Main Engine Cut Off - T+27: Financial vs. Political Capital and Mission Sustainability

Episode Date: October 26, 2016

In light of the recent Schiaparelli lander failure, I discuss the differences between missions supported by financial and political capital, and how those differences will play out in the next era of space exploration. ExoMars completes crucial orbit insertion, hope lost for lander | NASASpaceFlight.com Schiaparelli descent data: decoding underway / ExoMars / Space Science / Our Activities / ESA mobile Arbitrary Spin and Damage Control - Main Engine Cut Off MRO image of Schiaparelli – after / 10 / 2016 / Images / ESA Multimedia / ESA Online Videos Main Engine Cut Off Weekly, Issue #1 Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on iTunes, Overcast, or elsewhere Subcribe to Main Engine Cut Off Weekly Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. This week I want to talk about the mantra, failure is not an option, and the way that that mantra impacts governments and private companies and different agencies like that and how they respond to failures and how they may respond to failures into the future. And this whole idea comes down to the concept of capital, both political capital and financial capital. For NASA or ESA or other government agencies like that, their missions are funded and supported and sustained by political capital. For companies like SpaceX or Moon Express, like we'll see go to the moon as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE next year, or Blue Origin, they're sustained by financial capital. Now, obviously, there's a little bit of both mixed in, and it's never

100% political capital or 100% financial capital. But in a lot of cases, it's largely tipped in one direction. And I'll give you a few examples to understand what I'm saying here. We'll start back at the Apollo program. That was a program that was sustained on political capital. It took a certain amount of financial capital to make possible, but the thing that sustained it was political capital. It took a certain amount of financial capital to make possible, but the thing that sustained it was political capital. And it had so much political capital throughout the 1960s that it was able to withstand a certain amount of failures. Apollo 1, Apollo 13, a certain amount of these things that went into the planning and the program itself, those failures were overcome because of how much political capital that program had as a whole. We responded to the Apollo 1 fire in a certain way

because of how much political capital and motivation there was behind the Apollo program. We were on a mission to fulfill JFK's dream of getting a person to the moon and back within the decade, and we were motivated to beat the Soviets to the moon. All of those things built up a certain amount of political capital that sustained the program over that decade through failures, through high times, through high costs, through all of that. And then you saw how quickly the political capital was lost for the Apollo program in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After we beat the Soviets, after we fulfilled JFK's dream, the political capital that was sustaining the Apollo program

dropped through the floor, eventually leading up to the cancellations of the final few missions. Certainly, there were arguments made about how expensive the Apollo program was, but those weren't the reasons that its cancellation were brought about. The cancellation was first brought about and floated because it had lost political capital. If we had the motivation to sustain the program beyond 1972, we would have done that. We would have come up with the money just like we did throughout the entire 1960s decade. And to continue the US-centric focus there, though we'll branch off into Europe very shortly, this was seen again with the shuttle program. The shuttle program started off with a lot of political capital, largely because the

Air Force was so invested in it. And there's a very interesting history about the way that the Air Force kind of dictated what the shuttle became. And NASA took a backseat to the Air Force's wishes, and a lot of the shuttle's design was dictated by the Air Force and its needs. So for that reason, the shuttle came in with a lot of political capital, so much political capital that it sustained it through the 1986 Challenger disaster. And we went on from that disaster to build the space station. But after the Columbia disaster in 2003, you could tell that the political capital of the shuttle program was nearly lost entirely.

The investigation into Challenger was certainly harsh on NASA. And it was almost as harsh on NASA as the 2003 investigation was. In both cases, there was a lot of evidence found that people within NASA were being careless, the operations of NASA were careless there was a lot of evidence found that people within NASA were being careless, the operations of NASA were careless and overlooked a lot of the concerns. Engineers' voices weren't heard and weren't run up the flagpole, if you will, when a problem was reported, you know, in the case of the boosters in Challenger and in the case of the debris strike on Columbia. There was an environmental issue there within NASA that created these problems. And in both cases, the investigation was not kind to NASA by any means.

