Main Engine Cut Off - T+38: 2017 NASA Transition Authorization Act Speculation

Episode Date: February 2, 2017

Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com saw a draft of the 2017 NASA Transition Authorization Act, and it contains some very interesting changes from the 2016 version that bounced around Congress last year. I discuss what some of these changes may mean in the light of Commercial Crew delays, NASA RFIs regarding SLS and Orion, and continued Russian reliability issues. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 4 executive producers—Pat O, Matt Giraitis, Jorge Perez, and one anonymous—and 28 other supporters on Patreon. The Intricate Dance of Orion, SLS, Commercial Crew, and Soyuz - Main Engine Cut Off What's Happening in Space Policy January 30 - February 3, 2017 Senate Floor Action on New NASA Authorization Act Could be Imminent As Russian Space Industry Tumbles, the Kremlin Steps In — Again — Parabolic Arc Doug Messier on the State of the Russian Space Industry - Main Engine Cut Off As Trump takes over, NASA considers alternatives to its Orion spacecraft | Ars Technica Issue #4 - Main Engine Cut Off Email your thoughts and comments 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

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo with you on a very busy week in the world of spaceflight. There's been a lot of interesting things going on, smaller things, nothing giant, but there's been a flurry of activity this week that I've been keeping my eye on. So if you want to see what I have to say about a lot of that, I would recommend checking out the blog over at mainenginecutoff.com. I've been doing a lot on the blog this week with a lot of these smaller kind of one-off stories that are of interest and I think worth reading, worth talking about, but maybe not worth an entire episode of the podcast here, however short they may be from week to week.

So head over to the blog, check out what I've been writing out on over there, because I think some of these stories you will find very interesting per, you know, conversations we've had on here in the past, emails that have been sent in, stories that I've talked about. So go check that out. I highly recommend it. But what I wanted to talk to you today about was some politics, which I'm sure you are not sick of hearing about politics at all right now. But luckily, this is a different kind, slightly so. But I wanted to talk about some things that Marsha Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com has brought to our attention. She does a great job of getting her hands on drafts of bills that are making their way through Congress. She did that last November. At the end

of November, she got her hands on a draft of the 2016 NASA Transition Authorization Act. That did make its way through the Senate, but they actually signed off on it the day after the House left for the year, so it wasn't that useful. And she got her hands on a draft of the 2017 version of that same bill that is due to enter the Congressional Halls in the near future. We don't know exactly when, but it does look like it's going to be on the very near horizon for us. So she got her hands on drafts of both of these, and she wrote a piece back in November on the 2016 version and did a follow-up post just a few days ago on the 2017 version with noted differences between the two. So none of this stuff has been actually signed into law yet. None of these policies in

here are in motion, but I did want to take some lines that were in her writing about that draft and combine it with some stories that we're hearing about right now, some trends that have been going on, some things we heard from NASA policy over the last few months, combine a couple of these things together and see where we might get with NASA policy in this administration, at least for the next few years. So this is going to be a little bit more speculative of a show. All of this is subject to change because political things like this tend to move very quickly as they enter Congress and things get taken out, things get added in. There's a lot of change that happens as these make their way through Congress. So we'll keep an eye on this. We'll probably talk about this again, but I did want to talk about a few things

up front here, however speculative they may be. So if you don't like speculative shows, this one might not be for you. But I've been kind of thinking about all of this the last couple of days and really wanted to talk it out here because it's a pretty complex and intertwined story that I've been thinking about. But I think that it is something we are interested in, as you know, I've talked with a lot of you in the past about some of these policy ideas. So I think it's, it's worth thinking through. And this is one of those shows where I would welcome a lot of feedback from you out there. If you have any thoughts on how this may shake out as I go, send them into me, anthony at managingcutoff.com. And we can kind of keep this conversation going until we see these things make their way through Congress.

