April 10, 2009
Those were the days….
The TRW Capistrano Test Site
An item caught my eye this morning as I scanned the space news of the day. A famous aerospace facility, the TRW Capistrano Test Site in southern California is closing. The closure of a space facility is hardly news. In fact, such a headline could have been written any time over the last 20 years or so. But it got me thinking about the nature of the spaceflight business and why things seem to be more difficult to accomplish now than in the “good ol’ days” of Apollo.
I have argued elsewhere that for many reasons, the Apollo program is not a good template for new space endeavors. Yet the idea that we have somehow lost something – something vital – since the days of Apollo persists in the minds of many space advocates. They’re not wrong. Among other things, we have lost a significant and critical component of space exploration: a robust aerospace industrial infrastructure.
It was inevitable that with the end of the Cold War in the 1990’s, many high-technology companies with lucrative defense contracts would either re-focus their attention elsewhere (such as consumer products), be bought out by other larger companies, or simply go out of business. This was and is a critical issue for national security. Many of these companies made parts and subsystems vital to the proper functioning of national defense systems. I always thought that the real motivation of the Space Exploration Initiative of President George H. W. Bush in 1989 was to give this industrial base something difficult yet achievable to do, keeping them occupied with challenging work until they were needed for future defense production.
President Bush never articulated this reason for SEI and with his defeat in the election of 1992, it was easy to write off the SEI as a failed political “stunt” (a criticism I’ve never understood as no President has ever reaped any political gains from making a major space declaration and that includes John Kennedy, who was in serious political trouble in the south in 1963, even after shoveling tons of cash into Dixie from the Apollo program.) In the post-Cold War era, the fight against terrorism soon emerged as a national defense priority, but this war was different and largely fought with existing space assets and technologies.
A few isolated projects in the 1990’s were able to draw on the legacy technical base of the Cold War. The 1994 Clementine mission was a test of very low mass, low power sensors originally developed for defense, but applied to space exploration. Some of those instruments were manufactured by small companies that no longer exist. Over the course of the last five years, as we built the Mini-SAR instrument now orbiting the Moon on Chandrayaan-1, our progress was impeded because many of the parts and subsystems we needed were unavailable or only available from a small pool of vendors.
There were only two major bids to NASA in 2006 for the development of the new Orion spacecraft, the replacement for the Space Shuttle now under development. Contrast this with the 12 bids NASA considered for the Apollo spacecraft in 1961. The difference is not simply a consequence of corporations teaming with each other; joint proposals were common during the Apollo program. The difference is that there are few aerospace companies left. Many of the small high-technology companies and the highly skilled workforce that made up our industrial base during the Cold War are gone or have been absorbed into the body of Boeing-LockMart-Grumman.
The net effect of all this is less innovation and resourcefulness in the execution of space projects. As they age, the tendency is for organizations to continue to do business in a certain way because “that’s they way we’ve always done it.” Institutions become more risk averse and less enterprising with time. It’s no surprise to read headlines about new delays in the Orion CEV program and how our return to the Moon will take longer and cost more because we have come to expect that from our space program.
It’s not surprising. Just depressing.
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I think you may have this somewhat backwards. Less aerospace companies does not (necessarily) result in less innovation. The loss of innovation looks to me to be more a product of less small programs. All too many aerospace programs are huge with all-encompassing scope and excruciatingly detailed requirements. It is very hard to be both innovative and successful with such enormous programs. True innovation is risky.
Small programs can be much more risky. Failure of them is not as expensive or embarrassing. Lessons learned from them can be applied more quickly. Some of them will be very successful. Others will fail. They can all be learned from. Small programs can (usually) be handled by small companies.
Unfortunately, small programs also look more expensive. Single all-encompassing programs usually appear to have efficiencies of scale. That seems to usually be a mirage.
Large programs generally take large companies to manage and coordinate, even though they nearly always subcontract out much (or most) of the work to small companies. The corporate culture and knowledge base needed for a successful large company is difficult to form and takes time to gel.
