How NASA Has Shortchanged US Space Effort

I was in Mission Control when Neil Armstrong announced that the Eagle had landed. The applause was unexpectedly muted as we were all overwhelmed by the significance of the moment. Nobody had any doubt that Tranquility Base was the first step in an expansion into space that would drive human progress for centuries to come.

We had of course all seen the 1968 Kubrick/Clarke movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the facilities depicted there seemed entirely reasonable. In our lifetimes, we expected to see hotels in orbit, translunar shuttles operated by commercial airlines, and settlements on the Moon. Only the alien monolith was questionable.

Despite cutbacks, NASA has spent a total of $450 billion since Apollo 11 (adjusted for inflation to 2003 dollars). That very large sum was more than enough to fund the developments that Wernher von Braun predicted for the end of the 20th Century, but we have not even started on any of them.

If it had been spent wisely, as seed money to stimulate commercial development, we could have established a growing, self-sustaining extraterrestrial enterprise, offering opportunities for thousands of people to live and work off Earth - but the sad truth is that we have less capability in human spaceflight now than in 1970.

In 1969, we landed on the Moon, but now we cannot leave low Earth orbit (LEO). NASA claimed that the shuttle would be fifteen times cheaper to fly (per pound of payload) than the Saturn vehicles used in Apollo, but it is actually three times more expensive.

The average cost of each flight is a staggering $760 million. After a mission, the time required to prepare a shuttle for the next flight was supposed to be less than two weeks, but in practice tens of thousands of technicians spend three to six months rebuilding each "reusable" shuttle after every flight. Worst of all, the shuttle is a needlessly complex, fragile and dangerous vehicle, which has killed fourteen astronauts so far.

In 1973, we had a space station called Skylab, with berths for three astronauts. NASA let it reenter and break up over Western Australia. A second Skylab was built, which could have become the Earth terminal of a lunar transportation system.

It is now a tourist attraction at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, and the Saturn V to launch it is nothing more than a monstrous lawn ornament, moldering on its side at Johnson Space Center (JSC).

Now we are building the International Space Station (ISS), which is still incomplete after twenty years of effort. Its orbital inclination, chosen for political reasons, makes it useless as a base for future missions beyond Earth.

In the original design, the ISS had a crew of six or seven, but cost overruns have forced deletion of a habitation module and a lifeboat that could return that crew to Earth in emergency. The shrunken station, called "core complete," will accommodate only three astronauts (who will use a Russian Soyuz as a lifeboat). In normal operations, only one of the crew will be American.

The cutbacks gutted the research program, by eliminating much of the scientific equipment aboard the station, reducing the scheduled shuttle flights in support from six to four per year, and leaving the small crew with very little time to spare from housekeeping tasks.

If there are no unusual maintenance problems, the lone American may average 90 minutes per day working on the research that is the alleged purpose of the facility. He or she will conduct experiments by following a checklist, because the small crew precludes specialists in relevant disciplines. The scientific program is thus perfunctory at best, with rote experiments of a kind that might win prizes at a high school science fair. (2)

The life-cycle cost of the ISS, including development expenses and shuttle flights, amounts to at least $8 billion per year (2003 dollars). This is 60% more than the entire budget of the National Science Foundation, which supports thousands of earthbound scientists.

US taxpayers have a right to expect that such expensive research will be of a quality that wins Nobel Prizes, but what we are actually getting are pro forma experiments that occupy a small fraction of the time of one person.

The cost is preposterous: it amounts to nearly fifteen million dollars ($15,000,000!) for each hour of scientific work by the American crewmember. NASA has no chance whatsoever of convincing scientists that this is a reasonable allocation of scarce research funds.

Until the Columbia accident, NASA had expected 4 shuttle flights per year to the ISS, and one more for missions unrelated to the station (e.g., to lower inclination). Now the shuttle may be restricted to orbits in the same plane as the ISS, so that the shuttle can go dock there if it is damaged during launch. In any case, present plans call for operation of the ISS until at least 2016, so there will be at least 65 more shuttle flights (5 per year).

