Debate: A Space Program for the Rest of Us

(April 15) -- While my admiration for and gratitude to Neil Armstrong and other astronauts and NASA officials from the Apollo era know no bounds, that doesn't mean they are the first people to whom I would go for space policy advice. The job of an astronaut or a flight director requires a certain skill set, but it doesn't necessarily include cost analysis or economics. And it shows in their recent open letter protesting the Obama administration's new space policy.

When they say that the decision to end the Constellation program is "devastating," they ignore how devastating that program was to our prospects in space. That these deservedly honored astronauts cannot conceive of a program of exploration that doesn't look like their own -- a race to a planet, at unimaginably high costs, on a gargantuan rocket -- is disappointing.

As Clark Lindsey of Space Transport News writes, it is an indication that they are not serious and are unwilling to confront the deep financial issues facing the nation and the space agency. There is not enough money to do all the things they want to do -- preserve the space shuttle, extend the International Space Station, build Constellation. What, if anything, are they willing to sacrifice or trade off? And if they want to preserve Constellation, is it worth the money?

Constellation included all the elements needed to return NASA astronauts to the moon -- the Ares I and Ares V launch systems, the Orion crew module (similar to the Apollo capsule and service module), an Earth-departure stage needed to leave low Earth orbit and a lunar lander.

Of all those elements, only the Orion and its Ares I launcher were under active development, and they were way over budget and far behind schedule. So far behind, in fact, with so much uncertainty in the date of first operation (the Augustine panel last year noted that the chances of meeting even a delayed 2017 date was of low probability), that it is ironic that Armstrong and his colleagues complain of the uncertainty of commercial launch systems, which have been delivering multi-hundred-million-dollar satellites safely for years, with an impeccable safety record..

Yes, it's true that there is some uncertainty involved with commercial crew transport, but with Constellation, there is something worse -- certainty that it will be horrifically expensive to operate and guaranteed that we are confined to a couple of flights per year to the moon, at many billions of dollars per flight, for a few astronauts.

Was the $10 billion spent on Constellation to date wasted? Yes, and so was the half-decade it cost us. But moving forward with it would simply be throwing good money after bad, and to do so is to indulge in a logical fallacy known as "sunk cost." We can't unspend the money that was wasted to date on Constellation, but we can spend our money smarter going forward, and that's what the new plan proposes to do.

Instead of a few government civil servants going to the moon at a couple billion taxpayer dollars per seat, the new plan, according to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, envisions hundreds or thousands of people, government and private, in orbit and beyond, with competition from private enterprise driving down the cost with increased volume of activity.

The low costs engendered by this new approach would enable us to do much more on the moon than simply follow in Neil Armstrong's footsteps. It might make it possible to actually have an affordable and sustainable lunar base, perhaps utilizing local resources, such as the water that appears to be in more abundance the more we look for it.

It could make the moon a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system, as the Bush Vision for Space Exploration envisioned in 2004, until the financially disastrous Constellation architecture crushed that possibility.

We have an opportunity to return to that vision. All we have to do is finally realize that this isn't your father's space program, or Neil Armstrong's.

It's a space program, finally, for the rest of us.

Rand Simberg is an aerospace engineer, space and business consultant, and serial entrepreneur. He blogs at http://www.transterrestrial.com.


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