View 682 Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Quietus : No More Spacefaring Nation
The Final Shuttle Launch for Friday has been cancelled, but it’s still the end of an era. Actually it’s the end of several eras, particularly the America as a space-faring nation era inaugurated by John Kennedy. The twist is that Shuttle killed space-faring.
Kennedy ran for President on “the Missile Gap” in which he claimed that the USSR had more ICBM missiles than the United States, and the US was in danger of losing a three-day war to the USSR. Since the Soviet Sputnik satellite had gone up and surprised us all, a lot of people believed that. It was a key factor in the election. After the election Kennedy needed something that would show we were winning the technology race. He also had a real vision of America as a space-faring nation. He had a dream and he sold that dream to America. God Bless Him.
When Kennedy announced that America would go to the Moon before the end of the 1960’s, there were only a handful of space scientists and engineers who thought we could do it. Chris Kraft in particular thought that Kennedy had promised more than we could deliver. Werner von Braun believed it could be done, and the technical design of the Apollo project was mostly his. The design was important because there were more goals than simply putting a man on the Moon.
One design was to do the Moon Project in steps: first we build a capability for routine access to orbit through reusable rockets. Start sub-orbital, but make them savable and reusable. Build X ships, and from them learn how to build better ships. The X-15 was a step in that direction. With routine orbital access the rest would be simple: build an on-orbit assembly capability, send up the parts, put them together in orbit in what would amount to a space station – the Von Braun Wheel was a popular candidate – then when the ship was assembled, send up the fuel and oxidizers. The moon ship would go to the Moon, land, and return to Earth orbit. Crew transfers to the space station and returns. Note that by the time of the Moon Launch (from orbit) the most fuel expensive part of the operation – Earth to Space Station, then Space Station back to Earth – would be routine. We’d know how to do it.
This looked both logical and safe, and from everything then known about the Soviet program, we’d beat the Russians.
Kennedy rejected this plan. First, we were in a race with the Soviets, and he was concerned that we would lose. Second, and less well publicized – it did not, as the Saturn/Apollo approach did, mean the reindustrialization of the South. It was important to the Moon Mission that Lyndon Johnson be on board. He had the Congressional power that Kennedy, formerly a Congressman and junior Senator without mu Congressional influence, never had. Johnson insisted that most of the heavy work be done in the South. Geography dictated that eastern launches would go from Florida. The Saturn/Apollo plan called for a great deal of heavy industrial work in Houston, Huntsville, and Michoud, Louisiana. No one pays much attention to Michoud now, but at one time it was terribly important – and if it had remained so, Shuttle would have been a different and far safer spacecraft and the Challenger disaster would not have happened. But that’s another story.
Once we were committed to Saturn/Apollo, with its enormous disintegrating totem poles, and once the nation was committed to winning the space race so that there were few fiscal restraints, the race was on and it was expensive. Terribly expensive. At a time when the national budget was under $100 Billion a year, Saturn/Apollo would cost $20 billion officially, and actually more as talent and research in other military operations were altered to apply to Apollo.
The problem is, there were no private industries with capabilities to manage anything this big and complex. The most complex operation in the history of the world was D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1944; Saturn/Apollo was a contender to be the new first place in complexity, and was certainly second. No private industry could have managed D-Day and no private corporation could have managed Apollo. The only “companies” used to managing hundreds of thousands of employees to accomplish a particular goal at a particular time were the military. Although the pretense was that NASA was a civilian operation, and most of it was, Saturn/Apollo was done with military managers and in the military way. The “soldiers” were civilian development scientists and technicians, of course; but the people doing the managing were military, and they did it the military way, which is to divide the enormous task into a series of comprehensible tasks and assign someone capable of getting that done to each task. This meant concern for getting the job done – mission oriented — and little to none for the concerns of the people assigned. “You, man. You are in charge of getting me an operating space suit design. It has to do the job, and it has to be ready on time. Go do it.” “Uh, General, I’m a control systems engineer –” “I know that. I also see your record. I know you can do this job, and this is the job I have to get done. Go for it. Dismissed.”
And on. In every case the notion wasn’t to put the best man in the right job. It was to be sure that a good enough man was in every job, and also to have enough redundancy with overlapping jobs to make sure that each job got done and was done on time to fit in so that on a certain July day in 1969 an American would step onto the surface of the Moon.
That happened. It happened on time, and while hardly under budget, it got done. The US could afford it. And during that era of Mercury and Gemini and Apollo and The Right Stuff, America was promised a space-faring capability, enthusiasm for space rose in the general population, space was popular, and the NASA legend grew. And we went to the Moon.
The problem was that we won to early. By the time of Apollo the Russians understood that they couldn’t win, and they gave up on the race, and told the world it wasn’t worth winning anyway. The grapes were sour. (For those with a modern education, that image is from a story in Aesop’s Fables, and if you never read those as a child, you ought to; you’ve missed something.) So by the time we landed on the Moon, it wasn’t so clear why we were doing it, or what we would get out of it; but it was clear that America was Number One, and our ability to go to space, do things, and come home was the demonstration of that. It wasn’t precisely The Dream, but it would do.
But we had built Saturn/Apollo, a huge disintegrating totem pole, and we hadn’t used Saturn for building any infrastructure in space. More: we accomplished Apollo the military way, goal oriented, damn the expenses, hire everyone you need, assign enough people to be sure the job was done. We had created an army of 21,000 development scientists and technicians.
And the Iron Law took over. If you don’t know Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, please go read it.
NASA was told to build systems that would make space operations cheap and routine.
The real job of NASA was to develop a system that would employ 21,000 development scientists and engineers. They did. The result was Shuttle, which was designed to employ 21,000 development scientists and engineers without regard to the success or failure of Shuttle as a spacecraft. In that sense, Shuttle was a complete success.
And it did some missions well. It did others horribly. We never developed a decent on-orbit capability. We never developed a decent working space suit for construction in space. But we did have a system whose budget was independent of its operations. Note that the Shuttle budget was pretty much the same year after year, independent of the number of missions. I used to say that the cost per mission of Shuttle was either zero or infinity: If we had five missions in a year the annual cost was the same as in the years when we had zero missions.
There was a lot to like about Shuttle but mostly because she was all we had. She ate the budget for X programs that might have taken the Reusable spaceship approach. NASA carefully killed all potential rivals to Shuttle. It also killed a number of concepts that couldn’t be built with Shuttle. No other approaches wanted or needed. It’s Shuttle or nothing, and back in Reagan’s day America’s space capability and a demonstrated ability to do Strategic Defense was an important part of the strategy to end the Cold War.
I will miss the old girl even so. Shuttle was the enemy of the space plan I had hoped to bring about through SSX. If you want to know more about that, see The SSX Concept, and How to Get to Space. I wrote both those long ago, but they are still relevant.
