Discover - January/February 2010

Ú

SPACE

2

NASA BRACES FOR COURSE CORRECTION

Norman Augustine is a well-known critic of wasteful government programs. As former CEO of Lockheed Martin, he is also a grizzled veteran of the aerospace industry. That explains why the Obama administration chose Augustine to head a commission on the future of NASA’s human space;ight program—and why the space agency was so shaken by his conclusion.

NASA “appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory,” Augustine and company began their report. Its plan to return to the moon by 2020 is out of the question. To keep the International Space Station aloft past 2016 (the program’s premature end date) and maintain a viable human space exploration program, NASA will have to scrape up another $3 billion per year—hard to imagine in a time of trillion-dollar de;cits. “The choice is to lower aspirations or increase the budget,” says John Logs-don, a space policy expert at George Washington University.

One way to cut costs, cautiously endorsed by Augustine’s commission, is to give private ;rms a bigger role in providing launch services. Contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have

always built the hardware, but NASA has kept close watch on each step in design and construction. That method worked for the Apollo program, but it has been a disaster ever since. For instance, the space shuttle, originally intended to provide cheap and reliable transport to low Earth orbit, has turned out to be roughly 1,000 times more dangerous and 100 times more costly to launch than ;rst promised. In classic bureaucratic style, NASA diluted the original idea by trying to make the shuttle all things to all people: a satellite launcher for the military as well as a pickup truck to space for the civilian program.

Private companies, the panel’s reasoning goes, would be better at reining in costs and keeping their eye on the ball. In addition, NASA would not have to pay the huge up-front costs of development and construction. Instead, it would give seed money to private ;rms and guarantee a market for their services. NASA has already begun to work this way in the development of a cargo vessel for the space station. (When the shuttle is mothballed, currently set for the end of 2010, NASA will have to rely on Russia’s Soyuz

TEXT BY FRED GUTERL

spaceship to get astronauts to the station.) The agency has given small grants to SpaceX, the aerospace ;rm founded by PayPal mogul Elon Musk, and Orbital Sciences, a ;rm that builds missile-defense systems; each company is developing its own launchers and capsules.

Pursuing this path would mark a huge change in NASA’s way of doing business. It would mean entrusting the safety of its crew to third parties. In terms of hardware, though, it would be a cinch. SpaceX and Orbital rockets could accommodate astronauts with minor modi;cations. And scrapping NASA’s new Ares I booster program could save billions of dollars over the next few years. “We think this is the time to create a market for commercial ;rms to transport both cargo and humans between the Earth and low Earth orbit,” Augustine said at a press conference accompanying the report’s release. “NASA would be better served to spend its money on going beyond Earth orbit rather than running a trucking service to low Earth orbit.”