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

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Believe me, the evidence for deliberate fraud and perjury before Congress not only exists: it's out there in public in massive amounts, and I am hardly the only person calling it that. There are plenty of space journalists much more prominent (and skilled) than I am who have been saying exactly what I'm saying for a long time: Gregg Easterbrook and T.A. Heppenheimer, just to drop two particularly large names. (Heppenheimer's book "Countdown", for instance, is excellent on the subject.) NASA has never whispered a single threat to sue any of them for libel, and it never will -- because they're not libeling it. (Nor was Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth libeling it when he said, "All government agencies lie part of the time, but NASA is the only one I know of that does so most of the time." He need only have added that this is simply because, having far less reason to exist at its current funding levels than most other government agencies -- at least after the Moon Race was won -- it naturally has to lie far more in order to maintain its funding levels.) In this case, there really was a conspiracy -- and it didn't have to be nearly as absurdly huge and sweeping as Hoagland's implausible ones, because it simply took advantage of the serious scientific and engineering ignorance of most Congressmen. They were sitting ducks for it.

The unnecessary lumping together of smaller spacecraft into Flagship missions was done all the time where planetary spacecraft were concerned. It was the precise cause of the growth of Mars Observer from several small separate spacecraft into a single billion-dollar one (thus causing us to lose tremendously more from that one failure than would otherwise have been the case), and Goldin himself pointed out that Galileo could very easily have been split into two or three missions. The same thing was done to the EOS Earth observation satellites, which (along with their predecessor UARS) were initially grown to gargantuan size entirely unnecessarily so that they could only be launched on the Shuttle. One can even make a case that Cassini could have been split up.

And -- to repeat -- after getting the Shuttle funded in the first place in 1972 by making utterly ridiculous claims about its low cost and high flight rate, NASA naturally had to provide incentives for the program to be maintained after its cost started rising and its flight frequency started dropping. One of those dishonest incentives was arranging for most scientific satellites to be so big -- whether they required it or not -- that they couldn't be launched on Delta or Atlas. This was done SIMULTANEOUSLY with NASA's strangulation of the ELVs; it did not either precede or follow that event. It was done to nip any initial pro-ELV mutterings in Congress in the bud before they could get rolling. But in the case of the Pentagon, this sort of deception failed, because the Pentagon DID know enough about space travel to see through it after a few years. (The battle between the Pentagon and NASA on this after the Pentagon finally put its foot down was ferocious; if I remember correctly, it took about six months of furious lobbying by the Pentagon to overcome NASA's attempts to continue tricking Congress on this subject.)

Another part of the plan -- described by the former head of the National Academy of Sciences' Space Studies Board about four years ago, in print -- was to keep the astronomers who wanted the Hubble Telescope from following through on their planned announcement that the Telescope would actually work better if it was only launched once, to an altitude too high for the Shuttle to reach, with a new telescope being launched whenever necessary instead of carrying out repairs on the old one with the Shuttle. NASA informed the Hubble team that --unless they kept their mouths shut and went along with the agency's claim that the Telescope would do best in a low Earth orbit with periodic repair visits by the Shuttle -- the agency would make sure they never got any big space telescope at all. So they did.

Yep, that's my article, about Robert Thompson's testimony. Thanks very much for digging up the CAIB testimony records; I urge everyone on this site to read his testimony. It was a lulu, I assure you. The only real surprise in it to insiders, however, was his casual but startling revelation that Nixon, for his own political reasons, was in on the plot with NASA -- the previous assumption by historians had always been that it was deceiving him at the same time that it deceived Congress in 1972. That man seems to have had some kind of religious scruples against being honest.

