This is an update on the debate over NASA’s human spaceflight mission, including statements made before President Obama’s April 15 speech at Kennedy Space Center as well as statements made since then.
This blog entry won’t review budgets and plans for
• robotic missions to Mars or the moon,
• new satellites for earth science, or
• NASA’s continuing role in the development of next-generation concepts in aviation & its inftrastructure.
These parts of NASA’s mission have not caused disagreement about their priority or cost.
We at AeroInnovate are especially encouraged by NASA’s investment in Next-Generation innovation for GA.
The debate is about human spaceflight, its long range goals, its short range targets and the proper allocation of funds for sending astronauts to the ISS, a return to the moon and trips to Mars and its moons.
Human space flight is what captures the imaginations of citizens across the globe. Progress here is the metric of successful accomplishment of lofty space goals—or failure of leadership. It is THE measure of success or failure in the new multinational spaceflight contest.
Who is speaking in the public debate? Politicians, especially those in Washington have been most vocal in their critiques or support of the President’s plan. Also in the dialogue are NASA employees, including past and current astronauts as well as engineers and scientists. Similarly the scientific community has been split on these issues. Finally, newspapers in their editorials have taken sides and shaped the debate.
The key decisions that form the basis for Obama’s NASA plan and budget include
• retiring the space shuttle after the final two missions this year,
• not replacing the shuttle with any NASA rocket or vehicle to take astronauts and supplies to the ISS,
• spending five years deciding on the design and manufacture of a heavy-lift rocket to take astronauts and exploration vehicles out of earth orbit
• spending the following five years building and testing the heavy-lift vehicle, and
• following a “flexible path” to get astronauts to Mars by 2030.
Obama did a poor job of stating that THE GOAL for NASA is getting astronauts to Mars by 2030. To the average person in the street, a goal that is 20 years from completion is not inspiring. People do not have the patience to wait that long. More importantly, a whole generation of young astronauts, engineers, scientists and other aerospace workers will have no immediate reward to excite and motivate them to do the hard work of getting higher education when the payoff is so remote. In truth, the younger generation of NASA employees and the space community is split on this issue. Obama’s announcement of “Mars by 2030” was so understated that many listeners came away with the conclusion that Obama had not presented ANY goal. Some in the new generation of the space community have the vision and the patience to push ahead with getting ready for a goal that grand, while others believe the nation needs clear, near term objectives that will lead us stepwise to that grand goal.
Obama spelled out no such objectives. In fact, he terminated the one obvious mid-way project – returning to the moon. His abdication of the moon shot has split every segment of the space community into supporters and critics. He argued that “we’ve been there already, there’s no need to go back.” He underlined his decision to sit out Moon Race II by reaffirming the retirement of the shuttles and the discontinuation of the Constellation program, including the Ares rocket –a rocket similar to the Saturn V, capable of putting astronauts and cargo in low earth orbit and then moon orbit and landing.
With the US out of the moon race, the Chinese, Russians, Europeans, Japanese and Indians will have center stage in a very visible race to map the moon, and then build permanent settlements there. These nations will gain the military and economic technological advantages at each stage — earth orbit, moon orbit and moon settlement. Although the US currently has the most sophisticated set of satellites for earth mapping, earth science and military staging, the US lead will appear to dwindle each time one of the moon racers passes one of the hurdles along the way.
Politicians were quick to decry a moon race without US participation as an affront to American national pride, national security and loss of economic opportunities. Most agreed with Sen. Shelby (R-Ala) who said, ”Future generations will learn how the Chinese, the Russians, and even the Indians took the reins of space exploration away from the United States,” and “ (discontinuation) ensures that for decades to come the United States will be subservient to and reliant on other countries for access to space. This request I believe abandons our nation’s only chance to remain the leader in space.”
The first race to the moon was a clear cold war competition between the US and the USSR, as vividly defined by President John Kennedy. While Obama gave no hint of using the moon race as a test of national supremacy, Shelby and others have pointed out that, in the eyes of the world, the second moon shot is another international competition which the US must win again in order to retain the title of space leader. The PR value of successes in human space flight is so high that the US cannot afford to sit out this round, according to this logic.
While each country gains global media coverage for every step it each takes along the way, the US will be busy with tasks that have no pizzazz for media attention, such as designing a heavy-lift rocket to take us beyond the earth and moon. The US will also be paying the Russians to take US astronauts and supplies to the ISS on Russian Soyuz capsules. Russia has set the cost as $50 million for each astronaut.
The US will not be totally inactive in the next decade, but it will not have a clear objective for the twenty-teens in the form of a return to the moon. Instead the US will be
• doing experiments on long duration spaceflight at the ISS,
• robotically mapping Mars, and
• designing, building and testing the heavy lift rocket needed to get to Mars.
The military has already enacted its strategy to weaponize space with the USAF program independent of NASA. (See the May 3 entry on this AeroInnovate blog about the USAF’s space vehicle, the X-37B).
Obama emphasized the importance of research done on the ISS by extending its mission for five years beyond the already-announced five year period, to cover the full decade till 2020. And he backed it up with an ADDITION of $6b to NASA’s budget for the next five years.
