

How to Avoid Repeating the Debacle That Was the Space Shuttle - tokenadult
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jul-aug/22-how-to-avoid-repeating-debacle-of-space-shuttle

======
econgeeker
This article makes a lot of good points, but I felt it failed to really break
the surface and address the core problem that led to the failure of the Space
Shuttle program.

That core problem is misalignment of incentives. Or in short, politics. When
you've got a public budget and your goals are political ones, you're going to
pursue a specific set of capabilities and policies that help your political
career. This is true from the President all the way down to the lowest level
of managers at NASA. I think the real cost, and thus tragedy, of this era is
the thousands upon thousands of good engineers who were sucked up into NASA
because they believed in the dream of human space flight, and were never able
to accomplish much over the courses of their careers.

The solution to this problem is very simple: No government agency with control
over space. Outsource everything. If government wants to fund scientific
research or exploration, great- give grants to institutions that then have
effectively complete autonomy. For instance, JPL, could be a separate
institute with little connection to government other than primarily getting
its funding from the government. If politicians want to send a probe to Mars,
let JPL be the master contractor, where JPL hires the scientists, while
subcontracting out the design, development and production to private entities.

SpaceX is much more efficient getting to space, cost wise and reliability wise
(I believe) than NASA ever has been, and they are using (IIRC) a discarded
russian design, off the shelf as the basis for their system (though certainly
they've done a lot of engineering work.)

The commercial space industry in the USA has suffered under the government
control over all things space since the beginning. I remember when Richard
Branson-- the founder of Virgin Galactic, and the one who funded the design
and development of SpaceShipTwo was prevented from seeing the design he'd paid
for because he was a british national!

In fact, I'm certain that the only reason Burt Rutan and Virgin Galactic were
successful is that their "launch" requires only a runway, and thus they can
easily do it from just about any country. Previously, NASA and the FAA has
made it very difficult for private entities to pursue space access, by denying
them the necessary permits to do testing.

After the X prize was won, when commercial operation plans were announced,
there was a flurry of congressional noise about regulating the space industry
("for safety" of course.) I think the only reason that died down is that there
is literally nothing stopping Virgin Galactic from flying off and launching
from a newly crated "space port" in, say, Panama. (Well, except that the
government apparently considers their designs "National Security Secrets".)

It is time to dismantle NASA. Let the capitalists pursue profit in space, and
government can get whatever it needs launched (or built) by the same
contractors under whatever terms the government wants-- but at much lower
costs.

~~~
wisty
The problem wasn't NASA. The problem was, NASA was told to build something
impossible - a cheap and reliable spaceplane. It was many times more complex
than anything else ever made (including the Saturn V). It was never going to
be cheap and reliable. (Well, it might be possible today, with decades more
experience and technology). Only the "yes men" said it was possible, and they
got promoted. The rest of the engineers were forced to work in a bubble where
a realistic big picture didn't matter.

OK, you can privatize that. But the same problems will apply. Look at
Australia's military acquisitions. Every vehicle we buy costs 10X the MOTS
price, because there's always a requirement "modifications for Australian
conditions". The private operators read this as "complete idiots in command",
and charge accordingly. A privatized space sector would work the same way -
stupid government orders will get stupid prices.

~~~
Retric
They could have built a cheap and reusable space plane. The problem was they
built it do far more than was necessary. You can build a "cheap" space-plane
that get's 7 people to orbit at around 100-1000$/lb. (by cheap somewhere under
10 million a flight.) You can't build a cheap space plane that hauls up 7
people and 50,000LB of junk into space at back at the same time. If they just
focused on people they could have avoided an external fuel tank and all those
fragile tiles. Focus on a reasonable amount of structural redundancy and ended
up with something that could get back from space without needing a new paint
job let alone a full engine rebuild.

PS: Feathers don't burn up on rentry but bricks do. The shuttle was far to
close to a brick to get back without a lot of trauma.

~~~
berntb
>>You can build a "cheap" space-plane that get's 7 people to orbit at around
100-1000$/lb.

That would push the costs down by a factor of ten, at least. For man-rated
space flight!

What is the NASA track record for big projects that push costs _down_?

(Didn't Burt Rutan have some story of when he built some high altitude air
plane on an order -- and the NASA space suit integration team was larger than
the team to design and build the aircraft?)

~~~
StrawberryFrog
> That would push the costs down by a factor of ten, at least. For man-rated
> space flight!

I don't think so. Those 7 people need all the "junk" up there too. it's their
living quarters, their food, their science experiments, etc.

Maybe you launch it separately. But don't forget about the cost of that.

~~~
berntb
You missed my point -- 100-1000$/lb is at least a factor of ten less than
anything else.

(NASA is not noted for going factors of ten _less_ than normal costs.)

