NASA's Artemis Program Updates and Discussion Thread 3

[whitelancer64]

For Artemis 3 specifically, the HLS must launch first and be in lunar orbit and confirmed ready to go before NASA will launch the crew on SLS. HLS should be able to adjust timing for entering lunar orbit to match the requirements by NASA.

I knew this, but now I'm not sure it's exactly optimal. HLS is required to be able to loiter in NRHO for 100 days. If SLS/Orion launch is delayed too much, that timer can expire, leaving a dead HLS. It seems like HLS should loiter near the depot as long as it can during the SLS/Orion launch preparation period before HLS departs from Depot to NRHO. This tradeoff might depend on the time it takes for HLS to get from Depot to NRHO.  By the time of Artemis III, Starship launch operations would be much more mature than SLS/Orion launch operations even if Starship were only being used for Artemis. That's the third SLS/Orion launch, but HLS demo requires from five to fourteen launches and Artemis III will have another five to fourteen launches before the SLS/Orion launch.

100 days should be more than sufficient - these pad bugs should mostly be ironed out by then, and 100 days would represent a dozen or so SLS launch opportunities.

The current procedure is that the HLS be in lunar orbit and checked out OK prior to crew launch on SLS. It is one of the SLS launch commit criteria for Artemis lunar landing missions. This completely eliminates any risk that the HLS will not be there when the crew arrives.

[FutureSpaceTourist]

Yet another GAO report about Artemis.

What GAO found:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans to conduct Artemis missions—a series of missions that will return astronauts to the moon, build a sustainable lunar presence, and ultimately bring humans to Mars into the 2030s.

To do this, NASA will need to develop, acquire, and integrate a number of new systems. NASA has made progress on integration and risk management for the first lunar landing mission, Artemis III. For example, NASA established integration processes, roles, and responsibilities, and recently took additional steps to manage risks for the series of missions.

NASA, however, does not yet have guidance for creating or managing Artemis mission schedules that will help integrate the individual programs required for launch. NASA is using existing schedule management guidance developed for individual programs, not multi-program missions. Without guidance specifically for multi-program missions, NASA lacks reasonable assurance it has consistent schedule management practices in place for the Artemis schedules. Schedule management guidance would also assist coordination, which will be increasingly necessary as the Artemis missions will involve more programs over time and therefore become more complex.

NASA conducts workforce planning through the programs that comprise the Artemis missions across the next 5 budget years. NASA faces uncertainties beyond that horizon that have hindered longer-term planning. However, NASA is committing billions of dollars in development and production contracts for future Artemis missions that extend into the 2030s. This will require an extensive workforce to execute. Prior GAO work found that other agencies facing uncertainty assessed a range of future options, known as scenario planning, which provided flexibility to determine future workforce needs. In May 2022, NASA officials said they were examining the use of scenario planning to help future workforce planning efforts. But they have not yet completed or implemented guidance to do so. As NASA begins to execute the first of many Artemis missions, it has the opportunity to use scenario planning to inform future workforce environments it may face and address broader workforce challenges.

[VSECOTSPE]

Yet another GAO report about Artemis.

As usual in these GAO reports, the really important findings are buried underneath the bureaucratese, management buzzwords, and pats on the back that GAO has to give implementing agencies for not being totally incompetent.  But there’s a couple doozy revelations with respect to the schedules for Artemis II and III in this GAO report that folks should be aware of.

Specifically, the schedule for Artemis II (5/24 launch date) has not been risk-adjusted.  That date could have zero or 100-percent confidence or anything in between:

NASA Has Not Performed Key Schedule Risk Analysis for Artemis II to Inform Realistic Launch Date

Although NASA has an Artemis II schedule, the ESD division has not conducted an SRA. An SRA is an analysis that uses statistical techniques to predict the likelihood of a project’s completion date, or in this case, a launch date. Using the Artemis II schedule, ESD officials said they plan to conduct an initial SRA sometime in 2022 after Artemis I launches, but they do not have a planned completion date. Conducting a high quality SRA as close as possible after the Artemis I mission would give NASA a more informed launch date for Artemis II—currently scheduled for May 2024—as it begins key integration activities.

