GET THE END RIGHT AND THE MEANS FOLLOW:

Getting Space Exploration Right (Robert Zubrin, Spring 2005, New Atlantis)

Over the course of its history, NASA has employed two distinct modes of operation. The first prevailed during the period from 1961 to 1973, and may be called the Apollo Mode. The second has prevailed since 1974, and may be called the Shuttle Mode.

In the Apollo Mode, business is (or was) conducted as follows: First, a destination for human spaceflight is chosen. Then a plan is developed to achieve this objective. Following this, technologies and designs are developed to implement that plan. These designs are then built and the missions are flown.

The Shuttle Mode operates entirely differently. In this mode, technologies and hardware elements are developed in accord with the wishes of various technical communities. These projects are then justified by arguments that they might prove useful at some time in the future when grand flight projects are initiated.

Contrasting these two approaches, we see that the Apollo Mode is destination-driven, while the Shuttle Mode pretends to be technology-driven, but is actually constituency-driven. In the Apollo Mode, technology development is done for mission-directed reasons. In the Shuttle Mode, projects are undertaken on behalf of various pressure groups pushing their own favorite technologies and then defended using rationales. In the Apollo Mode, the space agency’s efforts are focused and directed. In the Shuttle Mode, NASA’s efforts are random and entropic.

To make this distinction completely clear, a mundane metaphor may be useful. Imagine two couples, each planning to build their own house. The first couple decides what kind of house they want, hires an architect to design it in detail, and then acquires the appropriate materials to build it. That is the Apollo Mode. The second couple polls their neighbors each month for different spare house-parts they would like to sell, and buys them all, hoping eventually to accumulate enough stuff to build a house. When their relatives inquire as to why they are accumulating so much junk, they hire an architect to compose a house design that employs all the knick-knacks they have purchased. The house is never built, but an excuse is generated to justify each purchase, thereby avoiding embarrassment. That is the Shuttle Mode. [...]

Comparing these two records, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that NASA’s productivity—both in terms of missions accomplished and technology developed—was vastly greater during its Apollo Mode than during its Shuttle Mode.

The Shuttle Mode is hopelessly inefficient because it involves the expenditure of large sums of money without a clear strategic purpose. It is remarkable that the leader of any technical organization would tolerate such a senile mode of operation, but NASA administrators have come to accept it. Indeed, during his first two years in office, Sean O’Keefe (the NASA administrator from 2001 until early 2005) explicitly endorsed this state of affairs, repeatedly rebutting critics by saying that “NASA should not be destination-driven.”

Yet ultimately, the blame for this multi-decade program of waste cannot be placed solely on NASA’s leaders, some of whom have attempted to rectify the situation. Rather, the political class must also accept major responsibility for failing to provide any coherent direction for America’s space program—and for demanding more than their share of random projects that do not fit together and do not lead anywhere.

Advocates of the Shuttle Mode claim that by avoiding the selection of a destination they are developing the technologies that will allow us to go anywhere, anytime. That claim has proven to be untrue. The Shuttle Mode has not gotten us anywhere, and can never get us anywhere. The Apollo Mode got us to the Moon, and it can get us back, or take us to Mars. But leadership is required—and for the last three decades, there has been almost none. [...]

President Bush announced the new policy on January 14, 2004, in a speech at NASA headquarters. As articulated in that speech and an accompanying National Security Presidential Directive, the new policy, dubbed the “Vision for Space Exploration,” included something for each faction. The vision calls for:

Implementing a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond;

Extending a human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;

Developing the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and

Promoting international and commercial participation to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.

The directive then lists a series of actions and activities to achieve these stated goals. These include returning the space shuttle fleet to flight, using it to complete construction of the International Space Station, and then retiring the shuttle and moving beyond it by “the end of this decade.” The directive also states that NASA should develop “a new crew exploration vehicle to provide crew transportation for missions beyond low Earth orbit,” and should conduct “the initial test flight before the end of this decade in order to provide an operational capability to support human exploration missions no later than 2014.” It also says that NASA shall “acquire crew transportation to and from the International Space Station, as required, after the space shuttle is retired from service.”

Beyond low Earth orbit, the policy instructs NASA to “undertake lunar exploration activities to enable sustained human and robotic exploration of Mars and more distant destinations in the solar system.” By 2008, NASA should begin a series of lunar robotic missions intended to “prepare for and support future human exploration activities.” The first human mission is supposed to commence between 2015 and 2020. And unlike the short, three-day stay on the Moon that is the previous record (set by Apollo 17 in 1972), this would be an “extended human expedition.”

