The mission to Mars that President Trump promised in a White House summit in June would have been the stuff of dime-store novels when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was founded in 1958.
Six decades later, the hurdles that government and business must overcome to pull off the trip illustrate the chasm that still remains between the reality of space travel and Hollywood’s depiction of it.
There’s no artificial gravity, for instance, as shown in 2015’s “The Martian.” American engineers abandoned the concept in the 1960s because of size requirements that made it problematic to get an equipped vessel all the way through Earth’s atmosphere and beyond.
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And there’s no subspace radio, the commonplace technology from the “Star Trek” universe that allows two-way communication between ships and planets over vast distances.
Their absence matters. Human bodies evolved to function in gravity, and the prolonged lack of it on a three-year trip to Mars may cause symptoms from vision loss to bone deterioration. And in an emergency, the real-time, two-way conversation that’s possible from the moon, enabling Apollo 13 astronauts to work with ground controllers on returning home in a damaged spacecraft in 1970, isn’t an option.
Developing a vessel that insulates its occupants as much as possible from such risks as they travel farther from Earth than humans have ever attempted is both complex and costly. And NASA’s work on the project with Lockheed Martin, its prime contractor, is just one piece of the multi-faceted renaissance in a global space industry valued at $335 billion.
More than three-fourths of the total comes from commercial infrastructure and systems, marking a course reversal from the space race half a century ago. Of the government spending in the remaining 24 percent, the U.S. accounts for well over half, in part through a longstanding collaboration between NASA and private businesses.
It’s a relationship that “has ebbed and flowed over time,” Bill Barry, the agency’s chief historian, told the Washington Examiner. “The trend has been toward having more confidence in the commercial side as stuff becomes less cutting-edge.”
While the space outside Earth’s atmosphere was originally dominated by nation-states, investment by American businesses has been growing since 1984, when Congress set up a licensing system for commercial rocket launches.
Today, a sizable portion of U.S. spending consists of investments such as satellites used for television, communications and global positioning systems.
A 2004 law establishing a framework for privately-operated human spaceflight expanded the possibilities even further, opening the door to space tourism for companies such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
In April, Virgin Galactic completed the first supersonic, rocket-powered flight of its VSS Unity spaceplane, a craft built on the data and lessons of its predecessor vehicle, Enterprise, which broke up during a rocket-powered flight over California in 2014.
“Outer space is no longer a playground reserved for nation states,” Joshua Hampson, a security studies fellow at the Niskanen Center, wrote in a January 2017 research paper shared with the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
While that admittedly creates challenges, particularly in terms of congestion and navigation, the overall market environment is nonetheless the best since the 1960s, Frank Slazer, vice president for space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association, an Arlington, Va.-based trade group, told the Washington Examiner.
Investment in the earlier period was almost exclusively the purview of the U.S. and other governments, after President John F. Kennedy and his successors focused on the Apollo program that took Americans to the moon. Today’s endeavors range from satellite launches to the U.S. government’s Orion spacecraft, SpaceX’s Dragon vehicle and research programs aboard the International Space Station.
They’re subsidized by a diverse array of funding, including venture capital firms, banks and foreign investors, that ensures “if one sector goes down a little bit, it doesn’t mean the whole enterprise goes,” Slazer said.
Trump’s White House is making a concerted effort to woo such private investment, in part through the creation of what Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross refers to as a “one-stop shop” for the industry within his agency. A streamlined, central interface will handle everything from remote sensing to export controls, trade promotion and space-traffic management, he said.
Among the unit’s priorities is easing the licensing process for commercial activities in space so that companies such as SpaceX can obtain blanket permits for operations like video-recording that would otherwise require separate applications for each trip.
The agency is employing state-of-the-art space traffic-monitoring technology and improved government services to “incentivize more companies to launch under the U.S. flag,” Ross explained at a June meeting of the National Space Council, a group that Trump revived during his first year in office. “Nontraditional activities like space tourism, asteroid mining, space manufacturing and lunar habitation will soon become a reality.”
Lunar development, part of the foundation for Trump’s trek to Mars, is another area where business and government are working closely together. The Orion spacecraft, which Lockheed is building for NASA, is designed to make both trips.
Rival Boeing delivered its first intertank hardware for NASA’s new Space Launch System, a vehicle powerful enough to carry Orion off the planet, this year. The intertank, situated between two mammoth propellant tanks, houses the rocket’s avionics, the computer systems that serve as its brains.
While unmanned spacecraft have already traveled much farther than Orion will go, sending back images of celestial objects as distant as the moons of Pluto, the Lockheed craft must support a living, working crew.
Its development represents the sort of cooperative endeavor that NASA has relied on throughout most of its 60-year life, said Barry, the historian.
That was, in the beginning, a remarkable about-face. The agency’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was largely a research organization that depended on in-house expertise.
Once its 8,000 employees, three laboratories and a yearly budget of $100 million became part of NASA, the fledgling agency expanded even further, taking on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a Navy research facility in Maryland and the Army agency where engineers led by Wernher von Braun were developing large rockets.
“It quickly became apparent that the model of doing all the stuff in-house wasn’t going to work any more,” and NASA began outsourcing many pieces of its mission, especially building spacecraft, Barry said.
The amount of control the agency exerted over the process has waxed and waned since, depending on the nature of the mission and the human-safety considerations involved.
“In the early stages, when nobody knew what they were doing in space, there was much more concern about tighter control of things,” Barry said. NASA, sending humans into space for the first time, was keen to avoid losing an astronaut on such a mission.
So in the 1960s, when Chrysler Corp. was building and shipping components of Saturn rockets to the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Ala., government technicians “would take everything apart and put it back together again to make sure it was done right and properly,” he said.
That wasn’t a sustainable approach, and NASA administrators pushed hard to stop the practice. The balance that exists today “makes it easier for those of us entrusted with your tax dollars to feel like we’re being good stewards” while exercising closer oversight of the newest technologies and mission capabilities to avoid “putting people’s lives unnecessarily at risk,” Barry said.
For Orion, meeting NASA’s standards for a “human-rated vessel” means being ready for challenges that might be dealt with at the International Space Station or the moon by climbing into a spacecraft and returning to Earth, said Tony Antonelli, a former space shuttle pilot who heads advanced programs for the company’s space division.
“You don’t have that capability if you’re going to Mars,” he said. “When you’re on your trip, you’re going to have to stay alive — which Orion provides a lot of capability to do — long enough to fix whatever issues come up.”
Innovations that help ensure that include model-based artificial intelligence that’s being developed to assist a crew as large as six grapple with mission challenges when they’re too far away from Earth for real-time conversation, he said.
“Anything you have time to wait and communicate with the ground about, you’ll wait for,” Antonelli added. “They’re already a lot smarter than you because they’re sitting still, thinking.”
Orion completed its first flight test, which was unmanned and lasted more than four hours, in December 2014, reaching an altitude of 3,600 miles above Earth’s surface. That’s 15 times higher than the International Space Station, according to NASA. Next, a human crew will make the same trip, and in the 2020s, the ship will take astronauts to an asteroid. Mars is scheduled to follow in the next decade.
On a trip as long as that one, which might take about three years, the question isn’t whether something will happen, but “what’s going to happen,” Antonelli said.
With the capabilities of the ship Lockheed is building, “You could climb into Orion, button her up and stay safe for up to three weeks” at least, a time frame that could likely be expanded if needed, he said. “That would allow you time to analyze what your situation is, collect some data and communicate with the ground. Even if it took 20 minutes to get the data back to the ground, you’d have time living in Orion and staying safe to then come up with ideas on how to take care of your situation.”