The NASA Schedule Management Handbook states that programs should conduct an SRA sometime between the program’s concept and preliminary design and then update it as needed. Because there is no mission-level schedule management guidance, missions are not bound to the same timelines as programs for conducting an SRA. However, all three programs required for Artemis II are past preliminary design. Additionally, a lesson learned that NASA identified from the Artemis I SRA was to build an SRA model early, even if it requires high-level assumptions. The GAO Schedule Guide also states that in addition to conducting an SRA, agencies should update it to incorporate new risks and schedule updates. Therefore, with less than 2 years until launch, ESD should have already completed an initial SRA and be updating it as changes arise.

This is pretty shocking.  Other than waterfall/workflow charts laying out the critical path, NASA has no idea whether a 5/24 launch is a schedule it can confidently achieve for Artemis II with less than two years before that launch date.  The sector standard confidence level is usually 80%, and I think NASA uses a lower 70% confidence level,  Regardless, folks should expect significant delays in Artemis II when this analysis is done.  At a minimum, we’re looking at a seven-month delay to the very end of 2024 due to the Orion “reuse” iron-bar, as GAO points out:

NASA is already underestimating risks to achieving the current Artemis II launch date. Specifically, NASA estimates it will require about 27 months between Artemis I and Artemis II due to Orion integration activities and reuse of avionics from the Artemis I crew capsule on the Artemis II crew capsule. Officials noted that the time between missions depends on the amount of risk assumed. Since Artemis I is scheduled to launch in September 2022, Artemis II cannot logistically happen before December 2024, 7 months beyond the planned May 2024 date.

In all likelihood, it will be Artemis II launching in 2025 or later, not Artemis III.

And the state of schedule planning is even worse for Artemis III:

NASA Has Not Yet Completed a Schedule for Artemis III Mission, But Plans to Do So

The AES division—which is responsible for managing the Artemis III and later missions—does not yet have a completed Artemis III mission-level schedule. In lieu of mission-level guidance, the division is creating its own Schedule Management Plan that it expects to finalize by June 2022. Officials said the schedule management plan will incorporate scheduling processes from NASA’s Schedule Management Handbook since most of its best practices apply to the Artemis schedule, and will outline the division’s process for developing mission-level schedules and SRAs.

AES plans to extract key activities and critical path information from individual program IMSs to develop a mission-level schedule for Artemis III and beyond. This includes gathering schedule information from programs managed by the ESD division as well (see fig. 5). The AES and ESD divisions plan to collaborate on mission-level schedules and SRAs for Artemis III and later missions.

In other words, NASA has no critical path schedule for Artemis III yet, forget a risk-adjusted schedule.  When the agency claims 2025 for Artemis III, they’re just making it up.  I would expect multi-year delays from 2025 when they finally grapple with this and produce a critical path schedule and risk-adjusted estimate for Artemis III.

There’s a lot more good stuff in this GAO report from the boneheaded stovepiping of the ESD organization that underlies these schedule problems to the paucity of workforce planning at NASA, one of the agency’s long-standing weak underbellies.  But folks should understand that Artemis II and III (and probably the rest of the program) will move seriously to the right in the months and years to come.  For the time being, no one should put any faith in NASA’s launch dates for these missions.

Sobering... FWIW...

[sdsds]

I'm curious about all the references (48 of them) in the GAO report to the "workforce" involved with Artemis. That apparently means both the contractor and the civil servant workforces.

Sometimes it's possible to go to a contractor and ask, "What would it cost to get this task done sooner?" But if the contractor wasn't forewarned and doesn't have and can't hire the workers to do the task the answer is, "It simply cannot be done that soon." So the trick is to make sure the contractor is prepared for the request.

I think GAO understands that. I'm not clear on whether they're hinting in this report that, to meet the stated schedule objectives for Artemis, NASA would need to change the mix of civil servant and contractor work?    Is GAO thinking NASA should decrease the civil servant workforce at, e.g. MSFC, thus freeing up funds for contractor schedule acceleration?

[DanClemmensen]

There’s a lot more good stuff in this GAO report from the boneheaded stovepiping of the ESD organization that underlies these schedule problems to the paucity of workforce planning at NASA, one of the agency’s long-standing weak underbellies.  But folks should understand that Artemis II and III (and probably the rest of the program) will move seriously to the right in the months and years to come.  For the time being, no one should put any faith in NASA’s launch dates for these missions.

