Sedimentary rock on Mars as viewed and analyzed by the Curiosity rover (NASA).

The news of the day is abuzz with the new and astounding discoveries from the Curiosity rover that Mars once had an environment conducive to life.  Once it was warmer, wetter, more hospitable.  Water flowed over its surface.  The chemicals necessary for life’s emergence and development are present on Mars, suggesting that life may have arisen there in the distant past.  So why do I have this sense of déjà vu?  Perhaps because this new “result” gets trumpeted anew every few years.

The fixation on the possibility of martian life has been a constant throughout the history of the space program, starting before the first planetary mission to Mars in 1965 (Mariner 4) and then waxing and waning in likelihood every few years.  Mariner 4 showed us a moon-like Mars, with a rough, cratered surface and thin cold atmosphere.  The stock for martian life fell accordingly.  A few years later, the twin probes Mariners 6 and 7 flew by Mars, again returning pictures of a cratered surface, but with hints of the presence of unusual terrain, possibly the result of subsurface ice.  The stock of the life story rose slightly, but the barren cold desert of the martian surface was hardly a Garden of Eden.

A big breakthrough came with the flight of Mariner 9 in 1971.  To the astonishment of most planetary scientists, it revealed a world of giant volcanoes, canyons much larger than the Grand Canyon on Earth, and amazingly, channels that looked as though they were carved by running water.  The idea of life on Mars – at least in the distant past – gained credence and served as a springboard for the Viking missions of 1976, America’s bicentennial year.  These two missions consisted of both a lander and an orbiter and were specifically designed to test the surface of Mars for the possibility of life.  Both landers returned results that were immediately interpreted as negative (although there was some dissent); the surface materials of Mars had a very reactive chemistry, but no organic material was found in the soil, even at concentration levels measured in parts-per-billion.  Thus, we had the conundrum of abundant landform evidence for an early, warm and wet climate yet chemical evidence for an almost sterilizing environment at present.  If Mars had life, it must have been present only in the distant past.  The results from Viking were considered so definitive that no mission was sent to Mars for over 20 years.

What precipitated the new flurry of interest in Mars about twenty years ago was the finding that, astonishingly enough, we have samples in our possession from Mars in the form of meteorites, the so-called “SNC meteorites” (the initials of Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny, the first three meteorites recognized to be of martian origin).  It had been thought that the preservation of rocks intact during ejection from the planet at escape velocities and greater was not possible, but in this case, observations trumped theory.  Even more amazing, it was claimed that in one of these putative martian rocks, small features within it were actually fossils of ancient bacteria.  Although highly controversial then (and now), this finding was given widespread publicity (including even a Rose Garden Presidential statement) and the agency used this discovery to sell a program to send a series of probes to Mars at every two-year opportunity for the next decade.

This fleet of orbiters and landers returned an abundance of new, high-quality data on the martian surface, its composition, the locations of water and its environment.  Each mission confirmed that water had once been present on Mars.  Each mission confirmed that at present, the surface was not conducive to life.  Each lander went to a site that was thought to have been more promising for the development of life than the ones that preceded it.  As the years rolled on, each “new discovery” of the former presence of water and favorable environmental conditions on Mars became something of a joke among my colleagues in the planetary science business – how many times can you claim the discovery of something already known?

Lest you think that I am simply expressing my lunar parochialism, I note that this same media phenomenon occurs in regard to the existence of water ice at the poles of the Moon.  The theoretical possibility of ice on the Moon had been known for many years.  We first found direct evidence for it in 1996 with an improvised radio experiment on the Clementine mission.  Subsequent studies from Earth and a variety of other space missions caused the stock for lunar polar water to rise and fall, depending on who issued the latest press release for their published work.  Finally, the collision of the LCROSS impactor in 2010 removed all doubt – there was and is ice there, at least at the south pole and in quantities greater than could be reasonably expected to have resulted simply from solar wind deposition.  Yet each new finding was announced as a new “discovery” in the press.  So this media frenzy is not simply related to Mars mania or even to the over-preoccupation with finding life elsewhere.

The basic fact is that most in the news business do not understand (or at least, do not fully appreciate) the incremental, cumulative nature of modern science.  It is seldom indeed when a single experiment or observation causes a scientific revolution.  Moreover, it is equally seldom that a breakthough comes from one person or even one research team.  Science is a complex, interdisciplinary effort.  It makes progress, but slowly and in a manner that includes both leaps forward and (sometimes) backward.  Only over long periods of time (decades and greater) is it apparent what the key observation or measurement is and how it fits into a pattern of understanding.  Each new mission result adds knowledge, sometimes in great leaps and sometimes in increments so tiny that one can question whether anything new is being learned at all.  But even a repeated observation has value in science – in fact, if an observation is not repeatable, it is not a valid scientific observation.

The new inferences from Curiosity suggest a more benign and hospitable environment for life, but few working Mars investigators doubted that such existed in the past.  Even if it did not, we have found in the past few decades that even extreme environments on the Earth can support certain types of microbial life.  So the new results broaden and deepen our understanding of martian surface properties and processes, they do not revolutionize them.  That’s just how science normally works.  If some scientists tend to oversell their results, well, they’re only human.

President John F. Kennedy is briefed by Wernher Von Braun (partly hidden) and Hugh Dryden (speaking to the President) at Pad B, Complex 37, Cape Canaveral, Florida, November 1963. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

As a memorial to honor Neil Armstrong’s contributions to aeronautics and astronautics, a bill (HR 6612) was recently introduced by Congressman Kevin McCarthy and passed by the House of Representatives to change the name of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (a field center proximate to Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave desert north of Los Angeles) to the Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center.  While I take a back seat to no one in regard to my respect and admiration for Neil and his life of accomplishment, I think that this effort is both mistaken and inappropriate.

Who was this Dryden guy anyway?  Hugh L. Dryden was an American aeronautical engineer who became the last head of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)* in 1947 and the first Deputy Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958.  Dryden had a long research career in the complexities of airflow and the boundary layer, critical subjects in the science of aerodynamics.  Dryden’s published work in this field became standard texts for upcoming aeronautical engineers and aircraft designers.  Dryden, a quiet man whose life story is filled with notable achievements and roles, took the lead in establishing the National Academy of Engineering, the sister entity of the National Academy of Science.

In 1958, an act of Congress established NASA which absorbed the NACA and its aeronautical research facilities, including the field centers of Langley Aeronautical Laboratory near Hampton VA, Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center in Cleveland OH, and Ames Research Center next to Moffett Field in CA.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower tapped T. Keith Glennan to be NASA’s first Administrator.  Hugh Dryden was asked to join the new agency as its first Deputy.  In his new role, Dryden was a key link to the immediate past, providing both institutional memory and continuity of service.  The NACA had been involved in space research, including the X-15 project, a rocket-powered, piloted aircraft capable of supersonic transport to the outer fringes of the atmosphere.  Neil Armstrong, a NACA test pilot, flew seven X-15 missions before his career as a NASA Gemini and Apollo astronaut.

Dryden and the NACA worked with the U.S. Air Force on the MISS (Man-In-Space-Soonest) project, which ultimately became Project Mercury, our first human spaceflight program.  This program was being developed and managed out of Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, a NACA facility.  The Space Task Group at Langley was headed by Bob Gilruth (later center director of Johnson Space Center), with Max Faget as one of his young, bright engineers grappling with the problems of hypersonic and orbital flight.

Hugh Dryden performed admirably the job of technocrat and manager during these early, exciting years, but perhaps his biggest contribution to space history is barely known.  The fate of Project Mercury was unknown in early 1961.  Recently sworn in as the 35^th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy seemed supportive of bold new technical endeavors but had been largely silent on his plans, if any, for the civil space program.  Although Kennedy made much about a supposed “missile gap” with the Soviet Union, this policy discussion was focused entirely on our parity in ICBM deployment (or rather, the alleged lack thereof).

This all changed in April of that fateful year.  The Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin on his single orbit flight, once again beating America to the punch by putting the first man in space.  In the same month, the United States suffered a humiliating military and diplomatic setback with the very public failure of an American-instigated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.  The new President eagerly sought a high-visibility field of endeavor (preferably technological) in which America could demonstrate its superiority over the USSR.  Initially, the desalination of seawater was a leading candidate among the many projects Kennedy considered.  However, at the height of the Cold War, that challenge didn’t quite fill the bill.

On April 14, two days after Gagarin orbited the Earth, Kennedy met with his new NASA Administrator James Webb and his deputy, the holdover from the Eisenhower Administration, Hugh Dryden.  During this meeting, Dryden pointed out that while the Soviets could beat America to many different space “firsts,” a near-term human landing on the Moon was out of reach for both nations – that while declaring a “contest” with the Soviets on virtually any space goal ran the risk of America losing, odds were even for the first manned lunar landing.  America could not go to the Moon now, but likely we could within a few years.  Thus, if space was to be the chosen field for a superpower contest, Dryden believed the goal of a human lunar landing was the challenge we could win.

Kennedy received a detailed memorandum outlining all his space options from Vice President Lyndon Johnson on April 29, 1961, but Dryden had already forcefully made his case for a lunar landing to the President two weeks earlier.  It is often thought that Wernher von Braun was the one who convinced Kennedy that the Moon was the proper goal for Apollo, but Dryden had digested and presented von Braun’s technical arguments in policy terms that Kennedy could understand.  In the public’s mind, von Braun was “Dr. Space,” largely because of his work with Walt Disney in the 1950s popularizing the idea of space travel.  But it was Hugh Dryden who helped turn the dream of landing people on the Moon into a political commitment from the President and ultimately, a reality.

Hugh Dryden remained the Deputy Administrator of NASA until his untimely death in 1965.  He has been honored with a crater named for him on the Moon and as the namesake of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, an entirely appropriate memorial given his contributions to aeronautics and his key role in the establishment of the Apollo program.  He was at the right place (the White House) with the right President (Kennedy) at the right time (when America needed a challenging yet achievable space goal).  His life was one of service and excellence.  I think it does a disservice to the memory of Hugh Dryden to re-name the Dryden Flight Research Center and what’s more, I believe that Neil – the consummate gentleman – would also view HR 6612, the congressional bill passed to drop Dryden’s name and insert his in its stead, as unnecessary and wrong-headed.

I certainly agree that we should name a major facility for Neil Armstrong.   May I suggest that the first manned lunar outpost be named for Neil Armstrong – the first man to set foot on the Moon.

