These disgruntled engineers have, on their free time, prepared an entirely different proposal - the Jupiter Direct system. Instead of going back to the baseline, like Ares, the Jupiter Direct plan would utilize systems which have been used for years with the shuttle program, so they can be built with slight modifications to current designs and at facilities that already exist. Their projection is that these plans could be implemented into a rocket that's ready to fly by 2013, shaving two years off the Ares proposals.
Unfortunately, the Ares plan has already been approved, and money has been spent with it in mind. Also, the Popular Mechanics article indicates that the Ares mission is based in part on proposals made by Michael Griffin, the NASA administer, prior to his appointment to the position. Griffin claims that similar designs were considered, and dismissed, prior to the adoption of the Ares plan.
Now, I am not an aerospace engineer, so I honestly can't say which plan is the best. However, it does look like the NASA administration is trying to stifle any sort of debate on their choice, and I don't think that's healthy. If there are NASA engineers who genuinely believe so strongly as to devote their free time to this, I think it needs to be taken seriously.
This sort of myopic, get it done and don't ask questions attitude is not beneficial in either engineering or science, though it is par for the course in politics ... and I think that's what's so frustrating, that instead of allowing for a scientific debate, it appears that NASA is being motivated, at least in part, by political and bureaucratic concerns, as clearly laid out in an October speech from Griffin:
If it is not obvious that objective expertise underlies NASA decisions and actions, then the civil space program will grind to a halt in response to one searching examination after another by various other governmental entities which claim the right of agency oversight, and can make it stick.
I read this, and I see both a valid point and a frightening end result. Yes, NASA has to be able to make decisions and plans without being bogged down by unending bureaucratic analysis of every single decision, but they also need to be an environment that accepts ideas openly and uses the best one - even if that means stopping a project in mid-stream to switch to one that has more promise. Griffin's statement indicates that the need to avoid unending bureaucracy means that no one can question the objectivity of the process. In fact, questioning whether they've made a mistake, in and of itself, could result in this "agency oversight," so we'd better put an end to it entirely.
My friend, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer, made a comment a while back in an e-mail about the space program suffering because of Star Trek. In the show, the engineer - Mr. Scott - always objected to the plan, saying that the ship couldn't do what it needed to do. The captain - James Kirk - always told him to do it anyway, ignoring the engineer's expertise. This made for great drama, mostly because Mr. Scott (almost) always found a way to pull it off anyway ... but this is not the way to run a space program.
The Challenger disaster was largely caused because of the need to push on instead of listening to the concern of the engineers (as Richard P. Feynman recounting the investigation in What Do You Care What People Think?). In this case, the new proposal would actually accelerate the timeline, shaving two years off from the current one, which has political benefit, given that it looks like we're in race with China to return to the Moon.
Yes, a government agency needs to be able to do their work without being stifled by endless analysis ... but progress takes place exactly because of this sort of analysis. Any government science agency is forced into the unenviable position of having to balance the two, and I fear that this may be yet another case where NASA is failing to achieve that balance.
Comments
Great article. The myopic view on the launch vehicle design is just one example of NASA’s “just trust us” culture cultivated under Griffin’s leadership. There are numerous other projects were NASA ignores external input for their own internal analysis, regardless of the potential benefits, without an open and fair process. I wouldn’t be surprise if Obama’s transition team encounters very similar situations throughout the science programs under development at NASA, and the scientists working diligently to have a voice are waiting for someone to change NASA’s culture from the top down.