Just over forty-five years ago, the United States landed 12 men on the moon in a series of historic missions that are still seen as a national triumph and have become deeply embedded as a cultural reference point in America’s DNA. Those landings have become synonymous with how we see ourselves as a people: Bold, adventuresome, heroic. The Apollo landings were the very embodiment of the American Dream, symbolic of a nation that can dare great, even impossible, things – and succeed.
In the aftermath of those glory days, there were heady dreams of exploring other planets, building space colonies and solar power satellites, and expanding humanity onto the High Frontier.
It didn’t happen.
Today, more than a generation later, we can support at best half a dozen human beings at any one time in low earth orbit (barely a hundred miles above the surface of our planet), we lack the capability to launch our own astronauts even that far (we pay Russia to carry them into space for us at $70+ million a pop, a service that is hostage to their goodwill amidst increasing political tensions), and we have neither the tools nor the budget to return to the moon, much less go beyond.
In fairness, big new launchers are in development and have been for a long time – the budget is another matter, giving rise to significant doubts as to whether we can afford to use the very rockets we are building.
In 2009, a blue-ribbon commission of luminaries chartered by the Obama Administration reviewed the American space program and found deep flaws in our approach to human spaceflight. That commission argued that the space program was underfunded and falling behind. They said that to ‘advance humanity into space’, we needed a flexible approach that matched our means to our goals and would deliver a capability to launch astronauts into space to provide “inspiring moments” for the American public: The first visit to an asteroid, the first landing on Mars by humans, the first nation to return to the moon.
The Obama Administration promptly endorsed the recommendations of the 2009 Augustine Commission by announcing the goals of having astronauts visit an asteroid in the mid-2020s and putting Americans on Mars by the mid-2030s (and perhaps unintentionally squashing NASA’s dreams of returning to the moon with an ad-lib comment to the effect that it was little more than ‘been there, done that’).
Five years farther down the path, another commission of luminaries brought together by the National Research Council reported in 2014 that, once again, we were not funding our goals adequately and that on the current pathway to human exploration, we cannot afford to send missions off into space frequently enough to be able to meet our goals of landing men on Mars safely. That report admitted there was no single compelling reason to fund exploration, that a mix of pragmatic and aspirational rationales was a worthy enough reason to justify the funding, and suggested that a modest 2.5% annual increase in NASA’s budget would be enough to meet the most important goals for exploration over the next 50 years, including landing a few astronauts on Mars.
This then is the strategic vision we are currently operating under, one that focuses on the paradigm of space exploration [defined as sending humans to explore other planets and bodies in our solar system] and which attempts to calibrate our goals to our means – contingent on a modest budget increase.
With this essay, however, I will argue that a vision and strategy based on exploration is deeply flawed. At best, it gets us back to a future before we cancelled Apollo and scuttled the massive Saturn V rockets that once lofted our astronauts into the heavens, but does not resolve the reasons why we abandoned them in the first place.
A more fundamental test of strategy and vision is whether a proposed effort can gain the financial support required to make it sustainable. In the context of the space program, this translates into a question of political support and public funding. The answer for 45 years has been ‘No’ when it comes to space exploration and returning humans to the Moon and beyond as illustrated with a few specific numbers from the National Research Council’s recent report:
- Percentage of people ‘very’ interested in space exploration: 21%
- Percentage of people ‘well informed’ about space exploration: 5-6%
- Percentage of people ‘attentive’ to space exploration: 5%
- Percentage of Americans that believe we spend too little on space exploration: 22%
- Percentage of Americans that believe we spend too much on space exploration: 33%
- Rank of Space Exploration on a list of US national priorities: 16th (out of 18)
- Percentage of Americans that view NASA ‘very’ or ‘mostly’ favorably: 73%*
(*National Research Council, Pathways to Exploration, section 3.1.1-2, page 108-110)
These numbers don’t necessarily rule out a modest increase in funding for space exploration, but nor do they suggest space exploration is something that Americans are pining for or willing to fund in any significant measure. Within our current means, we have maintained a continual presence in space aboard the International Space Station for over 15 years, as a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly highlights. Yet people still aren’t engaged. The numbers have barely budged. Neither has the budget.
If we follow the current strategy of focusing on space exploration and inspiring moments, we may get a few more of those ‘firsts’ under our belt: The first visit to an asteroid, the first flybys and landings on Mars by humans, the first nation to return to the moon for brief visits. But if the past is any guide, none of these events are likely to be sustained beyond a few historic televised moments, replayed endlessly, and footprints left behind in the dust of other worlds for the same reasons that the moon landings did not lead to any significant presence beyond low earth orbit and permanent bases on the moon.
