Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier Read online

  Maybe all Bush needed was some of that famous charisma that Kennedy exuded. Or maybe he needed something else.

  Shortly after Bush’s speech, a group led by the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center presented a cost analysis for the entire plan that reported a coffer-constricting, Congress-choking price tag of $500 billion over twenty to thirty years. The Space Exploration Initiative was dead on arrival. Was it any more costly than what Kennedy asked for, and got? No. It was less. Not only that, since $100 billion over five or six years represents NASA’s baseline funds, thirty years of that spending level gets you to the $500 billion mark without ever having to top up the budget.

  The opposite outcomes of these two speeches had nothing do with political will, public sentiment, persuasiveness of arguments, or even cost. President Kennedy was at war with the Soviet Union, whereas President Bush wasn’t at war with anybody. When you’re at war, money flows like a tapped keg, rendering irrelevant the existence or absence of other variables, charisma included.

  Meanwhile, space zealots who do not properly factor the role of war into the spending landscape are delusionally certain that all we need today are risk-taking visionaries like JFK. Couple that with the right dose of political will, they contend, and we surely would have been on Mars long ago, with hundreds if not thousands of people living and working in space colonies. Princeton space visionary Gerard K. O’Neill, among others, imagined all this in place by the year 2000.

  The opposite of space zealots—space curmudgeons—are those who are certain that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money and that funds allocated via NASA centers are the equivalent of pork-barrel spending. Genuine pork, of course, is money procured by individual members of Congress for the exclusive benefit of their own districts, with no tangible gain to any other. NASA, by and large, is the opposite of this. The nation and the world thrive on NASA’s regional innovations, which have transformed how we live.

  Here’s an experiment worth conducting. Sneak into the home of a NASA skeptic in the dead of night and remove all technologies from the home and environs that were directly or indirectly influenced by space innovations: microelectronics, GPS, scratch-resistant lenses, cordless power tools, memory-foam mattresses and head cushions, ear thermometers, household water filters, shoe insoles, long-distance telecommunication devices, adjustable smoke detectors, and safety grooving of pavement, to name a few. While you’re at it, make sure to reverse the person’s LASIK surgery. Upon waking, the skeptic embarks on a newly barren existence in a state of untenable technological poverty, with bad eyesight to boot, while getting rained on without an umbrella because of not knowing the satellite-informed weather forecast for that day.

  When NASA’s manned missions are not advancing a space frontier, NASA’s science activities tend to dominate the nation’s space headlines, which currently emanate from four divisions: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Planetary Science, and Astrophysics. The largest portion of NASA’s budget ever spent on these activities briefly hit 40 percent, in 2005. During the Apollo era, the annual percentage hovered in the mid-teens. Averaged over NASA’s half century of existence, the annual percentage of spending on science sits in the low twenties. Put simply, science is not a funding priority either for NASA or for any of the members of Congress who vote to support NASA’s budget.

  Yet the word “science” is never far from the acronym “NASA” in anybody’s discussion of why NASA matters. As a result, even though geopolitical forces drive spending on space exploration, exploring space in the name of science plays better in public discourse. This mismatch of truth and perceived truth leads to two outcomes. In speeches and testimonies, lawmakers find themselves overstating the actual scientific return on manned NASA missions and programs. Senator John Glenn, for instance, has been quick to celebrate the zero-G science potential of the International Space Station. But with its budget of $3 billion per year, is that how a community of researchers would choose to spend the cash? Meanwhile, in the academic community, pedigreed scientists heavily criticize NASA whenever money is spent on exploration with marginal or no scientific return. Among others of that sentiment, the particle physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is notably blunt in his views, expressed, for example, in 2007 to a Space.com reporter during a scientific conference at Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute:

  The International Space Station is an orbital turkey. . . . No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value.

  . . . NASA’s budget is increasing, with the increase being driven by what I see on the part of the president and the administrators of NASA as an infantile fixation on putting people into space, which has little or no scientific value.

  Only those who believe deep down that NASA is (or should be) the exclusive private funding agency of scientists could make such a statement. Here’s another: an excerpt from the resignation letter of Donald U. Wise, NASA’s chief lunar scientist. Though less acerbic than Weinberg’s statement, it shares a kindred spirit:

  I watched a number of basic management decisions being made, shifting priorities, funds and manpower away from maximization of exploration capabilities . . . toward the development of large new manned space systems.

  Until such time as [NASA] determines that science is a major function of manned space flight and is to be supported with adequate manpower and funds, any other scientist in my vacated position would also be likely to expend his time futilely.

