Main Engine Cut Off - T+40: The Potentially Infamous EM-1 Memo

Episode Date: February 18, 2017

Robert Lightfoot, the Acting NASA Administrator, sent a memo to the agency on the possibility of putting a crew on EM-1. I discuss the potential fallout from this idea and where the SLS/Orion program may be heading in the future. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 5 executive producers—Pat O, Matt, Jorge, Brad, and one anonymous—and 31 other supporters on Patreon. Acting NASA Administrator Lightfoot Memo: Agency Update – Feb. 15, 2017 A bolder, risk-taking NASA? Agency looking at Orion crew launch in 2019 | Ars Technica NASA developing contingency plan for commercial crew delays - SpaceNews.com S.2617 - 114th Congress (2015-2016): MANIFEST for Human Spaceflight Act of 2016 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress Issue #14 - Main Engine Cut Off The Intricate Dance of Orion, SLS, Commercial Crew, and Soyuz - Main Engine Cut Off The NASA-Boeing-Soyuz Transaction - Main Engine Cut Off Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on iTunes, Overcast, or elsewhere Subscribe to Main Engine Cut Off Weekly Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. This past week, the acting NASA Administrator, Robert Lightfoot, sent a memo to NASA, and I just want to read you a short excerpt from that. I have asked Bill Gerstenmaier to initiate a study to assess the feasibility of adding a crew to Exploration Mission 1, the first integrated flight of SLS and Orion. I know the challenges associated with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date. That said, I also want to hear about the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of

pushing humans farther into space. The SLS and Orion missions, coupled with those promised from record levels of private investment in space, will help put NASA and America in a position to unlock those mysteries and to ensure this nation's world preeminence in exploring the cosmos. The huge news here is that NASA is going to investigate putting a crew on the flight of EM-1. Originally, that was going to be an uncrewed test flight of SLS, a full-up flight of SLS Block 1, which is the core stage, the solid rocket boosters, the Delta IV-derived upper stage, the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, and then the Orion stack with the spacecraft and the service module.

This memo is supposed to kick off the process of investigating whether putting crew on that flight is feasible, is achievable, how long it would take to do, what it would take to get there, what it would mean for the flight, what kind of risk it would bring about, and what it would do for the program as a whole if that became the plan. Short note before we dive into that part, the tail end of what I read there. The SLS and Orion missions, coupled with those promised from record levels of private investment in space, will help put NASA and America in a position to blah, blah, blah, do a bunch of cool stuff in space.

The news here is obviously about EM-1, but this part was glossed over a lot that, you know, even among a memo about SLS and EM-1, it was brought up that there's a ton of private investment in space and that there are big promises for what that will do in spaceflight. There's obviously nothing that we can read directly out of this memo about that, but I did find it very interesting that there was a mention of private industry in what is otherwise a memo about SLS Orion. That's something that seemed to get lost from people kind of up in a hubbub about this memo. Now, this clearly caused a lot of commotion around, oh my gosh, they're going to put crew on EM-1. They're going to take this giant risk. They're

going to, you know, do whatever. There was a lot of commotion around that, and I kind of want to break it down from a few angles here. The first, I just want to talk through what EM-1 and 2 were planned to do, where they are at currently, and what this would mean overall. So as of right now, if this memo had not been sent and we didn't have any of this in our mind, the plan is for EM-1 to be flown, uncrewed as I said, as a test of SLS, and that was slated for the end of 2018. The latest I've heard is that that's going to slip to mid to late 2019, almost a full year slip anyway, even before this memo was sent out, just from working through what they need to to get EM-1 ready. So that's already at risk for a fairly sizable slip. fairly sizable slip. After that, EM2 would be no earlier than 2021, so three years later,

and most likely it would be about five years later than EM1 was. And that would be a flight of SLS Block 1B, which is the same stack except for the upper stage. We move from the ICPS, the Delta IV derived stage, to the Exploration Upper Stage, which is a brand new stage for RL-10 engines, the old trusty RL-10s, different variant than the kinds currently flying, but a brand new stage, bigger diameter, so it would match the diameter of the core stage around 8.4 meters. And this is the stage that's meant to be used for flights of that block of SLS, which would be the workhorse of the 2020s. Now, originally, EM2 was planned to also fly without crew because we would be adding this new stage to the stack. And the safety panel that everyone loves to cite had said that no crew shall fly on a flight of SLS where there is a hardware piece undergoing its first flight. So that would put EM-2 out of the ability to fly crew because the EUS, the Exploration Upper Stage, would be flying for the first time. Thus, the safety panel would recommend that crew