So to start, I wanted to kind of brush up on the end of 2016 there. I want to just remind you that NASA put out those RFIs about Orion and SLS. Eric Berger of Ars Technica had a great scoop on this, wrote some great stories that I will link to in the show notes over at managingcutoff.com. But NASA put out these RFIs. The first one that he wrote about was about Orion. And it was focused on raising the production rates, bringing down the costs of the production of Orion with their one contractor right now, which is Lockheed Martin. But at the most extreme end of that RFI was the idea that NASA would be open to replacing Orion with a commercially sourced alternative, be it Dragon or Starliner or one of the commercially available or soon to be available crew vehicles, that they would take those, upgrade them to their needs for a return

from deep space, and that would replace Orion in the exploration roadmap. That is the extreme end of that RFI that was released about Orion. And there's a similar one about SLS somewhere out there. So I wanted to bring those two things up to just jog your memory that NASA at the end of 2016 kind of showed that they were open to commercializing the NASA roadmap to changing the way they're currently working on things. And, you know, if none of that is actually true, and it's just scare tactics, at least they want to bring the costs of their current contracts way down and get things under control, potentially even moved to a fixed cost method rather than cost plus in terms of how those contracts are actually agreed upon.

Also, at the end of 2016, as I mentioned, Marsha Smith got her hands on that 2016 NASA Transition Authorization Act, and I wanted to read two bullet points out of her summary of that draft to kind of combine with this information about the NASA RFIs. The first bullet point here says that the 2016 version of this bill prohibits the acquisition of non-U.S. crew transportation services to the ISS unless there are no U.S. alternatives and the non-U.S. provider is a qualified foreign entity. So that's aimed directly at the current state of things where the U.S. is purchasing seats from Russia to get their astronauts to the ISS, and we have no way of getting there from our own soil, by our own accord. It's all tied in to the Russians.

The second bullet point says that the bill establishes as policy that the United States should maintain an uninterrupted capability for human spaceflight in and beyond low Earth orbit once such a capability is demonstrated. So this is directly pointed out the fact that after the shuttle was retired, we are still in this multi-year gap of human spaceflight capability. We are no longer able to fly astronauts up to lower Earth orbit or beyond since we've retired the shuttle, and this bill would look to make it a policy that that will never happen again.

Now, it doesn't necessarily say that that capability be maintained through a program like Shuttle or Orion, or are they both okay to fit this policy initiative doesn't necessarily say. We could assume that both commercial crew would fit those needs and the Orion capsule would fit those needs as well. So that sort of covers the gap in human space flight that we're in now and pushes to make that a policy that we don't do that again when we are in times of transition. Now, since that 2016 version was released, since Marsha Smith saw the draft of that, since it made its way through the Senate, there's been some other situations with Russia, which is, you know, very much the top of mind of the people writing up these bills, because those two bullet points I just read were directly targeted at the fact that we are dependent upon Russia

to get our crew to the ISS. And in the intervening months, and obviously this has been a trend going on for the past few years, there are serious reliability problems within Russia and the Russian space industry right now. Beyond all of the geopolitics stuff that's going on with Russia and the US and Europe and all of that, there are serious reliability problems in Russia, in the Russian space industry that are of great concern to NASA and to anyone that's interested in space. Most notably, the manufacturer of the engines that fly on the third stage of Soyuz and the second and third stages of Proton. They have had serious quality control issues where, you know, different materials have been swapped out for ones that weren't quite as heat resistant. The solder was bad. There's a flurry of issues there that led to

the loss of launch vehicles in the past. Most recently, the Progress flight that was headed up to the ISS, the third stage came apart pretty much in flight, and that Progress vehicle never made it to orbit. And that's the same launch vehicle, slight difference, but the same third stage that is used for the crew flights to the ISS on top of the Soyuz launch vehicle. So the quality control issues that are impacting the Soyuz and Proton are directly impacting the crew capability to the ISS. Right now that manufacturer is under a quality control audit that is led by the manufacturer of the RD-180 and engines like that. So the engine supplier that supplies the Atlas V with its first stage engine and now the Antares with its RD-181 engine, which is actually the 191 from Russia. So there's

a lot of naming confusion there. But the manufacturer of those engines is auditing the quality control at the manufacturer of the Soyuz third stage engine. So there's a lot of intertwining details there. But all in all, the reliability issues in Russia are now hitting a point, or arguably they've been at this point for a while, where they're directly impacting NASA policy. So with all of these situations in mind, with the language that's in the 2016 NASA Authorization Act in mind that says that we should never have a crewed spaceflight gap again, and that we should not source our crew spaceflight outside of the US if there are US alternatives. With the RFIs that were released around SLS and Orion last year by NASA, and with the ongoing reliability problems

in Russia that is causing a lot of concern, you know, both here in the US and elsewhere around the world. With all three of those situations combined, now let's dive into the changes in the 2017 NASA Transition Authorization Act over the 2016 and try to put this all in context. I'm going to read a little blurb here from this spacepolicyonline.com article. According to a draft we've seen, there are three especially interesting changes. One clarifies that the primary consideration for the acquisition strategy for the commercial crew program is to carry U.S. astronauts to and from the ISS safely, reliably, and affordably. Another directs NASA to report to Congress on how the Orion spacecraft can fulfill the provision in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act that it be able to serve as a backup to commercial crew, including with use of a launch vehicle other than the Space Launch System. The third difference is that the asteroid redirect mission looks like it's on its way out.

