Understanding Current NASA Structure: Space Race to the Shuttle
Part 2 of 7 part series
Part 1: On the Proposed NASA Budget
To get an idea of how the new NASA budget impacts the industry, one has to understand the current NASA structure. To this end, it is necessary to understand the expectations acting on NASA and it's past. You have to understand what NASA in the 60's was really like, and what the real motivations behind it were vs. those expectations, because the Space Race remains the standard by which NASA's achievements are measured, and by which it's future achievements will be measured. We have developed some cultural myths about the Space Race that don't really reflect the reality of what was going on. What happened between then and now has created a NASA that is very different from the agency that landed a man on the Moon. The NASA of today is not the NASA of the 60's or even the 70's.
THE major reason for this is Shuttle Operations, and by extension, the ISS. The greater bulk of NASA to this point has been devoted to these two projects. NASA also does satellites and deep space probes, but in terms of budget, the Space Shuttle and the ISS are huge budget items that suck the budget of NASA like an unemployed 40 year old still living at home in the basement off his parent's income. The shuttle is a dinosaur in terms of technology, and much like a dinosaur it's out-sized and eats-- a LOT.
When the shuttle first came around, the idea was that it would be part of a two-part system-- the space shuttle, and then a space station for the shuttle to go to. But when NASA proposed this back in the 70's, Congress looked at the cost of such a program and was resistant. They chose to go with only the Shuttle, supposedly reducing the proposed cost of the program by half (note: supposedly). To understand how that decision came about, you have to understand that the Space Race wasn't really about some noble goal of human exploration. That is the patina of nostalgia that most lay people apply to it in retrospect.
NASA landed a man on the Moon in 1969. What that means in today's context is that if you're under the age of 40, this happened before you were born. If you're in your 40's this happened before you were ten. If you're in your 50's, the Space Race was playing out against your teenage years. Meaning the Apollo program had won the space race before most people alive today were adults with an adult outlook on it-- and memories of NASA are likely to be clouded by childhood nostalgia, in turn influenced by a rather hefty PR campaign on the part of the US in the propaganda theater of the Cold War. To understand the Space Race, one really has to consider what launched the Space Race-- in other words, the Soviet launch of Sputnik, which launched in 1957. If you were an adult when Sputnik launched, to have a first-hand, adult (18+) outlook on the entirety of the space race, then you would have been born in or before 1935-- and would be 75 years or older.
To be blunt, Sputnik scared the living daylights out of the US side of the Cold War. It in fact sparked a political crisis referred to as the Sputnik Crisis, which was motivated by both the successful launch of Sputnik, and the failure of the first two American efforts. It is also worthwhile to note that technical achievement had a particular emphasis in the 50's and 60's-- most adults of the time had lived through WWII, a period in which rapid technological growth forever changed warfare, and introduced the nuclear bomb. For the first time in history, the possibility existed that humanity itself could be wiped off the face of the planet through human action, and in order to avoid this, two nuclear-armed countries had to avoid war even when their political and economic interests were in direct opposition. In the 50's and 60's, the vast bulk of the adult American populace had direct knowledge that technical achievement was directly tied to survival in open warfare, and with the growing hostility between the world's two nuclear armed super-powers, this was emphasized much further.
The reason Sputnik scared the bejesus out of people back in the day is that it meant that the Reds could put a nuclear weapon pretty much anywhere on the planet-- and they were better at it than we were. This was a huge change; consider that before the rise of ICBM technology, there was at least some defense against the possibility of nuclear attack, in that at the very least you could shoot the bomber aircraft carrying the "Bomb" down over someplace relatively uninhabited, as opposed to say, New York City. Sputnik was proof the Soviets no longer needed bomber aircraft to pound the hell out of the good old US of A with a nuclear arsenal, even to it's heartland. They could launch ICBMs, which the Americans were powerless to stop.
