Obama and NASA -- <i>Per Aspera ad Astra</i>

By John Ballard

I got through Rand Simberg's A Space Program for the Rest of Us, recommended by commenter Greer. Rather than parse twelve pages I will drop a few snips and urge the interested reader to set aside some quiet time for reading. Simberg is to the space program what Julia Child was to French cooking."

� Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism, and Internet security. He writes about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.

That's from NRO where he opened with...

While I'm not a conservative, some of my best friends are, and I am sympathetic to that philosophy, so it pains me to see such an inadvertently unconservative post on space policy appear in The Corner from Jeffrey Anderson. I responded briefly at my blog, but I'm grateful to Kathryn to allow me some space here for a more proper rebuttal.

Short version, human-spaceflight policy is one of the few things that Obama seems to be getting right, at least from a conservative standpoint.

This appeared February 1, well ahead of yesterday's presidential vision of the future of space exploration in Florida. 

Readers in a hurry can get a Readers Digest version of Simberg's thinking at the NRO link. But those with time to go deeper should go to the longer piece linked first in this post. 

Though I was in elementary school at the time, I still recall how the launch of Sputnik was a shot heard around the world in 1957. The second night afterward we went into the back yard to peer into the sky at dusk trying to see its reflection as it passed overhead. And a few years later when John Glenn was sent into space everyone in our high school sat listening to the intercom as the event was reported live. I can't recall if we listened to the launch or the recovery, but there was no question that the event had a galvanizing effect on America. By the time JFK issued his famous challenge to have a man on the moon by the end of a decade, America was primed and ready. It's easy to forget that those of us later to be called children of the Sixties were not Quixotic about what mankind could accomplish. We knew it could be done given the right leadership. And it's possible that this young president is striking some of the same chords.

So this by Simberg sounds like heresy...

...the panicked public reaction to Sputnik in the United States in 1957; the young and charismatic Cold War president who ran and won on the issue of a �missile gap� with the Soviet Union in 1960; the Soviets� success in putting the first man in orbit in the third month of the young presidency; and that president�s humiliation at the Bay of Pigs. And who could have known that, just thirty months after announcing the goal �before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,� the young president would be cut down�leaving the nation, and the next president, to meet the goal now consecrated to his memory?

In the blink of an eye, a subject purely in the realm of science fiction became science fact�and a major cultural phenomenon, not to mention a huge government program. At its funding peak during the Apollo years, NASA consumed over four percent of the entire federal budget. The funding would not have flowed so freely if not for the urgency of the race with the Soviets. Had the Soviets been rushing not up to space but down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (which had in fact just been reached in 1960), the United States would have spent lavishly to get there first. Had Kennedy not been assassinated and had he won a second term, he might well have ended the Apollo program himself as it became clear that we were winning the space race and as the race became less urgent in the face of other national priorities. A couple of months before his death, Kennedy even told NASA Administrator James Webb that he �wasn�t that interested in space.�

And that has been NASA�s fundamental problem ever since. The American people and their representatives in Congress are just not that interested in space, and never have been, going all the way back to Apollo. And it shows in our space policy, which has from the start been confused and contradictory.

My emphasis.

Having burst a fantasy, Simberg proceeds to tick off the political and economic calculus that has sustained America's space program ever since, starting with LBJ's notion that it would be the key by which the South could be given a boost out of economic doldrums to the State Department's ulterior motives.

...the space station program almost died in 1993, barely surviving a congressional effort to end it, after which the Clinton administration transformed the planned station into a tool of diplomacy. As Vice President Al Gore, the chief supporter of this idea, put it, the new International Space Station would promote �international cooperation.� In less lofty terms, it was to be a foreign aid program for Russia, paid out of NASA�s budget instead of the State Department�s. The aim was to provide subsidies to Russian engineers and scientists to keep them from helping Iran and North Korea develop nuclear and missile technology (some wags called it �midnight basketball for the Russians�). It didn�t work: the Russians continued to supply rogue regimes with weaponry and technology. And now, there were new reasons for slowdowns in the space station�s schedule, as NASA had to wait for its international partners to deliver their hardware�sometimes delayed because money sent to the Russian space program ended up being spent on yachts, Mercedes, and dachas. Today, more than twenty-five years after President Reagan first announced plans for a space station, the International Space Station is still under construction.

Skipping over some historical developments, here is what Simberg says about more recent events.

First we have this insider's peek at how Obama's policy came about.

...Senator Barack Obama�s first space policy position appeared on the �Education� section of his campaign website; it bizarrely proposed that Constellation be postponed for five years in order to fund new educational programs. This was obviously an unconsidered position dreamt up by an overzealous education staffer who probably knew little or nothing about space but saw NASA as a juicy source of potential funding for his own pet programs. This gaffe caused a minor storm among the �progressives� in the space policy community, who quickly worked with the Obama campaign to devise a more serious space policy. Their efforts worked, and candidate Obama, especially on his Florida trips, took to speaking favorably about space and describing his memories of Apollo from his childhood in Hawaii, where the astronauts returning from space first came after they were plucked from the Pacific. (Obama was seven years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon.) His campaign eventually released a formal policy paper on space that was surprisingly enlightened for any presidential campaign, including advocacy of more commercial participation. By contrast, the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, never really had any coherent position on space, but that�s not unusual, either for him or for space, and of course, it wasn�t a factor in the race. Perhaps the most significant space-related action during the campaign came when, after finally defeating Senator Hillary Clinton in the long primary, the Obama team picked up her longtime space advisor: well-known Washington space policy analyst and advocate Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator.

