Thoughts on the space program

[unixronin]

As anyone who's been reading my journal for a while knows, I've been saying for some time that NASA manned space has not been doing its job, and that the responsibility for manned space needs to be shifted to the private sector.  This may lead some to be puzzled at my outrage when, at the beginning of February, President Obama cancelled the Constellation program.

I'd like to clarify my position a little.

What I have always felt is that NASA Manned Space has become too politicised and bureaucratic to do a good job at manned space any more.  Too many technical decisions have been made for political reasons, frequently reasons imposed on NASA from above ("You WILL use this contractor, Senator ______ owes them one").  But what I envisioned happening was a controlled technology transfer from NASA to the private sector, enabling private companies to take the accumulated NASA technical expertise and run with it.  I was therefore dismayed and enraged when it appeared at first that President Obama had simply killed off manned space exploration, period.

As I later learned, this wasn't quite the case.  The Constellation program was killed, yes.  But Constellation was fatally flawed, and its flaws bring us back to precisely my argument that NASA Manned Space has been politicised to uselessness.  When Constellation components failed to meet required performance bars, instead of redesigning and improving the components, the performance requirements were lowered.  And lowered again, and again, until we reached the absurd (but, at the time, not previously made public) state of affairs in which the ARES booster was projected to meet all required performance metrics, yet was at the same time projected to be unable to reach orbit.

Killing off Constellation was the right thing to do.  Designing a new heavy-lift booster from a clean sheet of paper, as President Obama has decreed, is also the right thing to do.  (One hopes it will be designed from the bottom up this time, as the Saturn V was, rather than top-down like the Shuttle.  There are places for top-down design.  This is not one of them.)

Recently, though, President Obama expanded on his manned space plan (discussed here), decreeing that we will not return to the Moon, but will instead send a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025, and then proceed to a Mars mission ten years later.  I have to agree with Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan, and others in disagreeing with this.  Not only is the Moon an excellent stepping-stone to the rest of the solar system, but until the new equipment is proven, the Moon is a destination in much easier reach — and much easier to return from — in the event of teething troubles with the new hardware.  What's more, there is a rather poor selection of asteroids that are "relatively" easily reachable from Earth, and they're all relative pebbles; even the largest available "nearby" choices range from only eleven to forty-five meters — not kilometers — or so in diameter, with gravity measured in thousandths of a G, and may well be little more than orbiting clumps of gravel.  All the really interesting asteroids, such as Vesta and Ceres, are further away than Mars, half-way to Jupiter.

More importantly, we are only just now beginning to learn how much we have yet to learn about the Moon, and how much is available there in the way of resources.  Our best way to explore the Solar System might very well be to launch from Earth and proceed to the Moon, or to lunar orbit, refuel there, and then proceed outward, instead of hauling all the fuel for the entire mission out of Earth's gravity well.  The Moon's, remember, is only a sixth as deep.  This makes a huge difference to the final mass ratio.  To lift a ton of fuel from the Moon's surface to lunar orbit requires only a sixth as much fuel as it takes to lift the same ton out of Earth's gravity well — and then all that extra fuel has to be lifted as well, requiring yet more fuel.  (Fortunately, most of the additional fuel only has to be lifted a short distance; the initial burn rate is tremendous.)  We've recently discovered that the Moon has relatively abundant water, which can be split into stoichiometric proportions of hydrogen and oxygen — ideal rocket fuel, in other words — with nothing but energy, of which the Moon has vast potential supplies in the form of solar energy with no intervening clouds or atmosphere to block or dim the sunlight.  It would, bluntly, be a mere engineering problem to set up partially or fully automated rocket-fuel refineries on the Moon, powered by sun-tracking photovoltaic arrays; and that's without even considering the potential for Moon-based mining, refining and manufacturing.

We're not done with the Moon yet, by a long way.  Any technology that can take us to an asteroid or to Mars is going to need to be proven first, and the Moon is a great place to prove it.  Skipping over the Moon when we return to space is a mistake.  It's certainly true that a mission to an Earth-crossing asteroid could be valuable in learning how to deflect a rock on a collision course with Earth.  But such a mission could be much more easily launched from the Moon, from where much more fuel can be carried along, and from where there is no risk of a launch window being missed because of adverse weather.

The Moon is the stepping-stone to the rest of the solar system.  Declining to use it simply because "it's been done before" is foolish and short-sighted.  When our next generation of heavy-lift hardware flies, it won't have been done before with that hardware; it'll be new and unproven hardware, and we should go back to the Moon with it and make sure it works as planned before we go further afield in the solar system.

Comments

[hugh_mannity]

Interesting. Have you read Net Assets by Carl Bussjaeger? It takes privatised space flight and runs with it.

[unixronin]

I have indeed. Have you read Michael Flynn's Firestar series?

