Selenian Boondocks

Hey guys, I know this is pretty lame, but it’s going to be a bit longer before I have anything useful to put up. I do have a pretty cool technology idea I’ve gotten permission to write about, but we’re doing an SBIR proposal on it first. There’s a lot more afoot in my world that I can’t talk about yet, so I advise patience.

I know I shouldn’t feed the troll, but Mark Whittington is sometimes amusing.  On his blog, he quoted a commenter to NASAWatch:

A commenter named Robert B. has a great answer:

Congress doesn’t trust NASA’s administrators to follow the will of Congress. The admins have proven that they will use the letter of the law to circumvent the intent of Congress. So Congress feels they need to be very specific about what they want done, to the point of being too specific. I don’t blame Congress, but it’s less than optimal I agree.

I think we need new NASA administrators once Congress has passed this budget. The current admins were picked in order to dismantle Constellation and move Obamaspace forward. Now that’s over with, we need administrators who are skilled in executing a space exploration program, and that Congress can trust.

This is all amusing, because the only reason Bolden was picked was because Congress thought he was going to be a shuttle-hugging lapdog for Congressional interests. That because he had been an astronaut, and had flown Nelson on the Shuttle that somehow he’d be easy to control to keep the pork flowing to their district. There were several other potential people for administrator who were probably more qualified, who “had skill in executing space exploration programs” (like say Steve Isakowitz), who were passed over explicitly because Congress didn’t want someone who knew what they were doing.

The problem is Congress (and most NASA fanboys) still don’t want an administrator who is actually innovative and knows what they’re doing. Because a NASA admin who knew what they were doing would do an even better job of pointing out how stupid it is to design an HLV *right now* when you don’t even know what the mission for it is, won’t have any hardware to use it, and will be stuck paying for it for decades to come. They want the status quo to continue so they can keep using NASA as a way to funnel benefits to their constituents at the nation’s expense.

I saw a comment by Jim Davis over on NASASpaceflight.com that made me want to do a poll about real attitudes towards Mars colonization.  Let me give some background thoughts, the questions, then some rules for comments.

First off, Jim’s goal here was to ask people questions that really delve into how likely they actually would be to do something like one-way Mars colonization, especially if the situation isn’t exactly a paradise.  He wanted someone to do a scientific poll, and while I’d like that too, I don’t have the money to do so myself.  But I think if we do this right, we can at least get some relevant data, even without doing truly random sampling.  But more on that after the questions.

Here are the questions:

1. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant leaving behind wife and children?
2. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week? 12 hours? 8 hours?
3. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if the annual mortality rate was 50%? 25%? 10%?
4. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if the level of privacy were equivalent to a subway car? A submarine? Antarctic research station?
5. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it was just yourself? 10 other people? 100 other people?
6. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if it meant eating food indefinitely equivalent to combat rations? TV dinners? School cafeteria?
7. Would you be willing to make a one way trip to Mars if there were significantly more people of your own gender than the other? Vice versa?

And here are some “control” questions:

1. What is the longest period of time you have ever been by yourself? Separated from wife and children? Away from civilization?
2. What are the longest hours you’ve ever worked? How long did you work these hours? How long would you have been willing to work these hours?
3. What’s the most dangerous work you’ve ever done? What’s the most dangerous activity you normally engage in?
4. What’s the lowest level of privacy you’ve ever experienced? For how long?
5. What’s the most bland diet you’ve ever experienced? For how long?
6. Have you ever had to work for/with someone you intensely disliked? How long did this go on?
7. Have you ever had to live with someone you intensely disliked? How long did this go on?

Anyhow, here are the rules.  All comments *must* include an answer to these questions, with the number of the questions (both the original questions and control questions).  You can suggest additional questions, or make other comments as well, but you have to answer the questions first.  Use anonymity if you don’t feel comfortable answering under your own name.  You also should mention where you heard about this poll from.  Any comments that break these rules are likely to get deleted outright.

