COVERmay-fin_Layout 1 4/18/13 12:34 PM Page 1 May 2013 Acquisition reform: Real solutions Shifting fortunes for commercial X-band A conversation with Eddy Pieniazek A P U B L I C A T I O N O F T H E A M E R I C A N I N S T I T U T E O F A E R O N A U T I C S A N D A S T R O N A U T I C S VIEW2layout0513_Layout 1 4/15/13 2:56 PM Page 2 Deep space 2023: The art of the possible “The object of your mission is to ex- tional Research Council report issued shifts in the agency’s overall goals. A plore the Missouri River, and such in December, stated that the agency’s change in NASA fortunes requires a princi pal streams of it, as, by its course progress toward achieving its long- change in strategic direction. and communication with the waters of term priorities is hampered by a lack the Pacific Ocean...may offer the most of national consensus on its strategic How far in a decade? direct and practicable water-commu- goals and objectives. Another serious On the current course, by 2023 NASA nication across the continent, for the obstacle is the mismatch between its astronauts will still be working aboard purposes of commerce.” directed goals and the congressionally the ISS, an outpost heading into its —Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether allocated budget. Because current law twilight years. Commercial transport Lewis, 1803. restricts NASA from reorganizing its firms will be handling resupply, and personnel and infrastructure more ef- NASA will be leasing private space- PRESIDENT JEFFERSON’S ORDER TO ficiently, the agency cannot use its craft for the launch and return of its Meriwether Lewis inaugurating the limited resources more wisely in pur- space station crews. ISS lifeboat serv- Lewis and Clark expedition offers the suit of long-term goals. The panel sug- ices also will have gone commercial, nation a model for guiding its explo- gested that the White House take the shifting that duty to the U.S. for the rations of Earth-Moon space. The U.S. lead in developing a national consen- first time since Russia’s Soyuz assumed should make deep space not only an sus on space polic y goals and provide the role in 2000. NASA will announce arena of scientific exploration, but also a budget better suited to the directives a stream of interesting scientific dis- a fertile economic frontier where pri- it gives NASA. coveries from the ISS, but no scientific vate enterprise and industry can Far from boosting NASA’s re- or technological breakthroughs will thrive. The guiding mission for the U.S sources, the Congress passed a budget have reached the marketplace. In pub- and NASA in the coming decade in March cutting about a billion dollars lic perception, the ISS and its mission should be to explore Earth-Moon through the rest of this fiscal year. will still have a very low profile. space and tap the resources found Whatever the funding details for 2013 By 2023, NASA’s Orion will have there—for the purposes of commerce. and 2014, neither the White House launched just three times, and only “NASA’s Strategic Direction,” a Na- nor the Congress will make any major once with crew aboard. The heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) might have two missions under its belt, per- haps propelling the first Orion crew around the Moon in 2021. But these milestones assume flawless perform- ance for Orion and SLS in their initial shakedowns. Budget projections for the 2020s envision NASA flying the SLS/Orion only once every couple of years. With progress and momentum so slow, and without the ability to equal even Apollo achievements, a fu- ture president and Congress could easily decide to end NASA’s entire hu- man space exploration enterprise. NASA hopes its announced deep space goal, an expedition beyond the Moon to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) by 2025, will finally revive its fortunes. However, progress toward that goal has been elusive: Orion and SLS are hardly on a fast track, and the The SpaceX Dragon was captured and berthed at the ISS by Expedition 34 using Canadarm II on March 3. agency’s ideal targets for such expedi- Future commercial vehicles will be essential in supplying propellant and hardware to exploration outposts in Earth-Moon space. tions have yet to be discovered. 