Category Archives: Space

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Don’t Know Much About Space Policy

Gregg Easterbrook thinks that NASA should be saving the planet from errant asteroids, instead of building a moon base. He can’t avoid the usual straw man, of course, which makes much of the rest of his whining about moon bases suspect:

As anyone with an aerospace engineering background well knows, stopping at the moon, as Bush was suggesting, actually would be an impediment to Mars travel, because huge amounts of fuel would be wasted landing on the moon and then blasting off again.

Bush only “suggested” that to people who miss the point of the program. No one is proposing that every, or even any, mission to Mars touch base on the moon before going on to the Red Planet. The point was that the moon might be a useful resource for making Mars missions more cost effective, particularly if we can find water there, and deliver it as propellant to some staging point, such as L-1, which isn’t particularly out of the way en route to Mars. In addition, learning how to build a base on the moon, only three days away, is valuable experience to wring the bugs out of a Martian base, which is months away, despite the different environments.

But ignoring that, the real problem is that he doesn’t seem to understand NASA’s role:

After the presentation, NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, came into the room. I asked him why there had been no discussion of space rocks. He said, “We don’t make up our goals. Congress has not instructed us to provide Earth defense. I administer the policy set by Congress and the White House, and that policy calls for a focus on return to the moon. Congress and the White House do not ask me what I think.” I asked what NASA’s priorities would be if he did set the goals. “The same. Our priorities are correct now,” he answered. “We are on the right path. We need to go back to the moon. We don’t need a near-Earth-objects program.” In a public address about a month later, Griffin said that the moon-base plan was “the finest policy framework for United States civil space activities that I have seen in 40 years.”

Actually, Congress has asked NASA to pay more attention to space rocks. In 2005, Congress instructed the agency to mount a sophisticated search of the proximate heavens for asteroids and comets, specifically requesting that NASA locate all near-Earth objects 140 meters or larger that are less than 1.3 astronomical units from the sun–roughly out to the orbit of Mars. Last year, NASA gave Congress its reply: an advanced search of the sort Congress was requesting would cost about $1 billion, and the agency had no intention of diverting funds from existing projects, especially the moon-base initiative.

Now, I disagree with Mike that we don’t need an NEO program–I think we do. But unlike Gregg, I wouldn’t put NASA in charge of it. And if Congress wants to fund NASA to look for space rocks, it’s going to have to tell NASA not to do the other things that it wants to do, or fund it. Also, this was a little verbal gymnastics on Gregg’s part. Mike said that Congress had not instructed NASA to defend the earth, which is true, and the fact that they asked NASA to look for hazardous objects doesn’t change that fact in any way, despite his sleight-of-hand at the keyboard. Looking for objects is one thing–actually physically manipulating them is a different thing entirely. It’s like the difference between the CIA and the military. The former provides intelligence, the latter acts on it.

The Space Act (almost fifty years old now) does not grant NASA the responsibility to protect the planet, even with subsequent amendments. It is simply not its job. Moreover, no federal agency has that job, and as Gregg points out, if the US military were to take it on, there would be widespread suspicion on the part of the rest of the planet, and it would open us up to tremendous liability if something went wrong (not that there would necessarily be any lawyers around to care).

And is it really the job of the military? Again, as Gregg points out, this is a natural problem, not an enemy. If ET, or Marvin the Martian presented a threat, it would make sense to get the Air Force (or if we had one, Space Force) involved, because that is a willful enemy to be engaged, which is what we have a military for.

But as I’ve written before (six years ago–geez, where does the time go?), the only historical analogue (at least in the US) we have for planetary defense is the management of flooding by the Army Corps of Engineers. This is a predictable (though not as predictable as an asteroid or comet strike) natural disaster, at least statistically, and one that can be managed by building dams, which is largely what they do.

Now, I’m not proposing that the ACE be put in charge of defending the planet, but that thought isn’t much more frightening than putting NASA in charge of it. Yes, Gregg, we could lobby to get Congress to amend the Space Act to put it in the agency’s portfolio, but do you really think that would be a good idea? NASA is fifty years old this year, and bureaucratically, it acts much older than that. You don’t want to take an existing agency, with too much on its plate, and too little resources with which to do it (and yes, much of what it’s doing it shouldn’t be doing, but that’s a different discussion) and give it such an important, even existential task. It worked fine in the sixties, because it was a young, new agency with a focus on a single goal (though it managed to accomplish a lot of other things along the way in terms of planetary exploration–Tom Paine once told me that there was so much going on during Apollo that NASA did a lot of great things that it didn’t even know it was doing).

No.

I’ve often said that if the president really thought that the VSE was important, he would have taken a policy lead from the Strategic Missile Defense program in the eighties, in which an entirely new entity was established to carry it out (SDIO, now BMDO), because it would otherwise get bogged down in blue-suit politics in the Air Force.