  With these comments submitted as evidence, one might suppose that NASA’s interest in science has ebbed since the old days. But Wise’s letter is, in fact, from the old days: August 24, 1969, thirty-five days after we first stepped foot on the Moon.*

  What an ivory-tower luxury it is to lament that NASA is spending too little on science. Unimagined in these complaints is the fact that without geopolitical drivers, there would likely be no NASA science at all.

  America’s space program, especially the golden era of Apollo and its influence on the dreams of a nation, makes fertile rhetoric for almost any occasion. Yet the deepest message therein is often neglected, misapplied, or forgotten altogether. In a speech delivered at the National Academy of Sciences on April 27, 2009, President Barack Obama waxed poetic about NASA’s role in driving American innovation:

  President Eisenhower signed legislation to create NASA and to invest in science and math education, from grade school to graduate school. And just a few years later, a month after his address to the 1961 Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, President Kennedy boldly declared before a joint session of Congress that the United States would send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth.

  The scientific community rallied behind this goal and set about achieving it. And it would not only lead to those first steps on the moon; it would lead to giant leaps in our understanding here at home. That Apollo program produced technologies that have improved kidney dialysis and water purification systems; sensors to test for hazardous gases; energy-saving building materials; fire-resistant fabrics used by firefighters and soldiers. More broadly, the enormous investment in that era—in science and technology, in education and research funding—produced a great outpouring of curiosity and creativity, the benefits of which have been incalculable.

  What’s stunning about Obama’s message is that the point of his speech was to alert the academy to the proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—legislation that would place the budgets of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology on a path to double over the coming years. Surely NASA’s budget would be doubled too? Nope. All NASA got was a directive on how to differently allocate a billion dollars of the money it was already spending. Given that space exploration formed the rhetorical soul of the president’s speech, this
move defies rational, political, and even emotional analysis.

  For his second State of the Union Address, delivered January 26, 2011, President Obama once again cited the space race as a catalyst for scientific and technological innovation. That original “Sputnik moment”—crystallized in Kennedy’s 1961 speech to a joint session of Congress—is what got us to the Moon and set the highest of bars for America’s vision and leadership in the twentieth century. As the president rightly recounted, “We unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.” Citing the hefty investments that other countries are making in their technological future, and the tandem failing of America’s educational system to compete on the world stage, Obama declared the disturbing imbalance to be this generation’s Sputnik moment. He then challenged us by 2015 to (1) have a million electric vehicles on the road and (2) deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless to 98 percent of all Americans—and by 2035 to (1) derive 80 percent of America’s electricity from clean energy and (2) give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.

  Laudable goals, all of them. But to think of that list as the future fruits of a contemporary Sputnik moment dispirits the space enthusiast. It reveals a change of vision over the decades, from dreams of tomorrow to dreams of technologies that should already have been with us.

  Following the February 1, 2003, loss of the Columbia space shuttle orbiter and its crew of seven, the public and press, as well as key lawmakers, called for a new NASA vision—one with its sights set beyond low Earth orbit. What better time to reassess a program than after a disaster? Makes you wonder, however, why the Challenger disaster in 1986, which also resulted in the loss of a seven-person crew, did not trigger a similar call for a renewed NASA mission statement. Why? In 1986, nothing much was happening in the Chinese space community. By contrast, on October 15, 2003, China launched its first taikonaut into Earth orbit, becoming just the third nation to join the spacefarers’ club.

  A mere three months later, on January 15, 2004, the Bush White House announced a brand-new Vision for Space Exploration. The time had finally arrived for the United States to leave low Earth orbit again.

  The vision was a basically sound plan that also called for completion of the International Space Station and retirement of NASA’s space shuttle workhorse by decade’s end, with the recovered funds used to create a new launch architecture that would take us back to the Moon and onward to more distant places. But beginning in February 2004 (with my appointment by President Bush to the nine-member Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, whose mandate was to chart an affordable and sustainable course of action), I began to notice a pall of partisanship descending on NASA and on the nation’s space policy. Strong party allegiances were clouding, distorting, and even blinding people’s space sensibilities across the entire political spectrum.

  Some Bush-bashing Democrats, predisposed to think politically rather than rationally, were quick to criticize the plan on the grounds that the nation could not afford it, even though our commission was explicitly charged with keeping costs in check. Other Democrats argued that the space vision offered no details regarding its implementation. Yet supportive documents were freely available from the White House and from NASA. Consider also that President Bush delivered his speech on the plan at NASA’s DC headquarters. No sitting president had ever done such a thing. To cover the West Coast, Bush tasked Vice President Cheney to speak at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, on the same day. (By way of comparison, President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, address to a joint session of Congress contains only a couple of paragraphs urging that a Moon mission be funded.) Other disgruntled Democrats, still fulminating about the controversial election in 2000 and feeling deep dissatisfaction with Bush’s first term in office, commonly quipped that we should instead send Bush to Mars.

