American Spaceflight: Lack of Clear Goals and Funding

Having been involved in a number of projects of various kinds in my career, I've always preferred being on those with clearly defined goals, and have tried to my utmost to avoid those with loose, nebulous, undefined goals. It's much more difficult to hit a moving target, and where the target is undefined in the first place, it is impossible.

Sort of typical for a lot of Bush Jr. goals, NASA's previous plan for returning to the Moon and perhaps on to Mars was pretty well defined, but it had another fatal flaw--a lack of funding. More than anything else, that's what has done in America's manned spaceflight program.

Last year, the White House Office of Science and Technology commissioned the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee to research and report on the status of where America is going in regards to manned spaceflight. In their report, issued last October, they hit the nail right on the head in the first couple of sentences:

"The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources."

[Here's a link to the report itself; however this is a 7.62Mb download, so if you've got a slow connection it's going to take a while.]

NASA's finest hour came back in the late 60's and early 70's, when they flew astronauts to the Moon. This was a result of having both a clear mission and sufficient funding to do the job. The U.S.-led coalition in the First Gulf War was successful because we had a clear mission (drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait) and had the supplies (mostly materiel stockpiled to fight the Soviets) and funding needed to make it happen. It's not enough to make grand political speeches and burst forth in flowery rhetoric, spewing pre-digested sound bites for mass media consumption--money in sufficient amounts is required. It's neatly summed up in a quote from the movie The Right Stuff--no bucks, no Buck Rogers.

So, what are America's goals in terms of human spaceflight? The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy lists the current administration's goals (a link to the document here), which is long on those nebulous 'sounds-good' goals (including the typical 'grow the American economy') and very short on specifics. Nowhere does it spell out time frames or specific goals as to what America intends to accomplish.

Some highlights:

• Adds $6 billion over 5 years to NASA's budget to 'enable us to embark on an ambitious 21st century program of human space exploration', but does not give any specifics as to what that program would include or when it would take place.



• Kills off the Constellation program, which was to be NASA's replacement for the Space Shuttle. "Instead, we are launching a bold new effort that invests in American ingenuity to develop more capable and innovative technologies for future space exploration." (And here's the heart of the problem--for the first time since the early 60's, the United States will not have any sort of domestically developed or built spacecraft capable of taking humans into orbit, and not even have any such spacecraft in development beyond the 'drawing board' stage.) Again, this lacks specifics as to what technologies are being developed or when we expect these investments to start showing results.



• Extends the service life of the International Space Station to 2020 or possibly beyond. Of all the proposals made in this document, this is the only one that makes sense (to me, at least). The Bush Jr. administration called for dismantling and destroying the ISS (by controlled re-entry, crashing it into the Pacific Ocean) in 2015. In other words, after nearly 15 years of construction (and untold billions in costs) we'll just crash it into the ocean after just 5 more years. ISS should have always been a more permanent facility; in fact, it would seem to me that it's obviously modular construction would allow for at least a limited repair and replacement capability in orbit, provided (of course) that a suitable transportation system (i.e., the Space Shuttle or some suitable replacement) were available to transport and retrieve modules needing repair and/or replacement.



• Creates several new programs 'to transform the state of the art in space technologies . . . potential 'game-changing' technologies . . . all intended to increase the reach and reduce the costs of future human space exploration as well as other NASA, government, and commercial space activities.' Again, it's long on grand inspiring pronouncements and very short on details.



• Improves the global climate change research and monitoring system, and increases NASA's efforts to 'bring cleaner, safer, and more efficient transportation to our skies'. Once again, sounds good but short on specifics. Also, we're getting into some inter-departmental stuff here. It's the FAA (in conjunction with the NTSB) that's supposed to make sure our skies are safer. Furthermore, since the American A300 crash in Queens, NY in November 2001, there's not been a major fatality accident of a major U.S. air carrier. All the other commercial fatality crashes since then have involved regional air carriers, and the recurring theme with these is inadequate enforcement of existing regulations, i.e., the FAA and the air carriers themselves not doing their job--not a technology issue. There is no apparent technology that needs to be developed to improve aviation safety. But I digress.



• Calls for a 'robust' robotic exploration effort, to include a probe to fly through the Sun's atmosphere and other new astronomical observatories. As before, other than the proposal to fly a probe through the Sun's atmosphere, there's no specifics. Noticeably missing is a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, which, with the demise of the Space Shuttle program, no longer has a means of being serviced and therefore has only a limited amount of time before it too comes down, burning up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

In other words, our new space policy is long on fine-sounding rhetoric and short on specifics. Now, having been involved in a variety of projects, sometimes it's nice not to have specifics. After all, if you don't have a deadline, you're never behind schedule. If you don't have a goal as to where you're going, you're never lost. In both cases, it's very easy to go back and get more funding, as no one expects you to get anything done according to any sort of schedule or plan. In short, what we've got for space policy looks like a great way to spend a lot of money on a lot of things that may or may not work, and to continue wasting time, getting nowhere at all except for the possibility of maybe developing some new piece of technology. And while we're at it, we'll be 'creating thousands of new jobs' at the expense of eliminating thousands of others. It smacks of yet another big funding giveaway to the biggest corporations who may or may not be able to deliver on what they promise to be able to do, but that's OK--we don't have any concrete goals in the first place, so it's hard to say if they meet those goals or not.

