Budget – Constellation

Where Things Stand with Constellation

Much has been said recently regarding the cost and schedule related to NASA’s successor program to the Space Shuttle. However, this is a subject where considerably more heat than light has been generated, so let’s review the bidding as objectively as possible.

First, some facts: NASA’s commitment has been and continues to be to achieve the first human launch of Orion by March 2015. We see that as eminently achievable, but it’s not a guarantee – there is no such thing in any large scale development program and especially for one where the available funding is never known more than one year in advance.

While there has been moderate growth relative to early cost estimates, these increases are contained within the projected budget profile to which the agency has worked to for the last three years. The development cost for achieving the first crewed flight today is roughly $30 billion, far short of estimates which have been recently bandied about.

How We Got Here

The Constellation Program, now in its fourth year, has nearly completed its ‘formulation’ phase – this is the phase in which concepts are developed, capabilities are defined, requirements are written, and contracts are established with industry.

When the program began, one of the many constraints it was called upon to honor was a ‘go as you pay’ plan – that is, the pace of the program would be dictated largely by the share of NASA’s annual budget that human spaceflight has historically been allocated.

Based on that constraint, it was always recognized that funding for a new development program would be exceedingly tight in the years 2008 thru 2010.

A second constraint, the key to achieving our exploration goals beyond low Earth orbit, was to make our early investments in Orion and Ares I so as to ensure that they could support missions to the moon, the near-Earth asteroids, and Mars, while nonetheless providing the capability to service the International Space Station

A third constraint embodied in legislative guidance was to use as much shuttle infrastructure and workforce as makes sense in the design of NASA’s new human spaceflight architecture.

All of this was in compliance with national policy. That policy, which was born out of the findings of the Columbia accident, started with a ‘vision’ from the Executive Branch in 2004, and then codified in two Congressional authorization acts in 2005 and 2008.

An additional desire (regrettably, never a policy mandate) was to do whatever possible to ‘close the gap’ between the last shuttle flight and the start of Constellation launches from KSC.

In short, Constellation is not ‘NASA’s plan’ – it is the manifestation of national policy.

Moreover, Orion and Ares I are not standalone products – the Constellation Program is a collection of seven product lines to conduct operations in and beyond Low Earth Orbit… servicing the ISS, returning U.S. astronauts to the Moon, and enabling exploration beyond – to Mars, Near Earth Asteroids, or other destinations in the solar system. This entire range of product lines encompasses the Constellation architecture.

So with these constraints, and many more, NASA’s Constellation team has executed this early phase – called ‘formulation’ – at historically low cost for a human spaceflight development program. Compared to Apollo, and to Shuttle, and to Space Station, Constellation has been markedly leaner in its efforts to date.

So Why Can’t Orion Fly Sooner?

As we have openly discussed, it is true that inside NASA we challenged our team during this ‘formulation’ phase of Constellation to do better than March of 2015 for flying Orion for the first time with a crew.

Our earliest plans had the first crewed mission targeted for September of 2013. While none of the cost estimates showed that date to be likely, we still felt that being internally aggressive would help us clarify what was really necessary to do the job. In that respect, as a program management strategy, it has succeeded.

It is also true that over the last year, as we approached the end of this formative period, we have adjusted our internal schedules to align with the reasonable projection of our ever-improving cost estimates.

We have thus gained a level of understanding of the ‘work to go’ that is very rich in detail, and a depth in understanding of what each of our requirements costs in time and money – perhaps as well as NASA has ever done. I will leave that to others to judge, but I’m quite proud of what we have been able to achieve.

It is simply a matter of money at this point, not technology. Further, it is not merely a matter of total cost, but also of the time-phasing of when the money becomes available.

Of ‘Unk-Unks’ and Schedules

We have been asked consistently for the last three years ‘what would it take to fly as early as possible’? Study after study of that question has revealed roughly the same answer – not more money, but money earlier, is the key to flying sooner, more confidently, and ultimately with the smallest amount of delay due to ‘problems’.

This is simply because, with sufficient early funding, engineers can investigate the riskiest parts of an emerging design for a spacecraft system or a rocket component and discover hidden problems early, before the design is ‘locked down’.

We call these ‘unknown unknowns’ or unk-unks, and if discovered early they can be accounted for in the design before building the final vehicle or system.

If discovered too late, after the design is ‘locked down’, then there is considerable cost required to rework the design, while the rest of the team waits until it is fixed.

We have done as much early risk mitigation as we have been able to afford in parallel with actually doing the design. But we have been forced to defer or eliminate some of that work in order to remain within our 2009 and 2010 funding limits – which have themselves changed as a result of Administration and Congressional decisions.

So those unk-unk’s we should be discovering now are lying in wait for us, and are of concern as we formulate our plan for achieving a March 2015 first crewed Orion launch, let alone anything earlier.