does not fly on that flight. So that was the original plan, that EM-1 and 2 would not have crew on it and crew would fly on EM-3. About a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago now, the decision was made to fly crew on EM-2, the first flight of the EUS. So that's an important piece of context here, that the roadmap even before this has shifted to contain crew flying on a piece of hardware that is making its first flight. that is making its first flight. Now the flight plans for these. EM-1 would put Orion uncrewed into a distant retrograde orbit of the moon. That would be a mission that is pretty long, you know, not too close to the moon, but in orbit nonetheless. And that would be a full shakedown for launch, orbit of the moon, and recovery. Then EM-2 originally was planned to be flying

the same mission, but with crew, and recently was changed to go from lunar orbit to doing a free return trajectory of the moon. So the crew would launch to orbit, low Earth orbit, check out the spacecraft, launch to, you know, boost themselves to a little bit higher of an orbit, check out the spacecraft, and then boost themselves to a shot around the moon. They would loop past the moon about 30,000 miles above the surface and head right back to Earth in a single loop. So that was where things stand currently. EM1, 2018 or 2019, distant retrograde orbit of the moon. EM2, crewed three or five years later, and that would be a free return trajectory flight to the moon. Now this memo, there's a lot of questions that come out of this. The first being, why do

we want to put crew on the first flight of this rocket? We did that with the shuttle. That didn't go well. Historically, it's known that the astronauts were not very happy with that flight once they got back and realized how close to the margins they were on that flight and how maybe it wasn't the best idea. But the shuttle didn't have autopilot. That's a story for another day. That's the biggest question is, why do we want to risk crew on this flight? The second question is, what kind of flight plan would you do with EM-1 if you have crew aboard? Would you do a shakedown flight just in low Earth orbit, kind of like Apollo 7, where you launch an entire stack of, in that case, Saturn V and Apollo, you just went to low Earth orbit, checked out the spacecraft, did what you needed to do to

verify the full system, but not leaving the safety of Earth orbit? Or would you continue on with the plan to do a distant retrograde orbit? Or would you go with the EM-2 style flight plan for a free return trajectory? That's a question mark that I think will be part of the response from NASA on this of, yes, we can put crew, but we can only fly these flight plans. I think that will be part of the response here. Now, the other question is, what would it do to the schedule? And, you know, it's worth mentioning that this entire memo, the idea for this, from what it sounds like from various people within NASA and some leaks that are coming out around the seams there, this sounds like it was sour part of the new administration. So you figure they come in and they hear that EM1 is slipping a year right now from what is scheduled at this current date. It's going to slip about a year when they go through the next review. And then you hear that there's

this giant gap between EM1 and 2, the three or five year gap, probably five year gap. That schedule sounds horrible. So it's not weird that the transition team came in. It's no secret that they came in and looked at this schedule, and it's a total mess. You can't really argue that the schedule is not a mess. We've been criticizing the roadmap of the early exploration mission flights here for a while now. This single flight uncrewed and then a jump to a new upper stage with this five-year gap between, that is not a very sustainable roadmap, especially when you have this administrative handover that we're seeing now. So we can imagine the transition team came in and looked at that.

A slipping flight up front, a huge gap in the middle, that's problem territory. So it's not weird that they said, hey, can we put crew on that instead? Because maybe we can accelerate this roadmap a little bit. If EM-1 is slipping a year anyway, and maybe even slips further than that, investigating whether you can pull crew up to that flight doesn't sound like the craziest idea if you put the safety argument aside for a second, which is clearly the biggest argument to have. But if you're saying that EM-1 is still two years out and it's going to take, from where we're at now, two or even three years to get this

