A Few Word About This Picture

Briefing on Tile Repair

I ran across this picture from the NASA public affairs archives yesterday and the more I think about it, the more it illustrates some principles that are in effect even today.

First of all it is a picture of me getting to brief Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee and her staffers.  Just another picture that JSC public affairs took of Wayne briefing yet another dignitary, lots of those to go around.  Mid 2005 and we were trying furiously to get the shuttle back into flight.  Periodically – frequently – we were visited by various elected officials or their staff who would check on our progress.  After all we were burning through a great deal of taxpayer money and they had the responsibility to see that we were not wasting it.

The particular topic under discussion at this photo stop was detection and repair of damaged thermal protection tiles during flight.  That is a pretty arcane technical subject, and Congresswoman Jackson-Lee and her staffers were trying their best to stay focused.  In the background you can see my boss, JSC Center Director Jeff “Beak” Howell – a former Marine Corps Lieutenant General.  He is very interested in how well I can convince our visitors that we are making satisfactory progress.  His expression does not lead me to believe that I was doing a good job when the shutter snapped on this picture.  In the background you see many NASA civil servants and contractors who were distracted from their normal duties for the day in order to put on a well organized and effective presentation.  They are all quietly pulling for me to get the explanation over with so they can go back to their “real” jobs.

Of course, Congresswoman Jackson-Lee’s district does not include JSC, nor is she on any space-related legislative committees.  Her constituents are not terribly interested in space, her district in largely urban downtown Houston was and is primarily interested in jobs, civil rights, and related matters.  But the congresswoman is a member of the Texas congressional delegation and is well respected in the House of Representatives, so it was important for her to understand what we were doing. It was important for us to make sure she heard it right.

I realized that Congresswoman Jackson-Lee was not getting the whole story.  I changed track from the technical discussion of chemical interactions required to form a good bond between the silica tiles and the organic repair material in the vacuum of space.  Instead, I decided to talk about the work that NASA people do in the schools in the area –  including in her district – encouraging children to stay in school and study, especially to study the hard subjects of math and science.  Fortunately I had recently been given a good briefing on the subject and could quote statistics and give a couple of illustrative anecdotes.  Then we started talking about employment provided by the space program to small disadvantaged businesses in the Houston area – in her district.  Good jobs with good benefits, both professional and blue collar jobs were provided through contracts with SDBs.  Now I really had her attention, and her aides were taking furious notes.  Then our time was over, the entourage moved on to the next show-and-tell stop.  Beck told me later that I had “done good”.

So what can we glean?

First: all politics are local, congress faces election every two years and the constituents want to know what their representative has done for them lately.  If the constituency is interested in jobs, all government work had better look like a jobs program.  Sorry if you don’t like it, but that is the fact of political life in America, then, now, and in the future.

Second:  not everybody is awed by the glamour and romance of spaceflight, not everybody is a tech geek; but we are asking all taxpayers to make a compulsory contribution to the space program.  If one wishes to use the taxpayer’s money one had better be ready to justify it in very concrete, non-romantic terms.  Sorry if you don’t like it, but that is the fact of political life in America, then, now, and in the future.

Third:  government bureaucracies are inherently inefficient.  After all, they have to cater to all kinds of political directives.  Just look at all those folks standing by to give their part of the show.  But without doing that, support won’t be there when the budget votes come up.  And those SDB contracts were in place because the Federal Acquisition Regulations require a certain percentage of taxpayer dollars go those type of businesses.  Does the FAR lead to inefficiency?  Maybe, maybe not.  Do you hate the FAR?  Get over it; the FAR is not going away; it is the price of doing real business with the government.  Sorry if you don’t like it, but that is the fact of political life in America, then, now, and in the future.

If you want to get things done in this democracy, you have to build a political coalition that agrees with you.  Standing on your soap box in the park railing against those who disagree with you may satisfy your ego but it will not get your program enacted.  Reaching out to other folks who have different perspectives and interests than yours is exactly what the political system is all about.

