Main Engine Cut Off - T+143: Starliner, 2020 US Space Budget

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Starliner’s flight test did not go as planned, and the US 2020 budget was passed, which creates Space Force and has big implications for NASA’s work.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 317 other supporters.TopicsStarliner anomaly to prevent ISS docking - SpaceNews.comNASA, Boeing Complete Successful Landing of Starliner Flight Test | NASAThoughts on Starliner - Main Engine Cut OffTrump Signs FY2020 Appropriations Into Law – SpacePolicyOnline.comArtemis Wins Only Lukewarm Support in Final NASA FY2020 Appropriation – SpacePolicyOnline.comTrump signs defense bill establishing U.S. Space Force: What comes next - SpaceNews.comThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. We've got some interesting topics to close the year out with. We're going to talk about the 2020 US budget that just got passed and how it relates to space. We've got some Artemis stuff to talk about in there with NASA, and we've got some Space Force stuff to cover. But before we get into that, I want to talk about Starliner. Boeing had their orbital flight test this week of Starliner, which is their crewed spacecraft for commercial crew to get crews up to the International Space Station. And this was the test that didn't have any people in it. So this was the test that they would fly, make sure everything checked out all right. And then

if everything went well on the next flight, put people up to the ISS. Well, everything did not go all right. They launched successfully on an Atlas V. And then once they got to the spacecraft separation point, that releases in a suborbital trajectory, just slightly suborbital. So the low end of the orbit dips into the atmosphere. The higher end is up above the atmosphere. And when it gets released, then the plan is for Starliner to go up and circularize its orbit when it's over the Indian Ocean.

And that way it is in orbit and all of the rocket's pieces are now destroyed in Earth's atmosphere. So this is very similar to what the shuttle did. The shuttle launched and then it put itself into that same kind of trajectory. The external tank would end up burning up in the atmosphere and then the shuttle itself would put itself into orbit with its orbital engines. So Starliner's following a very similar trajectory to that. Well, turns out when it got to that point, the orbital insertion burn never took place. And then they had some issues figuring out which way the spacecraft is pointing. And they had some communications blackouts with it because of that. But eventually they did use its different engines, its reaction control

system, its attitude control system, to put itself into a lower than planned orbit. And they used so much fuel doing that, that they aren't able to get up to the ISS. So they were ended up in an orbit that was about 200 kilometers, a little bit above that. And they stayed there for two days. They tested out a bunch of things in orbit and eventually landed on Sunday morning at White Sands in New Mexico to complete their orbital flight test. Now, it came out that the issue was the clock on Starliner was 11 hours off of where it should have been, so it was not following the scripted trajectory plan that it had loaded into its flight software, which is what delayed the orbital insertion burn and led the teams to work all of those issues. As a knock-on effect of that, they obviously never made it to the ISS, so they couldn't test any of the docking, the rendezvous docking,

the approach, all of that that they needed to test out to get to the ISS successfully. So in the wake of this, there has been a ton of spin from NASA, from Boeing, that this was still a really good test. We tested a lot of things. We did everything we could, trying to downplay the fact that they weren't able to dock with the ISS. In some of the press conferences, they even said that that was not a requirement of the missions. Came out later, somebody went through all of the contracting language of commercial crew and did find a requirement that says they need to do a docking with the ISS on an uncrewed flight. So then there was some more spin from that. You're getting the sense already for what this story was like. There was some more spin after that about how that might be a contract requirement,

but not a NASA requirement. So maybe NASA could issue a waiver that they would be able to go ahead with the crewed test flight on the next flight, fly up to the ISS, and the first docking that Starliner would ever do would be when there's people aboard. Now, this is where it's going to be really interesting to see how this gets played out in the long run, because that doesn't sound like a thing that NASA would be comfortable with with many companies. That the first docking of a spacecraft with the ISS would have people aboard waiting for that hatch to open to get into the

