Good afternoon everyone! I apologize for the slight delay, but the post is here now. Over the last few weeks, we've covered the exploration and operations side of space, from boots on the lunar surface to robotic voyagers around the solar system to telescopes gazing deep into the history of the galaxy. However, ultimately, all of that comes down to two things: cash, and the people who control the purse strings, which brings us to this week's post...
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part IV: Post #12
While spacecraft from various nations were blazing new trails across the solar system and astronauts from around the world were walking on the Moon, spaceflight policy had never been dictated by the sheer joy of exploration, but rather by what technologies were available and, more importantly, the Earth-bound politics which would direct them. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States had emerged as the world’s undisputed leader in spaceflight--while the European Space Administration, Japan’s JAXA, and Roscosmos could achieve much, NASA’s large budget and role in spearheading international collaborations such as Freedom and Artemis had made the United States the de facto global director of space policy. For more than a decade, NASA’s activity had been shaped by two major figures, Lloyd Davis and Ann Richards. As Vice-President and then as President, Richard’s input had essentially codified the policy laid out in the Richards-Davis report of 1993: focused, cost-effective primary efforts in human and unmanned exploration, surrounded by government-organized research and development into technologies to reduce the costs of spaceflight--a policy which Lloyd Davis had enforced with his legendary devotion to detail and irascible control of those who broke too far from these core tenets. By 2004, as the Richards/Davis team’s main efforts--the first six Artemis missions and the Centaur-derived Cryogenic Depot Demonstrator--were reaching fruition, new, non-governmental efforts were going even further, with the partially reusable Thunderbolt launch vehicle and CDC-based Northrop TransOrbital Services geosynchronous orbital tug system promising a new era of space exploration
However, although altering NASA’s spaceflight program to take these new possibilities into account would undoubtedly be the cornerstone of the next presidential term’s spaceflight policy, that task would not be Richards’. In late 2003, just as she was organizing her re-election campaign ahead of a primary in which virtually no serious opposition was expected, the president was diagnosed with throat cancer. Projected by the best available doctors as having less than two years two years to live, Richards withdrew from the race, leaving the Democratic field in chaos just before the Iowa caucuses. The primary candidates to emerge in the wake of her departure were her vice-president, Evan Bayh, and Richard’s primary opponent in 2000, former DNC chairman and Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton. Extensively tied into the DNC machine and a consummate political operator, Clinton’s showing in Iowa was quite strong, as his charisma carried him ahead of Byah, who seemed to be assuming that sympathy for the President’s condition and his own position as vice-president would effortlessly carry him to victory. Before Clinton could consolidate his position with a victory in the New Hampshire, however , stories began to break accusing the former DNC chair of financial malfeasance connected to serial marital infidelity. The initial rumblings of the scandal (and a certain degree of advocacy by Richards herself) helped Bayh secure a narrow win over Clinton in New Hampshire, and despite the best efforts of the Clinton machine, stories of questionable fundraising, controversial financial deals, and adulterous affairs continued for week after week afterwards as the primary season moved on. In South Carolina and other more-conservative states, Bayh’s traditional focus on family contrasted strongly against the increasingly-beleaguered Clinton campaign. The win in South Carolina was followed by others for Bayh, and by Super Tuesday, Clinton finally withdrew from the race, declining to push through to the convention under fire.
On the Republican side, the race was simultaneously more and less chaotic than the Democratic primaries, as the open spot to challenge Richards had seen challengers jockeying for position nearly since her election, unlike the abbreviated shadow primaries on the Democratic side in the wake of Richards’ abrupt resignation from the race. The eventual winner was Senator Keith Woods of Illinois, the former Lieutenant Governor of his home state. In the middle of his second term as Senator, Woods had attracted attention and a reputation for a focus on government spending and economic issues, as well as a bridge-builder seeking to “triangulate” positions on social issues--which, some opponents accused, boiled down to rephrasing traditional GOP positions until moderates couldn’t tell what they were, then calling that compromise. Nevertheless, in the general election, he proved well-suited to speaking to moderates and independents, succeeding in fact where Charlie Salinas in 2000 had only succeeded in theory and primaries, and his economic chops proved an unexpected boon in light of the other major development of late 2003 which affected the race. While the 1994 Christmas Plot had seen a contraction in East Asian and, as a result, American markets, by 2003 the economy had not only recovered, but actually begun to overheat, with a bubble developing behind the wave of high-tech businesses that had sprung up following the development of the Internet before spreading into lending and financial services as people sought to utilize their paper fortunes. In late 2003, the bubble popped, leading to a serious recession which developed throughout the early primary season in 2004, and placed “kitchen table” emphasis on the kinds of traditionally-obscure areas of financial regulation and government spending which were Woods’ traditional portfolio [1]. After securing the nomination, Woods pushed hard in the general election to tie the recession to Richards’ policies, and by extension Vice-President Bayh, playing on the tendency of American voters to associate Presidents with the national economy. In the end, it was a decisive factor: Senator Woods would carry a decisive electoral majority, and be elected the 44th President of the United States of America. As with other Federal Agencies, NASA held its breath to see what Woods would have in store given his traditional critique of extensive discretionary spending on “wasteful” endeavors.
