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Giant Leaps … off a cliff: why U.S. space policy is all wrong
National Review, Feb 28, 2005 by Alexander Rose
THOSE unfeeling suits at UPN just canceled Star Trek: Enterprise, a spin-off "prequel" to the original series that neither lived long nor, apparently, prospered. The show depicted mankind's hesitant baby steps into galactic affairs and its first contacts with sundry Klingons and Romulans. Despite Enterprise's dreadful theme song--a cheesy Michael Boltonesque number--its opening-title sequence was splendid, with images of the space shuttle and the international space station blending, as if it were a natural historical progression, into our first warp-driven starcraft and the consequent exploration of the final frontier.
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Splendid, but wholly unrealistic. The way our space policy has developed, we're going ... nowhere. In truth, the shuttle and the station have nothing to do with warp-cores and Prime Directives: They're technological dead-ends whose uselessness was only highlighted by the recent landing of the unmanned probe on Titan. Indeed, the decision to chop Enterprise coincided with the second anniversary of the Columbia shuttle explosion, and the first anniversary of President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), which was intended to kick-start a new Space Age.
The VSE--with its uplifting talk of manned missions to the moon between 2015 and 2020, and thence to Mars at an unspecified date presumably subject to future administrations' caprices--is a scheme almost destined to stall. That is, unless NASA puts its thinking cap on, which it hasn't done since the glory days.
Ignore the sunny prognostications you hear about Mankind's Destiny In Space: the driveling descant that, as the president put it, exploring the unknown "is a desire written in the human heart"; the meaningless guff proclaiming space's ability "to inspire us and motivate our children"; the vainglorious "national greatness" project to beat the Chinese; the Norman Rockwellized "artists' conceptions" of space-suited kids playing tag on the moon. This is all propaganda designed to separate you from your tax dollars. Next, pay no attention to official timelines ("human exploration missions no later than 2014"), let alone any budget estimate emanating from NASA: These are masterworks of science fiction. And, last, put out of your mind the sexed-up utopian silliness circulated by Mars enthusiasts about "terraforming" and "colonizing" the Red Planet with futuristic kibbutzes.
The main problem with the VSE is not its objective, but its abdication to NASA of the responsibility for making all this happen, by whatever means they think appropriate. In so doing, President Bush is giving carte blanche to the same guys who've been running the operation for half a century--and they're still paying homage to the ideas conjured up by Wernher von Braun, the German designer of the devastating V-2 rocket.
NASA remains wedded to von Braun's postwar concepts of big-ticket, government-run space exploration. It's owing to this obsession with the past that we have a creaky space station costing billions in "maintenance" each year, yet of no discernible use to anyone; an aging fleet of grounded space shuttles; and a predilection toward blasting expensive payloads into space using throwaway, titanically wasteful rockets. In this weird world, while the president's new budget has proposed $4.5 billion for the shuttle, the ailing Hubble telescope can't be fixed because the shuttles are too dangerous to be used on a repair mission.
You can be sure of one thing: If the VSE is pursued in its current form, none of this will be changing. We'll just have shinier, newer white elephants than we did before.
Put bluntly, the space industry is not about exploring space; it's about rather more touchingly terrestrial concerns, such as back-scratching, institutional rigidity, and astronomical piles of money. NASA is not the lean, mean forerunner of Starfleet Academy: It's a high-wattage government-jobs project running a feeding-trough for the aerospace industry, the very same complex that has a vested interest in building our Atlas rockets (Lockheed Martin), Delta rockets (Boeing), and shuttles (a Lockheed-Martin/Boeing consortium).
So it tends to stick with what it knows. And what it knows is the way it managed to get a man on the moon in 1969. But that particular way was a historical accident, and what worked then is not practicable now. The sole reason why, for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, NASA hurriedly converted an intercontinental ballistic missile into an expendable, one-time-only rocket booster and perched a small, manned capsule atop it was that the Sovs had startled them with the 1957 Sputnik, which was launched aboard one of their new ICBMs. NASA had theretofore assumed that rocket-powered airplanes, which could take off, reach suborbital altitude, and land--repeatedly--were the way forward. That's why Neil Armstrong earned his astronaut's wings in the X-15 plane, not on his Gemini mission.