Not going to dive into that now. That's a story for another podcast in the future. But just take those first two, that the commercial crew program acquisition strategy is prioritizing safety, reliability, and affordability. And the second is that NASA is, if this passes as is, will have to report to Congress on how the Orion spacecraft can fulfill the backup role to Commercial Crew as was laid out in the 2010 Authorization Act, and if it can be used on a launch vehicle that is not SLS. For a little historical context, back in the Constellation program, Orion was originally supposed to service the ISS until we were done with the ISS and then

be used when we move on to exploration of the moon and Mars and everywhere else that was contained in Constellation. When that was cancelled and we transitioned to the SLS Orion days here, that was one of the things that was in the 2010 Authorization Act, that Orion be able to serve as a backup to the new commercial crew program to get crew to the ISS in times of emergency or great need and other situations like that. The kind of the kind that we're in right now where commercial crew is being delayed months and years at a time and we are continually stuck flying astronauts to the ISS through the Soyuz. That's the only way to get into orbit right now if you are a human and not crazy. So this is sort of a, you know, this is, there's a reason that I read those stories out before for context,

because the 2017 version of this act has language directly targeted at these current situations. The biggest criticism of commercial crew lately has been that Boeing and SpaceX are both late on their missions. You know, the early years, funding was completely inadequate for the program. But the last two years, the program has been funded at roughly at the level requested for Commercial Crew as a whole. So the budgetary restraints seem to be going away as we get farther away from the days of the shuttle. But we're still two, three years out from seeing an astronaut take off in one of these two vehicles. So this is the biggest criticism of Commercial Crew. And that's compounded by the fact that we have to keep flying our astronauts on Russian vehicles, which, as I said,

are unreliable. So this is something that Congress is starting to come around to as a very big political motivator, bigger than other political motivators have been in the past. And I think that's pictured here in this 2017 Authorization Act draft. The language in this bill may be an indication of shifting priorities in policy here, and shifting priorities from general NASA exploration programs to, we really need to get crew flying to low Earth orbit, to the ISS, from the U.S. again, because it's becoming a very, very large need of the country. So I wanted to dissect some options, where this might go if this language stays in the bill and if it gets passed by Congress, where this might lead for NASA policy in the future, in the next few years under this administration and maybe even beyond. very big thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff on Patreon.

This show is 100% listener supported, and I am hugely, hugely thankful for all of you that are supporting the show over on Patreon. This episode of Main Engine Cutoff is produced by four executive producers, Pat O, Matt, George, and one anonymous executive producer. If you would like to help support Main Engine Cutoff, head over to patreon.com slash Miko and give as little as $1 a month. All of your support is really, really appreciated, and I could not do it without you. With the 2016 and 2017 Transition Authorization Act drafts in hand, with the current situation in Russia with reliability, with the RFIs out for Orion and SLS, with reliability, with the RFIs out for Orion and SLS, and with the current state of commercial crew, let's project a little and see what options there are, where this might lead, and what we might see in the future. And again, this is highly speculative. I know some of you out there do not like when I get speculative, so I'm sorry about that. But for those of you that do,