* Pronounced by saying each individual letter: “N-A-C-A,” not as a single word, as we do for its successor agency, NASA.

——

Note Added Jan. 7, 2013:   I have been reminded that the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 had already designated the American portion of the then-planned international lunar outpost as the “Neil A. Armstrong Lunar Outpost” (sec. 404 b).  Thanks to both Bill Mellberg and Joel Raupe for jogging my memory on this.

Map of the Moon by Grimaldi and Riccioli, 1651. Most of the names on this map are still in use today.

The Moon is remarkable for the variety and unusual nature of the names of its surface features.  The dark, smooth maria are named for weather or states of mind (Sea of Rains, Sea of Tranquility) while many of the abundant craters of the Moon are named for famous scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and explorers.  Before the advent of the space age, only the near side of the Moon was visible, although most scientists believed that the far side probably looked exactly like the one facing Earth. (How wrong they were!)  Naturally, once we had the ability to see uncharted lunar territory, a new era of name assignment commenced.  But even now, many lunar craters and features await something more than mere coordinates.

The drawings by Galileo of the Moon in 1610 show craters and mountain ranges but he did not assign names to them.  As telescopes improved, revealing finer surface details, several maps appeared with names bestowed by their astronomer authors to flatter patrons or express their nationalism.  Most of those early names have been forgotten to history.  In 1651, an influential map by Jesuit astronomers Grimaldi and Riccioli became the foundation for the official naming reference guide that we use today.

With the flight of the Luna 3 probe in 1959, the Soviet Union was the first nation to image the far side of the Moon.  To the surprise of most, large regions of maria (so prominent on the near side) were mostly missing from the far side.  Although the first images were of very low quality, the Soviets couldn’t resist the urge to name newly discovered features for a variety of Russian heroes and place names, such as Tsiolkovsky and the Sea of Moscow.  Some new “features” were misidentified because of the low resolution – the name “Soviet Mountains” (no longer used) was given to a bright linear streak across the far side globe (a feature that turned out to be a long ray from the fresh crater Giordano Bruno and not a mountain range).

Over subsequent years, as both American and Soviet spacecraft filled in the far side coverage with increasingly higher quality images, most major far side craters received names of various scientists and engineers.   From around the world, a mixed bag of names were submitted to the International Astronomical Union (IAU – the body of scientists who authorize the names of planetary surface features) for consideration and approval.  Although some were historically significant, many were people with whom few were familiar.

Though NASA does not have the authority to assign names to features on the Moon, an informal practice of naming landmarks was common during the Apollo missions.  Names were given to the small craters and mountains near each landing site (e.g., Shorty, St. George, Stone Mountain) but official names were used as well (e.g., Hadley Rille).  NASA adopts informal names for the same reason that names are given to geographical features on Earth – as shorthand to refer to landmarks and other mapped features.  The most recent illustration of this practice occurred on December 17, 2012 when NASA named the location where the deliberately de-orbited GRAIL spacecraft crashed onto the Moon near the crater Goldschmidt (73°N, 4°W) the Sally K. Ride Impact Site.  Sally thus joins other women of science and note who have lunar features named for them – Hypatia, Caroline Herschel and Marie Curie, among others.  Most of the informal names assigned during Apollo were later given “official” status by the IAU.

The Apollo basin (a 540 km diameter crater on the southwestern far side) was named to honor the Apollo missions – the only crater on the Moon so designated.  Within a few years of their missions, smaller craters were named for the living crews of Apollo 8 (Borman, Lovell and Anders) and Apollo 11 (Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins).  Also located around the Apollo basin are craters named for deceased astronauts and NASA employees, including the lost crews of Apollo 1 and the lost crews of the final missions of the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttles.  It is appropriate that some feature honors humanity’s first efforts to reach the Moon, as well as others who gave their lives pioneering space.  In a similar vein, craters near the poles of the Moon tend to be named for famous polar scientists and explorers, such as Nansen, Shackleton, and Amundsen.

Other than these exceptions, the location of specifically named craters has little rhyme or reason.  Neither scientific prominence nor contribution guarantees any crater-endowed immortality.  Copernicus and Archimedes are rightly honored with spectacular craters named for them.  But Galileo and Newton (titans in the history of science) are fobbed off with insignificant or barely detectable features.  One of the most prominent craters on the Moon is named for the astronomer Tycho Brahe, an eccentric who spent most of his career trying to validate a variant of the Earth-centered, Ptolemaic model of the Solar System (Ptolemy also has a prominent crater in the center of the near side named for him).  It’s not clear why Riccioli assigned the names he did to these craters, though he cannot be blamed for giving Newton short shrift, as the future Sir Isaac was only nine years old when the Grimaldi and Riccioli map was published.

It is possible to both suggest a name and to propose a crater for that name, though the IAU is not obliged to accept either.  Often, a suggested name is approved but assigned to a different crater.  Currently, the guidelines for submission and assignment of new names for lunar craters are: 1) a scientist or explorer who has made some significant contribution, preferably to the study of the Moon and planets; 2) deceased for at least three years before a crater name becomes official; 3) it cannot duplicate any existing lunar name.

In 2005, I proposed the name Ryder (to honor my colleague Graham Ryder, a lunar scientist who passed away in 2002) and suggested a small, bright crater on the far side to carry his name.  Both suggestions were adopted.  We have since found that Ryder crater is actually quite a geologically spectacular feature (Graham would be proud of his namesake).  In a truly singular event, the crater Shoemaker (named in 2000 and located near the south pole of the Moon) actually contains some of Gene Shoemaker’s remains – a small portion of his ashes was carried aboard the Lunar Prospector spacecraft in 1998.  At the conclusion of that mission, the vehicle was crashed into the south polar crater that was subsequently named for him.

We don’t know what the IAU will do concerning the designation of the Sally K. Ride Impact Site but as history suggests, granting of official status is not guaranteed.  No matter – we will continue to assign names to features as needed and the IAU will do what they do.  In the early 1970s, the IAU (by fiat) abolished the famous Mädler nomenclature system (wherein a small, nearby crater is given the name of a large neighbor plus a letter, such as Copernicus H).  Most working lunar scientists stubbornly refused to accept this decision and continued using the old crater names.  After 30 years of bureaucratic intractability, the IAU finally surrendered and formally adopted the Mädler system.

Official or not, with the passage of time, named lunar landmarks will become familiar to those visiting and working on our nearest neighbor.  Perhaps interesting monikers will be attached by those locals, as is done here on Earth when we assign nicknames to places – like the Big Apple, the Windy City, the Big Easy and the City by the Bay.

Just published:  The Clementine Atlas of the Moon, Revised Edition, an updated atlas and reference guide to lunar features, by Ben Bussey and yours truly.

Future industrial activity on the Moon -- science fiction? (Artwork by Pat Rawlings)

Space missions are commonly thought of as the ultimate in “high tech.”  After all, rockets blast off into the wild blue yonder, accelerate their payloads to hypersonic and orbital speeds and then operate in zero gravity in the ice-cold, black sky of space.  It requires our best technology to pull off this modern miracle and even then, things can go wrong.  Why would anyone believe that with high technology, sometimes less can be more – that we’re missing a bet by not utilizing current technology.   Like the intellectual tug of war involving man vs. machine, there also is a tug of war between proven technology and high-tech.  Creating these barriers and distinctions is nonsensical.  We need it all.  And we can have it all.

Point in question – in situ resource utilization (ISRU), which is the general term given to the concept of learning how to use the materials and energy we find in space.  The idea of learning how to “live off the land” in space has been around for a long, long time.  Countless papers have been written discussing the theory and practice of this operational approach.  Yet to date, the only resource we have actually used in space is the conversion of sunlight into electricity via arrays of photovoltaic cells.  Such power generation is clearly “mature” from a technical viewpoint, but it had to be demonstrated in actual spaceflight before it became considered as such (the earliest satellites were powered by batteries).

The reason we have not used ISRU is because we’ve spent the last 30 years in low Earth orbit, without access to the material resources of space.  Many ideas have been proposed to use the material resources of the Moon.  A big advantage of doing so is that much less mass needs to be transported from Earth.  The propellant needed to transport a unit of mass from the Earth to the Moon keeps us hobbled to the tyranny of the rocket equation – a constant roadblock to progress.  If it takes several thousand dollars to launch one pound into Earth orbit, multiply that amount times ten to get the cost to put a pound of mass on the Moon.

In the space business, new technologies tend to be viewed with a jaundiced eye.  Aerospace engineers in particular are typically very conservative when it comes to integrating new technology into spacecraft and mission designs, largely on the basis that if we are not careful, missions can fail in a spectacularly dreadful fashion.  To determine if a technology is ready for prime time, NASA developed the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale, a nine-step list of criteria that managers use to evaluate and classify how mature a technical concept is and whether the new technology is mission ready.

Resource utilization has a very low TRL level – usually TRL 4 or lower.  Thus, many engineers don’t think of ISRU as a viable technique to implement on a real mission.  It seems too “far out” (more science fiction than science).  Believing that a technology is too immature for use can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a “Catch-22” for spaceflight:  a technology is too immature for flight because it’s never flown and it’s never flown because it’s too immature.  This prejudice is widespread among many “old hands” in the space business, who wield TRL quite effectively in order to keep new and innovative ideas stuffed in the closet and off flight manifests.

In truth, the idea that the processing and use of off-planet resources is “high technology” is exactly backwards – most of the ideas proposed for ISRU are some of the simplest and oldest technologies known to man.  One of the first ideas advanced for using resources on the Moon involve building things out of bulk regolith  (rocks and soil of the lunar surface).  This is certainly not high-tech; the use of building aggregate dates back to ancient times, reaching a high level of sophistication under the Romans, who over 2000 years ago built what is still the largest free-supported concrete dome in the world (the Pantheon).  The Coliseum was made of concrete faced by marble.  The Romans also built a complex network of roads, some which remain in use to this day; paving and grading is one of the oldest and most straightforward technologies known.  Odd as it may seem, sand and gravel building material is the largest source of wealth from a terrestrial resource – the biggest economic material resource on Earth.