  All told, the criticisms were not only underinformed but also betrayed a partisan bias I hadn’t previously encountered during my years of exposure to space politics—although I am happy to report that after all the knee-jerk reactions ran their course, the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration secured strong bipartisan support.

  With Barack Obama in office beginning in 2009, the level of vitriol from extreme Republicans exceeded even that of the extreme Democrats who found nothing praiseworthy in anything President Bush ever said, thought, or did. On April 15, 2010, Obama delivered a space policy speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that I happened to attend. Factoring out Obama’s Kennedyesque charisma and undeniable oratorical skills, I can objectively say that he delivered a powerful, hopeful message for the future of America’s space exploration—a vision that would lead us to multiple places beyond low Earth orbit, asteroids included. He also reaffirmed the need to retire the space shuttle and spoke longingly of Mars. President Obama even went one step further, suggesting that since we’ve already been to the Moon, why return at all? Been there, done that. With an advanced launch vehicle—one that leapfrogs previous rocket technologies but would take many years to develop—we could bypass the Moon altogether and head straight for Mars by the mid-2030s, right about when Obama expects 80 percent of Americans to abandon cars and planes, and instead travel to and fro via high-speed rail.

  I was there. I felt the energy of the room. More important, I resonated with Obama’s enthusiasm for NASA and its role in shaping the American zeitgeist. As for coverage of the speech, a typical headline in the Obama-supportive press was “Obama Sets Sights on Mars.” The Obama-resenting press, however, declared: “Obama Kills Space Program.” You can’t get more partisan than that.

  Scores of protesters lined the Kennedy Space Center’s surrounding causeways that day, wielding placards that pleaded with the president not to destroy NASA. In the weeks to follow, many people—including marquee astronauts—felt compelled to choose sides. Two moonwalkers sharply critical of Obama’s plan to cancel the return to the Moon testified before Congress: Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11 and Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17, poignantly presented as the first and the last to step foot on the Moon. On the other hand, Neil Armstrong’s command-module partner Buzz Aldrin was strongly supportive of Obama’s plan and had accompanied the president to Florida aboard Air Force One.

  Either Obama had given two different speeches at the Kennedy Space Center that morning and I heard only one of them, or else everyone in the room (myself included, perhaps) was suffering from a bad case of selective hearing.

  Indeed, the president did deliver more than one speech that day—or rather, his single coherent plan had different consequences for different people. As an academic with a long-term view, I focused on Obama’s thirty-year vision for NASA, and I celebrated it. But to somebody who wants uninterrupted access to space, in their own country’s launch vehicle, controlled by their own country’s astronauts, any halt to our space access is simply unacceptable. It’s worth remembering that during the halt in shuttle launches that followed the Columbia tragedy, the Russians were happy to “shuttle” our astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station aboard their reliable Soyuz capsule. So the stipulation that American access to orbit shall always and forever be in a craft of our own manufacture may be an example of pride overriding practicality. And by the way, there was barely a peep back in 2004 when President Bush first proposed to phase out the shuttle. President Obama was simply following through on Bush’s plan.

  Taken at face value, the opposite reactions to Obama’s words need not reflect a partisan divide. They could simply be honest differences of opinion. But they weren’t. Views and attitudes split strongly along party lines, requiring olive-branch compromises in Congress before any new budget for NASA could be agreed upon and passed. A letter I was invited to submit to lawmakers—reaffirming NASA’s value to America’s identity and future while also urging a swift solution to the impasse—became a twig on one of those olive branches. A bipartisan posse of solution-seeking congressmen attempted to alter the p
resident’s proposal and the associated budget for NASA in a way that would appease the fundamentally Republican-led resistance. They sought to accelerate the design and construction of the heavy-lift launch architecture that would enable the first manned mission beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo era’s Saturn V rocket. This deceptively simple adjustment to the plan would help close the gap between the twilight of America’s shuttle launches and the dawn of a new era of launch capability—and, as a consequence, preserve aerospace jobs that the Obama plan would have destabilized.

  Jobs? Is that what it’s about? Now it all made sense. I’d thought the real issue was the cultural imperative of continuous access to space and the short-term fate of the manned program. Surely that’s what all the protest placards meant, as well as the associated anti-Obama rhetoric. But if jobs are what really matters to everybody, why don’t they just say so? If I were a shuttle worker at any level—especially if I were a contractor to NASA in support of launch operations—then the gap between the phaseout of the shuttle and the next rocket to launch beyond Earth is all I would have heard in the president’s speech. And if new, nonderivative, uncertain launch technologies would be required to achieve the vision, then the downtime for manned space flight in America would also be uncertain, which means the only thing certain in the face of these uncertainties is that I’d be out of a job.