I also want to hear your thoughts on any of this. So again, email me, anthony at managingcutoff.com, if you've got any thoughts in this department. The first option that I see is that NASA responds to Congress with the report that it is going to be mandated to do if this does in fact get passed. NASA would respond that Orion cannot fly on any launch vehicle but SLS. That would be a strange change of events because we already saw Orion fly on a Delta IV Heavy back in 2014. So that would be interesting to see if they say that Orion cannot fly on SLS. Maybe there are stipulations about crew and crew flights on SLS and Delta IV Heavy and everything like that. But that's the first easiest option is that the NASA report says that Orion is tied to the SLS for crew flights, for future flights. And I think that would leave us

kind of right back where we are, where we have the RFIs in hand about Orion and SLS. And we're right back to having the same debates about whether these programs are viable, whether they're sustainable, whether they should be replaced with commercial alternatives, whether the competition for those contracts should be opened up a bit. We're right back to the debate we've been having for years about these programs. But if NASA does come back to Congress and say that Orion can in fact be flown on other launch vehicles, that's where the fun would really begin. First, in terms of speculation, Orion, as I said, has flown on Delta IV Heavy in 2014. That was an uncrewed mission, the test flight that went up to about 3,600 miles above Earth and came back down. It was a two-orbit mission.

So, you know, that was capable of flying Orion to low Earth orbit as is. And I think for missions of the ISS, if you put Orion and its service module up in low Earth orbit, that would have more than enough Delta V to do a mission to and from the space station with crew and some cargo. So, you know, once you get Orion and its service module in orbit, that is possible. What NASA would say here is that that yes, it's able to fly other launch vehicles. Right now, all that's there is Delta IV Heavy. But in the future, we could envision this being flown on a New Glenn, maybe even a Falcon Heavy. You know,

payload wise, yes, but it would be interesting to see how that would fit on a Falcon Heavy. The Orion is 5.4 meters in diameter, and that's right around the size of a Falcon Heavy fairing. So, you know, it might be interesting to see there. There would obviously be design work in some of these cases to adapt this spacecraft onto a different launch vehicle. We've seen the kind of adapter that was needed on Delta IV Heavy. That would have to be done for other launch vehicles as well.

But, you know, in the future, this could fly on Newt Glenn. There's a lot of launch vehicles out there in the future that it could fly on. But right now we are left with the Delta IV Heavy, which is being retired, is extremely expensive. And ULA right now is in the process of producing the final Delta IV cores that would need to be flown. They're trying to produce the cores that they know they need. So they've asked the government previously to give them the specifications for what flights they may need from Delta IV Heavy into the future so that they can produce those cores up front. So this would be kind of weird to see this thing come about

because NASA might have to order a handful of Delta IV Heavies before that production line is shut down for good and transitioned to Vulcan. But that's really a crazy situation that I don't want to speculate on too much about how that would be handled. So a lot of this depends on the response from NASA. If they say yes, Delta IV Heavy and you're good to go, or if they leave it open to future commercial launch vehicles like Falcon Heavy, New Glenn, whatever would be applicable there. If they leave it open to future launch vehicles, I think that's a different situation than if they close it to Delta IV Heavy or nothing. That route, I think, might get us right

back to the situation we're at now, where essentially Orion can only fly on SLS. You know, politically, that would be the same situation that we're in now. So I don't think that would change too many things. But if NASA did leave the door open to be flown on future heavy lift launch vehicles that are not yet flying, then we would have to see some action of the type that was in the NASA RFI for Orion last year. They would either need to renegotiate the current contract that they have with Lockheed Martin to lower costs and increase production. Because if Orion's flight rate was kept as the flight rate is now, when would you fly the Orions on these other launch vehicles to the ISS? Because right now, there's a certain amount of Orions tied to a certain amount of SLS flights. And right now that number is like one, we don't really have approval too far into the future.

So that's a whole nother thing here is that we don't yet know what the production rates would be for Orion and SLS. We have a projection from NASA, which is once every two years or so until the 2030s, at which point it increases to once a year. We don't know if that is a hard limit on the flight rate. We've heard in the past that that is a hard limit on the flight rate for SLS given its current configuration,

but that doesn't seem likely that that's the flight rate constraint on Orion. If you could increase production or cut costs or do something else drastic that is in that NASA RFI, you know, everything up to and including replacing Orion with a commercially sourced alternative, you could probably get the flight rate up higher than that. So that could give you the ability to say, let's keep the Orion SLS exploration flights roadmapped as is, but add enough production to be able to fly one Orion per year to the ISS. And that is an ongoing backup capability to commercial crew. And it also gets us off Russian independence whenever we could get to that point. So that's sort of the speculative side of this,

is if NASA does respond that it can fly another launch vehicle, and they leave it open for future launches, that's kind of the route we could see it going, where we're trading these things and saying, we're going to mandate a flight of Orion to ISS once per year so that we have a steady flow of those missions to the ISS and augment it with commercial crew as available. This does nothing in the way of getting us off of Soyuz earlier

