Good afternoon, everyone! It's that time once again, and this week we'll be looking at what the incoming Gore administration thinks about where to go in space.
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #6
When Gore was inaugurated as President in January 1993, he had three major goals for the space program. First, with the end of the Cold War, he aimed to reap the “peace dividend” with a drawdown in defense spending. While he foresaw a hard sell on the Hill for any cuts to the military-industrial complex, he recalled the hard-sell that Constellation had required on the hill, and anticipated that checking the year-to-year increases to NASA’s budget could be popular with the Republican House--and a test case for cuts to the more traditional military-industrial complex. However, at the same time, he recognized that spaceflight leadership had been a key part of US soft power for more than a quarter century, and that the diplomatic and scientific initiatives it represented might be even more useful for maintaining American influence with the end of the Cold War and the slimming of the conventional military. Thus, his second vision was for a continuation of NASA’s pioneering efforts in spaceflight, specifically Constellation, Freedom, and scientific missions while also adding new emphasis to ongoing technology development and research more applicable to life on Earth, particularly for given technologies like satellite television, satellite data relays, and GPS which were beginning to flourish commercially. Finally, Gore wanted to promote co-operation to tie the world together, both with traditional allies like the NATO nations and with newer potential partners like the Chinese and the Russians. In Gore’s eyes the space program had already proved a valuable way to build ties, as the ongoing participation of ESA, Japan, and others in Freedom proved, and he wished to continue this, establishing a degree of global cooperation in space, an alliance of space-faring nations with the USA at its head working peacefully in orbit and beyond as an example for those back home on Earth.
Given how these goals asked NASA to accomplish more with less, while working more closely with other agencies on new programs (a recipe for confusion and failure if poorly implemented), Gore would need to have an Administrator he could trust to share and advocate for his vision as much in the halls of NASA HQ and the various centers as on the Hill. While Bush had aimed to change just the scope of NASA’s reach, Gore’s plans aim to change the way the agency would operation; he’d need a strong advocate on the inside if he wanted to overcome decades of inertia. Thus, in spite of respect for Administrator Schmitt’s service as administrator under Bush, when Schmitt tendered the traditional resignation at the start of the new administration Gore accepted it, and took the chance to make his own selection, nominating Lloyd Davis, a relative nobody from NASA HQ who Gore had met through work in the Senate. Though the joke on the Hill was that Gore had made the pick with the goal that there be one person in the executive branch with less charisma than himself, Davis’ selection was in fact the first volley of Gore’s attempt to recast the space program along his intended lines. A native of northeastern Ohio, Davis had been fascinated by spaceflight from an early age. Excelling academically, he had studied aerospace engineering at Purdue, receiving his bachelors degree and then returning to his home state to work at NASA Glenn in electric propulsion system research. However, after a few years, Davis was headhunted into industry, accepting a position with Aerojet. He would spend almost a decade there, gaining an insider’s view of the industry side of aerospace as he moved from engineering to management before returning to government work, this time at NASA HQ. At headquarters, Davis’ job had included dealing with strategic visions and their intersection with the budgetary realities enforced by the Office of Management and Budget. While he had never lost his passion for ambition in space, his time in industry and at the intersection of policy and budget left him with a fine grasp of the practical realities of space exploration. Moreover, Davis was a shrewd engineer--capable of maintaining a broad situational picture in his head and more than willing to pick at threads of detail in an answer to a question or a suggested solution to a problem until it unraveled completely as unviable or to discover the core value of a concept. While rather withdrawn in person, he had a reputation for letting loose in forceful memos and dramatic conference calls when his patience was stretched by attempts to dodge points. With Davis already having a firm grasp of the general picture of Constellation, Gore wanted him to put this keen understanding to work on every aspect of the agency to review it from the bottom up in line with his new objectives, a task he wanted to have done in the first two months after the inauguration. As was traditional, the White House’s main face on the review fell to the Vice President, a task Ann Richards embraced, and the end document presented to the President in April, the “Interim 60-day Progress Report on the State of the National Air and Space Administration” quickly became known as the “Richards-Davis Report”.