And one more note: one of the highlights of my college years was a personal meeting with the predecessor of the congresswoman:  Barbara Jordan.  You might think that a while middle class techno-geek college student would not have found much in common with her.  Just the opposite; true leadership and heroism outshines merely local and temporal politics.  Barbara Jordan will always remain one of my heroes.  There is a point in that story, too.

Living West of the 100th Meridian

Western prairie

“When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it.”  – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

“The caravan seemed a miserably frail and Lilliputian thing as it crept over the boundless prairie toward the sky line. Of road or trail there lay not a trace ahead; as soon as the grass had straightened up again behind, no one could have told the direction from which it had come or whither it was bound. The whole train–Per Hansa with his wife and children, the oxen, the wagons, the cow, and all–might just as well have dropped down out of the sky.”  – Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag

“It became impossible to find tracks in this country, because the grass straightened up again as soon as it was trodden down. “ – from the Journal of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado y Lujan

……………………………………………………………….

Growing up on the Llano Estacado, west of the 100^th meridian, I never understood the description of my native country as “the treeless prairie”.  Of course there were no trees; trees grow only where they are planted and tended by people, or on the high western mountains.  Out west, the sky is the most fascinating; rarely overcast, many days pure blue and uninterrupted, the entertainment is watching the clouds in their endless variety grow and contract and march across the blue and endless sky.  No limits there.

It wasn’t until later in my life that I traveled to places where the trees grow . . . naturally.  Places where the land is not . . . flat.  Places where hills and dales and forests block out the broad expanse of the sky.  To this day I get a little . . . nervous . . . hemmed in . . . when I travel through the piney woods forests of the South, or the hardwood forests of the Midwest.  Rolling hills don’t enchant me.  You can’t see the horizon there.  It all seems so . . . constraining.  It’s not what I’m used to.

The 100^th meridian west marks the a change in the ecosystem of North America where the precipitation no longer supports large forests; or even scattered trees.  The geography from there to the Rocky Mountains is dominated by . . . flatness.

The earliest explorers came, saw the plains, were frightened by it, and proclaimed it uninhabitable and left.  Later others, hardier souls, came and flourished there.  My grandparents came; and so the prairie is my earliest memory.

As I have lived many years on the coastal plains of Texas, I enjoy the flatlands here, but there are just too many trees blocking the sky to be comfortable.  In recent months I have been traveling a extensively by car: across central and western Texas; across central and western Oklahoma, across eastern New Mexico, across eastern Colorado; across eastern Wyoming and even across Kansas and Nebraska.  They are all alike to me:  comfortable; like home.  No trees; just flat country where you can rest your eyes and see the full dome of the sky all at one glance.  Home.

People joke about the lack of scenery.  I don’t get the joke. It is full of scenery to me.

Does that sound crazy?  But think about it:  where you grow up – what you experienced as a child – that place will always be home to you.  If you grew up on the seashore, or in the mountains, or in a great city – that would always be familiar and comforting to you. 

The early pioneers thought that they would go crazy living in “the great American desert”.  Some of them truly did.  Read any of the works of Willa Cather, or of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or any author who grew up on the prairie and you will see how the wide open spaces affected those from the wooded, hilly east.  How much more impact was there for the immigrants from Scandinavia who populate O. E. Rolvaag’s masterpiece.  The only sound they heard was the grass bending in the wind:  “tish-ah”.

A couple of years ago the National Geographic featured North America’s Great Plains and I was struck by how few of us there are: some sections between the 100^th meridian and the Rockies have a population density lower than that of Greenland. 

But we, the children of the prairie pioneers, think of it as home, and always will.  Nothing is strange there for us, just the familiar sky and wind and grassland.

Magnificent Desolation

So, will our great grandchildren someday think of Aldrin’s “magnificent desolation” as home?  Will they be uncomfortable with places that have trees and . . . air? 

Is it too much to imagine that somewhere west of another 100^th meridian, the great great grandchildren of our grandchildren will look west at the shining peaks in the distance and feel that there is nothing strange with the rusty appearance of Olympus Mons and its neighboring peaks?

Human beings are infinitely adaptable.  The most extreme places on this planet have their admirers, those who wish to live there.  Just because it is not your home, don’t imagine that your great great grandchildren won’t live there – and love it.

