This is another writing sample — a piece I did for the now defunct blog SciFiSuggestions.
EXPLORATION IS DEAD: The Downfall of NASA
by Troy Michael Larson
In August of 2009, a White House panel examined NASA’s budget. The results? There was not enough funding to achieve the goal of returning an astronaut to the moon by 2020, and a Mars-Direct mission is also out of the question. Now, it seems obvious that manned exploration of the solar system and beyond is a dead pursuit.
In retrospect, one could argue a neverending string of accidents, mistakes, and serious miscalculations culminated in a broken system and the effective death of a functional NASA. As a result, I present my list of the top six things that killed space exploration.
1. Public Expectation – Prior to the Apollo missions, the general public knew very little about the moon and other planets. Many expected to find evidence of life, and even intelligent life. It didn’t take long for people to lose interest when the Apollo astronauts started bringing back only rocks and moondust without finding any evidence of geologic activity, much less, life. Imagination was further dashed when Mars probes with primitive cameras returned pictures of a Martian surface which appeared similarly lifeless and cratered. Since Apollo 17, there have been very few developments to inspire the imagination of dreamers. Fascination turned to apathy, and eventually, scorn.
2. Politics – Through decades of prosperity and despair, legislators have always been quick to find better uses for funding which could have gone to NASA. Frequently, NASA has been the target of politicians seeking to score political points against their opponents. The resulting back and forth has created a plethora of missions and projects which were greenlit, cancelled, restarted, stripped of funding, and eventually killed for good. NASA Budgets have been stripped to the point of rendering the agency ineffectual. Consider for comparison’s sake–in an year when troubled financial institutions received $700 billion in bailouts, and a health insurance reform initiative has a projected cost of one trillion dollars, NASA has an eighty-billion dollar budget for the next ten years.
With changing times, goals changed as well. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing by virtually ignoring space exploration in favor of a more politically acceptable energy program. In contrast, President George H.W. Bush recognized the 20th anniversary by proposing the disastrous Space Exploration Initiative.
3. Grandiose Ambition – There is no better single example of a preposterous proposition than the aforementioned Space Exploration Initiative. SEI was a plan to return to the moon, and send a manned-mission to Mars. The elaborate plan included hundreds of NASA’s pet projects and technologies, and involved building space stations, orbital depots, moon bases and more. In fairness to then-President Bush, an exploratory report with a summary of costs was leaked before he had a chance to endorse any specific plan. Regardless, the price tag of 400-billion dollars was an extremely large number and it was immediately attacked by Congress and the public. The backlash was so severe, a simple request for five million dollars to get the process started was quickly struck down in Congress.
One can hardly blame NASA for being so eager considering the fairweather nature of enthusiasm for space science. I’m sure some of the engineers nearly jizzed in their pants when they heard the President was advocating a manned mission to Mars. Nevertheless, the space exploration community was faced with a new reality… figure out how to do it cheaper, or don’t do it at all.
4. Accidents – Without a doubt, the highly publicized tragedies of the US Space Program, from Apollo I to Challenger and Columbia, had a devastating effect on manned space exploration. Not only did they captivate the nation’s attention, but they shone a spotlight on the shortcomings of NASA. Terrible judgement, Go Fever, and engineering mistakes. The Space Shuttle disasters were particularly harmful. Everyone was soon aware that a space vehicle they once thought to be state-of-the-art, was far from it. O-rings were badly designed. Foam insulation for the external tank was an accident waiting to happen. The uninspiring achievements of the shuttle program soon had people asking if the risks were even worth it. Years later, Robert Zubrin would say “It’s time for NASA to have a goal worthy of the risks of human spaceflight.”
5. Orbital Lock – Upon the suspension of the Apollo program, NASA was faced with a curious dilemma… operating a space program without a defined destination. The science done in low Earth orbit is not without merit. We have learned volumes. But the idea of circling the Earth sixty times and coming back home doesn’t inspire many twelve-year-olds to take up a career as an astronaut. Even the International Space Station became more of a political achievement than an exploratory tool. Again, Robert Zubrin offered insight when he said something to the effect of, “We have been going round and round in Earth orbit under the pretense of gaining knowledge we can use when we actually have a plan to go somewhere.”
6. Bureaucratic Bloat – If you work for a large company, you know. Like every government agency, NASA’s efficiency is inversely proportional to the size of the bureaucracy. Since inception in 1958, the agency has grown and fragmented to unmanageable proportions. NASA has it’s headquarters in Washington D.C. Construction and launch complexes in Florida, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Virginia. Research centers in California, New York, Maryland, Virginia and Ohio. And test facilities in West Virginia, Mississippi, California, and Virginia.
In addition to sheer size, NASA has collaborated with so many contractors and foreign space agencies, they’ve created a virtual Sophus Lie puzzle which needs to be continually solved with every new mission. The unmanned Mars Climate Orbiter is a case in point. It burned up in the Martian atmosphere in 1999 after a miscommunication between NASA and subcontractor Lockheed-Martin concerning Imperial Units versus the Metric System. NASA Science Director for Solar System Exploration, Carl Pilcher, said “Human error occurs all the time. But even so we have a tremendous success rate because we have systems that detect and correct the errors. The problem here is that our system failed to do that.”
Thomas Gavin, Deputy Director for Space and Earth Science added the final insult: “A single error should not bring down a $125 million mission.”
Total monetary loss including the probe and lander amounted $327.6 million dollars. If that wasn’t enough, Mars Climate Orbiter’s sister probe, the Mars Polar Lander failed just 23 days later.
I have no doubt about the work ethic and good will of NASA’s hard working men and women. If you’ve ever known an engineer, you know they tend to be maniacal about their work and maddeningly anal about their attention to detail. Unfortunately, NASA’s engineers seem to be hamstrung by the agency’s broken system. We are left with only the hope that a burgeoning private space industry can jumpstart manned space exploration in a way that the world’s most successful government space agency can’t.
Help us Burt Rutan. You’re our only hope.
