China in Space: A Threat or Not?

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Paul Spudis
Mission Control celebrates another successful mission. It ain't JSC.

Mission Control celebrates another successful mission. And it ain’t JSC.

Readers would be hard pressed to find a more blasé attitude towards China’s space program than the current “nothing-to-be-alarmed-about-here-folks” op-ed column by John Kelly recently published in Florida Today.  In his piece, Kelly dismisses any possible concern that China’s development of new space faring capability has any relevance to American interests.  In what he calls “politically driven hysteria,” he outlines the supposed myriad ways in which China lags behind the USA and the rest of the world, touting their space station as “one-tenth the size” of the US Skylab station of the 1970s.  Since when does size trump utility in space assets?

Kelly accuses those whom he characterizes as “preying on the average voter’s lack of geopolitical knowledge” of “jawboning,” while – jawboning.  He’s convinced (and feels the need to convince his readers) that the Chinese space program is simply a national pride-driven, PR exercise, a pathetic re-hash of the “space race” era (and America must resist the temptation to join in such a “race”).  Perhaps.  But who recently conducted anti-satellite warfare tests in low Earth orbit, leaving behind a cloud of space debris that will take years to decay and dissipate?  Hint: it wasn’t the USA or any of its space partners.

It appears Kelly wants us to reach out and cooperate with the Chinese in space, even though they have not shown any particular desire for such a path.  Kelly, the geopolitical sophisticate, seems to think that we should woo China with promises of space cooperation, like we won the hearts of the Russians.  Yes, the Soviets were our one-time rivals, but I seem to recall that aside from one public relations “détente” mission in the 1970s (Apollo-Soyuz), real cooperation with Russia in space began after the fall of communism there in the early 1990s.  At that time we were no longer in global competition with Russia and the rapid easing of tensions and encouragement of good relations was pressing.  Such is not true now for China; in fact, geopolitical competition and tension between China and the U.S. is increasing, especially in the South Pacific region.  China may turn out to be an ally in the long run but such an outcome at this time is by no means obvious.

China’s approach to space is focused on systematically pursuing a step-by-step program to gradually and continuously extend their reach and capabilities in space.  It won’t take “multiple decades” for the Chinese to overtake our stalled U.S. space program and gain a strong (if not an upper) hand in space development.  Leading from behind never works as it comes from diminished authority, thus lacking weight or persuasion.  I have noted before that many of the allegedly “sophisticated observers” in the space commentariat seem intent on pooh-poohing Chinese space ambitions.  In the absence of a large amount of hard data on China’s program (it is run by the military and very secretive) speculation abounds, but ignoring potential peril or purposefully denying its existence (and ascribing questionable motives to those who are concerned by our complacency) is the height of irresponsibility.  The clear facts are these:  China is a nascent space power, but they appear to be determined and resourceful.  They are approaching the development of a space faring capability logically and incrementally.  China’s technical and architectural choices appear sound.

What might be China’s ultimate ambitions in space?  They have clearly zeroed in on the development of space power, which despite sounding “sinister,” is merely the projection of power in space to serve national interests.  This power can take many forms, but in effect, it’s the ability to protect one’s own assets and capabilities and to deny an adversary theirs.  Satellites are astonishingly delicate and vulnerable.  They can be disabled easily with small, cheap spacecraft designed to intercept and impact them or blind their sensors with laser beams.  In a matter of a few minutes, a small interceptor can turn a billion-dollar surveillance satellite into a useless piece of space junk.  It is laughable and dangerous to presume that emerging space powers don’t think in these terms.  Kelly attributes others’ concerns as a ploy to get money for NASA and/or the military.  He claims to find their program “interesting to watch,” attributing their success to a “stable budget” and their use of the hard-earned expertise of previous space faring nations.

Many people think of war in space as science fiction, but during some future global crisis there is no reason to imagine that space would not be one of the theaters of operations in addition to land, sea and air.  We depend on critical space assets for many different tasks, including surveillance, communications, GPS for troop and fleet movements and UAV guidance, weather prediction – most all facets of modern life – a dependency that most take for granted.  If all our space-based functions were threatened, blocked by an unfriendly power, we have few effective options to respond to this vulnerability.

In addition to the operational aspects of the Chinese space effort, there is a technological dimension as well.  China is using its space program to incentivize and bootstrap a robust technical industrial base.  The manufacturing and human intellectual capital needed to conduct spaceflight has critical national security implications.  Nations that have both a strong economy and a high-technology base hold a distinct edge in preserving peace or defending themselves if war ever comes.  However, since the end of the Cold War, we have systematically dismantled the high-technology aerospace industrial base that helped us to win that struggle.  Unlike us, the Chinese see a vigorous space program as a means to develop new technical capabilities that will have much wider applications than space.  They understand that this is a good thing; we used to.

China has already sent two missions to orbit the Moon.  They plan to send a third mission this year to soft-land on the lunar surface.  Clearly, the Moon is part of their long-range strategic vision.  Experts assure us the Chinese are only interested in the Moon to land a man there (eventually – not in the near future, so don’t worry and get into a pointless “race”), plant the Chinese flag, say “me too” and then come back home basking in glory.  It apparently never occurs to these geniuses that others might see long-range value to the Moon – perhaps to use its resources and location to create a permanent cislunar presence, where all the world’s space assets reside.

Tut-tut – what a silly idea!  Don’t you realize that everybody looks at the space program the same way – as a bread and circuses amusement for their citizens, designed to bring “excitement” (those precious web hits) with an ever bigger and ever more spectacular series of space “firsts?”  Aren’t we told that there’s no practical value to going to the Moon?  There’s no “gold” there!  Certainly we would have gone back if there had been – or at least, we would be following the same path as China.

Now, let’s get back to those more important discussion topics of New Space – things like one-way trips to Mars, crowd-source funding and suborbital junkets.

Posted in Lunar development, space policy, space technology, Space transportation | 12 Comments

Human spaceflight: Why and How?

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Paul Spudis
Map of cislunar space -- the logical next arena of human spaceflight.

Map of cislunar space — the logical next arena of human spaceflight.

There is an on-going study effort at the National Academy on the “value proposition” for human spaceflight.  This study was requested by the Congress in its last Authorization Act for NASA.  The committee has requested input from the public on their thoughts regarding human spaceflight.  Although I have doubts about the value of this study, I still felt compelled to submit my thoughts on this topic.  Frequent readers of this blog will recognize most of these points, but many on the committee may not know these arguments and I think it is valuable to recollect and collate them in one place to clarify our thinking.  A PDF version of this white paper can be downloaded at the NAS committee web site or here at my main web site.

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ABSTRACT

The valuable partnership of humans and robots in space was demonstrated with the building of the ISS and the servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope.  Machines alone cannot perform many of the intellectual and manual activities required for space utilization and development.  Humans have proven themselves capable and often indispensable in advancing space objectives.  With the completion of the International Space Station, human missions beyond low Earth orbit are the next logical steps.  Of all possible destinations beyond LEO, the Moon provides the optimum location for the development of new space faring capabilities and the best opportunity to maintain a permanent presence in space.  The lunar surface contains the material and energy resources required to develop a permanent, extensible space transportation system.  By using an incremental, scalable architecture, our civil space program can realistically achieve two components vital for success – affordability and sustainability.  This system will provide access to the lunar surface and all points within cislunar space, permitting the construction of large, distributed satellite systems.  A permanent transportation system in cislunar space – fueled by propellant made from lunar water – creates an extensible, maintainable space faring capability.

The United States and its civil space program stand at a critical juncture.  Due to strategic confusion and loss of direction, our nation is in imminent danger of permanently destroying this once-great capability.  It is crucial that this committee understands that our nation’s technical competitiveness and economic health, along with that of other countries who value and champion individual liberty through the power of free markets and democratic pluralism, is at stake.

As requested in your call for papers, I organize my thoughts around your suggested questions.

1. What are the important benefits provided to the United States and other countries by human spaceflight endeavors?

Humans are needed in space to do those important and critical tasks and activities that only people can accomplish.  These types of jobs break down into three main categories.

To explore, discover and learn.  While scientific exploration is often thought to be central to the robotic space program, the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs demonstrated the critical role humans play in this area.  Field science is interacting with an exotic environment such that specific and relevant questions are both posed and answered in real time.  Beyond sample collection and the deployment of equipment, human creativity is crucial.  The spontaneous interaction of human cognition and intelligence, skills honed through highly interpretive knowledge, innate manual dexterity and real-time adaptation in the event of difficulties and/or opportunities, all offer important advantages over purely robotic spaceflight.

