starship-design: Explaining Thirty Years Of Fudge

["L. Clayton Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Explaining Thirty Years Of Fudge


by Bruce Moomaw
Sacramento - May 02, 2003
While a great deal of the testimony before the Columbia Accident
Investigation Board has been newsworthy to non-specialists -- and the Board
has by now made it plain that it does not intend to serve as the blind
puppets of NASA's officials -- nothing in it up until April 23 could be
described as "explosive".

But that is the only possible word that can be applied to the testimony on
that day by Robert F. Thompson, the Shuttle program's manager during the
crucial period from 1970 until just after the first Shuttle flight in 1981.
Thompson delivered a whole series of bombshells on a wide variety of
subjects, which can be roughly grouped into two categories.

The first is his casual official confirmation of the astonishing degree of
deliberate, flat-out dishonesty that went into NASA's tactics to persuade
Congress to approve the Shuttle program in the first place -- plus his
apparent revelation that, to some extent, President Richard Nixon himself
collaborated in it.

It has been known for some time that, in order to persuade a reluctant
Congress to reject Sen. Walter Mondale's campaign against the Shuttle, NASA
told outrageous distortions about the frequency with which it could be
launched, and thus its cost-effectiveness.

One anonymous former NASA official told a "Time" magazine reporter shortly
after the Challenger disaster, "We hated to do it, but we were getting SO
many votes." But no NASA official, past or present, ever openly admitted the
fact -- until Thompson.

CAIB member John Logsdon pointed out that in May 1971 the Office of
Management and the Budget had placed a mandatory cap of $5.5 billion on the
Shuttle's development cost -- and that NASA's "ultimate presentation, at
least to the White House level, said you could do that" and fly the Shuttle
"with an operating cost of $118 a pound (of payload). I'm curious where
those numbers came from particularly the operating cost."

Thompson's response was, first, to casually admit that NASA had lied to
Congress about development costs -- apparently with the connivance of
President Nixon and the OMB:

"In December 1971, when [then NASA Administrator] Jim Fletcher and [then
associate administrator] George Low went to San Clemente to present the
final recommendation to President Nixon, we prepared a letter that George
and Jim took with them...

"That letter said that we felt we could build the Shuttle for a total cost
of $5.15 billion [in 1971 dollars]... but that it would take another billion
dollars of contingency funding over and above that to handle the
contingencies that always develop in a program like this.

"So you need to budget $6.15 billion...we could build it and fly it by 1979
if everything went perfectly, but that [another] $1 billion and 18 months
ought to be planned in the program because that's probably what will really
happen and we'll probably fly it in early 1981. That's in the document...

"President Nixon approved it... Bill Lilly, who was comptroller of the
agency [NASA] at that time, took that letter and started his negotiations
with OMB. When he finally got around to getting it through the OMB cycle,
they took the letter and said, 'We'll take the $5.15 billion, but we won't
give you the [additional] $1 billion because we never budget contingencies.
We'll hold you to the 1979 launch date...and we'll put it in the '73 budget
at those numbers.'...

"I went back and talked to Bill Lilly. He said, 'Shut up. You got your
program. Go on about your business.' So we did... The Shuttle was picked as
a program to be monitored by OMB, and they actually put five or six people
from the OMB into my office level here at the Johnson Space Center...It's a
pretty complex job to keep up with the true cost of a development program
like the Shuttle. In fact, after three years, OMB quit and went home."

In short, the president and his OMB both knew that the Shuttle's likely
development cost would be a billion dollars more than what Congress was led
to believe by the White House.

Remarkably, Thompson revealed all this in the course of proudly telling the
Columbia Board that the Shuttle, contrary to traditional belief, had not
overrun its real (if secret) original cost estimate (taking inflation into
account), and had not been delayed beyond its real (if secret) planned
launch date.

This, however, is a good deal less shocking than his next statement, on the
origins of that $118-per-payload-pound operating cost estimate:

"At the time that we were selling the program at the start of Phase B, the
people in Washington got a company called Mathematica to come in and do an
analysis of operating costs. Mathematica discovered that the more you flew,
the cheaper it got per flight."

"Fabulous… So they added as many flights as they could. They got up to 40 or
50 flights a year. Hell, anyone reasonable knew you weren't going to fly 50
times a year.

