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A diverse cast for a human spaceflight study

On Friday, the National Research Council released the list of committee members for a new review of the US human spaceflight program. This review was mandated by Congress back in the 2010 NASA authorization act, which called on NASA to contract with the National Academies in 2012 for “a review of the goals, core capabilities, and direction of human space flight” based the goals set in various legislation dating back to the 1958 Space Act. The provision in the 2010 act called for a “broad spectrum of participation with representatives of a range of disciplines, backgrounds, and generations, including civil, commercial, international, scientific, and national security interests.”

The committee list does appear to meet that “broad spectrum” criterion. The co-chairs are Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University; and William Perry, the former secretary of defense in the Clinton Administration. Other members include former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Cartwright; Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center; and Ariel Waldman, founder of Spacehack.org who has also been, among other things, “a sci-fi movie gadget columnist for Engadget.” A diverse group, indeed.

The composition of the committee has raised a few eyebrows—and questions—from observers. There’s a strong emphasis in the committee in the area of surveys, with several other members besides Kohut with expertise in that area. There’s a mix of people from the physical and social sciences as well. Notably absent, though, are any representatives from the aerospace industry itself (one member, Franklin Martin, is a consultant who provides “independent review services for NASA spaceflight projects”), either from the major aerospace companies or the smaller entrepreneurial firms. There’s also only one person on the committee who has flown in space: former astronaut Bryan O’Connor, now an independent consultant. The absence of such people can be seen as a weakness, or a willingness to take a different approach to such a study. (There is a public comment period on the committee’s membership that is open until Thanksgiving.)

There’s also the question of how useful the committee will be. The study, according to the committee’s website, will provide “findings, rationale, prioritized recommendations, and decision rules that could enable and guide future planning for U.S. human space exploration.” Similar language in the 2010 authorization act gave the perception that this is a “decadal” study for human spaceflight analogous to the ones done in the sciences. The usefulness of such a study has been debated in the past, with mixed opinions about how well it could guide future programs. The committee’s final report is due out in May 2014.

19 comments to A diverse cast for a human spaceflight study

  • Alan Ladwig

    I’ll clear a space on my book shelf to put this report next to all the others from Presidential Commission, Blue Ribbon Panels, other NRC reports, and ad hoc reviews from the past four decades. A good research project for a student studying space policy would be to review all the studies from the last 40 years and see how many of the recommendations have actually been implemented or resulted in significant and positive change to advance the space agenda. This study is supposed to last 28 months. Add to that at least 6 months to write the report and another 8 months for the NRC concurrence process and you’ll be approaching the next election, which makes it dead on arrival. The lack of people with actual experience in managing human space flight programs is somewhat troubling and one has to wonder how long it will take them to get up to speed on things. This study will only make an impact if it comes out with a declaration that the traditional approach the country has offered of destination goal-driven space exploration has not worked and a radical new approach is necessary if we are ever to achieve, what Krafft Ehricke called, the Extraterrestrial Imperative.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    NASA’s human space flight programs could greatly benefit from the same kind of community-driven decadal survey process, and its rigorous goal prioritization and mission definition, that NASA’s science programs subject themselves to. But this committee isn’t set up to do that. Its leadership and many of its members are not from the human space flight community, and there are none of the subcommittees that do the actual outreach and work on the science decadal surveys. Hopefully this committee will have something different and interesting to say about the purpose of NASA’s human space flight programs, but no one in the community or Administration is going to own that. And the committee as set up is incapable of setting and prioritizing goals and defining the resulting missions — the central purpose of a decadal survey.

    “This study will only make an impact if it comes out with a declaration that the traditional approach the country has offered of destination goal-driven space exploration has not worked and a radical new approach is necessary if we are ever to achieve, what Krafft Ehricke called, the Extraterrestrial Imperative.”

    Amen, Alan. Amen.

    Unfortunately, even if this committee is capable of coming to the conclusion that the current human space exploration program is broken, they’re not set up to develop any fixes.

  • Swell, another document Congress will ignore.

  • E.P. Grondine

    There are no comet or asteroid impact specialists on this committee.

