Working Hand In Glove

Many of those enthusiastic about the president’s new space policy want to redo Apollo.

I pointed this out when it was first announced, but I didn’t really describe all the implications of it.

There are many, but I want to focus here on those aspects of it that affect our choice in launch systems to achieve the president’s goals, whether existing, or new.

There is an assumption that we cannot move humans beyond earth orbit without a heavy-lift vehicle, like the Saturn that first took men to the moon three and a half decades ago (and the fact that this July 20th will be the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first lunar landing makes me feel quite ancient). This assumption is based on the fact that it’s how we did it the first time, and some have too little imagination to conceive that it could be done in any other way.

But that was then, and this is now.

What are the differences between then and now, in terms of our ability to fling humans beyond earth’s orbit, and on to other worlds?

First, of course, we know much more now than we did then, if for no other reason than we’ve done it. But more importantly, technology has advanced over the past third of a century since we first went to the moon, in a time period in which technology has been generally advancing at a dizzying pace, with a seeming continuous acceleration.

Computers are much smaller and faster, materials are stronger with the ability to take higher temperatures, our ability to design is much greater, and our ability to get designs from a computer screen to functional hardware is phenomenal, compared to our capabilities in the 1960s.

Consider also that our goal then was not to open up space in any sustainable way, but to simply beat the Russians to the moon.

Under those conditions, our choice to launch a lunar mission on a single large rocket probably made sense. It wasn’t cheap, but it was low risk, since we knew how to build big rockets (we only had to scale up what we already had), and we didn’t know how to assemble things in space.

But there seems to be an assumption on the part of many that large launch systems are an intrinsic requirement of manned space travel. Accordingly, they’ve skipped past the part of the trade studies that would determine whether or not this assumption is valid, and gone straight to debating the best way to get heavy lift.

Of course, there’s another motivation on the part of many engaged in such debates–a large launch system means a large development contract that provides continued employment for many who may fear losing their jobs when the space shuttle is phased out.

There is a huge constituency for the Shuttle program–in Florida where they are processed and launched, in Utah where the Solid Rocket Boosters are manufactured, in Louisiana where the external tanks are built, and other places. The president’s announcement that we will no longer fly the shuttle after the end of this decade had to have cast a pall over many people in those places, because even if the new initiative blossoms, there’s no guarantee that it will benefit the communities that are currently supported by shuttle-based jobs.

So it’s not surprising that some are talking about building a new heavy-lift launch system that uses shuttle components. If they can’t keep the orbiters, there are certainly many parts of NASA and its contractors that will work very hard to maintain the rest of the (costly) shuttle infrastructure. Concepts for shuttle-based launchers have been around as long as the shuttle itself, and many will claim that this is the fastest and cheapest route to the capability that they insist we need.

But do we?

Most people are unaware that other options were considered for Apollo, including earth orbit assembly, but as I wrote above, this mode was ultimately rejected as being too risky in terms of the primary goal–beating the Russians to the moon.

But as the president said last month, this isn’t a race–it’s a journey, and we need to come up with modes of operation that recognize that, and make the journey an economically sustainable one. A heavy-lift vehicle, even a shuttle-derived one, will cost a lot to develop, and unless it flies enough, it will be difficult to amortize those development costs. Smaller vehicles, flown more often, will be more likely to reduce launch costs in the near term.

The objection, of course, is that orbital assembly carries its own risks. What few realize is that this is because NASA hasn’t really devoted the effort necessary to reducing them (particularly in developing space suits that don’t tire out the astronauts).

The current soft suit resists motion because bending a joint changes the volume of the air inside it, providing a force that wants to restore it to its original position. Think of a rubber glove, limp until inflated, but difficult to bend the fingers once under pressure.

In fact, the glove is the biggest problem in designing the high-pressure space suits necessary to avoid the bends (the same problem a diver has when she surfaces too quickly) when an astronaut goes out into the vacuum of space. Larger joints like shoulders and knees have special designs that are zero-volume change, but no one has yet miniaturized such a design to finger joints.

