NASA just closed their latest application drive for astronaut candidates. A staggering 6372 people applied – the second-largest candidate group in NASA’s entire history! (Personally, I’m rooting for this one.) What gives? Do people love science and technology a lot more all of a sudden? Is it American pride? Is it Newt’s promise to build a Moon base for less than $2 billion?*
It is clear to anyone who follows space activities that the end of the Space Shuttle program was not anything close to the end of NASA itself. The astronaut program is no exception: every few months, a Russian Soyuz blasts off carrying three human beings up to the Space Station or back down to Earth. The completion of the Shuttle program also meant the completion of Space Station construction, allowing the ISS to become an orbital scientific workstation in earnest.
Perhaps it’s the profusion of photoblogging, twittering, and facebooking astronauts driving the upsurge. When we have astronauts writing stuff like this, while in orbit, allowing people to get their own glimpse of life in space, it’s a small wonder that people still want to be astronauts!
* In case you’re curious, $1.9 billion would be 10% of NASA’s budget (devoted to prizes, of course). For comparison, the entire Apollo program cost approximately $25 billion. In 1973 dollars.
Artist's concept of exoplanet systems. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
Ever since the launch of the Kepler space telescope, it seems like extrasolar planet discoveries have been rolling in constantly. But this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting, there were several big announcements.
The first was the discovery of the smallest exoplanetary system yet, containing the smallest planets known. The star in question is a red dwarf, and none of its three (known) planets is larger than the Earth. One of them is about half Earth’s radius – approximately the same size as Mars.
The second announcement was of the discovery of an object orbiting another star that seems to have a vast ring system – larger even than Saturn’s majestic companion rings! Astronomers found the rings when they passed in front of their planet’s star, dimming its light. I think the truly amazing thing about this discovery is not just that our telescopes can detect transits of rings, but that the scientists analyzing this event tracked the variation of sunlight shining through the rings and discovered that these rings, like Saturn’s, have gaps. Gaps in ring systems form when the ring particles get into an orbital resonance with another orbiting body: the second body’s gravitational tugs push the ring particle at just the right frequency to knock it away from that orbital radius, clearing out a gap. Furthermore, computer models indicate that rings around planets are generally unstable – they spread out and disperse. Saturn’s rings, for instance, would not have lasted to be the age that they are – if not for the presence of shepherd moons. My point is this: in order for this extrasolar planet to have rings, especially rings with gaps, it must have moons.
Third, and most exciting in my opinion, there has been a survey of star systems imaged with a gravitational lensing technique, and it concluded that there are more planets in our galaxy than stars. Put another way: on average, every star has at least one planet! Astronomers used to wonder: is the Solar System exceptional in the universe? And, if so, what made it so special? Now, there are more and more indications that planetary systems like ours are not just out there – they’re downright common!
The thing that makes exoplanet research so fascinating to me is the sheer variety of worlds discovered. There are so many stars out there, and so many planets, that it seems almost harder to imagine a world that can’t happen than a world that might. And some of the newly discovered worlds might give George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry a run for their money! Nothing drove this point home to me more than an astronomy lecture I attended a few years ago, in grad school: the speaker talked about M dwarf stars, and how the “habitable zone”* of some of those stars would be at such small orbital radius that a planet in that zone would be tidally locked – orbiting once per day, always pointing one hemisphere towards the star. But, continued the speaker, we have discovered exoplanet orbits with rather high eccentricity – and those worlds would “rock” back and forth around their tidal equilibrium. On those worlds, you could stand on a beach and watch the sun rise over the ocean…then, a few hours later, the sun would reach its zenith, turn around, and sink right back down to set at the same point on the horizon!
Then, a few weeks later, I heard another speaker talking about Gliese 581g – alias “Zarmina” – shortly after its (potential) discovery. This planet, if it truly exists, lies smack-dam in that habitable zone* but would be locked to its star, so one hemisphere is always day and one is always dark. Naturally, many sci-fi fans attached themselves to the idea that only the strip of land near the terminator would be habitable. (io9 even posted a bunch of whimsical concept art from the hypothetical Zarmina Minitry of Tourism.) But in this lecture, I learned that the climate on such a world would likely make it even stranger – rather than being habitable in a twilight band circling the globe, the world would be encased in ice with a liquid sea directly beneath its sun: the astronomer called this “eyeball” Earth. What strange and intriguing cultures might arise on such a world?