Tish-ah

What Would Rick and Gus and Dick Want?

NASA observes a solemn day of remembrance the last Thursday in January to remember the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.  That is well and proper, a fitting observance.  Remembrance Day serves to remind us of the dangers and difficulties of space flight and our individual role in preventing future accidents.

It is also a day to remember what it means to be a hero.  Remembrance Day inspires us to attempt the difficult and dangerous when the potential reward is important and worthwhile. 

Those lessons should be remembered on the other 364 days of the year as well.  Sometimes I get caught up in hectic daily busy-ness and forget; but never for very long.  Ghosts of heroes departed pay regular visits at my house.

I never knew Gus Grissom or Ed White or Roger Chaffee; they died while I was still in grade school.  I knew them only as heroes, seen from afar, on television or in magazines and newspapers. 

But I worked with Dick Scobee, El Onizuka, and Judy Resnik.  And I worked even more closely with Rick Husband and KC (Kalpana Chawla).  These I knew well; trained together, struggled alongside, shared jokes together; they were my colleagues.

The others: Ron McNair, Mike Smith, Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Willy McCool, Mike Anderson, Dave Brown, Laurel Clarke, Illan Ramon; I was in meetings, saw them in the halls, but can’t really say that I knew them well.

And I have other colleagues whose names are written on the Astronaut Memorial; they died on duty if not in space.

Biographies have been written of them, their stories have been told on television and movies.  So nine, twenty six, or thirty five years later, what can we say about them that hasn’t already been said?

Just one question:  what would they want today? 

Do you think that they would be proud of their country which can no longer send humans into space?  Do you think they would be proud of their space agency which has no coherent plan to continue with exploration?  Do you think that they would be proud of their government which has fallen into bickering so badly that even the ½ of 1 percent of the federal budget that used to enable the future has been significantly reduced?  Or do you think that they would be proud of a commercial sector that is long on PR and short on delivering new commercial spacecraft?

One of the candidates for the nation’s highest office offers an imaginative space initiative and the other candidates poke fun at it.  I don’t know which is worse:  offering a goal with no resources or belittling the idea of having goals at all.  Personally I am disgusted with the whole process – and the polls tell me that I am far from alone.  I wonder what Gus and Dick and Rick would have thought of that, too.

It is clearly presumptuous on my part to imagine what those heroes who made the supreme sacrifice would want.  But they were all on record, before they died, giving voice to what they wanted.  That record is one we can listen to, read, study, and evaluate.

Without exception, they were going into space because they thought it was worth the cost, worth the risk.  They saw the future out there. 

It is impossible to build a business plan on exploration of the unknown; some decisions aren’t amenable to the quarterly profit and loss statement.   Seward’s folly, Jefferson’s gamble, Teddy’s canal – they were all the butt of jokes and sarcasm.  Yet, America, the land of opportunity, was not built by skeptics.  America was built by people who were willing to risk everything on a dimly perceived future.  Facing the unknown frontier changed Americans and made us what we are.  We would be a lesser people if our great-grandparents had not chosen those challenges.  The cost was high and many did not live to see the results of their gamble.  But as a nation we continued on and became great.

Now where is our frontier?  Making corporate profits on Wall Street by moving money around?  Now what will inspire our children?  Playing video games that are made in overseas sweatshops? 

You know better than that. Without the challenge of a frontier stagnation, mediocrity, and decline is our guaranteed future.

Dick and Rick and Gus and the others knew that what they were about was supremely important.  Not because of the profit and loss; not because of the potential for near term gain; but because being on the frontier changes us.  The challenge makes us better; it clarifies our values; it sets our sights on a better future.  It illuminates what really is important. 

It reveals heroes who inspire our children and grandchildren and will inspire their children to strive for greater things. 

That is, I think, what Rick and Gus and Dick would want.

Whither America’s Human Space Program?

The 2012 Presidential campaign dominates the news but space policy rarely gets mentioned; and when it does the mention is often ill-informed or very abstract.  Perhaps that will change.

The old paradigms supporting America’s space program have faded; China has not replaced the Soviet Union as an opponent which requires a national demonstration of technical capabilities.  Spinoffs and jobs provided from space are overlooked in the larger economic mess.  Science is nice but hardly urgent when the debate centers on the national debt or the social safety net. 

