ISBN: 9781619276857
Table of Contents
Introduction: Competing Visions
Eric R. Sterner
The Cislunar Solution: A 21st Century Space Strategy
James A. Vedda
Advancing U.S. Geopolitical and International Interests in Space
Scott D. Pace
Ensuring Space Leadership: A 21st Century R&D Investment Strategy
William B. Adkins
Achieving Cheap Access to Space, the Foundation of Commercialization
Charles M. Miller
Conclusion: The Vision Thing
Eric R. Sterner
About the Authors
About the George C. Marshall Institute
Introduction: Competing Visions
Eric R. Sterner
Do we need another volume on space policy? It is not just a rhetorical question, but also likely one an editor of any such essay collection should answer, if for no other reason than to convince the reader to keep going. Clearly, our answer at the George C. Marshall Institute is “yes.” But, why? After all, it is not difficult to find informed commentary about the space program, ranging from National Research Council (NRC) reports to snarky observations in blogs or at conferences -- and everything in between.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is in a state of perpetual uncertainty. Since, at the moment, the success of the U.S. civil space program is largely defined by the agency’s state of affairs, such irresolution bodes ill for the nation’s prospects of achieving its most important goals, to the degree that it can settle upon them. Moreover, constant churn around the agency undermines the cost-effectiveness of its activities, which require predictability but cannot rely on consistent budgets or guidance.
Criticism that NASA lacks a vision or guiding principle around which to organize its priorities, plans, and programs has become commonplace. Following the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, the Reagan Administration created the National Commission on Space “to formulate a bold agenda to carry America’s civilian space enterprise into the 21st century.”1 The Commission laid out a vision for making the solar system—and not just Earth—humanity’s home in the cosmos and identified several steps for achieving it. It envisioned completing and operating a permanent space station, followed by new space transportation vehicles that would radically lower costs, modular transfer vehicles between Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and other destinations in the solar system, LEO spaceports, a lunar outpost, shipment of shielding mass from the moon, a spaceport in lunar orbit, initial operation of an Earth-Mars transportation system for robotic precursors, flight of an Earth-Mars cycling spaceship, human exploration of planetary moons, and development of Martian resources. Perhaps due to its ambitiousness in a time of declining budgets, that vision failed to satisfy critics of the nation’s space program. Arguably, the federal government has tried to follow this plan by completing the space station and attempting—but failing—to replace the space shuttle with a more affordable alternative. Still, it remains largely stuck.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush, concerned by continuing complaints about a perceived lack of direction in the space program, convened an Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program. The committee identified nine issues with the program, the first of which was “the lack of national consensus as to what should be the goals of the civil space program and how they should in fact be accomplished.”2 The committee also concluded “NASA is currently over committed in terms of program obligations relative to resources available.”3
Fast-forward nearly a quarter century past the loss of the space shuttle Columbia. The accident investigation board specifically singled out the Advisory Committee’s report and strongly noted, “The U.S. civilian space program has moved forward for more than 30 years without a guiding vision, and none seems imminent.”4 In other words, on that score, little had changed.
Frustrated with the chronic nature of the problem, in 2011, Congress asked for an independent assessment of NASA’s strategic direction. In response, the National Research Council produced a report, NASA’s Strategic Direction and the Need for a National Consensus at the end of 2012. Its observations and conclusions are achingly familiar: “[T]here is no strong, compelling national vision for the human spaceflight program, which is arguably the centerpiece of NASA’s spectrum of mission areas. The lack of national consensus on NASA’s most publicly visible mission, along with out-year budget uncertainty, has resulted in the lack of strategic focus necessary for national agencies operating in today’s budgetary reality. As a result, NASA’s distribution of resources may be out of sync with what it can achieve relative to what is has been asked to do.”5
Not surprisingly, the committee further identified a mismatch amongst NASA’s budget, portfolio of missions, facilities, and staff. These implementation problems, along with those that virtually every large technology development program experience, conspired to exacerbate debates about any vision that a President had offered. According to the NRC, part of that continuing problem flows from the lack of clear and consistent strategic guidance from policymakers. In its absence, NASA has attempted, and largely failed, to chart a strategic course for the nation’s space program. But, as the NRC report notes, “Absent such a consensus, NASA cannot reasonably be expected to develop enduring strategic priorities for the purpose of resource allocation and planning.”6
A private organization, The Space Foundation, came to similar conclusions at roughly the same time. Its report, Pioneering: Sustaining U.S. Leadership in Space, observes, “As the space program has evolved, we have witnessed frequent redirection and constantly shifting priorities at NASA, mixed signals from Congress and the administration, organizational conflicts, and the lack of a singular purpose, resulting in a space agency without a clear, stable direction … NASA needs to embrace a singular, unambiguous purpose that leverages its core strengths and provides a clear direction for prioritizing tasks and assigning resources.”7
Quite simply, despite decades of stunning accomplishments, ranging from deep outer space probes and scientific missions, to building and deploying one of the most complex and difficult engineering feats in human history (the International Space Station), the agency, and hence the U.S. civil space program, continues to suffer from chronic problems that have afflicted it since the end of the Apollo program. Therein lies the root of the problem. The United States has not been able to establish and sustain a consensus around a unifying purpose for the civil space program since the Kennedy Administration’s commitment to beat the Soviets to the moon. Even that national goal was challenged, often by members of Congress and occasionally by President Kennedy himself, suggesting that it may not has been as “unifying” as we remember.
