The Aldridge Commission report was issued in July 2004.8 Even though its recommendations were reasonable and moderate, only a few were seriously considered and even fewer were eventually implemented. Our idea for NASA to procure delivery of goods and people to low Earth orbit eventually resulted in the Commercial Cargo and Crew program. Engineering management buzzwords like “spiral development” were eagerly embraced by the agency, but such enthusiasm did not move the ball forward to any great degree. Some ideas were conspicuously ignored, such as resurrecting the National Space Council to act as an oversight body for NASA and the idea to turn field centers into federally funded research and development centers (FFRDC), a mode of operation in which a university manages an agency field center—NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by Caltech, operates this way. This structure permits easier personnel recruitment and turnover, and it allows centers to seek new business from the private sector—features designed to keep field centers technically strong and their management more nimble and responsive to rapidly changing fiscal and programmatic conditions.
That the commission’s report was largely tabled is probably not too surprising. However, I was surprised at what I perceived to be the extreme inertia of the agency in getting the VSE started. The obvious first step in any lunar return was to fly a robotic mission to follow up on the Clementine and Lunar Prospector polar discoveries. Mapping the Moon globally at high precision and resolution would create a database of strategic knowledge to help plan and execute future missions. An agency call went out to the scientific community (called an “Announcement of Opportunity,” or AO) to propose instruments to fly to the Moon on a mission called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Among the many specifications of new, required strategic data was one to “identify putative deposits of appreciable near-surface water ice in polar cold traps at ~100 m spatial resolution.”9 At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, I was part of a team that proposed an imaging radar for the LRO mission to address this requirement.10 We also proposed flying a smaller, less capable radar instrument that could fit on the Indian Space Research Organization’s forthcoming Chandrayaan-1 mission to the Moon as a guest payload. Radar would be useful to map the shadowed, cratered regions near the poles, data needed to study the RF reflection properties of the interiors of these craters to determine if ice might be present there.
To our surprise, the radar instrument (Mini-SAR) was selected for India’s Chandrayaan, along with a spectral imager (Moon Mineralogy Mapper or M3) as a second American guest payload—but not for America’s LRO mission. In fact, the selected payload for LRO contained no radar instrument at all. Instead, to infer the distribution of water, a Russian neutron detector was chosen, a design that experts told us was probably inadequate to produce hydrogen maps of the poles at the high resolution required by the AO. These decisions, made in early 2005, caused great concern among those of us working toward lunar permanence and resource use; it appeared to be a selection designed more to check off a box on a chart rather than one geared toward the gathering useful strategic knowledge. Our rejection was appealed to the Administrator of NASA and after some wrangling, the Mini-RF radar was approved for flight on LRO. This administrative fracas led to some resentment toward the radar experiment by some of the LRO project people at NASA–Goddard Space Flight Center. Our Mini-RF experiment was accommodated on the LRO mission as a “tech demo,” and although the project had been directed by senior management to accommodate Mini-RF, our team had to fight for observing time and spacecraft resources during the nominal mission.
Flying the radar on the Indian mission was more gratifying.11 Chandrayaan-1 was India’s first mission to deep space and the Indians were quite excited and proud of their maiden efforts in trans-LEO spaceflight. The Chandrayaan spacecraft was relatively small, about the size of Clementine, yet very capable. It carried not only precision imaging cameras but also flew instruments to map the mineralogy and chemistry of the surface. The two American experiments flown on Chandrayaan, our Mini-SAR radar instrument (built by Raytheon and APL) and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (built by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) had to get approval from the State Department before we could fly them to the Moon. I was told at the beginning of this effort that because of sensitivities to export control issues, it was highly unlikely that we could get permission to fly the Mini-SAR on India’s mission. But it turned out that our application to participate on Chandrayaan coincided with a presidential-level initiative to improve US-India relations. As a result, the State Department was very supportive of our effort. A last-minute intervention by the White House led to the approval of the export license. Mini-SAR became the first American scientific experiment to propose and be selected to fly on an Indian space mission.
I made almost a dozen trips to India over four years. Each one-way journey required roughly twenty-six hours in transit and lasted only a few days; the nearly twelve-hour time difference between India and America played havoc with my internal clock. The upside was that the Indians were a pleasure to work with. They were enthusiastic about going to the Moon and their mission received a lot of local publicity. Whenever I told anyone why I had come to India, the universal response was excitement and an eagerness to learn more about the mission. After selection, the actual work of flying an experiment in space largely involves attendance at innumerable meetings, where the arcane details of each system and every part are described and debated. During design, assembly, and test, scientists have little real work to do; we determine and define the parameters of the instrument and devise a plan to collect the data, but ordinarily, our work happens during and after the flight, when the data streams down and must be reduced, formatted, and interpreted. Many of us view preflight work as paying dues for the fun work to follow. And as many can attest, all of this planning and effort can just as easily go up in flames if the launch does likewise.