In addition to studying the Moon itself, these lunar activities are meant to “develop and test new approaches, technologies, and systems ... to support sustained human space exploration to Mars and other destinations.” The plan calls for robotic exploration of the solar system—Mars, asteroids, Jupiter’s moons—as well as a search for habitable planets outside our solar system. The knowledge gathered from the robotic exploration of Mars, along with the lessons learned from long-term stays on the Moon, along with new technologies for “power generation, propulsion, life support, and other key capabilities,” are aimed at making possible “human expeditions to Mars” at some unspecified date.

The most obvious problem with the Bush plan is its long, slow timeline. The only activities that the Vision for Space Exploration actually mandates before the end of the Bush administration’s second term are the return of the shuttle to flight, the use of the shuttle to complete the International Space Station, the flight of one lunar robotic probe, and the initiation of a development program for the Crew Exploration Vehicle. The ten-year schedule for the development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle is especially absurd. Technically, it makes no sense: starting from a much lower technology base, it only took five years to develop the Apollo command module, which served the same functions. Politically, it is unwise: the delay makes the development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle reversible by the next administration. And fiscally, it is foolish: the long timeline only serves to gratify the major aerospace industry contractors, which desire a new long-term, high-cost activity to replace the recently cancelled Orbital Space Plane. Stranger still is the decision to set the next manned Moon landing as late as sixteen years into the future—twice as long as it took the United States to reach the Moon back in the 1960s—and to place the Mars mission at some nebulous time in the future. Such a drawn-out timeline is unlikely to serve as a driving force on the activities of this slow-moving bureaucracy.

Still, there are aspects of the new policy that make it a positive step forward. By declaring that Moon-Mars would be the next order of business after the completion of the space station, the Bush vision precludes starting alternative initiatives that would get in the way. More importantly, by declaring that human exploration of the Moon and Mars is the goal of NASA, the new policy makes it legitimate for the space agency to allocate funds for technology development to support this objective. This is very important, since such spending previously could not be justified unless it could be defended as a necessary part of other programs, such as the space station or the robotic planetary exploration program. The mere designation of the Moon-Mars objective broke a formidable dam against the agency’s progress, and the administration rapidly showed its bona fides by requesting several hundred million dollars to support such newly permissible research and development. In addition, it was made clear that funds would be available to demonstrate some of these new technologies using subscale units on robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, starting around the end of this decade. But even this positive news must be viewed with caution. For in the absence of an actual Moon-Mars program—one that develops an efficient mission plan that designates the program’s technology needs—broad R&D expenditures can be quite inefficient.

Relative to the decisive form of leadership that drove the success of the Apollo program, the Bush policy set forth a large vision without the sense of urgency to make it real. But an uncertain trumpet is still better than none at all. Before President Bush’s announcement, the idea of an American program to pioneer the space frontier seemed to many like the stuff of science fiction writers, wistful dreamers, and marginal visionaries. Suddenly, it was a mainstream political idea, and significant social forces began to rally both for and against the plan. [...]

So far we have discussed the problems that have caused NASA to drift for the past thirty years, how those problems came to the fore in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, and the efforts of the administration to address those endemic problems. As we have seen, the resulting new space policy, while clearly a step in the right direction, includes so many compromises with the old way of doing business that a positive outcome remains in doubt. We must now address the question of how a rational human space exploration initiative should be done.

It is not enough that NASA’s human exploration efforts “have a goal.” The goal selected needs to be the right goal, chosen not because various people are comfortable with it, but because there is a real reason to do it. We don’t need a nebulous, futuristic “vision” that can be used to justify random expenditures on various fascinating technologies that might plausibly prove of interest at some time in the future when NASA actually has a plan. Nor do we need strategic plans that are generated for the purpose of making use of such constituency-based technology programs. Rather, the program needs to be organized so that it is the goal that actually drives the efforts of the space agency. In such a destination-driven operation, NASA is forced to develop the most practical plan to reach the objective, and on that basis, select for development those technologies required to implement the plan. Reason chooses the goal. The goal compels the plan. The plan selects the technologies.

So what should the goal of human exploration be? In my view, the answer is straightforward: Humans to Mars within a decade.

Interesting how you're always likely to develop more effective means more rapidly by focussing on the end, than on the means. Energy and environmental policies would likewise benefit from shifting into Apollo Mode.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 21, 2005 4:09 PM