And, as Easterbrook says, it may not be coincidence that James Fletcher -- the NASA Administrator who launched NASA on its path of really huge post-Apollo fraud and dishonesty -- was a Nixon appointee. Bruce Murray, in his bitter book "Journey Into Space" -- another very good source on all this -- calls Fletcher "a strange man", and recounts the time Fletcher asked him to provide fake "true-color" photos of Mercury from Mariner 10 to sweeten the press. One strange and dishonest man appointed by another one. Murray, by the way, also informed me by E-mail that he had only learned from the CAIB testimony that the NASA official who told him in the book not to push for a Titan launch for Galileo because the Shuttle was sure to be ready by Jan. 1982 -- "Hell, Bruce, we have two years of pad" -- already KNEW when he said it that it was totally false. The guy wasn't mistaken; he was deliberately lying. By the time of the CAIB testimony, however, he was also safely dead and thus safe from any indignant confrontation by Murray.

(One final tidbit: even after Challenger, NASA was still so determined to launch Mars Observer on Shuttle rather than on a Titan, just to keep the Shuttle program propped up, that they deliberately delayed its launch from 1990 to 1992 for that reason alone -- a delay which raised the project's total cost so much that one of its most important instruments, VIMS, had to be kicked off it to compensate. They finally ended up having to launch it on a Titan anyway, of course.)

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

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?

Haven't you been watching Space Above and Beyond? We will just send the Marines into space if we need to open a can of whoopass on some aliens. (that should be read with the thickest American accent you can imagine...) :-)

Seriuosly though, here is the website of the Air Force Space Command: AFSC

[tedstryk]

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.)

Gosh, and all this time I thought it had to do with the fact that when we were down to so few missions, they were desperate to cram everything they could on each one, since the next chance was going to be a long way off. But of course this wouldn't fit into your Shuttlemonster conspiracy, so it cannot be considered.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Gosh, and all this time I thought it had to do with the fact that when we were down to so few missions, they were desperate to cram everything they could on each one, since the next chance was going to be a long way off. But of course this wouldn't fit into your Shuttlemonster conspiracy, so it cannot be considered.

You've got the sequence backwards -- there were so few missions because NASA insisted on making each one as big as possible, not vice versa. (While going through my old records two days ago, I ran across an article in "Science" on the advent of the Discovery Program making exactly that point. If I have to dig up all this stuff word for word to convince you people, I am going to be VERY annoyed -- but I'll do it.)

And, to repeat, I'm hardly the only one calling the Shuttle a "monster". Murray, however, in his book, is a bit more refined and merely keeps calling it "the Beast".

(By the way, I'll see if I can find that E-mail Murray sent me. I lost several thousand E-mails a couple of years ago in a hard drive accident, but I also have about 3000 stored on CD-ROM and Murray's may be among them.)

[tedstryk]

I am not saying the shuttle had nothing to do with it. And I am not saying there weren't other factors....I mean, there has been a propensity to want big missions that would do a lot, but simply break the bank. But I have studied it quite a lot, so I really don't need a history lesson. I also realize you are not going to consider anything that doesn't fit into your narrow view of how things work. Frankly, I would think a great conspiracy, in which the planetary programs were made impossibly large so that their funding would be gobbled by the shuttle, would be far more sophisticated and organized than those who supported the shuttle from the bureaucratic end were ever capable of.

[mcaplinger]

The unnecessary lumping together of smaller spacecraft into Flagship missions was... the precise cause of the growth of Mars Observer from several small separate spacecraft into a single billion-dollar one...

While this seems to be the common wisdom, I don't think it's accurate. Mars Observer as flown looked very much like the Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter proposed by the SSEC in the early '80s. The main difference was the addition of two small instruments (MOC and TES) instead of one big one (VIMS). The cost increases through May 1988 are documented well in the GAO report NSAID-88-137FS and say nothing about spacecraft size changes. I see no evidence that there was ever any serious plan to fly multiple spacecraft to address the goals of MGCO. The whole time I worked on it (1988-1993) MO was viewed as a low-cost mission, which in comparison with Galileo and Cassini, it was.