Recently, interest has focused on the harvesting and use of water, found as ice deposits, at the poles of the Moon.  Digging up ice-laden soil and heating it to extract water is very old, dating back to at least prehistoric times.  This water could contain other substances, including possibly toxic amounts of some exotic elements, such as silver and mercury.  No problem – we understand fractional distillation, a medieval separation technique based on the differing boiling temperatures of various substances.  Again, this concept is not particularly high-tech as only a heater and a cooling column is needed (basically the configuration of an oil refinery).  Some workers have suggested that lunar regolith could be mined for metals, which can then be used to manufacture both large construction pieces and complex equipment.  Extracting metal from rocks and minerals is likewise very old, developed by the ancients and simply improved in efficiency over time.  Processes like carbothermal reduction have been used for hundreds of years. The reactions and yields are well known, and the machinery needed to create a processing stream is simple and easy to operate.

In short, the means needed to extract and use the material wealth of the Moon and other extraterrestrial bodies is technology that is centuries old.  Even advanced chemical processing was largely completely developed by the 19^th Century in both Europe and America.  The “new” aspects of ISRU technology revolve around the use of computers to control and regulate the processing stream.  Such control is already used in many industries on Earth, including the new and potentially revolutionary technique of three-dimensional printing.  A key aspect of the old “Faster-Cheaper-Better” idea (one NASA never really embraced) was to push the envelope by relying more on “off-the-wall” ideas, whereby more innovation on more flights would lead to greater capability over time.

Nothing that we plan to do on the Moon involves magic, alchemy or extremely high technology.  Like most new fields of endeavor, we can start small and build capability over time.  The TRL concept was designed as a guideline.  It was not intended as a weapon eliminating possibly game-changing techniques from consideration or to carve out funding territories.  Attitudes toward TRL must change at all levels, from the lowly subsystem to the complete, end-to-end architectural plan.  A critical first step toward true space utilization and for understanding and controlling our destiny there is to recognize and take advantage of the leverage one gets from lunar (and in time planetary) resource utilization.

Enterprise in space: Free markets or government subsidies?

Free Enterprise:  Business governed by the laws of supply and demand, not restrained by government interference, regulation or subsidy – also called free market.

Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation published a “free-enterprise” critique of the Republican platform in regard to the American civil space program. Indeed, the text of the space plank is vague (no doubt intentionally, so as to give the candidate maximum flexibility to structure the space program to align with his vision and goals for the country).  But what I found most interesting was the underlying premise and assumptions in Tumlinson’s article, a worldview that I find striking.

In brief, Tumlinson approves of the current administration’s direction for our civil space program.  The U.S. has stepped back from pushing toward the Moon, Mars and beyond and redirected NASA on a quest for “game-changing” technologies (to make spaceflight easier and less costly), while simultaneously transitioning launch to low Earth orbit (LEO) operations to private “commercial space” companies selected by our government to compete for research and development funding and contracts.  Many see this as gutting NASA and the U.S. national space program.  To be clear, the term “commercial space” in this context does not refer to the long-established commercial aerospace industry (e.g., Lockheed-Martin, Boeing) but to a collection of startup companies dubbed “New Space” (typically, companies founded by internet billionaires who have spoken much and often about lofty space plans, but have actually flown in space very little).

Tumlinson criticizes the Republican space plank because it does not explicitly declare that a new administration would continue the current policy.  In his view, the very idea of a federal government space program, including a NASA-developed and operated launch and flight system, is a throwback to 1960’s Cold War thinking.  Instead, he envisions space as a field for new, flexible and innovative companies, untainted by stodgy engineering traditions or bloated bureaucracy.  Many space advocates on the web hold this viewpoint – “If only government would get out of the way and give New Space a chance, there will be a renaissance in space travel!”  But travel to where?  And why?

The idea that LEO flight operations should be transitioned to the commercial sector is not new.  It was a recommendation of the 2004 Aldridge Commission report on implementing the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE).  NASA itself started the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (COTS) in 2006, designed to nurture a nascent spaceflight industry by offering subsidies to companies to develop and fly vehicles that could provision and exchange crew aboard the International Space Station.  That effort was envisioned as an adjunct to – not a replacement of – federal government spaceflight capability.

The termination of the VSE and the announcement of the “new direction” in space received high cover from the 2009 Augustine committee report, which concluded that the current “program of record” (e.g., Constellation) was unaffordable.  The Augustine Committee received presentations with options to reconfigure Constellation whereby America could have returned to the Moon (to learn how to use resources found in space) under the existing budgetary cap, but they elected to start from first principles.  Hence, we have something called Flexible Path, which doesn’t set a destination or a mission but calls on us “to develop technology” to go anywhere (unspecified) sometime in the future (also unspecified).  With target dates of 2025 for a “possible” human mission to a near-Earth asteroid and a trip to Mars “sometime in the 2030’s,” timelines and milestones for the Flexible Path offer no clarity or purpose.  Try getting a loan or finding investors using a “flexible” business plan.

Tumlinson argues that both political parties should embrace this new direction because New Space will create greater capability for lower cost sooner.  He also makes much about the philosophical inclinations of the Republican Party (the “conservative” major party in American politics) – Why don’t the Republicans support free enterprise in space?  Why are they putting obstacles in the way of all these new trailblazing entrepreneurs?  As to those obstacles, it is unclear exactly what they are.  True enough, there are regulatory and liability issues with private launch services, but not of such magnitude that they cannot be handled through the traditional means of indemnification (e.g., launch insurance).

The COTS program record of the past decade largely has not been a contract let for services, but a government grant for the technical development of launch vehicles and spacecraft.   Close reading reveals the real issue:  Tumlinson wants more of NASA’s shrinking budget to finance New Space companies. He is concerned that a new administration might cut off this flow of funding.  However, what will cut off the flow of funding is having no market, no direction, and no architectural commitment – regardless of who occupies the White House.

The belief of many New Space advocates is that once they are established to supply and crew the ISS, abundant and robust private commercial markets will emerge for their transportation services.  Although many possible services are envisioned, space tourism is the activity most often mentioned.  Whether such a market emerges is problematic.  Although Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has a back-listed manifest of dozens of people desiring a suborbital thrill ride (at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars), those journeys are infinitely more affordable than a possible orbital trek (which will cost several tens of millions of dollars, at least initially).  Nevertheless, there will no doubt be takers for a ticket.  But what will happen to a commercial space tourism market after the first fatal accident?  New Space advocates often tout their indifference to danger, but such bravado is neither a common nor wise attitude in today’s lawsuit-happy society (not to mention, the inevitable loss of confidence from a limited customer base).  My opinion is that after the first major accident with loss of life, a nascent space tourism industry will become immersed in an avalanche of litigation and will probably fully or partly collapse under the ensuing financial burden.  We are no longer the barnstorming America of the 1920’s and spaceflight is much more difficult than aviation.

Despite labeling themselves “free marketers,” New Space (in its current configuration) looks no different than any other contractor furiously lobbying for government sponsorship through continuation of its subsidies.  True free-market capitalists do not seek government funding to develop a product.  Rather, they devise an answer to an unmet need, identify a market, seek investors and invest their own capital, provide a product or service and only remain viable by making a profit through the sale of their goods and services.

Tumlinson bemoans the attitude of some politicians, ascribing venal and petty motives as to why they do not fully embrace the administration’s new direction, e.g., the oft-thrown label “space pork” to describe support for NASA’s Space Launch System.  In regard to New Space companies, Tumlinson asserts that, “[We] have to both give them a chance and get out of the way.”  But in fact, he does not want government to “get out of the way” – at least not while they’re still shoveling millions into New Space company coffers – nor when they need (and they will) a ruling on, or protection of, their property rights in space.  Any entity that accepts government money is making a “deal with the devil,” whereby it is understood that such money comes with oversight requirements (as well it should, consisting of taxpayer dollars).

Questions about the vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not.” – Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger, 2006

Successful commercialization of space has occurred in the past (e.g., COMSAT) and will occur in the future.  But the creation of a select, subsidized, quasi-governmental industry is not by any stretch of the imagination what we commonly understand free market capitalism to mean.  It is more akin to oligarchical corporatism, a common feature of the post-Soviet, Russian economy.  True private sector space will be created and welcomed, but not through this mechanism, whose most worrisome accomplishment to date has been to effectively distract Americans from noticing the dismantling of their civil space program and preeminence in space.

Neil Armstrong examines a sample from the Sierra Madera impact crater, west Texas during geology training for the Apollo program.

Because of his flying career and the life that he led, Neil Armstrong’s passing has many recounting his place in the history of spaceflight and remembering a life well lived.  He holds a special place in our hearts and a unique place in history – and he always will.

I met Neil Armstrong at a conference, an encounter I won’t forget.  A quiet, unassuming man of medium height and build, pleasant and genial, surrounded by a horde of admirers and well-wishers, I could tell he was slightly uncomfortable with (but resigned to) the adulation he received.  In his mind, the 1969 flight of Apollo 11 was simply another professional assignment he flew as a test pilot – the landing on the Moon was of more significance than his first step on it.  He was an aviator, in every sense of that word.  The landing was an accomplishment for humanity – a giant step for mankind.

My glimpses of Neil come not from personal encounters with him, but from others who knew him.  During a discussion several years ago with Dave Scott (Apollo astronaut and Commander of the 1971 Apollo 15 mission), I inquired about an obscure incident during the 1966 flight of Gemini 8 (flown by Neil and Dave).  That mission conducted the first docking of two spacecraft in space and I wanted to know some details of the emergency experienced by the crew on that flight.

The incident had occurred shortly after the docking, when the Gemini-Agena spacecraft began to roll slightly.  The rate of rotation became greater with time and it was evident that something was very wrong.  Neil, as commander, was responsible for “flying” the spacecraft but couldn’t get the rolling under control.  Thinking that the Agena (their unmanned target vehicle) was responsible, the crew made the decision to undock from it (they were out of contact with Mission Control at the time).  As soon as they did, the Gemini spacecraft started to roll and tumble at an ever increasing and alarming rate.  Dave recalled with a chuckle that Neil looked over at him, pointed at the attitude control stick and said “See if you can do anything with it!”  Dave’s recollection of their exchange gave me a glimpse of a very human moment in a life and death situation.  This was serious – if they couldn’t regain control, they would black out from the centrifugal forces in the tumbling vehicle.  Neil kept his cool, activated the re-entry thrusters and soon stabilized the bucking Gemini spacecraft.  The solution saved their lives but ended the mission, sending them home prematurely but safely.