Somehow, the ½ of 1 percent of the federal budget that gets spent purely on the future has gotten overlooked.

Almost three years ago, the Review of Human Plans Committee (aka “the Augustine Commission”) was announced.  I know we all had great hopes of that commission and its report.  Whatever you may think of their work – and I believe a lot of it was good – the political leadership in Washington has made hash of the nation’s space policy.  Not only did the current administration fail to adopt any of the major options which Augustine reported as “worthy of a great nation”, but the Congress has decided to fight the administration’s initiatives at every step.  Paul Spudis just named 2011 as America’s space “Annus Horribilis”.  It has really been a lousy three years.

Not that there haven’t been great accomplishments; Hubble still making discoveries every day, as is Kepler; the ISS is fully crewed with research going on every day; Curiosity is on its way to Mars; even the Shuttle made a graceful and successful dénouement.   But the future, the plans and policies for the future; there lies a sad state of affairs.

In the spring of 2009, Bill Gerstenmaier asked me to be one of the NASA support staff to help the Augustine Commission effort.  He also assigned one of the senior NASA HQ staff, Tom Cremins, to work with me.  So all summer, Tom and I played a tag team along with several other NASA folks helping to provide support to the Augustine Commission.  I got to know Tom really well during this period and have a great deal of respect for his judgment and knowledge.  That friendship was my best personal reward for supporting Augustine. 

Now, Bill and Tom are in the final stages of preparing a paper reviewing the value of human spaceflight to the nation.  In the midst of bickering and roadblocks, they remain positive and are looking for the way ahead.

Many of us, including my friend Tom, are gathering in Boulder, Colorado, in less than two weeks to review this situation and hopefully find meaningful ways to explain the importance of space exploration in these days.  You can join us for this discussion; see   http://sas.data-engineering.com/

I’ll give you a report on the outcome in about two weeks.

Requirements

I told this story at the ISPCS meeting last month, so pardon me if you have heard it already.  It is a mostly true story.

Recently I traveled to a somewhat remote government facility.  At the mid-day break in our meetings, the facility director took us to the cafeteria where the food was excellent and very reasonably priced.  Then he surprised us with the story of how hard it had been to keep the cafeteria open.

It seems that the government regulations on cafeteria operators are quite lengthy.  There are requirements to buy the food ingredients from certified vendors to ensure high quality of the food.  There are requirements to post the nutritional content of the foods so that the customers can make informed choices about their meals.  There are requirements to provide “healthy choice” meals which must meet certain defined nutritional content.  A whole lot of common sense, very good requirements that almost anybody would agree are reasonable.

The outcome was that no operator could run the cafeteria there at a profit.  After going through several operators, the director had to provide almost $200 k a year to keep the cafeteria open.  Then the budget cuts came, and without the subsidy, the cafeteria closed.

Then, the facility director noticed that every day just before noon, a food truck appeared just outside the security gate of the facility and many of the employees would go outside the gate to purchase food from them.  This family owned operation did not provide “healthy choices”; they sold what the people wanted to buy.  The family owned operation did not buy their supplies from certified vendors; they went to the local grocery stores where the employees also bought their food.  Nobody got sick – after all the state still inspected the operation, just not the feds.  Nobody asked to see the nutritional information on the food. In fact the only problem was that there was a traffic jam at the security gate every noon-time, and a fair amount of lost productivity resulted from employees traveling down to the off-site food truck.

So the innovative, flexible facility director made a command decision; he invited the food truck operators to come into the empty cafeteria and sell food there; all of this under a non-standard contract mechanism.  Interesting, yes?

So the result; cafeteria food that was popular, even sought after; low prices; and a profitable business with the food truck proprietors making a reasonable return on their investment and labor.  No government subsidy required.  No traffic jams, no lost productivity, and everybody was happy.  Free enterprise at its finest! 

This is a mostly true story, after all.

So what do we learn from this?  Government requirements, even apparently good ones, come with a price.  Flexible, nimble commercial operations working in the competitive market can provide services and products tailored to their market better than government planners can mandate. 