To create, build and maintain.  This category of activities takes advantage of the proven ability of people and machines working together to build and maintain large distributed space systems on orbit.  The most complex spacecraft ever built, the International Space Station (ISS), was constructed this way; this platform could not have been built and launched en masse in a single launch vehicle – it had to be assembled on site.  In a similar manner, space systems constructed in the higher orbits of cislunar space (e.g., geosynchronous orbit – GEO) could likewise be made to possess unprecedented degrees of power and capability; an ISS-sized communications complex constructed in GEO with global coverage and virtually unlimited bandwidth would render the current terrestrial cell phone network obsolete.  For this practical reason alone, routine movement of people and machines throughout cislunar space should be a priority goal of human spaceflight.  Once built, such a space transportation system will serve as our means to travel into the Solar System beyond the Moon.

To preserve, protect and survive.  It has been posited by some that the movement of humanity into the cosmos is the “ultimate” long-term goal of human spaceflight.  A species present in multiple locations faces better survival odds than a single-planet species in the event of a planetary catastrophe.  Although this may be an ultimate rationale for human spaceflight, it is not a viable objective for a federal civil space program.  Before we can settle space, we must develop the ability to get there.  Once there, we must create the ability to stay there.  These latter two tasks constitute the development of a space faring capability, a sine qua non to space settlement and human expansion into the universe.  Developing such skills is an appropriate task for our national space program.  Instead of fixating on Mars, human space exploration should focus on becoming space faring – a goal that includes Mars, but one far richer in possibilities, both exploratory and practical, and one whereby we create wealth rather than simply consume it.

In short, we desire to develop the ability to go wherever we want or need to in space, with people and machines, to accomplish whatever goals and objectives we may desire.  By accepting this as our overall goal and stating at the outset what our endpoint is, the development of a strategic approach and tactical path to attain this ability becomes possible.

2. What are the greatest challenges to sustaining a U.S. government program in human spaceflight?           

Although it is tempting to ascribe the cause of our current space malaise to a lack of funding, in fact the problem is more fundamental – it is a failure to fully understand exactly what we are trying to accomplish and why.  I discuss the “why” in the section above; if these objectives are granted as valid for the sake of argument, how then might we best begin to establish such capabilities?

Human spaceflight requires specific destinations to be programmatically viable.  The idea that we should develop technical systems before we decide where we will go takes us nowhere.  The clear next step for human spaceflight in the post-ISS era is beyond low Earth orbit.  The Moon offers the best near-term, sustainable destination to practice and accomplish those space faring goals mentioned above.  The reasons are three-fold:

1.  The Moon is close.  Only a few days away, the Moon is constantly accessible for launch at any time.  Its proximity permits remote control of machines by operators on Earth, allowing us to perform many menial and preparatory tasks by teleoperated robots prior to human arrival.  The closeness of the Moon makes our early venture beyond LEO safer, as mission aborts are easier and opportunities occur more frequently than for trips of interplanetary dimensions.  Milestones and capabilities for lunar return can be set and met in achievable timeframes.

2.  The Moon is interesting.  Etched in the Moon’s surface is the geological record of its history, as well as the history of the Earth-Moon system and that of the Sun and galaxy.  A small rocky planet of surprising complexity and richness, the processes that operated on the Moon also operate on all of the other terrestrial planets.  The Moon uniquely retains a record of the early impact bombardment history of the Earth, something no other space destination offers.  A record of the ancient Sun and its output through time is recorded in the dusty regolith of the Moon’s surface, information vital to the reconstruction of Earth’s climate history.  The airless, seismically quiet lunar surface is a superb platform to observe the universe by constructing astrophysical instruments of unprecedented sensitivity and capability.  The Moon’s extreme vacuum and thermal environment permits scientific experiments difficult or impossible to attempt elsewhere in space or on Earth.

3.  The Moon is useful.  The Moon possesses the material and energy resources needed to create new spaceflight capabilities.  Areas near the lunar poles contain abundant water (billions of tons) and receive near-continuous sunlight.  These properties permit sustained human presence on the Moon through the use of sunlight to generate electrical power and the harvesting of water ice to both support human life and make rocket propellant through electrolysis of water into liquid oxygen and hydrogen.  The Moon’s surface materials provide feedstock for the production of metals, ceramics and useful objects, allowing us to construct new space systems derived from sources other than Earth, the deepest gravity well in the inner Solar System.  The utilization of the Moon’s material and energy resources permit us to build a permanent, reusable and extensible space transportation system, a system that not only permits access to and from the lunar surface, but to all other points in cislunar space.

All of the Earth-orbiting satellite assets upon which modern technical civilization depends reside in the volume of space between Earth and Moon (cislunar space).  Currently, custom designed satellites are launched on expendable vehicles, used for a time and eventually abandoned.  Because our options are limited to satellites that can fit on the largest launch vehicles, and since we cannot get people and machines to high Earth orbit (e.g., MEO, GEO and the L-points) to build, service and repair space systems, our satellite assets are mass- and power-limited and thus, capability-limited.  By creating a system that can routinely access cislunar space (using rocket fuel made from lunar polar water), we are able to transport people and equipment to any point to service existing assets and build new and powerful distributed systems.  Once we break free from the expense and restrictions of hauling everything out of Earth’s gravity well, we become capability UN-limited in space.

To be politically sustainable over many years and decades, it is important to construct a program that is affordable and is seen to accomplish recognizable milestones at frequent intervals.  One way to achieve this is to implement an architecture that consists of incremental steps, each one small enough to be affordable under reasonable funding scenarios, yet capable over time of being operated collectively as a large, distributed system.  Because the Moon is close (round trip time for a radio signal is 3 seconds), we can control robots via teleoperation from Earth and prepare an outpost and manufacture rocket propellant and other useful materials prior to human arrival.  People can then move into a turn-key outpost on the lunar surface, emplaced by robotic machines, with the ability to refuel a reusable lander for trips to and from the lunar surface.  Such an architecture has been developed (see bibliography) with estimated costs that fit under a NASA budgetary envelope of less than one-half of one percent of the federal budget.

3.  What are the ramifications and what would the nation and world lose if the United States terminated NASA’s human spaceflight program?

America is not the only entity interested in space.  Other nations, corporations and non-government entities have already shown that they plan to be present in LEO, in cislunar space, and on the Moon.  If the United States as a collective entity (i.e., the nation as represented by the federal government) is not present on the new frontier of space, what other country will promote, advance and protect our political and economic values in this area?

We depend upon a technical industrial infrastructure for our national economy and security.  That industrial base has significantly deteriorated in the years since the end the Cold War.  The great advances in consumer products in the last 20 years do not fully develop all of the technical capability needed for national security purposes and vice versa.  A vigorous civil space program has proven to be an excellent means to develop and maintain this capability, one that we may need at any time on very short notice.  Thus, civil space occupies a critical niche in the American national defense posture, regardless of our avowed peaceful intentions in space.

In an early speech defending the Apollo program, President John F. Kennedy laid out the reasons that America had to go the Moon.  Among the many ideas that he articulated, one stood out.  He said, “whatever men shall undertake, free men must fully share.”  This was a classic expression of American exceptionalism, the idea that we explore new frontiers not to establish an empire, but to ensure that our political and economic system prevails (or at the least, is represented).  That system has encouraged and defended basic human freedoms and put new wealth into the hands of the greatest number of people in the history of the world.

We make the Moon the first destination for humans beyond LEO because it has the material and energy resources needed to create a true space faring system.  With both abundant water and energy available near the lunar poles, we return to the Moon to learn how to extract and use those resources to create a permanent transportation system, one that opens up cislunar space and allows routine access with machines and people.  Such a system is the logical next step in space security and commerce.  Cislunar development is fiscally prudent and ensures that our civil space program is relevant to important national interests of security, technology and economy, as well as advancing scientific understanding and knowledge.

Space should be more than a sanctuary for science and PR stunts.  Space needs to be a true frontier, beaconing scientists and pilots as well as miners, technicians, construction workers, entrepreneurs and settlers.  Decisions made now may decide humanity’s fate for generations.

Bibliography

A Rationale for Cislunar Space  http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2011/04/a-rationale-for-cislunar-space/

The New Space Race  http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1376

Develop Cislunar Space Next  http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Bibliography/a/a40.pdf

Spudis testimony to House Space Subcommittee, May 21 2013  http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Opinion_Editorial/testimony2013.pdf

Using the resources of the Moon to create a permanent, cislunar space faring system

http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Bibliography/p/102.pdf

Posted in Lunar development, space policy, space technology, Space transportation | 41 Comments

Some Myths of Shuttle History

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Paul Spudis

History is a set of lies agreed upon. – Napoleon Bonaparte

Discovery in orbit

Discovery in orbit

Now that the Space Shuttle’s been retired, we’ve witnessed nearly universal agreement within the space commentariat on its legacy:  Failure.  Take your pick of descriptors – a mistake, a bad design, “the end of an error,” the wrong path, a death-trap, and/or “Nixon’s destruction of Apollo.”  It doesn’t matter whence this criticism comes; the same words and phrases are recited again and again.  Are these denunciations independent convergence on the truth or simply echoes in a canyon?

