1.
The "Near Term" and Present Situation
The Sounding Rocket Working Group is alarmed by the sudden
loss of significant numbers of persons from the Wallops Flight Facility
work force with considerable expertise concerning scientific payloads,
launch vehicles, and sounding rocket project management. It is also
disconcerting to see large numbers of young engineers and technicians
leave Wallops for jobs in other NASA centers or in industry.
We urge the NASA/Wallops Flight Facility management to
develop policies to ensure that the needed technical and managerial
expertise and "know-how" at Wallops, which is vital to the continued
success of the program (even under a GoCo arrangement), will remain at
sufficient levels to satisfy the agency's commitment to a healthy and
robust sounding rocket program. We are particularly concerned that this
loss of expertise could result in a decrease in the mission success
rate in the future.
2.
Government-owned, Contractor-operated Operations
The Sounding Rocket Working Group is committed to helping the
transition process of the current rocket program to a government-owned,
contractor-operated ("GoCo") arrangement, and has provided input to
Wallops' GoCo transition and "statement of work" teams at its last two
meetings. Despite this, we remain deeply concerned about how well the
GoCo arrangement will actually run NASA's sounding rocket program.
The Sounding Rocket Working Group strongly believes that the
new GoCo arrangement should be as cost effective, flexible, timely, and
"all encompassing" as the present program, whose record of achievement
is exemplary within NASA. Chief among our concerns are the following:
(a.)
Costs and Flight Rates
Recent, high level programmatic reviews have concluded that
the sounding rocket flight rate should be maintained near the current
level of 30 flights/year (with the current average mix of mission
complexity) in order to ensure the cost-effectiveness of the program
and to maintain its viability within the science community.
Anticipating that the GoCo arrangement may be very costly, we are
concerned that the flight rate will therefore decrease significantly as
will the science-per-dollar research return of NASA's investment.
(b.) Maintaining flexibility and innovation
Flexibility and innovation have been traditional hallmarks of
NASA's sounding rocket program and are facilitated by the close
partnership between the scientist (P.I.) and the Wallops
engineer/technician teams. The Working Group is concerned that
anticipated contractor requirements for: (1) technical specifications
that are locked in at project initiation, (2) increased paperwork, and
(3) rigid time schedules, such as one encounters in satellite programs,
will leave little room for innovation and change, and thus are the
surest way to create a mediocre experimental science program.
We recommend that NASA management vigorously pursue ways to
prevent such a situation from occurring by structuring the new program
to instill the present standards of performance, cost effective
informality, and common sense "partnering" between the scientist and
contractor.
(c.) Remote campaigns
An important ingredient of the sounding rocket program is its
ability to conduct low cost scientific experiments at all latitudes --
whether it be space physics missions at high (e.g., aurora) and low
latitude (e.g., magnetic equator) sites, or astronomy missions which
observe southern hemisphere celestial targets in Australia. The success
of such remote campaigns has relied on decades of experience of Wallops
personnel who have planned, managed, and carried out highly successful
programs at distant launch sites, often under adverse conditions.
The Working Group emphasizes the need for the GoCo contract
to maintain the capability to carry out such remote campaigns at low
cost so that this unique and vital aspect of NASA's scientific program
is not lost.
(d.) New Technology
In addition to its main activities of designing, building,
testing, and launching scientific payloads, an important element of
NASA's sounding rocket program has included the development of new
sub-system technologies and vehicle systems that subsequently engender
a large number of experimental requirements. Examples include
innovative recovery systems of upper atmospheric air samples, the Black
Brant XII vehicle, and very high rate telemetry systems (see Item 4(a)
below).
The Working Group urges the new program structure to include
a cadre of civil servant engineers and technicians, free from the
profit incentives that typically govern short- and medium- term
business decisions, that may continue to explore and develop innovative
and appropriate new technologies that are responsive to the evolving
scientific requirements of the experimenters.
(e.)
Escape valve
The Sounding Rocket Working Group has been informed on
numerous occasions that the GoCo arrangement will contain an escape
valve, and that provisions will be included so that if the new
operating system does not work, the agency would then be able to
recover the essential elements of the previous arrangement. The loss of
critical Wallops personnel as noted above, however, raises grave
concerns that the agency's critical expertise is quickly eroding in the
areas of design, fabrication, testing, and launching of scientific
payloads on sounding rockets and that this situation could thus
prohibit a return to a program as robust and innovative as the current
one.
