OK, smart guy, so how SHOULD the VSE be done?

In response to my last post, Paul Spudis wrote in the comments (emphasis mine):

The whole NASA v. private sector argument seems more theological than technical to me. But I'll just make one point: NASA (or more properly the federal government) has legitimate interests in space (including on the Moon) and I believe it is entirely appropriate for them to be striving in that direction. Moreover, as you correctly note, they are not likely to be dismantled at any time in the near future, so as they are already spending $16 billion per year, they might as well spend it on developing systems and technologies useful for the long-range settlement of space.

For some, the NASA vs. the private sector argument might be more theological than technical; for me however, it is philosophical, historical, and technical. Philosophical, in that there simply is no constitutional basis for NASA to exist at all - Thomas Jefferson would have violently opposed such an agency, and indeed a great many of the current US government departments. Historical, in that NASA has proven over and over again that the level of competence that existed in the first fifteen years just hasn't been present in the subsequent thirty-five (cf. the Shuttle program, the ISS, X33, Mars Climate Orbiter, and too many other examples to list here).

But most of all, my argument is technical. NASA's mistakes since Apollo would be forgivable if lessons had been learned and put into practice, but with the Ares series NASA appears determined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

I agree with Paul Spudis that NASA should be doing something useful with their $16 Billion a year, but honestly, Ares isn't it.

In my last post I briefly mentioned Jon Goff's article Technologies Necessary for a Spacefaring Society. He laid out a series of enabling technologies that would build a true space infrastructure: high longevity rocket engines, low-maintenance reusable thermal protection systems, aerobraking technology, on-orbit propellant transfer, long-term on-orbit propellant storage, on-orbit assembly, on-orbit construction, closing the water loop, extraterrestrial navigation, low-maintenance space nuclear power, space tugs, in-situ resource utilization, and artificial gravity (ie centrifugal).

Those sorts of technologies would enable everyone, not just NASA, to get a real toehold in space. If I wanted to be uncharitable, I would suggest that is precisely why NASA isn't doing those things, and that they really want to be the entire industry all by themselves.

So, what should NASA be doing, beyond just developing those enabling technologies? If they are going to go about doing the Vision for Space Exploration, then what is the better way to do it?

The solution is to decouple the mission from the implementation. It matters that it gets done, not that NASA does it or that the agency does it in a specific carved-in-stone way. NASA can't do it all by itself anymore, so it shouldn't even try. No more of this business of NASA building their own brand new launch vehicles and their own brand new manned capsules and their own brand new moon landers and their own brand new moonbases and micromanaging every detail. It is a brittle way of doing things, and the slightest hiccup in the yearly budget process or the slightest failure along that critical path brings everything to a screeching halt.

In a nutshell, the solution is simply taking a cue from object-oriented computer programming. Define the problem. Break the problem down into subproblems. For each subproblem, define the input to the subproblem, the output from the subproblem, and the process that must occur. Each subproblem becomes a black box: the whole system doesn't need to know what is going on inside the black box, only what sort of inputs to give and what sort of outputs to expect.

So, if the problem is to get men to the moon, break down the problem into subproblems: (a) ascent to earth orbit (b) travel to lunar orbit (c) descent to the lunar surface (d) living on the lunar surface (e) working on the lunar surface (f) ascent to lunar orbit (g) travel to earth orbit (h) descent to earth.

Now we are left with manageable subproblems. The first thing to note is that the same vehicle doesn't have to address all of the subproblems. For instance, subproblems (a) and (h) could be handled by one vehicle, whose task is simply to get people to Earth orbit and bring them safely back to Earth. That vehicle doesn't need to make the trip beyond Earth orbit. It doesn't need to have a galley and a toilet and sleeping facilities. It doesn't even have to be a NASA vehicle: it could be built by SpaceX or Virgin or Armadillo or the Russians. It doesn't matter who gets people to orbit or what craft they use, as long as the job gets done.

Once in Earth orbit, the next step is to get to Lunar orbit and back, steps (b) and (g) above. The craft that brings people to lunar orbit never needs to return to the surface of the Earth, it never needs to go to the surface of the moon. All it has to do is go from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit and back. And it doesn't matter who does it or what the craft looks like, as long as the job gets done.

Similarly, subproblems (c) and (f) above can be handled by a vehicle that only goes from Lunar orbit to the surface of the moon and back. It never needs to come back to Earth, it never even needs to come back to Earth orbit. It can be optimized for the job of bringing people from Lunar orbit to the moon and back, and once again it doesn't matter who builds it or operates it, as long as the job gets done.

Subproblems (d) and (e) are handled in a similar fashion. It doesn't matter if the moon base is something that NASA develops, or if it is a complex of Bigelow modules lowered to the surface from L1 - just so long as the job gets done, that's all we care about.