When Sputnik was launched, there were still hold-outs in the US trying to argue that delivery of nuclear weapons by bomber was still the most cost-effective means (it was) and that we didn't need to invest huge sums in expensive ICBM technology. Sputnik was proof that the Commie Reds had already made that investment, had perfected it before we did, and if we didn't act fast, they'd have the edge in a war gone nuclear, because their ICBMs could launch to any place in America much faster than anything we could launch by plain old bomber plane. Sputnik was proof that the American heartland was no longer protected by it's distance from the rest of world, through the awesomely terrible wonder of the technology of the future.
The Space Race was about showing the Commie Reds that we had better rockets then they did, so that they understood that if push came shove, we would nuke the living bejesus out of them better then they could nuke the living bejesus out of us. This was deterrence theory, and history shows that it worked, because the Cold War never devolved into a nuclear confrontation. What the mission to the Moon demonstrated was a mastery of all the technology present in ICBM technology-- rocketry, a mastery of orbital dynamics (the Moon required a working solution of the 3-body problem, still one of the biggest nuts to crack in math and physics), vehicle control (vital to targeting-- i.e. putting the nukes in the most effective places), not to mention range (we can launch literally tons of material, stable enough to support a man in space and bring him back = we can launch tons of nuclear material with sensitive electronics to anywhere on the planet = our bombs will definitely blow up when they arrive at target).
The Sputnik crisis was the reason Eisenhower and Congress created NASA, but the Americans were still behind. In fact, throughout most of the Space Race, America lagged behind. Today, based on what we now know about the Soviet side of the Space Race after the fall of the USSR, many quite reasonably speculate that the only reason Russia didn't win the Space Race was political-- following Khruschev's fall from political power in the USSR, his successors mangled the management of the Soviet space program rather spectacularly. It's quite possible that if the political change hadn't occurred, and the Soviets had stuck to their original management scheme and political commitment, they likely would have beaten us to the Moon. In brief, the only reason the US won the space race is that the Soviets got cocky, and cocked up a victory that would have likely been theirs otherwise.
What this would lead to was a redoubling of already out-sized efforts to get ahead, when Kennedy decided that the finish line for the Space Race was putting a man on the Moon. This extended the race, giving the Americans the time they desperately needed to catch up. Technically all the expertise for nuclear ICBM technology would have been aptly demonstrated by a manned orbital mission-- but setting the target of the Moon would extend the race to show whose technology was more sophisticated and robust. Landing a man on the moon was the perfect way to demonstrate that technology without actually demonstrating out-and-out weapons which might provoke international incidents in a Cold War.
More importantly, though, it became a rallying point for American morale. Sputnik was a black eye to the American military program, and seriously scared a lot of Americans (and for good reason). By relentlessly pushing the growing success of the American space program, the US boosted it's national morale and gave it's citizens confidence that they could in fact compete with the USSR in a military conflict.
The PR campaign also allowed the US to funnel billions (in 1960's dollars!) into a broad-scale technological investment without having to somehow keep this out-sized program secret. In retrospect, Sputnik is even scarier when you consider the levels of secrecy that the Soviets maintained with their space program-- the Soviets considered Star City to be a state secret and spent the resources to keep it mostly so, while Americans built Kennedy Space Center in the open, because hiding it's development would have been that difficult. That had to scare the bejesus out of those with the security clearance to access American intelligence on the Russian space program.
When the race was over in the 70's, we had won-- we had the technology needed to build superior ICBM's, and were no longer massively behind in a technological area vital to national security. NASA had succeeded wildly as a PR operation, however, and the public had been taken with the idea of space exploration. The 70's were economically troubled times, though-- Vietnam had become a sinkhole for money that few had expected at it's outset. So after Skylab, the last major achievement of the Apollo-based space program, when NASA came back with a new idea that offered no direct compelling link to national security, politically it didn't make any sense to spend such an out-sized portion of GDP on developing space technology. Kind of like today, it didn't make sense to spend so much money on space toys when there was a war to be paid for, and economic troubles at home.
