SPACE

The $18 Billion Question

Where Is U.S. Space Policy Headed, And Why Is It Going There?

From a pure public relations standpoint, 2007 hasn’t exactly been the best year for NASA or the U.S. civilian space program. Stories of astronauts behaving badly—Lisa Nowak and her diapers, tales of alcohol use before take-off—became fodder for late-night comedy and tabloid headlines. In August, the Space Shuttle Endeavour sustained foam-related damage on a mission that, while ultimately harmless, brought back memories of the Columbia disaster three years earlier.

Yet behind the scenes—and with relatively little fanfare—NASA continues to move forward with what may be its most ambitious new effort since the Apollo program. NASA funding could increase by more than 12 percent next year, if the president signs into law an extra $1 billion the Senate added to the agency’s budget.

Why—and to what ends—do we send men and women into space anyway?

Sputnik’s 50th anniversary has inspired nostalgia for an era when space policy was a major political issue. By contrast, NASA is unlikely to earn much more than lip service from presidential candidates in either party before next November. Yet when the next president assumes office in January 2009, he or she will be responsible for answering several questions that could determine U.S. space policy for a generation or more. Of those questions, three in particular stand out.

President Bush’s Vision might have taken hold, but does it make sense?

The first time a President Bush proposed an ambitious new space program that would return the United States to the moon and begin an effort to send humans to Mars, it was 1989. But faced with a skeptical Congress and a resistant NASA, the Space Exploration Initiative—as it was called—never moved forward. Within two years, the SEI was all but dead, never making it into NASA’s budget.

Given that history, perhaps the biggest surprise about the current President Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration is how quickly – and quietly – it has become the status quo in the space policy community.

Like the SEI, the Vision received a skeptical response when it was first announced in early 2004. But in the three years since, a consensus has emerged around the major components of the Vision. In 2010, the Space Shuttle will be retired. Then, after a gap of perhaps four years without any American manned missions to space, NASA will launch a new vehicle. By 2020, that vehicle will return U.S. astronauts to the moon—with longer lunar stays and a mission to Mars intended to follow.

Unlike the SEI, that basic outline gained the support of Congress—and crucially, a place in NASA’s budget. And until January 2009, at least, it is unlikely to undergo any major changes.

“Whatever you call it, I think most people recognize that in human spaceflight, it’s time to go beyond low earth orbit,” says Lori Garver, the president of aerospace consulting firm Capital Space and a former NASA associate administrator for policy who advised Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) on space during the 2004 presidential campaign.

But Garver and others say the next president will still have an opportunity to reevaluate whether a strategy thus far associated with the Bush administration will continue as planned. If not, a new president could do anything from changing the strategy’s timeline to redefining its goals to scrapping it altogether.

In making that decision, he or she will have to face a question that has plagued U.S. space policy ever since the Apollo program ended in the 1970s: Why—and to what ends—do we send men and women into space anyway?

For many in the space policy community, that is the $18 billion question. From a scientific perspective, advocates for human spaceflight can point to certain direct benefits of sending men and women out of Earth’s atmosphere. Astronauts are more adaptable and flexible than robots, they argue, and they point to the many technological “spin-offs”—from dialysis machines to water purifiers—researchers developed as a result of human spaceflight.

But most space policy experts acknowledge that human spaceflight cannot usually be justified on the basis of science alone. As technology improves, robotic missions can provide a far greater depth and volume of data, at a fraction of the cost and no risk to human lives.

Instead, supporters of a revitalized human spaceflight program say the benefits go beyond science. Wendell Mendell, assistant director of the ARES program at the Johnson Space Center, argues that human spaceflight’s symbolic importance is a powerful justification on its own.

“Over the years, as people try to write down why we are going out into space … it has become okay and legitimate to say we have the human space program for reasons of inspiration,” Mendell says.

Yet whether the Vision will satisfy even that justification is a complicated question. The goal of a Mars mission remains only loosely defined, with little indication yet of how long it will take or how much it will cost. For the foreseeable future, the Vision’s focus is a return to the moon—an effort that has questionable value for a Mars mission anyway. That leaves critics to say that in the near term—which means well over a decade—the Vision amounts to little more than a costly move to do something the United States already accomplished nearly four decades ago.

And in order for the Vision to proceed on schedule, NASA’s other priorities—from earth sciences to aeronautics research—have begun to feel the squeeze…

“If you spend money on a colony on the moon with the idea that it will train you to go to Mars, that’s silly,” says Donna Shirley, a former manager of the Mars Exploration Program and original leader of the team that built the Mars Pathfinder. Shirley says that recent robotic missions to Mars are illustrating just how challenging a human mission there, and a safe return home. will be. So while she is an outspoken supporter of the goal of sending humans to Mars, she remains unsure as to how the Vision will accomplish that objective.

Skeptics and supporters of the Vision share the same concern over just how open-ended it remains. NASA set a goal for the cost of returning humans to the moon—about $104 billion, with the Government Accountability Office projecting a total $230 billion cost for the Vision by 2025—but the plan may lack the kind of deadlines that might push the program forward, says American University political science professor Howard McCurdy.

