An extremely weird defense of Dan Goldin's Mars program... Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

...from the Space Foundation's Elliot G. Pulham ( http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=20790) :

"As the space community is collectively lurching to find a road to sustainability for America's vision for space exploration, the big success stories most frequently trumpeted today have to do with Mars exploration. Without Dan Goldin, we very well might not have any of those success stories to which we so often point.

"By the late 1990s, Goldin had inherited a flawed and discredited Mars exploration architecture that had produced a string of embarrassing disasters. Most notable among these were the catastrophic uncontrolled landings of the Mars Climate Orbiter (which, of course, wasn't supposed to land at all, much less go full lawn dart), and the Mars Polar Lander that landed with considerably more gusto than it had been engineered to support.

"A key blunder, you may recall, was basic confusion among the spacecraft teams as to whether they were supposed to be working in U.S. Customary System of units or metric measurements. The 'was that inches or centimeters?' fiasco became long-running fodder for late-night comedians like Jay Leno and David Letterman.

"Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, Goldin seized the moment to call for a clean sheet approach to Mars exploration. In 1999, a new Mars program office was established and a new strategy developed. 'Follow the water' became the Mars exploration mantra, and it has had breathtaking success. The new effort got underway with the successful Mars Odyssey - a legacy program that was rigorously re-scrutinized by the new program office leadership."
________________

Well! Y'all know that -- while Mars Observer's subtle (and, in my opinion, largely forgivable) failure was not Goldin's doing -- the 1998 failures were precisely the result of his own half-witted insistence that we fly two missions for less than the combined cost of Mars Pathfinder, and that his "victory" consisted entirely of hastily backing away from his own belief that we could fly a huge Mars program on a shoestring (including his downright lunatic scheme to launch two Mars sample return landers by 2005 for a total cost of less than $1.5 billion -- along with a Mars airplane in 2003 for less than $50 million spacecraft cost).

[edstrick]

Goldin, much as we like to stick pins in wax dolls of him, did a lot of good, much of it before his personality and managerial defects did a lot of damage. Smaller, Faster, Cheaper is good, as long as it isn't smaller, faster, cheaper, Cheaper, ***CHEAPER***. We had 2 good missions in 99 that were simply penny-pinched to death.

[djellison]

He wasn't perfect, far from it....but one thing for which I think he deserves credit is going for two MERs.

Doug

[paxdan]

.....pick any two.....

[tedstryk]

The fact of the matter is that when he took over, the only planetary missions that were flying were missions like Mars Observer, Galileo, and Cassini - Missions that had been planned in the early 80s or before - no more missions were being fed in to the pipleline, as the budgetary situation didn't allow for such spacecraft. His vision, flawed as it was, got planetary exploration going again. However, he got too carried away, and had an abrasive leadership style. But I don't think demonizing him is of any use.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

True as far as it goes -- he did begin the valuable work of busting up NASA's oversized "Flagship" missions. But it's important to realize that NASA had set up the planetary Flagship missions only as part of its continuing Great Swindle to support the Shuttle, by deliberately making sure that most US science spacecraft were so big that they couldn't possibly be launched on any expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle.

So, after Challenger, whoever took over as NASA's head in the early 1990s would probably have ended up having to do much the same break-'em-up job as Goldin -- and some of them probably wouldn't have gone in for his goofy additional willingness to demand cost cuts to the point of virtual insanity (which also contributed further to the Shuttle's continuing lack of safety, and thus maybe to Columbia).

[tedstryk]

Wow...that's a stretch....

[Stephen]

True as far as it goes -- he did begin the valuable work of busting up NASA's oversized "Flagship" missions.

Are you intimating that NASA doesn't need any more flagship-size missions?

But it's important to realize that NASA had set up the planetary Flagship missions only as part of its continuing Great Swindle to support the Shuttle, by deliberately making sure that most US science spacecraft were so big that they couldn't possibly be launched on any expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle.

OK, I'll bite: which "expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle" are you referring to?

My recollection is that there weren't any! Or rather there were not intended to be any other than the Scout once the Shuttle entered service. That's because NASA intended the Shuttle would replace every American launch vehicle other than the very smallest (the Scout) and the very largest (the Saturn V). I can still remember the graphic that appeared in various books published in the 1970s on America's space program showing the lineup of America's space vehicles and which were the ones that would go and which would stay. (Of course in the end the Saturn V was ditched as well.)

