The Failure of NASA: And A Way Out

by Philip K. Chapman
Sunnyvale - May 30, 2003

I was in Mission Control when Neil Armstrong announced that the
Eagle had landed. The applause was unexpectedly muted as we were
all overwhelmed by the significance of the moment. Nobody had
any doubt that Tranquility Base was the first step in an
expansion into space that would drive human progress for
centuries to come.

We had of course all seen the 1968 Kubrick/Clarke movie 2001: A
Space Odyssey, and the facilities depicted there seemed entirely
reasonable. In our lifetimes, we expected to see hotels in
orbit, translunar shuttles operated by commercial airlines, and
settlements on the Moon. Only the alien monolith was
questionable.

None of this has happened.

Despite cutbacks, NASA has spent a total of $450 billion since
Apollo 11 (adjusted for inflation to 2003 dollars). That very
large sum was more than enough to fund the developments that
Wernher von Braun predicted for the end of the 20th Century, but
we have not even started on any of them.

If it had been spent wisely, as seed money to stimulate
commercial development, we could have established a growing,
self-sustaining extraterrestrial enterprise, offering
opportunities for thousands of people to live and work off Earth
- but the sad truth is that we have less capability in human
spaceflight now than in 1970.

In 1969, we landed on the Moon, but now we cannot leave low
Earth orbit (LEO). NASA claimed that the shuttle would be
fifteen times cheaper to fly (per pound of payload) than the
Saturn vehicles used in Apollo, but it is actually three times
more expensive.

The average cost of each flight is a staggering $760 million.
After a mission, the time required to prepare a shuttle for the
next flight was supposed to be less than two weeks, but in
practice tens of thousands of technicians spend three to six
months rebuilding each "reusable" shuttle after every flight.
Worst of all, the shuttle is a needlessly complex, fragile and
dangerous vehicle, which has killed fourteen astronauts so far.

In 1973, we had a space station called Skylab, with berths for
three astronauts. NASA let it reenter and break up over Western
Australia. A second Skylab was built, which could have become
the Earth terminal of a lunar transportation system.

It is now a tourist attraction at the Air and Space Museum in
Washington, and the Saturn V to launch it is nothing more than a
monstrous lawn ornament, moldering on its side at Johnson Space
Center (JSC).

Now we are building the International Space Station (ISS), which
is still incomplete after twenty years of effort. Its orbital
inclination, chosen for political reasons, makes it useless as a
base for future missions beyond Earth.

In the original design, the ISS had a crew of six or seven, but
cost overruns have forced deletion of a habitation module and a
lifeboat that could return that crew to Earth in emergency. The
shrunken station, called "core complete," will accommodate only
three astronauts (who will use a Russian Soyuz as a lifeboat).
In normal operations, only one of the crew will be American.

The cutbacks gutted the research program, by eliminating much of
the scientific equipment aboard the station, reducing the
scheduled shuttle flights in support from six to four per year,
and leaving the small crew with very little time to spare from
housekeeping tasks.

If there are no unusual maintenance problems, the lone American
may average 90 minutes per day working on the research that is
the alleged purpose of the facility. He or she will conduct
experiments by following a checklist, because the small crew
precludes specialists in relevant disciplines. The scientific
program is thus perfunctory at best, with rote experiments of a
kind that might win prizes at a high school science fair. (2)

The life-cycle cost of the ISS, including development expenses
and shuttle flights, amounts to at least $8 billion per year
(2003 dollars). This is 60% more than the entire budget of the 
National Science Foundation, which supports thousands of
earthbound scientists.

US taxpayers have a right to expect that such expensive research
will be of a quality that wins Nobel Prizes, but what we are
actually getting are pro forma experiments that occupy a small
fraction of the time of one person.

The cost is preposterous: it amounts to nearly fifteen million
dollars ($15,000,000!) for each hour of scientific work by the
American crewmember. NASA has no chance whatsoever of convincing
scientists that this is a reasonable allocation of scarce
research funds.