The story of the first lunar landing is well known.  The automatic systems of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle were targeting the vehicle into a large crater filled with automobile-sized boulders.  Landing there would be disastrous, as the LM would likely topple over on touchdown, eliminating the crew’s ability to liftoff from the Moon and return home.  Taking manual control, Neil (with Mission Control advising the crew they had thirty seconds of fuel left) guided the LM over the hazardous debris field to a safe touchdown a few hundred meters beyond the original landing site.  Tension during the agonizingly long pause in the air-to-ground communications was palpable.  Relief could be heard in Capcom Charlie Duke’s voice as Neil calmly announced that the Eagle had landed.  Yet again, a critical situation expertly handled by a test pilot just doing his job – the calm and collected decision making necessary when flying finicky machines near the edges of their performance envelopes.

Neil’s scientific work on the Moon during his EVA warrants special mention.  Being the first humans to  land on another world, it is understandable that the crew had many ceremonial duties to perform.  Although they had been carefully instructed to stay close to the LM, without informing Mission Control, Neil walked back a hundred meters or so to Little West crater (overflown earlier) to examine and photograph its interior.  Those photos showed the basaltic bedrock of Tranquillity Base – documenting that the Eagle had landed amidst ejecta from that crater thereby establishing the provenance of samples collected during the crew’s limited time on the surface.  According to Gene Shoemaker and Gordon Swann, both of the U.S. Geological Survey, Neil was one of the best students of geology among the Apollo astronauts.  Through his work on the Moon, he showed an ability beyond mere mastery of the facts of geology – he intuitively grasped its objectives, as well as the philosophy of the science.  Like every other facet of the mission, Neil understood and took this role seriously.  No matter what topic was addressed or which role was taken, he could always be counted on to turn in his best performance.

Armstrong understood the historic role of being the first man on the Moon but he never succumbed to the siren call of fame.  He could have cashed in on his status but choose a different path.  He was the quintessence of quiet dignity, possessing the “Aw shucks, t’weren’t nothin’” Gary Cooper-ish manner of understated heroism.  After retirement, he lived happily in his home state of Ohio, taught aeronautics (his first love) at the University of Cincinnati, and advised on various engineering topics and problems for both government and industry.  Throughout NASA’s post-Apollo efforts – without fanfare – he often and freely lent his efforts to the space program.  He served his country with honor and dignity.

As a test pilot, Neil routinely showed his ability to make quick, life saving decisions in dangerous situations.  As a senior spokesman for space, he clearly voiced his concern over the dismantling and destruction of our national space program.  Neil understood that our civil space program is a critical national asset, both as a technology innovator and a source of inspiration for the public.  Who would recognize this more clearly than Neil Armstrong?  From long experience, he knew what kinds of government programs worked and what kind didn’t.  He knew his fellow man.  In appearances before Congress in recent years, he outlined specific objections to our current direction in space.  A true patriot, Neil did not hesitate to voice his opinions, whether they aligned with current policy or not.

It’s become cliché to say that Neil Armstrong holds a unique place in history.  On this occasion, we should pause to consider just how singular his place is.  No one – not the first human to Mars nor the first crew to venture beyond the Solar System – will ever achieve the same level of significance as the first human to step onto the surface of another world.  The flight of Apollo 11 was truly a once in a lifetime event – and by that, I mean in the lifetime of humanity.  That first step was indeed one to “divide history,” as the NASA Public Affairs Office put it at the time.

Goodbye, Neil Armstrong – and thank you.  We’ve lost one of our most authoritative and articulate spokesmen for human spaceflight.  I mourn him and share his valid concerns for our dysfunctional national space program.

Luna 9's view of the lunar surface, the "unauthorized" version (Jodrell Bank Observatory)

Sir Bernard Lovell, the former Director of Britain’s Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory, died recently at the age of 98.  Lovell took the lead in establishing Jodrell Bank near Manchester – one of the world’s premier radio telescopes, a facility that played a lead part in the history of the early space age.  One of its most memorable episodes was its role in releasing the world’s first images taken from the surface of the Moon.

In late January 1966, the USSR launched the probe Luna 9 to the Moon.  The Soviets had tried to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon several times previously.  Each attempt ended in failure.  The United States had the Surveyor project under development, but it had yet to see its first launch.  As was their custom, Jodrell Bank tracked the Luna 9 during its coast to the Moon, listening in on its telemetry signals and documenting the position and velocity of the probe throughout its flight.  On February 3, 1966, with an encounter speed of 6 meters/second (about 13 mph), the probe “crash-landed” on the lunar surface.  Signal transmission from the probe stopped abruptly.  The team at Jodrell Bank assumed that the mission was over, surmising that Luna 9 probably hit the Moon too hard or was designed as a crash lander.  Then to their astonishment, the probe began transmitting radio signals and the observatory recorded them, uncertain as to their meaning.

Lovell thought – suppose these signals were simply an ordinary telefax communication?  If these transmissions were pictures of the lunar surface, perhaps the signals the observatory recorded could be read by a commercial facsimile machine.  But Jodrell Bank Observatory had no such machine; the observatory was a scientific laboratory, which in those days displayed its received radio signals in the form of line graphs made by paper strip recorders.

Enter the power of the press!  The local office of the London Daily Express rushed a fax machine to the observatory where Lovell and his staff printed out the first picture of another planetary surface ever returned to Earth.  Because the staff of the observatory didn’t know anything about Luna 9’s encoding system design, they had to guess at the ratio of the horizontal to vertical dimensions of the image.  They guessed wrong.  The resulting image showed a jagged, rough peak-like surface, although apparently fine-grained. To both the chagrin and annoyance of the Soviet builders of Luna 9, surface images were released to the world press by the British observatory, leading to an amusing sequence of scientific “instant interpretation” that appeared in the press over the days that followed.

In the early days of lunar science, an intense debate raged over the geologic nature of the Moon.  Was it a cold, ancient body that had never undergone melting?  Chemist Harold Urey and Astronomer Thomas Gold thought so.  They postulated that the Moon was a giant, primitive chondrite meteorite, an unmodified piece of the early solar nebula that would tell us about the cold accretion of the planets.  Additionally, Gold was famous for his idea that the dark maria of the Moon were large “dustbowls” in which a heavy spacecraft would slowly sink like a body caught in quicksand on the Earth.

In contrast, many geologists and some astronomers thought otherwise – in their view, the Moon was a body shaped by internal melting, magmatic activity and volcanic eruptions.  These “hot moon” people saw evidence for volcanism in many lunar surface features, from the maria to craters.  Some, such as the founder of the field of planetary geology, Eugene Shoemaker, had a more nuanced viewpoint, ascribing both impact and volcanic origins to specific features, as appropriate.  Although the hard landing American Ranger spacecraft had transmitted high resolution video pictures before hitting the Moon, it did not survive the lunar impact and no one had seen a picture of the surface from a vehicle that landed softly enough to survive and long enough to send back a picture, until now.

A cascade of instant science followed the release of the Jodrell Bank images. Tommy Gold claimed that the pictures validated his dust bowl idea, even though it showed a fine-grained surface strewn with rocks (which Gold thought were clods of fine dust).  Gold also said that the Luna 9 capsule was slowly sinking into the surface (in accordance with his model, of course) and would soon sink out of sight.  Gerard Kuiper of the University of Arizona thought that the surface of the Moon was composed of bare, dust-free bedrock and so interpreted the new Luna 9 images thusly.  U.S. Geological Survey geologist Hal Masursky said that the image looked like the rough, clinkery surface of a jagged lava flow (a surface for which geologists give the Hawaiian name “aa”) and was clearly of volcanic origin.  An eager reporter pressed him:  this surface is volcanic – isn’t that where gold is sometimes found on Earth?  Hal distractedly nodded agreement, leading to the ludicrous headline that Luna 9 had found veins of gold on the Moon.

Alas, there was gold — scientific gold.  The distortion of the image caused by a wrong guess of the aspect ratio by the staff of Jodrell Bank soon was corrected when the Soviets released their own version of the image.  The lunar surface consists of fine-grained dust, smooth and undulating (because of the presence of a myriad of small surface craters), with the occasional rock lying about — no dust bowls, no bare bedrock, no “quicksand,” no aa lava flows, and no veins of gold.  The disappointment of the press was palpable.

The tendency of scientists to see confirmation of their own predispositions in the new data is striking.  We all are human, possessing the natural inclination to interpret new data in a way most favorable to our own long-held beliefs.  In this instance, a simple and excusable error in the reconstruction of the surface image led to abundant egg on the faces of most of the world’s experts on lunar science.  Instant science is often wrong at worst or incomplete at best.

First flight of Langley's aerodrome - one second after launch and one second before impact

During a recent talk to a gathering of students, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke of his longstanding interest in space by mentioning the dust-up over comments he made about a Moon colony during the GOP primary.  He expanded this episode into a teaching moment about the nature of innovation and progress in space.  Gingrich is vigorous in his enthusiasm for space exploration but is not a devotee of the current agency and its programs.  In his considered opinion, we need to re-think our approach to space exploration and use more innovative, non-bureaucratic approaches to develop space systems and capabilities.

A historian by training, Gingrich often uses historical analogies to illustrate his point.  On this occasion, he spoke of the experiences of the Wright Brothers and Samuel P. Langley in the development of the first airplane.  As Gingrich relates it, after several failed attempts the Wright brothers finally achieved flight on December 17, 1903, spending in total about $500.  In contrast, Langley (the recipient of a $50,000 government grant) failed in his attempt to fly when his “aerodrome” crashed into the waters of the Potomac River (the actual amounts spent were “less than $1000” and $70,000 respectively, according to James Tobin’s excellent book on the subject).  That powered aircraft might have military use was not a new idea and the then-recent war with Spain led to a re-examination of our defense posture, with the military eager to fund Langley’s aeronautical experiments.

Gingrich contrasts the “faster, cheaper, better” (and successful) approach of the Wrights to the supposedly bureaucratic, measured failure of Langley and suggests that this incident parallels the current differences between the approach of “New Space” (an umbrella term referring to the variety of current efforts by the private sector to develop spaceflight capability) and our federal civil space program.  In other words, it’s not the lack of resources or technology that’s holding us back – it’s our business model.  He suggests that many of the central tenants of “New Space” (including the offering of prizes as technical incentives and “lean” management models) will accomplish more in space than we’ve received through government programs and for much less expenditure.