Based on experience to date (two shuttles lost in 113 missions), the accident probability is a little less than 2% on each flight. Astronauts may accept this risk because there is no other way to fly in space, but they would of course prefer a safer system. As a matter of public policy, however, only a compelling national interest can justify so hazardous a venture. The ISS presents no such necessity.

With these odds, the probability of losing at least one more shuttle during the life of the ISS (i.e., in 65 flights) is nearly 70%. In other words, NASA is gambling its future, and the lives of astronauts, on a program that has less than one chance in three of avoiding disaster. This is like playing Russian roulette with a revolver in which four out of the six chambers are loaded. Only a suicidal lunatic would accept such a proposition.

After wasting three decades (and a perfectly good Cold War), frustrating the dreams of a whole generation of space enthusiasts, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars, NASA's net achievement is a space station that has no definable purpose except to serve as a destination for shuttle flights.

We would not need the shuttle missions if we did not have the station, and we would not need the station if we did not need something for the shuttles to do. The entire human spaceflight program has thus become an exercise in futility.

The lack of progress has not been due to insufficient funding or to technological problems, but to a series of blunders by NASA management. NASA engineers did not understand the popular enthusiasm aroused by Apollo. They thought the Giant Leap for Mankind was not the lunar landing itself, but the technological prowess it displayed.

This led to the mistaken inference that the way to maintain popular support, and hence generous funding, was to propose megaprojects of great technical complexity, regardless of whether they were intrinsically interesting.

They are surprised and disappointed that the public are unimpressed by the shuttle and ISS, despite their technical virtuosity. The Giant Leap delusion persists today, in the form of proposals for a flags-and-footprints mission to Mars.

In reality, of course, Apollo existed because Jack Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev chose to make space a principal arena for competition between the superpowers. The purposes of the program were to overcome the perceived Soviet lead in space, and to foreclose the possibility that the USSR would reach the Moon first and claim it as Soviet territory. No Congress was willing to spend more than the minimum needed to achieve those objectives.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 relieved concerns about Soviet hegemony by banning weapons and territorial claims on the Moon. This allowed Congress to respond to Lyndon Johnson's simultaneous expansion of social programs and the war in VietNam by slashing funding for NASA. As shown in Figure 1, the budget peaked in 1966, and then fell precipitously.

Despite these obvious trends, NASA developed grandiose visions of the post-Apollo program, which culminated in the Space Task Group Report of 1969. (3)

-a manned Mars mission in 1981; and expansion of the Earth orbit space base to 100 people by 1985.

The other options retained all these objectives, but reduced the cash flow by delaying some of them for up to five years.

Figure 1 also shows the funding profiles required by the STG proposals (in 2003 dollars). Richard Nixon responded immediately, making it perfectly clear that the whole STG Report was sheer fantasy, and that NASA should expect less money, not more.

Given this fiscal reality, NASA could have adopted an incremental approach to space development. The obvious plan was to launch the second Skylab, with minor modifications to permit a long life on orbit, and to support it initially with a simple ballistic capsule (such as a proposed stretch of the Gemini capsule, called the Big G, which could carry seven to nine people) atop an expendable booster.

In time, a small reusable orbiter would replace the capsule, and the booster could eventually become reusable too. Beyond that, the scope of the program would depend on funding, but might include a permanent lunar base.

This plan was unacceptable because it had two dreadful defects. First, it involved a series of small, affordable steps, instead of the Giant Leaps that many in NASA thought essential to public support.

The second and much worse problem was that Skylab was a project run by Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and not by JSC. As JSC Deputy Director Chris Kraft said, people in Houston believed that "being in charge of manned spaceflight was their birthright," and they resented Marshall's intrusion.