But the program was able to move on after Challenger because it still had the political capital to do so. But in 2003, that was when it was determined that we were going to set a new course for the space program. That is when the cancellation of shuttle became a topic of discussion. That is when we started putting out these plans for the vision of space exploration with Project Constellation and what became SLS and Orion. That's where all of that came from once the shuttle had lost the political capital and plans were changed. To give you an example of financial capital and how it sustains programs and kind of show the difference I'm talking about between political and financial capital here. Elon Musk in the early days of SpaceX, he was down to the last few bucks of the company, you know, in the later days of Falcon 1, so much that he had to bring in some

outside help to sustain the program financially. But the financial capital that they did have was able to sustain them through multiple failures of Falcon 1. They had a string of failures that put them in a really rough spot. Eventually, they did launch it successfully and they moved on from that. But then again, he was on the last few bucks of a company when he got a big break with the NASA contract that was able to sustain him into the years up until now, really. So that's kind of the example I'm talking about, where if you have enough political capital or if you have enough financial capital, you are able to sustain yourself through failures and you're able to outlive those failures and move on to bigger and better things. And when you look at government

missions, you have to look at political capital. When you look at missions from SpaceX or Moon Express or Blue Origin or whoever it is that you're looking at on a private level, you have to look at what financial capital they'll be able to sustain their missions with. And this is really the way to look at missions and sustainability and all of these kind of factors when you're looking at all the plans that are out there today, both government and private. You look at a project like the SLS and Orion programs. That was salvaged out of Project Constellation, which was determined to not have enough political capital to maintain. The Obama administration came in,

the transition team looked at everything that was going on and decided to cancel Constellation. But there were certain components of that plan that had enough political capital to be sustained beyond that. So Congress re-implemented SLS and Orion out of the failure that was Constellation. And that's still at play today in terms of those projects. And this is just kind of to set the stage and get you to think about the way that missions are sustained in today's environment. And I really want you to look at the decisions that are made, the things that are approved, the things that are flown, and think about it in this way. Think about the ways that they are approved, the things that are flown, and think about it in this way. Think about the ways that

they are approved, the ways that they are sustained, and think about whether a government program has enough political capital to exist, and whether or not a private program has enough financial capital to exist. And to bring it into today, I want to talk about ESA's Schiaparelli lander that failed at Mars and the way that they responded to that. And then maybe to look forward a little bit to SpaceX's Red Dragon and interplanetary transport system, and even Moon Express's lander as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. So we'll start with Schiaparelli. This was the lander that was part of ExoMars 2016 that ESA sent out towards Mars.

It was a two-part mission. There was an orbiter, the Trace Gas Orbiter, which is sent to look for sources of methane in the Martian atmosphere and understand the way that methane exists at Mars a little better. And then there was the Entry, Descent, and Landing Demonstration Module. This was a lander that was designed to test out their full entry, descent, and landing system that they would use in the future. You know, this is a small-scale test. It was a small lander. It doesn't even have landing legs.

It just has a crushable core that it would land on. But really, this was meant to figure out how to land on Mars since, you know, infamously, Mars is very tricky to land at, and very few probes and spacecraft and rovers have ever actually landed on Mars successfully. You know, NASA's landed successfully many times, and there have been a Russian success and a European success, but, you know, those landers did not transmit back data for very long once on the surface, though they did land successfully. So Mars is a very tricky place to land. So this small lander was sent as part of the 2016 mission to get data and figure out

their landing systems in preparation for their rover, which is now flying in 2020. So now we know that the lander system did not work fully because the engines fired for three seconds, then the software thought it was on the ground, so cut the engines off, and then it hit the ground going something like 300 kilometers an hour, which, you know, caused a pretty nice explosion on the Martian surface. And we have photos of the crater it made from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which are pretty awesome photos to look at, so I'll put a link in the show notes over at mainenginecutoff.com. You should definitely check out those photos if you haven't seen it yet. But the long and the short of it is the lander failed. And what happened after that,

I think, is the interesting part. Obviously, I would have loved to see the lander succeed and to have ESA go into the rover mission with a successful landing under their belt to give them a little confidence and a little bit of extra political capital to work with heading into the 2020 mission. But we weren't so lucky this time, and the lander did fail. It made it through entry, through descent, and once the landing phase began, that is when the failure occurred. Now, in response to that, ESA went into full PR spin mode. They responded instantly by putting out a lot of spin about the lander and how it was a secondary mission.

