Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

This is not what I had planned for this week, y’all. As they say, “events done overtook me.”

Can we stop here a minute so I can get my soapbox out again? The last time I did that, with a little piece called “To Light One Candle,” I took some brickbats to the head. But think I got even more complements on that piece, which concerned the state of scientific literacy in the good ol’ U.S. of A. and those sticky sidebars, Evolution and Creationism. So here I go again.

A political animal I ain’t. Not since the 1960s and my (slightly foolish) youth, at least. I mostly keep my party affiliation (if any) to myself. I invariably excuse myself from star party bull sessions when the subject turns to “Democrats versus Republicans.” I keep abreast of the political news, but I don’t follow it obsessively. I find that keeps my hairline intact and my blood pressure down. Life’s too short to spend it arguing politics in these days when “argument” consists of “I talk, YOU listen.”

I ain’t gonna sit here and tell you our current President was my first choice for the office, but I don’t look on politics as a zero-sum game, either. And I ain’t gonna grab up my tinfoil hat and run around like a chicken with its head off squealing that our President is an illegal alien (prob’ly from Zeta Reticuli II). I hope Obama does his level best for our country and is very successful in getting us on our feet again, and if my support contributes to that goal in some small way, Obama damned sure has it.

There comes a time, though, where even apolitical li’l ol’ me decides it’s time to raise his voice. When a President screws up, and screws up so royally, that I begin to fear it will affect not just my children and their children, may not just harm America, but will have an impact on the long-term survival of the human race. What the hail am I talking about? President Obama’s recent budget/policy decision concerning the fate of NASA’s manned space program. What he decided is, essentially, that we do not need and will not have a manned space program.

NASA and Unk (and a whole bunch more Baby-boomers) got going at about the same time. I was a four year old sprout when the Russkies orbited Sputnik and what a time that was. I clearly recall the night The Old Man (a.k.a. “The Chief Op”) invited the neighbors over to listen to Sputnik’s beeps on one of his big HF radio receivers. I don’t remember anybody stepping outside to take a look at the sky, so I assume it must have been cloudy in Possum Swamp that evening—not exactly an unusual occurrence.

What I do remember is the long faces on my dad’s pals. After the women adjourned to the kitchen to help Mama, Daddy passed out Spearman Ales, and he and the guys sat around in his (radio) Shack talking in hushed whispers. What they said, I don’t know. Probably I didn’t hear or I didn’t understand, but today I expect the discussion went along these lines: “Frank, it won’t be long before those Commie sonsabitches put an H-bomb on them Sputniks. What we gonna do? I bet they got a camera on it already. Probably watchin’ us right now!”

I wasn’t skeered; I was elated. At four-and-a-half I was just barely old enough to understand (with a lot of help from Daddy) what a Sputnik was, and once I grasped the concept, I couldn’t seem to think about much else. As the women cooked and the men commiserated, li’l Rod orbited from his room to the living room and back with a toy rocket just like the one at left. Not long after, a sad little stray pup wandered into the yard, and I begged and pleaded for Mama and Daddy to let me keep him (technically, I already had a dog, Old Tuffy, but he tended to act like I was a fool puppy and boss me around). When they reluctantly assented and Daddy asked what I was gonna name the hound, I responded without hesitation, “Satellite!”

So what? Just that space was something Real Important back then, not just to me, but to almost everybody. Little Rod and most of the rest of the folks on this pebble in the sky were glued to the tube and the edge of our seats all through Mercury, Gemini, past the Apollo I fire, and on to the Moon landing. July 20, 1969 had to be experienced to be understood. We—by which I mean most of the world—were one people when Armstrong and Aldrin walked. Oh, there were naysayers even then; there always are: “Too expensive. What good is it? Let’s fix all the problems on Earth first.” Nobody paid much attention to them, though, not then. The benefits of the space program, ranging from spin-offs (which, interestingly, do not include Tang and Teflon), the jobs, and the fact that we were sticking a toe in the great cosmic ocean we’d have to learn to swim if the Human Race were to survive into Deep Time seemed obvious.

“What happened?” Why did the most of us stop watching the skies (I’ve still got my Marx Cape Canaveral Playset)? A one-two punch. Unfortunately, the Apollo program’s triumph coincided with the “undesirable outcome”—not quite defeat, but close to it—in Vietnam. The country had a hangover that Apollo couldn’t cure. Oh, economics were part of it. A small part. The abruptly cancelled Apollos 18 – 20 had essentially already been paid for. Then as now, continuing NASA expenditures weren’t a huge burden on the budget, with anything NASA could even dream of paling beside LBJ’s Great Society programs, which were now firmly entrenched.