Kraft once told me that a space station was unnecessary, because the shuttle would be so cheap that astronauts could commute to orbit, returning home every evening.

The claim that the shuttle would be cheap was based on an economic model that was totally divorced from reality. It assumed that the shuttle would fly 60 times per year, so that fixed costs could be amortized over many missions, and that the direct operating cost would amount to less than $250/pound (2003 dollars). If these estimates had proven correct, we would have flown the shuttle 1500 times by now (and presumably would have killed about 200 astronauts).

The worst mistake made by NASA managers was that they allowed disputes over who would be in charge to influence the direction of the program. Their preoccupation with intercenter turf wars obscured the writing on the wall.

The real lesson of the STG debacle was that a healthy program was not sustainable if funded only by taxpayers. NASA could retain exclusive control of an insignificant, moribund program, or it could accept a supporting role in a growing program, funded by investors and controlled by entrepreneurs.

Given these options, NASA chose the first - but instead of doing the best it could with limited funds, it dissipated its resources in the care and feeding of the white elephants called shuttle and ISS.

The Article says"
"Despite cutbacks, NASA has spent a total of $450 billion since Apollo 11
...
If it had been spent wisely, as seed money to stimulate commercial development, we could have established a growing, self-sustaining extraterrestrial enterprise, offering opportunities for thousands of people to live and work off Earth "

Apparently this writer has no idea of the cost of anything these days.
450billion of "seed money"? How many global crossings or enrons would that have funded? The amount of graft expands to empty the available coffers. And 450billion over 40 years would buy you didly squat.

Despite cutbacks, NASA has spent a total of $450 billion since Apollo 11 (adjusted for inflation to 2003 dollars).

450 billion...that's a large chunk of change. We really should itemize to get a sense of what this money was spent on.

Let's see...there's the Apollo 12-17 missions. That had to ring up a hefty amount. Hell, the overtime on Apollo 13 had to be sizable to say the least.

Then we've got loads of R&D that -- lo and behold -- was paid for under NASA's budget and given without fee to the commercial sector; the results of which were miniaturized computers. (sarcasm) Nope...no use to anyone there. (/sarcasm)

Then we have the Mars Viking program. That was $3 billion dollars in 1970s money (not adjusted for 2003). And then we have Galileo, the Voyagers, R&D into reusable spacecraft (which culminated in the Shuttle program), Mars Pathfinder, the Hubble Space Telescope, SIRTF, Cassini-Huygens, and a host of other projects spanning three continents (the Deep Space Network resides in the U.S., Spain and Australia).

And this is just barely scratching the surface of a program that makes its living in building spacecraft that contain computers and other hardware that must be fault-tolerant, hardened systems that can thrive in the harshest of conditions. The neatest trick being that the systems must be resilient enough to compensate for unplanned problems when they're millions of miles from the nearest technician.

I'd like to see someone do better.

Talk is cheap. And armchair rocket scientists are a dime a dozen.

-Jay

I worked on the ISS for a few months for a company, for another company, for NASA. I think both of you have been a bit over-optimistic of commercial developement.

Companies are only going to invest in space when they can be "pretty" sure they'll get something useful out of it. Sure companies will send up communication devices. I could see a consortium of cell phone companies paying for that really acurate mapping of the earth they did while I was there. I cann't see them putting a man on the moon or Mars, to sell pay-per-view of it. If the US wants more than that they'll have to pay for it.

Some(not me) argue that we shouldn't be wasting our time with such lofty goals and rather concentrate on problems here at home.

Here's how NASA is supposed to work: They do the R&D for which it is hard to organise a consortium of companies for. If they find anything cool (like silicon chips) every US company has a right to it. When NASA needs something simple and repeatative done, like our job (calculating stress on ISS), they write up the requirements and hire the lowest bidder. This is supposed to take advantage of corporate efficiancy.