"The most capability we EVER put in the program is when we built the
facilities for the [External] Tank at Michoud -- we left growth capability
to where you could get up to 24 flights a year by producing tanks, if you
really wanted to get that high. We never thought you'd ever get above 10 or
12 flights a year.

"So when you say, 'Could you fly it for X million dollars?', some of the
charts of the document I sent you today look ridiculous in today's
world...Those costs per flight were not the cost of ownership... We didn't
try to throw the cost of ownership into that. It would have made it look
much bigger. So that's where those very low cost-per-flight numbers came
from. They were never real."

In short, the Shuttle's program manager during that period has now told the
CAIB that the figures on yearly cost frequency and cost per flight that NASA
gave Congress -- which were crucial to the conclusion that the Shuttle
program as a whole would be more cost-effective than unmanned expendable
boosters -- were deliberate distortions.

Thompson also said that President Nixon, at least, had decided to back the
Shuttle for reasons other than its supposed economy as a launch vehicle --
but had kept his real reasons secret from Congress:

"In 1969, driven by the fact that the government works on five-year budget
plans, it was then incumbent on NASA to put some dollars into the out years
for where they wanted to go post-Apollo...If something wasn't done, we were
going to go out of the manned spaceflight business. That simple.

"So the Vice President at the time, Spiro Agnew...chaired the Space Council
and they worked for about six months...They looked at a manned Mars
expedition, they looked at a follow-on lunar program, they looked at a
low-Earth-orbital infrastructure program, and they looked at getting out of
the business...

"They made the decision to have a low Earth orbital infrastructure
program...It never got announced like Kennedy announced the lunar program,
but that decision was made by the President on the advice of the Space
Council.

"We then undertook obviously to build the Shuttle first, and then a modular,
zero-gravity space station second...As the thing evolved, we started with
the Shuttle, and the requirements for the Shuttle were driven 99 percent by
what we wanted to do to support the space station. It also happened to give
the Air Force the kind of payload volume and the kind of capability they
wanted, although they really wanted to be at higher orbits for their work

"So the Air Force came in and said, 'We will plan to use the Shuttle, and we
will also take on the task of building the Interim Upper Stage, which was
part of the low-Earth-orbital infrastructure. So NASA embarked on the
Shuttle. It wasn't necessary to commit to a space station at that time
because the Shuttle had to be built and operational before you commit to the
space station, and the President at that time -- Nixon -- had other things
on his mind. He didn't get up and make a great big speech about
low-Earth-orbital infrastructure.

"So now a lot of myths have grown up about how we stumbled between a space
station and the [Shuttle] Orbiter, and how we wanted to do an Orbiter this
way and then an orbiter that way. That's not the way it happened at all. It
was pretty orderly planning. It was a decision to go to the low Earth
orbital infrastructure -- let's have a shuttle, then let's have a modular
zero-gravity space station...

"When Nixon made the decision...there was no big national-level discussion
of it or national-level announcement of it or national-level description of
it. So a lot of attention was not drawn to it.

"Part of the reason was that politically you were proposing to do something
that was considerably less expensive, less effortful, less glamorous than
the Apollo program.

"So compared to what Kennedy did with the Apollo program, announcing a low
earth orbital infrastructure wasn't that sexy, so to speak. Plus the
personality of the man -- he wasn't that interested in space. So he didn't
make a big to-do about it."

But Nixon's failure to "make a big to-do" about his real plans for the
Shuttle included never even telling Congress about his true reason for
backing it -- and letting them endorse it entirely because of outrageously
phony figures about its supposed economic efficiency as a reusable launcher,
rather than on the basis of its real (but secret) purpose as the support
vehicle for a space station that Congress had already made it clear it was
very skeptical about backing.

The second keg of dynamite exploded by Thompson at the hearing involved his
flat-out announcement that it had never been designed -- and probably could
never be designed -- to endure pieces of foam insulation regularly falling
off its External Tank, and his repeatedly expressed outrage that the
Shuttle's current program managers have tolerated this.

Major Gen. John Barry of the Columbia Board asked Thompson, "Was the Space
Shuttle designed to accept debris hits from foam, either at the RCC
[wing-edge panels] or at the belly with the tiles?"