Also, to make this more valid, the wider this can be passed around, the better.  So, if you think this is a good poll, tell friends about it.  Especially friends/blogs outside the traditional alt.space crowd.  I’d be interested in seeing it linked to both by technology blogs as well as right-wing, left-wing, and/or libertarian sites as well.  The more answers we get, the more likely this poll will actually be even remotely useful.  It’s also important to remember that it’s ok if most of the answers are variations on “heck no!”  That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but it would be interesting to get a wide enough sample to start seeing something closer to at least the opinion of tech-savvy people in general.

If this works out, I’ll do a poll like this on lunar colonization next.

guest blogger john hare

One good thing about the current congress/senate/president funding mess is that we won’t have to listen to as many cranks start their rocket development plan with, “First we convince the president.”

I saw on twitter that Alex MacDonald’s paper on comparing the private funding of astronomical observatories and space exploration is finally up.  It’s a fascinating read.  I met Alex at New Space conference last year, and he showed me some of his research.  His hypothesis is that astronomical observatories were the “space exploration” of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and a large percentage of that was funded by wealthy individuals who wanted to leave their mark on society. He points out that a lot of the discovery-driven, privately-funded observatories of the day were actually significant expenditures compared to the wealth of the individual funding them or of the nation’s GDP as a whole.  His point was that the Bezoses and Musks of the day were just continuing what used to be the dominant trend.

Here’s the link.

As I said, very well worth the read, since it’s only 3pgs.  I think he may be working on a more detailed paper as part of a Master’s Thesis or PhD dissertation, though I could be misremembering.

And now back to continued light blogging.

guest blogger john hare

There have been many comments over the years on many sites about cost plus being used when nobody has any idea of the costs of a project or how to bid it. This morning on Clark’s site spacetransportnews.com he linked to an article claiming that getting bids was so uncertain that contractors would bid 50% higher than it would run to do the same project cost plus to make sure they didn’t lose money. That is an interesting claim. Cost plus is noted for budget over runs while straight bids, honestly enforced, cannot over run as the contractor wouldn’t get paid.

Considering the Constellation mess, wouldn’t it possibly have been cheaper back in 2005 to put the project out for bid? With the current projection of $35B to complete Ares, 50% more would have been a $52.5B  bid. If there was that much money on a fixed price contract, how many companies would have been willing to bid on the expectation of making a large profit? How much would they have been willing to cut to get the bid? This is when someone usually points out that there are only one or two companies qualified to bid on such a system. That should be a red flag. If you are specing a system with too few qualified bidders, then you are overspecing more often than not.

Cost plus seems to have a fairly low percentage of profit or even a fixed profit in the contract and requires extensive oversight to keep the contractors honest. I question whether the mandated low percentage itself eliminates potential contractors. Who wants to do a contract with a limit on potential profits when there is other work with much higher margins except the one or the few companies that are set up to do the insane paperwork and deal with the oversight? I think the profit limits in the name of taxpayer cost control end up costing far more than letting companies make higher profits or take their losses. If there were a half dozen or so companies bidding on the Ares, don’t you think it possible that some of them would think they could do the job for far less than $52.5B, or even $35B?

There are companies that are just better at cost control than others just as some people are smarter than others. I don’t think it is out of line to suggest that some companies can execute a rocket project for half of the cost of a competitor. If one qualified company bids $10.00 on a widget and another bids $9.00, go with the lower bid, and don’t pay if they don’t produce. Then if the second company has costs half that of the first, then they spend $4.50 in costs while the first spends $9.00. The second company has profits of 50% of income while the first has 10%. The government attitude seems to be that since this is taxpayer money, excessive profits are harmful to the taxpayer. With this attitude, the more expensive company has the edge since they will make twice as much profit as the better managed one at the same percentage.

If government contracting would quit worrying so much about how much profit a company makes, and start worrying about what is being delivered for the dollar, more companies would try for the contracts. A possible contract with 25-50% profit potential will attract more players. As more players enter a field, some will have better people or ideas which translates to lower costs, which becomes lower bids. When faced with real competition, Lockheed and Boeing can both find cost saving options when it is in their best interest to do so and they can make higher profit margins doing it.

