It Doesn't Take a Rocket Scientist

Our TransHab project team was ultimately able to get far enough in our testing and design to warrant what NASA calls an Independent Technical Assessment. In our case, this meant that NASA invited some of the old guard (including Charlie Feltz, chief engineer of the X-15; Chris Kraft, Mission Control pioneer and former Johnson Space Center director; George Jeffs, chief engineer on the space shuttle; and Johnson Space Center director George Abbey) to come out of retirement for a few days and formally assess the project. Such events seem relatively rare, yet in their intensity, methods and relentless pace, they hearken back to the early days of human spaceflight. The panel picked apart our reasoning and process just as surely as they tackled the technologies we had developed, and in so doing taught us how they themselves had pulled off
the feats that made NASA great. Finally earning their approval after three days of vigorous work felt like the greatest achievement of my life.


Our final task, a six-week feasibility study on a different vehicle, was particularly exhilarating. By then we had absorbed all the questions and critiques from our advisers, and we started using their assessment tactics on one another. Now able to anticipate how our teammates would work, we came up with solutions that produced a truly elegant spacecraft.


And then we were disbanded. The dissolution of a project team that could produce a vehicle like TransHab on a shoestring budget is a great loss to the space program, not necessarily because any one of us is particularly special but because the team’s accumulated knowledge represented nearly
40 years of spaceflight, the results of thousands of failures large and small. As Charlie Feltz told us, "engineers learn by failures. We’ve had a lot of failures."


Here’s an idea: Why don’t we borrow a pattern from design disciplines like architecture and industrial design, and develop "studios" populated by specialists from different fields—and when one project is done, try keeping the team together.




THE “VISION CAPTURE” PROBLEM
NASA has a bigger problem than the knowledge-capture failure noted above: It has an institutionalized inability to capture vision. Post-Columbia, more Americans than ever have sensed this. "The space shuttle is unsafe, and we should stop flying it now," they say. "Why hasn’t NASA developed anything to replace it?" It’s a question that insiders ask as well. Most folks I’ve talked with in advanced engineering at NASA agree that the United States should have started building a next-generation shuttle in the mid-1990s, when Columbia and Discovery, the oldest shuttles, had reached their 10-year minimum life span. Max Faget, the chief engineer on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, told the press last spring that it’s a shame we haven’t built a new spacecraft. With today’s technologies and materials, we could make something much lighter and cheaper to fly and maintain than the shuttle.


It’s not that NASA hasn’t taken first steps toward developing a meaningful shuttle replacement—it’s just that those steps invariably ended in a stumble. In the past three years, we’ve seen three separate programs proposed: the Second Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle (2GRLV), the Space Transportation Architecture Study (STAS) and the Space Launch Initiative (SLI). Each set forth overarching new strategies and architectures for human spaceflight that differed only slightly in scope. And each took a few toddling steps before the rug was pulled out. (Just three months before the Columbia accident, NASA diverted the SLI’s $4.5 billion budget to help cover the needs of the shuttle and International Space Station programs.)


Now NASA is pushing a new program dubbed the Orbital Space Plane, which is widely touted as the plan to replace the space shuttle. There is some confusion in this, since not one of the specifications of the Orbital Space Plane as currently envisioned could match the shuttle’s capacity for crew support, nor its sheer power as a high-tonnage launch system.