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Wanted: A Space Program with a Vision
Can the Obama administration breathe new life into NASA?
As in government policy in general, there are major inflection points for civil space policy, starting with the initial one a little over half a century ago when, after Sputnik, it was determined that we would have a federal civil space program and NASA was formed. Three years later, in 1961, it was decided that NASA would land a man on the moon in a decade, and return him safely to earth.
After Apollo, a decision was made in 1972 that we would build a fleet of space shuttles which would supposedly make space travel routine. Despite the fact that they had not yet done so, a little over a decade later in 1984, President Reagan declared that we would build a space station in earth orbit, using the Shuttle for construction.
In 1986, when Challenger was lost with the first schoolteacher on board in full view of the nation, it was decided that it would no longer be official policy that the Shuttle would be the only space transportation system. In 1989, there was an aborted attempt at a new direction in space policy, in which the current (for a few days more) president’s father said that we would go back to the moon, and on to Mars, and settle the solar system. That idea was stillborn due to resistance from the space agency itself, which preferred to focus on its space station and Shuttle.
In 1993, when the space station was on the verge of being canceled, it was saved by only one vote in Congress, and then only because the Clinton administration converted it to a foreign-aid program for the Russians. This explains much of the quandary in which we remain today; in which we are dependent on them for a lifeboat to get us to the Space Station and for actual access to it after the Shuttle retires next year, if current policy follows through.
There were no more major changes, until a year after the loss of Columbia. Then, five years ago today and in the wake of that disaster, President George W. Bush announced that the nation was going to once again send humans beyond low earth orbit (LEO). In his words, humanity was going to go out into the cosmos.
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Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.
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23 Comments
1. Barry:As a kid watching the Apollo program that culminated with man on the moon in July 1969, I thought I would see an American astronaut walk on Mars in my lifetime. I don’t anymore.
Jan 14, 2009 - 4:02 am 2. ThinkingPerson:Can Obama revive NASA? Hell yes! He’s already going to close Guantanomo, end the Iraq War, bring all the soldiers home, give all the unemployed jobs or at least a “rebate”, let illegal immigrants have all citizens rights available, fix the entire US infrastructure, fix Social Security, lower taxes for everyone, end the Recession, save the Planet from Global Warming, install solar panels on every home, talk to Iran about just being friends, assure Russia we’ll stop putting defensive measure in Europe, cure AIDS, pay teachers as much as doctors and still have time to play Basketball on the new White House court! NASA will be a cake-walk! Just turn on his teleprompter and he’ll tell us all how!
Jan 14, 2009 - 7:15 am 3. Staring In Disbelief:There simply is no compelling reason to “send humans beyond LEO”. All the funding and leadership and decision and architecture and schedule difficulties are because no one has given a compelling answer to “WHY?” Apollo was a Cold War test of strength, nothing more. It was wonderful and exciting and I am so proud of our country for its accomplishment but it was a demonstration of national will & skill – that’s it. No more, no less. NASA has suffered the ignominious tragedy of having accomplished its mission (going to the moon) with such singular panache and skill that it has wandered around looking for a dragon to slay for 40 years, gradually ossifying into just another bureaucracy. It should have been shut down decades ago, we should have left space to commercial exploitation, or just concentrated on unmanned exploratory science (it’s only source of truly brilliant successes in the last 20 years).
I suppose in this looming age of even more Government Gigantism, NASA will find it’s place at the trough, but only as a jobs program, its heroic age over and the true value of its unmanned science program dwarfed and crowded by its rudderless and stupefyingly costly manned space programs.
Jan 14, 2009 - 9:27 am 4. Paul A'Barge:Just a suggestion: why not eliminate NASA and let those who want to go into space provide the funding and effort.
I have no desire to go and I want my tax dollars back.
Jan 14, 2009 - 10:22 am 5. gaetano marano:.
about the (faster, cheaper and safer) Space and Moon exploration…
these are five articles the new NASA Administrator should read:
1. about the NASA Administrator: ghostnasa.com/posts/043griffin.html
2. about the Direct’s BIG LOBBY: ghostnasa.com/posts/033directstruestory.html
3. about the Space Solar Power: ghostnasa.com/posts/038sspdebunked.html
4. about the RISKY Hubble SM4: ghostnasa.com/posts/039hubbledeathtrap.html
5. about the CREWLESS Shuttle: gaetanomarano.it/spaceShuttle/spaceshuttle.html
he’ll be HAPPY to read something of TRUE and RATIONAL about NASA and Space…
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Jan 14, 2009 - 10:36 am 6. Dave Gore:We should leave manned efforts to the Chinese, the Russians, and privately funded ventures. Instead, NASA should concentrate on unmanned science missions and on robotic missions to near-Earth asteroids with the goal of mining and processing these resources.
