Despite all those images we've seen over the years of buzzing mission control centers, fiery launchpads, and exotic test chambers, a walk by NASA's bland headquarters at the corner of Third and E Street in downtown Washington, D.C., is a good reminder that the agency is at its core a government bureaucracy. Still, there are times when even a bureaucracy can break free of its ordinary confines and achieve the spectacular.
NASA got the call in January 2004 when President Bush addressed a group at the agency's headquarters. Chastised and inspired by an investigative report on the shuttle Columbia accident that bluntly described a failure in leadership for manned space exploration, Bush called on NASA to begin developing the space vehicles to carry astronauts back to the moon by 2020, then build a lunar base, and finally send a crew to Mars. "Humans are headed into the cosmos," he declared. Six months later the House of Representatives approved the mission 383 to 15, and the Senate followed by unanimous consent.
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Cost in Space |
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1. Constellation-X Observatory (target date, 2017; cost, $2.5 billion) |
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2. Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO, shown above) (target date, 2017; cost, $10 billion) |
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3. Terrestrial Planet Finder (target date, 2020; cost, $1.7 billion) |
As NASA funnels money to the space shuttle and a return to the moon, a number of unmanned science missions have been delayed or cut. These are a few key examples.Bush's 2005 nomination of Griffin as NASA chief, which gave him responsibility for turning that vision into an actual space program, likewise met a warm reception. While most presidential nominees can count on savage grilling in congressional hearings, the Griffin nomination was notable for its utter absence of hostility or even significant skepticism. Expertise? The man holds six advanced degrees in science, engineering, and business, and he was head of the space department at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. Management know-how? He led major divisions at Orbital Sciences Corporation. Agency savvy? He held high-ranking positions at both NASA and the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as the Star Wars program. Even beyond that impressive paper record, Griffin had shown himself in previous appearances before Congress to be outspoken, decisive, and bold, a man who would be willing to light a fire under resistant bureaucrats and waffling politicians. "We did not retreat from the moon because of technical difficulties, we did not fail to go to Mars because of technical problems, and we have not taken 20 years to put a space station in orbit because of technical matters," he told Congress in 2003. "In each case the issues are matters of politics and leadership." In particular, Griffin made abundantly clear his belief in the Big Mission—getting humans out into the solar system.
Anyone who doubted Griffin's resolve to keep Americans flying into space was set straight in the days leading up to this July's launch of the space shuttle Discovery. Griffin ordered the launch to proceed, overriding no-go assessments by the agency's chief engineer and top safety officer. The officials, along with many others in the agency, were concerned that falling foam at launch could damage the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles, as happened to Columbia in 2003, and leave the shuttle unable to reenter the atmosphere safely. "This is a risk worth taking at this time to get us back on track in space," Griffin insisted. With stakes this high, he decided, the gamble was worth it.
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| Dean Eppler, a geologist from NASA's Johnson Space Center, tests a 210-pound Mark-III space suit designed for easy mobility on the moon. |
This detailed agenda has certainly reenergized much of NASA. "Anyone under 50 here has never had a chance to work on a new space vehicle from the start," says Greg Brauckmann, a NASA Langley aerodynamics and thermodynamics researcher who joined the agency in 1980, when the shuttle was already completed. Most work since then has been on experimental vehicles that never made it into production. "It feels pretty good to work on something that's going to fly," he says.
So far, NASA's efforts have centered mainly on sorting out the aerodynamics of the CEV and its rocket, along with a launch-abort system and a "service module" that stays attached to the CEV until shortly before reentry, providing it with power and propulsion. Since late last year, NASA engineers have been sticking models of these vehicles in Mach-10 wind tunnels, and even firing them out of large guns, to identify possible flight instabilities. The initial launch-abort tower design proved to be a potential source of flight wobble at around Mach 1.5, for example. "When you're able to identify these sorts of things and fix them, that's when morale goes through the roof," says Langley engineer Bill Tomek. The contract to build the CEV, which could eventually be worth $10 billion, is scheduled to be awarded this month to either Lockheed Martin or a joint Boeing and Northrop Grumman team.
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| A mock-up of the Crew Exploration Vehicle, including, from top, the pilot's seat, the exterior, and an interior configured to carry either four astronauts to the moon or up to six to Mars or the International Space Station. It will also make unpiloted cargo deliveries to and from the station. At 16.4 feet wide, the CEV has a volume approximately three times that of its predecessor, the Apollo capsule. |
Now comes the deflating reality check: The long road to Mars may come with a price tag that will cause plans to fizzle well before we make it back to the moon. A stark acknowledgment of a mismatch between goals and budget realities came in February, when, after vehemently vowing not to take "one thin dime" from NASA's space-science efforts to fund human spaceflight, Griffin announced he was doing just that. In NASA's 2007 budget request, he canceled substantial increases previously scheduled for space-science funding, which would now remain almost flat through 2011. Funding for the Big Mission, by contrast, would multiply more than fourfold. Between now and the end of the decade, then, NASA science would receive a total of $4.7 billion less than projected in 2005. Manned space exploration would receive $6.9 billion more. Griffin was pushing more chips into the pot.
