Tweet
Space Program Priorities Revisited
A good article in the Wall Street Journal. I agree that it's time to wind down Shuttle and the Space Station. The $5 billion per annum saved should be plowed into some more exploratory and science items. Many of these programs are absurdly cheap for the expected payoff. With better engines, the payoff would be quicker as well.
I would also put some money ($1/2 billion per year) toward basic technology for single-stage-to-orbit reusable manned vehicle. The Shuttle technology is valuable, just not in its current configuration.
I would also put some money ($1/2 billion per year) toward basic technology for single-stage-to-orbit reusable manned vehicle. The Shuttle technology is valuable, just not in its current configuration.
BUSINESS WORLD
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
How to Spell NASA
Revival: N-U-K-E
NASA will be flayed and hung out to dry for its performance in the latest shuttle disaster. But let's face it: The country has not done right by the agency or its personnel.
Back in the 1960s, Apollo earned NASA the curse of bureaucratic charisma. Ever since, presidents have felt obliged to nail their colors to space. That's how we got the shuttle from the Nixon administration and its bastard half-cousin, the space station, from the Reagan administration. Now both projects have left the agency looking like a case of the federal budget writ small: A sliver of productive discretionary spending squeezed between two entitlement programs that live on regardless of rationale.
The space station is tens of billions of dollars over-budget and almost useless because we failed to provide an escape craft that would permit more than three crew members aboard at one time. Maintaining the station uses up their time, leaving one crew member a few hours a week at best for the science studies that were supposed to justify the station's massive cost.
It's no stretch to say the space station exists to give the shuttle somewhere to go and the shuttle exists to give the space station an illusion of viability. Neither program could survive long without the other. If Columbia's sisters are grounded for any length of time, the space station will effectively be abandoned -- though rhetorical fig leaves will be found to fuzz this reality.
To pile irony on top of the weekend's tragedy, the Bush administration and NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe were shaping a constructive mission for the sliver left over even as they fed the legacy budget beast. Before events intervened, NASA was slated to unveil plans to spend $1 billion over five years to develop two kinds of nuclear power plant for robotic and manned space exploration. While the rest of the world was preoccupied last week by passing storms in Iraq and North Korea, space obsessives were thrilling to news leaks suggesting the words "nuclear rocket" might even appear in Tuesday's State of the Union address. They didn't, but in retrospect the public would have been well-served to hear that NASA is on the verge of getting ambitious again.
Yes, this emerging prospect has been causing nuclearphobes to have a cow all year, especially those who suspect the secret purpose is to advance the cause of missile defense. But even the European Space Agency has acknowledged that further space exploration isn't possible without atomic energy. NASA's Mr. O'Keefe called it the "single most important initiative" of his agency.
Nuclear power provides several times the energy of chemical rocketry for any given mass of propellant. For deep space probes, this means being able to enter and leave orbits of distant objects, going from one to the next, rather than mere flybys. And it means being able to generate enough electricity for active scanning and to send large data files back to Earth, allowing sharper and richer images.
On manned missions, nuclear power would allow transit times to Mars to be cut to 45 days from six months, saving the crew prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. And nuclear power is perhaps the only way to generate power to convert Martian resources into air and water for explorers (or settlers) and fuel for the trip home (hydrogen being the preferred molecule to be heated by a fission engine to produce high-velocity thrust).
Mars is more affordable as a percentage of GDP today than Apollo was in the 1960s, though that was before colonization of the federal budget by the Medicare blob. Nonetheless, the job would require a far different kind of NASA, more in tune with the decentralizing possibilities of information technology.
Look at the first Bush budget: In 2002, every NASA program was judged to be "ineffective" under benchmarking except for two -- the Discovery and Explorer planetary/astronomy projects. They both choose their missions by peer review, then put them out for cost-capped competitive bidding. Were the shuttle run this way, it never would have passed muster on a cost-benefit analysis. Even now the results of its experiments are seldom published in a refereed journal. NASA can't take the chance with a shuttle program so powerfully controlled by political and budgetary imperatives.
Robert Zubrin, a former Lockheed engineer and pied piper of the private Mars Society, argues cogently that a $20 billion Mars Prize, endowed by the U.S. government, would be enough to get the first humans to the Red Planet and back. Don't write him off. NASA's own deep planners have sketched out a Mars mission for $30 billion.
Blaming budget cuts for the Columbia disaster, as many seem inclined to do, invites us to make exactly the wrong choice. NASA already has too much budget for the wrong things -- at a time when we should be making the quantum technological progress that would keep us a full generation ahead of emerging space powers like China and India. Mr. O'Keefe has taken darts for saying it but he's right that NASA should be concentrating on bringing forth the "enabling technologies" for missions we'll want to undertake a decade hence, Mars being the obvious case.