The historical story is interesting but did Gingrich draw the correct conclusion?  Should the success of the Wright brothers be attributed to how they approached the problem or to how much it cost?  In contrast to Gingrich’s suggestion, Samuel Langley did not represent an enormous, bloated and hidebound bureaucracy.   At the turn of the century, the Smithsonian Institution was not the behemoth it is today.  Langley had been hired as an assistant secretary for international affairs at the Smithsonian.  Secretary Spencer Baird died eight months after Langley reported for work, leaving open that position, which Langley accepted.  He wanted to continue his aeronautical experiments and used the facilities of the Smithsonian (including its shops and technicians) to build and test his flying machines.

Langley built a high-powered internal combustion engine for his aircraft, producing greater horsepower per unit weight than any other effort of the time, including the one used by the Wright brothers.  The failure of Langley’s aerodrome largely resulted from its design; the dihedral cross-section of its wings led to instability in any type of wind.  Wilbur Wright described this problem in a June 1903 talk – an understanding that came from the brothers’ experiments with wing shapes on kites at Kitty Hawk.  The Wright flyer used wing-warping to create control surfaces, which made it possible for a pilot to steer the airplane in variable wind conditions.  The Langley aerodrome was naturally unstable; with its wing shape, any gust or cross-wind rendered the aircraft uncontrollable.  In other words, the success of the Wright brothers was due to a superior technical approach, not to their management model.

For anyone who has dealt with bureaucracy, freedom from the ponderous administrative overhead of a government agency is always an enticing vision.  But in many ways, it is orthogonal to the real issue – what are you trying to accomplish and by what means or mechanism?  The Wrights and Langley both knew what they were trying to do, but only one of them had the correct technical approach.  Their technical choices determined the outcome of their efforts, not the total amount of money spent nor the managerial structure of their respective projects.  If so, can we draw any conclusions from this and apply it to the current model of our national civil space program?  The idea that government cannot do anything right is understandably attractive and in vogue, but not completely borne out by the evidence.

As a counter-example to Gingrich’s history of early aviation, consider a technical development project closer to us in time and memory.  A nuclear ship that has to refuel only every few years has an enormous advantage over one that needs near-constant refueling.  The United States possesses a nuclear navy (both aircraft carriers and submarines) largely because of the vision and persistence of one man, Admiral Hyman Rickover.  A true visionary, Rickover believed that nuclear reactors could be made small enough to fit into a ship and safe enough to entrust the lives of thousands of men to such vessels.  For years he fought the navy and the Defense Department to sell the advantages of nuclear sea power to the Congress and President.  Today we have such a fleet largely because of his vision and determined efforts.  And nobody ever took a poll to see if a nuclear navy would “excite and engage” the public.

Newt Gingrich is a true believer of humanity’s future in space.  I admire his dedication and courage in speaking the truth as he sees it.  However, in this case, I believe he has drawn the wrong lesson from history.  Compelling national interests sometimes require the marshalling of our combined will and resources.  We need a dedicated federal space program with a clear strategic direction and the know-how to pull off difficult technical tasks.  No cult of management or prize money will have us walking again on the Moon or using its resources.

For our country to remain vibrant and strong, it is vital that Americans be called upon to engage in the mental and physical challenges of a national space program, coupled to the realities and challenges inherent in an expanding cislunar territory and new markets.  Our pioneering space legacy needs to be embraced and celebrated through a renewed commitment from our government.  If Americans forfeit this direction and opportunity because their government cannot see the danger in the current path, we will have grievously failed in our promise as a nation and our obligation and duty to future generations.

The Falcon 1 lifts off!

Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) in 2002.  Its stated business objective was the development of launch services for a fraction of the cost of the then-available commercial launch providers – to the greatest extent practicable, they would create reusable pieces of its launch system, thereby greatly lowering the cost of space access.  Toward that end, SpaceX sponsored the development of its own launch vehicle and engines, using a vertically integrated business model in which SpaceX would design, fabricate, prepare and operate a launch system.

Alan Boyle’s recent review of commercial efforts to supply the International Space Station naturally included coverage of the successful flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon’s delivery demonstration.  The article focused on the way commercial space is financed, specifically how NASA is sponsoring the development of some of these capabilities.  This financial arrangement is the basis for a point repeatedly voiced by critics of the heralded vision of “New Space” replacing “government” space – a company like SpaceX is not actually commercial in the traditional free market sense, but simply another government-funded contractor using a different procurement model.

Falcon 1 was the first rocket developed by SpaceX.  It is a two-stage launch vehicle capable of putting a metric ton (1000 kg) into low Earth orbit.  Falcon 1 uses a single Merlin, a SpaceX-developed, LOX-kerosene rocket engine producing ~570,000 newtons of thrust (for comparison, a single Shuttle main engine burns LOX-hydrogen fuel and produces about 2,300,000 newtons of thrust).  The Falcon 1 was designed to put relatively small satellites into low earth orbit.  With such payload capacity, it is also capable of sending 100-200 kg microsats beyond LEO, into cislunar space.

Much of the private start-up capital for SpaceX was used to develop the Falcon 1.  They also received some government funding from other than NASA.  The Department of Defense (DoD) had need for reliable, quick, and cheap space access for small payloads.  To that end, SpaceX received funding from several DoD entities, including several million dollars from the U.S. Air Force under a program to develop launch capability for DARPA (a defense research agency).  Space X was given access to and the use of DoD launch facilities at the Reagan Test Site (formerly Kwajalein Missile Range) in the Marshall Islands.

The early days of Falcon 1 development were not pretty.  The first launch failed after 25 seconds of flight.  The second flight successfully launched and staged, but did not reach orbit.  After the third attempt at flight failed during staging, a review board looked in detail at SpaceX’s launch processing stream and made recommendations for some significant changes.  The next launch was successful in putting a dummy payload into orbit.  In July 2009, six years after Falcon 1 development had begun, SpaceX achieved its first (and so far, only) commercial space success with the launch and orbit of the Malaysian RazakSAT imaging satellite on a Falcon 1 launch.

Typically when a space company finally achieves a long-sought success, it moves rapidly to exploit the new vehicle’s operational status and begins to aggressively market and sell its new launch service.  However, no Falcon 1 launch has occurred since the success of RazakSAT.  A visit to the SpaceX web site describes the Falcon 1 vehicle, but at the bottom of the page it states that a Falcon 1 launch is no longer available for purchase.  Instead, small, one-ton class payloads will be accommodated in the future through “piggyback” rides on the new, Falcon 9 medium-class launch vehicle.

For a company to spend six years and start up money developing a needed launch system, only to abandon it just as success and profit is at hand, is difficult to sort through.  One could be forgiven for imagining that the development of the Falcon 1 as a commercial launch system was never intended but rather a pretext to flight qualify the pieces (specifically the Merlin 1 engine) used in the nine-engine cluster that powers the Falcon 9 launcher.  Interestingly, others have noted that the now-cancelled NASA Constellation Ares I launch vehicle (“The Stick”), purportedly designed to launch the new Orion spacecraft to LEO, likewise appeared to be more of a development effort than a flight project, in that its various pieces (e.g., cryogenic upper stage, five-segment SRB) were all needed to build the large Ares V heavy lift rocket.

Meanwhile, customers in need of low-cost options for launching small payloads are out of luck.  Falcon 9 has yet to launch an ounce of commercial payload and Falcon 1 is not for sale.  Of course, one can launch small satellites using Orbital’s Taurus launch vehicle, but its ~$50-70 M cost and recent record of unreliability (e.g., the Glory satellite launch failure) engender neither comfort nor confidence.  More significantly, after investing in the R&D effort of a new, unproven company that was offering a low cost, small launch vehicle, SpaceX’s original DoD customers, banking on the creation of a quick, inexpensive capability to launch small satellites, saw their support of Falcon 1 go by the board.  It appears that SpaceX dropped their initial operational vehicle for the promotion and promise of far more ambitious and distant goals.

That template seems to work for them – NASA has “invested” more than $500 million in the Falcon 9 over the last five years.  Now, SpaceX holds court to advance their founder’s Mars fantasies and plans for a Falcon “heavy” launch vehicle – designed and marketed as sending very large payloads into space, at unbelievably low prices.  (As an aside, I thought that a New Space article of faith is that heavy lift is a boondoggle and that fuel depots are the way to go beyond LEO.)

When New Space advocates characterize old NASA contractors, legacy launch companies and politicians with NASA centers in their districts as “pigs at the trough of government funding,” they’d be wise to watch out for a “pig” donning falcon feathers.  Debate, like competition is good and helpful but only useful when advocates honestly pitch their abilities, services, products and intentions.   Money is an important consideration, however our nation’s ability to compete in the arena of space must be the overriding concern.  In light of the current situation, that ability is slipping further and further away.  We need to honestly assess what we’re buying before nothing remains of our decades long investment and leadership role in space.

Two Presidential announcements on space

In the aftermath of a major Space Shuttle accident, an incumbent President decides that our civil space program needs a bold new strategic direction.  In a major public speech, he outlines a path to return to the Moon and go to Mars.  The space agency responds with full-color sales brochures, committee meetings, community workshops, and a thousand charts outlining the steps they will take to carry out the new direction.  A couple of years pass, a new President takes office, and then – promptly cancels the initiative of the previous administration.

Sound familiar?  This has happened in our space history – twice.

In 1989, after much agency soul-searching following the loss of seven crew members aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, President George H. W. Bush took to the steps of the National Air and Space Museum and announced what was soon dubbed the “Space Exploration Initiative (SEI),” a long-range program to send people beyond low Earth orbit, first to the Moon and then to Mars.  NASA responded to this challenge by outlining an architecture imaginatively named the “90-Day Study.”  It called for the development of new launch vehicles, new modules, transfer spacecraft and numerous robotic elements, including lunar and martian orbiters and landers (most of them extensions of existing hardware and designs).  Financial analysts somehow arrived at an aggregate cost of $600 billion (which also included assembly of ISS) and everyone gasped.

After numerous politicians and bureaucrats scoffed disapproval, a special ad hoc group was convened to re-examine the objectives and devise a less expensive approach for implementing SEI.  Their report was delivered and immediately put on the shelf.  In the ensuing three years, a new NASA Administrator was named, Congress refused to increase the NASA budget, and President Clinton cancelled SEI.

