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"  During World War II in the Pacific, many native tribes were astounded by their first contact with an advanced technological civilization, when the Americans would come in, clear a strip in the jungle, set up a control tower and loud giant silver birds would appear from the sky bearing canned food, trinkets, fuel and other supplies. After the war, the Americans went away for the most part, but the memories remained. Many of the natives, changed forever by the experience, decided to replicate it. They cleared their own strips, built control towers of thatch and palm, and waited for the silver birds to come back, providing again the manna from the heavens. Unfortunately, many in the space community engage in similar thinking, with a nostalgia for Apollo, when we had a &amp;quot;real space program.&amp;quot; After President Bush&amp;#039;s announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration a little over six years ago, the program got off to a good start under NASA administrator Sean O&amp;#039;Keefe and exploration chief Admiral Craig Steidle. But O&amp;#039;Keefe resigned, and was replaced by Mike Griffin, who canned Steidle, and then formed his own cargo cult, one that aimed to be an &amp;quot;Apollo on steroids,&amp;quot; complete with a bigger rocket and crew and service module. He hoped, as the Pacific natives did, that by replicating the plans of the fathers of the space age, he could replicate their success as well. But Apollo was a success only in terms of the fact that we beat the Soviets to the moon at the peak of the Cold War, which was the main reason it could justify the funding it received. (At one point, it was four percent of the federal budget.) In terms of providing an affordable and politically sustainable manned space program, it was an utter failure, as evidenced by the fact that we stopped doing it (and the decision to do so was, in fact, made in 1967, even before the first landing). In modeling his plans on this achievement, he has caused the new vision to fail as well. Because of both its slow pace, and its sixties approach, it was less Apollo on steroids than Apollo on Geritol. While my admiration and gratitude to Tom Jones for his service to our nation, both on the planet and off, is unbounded, I believe he is wrong in his description of the new space policy as a &amp;quot;path to nowhere.&amp;quot; In so characterizing it, he falls prey to the same mental traps as many of us have for the past forty years since Apollo, in which we don&amp;#039;t have a real manned space program unless we have something that looks like Apollo\u2014a goal to send a few NASA astronauts to a specific place by a specific date on a really big rocket. Not to mention spending an eye-boggling amount of money on it. In this mind set, anything that doesn&amp;#039;t fit within that model is turning our back on the universe. Tom Jones&amp;#039; opinion piece contains a couple of unstated assumptions: The first is that Constellation is synonymous with sending humans to the moon, and absent this goal, we will go nowhere. There are many ways to get back to the moon, and I would argue that, politically, the Constellation plan is the least likely way to achieve it, because of its budget, schedule, performance and technical issues. It&amp;#039;s very easy to claim that the program was underfunded. Much easier, in fact, than actually substantiating such a claim. A look at the actual history, in which NASA was given a &amp;quot;sand chart&amp;quot; in 2004 of how much money they were to get per the VSE, shows that Constellation cost projections quickly exceeded that, to the point that Mike Griffin starved the funding for technology development needed to do things actually useful once on the moon. If the Bush administration &amp;quot;underfunded it by 35 percent,&amp;quot; as Jones claims, that is because they didn&amp;#039;t anticipate having to develop the expensive and redundant launch system that Griffin came up with. And contrary to Jones&amp;#039; assertion, the Augustine Panel did not recommend an additional three billion per year for NASA. It did not &amp;quot;recommend&amp;quot; anything at all\u2014recommendations were not in its portfolio. It simply said that, in order to do all of the things that NASA wanted (not needed) to do, that much would be required. But for the sake of the argument, I do in fact believe that some vehicles called &amp;quot;Ares I&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Orion&amp;quot; that vaguely resemble the current Powerpoint charts could be developed if we were to pour enough taxpayer funds into them. The question is: would it provide commensurate value? If, as the GAO states, the development cost turns out to be on the order of fifty billion dollars (and few dispute this number), and we fly it (say) a hundred times (say four flights a year for a quarter century), that means that each flight of that vehicle will cost half a billion dollars just to amortize that development cost, even ignoring the time-value of the money. Add in the fixed annual costs to fly a few times a year, and the cost of the hardware itself, all of which is currently planned to be expended each time, and now we&amp;#039;re probably up to a couple billion dollars per flight. So even ignoring the development costs (a sham on the taxpayer) doesn&amp;#039;t solve the problem. As Jeff Greason of the Augustine Panel said (and co-panelist Sally Ride agreed), if Santa Claus were to deliver the system to them fully developed, they&amp;#039;d have to cancel it because they didn&amp;#039;t have the money to operate it. In other words, this vehicle will cost (depending on assumptions) anywhere from two to five times as much as the Shuttle per flight, with much less capability\u2014only four crew, little return cargo, no EVA capability and less habitable volume. Jones correctly