Sobering... FWIW...

Ouch. I hope that this is not interpreted by the SpaceX team or the space suit team as an implicit schedule extension. SpaceX at least has interim deliverables like the HLS demo that they will get paid for, so I hope they can stay focused.

Do you know (or can you guess) what the contract says about payment for the actual crewed HLS? if SpaceX is ready to launch in late 2024, can they be paid then, or must they wait until Artemis III actually flies?

[yg1968]

There’s a lot more good stuff in this GAO report from the boneheaded stovepiping of the ESD organization that underlies these schedule problems to the paucity of workforce planning at NASA, one of the agency’s long-standing weak underbellies.  But folks should understand that Artemis II and III (and probably the rest of the program) will move seriously to the right in the months and years to come.  For the time being, no one should put any faith in NASA’s launch dates for these missions.

Sobering... FWIW...

You also have to look at NASA's (Jim Free's) responses on pages 38 to 41 to get the whole picture. The Schedule Risk Analysis for Artemis II will be completed 6 months after Artemis I launches (around March 2023). See below:

Recommendation 2: The NASA Administrator, in coordination with the relevant Mission Directorates, should ensure NASA conducts a schedule risk analysis for the Artemis II mission as close as possible to completion of the Artemis I mission and update it as needed to incorporate schedule updates and new risks.

Management’s Response: NASA concurs with this recommendation. ESDMD/(CESD) recognizes the importance of performing an Artemis II SRA and has established plans to complete this SRA within 6 months after the Artemis 1 launch. The Artemis II SRA completion is driven by the time needed to allow for a data-driven development of risk and uncertainty. Following the Artemis I launch, CESD and CESD programs will conduct a detailed analysis of first-time integrated operations activities. This assessment will help inform Artemis II integrated operations estimates by analyzing differences in operational flows between missions, assumptions used to apply Artemis I performance to Artemis 1 activities, and any potential opportunities to streamline the second flow. In parallel, the Space Launch System and Orion programs will also continue to assess their risk and uncertainty for Artemis II manufacturing and integration activities based on Artemis I past performance as well as current opportunities and challenges. CESD will then integrate all inputs to perform an enterprise-level Artemis 11 SRA.

Estimated Completion Date: March 2023

Recommendation 3: The NASA Administrator, in coordination with the relevant Mission Directorates for Artemis III and later missions, should ensure NASA develops guidance for division-level schedule collaboration including setting expectations for data sharing and the type(s) of data required.

Management’s Response: NASA concurs with this recommendation. Guidance for division-level collaboration is included in the ACD Division’s Schedule Management Plan (SMP). The SMP provides information on the methodologies, techniques, and tools that will be used to produce schedule management products. The ACD SMP documents how the ACD Division will work with programs and supporting organizations to achieve this functionality and what will be expected from each of the programs. ACD anticipates baselining the SMP at a Joint ACD/CESD Control Board in September 2022, followed by the document’s release in October 2022.

[VSECOTSPE]

I'm not clear on whether they're hinting in this report that, to meet the stated schedule objectives for Artemis, NASA would need to change the mix of civil servant and contractor work?    Is GAO thinking NASA should decrease the civil servant workforce at, e.g. MSFC, thus freeing up funds for contractor schedule acceleration?

That could be one outcome of better workforce planning at NASA, but I don’t think the GAO is leading NASA by the nose to that conclusion.  Rather, this GAO report is making a broader, more generic point — that NASA doesn’t do much, if any, workforce planning beyond a five-year horizon, but NASA needs to longer-term workforce planning because NASA is letting Artemis contracts for hardware and missions out into the late 2020 and 2030s.  NASA’s excuse is that the agency is subject to the whims of changing Administration and congressional priorities, which is true.  But the GAO has a point that, look, if NASA is going to create these long-term contracts, then by definition, NASA has bet on (or tried to lock in) a certain long-term future and needs to shape its workforce accordingly. 