In part, it’s the image of the Space Shuttle that suffers in comparison to its immediate predecessor, Apollo.  The Saturn V was magnificent – a gleaming white monument pointing to the stars, a Teutonic beauty rising above Earth, carried aloft on a glorious blinding pillar of orange flame while thunderous super-bass, low frequency pounding of engines vibrated inside your chest up to five miles away.  The Apollo spacecraft took people to the Moon, hundreds of thousands miles beyond low Earth orbit.  From that lofty perch, we saw the full globe of the lovely blue-and-white planet Earth, hanging before us like a masterpiece in the Louvre.  For space buffs, the Apollo program was a spectacle to remember and savor.

Contrast that vision with the Space Shuttle – squat and ugly, the vehicle defaced Pad 39A by its ignoble presence.  It was a kludged-together conglomeration – an airplane standing on its tail, overwhelmed by the presence of the big, ugly orange hulk of the ET and two giant Roman candles strapped to its side.  When it lit, you held your breath, waiting for the inevitable catastrophic fireball explosion.  Then by some miracle it reached orbit, but no further.  What a disappointment – a thrown-together launch vehicle that only reached low Earth orbit (barely).  It even had to open its cargo bay doors to radiate internal heat so the crew could remain aloft.  The Shuttle ugly duckling suffered greatly in comparison to the beautiful Saturn V swan.

Why should it matter that Shuttle is gone?  What have we really lost?  In fact, just about everything.  Outside of leasing seats on regularly flying Russian Soyuz spacecraft, America has no way to get humans to and from space.  We cannot launch large replacement parts for the International Space Station (good thing that it’s fully assembled; let’s hope it does not develop any serious difficulties that require replacement of any of the major pieces).  We no longer have the ability to access and service the Hubble Space Telescope, or any other satellite for that matter.  We will remain without this capability even after the new Orion spacecraft becomes operational.  The Shuttle stack had a throw weight of more than 100 tons; nothing in the world’s stable of launch vehicles remotely approaches that capability.

The Shuttle program came about because NASA was looking for a path to make spaceflight affordable and routine.  Although proven, Apollo was simply too expensive to continue.  Parts of the Saturn V were (literally) hand-made.  Recently I’ve been reading commentary about the Shuttle program that’s appeared in the last few years and certain tropes repeatedly appear.  In this piece, I want to examine and address some of them.  I reserve the right to revisit this topic later for more rumination on other issues.

One canard often mentioned in the Apollo-Shuttle comparison is that for what the Shuttle program cost, we could have launched dozens of Saturn Vs.  Perhaps, but what would we have launched?  The Shuttle payload was about 25 tons; Saturn V could carry 120 tons.  If we’d flown the same manifest, Saturn would have wasted 4/5 of its capacity on each launch.  Of course, we could have combined some payloads – if they were ready at the right time and they all needed to be delivered to the same orbit.

It’s often alleged that Nixon cancelled the Apollo program because it was a Kennedy initiative.  In fact, it was Lyndon Johnson who shut down the Saturn V production line in 1968 to finance the war in Vietnam and expand entitlements.  True enough, the last three Apollo missions to the Moon were cancelled, but it was NASA that wanted that.  The Apollo program managers thought that having accomplished their primary goal (“man-Moon-decade”), they were simply tempting fate (and a possible catastrophic loss of crew) to continue the program.  As a lunar scientist, I am more grateful that we got the six landings that we did than resentful that the last three were cancelled.

Nixon was actually a huge supporter of human spaceflight.  At a time of great social upheaval and turmoil, Nixon thought that the space program was a positive, forward-looking activity that could help counter the negativity then prevalent in America.  However, as both a plain-cloth Republican and a political realist, he realized that there was no support for the expenditures that a human Mars mission (as his Vice-President Spiro Agnew advocated) would require.  Nixon wanted a space program that we could afford.  He also recognized the geopolitical importance of not allowing the Soviet Union to become the only world power with a human spaceflight program.  Nixon’s judgment was that a program that could hold the line at less than one percent of the federal budget would be sustainable on a long-term basis, a supposition that the subsequent thirty-year history of the civil space program has shown to be correct.

It was on these terms that NASA began to examine possible Shuttle configurations.  It was not simply a matter of being given a number and designing a program to fit that number.  Cost is always a concern in any big technical project.  In this case, the issue was what kind of human space program could we have given such a level of support.

Early design sketches for a space shuttle included a two-stage, fully reusable vehicle.  That led to the legend that it was this obviously superior design NASA wanted but was forced by the budget bean counters to build the lower cost, partly reusable alternative.  In fact, there were serious issues with the fully reusable design; many engineers thought that in technical terms, it was just a bridge too far in 1970 (and still is in 2013).  According to Bob Thompson, Shuttle Program Manager during this era, it probably could not have been made to work.  The decision to adopt a partly reusable design probably saved the space program from inevitable failure and subsequent collapse.

Also held up for criticism is Shuttle’s delta wing.  It is often claimed that the large delta wing configuration of the Shuttle was imposed by military requirements.  If Shuttle had been launched into a polar orbit, after one revolution the launch (and landing) site would no longer be under the Shuttle groundtrack.  Delta wings gave the Shuttle the large cross-range capability (more than 1000 km) it needed to return to base quickly in launch abort scenarios.  The massive triangularly shaped Shuttle wings reduced the payload capacity of the vehicle, but delta wing vehicles are more aerodynamically stable in the various velocity regimes through which the Shuttle traveled during re-entry from orbit to landing.  If the Shuttle wing design was an “imposition,” it was a beneficial one for the ultimate design that emerged.

The sizing of the Shuttle payload bay is also held to be another military imposition.  Supposedly, the 15 by 60 foot cargo bay was sized specifically to accommodate launching the then-planned reconnaissance satellites needed by the military.  However, NASA also wanted a big cargo bay. They intended to eventually build a space station in low Earth orbit and Shuttle was sized in accordance with its anticipated needs.  If the Shuttle stack had been much larger than it was, it might never have gotten off the ground; it certainly would not have fit through the doors of the VAB at the Cape, necessitating extensive reconstruction.  If it were much smaller, a single vehicle would no longer serve all of the space program’s needs.  Like Goldilocks, a “just right” Shuttle was built to satisfy all of the program requirements, as they were then understood.

Part of the great disappointment with Shuttle was that it cost more to operate than planned.  Some pre-program economic studies showed that if you could fly the Shuttle 50 times a year, it might actually make money.  No one seriously thought that we would ever achieve this number.  Klaus Heiss, the man who did this analysis, once told me that the study was primarily an academic exercise, designed to compare the economics of a Shuttle with then-existing expendable launch vehicles.  (Klaus also demonstrated that a partly reusable vehicle was better economically than a fully reusable one.)  A reusable space vehicle had never been built and serious technical difficulties arose during its development.  The complex thermal protection system (tiles) is one example.  Upon each return to Earth, the Shuttle had to dissipate its enormous orbital kinetic energy as heat.  Finding a material strong and light enough to provide this protection was extremely difficult and the system turned out to be more maintenance intensive than had been hoped.

Despite these difficulties and a lingering resentment about its origin and appearance, the Space Shuttle flew 133 successful missions, delivering over 3.5 million pounds of payload to space, including nearly the entire mass of the largest spacecraft made to date – the International Space Station.  More than 350 people have traveled to space on the Shuttle.  Over the course of its thirty-year history, the Shuttle program demonstrated the value of on-obit assembly, in-space repair, and maintenance of vehicles by people and machines working together.  Such a step-by-step, extensible series of operations and experience must continue if we intend to pursue and successfully secure humanity’s long-term future in space.

Posted in space policy, space technology, Space transportation | 51 Comments

“Where, Why and How?” – Concerns of the House Subcommittee on Space

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Paul Spudis

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be – Alfred Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall

Where there is no vision, the people perish – Proverbs 29:18

Inscribed on the walls of the Science Committee Conference Room, House Rayburn 2318

Meeting room of the House Science Committee

Meeting room of the House Science Committee (archive photo)

Recently I had the honor of testifying before the House Subcommittee on Space.  A hearing was called to address questions and concerns about “The Next Steps in Human Exploration.”  The hearing charter focused on comparing a possible return to the Moon with a proposed mission to a near-Earth asteroid in preparation for human missions to Mars and points beyond.  Sitting before the subcommittee with me were Lou Friedman, formerly of the Planetary Society – one of the architects of the proposed “haul asteroid” mission which had quite suddenly appeared in the administration’s proposed FY2014 budget, Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist and current chair of the NASA Advisory Council, and Doug Cooke, a former Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems at NASA, now president of his own consulting firm.