Chances are, if you can imagine it arising from the physics we know, it does exist out there. Now the questions become: how can we explore these places? And how many other explorers are out there, looking back at us?
* I find the term “habitable zone” bothersome, because we have coined the term based on a single data point. However, the alternative “liquid-water zone” is misleading, because we know that there is liquid water in our outer Solar System. (Heck, Europa may even be habitable, we don’t know!) But “liquid-surface-water zone,” which is what astronomers really mean by this term, is just awkward.
In grad school, I became a big fan of NIAC (the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts) and the Office of the Chief Technologist. These wings of the NASA organization support research into far-flung, visionary technological concepts. They are the parts of NASA pushing for the kinds of research that will usher in the next generation of space exploration.
The new NIAC call for proposals is out. Interestingly, this time it includes a specific call for “citizen science.” So, if you’ve got some crazy ideas for spacecraft technology…why not try for it?
Decadal surveys and other prioritizations of potential NASA exploration missions often rank one thing very highly: a sample-return mission from Mars. However, I think there are some much more scientifically interesting, technologically challenging, and engaging to the public mission proposals out there. This is one: a Titanian UAV!
The idea is to send an airborne vehicle to Saturn’s moon Titan which would fly around the moon, observing surface features from its high vantage point. A powered flyer, as opposed to a balloon, has the advantage of being able to travel to a specific location: such as the moon’s liquid lakes!
The proposal team uses some clever mission planning approaches to handle the limitations of the aircraft: for example, using glide phases to hoard power for downlink sessions. Their nominal mission duration is one year: a year of exploring another planet from the air, a year of images and science data depicting a world of lakes, rivers, ice, and rain. The full proposal is online here.
I find the idea exciting, and I hope that NASA’s governing councils soon prioritize exploration of those extraterrestrial locations most likely to harbor life – like Europa, Enceladus, and Titan.
Ah, I’ve only been out a few months, but I already miss some things about being in grad school! For instance, I miss all the crazy brainstorming of new and wild space systems, missions, and technologies. No doubt you, dear reader, also miss my crazy brainstorming: after all, that is how I ended up writing blogs about space battles or missions to Europa or what the Earth would look like with rings or the science of Avatar. Now I have an industry job where people tend to care more about “affordability” and “reliability” and “performance,” than they do about harebrained schemes to drop space probes into the Europan ocean.
But, fear not, intrepid reader who has been sticking it out hoping for another crazy notion to appear here! You see, my research group at Cornell is still working at churning out wild ideas. And you can participate!
Check out this message from Zac, who was starting his Ph.D. as I was on my way out:
Zac has set up a page on KickStarter, which you can jump to by visiting KickSat.org. The idea behind KickSat is to make a bare-bones 10x10x10 cm CubeSat which contains hundreds or thousands of microchip-sized satellites called Sprites and will deploy them all in low Earth orbit. The KickStarter platform means that, if you want, you can sponsor your very own Sprite – Zac has even defined a sponsorship level at which you get to write your own flight code for the tiny spacecraft to run in orbit!
The spacecraft, which each could fit comfortably in the palm of your hand, are very simplistic as far as spacecraft go – they consist of solar cells to charge a little bank of capacitors, a teeny TI processor for a brain, and a little antenna. These are proof-of-concept spacecraft, and are actually derived from three test units which my lab group sent up to the Space Station on the last launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour! In the future, they hope to integrate other sensors onto the chips to give Sprites more capabilities. One of the ideas batted around during lab meetings that I consider a personal favorite: put “lab-on-chip” detectors on a Sprite to look for characteristic organic compounds (like nucleic acids!) and program them to simply send a chirp back if they get a positive result. Send a million Sprites to Mars, and listen to the peeps – and then you know where on the Red Planet the next big flagship mission has just got to go!
