End of An(other) Era

Hey Space Placers!


(Note: The opinions expressed herein are entirely my own.)

When Space Shuttle Atlantis achieves “Wheels Stopped” at the Kennedy Space Center, July 20th (the 42nd anniversary of Apollo 11), another era in America’s manned spaceflight program comes to an abrupt end. The Mercury and Gemini programs gave us the ability and experience necessary to do all the things required by the Apollo program to get to the Moon and back.

Apollo got us to the surface of the Moon six times and was cancelled with ready to go lunar missions left hanging due to fiscal cutbacks caused by the Vietnam war. Instead of going to the Moon we flew one Apollo mission with the Russians and then several others during Skylab – America’s first orbiting space station.

Then came a gap of several years while the Space Shuttle program developed fixes for vexing technical problems. Now 30+ years later, America is once again at a manned spaceflight crossroads – where to go and what to use to get there. America is once again out of the intrinsic manned spaceflight business for the foreseeable future.

How Did We Get Here?
In 2004 President Bush launched a post-Shuttle plan called the Constellation Program which was going to use Apollo and Space Shuttle derived hardware designs to go to the Moon and beyond – including Mars. No longer would America be locked into low Earth orbit (LEO) as we were with the Space Shuttle. We would be going TO space places again. There was no budgetary plus up forthcoming however, to jump start this new program.

In response to Constellation, NASA started building hardware in the form of the Ares 1-X test launch vehicle, the Orion crew capsule, launching science missions to the Moon to learn more about this future colonization site. NASA was going back to the Moon and was going to stay this time. 4 astronauts would stay on the Moon’s surface for two weeks at a time. Resources would be sought at promising landing sites so that the astronauts could learn to live in-situ on the Moon. Read More About It: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index2.html

A change in administrations as well as the fiscal state of the country led to the creation of the Augustine Commission in 2009 which was to study NASA manned spaceflight and come up with recommendations.

Bottom line of the Commission’s findings involved a fiscal bottom line – NASA could not pay for Constellation with its current and projected budget. NASA was short at least $3 billion a year from achieving its stated goals in Constellation. Read More About It: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/about/background.html

So Constellation was shut down after billions had been spent although the Orion crew capsule is still going forward as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). There also may be other hardware aspects from Constellation going forward but that remains to be seen.

As it stands now, NASA is getting out of the Low Earth Orbit business and turning that over to private industry. We still have to support the International Space Station (ISS) which is slated for another 10 years of operations. Astronauts, supplies, parts and trash removal still have to be shuttled to and fro from ISS. Commercial spacecraft are being developed to perform these tasks but it will take years to achieve manned spaceflight certification. Until then, Americans will pay $63 million per seat for passage to ISS on Russian Soyuz spacecraft http://www.space.com/11125-nasa-russia-soyuz-deal-spaceflights.html. And the follow on commercial per-seat costs could be even more http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=space&id=news/asd/2011/05/13/02.xml.

So what is NASA itself to do now that it is supposed to be out of the LEO business? The stated goal of the President and the NASA Administrator is a manned spaceflight mission to a Near Earth Object (asteroid), the Moon and eventually Mars - http://www.nasa.gov/about/whats_next.html.

We are gathering a lot of data about asteroids from a number of missions that have flown to them. NASA’s DAWN mission is slated to go into orbit for a year around the second largest object in the asteroid belt (located between Mars and Jupiter) on July 16th. DAWN will then fly to Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt and orbit it for detailed study. Such missions will help prepare for a manned spaceflight mission to an asteroid http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/.

The final design of a new heavy lift vehicle is to be announced shortly but I have not seen any mention of a lander-type spacecraft. Why fly astronauts to someplace without landing? We can do far more with robotic orbiters than orbiting astronauts. This is something else NASA will have to do.

I want NASA to succeed and I think Administrator Bolden – a retired Marine aviator and astronaut – is sincere in his efforts to steer the agency to success. But, it cannot happen without funding…..”No bucks, no Buck Rogers”, as succinctly stated in the classic movie, “The Right Stuff”. NASA has to have the funding stream – years of guaranteed funding – in order to succeed.

Already Congress is putting NASA on the chopping block and is moving to cancel the James Webb Space Telescope – the follow on space telescope to Hubble http://aas.org/press/pr2011Jul07_jwst. Again, billions spent and Congress wants to throw it out.

Do you know what NASA’s budget is? It is .5%, yes, .5% of the total federal budget. A paltry, yes paltry, $18 billion and change. That is the equivalent of what Americans spend on pet food every year http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/16/wait-how-big-is-nasas-budget-again/. Also consider this – the greatest “Ponzi Scheme” in American history was proven to be over $50 billion or three years of NASA’s current budget, scammed from investors by one man.

NASA is not an extravagant luxury. It is the ultimate life insurance policy for the human race. We need to move the species off the planet to other worlds and learn to be self-sufficient on those worlds. We need to be able to respond to an incoming asteroid or cometary threat that could conceivably wipe us out as happened to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We need to use natural resources that space can give us. None of this is possible from the ground.

America is not alone in space pursuits as Russia, China, India, Japan, and Europe have space programs. China is working towards landing men on the Moon and with their fiscal capabilities should be able to sustain their effort to do so. I wonder how their lunar landings will take place – one and done or long term towards colonization. If they are successful at least humanity will once again have a personal presence on another world.

As Atlantis fulfills her mission to “stock the shelves” at the ISS and bring the historic Space Shuttle program to a close, America needs to focus on manned spaceflight more than ever. We can’t let our significant problems, polarized politics or fiscal woes keep us on the ground. We have to step forward and build the spacecraft and launch vehicles that will get us to space places of the future.

I longingly await the day when there is again fire on the pad and thunder in the air as American astronauts in an American spacecraft launch on a mission to a new world.

Sky Guy in VA