Forgive me for a moment this off-topic commentary about the real world, but sometimes the impulse is impossible to resist…
It’s become popular to criticize on NASA these days. The argument seems to go as follows: ”Murfle murfle murfle… if the NASA would only get out of the way!… murfle murfle… Private Enterprise!… mrfle murfle… Spaceship One!… murfle murfle… Google!…. murfle murfle… PayPal!… murfle murfle murfle… Libertarians in Spaaaaace!” But for all of it’s supposed flaws, NASA still has the world’s only working spaceplane. It still has the only working space station. And it’s still the only organization that has landed men on the Moon. Ever. And they did it six times.
History is full of people who thought they could do better. Remember Japan? They were going to take over the space industry with their superior technology. Remember China? How many orbital missions have they flown? Remember VentureStar, Beal Aerospace, Rotary Rocket? Getting into orbit is hard! You need to fly at Mach 23. That’s eight times faster than Spaceship One! Sixty-four times the kinetic energy! To reach that kind of speed, you need more than Burt Rutan and a hybrid rocket motor. You need powerful fuels, engines with a high specific impulse, materials that can withstand fantastic temperatures and pressures. You need guide the ship, fly it, and keep it under control. You need to deal with instabilities and vibrations that could blow it to fragments or tear it apart. And you need to keep the thing from exploding… keeping in mind that a rocket engine is basically one big controlled explosion.
That’s why launch vehicles are so complex. It takes more to build one than wishful thinking. This isn’t to say they can’t be improved. Most rockets are built for the commercial market by private companies like Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and ULA. Their management has considerable incentive to get costs down and reliability up, and vehicles like the Delta IV — the unglamorous workhorse of the modern launch industry — have become a commercial success.
So why aren’t we on Mars already? There are two reasons. First, NASA has ended up in situation where managers will be penalized for their failures, but never… ever… be rewarded for success. The result is predictable: many cover themselves in paperwork. And contractors who should be doing science or designing equipment find themselves creating reports about how Everything Is Fine to protect those managers. This is a sure way to destroy an organization. It has destroyed any number of large companies. It brought General Motors to the brink of bankruptcy. It brought us Windows Vista. Viewed in this light, it’s a testimony to the dedication of NASA’s scientists and engineers that they’ve kept the agency alive!
The second reason is best explained by the image below.
This the X-20. It is a small reusable space shuttle that was under construction and scheduled to fly in the 1960s (!!!) before the program was terminated by Robert MacNamara. The history of the American space program is littered with vehicles like this that were canceled when they were almost ready to fly: the X-20, the National Aerospace Plane, the X-33, the X-34, and now Constellation. Some were canceled by Congress. Others were canceled by the President. A few seem to have been canceled just for the heck of it. Now imagine yourself a senior manager. You’ve dedicated thirty years of your life to five successive programs, every one of which was cut short by some previous administration when it was on the brink of flight. A new administration, with great fanfare, has announced the next Great New Plan That Will Usher In New Era Of Space Exploration. Do you believe it… this time? And what do you do?
I’m also guilty of piling on NASA. I thought they were given too much money and not enough direction after the successful moon landings, and the Space Shuttle turned into a giant boondoggle; over-missioned, overpriced and overly complex. Not sure how the solid state boosters got in there, but it was bound to be a disaster eventually. I DON’T agree the agency is broken beyond repair and should get out of the way for private concerns. If those concerns truly believe in capitalism, let them prove themselves the old-fashioned way.
As for current and future missions, I’m not sure a manned expedition to Mars is a priority. It appears to be just a larger, much more distant and dangerous Moon. Yes, there are things to be learned and all discovery is good, but the money and effort to get there have to be weighed against that good. Nearer to home, there are discoveries being made in our own space station, communication satellites to be launched and old satellites to be brought back before they add to the growing Sargasso of space flotsam. Not as glamorous as Mars but still necessary. And as you say, no one but NASA is equipped to do it.
Kona said: “Not sure how the solid state boosters got in there, but it was bound to be a disaster eventually.”
The solids were used for 2 reasons in 1972. 1) The liquid strapons would require the shuttle development budget to spend $1.05 Billion dollars in its peak funding year. The solid strapons promised (and later did not deliver) a peak of shuttle funding of $.946 billion. Since a limit of $1.0 billion had been set, the OMB took the easy recommendation . 2) President Nixon owed a very large political debt to Senator Jake Garn, of Utah, where the plant to make the solid oxidizer already was, and where a plant was built to make the segments of the SRBs.
