NASA Turns 50 — Now What?

The first week of October is always one fraught with space history, but this one is particularly significant, both by the nature of the anniversaries and the fact that so much space future is playing out as well.

Wednesday, October 1, will mark the end of the first half-century of NASA. That it falls on the first of the month is no coincidence — the legislation authorizing the new agency in 1958 was signed on July 29, but the funding to actually create it wasn’t available until the beginning of the next government fiscal year, which always starts at the beginning of October.

NASA was formed as a response to an event that had occurred a little less than a year before when, on October 4, 1957, the nation and world were shocked by the Soviet announcement of the first satellite launched into space, Sputnik 1. While the Eisenhower administration wasn’t surprised at the event, they were surprised at the public reaction to it and had to hastily and visibly accelerate the nation’s own space efforts, which had been occurring for a few years with little fanfare. The fifty-first anniversary of that event occurs this Saturday.

There had been a civilian program called Vanguard and an Army program in Huntsville directed by former German and Nazi rocket engineer Dr. Wernher von Braun, who had escaped the advancing Soviet troops in Germany with much of his team, to surrender to the Americans in 1945 — causing some to accuse the American space program of having been “born in sin.” The administration had wanted the first launch to be civilian to demonstrate that our space intentions were peaceful. The Vanguard program was intended to launch satellites as part of the upcoming International Geophysical Year (IGY) declared for 1957-1958. The desire to avoid having the Army launch the first satellite was so strong as to require that sand ballast be put in the payload of an Army test launch to insure that it didn’t reach orbit. But after Sputnik in October, when Vanguard TV-3 failed spectacularly and humiliatingly on the pad in December, in front of the entire world, von Braun’s team was given the go-ahead to launch the first satellite. It was successfully placed in orbit on a Jupiter C rocket, a descendant of von Braun’s World War II V-2 missile, in January 1958. Called Explorer 1, it helped discover the Van Allen radiation belts that protect our planet — including objects in low-earth orbit, such as the International Space Station — from harmful solar radiation and demonstrated that we, too, could cast objects into the cosmos. It also gave us some unexpected lessons in the dynamics of satellites.

But this was just a stopgap and the administration was still resolved to have a civil space agency lead the way into the new frontier. So the following summer, legislation was passed to authorize a new agency to be made up of the old National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), with existing centers in Cleveland, Ohio; Mountain View, California; and Hampton, Virginia; and new ones to create an aeronautics and space agency to meet the new technological challenges of the latter half of the twentieth century.

These days, they say that fifty is the new forty, and people can certainly be at the peak of their creativity and achievement at that age. Sadly, though, government bureaucracies often grow sclerotic at the half-century mark — and even before. The agency achieved great things in its youth — a lot easier to do when you have a fresh new organization, a sense of national urgency, and almost unlimited budgets — landing men on the moon, sending out the first robots to explore that body and the planets, and building the first space station, albeit a short-lived one. And it still does some things well, continuing to open up the wonders of the solar system and universe. But the human spaceflight program has grown moribund, mired in politics and pork, to the point that we will be dependent on the Russians for years to access our own space station. The planned new Ares 1 and Orion programs continue to have technical, budget, and schedule difficulties, not really papered over by what some NASA insiders view as a “Potemkin” preliminary design review recently. These problems, particularly the budgetary ones, will only grow more dire with the ongoing national and global financial crisis. There may not be a lot of money for NASA.

And NASA now has competition, as events of the last few days indicate. This past Sunday, two notable events occurred. The Chinese landed a crew from their very first EVA mission on Saturday, demonstrating that, while they are four decades behind us, doing what NASA first did in the mid 1960s, they are making slow and steady progress. And that evening, way out in the south Pacific, Space Exploration Corporation (SpaceX) had their first successful launch of their Falcon 1 vehicle from Kwajalein Atoll, after three previous consecutive failures. The latter is significant in that it proves out much of the basic technology for the much larger Falcon 9, which is planned to launch next year and may, along with the planned Dragon capsule, be one of the keys to supporting the ISS without the Russians early in the next decade. Beyond that, on Monday, the European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) entered the atmosphere after proving out many capabilities that would result in its ability to support ISS as well.

Non-NASA progress continues on other fronts as well. In addition to Saturday’s Sputnik anniversary, it will be the fourth anniversary of the winning of the X-Prize by Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne — again, not a coincidence, as Burt likes to do things on anniversaries. While many had hoped that progress would be more rapid, the commercial space tourism version, SpaceShipTwo, has had some setbacks but is still expected to start test flights in the next two years. And in an interesting indicator of the potential market for private space travel — and in defiance of many who call it a “fad” — Space Adventures announced on Tuesday that Dr. Charles Simonyi, who flew to the ISS last year, was so delighted with the experience that he is going to pay millions to do it again next year.

So, on this half-century mark of U.S. civil space exploration, even if NASA’s future doesn’t seem to necessarily be as bright as its past — particularly its early years — the future of American space activities seems very promising, offering hope that we may finally see the kinds of progress that we’ve been promised for all these past decades.