Aldridge Hearings Review

05/05/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

The President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond held its last public hearing today in New York. This session included some interesting additions. Due to legal requirements the commission had to have 'public deliberations' of some kind, so we were treated to presentations on various topics by commission members instead of the usual witnesses. Some of the comments made it clear what some of the recommendations might be but that the details were either still to work out or were simply out of scope for their deliverable. Read on.

Other reports on the last hearing are here:

Music To My Ears – Rand on this Mark Carreau article.

NASA Chief Says Agency Must Revamp Organization to Reach Moon, Mars (Space.com)

Panelists want more focused space vision Associated Press via MSNBC

All of the presentations still stressed three major themes: directly involve the public, NASA isn't capable of doing this alone, and the output must be a viable and sustainable industry that is based on innovative private enterprise with multiple customers, not just one large government customer. There was also considerable discussion about how to fix the governmental aspects of the program from a project management perspective. This includes a lot of discussion around the military's techniques for the Joint Strike Fighter and the Future Combat System projects. The two management buzz words that stuck were “spiral development” and “systems of systems”. I had to keep reminding myself that this discussion wasn't about some attempt to manage a 'program' in the old Apollo sense, but simply how to bring the best practices found in other agencies to the entire project, and specifically to NASA's portion of the overall strategy.

Sean O'Keefe presentation was interesting since he had been in on the development of the vision itself from the very beginning and since several commission members had been doing site visits at several NASA centers. He said the right things in terms of “not a program, but an strategy”, “build an industry”, “facilitate private industry”, etc. But as we all know, the details about how the agency implements those ideas can determine their eventual failure. Carly prompted him with a question about the difference between “transformation” of the agency and a simple “reorganization” of it. If he can pull of a real transformation then he might be able to put those principles into action, but that's an awfully big agency to transform.

One of the more interesting exchanges with O'Keefe was around why Congress was having issues with the budget requests from the Whitehouse for the implementation of the vision. O'Keefe felt that the main reason is that many in Congress wanted a simple, discrete program with a single price tag when what is actually being sold is a strategy. As someone in R&D in his own organization I can understand that frustration. Many in management or financial positions simply refuse to think strategically, instead choosing to focus on discrete components and nothing more. The other point, brought up by Neal Tyson, was that NASA has developed a reputation of very unreliable cost estimates and Congress had simply been burned to many times to take NASA's budget forecasts at face value.

While these two issues are probably the major contributors to the problem, along with simple election year posturing, my reading of things suggests that many are simply waiting to see what this committee recommends in order to find out what the total picture might look like. At many points during the hearings I felt that the committee was asking for support before anyone had seen their output. Especially when it came to the space advocacy groups (NSS, Planetary Society, etc). Several commission members asked them why they weren't motivating their members to write their congressman to support NASA's budget requirements. I was disappointed that none of them said that everyone was really waiting to see what this committee had to say. If, as every witness has said, NASA can't do this alone, no one is going to support this effort based solely on what NASA has said so far. That's business as usual. That's Apollo/Shuttle/ISS thinking. None of us are going to put our “political muscle” behind something without some evidence that this really is something new and that it will be executed as specified. We've all heard from commissions like this before so, like Congress, we're not willing to take this at face value anymore. If the Commission's report says what they're suggesting it will say and the President executes on it without regard to the entrenched constituencies who prefer the status quote, then we will get behind it, but not before that.