And as the GAO points out, long-term planning doesn’t mean one hard and fast long-term future.  Long-term planning can be scenario based so that the agency has the right mix of workforce, options, and off-ramps so that it can deal with a range of likely futures.  An obvious couple of scenarios would be whether NASA continues to own and operate some ETO launchers and transportation (i.e., Orion/SLS) or whether that all of that function transitions to private sector providers (as happened with commercial cargo and crew).  In the former scenario, the agency needs to have a plan for replacing retirees in an aging workforce against a more competitive aerospace sector jobs market.  In the latter scenario, the agency needs to have a plan for what it would do with the remaining Orion/SLS workforce.

I don’t disagree with GAO’s points here.  But there are even more fundamental workforce management issues at NASA that probably can’t be resolved without fundamental reform in civil service rules, conversion of NASA fields centers to FFRDC or UARC structures, and full-cost accounting.  Put simply, there’s a lot of deadwood and overhead at NASA.  It’s extremely hard to move that deadwood off of program budgets because the agency keeps separate accounts for contractor and civil servants costs and program managers only directly control the former, not the latter (which the center directors largely control).  And it’s extremely hard to move that deadwood off of the agency’s budget because of how hard it is to fire a federal civil servant.

For NASA to have a lean, mean, agile workforce, center directors would have to cede much of their discretionary power to program managers, the centers’ civil servant workforce would likely have to be rebadged under JPL- or APL-like organizations (FFRDCs and UARCs), and NASA would have to return to full-cost accounting for programs instead of keeping separate books for civil servants.  During the Goldin and O’Keefe eras, NASA nearly implemented full-cost accounting and made some pretty serious progress towards civil service reform/alternatives.  But Griffin sold out and reversed all that, and there’s been no substantive attempt at reform since.  Workforce reform at NASA will probably come around again, but I have no idea when.  (Certainly not under Nelson.)  In the meantime, even with all the deadwood and overhead, the GAO is right that NASA still needs to actually shape its workforce (for once!) for the long-term and have options and plans in place for different scenarios.

[VSECOTSPE]

Ouch. I hope that this is not interpreted by the SpaceX team or the space suit team as an implicit schedule extension.

Should not be.  The problem is that Artemis III is managed across two different ESD divisions (dumb), HLS (or whatever the lander program is called) is in a different division from the heritage programs (Orion, SLS, and EGS), and the two divisions have not been communicating to figure out the critical path schedule for Artemis III.  The critical path could be in the heritage hardware, or it could be in the newer lander and suit programs.  But they don’t know because they haven’t been talking, which means the 2025 date for Artemis III is just a one-year delayed WAG from the 2024 Trump Administration accelerated date for human lunar return, which itself was just a WAG by Pace.

I thought NASA at least would have a critical path analysis for Artemis III by now.  Even setting aside the fact that means 2025 has no basis (and why in heck the agency is communicating such unsubstantiated dates publicly), there’s no way to manage a mission to completion without knowing the critical path and allocating resources to beat down the threats against it.  Free or his mission manager has to have this, or they’ll never get there.  They’re three years out from their made-up date and they don’t have a critical path?  What the heck are they thinking?  Honestly, I’m gobsmacked.

Regardless, there will be pressure on Lunar Starship to not become the critical path or to not create delays if it is the critical path.  But wherever the critical path lies for Artemis III, it’s not going to end in 2025 and certainly won’t by the time they also do a risk analysis.

Do you know (or can you guess) what the contract says about payment for the actual crewed HLS? if SpaceX is ready to launch in late 2024, can they be paid then, or must they wait until Artemis III actually flies?

I don’t know if the milestones are public (yg1968 probably knows), but the payment amounts against those milestones almost certainly are not.  That said, if it’s anything like COTS, the payments are front-loaded, meaning the earlier milestones are worth more than the latter ones.  It would not surprise me if the final landing milestone is only $100 million or even $10 million out of the $1.9 billion for Lunar Starship.  We front-loaded on COTS so that the payments resembled the Gaussian curve that a normal development budget is optimized for (plus some margin).  I assume that HLS is doing the same.  Hopefully budget scarcity outside of Orion/SLS hasn’t forced them to compromise.

You also have to look at NASA's (Jim Free's) responses on pages 38 to 41 to get the whole picture. The Schedule Risk Analysis for Artemis II will be completed 6 months after Artemis I launches (around March 2023).