NASA’s current Constellation Program (composed of Orion, Ares I, Ares V, Altair, CSSS Spacesuit, etc.) unfortunately looks to be a textbook example of a large program. NASA’s much smaller COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program is an interesting contrast. COTS competes almost directly with the Orion part of Constellation (at least it could if the COTS-D contract is pursued). It would be very interesting to see which succeeded.
I believe that we need more small programs.
Comment by Tom D — April 10, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
Tom,
Thanks for your comment. I am a big fan of small programs (like Clementine), but my piece was focused more towards the deterioration of our national technical support base, which for the last 60 years has been supported mostly by defense spending. Although that’s a “big program” in the macro- sense, it actually consisted of a myriad of programs and projects of a wide variety of sizes, all of which required many capabilities and technologies to be developed. What I am concerned about is the erosion and extinction of these capabilities.
Comment by Dr. Paul D. Spudis — April 11, 2009 @ 5:22 am
I think you have it exactly right. When I was in high school, I visited the Bethpage Long Island Grumman plant several times where I saw the manufacturing underway of Apollo Lunar Modules (also F-14 fighters and other aircraft). I had been active at YMCA and Boys Club in woodworking and matal working, and here were the same kinds of planers, lathes, and other machines but on a huge industrial scale – building sized. They would start with solid blocks of metal and machine it down to the needed components – the the shell of the ascent module.
Today, much of the area where the plant lay is a shopping mall. Along with the torn down or shuttered buildings, where are all the engineers and technicians ?
In the early 1980s I worked for Rockwell and regularly visited the Downey plant where the Shuttle orbiters were manufactureed and asssembled, and before Shuttle, Apollo, and before that various aircraft going back at least to the P-51 Mustang of WWII. Today that plant lies in mothballs – shut down. No capability.
Fifteen years ago I was assigned to work on NASA Mir, leading the redesign and integration of the lkas module of Mir, Priroda. NASA-JSC was just about to go to full cost accounting but it had not quite happenned yet. So when we wanted to design and build and test and certify hardware, we had the machine shops, the test facilities, and the technicians.
We redesigned the Russian module, built a US secondary mechanical, electrical and data infrastructure, and we did, most of it in-house at NASA’s JSC. Because we needed the hardware fast, to meet Russian schedules, we built an enormous amount of flight, training and back-up hardware-racks, lockers, electrical systems, computers and data systems, and all of the utility routing. We did it on an expedited schedule working around the clock. In several cases hardware went from conception to flight in a matter of months. We were able to move quickly because we had an experienced cadre and the required facilities were open and available.
A good example was the COSS computer training system. The requirement for this orbital system was realized during Norm Thagard’s long duration Mir stay in July, 1995. The hardware and software was needed in time for Shannon Lucid’s mission in March, 1996, less than a year. We were able to design the system, procure, manufacture, modify, test, certify and integrate the hardware and software for flight. The hardware flew on schedule. Today as a result of full cost accounting many of the facilities required to support these kinds of DDT&E have been shut down and the experienced workforce is no longer in place.
An important part of the Nation’s Vision should be to ensure the nation has the required facilities and a trained and experienced workforce that is kept in place and working towards future missions on a continuing basis.
At one time, aerospace manufacturing was one of the greatest and most profitable manufacturing industries in the US. We cannot afford to lose the facilities, capabilities, expertise and personnel or the nation’s industry.
Comment by GaryK — April 30, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
Hi Gary,
Many thanks for your thoughtful comment. I neglected to mention in my piece the long-term deterioration of NASA’s in-house engineering capabilities. As we lose these assets in both the private sector and the government, who will pick up the slack? I suspect foreign entities, a result not necessarily good for us as a nation.
Thanks for dropping by and come back often!
Paul
Comment by Dr. Paul D. Spudis — May 1, 2009 @ 8:58 am