Now, the vehicles that carry passengers from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit and the vehicles that go from Lunar orbit to the moon would need propellant. The people themselves would need supplies like food and oxygen and water and spare parts. So, once again, we break those problems down into subproblems: (i) getting fuel to orbit (j) getting other cargo to orbit (k) transporting fuel or other cargo from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit (l) transporting fuel or other cargo from Lunar orbit to the surface of the moon (m) refueling the passenger or cargo transports that make the trips from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit and back (n) refueling the passenger or cargo transports that make the trips from Lunar orbit to the moon and back (o) storing propellant in orbit or on the moon until it is needed.

Once again, it doesn't matter who builds rockets boosting fuel to orbit. It doesn't have to even be man-rated rockets doing that. It doesn't matter from where in the world the rockets are launched, nor whom is doing the launches.

What does matter are the interfaces between all these subproblems. For instance, while the flag or company logo outside the vehicle going from Earth to Earth orbit and back doesn't matter one bit, the docking ring matters a lot. It needs to either dock directly with the EO-LO transport, or to an intermediary Earth-orbit space station. If docking with a space station, then that space station could be the ISS or a Bigelow module, or something else, and it doesn't matter, as long as that station can dock with both the transport to/from Earth and the transport to/from lunar orbit.

The flag or company logo outside a propellant launch vehicle doesn't matter, but its interface to an orbital propellant depot matters a lot. One type of nozzle might connect one of these tankers to an oxygen tank, another type of nozzle might connect to a hydrogen tank (one sure wouldn't want to mix these up!), another type of nozzle would connect to a hydrazine tank, another type of nozzle to an RP-1 tank... you get the idea. Standardize these connections so that anyone capable of delivering propellant to orbit can just hook up to an orbiting depot and drop off their load, or so that for instance the EO-LO transport can simply hook up to the depot - either in Earth orbit or Lunar orbit - and refuel.

That's how to get the VSE done. If NASA defines the docking ring or airlock interface, if NASA defines the propellant-transfer interface - basically if they define the interfaces between all the black-box subproblems - and if they take care of the basic research that Jon Goff mentioned in his article, then their $16 Billion a year will be well-spent. Such a system architecture would immediately create a market for such things as delivery of propellant to orbit, in the same way that IBM's publishing of their PC architecture created an instant market for computer peripherals back in the 1980s. That's the way to get a robust space industry.

The real beauty of this is that it opens up way more than the moon to humanity. Such a way of doing things means that some of the Near-Earth Asteroids are accessible, too, since travel from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit is the same as travel to some NEAs, in terms of energy.

It also means that NASA doesn't have to build all their own hardware. If somebody else builds launch vehicles, if somebody else has available propellant in orbit, if somebody else is making the the EO-LO-EO run, if somebody else is delivering Bigelow-style space stations to Lunar orbit (or L1), if somebody else is operating a vehicle from lunar orbit to the moon and back, if somebody else is dropping Bigelow-style bases on the moon... if they are doing those things, then NASA just needs to pay for services rendered, not for the R&D and maintenance and training and personnel and facilities that went into those services.

And, if multiple companies are doing those black-box subproblems, then the system is robust; a failure in a SpaceX launch doesn't bring the whole VSE to a halt - NASA just switches to whatever provider happens to have a launch available. A propellant depot explosion doesn't bring the whole VSE to a halt - the EO-LO transports simply refuel at whatever other depots are available. By opening up the architecture and defining the interfaces, NASA avoids choke points in the critical path.

NASA really needs to stop what they are doing on the VSE and take a critical look at themselves. Continuing on full-bore down the Ares path is to repeat the same mistakes they have made over the last 35 years: a brittle system that does nothing to open up space to the enormous power of the market, that grinds to a halt for years at a time when it encounters the slightest problem.

Remember the first few days after 9/11, when no airplnes were in the sky? That's what happens every time NASA loses a flight vehicle. Can you imagine what it would be like if every time there was an airplane crash, those few days of no flights we experienced in mid-September 2001 were to be extended to a few years of no flights?

Suppose you are taking a flight from Toronto to Los Angeles. Chances are that you don't live at the airport itself, and your destination isn't really LAX, it is perhaps Hollywood. If the airline industry were run the way that NASA is, then you would have to be a pilot yourself to get on that flight (and you might have trained for years to do so, without knowing if you would actually get to fly), and you would get on the airplane at your house and land in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. While in Hollywood, you'd sleep on the plane.

Instead what likely happens to you on that flight is: you take a taxi or bus or car to the airport, you get on the plane, the stewardesses show you the emergency procedures, and you sleep while someone else flies the plane. You get off at LAX and rent a car or take a cab to your hotel. Later you drive or take a cab to Hollywood boulevard. Your car or the taxicabs, the hotel, and the airplane all have different functions, for which they are optimized.

You don't need to know the first thing about the actual operation of an airplane in order to be a passenger; you don't need to know the first thing about changing your oil in order to drive a car; you don't need to be a hotel manager to sleep in a hotel bed. It doesn't matter, as long as the job gets done. The mission (getting you from your house in Toronto to Hollywood Boulevard) has been decoupled from the implementation (getting to and from airports, driving around). Alternative implementations are also available, like Greyhound.

That's a robust system. That's a system that has been opened up to the power of the marketplace. And that is what NASA should be doing.