A New Sheriff In Town

[wvbraun]

An interesting article by Rand Simberg about Griffin's shake-up of NASA.<br /><br /><br /><i>It's clear that there's a desire, and even a consensus (one mistaken in my opinion) to go "back to the future," in which we launch capsules on top of expendable launch vehicles -- the mode by which we successfully went to the moon thirty-five years ago. We never killed anyone that way (so the thinking goes, though we came close in Apollo XIII) and that newfangled reusable vehicle has been a death trap for fourteen astronauts, so it's time to return to the tried and true. Moreover, there are many who think that we need to replicate that era even more by developing a grossly heavy-lift vehicle, like the Saturn V, to get there. The new administrator seems to fall into this camp, so the chances of this being the ultimate selection have gone up dramatically in the last few weeks (pending, of course, the final approval of the president, per the new space transportation policy). Now he seems to be recapitulating the management approach of that era as well, with NASA directly managing the contractors without a separate systems engineering contractor.<br /><br />The problem with this approach is that, to use a trite but useful phrase, that was then, this is now. We chose that approach because we were in a hurry to get to the Moon, because we had to beat the Russians, and price was no object. But now, as the president said in his announcement of the new policy, this is a vision, not a race. In addition, unlike then, NASA has to operate within a constrained budget for the foreseeable future. Will the technical and management approaches of yore be effective in the changed political and economic circumstances, and technology of the early twenty-first century?</i>

 

[jurgens]

I dunno, I don't think that's what any of the teams actually want to do. I believe that they actually want to set up a resuable but not necessarily cheap LEO-Moon Transportation system and also a cheap but not necessarily resuable Earth-LEO Transportation system, so that once the infrastructure is in place on the moon, astronauts can go back and forth. Heavy Lift is going to be needed nevertheless to get that infrastructure started, and like Griffin says, we already have the Shuttle Stack, a modified version of it can approach the lift capabilites of the Saturn V.

 

[jurgens]

not to mention, he is forgetting that the private industry is involved this time unlike Apollo.