Over the moon?

AFP photos

NASA has never really recovered its direction since the triumph of the Apollo project. The zenith of that project was 40 years ago today on July 20th 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11’s lunar module onto the Sea of Tranquillity, and promptly fluffed his lines. The cancellation of Apollo three years later started the slide, and the space shuttles that were supposed to fill the gap failed to become the workaday vehicles that had been promised. The agency’s probes have visited all of the solar system’s planets and it has done a lot of important science. But its manned space programme has never got back the pizzazz of 1969.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Five years ago, in a flurry of manifest destiny, George Bush outlined a plan to return Americans to the moon in 2020, with an option on going to Mars later. Now that plan is the subject of a rather un-American bout of introspection and self-examination. Instead of back-slapping and sky-punching there is hand-wringing and uncertainty. At the behest of Barack Obama’s newly empowered Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), NASA, America’s space agency, is submitting to an independent review of its human-spaceflight plans in order to determine their future.

In truth, NASA has never really recovered its direction since the triumph of the Apollo project. The zenith of that project was 40 years ago on July 20th 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11’s lunar module onto the Sea of Tranquillity, and promptly fluffed his lines. The cancellation of Apollo three years later started the slide, and the space shuttles that were supposed to fill the gap failed to become the workaday vehicles that had been promised. The agency’s probes have visited all of the solar system’s planets and it has done a lot of important science. But its manned space programme has never got back the pizzazz of 1969.

This year, though, has been a particularly difficult one for NASA. It started with the incoming administration asking some hard questions, such as how much money could be saved by cancelling various bits of the spacecraft that the agency plans to use to replace its fleet of ageing shuttles—which, among other things, provide America’s only direct link with the International Space Station. The shuttles are due to retire next year, and there is already consternation about the gap between that retirement and the arrival of their successor. In the interim, NASA will be forced to use a Russian stand-in, Soyuz, in order to keep the space station supplied and afloat, as it were. This has become even more politically awkward since the war last year between Russia and Georgia.

The starting point for the review is a simple one: money. Mr Obama’s administration, like every other new government, wishes to impose its own spending plans, and human spaceflight has never been high on its list of priorities. The existing plan for human spaceflight sets NASA on a path that will lead it to consume what one insider estimates to be around $100 billion before the programme is complete. It seems entirely prudent, therefore, for the administration to examine whether this is money well spent.

The letter to NASA requesting the review, from John Holdren, the director of the OSTP, refers to a trajectory for the future of human spaceflight that is “safe, innovative, affordable and sustainable”. Within those four little words, though, lie a number of substantial challenges. For example, as currently designed, NASA’s plans for a system of rockets to replace the shuttle (known collectively as Ares, the Greek name for Mars) do not fit within the funds that are available, and have been criticised for showing too little innovation and even less progress. NASA’s role, some argue, should be the whizzier business of novel plasma-drives and nanotech-based heat shielding—not “Apollo on steroids” as some people have derisively described Ares. Nor is there any sense of how the proposed moon base that would eventually be built, supposedly as a stepping stone to Mars, can be supported financially.

Contact light. OK. Engine stop

The difficulty, as ever, is to make the agency properly serve the public that pays for it. Shortly before he was appointed to the review panel, Jeff Greason, the head of a small spaceship company called XCOR Aerospace, said, possibly prophetically: “There is a question that gets asked far too seldom, which is why do we have NASA?”

Few are suggesting that NASA be eliminated, but such questions reflect the struggle for purpose that it has had since the end of Apollo. The legislation that created it speaks of the expansion of human knowledge of the atmosphere and space, and the improvement of the usefulness and performance of aeronautical and space vehicles. Its mission is not human exploration for its own sake, nor off-planet colonisation, yet human spaceflight consumes a large chunk of the budget. It is interesting, then, that the review is also instructed to determine the appropriate amount of robotic activities needed to make human spaceflight productive and affordable over the long term. Such language allows questions to be asked such as whether it is possible to achieve more of NASA’s goals with fewer human missions.

Give me the moon, O Lord, but not yet

Some people—including Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step out of the Apollo 11 lunar module—have taken the opportunity to wonder whether returning to the moon is such a good idea anyway. Dr Aldrin, whose book is reviewed here, would prefer NASA to aim for Mars directly. He questions the whole “moon to Mars” concept. And he is right. If the real goal is to fly to Mars, there is no reason at all to go via the moon.

At the moment a shift in priorities that would lead to a direct Mars mission seems unlikely. Some commentators think the panel will go as far as reaffirming the concept of returning to the moon when it completes its whirlwind review this August. Others argue that the administration is simply not committed to human spaceflight and wants to do other things with its money, and that the composition of the review panel indicates that it is merely intended to divert political flak.

Anyone versed in the dark art of commitology, the study of committees, will know that who you appoint to an “independent” panel matters, as do its terms of reference. This panel is commonly referred to as the Augustine committee, after its chairman Norman Augustine, who was once head of Lockheed Martin, one of America’s largest aerospace companies. Mr Augustine was also the head of a committee that met in 1990 to discuss NASA’s priorities. That committee called for space science to be given a far higher billing—above and beyond that accorded to manned missions and space stations—and resulted in a lot of cheap but effective scientific missions being launched. Although the scope of Mr Augustine’s latest review does not allow for such an explicit conclusion this time, it would still be able to place more emphasis on private-sector human spaceflight and demand more unmanned missions to the moon.

Even if the eventual conclusion is that astronauts should return to the moon, though, the means of getting them there must still be decided. Frank Sietzen, a space analyst and writer, reckons a lack of money will mean the Ares project “will be on life support by the end of summer”. One alternative to Ares, proposed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is to use modified versions of their existing Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rockets both to go to the moon and to resupply the space station, but at lower cost. And if Ares is cancelled another winner may be SpaceX, a small Californian firm that is building a series of rockets called Falcon. These will be able to fly cargo to the International Space Station—and, if all goes well in the future, people.

SpaceX differs from Lockheed and Boeing in that Falcon is a speculative venture rather than having been commissioned (as Delta and Atlas were) by the government. Many see this sort of true private enterprise, rather than the taxpayer-assisted sort, as the way forward in space. And if that is the case, then whatever the Augustine committee’s conclusions are, the eternally difficult question of what NASA is for will soon have to be asked again.

From The Economist print edition. July 16th 2009