Jan 14, 2009 - 10:54 am 7. John Moore:Apollo was a dramatic success (and, contrary to the article, contributed greatly to the nation’s technological base) because the project had a clear and very exciting vision. Few at the time were excited about beating the Russians – we were excited at the continuous push to put man on the moon – a program with visible and exciting achievements every year or two during its nine year course.
NASA achieved a remarkable success during Apollo, one it has never come close to since.
The Space Shuttle was a symptom of more typical government efforts. It wasn’t an inspiring project. It was justified by promising benefits to various constituencies (science, military, global idealists) and those promises forced a compromise design tha no engineer in his right mind would have come up with. It was a technological tour de force, built to a stupid specification.
The Space Station was another colossal waste. It has cost an incredible amount of money which could have been better spent, and provides virtually no value.
Any decent space program needs to start with a popularly supported vision, and needs to make rapid, visible progress towards that vision. Otherwise, it’s just another government mess.
A popular vision requires human space flight. Period. End of story. Science will need to tag along for the ride, but it’s the only way to really get somewhere politically.
I fear that government needs to be involved – but a the vision should force it to be an enabler rather than a monopolizer. That will be very hard to do.
In spite of its leadership follies, NASA has many brilliant scientists and engineers, and they do a whole lot of really great work.
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As an aside, for Ares, why didn’t they just rebuild Apollo using the original design, just adding in more modern electronics?
Jan 14, 2009 - 11:49 am 8. Richard:The vision needed for commercial space is commerce. What does space have that we need? Abundant energy. It was all worked out 30 years ago, amazingly enough by NASA itself.
http://www.amazon.com/High-Frontier-Human-Colonies-Apogee/dp/189652267X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1231962875&sr=8-1
Gerard O’Neil’s book “The High Frontier” laid it all out. After an initial investment, it pays for itself. The initial investment is substantial, which is why the private investors haven’t done it by themselves. Burt Rutan and Richard Branson are on their way to making that vision come true via the path of space tourism.
NASA is an agency whose primary mission has become the survival of NASA. The Space Shuttle? Give me a break, its a beast born of a committe whose primary mission is to distribute the contract work to every congressional district in order to ensure survival. The Space Station? Give me a break, its just a repeat of all the same mistakes as the Shuttle. The next “vision” of NASA won’t be any different or any better. About the only thing NASA does competently seems to be the robotic exploration done by JPL.
Jan 14, 2009 - 12:03 pm 9. BackwardsBoy:We paved the way into space for mankind, then let others overtake us. But when I remind myself that they must convince the technology-deficient lawyers in Congress to give them money, I understand why NASA will never achieve anything worthwhile again. At least it was fun while it lasted.
Jan 14, 2009 - 12:09 pm 10. Robert Horning:Paul A’Barge wrote:
“Just a suggestion: why not eliminate NASA and let those who want to go into space provide the funding and effort.
I have no desire to go and I want my tax dollars back.”
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I wish that really were the case. I really do wish that pork barrel projects like NASA (and others much more wasteful in federal and state governments) didn’t exist and instead private individuals could afford to go into space on their own.
Not only that, I wish the regulatory environment for building rockets and even the legal issues of what you can do in space were resolved by somebody other than a bunch of feel-good politicians that don’t think beyond the next election.
It wasn’t until recently with the establishment of the FAA-AST office that you could even get a permit to go into space at all, and even the current set of regulations for private spaceflight are mostly “provisional” or at least set up explicitly (if you listened to the legislative debates over them) to be a try this for now but we’ll throw the regs on in force shortly.
If Wilbur and Orville Wright had to follow the current FAA, EPA, OSHA, and other regulations for building aircraft, the current concept of an airplane would never have been built in the first place. Yet it is into this environment that modern spacecraft developer must enter in order to go into space on their own… with bureaucrats and politicians who explicitly don’t even want this sort of private activity going on.
Even if you get into space and, for instance, land on the Moon, what can you do when you get there? You can’t take a picture of the Earth from there (regulated by NOAA) or even take rocks from the surface, except for “scientific analysis”. You can’t even defend yourself against an attack by somebody else, as weapons are prohibited from going up in spacecraft. And this is but one of the problems facing would-be private spaceflight developers.
