Panel Recommends Major Changes in Space Policy
Critics have argued that it is senseless to abandon the facility just a few short years after completion, and that having the Russians control our destiny for such a long period of time would be both imprudent and (in former administrator Griffin’s words) “unseemly” for a great nation that claimed to be the world leader in space exploration. The Augustine panel seems to agree, and all of their options except the first assume the ISS continuing at least through 2020, with a potential Shuttle program extension. But this wipes out much of the assumed available budget for the new program. And none of them seem to put humans back on the moon within the next two decades.
Conventional wisdom, as described by long-time space policy analyst Marcia Smith, is that there are two broad options:
That leaves the White House with a tough decision: back billions more for human space exploration, or support an emasculated program that critics will call pointless.
“Giving NASA a couple more billion dollars a year for the next 20 years isn’t really going to affect the deficit that much, considering how huge the deficit is,” Smith said. “So it’s a matter of presidential policy and what Obama wants to do.”
While it’s true that, in today’s budget environment, a few billion added to the NASA budget is a rounding error, this formulation presumes that there’s nothing wrong with NASA’s approach that can’t be solved by simply sending more money. But the agency’s problems are much deeper than that.
Fortunately, there is a third option. It remains a politically unpalatable one to much of the Beltway establishment, particularly on the Hill, but it’s one for which the panel started to break the ice in its specific presented options, particularly in variation “B” of Option 5: get NASA out of the earth-to-orbit launch business, which it doesn’t seem able to do affordably, and spread the work around to the U.S. commercial sector and potential international partners. The problem isn’t just development costs of the new rockets; it’s the operational costs.
As one of the panel members, XCOR head and space entrepreneur Jeff Greason noted, “If Santa Claus brought us this [Constellation] system tomorrow, fully developed, and the budget didn’t change, our next action would have to be to cancel it,” a view concurred with by fellow panel member Dr. Sally Ride, first American woman in space. Even Option 5 in general, the “Deep Space” option, in which astronauts would be sent far beyond earth, to the asteroids or the moons of Mars is unaffordable with the current planned budget, and many critics say that not having an initial plan to descend humans deep into the gravity wells of Mars or the moon lacks sufficient public interest, though I disagree.
Option 5(B) is the most radical solution, which was discussed a great deal in the public panels, but (unfortunately) not as emphasized in the final panel results (though it is still there). It is to develop a different mindset — an architecture to separate out hardware launches from propellant launches, and start to develop an affordable transportation infrastructure for space.
Launching propellant separately in increments of varying sizes provides several benefits: it allows easy participation by international partners and commercial launch services, putting no one country or company on the critical path; it provides a vast new market of low-cost payload for a fledgling commercial launch industry, allowing them to develop vehicles while risking only the vehicles; and most importantly, it eliminates the need for any heavy-lift capability exceeding new larger versions of the existing Delta IV and Atlas V offered by United Launch Alliance. This would save billions in development costs of a new heavy lifter, and billions more in operating costs of such a system, with its high fixed annual costs and low flight rate.
Even without the refueling option, Chairman Augustine made it clear in an interview on the Newshour on Friday that NASA has to be a better customer, embrace commercial launch providers, and help build the commercial launch industry in the same way that the Post Office provided a critical market to the early aviation industry, with airmail.
Unfortunately, while such a plan is attractive to people who are more space enthusiasts than NASA fans, what it won’t do is continue the politically important NASA/contractor gravy train that has been the true raison d’etre for continuing congressional support of the federal human spaceflight program since the end of Apollo. So even if the White House likes it (only Florida will be considered important politically for the 2012 reelection campaign — the White House has no expectations of carrying Texas or Alabama anyway), it may be dead on arrival on the Hill. This is a shame because, as I discussed at length last month in The New Atlantis policy quarterly, it may offer us the only way to affordably break out of the low-earth-orbit merry-go-round, at multiple billions per flight, in which we’ve been trapped since the last human trod on lunar dust over a third of a century ago.
Winston Churchill famously noted that Americans will usually do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities. Perhaps, forty years after the first moon landing, we’ve reached that point. The policy actions of the White House and Congress in the coming months will tell us.
I notice there was no mention of the Jupiter proposal, to build a next-generation heavy lift launch vehicle (HLLV) from “off-the-shelf” components from the present shuttle program (engines, etc.)- just minus the aging and increasingly unsafe shuttle orbiters. We’ve lost two of them , one going up, one coming down; the latter was a signal that the airframe time is reaching a critical state. “Extending” their use is another way of saying, “we’re willing to kill another crew to save money.” (Except that with increasing maintenance costs, it doesn’t even accomplish that.)