Kona also said: “I DON’T agree the agency is broken beyond repair and should get out of the way for private concerns.”
No speaker at the recent Space Access Conference called for the dissolution of NASA. Indeed, Jeff Greason pointed out that MSFC, KSFC, and JSC could not be built today, because the EPA would never give them permits for construction. So, if they die, we cannot replace them, and we *might* need the larger boosters they can build and launch someday. Nevertheless, it was generally agreed, that if NASA behaviors did not change, it *would* die because the Congress’s distrust ofNASA would rise to high for funding to pass.
Certainly the individual engineers and staff of NASA deserve great praise for getting anything at all done in such an environment. Indeed I know of few space activists who denigrate the line people at NASA. What *is* heavily criticized is two levels of NASA action.
One is continually tweaking its policy to get a NASA-only Human Spaceflight Operations environment in the US. An example being that Mike Griffin threw out a perfectly good plan, and substituted one that had a publicly funded NASA booster “competing” openly with privately funded suppliers of crewed orbital launch, two of whom already had excellent boosters flying. This made it far harder to raise money for anyone else not already flying with an Angel investor. It was meant to do just that. That way, NASA’s COTS program was the only way the private companies could hope to get to orbit with crewed spacecraft. Thus, they would be more and more under NASA’s thumb, through the COTS that was mandated by the Aldridge Commission, and could not be ignored in 2005. This is the sort of policy dance that NASA did when they decided that *all* US satellites would be launched on the Shuttle in the 1980s.
The other past behavior of NASA managers that gets them no slack from New Space advocates is 25 years of specific attempts to scuttle private launch companies that were not already NASA contractors. In 1996, I was privileged to sit for 90 minutes in an alcove at the Space ‘96 Conference, and listen to Max Hunter’s wisdom about spaceflight and rocket development. Max was the man who took the Thor IRBM from concept drawings to successful test in 15 months. His knowledge was deep and broad.
However, he spent 45 minutes of that telling me about attempts by Mr Mueller to recruit him in 1979 for their scheme to sink” Space Services Inc.” the first non-NASA contractor company to get a rocket to the pad since the late 1940s. He was told “Max, we’ve just *got* to stop these people! The mistakes they will make during their learning curve will destroy the reputation of anyone launching rockets, including NASA.” After SSI blew up their first example of their first rocket on the pad, as NASA had often done, Mr. Mueller wiggled his way into SSI, and got them to use old Minuteman stages, that were in limited supply anyway, and far to costly to produce to compete with NASA’s Space Shuttle prices.
Not surprisingly, SSI ran out of money before anything got to orbit. This history was repeated more indirectly with Pan American Spaceways and other private and public efforts (SEI, and DC-X/Delta Clipper) up to 2004.
Its harder to do that sort of thing when Elon Musk has all the money he needs, and Discovery killed seven more astronauts. There are remnants of that attitude yet, and they come out in policy shaving like Griffin’s, when he set up his co-opting in COTS, through “competition” with an Ares 1 program that had 20-50 times the development funding that private teams would spend. If it once again becomes specific and blatant as before, then we can once again expect to hear Jim Davidson’s old cry from many more mouth’s, …”NASA, Delenda Est!”
It’s really up to NASA managers behavior.
Kona says “Yes, there are things to be learned and all discovery is good, but the money and effort to get there have to be weighed against that good. Nearer to home, there are discoveries being made in our own space station, communication satellites to be launched and old satellites to be brought back before they add to the growing Sargasso of space flotsam.”
It’s not just what we learn ON Mars but what we learn on the way there. The engineering and psychological problems with extended spaceflight, that sort of thing, we can only learn so much about those things close to Earth, even if you try to simulate a Mars mission in orbit there’s still the (relative) safety net of being in orbit where someone could get you down if it became necessary, on a real mission to Mars you don’t get that.
The Moon program developed LOTS of technologies very rapidly, it was a hard problem with a well defined goal and a time limit, that sort of environment tends to breed piratical solutions quickly.
Even without the pressure of the space race going to Mars could develop the foundations of future space exploration further from Earth, the sorts of stuff you need before you can even thing of colonization, that’s generally the overall end goal most people pushing for a manned Mars mission have in mind.