NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency’s auditor, fears that work on next-generation spacesuits won’t finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028. In a report [PDF] published on Monday, the Inspector General points out that NASA kicked off its quest for next-gen …
You really can't make this stuff up. :)
Doesn't anyone do Operations Research these days or real project management rather than titting about on gross expense accounts ?rhet.
I can imagine the complete dogs breakfast if the Berlin Airlift were contemplated today.
So no basic specs being provided from NASA as to what the space suits must have to ensure a minimum level of compatibility between different hardware? How the hell is a company with zero experience supposed to design and manufacture a spacesuit from scratch when this information isn't being provided? It's like the carbon dioxide filters in the command module and lunar module on Apollo 13 all over again.
Are there any engineers left as NASA?
I'd imagine that there are many and that they are rightfully ticked off. Looking at the rest of the Trump administration I'd say that the whole mess was likely created by political appointees arranging a grift and giving the engineers the cold shoulder.
"Are there any engineers left as NASA?"
It's more like the manglers in charge were chosen using alternate selection points opposite of competency.
Of Course! suit interfaces need to be compatible with everything. NASA should be writing those standards and providing them to every company. I've got a shelf full of standards manuals from various aerospace companies that tell engineers the things they need to know. Stuff like that everything is in metric and if it has to be in imperial measurements to latch into vintage tech, only that part that interfaces shall be imperial. The books are thick and just keep growing. I suppose now they'd be on the internal servers.
"It's like the carbon dioxide filters in the command module and lunar module on Apollo 13 all over again."
That wasn't a design issue, the command module needed flat filters to go against the walls, the space suits needed round filters for their backpacks. So it was decided that the lunar module should use the same filters as the suits so that if there was an issue on the Moon they would be able to use a suit filters in the LM whilst they try and fix the issue. If there was an issue in the command module then they could just retreat to the LM.
Basically there was no expected scenario where an explosion involving the O2 tanks would leave the spacecraft in any way operational. (as opposed to confetti).
The Apollo 13 filter issue was that the two man Lunar module filters were having to support three astronauts for most of the round trip and the LM/suit filters carried were just not up to that length of mission.
It was a trade-off made with launch mass & physical space requirements being in mind.
You have to look at the disastrous evacuation/running away from Afghanistan after Trump’s ghastly capitulation agreement as a case study here.
Both the US and UK withdrawal, those left behind … though many that were evacuated by the US now seemingly have a dishonourable forced choice of death going back, of living in the shithole of ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’..
Doesn't anyone do Operations Research these days or real project management
People at NASA did, back when Artemis started to get backing from politicians. The joke was that although NASA might well send people to the Moon one day the astronauts wouldn't have a thing to wear when they arrived. That joke was how NASA was able to get funding for space suits in the first place. The contract was awarded in mid-2022, 14 months after SpaceX got the HLS contract. A spacesuit has almost all the complexity of a space ship plus a very restrictive mass budget.
The fact that the space suits are going to be late is not a surprise to anyone who has been following the situation. The big suppliers SpaceX/HLS, Axiom/Suits, Boeing SLS and Northrop Grumman/Orion have been playing schedule chicken for years. I have been surprised by Boeing making real progress on SLS cadence. I will reserve judgement on Orion until Artemis II's heat shield has been thoroughly inspected. Blue were very optimistic about the timeline for their HLS. Reality has given them a big slap in the face because the last New Glenn launch did not reach the required orbit. SpaceX also have an optimistic timeline. That will get a big test next month with the first launch of version 3 Starship.
The interesting race is not between US and China. It is between the main Artemis contractors.
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When they are being paid only $3.1 billion? (with a b!)
When the experienced firm that has been around forever drops out and the only one you have left is some new company with zero experience you know either the demands they are making in the contract for this program are totally unreasonable, or this is some congressional boondoggle where they are requiring some work be done in every congressional district or something stupid like that. Probably both.
"I'm pretty sure all roadblocks for NASA would lift about 10 seconds after that announcement was made"
Perhaps, but it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. Many of the required trees weren't planted 10 years ago so there's no fruit today. Money is certainly a factor, but it's not going to fix stupid.
Given how expensive these suits are, it makes far more sense to send robots instead. They’re becoming cheaper to manufacture, can operate for long periods on modern batteries, and only need additional shielding to handle the environment. Maybe a bit more but still doable
Unlike humans, they don’t require food, aren’t affected by weightlessness, and don’t need life-support systems like oxygen/toilets. Also less to worry about when taking off and in re-entry with those ever important heat shields.
The other thing is if NASA want to try a risky manoeuvre for testing , there's less to worry about - apart from reusable parts which I think are mostly booster rockets which are recovered from the ocean after lift off. Most items are single-use.