Imagine if you got the shot at writing the flight code. If you could put a solar cell in space and make it beep, what could you measure? How creative can you get in getting the Sprite’s whisper of a radio signal to carry information? Could you receive enough data to tell how fast the chip is spinning and seeing the Sun, or how much average power it has to work with, or how long it lasts before an errant proton from the solar wind blasts your Sprite out of the sky? The chance to put your own code on a spacecraft, even such a simplistic one, offers a lot of learning opportunities.
(Incidentally: one question that Zac and his research advisor, Dr. Mason Peck, get a lot is some variation on: “Hey, paint flecs moving at orbital velocity are enough to crash through the Space Shuttle windows. Aren’t these Sprites going to become dangerous space junk?” The answer is that yes, the Sprites could be hazardous as long as they are in orbit; but the orbit that KickSat will reach is going to be within just enough of the Earth’s atmosphere that all the Sprites will get dragged down in a couple days. The special property Sprites have that influences this fast orbital decay – and other effects – is a high surface-area-to-mass ratio.)
KickSat has already reached its minimum fundraising goal to start building hardware. However, the project is still looking for more backers to secure a commercial launch opportunity, which will offer more certainty than applying for a free launch program through NASA. But if Zac gets to about $300,000 of funding, he thinks that will be enough to start looking at new technologies to shrink the Sprite chips down to even smaller sizes – and offer even more capability in the future!
Cool stuff. I’m glad to see the Cornell Space Systems Design Studio keeping the wild space ideas flowing!
I’ve been very critical of NASA lately, and similar criticism to mine has been trickling out of the space blog community and into major news outlets. So, in all fairness, I would like to offer up some much more constructive thoughts.
If I suddenly became Dictator of NASA Authorization and Appropriation, this is what I would do: First, I would decouple the portions of the NASA budget that deal with science and with human spaceflight. Next, I would double (or triple!) both budgets. And then I would put the budget on a schedule in which it gets re-authorized every decade, rather than every year.
Finally, I would give NASA a mission for human spaceflight.
One finds many challenges in trying to come up with a solid mission for human space exploration. The mission must be simply stated, so that it is easily grasped by the community at large, has simple criteria for success, and gives scientists, engineers, and administrators maximum creative leeway. The mission must also have clear, tangible benefits to the public at large in order to maintain broad-based support. Finally, and perhaps most challenging, the ideal mission for the program should be one that leads to a self-perpetuating endeavor of exploration. Those of us who see value in spaceflight want to go out and explore, and keep exploring, instead of reaching a goal and turning back, victory in hand.
In the political climate of the early 1960’s, reaching the Moon was the right mission. NASA was all about proving that our democratic society and civilian exploration program could beat the pants off our rivals’ soviet society and militarized rocket program. It was about spurring the development of high technology in this country. It was about national pride. It was about proving that we could do something awe-inspiring.
I think that we could use some of those initiatives again, but that our current society will not support a simple destination in space as a goal. I think that people today want to see immediate results from the exploration effort. They want to see a space program that pays for itself by giving them something to hold in their hand.
Paramount to the long-term success of this mission is its ability to survive success. In many ways, this is NASA’s problem. It went to the Moon, and the public began to question the need to go to the Moon any more. When the Apollo program ended, instead of a NASA that looked out to the next horizon, its reach diminished. Now NASA is in a position where its mission gets redefined too quickly for it to accomplish any goal. The space community squabbles over whether the exploration goal should be the Moon, or Mars, or an asteroid. But I think we need a fundamentally new kind of goal: Often, the idea of a mission for NASA gets confused with the idea of a specific destination or a specific spacecraft program, but a “mission” is broader than both. The problem is that NASA needs a focused effort, and that effort has to be harnessed in such a way that achievement of its goals perpetuates the mission instead of becoming a bygone climax.
I think the mission should be pushing the human presence out into the Solar System. And so here is what I would suggest for NASA’s human exploration goal:
Build and launch a human-carrying space vehicle, using no materials from the Earth, within the next 15 years.
That’s it. No engineering decisions, no restrictions on technology; a broad statement of an extremely big idea, simply stated. Oh, we can haggle over the precise wording or the timeframe, but I think this is it: the space exploration goal that could revitalize the space program.
