Comment by mcswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcswell | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This will be a bit off-topic, but I can't resist.

"The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded... got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations"

LtCdr Joseph Rochefort, leading a team in Hawaii during the early months of WWII processing Japanese encrypted messages about an impending attack, got both the location (Midway Island) and the date (early June) right, while other cryptanalysts near Washington DC got both wrong. Rochefort was recommended for an award by Admiral Nimitz (CINCPAC, in Hawaii), but this was turned down by Admiral King in DC. Eventually Rochefort was re-assigned to command a floating drydock in San Francisco, about as much of a demotion as he could get. At the end of the war, Rochefort did get a medal, still over the objections of Admiral King. Some think this bad treatment was because Rochefort and his team in Hawaii embarrassed the crypt analysts in DC.

She first headed commercial crew which outperformed tremendously by comparison to almost all NASA programs (in terms of budget and execution).

She then got promoted to lead Human Exploration and Operations - which is absolutely a promotion. In terms of putting US Astronauts in space, her crew dragon program as significantly outperformed SLS at an absolute fraction of the per seat cost. So yes, very embarrassing.

I'd have to look at timelines, but my instinct is Nelson likely came on and that pretty much marked the end of her career at NASA as a result.

She wasn't afraid to make the calls she thought were right, she was pushing towards fixed price awards even on things like HLS, and having her in Exploration Systems Development would just have ruffled too many feathers over time.

The whole lunar landing architecture was so comical. SLS launching Orion to lunar gateway? Lunar gateway in a nonsensical orbit that would have needed an an entire separate transfer vehicle to get to LEO where it should have been to start with?

“Why would you want to send a crew to an intermediate point in space, pick up a lander there and go down?” asked Buzz Aldrin, who called the Gateway concept “absurd.”

Kathy was involved in HLS selection I think - and when I saw they were going to maybe leave gateway out of architecture for first lending... you knew that common sense couldn't last!

The ihab module on gateway (currently getting maybe 800 million per year in funding) is going to have 53 cubic feet for FOUR PEOPLE!! The entire module has a diameter of maybe 4 feet BEFORE life support? And gateways orbit mean you can only get to it at a very specific time once a week basically .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com