FWD: The Economist - Is Space exploration too farsighted? (2 articl

Two articles from the British journal "The Economist," forwarded to me via the "Friends and Partners in Space" List, for your review and comment.

Regards,
Jim Spellman
NATIONAL SPACE SOCIETY
Western Spaceport Chapter
www.hometown.aol.com/wspaceport/Welcome.html
www.nss.org

Space exploration too farsighted

EARLIER this year, Tom DeLay, a Republican congressman from Texas, accused NASA, America's space agency, of having a "lack of vision." He is not the first person to make this criticism and he certainly won't be the last. But what such critics actually mean is not that the agency has no visionbut that
they happen to disagree with the one it has. In the case of Mr. DeLay, his expressed dismay at the "anemic" financing available for human spaceflight
was more a call of "Houston, we have a funding problem."

Such accusations of a lack of vision should not sting NASA, because they could not be more wrong. For one thing the agency already spends the lion's share of its $15 billion annual budget on human spaceflight. For another, if there is one thing that sums up what NASA has suffered from over the past three decades, it is too much vision, not too little. And the symptoms of this are most visible in the bloated, late, over-budget and largely useless human
spaceflight projects that it has been pursuing since the Apollo program.

Vision Express

After men landed on the moon, NASA needed to find something else to do, so it decided to try to put men on Mars. But Richard Nixon turned down this grand vision. And so, according to Roger Pielke, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the agency simply broke the mission into three more easily sellable parts: the shuttle, the space station, and then Mars (see article). It was then left in the impossible position of having to justify each step on its own merits alone. This led both to the overselling of the shuttle and to the thin veneer
of "science" that has been arranged around the space station.

It is true that science can be done in the space station. But science can also be done dressed in a clown suit atop a large Ferris wheel. The argument ought
to be over where is the best place for it. Performing experiments in microgravity does not require a $100 billion platform. Moreover, much of the work that can genuinely be done only on the station is justified through another magnificently circular leap of logic. Research into the effects of microgravity on human health and the growth of soy beans, for instance, is useful only in the context of a manned mission to Mars.

The only good reason for NASA to be involved in human spaceflight is to lay the ground for opening space up for everybody. It takes a vast leap of
imagination to detect this reason in NASA's present strategy. Fleeting visits to the moon (or, one day, to Mars) would turn the agency into little more than
an elite travel agent. But for decades there has been a huge pent-up demand for flights into space. Although the private sector is finally making some
progress towards this, NASA should have been there years ago. What is still needed is research and development on economical and safe space transport for the public at large. Space, like the Wild West, can be truly opened up only by the private sector. NASA's central goal in human space flight should be to make that possible.

Until NASA swaps its destination-driven thinking for a science-based approach focused on such objectives, the post-1960 generation that has grown up hoping to travel or even live in space will continue to feel betrayed. Several years ago, an organization called the Space Frontier Foundation observed bitterly: "Thirty-six years after sending John Glenn into orbit, NASA has finally achieved the capability to send John Glenn into orbit." NASA must find a more practical reason for the human spaceflight program. Sending people to eat all those soy beans cannot be it.

Human spaceflight: 2020 vision
NASA does some fancy financial footwork to deal with a budget crisis

FIVE BILLION dollars is a lot of money. A line of dollar bills five billion long would reach to the moon and back. Finding that you have a $5 billion
budget shortfallas NASA, America's space agency, did last yearis therefore no mean feat.

Cash crunches are nothing new at NASA, but this one is more serious. In the past, when the agency has waved its begging-bowl before American politicians, the bowl has usually been filled. This time, neither President George Bush nor Congress is interested in letting NASA spend its way out of its problems. A true crisis has finally arrived. And, a year ago, Mr. Bush appointed Sean O'Keefe, a self-professed "bean-counter," to deal with it.

Opportunity knocks

The Chinese ideogram for "crisis" combines those for danger and opportunity. The opportunity for NASA is to scale back some of its overambitious plans for human spaceflight and to try and stick to a budget. The danger is that, even if scaled back, most of this program is pointless, and it would be
unreasonably expensive even if it had a point.

Roger Pielke, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says that when NASA's grand
vision of a mission to Mars was turned down almost 30 years ago, it broke its proposal into three smaller parts that were easier to smuggle past the
politicians. One was a reusable launch vehicle; the second, a space station; and the third, further off, a putative Mars mission. But this meant that NASA
had to sell the shuttle and the station individually and on their own, rather dubious merits.

It is this, says Dr. Pielke, that has led to NASA's big problem. The shuttle, it was promised, would make access to space more affordable. Instead, it
became more expensive. The suggestion was that shuttles would fly every week at a cost of $14m a pop. In fact, the four-to-six launches a year that the
agency now manages cost roughly $400m each. The space station, meanwhile, was supposed to cost $8 billion when it was first assessed in 1984, and it was meant to take a decade to build. The total cost of the project, when it is completed (which is not yet), is now put at some $100 billion.

For now, the budget crisis has put NASA in a holding patterntrying to keep all its assets afloat. Details of its long-term strategy will not emerge until
its 2004 budget request. But both inside and outside the agency, questions are being asked about what its core mission should be.