Keys to Success

NASA’s plans and programs are strictly a reflection of national policy. If the policy is to ‘go to the Moon by 2020’ and ‘go as you pay’, we respond with ‘here is how we propose to do it and, as best we can gauge it, here is how much it will cost’.

A few keys to success – and they are nothing new to program and project managers in any industry – are:

· stable funding – don’t keep changing the money

· stable requirements – don’t keep changing the plan

· early investments to investigate the riskiest parts of a complex design such as a human spaceflight system will save billions in delays and overruns

· a clear vision of the desired outcome – help the team ‘see’ the end game

NASA has done what it said it would do, indeed what it has been directed to do under national policy.

We have a functioning successor program to the shuttle. It is employing and re-invigorating the NASA institution across all of its 10 centers in California, Mississippi, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Alabama and New Mexico.

We are today producing detailed designs and preparing to perform flight testing this year from test facilities in New Mexico and a shuttle launch pad in Florida.

We have laid out a plan and architecture, not just to replace the space shuttle, but to take astronauts beyond Low Earth Orbit. Not only are the Orion spacecraft and Ares I rocket progressing well in their designs, but early concept work is proceeding on the heavy-lift Ares V rocket, which will be more powerful than Apollo’s Saturn V, and the Altair Lunar Lander.

Construction is progressing at the Kennedy Space Center on launch pads, processing facilities and even the factory where Orion will be assembled.

Large scale facilities are being renovated or built anew in Utah, California, Colorado, Ohio, Mississippi and Louisiana to fabricate and test the major components. And orders are being placed with high technology suppliers in most states of the union.

NASA’s Constellation Program is rejuvenating an agency and an industry.

NASA’s value lies in the trails that it blazes, the things we do that are hard, so that industry can follow and create new markets. Our role is to occupy the pinnacle of a $300B ‘space economy’ that generates products and services that bolster the nation’s broader economic productivity. We are doing so in a highly constrained ‘go as you pay’ environment, in parallel with meeting the nation’s commitment to completing the International Space Station, retiring the Space Shuttle, and mapping a course for human endeavor beyond our experience.

Contributed by Jeff Hanley, Constellation Program Manager

Same Choices,Same Story Here

There’ve been a lot of stories in the press lately about Constellation and its progress or supposed lack thereof. The alleged danger that the program is in. Could it be that when there’s nothing real to report that people try to stir up old news?

The fact is that Constellation is targeting March 2015 for the first crewed flight to the International Space Station, with Orion aboard the Ares I rocket. That date hasn’t changed for some time. We did originally give our teams a very tough challenge in the early days of the program of making this milestone in September 2013. And they worked hard toward it. But the fact is, we needed more money early on. Given the way budget cycles work, we were given a budget to initial operational capability, but the critical mass we would have needed to make that earlier date just wasn’t there right away.

So we made choices. We continue to make choices. About what to do and when. About sequencing and doing things in parallel that we might ideally do in a different fashion given every dollar we wanted when we wanted it. But who gets that? The reality is that we are very fortunate to have a budget that will enable us to get to a crewed flight in 2015, but we’re going to have to put off some other work until we get the Ares I and Orion system fully designed, tested and flown.

Our budgets are built to accommodate the change and contingency that any development program encounters. We have, after all, not created a new system for spaceflight in over 35 years. It’s an enormous challenge and one that we welcome. There have been varying budget numbers reported in the press. The bottom line is that we had some numbers early on that we used as estimates while the overall architecture we were going to use was still under discussion. Right now we’re targeting $36 billion for Constellation’s cost through initial operational capability. That’s for hardware, the stuff that will actually get us into space. But we also need to budget for the people and ground operations, the upcoming work that must begin on Ares V and early development work on lunar systems. When you add that in, you get to around $44 billion for Constellation through 2015.

But those budgets are still being worked out with the new Administration. In the meantime, America should be proud of the exceptional work by teams across the country for the next generation of space vehicles. We’re working hard on them every single day.

Small Steps to a Great Adventure

If the greatest adventures begin with small steps, the Constellation Program took giant strides in 2008 and has more planned for 2009. Here is an excerpt from the year’s-end note, dated December 2008, Constellation Program Manager Jeff Hanley sent to his team.

All, as I type this I’m coming to the end of nearly a full week in our nation’s capitol, and here at the end of our third year as a team I owe you an update from 50,000 feet (sorry, 15 km). I think it’s important that our entire team have this context, so that we can together take on the challenges that 2009 will surely bring.

First, as I review the events of 2008, and the progress that we together have made across this agency team, I am truly proud of what you have accomplished — and you should be too. Today we have projects and hardware and software in nearly every phase of the lifecycle, from pre-formulation of our lunar surface strategy and the international partnerships that are already beginning to form, to formal formulation of the Ares V and Altair requirements, to completion of the program definition phase for Ares I, Orion, and their sister projects, to the testing of engine components and fabrication of flight test hardware for Pad Abort 1 and Ares I-X.