It wasn't important. It wasn't the primary mission, which is certainly true. You know, Trace Gas Orbiter is the primary mission. It's the thing that we care about being around Mars because it's going to give us important information about Mars, about methane at Mars, which will be important for humans to live on Mars, for both the search for life and for the production of rocket propellant to get back from Mars. But in my view, they were throwing aside the lander too easily in an effort to save face and save political capital in the environment they existed. They were pushing very hard to say that the lander was a secondary mission, didn't matter as much, it was just a demonstrator, it doesn't really matter, not going to have any big effects for us in the future, stop worrying about it, just worry about the orbiter, for God's sake, please worry about the orbiter because we just don't want to talk

about the lander. And I think tellingly about the way that they responded to this was Jan Warner, the director general of ESA, and what he wrote in the blog post about the way that they responded to this was Jan Warner, the director general of ESA, and what he wrote in the blog post about the lander and the failure that it was after the case, after they figured out what was going on. I'm going to read you just a quick excerpt from his blog post to kind of show the kind of spin that they were applying to the failure of the lander. Now in this little excerpt, he says TGO, which is the Trace Gas Orbiter, and EDM, which is the Entry Descent Landing Demonstrator Module, just to clarify those acronyms that he uses in this little blurb. The importance of TGO and EDM can be described as 80% versus 20%

respectively. Since we obtained at least 80% of the data during the descent, the overall success rate can be calculated as follows. 80% plus 80% of the data during the descent, the overall success rate can be calculated as follows, 80% plus 80% of 20%, which equals 96%. All in all, a very positive result. While it may sound like Elon Musk is ghostwriting for Mr. Warner in this case, because I could certainly see this being a quote that Elon Musk tweets out after a Red Dragon failure. This is seriously the kind of spin that they were putting out there about the lander. And this begins to get into the issue I have with the way they responded to this. Their response was in an effort to gain themselves some political capital, or at least to avoid losing a lot of political capital, because this is a government

mission. So as I talked about at the beginning of the show, government missions are sustained by political capital. And in this case, it's a very tricky political environment because there are a lot of countries at play. There's even countries within ESA and they're working with Russia on ExoMars. So there's a lot of geopolitical stuff going on. There's a lot of money changing hands. There's a lot of geopolitics that go into these missions. So the political capital is very hard to come by for ExoMars. The rover was already delayed from 2018 to 2020 because of funding issues and budget issues and a whole bunch of stuff surrounding that mission. And they're already in a tough spot for that mission. And, you know, it's going forward

right now, but they still need to weather the storm that is the budgetary issues surrounding the rover mission. So they're not out of the weeds yet, and that's why they went so hard into spin mode to save that political capital. The problem I have with the way they went about it is that they went so hard to discredit this lander, to make it seem completely unnecessary, completely useless, that it sort of undermines the case for why they even sent it. They sent the lander because they need to figure out how to land at Mars. Collectively, we have a ton of experience at the entry and descent part of EDL. The landing is the part that has been the trickiest over time.

