Rocket Billionaires by Tim Fernholz

Author:Tim Fernholz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

10

Change Versus More of the Same

The truth is, NASA has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astronauts to space, from the Mercury capsule that carried John Glenn into orbit nearly fifty years ago to the space shuttle Discovery, currently orbiting overhead.

—President Barack Obama, 2010

When the lanky, youthful senator from Illinois arrived in Washington as president-elect, he famously set the scene as “change versus more of the same.” Each new administration receives a list outlining the biggest financial threats to the US Treasury. Obama’s included the financial crisis, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the following year’s national census, and the stressed health-care system. But one item focused on NASA’s problem: the space shuttle was still scheduled to retire the next year, with no obvious replacement.

NASA’s bifurcated spaceflight strategy—to build the agency’s own heavy-lift rockets and exploration spacecraft while funding private companies that would service the space station—was under stress. SpaceX and Orbital were building hardware toward their flight dates under the space taxi program. But the Constellation program, the “Apollo on steroids” concept, was already mired in the usual delays of big NASA programs. The previous president had said that Americans would return to the moon by 2015, but four years later, significant uncertainty remained about whether or not that could be done.

“It’s not just that the rocket takes longer to build; you’re paying for a standing army of people that are on that project for another year,” one NASA executive explained. “So you’re paying for maybe 10,000 people at $200,000 per year. That’s some cost overrun compared to what you originally thought.”

NASA had already contracted out $7 billion to the Constellation project, and the agency anticipated spending some $230 billion more over two decades. Originally, Griffin’s concept was pragmatism distilled: use proven hardware from the space shuttle and the Apollo program to build two modular rockets—one human-rated, for flying a space capsule called Orion with crew, and another, bigger rocket to launch the enormous weight needed to explore the solar system. But the heritage approach turned out to be easier said than done: NASA decided not to use the space shuttle engines as planned, instead hiring Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne to build a whole new engine. (Rocketdyne is another long-lived specialist contractor, which built engines for the Saturn V, the space shuttle, and the Delta IV; today it is Aerojet Rocketdyne.) Plans to reuse the heat shielding from the Apollo spacecraft on Orion were scotched when engineers couldn’t figure out how to re-create the material. And the teams of engineers who were working to design the new rocket, engines, and spacecraft in tandem kept running into trouble when a change in one system necessitated adaptations in another.

Auditors fretted about unsolved technological problems, schedule slippage, and unrealistic budget forecasts. They were alarmed when Pratt & Whitney, which was on a fixed-cost contract from the government, gave cost-plus contracts to its subcontractors. Griffin wasn’t impressed with their criticism. “We have organizations like the Government Accounting Office investigating our decisions on a launch architecture,” he mused in 2007.

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