Johnson deferred major post-Apollo decisions to Nixon, whose administration did not embrace civil space as a national priority. Budget cuts that began under Johnson continued, despite the success of the Apollo program, while the Nixon and Ford administrations sought to introduce a more rational program planning process and pursue a “balance” of manned and unmanned programs. Nixon decided to proceed with the space shuttle program for several reasons, casting it both as a long-term money-saver and contributor to détente. President Carter was not an advocate of civil space and his Vice President, Walter Mondale, had been one of its leading Congressional opponents. As a result, NASA remained largely on the same autopilot that a disinterested Nixon Administration had put it on earlier in the decade.
The Reagan Administration took a greater interest in civil space, seeing geopolitical and economic value in space activities. Following the space shuttle’s early missions, the President initiated the space station Freedom program (1984), the National Aerospace Plane (1986), and recommitted the country to an ambitious future in space following the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. President George H.W. Bush, who had been Reagan’s Vice President, offered an Apollo-like, mission-focused concept for the future of the space program in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing. The Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) would return Americans to the moon and venture on to Mars. While Congress did not reject the vision outright, it declined to fund the initiative at a time of heightened concern about growing budget deficits.
The Clinton Administration, which came into office in 1993, eventually cancelled the SEI and the National Aerospace Plane, while threatening to cancel the International Space Station before reorganizing it as a foreign policy initiative that would strengthen U.S.-Russian relations, advance certain nonproliferation goals, and demonstrate Russia’s emergence from Communist authoritarianism.
Following the 2003 loss of NASA’s oldest shuttle orbiter, Columbia, the George W. Bush Administration offered the Vision for Space Exploration, or VSE. Like the SEI, the VSE called for a return to the moon before sending human to Mars. Unlike SEI, which was not initially constrained by serious budget projections, the VSE was supposed to fit within a period of modest growth in NASA’s budget. The administration announced that it would end the shuttle program and complete the International Space Station, which would free up funds for the VSE. Although Congress endorsed the VSE on a bipartisan basis, neither the administration or Congress provided enough resources to accommodate the cost of returning the space shuttle system to flight, rebuilding from natural disasters that affected NASA’s infrastructure, or pursuing the multiple programmatic and scheduling goals associated with the VSE.
The Obama Administration, which arrived in 2009, cancelled the VSE and its flagship programs, proposing instead to develop technology, visit an asteroid, and expand government subsidies for companies seeking to stimulate the emergence of a commercial market in human spaceflight. Congress adjusted the administration’s approach, resurrecting flagship VSE programs under a new name and declining to fund most of its technology programs, but affirming its plan to subsidize the private development of new low-Earth orbit space capabilities that could meet the need to sustain the International Space Station.
In short, since the Apollo program, few presidents have offered comparable unifying, mission-focused visions. Congress rejected one and policymakers (the legislative and executive branches combined) failed to provide sufficient resources for the other. On both occasions, each president’s successor reversed the nation’s course in space.
Given this brief history, it is reasonable to ask whether any recommendation to build consensus is truly meaningful. Agreement is always desired, but it may already exist after a fashion. Various interest groups seek to influence the United States’ course in space. The competing and divergent priorities and interests of those groups have made it politically necessary to satisfy them all in order to conduct civil space activity. Predictably, that produces a program, which occasionally accomplishes great things, but remains less than the sum of its parts. In light of past failures to implant a multi-decadal, guiding vision in the space program’s DNA, it appears there is, in fact, a political consensus for the space program: the status quo, as deficient as it may be in some eyes, is politically preferable to any unified, destination-focused course of action. The policymaking community and process are firmly resolved to remain indecisive on this score. Of course, that does not leave NASA with nothing to do; the post-Apollo decades witnessed a range of contributions to science, exploration, human spaceflight, and even American geopolitical leadership. No doubt, the agency will continue in that tradition. So, the question for policymakers is not whether NASA has a future, but, rather, how should they define the agency’s role in America’s future?