So the whole reason that this was sent as part of the 2016 mission was because they had some extra performance they could use. They wanted to get a lander there before they land the very complex rover. They needed to test out these technologies, so they sent this lander. And I don't care how you name something. If you name it Demonstrator, that doesn't absolve you from a failure on the surface of Mars. And, you know, there's another side of this, which is, who is he really talking to with this fuzzy math? Because you and I, people who are very invested in spaceflight, who care deeply about spaceflight and exploration,

who find it a valuable effort, a valuable place to put money and resources and political capital, we already look at it with fuzzy math. You know. We already do that weird calculation that's like, well, we understand that the data they got from this will be useful in the future. We know they're going to learn from this. You always learn from a failure. We understand that. You don't need to sell us on that. The people he needs to sell this to as not a catastrophic failure is the general public, the people that are supporting these programs, the people who are funding these programs, sustaining these programs. That's who he's targeting these messages at. So while it might seem like it's targeted at me, in a lot of ways, I probably shouldn't even be discussing it on this show because it's not for this audience. But I felt that it was a little disingenuous to say that the lander didn't matter

at all. So it's not a big deal that it failed. Because why did you even send the lander in the first place? You sent it because you needed to land something there, so it can't be totally useless. And this is the kind of cognitive dissonance, you might say, that when people who aren't us, people who are outside of the spaceflight and exploration diehard audience, people outside that audience, when they read fuzzy math like that and they get this weird double meaning where you're saying the lander's useless, so it's not a big deal, but why did you send the lander? That just feels like you're trying to cover up for a failure. That audience probably won't be swayed

by your math that you're doing with 80% plus 20% plus 80% of 20% is 96%. It was a total success. What they see is you sent a lander, the lander didn't land, it's a failure. And the harder you try to push this fuzzy math, the more political capital you spend. They didn't spend a lot of time saying, listen, we failed on this lander, we sent it as a test because we needed to learn. And while we weren't successful here, we'll take the data, put it into our work that we're doing now for future missions, and we're going to get it right next time. Now, they said parts of that, but they couched it in this lander is not a big deal. It wasn't the main mission. Don't even worry about it.

And I think that bit comes off disingenuous and is a waste of political capital. If you want to sell someone on a good program, show us how you're going to use this data and make the next time better. Show us how you're going to respond to this. Don't tell me that the work you were doing wasn't a big deal, wasn't the primary mission, and no one needs to worry about it. But all that's to say is that the response to the Schiaparelli-Lander issue is 100% about political capital.

It's not about a technical failure or any sort of process issues or operations issues or quality assurance issues. It's 100% about political capital and saving that for the support you need for the 2020 Rover. So while I have issues with the way they went about that, I understand why they had to go about it. I don't necessarily blame them for doing it. I wish they would have done it differently. I wish they would respond differently to it. But I understand that they're in an environment that might not let them do that. My point is that this might not be the best way to save yourself political capital and to make

sure that your missions can carry on into the future. But the environment we're in right now is that a failure costs a hundred times as much as a success benefits. You know, meaning the amount of headlines you see in the world right now about the lander and the hole that it made on Mars and the failure that it was, it's a massive amount more than the headlines you see about the orbiter successful. The orbiter success is typically the sub-headline of an article. You know, the headline is, ESA smashes probe into Mars, sub-headline, orbiter enters orbit successfully. And that's the source of this reaction. And when I said I want to talk about failure is not an option, this is what I mean.

Failure is not an option because of how much it costs relative to how much a success gains. When you're faced with that, when you're faced with that equation, you have to save all the political capital that you can. We're given less political capital than we think we are based on this. We see that our failures are put up in headlines bigger than our successes are, and that threatens the future of your program. So this is a bad environment in general. I'm not blaming ESA.

I'm probably blaming the general public more in the way that we look at spaceflight as a whole, as a society. But, you know, it's all mixed in here. And this is the operating environment that governmental agencies have been in for decades. This is the environment that NASA exists in now and has existed in for 20 or 30 years. You know, the Apollo fire obviously dominated headlines when it happened, but that was all kind of focused on what are we going to do next? Where are we going from here? Because there was such buy-in publicly for the program.

