Leader has full faith in private sector
'It's going to happen,' Leinbach says
John Kelly - Florida Today
The day his team blasted one last space shuttle from Kennedy Space Center, longtime NASA launch director Mike Leinbach looked into the future, speaking with a crack in his voice.
The shuttle team would scatter, he said, joining up with new programs in the space agency, or the Defense Department, or private companies, and they would tackle whatever was coming next in the human space program on the shoulders of what they’d accomplished together with shuttle.
Less than a year later, it’s coming true. And Leinbach is smack in the middle in his new job helping United Launch Alliance’s growth into human space flight.
We talked this week about a wide range of space topics and the most important thing I got from it is that Leinbach, who commands an awful lot of respect from the human space flight community, is perhaps more optimistic about the potential of private companies’ efforts to deliver astronaut crews to low Earth orbit than anyone I’ve heard talk about it, including SpaceX’s Elon Musk.
“This is going to happen,” Leinbach said, repeating the mantra several times. “It’s going to happen.”
Here are some of the highlights of what we talked about:
Atlas V can and will be ready to fly humans by the middle of this decade.
Leinbach was talking with his boss just this week about the timetable and based on what he’s learned since joining the company, his assessment is two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half years based on a range of factors, some of which are driven by the readiness of the spacecraft being built by three different companies rather than ULA’s rocket.
“We will be waiting for the spacecraft providers,” Leinbach said, signaling that he expects the company to have met NASA’s requirements on safe flight of astronauts and to have engineered and built the ground support equipment necessary prior to the private companies’ space taxis being at a similar readiness level. That’s not because those engineering efforts are behind or slow. Rather, it’s because Atlas V has a head start that perhaps doesn’t get quite enough attention.
The Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles developed and flown almost 60 times now with seed money from the military, The Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. have a track record that helps “retire risk” of flights that would put humans inside spacecraft on top.
All those flights help validate the computer models on how often components fail and things go wrong. They help build confidence, likewise, in the things that go right. The safety and success measures taken for flying national security spacecraft critical to our nation’s defense (and costing taxpayers hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars) are nothing to sneeze at and not that much of a step down from those that would be taken to protect humans.
“It’s my job to be a sort of consultant, to the processing and operations team and my management here about how the shuttle did things and why we did them that way,” Leinbach said. “It’s about taking the things that we did that were good and applying those to this system and maybe taking the things that were bad and make sure that we don’t build those into our systems and procedures.
“I’ve said all along that ULA never wanted to lose a rocket. It has super-sensitive national security payloads on it. It’s not a question of whether the rocket was safe. ULA always made sure the rocket was safe. It’s the whole other aspect of having people on top, which is different, and it’s my job to make sure people understand the differences and address those differences, but also to make sure that people don’t over-react either.”
Consistent, continued funding of NASA’s commercial crew program is the biggest hurdle to success.
Technical progress is being made and can remain on schedule with reasonable funding. The program’s been funded, but already faced many threats from Congress in a tight budget time. If cuts come or funding is stretched out over more years, that can slow progress. The potential danger of another change from a new presidential administration could be problematic as well.
“It’s a fact of our lives,” Leinbach said. He said the constant change of direction during the past decade or so has been NASA’s “Achilles’ heel” and “that’s something that a long-lived space program shouldn’t have to go through. We seem to do it in this country too often. It would be really, really nice to have a space policy that endures from administration to administration and even generation to generation. We had good direction and then it changed. We’re just hoping that it doesn’t change again.”
The biggest technical challenges to the United Launch Alliance effort to launch humans may not be the rocket at all.
One “long pole” in the development effort involves ground systems. A new launch tower, for instance, has to be built around the existing Pad 41 infrastructure at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was never meant for human spacecraft. So a tower that provides access for astronauts to get aboard is under development. A further complication to that effort is developing an access tower that would work for three different designs of spacecraft: from private operators Boeing, Siera Nevada and Blue Origin, the three commercial crew firms who’ve opted to fly on Atlas V.
“That’s part of the engineering challenge that everybody likes,” he said. “Engineers love that kind of stuff. We’ll excel at it.”
There’s a palpable excitement across the spaceport right now among the various government and commercial endeavors, Leinbach said, as people look toward what could be next.
“The folks I talk to in my company are super excited about the prospects of launching humans on the rockets,” he said.
The other day, Leinbach said he and a ULA vice president were looking out across the launch complex and chatting. “Just imagine a few years from now when we are launching the first human on our rocket.” That’s Leinbach’s career goal now, the one thing he wants to achieve before leaving the business.
“I want Americans to launch on American rockets to the space station before I retire,” Leinbach said. “Plain and simple, we owe that to the station, to the agency and to the American people. We need to get back into space on American rockets. It’s sad to me that we are reliant on the Russians. They’re an outstanding partner and they have very reliable system, but it’s sad to me that we are without redundancy.”
The United States needs a human spacecraft launcher, he said. “My God, that will be a great day.”
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