May 2014 Hard Choices for Manned Spaceflight: America as Icarus James Andrew Lewis

The prestige of the United States will in part be determined by the leadership we demonstrate in space activities.—Report to the president-elect of the Ad Hoc Committee on Space, 1961

Let us consider two possibilities for America’s defunct manned space program. One is that this is a temporary hiatus and America will soon be able to again do what it could do in the 1970s and put small capsules in low earth orbit. The other possibility is that a combination of political indifference and a decline in the government’s ability to manage large, complex projects means that the age of manned space exploration by America is over.

A small, vocal, but politically ineffective space community will protest that such decline is unacceptable. It certainly runs contrary to America’s image of itself as a global leader and to the rhetoric that surrounds our space activities, as when NASA’s administrator recently told the audience of an international space conference (held in Beijing) that America still had “the best space program in the world.” This is true for many space activities but manned spaceflight is not one of them.

The rhetoric of space reflects the politics of an earlier era, when space was a new, strategically important technology and manned spaceflight had immense symbolic value. But policy is best measured by outcomes, and the decision to let manned spaceflight stagnate says much about how America thinks about space. America’s political leaders may be right to be indifferent to space. Or they could be making a strategic miscalculation in ceding leadership to China, assuming they are the tortoise and we are the hare whose speed remains unsurpassed.

Space and Influence

America’s unmanned space exploration programs are unmatched by any other country’s efforts, and the United States is first in select categories for space activity—spending, number of satellites operated, possession of a space station—but this is not space leadership in the conventional sense, provided by manned spaceflight. The question is whether the United States still wants influence and prestige from manned space activities. The choices for any strategy for manned space flight are:

• Increase NASA resources;

• Make NASA more efficient in using the resources it already has;

• Leave space flight to subsidized private-sector entrepreneurs;

• Abandon manned space flight.

The latter, of course, is in effect the current position. The end of manned space flight will become permanent if the United States does not make some hard choices on spending and organization. These are political decisions, where political leaders must weigh the loss of prestige against the cost of a serious manned program. They need

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to assess if there is political, military, or economic benefit to manned space flight that justifies more than custodial expenditure.

The primary reasons for manned spaceflight are international prestige and influence. There are no military benefits from manned space. In military terms, the United States has unmatched (although vulnerable) and unmanned capabilities in space. The economic and research contributions from manned spaceflight are minimal—there are spinoff effects in creating new technologies from the investment in human spaceflight, but it would be equally effective to spend the money directly on research and development. If the goal is to advance science, robots are more effective. This leaves only the possibility of engaging in human space flight for international political advantage, with the space program providing an increased ability to influence the behavior or decisions of other nations in issues not related to space.

The 1958 National Security Council document “U.S Policy on Outer Space” emphasized the effect of space leadership on the U.S. global position, noting that space was characterized by “national competition” and that achievement in space was equated “with leadership in general.” The document notes that the Soviet success with Sputnik was “undermining the prestige and leadership of the United States” and that another country possessing “a significantly superior military capability in space” would “pose a direct threat to U.S. security.”1

Competition quickly centered on manned space flight and ultimately, a race to the moon. The culmination of the successful U.S. effort in the race was a landing on the moon, the construction and launch of two space stations (one of which is still in orbit), and the development of the space shuttle. This means that the successes of the U.S. manned program are more than two decades behind it and leads to a fundamental question: Does the United States still need a manned space program? The political rationale for manned spaceflight—to demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union—has disappeared.

America has not had the ability to put a human into space since 2011. The only nations with this capability are terrestrial competitors, Russia and China. The space shuttle, although striking and dramatic, was an expensive dead end. If the United States knew 10 years ago that it would need to replace the shuttle, if NASA received more than $150 billion since 2000, why was there no drive to replace it? False starts do not count. Shuttle missions were unimaginative, limited to resupplying the space station. This was not exploration nor was it a significant contribution to science. The collapse of the U.S. manned program illustrates the failures of space strategy and the lack of political interest.

The minimal requirement for the United States is to be able to put humans into space to allow for crew rotation on the space station. Until recently, manning the station depended on an expensive and increasingly erratic Russian manned space capability. Russian, European, and, increasingly, commercial operators are capable of supplying its needs in low earth orbit. Whether China’s fledgling manned program could service the space station is an open question. China designed its orbital vehicles to be able to dock with the station, but this option is not attractive in the current atmosphere of Chinese hostility toward the United States.

