How to do space right

November 6, 2004 - Reading time: 14 minutes

Note, 30 May 2020: As with other space-related posts from this era, 2020 me doesn't totally agree with 2004 me, and there are some very confident statements that seem a bit questionable, but overall the post isn't bad so I'm posting it anyway.

I visited the Kennedy Space Center tourist attraction last week, which was pretty fun.  It's an interesting place to go and look at authentic-looking replicas of cool space technology, and they have a big gift shop.

On the way back, David and I were talking a bit about the space program in general, and it got me thinking about current events in the space program.

In a time when NASA is thinking about retiring the Space Shuttle early, the 35th anniversary of man's first steps on the moon pass by with barely a mention, and Russian Space Shuttles are turning up abandoned in the desert, I think it's important to ask: what's the deal with the space program?  Why do we have it?  What's the goal?  And what do we do
the Space Shuttles?

As I've said before, the Shuttle was a great first step, but it's time to move on.

But to where?  Over the last couple of decades, when we should have been looking forward, we've been focused intently on low Earth orbit.  Without clear goals for the future, we experimented with a few neat ideas, but nothing really took off (so to speak) because they weren't any better than the Shuttle at performing the same tasks, and they didn't really take us any farther than the Shuttle could.  So NASA dumped some money at them, learned a few neat things, came up with some nifty ideas, and then pitched them all in the trash.  (In theory, all of those ideas are recorded somewhere, but for practical purposes, my guess is that most of them are permanently lost).

So now we're left with aging (and ailing) Shuttles, but nothing to replace them.  Our esteemed president has suggested a new mission (first the moon, then Mars), but we don't have the slightest idea how to do it.

How is that possible?  I mean we've already been to the moon, right?  So we know how to do that, right?  Wrong.  We've forgotten how, because we've totally ignored it for 20 years.  One would assume that all of the data still exists somewhere, but it's more likely that the data has been lost, or destroyed, or purged.  And the people who worked on the Apollo project have long since retired or died, and since there was no continuing work done, none of that information was passed on to the next generation.  So we have to learn it all over again.

In the last twenty years, we could have been learning how to keep astronauts in space for months on end without any intervention from Earth-based assistance.  We haven't figured that out yet - the small crew of the ISS spends all of their time desperately trying to keep the thing working; without frequent supply missions with food, water, and spare parts, the ISS would kill its occupants and come tumbling to Earth.  And it's not even technically in space - it sits in the layer of plasma that surrounds the planet.  (If this doesn't seem like an important distinction, ask the crew that decided to run the US-built solar panels at 130-180V why plasma is different than space).

There are many reasons for our lack of progress, but I think that it comes down to two main reasons: lack of defined goals and a subcontracting fetish.  I'll address the two separately.

All dressed up and nowhere to go

The prime of NASA's existence was when the US was focused on getting to the moon.  At that time, the agency had a concrete goal and the means to get there.  The best science and engineering in the world was happening at NASA, and because of that they attracted the finest minds in the world.  As we made our first stabs at the moon, we inspired a generation of students to become scientists and engineers - through the 80s and 90s we reaped the benefits with amazing scientific discoveries and engineering feats.  This is starting to taper off; our generation's inspiration comes from people who dropped out of college and became millionaires in the personal computer industry: hardly positive role models.

Though getting to the moon was an excellent goal and worthy of doing, we went about it for the wrong reasons: once we got to the moon, Americans immediately lost interest and wondered why we needed to be spending all of that money playing low-gravity golf and lugging rocks around space.  Indeed, even NASA seemed to have a hard time justifying itself once we had been there a few times, and we cut the number of moon missions short.  Thankfully, there were still communists to compete with, so somebody got the great idea of making a reusable launch vehicle (also an excellent goal worth pursuing), and NASA jumped on the task.

The only problem was that while a reusable launch vehicle might be practical, it wasn't all that exciting.  Indeed; it was named the "Space Shuttle" precisely to conjure up images of routine, uninteresting voyages in to space: the Shuttle was to be means to an end, a way to haul the interesting stuff in to space.  So we came up with the Shuttle, and everybody looked around again for something to do, but couldn't find anything: NASA had already expended all of its political capital justifying the horrendous budget overruns the Shuttle had produced, and explaining why it was so expensive and non-routine to launch, and couldn't get congress to give them any more money until they made it cheaper.

Fast forward twenty years, and here we are still trying to do that: the interesting work has all been done, and all of the great minds that NASA attracted in the 1970s and 1980s have all left to better paying, more secure jobs in the private sector.  The underpaid, overworked subcontractors remaining do a great job under the circumstances, but they're doing exceptionally non-glamorous (and mostly thankless) work, with low-level (at best) scientific gain.  NASA, once a powerhouse, lies slowly decomposing in the wide-open spaces it once filled.

Government == Bad?

