NASA Spaceflight.com by Chris Gebhardt May 29, 2019
As part of a planned presentation to the NASA Advisory Council, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, Kathy Lueders, updated the advisory council on the status of the investigation for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon anomaly that occurred in April.
Ms. Lueders did not go into in-depth detail but did highlight SpaceX’s daily communication with NASA, the “great job†done so far, and provided insight into changes that “might be†needed to the Crew Dragon’s SuperDraco system.
More so, Ms. Lueders revealed the readiness dates for the new Crew Dragon capsules that will fly the In Flight Abort and Demo 2 crew test flights.
Anomaly update and question of communication issues:
Ms. Lueders began her overall update on all elements of the Commercial Crew Program to the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) by stating that “I think sometimes people don’t understand how much we are engaged and working with each of the providers as they’re performing these final critical test and verification activities.â€
To this end, Ms. Lueders spent a good deal of time emphasizing how involved NASA personnel have been from the very beginning of the investigation into the anomaly suffered by SpaceX’s Crew Dragon during its planned SuperDraco static fire on 20 April.
The issue of communication regarding the anomaly with the general public has been one raised since the very beginning, even with public statements from NASA and SpaceX on the day of and the initial days after the anomaly.
However, more than a month out, those questions and when information will be revealed to taxpayers is a more necessary question. And curiously, it’s a question NASA does not appear to want to answer itself from a Public Affairs standpoint.
Last Thursday during an Apollo 50th Anniversary event at the Kennedy Space Center, Center Director Bob Cabana and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine were asked about the secrecy surrounding information on this anomaly and if taxpayers should be worried.
Mr. Cabana spent a little more than a minute praising SpaceX’s communication with NASA and emphasizing that there has been no secrecy from NASA’s contractor on this matter.
What NASA Public Affairs then edited out of the publicly released video of that Question and Answer session was Administrator Bridenstine stepping in to admit that communication on this issue had been poor – though exactly which agency’s communication he was referring to, NASA or SpaceX, was ambiguous.
The irony of a government agency – which spends taxpayer money – editing out its own Administrator’s comment that communication was poor underscores just what Mr. Bridenstine was saying about the agency he leads.
All of this does raise the legitimate question of who should be the one disseminating information. On the one hand, NASA is the government agency that has spent taxpayer money on the Crew Dragon and Starliner systems by contracting with SpaceX and Boeing to build and provide these services.
More:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/05/nasa-briefly-crew-dragon-anomaly-spacex-schedule/