Obama is content to buy passage from the Russians for a few years until the fledgling US private rocket companies are ready to safely and reliably give the US control over its own passage (his estimate is 2013).
The cancellation of the Constellation program means that NASA will not build the next earth & moon orbit rocket. It will only act as a partial funder and conceptual partner to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in their construction of a new low-earth orbit rocket.
Obama’s plan calls for NASA to contract with these two new private space delivery companies to rebuild a US rocket option to be ready by 2013. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) expressed skepticism with NASA’s plan to rely on commercial crew taxis to ferry astronauts to and from the space station.
Hutchison stated, “The emphasis to the tune of $6 billion into a very fledgling commercial capability I just think is not sound and it’s certainly not going to be reliable,” she said, adding that it would be premature to rely on Hawthorne, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences Corp. to deliver crews to low Earth orbit. Hutchison said NASA’s two Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) providers are, in her opinion, “not ready for this kind of reliance and I don’t think we can take that kind of chance.”
The issue of control of our own capability to get to and from the ISS has split the space community and the politicians. The split among Washington politicians is not partisan.
There is clear bipartisan support for continuation of Constellation. Congress members from both parties have vowed to keep Constellation and the Ares alive by their control of the budget process. Florida stands to lose 7000 NASA jobs when the shuttle retires, Texas about another 5000, and Alabama (home of NASA’s Marshall Rocket Center) a few thousand more.
At a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing a week after Obama’s speech, Senator Bill Nelson, (D-FL).urged Obama to continue development of a US low-orbit rocket for national security reasons, and proposed budget language requiring that 2011 funds continue the development of the Ares rocket. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) agreed that “this (continued development) is absolutely essential for the national security.”
Nearly all the Congress members whose home states will lose jobs when shuttle is retired are fighting to keep those jobs, both in NASA and in contractors such as United Space Alliance.
The two decisions – to discontinue Constellation and to retire the shuttles—have politicians at all levels from local to state to federal fighting to rescind the discontinuation of both programs. A guest editorial on an online space blog site (nasawatch.com) by a non-NASA engineer argued for the need to keep the shuttles flying. It received over 60 supportive comments within two days of publication – most from fellow engineers, but many from politicians and concerned scientists and citizens, arguing that the US cannot afford to abandon the shuttles, cannot be without a US-owned vehicle to get astronauts and cargo to the ISS and to low earth orbit on the way to the moon.
The blog’s comments showed that they doubted the validity of the analysis and decision by NASA engineers done five years ago that the shuttle was too old and too costly to be a reliable vehicle. It did not seem to matter that the decision to end the shuttle flights was made by President Bush in 2004, based on the recommendation of a national commission of leaders of the US space community. These writers blame Obama for leaving the US without a way to get to the ISS and earth orbit. (nasawatch.com). They called for the continuation of shuttles and a rapid deployment of resources to build the Ares rocket to maintain US control over access to the ISS and the moon.
Apollo moon astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Gene Cernan wrote a scathing letter to Obama, warning that without the Constellation and shuttle programs, the US space program will become a “journey to nowhere.”
If all these representatives of the astronauts, the scientific space community, the space hardware engineers and the politicians are aligned against Obama’s plan, then who supports it?
The Planetary Society, one of the few organizations with broad membership across all levels of the space community, published supporting comments by
• Astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride and four other astronauts,
• four space scientists involved in both robotic and human space flight,
• 2 governors in states with a strong presence of “New Space” companies in the Southwest,
• Newt Gingrich and Robert S. Walker, former Chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee
• editorials by the NY Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and the Economist
Each of them emphasized that the challenge of reaching Mars by 2030 is the only space objective worthy of pursuit by the leader of the space club. They endorsed Obama’s “flexible path” to the moon, a responsive journey guided by discoveries made along the way. They supported the notion that the time has come for the commercial pursuit of space travel by private entrepreneurial firms. They spotlighted the synergies between discoveries from remote robotic exploration and human space exploration.
• Separately, the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s campus editorial by a space engineering student said he and his cohort would be pleased to help at any stage along the way to Mars.
• The Orange County Register said it’s time for the entrepreneurs to take over and take the risks –this from the heart of the new Space Center of the Southwest.
• The Chicago Tribune stated, “The stars are already in space entrepreneurs’ eyes. They see money to be made in space tourism and industry. We hope they’re right. It’s time to let them take more of the risk — and reward — in finding out.”
The debate will no doubt be continued in Congressional budget hearings for the 2011 budget. The White House has already modified its 2011 budget request to accommodate support for continuation of the Ares, mostly to placate Congress members who will not give up thousands of NASA and contractors’ jobs without a fight.
Now Obama needs to make the case that now is the time to turn over the development and manufacture of the next low earth orbit rocket to new space entrepreneurs and make it clear that they must succeed by 2013.
And Obama needs to spell out the short term objectives needed to succeed in the development of heavy lift rockets capable of visiting Mars in 2030—he said, “I intend to be here to see this happen.”
