The reaction to the work of the committee was mixed. It was widely and incorrectly interpreted as a slapdown of the Constellation architecture. In fact, the report noted that the chosen Constellation architecture would create the capabilities claimed for it. However, costing estimates suggested to the committee that an additional $3 billion per year was needed to meet the chosen schedule goals of Constellation. Attention mainly focused on the Augustine committee’s Flexible Path architecture, one that promised technology development in the near term and missions to unspecified destinations sometime in the future. Some thought this was a great approach, while others pointed out that nebulous goals and indefinite timelines are, in general, not a good recipe for a space program “worthy of a great nation.”
As always with committee reports, the devil was in the details. Cost estimates provided to the committee by the Aerospace Corporation included excessively large margins and totals came in much higher than other analysts estimated. Moreover, the committee had been presented with evidence showing that modifications to Constellation and other alternatives, such as shuttle side-mount for heavy lift, were possible and affordable without a funding augmentation. Leverage provided by and capabilities created through the use of the resources of the Moon to enable both lunar and martian missions were documented and presented to the committee. Yet, none of these alternative options were given serious consideration.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was on record making public comments suggesting he was not enamored of the VSE goals, particularly the one involving the Moon. He was critical of lunar return and indicated that while he was strongly in favor of a human mission to Mars, he believed that it was far away in cost and time. But no matter what new direction human spaceflight took, Bolden stated that he was against any future change to that direction.32 President Obama’s science and technology advisor, John P. Holdren, indicated his desire to make NASA principally responsible for global monitoring of the Earth, with an emphasis on the tracking of climate change from space. It was clear that a correlation of forces was assembling to significantly change the direction and outlook of NASA and the US human space program.
President Obama’s April 2010 speech at Kennedy Space Center in Florida outlined his administration’s new space policy.33 At first glance, it appeared to embrace the Flexible Path of the Augustine committee. Obama called for spending on technology development, to be followed by human missions to a near Earth asteroid. He also called for increased efforts to develop commercial capabilities to launch payloads to low Earth orbit. A planned return to the Moon was dismissed with the trite phrase, “we’ve been there—Buzz has been there,” a reference to Buzz Aldrin, who had flown on Air Force One to Florida with the president, apparently giving him the benefit of his vast space expertise during the flight.
The announcement of this new path effectively ended the VSE. More significantly, it was also the end of any strategic direction whatsoever for the American civil space program; that direction had been replaced with rhetoric and flexibility. The promise of spaceflight in the future became the stand-in for real spaceflight in the present. Instead of a mission for people beyond LEO, we were given vague promises of “a spectacular series of space firsts.” Inconceivably, a relatively small, preexisting program designed to help develop commercial resupply of cargo to and from ISS was heralded as the centerpiece of America’s space program—the “new” direction. Gone was the concept of creating a lasting, sustainable spacefaring infrastructure. Back was the template of one-off, stunt missions to plant a flag and leave footprints on some new, exotic, faraway target—it didn’t matter which one—sometime in the distant future, the all too familiar “exciting space program.”
What many forgot or chose to overlook was that with large bipartisan majorities, the VSE had been endorsed by the Congress in two separate NASA authorization bills, once in 2005 and again in 2008.34 Understandably, Congress did not react favorably to Obama’s new direction for the civil space program. In the new 2010 authorization bill, Congress laid out some surprisingly detailed specifications for a new heavy lift launch vehicle. It directed NASA to transform the planned Ares rockets of Constellation into a new heavy lift launch vehicle to be called the Space Launch System,35 or SLS, dubbed the Senate Launch System by its critics. While enthusiasts for the new direction decried the Congressional actions as pork, the simple fact was that many on the Hill, sensing that a critical national capability was being irretrievably lost, were concerned with the unabated, scheduled retirement of the shuttle. Orion was retained as the program to develop a new government-designed-and-run human space vehicle.
Interestingly, the resulting 2010 NASA authorization bill kept all the potential destinations of the old VSE, including the surface of the Moon, something else that many have ignored. Despite the fact that this bill was a partial repudiation of his proposed space policy, President Obama signed it into law. NASA architecture teams examined possible human missions beyond LEO, including to an L-point and near Earth asteroids, but an achievable mission that would materially advance our spacefaring capability could not be identified. To disguise the embarrassment of not finding an asteroid that a human crew could reach, the agency embraced the preposterous idea of capturing a small asteroid and returning it to an orbit around the Moon: the Asteroid Return Mission, or ARM.36 At that point, the space rock would be accessible to a human crew using the Orion spacecraft, launched on the new SLS vehicle. This concept was roundly criticized, and most space stakeholders reviled and rejected it, except for those who had advanced the idea in the first place. Congress has yet to embrace the ARM and is split on possible future destinations, although it is still considering a possible Mars flyby, a Phobos landing, an L-point mission, or even (gasp!) lunar return. Everything is up in the air—and we are going nowhere.
