In those heady days twenty-five years ago when we first landed on the moon there were all sorts of predictions about the future of space exploration. One year before the moon landing the film 2001: A Space Odyssey presented a turn of the century where commercial space liners routinely flew paying passengers to orbiting space hotels, where there were several settlements of a few hundred people on the moon, and where the first manned mission to the planet Jupiter was about to be launched. These predictions were based on sober and conservative extrapolations of the 1960s space program which assumed that access to space would quickly become cheap and routine in the following decades.
Today, seven years from the year 2001, we have a fleet of four aging space shuttles which cost just under half a billion dollars for each and every launch, a rapidly shrinking space science program, and the inability to do any new space missions with less than a 10 year lead time. And the centerpiece of NASA's vision now is a paper design for a space station that has already cost us $9 billion (after 10 years and at least five major redesigns), will cost at least another $21 billion to actually build, and will not even be finished until 2002. NASA, once the golden child of the federal government, has become an incompetent middle-aged adult.
What went wrong? Why won't the year 2001 be like 2001?
NASA and the image of the future of space travel that it still promotes were born of the romantic notions of the future we had in the 1950s. This vision of the future was based on two premises: 1) that a human presence would be necessary to do anything worthwhile in space and 2) that the cost of physically putting materials into space would eventually drop to about the level of the cost of shipping a similar amount of material across the country or across the ocean. Werner von Braun's first designs of a space station that were published in Collier's magazine in the early 1950s (and popularized in a series of documentaries by Disney) required a crew of 15 to 20 on board to maintain all the equipment. For example, Von Braun's design had a telescope on the station which required an astronomer on board to run it. In the 1950s the only way to image the stars and galaxies with a telescope was to place photographic film in the telescope, expose the film for a period of time, then remove the film and develop it, all of which would require a person on the station to accomplish. When Arthur C. Clarke first proposed the idea of communications satellites in 1946, he envisioned it as a manned station. Why? Because with 1946 technology there had to be a human operator there to connect and disconnect the calls.
Today the Hubble Space Telescope routinely images stars and galaxies using a CCD chip (similar to the video chip in a home video camera) and sends the image back to Earth by radio signal. Likewise there are nearly one hundred active communications satellites in orbit today, each crammed full of microelectronics and remotely controlled from Earth. The microelectronics industries of today are the major economic spinoff of the space program of the 1960s. Because it was so expensive to put material into orbit in the 1950s and 60s, the engineers began to look for ways to miniaturize the electronics on board satellites. As the electronics became smaller, more powerful, and cheaper to manufacture the unmanned spacecraft we launched became more sophisticated and versatile. Likewise, new markets for the Earthbound use of this technology opened up. The computer on your desk and the worldwide live coverage of events such as the Olympics and the World Cup are just two examples of how space technology of the 1960s changed our lives.
But while the weight and size of the electronics decreased, the weight and size of people did not. If people, not just machines, were going to routinely fly into space, then there must be a way to bring down the cost per pound of launching material into space. This was the idea behind the space shuttle, a reusable spacecraft that would make spaceflight cheap. Low cost access to space was a good idea, it is still a good idea. But the shuttle never achieved it. Originally the shuttle designers envisioned a system where each shuttle could go from landing on Earth to back on the pad ready for launch within four days. The reality is that it takes a minimum of two months. They envisioned routine launches of between 50 to 100 flights a year. The reality is that a maximum of 10 or 11 flights per year is the best the shuttle system will ever be able to handle. Although the shuttle can launch larger payloads than most rockets could in the 1960s, the launch costs have not come down any. Currently it costs about $10,000 per pound to launch a payload using the shuttle. Once inflation is corrected for, the cost per pound of launching anything into orbit is about the same today as it was in the 1960s.
Ironically, NASA became a victim of its own spinoffs. The microelectronics revolution NASA help spawn in the 1960s has just about eliminated any serious need for a human presence in space. The robot satellites we send up today can do the jobs much better, much faster, and much, much cheaper than a human in space. Everything has changed since 1969 except NASA's thinking. NASA still persists in believing that the only way to get funding for a space program is to have people in space, so in order to justify the shuttle's existence, they must tie all of their missions to shuttle launches. And doing so results in the most expensive and cost-inefficient way of doing most of the missions. Meanwhile, all the commercial satellite business abandoned the shuttle years ago and went to the cheaper, unmanned launchers.