Naturally that necessarily meant that the only launch vehicle America would have available for launching interplanetary missions of any size, small, medium, or large, would be the Shuttle. So why on earth (or in space) would NASA "deliberately mak[e] sure that most US science spacecraft were so big that they couldn't possibly be launched on any expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle"?

Perhaps you had the ESA's ELVs in mind. But given that the space probes you're alluding to would (like the Shuttle) be being paid for by NASA your suggestion would seem to amount to NASA trying to "swindle" itself!

So what evidence do you have to suppose that claim of yours?

As far as I can see if NASA is guilty of anything with the Shuttles (at least in respect of its space program) it's hubris and folly. The hubris: even contemplating replacing so much hardware with one launch vehicle before the new vehicle had even flown, much less proved itself in flight for a sufficient length of time to justify the confidence in it implied by the retirement of so many tried and tested launch vehicles. The folly: putting so many of its space program eggs in one launcher basket. For what nobody at NASA (or, to be fair, the Administration or Congress) seems to have contemplated--or if they did the notion was dismissed--was what the consequences would be should the entire Shuttle fleet, for whatever reason, be grounded?

Which, of course, is exactly what happened in 1986 following the Challenger disaster. Grounding the Shuttle fleet as a response was no different to what the FAA would do had a Boeing 747 mysteriously exploded in flight. But unlike America's air traffic system, which could always fall back to at least some degree on other makes and models of aircraft, NASA had no fallback position at all. However bad the problem might be if every Boeing 747 had to be grounded, intercontinental air traffic would not come to a grinding halt. Yet that is essentially what happened after the Challenger disaster. By grounding the Shuttles as a response to Challenger NASA effectively grounded the entire American space program, military and civilian.

To its credit, NASA has now learnt the lesson; and the more recent Columbia disaster, for all its impact, especially on ISS construction, has not prevented NASA's planetary missions flying.

======
Stephen

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Another difficulty was the realization that it is too dangerous to use the shuttle to carry a fully fuel escape stage as payload. That put an end to ever using the shuttle to launch interplanetary missions.

I don't buy conspiracy theories, but I have heard that Boeing had a lot of trouble geting NASA to accept the Delta IV. Is there any truth to that? It does compete with the shuttle for milsat and comsat deployment.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

(1) "Are you intimating that NASA doesn't need any more flagship-size missions?"

Absolutely not; we all know perfectly well that they frequently do, and not just for space telescopes. Many planetary missions (especially in the outer Solar System) simply demand large spacecraft. My point was that a large number of the Flagship missions NASA was peddling in the 1970s and 1980s COULD have been broken up into smaller craft -- and, as I said, virtually any NASA Administrator besides Goldin would have had to do the same thing in the early 1990s. (I do, however, think he deserves more credit than I gave him in that earlier message for setting up the competitive-proposal system for Discovery and Explorer.)

(2) "OK, I'll bite: which 'expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle' are you referring to? My recollection is that there weren't any! Or rather there were not intended to be any other than the Scout once the Shuttle entered service. That's because NASA intended the Shuttle would replace every American launch vehicle other than the very smallest (the Scout) and the very largest (the Saturn V). I can still remember the graphic that appeared in various books published in the 1970s on America's space program showing the lineup of America's space vehicles and which were the ones that would go and which would stay. (Of course in the end the Saturn V was ditched as well.)

"Naturally that necessarily meant that the only launch vehicle America would have available for launching interplanetary missions of any size, small, medium, or large, would be the Shuttle. So why on earth (or in space) would NASA 'deliberately mak[e] sure that most US science spacecraft were so big that they couldn't possibly be launched on any expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle'?"

My dear fellow, that's exactly my point. NASA's unnecessary lumping of scientific missions into a small number of huge Flagship craft rather than a larger number of smaller craft, in order to make sure that there was no way to launch them on anything but the Shuttle (or the Titan), was done precisely to encourage the elimination of production of any US boosters but the Shuttle -- as yet another part of NASA's gargantuan fraud to ensure that the Shuttle program would continue to be funded even after its cost overruns and utility underruns were becoming gradually clearer.

