Apparently, NASA’s facing a rather-paltry $100 million dollar budget shortfall for fiscal year 2007. So what is it considering cutting? Of course, “all options are on the table” which is to say “all low priority activities are on the table”. What is one of those low priority options? Why, ISS science research!
Scientists have said for years that the ISS research program is little more than an orbiting science fair, so this is probably just an admission of what has been painfully true for some time. The cut would only be for 2007 and would presumably not apply to research into the effects of microgravity and radiation on human health. But either way, microgravity research was one of the prime justifications for the ISS.
We’ve heard this story before, though, haven’t we? Launching and servicing expensive commercial and military satellites was one of the prime justifications for the Shuttle program. Some of the early shuttle flights did just that, but after a while it became clear that servicing them was just too expensive, and that there were far cheaper options available for launching.
Program- vs. Mission-Driven
This is what happens when space programs follow what Robert Zubrin calls a “program-driven” agenda. In this mode of operation, NASA is not an agency in charge of exploring space, but rather of managing programs, and justifying its existence via those programs. The ISS exists to justify the Shuttle, and the Shuttle continues to drain manned exploration funding in order to finish the ISS. Seems wacky, I know, but that’s what you get with a program driven mindset.
“Mission-driven” agency culture is totally different. If a program is incapable of satisfying the demands of exploration or science it is either transformed or cut. NASA should be judged in light of its capability to achieve mission goals, not upon its ability (or lack thereof) to see a program out to completion.
Most of the non-space-enthusiast community judges NASA this way, and they’ve come to the conclusion that NASA is a schizophrenic agency. Its mission-driven suite of robotic explorers have taken up some of the slack left by the horribly dysfunctional program-driven mindset of its manned exploration directorate. Since the last moon landing, they have cheered the successes of Viking, Voyager, Magellan, Galileo, Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, the Mars Exploration Rovers, Cassini, Huygens, and many many more. Against that august list of successes stands the lone manned exploration accomplishment of the last three decades: the Hubble servicing mission(s).
Making that same comparison, many scientific and editorial-board critics have come to a very logical conclusion: Manned exploration is a giant boondoggle that wastes taxpayer money in comparison to the spectacular successes of robotic missions. But they’re wrong, because manned missions are governed by a program-driven mentality, they are bloated boondoggles of state-sponsored industry. The mission-driven robotic probes have their management foibles, but considering the fact that they are publicly funded on cost-plus contracts, they are remarkably budgetarily lean.
Program-Driven Robotic Exploration, A Fictional History
In 1969 NASA was given the go-ahead for a new class of robotic exploration vehicles. Dubbed Viking, these vehicles would be all built of an identical chassis in order to maximize cost-savings. General Dynamics, an all-purpose government contractor was the lowest bidder in the creation of the Viking program. “Each Viking explorer will be built to withstand the heat of the inner solar system, will have the cooling capabilities to land on Venus, and the communications power to send a signal back to the Deep Space Network from Pluto,” stated GD’s Space Programs Manager.
By 1975, the Viking Program was several billion dollars over budget. The engineering difficulties of such a complex design objective had multiplied, and the weight of the craft had nearly doubled. As a result, the capabilities had to be scaled down in order to fit on the available launch vehicles. Congress began to hold hearings on Viking where NASA and GD officials defended their Program. They lauded the marvel of computer-age engineering they had designed, and noted that thousands of employees had been given highly-paid jobs in several key Congressional districts. Mollified, Congress demanded that the Viking Program be managed within NASA’s existing budget which led to major cutbacks in the nascent Landsat program.
In 1977, still without a single succesful launch, NASA began issuing diagrams in which the Viking Program would be one of the first new missions for its upcoming Space Transportation System (or Shuttle). The Shuttle would be the only vehicle capable of lifting the 20-ton Vikings. Meanwhile, the delays and cost-overruns had scaled back the Mars Vikings to one, and forced the indefinite postponement of visits to Venus and Mercury. It also became apparent that such a heavy vehicle would be incapable of reaching Pluto even from the Shuttle. Advancing Nuclear engines were proposed to launch the Vikings to the Outer Solar System perhaps 20 years in the future.
In 1983, the first Viking, Mars-1, landed on the surface of Mars where it functioned admirably. Bristling with decade-old electronics and gadgetry, Viking was a shining success for both NASA and GD. Its life-detection experiments achieved some promising results, but were not replicated on the surface elsewhere. Mars-1 would be the only landed Viking probe. Venus and Mercury missions were abandoned after the explosion of the Challenger craft in 1987. After Voyager, no crafts have visited Jupiter or Saturn and Earth Remote sensing is still largely military in nature, as satellite remote sensing development was nearly halted during the 1980s to make room for Viking.