thing crew rated, it starts to become interesting when you look at this program as a whole. Especially if you consider that this memo is the first of a series of questions that are going to be asked about NASA's program. If you look at this as the first of a series of things that they're putting out there to assess what they can do with the program and to reorganize the program, this all starts to make more sense. Because the only way that this kind of memo makes sense is if whoever's prodding about this, whoever on the transition team or the new, whatever they're calling it, the beachhead team, if whoever is behind the motivation for this, if they have

something in mind that says, you know what, if we can get crew on EM1, then we can do X, Y, and Z. If that is the case, which it seems to be, then I'm interested to see when that next part comes out. Because if NASA responds and says, we can put crew on this, it's going to take an extra two or three years. I want to see what the response is from whoever's the motivation for this memo that says, okay, well, that being the case, we're going to fly crew on EM-1 in 2020, and here's our roadmap for where we go from there. Here is a roadmap with this kind of budget. We can put this up to Congress to approve or disapprove, and we can go from there. That is the only way it can make sense of this, is that you would be pushing crew to EM-1 in order to fulfill a roadmap that isn't the

current SLS roadmap. We look at this memo right now in the context of what we have, that you would just put crew on EM-1 and everything else after that would stay the same. But I don't think that makes sense. I don't think that that's why this memo was put out there. I don't think that's why this question was being asked from the transition team. My hunch is they're asking if crew can get on the first flight of EM-1, and then they would replan the SLS Orion program. Now, there's a few other things to think about here. Number one is, if everything stayed the same,

the schedule right now would be absolutely catastrophic. And here's why. EM-1 flying at 2018, 2019 even, that's not horrible given the current state of things. We expected that, right? Commercial crews behind schedule. Everyone's having schedule issues right now. There's a lot of budgetary issues right now. There's a lot of upheaval in the world of politics. So it's not a big surprise that these things are slipping months or a year at a time. But if you look at that gap between EM1 and 2, the way it's planned right now, within that gap, we would be seeing some serious changes in the private industry space. If we assume there's a five-year gap, by the time EM2 would fly, we would have Falcon Heavy

up and running. We would probably have some test flights of SpaceX's ITS. We would be having commercial crew in full swing. We would be seeing orbital flights from Blue Origin. We would be seeing the CRS-2 contracts, which include a Dream Chaser, a very lifting body space shuttle reminiscent to the non-hardcore fans out there. We would be seeing that flying to the space station and back. We would see propulsively landing Dragon 2s coming back from cargo missions. Because remember, the CRS-2 flights for SpaceX include propulsive landing of Dragon. We would be seeing so many different innovations in the private space,

just from what we can see today. We don't even know about some other things that are out there. But think about what will exist in 2023 to 2025 range. Vulcan will be flying. They might even be doing something that's somewhat reusable by that point. Vulcan Aces will probably be flying by then. If Orbital ATK keeps up their progress, they'll have a next-generation launcher. There's so many changes that could happen in the industry, even if 50% of that pans out. Think about what the environment would be and how much different the environment would look

between EM1 and 2. And that kind of change to a program that seems fairly stagnant because it takes a lot of time to rework the launch infrastructure from EM-1 to 2, to build that new upper stage, to build all the things that you need to between those two flights, the amount of change everywhere else in the industry would be staggering in that delay. So even on the current schedule, I think this program was heading for a major shakeup between EM1 and 2. And we can delay that. We can put that off a few years.

But you can't avoid entirely the trends at play in this industry. So when you're looking at this kind of program with a long timeline, you really have to think about how the industry will look, how the playing field will look at each of these different pieces in time. If EM1 does get off the ground in 2018 or 19, and then we have another presidential election in 2020, and just say that this is a one-term administration and a new one comes in, this would all be happening again, but in a completely different environment, where you have commercial crew flying, you have more people flying commercial cargo, you might have two or three heavy lift options available on the commercial market. So we are in a very tense time of transition. And that doesn't mean just presidential transition.

We are in a very transitional period in the industry where there's a lot of pieces at play, We are in a very transitional period in the industry where there's a lot of pieces at play and not all of the chips have fallen yet. The hardware isn't flying yet. The Falcon Heavy hasn't flown yet. We haven't seen any launches from Blue Origin other than Suborbital. We haven't seen Vulcan hardware yet. We haven't seen all of these different things that will be there by the time a new president is elected or at least voted on.

