What Is A Space Agency For?
President-elect Trump has made a disruptive choice for NASA administrator. What is the fate of the agency?
In the past few years, founder of payments company Shift4 Jared Isaacman has been running a private space program in collaboration with SpaceX. Two missions have been flown - Inspiration4 in September 2021 and Polaris Dawn in September this year. The first was the first all-civilian mission to orbit, gaining wide media attention and raising money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. The second mission had more ambitious scientific and technological goals - including the highest altitude flight since the Apollo program in order to learn about human exposure to radiation and the first test of the EVA suit SpaceX has been developing.
Suddenly, on Wednesday December 4th, Donald Trump announced through his social media channels that Isaacman would be the next NASA administrator. Pending confirmation then, he will go from running a small agile private space program to running the largest publicly funded space program in the world.
This has been greeted with a good deal of enthusiasm - he is a great advocate for the cause of space exploration and colonisation, as I myself was saying on my recent
So will the new administrator change NASA, or will NASA change him?
The Reality of NASA
To understand the agency, its important to understand the context in which it was founded - the Sputnik crisis. On October 4th 1957, the USSR launched the worlds first satellite. It was not exactly a surprise - for the International Geophysical Year both the US and the Soviets had announced they would attempt satellite launches, and prior to Sputnik there had been several tests of the R-7 missile that was used. But it was a shock that the Soviets managed to do it first.
The Second World War had only ended 12 years earlier, and the Soviet front had been so brutal and destructive that the modern mind can barely conceive it. Half of the population, and a significant portion of the countries industrial base, fell under Nazi occupation and were terrorised by the Wehrmacht policy of “living off the land” - stealing food and other supplies from the population to make up for the shortfalls in their own logistics - in addition to the more direct forms of genocide. The siege of Leningrad, the country’s second city and a major industrial centre, cost over a million lives alone, and total Soviet deaths from the war are now considered to be in the region of 27 million. Yet just over a decade after this, the USSR had rebuilt its scientific and technological capability to such an extent it could beat the Americans at a cutting edge technology - it seemed miraculous.
The Soviets naturally credited this miracle to their centrally planned socialist economy, and this was also taken to be the case in large parts of the West. The significance of Sputnik was of course exaggerated by the Democrats in the lead up to the 1958 mid term elections and the 1960 Presidential election, and it was in response to this political threat that the Eisenhower administration gathered the small space programs that each branch of the US military was operating at that point into a centralised civilian agency, which was NASA. This period was the high water mark of the public perception of economic planning - Red Plenty by Francis Spufford gives a good semi-fictional account of the time, mostly from the Soviet point of view. There was an idea, sometimes called high modernism, that society could be indefinitely improved through sufficiently sophisticated technocratic planning. Sputnik seemed to provide strong evidence for this worldview. Few were in doubt about the brutality of the USSR (they had demonstrated this in Hungary the previous year) but the planned society was superficially effective, and many thought this was the direction the West should go in at least economically.
The truth is that, somewhat awkwardly for their ideology, the Soviet effort was largely enabled through the strong personal leadership of Sergei Korolev, head of the OKB-1 design bureau. He was able to work within the constraints of a dysfunctional system to build a rocket that avoided solving a number of problems that were tricky at the time (air starting engines, roll programs etc.) but were not actually needed to reach orbit. The R-7 was a “minimum viable product” before the term was coined and worked well enough that it continues to be the basis for Russian launch vehicles to this day. Nobody knew who Korolev was at the time though - his identity was kept a state secret until after his death in 1966.
As the Moon race proceeded, the Soviet program featured intense competition for limited resources between rival design bureaus. The projects to fly humans around the Moon and to land humans on the Moon used completely different rockets from different bureaus (Proton and N-1). In contrast, the NASA lunar program was heavily centralised and focused once the Apollo mission was defined. Diversions such as a potential extension of the Gemini program (which could have led to an earlier lunar flyby) were ruled out.