I’ve testified previously before Congressional committees (on both the Senate and House sides) and each time the opportunity has been interesting and educational.  I am always impressed by the thoughtful nature of the members’ questions, belying their sometime public image as know-nothing time-servers.  I sense that they want to do the correct thing for the nation and for their constituents.  If there are differences of opinion, they appear to be honest ones.  This is especially true in regard to our national civil space program, one of the rare areas of public policy that has historically enjoyed strong bipartisan support.  The divide in belief on the value of space is philosophical, not political.  Some on both sides “get it,” and some on both sides don’t.

I found that there is confusion and even some anger on the Hill over President Obama’s decision to abandon the Moon as the near-term goal of human spaceflight.  Additionally, there is widespread puzzlement about the newly minted, asteroid retrieval concept – whether it will accomplish any scientific benefits, if it will prepare us for human missions beyond LEO, and what societal value it may or may not have.  The question before the committee was how we might best move forward in space.  As the discussion proceeded, it was patently clear that we desperately need a guiding vision with a strategic direction, one that constantly, incrementally and cost effectively creates and extends our space capabilities.  It requires a plan with abundant milestones, intermediate in time and money, which will move humans beyond low Earth orbit.

Sitting before the committee, I read the words (quoted above) of Tennyson and Proverbs, a stark reminder of the importance of  “vision” highlighted prominently on the wall behind the assembled committee.  The 2004 Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) was designed to extend human reach beyond low Earth orbit – throw open the door to opportunities on an extensible path forward.  A key part of that vision (endorsed by two Congresses, under different leadership) was to learn how to use off-planet resources – the abundant material and energy wealth of the Solar System, beginning on the Moon – to create new spaceflight capabilities and commercial opportunities.  The idea that lunar return was meant to be some sort of Apollo Redux, in which we would conduct super-sortie missions to a few landing sites and then depart for Mars was not the intent of lunar return in the VSE.  Unfortunately, NASA itself helped play into the moronic “been there, done that” canard by emphasizing the same things that characterized Apollo – a program of custom built, one-off disposable spacecraft, launched into orbit on behemoth rockets.

An interesting moment in the hearing came when Squyres expressed concern that even if the Space Launch System (SLS) is completed, there will be no money to operate it or provide payloads for it.  I believe this concern comes from a misunderstanding of the fundamental purpose of the SLS – the launch vehicle mandated in the 2010 NASA authorization bill.  I have written previously that because of the peculiar wording of that bill, there may have been an ulterior motive involved in such specificity, viz., that the SLS is Congress’ way of retaining a semblance of spaceflight capability within the agency, a national technical capability that they believed was discarded with undue haste and little serious thought.  In such a scenario, the operational cost of SLS is not relevant, at least until an attainable, strategic horizon is recognized and adopted by a future administration.  SLS is merely a mechanism to retain a national capability and operational spaceflight team, the hard-fought-for-and-won national treasure of space expertise which otherwise would be scattered to the winds.

I used my opportunity before the committee to submit a detailed architecture for building an incremental, cumulative space transportation system (see the links at end of my submitted testimony here).  While we should not make a fetish of reusability, to create a lasting system (one that serves our diverse national needs in space), we need to adopt the ethic of a space “fleet” whereby ships operate in one locality in space and only there.  One size does not fit all.  Different functions require different kinds of ships and one might change vehicles several times in the course of a journey.  In other words, we should begin to move from an Earth-based and dependent transportation system to a space-based and provisioned one.  Harvesting lunar water is key to this development.

Witnesses at the May 21 hearing. From left to right, Friedman, Spudis, Squyres and Cooke.

Witnesses at the May 21 hearing. From left to right, Friedman, Spudis, Squyres and Cooke.

If we intend to go to the planets – to incorporate the Solar System into our social and economic sphere – we must understand and master the extraction and use of the indigenous resources of space.  So why not start now on our nearby, accessible and useful Moon, where acquiring this skill can be done with some degree of ease and safety?  Doug Cooke endorsed using the Moon as a resource and test-bed, stating his belief that the lunar surface offered the best place to develop the skills and technology needed for future human planetary missions.

In response to a member’s question about the possible advent of a new space race, Lou Friedman remarked that America and the Soviets raced to the Moon fifty years ago and found “no gold” there.  But I contend, sometimes “gold” glistens instead of glitters and you must be able to recognize it.  The abundant water ice of the lunar poles (already in Earth orbit and waiting to be collected and used) is pure spaceflight gold – the substance that permits permanence and utility for humans in space.  Call it what you will – a race, a gold rush, a science and technology driver (all the above) – but while the rest of the world reaches for the lunar gold ring, we should not forfeit our participation in a growing space-based economy by focusing on a cobbled together asteroid junket.

There is nothing prohibiting us from returning to the Moon except for a stubborn, nonsensical insistence that there’s no reason to go back because “we’ve been there.”  Of the four witnesses who testified on May 21, three believe that the Moon serves a critical role in preparing people for longer journeys.  Our next steps from Earth should lead us back to the Moon for study and use – a lunar harbor from where travel into the larger Solar System begins.  I believe that most of the committee members understand that.  They are not fooled by proposals for “bread-and-circus” stunt missions to bag a space rock and then visit it because it is proclaimed to be the only place that we can get to.  That’s putting a “happy face” on our space program and nothing more.  It is a mission out of step with America and one that ignores words of wisdom spelled out on the House hearing room wall.

Links to the testimony of the four witnesses can be found at the Committee web site.

A video of the hearing can be found on YouTube or downloaded here.

Posted in Lunar development, space policy, Space transportation | 62 Comments

Heavy, Man….Heavy

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Paul Spudis
Destinations beyond LEO beckon -- a view of moonrise from the ISS

Destinations beyond LEO beckon — a view of moonrise from the ISS

A basic principle of spaceflight is that simpler is preferred to the more complex.  The use of a heavy lift launch vehicle (HLV) is “simpler,” in that fewer launches of big rockets creates less risk than an architecture requiring multiple launches of smaller ones.  Woven into our current debate about future strategic directions in space are arguments over whether to develop and use an HLV for human missions beyond low Earth orbit, and if so, what type.  In brief, the problem flows from the fact that even when using the largest rockets, we arrive in orbit with empty fuel tanks.  To go beyond LEO we must carry a fully fueled Earth departure stage, which is very heavy.  Thus, the requirement for “heavy lift.”

An alternative to a heavy lift vehicle is the fuel depot, in which caches of rocket fuel are collected and stored over time.  When we are ready to leave on a trans-LEO mission we re-fuel our rocket at the depot in space and go.  A variant of the depot concept employs separate launch, rendezvous and the assembly in orbit of multiple pre-fueled pieces, all launched within a short period of time.  Each approach presents its own technical and fiscal challenges.

The possible use of the promised future Falcon Heavy (FH) launch vehicle to conduct human missions to the Moon was the topic of a recent AmericaSpace article.  I found this piece particularly interesting as the debate about the use of FH vs. the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) has some historical resonances with a previous round of lunar exploration, namely when America raced the Soviet Union to the Moon.

Although the fuel depot/HLV debate is one side of the architectural argument, I will set that aside for now and focus here on the type of heavy lift vehicle needed.  Based largely on the limited payload capacity of Falcon Heavy (53 tons to LEO) compared to the NASA developed SLS system (initially, 70 tons, expandable up to 130 tons), the article at AmericaSpace questions the capability of the Falcon Heavy to conduct lunar exploration.

The Falcon Heavy consists of three Falcon 9 rockets strapped abreast. The 3 rockets contain nine engines each, resulting in 27 engines firing simultaneously at launch.  Although claimed to be tolerant of engine out conditions, obviously if too many failures occur, loss of vehicle would ensue.  The FH uses liquid oxygen (LOX) and kerosene, a tried and proven fuel system, containing somewhat lower total energy than the liquid oxygen LOX)-liquid hydrogen (LH2) of the SLS.  The specific technical details of Falcon Heavy suggest a parallel with a previous trans-LEO launch vehicle: the Soviet N-1 rocket, the super HLV that the USSR designed and built in their failed bid to beat America to the Moon.