What really did it? What started the decline was that the landing on the Moon took place during the tenure of a President who wasn’t much interested in space, and who was soon too distracted by personal issues to give a flip about the Moon. Congress was mostly out of the space business, too, except for those legislators whose districts held lots of NASA jobs. One of our parties had changed course fairly sharply to the left, and some of its members were convinced their liberal constituents didn’t care pea-turkey about space (not necessarily true, but that was the assumption and often still is).

Worse, there’s no doubt Mom and Pop America weren’t as captivated by man-in-space as they’d once been. As I’ve said before, most of us weren’t interested in space or science per se, anyhow. It was the sporting aspect of it that grabbed us. The race to the Moon with us versus the dadgummed commies. That was now decided, so what was there to care about?

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a thing folks at NASA could have been done to restart the Space Race. The Russian Moon program dissolved as their economy began (or continued) to implode and they spent their last rubles, not on Moon rockets, but on SS-18 Satans. They weren’t just out of the Race, they were out of the non-defense-related space bidness altogether except in a comparatively minor way. They decided what little money they had to spend would best be spent with orbiting space stations; especially those with potential military usefulness.

It was at this time, when the U.S. manned space program was on the edge of a knife and could have fallen either way, that the government (with some help from NASA themselves) well and truly screwed the pooch. As directed by the politicians of the 1970s, the Agency shelved plans for the Mars program that would presumably have followed Apollo, began to lay-off or retire their German rocket scientists (supposedly, Nixon had long yearned for that), and began casting about for something cheaper, easier, and less controversial that would keep them all employed over the short run. Their conclusion? Like the Russians, they thought space stations sounded good.

In some ways, space stations as a next step wasn’t a bad idea. A properly designed one could have advanced our eventual progress toward Mars or back to the Moon at the behest of a subsequent and more manned space-sympathetic Administration. Skylab, which was done relatively cheaply using a leftover Saturn booster and one of the remaining Apollo Command/Service Module pairs, was a good start. Unfortunately, the promising Skylab was allowed to unceremoniously re-enter the atmosphere way before its time. NASA decided they didn’t have the money to save it; every penny was needed for The Next Big Thing. There’s no denying Skylab wasn’t much of a hit with the public, anyhow (about as well-liked as Comet Kahoutek whose visit coincided with one of the Skylab missions). Skylab vs. Almaz ain’t exactly Apollo versus Soyuz.

On the face of it, NASA’s Next Big Thing, a reusable space plane, which eventually became not just part of the process of going back to the Moon or on to Mars someday, but an end in itself, was an attractive notion. It would be able to do lots of cool stuff. As originally envisaged, the Shuttle could have done a lot. It would have been equally capable of reaching low and high Earth orbit, doing everything from resupplying a space station, to servicing satellites in high orbits, to assisting with on-orbit construction of deep space craft. Before Nixon gleefully axed Mars, there were even some concepts that included a Shuttle-like vehicle that would not only have participated in preparations for a Mars mission, but would have flown that mission.

Alas, NASA had learned the art of compromise too well. A series of Administrations got their eyes on NASA’s budget, and wanted to know if the Shuttle couldn’t be done cheaper. And cheaper. And cheaper. NASA, in the interest of staying in business, kept whittling down farsighted NASA Administrator Tom Paine's ambitious Shuttles and we wound up with the model we had to learn to love and live with for thirty years. One able to reach low earth orbit (LEO) and nothing else.

Not that the Shuttle was a complete disaster as a spacecraft. The HST servicing missions were real and true triumphs and showed that a few smart humans can accomplish more than any robot. Yes, we lost two Shuttles, but, while that’s tragic, the spacecraft’s record is still a good one considering the number of flights and its years in service. The Space Shuttle, like any space-going craft we or anybody else have built or likely will build for a long time, had more in common with an experimental aircraft than a Boeing 747. Yes, it was horrible to lose two Shuttle crews, but it was also horrible to lose the test pilots who, for example, rode their F-104s down. There is no doubt every one of these hero pilots and astronauts knew the calculus of the possibilities for disaster and believed the answer was “Worth It.”

When Columbia lifted off for the first time, I felt a resurgence of the old American thirst for space. But that didn’t last. There were no Russkies to race, but what was more problematical was that there was nowhere to go. The Shuttle went round and round, performing and re-performing weightless experiments on mice and bugs. Soon, even NASA’s staunchest supporters began to wonder where the hell this was getting us. The Shuttle went nowhere, literally and figuratively. Worries after Challenger’s loss severely restricted work with satellites, commercial or otherwise. The killer, though, was that NASA had no larger dreams, and even if it had had any, it was not clear how the Shuttle could contribute. Few at the Agency dared whisper “Mars” or even “Moon” anymore. If there was a goal, it was just keeping themselves and their contractors on the receiving end of paychecks.