The Shuttle, in other words, marks the point at which the Space Race became permanently decoupled from military technical prowess-- especially considering that since the Russians had given up on it, it was no longer the useful tool for raising national morale that it had once been. Space technology hadn't helped us to win the Vietnam War. It's continued development was of limited application to national security, and those aspects which were useful were given over to the military to manage through the Air Force and Navy to operate on black budget for weapons development.
What was decided was that NASA could do the shuttle part. The shuttle was definitely the cheaper of the two, plus over time it was supposed to get cheaper, as the idea was that a reusable launch vehicle would save money over time. About in the mid-80's, NASA revived the idea of the space station, with the idea that eventually they would get enough foreign partners to defer the massive cost of the Space Station portion of the plan. This concept would be shopped around for some time, and ironically would only become possible after we made friends with the Russians following the collapse of the USSR. Russia was out to prove that it still maintained technical expertise comparative with the rest of the free world even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ISS was worked out and the funding for it was defrayed across a number of international partners.
The Shuttle, and eventually operations to the ISS, would remain the core of NASA activity for 30 years, for the most part entirely abandoning the infrastructure developed to achieve the success of the Apollo program in favor of what was supposed to be better technology. There were a few problems with this plan that we didn't really grasp until after the project was well under way.
The Challenger disaster was the first black eye NASA suffered, and it brought about a political change in which NASA was held more accountable for it's actions, and criticism of it's budget became more robust. That criticism would lead to "Better, Faster, Cheaper," which in turn would lead to several high profile losses of Mars probes. The Columbia disaster, itself sparked in part by budgetary concerns on the part of administration, would finally force NASA to reckon with fundamental short-comings of the Shuttle program, and bring about it's end.
Over time, what had happened was that the public had become so inured to human access to space that catastrophic losses would make NASA resistant to the high risks it had taken during the Space Race, risks (and in some cases, catastrophes) that the public had previously accepted due to the bearing the issue had on national security. Under intense public pressure, NASA would operate with increasing caution, and that added caution would cause it's budget to grow in proportion, which would only redouble the pressure being applied to the agency.
Part 1: On the Proposed NASA Budget
To get an idea of how the new NASA budget impacts the industry, one has to understand the current NASA structure. To this end, it is necessary to understand the expectations acting on NASA and it's past. You have to understand what NASA in the 60's was really like, and what the real motivations behind it were vs. those expectations, because the Space Race remains the standard by which NASA's achievements are measured, and by which it's future achievements will be measured. We have developed some cultural myths about the Space Race that don't really reflect the reality of what was going on. What happened between then and now has created a NASA that is very different from the agency that landed a man on the Moon. The NASA of today is not the NASA of the 60's or even the 70's.
THE major reason for this is Shuttle Operations, and by extension, the ISS. The greater bulk of NASA to this point has been devoted to these two projects. NASA also does satellites and deep space probes, but in terms of budget, the Space Shuttle and the ISS are huge budget items that suck the budget of NASA like an unemployed 40 year old still living at home in the basement off his parent's income. The shuttle is a dinosaur in terms of technology, and much like a dinosaur it's out-sized and eats-- a LOT.
When the shuttle first came around, the idea was that it would be part of a two-part system-- the space shuttle, and then a space station for the shuttle to go to. But when NASA proposed this back in the 70's, Congress looked at the cost of such a program and was resistant. They chose to go with only the Shuttle, supposedly reducing the proposed cost of the program by half (note: supposedly). To understand how that decision came about, you have to understand that the Space Race wasn't really about some noble goal of human exploration. That is the patina of nostalgia that most lay people apply to it in retrospect.
NASA landed a man on the Moon in 1969. What that means in today's context is that if you're under the age of 40, this happened before you were born. If you're in your 40's this happened before you were ten. If you're in your 50's, the Space Race was playing out against your teenage years. Meaning the Apollo program had won the space race before most people alive today were adults with an adult outlook on it-- and memories of NASA are likely to be clouded by childhood nostalgia, in turn influenced by a rather hefty PR campaign on the part of the US in the propaganda theater of the Cold War. To understand the Space Race, one really has to consider what launched the Space Race-- in other words, the Soviet launch of Sputnik, which launched in 1957. If you were an adult when Sputnik launched, to have a first-hand, adult (18+) outlook on the entirety of the space race, then you would have been born in or before 1935-- and would be 75 years or older.