Legitimate private spaceflight has enough obstacles in the way that in effect NASA is actually needed to get at least something happening. If you want this situation to change, you need to change the whole situation and not just one little aspect like killing off NASA… which I happen to agree with but for other reasons than you have listed.
Jan 14, 2009 - 1:06 pm 11. myth buster:Here’s a good reason to go back to the Moon: Helium-3, which costs $23,000/ounce, is abundant on the Moon, though it is scarce on Earth. It is an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion, because it creates no neutron flux. That’s why we should go back. We mine Helium-3 and sell it.
Jan 14, 2009 - 6:57 pm 12. John Moore:Maybe we should get fusion working without He-3 first? It’s been just over the horizon for the last fifty years, and still isn’t in sight.
Jan 14, 2009 - 8:27 pm 13. progressoverpeace:You will never get coherent strategy from any government ventures. That’s just not how government works. The best way to get our space program moving is through the private sector (the same way that America was settled and developed).
Jan 14, 2009 - 9:36 pm 14. riff_raff:NASA: Space-based socialism.
Jan 15, 2009 - 6:26 am 15. njcommuter:Having vision means reaching for goals that other people don’t value. It means taking risks that others will not take. It means spending time, effort, and money that others will not spend. And each of these will be contested by people with good intentions and good values.
“Vision” is most easily maintained in small communities without outside interference. One definition of Congress is “outside interference.”
Jan 15, 2009 - 7:55 am 16. G Alston:We can solve a number of problems right here and right now thanks to NASA. Solar power generation from space can be done. We know how to do this. It’s a matter of doing it. But to do this we had to solve a number of smaller problems, i.e. getting the stuff in place, assembling large structures, and so on. The shuttle and ISS were the learning grounds. We now *know* how to build big stuff in space and make it run. We’ve done it. Sorry robot fans. Humans are needed for these things, and space is acually useful. It’s a matter of applying technology; i.e. it’s now about engineering.
ALmost everything we take for granted in the modern world was generated by NASA and military needs — computers, the internet, all of it. Robotic explorers. Robotic aircraft. Fuel efficient aircraft using new materials. GPS. Funding NASA is one of the few sane things that we spend money on in this country.
And I say this despite my conviction that NASA is a money sucking black hole like any other agency. At least this black hole gives something back. If it were up to me I’d fund them at about 50x what they now get. By my calculation NASA returns about $10 for every $1 invested.
Jan 15, 2009 - 10:32 am 17. Philip Wittamore:It looks like some of the people that work at NASA actually do have a space program with a vision: http://www.directlauncher.com/
Jan 15, 2009 - 1:13 pm 18. Andrew:NASA spends $18 billion a year to literally fly around in circles for no reason, with no tangible end product. It is a perpetual pork barrel project that mainly benefits Houston and Cape Canaveral. Somehow, NASA gets the credit for inventing a lot of things (like Tang, transistors, Teflon and Velcro) with which it had no connection.
Jan 15, 2009 - 2:08 pm 19. cedarford:John Moore – A popular vision requires human space flight. Period. End of story. Science will need to tag along for the ride, but it’s the only way to really get somewhere politically.
Garbage.
If America needs heroes – it would be cheaper to crank out a few heroes by awarding the Medal of Honor to living soldiers that legitimately did enough to warrant the award. Only dead guys who flopped on a grenade or allowed his unit to be ambushed by Taliban inspire few..
As is, for support – we have a public that knows we get tremendous benefit from unmanned near-Earth orbit satellites. Economic benefits, military benefits, scientific benefits so great that the public has no problem investing in that.
As we transitioned away from hugely expensive manned flight and the discoveries and real exploration are done by robotics….the more literate part of the population has thrilled to Hubble, the Rovers, Chandra, our deep space robots. Part of the reason NASA has not pushed the PR on unmanned to the masses is that much of the management and direction of NASA is dominated by “former Astronauts” who wish to keep manned exploration as the “marquee event” where the bulk of the resources go with very little public, commercial economic, or scientific benefit.
(Just as if you asked a bunch of helicopter pilots to design and run a future Army, you could be pretty sure what that Army would look like….)
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G Alston – We now *know* how to build big stuff in space and make it run. We’ve done it. Sorry robot fans. Humans are needed for these things, and space is acually useful. It’s a matter of applying technology; i.e. it’s now about engineering.
Not true. We, the Russians, and Japanese have craft that fly and dock robotically. Robots that have done repairs – simple stuff autonomously, more complicated tasks under the direction, even waldo-ing, of a ground controller. We can build big stuff if we want using only robots. Lack of human workers is not an impediment in space. If something breaks, a human might, just might be able to improvise a fix on certain components in less time than it takes to design and launch a robot…but not as cheaply.