In the long run, competition will cut into the possible profit potential and the end result will be a percentage similar to that mandated in cost plus except on a far lower total price. Financial oversight can be vastly reduced for further savings.

One objection many make is about quality when a simple low bid is the criteria. They believe that low cost is low quality. This has been demonstrated to be false anytime there is a competent purchasing agent involved. If the product doesn’t perform, don’t pay.

Another thing brought up all the time is dishonest contractors when there is no oversight, with the assumption that most contractors will cheat when no one is looking. Thomas Matula says that this is why the government must have a ten page spec for an ashtray. From rotten food to weapons that don’t work to vehicles that don’t run, he suggests that every single one of those specs is required due to suppliers cheating at one time or another. I believe this is a  poorly thought out objection. Every single time one of those suppliers cheated, there was a government official not doing his job of confirming an acceptable delivery. It is a matter of historical record that much of the time the particular official was corrupt. You want honest delivery, write a simple spec and have one (1) official responsible for the proper delivery. Responsible includes prison for corruption, which he can share with this supplier.

They misnamed the bill though. Should’ve been called “Found a Pork Program (un)Worthy of its Host Nation”.

I find it amusing that so many of the opponents of Obama’s proposed space plan are so happy with this, when it doesn’t actually resolve most of the things they said were wrong with his policy. To whit:

1. There are no details, plans, or near-term destinations.  Just an unfocused non-plan to build an HLV without really having a plan on how it will be used or when.  So unfocused spending and lack of a plan or near-term destination wasn’t the issue?
2. Even the Moon isn’t outright dismissed, it’s pretty clear the plan is a modified version of flexible path.  Ie this isn’t going to give people that moonbase they craved so soon.  So actually going back to the Moon anytime in the forseeable future wasn’t the issue?
3. Without the shuttle extended, and with commercial crew being delayed (let’s get real folks, moving most of the funding to the out years is a cheap way of defunding a project without actually having to have the huevos to do it honestly), it is now guaranteed that the ISS is going to be accessible only via Russia for most of the rest of this decade.  There will be no way of launching those critical spares that were the reason Jeff Bingham was always giving for a shuttle extension.  So apparently the gap isn’t an issue?
4. The KSC portion of the Shuttle team is going to get decimated next year still, this time with no commercial crew projects ramping up to help soften the blow.  So apparently workforce retention wasn’t really an issue?

As far as I can tell, the only issues people really cared about were not having to compete for a real job if you were a USA/MSFC/JSC shuttle guy, and making sure we get a big HLV as soon as possible, even though we won’t have anything to do with it once we get it.

The good news is that the “dot-product” of NASA’s direction and sanity is a fair deal of money, and it grew quite a bit compared to last year.  At least some elements of useful things survived.  Instead of being 99% orthogonal to the actual development of space, it’s now only 95% orthogonal.  It’s just so frustrating and disgusting when we actually had a chance for something so much better.

Here’s to hoping that now that JSC and MSFC got their rattle back, the creative and useful parts of NASA can be moved to locales better-matched to small development programs.  Even the pittance they’re being given compared to feeding the HLV albatross can go a long way if managed by the right group.

guest blogger john hare

Many of us have complained from time to time about the lack of true progress from NASA even while agreeing that there are a lot of very smart motivated people in the agency. It would be useful if some way could be found to use the capabilities of those skilled  people without the anchor of bureaucracy holding them back. It is even more difficult considering the role congress plays in controlling the outcome of funding for the different stakeholders.

I wonder if it could be made possible to provide incentives to the people that can produce, while simultaneously preventing the bureaucrats in the agency from interfering with the producers. I suggest a thought experiment for increasing agency performance in a politically acceptable manner, while reducing long term costs. This is just a first cut for the Halibut.

List a series of projects internal to the agency for employees to bid on. A condition of the bid is that successful completion of the project ahead of time and budget qualifies the participating employees for full retirement effective immediately after the demonstration of success. Incentive also is that 10% of the funds remaining from being under budget is split among the participating employees. Failure to complete on time and budget is immediate layoff from the agency.