But the space shuttle issues, the space shuttle disasters and other issues that we had, those were generally looked at by why are we spending the money here? Why are we doing that? Why are we spending so much time and effort and putting these people at risk? You know, there's a reaction to all of these things. And in ESA's case, they're facing a reaction similar, where they think that they have to go into this full PR spin mode because they need to save the limited political capital they're given. So I got pretty ranty here about governmental agencies and the way they have to plan, the way they respond to failures, and the way that they operate in general. And I probably didn't say too much new to you,

but, you know, I wanted to frame all of that to ask the question of, what is this going to be like when it's not a government? We're used to seeing the response from governmental agencies of failures and successes in those cases, and the way that they work to save political capital. But what happens when that doesn't matter anymore? SpaceX obviously always needs to keep an eye on their political capital, because there are times when they need things from the government. They do need the NASA contracts they've gotten. They do need to work with the US government for the Outer Space Treaty. There are things that they need to interact with the government for, and they need political capital for that. But what happens when they send a red dragon to Mars and it

crashes, and they do not have to respond to the public in the same way that the government does. ESA needs to respond this way because ExoMars as a whole is at risk. And they see that at risk when they have a failure. So they respond in a certain way to make sure that the program lives on. In SpaceX's case, they need to make sure that they have the financial capital to overcome that failure, but they don't necessarily need to prove themselves to the public as to why their program should exist because they're the ones that are saying it does. So obviously, SpaceX needs to make sure that they maintain solvency, make sure that they stay in

business and have enough money to pay for Red Dragon missions. But when a Red Dragon fails, they only answer to themselves. Obviously, there are people paying them for payload space, and there will be some contract issues with that, just like we saw with CRS-7's failure. There are monetary issues that they need to worry about, contractual issues they need to worry about. But when it comes down to it, they would still send a red dragon the next transfer window on their own accord. They would still pay for that themselves because that is their goal. They don't need to fight for existence from public perception. They have to make sure that they have the money to pay for it. Whether that means funding it themselves and flying their own payloads, whether it means selling payload space to other people who I'm sure will be chomping at the bit to buy space on a red dragon.

That is their main fight to fight. They don't have to say, hey, government, you should keep pouring X amount of money into this program because it should exist. And here's why our failures don't matter. And here's why we should exist. They need to exist on their own accord. They need to do what they can to make sure that they stay in business to do the mission, but they do not need to fight for the existence of the program as a whole. And we have never seen that yet in the industry.

We have not seen that interaction yet. And the public reaction to a failure of Red Dragon is going to be totally different than something that they say, hey, why are we spending our money on that? Or why is our government doing that instead of healthcare or whatever the argument is? The reaction is going to be different because it's a company doing it on their own accord. All of that is not to say that SpaceX will not try to spin it when a Red Dragon fails. They certainly will, but they are obviously setting themselves up with accepting failure. Elon Musk did not stray away from talking about how many people would die colonizing Mars in his talk at IAC. They have not strayed away from showing Falcon 9s exploding

on the ASDS at sea when they're working on recovery. They haven't shied away from showing these failures. They're trying to make it acceptable to have failures again. And that's a lot of the part that the excitement around SpaceX comes from, because we see SpaceX doing these things and not being afraid to fail because it's their own dime that they're doing it with. They launched the primary payload, which let's say it's a CRS mission. they launch CRS-6 or 8 or whatever it is, and after that's deployed, they're doing their own thing with the first stage, and they're doing something very exciting by landing it back at sea or on land, or they're doing something exciting with their own money, with their own resources, and that is very exciting to watch. And we saw with the Falcon 9 recoveries that it's

easy to sell people on something that's technically exciting and not tied to anything that they have an emotional attachment to. SpaceX is able to say this is our own mission, we're funding it ourselves, we're doing our own research, we're pushing technology forward and it's all on our own dime and not at any risk to these other parties who you may care about. We're doing this on our own for our own reasons. And the response to that is something that we really, again, have not seen in the industry, at least in my lifetime. So while Jan Warner is putting the kind of fuzzy Elon math that he is in that blog post about the failure of Schiaparelli. I just want you to

think about this kind of interplay between political capital and financial capital, and how that might look when we get out towards Mars with a red dragon, or when we're doing space tourism with New Shepard or New Glenn from Blue Origin, when we're sending private landers to the moon as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. We're entering a phase when the reaction to failure is going to be different than it is with a government agency. And the root of that is the difference in what's supporting it, financial capital or political capital. So the mantra of failure is not an option, you know, that kind of took hold because, like I said, failure costs so much that it threatens your existence. And that is why it's not an option.