Another part of that fraud was its straight-faced insistence that the Shuttle's chances of a launch explosion were only 1 in 100,000. They even tried to pull that one on the Pentagon -- which (fortunately for America) smelled a rat (after all, they had a very extensive space program of their own), did their own study which concluded that the real odds were 1 in 78, and then engaged in a furious battle with NASA to get Congress to resume Titan production in case the Shuttle got taken off line for a while. They finally got that measure approved in June 1985, only 7 months before Challenger blew up. Had they not done so, we would have had precisely no way to keep launching our vital reconnaissance satellites during the period before the Shuttle launch rate cranked back up to something like its former level in 1990-91.

The whole story is quite extraordinary, and the former NASA officials from that era don't even bother to publicly deny it any more, now that the statute of limitations for perjury before Congress has run out. The Shuttle's 1970s program manager, in fact, not only admitted it to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board during his testimony -- he actually laughed about the way NASA had snookered those ignorant Congressmen in the early 1970s to get the program funded in the first place! "Hell, anyone with any sense knew you'd never get more than 10 or 12 flights per year!" he guffawed during his testimony -- although it was only NASA's insistence that 50 flights per year were possible that got the program past Congress, since the studies had shown by then that only with a launch rate that high would it be even slightly more economical than continuing to use ELVs. (NASA seems to have yanked his testimony before CAIB off the Web now, along with all the other testimony to CAIB -- but not before I both recorded it and got a SpaceDaily article out of it.)

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

The military space program is a huge effort. I found figures for 2004:

NASA - $15.3 billion
Military - $20.4 billion

Military space command has a program that is rarely discussed. Besides KH and Lacrosse satellites, there is a huge command and control system based on satellites that permit generals in Washington or Colorado Springs to direct battles while observing in real time from space. That capability became routine during the first Gulf War. No matter what happens to NASA, the pentagon will always consider space to be the "high ground" which must be absolutely dominated by the US.

It would also be interesting to know the size of the civilian space effort in America, comsats and resource satellites, etc. NASA's budget also does not cover some other agencies like NOAA, which pays for a lot of weather and Earth-resource missions.

[ljk4-1]

I wonder how long before we have the USSF - the United States
Space Force?

They are certainly pushing for it in this publication:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchro...um06/sum06.html

Or does it already exist but they aren't telling the public?

[Jim from NSF.com]

I wonder how long before we have the USSF - the United States
Space Force?

They are certainly pushing for it in this publication:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchro...um06/sum06.html

Or does it already exist but they aren't telling the public?

It doesn't exist. If it did, it doesn't mean that it has an "offensive" capability.

The issue is similar to when the USAF was part of the Army, and needed to break away.

[Stephen]

(2) "OK, I'll bite: which 'expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle' are you referring to? My recollection is that there weren't any! Or rather there were not intended to be any other than the Scout once the Shuttle entered service. That's because NASA intended the Shuttle would replace every American launch vehicle other than the very smallest (the Scout) and the very largest (the Saturn V). I can still remember the graphic that appeared in various books published in the 1970s on America's space program showing the lineup of America's space vehicles and which were the ones that would go and which would stay. (Of course in the end the Saturn V was ditched as well.)

"Naturally that necessarily meant that the only launch vehicle America would have available for launching interplanetary missions of any size, small, medium, or large, would be the Shuttle. So why on earth (or in space) would NASA 'deliberately mak[e] sure that most US science spacecraft were so big that they couldn't possibly be launched on any expendable boosters less powerful than the Shuttle'?"

My dear fellow, that's exactly my point. NASA's unnecessary lumping of scientific missions into a small number of huge Flagship craft rather than a larger number of smaller craft, in order to make sure that there was no way to launch them on anything but the Shuttle (or the Titan), was done precisely to encourage the elimination of production of any US boosters but the Shuttle -- as yet another part of NASA's gargantuan fraud to ensure that the Shuttle program would continue to be funded even after its cost overruns and utility underruns were becoming gradually clearer.

(1) I'd be careful if I were you. Even more than "swindle", "fraud" implies serious criminal activity. Since some of the people you're alluding to are (probably) still alive and well and in a position to sue for defamation I can only assume you're either being reckless or have solid evidence to support your accusations.