In 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, killing its crew of seven.  The agency investigated and concluded that foam shed during launch destroyed the integrity of the vehicle’s thermal protection system, causing the loss of the Shuttle.  In January of the following year, President George W. Bush announced a new strategic direction for space – the “Vision for Space Exploration (VSE),” a long-range program to send people beyond low Earth orbit – first to the Moon and then to Mars.  NASA responded to this challenge by outlining an architecture to implement the new direction that called for the development of new launch vehicles, new modules, transfer spacecraft, and numerous robotic elements (including orbiters and landers for both the Moon and Mars – most of them extensions of existing hardware and designs).

Once again a committee was convened to examine the agency’s implementation of the new direction.  Another report was written and put on a shelf.  During numerous meetings and workshops spread over several years, an architecture emerged – accompanied by many charts (all electronic this time – technology marches on!). President Obama terminated the VSE in April, 2010 during a speech at the John F. Kennedy Space Center (“We choose NOT to go to the Moon!” – the historical resonances astound!).

What, if anything, is to be learned from these two sequences of events?  According to Mark Albrecht, Executive Secretary of the National Space Council in the Bush-41 White House, it means that the space agency is fundamentally broken – comprised of various constituencies that protect turf and resist implementing any new direction that may challenge or threaten their existence.  However, there is another possible reading of the situation.  The space agency was in a very different predicament during SEI than it was during the VSE.  In 1990, NASA had a clear but unfulfilled mission – Space Station Freedom, for which not a single element had yet been launched.  NASA’s anxiety at the time was uncertainty in being able to execute both Station and SEI simultaneously.  The oft-quoted 30-year, $600 billion cost of SEI, repeated by the media to denigrate the effort, included construction and operation of Station, which was to serve as both an orbital platform for missions beyond LEO and as a source of hardware (e.g., habitation modules) that could be adapted to trans-LEO missions.  Even so, most of the costing assumptions in the 90-Day Study were inflated beyond reason, presumably following in the footsteps of former NASA Administrator James Webb, who after reportedly being told that Apollo would cost about $20 billion, asked for more than $35 billion as a cushion.

In contrast, the VSE came along just as NASA was in the middle of ISS construction, with the program’s end clearly in sight.  There was no future plan for human spaceflight beyond Shuttle/ISS and the agency sorely needed some high-level direction.  The idea of Shuttle replacement came from the Columbia Accident Investigations Board report, which contended that the Shuttle system was inherently dangerous and that we ought to develop a new space transportation system as soon as possible.  In contrast to uninformed reporting and Internet mythology, President Bush did not “retire” the Shuttle – he ordered that it first be brought back to flight status (so that ISS construction could be completed) and then transitioned and replaced with new human spacecraft capable of journeys beyond LEO (which became the now-cancelled Project Constellation).  In contrast to SEI, the VSE came to NASA with price limits already in place – after a small incremental increase in the early years, it was to cost no more than we were then spending on human spaceflight (about $8 billion per year) with funding available from the gradual decline in spending on the Shuttle/Station program.  Finally, unlike SEI, which never had much Congressional support, NASA was given two Authorization bills (in 2005 and 2008) that strongly endorsed the VSE (many VSE goals, though ignored, remain in the current 2010 Authorization).

Although neither SEI nor the VSE succeeded in their principal objectives of sending people beyond low Earth orbit, they did manage to greatly advance our understanding of just what is at stake.  In the case of the former, a variety of people from the defense and civil space sectors worked together on SEI, creating networks that advanced an outbound agenda.  One accomplishment was the Clementine mission, a joint effort by the Department of Defense’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and NASA.  Flying in 1994, Clementine successfully mapped the entire Moon in eleven spectral bands, mapping its mineral composition in detail.  Clementine made the first global topographic map of that body and most significantly, found evidence for the presence of water ice in the dark areas near the south pole of the Moon.  The success of Clementine led to the Lunar Prospector mission, a robotic orbiter flown under NASA’s Discovery program, that both confirmed the excess hydrogen at the poles of the Moon and globally mapped the Moon’s chemical composition.

The intriguing results from Clementine and Lunar Prospector resulted in an international fleet of six spacecraft being sent to the Moon in the past decade, adding to our knowledge of the processes, history and potential utility of that body.  From this exploration, we now know that the Moon contains millions of tons of harvestable water.  We possess detailed maps of lunar physical and compositional properties.  In short, we now know that the Moon is habitable and is both an appropriate near-term destination for people and a unique enabling asset for future spaceflight within and beyond the Earth-Moon system.

Now, just as we find the Moon to be an attractive destination, we shrink away from the challenge, watching as others blaze trails we once traveled.  We willingly accept the pablum to not fret over new space powers who do not cancel their programs.  We are told they have not yet done all that we have and that we still carry the mantle of the world’s leading space power.  This is not logical. Similar thoughts once prevailed in Portugal, during an earlier age of exploration.  One doesn’t assume or retain the mantle of leadership by fiat or declaration – it must be earned and exercised.  Perhaps the real issue is not whether NASA is up to the task but rather, whether we as Americans are blind to the truth, unable to recognize that by having our nation withdraw from this arena, that we are retreating from our position, thereby ceding our prosperity, leadership and greatness to other nations who do have the will and the vision to press forward.

Shenzhou 9 lifts off for rendezvous and docking in space

With the weekend launch of the latest Shenzhou spacecraft and its successful rendezvous and docking with an orbiting space station, world attention is once again focused on China’s flourishing space program.  Although China’s human spaceflight efforts currently focus on low Earth orbit, in recent years they have sent two robotic orbital spacecraft to the Moon and have announced their intentions for a lunar lander/rover mission.  These efforts lead many in the west to speculate that a presence on the Moon is a likely and realistic goal for China’s space future.  In terms of the possible purpose for such lunar efforts, things are little more vague.  Most assume that China will go to the Moon for reasons similar to the geopolitical motives that impelled America to undertake the Apollo missions.  While some actually welcome China’s aspirations to conquer the Moon, other space observers smirk at their apparent willingness to (as they characterize it) “waste billions of dollars to repeat what America did thirty years ago.”  Others understand why China aims for the Moon.

The United States currently has no strategic space goal.  Many in the U.S. space community argue that the development of commercial launch services through federal subsidies is a goal.  To smooth the path for this approach, calls for consensus have been made by some New Space advocates.  Funding to support the research and development costs of these new commercial services would come by excising chunks of the rapidly dwindling NASA budget.   “Flat or declining” now describes the American civil space program budget and regularly reaching LEO to supply ISS has become our “new” vision.

In contrast, China is conducting an incremental, step-wise effort to gradually but inexorably extend their reach and influence in space, first into low Earth orbit and then into cislunar space and beyond.  Their approach uses a variety of hardware derived from existing systems while adding new capabilities over time.  China appears to be focused and following clear, long-range goals in space.  Because we do not look ahead on timescales of 20-30 years (accustomed instead to a 5-10 year timeframe), we have no long-range strategy to guide what we build or a plan for securing any long-term space goals.

Certainly wide-ranging concerns propel China’s push for human space access, some that can be envisioned now and some that cannot.  But fundamentally, they have accepted the proposition that freedom of space in the 21^st century is equivalent to the principle of freedom of the seas that governed 19^th and 20^th century geopolitics.   In short, such a principle comprises the ability to project power and to protect national interests whenever and wherever China might be confronted within the strategic theater in question, in this case, the domain of cislunar space.

I have written before on the economic, strategic and scientific value of cislunar space, the zone in which virtually all of our space assets and satellites reside.  China intends to preserve her freedom of action by creating a spaceflight capability that can access and use any location of cislunar space, up to and including the lunar surface.  To build a sustainable space program using incremental, cumulative steps, it makes no sense to “leapfrog” over (or to ignore) the intermediate locations from which space faring capability and utility can be demonstrated, established and used.

Much of the published speculation on China’s interest in the Moon focuses on mining the Moon for the nuclear fusion fuel ³He or substances found on the lunar surface, such as titanium or rare earth elements.  In fact, one of the simplest substances found on the Moon has enormous value in space – water.  Water can be used to support human life, as a medium of energy storage, and as rocket propellant.  Water is the currency of spaceflight and one of the most valuable, usable substances we could obtain from any extraterrestrial object.

If I wanted to establish a secure foothold for my country in cislunar space, I would secure the territory near the poles of the Moon.  We know from the results of several recent probes that the lunar poles contain billions of tons of water, much of it chemically unbound as ice, a particularly easy form to harvest, concentrate and use. Material and energy resources, concentrated together in a compact location are assets of immense economic and strategic value.  Wars have been waged over less.

International treaty prohibits claims of extraterrestrial territory by national entities.  But treaties are “gentlemen’s agreements” and sometimes nations do not behave like gentlemen.  There is no mechanism to enforce the 1967 Outer Space Treaty except for a given country’s unwillingness to undergo international opprobrium.  Moreover, a country can withdraw from the treaty at will.  China tends to do what it wants to do, unless the economic or political price is perceived to be too high.  The potential of the Moon and cislunar space may outweigh their sense of geopolitical risk or concern about international ostracism.

What does this mean for the United States?  To listen to many in the space press, nothing.  A quick yawn and then back to propagandizing for more federal dollars to be passed on to new space companies.  But ultimately, it could mean that their libertarian dreams of a profit-making space frontier will never come to pass.  If free market capitalism and democratic political institutions are to have a future in the new frontier of space, entities, investors and consumers who share these values must secure a notable presence.  If the United States has a vigorous civil space program that creates a permanent presence there, such a system may have a chance to take root.  Conversely, our absence is almost a guarantee that our system and values will not be the guiding paradigm on the new frontier.

For many observers, an absent America (or with a mere supporting role) would be acceptable.  They believe America is what’s wrong with the world and that it’s high time that we step aside (in their opinion to one of subservience and irrelevance – certainly not one of power projection or as an economic engine and technology driver).  Parties (and countries) that lead make the rules.  While China has a great industrial base and a large, seemingly market-based economic system, it is actually a system of big government corporatism, where central planners decide which industries shall be allowed to grow and in what direction – capitalism, under total governmental control.

China is a rapidly advancing technically and is one of our largest trading partners, attributes beneficial in relationships between equals.  Historically, once a shift occurs in the status of partners, relationships change.  Because China’s influence in the world is growing, it is vital that we discuss and weigh these facts.  Our national economic and security interests cannot be jeopardized by a misguided rush to hand our space future over to companies who are in the imagining stage of what China just accomplished this weekend.