Does this have anything to do with human spaceflight? 

You bet it does.

Standards

Recently I visited old colleagues at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility.  The Orbital Maneuvering System tanks, removed from Discovery, were sitting in the dirt, ready to be cut up and disposed of.  The toxic rocket fuel they held for most of their lives makes cleaning those tanks impossible, and it would be a hazard to museum goers to be exposed to fumes from residual rocket fuel hiding in those tanks.  So disposing of those high tech, precision built tanks is sad but necessary.

At an early point in my career at NASA I cared a great deal about the function of those tanks.  Because I was responsible to know how much gas was in the tank.

The gas gage on the shuttle never worked.  Think about it; the gas gage on your car depends on gravity to keep the fluid in an orderly manner in the bottom of the tank. In space, in microgravity, blobs of fluid just float around inside the tank.  How do you measure that?  Even more important; how do you get the fuel to the rocket engine?  In the Orbital Maneuvering System that question was answered by building in a fine mesh screen: double dutch twill weave.  The surface tension of the liquid would keep the gas out and fuel in where the pipe exited from the propellant tank.  But reusable tanks brought the concern that those screens could be damaged by vibration or shock during flight. Periodically between flights the screens were tested using a “bubble point” device.  A good pressure check with no bubbles meant the screens had no holes and were working properly. Those bubble point tests were done at White Sands.  Thereby hangs a tale.

Removing the OMS pods and shipping them to WSTF was a real logistical nightmare.  Somebody had the bright idea to move the bubble point testing equipment to KSC so the test could be performed without moving the pods.  Brilliant!  Until we ran into the standards issue.

For space flight hardware, the Shuttle program specified the standards used in the design, development, testing, and production.  But for ground test equipment, the space center where the equipment was used was responsible for the standards.  You might think that NASA would have a set of standards for things like welding a pressurized metal tank used in ground checkout of space flight hardware.  But if you thought that you would be wrong.  Much of the time NASA appears to be a loose confederation of 10 quasi independent fiefdoms, each pretty much in charge of their own business.  People often ask me what would I do if I were king of NASA for a day.  They expect me to say something like:  build this rocket, launch that satellite.  Rather I think how I would standardize the procurement processes, or the human resources procedures, or the engineering standards used across the agency.  But then I always was a dreamer, tilting at impossible windmills.  Launching rockets is easy; getting engineers to agree on standards is hard.

Back to our story . .  .

The WSTF had build the OMS tank screen bubble point testing equipment to the center recognized standard for welding pressure vessels.  I don’t remember whose standard that was, but it was a nationally recognized standard; let’s say it was a standard of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.  A good standard.  A recognized standard.  But not the only standard.

At the Kennedy Space Center, they use a different standard; I don’t remember which one, but let’s just say it was the standard of the American National Standards Institute.  Now I’ve probably gotten it wrong, but that is just the illustration.  Another standard; equally recognized, equally good. 

Unless you are a welding standards expert.  At KSC, as at every center, a Technical Expert is responsible to see that all hazardous equipment is built to their standards

Moving an ASME certified piece of hardware to the ANSI requiring Kennedy Space Center turned into a herculean job.  The KSC Technical Expert would NOT approve its use.  Some obscure, arcane difference existed between the standards that he never completely explained to me.  A poor program manager could not overrule the Independent Technical Expert, only the Center Director could do that.  So no matter how much we cajoled, persuaded, pleaded, accepting the equipment was a non-starter.  The Center Director said it was important to show support to his Technical Expert.

So what were we to do?  Continue the costly and somewhat dangerous practice of sending OMS tanks half way across the country?  Stop doing a necessary safety check of the screens and risk stranding astronauts in orbit some day? Build a new set of test equipment with the KSC required standard which would be a complete waste of the taxpayer’s money?  Or. . . accept a waiver. 

Yuck. 

The program manager had to sign a waiver to the requirement saying that we, the program management, accepted the risk of using non-standard equipment.  Yes, we were evil, blind to the risks involved, interested in only schedule and cost.  Or so you would think if you read the waiver description.