than commercial crew already does. This does not help that in any regard because, you know, to go from this policy to Orion flying on a commercially sourced launch vehicle to the ISS, that pushes it way past the first flight of Commercial Crew, even if Commercial Crew got delayed more than it already is. So this does nothing for our current situation. But from what is in the 2016 transition authorization and the 2017, the priority is more about forward-looking and saying that we should never again have a gap of human spaceflight from the US. So if a policy of making Orion open to other launch vehicles, making Orion available more than just SLS flights, if those policies fit those needs,

it starts to look kind of likely that this type of language could make its way into law, and we could see some political maneuvering to get the flights and the contracts to the contractors that are preferred by the Congress people that are pushing this bill through. So that's a whole other side of this, is that who are the entrenched interests here? Who are the constituents that this is for? But at least we do see some movement, and it's not just stay the course on Orion SLS. I think if nothing else, this shows that the political motivations are shifting a little bit. And the US right now has no active crew vehicles, but we do have a lot of active launch vehicles. So if the political winds shift,

both because of Russian dependence and decreased reliability, and this gap of human spaceflight lingering on and on, those two things can shift political focus. And if the political priority shifts away from just having a general NASA exploration policy and towards a very urgent need for human spaceflight, a very important need for consistent access to space for crew vehicles into the future, if that is where the political winds are shifting, we could see some interesting policy changes in the line of this bill. And, you know, the political shift in that direction would be very, very interesting to see a policy led by the urgency of needing to assure us access to space.

You know, the same way the Department of Defense says we need assured access to space, NASA might say we need assured access to space for crew. And that's an interesting policy change, and even just priority change that could be very interesting to see play out over the next few years. The other conclusion I can draw from this sort of language is that this is sort of the first crack in the SLS armor. Because up until this point, we haven't seen anything in Congress and congressional language anywhere that highly doubts SLS or even casts any doubt on using it for every flight of Orion or using it to the fullest extent possible. So far, we've seen

that SLS, its primary mission is to fly Orion on these exploration flights, and secondary mission are for cargo or exploration flights like Europa Clipper. This is sort of casting a little bit of doubt that that is a hard rule that we need to abide by, and that maybe there are some people within Congress thinking differently about the role that SLS should play, if any at all, in the NASA roadmap. Now, that does get very tricky because SLS is a much more politically spread out program than Orion. There are contractors in various states between Boeing, Orbital ATK, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, which are the three contractors, the three primary contractors that make up SLS. Boeing is the primary contractor for the core

stage. Orbital ATK does the boosters, and Aerojet Rocketdyne does the engines, both for the main stage and the upper stage. So there are three contractors spread across multiple states, multiple districts, multiple NASA centers. So there are a lot more entrenched interests in the SLS side than there are on Orion, which is primarily just Lockheed Martin. And they're obviously a big constituent for their Congress members that represent the areas in which Lockheed Martin operates and produces Orion, but SLS is a much trickier thing to unwind from all of the politics. But even so, this does indicate a certain amount of doubt from somebody in Congress. So once this bill starts making its way through Congress, we'll see who's

speaking up about it, who's pushing heavily for certain parts of the bill, who supports this, heavily for certain parts of the bill, who supports this, who doesn't support that, we'll start to see the battle shape itself as this makes its way into Congress. And I'm very interested to see how this does shake out. So that's sort of my stream of consciousness thinking on this language, this situation that we find ourselves in. We're in a very tumultuous period here of politics, not just because of everything that's going on in. We're in a very tumultuous period here of politics, not just because of everything that's going on in the general area of politics, but we're in this weird NASA transition phase that is now being affected by outside forces, like the commercialization of space, like the issues in Russia. All of those things are starting to come to a head and kind

of butt heads with NASA policy, and that's starting to shape policy a little bit more. So we're in a very fluid time period here where there's a lot of influences and a lot of ways for these things to come together. So it's hard to predict exactly what route this will take. But I hope this kind of rumination on it is at least interesting to think about and spring some thoughts out of you. And if they did, if you did have some thoughts on this, again, please email me, anthony at managingcutoff.com. I want to keep this kind of train of thought going until we see some hard policy out of Congress. With that, that's all I've got for you this week.

So I want to thank you very much for listening and I will talk to you next week. Thank you.