Because of an understandable desire to keep gainfully employed and to accomplish something, no matter how minor, NASA’s chiefs didn’t have the balls to stand up to the politicians and insist on ambitious long term goals, just as they hadn’t had the spines to decline to cheapen the Shuttle to near uselessness. If people up and down the food chain at NASA had told the politicians, “Sorry, no can do” when the Shuttle was fatally compromised, things might have been different in the coming decades. Not that the NASA honchos didn’t eventually realize there was a malaise abroad in Houston and that they needed somethin’ other than the Shuttle. With the help of the politicians, they came up with a near-term goal, the International Space Station. The ISS wasn’t a bad concept at first. Even with the cold war beginning to wind down, engendering cooperation between us and the Soviets was a good thing.

In the end, of course, the ISS wasn’t a good thing at all. Before long, there were no Soviets and no hot strategic pot boiling to cool down. After a while, it became apparent that the committee-designed ISS wasn’t much of a space station, either, and wasn’t capable of doing most of the things we’d heretofore associated with space stations. In its final form, it wasn’t any good for astronomy, it wasn’t even as capable of Earth observation tasks as some of the Soviet military stations had been. And there was no provision for using it as an orbital construction shack to build deeper-ranging manned spacecraft (if anyone had dared suggest such a thing). There was a joke going around in the aerospace community that offers a glimpse of the real and sad truth: “Q: What’s the Shuttle for? A: To get to the ISS. Q: Well, what’s the ISS for? A: To give the Shuttle someplace to go.”

George Bush the Younger is not an overly popular ex President. By the end of his second term his vaunted “political capital” had been well and truly squandered. I’ll leave the verdict on Dubya to those to whom it rightfully belongs, the historians of the next century. But I don’t believe there’s ever been a Chief Executive who didn’t make a single good decision—well, maybe William Henry Harrison. Dubya? One day, out of the blue in a speech at NASA headquarters in January of ought-four, he went beyond the standard NASA speech (“vision…blah-blah-blah…great achievements…blah-blah-blah…future accomplishments…blah-blah-blah) and said things I’d figgered I’d never live to hear a U.S. President say again: not only were we going back to the Moon, we were going on to Mars, and he expected NASA to find a way to do it:

Inspired by all that has come before, and guided by clear objectives, today we set a new course for America's space program. We will give NASA a new focus and vision for future exploration. We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own.

Reactions? Joe and Jane America seemed to give their assent—maybe even tinged with some of that long-lost enthusiasm—for a return to the Moon. The most common comment I heard? Not "Why?" but “I always wondered why we never went back.” The critics, of course trotted out their usual and ever more tired objections: “Don’t see why, too expensive, robots can do it better.” Along with a new one: “Just rehashing Apollo.”

The first objections are both easy and hard to counter. There are people who, for a variety of reasons, from the economic to the political to the religious, do not think Men and Women should voyage into space at all, much less to the Moon. They can’t be convinced otherwise. Luckily they are a very small minority.

Then there are the folks who parrot the “robots can do it better/cheaper/safer” party line. In some cases they are right, but not always or even often. I don’t mean to minimize the incredible accomplishments of the current Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, or the people who made and make their missions such a success. But, really, there isn’t much doubt that one PhD geologist with boots on the ground could have accomplished tremendously more in far less time. Sending men and women into the Great Out There goes beyond the gathering of knowledge, though, to the realm of inspiration, and laying the groundwork for what must come in the future if we are to survive.

“How about safety? It’s dangerous to travel in space!” Yes, it is. It will be for a long time. It was also dangerous to descend from the trees and walk the savannah. It was dangerous to sail the world’s vast oceans in tiny wooden boats. It was dangerous to cross the Atlantic alone in a single-engine aircraft. Some people will always prefer to stay home in safety. Others believe We Were Born to Go, and gladly and even eagerly accept the inevitable risks.

We’ve heard these complaints before, but something new has been added this time, “We’re just rehashing Apollo.” That is just plain silly. The only “rehashing” is that we are going back to Luna after an absence of 38 years and that the Orion capsule looks a lot like an Apollo Command Module. Looks deceive. It is considerably larger and much more sophisticated. Yes, its cone shape makes it look like the CM, but given my days in the USAF ICBM program, I can tell you that a cone is still the best shape for a reentry vehicle.

