But it is not because Florida Today's The Flame Trench blog has not done its journalism properly, no, its because NASA's public affairs office got it wrong - well everybody makes mistakes I guess
NASA has told Hyperbola that The Flame Trench's article about the Aerospace Corporation Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) study on EELV suitability for launching the Orion crew exploration vehicle is wrong when it's first sentence says:
Senior NASA managers are reviewing an independent analysis
because:
Under evaluation was not accurate re: the Aerospace report. I learned later that it is in fact not finished and we can't discuss it further at this point.
Hyperbola wanted to put this information into the public domain because searching for reports about this study this blog has not uncovered any correct articles, only blogosphere postings that propagate this initial error (Yes very community minded I know)
The statement that the study is not finished also raises questions about the validity of the NASASpaceflight.com (NSF) article that kicked off this whole situation
It suggests that NSF has been provided with an incomplete summary or portion of the Aerospace Corporation report that does not reflect its true conclusions
If you read the NSF article closely it does appear that the story is actually based on the United Launch Alliance review conducted as part of the work and not the Aerospace study itself, especially when it says
The ULA (United Launch Alliance) were asked to contribute a limited review of the technical elements of the study. However, they were not given access to the cost or schedule data that was to be used in the findings.
and then later on
It is also noted that the ULA used the same ascent trajectory constraints as Ares I
and then again here
However, ULA's estimate of $400M to human rate the Delta IV-H - and a figure of around $200m to carry out the same process on an Atlas V-H - are deemed as "wildly off base" by NASA sources
and clearly the NASA sources are not the Aerospace study team. This would also explain why NASA is able to say that the Aerospace study is not finished. The Orlando Sentinel's 20 April Write Stuff blog post about the NSF article also referred to ULA employees as a source about the use of EELVs for Constellation
What peaked Hyperbola's original interest in the NSF article was the timing of the report. This blog asked NASA in a Monday 20 April email:
Michael Griffin said on different occasions that the EELVs would not be as safe as Ares I and that statement would not exclude either that Aerospace Corporation had carried out a study or that the ULA booster could loft that payload. Can you confirm that this Aerospace Corporation study was carried out, when it was carried out and whether it was the study that led to Griffin being prepared to make the statement that EELVs were not as safe as Ares I?
What is clear now is that Griffin could not have been referring to this report. Was it the 2005 Exploration Systems Architecture Study instead? I'll leave that to another blog post
Thanks to NSF for bringing the Aerospace study to our attention, Hyperbola will be tracking its progress and hopes to bring its results to its readers as soon as possible
In the meantime if you want interesting EELV comments look no further than the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel 2008 annual report
While it says nothing about EELV suitability for launching Orion there is one entry that is very interesting. Acting administrator Christopher Scolese is qouted (I guess at the time he was associate administrator) as saying, when asked by ASAP what was harder than you expected?
Designing Ares and Orion to have improved operational characteristics over
our Shuttle and EELV systems.
Interesting? Whether you think so or not Michael Griffin's responses to the Panel's questions are hilarious and worth reading
on April 23, 2009 1:55 AM | Reply
Thank you very much for this correction, Rob. We've issued a correction and will take the cue to watch our P's and Q's.
Much Appreciated.
Joel R
on April 23, 2009 11:00 AM | Reply
Possibly yet another witch hunt among ULA employees starts: making Ares I look bad is a serious issue for the owners, no matter if it is the truth or not.
on April 23, 2009 3:00 PM | Reply
I do not see your grounds for questioning the validity of the original NSF article just because Florida Today's blog made a mis-statement about the study being already completed.
Bergin confirmed the initial report with multiple sources from multiple organisations over the course of a week. I know this because much of this work was documented on NSF's L2 "insider" forum from start to finish before the article was published.
Having written for NSF in the past, I can say that Chris is nothing if not thorough and well connected.
on April 23, 2009 7:46 PM | Reply
I'm a journalist, my job is to question everything, I don't need any grounds. What do you mean by initial report exactly? Nothing you say invalidates my suggestion that on examining the NSF article it appears that the information really came from the ULA work done for the EELV study and not the Aerospace Corporation study itself, which NASA says is unfinished. So my queston to you is, that material in L2, is it clearly pages from the Aerospace Corporation study or not? You could have simply said it was.
on April 23, 2009 8:53 PM | Reply
I don't know if Chris has a copy of the study, a draft, a partial draft, or what.
I do know he is working with multiple human sources from different angles who know what is going on - which is far more important.
A full copy would almost certainly be under ITAR restriction anyway. He certainly never claimed to have obtained a full copy - he certainly didn't need one to write and validate the short article.
on April 25, 2009 8:43 PM | Reply
It seems that you failed to act like a journalist by failing to question the unnammed source you are using to make claims. Hopefully it wasn't the same source who keeps insisting you call Ares V the CLV.. You seem to have bypassed both the NASA and ULA statements on Florida Today confirming the original article. You say "NASA" say, but you fail to name the person. Poor showing.
on April 26, 2009 8:37 AM | Reply
The source was NASA and that means it was a public affairs officer. Under Flight style we do not name public affairs or media relations or anyone else who works in the press office. Call it what you will. If it was someone who worked for NASA and was leaking information I would call it a NASA source or space programme source. That is standard journalistic practice. If the person I spoke to was saying things on the record I would name them and their job title. That is how journalists work.
NASA's public affairs office admitted to me that their original comments to Florida Today for that original story, blog posting that you refer too, were wrong. The public affairs officer who made those statements to Florida Today got his facts wrong. So the Florida Today story is wrong. Do you understand now? The study has not concluded it is still ongoing and no one is evaluating anything. In that regard the NASASpaceflight.com story is also wrong.
And what are you referring too about Ares V? Ares V is the cargo launch vehicle and the acronym NASA uses is CaLV. Ares I is the crew launch vehicle, which is referred to by NASA as CLV. I use both correctly.
As for your claim that I have failed to act like a journalist, you clearly don't know what journalism is.
on April 26, 2009 10:49 PM | Reply
It depends upon how one defines "complete." It's not usual for a report to be completed, but it's not released (and not discussed publicly) until weeks or months later.
My guess is that the original story in NASASpaceFlight.com is correct.