If the latter then perhaps I had better clarify my earlier suggestion ("what evidence do you have to suppo[rt] that claim of yours?"): what are the sources of your claims about "flagship" missions? By that I mean what are your references so that the rest of us can go along to consult the evidence which convinced you?

(2) That aspect aside, what you seem to be postulating is yet another conspiracy by Nefarious NASA to deceive the Blissfully Ignorant (Congress in this instance).

Sound familiar?

The only thing missing is Richard Hoagland. (In fact I'm surprised he hasn't picked up on this one. It would be right up his alley. Perhaps he's waiting for the incriminating photos to appear. )

(3) As for your argument that:

"NASA's unnecessary lumping of scientific missions into a small number of huge Flagship craft rather than a larger number of smaller craft, in order to make sure that there was no way to launch them on anything but the Shuttle (or the Titan), was done precisely to encourage the elimination of production of any US boosters but the Shuttle."

Perhaps you might oblige with an example or two of the sort you mean? The only examples I can think of that come anywhere near your description are Cassini and CRAF; and surely you can't call Cassini's scientific mission an "unnecessary lumping". In any case neither of them flew on the Shuttle, and one did not even get off the proverbial ground.

(4) Your entire case presupposes the existence of efforts by elements within Congress to retain those other boosters. While I do have some vague recollection of reading in the press about attempts in Congress to retain an independent capacity for the military, I do not recall anybody going in to bat for the civilian boosters. Why then would NASA invent these "unnecessary lumpings" of civilian space probes to discourage the elimination of a threat to the Shuttle which had no real existence?

Were there indeed serious attempts within Congress during the period in question to retain all or some of those other civilian boosters?

(5) All in all you seem bent on casting NASA's decisions in the worst possible light in order to support your own argument; and with all due respect your obvious bias against the Shuttle (and manned spaceflight in general) do not exactly assist your case. Without access to the evidence which seems to have convinced you my own instinct tells me that you are engaging in the very sort of thing you are accusing NASA of: spin-doctoring the facts.

If I am wrong please enlighten us all with actual evidence--as opposed to your interpretation of events.

Another part of that fraud was its straight-faced insistence that the Shuttle's chances of a launch explosion were only 1 in 100,000.

Are you alluding here to the Challenger? (Which strictly speaking did not, of course, explode on launch. The problem occurred during flight.)

They even tried to pull that one on the Pentagon -- which (fortunately for America) smelled a rat (after all, they had a very extensive space program of their own), did their own study which concluded that the real odds were 1 in 78, and then engaged in a furious battle with NASA to get Congress to resume Titan production in case the Shuttle got taken off line for a while. They finally got that measure approved in June 1985, only 7 months before Challenger blew up. Had they not done so, we would have had precisely no way to keep launching our vital reconnaissance satellites during the period before the Shuttle launch rate cranked back up to something like its former level in 1990-91.

The whole story is quite extraordinary, and the former NASA officials from that era don't even bother to publicly deny it any more, now that the statute of limitations for perjury before Congress has run out. The Shuttle's 1970s program manager, in fact, not only admitted it to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board during his testimony -- he actually laughed about the way NASA had snookered those ignorant Congressmen in the early 1970s to get the program funded in the first place! "Hell, anyone with any sense knew you'd never get more than 10 or 12 flights per year!" he guffawed during his testimony -- although it was only NASA's insistence that 50 flights per year were possible that got the program past Congress, since the studies had shown by then that only with a launch rate that high would it be even slightly more economical than continuing to use ELVs. (NASA seems to have yanked his testimony before CAIB off the Web now, along with all the other testimony to CAIB -- but not before I both recorded it and got a SpaceDaily article out of it.)

A URL for that SpaceDaily article might have been nice. Were you alluding to this one?

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03p1.html

As for that CAIB testimony, was it on "www.caib.us" (as distinct from the present "caib.nasa.gov")? If so, then for a trip down the CAIB memory lane check out:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.caib.us/

There you'll find a veritable flock of "www.caib.us" websites going back to late February 2003. What you want may or may not be there.

======
Stephen

[Bob Shaw]

Children:

Don't fight, or Uncle Doug will send you to bed without supper.

Bob Shaw