notes that at its peak Shuttle was flying up to forty astronauts a year. From this standpoint as well, Constellation would be a huge step backwards. As the administration stated, it is old technology, at ruinously high cost. To repeat Jones&amp;#039; own question: Is this a bold new course for the nation? Note also that this doesn&amp;#039;t include the costs of the heavy-lift Ares V, or any of the components necessary to get to the moon (such as the Earth departure stage and lander). But there is a second, related assumption in Jones&amp;#039; piece:  While NASA hopes its commercial effort will produce a ship that can service the ISS, the end of Constellation defers indefinitely the building of a heavy-lift rocket. Without such a Saturn V-class launcher, Americans will never get out of low Earth orbit (where we have been marooned for nearly 40 years). This goes back to the cargo cult\u2014that we must have a Saturn-class vehicle to get to the moon, or anywhere. But most of the mass that a Saturn V delivered was propellant. And propellant is almost infinitely divisible. It can be launched on rockets of any size ; it&amp;#039;s simply a question of how many. And in-space vehicles, such as landers, can be lighter, with better performance, if they aren&amp;#039;t launched fueled, because the launch environment is the most structurally stressful. So it is possible to devise an architecture in which a lunar mission is supplied by several launches of propellant tankers, offering competitive opportunities both for the private American sector and international competition, without putting anyone on the critical path. Beyond that, a single-vehicle architecture is as fragile as the Shuttle was: What if something happens to the heavy lifter that shuts it down for months or years (as happened twice with the Shuttle)? We are out of business until it comes back on line. And suppose that we build such a vehicle for the moon, and then decide to go to Mars? Do we need yet a bigger vehicle? Where does this fetish for heavy lift end? No, what we need to do is not to develop gargantuan, unaffordable launch systems, with low flight rates, creating single-point failure modes. Rather, what we need is to develop the technologies and orbital infrastructure needed to allow excursions beyond earth orbit without such launch systems, and that can utilize a robust commercial launch market, in which if one vehicle type cannot fly, another can pick up the slack. This is one of the reasons that the Augustine Panel called this approach Flexible Path. It is flexible not only in destination, but in how large the mission can be, unconstrained by any specific launch system. And unlike a heavy lifter, these things truly are critical to becoming a spacefaring civilization. And in fact, this is exactly what the administration proposes to do. In ending Constellation, all plans for human exploration beyond LEO have not been abandoned. But the budget and new administration have outlined plans for technology development of things like propellant depots and orbital mating and assembly techniques. As the administrator said last week,  \u2026the president has laid out a dynamic plan for NASA to invest in critical and transformative technologies. These will enable our path beyond low Earth orbit through development of new launch and space transportation technologies, nimble construction capabilities on orbit, and new operations capabilities. Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year; people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the Moon, asteroids and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of &amp;quot;firsts;&amp;quot; and imagine all of this being done collaboratively with nations around the world. Why would the administration be proposing and budgeting for these things, and advanced life support and other technologies, if it is turning away from the dominance in space technology America has enjoyed since Apollo? I would claim that in fact, this is the most visionary space policy that the nation has ever had, including Apollo. It finally, forthrightly declares a national goal of large numbers of humanity living off planet, with many of them going on excursions into the solar system, and it harnesses the vital element of private enterprise and competition to make it happen in a way that will drive costs down instead of up. It may be disappointing to not have a specific date and planet, but it was politically unrealistic to expect one, given the current fiscal straits of the nation. Such a goal tends to become an open-ended call on the budget, as Apollo was (where the motto was &amp;quot;waste anything but time&amp;quot;). And as we saw with Constellation, such an artificial deadline can actually stifle innovation, particularly in a constrained budget environment, because utilization of new technologies increases schedule risk. It may be that there will be no real follow through in the years to come from this new direction\u2014governments, both Republican and Democrat alike, have proven quite fickle when it comes to space (and much else). But at least, unlike the current direction, it&amp;#039;s a direction that holds promise of real progress, and not just for a few NASA astronauts but, in the new administrator&amp;#039;s words, the &amp;quot;thousands of people to visit or live in low earth orbit.&amp;quot; Those are revolutionary words from a NASA administrator. And as Robert Heinlein famously said, once you&amp;#039;re in orbit, you&amp;#039;re halfway to anywhere. If there is follow through, General Bolden&amp;#039;s truly bold vision, combined with the critical development of orbital technologies that will replace the moribund Constellation, will create a path not to nowhere, but to anywhere and everywhere, affordably for all, finally ending the cargo cult of Apollo. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a5060/4345250/>