ISS, risking people on both sides of that hatch if anything were to go wrong. It doesn't sound like something that they'd be very comfortable with. Because of it being Boeing and Boeing's relationship with NASA and politics in general, it seems like one of those things that we would all expect Boeing to get off easy, essentially, and be able to go ahead with this crewed test flight, knowing that so many things went wrong on this mission. So it's going to be really interesting to see how this gets played out. And myself, personally, I'm even a little conflicted here, because I do think that they should have to refly an uncrewed mission, because I think many other companies, notably SpaceX, but many others, would be held to that standard, that this wasn't a

successful mission in the way that we needed to see a successful mission. So fly that again and make sure everything checks out all the way up to the ISS and back. But on the other hand, commercial crew is a very important program. It is of high importance to get these spacecraft operational and to get people to the ISS on these two spacecraft. So in that sense, are the risks worth it? And I think we even had this conversation a year or two back when NASA was debating putting people on the first flight of SLS. And at the time, I said on the show that it doesn't make sense because the payoff for that risk is not worth it. But if there is significant payoff for risk, then the risks become more worth it. So in this case, is this knowing our relationship with Russia right now and the fact that we can only get one crew member up on a Soyuz every couple of months,

knowing how much there is at risk there of losing access to the ISS if another Soyuz issue happens like we've seen a couple in the past year. There's so much risk there that, you know, at a certain point, it might be worth it to put people on these things and get up there as soon as possible. So I'm even a little conflicted here, right? Because I think it's worth it at a certain point to make sure that we can get access to the ISS via these spacecraft. Now, we're all assuming there's going to be a double standard here, that if this were to happen to SpaceX, that they wouldn't be able to fly people on the next mission, and that we're all assuming that NASA is going to be okay with people going up on the next

flight of Starliner. I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I do know that I'm personally conflicted by this, and I'm curious to see how this gets played in public. And that's another part I want to touch on here. Commercial Crew is an interesting program. It's a political program, right? Because it's from NASA. It's from a government organization. They need to get funding from Congress for it. It's been a battle in Congress historically, and it's come up in many congressional hearings. But it's always been an odd one because it is a fixed price contract, or that was the intention. Boeing did eke out some extra funding after the contract was signed, which is another outrageous issue in its own. But the congressional

hearings where Commercial Crew comes up, nobody really knows how to play it because one of the easy things to rely on in Congress is, how much are these delays going to cost the American taxpayer? And that was never really straight up to answer with Commercial Crew, because they were fixed price contracts. Now, certainly, you can say that it cost us money, because we had to buy more seats from Russia, and we had to extend ISS operations out through different mechanisms, because we don't have as much crew up as we thought. And NASA's spending more time on the development process of commercial crew. So therefore, you know, that's money that we didn't intend to spend.

So there are definitely areas that you could say costs were going up, but the costs that were paid out to Boeing and SpaceX are not changed by however long it takes them to get flying. So the people in Congress never really knew how to probe and ask questions about that kind of thing. So what you saw instead was this kind of positioning for future stuff. It was this kind of narrative building so that when stuff comes up in the future, be it new contracts, be it reworking contracts or extending contracts or new contracts, that you have this narrative in place to influence that in the way that you want.

So a lot of it was in the early days, how can we trust SpaceX? Look at what just happened on CRS-7, their cargo mission that blew up on the way up to orbit. How can we trust SpaceX? And this fueling procedure, look at what just happened to the Amos mission that was on the launch pad and exploded. A lot of that came into play, right? That was this narrative building that SpaceX was fast and loose with safety and we couldn't trust them with our astronauts. And a lot of that was from, turns out,eing lobbyists that were kind of laying the seeds

of doubt there um and they're tight with a lot of politicians so that's not too surprising but that kind of thing is what happens with commercial crew in politics and this starliner situation plays into that directly because yes spacex has made some mistakes and certain ones were really dumb mistakes. But they were never really easily understandable by people from the outside. Now with Starliner here, from the beginning of November to now, there have been two major issues that when you say it in plain language, just sound downright stupid. And that's how it's going to play in public.