This dilemma prompted the Marshall Institute to produce this collection of essays. Most simply, we asked what a space program designed to achieve a single goal—rather than satisfy multiple divergent interests—should look like. We asked experts in their fields to contemplate alternative visions for a national space program based on different sets of national goals: spreading human civilization into the solar system; strengthening the U.S. position geopolitically; expanding space-related commercial activity; and, developing new technologies. Each author was charged with playing devil’s advocate, designing an organization, program, and policies to pursue the assigned goal without regard to space history, politics, or other goals. In effect, we wanted to pursue each vision to its logical, yet unrealistic, extreme.
Of course, we recognize that even unified and focused goals are not mutually exclusive. Traveling to the moon, for example, required the development of new and incredibly advanced technologies as well as a new and larger cadre of trained scientists and engineers, not to mention an increase in our scientific understanding of cislunar space and the human body under abnormal stresses. Those technologies, people, and knowledge, of course, also benefitted the American economy, science, and geopolitical position independent of their contributions to the Apollo program. In the same vein, adding to the sum total of human knowledge requires new technologies, which could similarly find their way into the economy and other areas of human activity. That said, setting those goals—reaching the moon for geopolitical reasons or advancing scientific research—is not likely the most efficient way of achieving other goals, such as developing new technology for economic productivity or training new cadres of personnel with advanced training in science, technology, engineering, or math.
Taken collectively, the purpose of these essays is not to develop or identify a set of recommendations for the future of the American space program. Rather, it is to sharpen distinctions and identify the tradeoffs and commonalities that any space program seeking to pursue multiple goals must make. This should be a prerequisite for acting on the recommendations of the aforementioned studies, commissions, and reports that the United States develop a unifying goal. Surely, settling on a national vision — if such proves possible—should consider the opportunity costs of foregoing the alternative futures.
The authors are engaged in thought experiments, not in advocacy. Their essays may, or may not, represent their personal conclusions or recommendations for the U.S. space program today. We specifically asked the authors to think “out of the box” and begin with a clean slate, rather than be bound by the hardware, technology, markets, or political realities that define the current policymaking environment. The Institute hopes that this collection will enlighten policymaking by helping the policy community confront, and question, assumptions. It highlights the pros and cons of pursuing multiple national goals without setting priorities among them and offers alternatives for policymakers to consider as they wrestle with the challenge of building a future for the United States in space.
1 National Commission on Space, Pioneering the Space Frontier (New York: Bantam Books, May, 1986), http://history.nasa.gov/painerep/begin.html.
2 Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, December, 1990): 2.
3 Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program, 2.
4 Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report, Volume 1 (Washington, DC: Columbia Accident Investigation Board, August, 2003):210.
5 Committee on NASA’s Strategic Direction, National Research Council, NASA’s Strategic Direction and the Need for a National Consensus (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2012): 1.
6 National Research Council, NASA’s Strategic Direction, 39.
7 Space Foundation, Pioneering: Sustaining U.S. Leadership in Space (Colorado Springs, CO: Space Foundation, 2012): 1.
The Cislunar Solution: A 21st Century Space Strategy
James A. Vedda
For much of the time since the end of the Apollo era, participants in the space community and members of the interested public have been frustrated by the nation’s inability to choose a coherent path for space exploration and development, make a commitment to its implementation over the long term, and fund it appropriately. Despite the aggravation caused by this indecision and instability, more change is in order.
Why propose such a thing? The short answer is that this is a high-risk, high-cost, long-term endeavor, so it is more important to get it right than to do it fast. The long answer is that we need to redefine what it means to be a spacefaring nation in the 21st century. (Hint: Space is more than just a prestige activity and another path for relaying electromagnetic signals.)
The end of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s should have been a wake-up call that it was time to rethink the justification and strategy for human spaceflight. But most people missed the call. Some of those who did recognize it perceived it as a death knell, perhaps believing that U.S. human spaceflight was merely surviving on the momentum of the space shuttle and space station programs.
What changed for human spaceflight at the end of the Cold War? Much has been said and written on this topic, so let me boil it down. During the Cold War, human spaceflight fulfilled two major national purposes: 1) it contributed to prestige, and 2) it was a research and development project that stimulated technology development and the industrial base. In a few specific locations around the country, it was also a jobs program. At the time, this was sufficient to justify the investment and the risk. After the Soviet threat disappeared, these purposes still existed, but they were no longer sufficient to justify indefinite continuation of the program in the United States – although they may still be sufficient for emerging space-faring nations such as China and India.
