by Jeff Pollard
“I'd also like to add,” Kingsley interjects, “that the selling point is the technology, and yet right now the F-35's inertial navigation system is faulty, the missile system is full of bugs, that advanced sensing stuff is not working, and the pentagon says that software development is the biggest problem.”
“We've seen this time and time again,” Harold adds. “Computers this and computers that, and they wave a magic wand and say it'll do amazing things. And it never quite lives up to the hype, does it? And when it doesn't live up to they hype, you're going to be left with a 150 million dollar plane that's outmatched by the new stuff coming out of Russia and China.
If we abandoned this one-plane-fits-all nonsense, we could design three or four different planes, a ground attack, an air superiority, a vertical take-off, and a real multi-role fighter, and each of those planes would be better at their job than the F-35, the best in the world at their respective jobs and I guarantee you it would be cheaper. We could have 50% more planes, that are just as effective if not more so for this price. And yet, here we are, arguing about whether or not to keep buying these F-35s. I like to think it's because people are too dumb, too many politicians think they're aerospace engineers. But the longer I live, the more I see it's not stupidity, it's malice. It's greed. It's people who've been bribed making wrong decisions that will cripple our military, that will kill good pilots, all so they can get re-elected or pocket some of that contractor money. It's a disgrace.”
“Look,” Senator Winger says in a serious voice. “You two come out here and have all the answers. Yet you feel the need to lie to bolster your case. You say these planes are so different, they have so little in common, yadda yadda. Then why is it that every single F-35, all three variants, is made in one single factory in Fort Worth, Texas. How can they all be made in that one building if they are so different?”
“That's just the final assembly plant,” Harold says. “They don't make anything in that plant, they simply take all the parts that have been made in 48 states and however many countries and bolt them together.”
“One production line, parts come in, all three variants go out,” Winger says.
“That's like saying that Ikea furniture is made in my living room,” K replies.
“You defend this program,” Harold says, “even though it has failed to meet any standard they set out for. They wanted 80% commonality, they're in the 40s or 50s, depending on who you ask. They wanted 60 million dollar planes, the ones coming off the line right now are costing more than 140 million dollars. Lockheed keeps saying they'll bring the price down to 90 million a piece, but we're 8 years into production and they haven't gotten it under 140 million a piece, so I'm not holding my breath. They're also so far behind schedule that we're paying out the ear to keep old planes in service that were supposed to be replaced by now, they're a decade behind schedule. They're also behind in terms of cost of maintenance. It was supposed to be cheaper to maintain these than legacy aircraft, but so far they're more expensive. They are also behind where they were supposed to be in the number of flight hours between critical failures. So they break more often than they're supposed to, then they cost more and take longer to fix than they're supposed to.”
“So what do you propose, we cancel the program and rely on those old planes that are so expensive to maintain now? How does that solve it?” Winger asks.
“Well you guys have got yourselves into quite a pickle,” Harold says. “You put all your eggs in a single basket. You have no other choices. You gave all your money for fighter plane design and production for two decades to one company. And they've known that they have no competition, you have no alternative, so big surprise when they are over-budget and under-deliver. Why is it that congress and the DoD are the last people in the world to see why that was stupid? I mean, if you put Lockheed-Martin in charge of designing the JSF program, they couldn't have designed it any better themselves. Put all the eggs in one basket, give everything to one company, eliminate all their competition, and make it so that even if they badly under-deliver and are a decade late, that you have no choice but to keep pouring money down that sinkhole. If there's anything here that was designed well, it was this program. It was really designed well if you're a Lockheed-Martin shareholder. Not so much if you're the DoD or a taxpayer.
The last estimate I saw said that each plane, each F-35, over its lifetime if you count maintenance and upgrades, the whole program will cost 1.5 trillion dollars. Trillion with a T. If this program isn't canceled, it will bankrupt us, it will weaken our military, make our country less safe, and it'll be a disaster.”
“Just to give a sense of scale,” Kingsley adds, “when we say something like 1.5 trillion dollars, that the entire operating budget of NASA, going back to 1958, until this year, 2016, is under a trillion dollars. It's 965 billion if you use 2015-equivalent dollars, adjusting for inflation all of that time. So that's 60 years of NASA, from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo to the Shuttle, that's Voyager 1 and 2, that's four Mars rovers, the Hubble, that's everything NASA does, not just manned spaceflight. All of that has been accomplished for under a trillion in today's dollars. Yet NASA faces budget cuts while the DoD is trying to spend a trillion on a plane that was originally called the Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter. Something ain't right here folks.”
“Folks,” Hannah says derisively as K, Hannah, and Harold exit the hearing during a recess.
“Are they gonna cancel this thing?” Harold asks Kingsley as the return to the rotunda.
“As much as the military-industrial-complex has infiltrated the DoD, they can't overcome the fact that there are enough generals that actually care about national security to stop such a boondoggle. You can pay people off to influence them, but only so far. It's one thing to get them to pick your slightly worse plane over a better plane, it's quite another to buy enough influence to make the military turn a blind eye to a disaster that will cripple the military. I mean, we're dumb, but we're not that dumb.”
