Torment and Triumph

America has a new spaceship. Where will it take us?

The morning of December 4, 2014 was crisp and breezy along the mid-Atlantic coast of Florida — a bit too breezy as it turned out.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had chosen that day to flight test its new Orion spaceship designed for human exploration. Orion’s ride to space this day would be a 242-foot United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket that towered over Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It would be a critical inaugural test of America’s first spacecraft for humans since the Shuttle was designed in the 1970s and could be, as NASA touted, an important step on the road to the human exploration of Mars. In many ways, the mission would evoke Apollo 4, which tested the Saturn V rocket and Apollo command/service modules in 1967, but with an important distinction.

When Apollo 4 lifted off 47 years earlier from Launch Complex 39 just up the road from Orion’s perch, it did so with a sense of urgency. America was on a definite path to the moon and it had only a few short years to get there in order to satisfy President Kennedy’s challenge to land by the end of the 1960s. Orion’s flight path is far murkier. By building Orion and the monstrous Space Launch System rocket, and continuing the Commercial Crew program which hands responsibility for access to low Earth orbit (LEO) to American industry, NASA is giving the United States the tools it can use to service the space station and escape LEO, all within tight budget constraints. But new space hardware does not constitute a coherent national space policy. So while America’s space agency is busily building a brand-new space infrastructure, just what the United States and its international partners will do with that infrastructure and when they will do it remain open questions.

Over the last several years, presidents and Congresses have studied, argued, gone down one path and then another, strangled projects of proper funding and ultimately cobbled together an amalgam of statements, policy papers and appropriations that in sum direct NASA to build hardware that will allow the United States to send astronauts somewhere to do something at some point in time. If these seem somewhat less definitive goals than, for example, sending a person to the moon by the end of the decade, that’s because they are. The lack of clear national objectives in space is the predominant policy problem that has dogged NASA since the very moment Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin satisfied the challenge laid down by John Kennedy. The schizophrenic history of NASA has been equal parts torment and triumph. In its moments of glory, the agency has quite literally brought humankind to new heights of achievement. But with the exception of Apollo, the dominant drag on NASA’s aspirations has been politics, not gravity.

Even by post-Apollo standards, Orion’s path to Launch Complex 37 was tortured. It was once part of a program to return to the moon called Project Constellation, which survived just four years. When Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president, and the Augustine Commission determined that the program was woefully underfunded, Constellation and America’s return to the moon were quickly dispensed with by President Obama. Orion, however, survived — not because the Obama administration wanted it, but because the Congress did. Its history reflects the how brutally fickle national policy makers can be. Mired in the start-stop, prosaic politics of the 21st Century, it’s easy to forget just how remarkable America’s ambitions in space have been, first with Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, then a revolutionary and (partly) reusable spaceplane and finally the vision to build a permanently occupied city in space. On a chilly December morning in 2014, NASA recaptured a bit of that magic.

With so much riding on this new little spacecraft, VIPs were there to witness the moment, among them veteran NASA Flight Director Gene “failure is not an option” Kranz, Enterprise-D Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge and Elmo. No astronauts would take this first ride, but a bit of lunar material brought back by Apollo and a Captain Kirk action figure kept watch inside Orion.

The test, dubbed Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1), would examine Orion’s performance including the separation systems (which detach the Orion capsule from its booster), navigation, attitude control, communications and the like. Importantly, one major part of the flight would be the trial by fire for the heat shield on the new spacecraft. On its EFT-1 return trip, Orion is designed to punch through the atmosphere at 20,000 miles per hour, searing the heat shield at some 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

To put all these systems through their paces, Orion first needed to get off the ground. For that, NASA needed a clear flight path, a working spacecraft and cooperation from the weather both at the launch site on the Atlantic coast and in the recovery area some 3,000 miles to the west, off the Pacific coast of Baja California.

But for the moment, it was not to be. First a boat strayed into the restricted zone out in the Atlantic, beneath the rocket’s flight path. Then surface level winds at the launch site and problems with valves aboard the booster conspired to delay the launch. It was a morning of highs and lows as each green light was followed by a red one, until the launch window closed and the liftoff scrubbed. The growing angst among those assembled on the NASA causeway (and no doubt at Launch Control) was palpable, but Elmo quickly brought grown-up frustrations down to Earth:

In many ways, the morning was testimony to the extraordinary, clockwork precision required to get off the planet. Everything has to mesh just so. On this day, however, things only meshed so-so.

Among the group of NASA social media invitees on the causeway (of which your correspondent was one) the next few moments after the scrub witnessed a torrent of airline change fees and extended hotel reservations as people scrambled to alter their plans, hoping to catch the next attempt the following day.

