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The path to Cone crater (LROC image, Ariz. State Univ.)

In 1961, Alan B. Shepard’s successful 15-minute sub-orbital hop gave President Kennedy the high cover needed to announce a reach for the Moon, “by the end of this decade.” America’s spirit was lifted and Alan Shepard became a national hero, getting ticker tape parades and White House receptions. Then, as in a Greek tragedy, he was struck from the flight list after developing Meniere’s syndrome (an imbalance of the inner ear). His flying days were over. Or were they?

Shepard, a smart, tough, no-nonsense aviator, took a job helping Deke Slayton (previously grounded by a heart murmur) run the Astronaut Office. Shepard and Slayton picked all flight crews for the Gemini and Apollo missions. Very early on, it became clear that you did not cross Al Shepard, lest your career come to a screeching halt. Shepard never stopped his Apollo training or flying in the T-38, even though he had to “backseat it” with another astronaut. His personality was memorably captured in Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff, as “The Icy Commander.”

After taking a chance on experimental surgery to correct his inner ear problem in 1969, he successfully returned to active flight status and looked ahead to an Apollo flight assignment.  Rejected for the Commander’s seat on the next available flight by NASA Headquarters (on the grounds that he needed more training time), he was named to command a subsequent flight, while Jim Lovell was named Commander of Apollo 13.

Geologists who worked on the Apollo training were ecstatic – Lovell was one of their favorite pilot astronauts, a smart, capable guy with a keen eye and an analytic mind. He was being sent to Fra Mauro, the first highland site to be visited on the Moon. This region was considered a key locale to decipher lunar geological history, being located on the ejecta blanket of the Imbrium basin, the largest impact crater on the near side.

Jim Lovell was considered the right man to study this site and collect the key samples scientists needed to help unlock the secrets of the Moon. Unfortunately, with the failure of Apollo 13, Jim Lovell didn’t land on the Moon. Still, the Fra Mauro site was considered so important, it became the designated landing site for Apollo 14, eighteen months later.

Uh-oh. Lunar scientists didn’t have Jim Lovell to explore with—they had drawn the “Icy Commander,” the guy who cheerfully admitted that, compared to aeronautics, he thought geology was a low-grade science. Nevertheless, Shepard assured the Apollo scientists he would try to do the best job he could for them.

While successful in almost every way, the Apollo 14 mission was not without controversy. Cone crater, a large young impact feature, had apparently dug up rocks from deep within the Fra Mauro Formation, including it was hoped, ejecta from the Imbrium basin. During their second moonwalk, Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell trudged up steep slopes leading to Cone, dragging along their Modularized Equipment Transporter (MET), a small pull-cart designed to carry tools and samples with them, getting more winded and disoriented with each step. Getting to the rim of Cone crater was considered critical to the scientific success of the mission.

At 47, Shepard was the oldest man to fly to the Moon and many felt that he was out of shape and not up to the rigors of lunar trekking (which didn’t explain why Ed Mitchell was also having problems.) Moreover, it seemed that Shepard was all too eager to abandon the trek and declare victory after he radioed to the ground that he thought they were already at the rim of Cone crater. (Enough with the hiking trip! We’re running out of time and consumables. Let’s sample this area and call it the rim of Cone crater.)

Scientists in the back room were aghast. Getting Cone crater samples was critical to mission success. And now this old, panting geezer was destroying their chance to unlock a deep secret about the Moon. Although they put on a good face, scientists were resentful; after all their work on geological training, the “Icy Commander” simply declares victory and turns for home. Adding insult to their perceived injury, back at the Lunar Module, Shepard pulled out a 6-iron and conducted a little sand trap practice. (He abandoned the quest for Cone crater – to play golf, no less!)

Now, thirty-eight years later, we’ve just received a magnificent picture of the Apollo 14 landing site from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). Its quality is so good we can see the path of the astronauts footprints and MET tracks on the Moon. It is even possible to follow their tracks all the way up to Cone crater—to the point where Al Shepard declared victory.

Oops. Al Shepard was right. He was at the rim of Cone crater. Terrain around the rim is so hilly that he and Ed Mitchell didn’t know they had reached the rim; the deep crater interior is just over a slight rise, a few tens of meters north of where they were. The samples that Shepard and Mitchell collected do represent the deepest ejecta from Cone crater, thereby fulfilling that goal geologists set many moons ago. For almost 40 years, the “Icy Commander” was right. Yet his name lived in infamy in lunar geologic circles.