Small price to pay to get on with business, save money, eliminate other hazards.  Honestly, I never understood what the argument was about.  I think it was really about control.

So these days I read the NASA procurement request for the new Commercial Crew vehicles, and see that there is a long list of specifications that the companies must use.  Almost all of them have the notation that the bidder could propose using a different standard if they are willing to prove to the NASA Technical Expert that the proposed standard “meets or exceeds” the NASA requirement. 

And I think about that OMS bubble point equipment and wonder why we are making companies tilt at impossible windmills.  Building the rocket is easy.  Getting agreement on standards between engineers is hard.

Murphy Strikes

 

On April 29, 2002, the newly confirmed NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe planted a time bomb in the International Space Station program.  Coming to NASA from the US Office of Management and Budget, where he was Deputy Director, Mr. O’Keefe had a reputation as a bean counter and penny pincher.  Mr. O’Keefe publicly joked that he was not smart enough to be NASA Administrator.  But he knew the ISS program needed political capital in the US political arena.  Providing a big, flashy cut in the ISS program would cement O’Keefe’s position as NASA Administrator and aid in the annual budget fights in the US Congress.  One part of the ISS program caught his attention: the plan to develop a US “lifeboat” for the ISS.  Since the Russian Soyuz could fulfill that job – and the Russians were providing that service as part of their initial contribution to the international partnership – the Crew Rescue Vehicle (CRV or X-38) became an easy cut.  So on April 29, the total dependence on the Soyuz for the life of the ISS program was established by NASA fiat, with virtually no consultation with the other ISS partners.

Flash forward nearly a decade: with the ISS construction completed, the incredibly capable but ever risky NASA Space Shuttle is retired.  Not that the Shuttle could have replaced the Soyuz; Shuttle stays at the ISS were limited to about two weeks duration, not the six or more months an expedition crew stays aboard.  The logistics is not the problem: cargo and logistical resupply can be accommodated by the European Space Agency Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), two new cargo vehicles under development by the US commercial space industry – the Orbital Science Corporation Cygnus cargo vehicle launched on their Taurus–II launch vehicle, and the Space Exploration Technology’s Dragon capsule launched on their Falcon 9 rocket.  And, of course, the old reliable Russian Progress cargo vehicle. 

The Progress rides the same basic rocket as the Soyuz spacecraft.  Soyuz is now the only way to transport human beings to and from the ISS.  New spacecraft are being developed to provide future human transportation to the ISS.  Boeing, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Sierra Nevada are competing for US government development funds to build human transportation vehicles within the next 5 years.

But Mr. Murphy, the author if the law that states “if anything can go wrong, it will,” struck on August 24, just one month after the Shuttle was retired.  The third stage of the Russian launch vehicle suffered a critical failure and the 44^th Progress resupply vehicle to the ISS broke up and crashed in eastern Russia.  A state commission has concluded that the failure was a random one and that reinspections of the existing launch vehicles could clear them for early flight.  Time will tell, the Russians know their business well and I expect them to be successful. 

The implication is clear.  The O’Keefe time bomb is on short fuse.  If the Soyuz cannot fly safely, then the ISS will lose its human crew – and its reason for existence.  Until there is another craft that can not only carry human beings back and forth from the ISS but also stay there with them for six months as a life boat, the ISS is on shaky footing.  Not that the Russians are unreliable or their launchers are not dependable – quite the opposite.   But in the world of space flight, random failures do occur.  Even if the shuttle were still in service to carry human beings to the ISS, that would not be sufficient to keep the ISS staffed; the shuttle could only stay in flight for two to three weeks – not the six months required for the lifeboat function.  When will the Dragon, the Dreamchaser, or the CST-100 be ready to carry people and serve as a lifeboat?  Not soon enough. 

We could have really used that CRV.  It might even have become the basis of a mini-shuttle crew transport vehicle.  But no; it was eliminated for the most transient and banal of reasons.  The old adage against being “penny wise and pound foolish” has struck the human space effort once again. 

Or more to the point; every good space designer knows that a system with a critical single point failure is not a good system.  Reliability is key, but even then, having redundancy is the standard practice for a truly resilient system.