Until the Columbia accident, NASA had expected 4 shuttle flights
per year to the ISS, and one more for missions unrelated to the
station (e.g., to lower inclination). Now the shuttle may be
restricted to orbits in the same plane as the ISS, so that the
shuttle can go dock there if it is damaged during launch. In any
case, present plans call for operation of the ISS until at least
2016, so there will be at least 65 more shuttle flights (5 per
year).

Based on experience to date (two shuttles lost in 113 missions),
the accident probability is a little less than 2% on each
flight. Astronauts may accept this risk because there is no
other way to fly in space, but they would of course prefer a
safer system. As a matter of public policy, however, only a
compelling national interest can justify so hazardous a venture.
The ISS presents no such necessity.

With these odds, the probability of losing at least one more
shuttle during the life of the ISS (i.e., in 65 flights) is
nearly 70%. In other words, NASA is gambling its future, and the
lives of astronauts, on a program that has less than one chance
in three of avoiding disaster. This is like playing Russian
roulette with a revolver in which four out of the six chambers
are loaded. Only a suicidal lunatic would accept such a
proposition.

After wasting three decades (and a perfectly good Cold War),
frustrating the dreams of a whole generation of space
enthusiasts, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars,
NASA's net achievement is a space station that has no definable
purpose except to serve as a destination for shuttle flights.

We would not need the shuttle missions if we did not have the
station, and we would not need the station if we did not need
something for the shuttles to do. The entire human spaceflight
program has thus become an exercise in futility.

The lack of progress has not been due to insufficient funding or
to technological problems, but to a series of blunders by NASA
management.

NASA engineers did not understand the popular enthusiasm aroused
by Apollo. They thought the Giant Leap for Mankind was not the
lunar landing itself, but the technological prowess it
displayed.

This led to the mistaken inference that the way to maintain
popular support, and hence generous funding, was to propose
megaprojects of great technical complexity, regardless of
whether they were intrinsically interesting.

They are surprised and disappointed that the public are
unimpressed by the shuttle and ISS, despite their technical
virtuosity. The Giant Leap delusion persists today, in the form
of proposals for a flags-and-footprints mission to Mars.

In reality, of course, Apollo existed because Jack Kennedy and
Nikita Khruschev chose to make space a principal arena for
competition between the superpowers. The purposes of the program
were to overcome the perceived Soviet lead in space, and to
foreclose the possibility that the USSR would reach the Moon
first and claim it as Soviet territory. No Congress was willing
to spend more than the minimum needed to achieve those
objectives.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 relieved concerns about Soviet
hegemony by banning weapons and territorial claims on the Moon.
This allowed Congress to respond to Lyndon Johnson's
simultaneous expansion of social programs and the war in VietNam
by slashing funding for NASA. As shown in Figure 1, the budget
peaked in 1966, and then fell precipitously.

Despite these obvious trends, NASA developed grandiose visions
of the post-Apollo program, which culminated in the Space Task
Group Report of 1969. (3)

The STG proposed three options. The most ambitious called for

* a reusable Earth-to-orbit shuttle and a small space station by 1975;
* a reusable orbit-to-orbit tug and a lunar orbit station in 1976;
* a nuclear-powered tug and a lunar surface base in 1978;
* a 50-man space base in Earth orbit in 1980;
* a manned Mars mission in 1981;
* and expansion of the Earth orbit space base to 100 people by 1985.

The other options retained all these objectives, but reduced the
cash flow by delaying some of them for up to five years.

Figure 1 also shows the funding profiles required by the STG
proposals (in 2003 dollars). Richard Nixon responded
immediately, making it perfectly clear that the whole STG Report
was sheer fantasy, and that NASA should expect less money, not
more.

Given this fiscal reality, NASA could have adopted an
incremental approach to space development. The obvious plan was
to launch the second Skylab, with minor modifications to permit
a long life on orbit, and to support it initially with a simple
ballistic capsule (such as a proposed stretch of the Gemini
capsule, called the Big G, which could carry seven to nine
people) atop an expendable booster.

In time, a small reusable orbiter would replace the capsule, and
the booster could eventually become reusable too. Beyond that,
the scope of the program would depend on funding, but might
include a permanent lunar base.