“NASA is an agency full of engineers. They are much more adept at meeting deadlines than meeting cost constraints,” says McCurdy, an author of several books about NASA. “Clearly, the thing that made Apollo work was the end-of-the-decade deadline. If you didn’t have that deadline, we might still be trying to go.”

Can NASA find “balance”?

For critics of the Vision for Space Exploration—and of NASA in general—one of the agency’s biggest failures is that it has become “unbalanced.” If the Vision’s political resiliency so far has a flip-side, it is the fact that NASA’s budget itself hasn’t changed significantly. As a result, as Syracuse University professor Harry Lambright says, “NASA probably has a $30 billion program with only a $17 billion budget.”

And in order for the Vision to proceed on schedule, NASA’s other priorities—from earth sciences to aeronautics research—have begun to feel the squeeze, says Rice University provost Eugene Levy, an expert in astrophysics.

“The risk there—and I think it’s a risk that is not well-understood and anticipated—is that this will be much more expensive with less capabilities than we wish, with consequences with other programs,” says Levy, who served on a council of NASA advisors before falling out with administrator Michael Griffin over the issue of science funding.

Levy and others argue that NASA is already feeling those consequences. The agency’s budget for earth sciences research, for example, has declined 30 percent since 2000, according to a study released by the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year. That research includes missions that monitor changes in sea levels and the size of the polar icecaps, along with efforts to understand how global warming is affecting global weather patterns.

Efforts like the Global Precipitation Measurement mission—which would help track hurricanes and droughts—have been delayed by years. The Deep Space Climate Observatory, another program intended to provide critical data on climate change, has been canceled altogether.

“When you delay like this, you create a gap in critical datasets which we need now to document the extent to which the environment is changing,” says Charles Kennel, former head of NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth program and a past director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In the areas of space science and aeronautics, the story isn’t much different. Researchers complain about cutbacks on efforts that explore the suitability of other planets for human life or better understand the phenomenon of “dark energy.” A National Research Council study co-chaired by Kennel concluded that a proposed series of NASA missions have the potential to “fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe”—but also determined that projected funding for the efforts is unlikely to provide enough support to accommodate them.

And then there are the new kids on the block—India, and even more importantly, China.

On the earth science side, at least, the next president will likely feel significant pressure for a renewed commitment. With political views concerning global warming and its consequences finally beginning to catch up with the scientific consensus, earth scientists—who note similar funding shortfalls for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—question how long NASA’s scientific arm will be overshadowed by human spaceflight.

“What the next administration will face is the question of whether they ought to … adjust the pace of the human side to give a little more breathing room to the many good things that are done on the scientific side,” Kennel says.

How does the United States handle a new international playing field in space?

When Al Gore and Russian vice premier Victor Chernomyrdin agreed on plans for the International Space Station in 1993, it appeared to herald a new era in international space politics. With the end of the Cold War, the space race was over, the U.S. program was dominant, and cooperation, not competition, would rule the day.

By the time the next president takes a close look at the U.S. space program, it will be clear how much has changed—and how much international politics is still wrapped up in the space program.

In the case of the International Space Station, the question is how the United States can keep a set of promises with other collaborating nations as the new architecture of the Vision for Space Exploration takes hold. If all goes as planned, the continuation of the shuttle program until 2010 should allow for the completion of the ISS. But the space station is supposed to operate until at least 2016, and it will require regular service until then.

For now, U.S. policymakers are set to rely on a combination of the Russians, new commercial vehicles, and planned Japanese and European flights, but whether those options can fill the gap left by the shuttle is an unanswered question. And already, NASA has ramped down the number of shuttle missions it originally scheduled to the ISS and canceled plans to launch a Russian science power platform and a Japanese centrifuge.

Thor Hogan, a space policy expert at the Illinois Institute of Technology, says that while the Japanese and Russians may accept a scaling down of the ISS, the Europeans are more likely to raise objections.

“I think the Europeans have felt burned by NASA with respect to space shuttle cooperation,” says Hogan.

And then there are the new kids on the block—India, and even more importantly, China.

At first glance, the emergence of the Chinese capabilities should mean little for the direction of the U.S. civilian space program. (Military space is, of course, an entirely different story.) The Chinese have come very far in a short period of time, but they remain decades behind the United States. Yet veteran space-watchers say the emergence of China will affect the priorities of U.S. policymakers.

“The Chinese worry that our capabilities are significant and will only increase,” says William Martel, a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “We worry that the Chinese will displace us.”

Ideally, the emergence of a robust Chinese space program might spur cooperation—or at the very least, a renewed effort to bring some clarity to the rules governing space. But a frosty relationship, symbolized by a trip NASA administrator Michael Griffin curtailed last year when he was refused access to Chinese facilities, suggests that close ties may not develop anytime soon.

Instead, it may be competition with China that motivates the next era of U.S. space policy. Indeed, if the Chinese succeed in sending a man to the moon before the United States does—a possibility Griffin acknowledged to Congress earlier this year—it could serve as one of the biggest jolts to the U.S. space program since Sputnik. As Griffin recently said in a speech, “I think when that happens, people will not like it.” In that case, it may be Beijing that determines Washington’s next move in space.

Jacob Leibenluft is a writer in Washington, D.C.

Tags: funding, Space

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