But if you're able to sustain yourself beyond a failure, whether that be with political capital, whether it be with financial capital, if you're able to sustain yourself through that, that is when you do incredible things. through that, that is when you do incredible things. Now, I know I'm going to hear from people that think I'm sitting here saying, ESA sucks, SpaceX rules, let's go to Mars. But that's not at all what I'm saying. You know, I wish the best for ESA and their program, and I wish everyone that sends something to Mars lands it, unless it's something incredibly nefarious. But what I am saying is there's a difference between ExoMars and Red Dragon. There's a difference in the things that are sustaining them. And I think those things that are sustaining them will change the outcome because, you know, in one case, it's much more reliable to have financial capital that you're sustaining yourselves with because you can kind

of predict that. You cannot necessarily predict political capital because things change very frequently. New people take office, geopolitical situations change. If the situation deteriorates between Russia and EU, who knows what will happen with ExoMars? The space program has typically been a little bit immune to geopolitical concerns like that. We're even sort of seeing that right now with US and Russia. But the point being is there's a certain amount of unpredictability to political capital and a certain amount of predictability with financial capital. You obviously can't predict it entirely, you know, Firefly, etc. But there is a difference in the motivation and the driving force for these missions. And that changes not only the way the

missions are carried out, it changes what they can accomplish, and it changes the way that a company or agency needs to react to failures and successes in those cases. So when you're looking around the industry and you're seeing different missions get approved, different plans take place, different things move through Congress, or different companies spring up to do something individually. Think about it in this context. Think about what is going to sustain that mission. Does it need to be sustained on political capital, or does it need to be sustained on financial capital? On the SLS and Orion front, those clearly have the political capital that they need to sustain themselves. If a private company were

running SLS and Orion, it would look incredibly different for obvious reasons. But we know what goes into sustaining a program like SLS and Orion. We have all these different constituencies that are pulling hard for those things to exist, you know, through Alabama and Mississippi and everywhere else that plays into SLS and Orion. Those things are the political capital that SLS and Orion are surviving on, and those are the things that will sustain it. So when you think about how long those programs are going to be around, if they're going to be around in the next administration, or whatever questions you may have, think about it in terms of that. How would the political capital dry up quickly that would lead to a failure of those

programs? Will the political capital sustain regardless of what happens within the country politically? It's not as simple as whether something makes financial sense in the political aspect, or it's not something that, you know, does this make political sense in a financial aspect. They don't necessarily have a bearing on each other. You know, Elon Musk is going to need to figure out a business model that will sustain the missions that he wants to do with Red Dragon and ITS into the 2020s and 30s. He needs to figure out what business model he can have and he can set up that will maintain those programs. For SLS and Orion, we've sort of seen the way that the political capital is going to turn out for those programs. Both problems are tricky to solve. It's tricky to come up with a business plan that will sustain a

program, and it's tricky to construct a political environment that will sustain a program like SLS and Orion. I'm not saying one way is definitely better than the other, but there are certain differences you have to take into account when you're looking at these kind of situations. That's about all of the rant that I have for you today. Thank you very much to those of you supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Miko is where you can go to help support the show and the blog if you like what I'm doing here. This is a one-man shop doing it all myself, so if you like what I'm doing, I would really, really appreciate your support over on Patreon. I also want to

mention that the first issue of Main Engine Cutoff Weekly went out last Friday. That's the newsletter I'm starting. It's a weekly newsletter. You'll get it every Friday in your inbox. It's sort of a column of sorts where I talk about interesting things going on, break down some of the news, and link out to some interesting projects or videos or articles that I would recommend checking out. So if you want to get that, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash weekly and sign up there. Thank you very much for listening and I will talk to you next week.