The LRO version of the instrument was a bit more challenging. The LRO radar was to operate in two radio frequencies at two different ground resolutions, but the Mini-SAR and Mini-RF instruments were basically the same. In terms of operation time, Chandrayaan was scheduled to launch about a year before LRO. It was hoped that we would obtain full data for both poles from Chandrayaan, which in turn would help us plan to take high-resolution data of interesting areas with the LRO Mini-RF build. During an extended mission and with a little luck, we might even be able to collect enough data to make a radar reflectance map of the entire Moon, detailing slope distributions and locating jagged rock fields on a global basis.
The Fate of the VSE at NASA: What’s the Mission?
Although much of my time was spent working on the two radar instruments, I was also on a number of advisory and analysis groups at NASA dealing with the implementation of the lunar phase of the VSE. Once the Aldridge Commission submitted its report, the new Exploration Systems Mission Division (ESMD) began its process to define the spacecraft, dubbed Project Constellation,12 and the missions that would constitute our nation’s new space program. Despite the clear, strategic direction NASA had been given regarding the Vision, in those early planning stages, there was growing cause for concern about the fate of the VSE.
The head of ESMD at NASA, Admiral Craig Steidle, who came to the VSE from another large engineering project, the Defense Department’s Joint Strike Fighter program, had no spaceflight experience. The then-current vogue in large engineering projects was a technique called spiral development.13 The spiral plan called for four sequential stages: develop requirements, analyze risks, build and test, and evaluate results. The product becomes the new “block” to be refined in the next spiral. Another name for this process is “build a little, test a little.” The idea is to pursue the most promising designs by not committing to a final version until significant experience and test data are acquired. NASA’s devotion to this new management voodoo was reminiscent of many previously embraced business school fads, such as Total Quality Management (TQM). One notable employer of sp
iral development, amazingly enough, was the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the project whence Steidle came and one renowned for being years behind schedule and billions of dollars over cost.
Thus, from the first step, with the development of requirements and a seemingly endless exercise called technology “road mapping,” the VSE at NASA started off slowly—and then tapered off. Many different experts in science and engineering were brought together at great time and expense to opine on what the new spaceflight systems had to accomplish, in what order, and to what degree of fidelity. This involved building complicated spreadsheets whose contents were populated by technologies, instruments, and knowledge needs. The problem with this activity is that too often, problem definition becomes a substitute for actual programmatic progress, since critical decisions can always be deferred while awaiting better defined or more perfectly understood requirements.
Lest it seem that no progress was being made, there was one activity in the post-VSE announcement era that warrants special mention. Associate Administrator for Spaceflight Bill Readdy had pulled together an informal study team (taken from his section of engineers and experts) to examine a possible path to implementing the VSE. While the agency had an internal “red team/blue team” study effort, which came up with the lunar “touch-and-go” concept, Readdy put together what was called the “Gold Team,” whose mandate was to examine unorthodox approaches to implement the Vision. The Gold Team looked at the issue of developing a new human trans-LEO capability, while at the same time returning the shuttle to flight and completing the construction of the ISS.
The Gold Team found that the original charge to the agency—to return to flight, finish building the ISS, and develop a new human space vehicle, all with the aim of returning to the Moon by 2015—was achievable if certain architectural choices were made early. The most significant feature of their approach was to retain the shuttle launch infrastructure to support the first two milestones and then use that asset to build the shuttle side-mount heavy lift launcher, a derived vehicle that used shuttle engines, external tank, solid rocket boosters, and all of the existing Cape infrastructure. The advantage of shuttle side-mount was that by using existing pieces, it would require minimal new development. As will become clear, the reason that Project Constellation was cancelled is rooted in escalating, higher than expected early development costs that continually pushed its projected first flight farther and farther out into the future. If NASA had chosen to go down the path of the Gold Team, we would have completed the ISS and retired the shuttle on schedule, and the new shuttle side-mount would have been ready to fly humans by 2015.
The advantage of the Gold Team approach was that by adopting shuttle side-mount, most of the development costs for new deep-space systems could be focused where they were most needed: on the new CEV and a robust program of robotic precursor missions to the Moon. The CEV at this stage was undefined; it could have taken the shape of an Apollo-type capsule, as it ultimately did under the Constellation program as the Orion spacecraft, or it could have been the more flexible “bent biconic” design,14 an aerodynamically shaped body similar to that of the Blue Origin commercial spacecraft. This latter design could have served as a pathfinder development for a Mars entry vehicle, as they have similar aerodynamic shapes and would be able to land on its tail under thrust, permitting soft, dry landing at the launch site, like the shuttle. Separate crew modules derived from ISS hardware would serve as cislunar transfer vehicles.
