NASA’s Struggle for Space

 

Reprinted from the Fall 2002 issue of Kitchen Sink magazine

 

The biological model that seems to be humanity’s destiny is not at all uncommon: We need a somewhat healthy (and preferably planet-shaped) host to survive as a species, even as we are driven to adapt it, come hell or high water, to our personal desires. Like our own bodies’ bumper flocks of microorganisms, from benevolent eyelash dwellers to E. coli, malaria and even HIV, maintaining that precarious balance between our own private comfort zone and the good of Mother Earth is always a challenge.

 

And lately, despite our much-vaunted ability to “reason,” we’ve been acting more like those unwise viruses that kill the very hosts they rely on. Sure, we could act a little bit less like Ebola, but there’s a sale at the Gap! And make no mistake – you recycling vegetarians are going down on the same ship as that wanna-be Navy Seal who almost mowed you and your second-hand bicycle down with his shiny black H2.

 

All this means that, if we are to take our cue from the viral infections we are quite consciously emulating, we’ve got exactly one option: Inspire some sort of sneeze that will propel our DNA, along with Shakespeare’s plays and Einstein’s musings, elsewhere.

 

Infecting Mars

Two weeks after the successful 1969 Moon landing, NASA deputy chief Wernher von Braun announced NASA’s next giant leap: Sending mankind to Mars, which apparently had everything necessary for human habitation. ETA: 1982.

 

Von Braun, however, created his schedule during the Cold War, when the Kennedy Space Center and the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome (in present-day Kazakhstan) were well-funded hives of activity, packed with scientists and soldiers intent on exploring the universe before the other team got there. In the United States, the space program was getting about 4% of the total US budget to achieve that goal; today, NASA receives only about .7% of that budget, around US$15 billion per year. Sure, that’s a lot of money [Authors note: Not quite two weeks of Iraq War expenses in 2005], but consider the shopping list when you’re trying to put together, say, an International Space Station:

 

  • Bailing the post-Soviet Russian space program out of economic ruin: US$600 million, plus expenses.
  • Shuttle flights (six to eight per year): US$450 million a pop
  • Station design: US$3 to US$10 billion
  • Fighting with your so-called partners – Brazil, Canada, Japan and the 14 members of the European Space Agency – when they sue over unavoidable delays: Classified

 

For some perspective, consider that the War on Drugs gets US$20 billion per year to fight domestic marijuana growers and impoverished Colombian coca farmers, which while arguably important, isn’t exactly rocket science.

 

Manifest Destiny on a Shoestring

If battle can be in anyway glorious, the race for space was the Cold War’s Excalibur. From the USSR’s 1957 launch of tiny, ominous Sputnik to the USA’s 1969 Moon landing, the entire world felt fear, awe and pride in equal measure at the realization of exactly what we over-evolved apes could accomplish.

 

And when craft from the two skyborne nations rendezvoused high above our watery sphere for the 1975 “Handshake in Space,” it signaled the thaw of that Cold War that had for decades raged hot and bloody in battlegrounds rolling ever eastward below.

That handshake was also the end of NASA’s free ride. Americans had long since grown bored with extraterrestrial accomplishments, and now that the fierce one-upmanship between the two economic systems had devolved into the comfortable myth of mutual assured self-destruction, there was simply no good reason to keep funding the quest for any inky black final frontier.

 

Run by scientists rather than businesspeople, NASA became an easy target for Congress’s pork-barrel budget cuts; that money could be spent where the voting public would perhaps appreciate it more. Despite handy inventions like hurricane tracking and global communications (remember life before cell phones and live video feeds from the other side of the world?), NASA officials seemed unable to justify its expenditures in front of the American people.

 

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, slashed budgets and massive layoffs crippled NASA’s capabilities dramatically. The long-anticipated manned Mars mission had become a pipe dream; even a return to the Moon seemed impossible. NASA engineers, striving to make the most of their fiercely curtailed budget, pinned their hopes on a reusable space plane that the Soviets had already abandoned as inefficient: the Orbiter, which would become better known as the Space Shuttle.

 

Basically a space truck that hauls payloads of private satellites, military equipment and corporate experiments into orbit, as well as the occasional item useful in the pursuit of exploratory space travel, the shuttle seemed more a more useful and financially sound investment than any silly lunar base. And indeed, the Shuttle was a success, capturing the nation’s imagination with its spectacular launches than any NASA project since the lunar missions. Regardless, budgets continued to shrink.