The first one was on the pad abort test when they didn't attach a parachute. So only two parachutes deployed instead of three, because one was just straight up not attached. And then on this one, the orbital flight test, they had the clock set wrong. And obviously, both of those are more complicated than that. There's a lot more at play than a simple over you know, overlooking of a mistake or something. But that's how they sound. And that's how they're going to sound to people in politicians' offices. That's how it's going to sound to the public. And that's how it can be played if somebody wants to play it that way. So if somebody in Congress has sufficient motivation or sufficient lobbying from

SpaceX and some of the new space companies, you know, this is a really easy target for them to come at Boeing and say, like, look at these two really simple mistakes. You didn't set the clock right. You didn't attach the parachute. That's the kind of stuff that really hurts politically to have as, you know, your opponents have that kind of firepower in their pocket. And then even on top of that, consider the fact that SpaceX is getting pretty close here. We've got an in-flight abort coming up on, I think right now it's January 11th, so just about a week, two and a half weeks away, I guess. And then after that, they're going to have their crewed flight test, which is DM-2.

We don't know a date on that yet, but it's mere months away if all goes well with that in-flight abort. So if they're able to get those two missions off pretty quickly, and if Boeing has some significant delays before they're ready to fly people, SpaceX could get a mission or two up to the ISS with people aboard before Boeing does. And that is some good political firepower in SpaceX's pocket for future deliberations and for future political management of the situation. So this all kind of sounds like weird and amorphous, but this is the kind of stuff that commercial crew has always been impacted by in the political realm. And it's the stuff that's important for it when you're looking at the future of the program or extensions of this program or

even, you know, think wider than that, other programs that might look like commercial crew in the future. Think about stuff that happens out at the Gateway, the Lunar Gateway, this program that NASA's kind of working on that we'll talk about in a little bit. If there's future programs that look like commercial crew that aren't at the ISS that are somewhere further out than that, this stuff is going to play into the decisions that get made there, the political conversations that get made there, the political conversations that will happen there, and they will have impacts down the line. So it might sound kind of weird right now, might sound like it doesn't really impact a lot

day-to-day with Commercial Crew, but it does have longer-term impacts than that, and these storylines will persist beyond just these little one-off events. Now, it also happens to be that this morning, as I record this Monday morning, Dennis Muhlenberg, the CEO of Boeing, has been fired or stepped down. I don't know exactly what the details were internally. And a lot of that, almost all of it, probably all of it, was related to the 737 MAX situation that's been going on for over a year now. But pretty much every big program at Boeing is having problems. You know, they've got problems

with 737 MAX. They've got problems with some of their other defense programs that are related to aerospace. They've got problems with SLS. They now have problems with Starliner. They are in major crisis over there. The CEO is out, and there is a lot of firepower to be used against them if you have sufficient motivation to do so. But not a lot of that panned out in the 2020 budget, which is what I want to get into next. And before we do that, let's talk about our budget here at Main Engine Cutoff. This is an entirely listener-supported show, so I thank everyone out there who supports Main Engine Cutoff. There are 355 of you supporting this show, including 38 executive producers who made this show possible. Thanks to Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris,

Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everdashnaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from lars from agile space tommy adam sam and six anonymous executive producers thank you all so much for your support for keeping this thing running uh it is amazing to have that kind of group supporting this little independent operation so if you want to help support the show head over to mainenginecutoff.com support all right so the budget we almost had a government shutdown again um We were heading towards one on December 20th if a budget deal did not happen. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, out of the impeachment scandals that have been happening and through all that political grossness, two spending bills made their way through Congress. President Trump signed them.

