Is ISS the opposite of SSI? :-)

Robin's appeal for ISS sounded like what I would have supported 15 years
ago. I worked many years thinking SSF/ISS was the vital step toward
O'Neill's vision. (Letters to the Washington Post, lobbying, displays in
shopping centers, even an effort to put a full scale space station model on
the mall next to the Air&Space museum.)

But then I got burned by working as a contractor for NASA. After five space
station redesigns, the cancelation of the space station evolution office,
the collapse of the Space Exploration Initiative (after helping coordinate
transportation node studies), and the limbo of the Advanced Program Office,
I learned first hand how NASA's only customer is Congress, and "effort"
counts more than results (effort=jobs). Even the science mission list for
the ISS redesign was sorted by Congressional district.

It was really sad to watch as NASA Langley threw out all their space solar
power files. (Don't worry, they are not lost - I saw many of them
translated into Japanese while the International Space University space
solar power study in Kitakyushu in 1992.)

The technology developed for ISS may be of some use in future space
operations.
Maybe.

The problem has been a culture that searches for the most expensive
solution to any problem. Why? Because you need to justify the size of your
organization within tight budgets. If your 50 person office can accomplish
its task with only 5 people, that is a disaster! Some of the resulting
technology works, and might be used - but it was developed in some weird
parallel universe where cost is the last thing considered, if at all. (Some
examples: Our group designed the facility to add to ISS to assemble lunar
vehicles. But we were not allowed to see any cost assessments during our
design work. We had to read in AviationWeek that it would cost $1 billion.
On one of the budget SSF/ISS redesigns, I was finally given access to the
cost numbers. I zeroed out ALL the hardware, and we were still over the
Congressional $2.1B/year limit. Last bit of info - at NASA Langley, I
worked for the manager who was on the team that invented the initial $8B
(1984) space station cost estimate. He told me directly, 'we chose that
number since we thought that was what Congress would support - it was not
based on anything.')

That statement about the ISS crew of 3, with 2.5 for maintenance - is the
NASA line. It was strange being at the Congressional hearing on space
tourism June 26. Congress is really outraged by the cut in crew, and that
'0.5 crew for science'. Especially since there are hints that NASA used an
artificial crew constraint to sell the US Hab and/or Transhab modules. With
Hab cut, they are stuck by their earlier claims the Russians systems can
only support 3 crew. When Dennis Tito said his Russian trainers (during his
8 month training) had told him their system could support a larger crew,
the congressmen jump on his info. They actually believed Tito more than all
of NASA on this question of ISS operations. This is an indication of how
low the credibility of NASA has sunk on Capitol
Hill. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=375

Actually, I know that my negative rhetoric (above) does not work.

These are not the kind of feelings that motivate people interested in space.

Somehow we do need to find a way to let NASA finish ISS, *declare victory*,
get out of routine operations, and transform itself into the kind of agency
we need. We need to frame this as a challenge for NASA and the space community.

One idea is to let regular ISS operations stimulate space commerce. This is
the Alpha-town concept (like a town growing up around a federal fort in the
west.) It has often been pointed out that ISS logistics can serve that role
that air-mail did for early aviation. A predictable market, it includes
some payloads as low risk as water resupply. ProSpace.org pushed this point
last year and this year. We hope the 'alternative access' program for ISS
(as NASA calls it) can help startup launch companies. But NASA has a habit
of saying any vehicle can support ISS, as long as it has exactly the same
capabilities (15'x60', etc.) as the Shuttle..

An operations based management model of ISS might help. This is the
direction ISScongress.org is proposing. They are looking at port
authorities as model organizations. Ones that can make contracts for
logistics support, without following complex governmental bureaucratic
procedures (or at least follow simplified rules). The next NASA ISS
official plans on this come out in September, I think.

All of this will get critical in a couple years (say, around the 100th
anniversary of the Wright brothers).

"The ISS is complete" announces NASA and the partners.

"What is it doing for us??" asks the public, looking at the $100B
price tag.

*IF* we play it right, NASA may see it vital to their own interests to show
how the ISS will help open space according the SSI vision. Big IF.

But how do we get there, in only a couple years?

- Eric Dahlstrom

________ InternationalSpace.com _________
PO Box 60606 Washington DC 20039-0606 USA

Is ISS the opposite of SSI? :-) Hah! I almost think that's right. At least NASA's vision of ISS. Thevision of High Frontier is to go out into space and build ever-larger habitats for the purpose of making lots of money, and opening the space frontier to the average person. The vision of ISS is to go out into space to build an ever-shrinking habitat for the purpose of spending lots of money in the right congressional districts, but by all means keeping out the "unprofessional tourists". It was really sad to watch as NASA Langley threw out all their space solar
power files. (Don't worry, they are not lost - I saw many of them
translated into Japanese while the International Space University space
solar power study in Kitakyushu in 1992.) This description sure made me cringe. A while back it was fashionable to consider that it was time for the US to move over, the Japanese would be the movers and shakers of the world in the future. Now that expectation seems to have gone out of style. But we may yet regret our current complacency.

Regards,

Mike Combs

Eric Dahlstrom wrote,

"*IF* we play it right, NASA may see it vital to their own interests to
show how the ISS will help open space according the SSI vision. Big IF.
But how do we get there, in only a couple years?"

My simplistic idea in that regard is that we attach an electrical
propulsion system to ISS and send it, four crew members, and maybe a
Shuttle external tank or two to a NEO. Of course, ISS wasn't designed for
this purpose, and there's all sorts of technical questions that would have
to be answered (e.g., how do we get the occupants of ISS through the Van
Allen belts without getting fried, given that the transit time would be
long with electrical propulsion?). ISS would never be capable of
landing on the Moon, but with a suitable high-ISP propulsion system run by
those big beautiful 100 kW solar arrays, I think a solution could be
devised to send ISS all the way to a small NEO.

