Book Review: Return to the Moon, part 3
Back in December I started bothering Rick Tumlinson to get me a copy of the book Return to the Moon for review on this blog. At the end of February, the publishers - Apogee Space Books, kindly routed a copy to me. Since the book is a collection of short essays, I had promised Rick that I would review the book essay by essay over numerous blog posts. If there are any spelling errors in the quotations I give, then these errors are entirely mine, as I am copying from the book rather than cutting and pasting.
Previous in this series: Part 1, Part 2In the third essay in Return To The Moon, Courtney A. Stadd starts us off with a look into the future, to 2015, where he presents us with some possible alternate futures - mostly horror stories. Among these is this story:
"Welcome to the World In Retrospect where every week we try to take you, the viewer, back in time to understand why certain government initiatives went awry. Tomorrow morning at ten o'clock we will bring you live coverage of hearings by the Joint house and Senate Intelligence Committee. The Committee has called on the nation's Director of Intelligence, Dr. Chelsea Clinton, to respond to new reports of apparent laser weapons tests being conducted on the far side of the Moon by the Chinese-Indian lunar expedition force, and their reported replacement of US flags left by the Apollo astronauts with Chinese and Indian flags to bolster their claim of ownership of the Moon. In light of these hearings, this evening we review the long forgotten decision by former President George W. Bush to commit this nation to go to the Moon and on to Mars and try to understand why the initiative went nowhere and why President Britney Spears and her Administration is not only facing criticism for failing to respond to the actions on the Moon, but is also on the defensive explaining why American aerospace is now considered the least competitive industry sector - far behind Europe and Asia."
Well, for one thing, we won't have to worry about a President Britney Spears in 2015; she was born on December 2, 1981, and won't be 35 (and elegible for election to the office of President) until after the 2016 elections. But for the rest of the horror story, it is entirely possible that India and China will send men to the Moon long before the US government does. Stadd continues:
The choices made now and the methods used to implement those choices will determine whether the United States continues to have a viable, effective space exploration capability, or whether it will fail to match a renewed vision with a plan of action that discards old ideas of government-first or government-only approaches and instead pursues an aggressive collaboration with the commercial sector... Already, it is obvious that NASA cannot be the same agency it was before the [Vision for Space Exploration] was announced. It cannot do all the things it was doing before and still do all that is required to advance the new exploration agenda.
Stadd goes on to compliment the NASA Centennial Challenges Program, a series of prizes totalling $20 million (out of NASA's total budget of $16.5 billion) for "revolutionary, breakthrough accomplishments from innovators not usually affiliated with the space program", and ends off by urging NASA to find a way to become a co-equal partner with the American commercial sector in the historic return to the Moon.
The biggest problem with NASA is that it long ago (around 1970) ceased to be a
military government space program. Instead, NASA has morphed into a government
jobs program, sustained by Congressmen unwilling to lose the votes of thousands of NASA employees in their districts. As a result, the enormously-bloated workforce of NASA required for the Apollo missions is sustained, long after the professionals who ran the Apollo program have retired. With the military objective of beating to the Russians to the moon achieved, NASA's
raison d'etre became sustaining NASA.
This has had a chain reaction effect on space ventures for more than three decades. First, due to the enormous expense of maintaining that work force, the price for all space ventures has also been maintained at an enormously expensive level. New private businesses have had a very difficult time breaking in to the space market, as they are forced to compete with the deep pockets of NASA. Second, the impression that "space is so expensive that only governments can do it" limits the willingness of bankers or venture capitalists to invest in new space businesses. Financing for new commercial space ventures thus becomes particularly difficult - only the very rich dreamers like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Robert Bigelow, Jeff Bezos, and John Carmack are willing to put their money into commercial space programs.
This one-two punch has stalled commercial space ventures, other than abortive blips here and there over the last 30 years. With NASA in the way, venture capital is blocked and only the self-financed billionaires can get their businesses off the ground. By analogy, imagine what would have happened to the airline industry in the early 1900s if the FAA was responsible for all aircraft and airport construction, maintenance, and operation. Further imagine that the only people allowed to be passengers would be those specially-trained and vetted by the FAA, that there were only a couple of flights per year, and that there were only a couple of airports in all of North America. How far would aviation have come in the last hundred years if the FAA was to take on responsibility for every aspect of flight? If that were the case, then aviation would also be enormously expensive, and only governments could afford to do it, and new aviation ventures would have a particularly difficult time attracting enough capital to get their businesses off the ground. The same thing is happening in the space industry as a result of NASA's continued involvement in every aspect of America's presence in space.
The solution is to completely change NASA, from by itself being the entire industry, to something more like the FAA; to concentrate in that second A in NASA and be an administration of the industry rather than the whole industry.
Perhaps instead of NASA continuing to stifle America's space commerce (chiefly by being in the way), we might instead realize another one of Stadd's possible future scenarios:
"Hello, this is Nancy Adkins reporting live from our Fox "Eye in Space" media platform where Ted Nellis, employee of Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins company, is about to deploy the first space hotel, the Trump Celestial Plaza, at Taurus-Littrow, where the last American astronauts walked on the lunar surface in 1972. This project resulted from a deal struck in 2008 between 'The Donald', Mr. Elon Musk, who provided the low-cost cargo and crew transport vehicles, and Mr. Robert Bigelow, President of Bigelow Aerospace, who has successfully revolutionized the economics of building and deploying space habitats in low Earth orbit and on the lunar surface. In fact, as many viewers may already know, I am reporting from a module, orbiting the Earth, built by Mr. Bigelow's company."
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