So we now have an official budget for 2020 all the way through September. There's a lot in here that's not notable, right? They're natural extensions of things that have always been in place or things that have been in place for a couple of years that we've already dissected. But there are some notable things for NASA and for the defense side of space as well. For the defense side of space, we have a Space Force now. U.S. Space Force exists. It got incredibly low funding compared to the request. The request itself was only $72 million. And this is for the initial work to stand up Space Force to begin the process of building out this new arm of the military. They only got $40 million

in the final appropriations. So lower funding than planned, but it's going to be a long, slow rollout over the next couple of months or years before this thing's really up and running and because of the way that it all shook out space force is a part of the air force so it is going to live under the air force in the same way that the marines live under the navy it will report up through the secretary of the air force which is the part that i don't like i really wanted Space Force to be its own entity so that space has a completely unencumbered direct line to the leadership of the country without having to filter through the Secretary of the Air Force. Now, importantly, there is going to be someone from the Space Force on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so there is going to

be some advocacy for space at that higher level, but it still filters up through the Air Force after all. The process from where we are now to that fully fledged Space Force is going to be interesting to watch. It's going to take a while. So there's not a ton to really dissect right now. We're going to see some of these pieces start moving early in the year, and we'll do a whole show about it at then. But I did want to mention, it exists, the rollout is beginning, and we'll see the transition in phases as we go forward, and we'll certainly be talking about it here. Maybe I'll bring someone on soon to talk more in depth about Space Force overall. You've heard me talk about it before if you've been listening for a while. I'm pro-Space Force. I think it could be a really good influence for the industry, but I'm very bummed that it's still trapped under the Air Force. But it could be a really good influence for the industry. But I'm very bummed that it's still

trapped under the Air Force. But it could be some good things still, regardless of that in the future. All right, but the bigger stuff to break down from the budget is related to NASA. It is related to the Artemis program, the goal of landing people on the moon in 2024. And the big one here is that NASA was looking for a ton of money to get started on human landers. They requested something north of a billion dollars. It was like $1.4 billion, all said in the budget request. They only got $600 million for landers. That's less than half of the request. So definitely not full funding for what is the most important piece of landing people on the moon is actually being able to land on the moon.

Now there's some other stuff that's going on with SLS though that's related. They got $300 million for the exploration upper stage. This is a bigger upper stage that guess who would build? bigger upper stage that guess who would build? Boeing. And this would be used for flights four and later on SLS. NASA and the White House requested to delay the exploration upper stage or the EUS. Congress said, no, we want you to give a bunch of money to Boeing and build the exploration upper stage, even though NASA and the White House say we don't need it. We don't want it. We'd rather focus elsewhere. We want money for landers so that we can actually do something up there. But they're getting money for exploration upper stage. Now, these two things are tied. They're intrinsically linked. We talked about this a couple of shows ago. Boeing's proposal for their lander is

integrated with the SLS and requires the exploration upper stage. So my conspiracy theory back then, that might pan out a little bit more here, is that funding the exploration upper stage is a backhanded way to give Boeing a leg up on the whole lander program. Because by funding the exploration upper stage, you're funding a piece of their lander program. So if you're one of the Boeing and Congress are playing 4D chess people out there, certainly looks like we've got some 4D chess pieces on the table here with the EUS, with the lander funding, with NASA getting much less money for the landers than they requested. It's all weirdly interconnected. A couple other bits that are important before the last big chunk of this that I want to break down. NASA got a waiver extension so that we can buy seats up to the ISS from Russia until 2026. That should be enough time to get commercial crew

flying, as we were talking about in the last segment. And they also slipped Europa Clipper, not officially slipped the mission, but they slipped the requirement to launch the mission to 2025 instead of 2023. They still require that to fly on SLS. There's been a lot of talk about flying that on a commercial rocket, which would open up an SLS rocket for the Artemis program, and which would honestly be able to promise a quicker schedule than the SLS at this point. Now, the biggest reason to use SLS was that it can get Europa Clipper to where it's going much faster, thereby saving time on the mission because you don't have to wait around for an extra two or three years as it

