MarsBlog.net

I don’t have time tonight for a full review of the new space policy (just as well, as the details are still coming out). Instead, I thought I’d at least point out one item from the President’s speech that caught my attention.

To meet this goal, we will return the Space Shuttle to flight as soon as possible, consistent with safety concerns and the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The Shuttle’s chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the International Space Station. In 2010, the Space Shuttle — after nearly 30 years of duty — will be retired from service. [emphasis added]

When he first said that, I was distracted from thinking through the implications of it by the collective gasps and puckerings of my coworkers. But I did note at the time that it seemed to be the only portion of the speech Mr. Bush delivered with the same sort of forcefulness he has displayed in his foreign policy speeches since 9/11.

Given the current surplus of External Tanks, the lead time and delivery schedule, and the anticipated flight rate between RTF and retirement, I’d hazard a (personal and non-official) wild guess that ET production would be shut down perhaps two years prior to the final flight…which happens to be in 2008, the last full year of a hypothetical second Bush term. If he can carry out any of the incremental goals in this new policy, it’s retiring the Shuttle — it’s the first goal, it doesn’t require a huge increase in spending (not directly anyway), it will actually avert a huge expenditure on upgrades and recertification, it can be justified as freeing up money which will pay for the next step in the plan (avoiding controversial additional spending), etc. But the key fact here is that it is easily achievable for Mr. Bush: all he needs to do is to irreversably cut off production of External Tanks, and the Shuttle is dead before he leaves office.

This has me pretty well convinced that the 2010 cutoff date is certain: it’s easy, and it doesn’t depend on his successor or on Congress having loose purse strings.

It’s also a stroke of genius.

Put aside commercial and military efforts for a moment and look at NASA’s record. Looking back, we see twenty-years of aerospace projects billed as “Shuttle replacements” or “Shuttle derivatives” — none of which has succeeded. Oh, sure, the various projects have resulted in some interesting technology development, but no viable (or even flyable) spacecraft has resulted from any of them.

This failure is generally attributed to lack of ability, poor management, poor oversight, inadequate funding, or the like, but there is one common factor running through all of these programs: there has always been an easy fall-back position in the Shuttle itself.

The cost of project failure has not been the complete disruption of manned spaceflight. With the Shuttle to fall back on, “replacement” programs could take unreasonable technical risks, banking everything on revolution rather than evolution…and if they failed, oh well, at least they tried Something New.

This time, however, the Shuttle is going away. If NASA wishes to stay in the manned space game, they won’t be able to point to a few pieces of test hardware and a mountain of viewgraphs, declare qualified victory, and start over Monday morning with a spiffy new acronym and a blank .ppt — they no longer have the luxury of postponing the commitment to a new vehicle. Either NASA gets serious — and sensible — about a replacement, and devises a simple, workhorse vehicle it can build in short order without relying on gee-whiz technologies or bottomless wells of funding, or it risks losing the in-house ability to put humans in space.

Either path holds promise for the opening up of space…

Pardon me if I found the President’s new space policy initiative underwhelming.

No mention of private industry. Indeed, the reference to NASA sending robotic spacecraft to the Moon to scout out landing sites implies that they will be, well, NASA robots. So much for that avenue of commercialization. (And I second Rand’s observation that the “entrepreneurs” comment w/r/t the astronauts in the audience was just bizarre.)

The hookup with Mike Foale on ISS fell flat, at least for me. It came across as forced and phony, as did much of Bush’s delivery. There was none of the oratorical fire of Kennedy’s famous Apollo speeches…there was no life in his presentation at all.

Much of the speech was the usual Science Über Alles and Amazing Space Spinoffs boilerplate. It almost sounded like a Chamber of Commerce speech extolling the local economic virtues of Moonville. I suppose that is to be expected, as it was a speech ultimately aimed at a general (non-space) audience, to whom he was trying to sell the policy. At least he didn’t mention Tang.

As predicted (admittedly, this is the only one of my cynical predictions to have come true in the speech), the policy talks about Mars in a noncommittal way.

With the experience and knowledge gained on the moon, we will then be ready to take the next steps of space exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond.