The agency that the report profiled was in a state of near-schizophrenic action. The Ares and Artemis program offices were in the middle of receiving and dissecting the results from the first major rounds of Constellation Phase A study contracts, with almost every topic imaginable under review. For Artemis, concepts for landers of every design imaginable from LMs on steroids to “crasher” designs that would use larger hydrogen stages to brake a lander most of the way down to the surface to single-stage reusable landers to landers that would use multiple thrust axes or land on their “sides” were under consideration, along with virtually every combination of fuels ever proposed for use in spacecraft, from hydrogen to methane to hypergolics to--in one memorable study from Langley--a solid-fuel ascent stage for increased reliability after long periods on the surface. The process of getting that lander and its crew to the moon was also in flux, with studies considering using Earth orbit rendezvous, lunar orbit rendezvous, use of various Lagrange point meeting points, and any and all combinations thereof. The architectures mostly examined hydrogen departure stages, but of many and varied sizes and configurations, ranging from huge new monolithic stages launched fully fueled aboard Saturn Heavies to clustered Centaurs, either separately launched and assembled in orbit, or launched empty and filled by additional flights. The mission capabilities were similarly incredibly varied, as were the durations, though most studies had quickly converged on a crew size of four. Almost all, however, assumed that some kind of base would follow on the initial sorties, despite Congressional rejection of a definite commitment to such permanent outposts, and aimed at systems that could serve both roles. Many studies even looked directly at applying lessons from Apollo and Freedom into a longterm plan for operations of a potential permanent base, harnessing local resources to supplement supplies and fuel from Earth. The Ares program office’s studies were--incredibly--even more varied, as without the immediate time pressure of Artemis they had even greater flexibility to dream about technology and architectures. Some proposed Zubrin-esque single-launch monster missions, while others favored more von-Braun-style flotillas of spacecraft, built up in Earth orbit to fly to Mars as a convoy. Especially in conjunction with the last, there were multiple proposals for propellant depots, pre-positioning fuel caches in LEO, at the Lagrange points, and potentially even in Mars orbit. The proposed sources varied as much as the depots’ locations; besides the mundane option of launching the fuel from Earth, mining oxygen from the lunar regolith or cracking it, together with hydrogen, from the ice deposits hinted at by the Lunar Reconnaissance Pioneer were proposed to fill the tanks of future Mars-bound spacecraft. Even more speculatively, the potential ice content of Phobos or Deimos could be mined in the same way to produce fuel around Mars itself, even ignoring Zubrin’s proposal for producing fuel on the Martian surface.
This plethora of studies and analyses had done nothing, however, to help the agency actually choose an architecture and an approach for Artemis, let alone Ares. Instead, they left the agency struggling to choose between the advantages and disadvantages of each proposal. Should it opt for an architecture minimizing ongoing operational costs, to protect the program as its objectives were achieved, or one that minimized development costs, increasing the likelihood that it would survive any future political struggles to reach those objectives? How much should it involve international partners, including the unknown possibilities of Russia, China, and India? What balance between technical risk and possible performance should it take? Rather than provide it with the information needed to make informed decisions in all of these areas to present to the Administration and to Congress, the studies were instead paralyzing NASA with an excess of attractive options, forcing even more analysis to try to narrow down its choices even further, all the while accomplishing little of real import.
Falling under the goals of all three manned program offices, and thus answering to all while directed by none, the Advanced Crew Vehicle (ACV) program was a microcosm of Constellation’s problems. Originally conceived during the late 80s as a program to develop a next-gen crew capsule to finally replace the venerable Apollo with something more capable and modern, ACV was incredibly open in scope, and in the flush of money after Bush’s incorporation of the existing conceptual research into Constellation the number of contractors and NASA engineers involved had exploded. Almost every major US contractor had at least one proposal, while large ones like Lockheed and Boeing had several parallel programs. Other concepts and studies were being added by NASA centers, research universities, and even small startup companies. Vehicles proposed ranged from scaled-up capsules resembling Apollo or Minotaur, (aiming to include more volume and equipment into a returnable and reusable core capsule) to more exotic aeromanuevering configurations, including spaceplanes, lifting bodies, biconic capsules, and others. A third camp advocated for stripped-down vehicles intended to reduce costs per flight by allowing crew rotations in tighter conditions aboard commercial launchers like Lockheed Titans, McDonell Deltas, or even (in the smallest proposals) ALS Carracks. Most designs aimed at switching to land-landing, with precision touchdowns of one form or another, and many also called for at least some degree of reusability. However, the needs of the ongoing Freedom program, the near-term Artemis, and the longer-term Ares program offices clashed as to what the ACV was expected to do, when, for how long, and with what crew and cargo aboard, with almost no configuration able to answer every goal. Moreover, few of the designs were expected to be able to enter service before the year 2000 and, in some cases, even later. Thus, the Gore-Davis report highlighted ACV as a prime target of budget reductions. After all, with Apollo doing such yeoman’s duty for Freedom, and with such versatility, why bother with billions of dollars on a replacement that, although cheaper over an extended planning period stretching into the 2010s, would be more expensive in the next decade, while Freedom and Artemis were actually taking place and while Gore was in office? Instead of followup studies or hardware contracts, most of the original partners found their funding eliminated, while ACV was folded down to a smaller office looking exclusively at potential development of Apollo to meet current and near-future needs.