Adding to the general uncertainty surrounding Richard’s departure and Bayh’s loss, Lloyd Davis also resigned his position as NASA Administrator. He had held the post for more than 12 years, in the process outstripping the record of any Administrator before him. However, the job of riding constant herd on NASA’s more exuberant tendencies had pushed him hard, and during his final years in the office his legendary low tolerance for fools had if anything grown lower, while he had actually focused more on blue-sky long-term planning instead of the constant reviews of the day-to-day details of ongoing operations which had been characteristic of his management during the early days of the Artemis program. Indeed, Davis indicated that his resignation had been planned prior to the election, and in fact prior to Richards withdrawing from the race, out of sheer exhaustion. In his stead and to begin putting his own mark on the agency, Woods appointed Dean Banks, another figure with a history in both NASA and private industry. After holding a slot in the Space Operations Directorate during the Spacelab era, he had departed for a position with Lockheed’s space division, where he had worked until now. Also like his predecessor, Banks had a reputation for running a tight ship, but he lacked the legendary fiery temper. Instead, Banks’ history had been mostly focused on the commercial launch side of Lockheed’s operations, and it was this experience with both the aerospace industry and Lockheed’s “leaning” of both Martin’s original Titan and then-McDonnell’s Delta that lead Woods to appoint him.
In general, with the economy in recession, Woods was far too concerned with the country as a whole to focus on NASA individually. However, he did have a desire to make something of a symbol out of it, and his directions to Banks were to find a way to make it happen. NASA was one of the most well-known, and among the best-regarded federal agencies, with the ongoing operations of Apollo, Freedom, and Artemis being major marks of prestige for the nation both among its own population as well as on the world stage. However, it was also one whose spending was (according to polls) overestimated by the general population, and whose budget often seemed like a ripe target for cutting. While Woods had no real desire to see space operations curbed in practice, if ways could be found to achieve the same or more with a slight symbolic budget cut, it would be possible to tie into other, less glamorous cuts he aimed to make elsewhere in the federal budget, and his general economic plans. Additionally, while Woods was well aware of the lobbying power of industrial blocks within Congress and thus had no intention of causing serious shake-ups and battles which would be sideshows to his more critical domestic and international focuses, he also could see the blooming of commercial launch and reuse--indeed, Thunderbolt’s frequent launches from (and returns to) Wallops were regularly visible in the skies over Washington, D.C--and was interested in the possibility of wringing “efficiencies” out of the agency. With privatization of “unnecessary” federal roles (and supposed improvements in efficiency) something of a plank in his plans, Woods also directed Banks to make a careful study of potential for leveraging this emerging market.
With direction from on high, Banks set to work in his own examinations shortly after Woods’ inauguration in 2005, requesting detailed reports on all NASA operations, not dissimilar to the ones compiled by Davis and Richards in the early days of the Gore Administration in 1993. He also reached out to NASA’s aerospace partners and assorted think tanks,hoping to hear options which might have gone under-represented within NASA’s entrenched bureaucracy. In his search for fat to trim, Banks was stymied by his predecessor--while there was certainly a lot being done with NASA’s budget of just over $17 billion, Davis’ tenure and diligence meant there was less outright waste then might be expected, with the GAO rating NASA as one of federal government’s best-run agencies. Instead, to achieve significant cuts, it would be necessary to downscope, eliminate, or redefine the goals of ongoing projects. However, there were some existing plans to this effect, which Banks ended up compiling as the core of his presentation to the President, and which lead directly to Woods’ first NASA budget request.
In the long term, there was a general agreement by Banks and others compiling the report that reuse marked a path for the future--after all, Starlaunch was already flying payload for roughly half the cost of its expendable competitors, and others like Lockheed were beginning to follow, with Starclipper aiming to reuse not one but both of its stages for even lower costs. For instance, a reusable vehicle to carry cargo and crew to the Space Station (in line with proposals for the long-dead Space Shuttle) could potentially offer massive reductions in the operations cost of that station or its replacement--of the early $2.5 billion annual budget of the station, $1.25 billion were tied up in the launch costs of its Aardvark and Apollo resupply fleet. However, technologies to extend the reach of reuse beyond LEO were in their infancy--the Cryogenic Depot Demonstrator was due to launch that year, with any operational version fielded by Northrop TransOrbital for GTO access still years away, and full reuse even farther from active service. While NASA might benefit greatly from such services, slashing the cost of conducting its ongoing human spaceflight operations (and, to a lesser degree, unmanned operations) or enabling far more activity for the same budget, these benefits were quite distant.