They were rewarded for their fidelity. Twenty-four hours on, it was a remarkably different story. The weather was iffier, the mood on the pre-dawn ride out to the causeway more skeptical. Yet the countdown this time was smooth as silk and the Delta IV’s motors lit right on schedule at 7:05 a.m. Eastern Time, Friday, December 5. Four hours and twenty-four minutes later, after two elliptical orbits and reaching an altitude of 3,600 miles, more than a dozen times higher than the International Space Station flies and farther from Earth than any spacecraft designed for humans has been since Apollo 17 came home in 1972, Orion made a bulls-eye landing in Pacific waters.

For NASA, it was a timely moment of glory. Orion’s success came just months after two prominent setbacks in the commercial space business, one of which cost the life of Scaled Composites test pilot Michael Alsbury as Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship Two broke up over the Mojave Desert on October 31. Just three days earlier, Orbital Sciences’ cargo trip to the International Space Station ended seconds into the flight when its Antares rocket exploded in a huge fireball just above its pad at NASA’s mid-Atlantic Wallops Flight Facility. No one was injured.

In this case, both the Delta IV booster and the Orion spacecraft performed admirably. The heavy configuration of the Delta IV is currently the most powerful rocket in America’s lineup. But impressive as it is, it lacks the muscle to boost Orion to the moon, Mars or other deep space destinations, so in the long run Orion is designed to cap the unimaginatively-named Space Launch System (SLS) which won’t be ready for a few years yet. In fairness to SLS, the Shuttle’s real name was equally pedestrian — the Space Transportation System. Moreover, SLS is probably a preferable moniker to the name of the rocket series NASA had once envisioned to succeed the Saturn V — the Nova rockets. At least someone at NASA realized that naming rockets after exploding stars might be an incendiary idea.

Regardless of its name, the SLS will be a monster. It will be able to boost huge payloads into orbit, and also reach farther than humans ever have before. The rocket will likely have its first uncrewed test in 2018 and humans will not ride Orion/SLS until at least 2021. Together, Orion and SLS represent a huge investment in a flexible new space exploration architecture. Europe is building Orion’s service module — the first time US partners across the Pond have built a human-rated spacecraft. But for all the merits of Orion and SLS, they are just a means to an end. For America’s new space hardware to be a success, they will have to serve the interests of coherent, compelling and funded national objectives in space. Unfortunately, setting long-term objectives and then properly funding them has been a challenge for the United States over the last decade or so. Moreover, any future major endeavors in space will look much more like the International Space Station (a partnership of many nations) than Apollo (a purely American adventure). The space station got done through close international cooperation, but also as the result of determined American leadership.

To be clear, the inability to articulate a coherent space policy, fund it and stick with it is not a failing of NASA. Since 1959, the space agency has produced long-term plans for space exploration. And while no organization is perfect, as the twin tragedies of Challenger and Columbia attest, America’s space agency has performed remarkably well given its political environment, vast portfolio and miserly budgets. This problem is very much a failing of national policy making. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) noted in 2003 that after Apollo the US crewed space program had flown for thirty years “without a compelling national mandate.” The Board was equally unambiguous in its judgment of the efforts to develop the next generation of human-rated spacecraft in furtherance of national objectives. “It is the view of the Board that the previous attempts to develop a replacement vehicle for the aging Shuttle represent a failure of national leadership,” the Board said.

Since the CAIB report, Orion has been the focus of America’s efforts to build a new spacecraft for people, though, as noted earlier, it has developed in fits and starts. Even to a casual observer, Orion and SLS seem like a modern reboot of Apollo, and in many ways this is true even beyond the obvious capsule spacecraft design. In a briefing prior to the EFT-1 flight, NASA administrator Charlie Bolden made it clear that he saw Orion picking up the baton set down by Apollo in 1972.

Flying between Apollo and where we are today were the Shuttles. At Kennedy Space Center, one needn’t look very hard to find wistful romanticism for the Shuttle era. It is literally everywhere and not just in the gift shops. Certainly, the Shuttles — all of them — earned their place in history. The Shuttles were remarkable and revolutionary vehicles by any standard, and some of this wistfulness surely relates to the fact that America is reliant on Russia for rides to the space station, a humbling state of affairs for the nation that planted six flags on the surface of the moon.