Yet it would be beyond NASA or any agency, psychologically or budgetarily, to fess up that its most visible and heavily funded programs are a costly distraction. Needed now is an extraordinary act of presidential intervention, of a kind not seen in 30 years. President Nixon was the last to kill a major space program, but Mr. Bush would be doing NASA a huge favor if he helped it get off the shuttle treadmill.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
How to Spell NASA
Revival: N-U-K-E
NASA will be flayed and hung out to dry for its performance in the latest shuttle disaster. But let's face it: The country has not done right by the agency or its personnel.
Back in the 1960s, Apollo earned NASA the curse of bureaucratic charisma. Ever since, presidents have felt obliged to nail their colors to space. That's how we got the shuttle from the Nixon administration and its bastard half-cousin, the space station, from the Reagan administration. Now both projects have left the agency looking like a case of the federal budget writ small: A sliver of productive discretionary spending squeezed between two entitlement programs that live on regardless of rationale.
The space station is tens of billions of dollars over-budget and almost useless because we failed to provide an escape craft that would permit more than three crew members aboard at one time. Maintaining the station uses up their time, leaving one crew member a few hours a week at best for the science studies that were supposed to justify the station's massive cost.
It's no stretch to say the space station exists to give the shuttle somewhere to go and the shuttle exists to give the space station an illusion of viability. Neither program could survive long without the other. If Columbia's sisters are grounded for any length of time, the space station will effectively be abandoned -- though rhetorical fig leaves will be found to fuzz this reality.
To pile irony on top of the weekend's tragedy, the Bush administration and NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe were shaping a constructive mission for the sliver left over even as they fed the legacy budget beast. Before events intervened, NASA was slated to unveil plans to spend $1 billion over five years to develop two kinds of nuclear power plant for robotic and manned space exploration. While the rest of the world was preoccupied last week by passing storms in Iraq and North Korea, space obsessives were thrilling to news leaks suggesting the words "nuclear rocket" might even appear in Tuesday's State of the Union address. They didn't, but in retrospect the public would have been well-served to hear that NASA is on the verge of getting ambitious again.
Yes, this emerging prospect has been causing nuclearphobes to have a cow all year, especially those who suspect the secret purpose is to advance the cause of missile defense. But even the European Space Agency has acknowledged that further space exploration isn't possible without atomic energy. NASA's Mr. O'Keefe called it the "single most important initiative" of his agency.
Nuclear power provides several times the energy of chemical rocketry for any given mass of propellant. For deep space probes, this means being able to enter and leave orbits of distant objects, going from one to the next, rather than mere flybys. And it means being able to generate enough electricity for active scanning and to send large data files back to Earth, allowing sharper and richer images.
On manned missions, nuclear power would allow transit times to Mars to be cut to 45 days from six months, saving the crew prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. And nuclear power is perhaps the only way to generate power to convert Martian resources into air and water for explorers (or settlers) and fuel for the trip home (hydrogen being the preferred molecule to be heated by a fission engine to produce high-velocity thrust).
Mars is more affordable as a percentage of GDP today than Apollo was in the 1960s, though that was before colonization of the federal budget by the Medicare blob. Nonetheless, the job would require a far different kind of NASA, more in tune with the decentralizing possibilities of information technology.
Look at the first Bush budget: In 2002, every NASA program was judged to be "ineffective" under benchmarking except for two -- the Discovery and Explorer planetary/astronomy projects. They both choose their missions by peer review, then put them out for cost-capped competitive bidding. Were the shuttle run this way, it never would have passed muster on a cost-benefit analysis. Even now the results of its experiments are seldom published in a refereed journal. NASA can't take the chance with a shuttle program so powerfully controlled by political and budgetary imperatives.
Robert Zubrin, a former Lockheed engineer and pied piper of the private Mars Society, argues cogently that a $20 billion Mars Prize, endowed by the U.S. government, would be enough to get the first humans to the Red Planet and back. Don't write him off. NASA's own deep planners have sketched out a Mars mission for $30 billion.
Blaming budget cuts for the Columbia disaster, as many seem inclined to do, invites us to make exactly the wrong choice. NASA already has too much budget for the wrong things -- at a time when we should be making the quantum technological progress that would keep us a full generation ahead of emerging space powers like China and India. Mr. O'Keefe has taken darts for saying it but he's right that NASA should be concentrating on bringing forth the "enabling technologies" for missions we'll want to undertake a decade hence, Mars being the obvious case.
Yet it would be beyond NASA or any agency, psychologically or budgetarily, to fess up that its most visible and heavily funded programs are a costly distraction. Needed now is an extraordinary act of presidential intervention, of a kind not seen in 30 years. President Nixon was the last to kill a major space program, but Mr. Bush would be doing NASA a huge favor if he helped it get off the shuttle treadmill.
Comment