If you’ve read my quick summation of NASA and the latest bugaboo by Mr. Walker, you’ll be interested this op-ed piece at SpaceDaily by Philip K. Chapman (if you still don’t think NASA is a failure, read it).
A few prescient statements he makes:
- 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. [snip]- 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. [snip]
- 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. [snip]
- 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. [snip]
- 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. [snip]
- 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.
For those unfamiliar with the X-Prize, it is a $10 million award for any individual or privately funded company that can create a vehicle that can take a pilot and two paying customers up into orbit (62.5 miles) and then repeat the endeavor within 2 weeks. There are about a dozen serious players in it (and another dozen not so serious) who have until the end of 2004 to do so.
I should also point out the X-15 from the 1960’s. It was a joint project from the Air Force and NASA that managed to reach a 67 mile altitude and could achieve Mach 6.7 — all of this prior to Apollo landing on the moon and with a much smaller budget. The way it worked, was that it was “dropped” like a bomb from a B-52 (from the wing) and then the single pilot within the small vehicle would activate it’s hypersonic engines and fly up into the horizons of space. Then after fighting the extraterrestrials in space and uploading a virus into their mothership would glide down to the smiling faces of Tom, Dick and Harry.
The Russian Cosmopolis is an X-Prize class vehicle that is supposed to do what the X-15 did, only at a fraction of the cost. Space Adventures has already signed up with the Cosmopolis team to offer the service to paying tourists. You might remember Space Adventures as the company that helped Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth become the first 2 paying space tourists (Lance Bass was supposed to be the 3rd, but that fell through).
I think I’ll wait until someone builds the Millenium Falcon, outfitted with a Wookie and a hyperdrive that can outrun the Martian TIE Fighters.