Other NASA employees have no oversight role for these cheetah teams. If the team leader and his group are good though, they will get the support of many of the theoretically uninvolved to help accomplish the project, even though they will not be eligible for the retirement package.

A project might be a multipropellant depot in LEO. It must accept LOX and fuel from at least two vehicle types and dispense the propellants to a different vehicle type after storing it for at least two months. Time limit three years and bid cap at three billion including projected retirement payments.

 Whichever group gets the bid will increase spending in a congressional district through at least one election cycle and possibly two. With congressmen on the bid review board, it seems likely that they will be going for the infusion of near term pork and will worry about the following elections later. The bidding NASA teams will be aware of this and will dutifully spread the pork as far as they need to to get the congressmen on their side.

A bid might be a team leader and a couple of hundred other NASA employees bidding $2.6B and 32 months. If they succeed on time and for $2.1B, they split $50M two hundred ways by whatever formula they agreed to among themselves and retire early with full benefits. The depot is in orbit and operational and two hundred people with a performance track record are available to the private sector if they choose to keep working. Also $850M less than the original cap could be available for the follow on projects.

The retirement incentive is center to the strategy. After slamming a project through with little time for the agency drone workers, the project members will need to get out as too many toes will have been stepped on for them to be part of the clique again. The termination for failure is the stick to balance the carrots.

An F1 class kerosene engine might be another project with a functioning rotovator for a different group.

A suitably motivated group could have had Ares I flying by now, or if none would bid it would have been understood that it was a turkey five years ago. Either there would be working hardware, or the money wouldn’t get spent.

If there is a project that none would bid on, as seems possible for the Ares, then it is understood that the agency is not capable of that task. That would be a clear signal that the ‘experts’ in that field were not up to the job and would run the risk of losing whole departments that couldn’t get results in their field. The agency would need to get teams to produce with failure to do so carrying real penalties. Employees wouldn’t sign on to a project to be sacrificial goats to the bureaucrats and drones, so the bureaucrats and drones would need to support the teams in their own best interest.

With the truly productive getting projects and getting out, the agency drones would run out of workers to hide behind and could then be dismissed as excessive to the requirements of the agency. The congressmen gaining from the project pork would possibly support getting rid of people not getting them as much return in favor of the high profile projects they brought home. The high profile projects could get them more votes than the standing armies for this election, and the next one could be worried about later.

guest blogger john hare

There is a fairly constant murmur that commercial space will not go beyond LEO and more mumbling that there must be a specific destination with a specific timeline.

The second mumbling assumes that there is some top down command structure that will make one thing happen regardless of obstacles or opportunities along the way. Goals for the short term are often good, but not so much for the uncertain future. It is roughly the difference between getting married or staying single. When you get married, it better be the right one, and all the other options better be off the table. A single goal and time frame assumes that no other goal is worthwhile, and that nothing will ever change the relative values.

The murmur about commercial not going beyond LEO is often from people that haven’t considered the implications of CATS. For this post, I suggest that CATS is $1K per kilogram to LEO and work out a few costs that apparently haven’t been considered openly enough. I also suggest that RLVs are giving launch on demand in order to hit that price point.

Say someone wants to send a small commercial robot probe to a NEO. Current state of the art might be a one ton spacecraft with a mass ratio of three to go from LEO to the object. At $10K per kilogram for launch costs, $30M. The way it is currently done, perhaps $50M for the vehicle itself and another few million for operations. So $85-90M for one data set. From program start to launch could easily be from three to five years, plus looking for funding and operating the vehicle almost as an afterthought. It would be easy to burn a decade on the program, and well over $100M considering the time value of money.

With CATS and launch on demand, other methods become attractive. If it is allowed to triple the mass of the probe and use less efficient engines, a three ton vehicle with nine tones of propellant becomes 12 tons IMLEO instead of 3 currently, though launch costs drop from $30M with a long lead time to $12M whenever you get ready to go. With relaxed mass constraints developing the probe becomes a construction project rather than research and development. Shield modern electronics with mass rather than use expensive antiques that are space rated. It seems possible that the three ton probe could drop to $1,000.00 per kilogram in construction costs, for a total of $3M in hardware costs. Lead time could drop to a few months with relaxed hardware mass restrictions. Engineers could spec a 7mm bolt from COTS suppliers rather than spend the time and money to determine that a 6.26mm bolt gives the exact safety margin required.