To be blunt, Sputnik scared the living daylights out of the US side of the Cold War. It in fact sparked a political crisis referred to as the Sputnik Crisis, which was motivated by both the successful launch of Sputnik, and the failure of the first two American efforts. It is also worthwhile to note that technical achievement had a particular emphasis in the 50's and 60's-- most adults of the time had lived through WWII, a period in which rapid technological growth forever changed warfare, and introduced the nuclear bomb. For the first time in history, the possibility existed that humanity itself could be wiped off the face of the planet through human action, and in order to avoid this, two nuclear-armed countries had to avoid war even when their political and economic interests were in direct opposition. In the 50's and 60's, the vast bulk of the adult American populace had direct knowledge that technical achievement was directly tied to survival in open warfare, and with the growing hostility between the world's two nuclear armed super-powers, this was emphasized much further.
The reason Sputnik scared the bejesus out of people back in the day is that it meant that the Reds could put a nuclear weapon pretty much anywhere on the planet-- and they were better at it than we were. This was a huge change; consider that before the rise of ICBM technology, there was at least some defense against the possibility of nuclear attack, in that at the very least you could shoot the bomber aircraft carrying the "Bomb" down over someplace relatively uninhabited, as opposed to say, New York City. Sputnik was proof the Soviets no longer needed bomber aircraft to pound the hell out of the good old US of A with a nuclear arsenal, even to it's heartland. They could launch ICBMs, which the Americans were powerless to stop.
When Sputnik was launched, there were still hold-outs in the US trying to argue that delivery of nuclear weapons by bomber was still the most cost-effective means (it was) and that we didn't need to invest huge sums in expensive ICBM technology. Sputnik was proof that the Commie Reds had already made that investment, had perfected it before we did, and if we didn't act fast, they'd have the edge in a war gone nuclear, because their ICBMs could launch to any place in America much faster than anything we could launch by plain old bomber plane. Sputnik was proof that the American heartland was no longer protected by it's distance from the rest of world, through the awesomely terrible wonder of the technology of the future.
The Space Race was about showing the Commie Reds that we had better rockets then they did, so that they understood that if push came shove, we would nuke the living bejesus out of them better then they could nuke the living bejesus out of us. This was deterrence theory, and history shows that it worked, because the Cold War never devolved into a nuclear confrontation. What the mission to the Moon demonstrated was a mastery of all the technology present in ICBM technology-- rocketry, a mastery of orbital dynamics (the Moon required a working solution of the 3-body problem, still one of the biggest nuts to crack in math and physics), vehicle control (vital to targeting-- i.e. putting the nukes in the most effective places), not to mention range (we can launch literally tons of material, stable enough to support a man in space and bring him back = we can launch tons of nuclear material with sensitive electronics to anywhere on the planet = our bombs will definitely blow up when they arrive at target).
The Sputnik crisis was the reason Eisenhower and Congress created NASA, but the Americans were still behind. In fact, throughout most of the Space Race, America lagged behind. Today, based on what we now know about the Soviet side of the Space Race after the fall of the USSR, many quite reasonably speculate that the only reason Russia didn't win the Space Race was political-- following Khruschev's fall from political power in the USSR, his successors mangled the management of the Soviet space program rather spectacularly. It's quite possible that if the political change hadn't occurred, and the Soviets had stuck to their original management scheme and political commitment, they likely would have beaten us to the Moon. In brief, the only reason the US won the space race is that the Soviets got cocky, and cocked up a victory that would have likely been theirs otherwise.
