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The SP-100 space nuclear reactor

Wild claims are being tossed about regarding the future U.S. space program.  Recipes for success are touted and e-mailed around – concepts based more on wishful thinking than on solid science and engineering.  My friend Rand Simberg refers to those who would replicate anew the means we devised to go to the Moon several decades ago, as having an “Apollo cargo cult” mentality (i.e., Pacific islanders waiting for parachutes to once again drop wondrous things in crates from planes, as they did during World War II).  A counterpart to the so-called “Apollo cargo cult” also exists in the space community and they rely on their own talismanic thinking – a belief in some technique or item that allows us to go farther and longer in space, with incredible new capabilities.  The talisman takes different forms for different groups, but in all cases, they ward off the evil spirits of physical and bureaucratic reality.

Early in the history of the Vision for Space Exploration, talismanic thinking was apparent with Project Prometheus.  This was a program to develop an advanced space nuclear reactor for missions to the outer Solar System – where the Sun’s rays are too weak to provide enough energy to power systems.   Used anywhere, such a capability enables activities to take place in a power-rich environment, making many necessary and routine operations easier, safer and more efficient.  Former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe was enamored of Prometheus, so much so that he often unintentionally overstated its capabilities.  For him, Prometheus was a talisman – a unique capability that enabled the otherwise unobtainable.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden fancies his own talisman – the technology to “go to Mars in days and weeks, rather than months.”  Bolden is probably referring to VASIMR, the plasma rocket engine designed and undergoing testing by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz.  In principle, a VASIMR-powered vehicle could go to Mars on non-minimum energy trajectories, thereby cutting transit time between planets to a fraction of that required for a chemical rocket.

VASIMR is an interesting concept and some form of it will be very useful when we are ready to travel to the outer planets.  However, one aspect about it that I have not heard mentioned by Bolden is the low mass, high power system needed to run it.  The only known systems approaching the necessary power density needed are nuclear reactors.  Which brings us back to Project Prometheus, a joint NASA-Department of Energy (DoE) effort.

Prometheus was canceled in the FY2006 budget.  It was deemed too complex and too costly for its proposed use, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter.  This was a robotic spacecraft designed to tour the Jupiter system and obtain data on its satellites during multiple flybys.  Note well: this power system was thought to be both too complex and expensive for a robotic mission.  A similar system for human missions – which involves many more systems, power requirements, and propulsion – would be even more complex and expensive.  Tack on international participation and – well, you get the picture.

So where does this leave VASIMR?  Chang-Diaz notes that nuclear reactors can be launched empty and then assembled and fueled in space, presumably by human astronauts.  Thus, there are no safety considerations associated with its launch.  The problem is that the pieces of this reactor don’t exist and aren’t even being thought about being built.  For decades the DoE community has talked about a space reactor of the 100 to 1000 kW class; a VASIMR-powered Mars vehicle would need a 10 megawatt reactor.  Billions of dollars went into the SP-100 program in the 1980s and 1990s and still the reactors needed to power VASIMR exist only in the mind’s eye of some space dreamers.  The United States Navy has been building and operating nuclear reactors for over 60 years, so one would think that building a space reactor would be achievable, but practice has proven otherwise.

VASIMR is Bolden’s talisman, the magic beans that will grow a stalk that we can climb to Mars.  Such a rocket engine would be a technological breakthrough promising capabilities well beyond our current reach.  But for now, a Mars craft using VASIMR is imaginary.  Reality will not come about by spending massive amounts of money on general technology investment.  When VASIMR is finally built, it will be because it is needed for a specific application or mission.  Once again, the ends will drive the means, not the other way around.

Talismanic thinking is common in much of the current discussion about the new path for NASA.  Other talismans include cheap access to low Earth orbit, commercial transport replacing Orion, and an “exciting space goal” to engage the public.  These new dogmas (all of them means, not ends) clearly illustrate that there is no strategic thinking or thoughtful leadership guiding America’s space program.  Those at the top need to know where they are going and understand why; the fact that they currently do not bodes ill for the future of our country.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently said that “he is trying to find middle ground between groups “radically” in favor of keeping the Constellation program and others lobbying for reliance on commercial space entities.”  But he is still confusing the means with the ends.  We should re-affirm that our mission is to use the resources of the Moon to build a transportation infrastructure whereby all can travel to wherever they choose as often as they want.  Our direction in space goes through the Moon or we go nowhere.

Klaus Heiss and President Reagan

My good friend Klaus Heiss is resting in the hospital after recently suffering a stoke.  Klaus is not widely known or familiar to many in the space community, but over the years, he has had a major impact on our national space program – a major player in both the Shuttle program and in helping to promote a return to the Moon.  His work is thoughtful and visionary and deserves a wide readership.

