On the half-century anniversary of the Kennedy moon speech, three space icons of the sixties took to the editorial page of USA Today to lament what they perceive to be a rudderless current policy. It will be taken seriously by many, given that it is the first man to walk on the moon, the last man to walk on the moon, and a man who flew around it twice. Nonetheless, and sadly (all three men are heroes to me) it is flawed and and they don’t seem to be familiar with the facts.
The program enjoyed near-unanimous support, being approved and endorsed by the Bush administration and by both Democratic and Republican Congresses. However, due to its congressionally authorized funding falling victim to Office of Management and Budget cuts, earmarks and other unexpected financial diversions, Constellation fell behind schedule. An administration-appointed review committee concluded the Constellation program was “not viable” due to inadequate funding.
Actually, NASA was not “focusing on a return to the moon.” That’s what it was supposed to be doing, but it was instead focusing on building a capsule and an unneeded new rocket to get it to orbit. Getting back to the moon would have required an earth departure stage and a lander, items that were not under development because they didn’t fit within the budget. There were never any serious plans for Mars — the Orion capsule is far too small for such a long journey, and little work was being done to deal with critical issues for such a mission, such as radiation protection.
The second paragraph lacks ingenuity. The notion that Constellation was underfunded is a myth to which program defenders continue to cling, but it’s simply untrue, as I note at my blog today. The exploration budget went up every year except for one, and beyond that, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin raided other budgets to feed the insatiable maw of the Ares rocket program. Constellation’s problem was not underfunding — its problem was that Griffin selected a flawed architecture that couldn’t be delivered within the planned budgets, which is why it not only was continually overrunning, but losing more than a year per year in schedule.
In addition, as Jeff Foust notes over at the Space Politics web site, their own story is inconsistent. If it really had the full support of Congress, why wasn’t it properly funded? Even if OMB requested less than the moon walkers think it should have received, there is nothing to prevent Congress from appropriating funds above the request. Jeff’s answer:
The former astronauts don’t seem to be familar with the NASA charter, either:
In fact, NASA has no such “operational mandate.” If one actually reads the Space Act, even as amended more recently than its original version in 1958 when the agency was formed, there is no mention of either human spaceflight, or the operation of vehicles. They also seem to have bought into the popular myth of “Kennedy’s vision,” when in fact we now know that Kennedy was getting cold feet himself about the program before he was assassinated in 1963, calling it “a stunt,” and likely would have started to defund it in the mid sixties, as Congress and President Johnson did.
I think, though, what saddens me the most, is their distortion of the plans for creating a vibrant commercial human spaceflight industry, and their seeming lack of faith in American free enterprise and business:
Congress stated that rather than depending on NASA subsidies, the development of commercial sources to supply cargo and crew to the International Space Station should be a partnership between government and industry.
Entrepreneurs in the space transportation business assert that they can offer such service at a very attractive price — conveniently not factoring in the NASA-funded development costs. These expenditures, including funds to insure safety and reliability, can be expected to be substantially larger and more time consuming than the entrepreneurs predict.
And who are these so-called “entrepreneurs”? As I noted earlier this week, they include the Boeing Corporation, and the United Launch Alliance, which has been successfully launching billion-dollar satellites for the Air Force and NASA for many years. Boeing is a large, decades-old publicly-held company with decades of experience in offering hardware and services to NASA. It is not a entity that jumps immediately to mind when one hears the word “entrepreneur.”
I also don’t understand what they mean by “conveniently not factoring in the NASA-funded development costs.” Does NASA do this for its own programs? All I know is that (also as I pointed out earlier this week):
I understand these mens’ nostalgia for the space program of their glory days, and even sympathize with it. But they need to understand their own history better, and realize why no one has walked on the moon in the almost forty years since Gene Cernan last left boot prints in the dusty regolith. I can only hope that, over time, when dozens and hundreds, even thousands of people are going into space on commercial vehicles in the years to come, and even back to the moon, many at their own expense, they will still be alive to see it and come to regret their misguided attempts to slow down what could have happened earlier with more enlightened policies. And while I can’t agree with their opinions yesterday, I will always honor their accomplishments and sacrifices for our nation four decades ago.