Bringing Mission-Driven Mentality to Manned Exploration
Of course it’s ridiculous to build a single vehicle for each solar system exploration objective, but let’s take a look at what NASA’s planning in order to fulfill the Vision for Space Exploration. Lunar landers will be built to specifications demanded largely by Mars exploration. Their engines will (or will not be, depending on the day) methane burning. Heck the launchers that will take us to the Moon are even called “Ares”.
If NASA is taking us back to the Moon, let’s focus on getting to the Moon with the hardware we need for that job. Forget methane engines for Mars on the Lunar CEVs. Drop Ares 5. Don’t launch cargo and hardware on expensive NASA vehicles. Hire employees on a contractual basis, and acquire as much hardware as possible from off-the-shelf. Acknowledge that exploration is risky, and therefore “human rating” everything is a ridiculous waste of time. Let’s be prepared for our efforts to fail, because that will at least allow us to truly succeed.
Instead of dropping manned exploration because it’s a failure compared to the robotic side, bring the ideas that have made robotic exploration so successful back to the manned side. Sure, humans are different and need life support and bigger lauch vehicles, but those are simply differences of degree. Most importantly, NASA must be willing to axe programs that it deems unsuccesful at achieving mission objectives. The Shuttle and the ISS are two such programs. If NASA is willing to stop science aboard the station, then it is admitting that its mission there has failed, it’s time for the program to end as well.
Come to think of it, when you hear of the ISS, you only hear about how it needs repairs, you don’t hear about what it’s actually doing up there!
A lot of what you ascribe to the mission/program or unmanned/manned dichotomy makes at least as much sense seen as “smaller vs. larger payloads”… in other words, the boring, same old same old challenge of CATS.
Thanks to Moore’s Law and prohramming advances, we get a lot more function today from a kg of circuitry in a planetary probe or comm or sensing satellite) than we did decades ago. But the hardware required to enclose, support — and bring back — human beings hasn’t gotten much lighter at all.
So I trace the ISS’ shortcomings not to some inherent managerial dysfunction on the manned side, but to the underlying delusion — Reagan 1984 and ever since — that we had a cost-effective “space truck” to build and support a multi-hundred-ton station… when we didn’t then, and still don’t.
Try this exercise: imagine that Freedom/Alpha/ISS had been planned as fully automated, unmanned, from the beginning — but the same total mass. Would it have been completed on schedule, on budget, and be doing lots of good science and/or free-fall industrial research?
“That’s absurd,” you say. “An unmanned station wouldn’t need anything like the same habitable volume [i.e. payload mass]. An unmanned station wouldn’t need anything like the same level of resupply [i.e. payload mass.] An unmanned station would have been built from components delivered by ELVs with payloads that were all payload, not payloads less ~100 tons of vehicle to return to eartrh…” Are we seeing a pattern here?
We don’t yet have the ability to do anything massive in space cost-effectively; that applies just as much to SPsats or SDI battle stations as it does to ISS. If you asked the “robotic side” to soft-land a 50-ton package on Mars instead of a Sojourner or Rover, the results would be waaaay slow and waaaay expensive. IOW, “heavy vs. light” explains a very large part of what you pose as “mission vs. program” or “functional vs. dysfunctional.”
Monte,
I’m not sure that the effect of the increased mass of manned missions can substantially account for the utter failure of the Shuttle or ISS to produce results in either exploration or science. Sure, the cost increases dramatically with manned missions, but for 100 billion we got Apollo. For probably now on the order of 200 billion we also now have the Shuttle and the ISS. Those are all three big, expensive projects. Apollo was mission driven: create the hardware needed to accomplish a well defined set of goals. Shuttle and ISS are program driven: create the hardware needed to justify other programs and give NASA and the USA certain capabilities in the space arena.
I think it’s probably much simpler to run a mission-driven robotic program because the costs are smaller, and there are fewer hands in pot, so to speak. But nevertheless, this doesn’t justify why NASA has totally failed to accomplish its stated goals with either the Shuttle or ISS programs.
The Shuttle and ISS aren’t two distinct examples, but a single chain of cause and effect.