The military implications of a presence on the moon are limited. The military value of space lies in services with terrestrial applications. Decades ago both the Americans and the Soviets found, after some experiments with armed spacecraft and orbiting observation posts, that these applications were best performed by unmanned spacecraft. A later section will discuss the use of force in space, but neither manned spaceflight nor lunar bases provide military advantage.

1 National Security Council 5814/1, June 20, 1958.

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The same is true for commercial activities. Despite talk about how valuable resources such as helium 3 could be extracted, the economics of shuttling material to and from the moon is unpromising. After 50 years, most commercially valuable activities in space have been identified. These are services with terrestrial applications, such as communications, imagery, or positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). Given current technological limitations, which make it expensive to get into space and to return, mining on the moon or on asteroids or manufacturing in weightless environments are not commercially viable.2 Asteroid mining, space tourism, or industrial developments on the moon will not pay for themselves as long as we depend on expensive and fragile transportation systems. High-end space tourism in low earth orbit may be economically viable, but this will be a small market and not a source of national prestige.

Options for NASA

The level of funding allocated to NASA is a good metric for intent. NASA’s annual budget has averaged about $16 billion over the life of the agency. Over six years of intense effort, the Apollo program averaged about $27 billion. A serious effort now at human space exploration would require increasing NASA’s budget by about 40 percent every year for the next five or six years (to put this in perspective, the total cost would be the same as five months of warfare in Afghanistan). Today’s NASA is not, of course, the NASA of Apollo and it could be reasonably argued that sending more money to the agency as it exists now would not produce the same results. Management problems and congressional interference have dogged NASA for decades. Some of NASA’s space centers function in part as jobs programs defended by Congress and denying NASA managers flexibility to make cuts and adjustments.

We could ask if there are significant benefits from having manned and unmanned space activities under the same organization. By the end, the manned spaceflight existed largely to service the space shuttle and it is having a difficult time readjusting. An alternative approach would be to wind down NASA’s manned effort and create a public corporation along the lines of the successful COMSAT precedent—COMSAT being a federally funded, public corporation created in 1962 to develop communications satellites.

NASA could be restructured to make it leaner and more entrepreneurial. Congress and administrations are unwilling to consider this kind of restructuring, given the desire to preserve incumbent equities. This is a larger problem in American governance, with the 1970s corporate model of giant, lumbering conglomerates still being the preferred organizational model. Inefficient, risk-averse companies go out of business or spin off unprofitable activities; agencies live on. The concern is that splitting the civil space program into two agencies competing in Congress for funding could result in smaller allocations for both.

Another alternative would be to make NASA a funding agency and have it fund privately owned companies for space exploration. This would allow a major downsizing of NASA’s human spaceflight program (itself an obstacle, given the congressional interest in maintaining jobs). The advantage of this approach is that small private companies may be more innovative. So far, the space entrepreneurs are small enough that they can be less consumed by internal negotiations among bureaucratic power centers, and more willing to experiment. The disadvantage is that these companies are not yet capable of the massive projects needed for activities beyond low earth orbit, which will require sustained, long-term funding and support from NASA.

2 A DOD estimate put the cost of launching a single pound in orbit at $10,000 using existing launch vehicles. Entrepreneurial operators of space launch vehicles expect the cost to put a pound into orbit to fall to $3,000. David Kestenbaum, “Spaceflight Is Getting Cheaper. But It’s Still Not Cheap Enough,” NPR, July 21, 2011, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/21/138166072/spaceflight-is-getting- cheaper-but-its-still-not-cheap-enough.

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No president will say that he or she has abandoned manned space flight. A middle option would be to continue to announce that the United States plans to return to manned flight, subsidize entrepreneurial space activities to provide a low-earth-orbit resupply capability to the Space Station (which has at least a decade of operational life left), and eventually return to low earth orbit using space capsules on chemical rockets, as the United States did before the Shuttle and as the Chinese and Russians now do. This would buy time for old propulsion technologies to be improved and new technologies invented—the chemical rockets used by all countries would be familiar to the space scientists and engineers of the 1950s. Since this option would require no additional funding and little significant restructuring, it is bureaucratically and politically attractive, but it also offers little hope for significant improvement.