Because this is a critical technology, and one that has great leverage in influencing launch system trades, I would propose the following:

Build a vacuum glove box with a task box inside (perhaps an automobile engine that has to be dissassembled and reassembled). Put up a purse of a million dollars to the first person who can achieve the task working through gloves under a pressure differential of half an atmosphere, without a break.

Unlike many space activities, it’s a project that can be literally done in someone’s garage, and it may spur a great amount of innovation for very low cost. Accordingly, it would make an excellent candidate for the Office of Exploration’s new prize fund, and I hope they’ll strongly consider it. At very low cost to the taxpayers, one or more successful concepts could lay to rest myths about the intrinsic difficulty of working in space, opening up the options for how we will get to the planets beyond redoing Apollo, perhaps saving billions in dollars, and constituting a major step toward becoming a truly spacefaring nation.

Space Debate Report

In comments on this post, Chuck Divine has a review of last night’s space policy debate in DC.

Muncy was superb. His top ten myths of the Bush space plan were excellent. Myth #1? The plan is about NASA. No, it’s not. The plan is about us (humans). Muncy eloquently put forward the observation that space was about all kinds of human endeavors.

Former astronaut Searfoss was the big surprise. He was critical of NASA, supportive of private space endeavors. He observed he lost six friends when Columbia burned up. I was very favorably impressed.

Hudgins and Park were very predictable. To be honest, I could have done a better job at presenting cases for their positions (even though I have some disagreements with both) than they did. Debate training from high school and college (at least what I got decades ago) does give me a bit of an advantage, though.

Rick Searfoss wouldn’t have been a surprise to me. He’s a ‘stro who gets it, and is on XCOR‘s board of directors.

Return Of The Queen

For those who were following the saga, I brought Stella home yesterday. She had another close call on Friday, but the antibiotics seemed to finally kick in on the weekend.

She’s as ornery as ever, particularly when fighting to keep pills from going down her gullet twice daily. She has banished the usurper, Jessica, and retaken her rightful place in my lap.

The More Things Change…

I’m still too busy to write much, and it’s not going to get much better until the end of the month–it will be a challenge even to do my Fox columns this week and next–but in the meantime, go read this little history of presidential space initiatives by Dwayne Day, over at The Space Review.

For those who aren’t familiar with past attempts to set a new direction for NASA, it provides a lot of good guidance, and potential food for thought as to how to avoid the mistakes of that past. It also debunks the nonsense that anything that NASA does beyond LEO automatically costs four hundred billion dollars (which of course, because NASA is doing it, is automatically inflated to a trillion dollars by clueless commentators).

And by the way, congratulations to Jeff Foust on the one-year anniversary of The Space Review. It should be one of your weekly must-read links if you’re interested in space policy and technology.

[Update on Wednesday]

Clark Lindsey has an email from someone at NASA who says that the SEI cost estimate was even more inflated than Dwayne says (scroll down a little).

…the internal NASA JSC number was $100 Billion — this number was doubled by the comptroller at JSC and then doubled again by the Comptroller at NASA Headquarters.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all.

[Update at 8:45 AM PST]

Dwayne responds in comments.

Off Line

Sorry, for the light posting, but I’m frantically busy, still have a convalescing cat (who’s unfortunately still not out of the woods), still have a furnace that isn’t working (I’m pretty sure I’ll have to replace the valve, whenever I can find the time to pull it off and go find a replacement), and am off to Florida for the weekend to see my darling Patricia.

See you Monday.

The New NASA Moon Hoax

Some people are claiming that the president’s new space policy is a hoax.

There have long been deluded people who believe that the moon landing was a hoax, but these new accusers are supposed to be mainstream journalists, and respected former NASA historians.

Of course, what they mean is that the president isn’t serious–that this is just a reelection ploy in a reelection year.

This is a preposterous claim, to anyone familiar with space policy and its history. With the possible exception of Jack Kennedy’s moon program (and even that is highly doubtful), no space policy has ever been one on which public votes were cast, other than possibly in districts that directly benefited from it, such as Houston, TX, Huntsville, AL, and the area around Cape Canaveral in Florida. Even in the latter cases, it’s not clear that it’s ever been a dominant issue in any election.