You see, the goal I am setting is for a capability. I want to see humans figure out how to exploit space in an efficient and effective manner, and to prove it, I want to see them build a spacecraft in space. I don’t care where this happens: a crater foundry on the Moon, a near-Earth asteroid shipyard in an elliptical orbit, scaffolds on Utopia Planitia on Mars. Nor do I care where this spacecraft goes when it is launched. What I care about is this: in the process of achieving the goal I have stated, the space program is going to have to create an industrial and technological base, in space, that we don’t have at present. New technologies and products are going to come out of the space program on a weekly basis. The space program will create a foundation that our wider society can move onto. In other words, I want to see the space program create new industries, and I want it to drag them along with it into space and establish them firmly there. Think of this idea like spurring on an East India Trading company for space. So, I want to target the science and engineering of in-situ resource utilization and develop it into a discipline that will let human beings truly develop space.
Merely arriving at an asteroid – or even arriving at Mars – could be accomplished using technologies we have at our disposal right now. There are engineering challenges, to be sure; but we could potentially knock many of them off by optimizing known solutions. We only need put forward the effort and resources. Building something from scratch in space, though, will require some substantial new developments! Materials science, field medicine, robotics, chemistry, computing, electrical power generation, thermal management – all would likely have to jump forward in leaps and bounds. Tangible benefits would come out of such a program in many other disciplines, as well. I want average people getting to see and use devices that spin out of the space program at a pace that matches their expectations of high-tech fields. I want these devices and technologies making obvious differences and improvements to life on Earth: increasing our efficiency, reducing carbon emissions, making power more cheaply and more cleanly available, getting medicine into remote areas, growing food in truly sustainable ways to better support our populations – all things that are major problems in the world today, and all things that would have to happen to support a space-based industry.
I feel that it is very important for the timeframe on this goal to be ambitious. The reason is that I want to see space exploration become a high-tech industry again. It used to be – in the 1960’s, 70’s, and early 80’s. However, the most successful space programs and vehicles since then tend to be extremely conservative. For example: it used to be the case that the space program invented computer technology specifically for its new vehicles; now, the computers on spacecraft typically lag behind the state of the art by a decade or more. This is fine for the private sector if we care only about the bottom line of a single satellite, but it’s not good for long-term performance and I think our national space program should be reaching beyond those concerns. I feel strongly that the risks of new space technologies are often overestimated; but on top of that, I think we should be willing to take more risks with our astronauts! We should be filling our NASA missions with “firsts,” because only by doing so can we lay the groundwork for following developments. With that in mind, I would set a goal that requires entirely new engineering strategies and impose a deadline that forces rapid maturation of technology.
As the space program cranks out “firsts” related to building this ship, I want to see NASA taking full advantage of mass media. I want a Twitter feed posting pictures of spaceships under construction. I want the news showing astronauts each week, at least, doing things that look new: prospecting and mining on asteroids or the Moon, assembling huge structures, showing off how they support life in deep space with few resources from Earth. We should see astronauts, mission controllers, and engineers as heroes – as the people helping usher in new discoveries.
If the space program were to adopt my suggested goal, I can only speculate a little on how it would play out. I think asteroids would likely be the most obvious source for raw materials for the spacecraft – or might even be made into the spacecraft itself, if hollowed out in the classic sci-fi paradigm. I think that whatever asteroid or asteroids we choose to target would need vast solar power collectors to establish infrastructure. Closed-loop life support systems would likely be a key component of the set-up. And the space program would need a way to taxi astronauts up to space and back, as well as out to the asteroids and back. To do that, NASA would need to take advantage of affordable launch services from private companies and also develop or sponsor a fleet of interplanetary shuttlecraft. In all, I see the possibility for a lot of dramatic achievements – ending with a stirring first launch of the new spacegoing vessel from its drydock, of course!
Elon Musk announced that a SpaceX is developing the Falcon 9 and Dragon into a fully reusable launch vehicle/capsule system. In short, they are actually going to go for making the Falcon 9 live up to it’s namesake.
I can’t help but contrast this animated system with the SLS announcement from NASA. It illustrates my criticism of recent NASA policy perfectly: at Congress’s behest, the space agency has stopped innovating.