Thompson relied, "No. The spec for the [External] Tank is that nothing would
come off the Tank forward of the 2058 ring frame [low down on the Tank], and
it [the Shuttle] was never designed to withstand a 2-pound mass hitting at
700 feet per second. That was never considered to be a design requirement."

Aaron Cohen, the Shuttle Orbiter's project manager for 1972-1982, added: "In
the first early flights, we were concerned about ice coming off the
tank...because we knew ice would do very serious damage."

But Thompson added: "But usually ice under the [foam] insulation was our
principal concern -- where you would get a crack in the insulation, you had
cryopumping under there, you'd get ice formed up under it, and a chunk of
ice and insulation come off"

"We must have had... 15 [meetings on this] -- we had so many meetings on
trying to make sure we didn't have ice, we called them the Ice Follies
meetings."

Reminded that there is still a team that inspects the External Tank before
launch for ice, Thompson replied, "I don't know what they're doing today...I
was pretty sure we did ultrasonic testing on the tank foam insulation,
looking for any voids. We carefully did visual inspection. We put together a
very comprehensive ice team that walked up and down the vehicle just before
liftoff...We even talked one time about building a great big building around
the whole thing and environmentally controlling it, but we decided that
probably wasn't necessary."

Thomspon then revealed that the early Shuttle teams were far more concerned
about ice or form fragments hitting the carbon RCC panels on the wings'
leading edges -- exactly the thing thought to have been fatally damaged on
Columbia -- than they were about impacts on the Shuttle's tiles:

"We paid an awful lot of attention to making sure that nothing came off,
because we knew that if we fractured the carbon-carbon on the leading edge
of the orbiter, it was a lost day.

"We could take a fair amount of damage on the silica tiles and still be all
right, but it was a maintenance problem...People have gotten locked up on
the fragile nature of the silica tiles.

"The silica tiles are fragile to damage, but they're actually pretty
forgiving. You can take a lot of damage right there. You cannot take any
damage that knocks a hole in the carbon-carbon leading edges."

George Jeffs, the Shuttle program manager before Thompson, interjected that
the RCC panel designers had gone to some lengths to make them "as strong as
possible...We really had a rugged RCC...They're taking a pretty good
[strain] load up in that front end. So they're not wussies."

Thompson: "They are strong, but they're still a ceramic. What you don't do
is hit a ceramic with a real sharp, high-energy low-time blow. Anything
going 700 feet per second -- even if it's a soft piece of insulation -- if
you look at the force-time curve that we put onto that insulation, we didn't
do a dead-chicken test [i.e., firing any significantly heavy objects at the
RCC panels with a gas gun]. We knew well that you could knock it off if you
hit it with enough kinetic energy."

He seemed surprised that his successors had not been aware of this fact, and
added: "There was never any thought that those [RCC] panels would withstand
a 20,000 foot-pound kinetic energy strike [such as Columbia's foam fragment
produced]. They were not designed for that. The whole intent was not to let
it happen....I wouldn't know how to design the leading edge of that wing to
take a 20,000 foot-pound kinetic energy strike."

Milton Silveira, his deputy program manager, said, "Not many airplanes are
designed that way." Thompson added, "I think we might have had to abandon
the program, had that been a requirement."

When asked whether the Shuttle had been designed to withstand hits from
micrometeoroids or orbiting space garbage, Thompson replied, "We did not
know enough about the orbital environment to practically say what kind of
impacts you should take from orbit. So, frankly, we did not spend a lot of
time trying to design the Orbiter to take hits from unidentified objects
while on orbit."

Cohen pointed out that the Shuttle was designed to have enough spare air for
the crew to land before running out of oxygen if there was a half-inch hole
in its cabin wall, and that the windows were designed to take very small
impacts, but agreed that "I don't recall orbital debris being discussed very
much."

Thompson: "I don't think you would really know enough today to put a good
spec on a system flying in low Earth orbit...It's going to have to be a
judgment call for someone."

He also said that the decision, after he resigned, to give up painting the
foam on the External Tank -- which would probably have drastically reduced
its ability to absorb either water or air which could then liquefy when the
cryogenic fuels were pumped into the Tank -- had nothing to do with any
weight problems:

"The number that I remember was 700 pounds of paint on the tank. As far as I
know, they quit painting the tank more to save money, and it wasn't
really... that they were in any kind of critical weight bind."