    Aside from that, OSTP was supposed to deliver its operational impact report to Congress 30 days ago.

    Aside from that, with my diabetes I can’t drink alcohol. I can eat a couple of sweet rolls and black out, though.

  • amightywind

    Way too many left wing eggheads in this group. Academia was complicit in neutering the space program back in 2009. Not this time. The GOP needs to win the election then exercise raw executive power.

  • mike shupp

    Well, another document that deserves to be ignored by Congress.

    Rake a look at its initial task: “Consider the goals for the human spaceflight program as set forth in (a) the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, (b) the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Acts of 2005, 2008, and 2010, and (c) the National Space Policy of the United States (2010), and any existing statement of space policy issued by the president of the United States.”

    And its last: “The recommendations will describe a high-level strategic approach to ensuring the sustainable pursuit of national goals enabled by human space exploration, answering enduring questions, and delivering value to the nation over the fiscal year (FY) period of FY2014 through FY2023, while considering the program’s likely evolution in 2015-2030.”

    So, should we send a man to Mars? That’s not an official goal and it probably can’t be done before 2030, so the committee can ignore it.

    Should we build a base on the Moon and study in situ resource utilization? That’s not a goal either.

    How about that asteroid visist? It’ll be after 2023, so it isn’t a concern.

    What’s left for the committee to consider? The ISS. I expect a stirring, heart touching, defense of manning the IDSS thru 2023 and maybe to 2028 — that’ll be the main point of the report.

    Or actually maybe not. I look again at that committee list, and while maybe ten of those 16 people have space related backgrounds, there’s not much from the manned space side. One former astronaut, several people who study or lecture about space policy, several astronomers…. no medical researchers, nobody studying space habitats, no one with experience building launch vehicles, no one …

    I could be nasty and say it’s a committee organized to bury manned space flight rather than study it. But I don’t think thats quite the case. It doesn’t need a couple of pollsters for that. It also doesn’t need a former Vice Chairmain of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or a former Defense Secretary — these are people you pull in for a What-Went-Wrong? inquiry, not a What-Do-We-Do-Next? study. So I’ve the impression the people here were basically picked for their availability, rather then for knowledge or even interest in manned space flight.

    I suspect in the end the committee will say the usual things about manned flight being an essential part of a balanced space program, blaa blaa blaa, and this will be recieved with the enthusiasm such reports generally obtain. Possibly the committee might wander off track — it might recommend a major moon base for 2030, for example, or call for eliminating all federal manned space flight programs by 2020. But in such a case, the committee report would sink even faster than normal. (Memory says the last Augustine commission report was taken with pretend seriousness for about a month after it appeared, so “faster than normal” equates to about 6 hours.)

    • Dave Hall

      mike shupp: What’s left for the committee to consider?

      After evaluating the status quo, yet again, one would hope that the committee has the imagination to invite Elon Musk to give a public presentation of his Mars strategy*. And any other CEO or visionary with a HSF vision and plan worth hearing. Seems like the ideal forum to accomodate new age thinking and action-taking. The hearings ideally available online for all to judge and comment on.

      * http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17439490
      audio interview, skip to 10:15

      • mike shupp

        Dave: Ths ain’t how I read things. If there were 50 different companies busy shipping stuff between the earth and the ISS or the earth and the moon, then the committee might well ask itself “What sort of goals might private industry achieve in space in the next several decades?” But there aren’t — you’ve got exactly ONE company so far which has sent ONE payload to the ISS in LOW earth orbit. You want to think that’s a harbinger of the future? You might be right, you might be wrong. As the committee is set up it’s supposed to look at certainties. SpaceX doesn’t count.

  • common sense

    “The absence of such people can be seen as a weakness, or a willingness to take a different approach to such a study”

    I think I want to take this as “a willingness to take a different approach”. A attempt at reaching out to the community outside of the usual interested parties who might reiterate ad nauseam what we all already know.

    I will give it some consideration as it may reflect the “other people”‘s opinions – hopefully not contrived – who are interested in HSF.