The Working Group feels strongly that including the escape
valve mechanism is a prudent and wise measure to be incorporated in the
plans to transition to a GoCo arrangement. The importance of this is
underscored by the fact that NASA's Sounding Rocket program provides
unique scientific capabilities that virtually do not exist anywhere
else in the world. Fearful that the escape valve check may be lost in
the transition shuffle and contract negotiations, we recommend that a
formal review committee be convened after an appropriate interval (e.g,
1-2 years) to evaluate the impact of the new system on the scientific
yield and performance of NASA's Sounding Rocket program.
3.
Funding at NASA Headquarters
Aware that funds are tight within the government and that all
programs are being asked to undergo "belt tightening", the Sounding
Rocket Working Group is highly concerned about the stewardship of the
sub-orbital budget at NASA Headquarters, particularly since major
portions originate from sources other than Code S (Space
Science). (For example, operational support from Code O is a
critical element of the sounding rocket program, amounting to
approximately $10M/year.)
Given the changing fiscal environment of NASA, it is apparent
to the Sounding Rocket Working Group that a clear plan is needed to
detail how the necessary funds will be identified and maintained to
ensure the success and vitality of the sounding rocket program in the
future.
4.
Technical presentations
The Sounding Rocket Working Group was impressed by the
technical presentations made by the Wallops personnel and expresses its
appreciation to all of the speakers. We offer the following comments:
(a) The fact that a 10 Mbit/s telemetry system will now be a
"standard" option for experimenters represents the fulfillment of a
long sought goal. This report is thus gladly accepted by the Working
Group on behalf of the scientific community. For a large class of
experiments, such high rates can be immediately and directly related to
the yield of new scientific discoveries. Not only does the 10
Mbit/s rate represent significantly higher telemetry than the now
standard 800 kbit/s rate, but also it is higher than that of most
scientific satellites.
The Working Group congratulates the engineers and technicians
at the Wallops Flight Facility for this achievement.
(b) Including GPS receivers to obtain positional data
is a new way to provide trajectory data and may eliminate the need to
send high powered radars on remote campaigns, as well as consolidate
operations at existing ranges.
We are pleased with the successful follow on demonstrations
of the GPS receivers on recent flights from White Sands and look
forward to the results of detailed comparisons between the GPS-derived
trajectories and those obtained from traditional C-band radars.
5.
Appreciation
The Sounding Rocket Working Group expresses its sincere
appreciation and deep gratitude to Mr. Ray Pless and to Mr. Warren
Gurkin, who have managed the program so well over the past decades and
who will be retiring in early 1997. The sounding rocket program
that they have helped create has enabled unique scientific achievements
to be carried out in space, reflecting highly on both NASA and the
United States. We acknowledge their tremendous expertise
regarding sounding rocket systems and thank them for their untiring
dedication to the program.
Further, the Sounding Rocket Working Group acknowledges the
Wallops Flight Facility as a whole for the exceptional job it has
performed in the past year despite the stresses caused by frequent
management shifts, re-organizations, and the uncertainty surrounding
the GoCo arrangement and the future of the rocket program itself.
The scientific community owes a real debt of gratitude to the men and
women of Wallops for their hard work and dedication.
NASA
Sounding Rocket Working Group
Dr.
Robert F. Pfaff, Jr. (Chair)
NASA/Goddard
Space Flight Center
Dr.
Fletcher Miller
NASA/Lewis
Research Center
Prof.
Paul D. Feldman
Johns
Hopkins University
Prof.
Wilton T. Sanders, III
University
of Wisconsin
Prof.
Timothy J. Kane
The
Pennsylvania State University
Dr.
Alan Stern
Southwest
Research Institute
Prof.
Paul M. Kintner
Cornell
University
Dean
and Prof. Roy B. Torbert
University
of New Hampshire
Dr.
Clarence Korendyke
Naval
Research Laboratory
Prof.
Edward C. Zipf
University
of Pittsburgh
Prof.
Miguel F. Larsen
Clemson
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