Note that MGCO was originally supposed to cost $250M, not counting its Shuttle launch. The final figure, about $813M, includes the Commercial Titan launch, which was probably at least $150M not including the cost of the OSC TOS upper stage. The GAO report details cost increases for the spacecraft and payload of $163M.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

There was a piece on just that subject in "Science" (about half a page long) at the time of the Mars Observer failure. Mars Observer in its original form around 1983 was supposed to carry only about 4 experiments, with projected (if unclearly defined) later spacecraft to follow. Like Topsy, it growed -- and it growed because NASA kept piling additional instruments on the first spacecraft, instead of splitting them off onto one or more follow-up craft (which, of course, was what finally did happen after Observer failed).

Then the next event, as I said, was NASA's decision to try to keep it on the Shuttle even at the expense of a 2-year launch delay and the loss of one of its two most important instruments, VIMS. (VIMS got the axe because it was one of MO's two "facility" instruments paid for largely by NASA itself -- the other being the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer. All the other instruments were built and paid for mostly by their own experimenters, so that their costs were separate from NASA's own costs for the mission.)

I do also have the GAO report on Mars Observer, and will review it -- but just keep in mind that, technically speaking, every single thing that NASA did to start breaking up planetary missions and flying smaller ones after Challenger could have been done just as easily before Challenger. (The proposed Lunar Observer also started out dinky -- with only about 4 instruments -- but ultimately NASA was planning to put about 9 instruments on it. In the end, of course, LO didn't get funded at all.) There is a reason why that kind of breakup wasn't done -- even after COMPLEX recommended it in its 1983 advisory report (which I also have a copy of) -- and the reason is the one I mentioned. (COMPLEX even recommended splitting Cassini in two.)

As for Ted Stryk's comment: "Frankly, I would think a great conspiracy, in which the planetary programs were made impossibly large so that their funding would be gobbled by the shuttle, would be far more sophisticated and organized than those who supported the shuttle from the bureaucratic end were ever capable of": sorry, but that's exactly what happened. After all, it didn't have to be a sophisticated or complex conspiracy -- all that was necessary was for NASA's top-level officials (and particularly its Administrators from about 1972 through 1985) to say, "No, we're not going to fly a lot of small missions; we're going to fly just a few big ones." And, in fact, they did say that. One other little item I have in my files is Thomas Gold's 1992 piece on the subject in "Nature", in which he points out that NASA documents obtained from this period through the Freedom of Information Act (after years of resistance by NASA) have turned out to regularly include little handwritten notes from Fletcher, in particular, talking openly about the need for just this sort of dishonest move to bolster the case for the Shuttle. Gregg Easterbrook calls Fletcher "the Rasputin of NASA", and he deserves the title.

Once again: whether you guys like to hear it or not, this DID happen. We aren't even speaking in terms of it "probably" happening -- it provably, with no doubt whatsoever, DID happen. (And we get another indication of how it could have happened by considering the way in which, after Sean O'Keefe took over as NASA Administrator, his own underlings successfully flim-flammed him into supporting such wasteful absurdities as JIMO and the Hubble Repair Robot -- simply because he was an accountant who lacked training as an engineer. So do virtually all members of Congress.)

I'm going to spend a little while tonight digging up these documents I've mentioned; but I am not going to spend too long on this or on quoting them here in detail. If you want to find out for yourselves whether it happened, just read the same sources I use. They are absolutely unambiguous on the subject -- as unambiguous as Reagan's science advisor was when he called NASA a huge nest of habitual liars.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Actually, let me add another remark about Ted Stryk's statement that I'm saying that there was "a great conspiracy, in which the planetary programs were made impossibly large so that their funding would be gobbled by the shuttle". On reexamining his sentence, I see he still misunderstands what I'm saying. I'm not saying that planetary missions were made huge so that "their funding would be gobbled by the Shuttle" -- a great part of NASA's total space science budget had ALREADY been gobbled by the Shuttle in any case. I'm saying that the part of the space science budget that was NOT gobbled by the Shuttle was then divvied up to produce a smaller number of bigger spacecraft rather than a larger number of smaller spacecraft, so that those spacecraft would have to be launched by a booster as big as the Shuttle.