If there is a moral to this story, it could be that scientists should never state something is absolutely known and settled.  It’s likely they’ll be proven wrong.

The White House had a different view of the Vision for Space Exploration than NASA

Last week, the Augustine Commission held another public meeting in Washington DC and Dr. John Marburger testified. For those just joining our story in progress, Marburger was President Bush’s Science Advisor and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House between 2001 and 2009. He was a key player in the development of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) and his comments on the intent and reality of the VSE were interesting and insightful.

Marburger described a split between NASA and the White House during formulation of the Vision. NASA (led by former Administrator Sean O’Keefe, Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld and an internal study group within the agency) wanted a manned Mars mission (as it has for the last 50 years) while the White House (led by Marburger, his OSTP colleagues and some members of the National Security Council) called for a new direction and orientation of the space program. They favored a return to the Moon with the “mission” of radically changing the rules of spaceflight.

This latter course involved learning how to use the material and energy resources of the Moon to produce life support consumables, electrical power and rocket fuel, thereby creating new spaceflight capabilities. The White House group was informed by an abundance of detailed studies done over the past decade that demonstrated how the resources of the Moon could be tapped and utilized. Given the unlikelihood of significant new money for NASA, they believed that some kind of “game-changer” was needed – a way to step beyond low Earth orbit by incorporating innovative ways of conducting space business. A sustainable path, if you will.

Marburger’s biggest concern was that by inserting Mars as a goal (not by any means an “ultimate goal”) or even a date for lunar return, the path forward would become “burdened by deadlines and difficult budget issues.” He believed that a program composed of small, incremental steps would gradually but continuously expand human “reach” into space beyond low Earth orbit—with economy provided by a template of bootstrapping. The key was to use robotic missions as pathfinders to understand, access and acquire products derived from lunar and space resources.

As these differing threads were woven into a policy statement, NASA viewed the VSE as the next “large space program” for the agency. NASA’s traditional template dominated public discussion of the Vision, where gaps, arbitrary time scales and the long-desired human Mars mission as the “ultimate goal” became familiar talking points – not surprising, considering that the agency had sole custody of the VSE after it was crafted. Lunar return by 2020 was not meant as a deadline, but it is widely interpreted as such. Although the VSE is careful to mention trips to “Mars and other destinations,” the latter part of that phrase seldom appears in NASA charts.

The subsequent Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) is pure NASA. In classic agency fashion, “Apollo-on-steroids” (big giant booster, mega-capsule and gargantuan lander) was rolled out. The programmatic significance of Ares V in the architecture should not be overlooked – delivering 150 metric tones to LEO, it is a rocket designed for human Mars mission done in the Apollo-style, with everything needed for Mars dragged up from the deep gravity well of the Earth. It is overkill for almost any other space job, including missions to the Moon. Overkill can work, if you have the money (although it isn’t good practice even if you do have the money). But even with the most optimistic assumptions, the ESAS doesn’t fit into NASA’s current or projected budget.

Marburger’s concern is exactly what has happened. NASA thinks that its principal mission on the Moon is to conduct Apollo-style local site exploration and serve as a test-bed for the Mars flags-and-footprints extravaganza. The idea of building a spaceflight infrastructure using lunar resources was swept aside. An Apollo-like architecture was developed but with no political backing to pay for it. Now the agency finds itself subject to a protracted and embarrassing “public audit” of its mission and methods of doing business. The country is not disposed to a significant increase in spending on space, not just because of the poor state of the economy (although that doesn’t help) but because they think we are already spending the right amount. The comfortable, old shoe cannot be resoled; you cannot conduct space business today using the Apollo model, whereby technical difficulties are bludgeoned into submission by cash and long hard (and expensive) man-hours of work.

The way forward involves approaching the problem differently. Marburger’s take on the VSE is adaptable to any budgetary level. It makes continuous progress, using small steps when times are tough and larger ones when things are flush. It sets no deadlines but it does set strategic directions – incrementally beyond low Earth orbit, using what we find along the way to create new capabilities and possibilities. It has intermediate milestones that map progress and provide societal payback. It brings commercial enterprise along, with the aim of expanding our space economy and high-technology industrial base. In other words, it is sustainable. It is the antithesis of the conventional form of space exploration.

Given the dwindling amount of money for discretionary spending in the federal budget, perhaps the idea of using lunar resources to build a sustainable infrastructure in space should be embraced.

Target and Distraction: Which is which?