Chesley Bonestell's "Conquest of Space" (1949)

The influence of the arts on our popular culture is well known. The television generation grew up with Forbidden Planet and Star Trek, shaping our sensibilities and expectations about space travel.  The genre of “space art” enlightened and expanded our minds and ignited our imaginations.  The sixties and seventies brought us  “space” artists with their startlingly realistic vistas of unvisited worlds and ancient times.  Authors, writing for all ages and levels of interest, found eager audiences.  From the beginning, the space age left an indelible mark on many.

The spiritual father of these efforts was an artist from the earlier half of the century.  Renowned for what was called “astronomical art,” Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986) painted some of the most famous and classic works of space art.  His sequence showing the ringed giant planet Saturn from its various moons inspired hundreds of students to take up math and science.  Bonestell loved painting the planets because he was convinced that we would soon be visiting them.  His artwork was used to illustrate what media described and popularized about the forthcoming age of planetary exploration.

Bonestell made great efforts to get the technical details of his paintings correct.  He read the scientific literature so that his planetary landscapes reflected the most current knowledge of how his imagined scenes might really appear.  One of his classic pieces of work was for the influential film Destination Moon, produced in 1950 and based on stories by the classic science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein.  Bonestell did matte paintings for the Earth departure and lunar approach scenes.  His masterpiece in that effort was a fourteen-foot long, full panoramic view of the surface used during the lunar stay scenes in the movie.

Bonestell reminded his audience that our home planet is nearby — the backyard of near-Earth space.  Earth hangs relatively low in the sky over the horizon of the crater Harpalus in Mare Frigoris (latitude 52°N); rough jagged peaks, starkly lit by unfiltered blazing sunlight, are set sharply against a black sky holding a sea of silent, non-twinkling stars.  The demands of film intruded onto his artistic vision through the addition of giant cracks on the surface, a modification to which Bonestell objected.  The producer, George Pal, needed the surface cracks so that he could starkly illustrate perspective, as nearby human-scale cracks would rapidly fade into smaller ones in the distance.  Bonestell wanted to show just a dusty surface, a far-field contrast that would have been difficult to portray on the screen.

It is in regard to his portrayal of the mountains of the Moon that Bonestell has received, if not criticism, at least light censure (not without some slightly smug condescension) from some scientists.  He painted a lunar landscape ringed with rough, jagged peaks, towering about the plains, similar to the barren landscape of Death Valley in his native California.  In part, this was the conventional portrayal of lunar mountains; drawings made by engineer/astronomer James Nasmyth in the 19^th Century likewise show jagged mountains on the Moon.  Telescopic views leave this impression, based largely on the dramatic appearance of sharp cast shadows on the lunar surface, visible at low sun elevations as shadows of the ringed mountains of the mare basins extend hundreds of kilometers across the flat plains of the dark maria.

The remarkable smoothness of the lunar mountains was evident when Apollo 15 went to the Moon in 1971.  To the disappointment of many, Bonestell’s vision of rugged, craggy peaks (blindingly illuminated by early morning sunlight in the black sky) gave way to an undramatic,  smooth, undulating terrain, so bland that it was difficult to gain any perspective on distance.  The sense of letdown among space buffs was widespread and illustrated most dramatically in a 1990 painting by David Hardy entitled The Way It Should Have Been, which paid tribute to Bonestell’s now-obsolete vision of lunar vistas by showing an Apollo Lunar Module snugly parked amidst the craggy peaks of Bonestell’s old Moon.

LROC 2011 view of the central peak of the crater Tycho (left) and Bonestell painting for the 1961 book "Rocket to the Moon." (click on image for close-up view)

More of the Moon’s physical appearance has been unveiled.  The recent fleet of spacecraft that orbited the Moon has shown us dramatic vistas never before seen.  The spectacular high-definition television of Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft (by the way, when will NHK release a Blu-ray video disk of all that magnificent footage?) displays awesome landscapes that slowly drift beneath the orbiting vehicle, and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera system has provided some unique and remarkable views.  Some of the most dramatic are oblique-looking perspective views of famous lunar landmarks.  An oblique panorama of the floor of Tycho, the prominent rayed crater on the lunar near side, shows its magnificent, rugged central peak rising out of the inky darkness of the early lunar morning.  That description sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  In fact, when I first saw the new Tycho oblique, I seemed to recall a specific Bonestell painting that was very similar to it.  It was one that Bonestell did for an early 1960’s book, Rocket to the Moon.  The distant peak in Bonestell’s painting eerily foreshadows the dramatic LROC image by 50 years.

Chesley Bonestell’s Moon lives!  Fresh, uneroded features there are as sharp and dramatic as he portrayed them half a century ago.  As lunar features slowly erode under constant sandblasting by micrometeorites and downslope movement of debris, they become smooth and rounded.  The Apennine mountains at the Apollo 15 landing site are smooth because they formed almost 4 billion years ago, in the early dawn of lunar evolution.  In contrast, the central peaks of Tycho were thrust up a mere 100 million years ago, a blink of the eye in lunar geologic terms.  In a couple of billion years, it too will round off and mellow, a gentle undulation on the floor of a nearly obliterated crater.

“The Way It Should Have Been?”  Nah – the way it really is.  On the Moon, as on Earth, spectacular landscapes feed the human spirit and kindle our desire to travel to new places.

A lunar base creates new capabilities (Pat Rawlings/SAIC)

Where does the Moon fit into plans for future human space exploration?  From reading the space media, you might get the idea that the very notion is dead and buried, killed by President Obama’s casual dismissal of the idea in a speech over two years ago at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, followed this year by Mitt Romney’s dismissive remarks on the Moon during the Republican primaries.  Nevertheless, many in the international community (and in the United States) are keeping the lunar flame alive for a variety of reasons, not the least among them being that it is understood that politicians aren’t rocket scientists – nor should we expect them to be.

The Global Exploration Conference (GLEX) held last month in Washington DC was remarkable for the fact that most of our international space partners are proceeding with plans for lunar return as though its abandonment had never occurred.  The Russians were particularly eager to express their desire to establish capability on the Moon at the meeting, while in recent months strong interest in permanent lunar return has been expressed by the Europeans, Canada, India, Japan and of course, China.  Moreover, unlike many within our own national space agency, the world sees the Moon not simply as a box to be checked-off on the way to Mars but as the enabling asset for space exploration.  As Vladimir Popovkin, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos put it, “It’s a new Moon,” pointing out that the recently confirmed discovery of water at the poles of the Moon enables sustainable, permanent habitation of that body and the creation of new capabilities for voyages to the planets.

Our international space partners believe that spaceflight beyond LEO should entail incremental steps that will gradually extend reach and capability.  Once such a paradigm is adopted, expensive designer missions to plant a flag or do a “touch-and-go” at an asteroid are seen as having limited value and making no economic sense.  On the other hand, the gradual expansion beyond LEO using nearby assets builds a permanent, lasting space faring capability.  The Moon fits into such a scheme by virtue of both its proximity and usefulness.  In the absence of some technical miracle, such as the discovery of new physics that fundamentally change the nature of spaceflight, we are wedded to rocket technology for the foreseeable future.  The rocket equation dictates that it will remain difficult and expensive to reach space and operate there.  Given such problems, some now recognize and conclude that the Moon offers provisioning capability and for this reason and many others, is a desirable destination and near-term goal.

Our pioneering (and current) model of space access requires launching everything from Earth’s surface, taking months to complete a mission, yet gathering minimal information (due to limited time in the vicinity of its designated target) and leaving no lasting or reusable infrastructure in space.  This template guarantees that human spaceflights will be infrequent, expensive and subject to abrupt cancellation due to political whims.   If one views the civil space program primarily as an annoying expenditure whose ambitions must be constrained by making a previously small portion of the program (such as “commercial” launch services) the raison d’être of the entire effort and deferring any real goals to an indefinite and nebulous future, our current path might seem completely reasonable.  However, it appears that the international community believes that space is a real theater of human endeavor and their goal is to make it part of their domain and utility – until recently, also a goal of the American space program.  Perhaps it still is.

Despite common perception, the Moon has not been officially abandoned as a goal for the United States space program.  The current NASA Authorization Act of 2010 lays out the goals and approaches to be followed by the agency in executing its mission.  The Findings by the Congress (section 301) outlines the rationale and goals of the space agency’s human exploration efforts.  As I have written previously, in the seven points dealing with future agency activities, cislunar space is mentioned in four and the lunar surface is called out twice as destinations.  Development of the ability to use the in situ resources of space to create infrastructure is specifically cited in Sec. 301a (4).  The entire section 301 is worth a careful reading.  It calls for a program that uses a gradual, incremental approach to the extension of human reach in space beyond LEO, specifically specifying both commercial and international participation.  There is nothing in the current law that is at odds with the plans and desires of the international community as expressed at the recent GLEX meeting.  The only place one reads about the Moon being abandoned as a national goal for America is in the press and such cases, it is always in the context of a single off-hand remark in one Presidential speech.

From the perspective of two years later, that off-hand remark sounds increasingly ill thought-out and hollow.  Given its context in the speech, the statement seems to derive from the idea that lunar return must perforce be a repeat of the Apollo experience of 30 years ago.  NASA itself has fed this idea, depicting the return to the Moon as the equivalent of a Gemini program within the Apollo-to-Mars fixation of many in the agency.  In their 2006 preliminary plans for lunar return, NASA started out properly by describing the development of an outpost at one of the poles of the Moon and emphasizing human presence and development, but over the next few years architectural studies increasingly drifted away from an outpost and towards the sortie concept, in which we would stage (entirely from Earth) and execute one-off missions to sites of scientific interest all over the Moon for visits of limited duration.  Such an exploration approach dissipates assets and thus increases costs and reduces surface capability and infrastructure.  It was this exploratory approach to lunar return that the Augustine committee evaluated and declared to be “unaffordable,” not the concept of building a centralized outpost that could support ISRU and space development (an approach that the committee did not even consider).

President Obama signed the NASA Authorization bill of 2010 – a bill crafted when his party controlled Congress – and the findings presented in that bill are now law.  So even though the agency and most of the media seem to be blissfully unaware of it, NASA has been charged by Congress to develop space systems capable of conducting missions to and throughout cislunar space, including to the lunar surface.  Our international partners agree with this intended direction, convinced that the Moon is the appropriate next destination for humans in space.