Klaus comes from the Tyrol of Austria, near the Italian border.  His academic background is in economics, specifically the economics of space transportation, but he also has considerable expertise in physics and engineering.   In the late 1960s and 70s he worked on the rationale for the Space Shuttle, calling for the development of a fully reusable, liquid-fueled version.  For a variety of reasons, such a path was not chosen and the Shuttle failed to live up to his expectations as an economical method for launching payloads into space.  In the 1980s, Klaus participated in a variety of studies for the Strategic Defense Initiative, including satellite interceptors.

In the wake of the loss of Shuttle Columbia in 2003, many were concerned about the future direction of NASA.  Why do we have a national space program?  What should we be striving for – pure exploration, space applications, or some combination of the two?  Is there some goal or objective that creatively combines these two threads of spaceflight and is it attainable on reasonable timescales and budgets?

Klaus had long held an interest and fascination for the Moon.  In the spring of 2003, he visited President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and presented to them his ideas about a return to the Moon.  In his view, making the establishment a lunar base as the next NASA goal offered the country two principal advantages.  First, the Moon is a strategic destination that is in reach within a decade or so without a substantial increase in the agency budget.  Second, he recognized both the scientific and cultural value of establishing a human community on another world.  The Moon is close and possesses the resources necessary to permit its permanent habitation.  Once there, we can use the Moon as both an observing platform and a natural laboratory for scientific and engineering research.

Klaus was tasked by the White House to develop his ideas in a more detailed manner.  He spent the next few months mapping a pathway from where we were to where he thought we should be.  His report, Columbia: A Permanent Lunar Base, cogently summarizes all the various threads of lunar return, including not only an architecture for launch and transportation (based on Shuttle-derived vehicle components) but also the spectrum of surface activities that we will undertake there.  This document was presented to the NASA Office of Spaceflight in December 2003.

I first met Klaus at a meeting on the future of the American space program convened by Buzz Aldrin in Washington DC in that same month.  At the time, there was a widespread rumor that at Kitty Hawk, during a ceremony celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the Wright brothers first powered airplane flight, President Bush would announce a major new direction for the American space program.

For years I had been advocating a return to the Moon mostly from the “bottom up” as I worked my way up the NASA chain of command from the field centers to Headquarters, telling anyone who would listen about the advantages of lunar return.  I was unaware that while I was pursuing the Moon from the bottom up, Klaus had been doing the same thing from the top down.  He knew of my work and told me that a major decision would be forthcoming from the White House and not to be discouraged by the lack of an announcement at Kitty Hawk – that I would be “pleased” with the new direction.  President Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration about a month later, in January 2004.

As Klaus and I got to know each other over the next few years, we found that we saw space issues in a similar way.  Both of us were frustrated at the attempts by some in NASA to thwart the Vision, in some cases by slow-rolling it and in others by more deliberate action.  Yet at the same time, we both worked closely with and attempted to help our allies within the agency, a group of smart, dedicated people who were trying to do the right thing and implement the Vision, even when it wasn’t the desire of their immediate superiors.  For his leadership in fostering the Vision for Space Exploration, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in January, 2008.

Klaus was one of the first to see that the ESAS architecture (NASA’s chosen implementation path for the Vision) was unaffordable and unsustainable.  He specifically outlined a path by which the goals of permanent presence might yet be implemented, but his counsel and pleas fell on deaf ears.  Now, six years and $8 billion later, we see a new proposed budget that terminates the program designed to take us beyond low Earth orbit.  Despite the positive spin from many in the space community, a return to the Moon is as far away now as it was six years ago, before the Vision.  In fact, it’s actually farther away as much of the tooling for Shuttle parts that could enable the quick and relatively inexpensive fabrication of a moderately heavy-lift launch vehicle for the VSE are being mothballed or destroyed.

Klaus’s work on the activities of lunar settlement will stand as a lasting contribution to the literature of space travel.  We have too few clear thinkers in this business and we were indeed fortunate to have his informed and authoritative voice to help guide our journey out into the Solar System.  We need others who can clearly see the importance of a sustained lunar return to step forward and pick up where Klaus left off.

A growing catalogue of the resources of the Moon continues to spill out.  Much of this knowledge was gained through the vision and efforts of Klaus Heiss.  I am grateful for his contributions and his friendship.  Klaus will be with us in spirit as news of the Moon and its resources is presented at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference next week in Houston.

Our new space program. "You think that you hate it now... But wait till you drive it."