�

Even before the new NASA leadership was sworn in, the Obama administration appointed yet another committee to review the agency�s situation. Led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine, an aerospace industry veteran, the committee consists of almost a dozen representatives from across the industry�scientists; astronauts (including Sally K. Ride, the first American woman in space); managers; and even Jeff Greason, the CEO of XCOR Aerospace, a �New Space� company developing a suborbital space transport for tourism and research.

Again, my emphasis.

From here the essay is aimed at formulating the last portion of the article, Recommendations for the Augustine Committee.
Two important points jumped out at me: the nature and importance of fuel types and delivery systems, and the overall concept of making infrastructure for private space exploration more important than handling all the particulars. The example of America's interstate highway system echoes in the background. The following two clips will capture those two ideas.

?First, the importance of fuel and how it is delivered. (I love this analogy.)

The critical requirement of a reusable space system is refuelability. Consider a thought experiment from an earlier frontier. Imagine that, on the settlers� hard trek to the western United States, there had been no vegetation along the way for the wagon-pulling horses or oxen to eat. To get across the country, each Conestoga would have to carry enough hay to feed the animals (not to mention supplies for the pioneers for months). The wagon would have been so large that the animals wouldn�t have been able to pull it. The longest distance that could be traveled would be dictated by the largest size of wagon that they could pull when it was full, and the initial speed would be very slow, picking up as the wagon grew lighter. Once the final destination was attained, the wagon and the animals would be useless without more fuel, so presumably the wagon parts would be used to build a cabin or saloon. In reality, of course, such a system would never have been affordable; had the settlers not been able to avail themselves of food and water along the way, the West would never have been settled.

Now apply that logic to space. The vast majority of the payload for heavy-lift launch vehicles is the propellant needed to send a relatively miniscule spacecraft to the Moon (or Mars or whatever destination) and back. Recall the Apollo missions� gargantuan Saturn V rocket; the tiny capsule atop it was all that came back. And much of the propellant used by Saturn V was needed just to deliver into space the propellant that will be used for the trip back, since there were no gas stations on the Moon. The Apollo missions� marginal costs were astonishingly high�but acceptable in the context of a race, since we did not have the time to set up the infrastructure, the needed service stations for fuel and food, along the way.

?And finally, the creation of infrastructure for private sector development.

Broadly speaking, then, if we want to make human spaceflight affordable and sustainable, we must develop an infrastructure that makes it possible to refuel in space. A person might reasonably object that refueling makes no difference: we will still have to pay to get the fuel into space (or to the Moon or wherever), whether it is sent in the fuel tanks or is sent in some other container. What, in the end, do we save by sending fuel ahead of time? There are three responses to this.

First... we could get by with much smaller launch systems, because we wouldn�t have to carry as much propellant merely to deliver propellant. [Argument follows.]

Second, in a space infrastructure that permits refueling, the means of getting propellant to a depot will not necessarily be the same as the means of getting other hardware there. After all, gas stations are resupplied by tanker trucks, not automobiles. [More common sense illustrations here.]

Third... use the Moon as a steppingstone to other destinations. There is an abundance of oxygen that can be cracked from the silicates of the lunar regolith, and oxygen is a major component of rocket propellant. [More here]

�

...a space-refueling infrastructure would vastly reduce the cost of propellant..., it would allow full reusability of all transportation elements... and it would result in low marginal transportation costs and great scalability.

...Propellant is cheap�liquid oxygen costs about the same as milk�and almost infinitely divisible, so it can go into orbit on less reliable (and presumably less expensive) vehicles of all sizes, with cost being the deciding factor. This would create a market for reusable space transports that may not yet be trusted for carrying passenger or expensive cargo, but could deliver the low-cost payload of propellant at a low financial risk. This opens up business opportunities for anyone who wants to provide access to orbit to sell propellant into the fuel infrastructure. Propellant could be as fungible in orbit as oil is on Earth. This would satisfy two key requirements of the Aldridge commission that NASA has heretofore ignored�supporting commercial providers and incorporating international partnerships, without becoming too dependent on any single business or country. The proliferation of profit-seeking private enterprises heading into space could result in a robust diversity and redundancy of launch capability, so that if any particular launch system is temporarily grounded (as the space shuttle has been twice), overall access to space will not be devastated (just as temporarily grounding a particular type of aircraft does not shut down the airline industry).

In this space-refueling infrastructure, propellant would be cheaper, flight hardware wouldn�t have to be as heavy, and alternative launch vehicles would flourish. Every year that we starve the kind of research and technology that would make this possible and instead spend our money on mega-launchers like the Ares V is another year that we delay developing a truly sustainable space transportation infrastructure�and becoming a truly spacefaring people.

As I write this a single volcano in Iceland has crippled all air traffic in Europe in what may be the most widespread aviation catastrophe of our lifetime. And it's not over yet. My imagination flashes back to something Simberg put in this article. What if space travel were already feasible? Wouldn't that make the current air traffic mess comparable to a broken wheel on a wagon train? Or perhaps the latter stages of peak oil? I had no idea that liquid oxygen was as cheap as milk, but if a rocket scientist says so... Besides, if electricity can be generated cheaply, why not other energy sources?

You may say I�m a dreamer, but I�m not the only one: Apollo left many orphans. But it�s not a dream shared by NASA, successive presidents, or members of Congress, at least to judge by their plans over the past four decades. We have had a monolithic government space agency for half a century at a cumulative cost of roughly half a trillion dollars (in current-year dollars). If we are going to continue to spend that order of magnitude of money�as, for political reasons, it seems we are going to do indefinitely�we should at least have something more to show for it than just a couple hundred brief trips to orbit for elite civil servants at an average cost over that period of about a couple billion dollars per flight. NASA needn�t do all the work of making space affordable and sustainable, but it ought to do something. To put it another way, it isn�t NASA�s job to put humans on Mars; it�s NASA�s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company, to put humans on Mars.