NASA T-shirts: "WWED?"

[Dr Mordrid]

LA Times....

Can NASA change in order to survive?

The ability of a private California company to send an unmanned capsule around Earth relatively cheaply is raising questions about the space agency; many warn it must become leaner and more efficient to survive.

Reporting from Cape Canaveral, Fla. —

Early this month, Hawthorne-based rocket venture SpaceX launched an unmanned version of its Dragon capsule into orbit, took it for a few spins around Earth and then brought it home with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

The total cost — including design, manufacture, testing and launch of the company's Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule — was about $800 million.

In the world of government spaceflight, that's almost a rounding error. And the ability of SpaceX to do so much with so little money is raising serious questions about NASA.

The agency that once stood for American technical wizardry is starting to lose its luster. Inside NASA, some employees have taken to wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the letters "WWED," which stands for "What Would Elon Do?" — a reference to SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk, the Internet tycoon who invested his own fortune in pursuit of his dream of sending humans into space.

Aerospace industry executives, NASA contractors and employees all warn that unless the storied agency can become leaner and more efficient in an era of shrinking federal budgets, it could find itself becoming a historical footnote.
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[degrub]

yeah, and all the basic R&D was paid for by NASA/DoD over the last 5 decades. i seem to remember that NASA gave them a very good starting point for motor design, etc.

Guess they didn't count those $$$.

"But, Geyer said, the real change has been cutting down on supervision of Lockheed "to really focus on the higher-risk items and not all the stuff Lockheed knows how to do."

"Lockheed had a lot of skill in building flight hardware. NASA doesn't have to watch that a lot," he said."

They better watch out. Depends on the experience level versus application and who has it. If NASA has it, then they would be foolish to let L run their own show. If L has the experience , then NASA should get out of the way. It's inexperienced people leading experienced technical teams that drive up cost needlessly. Not to mention compensating for lack of experience by enforcing extensive paperwork systems.

Cost is only part of the picture. Congress and the media will be up in arms at the first failure of a manned Dragon questioning why NASA let them cut corners. NASA has run a failure rate of about 1:50 to 1:20 missions. The commercial folks are unknown.


This is looking very much like the Human Genome Project (NIH+) and Craig Ventner (Celera) tiff where faster better cheaper ended up having the use the HGP data in order to make sense of their data mess and assemble all the fragments in the proper order with a high chance of being right. It was good to have the contest since it sped the overall project up, but the Venter could not do it alone. i guess NASA is in the same boat as the NIH was.

Now if the neocon media runs with this and successfully trims NASA's wings, look out manned space flight - your days are numbered.

[Dr Mordrid]

yeah, and all the basic R&D was paid for by NASA/DoD over the last 5 decades. i seem to remember that NASA gave them a very good starting point for motor design, etc.

Of course there's some heritage, but it's not all NASA's. As to he engine design: not true.

The Merlin engine evolved from a simplified design that former veteran TRW engineer Tom Mueller was working on in his garage in 2001 - a kerosene-LOX engine that used a simple pintile injector instead of the usual (and very expensive) 'shower-head' injector. Pintiles had been used before, Grumman had one in the Apollo LEM descent engine, but not so simple/cheap. Everything else flowed from a KISS philosophy and vertical integration of the engineering.

This was the key to lowering the cost of Merlin and making it a production-line engine. Now SpaceX builds more engines than anyone else worldwide. Using monocoque stages with their own friction stir welding hardware also helps. Costs will go down further now that SpaceX will be building their own turbo-pumps instead of farming them out.

If you want to compare how they do things look to Russia: horizontal stage integration, simple & solid designs, basic pads (NASA's
Ares-1X launch pad cost more than SpaceX's entire program!), multiple engines, kerosene/LOX fuel, etc.

They better watch out. Depends on the experience level....Not to mention compensating for lack of experience....

A common mistaken notion is SpaceX's "lack of experience." Problem with it is that they hired veteran engineers from NASA, TRW (Mr. Mueller), Lockheed Martin, Boeing-Rocketdyne, Northrop-Grumman, etc. to lead their efforts, along with the cream of the nations aerospace engineering schools as well as experienced line engineers. Ex: of the top 10 grads at the U of M aerospace program last year SpaceX hired most of them. Now grads line up to get in there.

Congress and the media will be up in arms at the first failure of a manned Dragon questioning why NASA let them cut corners. NASA has run a failure rate of about 1:50 to 1:20 missions. The commercial folks are unknown.

