasas-h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/19/nasas-
human-spaceflight-chief-resigns-week-before-first-launch-astronauts-decade/)

~~~
Nokinside
Story so far: (correct me if I'm wrong)

NASA has plan to get into the Moon by 2028.

Pence blindsights NASA and contractors by moving timeline arbitrarily forward
without a plan in a grandstanding speech. "At the direction of the President
of the United States, it is the stated policy of this administration and the
United States of America to return American astronauts to the moon within the
next five years”. It's not a Tweet so NASA must scramble to make a plan.
Funding for a new timetable is not there.

Gerstenmaier is removed without explanation as a head of HEO almost
immediately after he testifies to congress. Gerstenmaier quits NASA to consult
SpaceX.

Loverro comes in, is very bullish about the timetable. Now Loverro quits
suddenly.

I think it's time for Jared to come in. If he can handle Middle-East peace and
Covid-19, why not a Moon landing as well.

~~~
pm90
> I think it's time for Jared to come in. If he can handle Middle-East peace
> and Covid-19, why not a Moon landing as well.

People say he's unqualified for anything. But he is uniquely qualified in that
he is immune to being fired for fucking up everything.

~~~
coliveira
Jared's talent (if he has any) is to screw up and then convincingly claim he
did a great job. Trump sees this as the apex of ability.

~~~
jfengel
And so do his supporters. It makes an extremely effective political
combination: all the enthusiasm of winning without actually doing anything.
And it works as long as you can have goodwill and assets to burn.

~~~
pm90
Except when something happens that defies spin, like a pandemic that takes
away jobs and lives.

I'm not sure how this is going to turn out, but even if the US elects a
different president, the current one has provided a nice handbook to a
potential autocratic future president to gain unlimited power.

~~~
jfengel
I suspect that even a pandemic may not suffice. The only thing that gets
through is a direct personal loss, and the death rate seems too low for that.
You'd need deaths in the millions for everyone to know someone who died.

Even then it's easy to blame it on someone else. There's a reason they are
calling it the Wuhan Virus.

------
bryanlarsen
"Two people with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss the personnel matter said his resignation was spurred
when Loverro broke a rule during NASA’s recent procurement of a spacecraft
capable of landing humans on the moon."[1]

My guess is that he was told: "Keep the moon landing on track for 2024 or
you're fired." And the only way he could do so was to illegally expedite the
selection process.

1:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/19/nasas-h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/19/nasas-
human-spaceflight-chief-resigns-week-before-first-launch-astronauts-decade/)

~~~
antishatter
Or maybe it was "You shouldn't have accepted gifts from contractors", my point
is only that you are guessing with no basis in underlying fact.

~~~
vipa123
I think you might be on to something. Maybe there is a further clue in his
preface of "My guess is..."

------
the_duke
Followup by Berger: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/heres-why-nasas-
chie...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/05/heres-why-nasas-chief-of-
human-spaceflight-resigned-and-why-it-matters/)

He guesses that Loverro violated rules around procurement, potentially by
pushing Boeing to improve their proposal because he favored a SLS based
solution.

------
dz0ny
While Mr Loverro offered no further explanation, he told the Axios news
website that his decision to leave the agency was unrelated to the upcoming
launch. "I have 100% faith in the success of that mission," he said.

[https://axios.com/nasa-head-of-human-spaceflight-
resigns-692...](https://axios.com/nasa-head-of-human-spaceflight-
resigns-692bc6c4-d38a-417e-b2d3-2825d9f2e0ac.html)

------
nickpinkston
This reminds of the human factors issues during the Challenger Disaster:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster#Thiokol%E2%80%93NASA_conference_call)

------
chosenbreed37
It's an eye-catching headline but maybe there's nothing to see here. The
resignation may be unrelated to the upcoming mission. I couldn't see anything
in the article to suggest otherwise.

~~~
sp332
They're probably not related. But whatever prompted the departure must have
been big if he didn't wait just a few more days.

------
bovermyer
Is NASA no longer an acronym or something?

~~~
abrowne
UK style, and this article is from the _Guardian_ , is to capitalize only the
first letter of acronyms that are pronounced like words, "Nasa" and "Nato"
being frequent examples. When each letter is pronounced (AKA an initialism),
they capitalize each letter, such as for the WHO:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-
canada-52294623](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52294623)

~~~
et2o
Very interesting, thanks for this.

I find this practice very dumb. A huge amount of acronyms now have to be
written like regular words.

~~~
nkoren
Eh, Americans do it too, just less consistently. When's the last time you saw
LASER?

~~~
slimginz
I'd say things like laser are no longer the acronym they once were. How many
people actually realize that laser is/was an acronym in the first place? The
word itself has 'genericized' to the point that it's just a word to most
people now.

~~~
detritus
I could as well suggest the same about Nasa :) For all HNers that the
distinction will be incredibly obvious, to Joe Schmo from Idaho, perhaps less
so.