Owen Morris, the Shuttle's systems integration manager in the 1970s,
confirmed this, saying that the decision was made that the paint was
unnecessary after the tank manufacturers had decided to quit machining the
foam after spraying it, which had been scraping off the hard natural "rind"
on the foam. However, the complicatedly shaped areas around the "intertank"
region -- and especially the bipod region from which Columbia's fatal
fragment came -- are still machined, and their rind removed.

Thompson's final verdict on his successors in the program was devastating:
"You have to maintain the PRACA ["Problem Report and Corrective Action"]
system...because that's a discipline that makes you look at anything that's
off nominal, whether it's in the [chronically] worrisome [Shuttle Orbiter]
engines or in the not-so-worrisome SRBs. You have to deal with it in a
formalized way through a Flight Readiness Review, or whatever technique you
want to use. You have to maintain those systems.

"Then you have to maintain enough high-quality well-trained people to make
good judgments with those decisions. Neither one of these accidents that
we've had on the Shuttles require Ph.Ds in physics to understand. In fact,
they barely exceed high-school physics to understand.

"Erosion on an O-ring when there should be no erosion is an obvious thing.

"Kinetic energies of a 2 1/2 or 3-pound hunk of foam when it's traveling 700
feet per second -- that's high school physics.

"There should not be anyone in a key management position in the Shuttle
program who doesn't understand those things in considerably more depth than
it would take to make a good decision on them.

"Why those things didn't happen is the kernel of your question. It appears
to me that the agency needs to make sure that the procedures bring the PRACA
to the right forum, and that the right people are dealing with them....
There may still be some actions that occur in the Shuttle that those systems
don't catch, but that's certainly no excuse not to have those systems in
place and have reasonably good people deal with them."

Finally -- while this doesn't begin to match Thompson's other bombshells --
he and his fellow former program managers had a good deal to say about their
skepticism regarding NASA's continuing habits in planning for its future.
George Jeffs said: "These programs cost a lot of money; and therefore, when
you start them, you better darn well make sure you've figured out what you
want to do with them...

"The other thing is that these programs are often paced not by money and
talent, but by technology. So there's no point in taking off on a Single
Stage To Orbit if you don't have an engine that can perform that kind of
mission. So we go charging off and we get all together and say, 'Let's go
Single Stage To Orbit' -- then say, 'But how do we get there? Oars?'

"Therefore you've got to look at the technology base as it permits you to
make decisions for the next generation...It seems like it's five years for
Gemini; 10 or 15 on Apollo; 15, 20, maybe 25 on Shuttle. The next one is
going to be larger than that. But it's going to [need] the technology behind
it that enables you to commit that kind of funding and duration of lifetime
of people to do it."

Thompson added that he is skeptical about manned deep-space expeditions as
NASA's next desirable goal, and that it should be thinking along Gerard
O'Neill's lines instead: "There is plenty about what we're doing today and
what we will do in the next 10 or 15 years that should excite a lot of
capable people to work on it, even though it's not exploring Mars.

"I frankly think it will be a long time before you can convince any Congress
to spend the money to embark on a properly thought-out Mars exploration
mission, because it's going to be extremely costly and there's going to be a
hell of an argument about whether it's worth that cost...

"So I think what is needed is a little more attention to explaining. For
example, the Space Station, I think, is a very exciting program -- the
thought, somewhere in the future, of direct solar conversion to electrical
energy with a solar power station in orbit. The kinds of things you can do
in a low earth orbit with shuttle and space station-type vehicles could be
made into a very exciting program.

"Part of the problem is that people want to throw that aside and go to Mars
for some reason -- and we've got to put the defense in that, because I think
where the nation's going to spend its money for the next several years in
manned spaceflight is low Earth orbit, and we'd better start explaining the
beauty of it. I don't think you'll be going to have any trouble getting
plenty of people to work on it, good people, if you'll talk about it and
explain it properly."

Very few people had expected any session of the Columbia Accident
Investigation Board to be as dramatic as the session on the morning of April
23. It will be much harder for NASA to continue sweeping its very serious
problems with its manned space program -- and its scandalous penchant for
dishonesty -- under the rug after Thompson's testimony.