In something of a historical irony, the US beat the Soviets to the Moon by being better at socialist central planning than them. But what sort of organisation did this create?
If We Can Put A Man On The Moon…
In its first decade of existence, NASA was able to perform some of the first exploration of other planets with robotic probes, radically advance the state of the art in computers and rocketry, and build the Saturn/Apollo hardware needed to put humans on the Moon. Remarkably for a massive government project, it delivered its primary objective on time, albeit at an immense cost.
With the Moon landing, NASA gain a status boost that it immediately attempted to trade for extra funding. In 1969, the Space Task Group formed by then Vice President Spire Agnew prepared a report asking for a vast expansion of the manned space program - a fully reusable Space Shuttle, nuclear thermal rockets, a Moonbase, a 50 man space station, and missions to Mars by the early 1980s - requiring a big increase in budget at a time when the rest of the government was subject to austerity. This plan, which was referred to as the Integrated Program Plan, failed to gain traction as neither President Nixon nor Congress were interested in throwing such huge amounts of money at NASA.
Facing budget cuts rather than massive budget increases, NASA decided to do the Integrated Program Plan in stages. First would be the Shuttle - not the expensive to develop fully reusable vehicle they wanted, but a cheaper to develop partially reusable vehicle - a choice which would have serious consequences. There was a belief - held more by managers than engineers - that the Shuttle would lead to frequent low cost space access, and then perhaps the rest of the IPP could be built. They got the space station part in 1984 when President Reagan announced Space Station Freedom, although that was of much smaller scale than the original concept and would be further descaled and descoped over the years until it only became viable when merged with the Russian Mir 2 project to become ISS. There were proposals to build the chemically-powered tugs to send payloads further out than Earth orbit, and the Shuttle-Centaur program that was preparing for its first flights in mid-1986 was a precursor to these vehicles. Slowly, and in a reduced form, NASA seemed to be moving towards something like the IPP.
Then the Challenger accident happened. NASA faced serious expert scrutiny and was found to be essentially lying about what the Shuttle could actually do. There were never going to be 24 flights a year. There was no way to safely carry a Centaur upper stage aboard the Shuttle. Engineers and astronauts had warned about the problems in both programs but were disregarded by the NASA hierarchy. At this point the IPP or anything like it was dead.
But when George H. W. Bush, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, directed NASA to send humans back to the Moon and on to Mars. He gave them 90 days to make a plan and the result was thus known as the 90 day study. You can go to that link and read it, but I shall save you some time - its more or less the Integrated Program Plan again. A hugely expensive grab bag of space stations, tug vehicles, Moon bases, and nuclear shuttles that would please every group at NASA if Congress were to ever fund it (unsurprisingly, they did not).
An alternative plan was put forward by Robert Zubrin and David Baker, then engineers at Martin Marietta, and Zubrin worked to convince NASA to adopt it over the next few years - it was called Mars Direct. In response to a bloat of the 90 day study, the Mars Direct idea was to make NASA human spaceflight more efficient and mission orientated by putting humans on Mars quickly using minimal resources.
The proposal was to use two Shuttle-derived launch vehicles, similar to the as yet unflown Block 2 variant of the Space Launch System of the Artemis program, to put a crew of 4 on Mars for 18 months. It exploited local resources to manufacture return fuel, and dispensed with unneeded technologies such as nuclear propulsion, a moon base, or a space station. When engineers at NASA evaluated this plan they thought it was necessary to add a third launch to support the return journey, but it was still a fairly lean mission and became the official “Design Reference Mission” for a human expedition to Mars. Over subsequent revisions though, the plans became more complex again, incorporating very large nuclear or solar-electric powered interplanetary ships assembled in orbit.
As sure as a pendulum returning to its equilibrium position, NASA swung back to its old way of thinking as soon as the impetus to reform was removed. The current proposals of the Moon-to-Mars Office can be seen as just technological revisions of the Integrated Program Plan from the Apollo era, albeit it with the space station relocated to lunar orbit in the form of the Gateway.