NASA has pushed for a space station for decades now. It sees that as the ultimate justification of the manned space program. But as the economic realities of the cost set in, the original design of ten years ago has shrunk to a much smaller station that will not be capable of doing most scientific research it originally claimed. Given the huge budget for the small amount of scientific return or technological worth it will produce, most professional scientific groups (including some which have been strong NASA supporters for years) have gone on record opposing the space station. They realize there are much better and more promising science and space projects on which to spend the money.
To put it into trendy psychological terms, NASA, as an organization, is in denial. NASA is still trying to live its dreams of the 1950s, dreams which do not make any sense given the technological and economic realities of the 1990s. And the public and the media have gone along with this denial; the dream was so beautiful that no one ever asked what the cost was. But the cost has been the slow rotting and incapacitation of the space program itself. The Challenger disaster should have been the wake-up for us all. But once the shuttle flights started again, we were lulled back into believing that everything was fine now. If we are to once again have a worthwhile space program, we the public and NASA must face up to two painful realities: 1) The shuttle is an economic failure and the continuing reliance on it is a roadblock to the development of space. 2) The enormous cost of the space station in any of its various designs cannot be justified on the basis of the slim amount of science and technology it will produce and it should not even be attempted until we have developed a cheaper space transportation system.
So what alternatives are there? It depends on what we want our space program to do. If we are willing to admit to ourselves that we want to put people into space simply because we like the idea (and maybe secretly dream that we or our children may someday be lucky enough to go into space), then we spend the money that would have gone into the station on developing new low-cost launching systems. There are lots of ideas out there, some of them promising, but NASA hasn't done anything new in launch technology since the shuttle designs were finalized twenty years ago! Currently there are at least two possible new technologies, the National Aerospace Plane (NASP or X-30) and the single stage to orbit DC-X rocket. Both show promise, but NASP was cancelled altogether last year and DC-X is now an orphan caught between NASA and the Air Force. (The military originally funded the early development, but now wants NASA to take it. NASA, facing a tightening budget itself and threatened by anything that might someday compete with its shuttle, doesn't want it.) We don't know whether either of these could work as low cost transportation or whether we'll have to try several other ideas before we find a solution, but if we don't try anything, then we will definitely be stuck with the shuttle as our space program's albatross.
Or perhaps we will decide that the cost of putting humans into space is too high to justify. Or ultimately, we may try several things and discover there simply is no cheap way into space given our current or foreseeable technology. In either case we will have to live with that fact and continue doing all of our space explorations by remote control. As our robot probes become more sophisticated and our interactivity with them becomes more developed the excitement of exploring the rest of the solar system will make up for the lack of a human presence in space. If given a choice between spending $50 billion to put ten people on the moon for a few weeks or the same amount to put hundreds of small mobile remote-controlled robots that could run all over the surface of the moon for years, I would choose the latter. Given the number of robots and the wealth of opportunity their sheer numbers would present, we could devote maybe half of them to the scientists for research and the other half to schoolchildren and classrooms. Imagine what would happen to the scientific literacy in our schools if millions of middle school and high school students could actually participate in exploring the lunar surface; if they could truthfully say that last Tuesday afternoon they and their robot had boldly gone where no one had gone before. If we started tomorrow, we could probably achieve that goal by 2001.
These are the sort of futuristic ideas NASA should be dreaming about, but instead it remains fixated on its out-of-date dream of a space station without a purpose and, rather than exploring new launch technologies, is making plans to nursemaid its current shuttle fleet through the year 2030. By now some NASA supporters reading this may be dismissing me and my arguments by saying that I do not believe in "the Dream". "The Dream" is the name many space enthusiasts have for the idea of putting large numbers of people into space and eventually building space colonies and settling the moon and other planets. Ironically, I share that dream, but I want a realistic and economically feasible way of achieving those dreams. After years of working with NASA and observing the current political situation within NASA, I have come to realize NASA's way will only delay "the Dream".
Today, every time NASA promotes its space station it loudly proclaims that this is the way to open the road to the stars, that unless we build it our children will be doomed to remain forever Earthbound. But the sad truth is that the path NASA is taking is a dead end. The squeeze between the gargantuan budget of space station with the launch cost of the shuttle and the shrinking federal budget is currently starving all the other space projects. Eventually this trend will kill everything but the station. With no new science funded, no new technology being developed, we will have a beautiful station that will look good on NASA publicity photos but will not do much else. And the saddest irony is that following NASA's plans will guarantee that our children will remain Earthbound.