That’s a bunch of baloney from Free (or whoever responded in his name).  Doing a risk-adjusted schedule only 14 months from launch is way, way too late.  As the GAO points out, this stuff should be started  much earlier around the PDR-equivalent.  Otherwise, you’ve wasted years not knowing where your schedule risks are hiding and pounding them down, only to discover them a year or so from launch when there’s little time and resources left to fix them, which leaves no option but to move the launch to the right, probably by a lot.  Free doesn’t even have a schedule that’s consistent with the Orion “reuse” iron bar, forget whatever is hiding in his unanalyzed and non-existent schedules.  They’ve been busy pushing toward Artemis I, but there’s no excuse to wait until after one mission to not put some people and time into getting a handle on the next one and the ones after.  They have to manage missions in parallel, not serially.  The schedule will just continue to slip and stretch to the right until they do.

Apologies for the exclamatory statements, but I’ve taken graduate-level engineering management courses.  I’ve taken NASA’s engineering management training courses.  These schedule basics are textbook to both.  What the heck is going on with ESD?  Why doesn’t this organization do what other NASA and engineering organizations do as a matter of practice?

Aye, aye, aye...

[JayWee]

Excuse my naivety, but is there really that much work to be done for AII? Is it listed somewhere?
One would kind of have expected that almost everything is done by Artemis I, gets properly tested, only what's off nominal gets fixed and THEN people are put on it.
How many untested systems are going to be on A2/A3?!?!
What has nasa been doing during the last 10 years?

[dglow]

Excuse my naivety, but is there really that much work to be done for AII? Is it listed somewhere?
One would kind of have expected that almost everything is done by Artemis I, gets properly tested, only what's off nominal gets fixed and THEN people are put on it.
How many untested systems are going to be on A2/A3?!?!
What has nasa been doing during the last 10 years?

Begin your meal by searching "Artemis II Orion avionics reuse." If there's room for dessert, proceed to "why does Artemis I Orion lack ECLSS?"

[yg1968]

I don’t know if the milestones are public (yg1968 probably knows), but the payment amounts against those milestones almost certainly are not.  That said, if it’s anything like COTS, the payments are front-loaded, meaning the earlier milestones are worth more than the latter ones.  It would not surprise me if the final landing milestone is only $100 million or even $10 million out of the $1.9 billion for Lunar Starship.  We front-loaded on COTS so that the payments resembled the Gaussian curve that a normal development budget is optimized for (plus some margin).  I assume that HLS is doing the same.  Hopefully budget scarcity outside of Orion/SLS hasn’t forced them to compromise.

The milestones aren't public. However some details can be gathered from this website:
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_80MSFC20C0034_8000_-NONE-_-NONE-

NASA has already paid SpaceX about $742M out of its $3B HLS contract. So I think that you are right about the contract payments being frontloaded.

Option B doesn't seem to have been exercised yet as the end date of the contract is still in July 2025 and the contract value hasn't significantly increased since it was awarded (the contract was bumped from $2.9 to $3B a while ago).

[yg1968]

VP Harris says that we are going to live and work on the Moon. See below:

Harris: soon America will go back to Moon, incl 1st woman and person of color. Not just to visit but live and work on Moon. Will build first space station in lunar orbit and first lunar base camp where Americans will train for mission to Mars.

It's at 13 minutes of the video below:
youtu.be/8I2G9aGItvc

https://twitter.com/SpcPlcyOnline/status/1568308698585657344

[Coastal Ron]

VP Harris says that we are going to live and work on the Moon. See below:

What she said is the standard NASA PR that is given to political leaders. Did you expect her to contradict what everyone in NASA is saying?

[yg1968]

VP Harris says that we are going to live and work on the Moon. See below:

What she said is the standard NASA PR that is given to political leaders. Did you expect her to contradict what everyone in NASA is saying?

I wasn't expecting anything (and I wasn't trying to be critical of it either) but I am thinking that this might be the new slogan. Instead of saying, we are going to the Moon to stay, the message is now that we are going to the Moon to live and work there (it resembles what Bezos says about Blue Origin and their objectives for human exploration). She made the point that we aren't going to the Moon just to visit like was the case for Apollo (i.e., we planted a flag and visited the Moon at that time). She talked about the lunar base the camp (i.e., the Artemis base camp) where astronauts will train for the first mission to Mars. There is nothing new in what she said about Artemis but the branding is a little different which is interesting.