The N-1 rocket contained four stages (30 engines in the first stage), all burning LOX-kerosene (as the Soviets had yet to master the difficulties of developing and flying high-energy cryogenic hydrogen engines and LOX-kerosene is more forgiving).  At liftoff, it produced over 11 million pounds of thrust.  Keeping such a behemoth stable during launch was a major challenge but unavoidable; the N-1 used carefully balanced throttling and gimbals on each engine to control and steer the vehicle.  In contrast, America’s Saturn V produced 7.5 mission pounds of thrust and used LOX-kerosene only in its first stage; both the S-II and S-IVB upper stages used LOX-LH2 fuel.  Even with the greater thrust produced by the Soviet N-1, it would have placed only 90 tons into LEO and sent 24 tons to the Moon; the Saturn V put 120 tons in space and delivered 45 tons to translunar injection.  Energy is the ability to do work and equals thrust times the length of the burn.  Because of its propellant, the N-1 had lower total energy even though its thrust was greater than the Saturn V, resulting in lower delivered payload mass.

The differences between the N-1 and the Saturn V are similar to those between the Falcon Heavy and the SLS core.  FH uses 27 LOX-kerosene engines to put 53 tons into LEO; the relatively low specific impulse resulting from the use of these propellants results in a performance of about 12 tons into translunar injection.  Thus, a lunar mission mounted with the FH would require multiple launches (at least 3 and possibly as many as 6 to conduct a complete lunar mission).  The SLS uses cryogenic hydrogen propellant and puts 70 tons in LEO and can send about 25 tons to the Moon.  A complete lunar landing mission could be done with two SLS core vehicle launches.  Incidentally, in the argument about which vehicle will be ready for flight first, I note that we could have had a 70 ton HLV flying now if a sane decision to build Shuttle side-mount had been taken before Shuttle retirement.  But I digress.

While both the N-1 and FH are comparable in their number of rocket engines, their layout and functioning are different.  The N-1 was a single vehicle with propellant tankage, lines and structure all common – feeding the 30 NK-15 engines simultaneously.  The ring-like arrangement of the N-1 engines was intended to take advantage of symmetry to handle failures through balanced shutdown of engine pairs.  But with thirty engines all firing simultaneously, instabilities (if they developed) would likely to lead to catastrophe.  Falcon Heavy is designed to operate in unison in a more linear fashion as three vehicles strapped together, although supposedly cross feeds are envisioned to even out flow rates and variations in thrust.  It remains to be seen how FH will handle instabilities.

In terms of historical performance, the Saturn V flew 13 times, with one partial failure on the second (unmanned) mission caused by severe “pogo” (longitudinal oscillations) during second stage firing.  The N-1 flew four times, never successfully.  A catastrophic explosion of the vehicle during the second N-1 launch killed several high-ranking Soviet officials and their lunar program never recovered.  The N-1 design was barely sufficient for its stated purpose and this marginal performance led to the complete collapse of the Soviet lunar program.  In contrast, enough mass margin was built into the Saturn V that an augmented, heavier version of the Lunar Module (including a surface rover) was flown on the later missions, thus extending the range and stay time of crew on the Moon, along with a commensurate increase in mission return.

There is a limit to how much even the largest HLV can carry into space.  Eventually, we will reach a stage where a single, double or even multiple launch cannot accommodate all of the mass required for a mission.  A case in point is the current Design Reference Mission for Mars, which requires not only seven (7) 120 ton HLVs (plus a separate crew launch) but also a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) for the Earth departure, a piece of technology with which we experimented 50 years ago and will require tens of billions of dollars to develop an operational model.  If we cannot develop this NTR, an all-chemical propulsion Mars mission could require as many as a dozen HLV launches.  All things considered, the resources and complexities of this mission concept approach the outer edges of what is possible.  I leave judgment as to the likelihood of such a mission ever flying to the delicate sensibilities of the reader.

The use of either the FH or SLS launch vehicle for trans-cislunar missions requires multiple launches; SLS will require fewer launches than the FH.  The choice of which to use is not exclusively related to cost but also to architectural complexity.  In general terms, the fewer launches required for a given mission, the better.  But other considerations may drive the mission design to more launches.

In short, although an HLV makes trans-LEO missions possible, future human missions to a variety of Solar System destinations will require us to eventually learn how to assemble and fuel large complex craft in space.  The basic requirement for any human Mars mission is about a million pounds in LEO, a value well beyond the capability of any HLV, existing or envisioned.  Moreover, I would argue the height of fiscal and technical irresponsibility is undertaking a planetary mission whose principal architectural strategy requires launching (energy) everything (material) we need out of the deepest gravity well (Earth) in the inner Solar System.

The current controversy over HLV or fuel depots is transitory.  Eventually, we will assemble and fuel trans-LEO missions in space because that is the inevitable direction in which we must evolve to become “space faring.”  Using an HLV in the early stages of cislunar development can jump start a permanent spaceflight capability, including developing the essential skill of using off-planet resources of materials and energy.  There will come a time when this debate will seem to our descendants as arcane as medieval arguments about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

Previous posts on heavy lift:

To do the heavy lifting

HEFT, Lies and Videotape

Posted in space policy, space technology, Space transportation | 66 Comments

The Elephant in the Room

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Paul Spudis
Doing our best to ignore the obvious...

Doing our best to ignore the obvious…

Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

A recent hearing before the Senate Space Subcommittee clearly demonstrated the disarray into which our civil space program has fallen.  The ostensible topic of the hearing was the President’s budget request for space, with the supposed goal of capturing an asteroid and returning it to Earth-Moon space to serve as a target for a human mission.  The witnesses described what they perceived as the requirements for this and other missions, variously touching on an extension of the lifetime of ISS, the new SLS launch vehicle, “commercial” space and other topics.

While they strained to connect all the dots and make the case for each of these various and sundry activities and programs, it struck me how the witnesses and Senators were feeling around (but not touching) the biggest issue of all:  Why human spaceflight?  Or more specifically – Why should human spaceflight be the lynchpin of our national civil space program?  We’ve never come to grips with this issue – it’s merely assumed to be axiomatic so the discussion of our national program then becomes reduced to arguments over destinations, space vehicles and modes of government contracting.  Every time this issue is brought up, it is fobbed off as an action item to the National Academy to convene yet another group of greybeard “experts” who in their sage wisdom will adumbrate the mystical rationale that we all so eagerly seek.

Although having personally succumbed to the temptation to provide a rationale for human spaceflight many times before, now that we sit amongst the smoldering ruins of a once-great space program, perhaps we should take time once again to re-examine this issue from a different perspective.  Just as the barbarian hordes lived in squalor after the fall of Rome because they could not repair the aqueducts built by their predecessors, we gaze at reposing Saturn Vs as strange artifacts of a former golden age, now reduced to tourist attractions – something to be checked off before taking the kids to Disney World.

Let me try to sum up the case by first tackling the need for a human spaceflight program.  Humans are needed in space to do the things that machines cannot.  At the moment – and I believe, for the foreseeable future – that includes the construction and maintenance of large, distributed systems in space.  By this, I mean satellite systems that are too big and too complex to be launched directly from Earth into the high orbits beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), places that most rockets can’t reach.   Over the last 50 years we’ve learned there are limits to the size and complexity of satellites that can fit onto a launch vehicle.  We’ve also learned that larger, more capable systems are possible when assembled in orbit by people and machines.  The ISS is only the most visible example of what I am describing.  There also is the legacy of the Shuttle program, where we proved that the repair and upgrading of equipment in space is possible, as the spectacular 20-year life of the Hubble Space Telescope has demonstrated.

The problem with applying the paradigm of human-machine space assembly to all of our current satellite assets is that we have no way to get people from low earth orbit out to these other levels of Earth-Moon (cislunar) space, where these useful assets reside.  People arrive in LEO with empty fuel tanks.  Suppose that we had a way to re-fill them in orbit?  We could then access those higher orbits where large satellite systems could be built and serviced.  It is for this reason that I have advocated using the resources of the Moon to create such a reusable space transportation system – it opens up space to routine access by people and machines.

It seems to me that there are two philosophical viewpoints in regard to human spaceflight.  The first views human missions as voyages into the unknown – daring leaps into the void to plant a flag, achieve a milestone, and to declare some kind of success in doing so.  This concept is similar to mountain climbing – we do it because it is a challenge and because it is exciting.  A corollary to this mentality is that we must press on to ever more distant space targets because, in the memorable phrase of one observer, we should not return to a destination because “we’ve been there.”  By this measure, human space missions should be designed (as Star Trek put it) “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

In contrast, there is another view of spaceflight, one that was actually touched on in the hearing but not pursued to its logical conclusion.  If space is a “new ocean” as John Kennedy once put it, then what we really desire is the ability to sail it, in many types of vehicles and for all kinds of reasons.  Certainly, visiting new places and exploring new worlds would be a part of that.  If we proceed down a logical path toward obtaining freedom of access to many different places, we would explore but we could also build, observe, repair and even dwell. 