NASA’s reluctance to go in this direction, even while other nations are making plans, forfeits the opportunity for our international leadership in space.  Our space program has to demonstrate the feasibility of using lunar resources to secure us a place as participants and entrepreneurs in the vast economic future of space.

The Falcon 9 launch vehicle (SpaceX/Chris Thompson)

If things go according to plan Saturday, the world will witness SpaceX launch its first Dragon cargo supply mission to the International Space Station.  As this flight has been heralded as the dawn of a new age in spaceflight – a paradigm shift in the way the spaceflight is approached – it is appropriate to step back for some reflection and perspective on what this flight may or may not represent.  As noted by many, this particular cargo flight has a lot riding on it – with overarching concern for success (even if a bit unfair), created in part both by vociferous advocacy and excessive public pronouncements.

1.  A successful or unsuccessful result from this flight neither confirms nor negates the value and/or viability of commercial spaceflight.

This proposition should be obvious.  Launch to orbit is an inherently difficult and risky endeavor.  Even launch vehicles with long histories of reliable flight fail, sometimes with distressing frequency.  We tend to think that space access should be routine but that appearance is deceiving; spaceflight is never routine, simply because orbital flight is possible only on the very edge of our capability.  Think of it as carrying a heavy load of luggage while ice skating – you may know how to do it and you may even pull it off successfully a number of times, but if you start taking it for granted, a fall on the posterior is quite likely (with this eventuality more probable in the early stages of the endeavor).

Looked at in another way, a successful mission does not “prove” the case for commercial human spaceflight (the case for commercial unmanned space launch has long since been proven) nor does it negate its feasibility.  The real issue with commercial human spaceflight is the existence of a market.  Right now, such a market does not exist.  New Space advocates have unlimited faith that one will emerge, but hope is not a business plan.  It will take years of successful commercial launches (and safe returns) for the creation of a genuine commercial market.  The uncertainties in the future legal status of commercial human spaceflight is enough to give one pause – contemplate the likely consequences following the first fatal accident in a commercial human spaceflight, after the ambulance chasers get their teeth into the flesh of every company who ever had anything whatsoever to do with the flight.

2.  The creation of SpaceX capability is not “commercial” in the sense that we in the capitalist United States of America understand it.  Likewise, a government space program is not “socialism.”

The word commercial has been re-branded.  Previously, in most entrepreneurs’ way of thinking, “commercial” enterprise meant that a person or group drew up a business plan, raised private capital and shouldered the financial risk in an attempt to make a profit by providing a product or service.  The understanding of the term “commercial space” has been stretched to encompass a business plan where a start-up company requests (and expects) government subsidies on their promise of future delivery of a product and/or service.  Because it’s not “run” by the government, this form of government-sponsored crony capitalism is now deemed “commercial.”   Financial tweaking is not how most would understand or define a new paradigm in space travel.

Typically during the last 50 years of our federal civil space program, we were working toward some clearly articulated, reachable (that adjective is important) goal on some kind of timetable.  Because spaceflight, particularly the manned variety, was considered to be dangerous and technically cutting edge, the program was more of an engineering research program than the deployment of an operational transportation system.  Such R&D has important national security and economic ramifications and as such, fits perfectly under the constitutional requirement for the federal government to provide for the common defense and promote economic development.  If that’s “socialism,” then America has been a socialist country from its founding.

3. True commercial space firms exist, but they are pursuing their goals quietly and generally without excessive hype.  They do not rely on government money to support their R&D costs.

Burt Rutan developed Space Ship One for Paul Allen in order to win the Ansari X-Prize (and did) and is currently developing a new spacecraft for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic suborbital spaceline.  Robert Bigelow’s company took a discarded NASA design for inflatable spacecraft and is developing a future commercial space station, available for sale of lease (it’s the transportation problem to and from his station that’s holding him back.)  None of these efforts are taking the King’s shilling – they are developing hardware and capability themselves.  It’s interesting that unlike some New Space firms, they tend to make fewer public pronouncements and the ones they do make are both substantive and realistic (you tend to operate that way when you’re risking your own nickel).

4.  The process of contracting with “commercial” firms to carry payloads into orbit is not a space policy.

This last item is obvious, but only if you’re not getting your news exclusively from the space media.  Even if SpaceX is completely successful, all we will have done is to add another player to the existing roster of supply vehicles that enable the occupation and use of the ISS.  Since discarding the Vision for Space Exploration over two years ago, we have no long-term goal or strategic direction for our civil space program.  The pre-existing Commercial Crew and Cargo Program has been billed as a “new direction” but it is simply a utilitarian effort to keep an existing program going, not a new path or direction to follow.  Mirages of human missions to asteroids and following a “flexible path” will produce pointless viewgraph engineering – and no missions getting off the ground.  At least with the VSE, the nation knew where, when and why we were going.

Even as we hope for a successful SpaceX launch and return, it is vital that America recognize that our government has no space policy or strategic direction – commercial or otherwise.  From both a security and an economic perspective, this is a dangerous situation for our nation.

The near-Earth asteroid, Eros.

There’s quite a buzz in space policy circles over the recent announcement of the creation of a new company that intends to survey, study and mine near Earth asteroids (NEAs).  Given my previous advocacy regarding the desirability of learning how to extract and use off-planet resources, many people have asked me to weigh in with my opinion of their proposed business plan.  I’d like to frame my remarks around Michael Listner’s recent piece on the possible legal issues involved in the plan as he has illuminated an interesting angle on the project.

The roll-out of the business plan of Planetary Resources Inc. made a big media splash, as is typical for many of these “New Space” private operations.  Close examination reveals the outline of a plan, but the technical details are rather fuzzy.  Given that no business should reveal too much detail about their plans lest they lose their competitive advantage, the company’s reticence is not too surprising.  To summarize it in broad terms, the plan is to launch a space-based telescope, dedicated to identifying candidate NEAs; at least initially, the main interest seems to be metal asteroids (presumably those rich in metallic elements of economic value, including gold and platinum) and water-bearing asteroids.  The former would have significant economic value in terrestrial markets, providing the possibility of high, near-term payback for investors.  The latter would have value for future in-space operations and could be sold to both national governments and to the private sector, presuming that such markets develop.

The next step involves sending robotic prospectors to the best candidate bodies to survey them, determine their physical, chemical and mineralogical make up, and identify the best targets for resource extraction.  The last step involves snagging a small asteroid (possibly several tons in total mass) and tow it back to cislunar space where Earth-based, teleoperated robotic machines can process and refine the material for sale.  This last step contains the most open questions.  Although such a mission can be envisioned in principle, it is technically out of reach at the present time.  However, I envision no particular show stoppers here – practical details of the material processing and handling these materials in microgravity are the biggest unknowns, but even these issues can be addressed and mitigated before any NEA is retrieved through the execution of some carefully designed experiments in low Earth orbit.

But then what?  This – as always is the case when human endeavors begin in earnest – is where the lawyers come in.

Listner’s article suggests that the proposed activity of capturing and processing an asteroid falls outside the current bounds of any outer space legal regime.  He recalls that the terms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (to which the United States is a signatory) prohibits claims of national sovereignty over extraterrestrial objects.  Space mining companies will be subject to the laws of the nation in which they are incorporated and thus, bound to the terms of any international treaty that nation has ratified.  While national ownership of outer space assets is prohibited by the 1967 treaty, the treaty is silent on private ownership.  Thus, the treaty is open to interpretation and subject to the philosophical and economic predilections of the parties involved.  One thing is certain however – if anyone ever does this, they are guaranteed to face protracted litigation that will no doubt take years (and many billable hours) to wind its way through the courts.

Listner goes on to describe issues with liability, mostly in relation to possible damages caused by future space operations or to existing space-based assets.  However, other more alarming scenarios are possible (e.g., suppose a retrieved NEA collides with the Earth during its arrival in cislunar space?)  Although no specific conclusions are drawn, the foreshadowing is a prerequisite for private companies to post a surety bond, one potentially of enormous scale.  If nothing else, such a requirement would certainly put a crimp in many new commercialization plans.

The infamous (at least in space circles) Moon Treaty is the last legal issue discussed by Listner.  In brief, this treaty prohibits private ownership of space bodies and demands that any profits from resource extraction from these bodies be “distributed” amongst the nations of the world.  This document was submitted to the United States Senate in 1980 for ratification and was defeated, thanks to a vigorous educational campaign by the L-5 Society.  Thus, thirty-two years ago, the United States (and also other major space faring nations, including Russia and China) rejected the Moon Treaty.  However, from the standpoint of most lawyers, the treaty has been ratified by 17 nations, giving it the full force of international law.  Considering the multinational make-up of many companies and that their corporate assets can be frozen or in some extreme cases seized (sometimes for entirely specious or arbitrary reasons), the legal status of the use and ownership of extracted space resources must be considered seriously.

Where does this legal confusion leave the prospects for the economic development of the Solar System?  That is unclear at the moment.  In broad terms, business does not like legal uncertainty to a degree usually in direct proportion to the amount of money involved.  For both technical and legal reasons, it is highly unlikely that there will be a “gold rush in space.” The technical issues are substantial (particularly for the Planetary Resources Inc. plan) but the legal ones are no less so.  In part, this is why I favor making the determination of how to extract and use off-planet resources a central goal of the American civil space program.  Note well: I do not say that we should turn NASA into a space mining company.  Rather, the role of government is to undertake technically risky ventures with the aim of determining how difficult they might be and to settle any thorny legal issues that may arise.  Questions of international law can only be addressed and settled by national governments – through agreements, treaties, new law and if need be, by stronger actions.  No private sector corporation has this inherent ability – only national governments can resolve these issues.  If such issues are resolved, the private sector can then successfully proceed and grow their businesses and governments will profit too.

I applaud both the vision and the chutzpah of Planetary Resources Inc.  For now, their plan to launch and operate a space-based telescope to map asteroids and locate promising prospects is a good start.  They may even manage to eventually send a probe of two for a close-up examination of a couple of NEAs.  As for the last piece of their plan, at this writing, color me skeptical.

* Henry VI Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2.  Yes, I am aware that lawyers claim that this phrase is taken out of context (i.e., it is actually an ironic assertion that if one wants a poorly run, bad society, eliminate the rule of law), but it is simply too good not to use here.