In a way, I am glad that she said what she said. Nelson and Free have been vague about whether we are going to the Moon to stay but VP Harris saying today that we are going to the Moon to live and work is essentially the same idea expressed differently.

[libra]

the Orion “reuse” iron-bar

I see that one being mentionned again and again. My gut feeling about it ?  How to try reusability the worst possible way. Salvaging bits of a flown capsule - while triggering massive delays into the launch schedule.

Remember, goal of reuse are a) saving money b) flying more by not rebuilding the whole thing.

[VSECOTSPE]

I see that one being mentionned again and again. My gut feeling about it ?  How to try reusability the worst possible way. Salvaging bits of a flown capsule - while triggering massive delays into the launch schedule.

Yeah, that’s why I use quotes.  Orion is reusing some hardware, but they have to because the program is so hardware-poor, not because reusability makes programmatic or fiscal sense applied this way.

[libra]

I see that one being mentionned again and again. My gut feeling about it ?  How to try reusability the worst possible way. Salvaging bits of a flown capsule - while triggering massive delays into the launch schedule.

Yeah, that’s why I use quotes.  Orion is reusing some hardware, but they have to because the program is so hardware-poor, not because reusability makes sense applied this way.

And that "hardware poverty" is another shot in the foot...

[clongton]

Yeah, that’s why I use quotes.  Orion is reusing some hardware, but they have to because the program is so hardware-poor, not because reusability makes sense applied this way.

Cannibalizing hardware from one spacecraft to make another one usable does not bode well for the program as a whole. That is *NOT* the way to operate a HSP program. I am appalled.

[libra]

You said it better than me.

[yg1968]

I see that one being mentionned again and again. My gut feeling about it ?  How to try reusability the worst possible way. Salvaging bits of a flown capsule - while triggering massive delays into the launch schedule.

Yeah, that’s why I use quotes.  Orion is reusing some hardware, but they have to because the program is so hardware-poor, not because reusability makes sense applied this way.

I think that Free and others mentioned that this was being done in order to better understand the hardware, not because Orion is hardware-poor. The initial idea, a long time ago, was for Orion to be reusable. In a hindsight, it was wrong the decision but that was the reason.

https://www.space.com/21541-nasa-orion-spacecraft-reusable.html

At earlier points in time, NASA had planned to reuse all the Crew Module avionics equipment in the Artemis 1 spacecraft for Artemis 2. Prior to 2019, the missions were called Exploration Mission-1 and Exploration Mission-2 and were the only ones fully baselined as a part of the initial operating capability within the Exploration Systems Development (ESD) division.

For a long time, as many as three years or more were forecast between the missions now referred to as Artemis 1 and Artemis 2; however, a significant revision in the ESD manifest in 2018 allowed the missions to be flown closer together. The change also put Artemis 1 on the critical path for Artemis 2, and the Orion Program advanced procurement of a second set of Crew Module avionics later in 2018 so that assembly of the Artemis 2 spacecraft would not be significantly held up by Artemis 1.

The full avionics set is conceptually divided into “core” and “non-core” groups; Orion first decided to move up procurement of the core avionics, and those computers and devices are at KSC ready for installation into the Crew Module. “The decision was made to accelerate the core set that was going to be built for Artemis 3, so that core set was built earlier and it’s going to be installed on Artemis 2,” Marasia said.

Meanwhile, the projected time frame for Artemis 1 continued to move from 2020 to now early 2022, and procurement of the non-core avionics was also started. Early in 2021, NASA was still trading options back and forth between reusing the Artemis 1 non-core avionics or a new set; however, Marasia said that the agency has since decided to wait for the non-core avionics flying on the Artemis 1 spacecraft.

“We do still have a set of the non-core avionics — basically antennas, receivers, inertial measurement units — those are still going to be reused from Artemis 1,” Marasia said. “We are dependent now on Artemis 1.”

“I wasn’t involved in those trades, [but] I think [between], schedule, funding, technical risk, I’m sure all of that risk was [considered],” she added. The decision to use the non-core avionics that will fly on Artemis 1 as a part of the Artemis 2 flight configuration means completion of the Artemis 1 mission remains a critical path for Artemis 2.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/11/orion-spacecraft-production/