Even the ballyhooed Hubble repairs that “vindicate” the usefullness of men is space, turn out when you factor in the shuttle and manpower costs as well as replacement components – to be more expensive than building and launching a better Hubble.
The Mars manned expedition? Even humans on the moon when so many unresolved life support issues exist to enable a stay longer than a few days?
We have gotten more science about Mars already from orbiters and ground probes – for one 500th the cost – than a manned expedition could ever deliver.
Even in the future a few Martian sample return rockets, complete with excavating, sample collecting rovers, a core driller – and with a return payload of 500lbs – would have a cost of under 25 billion for 3 locales mined and samples returned vs. 1.3 -1.4 trillion for two astronauts to plant a flag, make a speech, and return with the same goodies from one spot.
One bennie of Mars is it’s low escape velocity means a very small rocket could do the job.
Of course, it would be even cheaper to examine stuff in situ and not bring it back. Even microbes if they ever find any.
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myth buster:
Here’s a good reason to go back to the Moon: Helium-3, which costs $23,000/ounce, is abundant on the Moon, though it is scarce on Earth. It is an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion, because it creates no neutron flux. That’s why we should go back. We mine Helium-3 and sell it.
We haven’t even figured out how to make deuterium-tritium fusion work with energy breakeven, let alone even begin to consider the far higher temp and confinement time needed for HE-3 fusion – which is best explained as 5 times more difficult in terms of temperature and confinment power/time, with far less margin to energy breakeven.
The reason it is mentioned is the “magic, ideal solution” to anti-nuke, anti-any radiation people that want the perfect energy solution.
D-T requires a nuke reactor to make tritium and then you have that dastardly fusion neutron that can make new uranium fuel, thorium fuel – fission some U-238 or make steel and other fusion reactor components radioactive. All things anti-nuke folks just hate.
The only reason it costs 23,000 a – gram I believe, not ounce…is that it is scarce and only valuable to scientists doing experiments.
Boost the supply with billions put into space mining and if fusion is still not deemed practical with HE-3 or any other high-value use, all you end up with are happy scientists paying a heck of a lot less for their nuclear and cryogenic experiments.
Jan 16, 2009 - 3:47 am 20. G Alston:#19 cedarford — “Not true. We, the Russians, and Japanese have craft that fly and dock robotically.”
Indeed. The ISS crew would be hungry sans Progress modules. I have a great video of the Jules Verne docking procedure. Smooth as silk. But as Napoleon was fond of saying, “no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” You can’t count on everything being nominal.
Where humans are needed is where things do not go as planned, e.g. the landing of at least two of the Apollo craft. Docking to an existing structure isn’t the same thing as creating a structure. Not always. Things will go wrong. Waldos will break. It’s nice to have the ability to effect repair if need be. I think as complexity increases, so does the need for oversight. Specifically, this would apply to larger structures like solar power satellites. Especially the first ones.
I think I agree with much of your overall point. Certainly fixing a Hubble is more expensive overall than launching a new one. However, that said, the point was to learn how to do this and demonstrate the ability, which would have cost the same regardless. Mere accounting tricks don’t tell the entire story.
Jan 16, 2009 - 10:13 am 21. EasyEight:The best thing we could do for the future of spaceflight is get NASA out of spaceflight operations. NASA should be working overtime on R&D into next generation reusable space flight systems and technologies to get the private sector into space and help the nation develop something grander and more useful than an Apollo re-tread. NASA did this with aviation back in its NACA days, before it went to the Moon and lost its way. Then it can buy commercial systems, or buy rides to orbit, while continuing spaceflight technology development and deep space research missions.
Jan 17, 2009 - 5:26 pm 22. Marc Malone:The article and its responses are all intelligent, but I think everyone is overlooking one vital factor; private enterprise just cannot do it alone. Government is highly inefficient, but has a huge advantage; it needs not turn a profit.
However, for government to do the job, they need public support, which generally means good press (read sensationalism). Otherwise, science makes Americans yawn. If you make a video game out of controlling the robotics, or doing a launch, or somesuch, then suddenly, Americans get interested. And yes, we need heroes.
Jan 17, 2009 - 9:56 pm 23. G Alston:Human vs robot exploration?
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/moon-magnet.html
Human.
Next week: Ginger vs MaryAnn.
Jan 17, 2009 - 11:11 pm