[hugh_mannity]

No I haven't. Thank you for the link. I'll chase them down.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Assuming that Obama is honest about his motives on this, he's being rather naive about how to develop technologies. His argument is that we should engineer better launch systems and space drives, and then go to Mars and the Belt because there are more valuable scientific and other resources there. This is not a bad argument, but it ignores the reality that we have zero experience in maintaining any human outpost on another world. We need to make our mistakes on Luna, because if we plan it right we could have a reserve Lunar rocket and crew available to resupply or rescue any base in trouble within a month; rather than making them on Mars or beyond, where such aid would take many months to arrive.

What's more, there's the basic stupidity of switching away from an existing project just before it begins to yield its fruits. Obama should have read Clarke's "Superiority" on the consequences such management of technological policy.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I assume his advisors on this subject are about as competent as his advisors on most other issues seem to be. Which is to say, hardly at all.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

Cruithne. That's all I'm sayin'. A lot closer than Ceres, and a lot more interesting.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, Cruithne is another interesting one. Its closest approach is still thirty times the distance to the Moon, though.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

Sure -- but it's a lot closer than the rest of the asteroid belt. If there was a mission to Cruithne, I might be able to get behind it just for the geek points alone. :)

Agreed regarding the extreme paucity of interesting near-Earth asteroids, though.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Of course, from the point of view of life on Earth in general, that paucity of "interesting" near-Earth asteroids probably isn't such a bad thing. Lots of near-Earth asteroids would almost certainly mean a lot more severe and frequent asteroid impacts.

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

At this point I don't want NASA developing *anything*. It should put out standing orders for data or samples that it will pay for and not care about how people got it. A hardware development--such as that heavy lift booster--is going to be immediately turned into a jobs program and any actual mission will be thrust to the side.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I disagree, actually. NASA Space Science still does superb work, and much of it is work that there would be very little incentive for a private-sector company to do on its own, which means the private-sector companies have no accumulated body of experience doing it.

That said, I would be entirely in favor of NASA issuing contracts for heavy lift capacity to be able to put a payload X meters in diameter by Y meters long massing Z tons into LEO (probably for several ranges of X, Y and Z), or a payload X' meters in diameter by Y' meters long massing Z' tons into lunar transfer orbit, on the understanding that it will not be a winner-takes-all contract — all suppliers having boosters meeting the specification for a particular mission will be eligible to submit bids to fly that mission.

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

which means the private-sector companies have no accumulated body of experience doing it.

Gee, so all the time I spent working on Earth Observation System and Laser Altimeter Mission and NPOESS I was actually a NASA employee? And here my pay checks had the name of a private-sector company on them.

NASA writes long, long lists of requirements and then nitpicks compliance to them. Contractors build stuff.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I rather overstated the case there through poor choice of words.

You're quite right, of course. None of that hardware is built by NASA. But it's built to NASA requirements for NASA-defined missions. If there was a commercial case for doing the majority of space science, private-sector industries would be doing it already. But the only remotely scientific space-based activity that private-sector industry has figured out how to make money on is earth imaging. The data is useful to so many people who are willing to pay for it that there is a business case for putting satellites in order to get it. The same is not true for, say, fine-detail measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

So suppose we have an instrument X that is required in order to obtain observations Y and Z. Is there really so much difference between NASA saying "We'll pay you $FOO to build instrument X so that we can use it to obtain observations Y and Z, and possibly other observations later," or NASA saying "We want observations Y and Z, and will pay $FOO for somebody to build instrument X and get them"? Except that in the first case, NASA then has the instrument and can use it to get whatever additional observations it decides it needs, while in the second case, if no-one thinks they can make money flying the instrument, NASA doesn't get the observations at all? If a private company is operating the instrument, it probably costs them as much to do so as it does NASA — probably more, if they're using time on any government facilities to do it, or if they ahd to build their own tracking and monitoring facilities — and then they need to make a profit on top of that.

I really think this is a case where the private sector is not necessarily the best answer. While I'm a minarchist, I do think there is a case for the government funding and sponsoring basic research that there is no compelling case for the private sector to perform, particularly in this age of bottom-line-managed industry where anything that doesn't show up as a direct net profit on the bottom line of this quarter's balance sheet is an unnecessary expense that can be axed to improve the numbers.

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with government sponsoring research. The problem is that the NASA bureaucracy has calcified to the point where much more effort goes into jumping through paperwork hoops than actually producing some data of interest to the scientists. A from-scratch organization which contracted for satellite development would do better but it has the same pressures that screwed up NASA: jobs for specific Congressional districts, elaborate procedures to keep government staffing high, and lots of CYA requirements, analysis, and testing so the bureaucrats can always prove a disaster isn't their fault.

If you want good value for the money, offer prizes.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the NASA bureaucracy has calcified to the point where much more effort goes into jumping through paperwork hoops than actually producing some data of interest to the scientists.

Yup. Exactly. Bureaucratically paralyzed, and politicized on top of it.