The program has built considerable momentum in the past 12 months and indeed over the last three years since we stood up as a team. We’ve done it for a fraction of the cost in people and resources compared to Apollo, shuttle and station through this phase. We’ve done it while the same supporting institutions execute our other two human spaceflight programs. We’ve done it with focus and resolve to transition shuttle workforce and assets to the new program in the smartest way possible. We’ve done it — done it all — with the Moon as our goal. “Design for lunar” has guided our every move, our every decision, within the bounds of what we can fiscally afford through these lean years until shuttle is retired.

I know you all have seen the public discourse regarding Ares and Orion and shuttle, and understandably such discourse can temper our resolve to push forward — if we let it. But, let’s review the bidding. First, we should remind ourselves, as we saw in intimate detail at last summer’s Lunar Capability Concept Review (arguably the finest such review the team has yet executed), that the Ares I/Ares V/Orion/Altair transportation system is highly integrated and keenly designed to open the lunar frontier to us in the years to come. Our driving requirements of going anywhere on the Moon, staying twice as long as Apollo in a sortie mode, sending twice as many crew members, and enabling their return at any time, must remain at the forefront of any consideration to alter the nation’s exploration launch architecture. I assure each of you that we are doing all we can to communicate this key aspect of our baseline plan — it is about much more than launching Orion to LEO (Low Earth Orbit).

The shuttle team, as you know, has performed a study of projected cost and decision points for extending the life of shuttle. I have not seen the report in its final form so I won’t comment on the interim version. But I will say — will reassure you — that Constellation’s needs, interests, and requirements were central to their deliberations, and we were partnered closely with the study team to provide the Constellation implications of any extension. It was a good effort and I am quite satisfied that any impacts to Constellation are well accounted for.

Somewhat in tandem, in October we kicked off our own special study led by Ralph Roe out of NESC (NASA Engineering and Safety Center) to look at options to accelerate Constellation to allow the first human flight to occur prior to our March 2015 commitment date. All of the deputy managers of our program and project offices participated, along with a substantial number of experienced contributors from outside the program. It took our most recent baseline plan — including budgets, schedules, technical content, risks and threats, and assessed achievability of three different acceleration cases to improve upon the March of 2015 commitment date, assuming of course that resources were added to do so. Ralph briefed the draft report to leadership at HQ (NASA Headquarters), and while it is still being finalized, the findings are not new — the upshot being, if you want to accelerate Ares I and Orion then significant new money must be added to the Constellation budget in FY09 and FY10. This is the same answer that we provided more than a year ago when asked what it would take to keep our September 2013 baseline with an adequate level of confidence.

And no wonder – if you look at a “traditional” funding profile for an aerospace program and compare it to the Constellation budget profile, the deficit in these early years is obvious. What it compels us to do, therefore, is defer some key work to later that would buy down considerable risk — flight and ground tests, manufacturing demos, test articles to investigate structural margins, engineering development units, buys of long lead parts, etc. This is where we are at today with our internal target of September 2014, compounded by very lean reserves in these same two years to deal with surprises.

We’re at where we’re at. In the weeks ahead we will proceed assuming no new money will be forthcoming to accelerate and we will instead move forward to adjust our plan to meet our March 2015 commitment. If a decision comes forward to accelerate by the April timeframe, an earlier date is still possible, but that gets less and less likely with each passing month.

Again, none of this should be a surprise — though some will feign shock and accuse us of overselling. But we have been very careful these three years to avoid that. We have consistently pointed out that our internal ‘work to’ dates were aggressive with this fiscal profile and what additional funding it would take to increase our confidence and ability to execute. These same realities have been reinforced by those who independently review us. Throughout we have applied common government and industry practices and methods for how projects and programs are funded and managed. We kept the option open to enable a more aggressive date as long as we reasonably could before last summer’s re-baselining. Two years of continuing resolutions haven’t helped, but we’ve worked around them to the best of our ability to keep moving forward.

Look at all you’ve accomplished in spite of that!!

All this is offered as context to further amplify what an amazing result — in spite of it all — that 2008 has produced. Constellation is not a paper program anymore. It is a full-fledged assault on the frontier, and if we keep the mission at the forefront of our sights then we can persevere. As the year draws to a close, we enjoy broad support in Congress, we have a vision that we’ve not only embraced but have strategically over the last three years codified in an exploration architecture with a broad range of capability to allow us to unlock first cis-lunar space and then the inner solar system in the years to come… and who knows what other missions these new tools might be employed for?

In the coming year, let’s continue to make history — one milestone at a time — as we celebrate those whose shoulders we stand upon more than a generation ago.