NASA's ESAS: An Immodest Proposal
FYI,
"Space Access Update #112"
Space Access Society
http://www.space-access.org/updates/sau112.html
: Some things take more thought than others. We've been watching all
: summer as the details of NASA's new exploration plan come out,
: trying to decide what to make of it all. We're pretty much obliged
: to, since we're part of a coalition called Space Exploration
: Alliance that exists to support NASA exploration funding - we signed
: up with SEA last year, supporting the initial increases while we
: waited hopefully to see just how much actual useful NASA reform we
: might get.
: As of this writing, the new NASA plan - formally, the Exploration
: Systems Architecture Study or ESAS - still isn't official. But
: the basics of ESAS are pretty well known. It has been delayed two
: months now, as White House Office of Management and Budget
: reportedly had problems with the large increases over their NASA
: exploration budget baseline that the initial version of ESAS called
: for. It looks like part of these increases have been squeezed out,
: or offset by promised cuts elsewhere. ESAS has been accepted by
: the White House and passed on to Congress. Public release is
: today, Monday September 19th.
: To be blunt, we have big problems with this plan. It's the same
: basic approach as Apollo, disposable (mostly) spacecraft, on big
: NASA-proprietary boosters, flown a few times a year, by a standing
: army of NASA and contractor employees. This is Apollo 2.0, with
: somewhat more delivered exploration, at moderately higher cost, on
: a significantly slower schedule.
: We have to ask, after forty years of stunning technological
: progress, shouldn't we be able to improve on Apollo's cost-to-
: exploration ratio a bit more than this? US taxpayers will get
: little more Buck Rogers for their inflation-adjusted buck than they
: did in the 1960's. And we must remember, that's before the
: overruns and delays. This is still Old NASA - there's no radical
: organizational reform in this plan.
: However, we have a much more fundamental problem with ESAS. This
: Apollo redux has the same fatal flaw as Apollo: The specialized
: throwaway systems invented to get (back) to the Moon ASAP were
: (will be) far too labor-intensive at far too low a max flight rate
: to allow affordable followup. The new ships are not only based in
: significant part on existing Shuttle components and facilities, but
: they are to be operated in significant part by the existing Shuttle
: organization. IE, tens of thousands of people narrowly specialized
: in various aspects of flying a handful of astronauts on a handful
: of missions a year - at, by the time all this fixed overhead is
: added up, billions of dollars a mission. Like Apollo, NASA's new
: ESAS plan has built into it the seeds of its shutdown by some
: future Congress, once the warm glow of the first few daring
: missions has once again faded.
: If, in fact, this program gets that far. Apollo had a powerful
: political reason for its get-there-FAST-and-screw-longterm-costs
: approach - it was a major exercise in fighting the Cold War by
: means other than war, competing with the USSR in the realm of
: perceived national technological prowess. Settling the battle by a
: joust between champions rather than the armies fighting, as it
: were... As such, Apollo was not going to be cancelled while we
: still had any chance of winning the race.
: This ESAS plan does not enjoy that luxury - the two chief
: motivators behind funding for it are the diffuse national sense of
: pride that "we do space best", and Congressional reluctance to
: accept major job losses at the various NASA manned spaceflight
: centers and contractors. That national sense of pride in NASA has
: been taking a pounding lately; it may not survive many more blows.
: Once it goes, all bets are off in the Congress. NASA manned space,
: absent the national pride component, is a regional interest, and as
: such vulnerable in a time of tight budgets. This ESAS, with its
: multiple large upfront developments of big new NASA-proprietary
: vehicles and its lack of serious reform of the existing agency, is
: far too dependent on NASA not shooting itself in the foot anymore
: over the next few election cycles. Potential additional Shuttle
: problems aside, it's been a long time since NASA successfully
: developed a big new rocket on schedule and budget.
: As we wrote in Update #103 back in April '04: "Moon, Mars, &
: Beyond.. ...depends utterly on major reform and restructuring of
: NASA for any chance of success. Attempting to pursue MM&B without
: fundamentally changing the agency that brought us Shuttle, Station,
: and X-33 won't fly... Old NASA would not be able to do the job at
: anywhere near a sustainable budget." But what we've watched emerge
: this summer is not a plan to transform NASA - it's a plan to avoid
: NASA having to undergo very much genuine change at all.
: That's the other aspect of the disconnect here: ESAS follows the
: old Apollo ignore-longterm-costs roadmap, not because of urgent
: national requirement - if we're in a hurry, this plan doesn't show
: it, with the first new Moon mission slated for thirteen years on
: (Apollo made it in eight) - but as best we can tell because
: repeating Apollo requires the least organizational risk and change
: from NASA. Ultimately, NASA wants to do Apollo again because
: Apollo is what NASA was designed for, and in the thirty years since
: it ended they've downsized and ossified, but never fundamentally
: changed.
: We strongly urge the White House and the Congress to tell NASA to
: go back and come up with a practical plan for transforming
: themselves into a useful national space exploration agency. ESAS
: isn't it.
: We also see considerable danger that commercial Station resupply
: will turn into (despite the best will in the world by those at HQ
: conceiving it) a tarbaby (a glue-trap for you kids never taught the
: old folk tales) as the people actually administering Station set
: impossible standards for would-be vendors, until they go broke and
: go away. (Last we heard, not even Shuttle and Soyuz meet the
: official "prox ops" Station docking rules; both had to be
: grandfathered in.) Our hypothetical turf-jealous Station managers
: could then go to Congress saying "see, those damned amateurs
: couldn't hack it, now fund us pros to do the job!"
--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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