starship-design: Small Steps Keep Us Grounded

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Small Steps Keep Us Grounded
The Spacefaring Web 2.19

by John Carter McKnight
Scottsdale - Nov 22, 2002

NASA's recent budget request is uninspiring, reactive and constraining - and
just what the doctor ordered. Agency Administrator Sean O'Keefe has
apparently realized that our grandiose dreams of near-term space triumphs
are simply shattered, leaving us - government, industry and advocacy alike -
with the unglamorous work of living within our means, delivering on our
promises, and slowly building a new space infrastructure, one that, this
time, can last.

There's an old saying that the best is the enemy of the good enough. NASA,
following in the family tradition of its older brother, the Pentagon, has
spent twenty years proving the maxim. President Reagan's little $8 billion
Space Station Freedom managed to misplace $5 billion last year, in its 18th
year of bureaucratic life.

Despite the "faster, better, cheaper" mantra, the engineering
bells-and-whistles mindset, coupled with government budgeting procedures,
has caused most projects to bloat.

The gap between expectations and results then gets filled with "viewgraph
engineering," more grandiose promises, coupled with requests for yet another
one-time-only emergency handout.

NASA and its dependent contractors are not alone in overpromising and
under-delivering. Space advocacy's track record is, if anything, worse ("L5
in '95," for example).

Volunteer enthusiasm couples with pent-up demand fed by NASA's failure to
deliver on its promises to create the same dynamic. Ambitious projects are
declared, discussed in a frenzy of chat-board activity - then, like so many
amateur rockets, either fizzle or explode.

Entrepreneurial space companies, often drawn from the ranks of either
advocates or frustrated veterans of NASA disappointments, have followed the
same pattern: the initial draft of the business plan (if they're that
realistic) calls for conquering the Solar System, producing two dozen
products and making billionaires of their first round investors, all in five
years.

To their credit, though, the entrepreneurs have been the first to learn the
lesson of "foundations first." The die-off of many of the launch vehicle
startups triggered an increase in professionalism and a decrease in
grandiosity among their successors.

Many current space startups have much more business savvy and vastly more
humble - and achievable - goals than their predecessors did. The lessons
they learned in the unforgiving school of the marketplace are finally
beginning to spread to their governmental and advocacy peers.

The space community had no monopoly on excess, to be sure. We've all been
down that road. Overpromising was what the latter 1990s were about.

While space has had its own dynamic, driven by NASA's pervasive lack of
realism, the entire Western economy was, if not, as the Texans say, "all hat
and no cattle," at least running with a hat/cattle ratio that no sober
banker (had there been any) would have approved.

That party's over. NASA must rebuild credibility with the public, with
Congress and with its international partners, deliver on promises already
made, and live within its budgetary means. Advocacy must do the same.

The NASA budget request is a courageous attempt to meet those critical
requirements of credibility, frugality and infrastructure repair. The Space
Launch Initiative was shaping up to generate a replacement for the Shuttle
as disastrously out of step with fiscal and mission requirements as the
original has been.

There is no good solution to the problems caused by unsafe, spectacularly
expensive and antiquated transportation to a largely worthless destination.
Sacking the SLI program while extending the life of the existing orbiters
and developing a relatively cheap lifeboat capable of supporting a full crew
complement on the International Space Station, is a good faith, "good
enough" fix.

Hopefully, this approach, grounded in a blessed lack of vision, will spread
through NASA's upper management. The agency's "NExT" initiative, despite
some very positive elements, smacks too much of a re-creation of the process
that diverted the bulk of its attention and resources into the Station and
Shuttle, to precious little relative return.

More microgravity mega-engineering does not seem a reasonable response
either to NASA's own priority of exploring life's origins, or to the public
and commercial demand for affordable access to space.

Criticism of this sort of bureaucratic "beau geste" has been coming from
interesting quarters. The Economist, the British news weekly, has long been
fanatically hostile to human spaceflight. Yet its November 14 editorial
marks a change in tone.