------
xwdv
People act like this moon landing is not going to happen in 2024. It’s gonna
happen.

~~~
mikro2nd
The most obvious retort -- the one that springs to mind first, is, "What makes
you think that?" But that's not really the most useful question...

More usefully, I'd ask, "Why the Moon?"

The US has been there, the science is well known (which is not the same as
saying the science is all done) and all you (the US) can do in a international
consortium to "Moon" is _give away the crown jewels_ in knowhow and tech. Add
to that, it's a research mission down another gravity well. I'd think that
Mars is a more attractive science target (if you're determined to get stuck
with gravity wells), one of the Lagrange points more useful from an
engineering/space exploration perspective as a way-station, the asteroids for
science and potentially minerals/engineering/learning to build/do stuff in
space and outside the Earth's magnetosphere, or the gas-giants' moons for
science/the search for extraterrestrial life. And _all_ of those are things
that (for large values of `true`) _only_ the US has the capability to do.
Leave other nations to go back to the moon.

Do the stuff no-one else can do and that will hugely enhance US space
capability over anyone else. (I say all this as a non-US person.)

~~~
narag
_Add to that, it 's a research mission down another gravity well._

There are so many practical advantages in a Moon base that I don't know where
to start. It's very surprising to see them ignored in every discussion about
relative merits of the Moon respect other options. Maybe they've been
forgotten because much time passed since Apollo.

The main point is probably that the Moon is not _another_ gravity well. It's a
much much weaker gravity well. Take a look at the Saturn V and then to the
LEM. Of course the former had to carry the later and the other modules. But
still, only the upper half of the LEM was needed to put two humans in lunar
orbit:

[https://youtu.be/sj6a0Wrrh1g?t=171](https://youtu.be/sj6a0Wrrh1g?t=171)

Another important point: you can cover habitational containers with regolith
to provide a good protection against micrometeorites.

Eventually factories will be made. Unlike humans, you don't need to take stuff
from Earth, saving tons of fuel. The only things that seem to be a problem to
make there are fuel, and oxygen because there's no water. Solar energy is even
stronger while not at night, obviously.

Oh and "research project" is a way of talking. You can say "exploration" as
well, eventually "industry".

Edit: a couple of advantages more, that I don't see mentioned. One that the
Moon has gravity and a surface. That means that humans can work more like on
Earth and storage is much cheaper to build.

And another one: if a way to make ships or fuel from lunar materials is found,
it would help any other mission. Taking cargo from the Moon to Earth orbit is
much cheaper than doing that from Earth surface. Even if you plan to go to
Mars or the asteroids, a Moon base is a great thing to have.

~~~
throwaway052020
A lot of the justification for human space exploration seems to be circular
and rest entirely on the quasi-religious belief that sending people into space
is inherently good. Once you take away that belief, there's not much reason to
do things like building factories or habitats on the moon.

~~~
avmich
> A lot of the justification for human space exploration seems to be circular
> and rest entirely on the quasi-religious belief that sending people into
> space is inherently good.

It's just a short summary of the reasoning.

Here - [https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-
space-...](https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-
space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/) \- some arguments for space
exploration in general.

Human exploration in particular becomes more clear when one realizes that
modern robotics can't fit a lot of exploration requirements as well as humans
can.

Aside from commercial goals - like resources, tourism, support of space
equipment - we have natural, if strategic, curiosity of environment around us.
We're just at the point when that "around" starts getting bigger than the
planet.

~~~
throwaway052020
> Here - [https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-
> space-...](https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-..).
> - some arguments for space exploration in general.

I don't think anyone is against using space, but that's quite a different
thing from human space exploration. The only specific example he gives of the
direct use for space - using artificial satellites - don't require human space
exploration. Neither do the more indirect benefits he mentions - international
cooperation and having high level challenges. There are plenty of high
challenges (even if we just look at space), many that would also have much
more tangible benefits in addition to being a high level challenge.

Talking about our natural curiosity isn't a great reason either - we're
already doing much more robotic exploration of space than most cultures
historically did of their surroundings. And this exploration doesn't
necessitate humans.

~~~
avmich
A good example of benefits of human presence in space is science obtained on
orbital stations.

We don't have much more examples of actually being in space for humans -
Apollo flights were short and few, so most other examples are either space
stations or solo flights. Yet we have advancements of science even from that.

Particularly Apollo flights still represent the best overall scientific review
of the Moon - and in general other non-Earth celestial bodies - so from
science point of view advantage of robots is unclear. That advantage comes
largely from being more economical to send a robot to space than to send a
human, but things change with time, and flying to the same place becomes
cheaper with time, so this advantage of robots may decrease. Will it be offset
by increased robotic abilities is also unclear.

So Stuhlinger's arguments are not the only ones - and rather old by now, so
newer ones are better seen.

As for natural curiosity, yes, we did often survey the other side of the river
before going there - even before deciding if it makes sense to go, over
millennia. Yet by now all rivers on Earth are crossed. So saying that
exploration doesn't necessitate humans doesn't seem to generalize - it's the
status quo for today, not the necessary law of nature.