This hearing also gave us the best insight into what the recommendations will look like. They will be in the form of a dozen or so recommendations in terms of management and strategy. They won't get be getting into vehicle design or anything like that. Here's the list that I could glean from the time available:

• Carly Fiorina talked about political sustainability and reasons for doing the whole thing. Specifically she suggested that while glory, exploration, inspiration, etc are nice, the pragmatist in all of us can’t justify the cost based solely on that. Instead the justification is that “if we don’t, someone else will.” It may take longer, but that someone else will own space and will also have created the technological powerhouse that endeavor requires. And since power in the 21st century is based on technological leadership, the country that does it will be definition be a superpower. So, while it isn’t a classical Space Race™, it is a move to preserve our standard of living and place of preeminence in the world. Toward the end she did have to stick in a point that this requires a robust, private sector, space industry. (I think they gave the topics to those not typically tied to a subject but that Carly felt compelled to insert something about private enterprise in there anyway. Good for her.)
• Lester Lyles discussed the governmental and programmatic aspects of of the vision and the fact that NASA couldn’t do it alone. Specifically that the National Space Council needed to be reconstituted and that it needed to coordinate all of the agencies, not just NASA.
• Michael Jackson discussed interfacing with the private sector but didn’t give any great details. It was basically the statements of “we will need to build a space industry” and that “NASA should only do those things that NASA alone can do”. Not a lot of detail here.
• Laurie Leshin reiterated the need for an educational component but didn’t give any specifics.
• Neal DeGrasse Tyson discussed scientific needs and made several points that the ability of science to do things grows as technological capability grows. He chided scientists who find technology crude and somehow ignoble as naive and that it was technology that made the science possible. Beyond that he was also short on exact details.
• Paul Spudis discussed ISRU and that without the utilization of space based resources the entire plan would fail because it was simply to expensive to take everything with us each time. He suggested that NASA needed to create a new capability around surface based operations, even calling it the Office of Planetary Surface Engineering. He also stated that routine access to cislunar space would radically change the economics of the entire satcom industry since satellites would become re-usable resources instead of launch-‘em-and-leave-'em. But also that this exploration creates all sorts of commercial opportunities. NASA is good an pioneering but is horrible at operations. This area is ripe for commercialization.
• Bob Walker gave a nice rundown of why NASA just isn’t capable of doing this themselves and that they aren’t capable of transforming themselves from the inside out. Some suggestions were that NASA centers become more economic centers, that entrepreneurs should feel welcome at NASA centers (that would be transformational!). Beyond that, not much detail.
• Maria Zuber talked specifically about the NASA Centers and how they should be moved to more of an Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) which is how JPL, Ames and Lawrence Livermore are organized. This would mean large numbers of civil servants being moved to state agencies instead of as federal employees. She also discussed being more aggressive with requirements that people move between Centers and that no one should view Center employment as a lifetime thing anymore. Apparently they were surprised to find that 'a permanent civil service job" was not a great motivator for recruitment for young people. I still think its odd that anyone ever wanted to work for one employer for their entire life.

Below are some other noteworthy highlights from the hearings:

• During the Q&A for the “Lunar and Other Space Science” section Dr. Tony Tether (head of DARPA) interjected the point that the early space program promised that at some point soon everyone would get to go but that never materialized: bq. “What NASA seemed to forget was that then, we all wanted to go,” Tether told commissioners. “We were forgotten about.” He repeated this several times, driving the point home that he (and the rest of us) felt gypped by NASA and that the only real way to build a constituency is to deliver on that promise. The Commission came back to this point several times latter in the day. I’ll have more extensive comments on this latter.
• During the press conference an AP reporter asked about the price tag and their reluctance to deliver one. This prompted a long answer from several members. The best sound-bite was Aldridge’s statement that, again, this is a strategy, not a program. And that as a strategy, it would be “pay as you go”, which means that NASA would have to implement all of this within its existing budgets, which would remain at its current $16 billion (in 2004 dollars). No balloon payments, etc. So far this meme has been picked up by the Orlando Sentinel, CNN, and others. Maybe this will finally put a stake in the heart of that silly $1 trillion story.

So, am I still optimistic? Yes. But as I said earlier, I'm not going to do anything to actively support it until I see the actual recommendations and the President's response to them. And even then it will have to be earned support and it will be on a per-issue basis. There is still a huge potential for politics and bureaucracy to completely screw this one up.