A final option would be simply to renounce NASA’s role in manned flight. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that giving up manned spaceflight would save the United States $73 billion over the nine years.3 This is a tiny amount in the context of federal spending,4 but if it was reallocated to more productive space research, it could provide greater benefit. The United States could rely on third-party providers to maintain the Space Station for the rest of its time in orbit.

Civil space policy is, of course, not an all-or-nothing issue. The United States can fund a range of space programs for exploration and for earth sciences. It can meet its security, commercial, and scientific needs without manned spaceflight. While many in the world would see abandoning this capability as a retrograde movement for America, and while it would be emotionally wrenching for some, given the range of other U.S. activities in space and the declining role for space as a lever for global influence, retrenchment in human spaceflight may not have much political effect.

Mars as a Token of Commitment

Activities in low earth orbit do not provide political benefit. They have become routine. The International Space Station is a useful vehicle for cooperation among space agencies and provides the United States a toehold in space, but its larger political effect is minimal. The United States’ return to manned flight in low earth orbit would also be of limited political value, since it would duplicate feats from 40-plus years ago. Only manned flight beyond low earth orbit, to the moon or Mars, offers a political return on expenditure, but whether the benefits outweigh the costs remains open to question and attaining either objective poses difficult technical and budget problems.

The United States has the technology that would allow a return to the moon. The dilemma there is that NASA spent more than $150 billion in the last decade without successfully investing in manned spaceflight. It would need at least another $150 billion to return Americans to the moon more than 45 years after the first visit. There is no doubt that if another nation such as China was to get to the moon beforehand it would be interpreted as another sign of U.S. decline, while a return to the moon would bring some prestige to the United States. The question is how much prestige and to what end. The cost of creating a permanent presence on the moon (perhaps to replace the space station as a scientific outpost) is more than political leaders want to pay.

A trip to Mars is not irrational. New space propulsion systems could reduce the travel time to a more survivable length. But a flight to Mars could cost as much as all of the money NASA has received since the agency’s founding. Putting humans on Mars will require a massive investment, where the scientific benefits can be obtained by cheaper robotic exploration. Unlike the race to the moon, any political benefits to the United States

3 Brian Berger, “CBO: Ending U.S. Human Spaceflight Program Would Save Billions,” SpaceNews, November 19, 2013, http://www.spacenews.com/article/civil-space/38242cbo-ending-us-human-spaceflight-program-would-save-billions. 4 Nondefense discretionary spending was $615 billion in 2012, and defense spending another $670 billion.

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of a promised flight to Mars are so distant that they can be largely discounted. In contrast, a return to the moon is technically feasible, but funding a return program is politically challenging. NASA received more than $240 billion since 2000.5 With these funds, a focused, well-managed program could have put people back on the moon. Instead, the money went to other activities, some of which provided only a low return for science and security.

Proposals for the manned exploration of Mars are not an adequate substitute for an active manned program or even a return to the moon because a flight to Mars is so far in the future as to have no political effect. In fact, a mission to Mars is beyond our technical capabilities now and for the foreseeable future. Leonardo da Vinci could draw helicopters and aircraft, but they were made of wood and cloth. Until there were scientific breakthroughs in materials, chemistry, and physics, his ideas were unimplementable. The same is now true for manned planetary exploration. Life-support systems will not support a manned flight to Mars. There have been more extreme proposals that have called for “one-way” trips to Mars by astronauts, but these are politically untenable as Americans are unlikely to accept missions that offer no possibility of survival. With so many countries now in space, these manned activities do not have the same global cachet they did during the Cold War. Nor is the United States engaged in an “either-or” struggle against a totalitarian regime. The greatest obstacle to space exploration is not technical, but political disinterest.

Revitalizing the manned program will first require facing some hard truths about survivability in space and the state of our technology. A permanent presence on the moon is possible, but expensive. A flight to Mars is beyond the limits of our technology. Public opinion on the matter is confused. Polls show that many Americans are displeased with the end of a manned program but do not wish to pay the sums required for a revitalized program with expansive goals. In any case, polls are a strange way to determine strategy. Polling data is notoriously easy to manipulate or misinterpret unless great care is taken in the design, and while Americans express support for a manned program, different outcomes might result if the question was framed as “Are you willing to pay higher taxes to support manned space flight?”