A more immediate savings was offered by a plan fielded from NASA Langley, long enshrined as NASA’s center for “off the wall” thinking. As the report Banks received noted, Artemis missions were primarily limited by consumables on the surface and the power capacity of the Artemis habitat to support crews through the lunar night. However, such consumables made up a very small portion of the cargo carried to the surface on each landing, with the vast majority being the rovers, habitat, suits, and surface gear which each sortie mission was obliged to duplicate at its landing site. If a second cargo lander devoted solely to consumables was landed at a single site to join a habitat, modified with expanded habitat volume and power storage/generation capacity, the pair of vehicles could offer as much as ten times the consumables supply, allowing the site to be visited multiple times by several crews, which could each stay longer than the existing Artemis crews. A switch to a more closed-cycle water system--in use on Freedom but not on Artemis due to greater system mass--would also be possible, allowing supplies to be stretched still further. The site would not be suitable as a full-fledged moonbase, but it could be established rapidly using designs already in service on Artemis and once set up, each crew mission would require only ⅔ the cost of a sortie mission for even more time on the surface, perhaps up to months-long expeditions. The concept, circulating under the name “soonbase,” a name intended to stress its rapid availability, was attractive to Banks as a short-term “bandaid” for achieving expanded exploration capacity while opening up room in the budget for both Woods’ desired “haircut” as well as the investment in technologies which might be required for transitioning to a more reuse-based model. Additional room would be freed by redirection of existing development funds such as those currently being spent on the CDD and other programs within the “future technologies development” penumbra to development for this new purpose.
Thus, in the short term the plan resulted in little change to the status quo and the budget impact, though symbolically useful for Woods’ political goals, was relatively minimal: a nice, round number of “half a billion dollars” per year was to be cut through the transition from sorties to “soonbase” missions and the remainder made up through eliminations of some of the scores of smaller development programs and an across-the-board automatic 1% reduction in all NASA projects. The Woods NASA budget, certainly the least controversial part of Woods’ first budget, passed in late 2005. Though “soonbase” would remain an internal nickname, the official name of the semi-permanent outpost on the lunar surface was Orion--a reference to the legendary hunter, who had also been the only man the notoriously single goddess of the hunt Artemis had ever loved. While the Artemis missions already funded for 2005 and 2006 would go ahead, it was planned that the development of the surface hardware would be completed in time to allow the 2007 flight hardware to be appropriated for Orion’s two cargo vehicles, with the first Orion outpost crew to follow in 2008. Meanwhile, work on potential reusable-based station logistics, proper long-term lunar station modules, or Pegasus-scale depots and tugs on the TransOrbital model for access to the moon and beyond would proceed at a more measured pace, aimed to bear fruit soon in the next decade.
As they had in the past, American spaceflight policies would have ripple effects around the world. With the extension of Artemis into the Orion “soonbase” through the appropriation of hardware for the Artemis 12 and 13 missions, the creation of Orion necessitated immediate renegotiation of ongoing Freedom and Artemis flight participation barter agreements. ESA, as part of negotiating for continued flights to both Freedom and the Moon, was already increasing its logistics support role for Freedom, through the simple expedient of launching two Minotaur supply capsules per year instead of one. Since there would still be annual moon launches with similar availability of seats, ESA was able to leverage their ramping up of logistics to meet the existing agreements to get NASA to agree to directly convert the seats it had promised ESA on Artemis missions into crew slots to Orion--a continuation of traditional NASA-ESA co-operative policies dating back almost twenty-five years to Spacelab and the Seat Wars.
The process of negotiation, however, was trickier for the Japanese. They, too, had secured extensions to their astronaut corps’ presence aboard Freedom around the turn of the millenium in exchange for agreeing to take on some of the station’s logistical load. However, unlike ESA, JAXA had no existing logistics craft, and in order to fill the role it needed to develop one from scratch. The direction for this craft had been a point of extensive debate within Japanese space policy circles: while the HOPE spaceplane had seen almost a decade of basic research and development by this point, its technical state was less advanced than might be expected, largely due to the expense of developing and fielding Japan’s first all-native booster, the hydrolox-plus-solids H-1. However, with the H-1 finally into service, some hoped that the funds might finally be available for completing research and beginning actual development and fielding of the HOPE concept. On the other hand, other factions within JAXA pointed out that the development of HOPE would still require extensive funds, even given the sunk costs, while developing another vehicle--perhaps a capsule, or even just a simple cargo-can-and-bus like the American Aardvark--could be a faster, cheaper way of answering the role they had agreed on with NASA.