The conflict between these two alternative visions is often put into monetary terms, with some claiming that this latter template of spaceflight is something that we all want “eventually.”  In fact, this difference of vision is more primal – whereas one faction sees spaceflight as a stunt, to be accomplished and completed, the other sees it as a field of human endeavor where ongoing activities become more expansive in reach and capability over time – maturing, if you will.

This is the nexus of the “Why?” question.  Do we go into space to touch the marker and then scurry home as soon as we can?  Or do we venture forth to touch, expand, complete and extend?  This point is not merely a philosophical one but affects the entire approach and operational template of human spaceflight.  We had the former type of program with Apollo, whose main goal of beating the Soviets to the Moon was accomplished brilliantly (then dismantled as soon as decently possible).  The Shuttle/Station era, while certainly experimental in many respects, strove for the latter type of program, by promising (and partly delivering) routine access to and permanent presence of people in space.  The tension behind these two perspectives underlies the debates about goals and destinations in space.  

Now that Shuttle is gone and ISS is completed (with access dependent on Russian assets), we should bring this debate out into the open.  It is not a debate to entrust to some committee of the National Academy of Sciences – they should certainly be involved but their perspectives are fairly narrow.  As our elected government is the expression of national political will, this debate should be held in the open arena of the political process.  What kind of space program should we have?  Assuming that money to spend on space is and will likely remain limited in the future, we must carefully consider why we send people into space and what they will do there.

I suggest that a national space program of the future is likely to be “sustainable” only if it returns value for money.  The amount spent is less important than what we are trying to achieve.  A stunt mission to a destination designed solely around the need to be compatible with existing or projected hardware is the height of stupidity and a guarantee of future program termination (even if the mission is successful).  We need to understand what we are trying to do before metal is cut for the next spacecraft.  We have a government space program to do those things that the private sector is unable or unwilling to undertake.  At the moment, that includes flight beyond LEO.  We should build a program with small, incremental steps so that it is affordable under any likely budgetary conditions.  Permanence, extensibility, and reusability are highly desirable and are to be preferred over unique, one-off systems and disposable vehicles.

This is the elephant in the room: Why should there be a national human spaceflight program?  While this beast is clearly seen by many of us, it appears to be largely invisible to some elected and appointed officials and space experts whose concerns seem to be near-term, and focused solely on how much things cost.

Our space budget will continue to shrink because there is no compelling rationale to fly stunt missions (no matter how skillfully logic is twisted).  To regain our lost footing we must begin with the understanding that becoming a space faring people is the long-term goal, not “Mars” nor the “Quest for Life Elsewhere.”  Until then we will continue wasting time and money arguing about mission dates, acceptable levels of risk, reimbursable contracts, competitive contracts, open bidding, sequester – running around in circles over the “do nothing” distraction of the day.  Until we have serious leadership, we will remain hostage to a disjointed, non-productive concept of bundling agency ideas for convenience not outcome.  Once we are committed to becoming a space faring species there will be opportunity for all.

Posted in Lunar development, space policy, space technology, Space transportation, Uncategorized | 38 Comments

Let’s Haul Asteroids!

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Paul Spudis
Paper or plastic? Space vehicle bags up asteroid for return to Earth.

Paper or plastic? Space vehicle bags up asteroid for return to Earth (Keck Institute for Space Studies).

In their never ending quest to find something to do in space that does not involve going to the Moon, the wizards of space policy in the administration have seized on one of the nuttier ideas floating around space circles these days.  Based on a study last year by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, it is rumored that the new budget will propose to spend $100 million next year on a mission to “retrieve” an asteroid and bring it back to Earth-Moon (cislunar) space for detailed examination by humans.  Some see this as fulfilling the prophecy of President Obama in his 2010 appearance at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center – that since we wouldn’t be sending people back to the Moon (because “We’ve been there”) we would instead send them to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) in preparation for an eventual human trip to Mars sometime in the 2030s.  Maybe.

How far out is this idea anyway?  Not totally, but quite a bit.  In part, its degree of rationality is dependent on exactly how this mission fits into a general spaceflight strategy.  Since we do not have the latter, it’s hard to evaluate this proposal in programmatic terms.  So we must look at it as one possible “strategic” direction for human spaceflight for the next decade.

What’s the argument for moving an asteroid from its normal orbit to cislunar space?  Basically, the Orion spacecraft is a cislunar vehicle, capable of transporting people on missions of a few weeks duration within that zone of space and returning them to Earth (but not capable of much beyond that region).  If you exclude the lunar surface as a destination, there’s no place to go in cislunar space, except space itself.  A current scenario of a mission to “L-2” (the quasi-stable libration point 60,000 km above the center of the lunar far side) has to make up work for the astronauts to do there; one idea suggests that the astronauts “control” a robot collecting samples on the far side of the Moon, but that concept has not been fleshed out in detail nor is any planned surface sample rover and return vehicle in the development budget.

The principal programmatic virtue of the L-2 point is that Orion can reach it, so it is a prime “not-the-lunar-surface” place to go.  But it looks bad to go somewhere where nothing exists and then to do nothing once you get there – a “close but no cigar” scenario.  Hence, the ostensible plan about controlling robots on the surface of the Moon was developed (incidentally, such a robot could just as easily be controlled from the Earth using a communications relay satellite orbiting the Moon).  But the President said we were going to an asteroid.  So what’s the hold up?

Leaving aside the issue that few (or no) near-Earth asteroids are suitable targets for human missions, at least with current space systems (launch vehicle, life-support, total delta-v), the basic problem with human missions to NEAs is time – the length of travel time to get to a NEA, added to the amount of loiter time around it when you get there, followed by the time needed to get you safely home again.  During all this time, the crew is exposed to the full fury of solar particle events (the “coronal mass ejections” that can fry you in a few minutes time) and the steady stream of galactic cosmic rays – radiation unfiltered or stopped by the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts which protect crews aboard the ISS in low Earth orbit.  Add to this issue the fundamental problem of abort scenarios.  If things go wrong with your spacecraft soon after departure what do you do?  Can you get back home?  Usually, the answer is “not quickly or easily.”  The concatenation of these events usually ends in the sinisterly bureaucratic phrase, “loss of crew.”

The Keck Institute study of last year was hailed as a masterstroke to solve the asteroid mission dilemma (i.e., supposedly so many interesting targets but not the ability to get people to them): Bring an asteroid to cislunar space, park it at an L-point and examine it at our leisure.  Such an effort would be beneficial to a long-term scientific examination of the object, knowledge that we will need to understand tasks like resource extraction and processing.  So let the mountain (well, okay, maybe a knoll) come to Mohammed.

The problem with re-arranging the Solar System for our personal convenience is that it’s difficult in time, energy and effort.  Only the smallest asteroid could possibly be brought back to cislunar space; the object described in the Keck report is only a few meters across – a dried mud ball.  An asteroid that small will have virtually no geological diversity, thus giving us limited information about asteroid evolution (NEAs almost that large already exist in meteorite collections on the Earth.)  A body that size could be significant for resource utilization, except that we don’t yet know what we would process, how we would extract materials from it, and what we would do with the products once we have them.  Water is an extremely valuable resource in space, but the current fly-and-discard template of the Orion-SLS architecture does not feature an easy way to incorporate water into creating new capabilities.  The idea that platinum group metals (PGM) mined from an asteroid could pay commercially might be tested in such a scenario, but it’s not clear that a NEA suitable for capture and transport to cislunar enables that, given that we don’t know at this point even the nature of the feedstock we’ll get for processing.

There is one more issue to consider with asteroid hauling:  Safety.  An asteroid brought to one of the L-points has little chance of an accidental encounter with the Earth, but this may be a case where perception counts for more than fact (regrettably, an increasingly frequent event in science these days).  The recent Russian meteorite fall created an enormous publicity stir and many in the space community have sought to use that event to their advantage, with visions of fat federal contracts granted to ward off evil spirits raining down from the sky.  It’s one thing to ask for massive amounts of government money to protect the Earth from impact devastation; it’s quite another to ask for same to go and retrieve one of the dread objects.  Of course, this will be portrayed as an effort to learn how to “mitigate” asteroid collisions with Earth, but there’s nothing we can learn from a hauled rock at L-2 that we could not learn from a small robotic mission to a NEA safely situated in its own orbit around the Sun.  The idea that we can actually deflect an asteroid is still controversial, even in scientific circles where some will believe anything.