As far as a Lunar mission duplicating what we did in Apollo? Now that’s even more ridiculous. Altair’s stays on the Moon will be much longer, and the resources for exploration and study available to the new Moon walkers will make the primitive tools of the Apollo astronauts look laughable. Even if the new missions were not to be more ambitious than what we did all those decades ago, we still need to go back. Is anybody so foolish as to think we learned everything we could learn about our sister world in six brief landings? Apollo wasn’t finished when the plug was pulled, and even if it had been, it would have still constituted the merest initial reconnaissance of the Moon.

There things lay as Bush left and Obama took over. What did I think would happen to Constellation under the new regime? I couldn’t begin to guess. Post-LBJ, it’s true the Democratic party has not always been overly space-friendly (neither have the Republicans). Initially, the New Guy sounded OK; during the campaign, Obama told us he wanted to expand NASA, and wanted us to dream of doing extraordinary things in space again. There was a hiccup when the new President seemed to say he was considering diverting a part of NASA’s budget to education (though the money spent on the Department of Education absolutely dwarfs NASA’s budget). Mr. Obama quickly reassured us, however, that he was “raised on Star Trek,” and was very space aware and friendly. Hell, he and Michelle hosted a star party on the lawn of the White House and looked through a C8 (!). I was still hopeful.

Then the nerves of us space nuts began to get a little frayed. Obama decided he’d have an “independent” Panel look at NASA and Constellation. The findings? This Panel determined that it would take more money than NASA was being given to develop all the new hardware and run missions to the Moon. Which was no surprise; it was obvious the Bushies had not given NASA the budget for such relatively ambitious plans. The good part was that, according to the Panel, the extra money needed was fairly modest in gubmint terms. About three billion more a year. Yeah, that ain’t exactly pin money, but our government didn’t flinch at spending over a billion to help folks buy digital converter boxes so they could continue to watch reruns of Family Feud. Gull dern it, they doled out three billion in their silly (I thought it was) Cash for Clunkers Program, alone.

Shortly, I—and other spacies—began to get even more nervous. The word of the street was that all Obama and Company were thinking was “OVER BUDGET.” That NASA had screwed up. They couldn’t do the job for the money they’d asked for and been given. NASA is somewhat to blame. They’ve too long been content to jump on whatever bucks they can get out of the politicos (“WE CAN DO IT FOR THAT MUCH!”) while hoping to wheedle more later. Of course, you also have to question the sense of people in the Administration (assuming we believe the money is the real problem for them) who don’t understand that when you are building a brand new anything—airplane or automobile much less spacecraft—there are Unknowns and Unexpecteds that mean you will spend more than you thought. Every single, blinkin’ time.

That we were correct to be afraid of what Obama might do was made clear last month when budget rumors began to trickle-out with a vengeance. The first of these was that Obama would not make any kind of special announcement regarding the NASA budget. It would be included in his speech concerning his overall proposal. That told me the Administration either didn’t care much about space or was worried about the reaction their proposed space budget would cause or, more likely, both.

We didn’t have to wonder long. Shortly, the NASA budget was on the street. First as a leak, and then in black and white. Constellation was dead. No Moon. Period. Maybe Mars someday, but with the emphasis on “someday,” certainly not as a plan or goal. Maybe we’d do Mars, or maybe a Near Earth Asteroid, or maybe one of the Martian Moons, but that would be with hardware yet to be designed or even conceived. It was made very clear that these things were just possibilities and not set in even the softest stone. How about the LEO leg of the Constellation tripod? Nope that was gone too. Ares I was cancelled. Even if it hadn’t been, there wouldn’t be any Orion to heft into LEO. That was, with the Moon/Mars Constellation components, dead.

That was the take; what was the give? The Administration proposed that the life of the ISS be extended to 2020. For the immediate future, U.S. astronauts would ride Soyuz. There would be a modest increase in NASA’s budget of a little less than 1 billion for the forthcoming year. That would be used on development of new technology (exactly what wasn’t said), and, especially, satellites to monitor earth resources and global warming. I suppose the politicians figgered that telling the American public we would have to rely on the Russians for transport to the ISS might not go over too well, so the Administration announced that a new Earth-to-LEO spacecraft would be developed by “private industry.” Which private industry and when was left to our imaginations.

The reasons given for this volte-face? The Constellation program wasn’t just over budget according to Administration flaks. It was flawed. We were left to our own devices in deciding how an underfunded program could be “over budget,” and why a brand new booster, which had just been successfully tested in a semi-full-up manner, was so flawed. Yes…the Ares I has some problems. So did Titan and Atlas and Saturn at this point in their development cycles. There is no reason to think Ares I, Orion, Altair, and Ares V wouldn’t have survived whatever growing pains they’d inevitably suffer.