Now why is NASA not some super efficient thing? God I could go on all day. I'm sure the politically appointed leadership hasn't be perfect. Even if it were you have trade offs in deciding how big and small to subcontract. If you made one big contract to get too the moon, the bidders will have no idea how much it will cost and US will have no idea if they can deliver. If you cut the contracts too small, the bidding overhead and technical problems of interfacing all the parts eats you alive.

I'm not sure what guys mean by corporate seed money. If goverment should be giving companies money, it must be based on success. If you state simple goals and let companies bid and only pay them on success (fining on failure), they'll find their own investors. Are you suggesting give people money to say "hey we've got space company. we'll do R&D"? Just sounds like corporate wellfare to me. Sorry, maybe I've just misunderstood what's being proposed here.

"Talk is cheap. And armchair rocket scientists are a dime a dozen. "

Amen, here are ways to put that $450 billion in perspective:

"President Bush's proposed military budget for fiscal 2003 will be $379 billion"
http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/budget.html

National debt: $6,562,093,646,540.74
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Not that it is an insignificant sum. $450 billion is a bit over $1000 bucks per person. But, like you said we've gotten stuff for the money.

Umm, well I'd consider the ISS an example of this horrible "internationalism". I remember hearing the Italians were keeping up thier end and were offering to build more than their original share of moduals. I also don't think you should be complaining about the Russians shuttling our astronauts up and down, until we fix the shuttle.

First you complain that we spend so much money on it. Now you're complaining that others want to pitch in?

Blaming the French is such crap. If the American public cared about the space program like we did back in the 60s, NASA would have the money and more importantly the political attention on it, to do lots of cool things. They don't. We can either change that, or watch the European space program catch up.

Taking the long view of human history, exploration and colonization have always been driven by the lure of abundant, cheap, and profitable resources (both territory and commodities). A sustained effort to explore ane exploit space will have to be based upon the same dynamic. NASA has been looking at space exploration almost exclusively as a basic science research enterprise. Economic development and exploitation of space is seen almost as an afterthought -- something for PR to help sell continued funding to politicians. The selling that really needs to take place is in the marketplace, thus generating the private-sector funds needed to turn the space program into a viable, self-sustaining enterprise.

Naa, I stopped working at NASA after less than 6 months. They do lots of crappy inefficient things, like any large organisation (especially ones not driven by profit). Then again this is how we send people to the moon, build nukes, and well try to build star wars, hand out contracts to the likes of Lockead and Boeing.

You can tell me since it's not profitable we shouldn't do it. This guy thinks he has a better way to do it and I doubt he does. I say either leave it to industry or deal with government waste.

Oh, waste isn't quite the problem. Thomas Edison understood that -- he'd try one thousand things to get one single that yielded value. Waste is good. As long as it is NOT all waste.

There are two mighty problems with the government way of business. Due not so much to government as govrenment, but government as monopoly, government as sole authority. Government comes to pick a way of doing things, of looking at things and freezes on it. Intellectual vesting, power-base vesting. To some extent it doesn't matter if that way works or not. The one thing that MUST work about the chosen way is that it maintain the franchise. In that regard, as an undeniable and fearsome display of power and might, it's better to pick a way that doesn't work and fiercely, batteringly, kick-heads-in-ingly force submission to it. That is mighty problem ONE.

Mighty problem TWO is related, cojunctive. It is that I am NOT kidding when I've been suggesting that OUR FEDERAL EMPLOYEES have become a class of nobility. And once they become more aware of that -- which they are becoming -- and the non-government economy turn sourish and dreckish which it is -- we will all the dynamics in place to a Federal Feudal system that will be the devil to throw off.

There is something wrong with the search engine or the way we use it. This article was posted at least twice last week. It's obviously an important article that concerns many people. There should be a way to combine all the threads when this happens so instead of 3 threads with 40 posts each and 3 groups of FReepers who do not know the others exist, there would be one thread with 120 posts and one interest group. This would only increase the power of FR.

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