 

In 1985, popular interest in the Space Shuttle had waned, and NASA was desperate for some positive PR, something that could capture the attention of young people, the future taxpayers and space explorers of America. Thus, they announced that the Orbiter’s future payload would include a “Teacher in Space,” charismatic Christa  McAuliffe. Smitten by the brunette middle-school teacher, international camera crews followed every aspect of her training, preparation and finally, the launch.

 

A little over one minute after takeoff, the Orbiter Challenger exploded, killing all aboard. Children too young to remember the brave and deadly quest for space of the 1960s, who had grown accustom to success after success from the seemingly infallible space agency, left school auditoriums across America shaken by the knowledge of at what cost would be won the stars.

 

For the next three years, investigations stalled the shuttles’ launch schedule, as NASA operations ground almost to a halt. Shuttle redesigns devoured the shrinking budget, even as private business and the US military pulled the lucrative contracts that had kept America in space for the past decade. Gravity was no longer humankind’s biggest barrier to becoming a spacefaring species. It was money.

 

Playing Politics and Cutting Corners

In 1995, with the Shuttle Program arguably back on schedule and the International Space Station on the drawing board, NASA announced its “Faster, Cheaper, Better” program, designed to stretch what was left of the budget while living up to NASA scientists’ dreams of what could be accomplished despite the cuts.

 

The program, lauded by politicians as streamlining the agency, coughed to Mars-bound probes upward on Delta II launch vehicles, a US$300 million savings over the larger Titan missiles that NASA engineers had recommended. America got what it paid for. Neither probe made it through Mars’ atmosphere, thanks to an experimental aero-braking system necessitated by the blue-light-special launch.

 

And it isn’t just unmanned craft that were having their corners so efficiently cut. The Space Shuttle Program still runs on technology that was obsolete for your home computer back when President Reagan was still in office; even now NASA must scour eBay for Intel 8086 chips (popular circa 1981) to replace aging systems, according to a May 12, 2002 New York Times article.

 

The savings have also been passed onto what could have been humankind’s greatest achievement, proof that we as nations can work together toward our species’ highest good. Instead, the International Space Station has arguably become a Frankenstein monster of pork-barrel politics, pieced together not for architectural integrity so much as to secure ever-evasive funding.

 

Rather than awarding various contracts to the most innovative and thriftiest companies, NASA deliberately spread the wealth among manufacturers in 20 different states, choosing corporations with strong lobbyists that could potentially keep Congress (somewhat) interested. The result? A flawed and massively over-budget space station that can do little more than keep a handful of astronauts alive.

 

Despite international involvement in the ISS, the USA and Russia retain a monopoly on actual transportation between Earth and the station. And relations between the two old rivals remain tense. When Russia took pioneering space tourist Dennis Tito on his US$20 million jaunt to the station, NASA actually threatened to bar the millionaire from entering “their side” of the station.

 

In the end, like a good older sibling in the back of the car, NASA capitulated, allowing not only Tito but subsequent space tourists transported skyward on Russia’s Soyuz spacecrafts to enjoy all that the ISS has to offer. Between the space tourism program and other money-making ventures NASA is forbidden to undertake – for instance, advertising Pizza Hut on the side of their solid-fuel rockets – it’s simply become clear that the Russians are willing to milk capitalism for all it’s worth. Of course, that $20 million fee, which almost pays for a Soyuz launch in its entirety, wouldn’t cover a tenth of the average shuttle launch.

And to fix that would require a redesign that no one is willing to pay for.

 

In the meantime, look around you, my fellow viruses. Our planet has a mighty fever and seems, sometimes, to be making ready to flush our beautiful and elaborately constructed infection away. Even if we did all decide to forgo conspicuous consumption, fossil fuels and red meat tomorrow, there are still threats to our collective knowledge and wisdom, so hard won over these brutal millennia.

 

Just six months after President Bush cut NASA’s budget a further 5% to help pay for the War on Terrorism, asteroid 2002MN whizzed right between our own fragile planet and the Moon – and we didn’t even see it coming. That football-field-sized beauty could have done a lot more damage than knocking out a couple of skyscrapers, no matter how patriotic we are.

 

Survival is a serious – and expensive – game. And worth every penny. Just ask any common cold.