It’s not a super-heavy-lift launch vehicle that will enable expansion of the human exploration program beyond flags-and-footprints missions or the long-term development of space. Instead, it’s the fantastically easier access to space afforded by a rapidly reusable launch system like that presented by Musk. The control technology and hardware for such a system exists already; I hope to see test flights in a few years. With only a little luck, they’ll happen before the first SLS is supposed to take off.
I was thinking about NASA’s new launch vehicle plans, and I decided to dig through some of the data in the public record and crunch a few numbers on launch vehicle performance. Specifically, payload mass to orbit.
I am proceeding from my favorite space-system-engineering assumption, which is that we can take more than one launch to build a spacecraft. Thus, the payload mass to orbit on a single launch is not the most important metric for a launch vehicle. I care equally about how frequently the launcher flies. So I crawled through launch dates and came up with numbers for the average (and peak) payload masses various launch systems delivered to low Earth orbit on an annual basis. (For example, between January and November 1985, the Space Shuttle launched a total of nine times, and in no continuous one-year period did the Shuttle launch 10 or more times, so I multiplied the Shuttle’s payload capacity by 9 to get the peak annual payload to orbit figure.)
Here’s what I came up with:
Launch System
Mass to LEO, Single Launch
Mass to LEO, Avg Annual
Mass to LEO, Peak Annual
Saturn V
119,000
258,927
476,000
Space Shuttle
24,000
84,019
219,600
Atlas V
29,420
169,107
205,940
Delta IV Heavy
23,000
15,119
23,000
Titan IV
21,680
47,337
108,400
Ariane V ES/ECA
21,000
47,049
147,000
Space Launch System
170,000
170,000
170,000
All masses are in kilograms, and for the SLS I used the “evolved” 2021 configuration of the vehicle and the projection that it will likely fly once per year. Averages are over the course of the entire available service lifetime for the vehicle.
My points are these:
While the Saturn V is still the behemoth of launch no matter how you slice it, some of the other systems come surprisingly close in certain metrics. Even though SLS will boost more than the venerable Saturn, it’s more of an incremental improvement – and the Saturn launched more frequently in its heyday than SLS is likely to. Cost information on the Saturn V (either total cost per launch or cost per kilogram) is a little tricky to come by; I don’t think there are good estimates, so it’s hard to see how that stacks the deck. I suspect that the Saturn V’s cost per launch would hurt it in this comparison.
Historically, the Space Shuttle has already outperformed the projected mass to LEO of the fully evolved SLS. It didn’t always, but there were a couple year-long periods when I did count 9 STS launches/year. By the peak annual mass to LEO metric, then, SLS is a step back from the Shuttle.
The commercial Atlas V is essentially already as good at putting mass in orbit as the SLS will be, on average. And its peak annual mass to LEO is 35 metric tons higher.
My biggest point, however, still is that if you count cumulative launch capacity over several launches, you can get enough material into orbit to build some really big things. We could have NASA developing self-contained habitats and interplanetary spacecraft without developing any new NASA launch systems.
Today, the group of Senators with a stake in the space program and NASA administrator Gen Charles Bolden had a press conference to announce key decisions related to the design of the Senate Space Launch System, or SLS. To summarize:
The SLS is going to be based on a LH/LOx-fueled core, powered by 5 Space Shuttle Main Engines at the base and some Saturn V-derived engines on the second stage.
The SLS is likely going to have strap-on solid rocket boosters, derivatives of (if not exactly the same production models as) the Space Shuttle’s booster rockets.
The SLS will carry the Orion MPCV capsule.
The first targeted flight of the SLS is supposed to be in the late 2010’s.
NASA is supposed to paint it to look like a Saturn V. Saturn V Saturn V remember those? those were awesome, when you think of the Senate Space Launch System, think of a Saturn V.
Blatant paint job, huh?
I did not have high hopes for this announcement, because I am not a fan of the idea that NASA must have a heavy-lift rocket. I think that the premise the SLS is based on, that a super-heavy-lift rocket is a requirement for deep-space exploration, is flawed. To me, the SLS looks like the kind of rocket I would build if my goal was to send two or three people to an asteroid to plant flags and footprints, and then come home, and then let the space program atrophy away until nobody cares about it any more.