The release of the proposed NASA budget and new “direction” has led to an intense “cage fight” in the blogosphere over who has the best rocket and the best architecture.  Many “New Space” advocates are ecstatic, viewing the cancellation of the Constellation program as vindication of their view that:  a) this was a stupid architecture to begin with; and b) the purchase of launch services by NASA is more desirable than the development of same by the agency.  In the other corner, defenders of the existing program and paradigm see human spaceflight as still largely an experimental activity and that by contracting for launch services, astronauts’ lives will be put in danger, leading to the eventual termination of America’s human spaceflight program.  Both sides are locked in a fierce battle over the ownership of the “how,” while seemingly unconcerned as to the “why” or the “what” they are fighting for.

Once again the debate focuses on launch vehicles, the need or lack thereof for a heavy lift vehicle, and all the wonderful new technical development and leaps forward possible once NASA is freed from its responsibility to build and operate a space transportation system.  I agree with the New Space people that alternative options for launch and orbit are desirable and that a flexible, extensible architecture is the way to move beyond LEO.  On the other hand, I agree with the “Ares huggers” that this change will not result in the space utopia its advocates promise and that an agency saddled with an unworkable approach is a ripe target for elimination.

Those cheering the new path should step back from their celebrations, take a sober look at the landscape and ask themselves, “Now what?”  The “new path” has no mission.  Despite what many believe or have said, Project Constellation was not same thing as the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).  Constellation was the implementation that NASA chose to carry out that mission.  The VSE was both a set of destinations and a group of specific activities at those locations.  The Vision’s objective was to give us new spaceflight capability by learning to use the material and energy resources of space, first on the Moon and then from other objects in space.

The new policy indicates a lack of understanding of the difference between “means” and “ends” within both NASA and the current administration.  When they cancelled Project Constellation, the Vision was terminated as well.  And what was put in its place?

Nothing.

All of the current hand wringing and angst is focused on which rocket and spacecraft to build.  But to what end?  The “Flexible Path” concept came from the Augustine Commission.  It’s main focus was to find an affordable way to move people beyond low Earth orbit.  Using their concept, we would visit places beyond low Earth orbit that had very low gravity – libration points, near Earth asteroids, and the moons of Mars.  The supposed advantage of such places is that they do not require a large propulsive maneuver to land on (or more accurately rendezvous with) them.  Thus, the supposed enormous cost of building a landing vehicle is saved.

The “new path” called for in the budget envisions a government funded and commercially built and operated space launch system, freeing NASA from the necessity of building rockets.  The agency would “invest” in new technology.  Somehow, these new and wonderful approaches will lead to the spontaneous generation of a space faring infrastructure capable of taking us beyond LEO into the Solar System – anywhere and everywhere.  But to do what?

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden seems to think that a return to the Moon should be ruled out because “there are already six American flags there.” It is hard to imagine that he believes that the purpose of space exploration is to plant a flag and move on to the next destination.  Such a template will exhaust possible destinations quickly.  If the goals of travel beyond LEO are more significant than that, what are they?  What will people do at an asteroid?  What do we get from such a trip?  What capability does it create?  What are we buying? Again, the “means” and “ends” argument attempts to focus on outcome.

We had a considered and well crafted strategic direction in space – to go to the Moon and use its resources (which we now know are even more abundant and accessible than we thought) to create a new transportation system that will reduce costs and increase access to cislunar space.  That mission was not just the proposal of the former President; it was endorsed by two different Congresses (in 2005 and 2008), under the leadership of different parties, and both times, by huge bipartisan majorities.  The Vision for Space Exploration is our national space policy and will be until the Congress passes a new authorization bill, changing the mission and goals of the space program.

Currently, the proposed budget casts aside this hard-won, bipartisan policy and puts nothing in its place.  This new policy is striking in that, rather than serving America’s national security, economic and scientific interests, it undermines them.  The “new path” was apparently put together by a very small group of people, without significant debate or input from outside sources.  Whatever the circumstances of its genesis, it is poorly conceived; if it were well considered, we would know exactly where we were going, what we would do there, and what benefits would accrue from these voyages.  The idea expressed by some in the blogosphere, that we will now be able to “go everywhere and do everything” is ludicrously naïve.  Given the past performance of this agency (or any agency) given no direction, random motion is a much more likely outcome, at $20 billion per year.

If the current architecture is broken or unaffordable, fix it or change it.  If getting NASA out of the rocket-building business is the right way to go, do that.  But don’t discard our strategic direction.  The space program can survive a change in the business model of its implementing agency; it won’t survive fecklessness and a complete lack of direction.

The administration proposes; Congress disposes

The release of the new proposed budget for NASA has unleashed a blizzard of news articles and commentary.  The administration proposes to terminate Constellation, the agency effort to design and build a new space transportation system to carry people to low Earth orbit and beyond.  In its place, they plan to let contracts with several companies to provide orbital launch and spaceflight services, both as transport to ISS and to “destinations beyond LEO.”  This major change in the agency’s business model follows in the wake of last summer’s Augustine committee report, which concluded that NASA’s “program of record” to return to the Moon and beyond was inadequately funded and possibly, misdirected as well.