While still scathing ("It is true that science can be done in the space
station. But science can also be done dressed in a clown suit atop a large
Ferris wheel"), the editors go on to express sentiments that could have come
from this column:

[F]or decades there has been a huge pent-up demand for flights into space.
Although the private sector is finally making some progress towards this,
NASA should have been there years ago. What is still needed is research and
development on economical and safe space transport for the public at large.
Space, like the Wild West, can be truly opened up by the private sector.
NASA's central goal in human space flight should be to make that possible.

A broad consensus seems to be coalescing around this radical view. The
Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry delivered
its final report to the Administration this week. No visionary programs are
called for: rather, the focus is on rebuilding infrastructure, improving
basic research and removing trade barriers - the impediments to spacefaring
identified in the previous issue of this column.

The Commission calls for a realignment of Federal efforts around these
unglamorous but essential issues. The advocacy community as well should
follow suit, to aid in this effort and to redeem itself from the
overpromising/under-delivering space curse.

This past week marked the twentieth anniversary of a fringe organization
whose beginnings were much less promising than those of the space groups',
but whose influence, unlike that of our community, has become immense.

The Federalist Society began as a campus-based movement of conservative,
statist law students in an era when the top law schools were largely liberal
and biased against the exercise of imperial power. It was a fringe
organization regarded with deep suspicion by mainstream students and faculty
(as I recall from firsthand experience, having attended law school with
co-founders of the organization in its second year of existence).

Yet its anniversary was noted prominently in the New York Times - as the
commemorative celebration was attended by a Supreme Court Justice and the
Attorney General. No cabinet-level official has ever attended a
space-advocacy party, to the best of my knowledge.

What did the Federalist Society do right that the various space societies
have not? Three things of utterly critical significance: it focused on
training and promoting cadre, and on engaging in genuine, respectful debate
with its opponents. Also, it did not squander its energy on
personality-driven factional infighting or schismatic doctrinal squabbles.
The space advocacy organizations should learn that lesson and radically
revision themselves around those two positive projects.

The Federalist Society made the front pages because it spent twenty years
recruiting bright students who were receptive to its message, training and
indoctrinating them, and networking them with alumni and supporters in
positions of influence. In less than a generation their strategy has given
them policy dominance over the Federal agency of concern to them, the
Justice Department.

Imagine if a space organization could have placed its members throughout the
NASA hierarchy, claiming the Administrator and the Secretary of Defense as
allies - we might actually have a Federal space effort accomplishing
something other than intellectual and financial bankruptcy restructuring.

The other critical technique involves recruiting one's adversaries as
marketing representatives. By providing a forum for liberal and libertarian
opponents to hone their arguments through debate, the Federalist Society
forced those opponents to accord it respect and legitimacy.

By putting their people on panels alongside respected mainstream opinion
leaders, they declared themselves peers and serious players. When their
opponents would go out marketing themselves, they would likely refer to
having assailed their Federalist Society adversaries - again, marking the
once-fringe organization as a legitimate peer of the prominent mainstream
figure.

Space advocacy groups have consistently chosen to preach to the choir rather
than to engage their critics. This choice ghettoizes us, prevents us from
becoming truly proficient or convincing in delivering our message, denies us
the opportunity to win over moderates who have only heard the opposition's
case, and denies us the leverage of putting our adversaries to work
marketing us.

There has been talk of engaging the environmental and religious communities,
of opening a dialog with the technologically-skeptical "Party of Nah," but
little concrete action. Our failure costs us influence.

NASA now has an opportunity to rebuild its financial, reputational and
physical infrastructure. Only when this process is complete will it be able
to move on to grander things.

By abandoning the impulse to build deep-space Egyptian pyramids in favor of
more mundane and infinitely more useful Roman roads, the agency may actually
accomplish its true goal of opening the space frontier. If the space
advocacy groups similarly choose to abandon millennial fervor and
narcissistic self-destruction in favor of recruiting, training and
influence-building, they can provide the leadership of government and
industry necessary for opening that frontier.

Critical to both efforts is accepting that, for now, building a spacefaring
civilization does not involve grand theorizing, viewgraph engineering or
marching gaily off to triumph. For now, revolutionary patience lies in
inspiring the kids, paying the bills and building the roads. If we do those
things right, the triumphs will surely come.