As for the Ares program, that is the “prestige” item at NASA right now, the last time we decided to go with a “designed from scratch” system to get a package upstairs without using proven existing components, the result was the Navy’s Vanguard, based on the rather cranky Viking sounding rocket- which blew up on the pad. It was the Army’s Jupiter C, an uprated Redstone ballistic missile, that took first Explorer 1 and later Alan Shepard into space.
(Vanguard was the result of a PR-based decision to use only “non-military” developments for the satellite program- never mind that the Navy paid for same. Like most PR-based decisions, it became a major PR embarrassment.)
The Orion vehicle (basically an improved Apollo)is a good design, and one we should have been building and using for the last three decades, just as the Russians have used Soyuz. We should also have unmanned, robot cargo carriers, on the same principle as the Russian Progress vehicles. Such “one-shot” vehicles are, believe it or not, cheaper to build and “expend” than a “multi-use” vehicle like the shuttles. (They are also safer, as they rarely have time to develop “hangar rash”, etc.) The cheaper it is to put people and materiel’ in orbit, the sooner we’ll get back to the Moon, and on to Mars.
Interestingly enough, this was exactly the approach favored by Dr. Wernher von Braun, the architect of our manned space program before the shuttle. Who, incidentally, was the man who led the team that put Explorer 1 in orbit, and later put the Apollo missions on the Moon.
We didn’t listen. The Russians did.
clear ether
eon
Don’t expect Obama to do the right thing, expect him to do the political thing. Allowing the private industry to leap ahead via contract incentives and X-Prize inspired competition is an effort that would make the great Robert Heinlein proud. Unfortunately it does not provide our current president with more votes, or more people on the public dole who will then vote for others of his party. We’re at a critical juncture on the road to space, its up to the president to choose the right path and LEAD. For a man who mainly votes ‘present’ and blames others for problems, my expectations couldn’t be lower.
Sic Semper Tyrannus
Just like Obama’s Fedex and Post Office analogy, so is NASA. Budget overruns and bad decisions. I was stationed at Cape Canaveral in the mid-80s, and personally witnessed the Challenger disaster and went to sea for the salvage effort. A year or so later, on a very, very stormy day with lots of lighting, NASA launched a military satellite. Of course it was struck by lightening and exploded. Great management, eh?
Of course private industry can do it safer and cheaper. But no glory or control for government in that, is there? Obama will no more provide the right leadership in space than he does here. He will select the most expensive least efficient way of getting back into space, just like he wants to do health care.
A year or so later, on a very, very stormy day with lots of lighting, NASA launched a military satellite. Of course it was struck by lightening and exploded. Great management, eh?
That would have been an Air Force launch, not NASA. I don’t think that NASA managed launches of military payloads in the eighties, unless they were in the Shuttle.
As with everything else, the governmment does NOTHING efficiently. NASA is probably the least efficient program of the federal government. My father designed space suits and life support systems for the Air Force (1950′s), then later for NASA in the 1960′s. He, to his dying day, maintained that NASA was the least efficent way to promote space travel. He claimed that we could have had colonies on the moon by the 1980′s and Mars by the late 1990′s had the government permitted commercial exploitation of space travel. Additionally, he thought that we would be mining the asteroid belt by now.
By allowing the government to have a monopoly on space travel we have hobbled ourselves and forced us to remain a terrestrial race.
Imagine if the government had been in charge of cell phone development. We would be lucky to have the brick like phones of early days with very limited networks. Or government in charge of PC development. A 286 would be a FAST machine these days! These are two examples of what private enterprise can do when the government stays the hell out of the way. If government got out of trying to micromanage health insurance, and restricted the trial lawyers, private industry could do for health care what it has done for the cost of computing and communications.
#5 Rand, maybe my memory is failing, but I seem to recall at the time that NASA was involved in that launch. My flight instructor at that time had a day job as a range safety pilot. He had told me that NASA was launching a satellite.
Fairbanks: On the other hand, if you had a government-designed cell phone, you could throw the cell phone out of the back of a plane while nuclear bombs were going off during a hurricane, and after it landed it would still work at full capacity.
eon/Rand: Remember that the USAF designed the shuttle to put Big Bird vehicles into orbit on short notice. The fact that it had a NASA sticker on the side (and occasionally launched civvie missions) was an arms-control dodge.