~~~
onemoreact
I expect they would still blow a lot on R&D. However, rocket fuel for a small
craft is not that expencive so it's really a question of how much inspection /
repare the vehicle needs. A light craft could reinter the atmosphere with
minimal heating, and you can build reasonably efficent but vary simple rocket
engines so there is plenty of room to simplyfy matence. So, in theory we
chould build a fairly cheap and reusable shutte to LEO. The real question is
could NASA build such a ship? IMO, that's really just a question of would
congress fund such a ship?

PS: The space shuttle's never left the R&D stage. Practicly every flight
change some significant internal system. If they had simply said "these are
good enough" then the program would have been far cheaper.

~~~
berntb
>>could NASA build such a ship? IMO, that's really just a question of would
congress fund such a ship?

Sigh. To repeat a trivial point for the _third_ time...

You have the opinion that NASA after 1970 could do any large project and push
costs _down_ by a factor of ten.

If a serious argument could be made, then one of the NASA fan boys would have
posted it...

~~~
onemoreact
It's a question of incentives. The costs of sending 100 people up instead of
the normal crew of 7 and a lot of cargo on a shuttle mission would have been
minimal. However, there was no real point to sending that many people into
space at the same time and the risk from failure would have been insane.

So if there was some need for thousands of people to be sent into space per
year then NASA could design and operate a fairly low cost per launch system.
However, once they started operating highly capable but delicate system added
to the fact there was little value in sending more than a token number of
people into space in a given year then costs are going to spiral out of
control even if the desgin was reasonable.

PS: I have even heard the argument that NASA benefited from the amount of
spectacle involved in the shuttle program. If they had built something that
looked and operated like a 747 nobody would have cared but build something
that takes thousands of controlled explosions and then sit’s on a huge ball of
fire into space and wow you must be doing something important.

~~~
berntb
>>if there was some need for thousands of people to be sent into space per
year then NASA could design and operate a fairly low cost per launch system.

For the second time to you (4th time overall) -- uh... no. That account is
less than two weeks old. I am probably being trolled.

~~~
onemoreact
That's a strong dismissal with little evidence to back it up. I am not saying
that I expect NASA to become a lean organization tomorrow, just that there
incentives are all messed up.

Anyway, you might think that government organizations are always full of bloat
but compare the SSA with your 401k and you will find they are vary low
overhead. The problem with government organizations is they tend to make
really big a stupid decisions for political reasons, aka if SSA had invested
in a mix of stocks and bonds vs. US treasury bonds people would be talking
about how over funded it was right now. Instead the SSA “surplus” was used to
subsidize government borrowing and treated as yet another agency.

PS: I have 64 Karma on a 2 week old act that may suggest something about my
activities. If you actually have something meaningful to say feel free to
support your argument, but right now I am feeling trolled.

~~~
berntb
11 days, to be specific. All the trolls get some karma, I think you are marked
as new accounts below 50 now? If you aren't a troll, don't repeat claims
without answering people's points from a new account.

A link re the Shuttle: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2011/07/lunch-wi...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2011/07/lunch-with-the-astronaut.html)

Bye.

~~~
onemoreact
"Tethers in space, break" for a long number of reasons. NASA has actually
tried to use tethers in space several times and found a lot of surprisingly
tough issues. One of the least obvious induced current, but read up on it as
there is some really interesting engendering involved. So, from the
perspective of someone who you want to ride in a tin can at the end of one of
these you are really going to need to say, if these break the occupants
survive due the ability for each half to reinter the atmosphere, be rescued or
whatever.

Now run the numbers for a version of that a reasonable person would actually
be willing to live in for a full year and perhaps he would be willing to
discuss it. However, a moon base is probably both cheaper and safer.

------
carlcoryell
Maciej Cegłowski's essay "A Rocket to Nowhere" is a much better description of
how and why the Shuttle was doomed by political and military considerations.

<http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm>

~~~
tokenadult
Great essay, thanks. "And we must remember that space is called space for a
reason - there is nothing in it, at least not where the Shuttle goes, save for
a few fast-moving pieces of junk from the last few times we went up there,
forty years ago. The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and
we have not paid them a visit since 1972."

------
stretchwithme
What amazes me is how uncritically the media usually treats this issue.

A great many things the government does follow a similar over-promising,
under-delivering pattern. The notion that perception is reality and a loss of
confidence is the worst thing that can ever happen conspire to stifle public
questioning.

We see it with Afghanistan, stimulus spending, TARP. As justifications don't
pan out, something else is used to justify things.

Of course, the real root cause is that those paying for things are far removed
from the decision making process. If voters individually decided whether they
were going to be taxed $500 a year for continuing the shuttle or $100 a year
for returning to disposable rockets, this program would have been killed long
ago.

But everything is put in one big pot and dollars borrowed to conceal the
actual ultimate pain. There are so many deceptive aspects to how this
operates, its difficult to describe or even grasp.