The idea of "smaller but more frequent" spacecraft had already been proposed by COMPLEX as far back as 1983; NASA turned it down. Not until after Challenger and the downfall of the Shuttle program did NASA return to that idea and accept it. (As another example: at about the same time that the Discovery program started up in 1992, NASA proposed splitting the Lunar Observer back into two small separate "Lunar Scout" craft -- each one carrying 4 experiments, just as COMPLEX had originally recommended back in 1983 that the first Lunar Observer itself should do.)

[tedstryk]

I understand you perfectly well. However, the shuttle was purported to be useful for launching missions of any size, and none of these spacecraft were too large for other boosters, had NASA not cancelled them, as it did boosters for smaller missions as well. And there would have been advantages of having all the MO instruments on a single platform, and, had it gone up according to the original plan, would have cost less than MGS, MCO, and Odyssey.

[mcaplinger]

There was a piece on just that subject in "Science" (about half a page long) at the time of the Mars Observer failure. Mars Observer in its original form around 1983 was supposed to carry only about 4 experiments...

Bruce, just because it says so in SCIENCE doesn't mean it's true. You can go back and look at the AO if you can find it, but there was no such "original form". MO did not "grow": the instruments were selected to the mass, power, and volume limits as stated in the AO. VIMS was subsequently deleted because they ran into massive development problems, and the radar altimeter became MOLA for the same reason, but there is no evidence of the kind of growth you suggest in the historical record, only from poorly-informed outsiders and long after the fact. And a lot of the misinformation seems to be sour grapes from unselected instruments, and the VIMS guys talking trash about those of us who made the cut.

According to "The Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter 1990 mission" by Low et al, 1984, an Ames-led climatology study and a JPL-led geoscience study had been combined by the SSEC into a single MGCO mission by January 1984.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

TedStryk's latest comment actually points toward my whole central point all along: the real argument for breaking up space missions whenever it's practical to do so is that, if you do so, a design flaw that wrecks the first spacecraft doesn't cause you to lose as much as you would with a bigger spacecraft. Mars Observer cost twice as much as Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander did combined -- their two failures combined did only half as much damage as its single failure. "Smaller and more frequent" has always been the valid part of "better, faster, cheaper".

Now, a reinspection of the SSES' 1983 report "Planetary Exploration Through Year 2000: A Core Program", pg. 99) shows that Mike Caplinger is actually, to a large degree, correct about what that report says, and I was wrong -- the SSES itself did recommend, on balance, that two small separate Mars orbiters (Mars Geoscience Orbiter and Mars Climatology Orbiter) should be combined into a single "MGCO" with 6 instruments, because two of the instruments (GRS and VIMS) had some modest applicability to both disciplines. But this isn't really all that strong an argument for doing so, given the vulnerability of such a unified spacecraft to a single failure -- as of course actually happened, after which NASA immediately split up the replacement mission into not just two but three different orbiters. And Glenn Cunningham, in "The Tragedy of Mars Observer" ( http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/24136 ) agrees with that "Science" article ("How Observer Became a Billion-Dollar Mission", 9-3-93, pg. 1266) that NASA then proceeded to swell the size of the unified Mars Observer far further beyond what the SSES recommended. This included adding the MOC after the initial science payload had actually been selected (this "eventually cost more than $20 million" according to "Science", and "used up all of the spacecraft's resource margins" according to Cunningham), and also included selecting science instruments that were much more sophisticated and costly than what the SSES had recommended.

So, to repeat: NASA, in those days, was fond of making spacecraft much bigger than they should be. Why? For exactly the reason I stated. Quoting former Space Sciences Board chair John McElroy: "The human space flight program saw the Space Shuttle as a means to continue its work until NASA was called upon to again tackle a new goal, and fought successfully to gain the Shuttle's dominance among the launch vehicles that NASA's program offices could employ." And part of doing that was for NASA's bosses to make sure that spacecraft were repeatedly made so big that they could tell Congress that only something as big as a Shuttle could launch them.