Regrouping
So we arrive at the present: a space program without strategic direction and an uncertain future. We have seen the confusion and chaos that resulted from two different presidential attempts to set a long-term direction for the space program. These efforts were torpedoed by a variety of effects and events. Primarily, it was a lack of understanding of the objectives of lunar return or disagreement with them. We had experience with humans on the Moon during the Apollo program, and many, including some inside the space program, could not imagine anything that people could do there that was different than what the Apollo astronauts did—hop around, collect some rocks, ride in an electric golf cart, and fall down a lot. The characterization of Project Constellation as “Apollo on steroids” did nothing to convince and educate people that there were new and exciting possibilities involved in lunar return. Those who were offended by the idea that we were simply “repeating the Apollo experience” on the Moon did not notice that in their alternative program, they were endeavoring to perform that very experience on Mars, with a similar flags-and-footprints extravaganza.
Figure 5.2. Funding for NASA during the first five years of the Vision for Space Exploration. The light color is the agency funding without the VSE, the middle color is promised funding (an additional $1 billion, spread over five years with allowance for inflation) and the dark color is actual funding. In contrast to prevailing myth, NASA received all of the VSE funding that it was promised.
In the years since the demise of Constellation, a common complaint is that President Bush and the Congress did not adequately fund the VSE. This is untrue. On the rollout of the VSE, the amount of funding that NASA was to receive was specified: an additional $1 billion, spread out over the next five years (2005–2009), after which the agency budget was to rise only with inflation. NASA received this funding, although not in equal amounts over that period of time (Figure 5.2).37 The additional funding needed to develop the new CEV and launch vehicles was to come from the “wedge” produced as a result of money freed up by the shuttle retirement and the rampdown of the ISS program. Additionally, Congress formally endorsed the goals of the VSE in two different authorization bills; th
ose two bills passed with large majorities by a Congress under the respective control of both Republicans (2005) and Democrats (2008). Thus, the VSE was a presidential proposal, adopted on a bipartisan basis as national policy by Congress and funded at the levels promised. NASA was tasked with coming up with a plan to return to the Moon under those boundary conditions, not to devise an unaffordable architecture and then whine about not having enough money to do it.
As we have seen, new data for the poles of the Moon show that the critical resources of energy and materials are available there in usable form. This appreciation requires that we rethink our purposes in space and on the Moon. The VSE was an attempt to test a new paradigm of space operations—instead of bringing everything we need with us from Earth, we would learn how to access and use what we find in space to provision ourselves and to create new capabilities there. As we endeavor to break the logistical chains of Earth and become a true spacefaring species, this effort holds the potential to give us unlimited capabilities in space.
What is the best path forward? Was the original plan to use the resources of the Moon to create new spaceflight capability the right idea? What can we do to advance our “reach” beyond LEO into the solar system? Why is such a thing even desirable? These are questions I hope to answer in the next few chapters as I examine the facts, the potential, the hype, and the possibilities for the future of the American civil space program.
6
Why? Three Reasons the Moon Is Important
Throughout all of the various attempts to give our national space program a long-term, strategic direction, the Moon has waxed and waned in significance. Despite many attempts over the last thirty years to ignore it or focus exclusively on robotic space science or human missions to Mars or the asteroids, the logic of lunar return has not been refuted. Undeniably, the Moon will figure prominently in any plans for human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit, if not by the United States, then by some other nation with the foresight and the will to take the lead.
Previous attempts to define the “mission” on the Moon—the quest for various rationales for lunar presence—has produced multiple themes, goals, and objectives, the most infamous being the six themes and 186 objectives adumbrated at the 2006 NASA Exploration Workshop.1 It really isn’t that complicated. I will attempt to cut through this programmatic fog in order to examine the fundamental reasons why the Moon is not merely important but also critical for the development of permanent spaceflight capability. Whatever long-term space goal we adopt, the Moon will play a key role in enabling us to achieve those objectives. The value of the Moon lies in three principal attributes: It’s close, it’s interesting, and it’s useful. I will examine each attribute in turn, evaluating its significance to the development and exploration of space.
It’s Close: The Value of the Moon’s Proximity
Unlike most other space destinations, the Moon is Earth’s companion in space. The Earth-Moon system orbits the Sun as a single planet. Thus, the Moon is always accessible from the Earth. This is in marked contrast to other deep space targets such as planets and asteroids, all of which have independent solar orbits and thus, are optimally accessible only during certain short, periods called “launch windows.” In the case of Mars, good launch windows, those requiring the minimal amount of energy for transfer, expressed as “delta-v” or change in velocity, occur about every twenty-six months. Other targets, such as near Earth asteroids, may have more frequent windows separated by months but lasting only a few hours to a few days; some have even fewer launch windows.