The reaction? Pretty predictable. The manned space naysayers were happy. The space nuts like yours truly were devastated. Some Republicans who don’t care much about space used this as a cudgel to beat the new President for “ignorance and shortsightedness.” Some Democrats who don’t care pea turkey about space used this to give Obama laurels for his “vision and practicality.” Certainly it hasn’t all gone down along party lines or manned space-anti manned space lines, either. Some insiders, including astronauts--notably Buzz Aldrin--and some space advocacy groups, seem happy with the Obama decision (the last man on the Moon, Gene Cernan, has just come out strongly against the Obama Plan).

Me, I think the yea-sayer in the pro-space community are whistling in the dark. Some of us have grown so weary of NASA’s indecision and lack of goals we are ready to embrace anything that looks like a clean break with the recent past. I would be too if I thought the President’s new policy were that. It ain’t, folks. Examine it closely and it falls apart like a house of cards made of wet toilet paper.

Let’s see. We are going to ditch Ares I and go to an LEO transportation system built by private industry. I reckon it was a surprise to Rocketdyne, Alliant, and Boeing, who were/are building Ares I, that they are not “private industry.” What Obama is doing is stopping a program that is beginning to show progress and promise and going back to square one. What will we buy? Who knows? Whether it is SpaceX’s Falcon/Dragon, or a man-rated Delta or Atlas accompanied by some yet undesigned capsule, or what, it won’t be ready any time soon.

SpaceX, for example, implies they can be launching astronauts to the ISS in two or three years. That, despite the fact that they’ve managed to orbit exactly one small satellite thus far after numerous attempts. We are now to believe they will be able to field an advanced and safe manned spacecraft capable of doing rendezvous and docking in two or three years? Puh-leeze. My guess is that there will not be anything available to transport our astronauts to LEO before 2020. And if a similar Administration is in power at that time, I’m guessing they’ll just decide that without the ISS we don’t need an LEO system at all. It will be cancelled or allowed to wither on the vine.

What is most ridiculous? Obama seems to think he’ll save money on LEO by starting over with new players, with some Apple computer of space hardware. That might be true if we could expect private industry to spend their own money on the spacecraft and booster. Do you think any company will do that, spend the multi-billions required, on the outside chance they’ll eventually make lots of money sending astronauts into Earth orbit for the government? Or that they will clean up on space tourism? If you do, I have a nice bridge for you. When all is said and done, the taxpayers will wind up spending exactly as much, if not more, than we would have on Ares I. And it will be a standalone, not part of a system like Constellation.

It’s not clear to me why Obama is so dead-set against a Lunar mission. We’ve, literally, barely scratched the surface of the Moon. There is so much that could be done there, ranging from Lunar colonies to Moon-based telescopes, to who-knows-what that I’m absolutely gobsmacked the President turned up his nose at a close, easy, and exciting target. Instead? Mars (maybe) or asteroids (maybe) someday when money they are supposedly going to give NASA for new technology of some kind results in spacecraft that will make such missions possible. The dirty little secret? We could have been on Mars in the 1980s. It is not the technology or even the money that is lacking. It is the will. The guts.

I could go on. I’m a-gettin’ madder by the minute. There’s no money for a Moon program, but there is plenty for a high-speed Amtrak line in Florida (billions and billions) that I guarantee nobody will ride, will never be profitable, and which will suck down dump truckfuls of OUR money for however long it is allowed to. Yeah, I’m mad. Enough talkin’. What can be done?

Do not wait for 2012 to vote these suckers out of office if you believe that is the cure. The gigantic oil tanker that is the U.S. government will have changed course by then, and it will take a long, long time to move it back to the correct heading. Nope, the thing to do is contact your Senators and Representatives now and let them know you think this “plan” of Obama’s is a huge mistake. Yeah, “contact your Congressman” sounds corny—but it can still work and will work if enough of us do it.

We won’t always have this pretty planet. Someday something will happen. It could be tomorrow. It could be in a thousand years. It could be in a million. If you, like me, want to see us or our distant descendants keep on keepin’ on, the time to act is now. There may be plenty of time to get all our eggs out of one basket. Or there may not be. There will most assuredly not be enough time if we, like this Administration, always put it off to “someday.”

'Nuff said.

Postscript: If you’d like to see a good, if maybe a wee bit slightly over the top, video on this subject, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2IQVZmHnJQ Certainly, I expect y’all will let me know what you think of this article. I’m e’en now practicin’ my runnin’ and duckin’.