More on this later, after I reread Murray, Heppenheimer and Easterbrook on the subject. Right now I'm tired.

[mchan]

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.

Delta IV started launching payloads way after the shuttle was no longer in the business of milsat / comsat deployment. Did you mean another ELV? But then the only other ELV made by Boeing (after the McDAC acquisition) is the Delta II which is out of the league of payloads that require a shuttle.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The more I look into this, the more I think that -- at least on Mars Observer -- Caplinger and Stryk may well have a point; there seems to have been a significant amount of (mistaken) pressure from the scientists themselves to fuse two small missions into one bigger one there. I'm still reading on this (for instance, I've just discovered Howard McCurdy's 86-page report on the start of the NEAR project, which provides some information and some more new document leads on Mars Observer), and will report back again on this.

As for Mike's statement that VIMS got the boot from Mars Observer because of "severe instrument development problems": that's a new one to me, and I'd like to hear more. I've been working off (1) a very brief 1988 Aviation Week piece which said flatly that it was to deal with the price rise resulting from NASA's decision to delay the launch until 1992, and (2) a Mars Observer scientist I talked to back in 1991, who wasn't part of the VIMS team but was mad as hell that it had been removed and didn't say anything about development problems.

[mcaplinger]

As for Mike's statement that VIMS got the boot from Mars Observer because of "severe instrument development problems": that's a new one to me, and I'd like to hear more.

I'll have to retract that because I can't find any public supporting documentation about rises in instrument cost. It might have just been that VIMS was the most expensive instrument.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I'll go into a bit more detail later (it's been a long day) -- but:

(1) I'm currently rereading Heppenheimer's "Countdown", Murray's "Flight into Space", and Eric Chaisson's "The Hubble Wars" -- three books which I hadn't read in years (so that my memories of them were getting seriously fuzzy), and which should be required reading for anyone who has any illusions left about NASA. (Chaisson, however, also turns a baleful eye on his fellow scientists, some of whom are depicted as acting like tantrum-throwing three-year-olds -- including one prominent astronomer given to death threats and throwing things during conferences.)

(2) I have multiple-source confirmation of my previous belief that VIMS (although it did have some development problems) did indeed get the boot solely because of the 2-year delay and resultant massive cost jump in Mars Observer due to NASA's frantic attempts to keep it on the Shuttle manifest even after Challenger, rather than launching it on a Titan. (Murray devotes most of the last chapter of his book to that event alone -- and, my, is he steamed.)

(3) I have NOT been able to find direct confirmation of my initial statement that NASA deliberately made space science missions bigger than necessary in the 1980s in order to ensure that no rocket other than Shuttle could launch them -- but I have strong indirect evidence of it. Heppenheimer, for instance, also notes that in the 1980s NASA started flying bigger missions than before, even when it was unnecessary and dangerously risky -- and, while I haven't yet found any proof that NASA actually forced scientists to accept those missions, it's clear that it encouraged them to accept them (as with the SSES' 1983 acceptance of the belief that Mars Observer should not be split into two smaller spacecraft, for a single incredibly flimsy scientific reason).

(4) More seriously, I haven't been able to track down the source of my statement that NASA, in the early 1980s, blackmailed the scientific advocates of the Hubble Telescope into rejecting their own preference for a high-Earth orbit non-repairable version (which thus wouldn't require Shuttle repair visits) by threatening them with not getting any Hubble at all. I thought that incident was mentioned by John McElroy in http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ssb/aprjun02.pdf , but he doesn't. (Athough he does mention the very serious limitations on Hubble's cost-efficiency produced by that orbit -- as Freeman Dyson also does in an editorial in the April 1990 "Sky and Telescope", in which Dyson also points out that Lyman Spitzer himself stated similar beliefs when he proposed Hubble in the first place.) Nor is it mentioned by Chaisson in "The Hubble Wars". I have very clear memories of seeing that incident recounted somewhere, however, and I don't think I'm quite senile enough yet to have hallucinated it -- so I'll keep looking.