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Administration’s Space Goals Won’t Fly

By Don Nelson

President George Bush’s space exploration goals are based on star dust, not rocket science. Once again the incompetence that prevails in the senior NASA human space flight management has trapped a president into supporting a human space exploration plan that is dead before the ink will dry on the first contract.

An axiom all space scientists must abide by says if you can’t get it into space, you can’t use it in space. The NASA plan calls for a new "crew exploration vehicle" by 2014 to support a human moon mission in the 2015 to 2020 timeframe. What the plan doesn’t tell us is how this new spacecraft will be launched into space. NASA management proposes to scuttle the space shuttle, the only feasible and realistic launch vehicle for supporting space exploration. The Saturn V used in the Apollo program was too expensive and could return only 200 pounds of payload. Then there was the canceled Shuttle C, an expendable version of the space shuttle. The $5 billion development cost was a gross underestimation and would’ve required three launches to the canceled Space Station Freedom (another $11-billion NASA blunder) to assembly the lunar transfer vehicle. NASA’s 1992 First Lunar Outpost managers dreamed up the "Comet" based on a super Saturn V configuration. It was so big it wouldn't fit into the vertical assembly building at Kennedy Space Center and would’ve cost $4 billion to launch.

If the space shuttle is decommissioned, that leaves only the Delta 4 and Atlas 5 heavy lift evolved expendable launch vehicles (EELV) to put the crew exploration vehicle into earth orbit. But getting the crew vehicle to the moon is a very expensive endeavor. Conducting a lunar mission similar to the Apollo Program would require seven EELV launches to assemble in low earth orbit a 240,000-pound lunar transfer vehicle. The seven EELV launches cost about $1.4 billion and the expendable transfer and crew excursion vehicles in the neighborhood of $1.3 billion. So for around $2.7 billion, a lunar mission could be conducted that would put two astronauts on the moon for seven days and return a 200-pound payload! This doesn’t include the cost to develop the lunar transfer and crew excursion vehicles, likely to exceed $20 billion.

Decommissioning the space shuttle may result in NASA management having to decommission its $100 billion International Space Station. Without the shuttle, the European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle will be required to service the station. Its development cost is already $600 million over budget, and the cost to service the station will rise to $2 billion per year. It’s extremely doubtful the European governments will sign up to this commitment.

With the smell of big government money in the wind, the aerospace lobbies have already kicked into gear. The day after the President’s announcement, full-page adds praising the initiative started appearing. Unfortunately, the attitude in the aerospace industry is to give NASA what it wants, not what is needed to get the space program back on track. However, President Bush is aware of how NASA management sold out his father’s space initiative and has put in place a watchdog advisory commission headed by Pete Aldridge, former President of the Aerospace Corporation. Aldridge had a good record in keeping the Air Force space project on target, but what will it take to correct this mess?

First, there must be a change in NASA’s senior human space flight management. Second, the space shuttle must not be returned to flight without being automated to get the operating cost down and to get the weight margin needed to install crew escape pods. It is unacceptable to fly any launch vehicle without a crew escape system. Third, we must expand robotics exploration of space to lead mankind into space. We must remember that Spaceship Earth, like any other spaceship, has a limited lifetime. For mankind to survive, we must be able to live in space. It’s a do-or-die situation.

Don A. Nelson is a retired NASA aerospace engineer in Alvin, Texas. He has a website at www.nasaproblems.com