In Florida Today, former NASA historian Alex Roland opines that the Bush space plan is a "hoax". Roland was a NASA historian during the bland years between 1973 and 1981, and seems to have become rather embittered about the space program as a result.

On Jan. 14, President Bush directed NASA to develop an Exploratory Crew Vehicle that would fly to the International Space Station, support construction of a base on the moon, and eventually fly humans to Mars...

It's "Crew Exploration Vehicle". You know, if you're going to gripe about something, you might try to at least get its name right.

...This vision is a hoax, an election-year deception masking a cynical, mundane agenda. Evidence of the hoax is manifest.

"[I]'m not that interested in space."
-- John F. Kennedy

What did he expect, Bush was suddenly going to morph into Gerard K. O'Neill, and push for floating utopias in the sky for their own sake? He's a politician, of course there's going to be a heavy dose of constituency-building involved. But maybe he's right, that that's all there is to it, and that the Columbia disaster revealing the untenability of NASA's Shuttle-dependent, ISS-preoccupied, going-in-circles status quo had nothing to do with it. Who, exactly, is being cynical here, Alex?

The Crew Exploratory Vehicle turns out to be nothing more than a re-worked Orbital Space Plane, the shuttle replacement that Congress has already rejected. Some version of an orbital space plane may one day serve to take humans to low earth orbit, but it will never build a base on the moon or fly to Mars.

Another paragraph, another name.

I betcha a dollar that, had CEV been put up as a blank-sheet design, and the to-date OSP work circular-filed, Alex would be crabbing about that instead. CEV, as envisioned at the moment, is ineed a re-worked OSP. But since OSP was being driven in the direction of a small, Apollo-style capsule already, it makes sense that it should be the basis for what is, ultimately, an Apollo-like multi-purpose vehicle for Apollo-like missions.

And had it actually been "rejected" by Congress? I was not aware that such a decision had been made prior to the announcement of the new policy. There were rumblings about it, true, but no official rejection of it that I know of.

...We live in a gravity sink. Were we to set out tomorrow to fly to Mars, it would cost more to go the first 200 miles than it would cost to go the remaining tens of millions....

Hmm, that would seem to undermine arguments against Mars missions costing too much. After all, if you can afford to send crews and (eventually) Shuttles to the International Space Albatross, sending them the rest of the way to the Red Planet surely can't break the bank.

...To think that spacecraft on the moon can be refueled with oxygen extracted from moon dust is to believe that Halliburton will arrive in advance to build a gas station.

You just knew the Obligatory Halliburton Reference had to be in here somewhere.

Even if the Crew Exploratory Vehicle by-passed the moon, it would still face financial hurdles that President Bush simply blinkered in his speech. NASA's record is the best guide to future costs.

Apollo cost about $25 billion in 1960s dollars, perhaps $100 billion today. And that was just to set down and return, not build a base. The space shuttle, projected to cost $11 billion when first introduced, actually cost $39 billion in 1970s dollars, also about $100 billion today.

The Crew Exploratory Vehicle can be expected to devour similar amounts of money.

Now, here he does have a point: NASA's low-ball cost estimates and profligate spending are notorious. However, his choice of comparisons is a bit self-serving. He is implying that CEV will cost as much as the Shuttle, ignoring the vast difference between the two in terms of capabilities, technology development required, and sheer size...not to mention the fact that we already know how to do capsules like CEV. We aren't starting from a blank sheet, using exotic new materials, etc., in ways and to do things that have never been tried before. And comparing CEV to the whole of the Apollo program is even more transparent, considering that only a portion of that now-$100B pricetag went to the design, development and production of the Command and Service Module, the portion of Apollo comparable to CEV. (And yes, the broader Bush plan has other points of similarity to Apollo, but his comparison was between one element of the Bush plan and the entire Apollo program.)

Even comparing the cost of Apollo to the entire Bush plan is misleading, as another big chunk of Apollo's budget paid to develop JSC, Stennis, and the major facilities at KSC...from scratch. A wild guess would put the cost of building those facilities today in the $15-20B range, money that doesn't have to be paid out again this time around. And then there is the fact that there is a factory all warmed up and ready to churn out the big tankage you need for Saturn-class vehicles...

Furthermore, a vehicle of the size that President Bush now seems to envision, one big enough to land on and return from the moon and Mars, will also need a new expendable launch vehicle to place it into orbit.

This rocket would have to be bigger than the Saturn 5 that launched Apollo. Another $100 billion seems a modest estimate for that.

Pardon me while I horselaugh. $100B??? For just the launch vehicle?

There is no reason why a heavy lifter suitable for the Bush plan would need to be any larger than Saturn V. The materials, design capabilities, and manufacturing processes commercially available today would allow the same mission architecture to support much longer and more capable missions than Apollo. Saturn V, for all it's magnificence as a launch vehicle, was a product of the technology of its time and nowhere near as efficient a design as could be achieved today. The same goes for the LEM and CSM -- even if constrained to the same mass limitations as the Apollo hardware, that same assortment of modern commercial materials and processes would result in a lighter, stronger, safer set of spacecraft, which in turn would allow for more consumables to be carried along to support longer, more productive surface stays.

I laugh at the thought of a $100B heavy-lifter, because we have a heavy lift vehicle mostly available to us already, whose conversion costs need not cost more than a few billion dollars. A sidemount payload/propulsion module, using the same tankage, boosters, and facilities as Shuttle would likely be the cheapest option, at some sacrifice in payload potential, and would cushion the blow to the Hungry Space Constituencies during and immediately after the phaseout of Orbiter operations. After the cessation of Orbiter flights, both money and facilities become available for the development of a larger, more capable ET-derived launch vehicle, with Saturn class or (in some blue-sky configurations) much, much larger capacity. The magic in this is that the materials technologies, manufacturing processes, supply chain, production facility, large transportation and handling equipment, assembly facility, and launch complexes already exist in near-ready form for such vehicles.