NASA's shuttle failures have been multi-causal: the lack of a launch abort system, the use of solid boosters, poor judgment (both the Challenger and Columbia) and an exposed & easily damaged tile system.

SpaceX's Dragon will have a launch abort system with a huge over-margin and 2 ways to land: thrusters and 3 parachutes, of which it only needs 1 system to work - and only 1 parachute if that's the method. Instead of fragile tiles it will have PICA-X, their own version of PICA good for even Mars re-entry and up to 100 LEO re-entries without refurbishment. It's also covered during launch.

Then there is Falcon 9's ability to continue the mission even if 2 engines give out, or even blow, due to having 9 and all of them being armored against the fragmentation of the others and running a relatively low chamber pressure vs other launchers. If anything, it may be the safest launcher around.

Now if the neocon media runs with this and successfully trims NASA's wings, look out manned space flight - your days are numbered.

Actually, both the liberal and conservative media are impressed. The naysayers tend to be those with vested interests in the existing, outdated, paradigm - especially Senators with NASA centers or shuttle-supported industries like ATK, the manufacturer of the shuttles SRB solid engines. SpaceX is also the ones saying manned is their mission - NASA funds to help with the abort system is just to speed it up. If government wants to cede that mission to commercial interests, that's their problem.

Know what a parallel situation could be? US astronomical telescopes. They've evolved to the point where the US govt. funds only about half of them (through NOAO and NSF) - the rest are now private, state university-private joint ventures or pure university projects. US space flight is also moving to something like this, with parallel public and private crewed space programs

[cjolley]

Of course there's some heritage...

That's a silly thing to say.
They are standing on top of 70+ years of mostly government funded aerospace research.
There is no reason to denigrate the accomplishments of NASA.
None of the new aerospace startups could even exist if they really had to start from scratch.

[Dr Mordrid]

I agree about the heritage, but NASA has been allowed to become a shadow of what it once was and is not really open to internal innovation, hence Orion being "Apollo on steroids" instead of something more innovative like Dragon - lighter/more efficient use of volume because of its more spherical shape, PICA TPS etc.

Now NASA's a federal jobs program whose innovations get defunded on the cusp of becoming operational for political, or more often mismanagement, reasons. That new blood is necesssry to continue them (Bigelow's habs, VASIMR, Dream Chaser etc.), and why the insurrectionist Direct project came about among NASA staffers, is a huge symptom of the problem, and why NASA staffers themselves are asking "WWED?"

The line engineers that made it work are leaving because of the bad practices of the NASA managers & Congress and the cutbacks they caused, and guess where they're going? SpaceX and the other NewSpace companies.

[cjolley]

And I agree about the barnacle encrusted bureaucracy.
But that happens to all large organizations over time, not just government ones.

It would be interesting to know whether the engineers were leaving for idealistic reasons,
or because the pay is better than government pay

[Dr Mordrid]

According to the ones I've talked to it depends on the engineer. Many left because of the challenge, others for the chance to create things NASA's culture won't permit and others because the agency is laying people off while SpaceX etc. are expanding. It's certainly not the pay (fewer bemefits than federal jobs) or better hours (80/week at peak.)

Imagine what it's like for them;

they have a problem on the pad that causes a hot abort. They offload the fuel, put everyone who designed or even touched the part in a room or videoconference within an hour, make a decision, lower & roll it back in the hangar if necessary, fix it, re-fuel and launch either the same day or within 48 hours unless a major part (engine etc.) is needed from California.

This is possible because their system is designed from the ground up for rapid processing - as short as 1 hour, which they have achieved with Falcon 1. A similar fault at NASA/LockMart/Boeing would cause weeks of meetings, in triplicate, before a decision is made much less fixed.

Afterwards the whole industry is abuzz about their "right stuff," not NASA's. How must that feel?

[Dr Mordrid]

An example of how NASA's procedures work was just posted by one of their engineers to another forum. Might prove instructive -

How many NASA engineers does it take to screw in a bolt?

Take a generic piece of Criticality 2 hardware:

1) First there needs to be a released, CM-controlled drawing signed off by (among others) a stress analyst who does calculations to ensure that the bolt is not being over- or under-torqued. The drawing must be referenced later by the technician to verify the proper torque range of the bolt.

