Rob Coppinger: March 2006 Archives

It should become apparent over the course of this year that the NASA bidding process for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), part of the agency's new Exploration Transportation System (ETS), is about managing change and not about jumping through the hoops of a real procurement process.

NASA has not even selected a contractor for the CEV yet and already it's stated that the CEV's Launch Vehicle's (CLV) upper stage is to be made at its Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) near New Orleans - where Lockheed Martin builds Space Shuttle external tanks (ET). MAF is also designated as the assembly centre for the Earth Departure Stage, which will take humans to the Moon from 2018. And the booster it's to fly on, the Cargo Launch Vehicle (CaLV) is nowhere near even its first preliminary design review yet.

There is one big reality that is going to ensure that the contractors for ETS, and what they do for that new transportation system, will look surprisingly like the current industrial set up for the Space Transportation System, commonly known as the Space Shuttle; and that reality is the workers.

They have pensions and employment contracts with Boeing and Lockheed and the many other sub-contractors.

To take a simple example, let's say NASA decides to put the contract for ET manufacturing up for grabs again and Boeing bids for it and wins.

Does anyone think that Lockheed can just sack its workforce and that Boeing will have its own ET people to walk in there and take over? Or does anyone think that it would be easy to transfer the 2,000 Lockheed employees at MAF to Boeing?

These are not production line workers. These are highly skilled engineers whose knowledge and experience cannot be easily replicated.

So key is personal knowledge in the space industry that the Aerospace Industries of America trade association has called for the re-employment of Apollo programme engineers - most of whom are now in their sixties and seventies - because CEV looks like an Apollo capsule.

Now think of the entire STS, from propellant, to mobile platform repair, to orbiter avionics, magnify the exchange of people, the legal, financial enormity of that transition.

Yet in the world of NASA contracting we are expected to believe that operating a multi billion dollar manned space programme can easily exchange one contractor for another. That if Boeing can't provide a vehicle, then Lockheed or Northrop Grumman can.

The reality of the US human spaceflight system is that Shuttle has lasted 30 years and has a huge infrastructure supporting it, from workers, to the offices and test centres and labs that house them, both NASA and contractor owned.

ETS must use similar infrastructure, after all, much of it, we're told, will be shuttle derived - because that is proven technology.

It also has a proven supplier base, which represents thousands of jobs in many states across the US.

And this is where we cross into the twilight zone of politics, where Congressional representatives, Senators, NASA management, corporate exploration vice presidents, trade unions and lobbyists combine to create a complex mix.

The job NASA administrator Michael Griffin has is to design an ETS that retains the capabilities the agency has at its centres because those centres employ voters, who vote for the politicians who vote through government spending, and provide enough work for the aerospace company's whose lobbyists will also bat for the NASA budget.

So don't be too surprised when Northrop Grumman, with its Orbiter supplying Boeing partner, wins the CEV contract and Lockheed is provided with the CLV upper stage. ATK has already been given the job of integrating the first stage of the CLV, so expect Lockheed to get the job of integrating the first and second stages together and Northrop Grumman the job of integrating the entire CLV/CEV stack - just as Boeing integrates the Shuttle stack today. Expect a similar division of labour for the CaLV.

Already US software company Stottler Henke Associates has declared that shuttle launch provider United Space Alliance (USA) has awarded it a contract to supply activity scheduling software for CEV astronauts. USA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed, is a member of both CEV bidding consortiums.

Every now and then in aerospace research the man in his workshop can actually come up with something that the technology behemoths of Boeing and EADS and Lockheed Martin cannot.

Whether it’s bureaucratic cultural prejudice against radical ideas and the ‘play it safe’ thinking that goes along with that, I don’t know.

But the almost-lone inventor can still provide something intriguing despite the vast difference in resources.

It was with this expectation that I found myself standing outside 225A Star Road in Peterborough (pronounced "Peter-bra"), a UK city 2h north of London by train, on a chilly day earlier this month.

"Each year brings corrections to the programme", Anatoly Perminov head of Russia's Federal Space Agency said dryly at the heads of agencies International Space Station (ISS) press conference last week His agency has been considering the long term future of the station. Its already had to swallow the hard fact that its science power module would not be launched by a Shuttle, as planned. Russia would like to see the station operated after 2016, which is the end of the ISS certified flight period. NASA meanwhile considers the very near future of the station.

As Perminov notes the Space Shuttle programme has changed again and now we are on 18 flights, including two contingency missions, which means its really sixteen and the 19 flight plan announced just before December is shelved. The nineteenth flight was supposed to be the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. I do not think that will ever happen. NASA administrator Mike Griffin repeatedly says that NASA will determine at some stage whether or not it can do the Hubble mission. And he has the time to do it. Although Hubble will stop working in a couple of years it can sit in orbit for many years to come.

But being realistic the ISS assembly needs will end hopes for such a mission. NASA is soon to announce that Discovery/STS-121 will not take place in May. Its really expected in July followed by an October launch for Atlantis/STS-115 and then STS-117 is scheduled for December. But two missions in one year is the more likely outcome with -117 being pushed by glitches into January 2007. It would become one of around six launches NASA's planning has scheduled for next year. But then there is reality. NASA's extreme sensitivity to any technical hitches and foam loss will ensure that testing and analysis of anomalies that can be expected on STS-121 will hold up the launch schedule sufficientl to ensure -117 and STS-118 take up the first two quarters.

So at some point next year expect another re-evaluation of the ISS. Another final configuration. Russia might wish it had gone ahead with Mir 2 in the early 1990s instead of joining then President Bill Clinton's call for co-operation for the ISS. If Japan and the European Space Agency do not get their modules launched they might want to exchange that for astronaut time on the station. ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter will travel to the ISS on Discovery/STS-121 for the European agency's first six month mission aboard the station. It will be owed a lot more time on station if its Columbus laboratory is grounded.

Whatever happens with Shuttle and Station the partners should, as the Russians propose, continue with ISS. Although it could be complicated with US modules providing power and NASA no longer formally part of the endeavour, the station itself is an important feat of engineering and for long term space travel its systems and their reliability are going to be key. There is no other test bed available for technology that an inter-planetary ship would need for a Mars mission. A post-NASA ISS should also consider working with the Chinese, and possibly the Indians.

An incomplete station with realistic research goals and partners that can meet their obligations could actually be better for the long term needs of human space exploration.