On the other hand, don't forget that we also now have experience with assembling structures on orbit. There's nothing that says we can't build the requisite spacecraft in modular form and launch the modules on several Atlas Vs (or Delta IVs) for which little if any additional launcher development would be required.

The space station gives another indicator of costs. Promised by President Reagan in 1984 for $8 billion, the station is now only about 40 percent complete and teeters on bankruptcy as it slides toward $100 billion in total costs, including the flights to build and maintain it. Coins in this realm come in $100 billion denominations.

Again, he conveniently drops the context. Why did ISS get so horribly expensive? Could it have been because of the endless redesigns, brought about by a lack of clear purpose for the facility and the lack of firm accountable leadership on the program to develop it? The twisting of the project to unrelated political agendas? The prime's complete bollixing of the management of costs and schedule? Was there anything to the project that really mandated spending $100B? No. It just (shamefully) turned out that way. To shrug it off as the nature of the beast and assert that anything NASA does will automatically cost $100B is pretty simplistic...and it plays right into the hands of those responsible for making these undertakings so expensive, rather than learning, as the lesson of past failures, to demand competence, accountability, good stewardship, and responsibility from them.

Not since Apollo has one of these projects come in on time and on cost.

This incredible proposal comes from a president who had shown no prior interest in the space program. He was virtually silent on space during his 2000 campaign. He made no major policy speech on the topic before Jan. 15.

Unlike Kennedy or Johnson, I suppose, whose interest in space was as devoted as it was pure and enduring.

He retained President Clinton's NASA administrator, until bankruptcy loomed for the space station. Then he dispatched to NASA Sean O'Keefe, a bureaucrat with no aerospace experience, known around Washington as a protege of Vice President Dick Cheney and a number-cruncher.

Retaining Dan Goldin is, I agree, a serious strike against President Bush, given the harm Goldin inflicted on the agency. But faced with what Alex describes as an imminent bankruptcy after Goldin's none-too-soon departure, it seems to me that a number-cruncher is exactly what the doctor ordered.

After the Columbia accident, President Bush allowed NASA to investigate itself, unlike Ronald Reagan, who empanelled an independent investigation of the Challenger accident.

But unlike Reagan, Bush had the good sense to stamp an expiration date on the Shuttle system afterwards.

President Bush's speech on Jan. 15 simply reprised the predictable Kennedy gambit: every Republican president in the space age running for a second term proposes in his re-election year a manned space spectacular modeled on Kennedy's Apollo speech.

Seems to me Bush's announcement was anything but a Kennedy redux. Bush specifically did not lay out a huge all-or-nothing time-bound project for which cost was no object -- rather, he did quite the opposite, laying out a set of performance-based milestones for NASA that would, if attained, lead to a manned landing on Mars in seventeen or so years. The only firm dates involved were the termination of the Shuttle program in 2010 and resumption of robotic exploration of the Moon in 2008 (and even the latter was not as firm a date as the former). If anything, the program is modest -- hardly the grand spectacle promised by his father.

This time, however, the Kennedy gambit masks a more cynical purpose.

The ticking time bomb in the space program is the space station. A year after Columbia, it is still bankrupt, an international incident waiting to embarrass a president focused on winning and enjoying a second term.

The real purpose of the President's moon-Mars initiative is to reprogram existing NASA funds over the next five years to keep the space station from collapsing.

Soo...we're going to progressively step away from the station, but we're playing a shell game to put all of our money into it? Bush isn't serious about space, but he fears the hypothetical collapse of the space station program? Huh?

The raid on other NASA programs has already begun with abandonment of the Hubble Space Telescope. All the deliverables in the president's proposal are scheduled for 2008 and later, when he is safely out of office.

Hubble was cancelled because NASA fears sending any more Shuttle missions "into the wild"...that's the official version, anyhow, and Alex offers nothing but innuendo here to contradict it. It remains to be seen whether public appeals can overcome NASA's self-professed reluctance and reinstate SM4, or whether NASA will actually bend (imagine!) and allow entrepreneurs to reboost Hubble to extend its currently-abbreviated useful life.

Note that Bush, if reelected in the fall, will still be President until January 20, 2009. While only the robotic missions to the Moon will be in operation prior to the inauguration of President Rice or Rodham Clinton or whomever, significant other work will be going on behind the scenes. For one thing, the long lead-time on Shuttle consumables (notably the ET) implies a termination of production around 2006-2007 -- and that is the point of no return for the 2010 Orbiter retirement date (barring continued production of standard ETs for use in an interim heavy-lift vehicle of the Shuttle C type). Depending on how you read it, initial "flight" of the CEV is to be in 2008, meaning much of the design and development work for the spacecraft which will enable the Moon and Mars missions will be done by the time Bush finishes out the hypothetical second term.

The problem, of course, is that his successor will inherit a gutted agency, with the failed detritus of the shuttle and space station visions still limping toward some unspecified denouement, and public expectations of mission impossible on the moon and Mars barely begun.

So much for giving the plan the benefit of the doubt...not even three weeks old and Alex is already writing its obituary.

The space program, in short, will be in a shambles.

"Will be"?

That will be the legacy of this cynical, political hoax.

Nah, if all Bush wanted was a hoax, he could have just warmed up the Moon studio at Area 51... Posted by T.L. James on February 2, 2004 07:34 PM