Another Bit of “Shuttle Derived” Jettisoned
Well, unless one claims Shuttle heritage from the stillborn ASRM program – I must have missed this bit of news when it first emerged in August, but I was busy at the time with the Democrat convention:
Cook would like to get industry involved as early as possible. He stated that a point of departure design has been identified, along with key technology areas, such as a composite case booster. He noted that lessons learned from the Ares 1 vehicle integration are being applied, as well as from previous contract constructs.
The fact that NASA is learning from the Ares 1 experience and applying those lessons to Ares V shouldn’t be surprising, and in fact should be encouraging in a way. The question is whether they’re learning the right lessons from Ares 1. Given NASA’s desire to build an über-launcher, and the problems experienced with Ares 1’s solid first stage, perhaps there are other, more cost-effective ways to hit Ares V’s intended performance targets besides developing largely from scratch yet another solid rocket that merely looks like Shuttle’s to use as a booster.
Recalling that the ASRM program spent about $2B in early 1990s dollars before being scrapped (without ever entering production), the additional cost to Constellation of the change to a composite motor case should re-open the trade space to those Shuttle-derived booster concepts which entail large liquid engines but use truly Shuttle-heritage SRBs (or no SRBs at all). (For comparison, per Dwayne Day the estimated cost of the F-1 engine development program in 1991 dollars was $1.7B.) So, if building a big booster is what NASA wants to do for Constellation, and the new administration sustains that approach in its space policy, the cost associated with the apparent need to change to a composite SRB casing ought to motivate some re-thinking about exactly what that big booster should look like.
This discussion was also interesting:
He stated that the contracting approach includes maintaining NASA ownership of overall Ares V vehicle system architecture and key discipline areas; there will be government led contractor teams acquired through dedicated contract activity; the contracted work will involve severable entities with clear evaluation criteria so NASA can go elsewhere if needed; 5 work packages are being considered; and the request for proposal is in development with an aim to release it mid-December. He noted that when the NASA civil servants feel ownership of the products, the morale, excitement, and quality goes up dramatically.
Whether the quality, etc. goes up depends at how far down in the details “ownership of the products” goes, and how stable, clear, and predictable the working relationship is between the civil servant “owners” of a product and the contractors doing the work. Speaking from experience on a number of programs, having a constantly-shuffling team of masters adversarially challenging details whose background they are unfamiliar with, repeatedly demanding answers to questions already answered for others with whom they haven’t communicated, issuing vague and shifting requirements, and mandating significant changes and unstudied “improvements” is not a recipe for contractor morale, regardless of the benefits to the morale of the civil servants involved. In contrast, a clearly-defined “ownership” relationship between the agency and its contractors, stability in the requirements and processes and leaders in the program, and good communications and cooperative, non-adversarial relationships among the people involved at the working level go a long way towards improving morale, excitement, and quality all around. It’s natural that a customer should have involvement in a project they are after all paying for, but the nature and extent of that involvement is also important to the end result.
