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William Gerstenmaier may not have been not particularly well-known to the general public, but as the associate administrator for human spaceflight at NASA he carried considerable influence in the space community. So when he was effectively terminated from his position on July 10, it reverberated both throughout the domestic as well as the international spaceflight community.
NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, who moved Gerstenmaier aside because of ongoing delays with the Space Launch System rocket and a concern that the senior official was not moving ahead quickly enough with the Artemis Moon program, has said new leadership will be in place "soon."
This will be a critical hire for Bridenstine, as his new associate administrator for human spaceflight will have a number of important and difficult calls to make upon taking the job—and not just concerning the White House's efforts to return to the Moon by 2024. In particular, in the coming months, Gerstenmaier's replacement will be chairing meetings called "Flight Readiness Reviews" that will give a green light to the first crewed missions from US soil since 2011.
SpaceX has already flown an uncrewed demonstration mission of its Dragon spacecraft. Boeing is likely to follow suit this fall with its own Starliner capsule, possibly as early as September. Then each company will have a critical test of its spacecraft's abort system, and then a chance to work through any final technical issues. But once that's done, one or both of the vehicles could be ready to launch astronauts from Florida by early 2020.
"Here’s where losing Gerstenmaier is going to hurt," said Wayne Hale, former space shuttle program manager and an adviser to NASA. "Bill was recognized by everybody as being technically well grounded and very astute. He was known to listen carefully, and to make his judgments based on good technical reasons."
"Somebody is going to be unhappy," Hale said of the Flight Readiness Reviews for the first crewed flights of the new vehicles. "I guarantee it. If it’s not one thing it will be another. There will be a contentious meeting and somebody is going to have to say, 'Well, I heard the story and I think we ought to go ahead.'"
That somebody will almost certainly be the new associate administrator for human spaceflight. And depending on his or her experience, NASA managers and rank-and-file employees may decide they don't know the new person or don't think he or she has the technical capacity to make such a complex decision. As a result, they may go talk to newspapers or members of Congress to air their concerns.
"It’s potentially going to be ugly, and they wouldn’t have done that with Bill," Hale said. "If Bill were there and said 'I heard you, and I think the risk is acceptable,' the NASA workforce would have gone along. Now, they’ve lost that."
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by khallow on Friday August 09 2019, @12:06PM (4 children)
NASA has always talked big about how reliable their stuff is. But in practice, a launch system that launches once every year or two will never be reliable no matter what sort of development paradigm one claims to follow.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09 2019, @01:13PM (3 children)
"Somebody is going to be unhappy," Hale said of the Flight Readiness Reviews for the first crewed flights of the new vehicles. "I guarantee it. If it’s not one thing it will be another. There will be a contentious meeting and somebody is going to have to say, 'Well, I heard the story and I think we ought to go ahead.'"
"NASA has always talked big about how reliable their stuff is. But in practice, a launch system that launches once every year or two will never be reliable no matter what sort of development paradigm one claims to follow."
So far, designing and building a rocket that can support a perfect flight record without some trial and error is mostly just a goal. Saturn came close, shuttle not so much, falcon is pretty but good had some losses. To build a reliable rocket, you have to accept that the design process is never going to be perfect and at some point you are going to have to launch something and hopefully find out what you missed. Some warts take many flights to show up, so a system with a good, long track record is to be treasured.
The Apollo launch plan of a single stack to the moon was a drastic compromise of quick versus good. It met the primary mission goal of getting us there ahead of the Russions at the cost of our ability to do much once we were there. We haven't been back in 50 years. Fickle funding and NASA's loss of 'can do' are part of the cause, but Apollo was kind of a dead end which prevented incremental refinement to grow what we could do on the moon.
Given all this, NASA putting all their mission planning eggs in a new booster with a limited flight history is less than ideal. Having the 'right guy' in the FRR is not going to fix that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 09 2019, @09:45PM (1 child)
Well, they can always figure that out and then do something else. It's a solved problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 09 2019, @09:57PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 09 2019, @10:03PM
Well, SpaceX is pretty close to having already launched more than SLS's planned total lifetime launches (IIRC, something like 60-100 launches over the lifetime of the SLS theoretically). Launch frequency is how you build reliable rockets.
Saturn didn't launch enough. It still could have have (and probably did!) a failure rate an order of magnitude greater than the Space Shuttle, and just got lucky.