makes its way out to Europa. Well, slipping that to 2025 kind of erases that thing altogether. So if the mission is going to be ready to fly in 2023, and you put it on a commercial rocket, rather than waiting for SLS in 2025, what are you doing at that point? You know, it's still a really odd thing there to tie Europa Clipper to SLS, and I really hope that changes. But the biggest notable piece of the budget for NASA is this clause that says that NASA can only obligate 40% of the funding available for landers, for the Gateway, and for commercial LEO development until NASA submits a multi-year plan on how they will implement Artemis, including milestones and funding estimates for out years. So what that means is Congress wants plans for the next couple

of years from NASA on how this program is going to go before NASA is able to spend money on the program. Now, this to me is the best thing in the budget, because NASA has been pretty fast and loose with what the plan is long term here for a couple of these different things, including the landers, including the gateway, including what the plan is for this whole commercial LEO development program that they've been pushing, an idea to commercialize ISS or low Earth orbit platforms. What is the plan for that overall? And in the past, Congress has mandated NASA to deliver them reports by certain dates. NASA was late on those dates a couple of times. And then the reports never really said anything. They never really showed any budget details. They just kind of were

very broad and not very specific and really not helpful overall to understand what NASA's plans are. So Congress took a different tack this year and said, hey, you can't spend more than 40% of the money that we're giving you here until you let us know what your plan is overall and what your plan is down the line. And I think that is going to be hugely clarifying for NASA. I'm really excited to see those plans. And because it is so hard and fast about, you got to get us this before you can spend money, it's not something that NASA could slow roll or put on the back burner or kind of forget about, let the interns do it. This is something that is of utmost importance to NASA to get done and to get delivered and to get congressional buy-in, which is something that they rarely have with the proposals that they put out

there. So this should be a hugely clarifying moment for NASA. I'm really interested to see what they put in these reports, what kind of funding they show, what kind of milestones they show, how realistic those things are, or if they're just kind of do pie in the sky stuff and then see where that gets them. I don't know, but they've got to be pretty straight up with this if they want more money in the future, if they want to even be able to spend the money right now that they have. They got to really pull this off well. Now on the Lander side of things, $600 million sounds like a ton, right? But it's less than half the request, remember. So NASA has a couple options here. Originally, the plan was with the full $1.4 billion that they were requesting, they were going to select three

different providers for the Lander to work on their designs, to work on their components, and then eventually down select to two providers for the landers. With only half the funding available, they can go a couple of different ways. They could still select three providers and then only down select to one, or they could select two up front and just go with them, or they could just select one. They could just pick a winner. And if they do that, I think we all know who the winner should be, which is the national team, because NASA can get four different companies for the price of one. That is the Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Draper. That team was announced back at IAC. Seems like a very politically-minded move there.

And with this kind of budget numbers, it could be likely that they might get a sole source award. Now, the other side of that is the Boeing thing that I just mentioned with the EUS and the Boeing. Lander tied into that. And of course, Boeing has very tight ties to a lot of the politicians that are making decisions here. So I wouldn't be shocked if that was it. But that's really the thing that we're going to see early in 2020 is how NASA is going to play that. Are they going to pick three up front and down select? Are they only going to pick two? Are they only going to pick one? All of those things will really indicate how this whole mission is going to go from here on out. But at a certain point, this is just not enough money to do it by 2024. If you're somebody who really wants to see that date happen, it seems less and less likely every day. But who knows, maybe this report,

this magic report from NASA about how they're going to spend money in the future will really clarify things and say, oh, you know what, this is fairly realistic. I don't think that'll be the case. But I am interested to read the report in any case. So anyway, those are my fairly unsorted thoughts about the 2020 budget. There's a lot to look at in the future. There anyway, those are my fairly unsorted thoughts about the 2020 budget. There's a lot to look at in the future. There's a lot to track as we go into 2020. I will be back with you one more time in 2019. I've got a plan for a little end of year show that we did a variant of last year. So I'm excited for that. But until then, enjoy the holidays. Thank you all so much for listening. And if you want to help support as

always, mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Thank you all for listening. I will talk to you next week.