In other words, we’ll think about maybe going to Mars after we’re done building Moon Base Dubya in 2020 (or later).

I watched the speech at work, and there was a shocked murmur when he announced (rather pointedly) that the Shuttle would be retired in 2010. This was the only point in the new policy about which he seemed to be firmly committed and completely serious. When it was over, the general tone was disappointment and a feeling that we had just been fooled into wasting 45 minutes of time better spent elsewhere — aside from Shuttle being axed, nothing else looks likely to come of this.

What a disappointment.

Naturally, all anyone has been talking about at work this week is the President’s new space plan. And after the initial novelty and excitement wore off, we remembered that this is the real world, NASA is involved, and that we shouldn’t expect too much.

A couple of us ended up swapping predictions of what we thought the worst-case plan might contain:

1. International Involvement I: the Russians will be again placed in the critical path, such that the missions will not succeed without their involvement. Not just permitted to bid in open competitions or as team members, but with a guarantee of some important role.
2. International Involvement II: India will be asked in as a partner, which would actually be novel and interesting…if they are able to perform better than the Russians did on ISS. Even so, guaranteeing any role to any country precludes open competition among interested parties (be they national space programs, private businesses, or academic institutions) and pretty well guarantees that the results will not be as good, as affordable, or as timely as they might otherwise have been.
3. Saturn Chain-Saw Redux: the heavy lift capability inherent in the Shuttle stack will not be utilized after the orbiters are retired. Instead, the tooling and facilities for ETs and SRBs will be shuttered and eventually scrapped. On-orbit assembly of smaller, EELV-launchable elements will be employed in lieu of heavy lift, and this will be rationalized as making use of the space construction techniques developed for ISS. While such an approach may make sense, if done with the intention of developing a private launch industry, the plan will instead be arranged such that only EELVs will win the bids, even if SpaceX or one of the other small launch companies comes up with a cheaper EELV-class launcher — the real motive being to subsidize LM and Boeing to keep the EELVs in production.
4. The Big Maybe I: there will be contorted avoidance of specific plans regarding Mars. The Moon effort will be noncommittally described as prelude to possible manned expedition to Mars…maybe….someday. It will echo the rationalizations used with ISS: we’re learning the skills necessary for future missions to somewhere, someday, which we can’t plan for until we know everything there is to know about getting there safely (wherever “there” is).
5. The Big Maybe II: there will be an explicit avoidance of specific plans regarding the return to the Moon itself. The plan will tout the Moon as a goal, while giving only a vague outline of what the return will involve and when it will happen. It’ll be along the lines of “directing NASA, academia, and industry to put together ideas for how to get there, when we might go, how much it might cost”, etc….in other words, more Powerpoint planning for a fantasy dream vacation that will never happen.
6. Disabling Technologies: the plan, particularly the Mars portion, will be hitched to some as-yet-undeveloped exotic technology which is not needed and will inevitably be a showstopper. Nuclear power sources a la Prometheus will be needed; VASIMR and space elevators and L1 bases and TSTO will not. The bureaucratic potlatching may not be as blatant this time as it was with the 90 Day Report, but there will be some ill-conceived, high-risk, gee-whiz “requirement” in the plan that will sooner or later lead to serious trouble and expense.
7. Business as Usual: the plan may pay lip service to private enterprise, but there will be no firm requirement for NASA to involve it, or if there is it will not be enforced. NASA will be sending its own orbiters and landers to scout out a landing site, and will turn to the usual suspects to launch them.
8. Reduced Expectations: the plan will be far more modest than what the advocacy community has imagined from the rumors preceding the announcement. The plan will be seen as a huge letdown.
9. [update] Wissenschaft Über Alles: the plan will contain the boilerplate reassurances to the “international community” that the U.S. does not plan to claim territory on the Moon or Mars, and will treat these bodies in perpetuity as scientific outposts, the “common heritage of mankind”, ad nauseam.

We shall soon see if any of these prognostications come true. The plan will be announced Wednesday at 3pm EST (watch it here on webcast).

The new plan may include going international.

Why not? It worked so well the last time.

This sounds ominous. It suggests that NASA is going to be directed to continue business as usual, at least in some respects.