We wouldn't do this right upon completion of ISS. Rather, wait a few
years until the public has grown completely indifferent to it: by 2008,
John Q. Public won't give a hoot about ISS. Not that John Q. Public cares
all that much about ISS now, but at least now it's under construction, and
it's new and novel. By 2008, it will be boring. By 2008, it will be also
be widely known to the scientific community that, even if extra habitation
modules get built, that the value of the research coming out of ISS will be
small in comparison with the huge expenditures necessary to construct,
maintain, and run the ISS.

There are 1400 known NEOs right now, and the detection rate has been
growing wildly in the past few years. By 2008, I'd guess we'll know about
10,000 or more NEOs. Just pick an orbit suitable for ISS to achieve,
and we'll probably have found a NEO near there for it to visit.

But everything I've just said is just idle dreaming --- for the cost of
doing that, we could have sent a fleet of 100 small robotic probes to
various NEOs. Crewed spaceflight just does not achieve a very big bang
for the buck relative to robotic exploration. By 2008, robotics and
teleoperation will be far advanced over what it is today (computers will
have gone through several more Moore's Law cycles). Maybe we ought to
just fess up to The Big Mistake and let ISS fall into the South Pacific,
just like its predecessor Mir.

Ron Menich

Eric Dahlstrom
ssi_list@...
07/25/01 06:17 PM

Is ISS the opposite of SSI? :-)

Robin's appeal for ISS sounded like what I would have supported 15 years
ago. I worked many years thinking SSF/ISS was the vital step toward
O'Neill's vision. (Letters to the Washington Post, lobbying, displays in
shopping centers, even an effort to put a full scale space station model on

the mall next to the Air&Space museum.)

But then I got burned by working as a contractor for NASA. After five space

station redesigns, the cancelation of the space station evolution office,
the collapse of the Space Exploration Initiative (after helping coordinate
transportation node studies), and the limbo of the Advanced Program Office,

I learned first hand how NASA's only customer is Congress, and "effort"
counts more than results (effort=jobs). Even the science mission list for
the ISS redesign was sorted by Congressional district.

It was really sad to watch as NASA Langley threw out all their space solar
power files. (Don't worry, they are not lost - I saw many of them
translated into Japanese while the International Space University space
solar power study in Kitakyushu in 1992.)

The technology developed for ISS may be of some use in future space
operations.
Maybe.

The problem has been a culture that searches for the most expensive
solution to any problem. Why? Because you need to justify the size of your
organization within tight budgets. If your 50 person office can accomplish
its task with only 5 people, that is a disaster! Some of the resulting
technology works, and might be used - but it was developed in some weird
parallel universe where cost is the last thing considered, if at all. (Some

examples: Our group designed the facility to add to ISS to assemble lunar
vehicles. But we were not allowed to see any cost assessments during our
design work. We had to read in AviationWeek that it would cost $1 billion.
On one of the budget SSF/ISS redesigns, I was finally given access to the
cost numbers. I zeroed out ALL the hardware, and we were still over the
Congressional $2.1B/year limit. Last bit of info - at NASA Langley, I
worked for the manager who was on the team that invented the initial $8B
(1984) space station cost estimate. He told me directly, 'we chose that
number since we thought that was what Congress would support - it was not
based on anything.')

That statement about the ISS crew of 3, with 2.5 for maintenance - is the
NASA line. It was strange being at the Congressional hearing on space
tourism June 26. Congress is really outraged by the cut in crew, and that
'0.5 crew for science'. Especially since there are hints that NASA used an
artificial crew constraint to sell the US Hab and/or Transhab modules. With

Hab cut, they are stuck by their earlier claims the Russians systems can
only support 3 crew. When Dennis Tito said his Russian trainers (during his

8 month training) had told him their system could support a larger crew,
the congressmen jump on his info. They actually believed Tito more than all

of NASA on this question of ISS operations. This is an indication of how
low the credibility of NASA has sunk on Capitol
Hill. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=375

Actually, I know that my negative rhetoric (above) does not work.

These are not the kind of feelings that motivate people interested in
space.

Somehow we do need to find a way to let NASA finish ISS, *declare victory*,

get out of routine operations, and transform itself into the kind of agency

we need. We need to frame this as a challenge for NASA and the space
community.

One idea is to let regular ISS operations stimulate space commerce. This is

the Alpha-town concept (like a town growing up around a federal fort in the

west.) It has often been pointed out that ISS logistics can serve that role

that air-mail did for early aviation. A predictable market, it includes
some payloads as low risk as water resupply. ProSpace.org pushed this point

last year and this year. We hope the 'alternative access' program for ISS
(as NASA calls it) can help startup launch companies. But NASA has a habit
of saying any vehicle can support ISS, as long as it has exactly the same
capabilities (15'x60', etc.) as the Shuttle..

An operations based management model of ISS might help. This is the
direction ISScongress.org is proposing. They are looking at port
authorities as model organizations. Ones that can make contracts for
logistics support, without following complex governmental bureaucratic
procedures (or at least follow simplified rules). The next NASA ISS
official plans on this come out in September, I think.

All of this will get critical in a couple years (say, around the 100th
anniversary of the Wright brothers).

"The ISS is complete" announces NASA and the partners.

"What is it doing for us??" asks the public, looking at the $100B
price tag.

*IF* we play it right, NASA may see it vital to their own interests to show

how the ISS will help open space according the SSI vision. Big IF.

But how do we get there, in only a couple years?

- Eric Dahlstrom