Anthonares

Since last year’s successful X-Prize competition, the private space industry has received a serious shot in the arm. Websites buzz with the excitement of new companies entering this “Space Race 2″ to get regular paying customers into suborbital space. There are at least 5 different companies now all competing toward that same goal, along with 2 dedicated to doing the same for orbital space, and a few that aren’t planning on sending humans yet, but they do plan on sending up cargo much more cheaply than can currently be done. It’s interesting to me that despite this excitement and anticipation within the space community, there is very little public news or even knowledge about the effort. This led me to think of something about the goal of getting people into space cheaply and permanently that suggests to me that this Space Race 2 is going to succeed where the first one ultimately failed.

What history now tells us was the widely accepted view in 1969 was that NASA would soon lead us not just to the moon, but to Lagrange space stations, Mars, and beyond. Published plans, drawings and discourse seemed to make this dream an impending reality. Advocacy focused around getting the government to do just that. Perhaps the first real space advocacy organization, the L5 society, was organized based on the ideas of one man, Gerard O’Neil, to push the feasibility of Lagrange-point (a location sort-of between us and the moon where a space station can be stably placed without need for constant burning of fuel to reposition itself) to NASA and the public. But, had those groups put their ears to the ground they would have heard the rumblings of change within the structure of NASA and the public’s view of it. The Space Shuttle was to make access to space regular and relatively-cheap, but its cost-overruns and constant downgrades in specification should have (in hindsight at least) made it obvious that NASA was not going to be able to deliver on its promises. Never was a launch rate achieved that would make space access either cheap or regular, and the failure now seems to be rooted in the fundamental compromise of a winged-reentry vehicle. Those wings are tremendous points of failure that are enormously heavy, and 1970s technology was not up to the task. And, by the time Space Station Freedom was proposed, it was no longer a capable L5 station, but a much more humble shuttle-assembled low earth orbit station (after all, the shuttle cannot make it anywhere near as far as it would need to get to L5, which is a good fraction of the distance to the Moon). The L5 society, with all of their numbers and ideas was ultimately unsuccessful, though it would not die entirely, it merged with the National Space Society and now is largely directionless.

Similarly, the Mars Society formed in 1998 around the ideas of Robert Zubrin to advocate a plan called “Mars Direct” to NASA and the public. The idea was brilliant in its simplicity, and revolutionary in its reliance on Martian resources to manufacture rocket fuel needed for the Earth return voyage. Today we are facing a point similar to what the L5 society faced in the late 1970s, we are watching NASA develop a new infrastructure with capabilities to do what is needed to make it to Mars, but the costs keep going up, and the capabilities will soon be decreased to match. We can put our ears to the ground and hear the rumblings of discontent: “Why should NASA be getting over 100 billion to return to the Moon–what the heck would they even doing there?–when people in New Orleans don’t even have houses?” The public, and soon the next administration, will not stomach a lot of funds going into a nowhere program, and if Return to the Moon is required before we ever get a NASA mission to Mars, NASA will never reach Mars.

So, the Mars advocacy community needs to change its focus a bit. We need to labor to show how the Moon mission is a ridiculous diversion of effort and money that will ultimately doom our chances of a government funded mission. Zubrin has largely kowtowed to the new NASA adminstrator Michael Griffin because of his qualifications and former-membership in the Mars Society and because Griffin is proposing the very heavy-lift launcher needed to get to Mars. But, when the budget axe falls on the Moon mission and cancels the heavy lifter, the Mars Society faces irrelevance.

Look instead to the Mars Foundation and their goals of proving the economics and feasibility of private settlements on Mars. They are the forerunner of the private companies that will eventually get us there. Mars advocates will soon need to shift focus from working with gigantic, monopolistic government agencies to promoting these sub-orbital industries. For out of them will grow the capability to make a profit getting humans into space. Once a profit can be made in Low earth orbit, it can be made anywhere. We will see within the next 3 years if NASA will ever make it to Mars. One more failure, be it with equipment or securing funding, and the NASA human space program will be doomed. But, a single failure will not doom the Space Race 2. In fact, like all failures do in engineering, failure will spur further development and progress. We may be facing a period of time where the US cannot launch its citizens into space, but if we encourage the growing efforts of the Space Race 2 companies, we will eventually reap something much better than NASA could ever give us: real, permanent, and cheap access to space.