There’s an interesting story over at Wired about the need for more commercial involvement in human spaceflight. And it asks the obvious question about the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) coming from Lockheed Martin:
Stevens raises some valid points, but he’s also got a clear agenda — SpaceX and other firms like it are competitors and ultimately could do the job faster, cheaper and better than NASA. The Orion program is unlikely to make it to the moon any time soon based on current budgets projected in the future. The review committee says the goal of getting back to the moon by 2020 is currently about $30 billion short. And unless an extra $3 billion a year is put back in to the NASA manned space budget, the International Space Station is likely to be the only destination in space for the United States for the foreseeable future.
Naturally Musk, Burt Rutan and many others think otherwise. If they can do it, why shouldn’t they?
And what Stevens says is nonsensical, really:
“We know how difficult it is to transport to the station and we don’t want people to cut corners, and downstream having NASA pay the penalty of the time and cost of doing this,” John Stevens, of Lockheed Martin’s human spaceflight division, told Aviation Week.
That issue aside, Stevens wonders how the government is supposed to finance NASA and a contract with someone like SpaceX. “If we can’t afford one program, how can we afford two?” he asks.
We obviously can’t afford two of the way NASA wants to do it. We can’t even afford one. But NASA plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on Ares and Orion. To date, SpaceX has developed Falcon 1, mostly developed Falcon 9 and Dragon, for something south of half a billion. Based on that history, there’s no reason to think that it will cost even a full billion to get the final ingredient of a launch escape system. We could afford dozens of programs like that, not just two, for the same money that Lockheed Martin proposes to spend on its one.
Is it because SpaceX has “cut corners”? I don’t know, but you know what? If they can save that much money by “cutting corners” and have something that people are willing to fly, I say let’s cut a lot more corners. The reality, of course, is that the “corners” they are “cutting” is not using the standing development army at Marshall and Johnson that are driving the high costs of the current NASA way of doing business. I don’t believe that such corner cutting makes it less safe than Shuttle, or Ares/Orion.
But even if it is less safe, so what? Here is the director’s cut on that topic from my New Atlantis piece:
But will it be safe to trust our precious astronauts to private launchers?
There is no such thing as safe. Despite the fantasies of Safety and Mission Assurance (S&MA) types at NASA, “safe” and “unsafe” are not binary conditions. There is no ultimate safety, this side of the grave. All we can do is to make things as safe as reasonable, and that includes reasonable expense. NASA has spent untold billions in an attempt to make things “safe” over the decades, and they killed seventeen astronauts. Maybe they could have spent a lot less money, and perhaps killed a few more astronauts, but made a lot more progress. Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we’re not killing people, we’re not pushing hard enough. If our attitude toward the space frontier is that we must strive to never ever lose anyone, it will remain closed. If our ancestors who opened the west, or who came from Europe, had had such an attitude, we would still be over there, and there would have been no California space industry to get us to the moon forty years ago. It has never been “safe” to open a frontier, and this frontier is the harshest one that we’ve ever faced, but fortunately, we have sufficiently advanced technology to allow us to do it anyway, and probably with much less loss of life than any previous one. But people die every day doing a lot less worthwhile things than opening a frontier.
Before Mercury, the test pilots who flew in that program used to attend funerals of their colleagues, who had made smoking craters in the desert, on a frequent basis. But no one else knew about them, or cared much. They were just doing their job—developing the technologies and weapons that we needed to win an existential war. When they got out of their test aircraft and climbed into a Mercury capsule, they knew it was risky, but it was a lot less so than their previous job.
A frequent commenter on my blog has suggested that to avoid future national sob parties, such as occurred after Challenger and Columbia, we should set aside a special cemetery like Arlington, in a well-publicized ceremony, and declare that this was where all those who would lose their lives in our planned opening of the solar system would be laid to rest. And to make it big, just to make the point. There is in fact an astronaut memorial mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, with the names of those lost so far, and plenty of squares for more. A visionary president would point that out with the announcement of the new policy.
SpaceX is going to fly people on its Dragon, and it’s going to make it as safe as it can afford to and still have a market for it, but I doubt that they will “human rate” it, and I see no need for ULA to do so with its launcher, either. No one, after all, “human rates” an airplane. What ULA needs to do is to modify the design to make them reasonably safe, and contra the recent Aerospace Corporation report I’m confident that they can do that for a lot less than thirty-five billion dollars and in less than seven years, which is a pretty low bar to beat Ares I. If private individuals willingly climb Mount Everest every year (and many die in the attempt), and if private individuals are willing to pay their own money to fly on a private vehicle into space, what does it say about us as a nation, that the astronauts who are supposed to be super humans, willing to risk their lives, won’t do the same thing? At the risk of repetition, it says, as all of our space policy has said for the past forty years since Tranquility Base, that space is not important. It says that we are not serious about it.
This talk about “cutting corners” and safety is nothing but continued rent seeking by a government cost-plus contractor.
[Update mid morning]
It sounds like the new administrator has already made a major decision:
An honest question from the audience set the tone. “We’ve got a rocket assembled in the VAB ready for launch. Are we going to launch it?” came the inquiry from a veteran space worker.
“Well, that’s a good question,” said the Band Leader. “Since the program of record will not be recommended by the Augustine commission, I don’t see any point in continuing with the launch.”
What will Rob Coppinger say?