In the current wilderness of unattainable space policy ideas, this one certainly stakes out new territory.  Since we can’t get to an NEA, let’s bring one to a place to which we can get, thus successfully avoiding the place that we should be exploiting in order to attain true space faring capability – the lunar poles.  What to do and learn at this rock parked above the Moon is left as an exercise for the student.

Previous posts on human asteroid missions:

Destination: Moon or Asteroid? Part I: Operational Considerations

Destination: Moon or Asteroid? Part II: Scientific Considerations

Destination: Moon or Asteroid? Part III: Resource Utilization Considerations

Posted in Lunar development, space policy, space technology, Space transportation, Uncategorized | 50 Comments

What’s Our Vector, Victor?

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Paul Spudis
"Roger, Roger. We have clearance, Clarence."

“Roger, Roger. We have clearance, Clarence.”

The U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space recently held a hearing on a proposal to change how the NASA Administrator is selected and the agency is monitored.  The bill (HR 823, The Space Leadership Preservation Act of 2013) is co-sponsored by five Republican Congressmen.  It is a revised version of a similar proposal from the last Congress.  In brief, it would establish a committee composed of “space experts” jointly selected by Congress and the Administration.  This committee would nominate three candidates from which a NASA Administrator would be selected to serve a fixed six-year term (the last version called for a ten-year term).  The new group would also monitor the agency’s progress in implementing whatever long-range direction was selected for the civil space program.

Although many details of this proposal remain obscure, I find the motivation for it interesting.  Clearly, it stems from a belief that the current direction of the agency is aimless, unacceptable and in need of independent oversight.  Moreover, I take the proposal for a committee-nominated administrator as a not-so-subtle rebuke to the current management of the agency.  How and why did we arrive at this sorry state of affairs?

As described here earlier, the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) was the previous administration’s attempt to give some long-range direction to the national space program.  Former Secretary of the Air Force Pete Aldridge chaired a commission to study how NASA should implement the VSE.  Their report outlined several broad recommendations designed to better enable NASA to execute the new direction.

One recommendation was for the re-establishment of the National Space Council.  This body had existed twice before, first from the inception of NASA through to the initial development of the Shuttle, and then again during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, from 1989-1993.  The Council provided strategic guidance to the President on matters relating to space policy – specifically, whether the agency was properly implementing a given program or strategic direction.  In 1992, the Space Council decided that NASA was not implementing the “Space Exploration Initiative” and a change of management was needed, so the President replaced Administrator Dick Truly with Dan Goldin.

The basic rationale for having a National Space Council is that most people within the Executive branch and the Congress have neither the time, inclination, or background needed to monitor and make decisions on technical topics.  Agency drift is less likely with oversight from a group that includes both technical expertise and political influence – individuals that can identify and correct misdirection early in the process, thus keeping a program on track.  The Aldridge Commission wanted to re-establish the Space Council for precisely those reasons.  The idea was not to create a panel to micro-manage the agency’s daily operations but to provide broad strategic oversight to ensure that NASA was implementing the Vision as intended.

Of the many recommendations of the Aldridge commission, the one to re-create the Space Council was pointedly ignored.  That is not too surprising – no administrator wants some super agency authority looking over his shoulder.  At the time, arguments against the need to re-establish the Space Council were twofold.  First, it was planned that the Aldridge Commission itself would be called back together at regular intervals to review progress (that did happen – once).  Second, the agency already had an advisory council (the NASA Advisory Council or NAC) that would serve the ostensible function of a Space Council.  The problem with the latter argument is that the NAC is chosen by and answerable to the administrator and so tends to rubber-stamp whatever tactical path he takes.  Furthermore, the NAC has no independent standing or influence to steer agency direction; it merely “advises” the administrator on tactical aspects of current programs.

As an example of the need for a Space Council, one need only recall how the agency went about re-writing their strategic charter in the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the VSE.  To recap that episode, one of the principal objectives of the VSE was to return to the Moon to learn how to use it to create new space faring capability (this “mission” was clearly articulated in the Presidential speech given at NASA Headquarters in January 2004).  But by the summer of the same year, that original objective mostly had been forfeited, morphed by the agency into a “touch-and-go” on the Moon in support of an Apollo-style Mars effort.  At the time, many involved in the effort pointed out the mismatch between the Vision’s objectives and the direction the agency had taken, but their concerns were ignored.  Soon the idea that the VSE was in effect a human Mars mission became hardwired into both the architecture and the mindset of the agency, leading many in the space community, the media and the public to forget (or to never understand) the original rationale for lunar return – it was now misunderstood and described as a rerun of Apollo, not as a sustainable new approach to our space future by learning how to live and work effectively on another world.

On the basis of these impressions, after President Obama took office in 2009, he created a new committee to review the agency’s long-term direction of human spaceflight and its implementation.   Given that the agency had changed the direction of the VSE, the conclusions of this effort were entirely foreseeable – we were going on (what they thought was) the wrong path (i.e., the notion that lunar return was simply a repeat of Apollo – confusion caused by the agency’s re-direction of the VSE had become the perception) and without the necessary funding (so they told us) to reach it.  Although both of those conclusions were suspect (or at least arguable), they were used as the justification for a major re-vectoring of the agency.  Now, several highly questionable decisions later, we have arrived at the current pitiful “going nowhere” state of the U.S. civil space program.

Thus, because of the lack of adequate oversight and action on how NASA management was implementing the VSE, we now have a national space program that is being dismantled and discarded.  If the National Space Council had been established at the beginning of the VSE, as the Aldridge report recommended, their review of agency activity would have shown that the Vision was being steered in a different direction.  Neither the Augustine report nor its subsequent destructive effects would have transpired if a Space Council had stopped this drift and helped to identify a rational, affordable, step-wise implementation.

The Space Leadership Preservation Act of 2013 will establish a national space council; it will be accountable to both Congress and the Executive (arguably an improvement over the old Space Council, which was strictly a White House body).  The identification of “three candidates” for administrator is problematical – it’s not clear that a term of office for the NASA Administrator independent of the current administration would be acceptable to any President.  However, the review and oversight function of a space council – to “keep NASA on track” – could be critical, as recent history has shown how easily the agency re-writes its marching orders to accommodate its own desires and interests, rather than to serve a national goal.

The agency’s misdirection and lack of focus have irreparably destabilized our national space program.  Other space faring countries recognize that the U.S. program is adrift and floundering.  They are offering their astronauts Chinese language classes and actively (and very publicly) courting involvement and association with China’s space program and leadership.  China has moved steadily toward the goal of manned lunar access while America has retreated from that arena, content with fantasizing about a human Mars mission that won’t occur for many decades, if then.  Rather than facilitating a strong American presence in space, our current administration has sent the world a strong message – that they are fine with the ongoing atrophy of national capabilities in human spaceflight.  American space leadership has left the building and Congress is arriving late in the game in calling for legislation to preserve it.

Posted in space policy, Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Paul Spudis
Throngs of excited participants crowd a recent NASA Technology Day

Throngs of excited participants crowd a recent NASA Technology Day exposition. (NASA)

In their own inimitable style, the latest NASA re-org has been trumpeted with the release of a platitude-filled announcement.  A new Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) has been founded to “be a catalyst for the creation of technologies and innovation needed to maintain NASA leadership in space while also benefiting America’s economy.”  This new directorate will supervise a “portfolio of investment” in a variety of key identified technologies needed to send humans “to an asteroid and Mars.”

This event is not surprising, as technology development was a key part of this administration’s 2010 re-vectoring of the agency.   Direction for the space program in part followed recommendations from the report of the 2009 Augustine Committee, which concluded that development of several new key space technologies were needed to enable human missions beyond LEO.

What, if anything, is wrong with this development?  Why not use a fraction of the agency’s budget to develop all those great new gadgets that will allow us to forge ahead in space?  In short, the issues in technology research are focus and pace.  Are we developing the right technology and will it be available in a timely manner?  Even more importantly, which technology needs are most pressing?  This is not merely a question of organizational or economic efficiency but one of actually producing real flight systems for genuine missions –assuming, of course, that is your true eventual goal.

The agency has a long tradition of creating roadmaps, documents that lay out certain technical needs and wants and the order in which they will need them.  Prior to the creation of this new mission directorate, NASA had an Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT), whose job was to set forth the paths by which certain technologies would be available at certain times.  Apparently, the OCT will still exist, but under the new Associate Administrator in the new STMD.  In fact, if you compare the “About Us” pages of the two offices, it is difficult to see much difference between them; they even highlight the same video.  According to the press release, the “Office of the Chief Technologist also will continue to develop strategic innovative partnerships, manage agency-level competitions and prize activities, as well as document and communicate the societal impacts of the agency’s technology efforts.”  So why create this new directorate?