In the end, other American developments would be key to the final Japanese decision. As Japanese ministers debated in 2002, the StarLaunch Thunderbolt was beginning its first routine test flights ahead of operational service. Already, strong debates over the economic value of reuse were beginning at StarLaunch’s competitors, and though Japan had never attempted to position H-II as a commercial launcher, they weren’t interested in being left behind should reusability turn out to be a major success. If it were to be successful, though, the technologies needed, such as advanced reusable thermal protection, more easily serviced hardware, and autonomous guidance and control would be very similar to the technologies that JAXA was planning to demonstrate with HOPE. Therefore, on the grounds of an investment in the future, a modified, automated version of the HOPE spaceplane won out over the less ambitious capsule or cargo can solutions, with JAXA planning to develop a small-scale orbital vehicle launched on the H-II. Besides carrying several metric tons of cargo in an unpressurized payload bay (though one for which a pressurized cargo container could be designed), by including payload bay doors “HOPE-C” would be able to return experiments and hardware from the laboratory like the Minotaur--but including larger, exterior payloads as well as the relatively small interior cargos that Minotaur could accomodate. With approval from their ministers and formal confirmation from NASA that HOPE-C would meet Japan’s barter contributions, work began on the spacecraft in 2003 with first flight aimed for late in the decade.
As Japan’s HOPE debate demonstrated, America’s influence in international spaceflight programs was no longer limited to just what NASA was doing, either, with vehicles like the Thunderbolt appearing to herald a new age of low-cost spaceflight. Buoyed by this perception, and by a growing economy, there had been growing interest in commercial crewed spaceflight, with an American investor group under the name MirCorp working since 2001 with the Russian national space program, Roscosmos, to evaluate completing and launching the MOK-2 module remaining from Mir as the core for a new, Mir-2 semi-commercial station to provide some place for the anticipated wave of private astronauts to fly. In addition to housing Russian cosmonauts and experiments, it could also serve as a sort of “space hotel” for short-term space tourists, enabling a more comfortable, extended flight than would be possible aboard a single space tourism craft. By 2004, however, MirCorp was running into issues as the technology bubble that had provided MirCorp’s founders with their capital, and enriched many of their prospective customers began to deflate, depriving the company of both necessary funds and future returns just as costs were beginning to increase.
More troublingly, the MOK-2 core had proved to be in rougher shape than initial inspections made during the DOS-11/Tiangong conversion in the early 90s had foreseen, meaning those costs were increasing even more than expected. Indeed, the fact that inspections by the same team had missed the fuel system contamination which had added almost two years to Tiangong’s launch should in retrospect have been a red flag from the start. While work was proceeding on the TKS-derived subsidiary lab and habitat modules to be attached to MOK-2, the core module itself required substantial refit and rehabilitation to reach even the state which it had been believed to be in before the start of the project, while gaining access to replacements or spares for critical systems which had gone bad or had simply never been installed, such as the station’s ‘80s-vintage computers, solar arrays, gyroscopes, and thruster arrays was also proving a challenge--many of the employees involved in the original designs had even left the program as part of retirements of the “brain drain” of the 1990s. While Russia pushed forward on the station, officially deferring launch on a year-by-year basis[2] while they worked to secure funding. Ironically, the Mir-2 station concept which had been possible due to the downscoping of Mir-1 now seemed to require a downscope of its own.
As the heads of Roscosmos struggled with how to achieve their politically-mandated goals with the funding and technologies available to them, similar questions were faced around the world. Under their new Administrator Dean Banks, NASA engineers were beginning work on the detailed designs for the Orion “soonbase” while also working to figure out how to develop cheaper, more reusable future lunar access systems for potential permanent installations on the budgets allowed within Woods’ cuts to NASA. Meanwhile, across oceans from NASA headquarters, the European and Japanese space programs were wrestling with the implications of reusability and the newly renewed American lunar program as they angled to increase their own presence and capabilities in manned spaceflight amid the constrained budgetary environment of the 2004 economic downturn. It was a balance every nation would have to strike for itself, the same balance which had always dominated spaceflight planning.
[1] Worse than ‘92, but not nearly as bad as ‘08 IOTL. Of course, they lack that benchmark...
[2] This effect of slipping one year per year and thus growing no closer to launch is something I refer to as the “Nauka line” after the OTL Russian Multipurpose Lab Module, which is in a similar state.
Don't you feel enlightened?