So the rate of change is only getting quicker in the spaceflight area. And I think that alone will have major effects on SLS Orion. And this particular memo about replanning what SLS and Orion's roadmap is here, I think it might have effects on what the near-term plan is. But I think that within five to ten years, this program is going to have to face the music. So I got a little rambly there, but I did want to get back to the memo a bit and some questions I have coming out of that, some things you need to consider coming out of that memo. But before I do that, I want to say a huge thank you to all of those out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff on Patreon.

This episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by five executive producers, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, and one anonymous executive producer. They made this episode possible, and I am hugely thankful for their support and everyone else's support that is supporting on Patreon. If you want to help out, head over to Patreon at patreon.com slash Miko and give as little as $1 a month. All of your help is hugely helpful for me to do this show every single week and do the blog that I do as well. So thank you so much for your ongoing support. I do want to touch on a few pieces of what this rearranging would do. Orion was not

going to fly with a full life support system on EM-1. That would have to be done before they can fly it. The ICPS was specifically determined to not be human rated about a year ago, and that was what caused the early jump to the exploration upper stage for EM-2. Originally, that was going to be flying on EM-3 first, and EM-2 would be a reflight of EM-1, but with crew. So that plan was switched around, and they weren't going to be flying on EM-3 first, and EM-2 would be a reflight of EM-1, but with crew. So that plan was switched around, and they weren't going to human rate ICPS for one flight, they were just going to accelerate the US.

So those kind of things would have to happen, and all of that would bring about additional risk. Obviously, flying crew on the first flight of a new launch vehicle, that is risky from the start. There was a reason that the only time that's ever been done is on shuttle. So if they're increasing mission risk, if they're increasing the launch and overall mission risk, do they decrease the risk of the flight plan? I'm specifically wondering here whether they go back to an earlier iteration of what Orion was supposed to be, in that it would service the ISS. That was how Orion started out in Constellation,

that it would service the ISS till we were done with it, and then it would move on to the exploration roadmap. We've seen a handful of things in the last few weeks that make that idea not sound as crazy as you might think. It sounds crazy to me because I don't think it's a good idea, and I think it undermines commercial crew, but it doesn't sound outlandish in the world of politics. We've had a very unreliable Russia recently. We've had tense geopolitical relations with Russia in this country that I'm in currently over the last few months, and this space industry there is having some serious quality control problems. We've seen Congress ask NASA for a report of whether Orion can carry astronauts to the ISS like it was supposed to do by law. They are getting a report from NASA that says whether

or not that flight plan is still possible. And now we have this GAO report that came out that talks about the risks of commercial crew, the schedule problems they're having, and recommends to NASA, which NASA accepted the recommendation, that they develop a contingency plan for if commercial crew is late. At the base level, that means buy more Soyuz seats or figure out how to get them. But there are several ways to read that. There are several ways for the politics to play out there. But there are several ways to read that. There are several ways for the politics to play out there. So I'm not going to sit here and say that I can't envision a world in which EM-1 would be re-baselined to fly Orion to the ISS as sort of a lifeboat sort of situation and fly back from there. Specifically, this GAO report is saying that NASA is going to need to figure out what they're going to do in 2019. And they're talking about maybe changing around crew schedules so they do another year in

space flight that takes them through 2019. But interestingly, the date at which we run out with seats is the date of the first SLS launch. The date that they're investigating whether they can fly crew on it. These things are falling together in a very interestingly timed way from where we sit today. It's not crazy to think that if they're taking more risk to fly crew on this launch vehicle for the first time, that they would decrease the risk of the flight overall. Whether that risk would be appropriate to shift to the ISS as kind of a lifeboat

and then risk assets on the ISS with an unproven launch vehicle, arguably proven because we've flown it once before, yada yada. Whatever the case, I think you can't argue that this program is an absolute mess right now. The roadmap is all over the place. Priorities are all over the place. Priorities are all over the place.