The Moon versus Mars controversy has reared its ugly head yet again. For the newcomers, this is the perennial “debate” among space buffs about what the next destination in space should be. I do not mean to suggest that all possibilities are encompassed by these two options; it just seems that most advocates fall into one or the other of these two camps.

In part, this argument has arisen because the Augustine Commission, currently deliberating the future of NASA’s human spaceflight program, has resurrected the debate with an architectural option they call “Mars First” (a.k.a. Mars Direct, Direct to Mars, Apollo to Mars and Mars-in-MY-lifetime), beloved of the Mars Society and ex-astronauts everywhere. Briefly, this plan calls for sending people to Mars as soon as possible – no Moon, no asteroids, no L-points: do not pass “Go,” do not collect $200. In such a scenario, all pieces of the Mars mission are launched directly from the Earth; this roughly one-million-pound on-orbit mass includes all the propellant needed for the trip, which makes up about 85% of the mass of the spacecraft.

The Mars First option follows the “Apollo template.” In 1961, faced by the political necessity to get men to the Moon and back within a decade, Wernher von Braun designed the biggest rocket he could imagine – basically a scaled-up, clustered V-2 – to lift all of the parts he needed into space. This super heavy lift vehicle was actually a family of rockets (Saturn class), whose ultimate behemoth was the Nova, a vehicle with a lift-off weight exceeding 13 million pounds. Fortunately, the choice of lunar orbit rendezvous for the Apollo mission mode made Nova unnecessary and a self-contained mission was launched by a single, smaller (7 million pound) Saturn V.

The Apollo template makes use of maximum disposability. As the mission proceeds and each flight element is thrown away, unused and unusable, the vehicle gets smaller and lighter. For some items, such as fuel tanks and structural elements, this doesn’t introduce unwarranted penalties, but some parts of the vehicle are high in cost and value. Within the Apollo template, however, their loss is inevitable.

A significant part of the Apollo template is the lack of infrastructure legacy, i.e., the elements brought to a destination that are available for use by the next crew. We need to develop an architecture that leaves equipment in place for future use and expansion by subsequent visitors. This is one reason why sortie missions are inferior to establishing an outpost or a base; sortie missions spread surface assets over a large area where they cannot mutually support each other.

Much of the support for Mars First comes from the belief of its advocates that we will get “stuck” on the Moon or somewhere else, sort of like we have been “stuck” in low Earth orbit for the last 40 years. In their minds, Mars is THE destination. To hear the pitch, one might believe Mars has it all – atmosphere, water, a 24 hour day, and possible ancient fossil life. Adventure! Thrills! What else could a space cadet want?

Although the “Mars First” advocates vigorously present their position each and every time the direction of our space policy is debated, they have never won the argument. Why? Is it some evil conspiracy to keep them from their Mars dream? Is it just the stupidity of policy makers? Some simple facts suggest otherwise.

We do not now have the technology we need to support multi-month, self-sufficient human space travel. The International Space Station needs nearly constant servicing and re-supply from Earth. In fact, one of the missions of ISS is to learn how to live in space without such service and re-supply, closing the various life-support loops and thereby developing sustained human presence. This is experimental technology and not nearly mature enough upon which to rest the lives of a Mars mission crew. Regardless of claims, a Mars mission is at least one (and possibly two) order(s) of magnitude more costly than any alternative mission.

There isn’t the will in either the Congress or the Executive to significantly increase the amount of money allocated to our national space program. Spectacular claims about “exciting the public” with a human Mars mission, regardless of their veracity (which is doubtful), do not translate into higher budgets for NASA. To go to Mars using existing technology, with an Apollo-style business model, is both unachievable and unaffordable.

The Vision for Space Exploration makes Mars a goal – along with every other space destination – after we go to the Moon to learn how to live and work on another world. Moreover, the VSE implicitly states that such is to be accomplished under existing budgetary envelopes. In contrast to the Apollo template, time rather than money is to be the free variable. The Moon can be reached with existing launch assets; although NASA is currently bogged down in a debate about rocket development, the real issues are how you go back to the Moon and what you do there. The Moon offers the material and energy resources to develop the technology and skills necessary for sustained, long duration capability in space.

Mars First advocates worry about getting “stuck on the Moon.” In fact, it is their obsession for Mars that has kept us in low Earth orbit for the last 40 years. By relentlessly pushing for a space goal that is well out of our technical and fiscal reach, they have gotten an undesired (but not unexpected) result: stasis. There is no choice. You use the Moon or you get nothing. Right now, Mars is a bridge too far – we need the stepping-stone of our Moon to reach it.