Entrepreneurial Space Activities

Faced with a growing reliance on space and mounting expenses, the United States originally conceived of the space shuttle as a cost-saving measure. While the fixed cost of operating the shuttle was higher than single-use capsules, the additional cost per flight was lower and if most American space launches had been carried out by the Shuttle, the overall cost to the United States of putting objects in space would have fallen (the rationale for its formal name of Space Transportation System). After the Challenger disaster, the number of flights fell dramatically, especially when the Department of Defense decided that it would not risk expensive national security payloads on the Shuttle. Instead of providing cheap transport into space, the Shuttle cost America four or five times as much as traditional launch vehicles.

Operating the Shuttle may have also changed the culture of the manned space program in ways that reduced its ability to develop new technologies.6 Manned spaceflight became a custodial activity. One remedy to this adopted by the current administration is to support entrepreneurial private space programs that, according to prevalent thinking, would be more innovative and flexible. Nor do these companies face the political constraints

5 In constant 2008 dollars. A historical account of NASA’s budget can be found at NASA, “Strategy, Budget and Performance,” March 4, 2014, http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html. 6 Accident Investigation Board, “Columbia: Report Volume 1,” August 2003, http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts- 107/investigation/CAIB_medres_full.pdf.

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imposed upon NASA.7 Entrepreneurial space companies will provide automated supply vehicles and a “space taxi” so that the United States will no longer have to rely entirely on foreign providers to service the shuttle, but will not have the ability, given current funding and technology, to do more than this.

Some of these companies also have more ambitious plans for exploration beyond low earth orbit, including perhaps a return to the moon. They will be able to pursue these only if they receive expanded and sustained government funding. The various commercial activities proposed for private space initiatives do not generate sufficient returns to justify the necessary expenditure. However, NASA’s assistance (both financial and technical) to space entrepreneurs provides a lower-cost alternative for rebuilding a human spaceflight capability for the United States.

Space and Influence

The rationale for manned spaceflight in its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s was to demonstrate U.S. global leadership and the superiority of Western market democracies over communism, at a time when it seemed that large swathes of the world would fall one way or the other. But the contest with China, assuming there is one, is different. The Chinese model is not attractive in the way that Marxism was attractive after the end of the Second World War. China seeks greater influence, prestige, and wealth, but it does not have the capacity to mount a global challenge militarily and probably lacks the desire. This is not the Cold War, and no one talks of a “space race” with China, where the winner convincingly demonstrates its system’s superiority.

We can ask what the effect would be on U.S. international influence if China landed on the moon when the United States had chosen not to return. Another way to ask this question is whether international opinion would regard China as a global leader (and surpassing the United States) if it takes the lead in manned spaceflight. Since China’s program has so far only copied U.S. and Soviet achievements from the 1970s, and since the United States continues to operate the space station and other parts of the U.S. space programs far exceed China’s space capabilities, we do not want to exaggerate China’s space prowess. On the other hand, from the space community’s perspective it would be an embarrassment if China were to land on the moon and the United States was unable to return. If China were to establish some kind of permanent presence on the moon, it might easily be interpreted as a passing of the baton in global leadership, but unlike the 1960s, the world is not glued to its television sets to watch China repeat activities that the Soviets and Americans did some four decades ago. The drama is gone, and with it much of the political cachet.

We can only guess how American leaders would react to a Chinese landing on the moon, but barring change, it will not be a “Sputnik moment.” Sputnik, a tiny satellite the Russians put in orbit before slow-moving American programs were ready, frightened the United States because of its military and political implications, coming as it did at the height of the Cold War. The United States is not in a Cold War with China, the world is not divided into blocs, and while it is increasingly powerful, China has difficulty forming partnerships with other influential nations to support a competing vision for global politics. In this environment, the challenge in space is different and smaller. We should not expect another Kennedy moon speech,8 and grandiose commitments unaccompanied by increased funding discredit space policy.

7 Bill Theobold, “Private Companies Claim Better, Cheaper Options for New NASA Rocket,” Space.com, June 19, 2009, http://www.space.com/6868-private-companies-claim-cheaper-options-nasa-rocket.html; “Commercial Crew’s Public-Private Funding Paying Off,” NASA, August 9, 2013, http://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-crews-public-private-funding-paying-off/. 8 NASA, “The Decision to Go to the Moon: President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961, Speech before a Joint Session of Congress,” http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html.