If CATS makes it possible to send a NEO probe within three months of decision for a total cost of  $15M, that is a time frame and cost that fits into a quarterly stockholders report. Pick your favorite reason to go, and it is quite possible that there is a millionaire out there that will agree with you. Minerals, volatiles, SPS materials, or just to see what is there become affordable to many thousands of interested people. At that price point, hundreds of probes per decade would certainly fly.

Many many people will point out that a three ton probe is way too much craft for early prospecting. Some people will certainly agree that 10 kg of fairly sophisticated instruments could be quite capable and not even be all that expensive if they didn’t have to support a decade program and could avoid a lot of that helpful oversight. 10 kg of instruments in a 40 kg vehicle with an IMLEO of 200 kg including propellant would drop the launch costs to $200k. Instruments and hardware by the right people might double that total cost. With a total of $400k per flight, commercial and private players would launch them by the thousands. I think it would be safe to suggest that known NEOs, the moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and most of the asteroid belt would be explored for a fraction of today’s government exploration budgets.

There are some that would try to do probes with a 1 kg cube sat, While I’m skeptical, CATS would make it possible for them to prove me wrong for around $10k.

I personally am more interested in the effects on human spaceflight. With $1,000.00kg for launch costs, a person’s direct mass cost to LEO would be around $100k. A reasonable overhead for life support and supplies would bring it to perhaps $500k for a several week visit. A true CATS launch on demand would let people go during a month vacation. Bigalow would have to get busy building stations and hotels to accommodate the customers that could and would  go at that price point.  There is a laundry list of experiments that companies and governments would do if their orbital workers could do a three month LEO  tour for under a million. An EVA worker cost would drop to a couple of thousand dollars an hour under these conditions.

What about beyond LEO? A five ton vehicle could certainly shuttle from LEO to LLO and back with four people. Flying the same vehicle repeatedly with four people and supplies would require about twelve tons of propellant and provisions per trip. Twelve tons of supplies is about $12M in launch costs and about $6,346.50 for the actual supplies. Circumnavigating the moon for under $4M per person including launch costs and LEO accommodations is considerably less than anything currently planned and should be proportionately more attractive to customers.

If the vehicle has entered LLO, then a modest craft can single stage from there to the surface and back. Propellant costs would bring the whole adventure to about $8M per person for the round trip from Earth’s surface to a moon base and back. Additional time on the surface is simply a matter of supplies. At $10k per kilogram on the Lunar surface, a person could stretch their stay by about three weeks per million dollars. It is a fairly safe bet that many people will go, and some of them will go for profit as they look for something they think valuable to some market. Anyone that can create more than 5 kg per day in resources from the local materials can stretch their stay almost indefinitely.

For some, it’s Mars or nothing. There is no reason they can’t get to Mars while everybody else exploits the nothing they disdain. Think of a ship of a thousand tons for their comfortable journey to Mars that takes ten thousand man hours of EVA to assemble and needs three thousand tons of propellant for the trip. What would that cost? At $1K per kg for the ship mass, $1B for construction. $4B for launch cost. $20M for EVA labor costs. Total costs for a thousand ton ship on Mars trajectory, $5.02B plus tax, tag, and title.

Quit yammering about commercial stopping in LEO. If commercial creates CATS, the rest follows.

I really apologize for the light blogging lately. I’ve been under a lot of stress, and unfortunately I’m expecting the light blogging to continue for at least the rest of the month, and probably longer. I’m heading up to Oregon today for a family reunion on Tiff’s side of the family. Her mom’s been in hospice for about three months now, and we’re actually surprised that we’re going to get to see her again, instead of having a double reunion/funeral. I’ll be staying up in Oregon for a while to help. So, I probably won’t have the time or emotional energy to write very much anytime soon.