I think that, instead, NASA ought to leverage everything it learned from the Shuttle program about building things in space and construct a fleet of in-space vehicles, out of parts that could be launched on smaller, cheaper vehicles – such as Falcon 9’s or Atlas 5’s. These vehicles would remain in space for their entire lives, so that they don’t ever have to lug a massive heat shield all the way to Mars and back or anything like that. Every time we want to send another crew into deep space, we need only launch a new fuel tank and supplies – instead of a whole new spacecraft!
The SLS hardly represents a bold leap forward for NASA. Heavier and heavier lift is not so much of a challenge in innovation as it was in the ’60’s – and even the SLS is only fractionally more powerful than a Saturn V. It is supposed to use Saturn-V-derived (read: 50-year-old) engines on one stage and Shuttle-derived (read: 40-year-old) engines on the other. NASA artists went to great lengths to evoke the Saturn V in concept art of the SLS – but to me, that’s a bad omen. It demonstrates how much NASA has stagnated at the whims of Congress.
Worse, according to the New York Times, there are internal NASA documents showing that if the NASA budget remains flat, this rocket won’t have any manned flights until 2021 or beyond. And the NASA budget this year – in the very same appropriations process that generated the SLS – went down. I fear that Congress failed to learn the lessons of the Constellation program: that if you don’t fund a project like this, it will gobble up money from all the other science and technology and space research and missions NASA is supposed to be doing; and if all NASA’s eggs end up in one basket like that, then it really just takes that one project going over budget and coming in behind schedule to topple the whole thing.
I was pleasantly surprised by one bit of good news here, at least: the Senate has backed off a bit on over-specifying the SLS design. Allowing NASA to spec out a LH/LOx core rocket and put out the boosters for competitive bids is a Very Good Thing; previously, Congressional rumblings sounded like the rocket had all been awarded to ATK already. I worried about that because ATK has built itself a track record of running very behind schedule and over budget on NASA rockets, and a liquid-fueled design will be much more efficient than a solid rocket could ever achieve.
On the whole, the story wasn’t as bad as I thought is was going to be. However, I’m finding it harder and harder to be optimistic about the future of NASA with a project like SLS present. My prediction: SpaceX is going to come up with a Falcon 9 Heavy that totally outshines the SLS in capability, cost, and speed of delivery – and I can only hope that, before too many resources get sunk into the Big, Dumb Rocket, Congress wises up and says to itself, “hey, why don’t we just buy a bunch of those?”
The sooner Congress does so, though, the better – because that will give NASA more leeway to build the interplanetary spacecraft that I really want!
Representing the entire Orbiter fleet, the Space Shuttle Atlantis is above the Earth for the last time. She comes home on 21 July.
Atlantis floating over the Bahamas
The Space Shuttle is a tremendous vehicle, a real achievement of engineering. It has given us the Hubble Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory; it’s brought astronauts and nations together in a place where they can see the Earth for what it truly is; it has demonstrated and developed our capability for assembling structures and conducting experiments in space. I think the greatest achievement of the Space Shuttle Program has been the construction of the International Space Station, a huge structure where seven or so (sometimes as many as 13) astronauts can stay for half a year or more – a marvel of engineering if there ever was one. The population of the Station compares with some pioneer towns in American history.
This summer, the Shuttle Program ends. Every news outlet, blogger, commentator, and space enthusiast out there seems to agree that the word to describe the STS-135 mission is “bittersweet.” I agree that the Shuttle program has been pretty sweet…but I’m not bitter that it’s coming to an end.
In fact, I think it’s a very good thing.
The Space Shuttle Program has been active for 30 years now – and I find that simple fact quite unsettling. To put that timeframe in perspective: I grew up steeping myself in space, got a college degree in a hard science, completed a Ph.D. in spacecraft technology research, and began a career in the spacecraft industry, and I just turned 27. As long as I have been alive, there has been a Space Shuttle and a Space Shuttle Program. Or, for another view, NASA has conducted six manned space programs: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle, and International Space Station. Not only is the Space Shuttle Program the longest-running of them all, but it ran as long as all the other programs put together. Our nation got to the Moon from zero space-age industrial base and with a supply of engineers who had no idea how rockets worked in just over ten years. My point is this: The Shuttle Program started in the Eighties, and our nation should have been ready for the next space program in the Nineties.