There were other attempts at doing things differently. In the 90s, funded by the Strategic Defense Initiative, a small group developed a sub-scale prototype for a rapidly reusable fully reusable single stage to orbit rocket that would land vertically under power, the DC-X. It flew 12 test flights and achieved a turnaround between two of those flights of just 26 hours.
This was then moved over to NASA, who were not entirely happy to accept it and ultimately cancelled it in favour of their in-house solution of the X-33, a winged vertical take-off, horizontal landing spaceplane that would use an aerospike engine and composite construction. Due to problems in its development, this would end up being cancelled anyway, before any flights took place. In hindsight, looking at vehicles such as New Sheppard which is a near direct descendant of DC-X and Falcon 9 whose landing method was inspired by this early work, its clear that NASA decisively backed the wrong horse, driven by “not invented here” bias.
The commercial cargo and crew programs are a rare example of successful reform by outside forces, although it was only partially successful, and the endurance of the program is down almost entirely to the runaway success of SpaceX (which was not expected by industry insiders). Lori Garver, former Deputy Administrator under President Obama, details her part in the struggle to get NASA to outsource core functions to commercial partners in her book Escaping Gravity. It came about due to the delays and cost overruns of the Constellation Program initiated under the Bush administration, which itself had been initiated to give the human spaceflight program a new mission after the Columbia accident. That accident had been in part caused by similar organisational problems that had led to Challenger, had been pointed out in the report on that accident, and not been rectified.
Constellation had supposed to do a rerun of Apollo, in a fairly business-as-usual manner, using Shuttle derived launch vehicles called Ares V to launch an Earth Departure Stage and lunar lander, and a smaller Ares I to launch the Orion crew capsule. There were myriad technical issues with the program and its only launch was the Ares 1-X flight in 2009, which was a boilerplate upper stage and spacecraft mounted on top of a Space Shuttle solid booster. The incoming administration wanted to cancel the whole thing in favour of commercial development, but internal NASA interests and their allies in Congress fought back, and the compromise reached allowed commercial cargo, and ultimately commercial crew, at the price of allowing parts of Constellation to continue in the form of SLS and Orion.
This brings us to the present day. NASAs flagship human exploration program, Artemis, has so far flown a single SLS/Orion stack, 6 years late, and this test flight failed to validate the heat shield on the capsule. NASA just recently announced an intention to fly the Artemis II mission, with a crew on board, without modifications to the heat shield. It may well be that this is the correct decision, and the mission will be successful. But considering the alternative, of dismantling the capsule to replace the heat shield with one that lacks the issue of the Artemis I shield, would add a considerable delay to a flight already delayed to April 2026, and thus make it more likely that the entire SLS/Orion program be cancelled. That there is potentially a trade off between crew safety and survival of a program, even implicitly, should be a cause for concern - especially in such a rigid organisation.
The Other Side of NASA
This is the state of human spaceflight at NASA, and in many ways the unmanned side of things is better run. It doesn’t have the overhang of Apollo so much, and also has the advantage that sending probes to other planets is less costly and less complex than sending humans - although, contrary to what those wishing to axe human spaceflight tend to claim, it also produced less scientific output than a human mission would.
But things are not always rosy there either. The James Webb Space Telescope was late and over budget. The Mars Sample Return Mission is a complete debacle, and it would be far cheaper at this point for NASA to simply offer a bounty for the samples collected and let commercial providers get them back however they can.
When Elon Musk first announced what would become the Starship program in 2016, he also stated an intention to send unmanned, propulsively landed Dragon capsules to Mars on board a Falcon Heavy as precursor missions. Part of the reason this never happened, according to one leaked account, is resistance from JPL who didn’t want outsiders muscling in on their Mars contracts. If there was more of a willingness to outsource this kind of mission in whole or in part to SpaceX at that time, Mars samples might already have been recovered by now.
