Dear readers,
It’s the third edition of Space Business, Quartz’s newsletter on the economic possibilities of the extra-terrestrial sphere. Please share widely, and let me know what you think. This week: the mess that is SLS, climate change controversies, and taking pride in Sally Ride.
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I didn’t want this to be a newsletter about audits but here we are: The Government Accountability Office absolutely went off on NASA (pdf) yesterday.
We’re talking about the Space Launch System, known as SLS, a big new rocket intended to carry future astronauts to the moon and beyond. It was supposed to be ready in 2018, but it probably won’t be ready until 2021. It will cost over $8 billion just to get to the first flight, some $1.6 billion more than initially planned.
Here’s just one example of how these delays emerged, according to the auditors: “More than 900 engine section brackets that were in the design were not on the schedule and, according to NASA officials, Boeing had to install the brackets later, adding complexity to the work schedule.” Imagine the Boeing engineer who took that news to her manager: “Hey, we forgot to install a few brackets.” “How many?” “Uh, 900.”
And that’s not actually the news! That’s just how the world’s leading space program conducts business.
If the delays aren’t the news, what is? It’s that, as the problems piled up, NASA still paid Boeing and Lockheed Martin (which is building a spacecraft, Orion, to ride on SLS) more than $200 million in incentive payments. These payments are intended to reward success, but NASA delivered them as delays grew. Auditors also found that the agency did some dodgy accounting, assigning $782 million in development costs to a future mission in order to disguise the cost growth of the SLS program.
The report dryly notes that if the agency re-thought its approach to incentives, that might result in “motivating the contractor to meet upcoming milestone events within cost and schedule targets.” It concludes that both the government and the contractors are responsible for the issues, but that “NASA overpromised what it could deliver from a cost and schedule perspective.”
It’s not a great message as the agency tries to fund a $20 to $30 billion Artemis moon program. NASA did not agree with the GAO’s assessment, noting that auditors didn’t acknowledge the very real technical challenges of getting people into deep space or the progress they’ve made. It also took “exception to the unnecessarily negative language used.” Specifically, the agency took exception to the title—”Persistent Delays and Cost Growth Reinforce Concerns over Management of Programs.”
Where’s the lie?
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Imagery Interlude: On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly into space. It was a triumph for gender equality, though it came 20 years after the Soviet Union sent its first female astronaut into orbit. After her death in 2012, we learned that the physicist was also the first known LGBT astronaut. It’s fitting, then, that we can celebrate this anniversary during Pride Month.
Ride was a pioneer, but nearly four decades later, NASA is still catching up to gender equality in space; only 12 of the 38 active US astronauts are women.
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SPACE DEBRIS
Indoctrinate the children with climate science. Environmental activists investigating a semi-secret White House climate science task force uncovered some troubling correspondence: E-mails from a National Security Council official criticizing NASA head Jim Bridenstine’s new belief that climate change is real and connected to human activity. Another missive showed the official, William Happer, encouraging the deputy NASA administrator to take down a children’s educational website about climate change. The NASA boys didn’t respond, at least via e-mail, and the websites didn’t change. But the leadership of one of the top science institutions in the world also didn’t defend their scientists’ work, either.
Space Force preview. In Republican space circles, there are few more influential figures than Michael Griffin, a Reagan-era defense official who led NASA under George W. Bush, and Chris Shank a key Congressional staffer on space policy who worked for Griffin at NASA. This week, Griffin, now undersecretary of defense, abruptly fired Shank from his job developing advanced military technologies. What went wrong? Griffin is trying to centralize all high-tech R&D under his office, but congress and the military don’t agree. According to Inside Defense News, Griffin had IT staffers search Shank’s e-mail for correspondence with Congress about the debate, and when he didn’t like what was found, demanded Shank’s resignation. Drama aside, this was an argument over a relatively small Pentagon technology office. Imagine what the fights over re-organizing every military space activity will look like.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket is teed up for its third flight on June 24. The mission for the US Air Force will fly a collection of experimental payloads for the military as well as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including some scientific sensors, an experiment in “green” space propulsion, and a fancy deep space atomic clock. The launch of the world’s most powerful operational rocket and the landing of its reusable boosters isn’t a space show to miss. Perhaps the real import is that every successful Falcon Heavy flight underscores how much more quickly SpaceX built a heavy rocket than the government.
Kings of Small Launch. There’s a lot of talk about the next generation of small rocket companies, trying to fill in the gap in the launch market for small satellites. The only one that has gotten to space is Rocket Lab. The US-New Zealand company will launch its third mission in 2019 on June 26 (US time), carrying spacecraft for private companies, government researchers and even US Special Forces command. CEO Peter Beck has consciously eschewed the boundless aspirations of some space companies, insisting that his only goal is simple, reliable access to orbit. So far, so good.
Apollonia. We’re a month out from the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon. I’m already exhausted by space nostalgia. It was a near-miraculous and historic accomplishment, but if I hear one more boomer tell me where they were on July 20, 1969, I may launch into space myself. (Still, I agree with Quartz’s Adam Epstein—the new Apollo 11 doc is the best thriller of the year.)
More relevant is the ongoing debate over whether going to the moon was a good idea in the first place. Jill Lepore dives into the debate in a review of eight of the approximately 1,200 new Apollo books that came out this year, concluding rather ambivalently. A true calculation of costs and benefits is likely impossible, but one way to square the Earth vs. space circle (since it seems like an inescapable binary) is through the Overview Effect: The realization, reported by astronauts, of deep solidarity with humanity and Earth—as the song goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until you’re flying around it at 17,500 mph. Less spiritually, I recommend NASA economist Alexander MacDonald’s book “The Long Space Age” if you want to understand why Americans invest in space.
So tell me, readers, what’s your take on the legacy of Apollo 11? Give me some good ideas, because I should probably have some content ready.
your pal,
Tim
Hope your week is out of this world. Please send internal SLS contract documents, atomic clocks, tips and informed opinions to tim@qz.com.