How did NASA get to this point? The simple answer is that NASA was created as a weapon we could use to fight the Cold War. It was a two-pronged weapon: First, its purpose was to respond to the apparent Soviet dominance in rocket and spacecraft technology, and show that America could develop that knowledge, too. Second, it was a careful political weapon – “Look, your space program is entirely militarized. Ours is entirely civilian and peaceful, and based on capitalist contracts, and those purposes are actually superior!” Now, after it became clear that America won any Space Race that existed, NASA is a weapon without a war. It simply cannot command 4.4% of the federal budget like it did in the heyday of Apollo (it’s stuck with a measly 0.5-0.7%.). And NASA does not command the affection of the American people as well as it did in the mid-20th Century. Without those sources of support, it cannot achieve lofty goals.
I think that the Space Shuttle is, in fact, a good symbol for everything that is wrong with the American space program. In a word: Complacency. We’re too used to having a Space Shuttle – so much so, in fact, that the media continues to equate the Space Shuttle Program and the manned space program. Congress, in particular, is way too used to the Space Shuttle Program, and I think members of Congress view NASA more as a source for government sinecure jobs than for bold exploratory endeavors. The American public has become complacent about the Space Shuttle to the extent that one lasting legacy of the Shuttle Program is that the public thinks space travel is boring – NASA public affairs officers have not been able to deal with a generation that thinks iPhone apps are more exciting than human beings blasting off into orbit. And NASA itself has become complacent about the Shuttle, in many ways. NASA contractors lament the tragedy of this program ending after giving them a single, steady job for 30 years. NASA employees wonder what they will do after spending so long on this one program. And fourteen astronauts lost their lives to complacency within the Space Shuttle Program.
So, yes, the Space Shuttle is a sweet piece of hardware, and it has given us many achievements and advances. And I feel the bittersweet mood surrounding the STS-135 mission, the bittersweet mood that has been building for the last few years. But, for me, the “bitter” part doesn’t come from the end of the Space Shuttle Program.
I’m bitter because the plan America has to follow the Shuttle Program sucks.
Congress has decreed that the post-Shuttle American space program will be this: NASA shall build a really big rocket, and it shall stick the Orion capsule on top of this rocket. I am unimpressed: NASA has already figured out the really big rocket, and that capability has been in private hands for decades. Building a bigger rocket is just a question of scaling up the engineering of contemporary technology, it’s not a fundamentally new enterprise. And the Orion capsule is an Apollo-style vehicle with 125% of the personnel capacity of the 40-year-old Apollo. And Congress, while extremely interested in specifying how much stuff NASA should build and in which states NASA should build it, it has no interest whatsoever in giving the space program an objective to use that stuff for. President Obama, at least, has been willing to sketch out an objective, but NASA is going to be struggling to apply these Congressionally enumerated devices to meet exploration goals. There is a fundamental mismatch between the technologies NASA is supposed to develop and the goals it is supposed to achieve, and so our nation will end up with a Senate Space Launch System Program that exactly mirrors the over-budget, behind-schedule, and finally cancelled Ares program. So, I am bitter about the end of the Shuttle Program because it has clearly illuminated to what extent Congress views NASA as a source of pork spending, an agency to provide sinecure jobs in their districts, and not as a vehicle for our nation’s and our world’s loftiest aspirations.
I grew up with the legacy of the Apollo missions. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are heroes to me, but I am also acutely aware that they are now over eighty years old. And only ten other people walked the Moon since they have. I want to see NASA doing big things again, and I don’t think Congress has it on that path.
What do I think NASA should be doing? Simple. I think NASA should be going where no one has gone before.
Where no one has gone before. Not private companies, not other nations’ space programs, and not NASA itself.
Thus: I don’t think NASA should be in the business of building rockets. NASA paved the way in this country, but since the mid-20th Century, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital Sciences, and other companies have successfully privatized and industrialized the process of getting things into space – and that’s just in America. This process has even made its way into the small business market: SpaceX (which started small, but is rapidly growing) promises cost-cutting launches, has successfully sold its services to acquire the largest commercial launch contract ever, and it is planning to launch a heavy-lift rocket by the end of 2012. Just by the dates, before the program even starts, Congress’ SLS is in losing position and is slated for an inadequate finish – and that’s if it can keep to its intended schedule, which I don’t think likely after the Ares program. So I wonder why NASA should be doing so much as looking into the feasibility of such a vehicle. Just buy the ones that exist! The agency even has several options to pick from!