“When you've lived as long as I have, you realize there is no lower-limit to stupidity,” Harold declares.
“You've got a couple of voicemails from Richard Branson,” Hannah says, listening to K's phone.
K thanks Harold before he heads out to be picked up by the car service and taken to the airport.
“What's Branson saying?” K asks.
“Predictable stuff,” Hannah replies, “those G-D Zero-G people, stupid customers canceling with Virgin Galactic for other people's screw-ups.”
“How long a recess do we have?” K asks.
“Fifteen,” Hannah replies.
“Get me Josh on the line,” K says.
“Isn't he getting suited up?”
“He's taking his phone up with him, plans on doing some orbital tweets.”
“Brittany's calling,” Hannah says, looking at her phone. K grabs it and answers, then points to his own phone, telling Hannah to call Josh.
“Kingsley's Castle,” K answers.
“We've lost half our manifest in three hours,” Brittany says.
“Yeah, I figured as much,” K replies.
“Passenger flights were going to be our backbone, but now, we need those ISS missions. If you can't contain yourself, if you stick your foot in your mouth and they cut the NASA budget, take away those cargo missions, and we're done.”
“We just opened the first ever space hotel,” K says, “and then some other company kills a space tourist and now our hotel has plenty of vacancies. I can't say I didn't see this coming.”
“Which means, don't fuck this up.”
“I'm now the President of a sub-contractor that relies on government contracts. This is about the last place I ever wanted to be.”
“Here we are.”
“Josh,” Hannah says, holding up K's phone. K swaps phones with Hannah.
“You nervous yet?” K asks.
“No, not at all,” Josh obviously lies while a technician hooks up a
n oxygen hose to his flight suit. He had advanced quickly thanks to the internal SpacEx search for prospective astronauts. Since Kingsley had saved the day on Griffin 6 mostly thanks to his experience as a computer programmer and not as a pilot, he had pushed for more programmers and engineers to be pushed up into the astronaut program. SpacEx now allowed its programmers, engineers, and just about any employee to try their hand at the simulators and those who showed promise, quick thinking, and poise were considered for astronaut training. Many SpacEx employees worked there not for the promise of going to space themselves, but for the vicarious thrill of at least being involved in space travel. Now that they all had at least a glimmer of hope for actually flying to space, especially if SpacEx could get reusability going and dramatically increase their flight rate, enthusiasm at the company had skyrocketed. Josh was one of four engineers that had been placed into the Flight Engineer training program and the first to fly. He had in fact been slated as a backup for this mission and not scheduled to fly until Griffin 12. But Travis Clayton's untimely death had changed that schedule dramatically. Josh had been in the Flight Engineer program for only six months, but Kingsley was confident in his ability, especially when paired with Commander Tim Bowe who was flying on Griffin for the third time.
“What's to be nervous about, you've simulated this four or five times right?” K joked.
“Hey, you don't think there's any chance that Putin tries to shoot us down, right?” Josh jokingly asks at just above a whisper, but not quiet enough to escape Sergei Kuznetzov's ears.
“Putin doesn't have the balls,” Sergei replies.
“Make sure Sergei isn't sneaking any vodka on board,” K tells Josh.
“I was wondering why he brought eight liters of water,” Josh jokes back.
“Alright, well good luck over there,” K says before hanging up. “That's supposed to be Travis,” K says to Hannah.
“You alright?” Hannah asks.
“Let's get back in there,” K says. As they re-enter the conference room, K finds that Buzz Aldrin, second man on the Moon, is mingling at the front of the room. Kingsley rushes to shake his hand, having never met Buzz before. Giddy like a school-boy, he meets one of his heroes. Buzz shakes his hand but is otherwise unmoved by Kingsley's appearance.
Minutes later, Buzz Aldrin is testifying. “President Obama has pledged NASA to mediocrity with this private space industry non-sense. The way to Mars is not with some playboy billionaire running the show folks. We've already seen it, just today, a space tourist was killed. Private industry can't do it as well as NASA, so lets keep that NASA budget inside NASA and let's go to Mars.”
Aldrin's statements are met with applause from several members of the committee as well as people in the gallery.
“Are you crying?” Hannah whispers to Kingsley.
“Nope,” K lies, trying very hard to cover up how wounded he feels by this former hero of his.
After Buzz's appearance, Senator Wallace takes the floor. “I'm concerned that the current budget is an example of chasing the next idea while sacrificing current investments. This budget is riddled with the fiction of the private space industry. We need NASA developing rockets and space vehicles and doing what NASA does. Let's not let these silly billionaires take NASA away from us.”
Kingsley wants to shout, jump up and down on his table, light something on fire, or just lecture these people for a few hours, but he can't do any of those things. He drinks water and waits his turn. Senator Winger takes center stage. “All due respect to Senator Wallace and to NASA, but the space program is a huge waste of money. We don't need it. Sure, weather satellites, communications, GPS, fine, but what practical use is there for people floating around in a space station or probes landing on Uranus? This is all just a waste of money so some childish boys who've watched too many episodes of The X-Files can play out their boyhood dreams of being star trekking astronauts. We don't need it. We need to be focused right here on Earth on our real problems and our national security first and foremost-”
“Says the Senator from the state of Lockheed,” Kingsley whispers to Hannah.