That raises the question of what comes next, which has been and continues to be asked all around the space community and among policymakers in Washington. Answering this question, as it pertains to the U.S. government’s role, confronts pitfalls driven by short-term thinking coupled with partisanship and parochialism. The discussion quickly devolves into a shopping list of solar system destinations that we think astronauts will be able to visit within the next decade or two. We then pretend that the time, resources, and risk involved in the effort can be justified by the tech spinoffs, the aerospace jobs created, and the inspiration it will give to our youth. The goal of sustainable space activities that have purpose and generate value (beyond scientific findings) gets lost, as does the realization that creating a diverse and thriving in-space infrastructure will be a multi-generational and multi-national effort.
Creating a productive future in space exploration and development requires difficult technical, economic, and political tradeoffs. We want to advance our technologies and capabilities, but people disagree which approach offers the best chance of success: tying technical developments to specific missions, or more general investment in improving the state of the art in particular areas. A specific mission presents a clear goal, well-defined requirements, and often a firm schedule, but it is inflexible, doesn’t leave much room for general experimentation, and usually lacks a plan for establishing a long-term infrastructure. The final product may be a system with very narrow applicability that quickly gets discarded even if it is highly successful (a prime example being the Saturn 5 launch vehicle). On the other hand, too much reliance on undirected research efforts could be deficient in usable results as the quest continues for even better, more advanced, more elegant outcomes. Striking the right balance between the two approaches is a subjective exercise, more art than science.
Ideally, we would like to establish a series of significant milestones and achieve them as quickly as possible. This would keep the workforce busy, attract fresh talent to the effort, and demonstrate accomplishments that help sustain public and political support. But pushing programs onto a fast track without good reason and adequate funding could be their undoing. Exaggerated promises and unmet milestones will have negative repercussions. Even if there is short-term gain, a hastily executed program could undermine long-term utility. Strategic planners struggle to balance these many considerations.
Moon, Mars, Asteroids… What’s Next?
A human spaceflight strategy should not be devised in isolation from everything else. To do so would be like asking, “Assume a human spaceflight program. What should we do with it? Where should we send astronauts that will keep everyone interested?” This is a good way to make the endeavor look like a stunt or an athletic competition in which a crew reaches a “finish line,” after which everyone’s interest quickly wanes, crippling follow-on efforts.
To begin the process of setting sustainable long-term goals and crafting a strategy to carry them out, the first question that should be on the lips of policymakers is: “What program of space exploration and development would best serve U.S. national interests?” Then, after a reasonable answer to that question has been developed, the next question is: “What is the role of human spaceflight in this program?”
Before setting dates for human missions to asteroids or Mars, the U.S. needs to define the purpose of such missions as part of a larger strategic plan in the national interest. A plan of great scope and duration is extraordinarily difficult to formulate, gain approval for, and sustain. But enduring success in a resource-constrained environment demands that we undertake the difficult process of formulating and winning approval for a plan to expand human and robotic activity throughout the Earth-Moon system and then to other parts of the solar system. This cannot work if we try to substitute tools and tactics (“Let’s build a new rocket that can fly beyond low Earth orbit”) for goals and strategies (“Let’s create new knowledge, new capabilities, and long-term benefits”). If we make this mistake, we risk expending too many of our resources on designing, building, and testing flight hardware with little left to operate it or develop payloads for it, thus defeating the purpose of the whole exercise.
In recent years, NASA’s human spaceflight program has displayed some shift in its focus toward capabilities, knowledge, and experience, while reducing the dominance of destination-driven planning. The rationale for making a capabilities-driven approach central to the exploration and development of the solar system can be found throughout human history. What has motivated human societies, usually at great cost and risk, to undertake major migrations to, or activities in, unfamiliar and challenging environments? It comes down to two things. First, they go where the resources are. Humans in search of precious minerals, raw materials, and energy, and the wealth they bring, have explored the most hazardous environments on Earth, including the ocean floor, the polar regions, treacherous terrain, and underground mines. Valuable discoveries have spawned economic booms and determined human migration and settlement patterns. Second, they search for new avenues to solve their problems and improve their living conditions. There are many examples of communities of people moving to escape a deteriorating environment (famine, drought, overcrowding, etc.), political or religious persecution, and other conditions that didn’t allow them to grow, or even eke out a sustainable living. This familiar storyline will play out again as humanity gets busy beyond Earth.
Space science programs have a history of being highly productive. A very important part of their recipe for success is the scientific community’s ability to stay focused on the big, important questions that challenge their various scientific disciplines. The space exploration and development community needs to devise its own approach to answering its big questions in a coordinated way. Before doing that, there needs to be agreement on what the big questions are. Perhaps they can be stated in this way: