From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Goldin & NASA reform
Summary: Quick is beautiful
Organization: TECHbooks of Beaverton Oregon - Public Access Unix
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 07:39:24 GMT

Don't shout yet, but the replacement of Truly & Lenoir may be
part of a larger movement towards reform at NASA.  New Administrator
Goldin comes from TRW, where he was VP and GM of TRW Space & Technology
Group.  He worked as an engineer on the Pioneers (first spacecraft to 
Jupiter and Saturn), military reconaissance and electronic intelligence 
spacecraft, and Milstar.  He has been quoted as wanting "smaller, cheaper, 
faster" NASA projects.  (somebody's been reading my sci.space posts. :-)

Goldin & the Space Council face huge hurdles in getting funding for
the new smaller projects from Congress, and in figuring out what to
do with their inherited albatross necklace.  Tentative reports on 
Goldin's outlook:

* Supports Shuttle 
* Support EOS in new configuration
* Wants another look at the Fred design
* more specific goals keyed to budgets (yes!)

How much of that is practical posturing (Congress has been funding the 
white elephants & cutting the other stuff) and how much reflects his 
genuine outlook is hard to gauge. 

The SEI lunar project is being used as a testbed for management innovations
derived from the Lockheed Skunworks, Boeing, and the U.S. auto industry.
(I wonder about that last one...).  Here's the tentative schedule:

'95-'96: 1-2 Lunar Resource Mappers for $100 million
late 90's: Artemis robot lander series @ $100 million each, 4/yr (!)
late 00's: astronauts (vague) "$20 billion"

A scant $31 million is being allocated for SEI lunar in FY93, but that's
enough to get the LRM started.  The astronaut part is hand-waving 
for the benefit of "lunar colony" activists.  Extrapolation of 
SSF costs gives a lunar huddling base (4 astronauts in a module, no
rovers, no mining, no mass driver) cost over an order of magnitude higher 
than that quoted by SEI's Mandell.  Truly & Lenoir, who were quite 
experienced in and strongly in favor of astronaut programs, were 
vehemently resisting these kind of pick-a-number, damn-the-safety astronaut 
speculations.

I'm rooting for getting more of these LRM's manufactured and sent off to 
Mars, asteroids, and comets, so that we can get a more complete native 
materials survey.  I'm rooting for a design merge of Rosetta and Artemis 
for sampling asteroids and comets.  Most of all, we need to lobby
for a radical increase in both the SEI and planetary exploration budgets
(and perhaps a merger of the two efforts).   The sum of the two should
rise to 30% of NASA's budget by FY97, returning to where planetary exploration
was during most of the 60's and 70's.  That would give us money for
dozens of LRM and Artemis-type missions per year, to all corners of the 
solar system.  This is NOT planned; we have to lobby for it.  Those are 
more important than astronaut issues at this point, and easier to resolve.

I suspect Goldin cares most about getting the immediate projects done, 
and knows Bush & Quayle will be long gone before 2000.  Several other 
people, including reportedly General James Abrahamson, turned down the 
post because they doubt the political longevity of the Space Council 
programs like SEI.

While Bush/Quayle/Goldin are in control,  we have a "launch
window" within which we can make some radical changes at NASA,
turning over some new logs and letting some sparks fly, and _finally_
getting another look at the Moon!  Am I being hopelessly optimistic to 
sense a turnaround, or hopelessly cynical to suspect this is ephemeral?



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