starship-design: Sailing With Columbus Was Never Safe (Part 2)

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

Sailing With Columbus Was Never Safe

by Bruce Moomaw

NASA's current argument is that, if the Station is abandoned at this point,
the money already spent on it will have been "wasted". But this ignores the
fact that only about $40 billion has been spent on it thus far -- and the
cost of finishing it and running it for its projected 10-year operating
lifetime will amount to about an additional $60 billion, for an utterly
trivial gain in scientific and engineering knowledge.

What's especially interesting is that NASA totally rejects this same "we
should throw good money after bad" argument when it comes to its unmanned
space projects. Over $580 million has already been spent over the last
decade on the Gravity Probe B satellite to test Einstein's theory of general
relativity. The satellite is virtually complete, and scheduled for launch
later this year.

But the satellite has now run into still another in a long series of
technical problems, which will add another $36 million to its cost -- and
NASA is now very seriously studying whether GP-B should be canceled, even at
this very late date, simply because it now thinks that the science return
from it may no longer be worth the remaining $104 million needed to complete
and launch it.

If it had used this same reasoning -- or anything remotely near it -- on its
manned program, both the Station and the Shuttle would have been canceled
long ago.

What's keeping the Station and the Shuttle going at this point?

Firstly, the value of the two programs as pure pork.

To quote Sen. Bumpers: "What really keeps the Station alive is the politics
and the deep pockets and influence of aerospace contractors on Capitol Hill.
The Station represents a textbook case of corporate welfare. NASA and its
contractors have torn a page from the Pentagon's play-book and scattered
Station contracts across 46 states. That ploy increases costs, but it also
increases the number of senators with a stake in keeping the project alive."

And, as Glenn Easterbrook observed after Columbia's destruction: "Aerospace
contractors love the fact that the Shuttle launches cost so much...Keeping
prices up was a higher priority than having a sensible launch system... In
return for failure [after the Challenger disaster], the Shuttle program got
a big budget increase...'Reforms' were left up to the very old-boy network
that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from
continuing high costs. Concerned foremost with budget politics, Congress too
did its best to whitewash. Large manned spaceflight centers that depend on
the Shuttle are in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama. Congressional
delegations from these states fought frantically against a [cheaper] Shuttle
replacement.

"The result was years of generous funding for constituents -- and now
another tragedy. The tough questions that have gone unasked about the
Shuttle have also gone unasked about the Station, which generates billions
in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other
states...So far as I can tell, to Congress the mission of the Shuttle is not
to fly to orbit but to deliver pork to constituents.

"That members of Congress aren't calling for cancellation of the program
seems a kind of ultimate cynicism: Who cares if it blows up or accomplishes
anything commensurate with cost? All we care about is getting the money,"
wrote Easterbrook.

And the fates of the Shuttle and Station are now stuck together like Siamese
twins: cancellation of either one means cancellation of the other -- and the
instant and traumatic end of fully 40% of NASA's $15 billion annual funding
make it much harder for Congress to cancel either one of them.

However, a bigger factor at this point may be classic "political inertia" --
the simple fact that publicly confessing that you made an error of this
magnitude is the kiss of death for any elected politician or appointed
government bureaucrat.

Quoting former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold: "How can
you change direction without at least an implicit mea culpa that the Shuttle
was a bad idea? And once you go there, it is only a short distance from
saying (or implying), 'Yup, that great crew did die in vain.' Now, that is
one hell of a lot of crow to eat. What person -- whether in Congress, the
White House, or elsewhere -- wants to stand up and say THAT to Congress and
the American public?"

Planetary geologist Jeffrey Bell of the University of Hawaii puts it more
brutally: "Admitting that Shuttle [and Station] is a failure would discredit
all the people who told the Big Lie."

Finally, to quote former NASA historian Alex Roland: "In the same way that
the Shuttle was [deliberately] intended to get so much cost in it that you
couldn't cancel it, the Station has now reached that critical mass. And
added to that, NASA intentionally added foreign partners, not only to share
the cost, which was already over budget, but to make it politically
invulnerable. That is, it would be difficult for Congress to cancel the
Station because so many other foreign partners were involved in it."

Those foreign partners in Europe and Japan are indeed now raising hell at
any whisper of a suggestion that the Station should be canceled -- because
such a cancellation would force them to admit to their own voters that they
had made a serious mistake.

Finally, it should be noted that -- after former Administrator Dan Goldin
was forced to resign because he could no longer conceal the fact that his
plan to reduce the Station's costs by involving Russia in the program had
been a total failure -- the Bush Administration had tremendous trouble
finding any replacement for him, to the point that they even tried to hire a
headhunter for the purpose.

Every candidate they approached who actually had any decent reputation for
understanding science and technology hastily shied away from the post,
precisely because they DID have such knowledge -- they regarded taking on
the directorship of NASA at this point as the equivalent of parachuting onto
the bridge of the Titanic.

Thus Bush was finally forced to select as NASA's head O'Keefe -- an
accountant who has virtually no scientific or technical background, and who
can thus be easily led by the career NASA bureaucrats he relies on for
scientific and engineering advice into swallowing their arguments in favor
of continuing the manned space program (and other expensive new NASA
initiatives, such as nuclear propulsion for deep space probes) even when
those arguments include glaring factual errors.

For all these reasons, to quote Roland: "For better or for worse, we
probably are stuck with [the Station], and we'll have to find some way to
make use of what we've done."

But if we are so stuck, how can we possibly finish building and running the
Station -- for whatever trickle of benefit we get out of it -- without
continuing to fly the Shuttle despite its innate and uncorrectable dangers,
and thus endangering future crews until that highly probable moment when we
lose a third crew (and maybe a fourth one)?