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Great comment at a post at NASAwatch (via):

A lot of folks here are wondering, rightly so, why it should take NASA 10+ years (counting from ESAS in 2005) to build a launcher and a capsule when we built different launchers and managed three different spacecraft in less time on the 1960s.

Current management would lead you to believe that this is purely a money issue.

As someone who worked on Ares and Orion for the last 3 years, I can assure you that this is NOT the primary problem.

The reason is multifaceted but the short answer is that NASA does not know what the heck it is doing. Its simply as plain as that. The managers in charge (Hanley, etc) have never managed any project at all in the past, much less one as complicated as the Cx program.

They made absolutely terrible decisions early on in sizing the capsule, not using existing EELVs, sticking with the "corndog" rocket, etc. But most importantly they never had the balls to change course when it became apparent that the architecture would not work as advertised. This was right after ESAS in 2005 concluded and they discovered they could not air-start an SSME so the upper stage engine had to change.

This caused a ripple effect that caused the SRB to be lengthened, the SRB nozzle to be extended, the rocket to grow taller, which caused more uncertainty in the flight characteristics (think wet noodle), and of course then thrust oscillation came to prime time last year which has turned Ares into a Rube Goldberg machine in trying to mitigate it (Lets put giant SPRINGS between the stages - great idea geniuses lets add weight to an overweight rocket!).

Let me tell you how NASA works. Engineers in the hallways lament that they can't believe we are designing a rocket and spacecraft this way....with very little redundancy in critical systems, no weight margin, severely restricted capabilities from what we initially wanted out of the system. And then these same engineers enter the meeting room and none will jump on the table and beat their fists and tell others what they *really* think. All of the design reviews come off swimmingly because everyone is drinking the kool-aid. You end up with a "forward work" chart a mile long but everyone smiles and exits stage left.

In a nutshell you have tremendous group-think within NASA. Why do they behave this way? I will give you a hint....its because they don't want to rock the boat and they all want to collect their paycheck with a minimum of fuss and they all want to be promoted on schedule - many, many people think that "everything will just work itself out".

So the answer to the initial question is that in the 1960s the people designing the hardware had real world experience building missles and they were not afraid to speak up and be heard - and they had leaders who were experts in their field - who knew what they were doing.

Today, none of the Cx leaders have any such experience. All of that experience died years ago when those people retired.

So there you go folks. Bush made a speech in 2004, ESAS was in 2005, and here we are years later with a rocket that should have been reworked long ago due to insufficient performance. Instead of doing this, NASA shrunk Orion and made it less capable. Now, Ares is on the chopping block and they say it will take longer to rework Orion....well no kidding this is true because of the asinine way in which they designed the systems.

Want a simple abort system as in the Apollo days? Nah...lets put active control in it with a computer and make it as complicated as possible.

Insufficient upmass issues? No problem lets just gut Orion and take out the redundant systems and rewrite the NASA Human Rating Plan (look it up - this is true!)

Oscillating issues with your rocket? Lets just put springs on it to "ride it out" and lets tell the crew they probably will not be able to read their displays near SRB burnout.

What a Joke.

I can tell you that within NASA a lot of people think that while SpaceX is "cool" they feel that "they don't know what they don't know" yet. While that may be true, it is absolutely embarassing that they could develop a rocket large enough to launch a capsule in a fraction of the time and cost as NASA. As long as spacex doesn't kill its first few hundred passengers, they and other up and coming companies will be the future of human spaceflight.

NASA has lost its way.

- Corndog Rocket

Emphasis mine.

Notice that Corndog emphasizes technical issues with Ares, and no wonder, he's an engineer. But his is not the only perspective, and it's rather obvious. For one thing, it has to be noted that Mike Griffin was an expert in the field. He knew what he was doing. And he was doing everything to create a massive jobs program that would be difficult to cancel. This is what ruined the program. As Rand Simberg once said, that Ares turned out such a turkey technically is only the icing on the cake. The program would still be disastrously wasteful even if the rocket it produced was a marvel of the world.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 02:02 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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