Given the technology available c. 1970 and those reasonably expectable over the next few years, there was no way NASA (or anybody else) was going to achieve the promised flight rates and costs within a decade. They (and OMB and Congress and the public) pretended otherwise, and proceeded, and declared the result “operational” after four flights (!).
Given the Shuttle we actually had in 1984, there was no way that a multi-hundred-ton space station (or space commercialization, or SDI, or anything else dependent on much lower $/kg than Apollo) was going to happen on a reasonable schedule and budget. We pretended otherwise, and proceeded…
And 22 years later, say “Wha’ happen? Gosh, I guess the manned-spaceflight side of NASA got stupid after Apollo.” What we should be saying is: “We all told ourselves a string of pretty lies about keeping up the Apollo pace of ‘milestones’ while dropping NASA spending from ~5% of the federal budget to less than 1%, and reality bit us.”
I don’t have a silver-bullet answer to CATS, which I believe to be a much tougher engineering and economic challenge than Apollo was. I don’t believe the newer pretty lies — that a different STS design would have been dramatically better, or that Unleashed Free Enterprise will now do quickly what Big Dumb Government screwed up over 35 years.
What I do have is a conviction that any mission or program conceived as if we’d solved CATS, when we haven’t, is bound to be a disappointment.
You’re right about the string of lies that NASA and the Administrations told. Flight rates were clearly exaggerated, as were turnaround times and maintenance requirements. But don’t those stem from the fact that the Shuttle program was conceived too broadly and was created in order to give us the capacity to do something (then still to be defined) rather than for the express purpose of achieving that obective? A single objective piece of hardware seems to naturally have fewer engineering design objectives, therefore making it cheaper to develop, operate, and maintain. Also, if a single objective piece of hardware fails at its mission, then that program will be cut. On the other hand, the Shuttle can fail at all sorts of things but it still provides us one crucial capacity that has saved it (and the ISS): it’s our way of getting into space.
Try to put yourself in the context of 1970. You want “single-objective hardware?” There it is, the Saturn V - CSM- LEM stack: fine-tuned for the JFK mission, successful at that, but not what anyone sane would choose for an ongoing space transportation system, on either engineering or economic grounds.
The silver-bullet answer to that challenge was “reusability and high flight rates.” Both cost money up front in order to save over time: reusability meant wings, complex TPS, more robust airframe and engines (all of which cut into payload ratio, which sucks to begin with for rockets); and high flight rates meant more infrastructure and big turnaround teams. It was supposed to be done on an Apollo-ish schedule, on a budget that in the end was about 40% of Apollo (constant dollars.)
That was like greeting Roald Amundsen on his return from the South Pole: “Nice job — now we’d like you to build a railroad from the coast to the pole, two trains a week, suitable for passengers, cargo, scientific and military needs. Here’s 40% of what you spent before. Good luck.” That was not going to happen, Anthony, despite all the Monday-morning quarterbacks asserting since 1981 that their alternate STS approach would have been 1/10th the cost and flown 10x as often with a ground crew of 3.
Having been a space fan since 1957, and science writer through the 70s and early 1980s, knowing the STS principals, I reject the neat and convenient “lies NASA and the Administration told.” We all drank the Kool-Aid; we were all on a post-Apollo, we-can-do-anything high, and chose not to look too closely at the profound difference between the challenge of a closed-end moon race and the challenge of getting into space frequently, affordably, and flexibly.
In hindsight, in a perfect world, we would have said not “We’ll create an operational space truck in 6-9 years,” but “We’ll start a series of limited, overlapping X-craft programs, each with narrowly defined obectives: one for propulsion, one for flyback stages, one for TPS, one for fast turnaround procedures, etc. None will deliver any payload to speak of; candidly, we can’t say how long before the results add up to a space truck, and we can’t say how much the total cost will be, so keep the checkbook open.”
Good luck selling that to any government, ever, not just Nixon’s in 1972.
Thanks, Monte for your insightful perspective here! I think we’re pretty much in agreement, though it sounds like my comments have been a little too trite.
I guess the reason I am so strongly advocating single-purpose hardware here is because of the fact that I don’t think that any government would be willing to fund the long-term development needed for a viable space-truck. That said, NACA and its descendant programs within NASA have existed since the 1930s, right? The idea of theoretical, government-funded aerospace research is there in the X-program, it just must have looked too expensive to have been funded without an express purpose.
Thanks for your patience. I’m working on a book about the lessons to be learned from the first fifty years of the space age — and because the Shuttle has been around so long and left so many hopes unsatisfied, a lot of wrong lessons have been drawn from it.