The original VSE called for a significant and robust program of robotic missions, but the Gold Team took this further by using such missions to emplace infrastructure on the Moon. A large robotic lander was planned, designed to use solar-electric propulsion (SEP) and large solar arrays to spiral out slowly from LEO to the Moon and then use a LOX-hydrogen rocket to land up to several metric tons on the lunar surface. After landing this payload, a mobile lander platform would separate and the large solar arrays that powered the SEP would become part of the electrical power-generating infrastructure of the outpost. Through this approach, we would begin to establish a permanent lunar surface outpost, a facility eventually to be used by humans. By predeploying habitats and subsystems on the Moon using unmanned spacecraft, we could make the human-rated systems smaller (reducing development costs), yet adequate (taking advantage of preemplaced assets). The innovative use of robotic missions by the Gold Team was a significant departure from ordinary agency practice, whereby robotic missions are used primarily for the acquisition of scientific and engineering data, which are then used to design the human vehicles. Instead, the Gold Team advocated using robotic assets in tandem, and in parallel, with the human spacecraft and missions.
Although the Gold Team architectural approach had much to commend it, both in technical and in fiscal terms, Readdy was not the agency point man designated to make these choices. Steidle and the Office of Exploration were aware of this work but did not take it seriously, insisting instead on pursuing their road mapping and spiral development approach—which, in this case, consisted mostly of deferring decisions indefinitely. The only effort proceeding to actual flight was LRO—planned as the first in a series of robotic exploration precursor missions sent by spacefaring nations around the world to the Moon.
A New Administrator and the ESAS
Early in 2005, Sean O’Keefe announced his decision to leave NASA to become chancellor of Louisiana State University. Michael D. Griffin was tapped as the new administrator, coming to NASA with an impressive background of engineering and management experience backed up by seven university degrees.15 I knew Mike from the Synthesis Group days, when he was one of our senior members, and from the Clementine project, where he was deputy director for technology in the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. Griffin also served as the associate administrator for exploration at NASA during the SEI days, although as we have seen, that program was abandoned. A visionary, Mike was and is a strong advocate for a vigorous and expansive human space program. Around the time of the VSE rollout, Griffin had led a study sponsored by the Planetary Society, outlining an architecture for human missions beyond LEO, primarily driven by the requirements for human Mars missions.16 This plan was notable for its use of a crew launch vehicle derived from a single shuttle solid rocket booster, an innovation that generated much comment and subsequent controversy.
Griffin decided that NASA had wasted the last eighteen months with road mapping exercises and spiral development and summarily dismissed Steidle. In his place, Griffin brought in Scott “Doc” Horowitz, a former astronaut and the engineer who had come up with the idea for the “stick,” the SRB-based launch vehicle. To move the ball down the field, one of the first things Griffin did after assuming agency leadership was to convene an ad hoc study group to design an architecture for missions beyond LEO. This effort, dubbed the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS),17 was conducted from midsummer to the fall of 2005. The lead engineer was Doug Stanley of Georgia Tech who led a team of mostly NASA engineers from Headquarters and the field centers. I was a member of this group, but my involvement was focused only on lunar surface activities and the identification of possible landing sites. I was not involved in any major decisions about the spacecraft and launch vehicles of the architecture.
The ESAS team began with a set of assumptions about the requirements of the new transportation system and how it would be used. The study embraced the recommendation of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB)18 to separate crew and cargo, thought to be a safety issue, although no one could really give a logical rationale for it. There was a sense that launching a rocket with the crew positioned on the side of the vehicle, like the shuttle, was inherently unsafe, although this specific idea is not part of the CAIB report. It is difficult to justify this edict on technical grounds, since 134 shuttle flights safely launched people in this configuration and in the one accident that occurred during launch, Challenger, the crew and their cabin survived the explosion and would have lived had the cabi
n been equipped with parachutes; they were instead killed on impact with the sea. This ground rule was important because it meant that adoption of a shuttle side-mount design as a launch vehicle would likely require three vehicles per lunar mission rather than two, a consequence later used to justify the elimination of the side-mount option. The new architecture was mandated to serve ISS crew and cargo requirements, in addition to lunar surface missions, even though the then-current plan called for ending American participation in the ISS around the time that the new systems were to come online. Certainly this was not the first time in the history of the space program that an architecture was devised under the constraints of arbitrary and illogical ground rules, but serious consequences were to emerge from these boundary conditions.
The ESAS work came up with an interesting solution to the architectural problem of launch, something they called the “1.5 launch vehicle” solution. In brief, the study advocated the development of two different launch vehicles: a smaller (20 ton) crew launch vehicle identical to the Planetary Society’s SRB “stick” rocket (Ares I), and a larger (130 ton) shuttle-derived, inline vehicle (Ares V) to carry cargo and heavy payloads (launching two differently sized vehicles led to the nickname). A single mission would use both vehicles; the lunar lander and Earth departure stage would be launched on the large Ares V as “cargo,” while the crew would be launched separately on the smaller Ares I. The two spacecraft would rendezvous in Earth orbit, dock, and then depart for the Moon. The rest of the mission profile followed the same pattern as the Apollo missions: lunar orbit insertion, landing, ascent, rendezvous, and return to Earth in the Orion CEV. Both the Orion CEV and the Altair lunar lander were larger, more capable versions of the Apollo CSM and Lunar Module. Because of Constellation’s similarity of appearance and mission profile to the Apollo missions, Mike Griffin once referred to this architecture as “Apollo on steroids,” an unfortunate characterization that reverberates to this day.
The Value of the Moon Page 11