The Moon is always available. Fifty years ago, the Apollo launches were scheduled within very tight launch windows because the Lunar Module had to land on the Moon in the early morning hours, when cast shadows make the surface relief stand out clearly. In the case of a future lunar outpost, one of the first items to emplace on the surface will be a beacon, a radio device that allows future landers to land completely “blind” at any time of the lunar day or night. Departures and arrivals will be conducted for convenience, with timing imposed not by celestial mechanics but by the operational schedules of the flight systems manager. A series of radio beacons would enable the development of a completely automated flight system, one that could transport goods and people between Earth and a lunar outpost.
The Moon is accessible via many different orbital approaches (figure 6.1). Direct paths, requiring the maximum amount of velocity change (delta-v), are possible from Earth, resulting in transfer times on the order of three days; minimal modification permits lower total energy requirements and adds another day or so to transit time. Staged approaches can be conducted using the L-points or low lunar orbit as a staging location. The advantage of such an approach is that assets and pieces of a complex system can be assembled at a staging node, with the surface mission conducted from that point. The Apollo system used low lunar orbit (100 km circular) as a staging area. Staging from one of the L-points—usually L-1, about 60,000 kilometers above the center of the near side of the Moon—has many benefits, including its utility as a marshaling area for lunar exports when water production meets that level and for constant line-of-sight communications with both Earth and Moon. Finally, it is possible to send large payloads of cargo via “slow boat” transfer routes using efficient, low-thrust, high-energy techniques, such as solar electric propulsion. These transfers spiral out to lunar distances over periods of weeks to months. But while they pass through the Van Allen radiation belts multiple times, they impose no hazards because they carry only cargo and not people.
Figure 6.1. Zones of cislunar space. Low Earth orbit (LEO) is the location of the International Space Station and the limit of most human missions. Geosynchronous orbit (GEO) is the location of communications and weather satellites. The Earth-Moon L-1 and L-2 points are possible staging locales for trips to and from the Moon. Low lunar orbit and the surface are within the gravity well of the Moon. (Credit 6.1)
If problems arise during lunar journeys, the return to Earth takes only a few days. On planetary missions, a return to Earth may take many weeks to months, if possible at all. An abort capability is critical for the planning of human missions. This was demonstrated most dramatically during the flight of Apollo 13 in April 1970.2 An explosion of an oxygen tank in the Service Module crippled the spacecraft’s electrical system, making the Command Module inoperative. Because the Lunar Module was still attached to the vehicle (they were on their way to the Moon), the crew was able to use it as a “lifeboat” to survive for the three days it took to swing around the Moon and return to Earth. The ability to abort a flight in progress, for safety or other operational reasons, distinguishes the Moon from other planetary destinations. This benefit is an enormous advantage during the early stages of space development, as the reliability of new systems has yet to be demonstrated. Catastrophic loss of crew can bring a nascent program to a halt, and in some cases, result in its early termination.
Ease of communication with the Earth is another advantage of the Moon’s proximity. The leverage provided by this short time-delay ranges from the merely convenient to the operationally essential. For typical human operations on the Moon or at lunar distances, round-trip radio time is a bit under three seconds, a noticeable but easily handled delay, as listening to any of the Apollo audio files will attest. The critical value of the short time-delay of lunar distance comes with robotic teleoperation. As will be discussed in more detail later, a strategy for acquiring early operational capability on the Moon will come from the emplacement and use of robotic assets. These robots will prepare and construct the infrastructure of the lunar outpost, as well as begin work on resource harvesting, water extraction, storage, and processing, work that can be operated, or at least supervised, remotely from Earth. Because of the tens-of-minutes time delay for radio propagation, the remote operation of machines on Mars makes it difficult to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. In contrast, the proximity of the Moon permits us to operate assets on the lunar surface in near real time
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The many advantages of the Moon’s closeness make it a logical and useful destination in any trans-LEO human spaceflight architecture. The creation of capability in space will be accomplished more easily and safely by first learning how to operate in space at lunar distances. With experience and competence acquired on the Moon, we will be more confident and skilled when we move outward to more distant destinations. By using the Moon to learn these skills and techniques, we learn how to crawl before we attempt to walk.
It’s Interesting: The Scientific Value of the Moon
The Moon offers scientific value that is unique within the family of objects in the solar system.3 It is a recorder of history and process, an ancient world containing materials unprocessed since their formation more than four billion years ago. The Moon records its own history and the history of the universe around it. Its environment permits unique experiments in the physical and biological sciences. Additionally, it is a natural laboratory for understanding the processes that created our solar system and that currently drive the geological evolution of the planets.
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