This is not the first time America has lost the ability to put people in space. Six years passed between Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 and the Shuttle Columbia’s first flight in 1981. Yet when Apollo ended, the Shuttle was by then a well-defined program. The Apollo-Shuttle gap was supposed to be smaller, but the Shuttle was extraordinarily complex and it ran years behind schedule. Even so, the Shuttle program in its formative stages had clearer outlines than Orion/SLS, which continue to shift, and even the planned US crewed spaceflight gap this time around is nearly a decade. Moreover, the gap lays bare the simple fact that NASA has enough money to either build a spaceflight architecture or operate one, but not both. To move on to the next step, the Shuttle had to be grounded.

So with Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavour, and Enterprise now museum pieces, the Obama administration’s “flexible path” has American astronauts visiting an as yet unidentified asteroid of some kind, somewhere in the neighborhood, at some point in the mid 2020s, and then a trip to somewhere in the vicinity of Mars sometime in the 2030s. Inspiring it is not. The administration later said it would pursue capturing an asteroid and parking it near the moon and/or building a small space station on the far side of the moon. One has to squint pretty hard to find a coherent narrative in America’s human spaceflight program.

While all nations seem to agree that Mars is the obvious destination, with the exception of the United States they all seem to see the moon as an important way station. NASA Administrator Bolden disagrees. At the Humans 2 Mars Summit in 2013, Bolden said that while the Commercial Crew program was essential to getting to Mars, the moon was not. A stop on the lunar surface would drain too many resources needed for Mars. “If we starting straying from our path and going to an alternative plan, where we decide we’re going to go back to the Moon and spend a little time developing the technologies and the systems we need, we’re doomed. We will not get to Mars in the 2030s, if ever, to be quite honest.” Bolden is acknowledging the reality that his agency just doesn’t have the money for both moon and Mars.

But if human footprints are ever to mark Martian soil, the United States and its international partners must have a coherent narrative on Earth—important for any major endeavor, especially in democratic societies. Critical as they are for eventually getting to Mars, Orion/SLS are just a start. Other spacecraft, as well as facilities on both Earth and Mars will have to be developed for such a mission. And Mars is not the moon. Getting to Mars is not the same as traveling on to New York from Pittsburgh. It is not simply a matter of filling up the tank. The challenges are immense. It took just a few days to get to the moon. Flying to Mars will take many months. The technological, operational, physical and psychological challenges are daunting. Surmounting them will require many years of dedication and adequate, predictable funding. The dedication has long been in place at NASA and the space agencies of Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia. But except for the crucial step of building and operating the International Space Station — a platform to learn what happens to people and machines when they spend long periods in space — consistent policy-making and adequate funding have been lacking.

Space systems and operations take time and money to design, test and build. In the last few years, the hazards posed by orbital debris and asteroids in our neighborhood have become all the more obvious. Orbital debris threatens our ability to live and work in orbit; asteroids can threaten whole cities and perhaps civilization itself. And we don’t know how much time we have to tackle these threats — ten years, a hundred or a thousand. If we plan for a thousand but only have ten, we’re in trouble. The same is true for getting to Mars and becoming a multi-planet civilization. The ruins of the Colosseum or Rome’s massive aqueducts are reminders that technology (indeed, civilization) does not necessarily trend in one direction indefinitely. While we have the capacity to send people out into the solar system, we should.

To build a consistent and coherent space policy that will get humans to Mars, defend the planet against lurking space rocks and protect our very ability to operate in orbit, the public must be brought along with a simple, compelling case for why these are important international objectives. We have done it before. The International Space Station is the product of ambition translated into national policy in 24 countries (including the 20 states which make up ESA). It was built by a remarkable alliance — a successful model that the world can build upon to face down our threats and take up our opportunities. It is surely not as bold (or expensive) as Werner von Braun’s pinwheel space station design, which made a cameo appearance in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But it is an example of the spacefaring world coming together to achieve a common interest — a feat so ambitious that no one nation could do it alone. Today’s challenges and opportunities will require work on an even grander scale.

Here too, John Kennedy’s position on pursuing ambitious goals is instructive. In 1961, during his “moon speech,” the president cautioned the Congress against timidity and incrementalism in such an expensive and wide-ranging endeavor. “If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all… because it (the moon program) is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful.”

With Orion’s successful inaugural flight, NASA is an important step further in doing the work that could get us to Mars, explore the asteroid threat and open up the solar system. Political leaders have to create long-term national objectives that will enable us to build international partnerships in furtherance of common goals. If the spacefaring world can work together, we will make NASA’s triumph in December 2014 a meaningful one for humanity.

This was originally posted as “Torment and Triumph” on Medium on January 12th, 2015. Connect with Mack Bradley on LinkedIn or Twitter for more insights.