This budget shift still won't come close to solving the problem, says Marco Caceres, a senior space analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace and defense research firm. "It's sexy to talk about the moon and Mars, but it's going to be at least 2 or 3 times as expensive as NASA is estimating, and most big aerospace programs end up being 5 to 10 times as expensive as original estimates," he says. "We spent $100 billion and 30 years to build the space station, it's still not complete, and that's just hardware in low Earth orbit."
Griffin won't put a price tag on going to Mars, but NASA has released enough information over the years to permit some back-of-the-envelope calculations. The agency has predicted that getting to the moon will cost $104 billion (about 55 percent of the cost of the Apollo program in today's dollars, according to Griffin), and studies dating back to the 1960s predicted that a Mars mission would cost at least five times as much as getting to the moon. A price tag of $500 billion, then, is not unreasonable. At current funding rates, that would keep NASA off Mars for at least 50 years. In 1989 a detailed three-month study headed by Richard Truly, then the chief of NASA, put the cost at about $800 billion in today's dollars. Caceres thinks NASA will need as much as $2 trillion to complete its mission.
Scott Horowitz, a former shuttle commander who as NASA associate administrator for exploration systems heads up the agency's manned program, shrugs off accusations that the glorious moon-and-Mars agenda is seriously underfunded. "The bottom line is, the program has to fit in the current $16 billion profile," he says, referring to NASA's annual budget. He does not promise that this budget will be enough to get astronauts to Mars, however. Instead, he echoes a refrain heard frequently from Griffin: Americans won't complain about giving NASA more money once they understand what a tiny a piece of federal spending the agency accounts for. "We as a nation quite literally spend more on pizza than we do on space exploration," Griffin told Congress in October 2003. "NASA is 0.6 of a percent of the federal budget," Horowitz adds. "I do a lot of speaking to groups around the country, and you'd be amazed how many hands go up when I ask how many people think NASA's share of the budget is larger than 20 percent."
Abstract discussions of NASA's paltry budget might play well in some community halls, but they are unlikely to change many minds in Congress, which constantly hears the same argument from just about every agency in the country. In July the Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously approved an extra $1 billion in funding for NASA, but the ultimate fate of that bill remains highly uncertain. In fact, space experts see several ways the "paltry budget" argument could end up backfiring.
First of all, the high cost of reaching the moon, even if everything happens on time and on budget, may actually drain the enthusiasm for space exploration. "My concern is we go back to the moon, start building a lunar base, and because of funding problems—which there will be—we'll decide that going to Mars is noble but we can't afford it," says former shuttle commander Bolden. After the heady successes of Apollo, and in the midst of a highly motivating cold war, President Nixon asked for Mars plans but then blanched at the estimated cost and settled for the space shuttle alone. Congress and Nixon didn't even fund the final planned Apollo missions. "No one—no one—involved in the space program intended for us to go into low Earth orbit and stop there, but fiscally that's all we could do," Bolden says.
A second, related concern is that costs could careen out of control long before we ever return to the moon. The aerospace companies that NASA is enlisting to build Ares and the CEV inevitably run into cost overruns, delays, and operating problems. That is just par for the course with enormous, contractor-based projects, says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org and a former director of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists. Yet the aerospace giants have so much clout with Congress that NASA often has no choice but to send big projects their way, Pike says. Once all that expensive hardware is under development, it's hard to kill the project—a kind of protection scheme for both NASA and the contractors. The downside is that NASA becomes dependent on ever-bigger budgets and cannot avail itself of cheaper, simpler approaches that might make a Mars mission more likely. For example, Pike says, NASA could have got by with a much smaller vehicle than the CEV, which is three times the size of the Apollo capsule, requiring a scaling up of the launch vehicle and everything else in the program. "It's not designed to carry astronauts, it's designed to carry contractors," he says.
A third problem is the steadily shrinking tolerance for risk at NASA, in Congress, and among the public. Some of this is obviously due in large part to the trauma of losing two shuttle crews, but it is also related to the loss of a sense of necessity. "During the Apollo program this nation was in a race, and we perceived the outcome as important to national security," says Lennard Fisk, former NASA chief scientist and a space science professor at the University of Michigan. "Now we may not be prepared to go ahead when we encounter setbacks."
Low risk tolerance broadly translates into higher costs. Will Marshall, an analyst at the Space Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., notes that Russia runs space missions for about a tenth of what NASA pays. "The Russians don't bother making sure everything is perfect; they're willing to slap something that seems pretty good on a rocket and have a go at it," he says. "NASA is hypersensitive to everything being just right, and they check it a billion times." Marshall thinks that policy ultimately lowers safety, because the best way to eliminate problems is to launch frequently to keep learning and improving; operating at a tenth of the cost per launch could allow 10 times as many launches.
"The public needs to have a better understanding of risk," Horowitz acknowledges." A Vietnam fighter pilot had about a one in 400 chance of not surviving his first combat flight. The space shuttle flight risk was four times higher than that. If we're going to Mars, the risk is going to be even higher." If the public isn't prepared to accept the consequences of such a hitch, the program could come screeching to a halt.
