Giant Leaps … off a cliff: why U.S. space policy is all wrong

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.

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.

However, the spaceplane, loaded down with heavy wings and draggy wheels, never carried as much payload as ballistic missiles; even less could it achieve the massive thrust needed to reach orbital velocity. For instance, the X-20 Dyna-Soar--say that zippy name aloud--was canceled in 1963 precisely because the Gemini rocket provided the same bang for a third of the total launch mass.

The shuttle was conceived as a halfway house between the spaceplane's reusability and the expendable missile's capabilities. Alas, the halfway house was built to the wrong specifications, and we got a mindblowingly expensive, dangerous quasi-rocket that looks like a plane but that can be used just once before its "reusable" boosters have to be completely rebuilt. The result? A manned-spaceflight program flying in circles from the '70s onward, and a deformed hybrid that provides a lot of jobs in important voting districts, all while robots and probes have begun performing the kind of miracles astronauts were once expected to do.

NASA, clearly, has lost itself in space. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand rocket science: It's all about reducing the cost per pound of payload taken into orbit. If this cost could be brought down to an affordable minimum, the entire calculus would change and every aspect of spaceflight--including missions to Mars, lunar bases, unmanned probes to Jupiter, space stations, etc.--would suddenly become not just feasible, but possibly commonplace.

There are two keys to lowering this cost. First, spacecraft, fuel tanks, and their boosters must be truly reusable, and reused scores of times. While the initial expenditure may be larger than that required to buy disposable versions, the former will be amortized over time, thereby lowering the cost per flight. Which partly explains why it's just $149 for you to fly cross-country on a reusable Boeing 777--a complex piece of machinery with 3 million parts--where the cost basis is roughly a penny per pound, compared with $10,000 per pound for the shuttle. In other words, if we want to conquer alien worlds and build orbital colonies, we're going to need to build a starship with airplane economics. Even the United Federation of Planets couldn't afford to maintain a fleet of ships on the NASA model.

The other key is competition--and I don't mean the Ansari X Prize recently won by Bert Rutan's SpaceShipOne, which, its impressive engineering notwithstanding, cannot hit anywhere near orbital velocity. No, the real competition must focus on drastically cutting launch costs to Low Earth Orbit. One contender is SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, co-founder of the Internet-payment service PayPal. SpaceX has developed the Falcon rocket: a two-stager that is jettisoned after the initial blast stage, parachutes into the water, is recovered by tugs, and is then reused. To keep costs down, SpaceX's "Mission Control" is an 18-wheeler, and the staff consists of just 30-odd people. The potential savings are enormous: A satellite launch on the small Falcon I is estimated to cost $4,000 per pound compared with $14,000 on the comparable Pegasus, an air-launched booster made by Orbital Sciences. Longterm, as Musk's rockets get bigger, they could be used for manned flights to the moon and Mars. SpaceX, which is set for at least four launches this year, may eventually fail--commercial space activity is still in the doldrums--but its importance lies in demonstrating that non-NASA/ Boeing/Lockheed space exploitation and exploration need not be expensive or difficult.

Tell that to NASA, though. The agency is now soliciting design concepts for the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) that the VSE unoriginally posits as the Apollo-style manned transporter and reentry vehicle for the moon and Mars expeditions. The usual suspects have applied to build it, and if anything, the CEV will cost more per pound to launch than the old, jerry-rigged vehicles--at a time when budgets are more constricted.

Look, we can get a man to Mars using the old methods and by throwing money at the problem. That's not disputed. But if we want a sustainable and affordable longterm space effort, NASA and Friends must align their desires with current realities, and that means concentrating on getting a return on our dollars by ditching its dated contractor system and throwaway-booster concept. Otherwise, our latter-day Columbus will plant a flag, come home to cheers, and then the program, as Apollo did within a few years of the first moon landing, will stall and we'll be staying right here on this pale blue dot, a lot poorer but little wiser.

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