Space Access Update #101 12/13/03

Space Access Update #101 12/13/03
Copyright 2003 by Space Access Society
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Last time we got one of these out the door, we wrote something about
having more to say about NASA's problems in coming weeks. That was
one Space Access conference and a half-year of working for a living
ago. No more promises - but for the moment, we're writing again.
That, and starting to put together the next Space Access conference.
Thursday afternoon April 22nd through Saturday night April 24th, in
the Phoenix metro area; more details as we nail them down.
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Contents this issue:

- The Future of NASA Manned Space: Constrained Choices

(More on the current state of play in the emerging cheap-access
industry in late December... This time for sure!)
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The Future of NASA Manned Space: Constrained Choices


There has been a lot of breathless speculation on what the current
Administration review of national space policy might lead to, much
of it centered on what if anything the President might choose to
talk about on the upcoming 100th birthday of powered flight,
December 17th 2003. We have no inside scoops, but we do have a few
thoughts on the matter.

Our standard disclaimer on this: NASA is not a monolith; it's a
whole collection of organizations of wildly varying size, missions,
and competence. Some parts of NASA are both competent and
efficient, many are at least marginally functional, and some are
massively dysfunctional bureaucratic quagmires. There are lots of
good people in NASA, some fortunate enough to be able to quietly go
about producing value for the country, some mired up to their
eyeballs in the aforementioned quagmires. Unless we specify
otherwise, from here on we'll use "NASA" as shorthand for by far the
largest single part of the agency, the Shuttle/Station manned
spaceflight establishment.

First, however, consider that December 17th is the centennial of the
*airplane*, that the first "A" in NASA stands for "aeronautics", and
that the agency's problems are not confined to its space operations.
It occurs to us that come the 17th, the President might have
something to say on aeronautics. Just a guess, of course.

As far as NASA manned space goes, keep in mind two things: One,
money is tight. The country's coming out of a recession, there's a
war on, and the deficit is getting politically sensitive. Whatever
new directions national space policy might be aimed, overall civil
space spending is very unlikely to increase radically. That would
take a national consensus that simply doesn't exist.

Two, NASA is a mess. Read the CAIB Report and weep. Neither the
Congress nor the White House trust NASA anymore - neither to succeed
on-time/on-budget (if at all) with any large new project, nor to
reform itself unsupervised. As far as ambitious new missions are
concerned, these various parties are (or ought to be) acutely aware
that the existing NASA structure is capable of soaking up huge
amounts of additional money for a very long time before any new
output at all appears. The few federal legislators talking about
funding big new NASA projects tend to have major NASA centers back
home. The chances of their colleagues going along with any such
major new NASA spending anytime soon are, we estimate, near zero.

Given all this, why not retrench - wind down the existing NASA
manned space projects as quickly as possible, then start over from
scratch in a few years?

Three reasons: One, the Law of Conservation of Congressional Pork
says that established federal jobs-in-umpteen-Districts cashflows
are extremely difficult to shut down. Absent huge amounts of
political capital applied, the strong tendency on established
programs with entrenched constituencies is to trim only around the
margins, a few percentage points in any given year.

Two, we have international obligations to meet in the Station
program. Our diplomacy is difficult enough these days without
further annoying multiple major international partners.

Three, "doing space" has come to be a significant part of this
country's self-image. (Never mind that the reality for the last
twenty years has been a half-dozen astronauts flying a half-dozen
missions-to-nowhere a year at a billion dollars a mission - and
that's in a *good* year.) At a time of considerable national doubt
and stress, we cannot lightly walk away from "doing space".

But neither can we just keep pouring money down the same old
institutional rathole. How many major space transportation
developments in a row has NASA screwed up now? SLI, X-33, and
NASP... Four if we count Shuttle. Allowing NASA to continue
"business as ususal" guarantees further national trauma and
disillusionment, soon as likely as later.

A major part of any new national civil space policy has to be fixing
NASA. Indications are the White House understands this. We expect
a major thrust of the new policies will be to patch up the existing
NASA establishment enough to more or less reliably run the Shuttle
and Station programs through the middle of this decade.

Given the likely flat budget and the difficulties of fixing what
we've got, we don't anticipate any major new initiatives - no hard
date for a Mars mission or a return to the Moon. We wouldn't be
completely surprised, however, to see a relatively modest new
program to begin developing the deep-space transportation and
propulsion to eventually enable such missions. We do expect that
OSP will go ahead in some form, presumably with adult supervision
lest old NASA follow its natural inclination and bloat the project
into Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay.

Longer term, something needs to replace the existing NASA. NASA may
be repairable enough to finish Station and wind down Shuttle
gracefully, but it has far too much institutional baggage to ever
evolve into something fast and efficient. You don't build a race
car by tinkering with a Winnebago. (If you *must*, the right way to
do that is jack up the Winnebago hood ornament then roll a new race
car up underneath it...)

We will conclude by observing that much of NASA's current routine
space operations could appropriately be contracted out, given
reasonable attention to fostering a more diverse, innovative and
efficient space private sector.

In that vein, much of NASA's current advanced space R&D mission
could benefit from increased competition, both at the contractor and
at the contracting government agency level. The mid-nineties
consolidation of all advanced space transportation R&D in one agency
and two established major contractors was a disaster. From Space
Access Update #98, more on this point:

[written as X-33 was finally shut down and SLI begun, winter 2001]

"The real lesson here is NOT to give NASA massive new funding and
another five years - that would be pouring money down the same old
NASA RLV monopoly rathole. The lesson of X-33 is, next time give
the job to people actually willing to go at the problem in a manner
that gives them a chance of solving it with the wide array of
advanced technology that's already practical and available."

"This means letting multiple other agencies take a crack at the
problem, in competition with each other, so "it was too hard" after
a half-assed screwed up effort is no longer a safe excuse. Multiple
competing outfits, possibly inside NASA (Ames and Dryden, Glenn, or
Langley Centers come to mind) but certainly outside (DARPA, AFRL,
NRL, NSF, and DOT are some possibilities) should now get a chance."

"Slice up the SLI budget a half-dozen ways, set a half-dozen
agencies loose on the problem, encourage them to take chances with
streamlined procurement and non-traditional vendors, and tell them
that every four years, the two most successful among them get 50% of
the budgets of the two least successful. Then stand back and watch
the RLV's fly! That would be the ideal."

We look forward to seeing the actual policies the White House will
adopt this winter with interest, and perhaps even some optimism.

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Space Access Society's sole purpose is to promote radical reductions
in the cost of reaching space. You may redistribute this Update in
any medium you choose, as long as you do it unedited in its entirety.
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Space Access Society
http://www.space-access.org


"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein