Proper Motion: A Wandering Constellation

My most memorable experience with Ares II…definitely the RTF campaign. I’m sorry, I’m sure you get that a lot, but I think it’s for good reason. God knows the stakes were high, and I just work at Kennedy—I can just imagine what folks at Marshall or Michoud were feeling. All eyes are on you, you know? We’re launching rockets, it’s risky business, that comes with the job, but return to flight was really a whole different ball game. After Flight 5, everything we did was under a microscope. This is a silly thought, but it always reminded me of being in the navy—your shoes polished just right, standing up straight to the millimeter, or whatever it is they do. They counted every step—really, I’m not joking, I think they had a few folks wear a FitBit for a while. Trying to see how fatigued we were getting? I mean, just so anal about the weirdest things—sorry for my French. But it was all an abundance of caution, right? We weren’t taking any chances; they needed Galleon up for EM-5, the whole ...

Cancelling it was absolutely the right move. We should have started Commercial Heavy Lift twenty years ago, and Ares II should’ve been canned before it even flew in the first place. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the government has no business building rockets. This isn’t Apollo where we’re having to invent everything from scratch—the engineering has been solved for fifty years. What we need right now is rapid, responsive innovation, not a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy. Look at Commercial Cargo. Firm, fixed-price contracts handed off to small, agile companies that can afford to move fast and break things. You’re never going to get that kind of performance out of traditional contracting. And what did it give us? Two redundant launch vehicles and two redundant cargo ships to the space station. Hell, look at Commercial Crew. You can say what you want about SNC, but they got it done—what are we at, Phantom 9, 10 right now? And they did that even with NASA breathing down the...

No, I absolutely do not feel that developing Ares II was the wrong decision. Ares II was exactly the right decision. That vehicle did everything we needed it to do, and we accomplished it without needing to develop any new technology, without any miracles. It was perfectly suited to meet the needs of our program at the time, and we designed it that way intentionally. You can trace that line of thinking all the way back to the recommendations of the Augustine commission. Coming out of 2008, 2009, with the recession, the cost overruns in the Ares V program—we needed to refine our scope, and that’s what we did. And we did it well. I don’t think commercial enterprise was ready at that time. The commercial successes we had in the 2010s—you look at Antares and Falcon 9—we saw that companies could develop these complex systems with heavy oversight. But the industry was not mature at that time. We needed to take the time to cultivate that private sector and let it develop into what it is now. ...

L1, L1, L1. I did not like L1. Look, I’m a rockets guy, I like getting my hands on metal, right? So far be it from me to try and—and comprehend what those guys were planning. But, look, you gotta imagine, you wanna know where this thing is going, right? Biggest [ sic : second-tallest] rocket ever made, right, and it’s not even really going anywhere? I mean, I don’t know how many times the mission guys tried to talk me through it. Listen, I’m a mechanical engineer. I know stress and strain and I can tell you everything you never wanted to know about the goddamn Young’s modulus, but you start talking to me about quasi-stable this and gravity potential that, and you may as well tell it to a brick wall. All I could figure was that it was empty space, and we were gonna orbit around nothing, and we were chucking those things out to nowhere. And the worst part was my piece didn’t even get that far. The Loiter Skirt—and yeah, Loiter, not Lower, damn it—that was our baby. Massive, dense, whiny ...

Those were a tough couple of months. I say months - it felt more like a couple years. And just a lot of long nights. You can ask my husband, he’s getting ready for bed and I’m still at my desk, writing emails… We were nervous, all of us were. It was like a big anvil cloud hanging over everyone. Here was, really, the flagship vehicle of the program, and the whole idea that this, Ares II, even this engine, was the backbone of everything. And we felt like, was all of it at stake here? There was talk at headquarters about decrewing station if we couldn’t get Orion flying again, and all of it hinged on the flight five investigation. Well, ultimately, I think the outcome was the best it could have been. I mean, you never want a situation like this to begin with, but what we saw was that our failure mode, really, was isolated to Ares II, and we all breathed such a sigh of relief. And that meant we could get Orion back in the air, we could get back to doing rotations. And we still lost some sl...