I suspect that the real rationale for this newest layer of management and oversight is yet another attempt by the agency to convince people that we still have a viable space program and that we are going to forge ahead into the Solar System with a dazzling array of new and exciting machinery (“Phasers on stun, Mr. Sulu!”).  It certainly is true that some new technology development is needed to move humans significantly beyond LEO, but much of what we need (at least for the initial steps) is already in hand.  What is sorely lacking is the will to fly such missions.

Careful reading of the charter of this new directorate reveals a possible motivation for its creation:

By investing in bold, broadly applicable, disruptive technology that industry cannot tackle today, STMD seeks to mature the technology required for NASA’s future missions in science and exploration while proving the capabilities and lowering the cost for other government agencies and commercial space activities.  Research and technology development takes place within NASA Centers, in academia and industry, and leverages partnerships with other government agencies and international partners.  (link)

There’s that key word that we’ve seen many times before – “investing.”  In other words, the new directorate will dole out money.  Once again, the agency widget shop is open for business, with NASA Centers, academia and industry being the recipients of this taxpayer largess.  NASA’s mission statement is flexible: “To reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind.”   Note well:  space isn’t even mentioned in that mission statement – such a broad, unfocused direction makes it entirely suitable for funding technology development that doesn’t take NASA beyond low Earth obit, but redirects its ever shrinking budget to administration favorites like Earth observation and other various and sundry “green” directions.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with developing technology, but it should be done with purpose.  Unless you know exactly what you need and why you need it, you may build the best new widget available anywhere, but it may have no practical use or benefit.  Traditionally, whenever the agency “invests” in technology, a lot of hobby shop projects result.  If the widget doesn’t work at all or as well as anticipated, the design can be modified during next year’s proposal cycle.  On the other hand, if we are trying to build a real flight system, we have specific capability and performance goals that must be met on some schedule.  These goals act as a forcing function to make decisions, complete a development, get balky equipment to work, and conduct a flight mission.  In other words, we get the development of useful technology by setting requirements and flying missions, not by funding somebody’s science fair project.  True enough, pure research sometimes leads to promising breakthroughs, but such happens more often by chance than by plan – you might develop something useful eventually, though having a deadline more likely will lead to a technology breakthrough, than would random spending on somebody’s idea for the latest gadget.

Thus, NASA joins the long roster of other federal agencies that have turned away from the actual accomplishment of some mission or activity to one that promises to develop the means to carry out some mission or activity.  But this new path does offer one operational benefit to NASA – by “investing” in technology development, the undertaking of any actual mission can be indefinitely postponed.  “We’re just not ready to go anywhere – we need (fill-in-the-blank) technology first.”  There is less pressure on the agency to successfully conduct a space mission.  At the same time, the new path serves two additional purposes – it throws up a smokescreen to make the public think that you are accomplishing something with their tax money and at the same time, feeds (i.e., funds) the people who are your principal constituents, in this case, those in academia and industry that approve of the new direction.

Much process and no product.  America’s new normal.

Posted in space policy, space technology | 9 Comments

A Space Pseudo-Program

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Paul Spudis
Step right up, folks! Got a space program to sell to you!

Step right up, folks! Got a space program to sell to you!

A half-century ago, historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin writing in his book The Image, took note of and characterized a societal trend that he found disturbing.  Genuine accomplishment was being gradually replaced by what he termed the “pseudo-event,” something seemingly real but in actual fact, an occurrence representing no significant accomplishment or any real milestone.  According to Boorstin, a pseudo-event has four characteristics:

  • It is not spontaneous, but planned.
  • Its principal purpose is to be reported and thus, it is arranged for the convenience of the media.
  • Its relation to any underlying reality is ambiguous; parts of the event may somehow relate to genuine accomplishment, but that relation is either uncertain or unknown.
  • It is intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy – it is important because its promoters proclaim it to be so.

Boorstin was concerned with both the increasing triviality of cultural and political discourse, and with the rise of the cult of celebrity in America.  A classic example of the latter at the time The Image was published was the career of Zsa Zsa Gabor, a minor Hollywood starlet whose main claims to fame were being married nine times and appearing on television talk shows to brainlessly chat in a Hungarian accent.  Yet when pressed, most people who had heard of her could not say exactly why she was famous.  She was simply famous for being famous.  For younger readers who know nothing about Zsa Zsa, think of Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, or Snooki.

Recently, I’ve been struck by how closely Boorstin’s concept of the pseudo-event describes the current sorry state of our civil space program.  Specifically, the program is more notable for what it purports to be (or for what it says it intends to become) rather than for what it is actually doing.  For as long as I can remember, the alleged “ultimate destination” for people in space has been Mars.  The agency endlessly talks about it, even when they are specifically told not to.  Enshrined in agency lore is the belief that every space activity must ultimately contribute to the attainment of Mars.  If we talk about going somewhere else, such as an L-point or NEO, it is always in preparation for (ultimately) a human Mars mission.

The NASA human Mars mission is the archetypical pseudo-event for space.  With the Vision for Space Exploration, the mission of using the Moon to learn how to live and work on another world was specifically laid out in the founding announcement of the program.  But as far as NASA was concerned, getting to Mars was the only reason we were going to the Moon.  Thus a lunar return morphed into a touch the Moon and go to Mars event thus becoming, yet again, another too expensive and summarily axed move beyond LEO.

NASA has become a master of the space pseudo-event.  The announcement of a new mission or objective becomes the event.  We’re not really going to an asteroid – we’re just announcing that we’re going to an asteroid.  We don’t actually have to design the machines and build the equipment to do a mission – we’re on a flexible path.  We’ll simply have endless committee meetings and produce PowerPoint shows and high-quality CGI graphic animations of people visiting distant space destinations.  The absence of flight hardware doesn’t mean anything – we are developing technology to be able to do it “eventually.”  The media has become the message.

While this modus operandi certainly applies to NASA and many of its programs, it equally (and in some ways, more so) applies to many “New Space” companies, whose announcements of spectacular new vehicles, missions and programs continue on a monthly basis.  Recently, we have been regaled with tales of suborbital tourism on a routine basis, unlimited wealth extracted from near-Earth asteroids, national pride trips to and from the Moon for a variety of countries, and giant vacation resorts in Earth orbit where one can play weightless Olympic games.  Not only are we told that these wonders will soon appear but that they will be affordable for the vast majority of people.  No longer will space be the exclusive domain of government engineers and scientists – “Space-access power to the people!” is the clarion call to the uninformed.

In this sense, New Space is following in the footsteps of its governmental predecessor, only without having previously experienced the latter’s older record of actual accomplishment.  From a whole new set of providers, we now have pseudo-missions instead of real missions.  Instead of a space agency promising (but not delivering) expensive stunt missions by a few astronauts to exotic destinations, New Space is promising (and not delivering) cheap, meaningful and lasting space accomplishments for all.  Talk about a paradigm shift….

The net effect of the advent of a space pseudo-program is to make the average citizen (who thinks little about space on a daily basis but is broadly supportive of it) believe we are progressing in space, when in fact nothing is being accomplished except that some people are making a career out of pretending that we are accomplishing something.  We have a national space agency that doesn’t know where it is going or what it is doing.  Critical national spaceflight assets and facilities carefully built over several generations are being lost – decaying from neglect, being inexpertly mothballed or sold off.  A trained and dedicated technical workforce is disappearing like a vapor, as if it had never existed.  New Space companies cheer and proclaim the advent of a new era in spaceflight, but their launch manifests don’t begin to match the pace and predictability of their press releases.  Their endless demands to re-direct shrinking NASA funds to them belies their proclamation of being either “new” or “commercial.”

One of the most astonishing aspects of the space pseudo-program is how few seem to recognize its advent.  Shell-shocked by a continuous flood of misinformation, the public tends not to analyze news stories in detail, accepting them as the straightforward relation of new facts even though that function of the news media has long since become obsolete and is now more akin to cheerleading for their “team.”  New media (and this most certainly includes Internet journalism) eagerly regurgitates press releases and presents them as reality to the public, thereby hiding (willingly or otherwise) the essential hollowness of the U.S. space program.

Got a wild idea for a space mission?  You say you want to build a vacation resort on Jupiter?  Hold a press conference and you’ll have instant credibility as a space “entrepreneur.”  As for any skeptics in the audience – just ignore them or label them dinosaurs, old space fossils, cold-war warriors, senile, or shills for government space “pork.”  Got a difficult question for the space entrepreneur?  There’s the exit.  Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

The Moon landings are renowned for the fact that many believe they never happened.  What a remarkable development for American spaceflight – we once had a real space program that some thought was faked; now we have a fake space program that many believe is real.

Posted in Lunar development, space policy, Space transportation | 37 Comments