Good question.

1) SPACE SHUTTLE: NASA sold this nation on a government-designed, government-owned, government-operated space truck that would be all things to all people. It would fly 50 times per year, and would cost $10 million per flight (marginal cost).

WE THE PEOPLE: Trusted the NASA leadership.

RESULT: The Space Shuttle has never come close to achieving what was promised.

2) SPACE STATION: NASA sold this nation on a government-designed, government-owned, government-operated space building that would do almost everything desired by a large list of people, it would be operational in a decade, and cost $8 Billion.

WE THE PEOPLE: Trusted the NASA leadership.

RESULT: The Space Station has never come close to achieving any of the specific goals that we were promised.

Do I need to tell you about the X-33? The X-34? The X-38? The Space Launch Initiative? The 2nd Generation Reusable Launch program? The Orbital Spaceplane Program? The Crew Transportation Vehicle?

So, when you ask what is changed since Apollo, my question to you is …

Where have you been? on Mars?

– Al

I can’t believe I have to even point out how bad an idea this is.

Think Apollo was a well run program? In some ways yes. But by 1964, North American had so screwed up the Apollo capsule contract that there were concerns within the aero community, concerns that pointedly were not voiced publicly–people understood that such criticism would have empowered NASA’s critics to cancel funding for Apollo–that NASA sent in Joe Shea to fix things (Apollo: The Race To The Moon [172]), which he almost did. And even after the fire, NASA supporters knew that they had to stand behind the program or loose it.

What has changed since Apollo, since the 1960’s, that makes public dissent by space “supporters” of NASA’s execution the right thing to do?

One reason there is so little unity at the moment among the NASA human spaceflight, space science, and entrepreneurial space interests is the current monolithic NASA human space transportation development program is too big. It crowds out NASA funding that might have gone to one of the other interests, and does little to help those other interests until and unless it achieves its goals of a lunar base in 2020, and then transforms that effort to one that fosters science and commerce.

It’s a bit of a stretch.

As Administrator Griffin mentioned, some changes have recently been made that help address this problem. The lunar robotic science program now includes GRAIL, and possibly a small orbiter and 2 small landers. While this is offset by cutbacks in other robotic science areas, and doesn’t make up for the funding taken from robotic science for ISS/Shuttle/Constellation, it does at least begin a sustained lunar science program beyond LRO and instruments on foreign missions, which hopefully will result in common interests and mutual support in the human and science programs. Hopefully the lunar robotics line continues.

Griffin also mentioned some of the commercial developments, like the Zero-G Corp business, the suborbital human commercial spaceflight RFIs from the NASA science area, and the Orbital COTS award. These are also promising steps that tend to combine the interests of the science, NASA human spaceflight, and commercial sectors. Hopefully the trend continues.

My usual reaction is that we need to replace ESAS with something more modest, quickly done, and cheaper so we can address the science and commerce interests. However, I think I’d be satisified enough to not oppose ESAS – close enough to the unity Dr. Griffin wants – if something like the following extensions of the trends Dr. Griffin described happened:

– suborbital human spaceflight RFIs taken to the next step, experiments to fly repeatedly on commercial suborbital vehicles in development, RFIs extended beyond NASA SMD to the rest of NASA (+ equivalents at NOAA, DOD, etc), and RFIs extended to uncrewed commercial suborbital vehicles as appropriate

– lunar robotic science program extended to include ISRU demos, small demos of science missions that can be considerably improved by lunar astronauts, and incentives for Google Lunar X PRIZE missions to demonstrate technology or do science or experiments useful to the NASA lunar program

– COTS cargo business deals for actual ISS support started (i.e. letting the vendors – SpaceX, Orbital, or other – know they’ll get at least X missions for Y dollars if they achieve the ISS goals)

– COTS crew phase started (possibly in cooperation with Bigelow for technical compatibility, greater common incentives to transportation developers, etc)

– new Centennial Challenges prizes funded, and similar space-related efforts in DoD (e.g.: DARPA), NOAA, and NSF

Obviously NASA can only do so much – it can’t use commercial services that don’t exist yet, and can’t make other agencies use commercial space businesses. However, it can do a lot to encourage such services to be made, and to be sustained and improved once developed.

Historically, abuses that are levied against governmental agencies can be traced to connections within the private sector. Precious resources, such as the International Space Station, should be globally treasured, fully utilized, yet protected from the potential for destruction from a nefarious intent or a “rushed to market” error in use of new technology.