Like so many other things, what the United States needs in terms of space policy is clearly defined goals and a rough schedule of when we expect to meet those goals. Of course, no one should expect scientists to produce 'game-changing' technologies on a schedule--if in fact they're ever able to do so. There's going to be 'dry holes', to use an old oilfield term common here in Oklahoma. But we still need some clear direction as to what course we're setting. And this is something that's clearly absent in this new space policy.

So what should our goals be? That's clearly something for debate.

I think that, in some respects, trying to encourage commercial space development is a very good idea. It's not as if there's not already commercial space launches going on. Boeing has their Sea Launch partnership. SpaceX has developed it's own rockets and plans a manned spacecraft (though at least according to Wikipedia has had only a 40% success rate with it's unmanned rockets). Orbital Sciences Corporation has also been launching commercial satellites for years. And of course there's Richard Branson's audaciously-named Virgin Galactic Spacelines, which, despite all the hype, offers only a suborbital flight that can only barely leave the Earth's atmosphere, and is incapable of reaching even low Earth orbit.

Many years ago, my wife found a copy of G. Harry Stine's book, Halfway to Anywhere, at a Dollar General, and bought it for me. In it, Mr. Stine documented what was the state of the art in single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft in the early to mid 1990s. At that time, it looked like a great revolution was about to take place in the commercial development of space. Douglas Aircraft had developed their DC-X/Delta Clipper testbed and looked like they were going to succeed in scaling it up. Lockheed had their VentureStar spacecraft under development, and things were going good. There were supposedly many different companies lining up to have literally thousands of satellites launched into orbit, so many that there was bound to be a bottleneck due to not enough rockets and launch sites to go around. There were all sorts of applications that required commercial space transportation to make them possible, and the financial payoffs were clear and just around the corner.

So, what happened? Douglas promptly was bought out by their great rival Boeing, which killed off the Douglas commercial aircraft line and the DC-X testbed program (on the left), among other things. Lockheed's VentureStar (on the right) lost it's funding in 2001, though the company has been trying to keep the project alive in a much reduced form. There have been a flurry of smaller competitors that have popped up here and there, gotten their requisite article in Popular Mechanics, and then faded into obscurity.

Why is this? If the future was so rosy in 1994, why did it never materialize? Because it wasn't all that rosy to begin with. It was, to a certain degree, a product in search of a market.

Businesses exist to make money. If they don't make money, they die. With big companies, they study things before they jump into anything, and then if the return on investment is longer than they thought, or is in question, they'll generally cut their losses and move on. When Boeing, for example, decides to develop a new airliner, they first study the potential market for that airliner. If there's no market, or not enough of a market, they abandon the project and find some other new airplane that more closely matches what their customers want. I recall that prior to the start of the development program for their newest airliner, the 787 Dreamliner, they first looked at a high sub-sonic airliner, that would get to its destinations faster than the current generation of airliners, and would therefore have the potential to make more flights per day. However, their market studies showed only a lukewarm interest, so they dropped it. Similarly, Boeing didn't see all that big a market for a competing super-jumbo jet to match Airbus' A380 double-decker, so they didn't develop one.

This is why no one developed a new spacecraft capable of carrying humans into orbit. The technology is there, and has been there for decades. There are no major technical hurdles--it's just that there's no market for it. Now, the Obama adminstration and NASA (by abdicating it's leadership role) is attempting to 'jump-start' commercial manned spaceflight by creating a market--flying American astronauts to the ISS, which is what the Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz capsules already do.

Now, other than flying astronauts to the ISS, is there any other market for commercial manned spaceflight? There's tourism, but that's about it. Oh sure, someone might be able to offer an in-orbit satellite repair service (as was done with the Shuttle) but if there was a market for this service, we'd have already seen this happen.

Do we really want to have another government-subsidized transportation system? Something like Amtrack, but going into orbit? Is this really a good use of taxpayer dollars (or in reality, due to the massive deficit spending we're doing, with money borrowed from China)?

Furthermore, how long does it take to develop a manned spacecraft? The ISS, even with an extension/reprieve, is only going to be up there 10 more years. If it's going to take 6 to 8 years to develop a manned spacecraft (it's taken Boeing more than 7 years to bring the 787 airliner from the initial concept to its first flight, and it's still not forecast to be in commercial service until the end of this year, so a 6-8 year development time for a manned spacecraft is probably optimistic), and that only leaves 2 to 4 years for these new commercial spacecraft to have a market. Supposedly we'll have some sort of new program for something by then, but as I've pointed out above, there's no plan to develop something new. So, in order to make back their development costs, these manufacturers are only going to have a few years worth of launches, which means they're going to have to charge more per flight than they would if they had 20 or 30 years of launches to look forward to.