Worse, while we may get a burst of public enthusiasm after each new milestone, the glory may be a little less fleeting each time, overshadowed by the realities of limited resources, a challenge that is likely to get worse not better if the forecasted fiscal and demographic trends continue, our environment continues to deteriorate, the economy stagnates, or the world becomes an even more dangerous place than it is already.
Our strategy for space is flawed today because it misreads the significance of our past glories, fails to understand both the limits to and potential aspirations of public opinion and political support, and falls far short of any potential for scale and sustainability. Paradoxically, the vision we are pursuing today is both too expensive to fund and too small to sell.
Space exploration, as a vision and strategy, are wrong for our time.
We need a vision that corresponds to what the public wants and is willing to fund. There are a few tantalizing hints that the American public might be open to a more ambitious alternative.
In a survey by the Pew Charitable Trust in 2010, the survey found that 53% of the public envision ordinary people traveling in space in 50 years. A similar study by Pew in 2014, found 33% of the public expects humans to live in colonies on other worlds in 50 years. In a sense, the public is far more ambitious and optimistic in its view of the future than any policy roadmap that currently exists.
Policymakers may scoff, but these numbers represent a mix that is part aspirational desire and part educated guess by the public. And while these numbers don’t represent majorities, what’s truly impressive is that they exist in such large numbers at all – even before any systematic effort to communicate a vision of an expansive effort in space. These polls hint at the possibility that the public wants more – much more – from our space program.
It is to these aspirations that this essay speaks. My alternative point of view on the future of America in space can be articulated in three simple words:
Scale is possible.
Those three words sum up the vision I will articulate and the strategy I will propose. I will argue in this essay that our failure to seize the high frontier this past 45 years is not the result of the perfidy of politicians, the fickleness of voters, or changes in geopolitical fortunes. It comes down to the simple realities of engineering, economics, and a vision Americans will pay to support.
I am not writing to castigate the goals of space exploration or rain on anyone’s parade. They are fine and worthy goals. For the record, I like NASA. I fully support visiting asteroids, going to Mars, and returning to the moon as explorers and I will continue to do so. I hope to enjoy these “inspiring moments” if and when we get them just as I enjoyed and was inspired by the recent Pluto fly-by and the first images of that planet(oid). However, I firmly believe that a program of human space flight focused on space exploration should be the icing on the cake. My contention is that for the last 45 years we have failed to bake the cake. This essay will attempt a recipe for doing so.
For many, the private sector is the answer and government just needs to get out of the way. Companies like SpaceX and Planetary Resources and their ilk will open the door to a new frontier in space, breaking the stranglehold of governments and bureaucracies. I disagree. Without taking anything away from the innovations and energy these entrepreneurs and companies are bringing to the scene, I will argue (perhaps undiplomatically) that this point of view mistakes hype for reality and is deeply flawed. I will argue that ‘advancing humanity’ into space is going to require a massive public commitment to create the market and build the infrastructure within which the private sector will then flourish.
The rhetoric about opening up the space frontier for the benefit of private enterprise is, at this point, just that – rhetoric. We should not confuse Silicon Valley Libertarianism with a realistic plan to seize the high frontier. To be successful, the private sector is going to need government contracts at volume and scale. It’s going to require a partnership based on public funding. Yet the hard work of rallying the public to any such large-scale investment has not even begun.
I do believe it is possible to get to scale in space. This may seem wildly naïve given the record that I have just articulated in the past few pages. The perennial underfunding of NASA is so bad, it has become a Hollywood cliché. In the film Interstellar, denial of the Apollo missions is so widespread that NASA becomes (literally) an underground organization. But it isn’t just Hollywood. Writing just before the last flight of the Space Shuttle, The Economist magazine, a paragon of rationale economic thought, opined that ‘humanity’s dreams of a future beyond the final frontier of geostationary orbit had faded.’ In their words, outer space was ‘history’ and the Space Age was ‘over.’ (“The End of the Space Age, June 30, 2011)
For the record, I think they got it wrong.
With this essay, I will argue that there is potential to increase funding for our space program in a politically sustainable way by several magnitudes of order and I will lay out a case for gaining public support for doing so. I will argue the paradox that it may be easier to increase NASA’s budget by 10x than 2x. I have shown that the number of Americans truly focused on our space program is modest and that support for increased funding is soft, but I believe we may have been asking the wrong questions. I believe it possible that these numbers barely hint at the potential for support and I will put forth a plan in this essay to dramatically increase public engagement and to build the public coalition necessary to fund an American space program at scale.
The truth is we don’t need to wait for ecological disaster, external help from an ‘alien’ race, or solve for gravity to go forward into space. We can do this now. We need no particular magic or help from another dimension. The tools are more mundane by comparison. It comes down to engineering, economics, and – most of all – political will and public support. While not easy, these are problems we can knock down and challenges we can overcome.
Scale is possible.