Hard Choices for Manned Spaceflight: America As Icarus James Andrew Lewis
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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 2 | Hard Choices for Manned Spaceflight: America as Icarus 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. James Andrew Lewis | 3 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).