That NASA is serious about changing is suggested by an unusual budget request that the agency has just put to Congress. The request is unusual because it is not for more money, but rather to shuffle the existing budget around. Previously, NASA was planning to spend $4.8 billion on the groundwork for a
fully reusable launch vehicle to replace the shuttle. Now, it wants to divide that money between the space station (allowing crews to do some actual science
there) and the development of a reusable "orbital space plane" (OSP) that would be launched on top of a cheap expendable rocket.

If the request is approved, it will represent a big change of strategy, since research has already started on a fully reusable vehicle. It will also be a
move in the right direction. According to Antonio Elias, vice-president of advanced programs at Orbital Sciences Corporation, a commercial-satellite
company based in Dulles, Virginia, a reusable vehicle would take 15-25 years to pay back its development coststhree times longer than an OSP. Furthermore, he says that fully reusable craft are hard to justify at all unless they can be flown at least 50 times a year.

Since global demand for launches is expected to run at between 30 and 40 "shuttle equivalents" a year over the next two decades, the numbers scarcely
add up. The economic rate for reusable vehicles, says Dr. Elias, has not changed for decades, because the two fundamental parameters of rocketrythe
efficiency of rocket engines and the properties of structural materialshave not changed.

An OSP could, it is reckoned, be ready by 2012. It would have two functions. The first would be to provide a cheap way of transferring crew between earth and the station. The second would be to act as a lifeboat for the station, a role now filled by a Russian-built Soyuz capsule that can house only three
people.

NASA would still need to be able to get to the space station in the interim, however. It therefore proposes to extend the life of the shuttle program.
Not everybody is happy about this. Some are concerned that the shuttle fleet, which is two decades old, will become increasingly costly to run at present
levels of safety and reliability. Even now, the fleet costs $3.8 billion a year, including its fixed costs. That is a significant chunk of NASA's $15 billion annual budget. And the $400m marginal cost of a launch is ludicrous compared with the $60m that the Americans pay for a Soyuz mission. Objectors
thus believe that what is really needed is an "exit strategy" from the whole sorry mess.

The question is: what? There are precious few options. One is privatization. Some time over the next few weeks an independent report on privatizing the
shuttle fleet will land on Mr. O'Keefe's desk. However, one of the report's compilers, Peter Wilson of RAND, a think-tank based in Santa Monica,
California, says that the overall view it will take of the possibilities for privatization is "very pessimistic." Because the shuttle is such old technology, says Mr. Wilson, and is also expensive to operate safely, it is unlikely that any private enterprise would wish to acquire it without a direct subsidy. In any case, there is only one market for itto service the space station. It is therefore unclear what benefits would flow from full-fledged private ownership.

One suggestion in the report is that NASA could restructure the shuttle program to allow more competitive sourcing. Another is that the program
could be handed off into a new "space transit authority." Although this would merely create a different public monopoly in manned space travel, it might
have the benefit of getting NASA out of the business altogether and forcing it to focus on what should be its core competence of science and technology.

There is one other alternative to the shuttle fleetmore use of Soyuz. But according to Scott Giles, the deputy staff director at the House of
Representatives' Committee on Science, that will not work either. The crunch will come with the expiry in 2006 of agreements to buy Soyuz vehicles from
Energia, the company that makes them. According to Charles Vick, an independent space analyst, Energia could not build more Soyuz craft after 2006
even if the agreement were renegotiated, because the program is nearly bankrupt and is already running down in anticipation of its expiry (money
supplied to the Russian government to stop this happening having mysteriously evaporated).

Between 2006 and the arrival of the OSP, then, there will be a gap. And the one answer that might look obviousput the space station in mothballs and wait for the OSPis probably not an option since the station needs regular visits from craft with rocket engines to stop its orbit decaying. Without them it
might crash to earth within a year. So the shuttle will probably limp on, for this reason if no other.

None of this, of course, answers the question of why the station should continue to survive at all. Between now and the arrival of the OSP, therefore,
NASA would like to get some science done on it, so as to justify its existence.

At present, with only a three-man crew aboard (due to the limited capacity of the Soyuz escape pod), this is not possible. If the budget request goes
through, that will change a bit. There will be more shuttle launches to the station, and they will have science payloads on board. However, it is likely
that the experiments themselves will actually be done on the shuttleit will merely be docked to the station for an extended period while the research is
carried out. On top of that, there remains the question of whether any of the science will be worthwhile. Except for research directed at making manned
spaceflight easier (a pretty circular argument for justifying human-conducted experiments in space), it is hard to see the case for any human experimenters
in space at all.

Both feet on the ground

Back on earth, Mr. O'Keefe is also engaged in more mundane forms of cost control. Programs are being cut. Bureaucrats, heaven forbid, are being made redundant. And he has also cast his beady eye on things that you might think NASA would be rather good at. Recently, for example, he described the agency's information-technology capabilities as "expensive, fractured, incompatible, but remarkably accessible to those who would like to use sensitive design and personnel information for personal gain." Indeed, in August, hackers managed to steal plans for future reusable space vehicles.

There is still some way to go. Only this month, two sets of independent analysts found yet another huge budget shortfall at the space station. Depending on which of these estimates you believe, it is either $117m or $582m over the next four years. NASA is delighted. Steven Isakowitz, the agency's
comptroller, remarked to SpaceNews that this was great news because, "they could have come back and said you're $3 billion short."

If that is thought to be progress, perhaps human spaceflight is doomed after all.