    As for usefulness… Oh well…

  • Robert G. Oler

    It is an entertaining idea but it is hard to get all jumped up over the study. Several previous posters have pointed out some flaws, the thing was neatly summed up by Alan “I’ll clear a space on my book shelf to put this report …”

    what is not needed is yet another report or study it is some leadership which comes from the Administrator or someone to actually try and define why doing human spaceflight has some value so the program can be argued to the American public as something interesting.

    Studies looking down a decade or two are interesting and have some value if the thing that has being studied already has a defined role; ie the discussion is over how to achieve that role..staying away from the military try several studies about how to do Air Traffic Control..ground based radar, airplane based systems etc…all are stuff that panels like this can sort out and have some value on.

    If the panel is going to try and come up with arational for being for NASA HSF it actually has a nice set of characters…but the period is to long…and really what is needed on this is some political leadership.

    Dont count on that even with a likely Obama second term. RGO

  • Robert G. Oler

    Look what is needed is a policy to make the US a space industrial power. I dont care much for the article on Space Review as I think that Charles just flounders in his logic…but the title is good “A space industrial power” Or something like that.

    The US (as well as most nations) lacks a real space industrial capability in any terms but launching (Iand we dont even have that) develop that and almost anything is possible…and I suspect that is what the Reds are trying to do RGO

    • Googaw

      If it was an important political goal of NASA HSF to make the US “a space industrial power”, they would have stuffed the committee with leaders of the by far largest and fastest growing private sector space industry, communications satellites.

      Clearly it isn’t and they didn’t. For fairly obvious reasons. NASA HSF is at best irrelevant, and more likely a dangerous obstacle and expensive diversion, to developing industry in space. The main political justifications for NASA HSF, as lame as they may be, remain planetary exploration and national security, and thus the backgrounds of the committee members.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi AW –

    “Way too many left wing eggheads in this group. Academia was complicit in neutering the space program back in 2009. Not this time. The GOP needs to win the election then exercise raw executive power.”

    AW, Ares 1 had .7 G combustion oscillations. Raw Executive Power can not change that.

    I have asked you for your Plan B, but you have not responded.

  • amightywind

    I have asked you for your Plan B, but you have not responded.

    I’ve posted on it many times. Here it is again.

    I’ll remind you that the vehicle flew beautifully.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “I’ll remind you that the vehicle flew beautifully.”

    Yeah, real beautiful:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ares_I-X_booster_damage_2009-5997.jpg

  • Googaw

    Notably absent, though, are any representatives from the aerospace industry itself

    This looks quite refreshing. Instead of a committee of industry insiders chasing NASA contracts, according to self-serving economic fantasies derived from sci-fi, astronaut worship, and obsolete Cold War projects, we have a committee that seems to be mostly made up of leaders from communities those NASA contracts are claimed to benefit — especially science and national security.

    A few astronaut cultists have been reflective enough to ask “why” people not in the cult should be funding orbital HSF. Now apparently we have some big wigs outside of that cult, and outside the NASA contractor community that cult has fed — instead leaders in communities NASA HSF has been argued to benefit — who are lining up to answer this question.

    Of course if that’s the case, cultists probably won’t like the answer. And they along with their NASA contractor friends will start by bashing this committee. Tastes of economic reality have a way of generating vituperous cult opposition. How dare the funders and purported beneficiaries of NASA HSF demand a say on how these fantasies proceed?

    Bad news for the astronaut cultists, good news for the rest of us: Congress won’t ignore it.

  • NASA could solve the conundrum of what to with human spaceflight by thinking small, viz. the “Early Lunar Access” proposal of 1993 for return to the Moon:

    Encyclopedia Astronautica.
    Early Lunar Access.
    http://www.astronautix.com/craft/earccess.htm

    This only required 52 mT to LEO by using a lightweight 2-man capsule and all cryogenic in-space propulsion. So it could be launched either by the 53 metric ton(mT) Falcon Heavy in 2014 or by the 70 mT SLS in 2017.

    Moreover, the two required cryogenic stages already exist in the Centaur upper stages. All that would be required is integrating the two Centaurs into a single vehicle and adding lander legs for the lander stage.

    Bob Clark

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