Several more Senators lecture on the uselessness of space travel, while others argue about the need for NASA. But nobody is saying a positive word about SpacEx.
“I don't know why they invited me,” Kingsley says as they take their lunch recess. “They're just lecturing me and they don't know what they're talking about.”
“What do you want to do for lunch?” Hannah asks.
“Griffin 9 launch is in twenty minutes,” K replies.
Kingsley and Hannah grab lunch near the capitol while watching the livestream of the Griffin 5 launch on Kingsley's tablet. Kingsley talks to a new flight engineer in Launch Control on his phone, keeping tabs on the countdown. They finish eating and watch as Griffin 9 takes to the Florida sky, carrying Sergei Kuznetzov, Josh Yerino, Tim Bowe, Tom Hanks, and a pair of dot-com billionaires.
Kingsley is more focused on the first stage than the capsule. At stage separation, the first stage performs the turnaround maneuver to point its engines downrange, orienting for a burn back to launch site. In the process of turning, the Eagle 9 starts rolling. The yaw maneuver should have caused a level flat spin of 180 degrees. However, the remaining Kerosene and LOX in the tanks is settled on the under-side of the rocket, and thus the yaw thrust was not equally distributed around the off-kilter center-of-gravity. Thus the rocket began spinning, and as it spun, this causes the propellants to stick to the outer walls of the tanks instead of settling to the bottom of the tanks. Thus the engines cannot be restarted. After about a minute, they would be able to halt the roll with the cold-gas thrusters, and then thrust forward, sending the propellants to the bottom of the tanks where it can be used, but by then it was too late to perform a turn-around burn. The SpacEx team attempts to restart the engine anyway. It lights, and they burn through much of the fuel to simply slow down the horizontal velocity of the Eagle 9 for a nearly vertical re-entry.
The Eagle 9 powers its way to a simulated landing on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
It's a disappointing result as they had hoped to return to launch site, but this was fixable. They would quickly realize the problem and re-calibrate the flight computer to adjust for the off-center center-of-mass caused by propellant shifting and prevent another spin from occurring that would prevent the return burn.
It was another Eagle 9 lost to the sea. Perhaps they were a step closer to reusability, but in any case, Sergei Kuznetzov would soon be at his new home: Excalibur.
Kingsley and Hannah return late to the hearing.
“It seems our guests are fashionably late,” Senator Wallace says as Kingsley returns to the witness stand.
“You realize you're still under-oath,” Chairman Walken asks.
“I do,” K replies.
“Kingsley, the reason I wanted you here was to ask you about the possibility of SpacEx being an alternative to NASA,” Senator Wallace begins. “As a proponent of the Space Launch System, I've had many people say bad things about me. I could quote you to you with some of the nonsense you've been saying about me about how much money the SLS is wasting. I'm fine with criticism, but it bothers me when it's incorrect, so I'd like you to settle a few things. I hear all the time that the SLS is so expensive, and that NASA should take that money and instead buy your Eagle Heavys. You've even been on record saying that two Eagle Heavys have more payload than a single SLS at a quarter of the cost. So I'd like to ask you, how many Eagle Heavys would it take to launch an Apollo-style lunar landing.”
“That's kind of difficult to answer unless we get into specifics,” K replies.
“Let's get specific then,” Senator Wallace says. “I have a 54 tonne spacecraft, and I want to send it to lunar orbit. How many of the current version of the Eagle Heavy, with a payload of 53 metric tonnes, would it take to launch that spacecraft to lunar orbit?”
“Well, if you're talking about the current vers
ion, it would take three of them,” Kingsley says.
“Three. Okay, so three times 180 million dollars, that's 540 million dollars. How many SLS launches would the same mission take?”
“It depends on the version of the SLS,” Kingsley replies.
“The SLS will have a 145 metric tonne version, how many of those would it take to launch a 54 tonne spacecraft toward the Moon?”
“One,” Kingsley replies apathetically.
“So one SLS or three Eagle Heavys. The SLS will cost 500 million each, the three Eagle Heavys will cost 540 million. So can I now have you say on the record that the Eagle Heavy is not a cheaper alternative to the SLS?”
“No you cannot have that,” Kingsley replies.
“You're not entitled to your own facts, Kingsley,” Senator Wallace says.
“You're not making a fair comparison,” Kingsley replies.
“Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's not fair,” Senator Wallace says.
“Why is it not a fair comparison?” Chairman Walken asks.
“Because he's comparing a paper rocket to a real rocket. The SLS hasn't flown yet. The first one will fly in two years, and that one is only going to have a payload of 80 metric tonnes, not 145, which is the version he asked me about. That 145 metric tonne SLS isn't projected to be operational until 2030, and we all know how accurate government agencies are at projecting future timelines and cost figures. So he's comparing a paper rocket that won't fly until 2030 at best with a real rocket.”