In-space refueling for station-keeping satellites is one thing, but cryogenics can’t be transferred in space via bladders like room-temperature station-keeping propellants can. You either would need some sort of heavy piston arrangement (which probably would not work because having a moving part go from room temperature to near-absolute zero and maintain a seal in itself is problematic) or use small ullage rockets to propel both the depot and the vehicle being fueled at such an acceleration that the fuel goes to the bottom of the tanks for extraction.
A propellant depot in LEO would be like a gas truck in a shooting range, provided the gas truck was next to a liquid oxygen truck, and the shooting range involved bullets that go 15 times faster than most bullets on Earth. The risk of space junk hitting it would be far too great to actually build it.
Hmmmm…
NASA does seem to have been involved. I had thought that the Air Force took over military launches prior to that, but (if we can believe Global Security) apparently NASA was still doing it in ’87:
So I stand corrected.
Remember that the USAF designed the shuttle to put Big Bird vehicles into orbit on short notice. The fact that it had a NASA sticker on the side (and occasionally launched civvie missions) was an arms-control dodge.
This is nonsense. The Air Force provided some basic top-level requirements (thousand mile cross-range, 65,000 lb payload in a fifteen-foot diameter) which were one of the things that drove it to be a failed system, but they didn’t design it, or pay for it, and most Shuttle missions were civil (and pretty much all were after 1986). It was and is a NASA-designed, NASA-owned, NASA-operated vehicle, that did an occasional military mission.
In one of the most disappointing days in the Cape’s history, the FLTSATCOM-F was launched through heavy cloud cover on 26 March 1987 only to be struck by lightning and destroyed. NASA’s formal mishap investigation concluded that there was “no convincing evidence” that an important criterion-the avoidance of potential electrical hazards-was met by the launch crew.
Brevard County Florida is either the second highest or highest counties in the nation for lightning strikes. The day they launched that bird, the sky was almost black with cloud with a LOT of visible lightning. That NASA launched a moving lightning rod on that particular day demonstrated to me the same appalling lack of judgement that they displayed the frozen day they launched Challenger. I lost almost all respect for NASA management that day. (The continued employment of global warming shrieker James Hanson took care of the remainder of the respect).
Density, on the OTHER other hand, if today you said “GO” and government and private industry began to design and build that extremely rugged cell phone, which one do you think would field a model first?
Of course the government could always contract out the developement of the phone, much like it does its Express Mail overnight handling to Fedex. Hmmmm…
At the risk of being labled a backwards-looking, xenophobe here’s my two cents:
I think the US needs a more aggressive space program, emphasizing domestic engineering and manufacturing which not only helps the economy but inspires and leads many young Americans into those fields, instead of careers in marketing, law, media and other non-productive, economic rent seeking occupations.
This is called “isolationist” and “xenophobic” by today’s “one world globalists utopians” of either the liberal or conservative stripe but it’s what I think.
But we now have a president who is borderline anti-American but he’s also anti-armed forces because he wants, he needs taxpayer dollars to be redirected to his social utopian schemes, that bear witness to the fact that he’s a socialist/statist. Likewise, we won’t have economic recovery until we have economic growth and we won’t have economic growth until we have capital investment and the goal of making a profit. But the president does like profit and private enterprise. We’re kaput.
2 plus 5B. Faster, please.
As a current worker in the NASA “arena” I have to admit that NASA is by far the worst way to do this. I work in Deep Space Communications and we’ve just been given new consoles for our computer systems. Just two years after getting new consoles.
Yet we are constantly fixing every single antenna around here! We’re using stuff that was used for the Apollo program! O.O!
So yeah, priorities in this industry are all political.
Personally I’m more for a cannon instead of a rocket lift system. Unfortunetly we’re in a stupid international treaty preventing “Space Guns.” So instead of wasting all that fuel to get into orbit by using a mag cannon or something to “Shoot” our fuel and stuff into orbit we’re still having to carry everything with us all the way.
Oi Oi..
The Federal government should be spending about $30 billion a year (close to the Apollo days in today’s dollars) on the NASA budget instead of $17 billion. There would be no $100 billion a year world wide satellite telecommunications industry without NASA.
After its creation in 1958, NASA put Americans on the Moon in less than 11 years– a remarkable accomplishment! If we had allowed NASA to establish a lunar base in the 1970s, we’d probably already have bases on Mars and would probably already be exploiting the stupendous platinum resources of the asteroids for our energy efficiency and synfuel production needs on Earth.
Trying to be penny wise and pound foolish with our space program over the last 35 years has hurt America’s economy. America would be a much better country if we had self sustaining colonies on the Moon and Mars right now.