That's engineering / scientific reason for using robots for the last half century, easier, cheaper and safer.
The political reason for putting humans on the moon is to make the point "Our people are there with boots on the ground", quite literally skin in the game because humans in general don't regard 'things' anywhere near as important as humans.
"Or is this just one huge clusterfuck on all sides?"
Many large projects end up as clusterfucks due to poorly written contracts, unforeseen cost overruns, sudden changes in delivery time or specification changes part way through a project, etc.
If NASA wants these spacesuits on time then they ought to go the best most experienced contractor and pay $$$ for that.
Quite frankly, this is a clusterfuck of massive proportions and it ALL comes from NASA Management.
- Fixed cost contract on a development project for a brand new product. Utterly stupid. How much is it going to cost to produce this brand new item, that hasnt been developed in 50 years, whilst adding in all these new capabilities? Oh and we want it by Tuesday. That any one in management actually believed that a company would deliver on time and cost in such a case is gobsmacking incompetence.
If you must for such a case you provide a fixed cost to get to each milestone. With payment gates based on certain deliverables, and a mechanism for adjusting payments (up or down) depending on changing circumstances. But clearly that was too hard for NASA.
- Not providing a solid Spec and Requirements for the hardware to be designed to. That is just atrocious. It's just unspeakably stupid. You need to lock down use cases, interfaces, and all the other "minor" details that will let you actually use the Suits BEFORE you sign off on the contract. To let them just go away and design whatever they want. Unbelievable.
Really, this is just unforgivably dumb all round...
One of the last astronauts to walk on the Moon tried to do a 'high jump', and ended up on his back. As the backpacks on the Apollo lunar suits were rectangular, he literally could not get up, and his commander had to go over and 'rescue' him. (He was interviewed on Radio 4 recently and I think it was Charles Duke, but not sure.) I wonder whether being able to get up from lying flat on your back without assistance is one of the criteria for the new suits.
And I agree, after Apollo 13 you would have thought that standard interfaces and a minimum volume for the don/doff region would at the very least have been mandated or at least put out for suggestions of standards by NASA. Someone needs to get a grip on this or it will all go horribly wrong.
> Fixed cost contract on a development project for a brand new product. Utterly stupid.
Yes that would be entirely stupid.
What you do is award a contract, then there's an election and the whole thing is cancelled. Then there's a focus group/political rally (depending on party) and it's back on but with different requirements. Then there's another election coming up so the timeline is shortened. Then the contract is cancelled and new contract with different requirements is issued.
It's weird how the suit manufactures can't adapt to this. It's how we've done procurement for everything from police radios to aircraft carriers for 75 years
Surely there should be an ISO or similar that all countries build the spacesuits to, so that you just need a suit and go to market for a standard device.
Otherwise you could end up with say a Chinese and US moon base. But if one develops a problem you can’t rescue from the other side as the airlocks are the wrong size.
Just a thought…
You'd be surprised just how much 'white space' there is in space standards. However in this case what with decades not only of moon landings but space walks from the ISS, how in the heck has not standards evolved from that lot? Did someone just walk past those filing cabinets and decide to issue a brand new tender with f-all requirements? Just imagine that conversation:
Sales droid: 'so what's the spec?'
NASA: 'walk on the moon'
SD: 'and .....'
NASA: ' just that. How hard can that be?'
SD: 'right ...... that'll be 20 squlillion dollars'
NASA: 'nah here's a fixed price contract, we'll be round to pick them up in two years'
How do you tender for ANYTHING if you don't define some standards that have to be met !!!
How can anyone design and test a Spacesuit with no previous experience and no standards to be met !!!
It looks like the intent was to simply tick a box to say a spacesuit was going to be made without any intention of delivering anything useful !!!???
Not even something as simple, comparatively, as an old style ice car can be built without some standards to be met.
How exactly did Axiom win the tender when they had no experience and NASA still thought that NO standards needed to be followed to ensure success.
Sounds like 'Brown envelope' heaven for someone !!!
:)
>How do you tender for ANYTHING if you don't define some standards that have to be met !!!
There were probably 1000s of pages of standards
From the proportion that had to be built by veteran owned business to the font required on the tender document.
As to the details of the actual suit - how are we supposed to have standards for that, we haven't built one for like 75 years ?
"Some astronauts were unable to fly because there were only a limited number of suit component sizes and nothing would fit them."
The flight suits are individual, but the EVA suits only came in a few sizes. Wendy Lawrence was too small which was a big disappointment. I had a chance to interview her years back and got her to autograph my level 3 Nike Smoke rocket at one of Sally Ride's events. Amazing person.