~~~
kingkawn
I would think that the people are hacker news of all places would not get
caught up in media-hype trends about how all government spending is waste bla
bla. NASA tried to change the paradigm of space travel. It didn't work the way
they'd hoped, but that's the risk of trying something different. Comparing it
to TARP and Afghanistan is a ridiculous non sequitur that only works if you
buy into the anti-government yammering in the first place.

~~~
econgeeker
So, am I to understand that your position is that NASA is efficient in its
spending, and that this who think governments are inefficient (cost wise) at
achieving goals are caught up in a "media-hype" that is "antigovernment"?

If that is correct, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much
with such limited resources?

~~~
saturn
Indeed, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much with such
limited resources, 30 years later and having benefited immensely from NASA's
pioneering work?

NASA could definitely be run better but let's compare apples to apples. I'm
sure any given engineer at SpaceX has a computer on his desk superior to the
entire world's computational capacity at the time the shuttle was designed.

~~~
true_religion
I think its disingenuous to say that.

People are not comparing SpaceX of today to NASA of 30 years ago.

They're comparing contemporary NASA to contemporary SpaceX and finding NASA is
lacking.

~~~
stretchwithme
NASA could also be compared to the Russian program and found lacking. And the
Russians still have an ability to put things into space, while the US now
doesn't.

------
joblessjunkie
This article is mis-titled.

It makes an easy argument for "debacle," but omits the difficult "how to
avoid" part.

~~~
mkn
I was a little disappointed, as well. It looks like it was perhaps titled by
an editor or, conversely, edited down to its introduction so that the title no
longer matched.

That said, I do hope, now that the program is gone and the cheer-leading
apparatus can (hopefully) no longer feed on it, that the program can come to
be analyzed with reference to its poor safety, limited capability, high cost,
and needless complexity, rather than with reference to nostalgia and whatever
other reality-distortion field that was present that allowed it to receive so
little critical attention in the popular mind.

------
flocial
I think the F-35 is a better example. The selling point was re-usable
components for three different jets. The only thing soaring are project costs.

~~~
lutorm
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the F-35 is built by Lockheed-Martin, not by the
government.

------
jsherry
For the most part, the author is correct: by most objective measures, the
shuttle was a disaster. One point I disagree with is his criticism of "the
teachers who spoke about it in admiring tones to their students".

Is it really that wrong to try and get kids excited about engineering and
science?

~~~
sliverstorm
No, so long as it's science with solid economics and business sense behind it.
[/tongue in cheek]

------
cpr
Amen!

Though how we could ever expect federal government programs be efficient and
cost-effective is beyond me, when the work is being done by the governmental
agency itself.

We're much better at using governmental funds (which I still think are taken
largely by theft) via agencies like DARPA, which operate through private
industry and the educational establishments.

~~~
nostromo
NASA does work with private industry and educational establishments. In fact
Lockheed Martin manufactured many components on the Space Shuttle and will be
building its replacement as well.
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5748366>

I don't share your faith that this is a recipe for efficiency, as both Boeing
and Lockheed regularly lobby congress for wasteful spending (however, usually
for defense, not NASA).

~~~
econgeeker
I think the gap between your perspectives comes from the existence of lobbying
and the bid process not being open. Further, there is less competition because
the previous control over the entire industry that NASA enjoyed prevented many
possible competitors to LM or Boeing from getting off the ground.

Of course there is a wide array of subcontractors involved in NASA projects. I
don't think anyone who accuses NASA of being inefficient thinks that NASA
workers do all the manufacturing, etc.

------
exratione
This is also a good perspective, albeit old:

[http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_n...](http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_nafa.shtml)

"This country was bounded to the West by a desert. One day a telescope built
on one of the country's mountains revealed what looked like sea far away
beyond the desert which would have to be crossed in order to discover if there
was habitable land on the coast. So the politicians got together and
established a government agency to send some people through the desert. They
called it the National Agricultural Frontier Administration, NAFA for short,
and charged it with a dramatic task to demonstrate the vigour of the nation:
it would carry out a 'mission' to send people right through the desert to the
West coast of the continent and bring them back safely, within a decade."

~~~
cfgvjkljhgfb
The funny thing is that it's accuracy hasn't changed - which tells you all you
need to know about Nasa

~~~
gus_massa
I hadn't read this article before, and I couldn't find the publication date in
the page.

The first time it appears in the Wayback Machine is in December 2002.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20021217044832/http://www.spacefu...](http://web.archive.org/web/20021217044832/http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_nafa.shtml)

~~~
cfgvjkljhgfb
It circulated inside Nasa (and STSci) for a long time before it surfaced on
the internet