The same pattern was repeated throughout Constellation’s offices--while Freedom’s more tangible and largely underway efforts escaped serious cuts, Ares was gutted--manned Mars was off the table, as were more expensive robotic precursors like a Mars sample return mission. The Mars Traverse Rovers were to remain the main focus, plus some of the more budget-friendly planetary science missions like the international collaboration on Fobos Together. Indeed, the Ares Office was so stripped that the remaining manned planning was mostly folded in with long-term planning in the Artemis office, which was in turn renamed as simply the Exploration Office, though the lunar program itself would retain the Artemis name. The unmanned operations of what had been Ares were instead spun off into the arms of the Planetary Science Directorate. While the Artemis-cum-Exploration Office made off much better than Ares, it still saw a serious cutback in the scope of studies approved. The message was clear--Gore wanted to see more progress made considering the amount of money and time that had already been spent. Most importantly, Gore wanted the critical mode decision made, settling the question of how Artemis would go to the moon. While no Kennedy-esque deadline had been set for Artemis, Gore made it known through Davis that a goal of “before 1999” (and the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing) would be prefered--and that meant moving now. Gore also wanted to see more of the United States’ allies in space brought onboard in more meaningful roles--both as a way of putting his co-operative vision for space exploration into practice and as a way of spreading the costs of precursors and communications elements to reduce the program’s budget requirements--and Lloyd Davis would run the Exploration office ragged, with a narrow focus on the initial sorties: either to see the mission done or shown as impossible--and Davis knew it wasn’t impossible.
The money saved on Ares and Artemis research wasn’t cut from NASA’s budget entirely, though. Some was lumped into Artemis’ operational budget, aiming to help the Herculean task of moving the scheduled landing to meet the 1999 goal, pushing the program off its comfortable status quo of building castles (and moon bases) in the sky and towards results. However, other elements went to another of Gore’s pet projects. Given the flowering of the commercial space market in the 80s, Gore found the role of NASA in enforcing single-source monopolies with the Multibody, Delta, Apollo, and more to be contrary to what NASA’s goals for the US spaceflight industry ought to be in his mind--that instead of monopolism, NASA should be working to develop technologies to foster innovation in the commercial space field. The new Technology Development Incubation program was almost hypocritical--the same kind of kaleidoscopic array of contracts that had made up Ares and Artemis’ analysis paralysis, distinguished only by that most of them had near-term deliverables. Aimed at fostering innovations in the US launch market, the programs included contracts for all sort of projects, from advanced hydrogen/oxygen engines including the altitude-adjusting aerospike so fondly regarded by SSTO advocates to US-built high-pressure staged-combustion kerosene/LOX engines similar to Russian designs, from advanced reusable TPS to “dumb” mass-produced expendable stages using composite tanks, and from ion-drive tugs for reusable trips from geosynchronous orbit to low-Earth orbit and back in order to reduce the payload required for GEO satellites to new examination of storable hypergolic fuels like hydrogen peroxide/kerosene for use on spacecraft and satellites. The program was to culminate in the development of a testbed vehicle to put into effect the best concepts in reusability for a near-space suborbital single-stage demonstrator.
Finally, Gore proposed a new international initiative, extending the international aspects of Freedom’s operations to new potential partners--the Russians. Since the first launches of Skylab and Salyuts, Russian and American stations had shared the skies. Now Gore proposed that in a leadup to co-operation in more distant missions, Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts should conduct exchange missions, like the ASTP I and II flights. Unlike the earlier missions, though, these would be exchanges, not just meetings in space. American astronauts would travel to Mir via Baikonur-launched TKS spending time participating in operations aboard the station for a full rotation, while Russian cosmonauts would have the chance to fly aboard Apollo and do the same aboard Freedom. It was intended as a way of comparing operational practices, and of laying the groundwork for more extensive peaceful co-operation with the thawing of the Cold War--both in orbit and on the ground. More cynically, it was also a way of funneling US money into supporting the Russian program, preventing Russian rocket engineers and technicians from being headhunted by rogue states to build missiles that might pose a threat to the United States. In the end, while Gore’s eye for the practical cut ambition in some areas of the long-term space program, he hoped that by focusing on the near-term like Artemis, Freedom, the commercial space market, and co-operative missions he could enable the kind of peaceful, US-led joint future he envisioned in space.
Like you say, based on Soviet history, probably a vernier engine. Don't ask me for the specs on which specific engine, though.