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Kennedy (and Eisenhower before him) felt that Sputnik and the Soviet success of being the first to orbit a man put great pressure on the United States to overtake the Soviet Union. Eisenhower realized the military advantages space capabilities would provide, which at the time included manned space capabilities. To succeed in space, Kennedy said, “we must be bold,” but the shuttle program helped to create the exact opposite: we are now risk-averse. Kennedy believed that the United States must lead if it was to set the rules for the new domain and shifted the space program “from low to high gear.”9 Neither of these incentives exists today, and they are unlikely to reappear in the near term with the United States having “downshifted” in space at the end of the Cold War.

Ending spaceflight could become part of a larger narrative about American decline, but this narrative is not supported by changes in U.S. economic or military capabilities, which remain robust and are the metrics most people use for national decline. The lack of political support of manned spaceflight may reflect some deeper political change, but this could mean that Americans are more concerned with other competitions or other technologies. The tremendous benefits the United States gets from military and science space programs make them essential and provide a powerful reason to continue them. But neither the economy nor military power depends on manned spaceflight. Humans may have some kind of spirit of exploration, but they engage in exploration for commercial or economic gain. The only tangible effect could be to America’s international influence.

Influence is measured in terms of outcomes—the ability to get international outcomes favorable to the United States. At the time of Sputnik and the “kitchen debate,”10 space was a crucial arena for demonstrating superiority. The United States was the de facto leader of the noncommunist world. Being surpassed by the Soviets in space would have shaken the confidence of allies and helped to persuade nonaligned nations that the Soviet model was indeed superior. Today, a failure to return to the moon is unlikely to be interpreted as evidence of Chinese superiority that will lead nations to abandon democracy. Human spaceflight was an important part of the Cold War contest, proving that market democracies could surpass scientific socialism. First place in any space race today will not have the same effect.

China may hope that its manned space program increases its international influence, but there is little evidence to support this. It has spurred something of a space race with India and, to a lesser extent, Japan, but neither nation would accept that china’s advances demonstrate the superiority of the Chinese system. If China did not have a manned space program, it would not change the balance in its maritime disputes or its efforts to gain more influence regionally or globally. The chief benefit for China is domestic, with the space program demonstrating to the Chinese their return to global status and the importance of the Communist Party in achieving this. China’s goal is to have both international and domestic effect from its manned space program, but the effect is largely confined to a domestic audience.

Nations go into space to gain advantage. To maintain advantage, the United States needs access to space, untrammeled use, and stability in its interactions with other space operators. These are the fundamental goals for space policy, and while there are issues of workforce, sustainability, and governance, they are not the central problems. The central problems are political, driven by decisions on what best serves America’s larger international goals. Resolving these problems will require some uncomfortable choices. While most choices can be postponed, the fate of the International Space Station (ISS) provides a hard test for American intentions in space. The ISS’s operational life ends in 2020. NASA hopes to extend operations to 2028, if it can get support

9 John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, September 1962. 10 The Kitchen Debate was an exchange between U.S. Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev on the quality of life in each country.

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from ISS partners and Congress. If Congress will not support extending operations (with or without foreign support), if the ISS ends operations and there is neither a replacement nor American effort to send people beyond low earth orbit, it will signal the end of America leadership in manned space exploration.

The status of the U.S. space program reflects both indecision and indifference among political leaders, and a de facto decision by them on the lack of strategic utility of spaceflight. This could be a miscalculation, an underestimation of the political effect of a Chinese manned lunar landing, particularly on the Chinese own views of themselves and their place in the world. The force of bureaucratic inertia and worsening relations with Russia mean the United States will rebuild some capability to send people into low earth orbit, but the lack of interest by political leaders is likely an accurate estimate of the political benefits of a lethargic return to manned flight, particularly if the United States can continue to show leadership in other areas of space activity. Disinterest in manned spaceflight has telling implications for U.S. leadership, but absent a rekindling of interest among political leaders, the effect of a return to manned flight or its abandonment will be small because there is no political impetus or larger strategy behind the effort, and no link to larger international goals.

James Andrew Lewis is a senior fellow and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., where he writes on technology, security, and the international economy.

This report is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax- exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. All views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

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