2) Then a project engineer needs to write a Task Performance Sheet (TPS) that is no fewer than 4 pages long that documents, in excruciating detail, which bolt to tighten, what tools to use, the exact locations of every piece of hardware involved throughout the entire process. The part numbers, serial numbers, and lot numbers of every part involved are recorded on the TPS. (The work instruction document defining the TPS process is 55 pages)

3) The TPS needs to be signed by the Project Engineer, his/her manager, and two Quality Engineers (who designate "Mandatory Inspection Points - MIPs - where a Quality Assurance Specialist needs to monitor the process); additional signatures (e.g. stress or materials experts) may be needed depending on the job. Then a Quality Assurance Specialist looks over the paper, approves it, and sends it to the Quality Assurance Records Center (QARC) where it is scanned, copied, and then placed in a basket to be worked.

4) Oh, we need the bolt, too. The bolt has to meet certain quality and reliability specifications, so it is purchased from an approved vendor and is most likely a MIL-spec part. When the vendor ships the part, it must be traceable by lot or serial number and accompanied by a Certificate of Conformance (CoC). The Receiving department will open the package, inspect the parts and make sure the CoC is present. Then some percentage of bolts from that lot of bolts will go to the Receiving Inspection and Test Facility (RITF) and be tested to ensure that the bolts actually meet the MIL Specs (in spite of the CoC being present). Then the RITF report is attached to the lot of bolts, with the CoC, and they all go to bonded storage.

5) The Project Engineer takes the TPS to the bond room, and someone pulls the bolt off the shelf, then a QAS makes sure that the proper part was pulled and that the CoC and RITF report are indeed attached. The parts are labeled and bagged and the Project Engineer is called to pick up the paper and part.

6) These get walked to the work area, then the Project Engineer rounds up two QASs and a union technician who has received special training on how to tighten bolts (no joke). The technician gathers the calibrated tools.

7) The technician tightens the bolt and records the tightening torque on the TPS. The QAS and NT QAS stamp the TPS to verify that they witnessed the bolt being torqued. (While the bolt is actually being tightened, 3-4 people are present watching.)

8) The Project Engineer and one of the QASs will take the hardware back to the bond room or wherever it needs to go. If the hardware is going back to the bond room, it has to be cleaned and sealed in a bag first.

9) The Project Engineer takes the TPS back to the quality office, where one or two QASs will go through the document and make sure that all of the required information was recorded and each step in the process was stamped or signed by all of the required people. Then the QAS will stamp the TPS "closed" and send it back to the QARC office, who will scan and copy it again.

I'm not going to debate the wisdom of any of these steps; any one of them are defensible in some instance. But I count around a dozen people immediately involved in the process and in general I'd say it takes a couple of days, assuming none of the required people find something they view as amiss. I'll also point out that this is the process, as I understand it, as of today; every few weeks someone will get a wild hair up their ass and add another requirement.

[degrub]

That is about one level up from what is required for commercial aircraft work on critical systems. Main difference is self sign off and reduced number of independent checks.

Sounds worse reading than it is in practice, but the number of people involved can be excessive. It is because all people make mistakes, even highly trained, checklist using, procedure following, experienced mechanics.

i expect they were trying to satisfy a fault tree failure rate and just kept adding supposedly independent layers of procedures and eyes to get it down so the risk of a fatal mission was below the target. Something about "the most complicated machine ever built" might have driven that - too many opportunities for failure to get a reasonable mission failure rate that NASA could sell. Experience proved that they were optimistic anyway.

All because human life was valued to excess and NASA could not afford the PR hit and the expense of replacing shuttles. i think that is one of the reasons that SpaceX and others are faster, cheaper, better? than what NASA has been able to do. At least until the first casualty, then the intolerance for mission fatalities will creep back in with a vengance.

[Dr Mordrid]

Well, it's already having an effect - NASA cut the paper chase Lockheed-Martin will do for Orion by 2/3, lowering costs by 47% and speeding them up considerably.

Problem is that still leaves them in a relatively bad place; with a spacecraft design that's overweight & has relatively poor cabin space utilization. Then there are still the expenses needed to man-rate Delta IV Heavy, currently our largest rocket & the only one that can lift Orion until Falcon 9 Heavy arrives (almost 59% more up-mass than D-IVH) or someone comes up with the money to build a man-rated Atlas V Heavy.

OTOH Falcon 9 was designed to be man-rated and Dragon isn't in need of a diet.