The Augustine “Flexible Path” was an architecture designed to take people beyond LEO, but to low gravity targets: L-points, near-Earth asteroids, and Phobos and Deimos, the asteroid-like moons of Mars.  The idea behind that concept was two-fold.  First, it was a way to send people into deep space without the very high programmatic expense of developing a lunar landing spacecraft.  Given that Constellation is significantly over budget, cost control is certainly an issue.  The second motivation for FP was the feeling (not explicitly stated in the report, but clearly implied) that the agency plan for lunar return was largely a repeat of the Apollo experience of 40 years ago.  The strength of this impression varied among the committee members, with some thinking that the chosen architecture was simply the wrong approach while others questioned the value of going to the Moon at all.  The new proposed budgetary direction seems to follow the Augustine Flexible Path (FP).

I have previously discussed what I perceive as the most significant problem with FP, namely, that it is activity without direction.  The administration’s budgetary version of this path confirms this perception.  Much verbiage is thrown around about multiple missions to all sorts of destinations, blazing new trails with new technology, trips to Mars that last weeks instead of months, and “people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the Moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts.”   But nowhere in the budget documents or agency statements is there anything about the mission that we are undertaking.  So we’re going to an asteroid.  What will we do there?  Why are we going there?  What benefit accrues from it?

The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) of 2004 not only laid out a clear path, but also described exactly why such a path was being taken.  It is not a repeat of the Apollo experience.  We go to the Moon to learn how to create a sustainable human presence in space.  We do this by experimenting with and learning to use the material and energy resources of the Moon to create new space faring capability.  These skills enable us to build a space transportation infrastructure that allows routine access not only to the Moon, but all of cislunar space (where our space assets reside) and the planets beyond.  All of this activity is to be accomplished under the existing budgetary envelope; as there is no deadline, we trade time for money.

Many conflate the VSE with Constellation, the agency’s program to build the Ares launcher and Orion spacecraft, but they are different and distinct.  The former is a strategic direction; the latter is an implementation of that direction.  This is not some academic distinction; it goes to the essence of the current debate about NASA and the space program.  Virtually all of the argument and debate about our future in space has been about means rather than ends.  Launch vehicles, spacecraft, and architectures have been grist for the mills of the space blogosphere.  Beyond a vague notion that people should “move into the Solar System,” the purpose and meaning of that movement has been articulated much less often.  Partly that’s because different people have differing notions of what those motivations should be – science, settlement, curiosity, and technical innovation all have their adherents.  But if you do not clearly understand what your mission is, you are not likely to successfully implement it.

The VSE was a clear strategic direction.  It not only identified the path forward, but also the specific activities that would enable that path to be followed.  The new budget outlines the means (new commercial launch and transport) but not the object of our space program.  But more critically, it discards the clear and practical direction of the original VSE.  Before the new budget, we knew exactly where we were headed and why: a return to the Moon to learn how to live and work productively on another world.  Now, all we know is that at some point in the future, we will somehow go somewhere to do something.  Or other.

I wrote recently about a variant of the Flexible Path architecture outlined at the blog Vision Restoration.  I think that this approach has a lot of merit, but suggest one critical modification: it does not have a statement of the mission.  The VSE in its original guise should be stated up front and made a clear and unalterable part of the architecture.  If during the course of the program the implementation somehow falls short, change the implementation, not the mission.  The failure to do this in the Constellation Program led us into a blind alley of cost and schedule overruns, the Augustine committee, and now, cancellation.

This new policy will increase NASA’s natural tendency to engage in organizational “Brownian motion.”  We are already seeing agency leaders call for new studies to determine what will be done at the (so far unspecified) new destinations.  The current program looks upon itself as a transportation architecture; the activities undertaken at any given destination are irrelevant.  The new “direction” outlined in the budget request is similarly focused on means (e.g., commercial launch and transport) rather than ends (e.g., What will humans do at Earth-Sun L-1?).  And it will likely come down the same path, as indeed it appears to be starting to.  NASA as an organization will adjust to this; after all, viewgraphs are easily changed and mission studies easily re-written.  But what about the aerospace industry?  They find it very difficult to pivot on a dime when the direction changes.

I’ve often written about how I think the VSE ought to be implemented and have found the existing program of record wanting in several respects.  But at least it aimed in one direction.  We need a program plan that gets us beyond LEO using small, incremental, cumulative steps and the new model promises to do just that.  But small, incremental steps taken in random directions yield uncertain progress.

What is your mission?  It’s not just the most important thing; it’s the only thing.  NASA forgot that during the last 6 years.  Now, the White House has joined them.