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April 12, 2006,
7:15 a.m.
Flying Solo
NASA should embrace principles of free enterprise.
April 12 is an auspicious date for humanity's attempts to leave the planet on which it was born. Forty-five years ago, the first man, a Soviet Russian, orbited the earth. His flight hardware was primitive — he had to eject from his capsule after entry and land by parachute. Such was the pace of technological advancement over the next two decades that, on the same date in 1981, the much more advanced Space Shuttle Columbia ascended to the heavens, bearing with it the hopes and dreams of a country, and indeed, of much of the world. Two days later, it landed safely on a runway in California, just like an airplane, just as it was intended to land.
It wasn't on purpose that the launch occurred on the same date as Yuri Gagarin's flight. The original schedule was April 10, but a last-minute computer glitch delayed the flight for two days. It was, in some sense, an inappropriate coincidence. That first April 12 heralded an era of human spaceflight, while the second one presented a false dawn of routine, low-cost human spaceflight. This quarter-century, however, may well be a period of transition to a true space age, amidst accelerating plans for private trips to space, and disarray within NASA's plans for a renewal of human lunar exploration.
Columbia, which first flew 25 years ago, was lost over the skies of Texas a little more than three years ago. It was an event that spurred a great deal of soul searching in space policy — though perhaps not enough. It resulted in the formulation of a new policy. Almost a year after the disaster, in January of 2004, the president announced his "Vision for Space Exploration." Part of that policy is a recognition that the Shuttle never lived up to the high expectations placed on it, and never will. (The Shuttle is supposed to be retired in 2010, after it has finished its missions to complete the International Space Station, but continuing delays in getting it safely back to flight status will make it much harder to keep to that schedule.) A second part of the president's statement — a more noteworthy part — is the determination that we are going to once again send humans beyond earth orbit, as we did, haltingly, in the 1960s with the Apollo program.
The president didn't specify in detail how this was to be accomplished, other than laying out a rough schedule, including the shuttle retirement. It is to be replaced by 2014 with a "Crew Exploration Vehicle." This vehicle is planned to have the capability to deliver humans not only to earth orbit and the ISS, but all the way to the vicinity of the moon (like the Command Module of Apollo), whence the crew will be taken down to the surface and back up via a separate lander (also like Apollo).
Unfortunately, there has been turmoil in the program lately. Last summer, NASA's new administrator, Dr. Mike Griffin, announced the agency's plans to carry out the president's vision. They seemingly ignored most of the transportation-architecture analysis that had been performed by several contractors under Administrator O'Keefe and Admiral Steidle, who was O'Keefe's pick to manage the program. Instead, Griffin announced "Apollo on steroids," which bore little resemblance to any of the recommended architectures. It required two new expendable launch vehicles — one for crew and one for heavy cargo — utilizing Shuttle hardware, such as the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB) and external tank components, but not the orbiter itself. Former astronaut Scott Horowitz, who left NASA in October of 2004 to become an executive at ATK, the company that makes the SRBs, had been pushing this concept. Once NASA made the decision and granted the company a sole-source non-competitive contract, he left the company and went back to NASA, not quite a year later, to head up the exploration office. While there's no evidence to date of wrongdoing, this has presented an appearance of conflicts of interest.
This appearance is all the more unfortunate now that the program has run into trouble, with the development cost estimates on the supposedly cheap Shuttle-derived Crew Launch Vehicle more than doubling recently, making it look like a "bait and switch." In addition, the lunar mission hardware has apparently outgrown the planned launchers, potentially requiring a radical redesign of NASA's desired architecture. In the wake of all this, NASA is going to have to decide if its plans are really "affordable" and "sustainable," as the president demanded.
In the meantime, investors continue to pour money into the new private spaceflight industry, with hundreds of advance orders for personal rocket rides. NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program is moving ahead to encourage more commercial entities to provide space transportation, and the agency is moving more aggressively in offering prizes and other innovative procurement techniques.
Perhaps, 45 years after a race initiated by a socialist-state space program, and 25 years after a failed attempt at our own socialist program, it's time for NASA to support even more vigorously the new space era. The space program should be based on the American values of free enterprise and individualism, not on NASA's failed 5, 10, and 25 year plans.
— Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism, and Internet security. He writes about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.