What this would lead to was a redoubling of already out-sized efforts to get ahead, when Kennedy decided that the finish line for the Space Race was putting a man on the Moon. This extended the race, giving the Americans the time they desperately needed to catch up. Technically all the expertise for nuclear ICBM technology would have been aptly demonstrated by a manned orbital mission-- but setting the target of the Moon would extend the race to show whose technology was more sophisticated and robust. Landing a man on the moon was the perfect way to demonstrate that technology without actually demonstrating out-and-out weapons which might provoke international incidents in a Cold War.
More importantly, though, it became a rallying point for American morale. Sputnik was a black eye to the American military program, and seriously scared a lot of Americans (and for good reason). By relentlessly pushing the growing success of the American space program, the US boosted it's national morale and gave it's citizens confidence that they could in fact compete with the USSR in a military conflict.
The PR campaign also allowed the US to funnel billions (in 1960's dollars!) into a broad-scale technological investment without having to somehow keep this out-sized program secret. In retrospect, Sputnik is even scarier when you consider the levels of secrecy that the Soviets maintained with their space program-- the Soviets considered Star City to be a state secret and spent the resources to keep it mostly so, while Americans built Kennedy Space Center in the open, because hiding it's development would have been that difficult. That had to scare the bejesus out of those with the security clearance to access American intelligence on the Russian space program.
When the race was over in the 70's, we had won-- we had the technology needed to build superior ICBM's, and were no longer massively behind in a technological area vital to national security. NASA had succeeded wildly as a PR operation, however, and the public had been taken with the idea of space exploration. The 70's were economically troubled times, though-- Vietnam had become a sinkhole for money that few had expected at it's outset. So after Skylab, the last major achievement of the Apollo-based space program, when NASA came back with a new idea that offered no direct compelling link to national security, politically it didn't make any sense to spend such an out-sized portion of GDP on developing space technology. Kind of like today, it didn't make sense to spend so much money on space toys when there was a war to be paid for, and economic troubles at home.
The Shuttle, in other words, marks the point at which the Space Race became permanently decoupled from military technical prowess-- especially considering that since the Russians had given up on it, it was no longer the useful tool for raising national morale that it had once been. Space technology hadn't helped us to win the Vietnam War. It's continued development was of limited application to national security, and those aspects which were useful were given over to the military to manage through the Air Force and Navy to operate on black budget for weapons development.
What was decided was that NASA could do the shuttle part. The shuttle was definitely the cheaper of the two, plus over time it was supposed to get cheaper, as the idea was that a reusable launch vehicle would save money over time. About in the mid-80's, NASA revived the idea of the space station, with the idea that eventually they would get enough foreign partners to defer the massive cost of the Space Station portion of the plan. This concept would be shopped around for some time, and ironically would only become possible after we made friends with the Russians following the collapse of the USSR. Russia was out to prove that it still maintained technical expertise comparative with the rest of the free world even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ISS was worked out and the funding for it was defrayed across a number of international partners.
The Shuttle, and eventually operations to the ISS, would remain the core of NASA activity for 30 years, for the most part entirely abandoning the infrastructure developed to achieve the success of the Apollo program in favor of what was supposed to be better technology. There were a few problems with this plan that we didn't really grasp until after the project was well under way.
The Challenger disaster was the first black eye NASA suffered, and it brought about a political change in which NASA was held more accountable for it's actions, and criticism of it's budget became more robust. That criticism would lead to "Better, Faster, Cheaper," which in turn would lead to several high profile losses of Mars probes. The Columbia disaster, itself sparked in part by budgetary concerns on the part of administration, would finally force NASA to reckon with fundamental short-comings of the Shuttle program, and bring about it's end.
Over time, what had happened was that the public had become so inured to human access to space that catastrophic losses would make NASA resistant to the high risks it had taken during the Space Race, risks (and in some cases, catastrophes) that the public had previously accepted due to the bearing the issue had on national security. Under intense public pressure, NASA would operate with increasing caution, and that added caution would cause it's budget to grow in proportion, which would only redouble the pressure being applied to the agency.