16 AEROSPACE AMERICA/MAY 2013 VIEW2layout0513_Layout 1 4/15/13 2:56 PM Page 3 NASA has not even allotted funds to conduct the half-billion-dollar sur- vey mission, critical to finding a target for the administration’s 2025 asteroid goal. As NASA’s own Small Bodies As- sessment Group reported in January, “Funding a NEO survey mission has the collateral benefits of identifying potential NEO targets for ISRU [in-situ resource utilization] and robotic sci- ence missions, as well as Potentially Hazardous Objects for planetary de- fense.” Yet no funds to commence the needed space-based search (0.3% of the NASA budget over 10 years) can be found. Neither the scientific discoveries to be made in deep space nor the pros- pect of losing leadership to China in that arena seem to energize U.S. poli- cymakers. If science and foreign pol- icy are insufficient prods, perhaps we A deep-space mission to a near-Earth asteroid may reignite NASA’s fortunes. should turn to another incentive, one that has sustained U.S. progress for more than two centuries: entrepre- ric tons. The NEA population harbors ral sources of water, metals, and neurial commercial development. more than half a million objects as volatile organic compounds. They large as or larger than DA14, many on plan to find asteroidal w ater first and Reviving a mission orbits accessible to NASA and private sell it to space agencies, later using Fortunately for NASA and the nation, spacecraft. To date, we have discov- NEA metals, organic compounds, and the agency is already empowered to ered just 10,000, barely 1% of the total rare elements as feedstock for con- help open up the deep space eco- population. struction and industrial processes. The nomic frontier. Congress, in the Na- Two asteroid mining companies, initial benefit derived from the aster- tional Aeronautics and Space Act (as Planetary Resources and Deep Space oids (as from the Moon) is water for amended in 2010), declares: “…the Industries, have already announced use as propellant, to replace hydrogen general welfare of the United States re- their intentions to go after these natu- and oxygen launched at greater cost quires that the Administration seek and encourage, to the maximum ex- tent possible, the fullest commercial use The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope atop of space.” Haleakala, Maui, is part of NASA’s The Moon and nearby asteroids ground-based near-Earth object offer abundant raw materials, and the search program. NASA’s key first step toward locating and assessing Sun provides nearly limitless energy to asteroid resources should be to power industrial activity in space. The mount a comprehensive survey of president, then, should direct NASA to the hundreds of thousands of expand the $300-billion global space smaller asteroids (about 50 m and up) in accessible, Earth-like sector by using its deep space pro- orbits. Courtesy Rob Ratkowski. grams to actively open the resources of Earth-Moon space to economic development. The millions of NEAs are cosmic leftovers from the formation of the so- lar system, constantly streaming through Earth-Moon space. Asteroid 2012 DA14, for example, passed within Earth’s geosynchronous satel- lite ring on February 15; at 45 m in di- ameter, its mass is about 130,000 met- AEROSPACE AMERICA/MAY 2013 17 VIEW2layout0513_Layout 1 4/15/13 2:56 PM Page 4 launch systems, or harness commer- cial partners to put companies in di- rect contact with space raw materials. First, NASA can announce its in- tention to spur prospecting for space resources by starting a focused search for small asteroids using existing and off-the-shelf ground-based systems, such as the ATLAS search telescope just funded by the agency. It can eval- uate this year and next the practicality of a robotic asteroid capture and re- turn mission (see “Delivering on a promise to Columbia’s explorers,” March, page 14). NASA should initiate a low-cost mission to prospect for ice on the Moon using a commercially built rover and launcher. In parallel, NASA should push ISS experiments testing asteroid surface systems and commercial resource processors aimed at exploiting wate r- NASA astronauts Kevin Ford (foreground), Expedition 34 commander, and Tom Marshburn, flight engineer, bearing NEA regolith when available. worked with the combustion integrated rack multiuser droplet combustion apparatus in the ISS Destiny Within five years, NASA should launch laboratory on January 9. The ISS can host commercial/NASA tests of equipment and processors needed to exploit resources on the low-gravity surfaces of near-Earth asteroids. commercially built asteroid probes to- ward promising NEA targets, with the from Earth. Even a 500-ton asteroid technology goals as it plans to send results guiding development of appro- (about 7 m across) could harbor 100 astronauts to lunar distance and be- priate resource processors. tons of water, worth about $5 billion yond. By fast-tracking physical access The shift to including commercial at today’s launch prices. to in-space resources on both NEAs space activity as a NASA exploration and the Moon, NASA can make the se goal, equal to science and exploration Space resources, step by step materials available not only to astro- technology development, can happen Both companies expect to take at least nauts, but also to commercial industry.