I also don’t think NASA should be in the business of building space capsules! Again, NASA paved the way – but now, Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada are all developing their own passenger-carrying capsules, and again, that’s just in America. These vehicles come under the aegis of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which seeks companies that can sell taxi service up to the Space Station and back at competitive prices, with NASA oversight for astronaut safety. So I wonder why NASA has to invest in building yet another such vehicle. Just buy the ones that are further along in development! The agency will even have several options to pick from – and SpaceX’s Dragon is practically ready!
I think NASA should skip all these solved problems and get back involved in true exploration. That is not a goal that a space capsule is appropriate for: what is the most massive component of the vehicle? The heat shield. And on the way to an asteroid or moon or planet and back, what is that heat shield doing?Taking up precious mass capacity. Reducing the spacecraft delta-v. Shrinking our horizon. I look at the Apollo program, and I think the star of the show was really the Lunar Module – that spidery thing that looked silly on the ground, but was totally at home in the environment it was built for: airless moons. That is the kind of thing NASA should be building: interplanetary spacecraft for going into deep space. These should be launched on commercial rockets and assembled modularly in space – using techniques NASA has perfected during the Space Shuttle program as it built the Space Station. They could even be constructed while docked to ISS. Then, the astronauts would taxi up in Dragons or Dream Chasers, hop into the interplanetary vehicle, and go to other worlds!
Which other worlds is an important question, and I think it has to be driven by material benefits – not just science and exploration goals, much as I love them. Because, you see, I want a sustainable human space program, not a flags-and-footprints-and-then-Congress-and-the-public-forgets-it program. I think we have to look to destinations where we can use available resources to refuel and build new space vehicles. For that reason, and the fact that an astronaut can throw things at their escape velocities, I want to see these interplanetary ships going to asteroids.
We can practice harvesting space resources and building space vehicles on the surface of the Moon, before we go further afield to deep-space asteroids. We could go to the near-Earth objects or the Asteroid Belt. We can get to Phobos and Deimos, in Mars orbit, and build shuttles to go down to another planet’s surface. We can even learn enough to mount expeditions to Jovian moons. And as we send scientists and engineers to all these places, they will need a support network – and so NASA can contract with private companies to follow them. Y’know: Starbucks on Mars.
See, I want to take everything we learned from Apollo and the Space Shuttle and build a space infrastructure. NASA-built launch vehicles and capsules are not going to help with that.
It may seem silly to be making this argument at this time – while our political landscape is defined by budget and growth concerns – but I think NASA couldn’t be more relevant. First, it’s one of the most successful government programs in terms of its accomplishments, in terms of the technological benefits, in terms of the scientific returns, and in terms of the increased economic growth in response to each federal dollar spent. Second, we as a nation are faced with a growing number of long-term problems: how to provide cost-effective medical care, how to give our populace better nutrition to combat obesity at attractive prices, how to supply our power grid with enough energy for all its customers in a responsible, sustainable way…all of these things are problems that NASA would have to solve in order to keep people living in space indefinitely. We could solve our problems on Earth in the crucible of space. If we want to really push the economy, accelerate the pace of growth and innovation, and pull off a “Manhattan Project” to deal with climate change, I think a self-sustaining human colony in deep space is the way to go.
The whole situation that NASA is in just kills me. On the one hand, without the Space Shuttle Program, it has a tremendous opportunity to re-invent itself as the kind of program that conjures up images of men and women with the Right Stuff, consistently churning out dramatic stories of inspiring successes and garnering public support. But on the other hand, Congress has set NASA against that path by giving it directives that are almost certain to fall short of their objectives, wasting time and money. NASA was once a great agency, and it could be so again…but we in the space community will have to convince a lot of Congresspeople to look outside of their Shuttle-era complacency and into the future if we want to see a space program worthy of a great nation.