Some might argue that, while Texas and Alabama are in the bag for the president this year, Florida is a swing state on which the election notoriously hinged the last time, and a new space initiative could bring it firmly into the president’s column. But it’s not necessary to announce a visionary space policy to do so. It would have been sufficient to give lip service to continuing the space shuttle and space station programs, because those constituencies’ primary interest is in jobs, not planets.

Well, actually, there is another exception to the rule of space having no impact on elections, and a clear (and negative) one. Former Apollo astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was, for a time, a US Senator from New Mexico, his home state. That time didn’t last long, because he was perceived by his constituents as being too interested in Mars, and not sufficiently interested in the Land of Enchantment. His winning opponent’s campaign slogan was “What on earth has Jack Schmitt done for us”?

No one has ever won an election in similar circumstances. To the degree that we have empirical data on the matter, support of visionary space programs is not a vote getter, but a vote loser.

Consider the International Space Station. President Reagan announced it twenty years ago this year. It was originally supposed to fly in the early nineteen nineties. Now, the goal is to complete it by the end of this decade, over a quarter of a century after it was first announced.

Has there been any great hue and cry amongst the populace over our lack of a space station? Has anyone at NASA been fired because we don’t yet really have one?

No, because no politician has ever been fired because we don’t have one. It’s simply not important, politically.

Oh, yes, polls show support for space activities, but it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. People like it well enough, but when asked to make a choice between spending on space, and spending on, well, almost anything else, space rarely even shows, let alone places.

But wait, there’s more!

As I already said, the only practical way that a positive space policy ever translates into votes is in terms of its impact on local jobs at traditional NASA centers. But one of the new (and subtle) things about the president’s new policy is that it throws uncertainty into the potential effects at specific locations. One of the barriers to effective management of NASA programs has long been the undue influence of major NASA space centers, which leverage their local congressmen and Senators to support them on the Hill, often to the detriment of the program itself. There’s an old saying inside the Capital Beltway, that “NASA headquarters doesn’t have any congressmen.”

Administrator O’Keefe, presumably with the support of the administration, seems determined to change this. He’s pulled back management of the new exploration program to a new office at NASA headquarters in Washington, and he’s made no promises to any of the centers about which aspects, if any, they’ll be responsible for. Again, as Henry Vanderbilt of the Space Access Society points out, this is not a sign that the administration is attempting to curry favor with the voters in an election year–if anything, it’s the opposite.

So the notion that the president’s speech last month announcing a new direction for NASA was simply election-year politics, upon a serious examination, is ludicrous on its face.

So how do supposedly competent commentators get it so wrong?

Well, in the case of Joshua Micah Marshall, the author of the drive-by hit job on the president’s policy, it can be attributed to a combination of ignorance about space policy (a subject that he rarely comments on), and a well-established animus to President Bush, as exhibited on an almost daily basis in his weblog. The ignorance is demonstrated by the fact that he never even mentions in his comment the loss of Columbia a year ago, let alone suggests that it might have something to do with new space policy a few months after the release of the investigation of the report on that event.

Neither knowledgable or even casual observers of space policy would make such an omission, because it is clear that the formulation of the new space policy was accelerated, if not initiated, by it. The status quo was clearly no longer acceptable after it, because it was equally clear that the long-term continuation of a manned space program was not possible with a fragile fleet of three shuttle orbiters.

Former NASA historian Alex Roland has less excuse, because he’s supposed to be knowledgable about such things. Blogger Thomas James has dissected his unprofessional screed, and space historian (and policy analyst to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board) Dwayne Day has completed the job.

Given his supposed knowledge, Professor Roland’s piece can only be attributed to undiluted Bush hatred (as evidenced by the use of the tell-tale word “Halliburton” in his little rant).

I warned about this a couple weeks ago. Space policy is largely being discussed in a knowledge vacuum, and not on the basis of its intrinsic features, but rather, on who supports it.

Perhaps the real hoax being perpetrated here is by those who argue against policies and politics of which they apparently know nothing, as a surrogate for what’s sure to be a brutal upcoming political campaign.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!