I agree that we should be doing much more about this threat than we are, but just because NASA is ostensibly a space agency doesn’t mean that they should be in charge of it. I would establish a planetary defense agency, which had that as its sole charter. It might ask for (and occasionally get) cooperation from NASA, but it would do the same with the Air Force, and it would put out contracts to the private sector, and it would coordinate with COPUOS and encourage other nations to establish such entities to enter into cooperative agreements. If you ask NASA to do it, it will just become one more boondoggle, or it will get buried in the agency’s other priorities. Either way, if it’s important, you don’t want a sclerotic agency, long past its sell-by date, to be in charge.

Space

Frustration

1 Comment

Phil Plait has a little rant about our (lack of) progress in human spaceflight. The usual pointless man-versus-robot debate ensues in comments. (I think that the post title should be “whither,” though, not “whence”–whence, which is often misused with the redundant “from whence,” means “from where,” while “whither” means “to where”.)

[Via Tom Hill]

Space

On The Verge?

5 Comments

Jeff Foust has a report on the propellant depot panel at Space Access a few weeks ago, in which he asks whether their time has almost come. I hope so, because they are critical infrastructure for opening up space, in a way that HLVs are not.

Space

They Should

2 Comments

The last two Soyuz flights (or to be more precise, landings) are worrying NASA.

Via email from Jim Oberg, who notes a quote of his that the reporter didn’t use: “NASA would have a hard time developing any other human space transport system in the next 4-5 years as reliable as the soyuz. We now realize that the Soyuz backup systems were effective in insuring a reliable – if very rough – landing in these previous cases.”

What a policy mess.

Business, Space

What Could (And Should?) Have Been

6 Comments

Rob Coppinger has some thoughts on SpaceShipOnePointFive.

I suspect that Alex, and perhaps Sir Richard, are now regretting their decision to not take advantage of the bird in the hand, holding out for the flock in the bush. They probably (in fact, almost certainly) didn’t anticipate the development problems they’d have with the propulsion system, though they were warned. I suspect that they (like Burt) drank too much of the hybrid koolaid, and were lulled into complacency by the success and (apparent, though this was an illusion) safety of the SpaceShipOne engine.

As for the comment that a passenger wouldn’t have paid the costs of the flights, I don’t buy it. They could have charged much more than a couple hundred thousand for the first several, perhaps even few dozen, flights. But we’ll never know.

Political Commentary, Space, Space History

A Good Old-Fashioned NASA Bash

15 Comments

While this Orlando Sentinel columnist makes some valid points in his criticism of the space agency, he also takes some cheap, and unfair shots.

You know we are headed for a boondoggle when the agency’s marketing division starts up a Web page called, “Why the Moon?”

And the first sentence is, “If you asked 100 people why we should return to the moon, you’d probably get 100 answers — or more!”

Translation: We can’t come up with one good one.

I’d call that a mistranslation. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t have removed Saddam because we didn’t find WMD. It really is possible for there to be more than one reason to do something (and in fact, most decisions are made on that basis–any one reason might not, per se, be sufficient, but a combination of them often are).

It may in fact be true that none of the reasons listed are good (I haven’t bothered to check out the site to see), but one certainly can’t logically infer that from the fact that there are more than one, or even a hundred. But this part is actually a misrepresentation of history:

NASA once took on the mission of providing cheap, routine access to space with the shuttle. Then it took on the mission of building and servicing a space station.

Then came two shuttle disasters. And before the station was even half-built, agency officials began complaining they had no mission and needed to fly off into the solar system.

We still don’t have safe and routine access to space. And now, we won’t have our grandiose research platform up there either.

Which “agency officials” were making such complaints? Can he name names? In reality, much of NASA would have been content to continue to fly the Shuttle, complete the station, and finally hope to get some value out of it, even after Columbia. There are no doubt “agency officials” who, if asked over a beer, would say that would be the best course even now, given the problems with Ares 1 and Orion, and the fact that we have been getting a lot better at launching Shuttles. That was certainly the prevailing agency attitude in 1989, when President Bush’s father announced the Space Exploration Initiative, and NASA sabotaged it both indirectly, by coming up with a ridiculously overpriced program, and directly by actively lobbying against it on the Hill (one of the reasons that Dick Truly was fired).

In general, it’s unfair to blame NASA for what is really a failure of the entire federal space policy establishment. NASA doesn’t establish goals, or make policy (though it will often play bureaucratic games to attempt to influence it).

The space station was the “next logical step” in proposed plans for space, going all the way back to the fifties, based on von Braun’s vision. The problem was that the “logical step” before it was to establish affordable and routine access to orbit. The Shuttle was an attempt to do, but a failed one. Unfortunately, the policy establishment failed to realize this until long after space station plans had jelled into one dependent on the Shuttle (and later, the Russians, which is why it is at such a high inclination, increasing the cost of access).

Yes, NASA “took on the mission,” but it failed at it. And with subsequent failures, such as X-34 and X-33, the nation has learned the wrong lesson–that if NASA can’t reduce cost to orbit, it can’t be done, and we should simply give up on the project, and go back to the way we did it in the sixties. But the failure wasn’t due to the fact that it can’t be done, but rather than it can’t be done the way NASA does things: developing and operating its own systems, for its own uses. Government agencies, by their nature, are not well suited to either developing or running cost-effective transportation systems.