Timelines are all over the place. And I don't think just shifting crew to EM1 does anything to solve the underlying issues. If you were to just shift crew to EM1 and keep everything else the same, what would you be accomplishing other than a stunt of some sort? We still don't have a hard plan for SLS and Orion into the 2020s or beyond. We don't have a roadmap for what we would do. We have the notional roadmap of we would do some missions here, then we would do some missions there, then we would do some missions over there. We have that notional roadmap, but we need a clearly defined roadmap with a budget, with timelines, with rationale to do these missions. The first SLS launch with crew, with new hardware, all that stuff, that has a reason to exist. We need to shake down this hardware. But what do you do once you have the hardware? Those are the

questions we need to answer here. And I think, again, whether you support this program, whether you do not support this program, if you think this program could be great for NASA, if you think this program is horrible and it is ruining the productivity of private industry and commercial space and it could be done better, if you're either one of those, you want these questions answered. and it could be done better. If you're either one of those, you want these questions answered. If you're a supporter of the programs, you want to see what these hardware pieces are going to be doing in the 2020s. You want to see why Congress should support these programs in the future, why the public should support these programs into the future, and what they will actually accomplish in the 2020s. If you don't support this program, you obviously want to know what the hell these

programs are doing and why you should even consider supporting them or why your arguments about why commercial space could do this better or how a restructured program could accomplish these goals in a more efficient and lean way. You want these questions answered so that you can make a more informed argument that you can show why. And more importantly, you want these questions answered so that you can make a more informed argument that you can show why and more importantly you want these questions answered because there might not be any answers. If we're able to plan what to do with hardware for EM1 and 2, we need to know what you would plan to do with hardware on EM3, 4, 5. We want to know what you would do with that hardware. And that's partially because I'm interested to to know what you would do with that hardware. And that's partially because I'm interested to find out what you would do with that hardware,

and partially because I'm calling your bluff. That's the kind of thing that needs to be said to NASA, to Congress, to all of the people that are working on this roadmap right now. And there is a little bit of commotion in that area. There's a bill somewhere out there in Congress land that was put out the end of last year. I'm not sure where it's at right now because of all of the upheaval that we're going through. But it was called the Manifest Bill, and it was a horribly tortured acronym. It was mapping a new and innovative focus on our

Exploration Strategy for Human Spaceflight Act of 2016, or the Manifest for Human Spaceflight Act of 2016. And what this bill did was kind of tell NASA, listen, we need a roadmap. We need a plan. We need a manifest of what you're going to do here and how you're going to accomplish these goals, what the goals are, how you're going to accomplish them, and where we're going. And those are the questions that need to be answered right now. And I think all of this stuff about this memo, I do think that that's the first piece in this kind of process. I see this as the first probing question into a replanning of what SLS and Orion is. So I think making any assumptions about what this memo means to the program

with the current roadmap of the program on a piece of paper that you're looking at right now, that's not what this is about. This is about figuring out where the pieces are that we have and how we could plan them for the future. And I think a lot of that is the new administration saying, what if we put crew in this flight? What if we did X or Y on EM-1 and 2? Where could we go from there? So whether you are supporting this program, whether you're not supporting this program, ask these questions. You want the answers to these questions. You want the clarity that comes with this kind of process. So I think it's easy to sit there and say, you're crazy for putting crew on EM1.

Don't ask that question. You know, those kinds of things are easy to say, but on the other hand, ask these questions because it will force you to ask other questions. It'll force you to say, yeah, we can put crew on EM1. Then what? Then what would you do with that hardware? This process is really messy. This is as messy as politics get. There's priorities everywhere. Everybody thinks the program should be doing something different, accomplishing a different goal. This stuff is messy, and this is part of that process of shaping it into something useful. So again, whether you support this or not, be supportive of this memo going out, because it will bring some answers, and it will bring some insight. And I think that will be very clarifying

when we get the response to this memo, when we get the other half of this memo, and when on March 13th, we get a response from NASA to the GAO to say, here's our contingency plan for getting crew to the ISS. Those are the kinds of questions you want to know. I want to know what NASA is going to do in the near future, in the medium future, in the long future. So to that effect, I think this is the right question to ask, not because I think putting crew on EM-1 is the right decision, because I want to know what the answers are so I can ask some more follow-up questions. So that's all that's on my mind right now about SLS Orion and this memo and everything.

But if you've got any thoughts, send them in to me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Thank you very much for listening, and I will talk to you next week.