Posted on 01/23/2004 1:30:29 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
At the age of 9 I witnessed the most spectacular nondestructive man-made event in history - the launch of a Saturn V at night. From Kennedy Space Center, I watched Apollo 17, the last mission to carry men to the moon, slowly rise on its brilliant flames into the clear night sky; all the stars disappeared.
Today America's space program is in its worst position since Russia sent Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961. Today, we are less capable of putting critical assets into space than we were in the late 1970s. To maintain our technological edge and ensure our national security we need a space program that works; one with ambitious, inspiring and meaningful missions. The long-term goal of establishing a permanent moon base is such a mission.
The intermediate research and development needed to accomplish that goal will deliver jobs, technologies and other benefits right away. Reinvigorating America's space program requires a broad base of support.
This support will arise from clearly stated benefits - jobs, economic returns and technological spin-offs in both the short and long term. The transfer of technology to the commercial sector and the public is one of NASA's prime functions. A meaningful, challenging mission such as constructing a lunar national lab facility would reinvigorate that transfer, moribund in recent years because NASA has been flying with old, sometimes fatally old, technology.
The International Space Station has never delivered on its promises and may never do so if it is ever completed. The space shuttle program, hobbled and compromised from its inception is once again grounded and arguably missionless. For Florida, this is particularly damaging.
An initiative intent on re-establishing our access to space and building a reliable, commercially viable and exploitable space access infrastructure is crucial to our economy, our national security, the perceptions of the world community about American values and to our national self confidence.
The ultimate goal of a moon base may seem a long-term one; however, the process of doing it will deliver technological and economic results right away. During Apollo, one major obstacle to establishing a lunar base was the lack of water on the moon. A few years ago the classified Clementine mission confirmed the presence of water ice on the moon in large enough quantities to be useful to a base.
Many Americans believe that NASA got us to the moon and back. In fact, private industry - small and large, innovative companies contracted by NASA - did much of the rocket science. There were tensions between NASA and its contractors but the combined results are inarguable. When the Apollo program was abandoned, much of its knowledge and expertise was scattered widely or lost all together.
Fortunately many great "rocket men" remained at NASA and applied their skill and enthusiasm to the challenges and potential of the planned shuttle program. Unfortunately, the shuttle as designed by Max Faget, who holds patents on every vehicle that has ever carried American's into space, was not the shuttle we built.
The space shuttle has never worked as promised. To be successful a new space initiative will have to acknowledge the management and engineering errors of the past and apply those lessons to the new program.
The benefits of a permanent moon base are numerous. The construction of a telescope on the moon would deliver images that would outdo even the stunning results of the Hubble Space Telescope. From a permanent moon base we would be able to support large research efforts and experiments, which are impractical to perform on earth. When micro-gravity research is needed, the established moon base could launch and retrieve such experiments easily. The innovations and inventions required to build a lunar national lab facility will be returned for commercial use and exploitation further boosting the world economy.
Much of the expertise that took us to the moon no longer exists; it will have to be reinvented. This will require the knowledge and mentoring skills of the few remaining Apollo-era engineers, designers and technicians as well as the brightest and most enthusiastic minds from our country who are willing to learn from those who did it first.
It will also require NASA to change its management style; you cannot engineer your way out of bad management. A return to individual responsibility and rewarding, not discouraging, the discovery of problems and fixing them early is crucial to the success of any new space initiative and to NASA's re-establishment as a world-class organization of innovation.
Few endeavors are both difficult and complex - rocket science is both. Americans are well suited to such challenges, and when we have embarked upon them it has always paid off.
Keith McInnis is an independent space writer whose articles have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in Gainesville, but was born on Cape Canaveral, where his father was one of the space program's top rocket men from the early 1960s until he left NASA in 1984. Contact him at keith@openuniverse.com.
Correction: Faget registered the patents, but they are not his. Nothing invented under paid government contract can be owned by an individual. As a NASA engineer, he was subject to that stipulation. He gets credit, but not ownership.
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