People seem to have an aversion to government employees.  I've never understood it, but it's there, and it's hit NASA hard.  The end result of this feeling, of course, isn't to reduce the size of government per se; rather the standard reaction is to subcontract out government jobs.  This way the size of government is technically smaller, though as a general rule the number of employees doesn't really drop, and the cost generally goes up.

NASA's prime contractor for Space Shuttle operations, the United Space Alliance, sports the following scope of work:

At the Johnson Space Center in Texas:

• Flight Operations
• Astronaut & Flight Controller Training
• Space Shuttle Flight Simulator Operations
• Mission Control Center Management and Operations
• Mission Planning, Flight Design and Analysis
• Space Station Operations and Utilization
• Flight Software Development
• Flight Crew Equipment

At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida:

• Vehicle Modification, Testing, Checkout and Launch Operations
• Support U.S. and Trans-Atlantic Emergency Landing Sites
• Ocean Retrieval of Solid Rocket Boosters
• Space Shuttle Logistics Depot - manufacture, repair, and procurement of Shuttle hardware and ground support equipment

... so basically, they do everything.  Why do we need NASA again?  All they seem to do is manage subcontractors and hand out money.

The fact is, subcontracting isn't the way to do science.  Subcontractors spend half of their time justifying their existence, and the other half falsifying timesheets to maximize their paychecks.  Despite any claims otherwise, much of the United Space Alliance's often mentioned $400 million per launch savings comes from cutting corners on safety and reducing staff levels in important areas such as pre-launch checking.

Non-governmental organizations, either privately held or publicly traded, are in business first to make money.  That's what business is about: profit.  At first glance, it seems like an excellent way to save money; if the corporation sees a way to operate more efficiently to save money, it will.  Right?  Of course: but remember that priority one is making money; safety, quality, and reliability straggle in at distant second, third, and fourth.  United Space Alliance (hereafter USA) is not interested in the science.  They aren't interested in discovery.  They aren't interested in redesigning the Shuttle to be lighter, safer, or stronger.  They're interested in removing pre-launch checks to save $20 per launch.  They're interested in their award fee.  And most importantly, they're interested in keeping their contract when it comes up for review: $12 billion over ten years is what they want.

Steps for success

This is getting long, but I feel very strongly about it.  I feel that NASA shouldn't be doomed to irrelevance; there's so much we can learn from space that we shouldn't just abandon it.  So how should we proceed?  I'm glad you asked:

1. Start with a clear objective.  The moon to Mars thing is good:  establishing a permanent base on the moon and then proceeding to Mars is really three parts, all important.  Since the moon is several days away, it forces us to actually do it right: stuff has to work, and the base has to be self sustaining, because the residents can't just jump in the Soyuz and head back home if there's a problem.  The issue, of course, is that we don't really know how to create a self sustaining environment yet.  Remember Biosphere 2?  Didn't go over so well.  So first we have an opportunity for NASA to do some good science and long-term testing here on Earth.  While we're doing that, the rocket scientists can get together and figure out how to carry whatever the biosphere 3 people come up with to the moon, and put it together.  That's launch vehicles, orbiters, a few unmanned orbital missions to the moon to select a site, and so on.  Once all of that is running, the third mission is to take everything we've learned and use it on Mars.  That isn't the simple matter of duplication, since Mars is much farther away, and has very different conditions.  All of this is great science waiting to happen, and we'll learn a lot about our planet while we're at it.
2. Be honest when asking for money.  Part of the problem with the Shuttle and (to a lesser extent) the Apollo missions was their huge costs.  There's some speculation that these costs were known from the beginning, but nobody told Congress because they knew that Congress wouldn't fund the programs if they knew how much the programs would cost.  That tactic worked at the beginning, but it crippled the programs in the end as Congress insisted on massive cost cuts.  Start out with realistic numbers, and stick to them as much as possible.  Don't make promises you can't keep.
3. Sell the programs to the public.  This is the most important part.  A space race with the Chinese would not be productive.  Saying "Why?  Because it's there" won't work either.  And the current president is not the kind of person that can say "we choose to go to the moon."  How do you sell it?  That's a good question.  Let me know if you figure it out.  Maybe if we tell everybody that gay Martians are performing abortions, we can talk the American public in to the whole thing.
4. Let NASA do the work.  We've seen what subcontractors can do.  The organization will be better, faster, and cheaper if it's a single organization, not a kludge of competing subcontractors.
5. Don't require outside assistance.  The International Space Station is a noble effort, but depending on others is a recipe for disaster (as we've seen with the ISS).  That's not to say that we should exclude others; we'll be better off if we can attract the best minds from around the world.  However things will go much more smoothly if the entire project is the work of a single agency.

We shouldn't stay on our planet forever.  It's human nature to explore, discover, and expand.  There's still plenty to do on Earth, but we also need to start making tentative steps off the rock.  It won't be cheap, it won't be easy, and it might be a little dangerous: but the payoff will be profound.  We can make it happen, but only if we try.  Let's get started.