It is understandable and natural to want to maximize the value of something in which we have invested many tens of billions of dollars over the years, and it does seem like a waste to abandon the ISS just a few years after its completion, which took decades to accomplish. But there’s a concept called “throwing good money after bad” in which too many people engage. The fact that we spent a hundred billion dollars on ISS doesn’t make it worth a hundred billion dollars. It may, in fact have negative value, like the proverbial white elephant that costs too much to feed and care for.

The mistake of the Vision for Space Exploration was not in establishing a national goal of moving the nation (and humanity) beyond earth orbit. Such a bold and broad policy statement of our ultimate goals in space was in fact long overdue.

The mistake was in specifying in too much detail the means and schedule to do so, and in the failure to recognize that we never completed the job that was supposed to be performed by the Shuttle–developing affordable access to space. This is a capability without which attempts to open up the frontier will remain as unsustainable as they were during Apollo, and to repeat Apollo (albeit in slow motion), which is essentially NASA’s current plan, is to repeat that mistake.

Yes, the Shuttle was a mistake, as was a space station based on the assumption that it had met its goals, but that doesn’t make the goal of the Shuttle a mistake. Achieving that goal remains key to supremacy in space, for both civil and military purposes, and it has to be done before we can seriously contemplate human exploration and development of the solar system. But to blame NASA for these mistakes is wrong, not just because there’s plenty of blame to go around, but because if we believe that NASA is the problem, we won’t address the other very real sources of the problem, and we’ll continue to make such policy mistakes.

[Monday morning update]

More commentary over at Clark’s place.

Education, Space

Encouraging Words

In his Senate testimony, Frederick Tarantino, head of USRA, made the following interesting recommendation:

I also want to bring to the subcommittee’s attention an exciting new way in which university-led experiments with hands-on training could be boosted by NASA involvement. Within the next few years, suborbital commercial vehicles being developed by such companies as Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace, and Blue Origin, will provide a unique way to engage scientists and researchers. NASA has already taken the first step by issuing a request for information to help in the formulation of a Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program.

By providing the opportunity for researchers and even undergraduate students to fly into space along with their experiments, not only can new experiments be conducted, but the opportunity can inspire students to engage in the math, science, and engineering. The participatory approach of the personal spaceflight industry means each suborbital launch can be experienced by thousands of people, with young people able to tune in and watch live video from space as their professors and fellow students conduct experiments in real time and experience weightlessness and the life-changing view of the earth from space. The hands-on experience will create a new generation of Principal Investigators who will be prepared to lead the flagship science and human exploration missions, later in their careers.

These new vehicles will provide low-cost access to the space environment for scientific experiments and research. The market rate for these services has already been set by the space tourist market at $100,000-$200,000 per seat, a much lower cost than existing sounding rockets.

We believe the commercial potential here could be energized by the participation of our space agency. USRA requests the subcommittee authorize NASA to follow through on the request for information by establishing the Suborbital Scientist Participant Pilot Program and issuing a NASA Research Announcement soliciting investigations. This will create a university research payloads market for these emerging commercial operations, provide a new way for university researchers to conduct experiments with student involvement and hands-on-training, and bring the involvement of NASA, and its imprimatur, to an exciting new U.S. industry.

Let’s hope that the staffers were paying attention.

Space

A Depressing Thought

2 Comments

If I thought that Gene Kranz knew what he was talking about, I’d be pretty dismayed about this comment:

“This is the best game plan that I have seen since the days of President Kennedy,” Kranz said of ESAS, comparing it to the DC-3 and the B-52. “The system that Griffin’s team is putting into place will be delivering for America 50 years later…

What an insane comparison. The DC-3 and B-52 have been operating for decades because they were mission effective and affordable (the latter because they were extensively reused, and not thrown away after, or during each flight).

If a century after the founding of NASA we are still sending people into space in little capsules on large expendable rockets, that will be a testimony to a tremendous failure of national will, and of private enterprise. If that’s the best that we can do, I predict that we’ll just give up on human spaceflight, and we should. So either way, this prediction is very unlikely.

Fortunately, he’s just suffering from sixties nostalgia, and there’s little basis for his belief.

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently that was from his oral testimony, or an answer to a question. Here’s the written testimony as submitted, which doesn’t make the DC-3 comparison, or talk about fifty years in the future.

NASA Watch has the other witnesses’ testimony as well.

[Update about 11 AM EDT]

One other point about the Kranz testimony from the Space Politics link:

Kranz stepped in and described the cost in money and schedule he experienced man-rating the Atlas and Titan for the Mercury and Gemini programs.

Comparing human rating an Atlas V to the original Atlas and Titan isn’t a useful comparison. The latter were converted ballistic missiles, whereas Atlas V was designed from scratch to be a reliable launch system. All that’s really required to human rate it is to add Failure On-Set Detection (FOSD), and ensure that its trajectory doesn’t create any blackout zones for aborts (which it has plenty of power and performance to do).