This plan was unacceptable because it had two dreadful defects.
First, it involved a series of small, affordable steps, instead
of the Giant Leaps that many in NASA thought essential to public
support.

The second and much wo
se problem was that Skylab was a project
run by Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and
not by JSC. As JSC Deputy Director Chris Kraft said, people in
Houston believed that "being in charge of manned spaceflight was
their birthright," and they resented Marshall's intrusion.

Kraft once told me that a space station was unnecessary, because
the shuttle would be so cheap that astronauts could commute to
orbit, returning home every evening.

The claim that the shuttle would be cheap was based on an
economic model that was totally divorced from reality. It
assumed that the shuttle would fly 60 times per year, so that
fixed costs could be amortized over many missions, and that the
direct operating cost would amount to less than $250/pound (2003
dollars). If these estimates had proven correct, we would have
flown the shuttle 1500 times by now (and presumably would have
killed about 200 astronauts).

The worst mistake made by NASA managers was that they allowed
disputes over who would be in charge to influence the direction
of the program. Their preoccupation with intercenter turf wars
obscured the writing on the wall.

The real lesson of the STG debacle was that a healthy program
was not sustainable if funded only by taxpayers. NASA could
retain exclusive control of an insignificant, moribund program,
or it could accept a supporting role in a growing program,
funded by investors and controlled by entrepreneurs.

Given these options, NASA chose the first - but instead of doing
the best it could with limited funds, it dissipated its
resources in the care and feeding of the white elephants called
shuttle and ISS.

The end of the Cold War has intensified the need to engage the
engines of free enterprise. Absent a dire national exigency like
the Soviet threat, NASA must compete for funding with other uses
for the Federal dollar, and many of them are much more urgent.
The NASA budget has therefore shrunk to well below 1% of Federal
outlays, and there is virtually no hope of any significant
increase. Sustained growth is possible only in the private
sector, where it is seen as a boon to the economy.

Apart from other issues, the purpose of human spaceflight is to
open the solar system to all of us, not just to civil servants.
The appeal of the program depends on the perception that it is
opening a new frontier where people can escape the increasing
regulation of life on Earth. A centrally-planned, government-run
program is incompatible with that vision. It cannot survive,
because it contradicts a principal reason for popular support.

There are many other advantages to transferring responsibility
for human spaceflight to private enterprise:

* Commercialization could convert the program from a Federal
expense to a source of tax revenues.

* Corporations can grow exponentially because of positive
feedback of profits from investments, a mechanism that is
unavailable to NASA.

* Corporations can make rapid progress because they can take
risks that government agencies cannot.

* A growing commercial program would create the constituency
needed to avoid further cuts in Federal funding.

* Human spaceflight can be a potent demonstration of US
leadership, but the current NASA program sends the wrong message
to nations struggling with the transition from command economies
to democracy and free enterprise.

The extraterrestrial economy will be like that in Hawaii, where
tourism and the export of pineapples are important industries,
but not the reason most people live there. The gross Hawaiian
product depends primarily on trade between residents.

Similarly, space entrepreneurs may begin by exporting goods and
services to customers on Earth (the most promising candidates
are space tourism and electric power from solar power
satellites), but the real growth phase will begin when trade
between people living and working in space generates a
significant fraction of corporate revenues.

The principal barriers to expansion into space are firsty: the
high cost of launch to orbit; secondly: actions by NASA that
suppress competition from the private sector (4); and thirdly: a
regulatory environment, especially in the UN General Assembly,
in which capitalism and competition are seen as regrettable
aberrations that we should leave behind as we venture out into
the universe.

These are all correctable, but not within the institutional
culture that has taken root in NASA.


How to Fix It

First of all, we must recognize explicitly that NASA has bungled
human spaceflight. There have been many suggestions for reform
of the agency, and none of them has worked. The only viable
solution is a new Federal organization, one that sees its
purpose as helping the private sector rather than flying space
missions. For convenience, I refer to it here as the Advisory
Committee for Commercial Enterprise in the Solar System
(ACCESS).

NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, was a research organization that provided much of
the knowledge base that brought us from the Wright Flyer to the
Boeing 747 in 65 years. NACA did not try to run airlines. ACCESS
should provide analogous services for human spaceflight.

There will be plenty for ACCESS to do. The proper functions of
government include:

* support for development of enabling technology;

* sponsorship of facilities such as simulators and test
chambers, available for rent by anybody;

* funding for exploration and scientific research;

* utilization of Federal buying power in creating initial
markets for products and services;

* subsidies and tax breaks aimed at overcoming barriers to
investment;

* development of a legal framework for acquiring, regulating and
protecting property and other rights in space;

* negotiations leading to international agreements that benefit
US industry;

* law enforcement;

* search and rescue;

* traffic and debris control;

* protection of fragile environments in space;

* military applications of space technology; and

* provision for the security and, if necessary, the physical
defense of US space assets and interests, public and private.

Some of these functions may require military personnel in space,
but there is no need to transfer them from the USAF, USN or
Coast Guard to a civilian agency. Any civil missions the
government feels it needs should be flown in commercial vehicles
by astronauts who are employed by contractors.

I recommend the following specific steps:

1. Ground the remaining three shuttles permanently, as too
dangerous and expensive to fly.

2. Mothball the ISS and move it to higher orbit, where it is
safe from reentry, citing the lack of shuttles as the excuse.
Perhaps somebody will eventually find a real use for it.

3. Set up ACCESS as an agency entirely independent of NASA,
perhaps reporting through the Department of Commerce.

4. Remove the line items for the shuttle and ISS from the NASA
budget and use the money about $5.5 billion per year (5) to fund
ACCESS.

5. Have ACCESS provide immediate financial incentives for
private development of human spaceflight, including economical
launch vehicles (6) and corporate operations in space.

6. Provide office and lab space for ACCESS at JSC in Houston,
and transfer test facilities and selected NASA personnel to the
new agency. Eventually, JSC will become a center run entirely by
ACCESS.

7. Phase out other human spaceflight activities in NASA over a
five year period, and transfer the funding to ACCESS. NASA will
be left as a smaller agency, focusing on aeronautical research,
unmanned spacecraft and the space sciences.

A reform of this magnitude is possible only by legislative fiat.
NASA will of course fight it by every means available, but
perhaps the Congress will take the necessary action once it is
realized that transfer to the private sector can make human
spaceflight a source rather than a sink for tax revenues.

# FOOTNOTES

1. Phil Chapman was born in Melbourne, Australia. He has a
doctorate in physics from MIT, and was one of the second intake
of NASA scientist astronauts, during Apollo. He has been active
in the space advocacy community throughout his long career,
including serving as president of the L5 Society (now the
National Space Society) in the early 'Eighties. His principal
research interests have included laser propulsion, solar power
satellites and economical launch vehicles.

2. In 2002, the Space Sciences Board of the National Academy of
Sciences issued a scathing report on the scientific capabilities
of the "core complete" ISS. It is available online

3. This high-level committee was chaired by the US VP (Spiro
Agnew), and included the NASA Administrator (Tom Paine), the
Secretary of the USAF (Bob Seamans), and Nixon's Science Advisor
(Lee Dubridge). The report is available online here

4. An example: In the late 'Nineties, several small companies,
financed by investors, demonstrated substantial progress in
developing cheap launch vehicles for human spaceflight. NASA
responded by funding a comparable but much more expensive
project at Lockheed Martin, called the X-33. Since investors
were unwilling to compete with NASA, funding for the small
companies evaporated overnight. In 2001, after wasting $912
million, NASA canceled the project. By that time, some of the
small ventures were bankrupt. Whether motivated by malice or by
stupidity, the net effect of the X-33 was to crush private
enterprise.

5. This figure comes from NASA budget estimates - available here

6. For example, ACCESS could stimulate investment in launch
vehicles by offering a prize of $750 million (i.e., the cost of
a single shuttle flight) to the first company to demonstrate
routine, reliable launch of people to LEO, at a recurring cost
below $500/pound.

Source: SpaceDaily