Other parts of NASA offer similar resistance. Isaacman himself had indicated he wanted to do a Hubble servicing mission as part of the Polaris program, but the agency has so far refused permission to fly to their observatory. The observatory is close to its demise anyway, so this refusal makes little sense from a technical perspective, but does if you consider a closed off, hierarchical organisation that doesn’t want outsiders touching its stuff.
Some argue that human spaceflight is a waste of time, and an agency like NASA should just stick to robots. A Pew survey has shown that human spaceflight is a lower priority with the US public, and nobody would care if human spaceflight went away, but I have some issues with the phrasing of the questions - and more importantly it wasn’t as down on human spaceflight as sometimes reported. Over half of respondents said that sending humans to the Moon and Mars should be a top or important priority. Also, consider just how much space in the messaging of the agency human spaceflight takes up. Those who have convinced themselves its ‘rational’ to only send robots are deluded if they think an agency that exclusively does so would be able to attract anywhere near as much money or have as much public support.
What Of Polaris
If Jared Isaacman is confirmed as the new administrator next year, it is a safe bet he will have to divest himself of conflicting interests. His company owns a share in SpaceX for instance, and it seems unlikely that he could reasonable run his own private program in parallel to running NASA. So the Polaris program as we know it would end.
That could simply be it, or whatever work has been done on future flights of the program could be bought inside NASA. One impact is that there would be a much better chance of a Polaris Hubble servicing mission happening now as part of NASA. There would also be plenty of money for additional missions.
But would Polaris be Polaris if it were bought into NASA? So far, the program seems fairly dynamic and mission-orientated, achieving a great deal towards the objective of making a multi planetary society in its single flight. If done in the public sector, would this be lost? Would Polaris Dawn have suffered as many delays as, say, Artemis II if it had been an agency program?
Politics
In the present organisational structure, would the Administrator have much power to direct such missions in detail in any way? Both previous Administrators have been former Congressmen, and a significant part of the job is dealing with Congress, the various constituencies and interests that go with politics, and getting them to agree to hand over $23 billion of other people’s money. Whilst certainly a good advocate for the cause, will Isaacman understand the workings of Washington well enough to navigate this? And if he is successful at that, is it a valuable use of his time, compared to the leadership he can offer under the private Polaris program without such heavy oversight?
In other words, the question is does the much larger amount of money available from having access to taxpayer money counteract the drag from bureaucratic oversight that will be imposed on anybody handling such money?
He may try to fully reform the system, but it seems a challenge. If you look at contemporary NASA communications, you can still see the high modernist thinking in play. They emphasise the complexity and scale of what they are doing, to impress their audience, which is unusual for modern public sector organisations which more often try to present themselves as using your taxes as efficiently as possible. This promotional video for the Artemis program is an example:
I am British, and so you might argue I have no place commenting on these matters, but European spaceflight is downstream of US spaceflight. After the Moon landings, despite suffering humiliating budget cuts, NASA became the gold standard for scientific and technical excellence. When the European effort to build a launch capability, ELDO, failed abysmally in the 1970s the participating states instead founded ESA as a more or less organisational copy of NASA - there had been substantial transfer of management methods into the precursor organisation ESRO which developed satellite capabilities, and this continued and intensified as the new organisation was built (see Secrets of Apollo by Stephen B. Johnson, chapter 7).
The model that was established in the formative years of NASA has become simply what a space agency is - because man’s greatest achievement in space is still confined to that era. NASA remains the largest agency in the world by funding and can still boast capabilities that no others yet have, such as reaching the outer planets with probes. It doesn’t matter to the public or lawmakers that if organisation is outdated or in need of reform, or indeed that the same agency which put a man on the Moon has also prevented men from returning since. Whenever NASA under-performs what its political masters expect, the question is not so much as what to do new but how to return to its heyday of the 1960s, and the plans that were written there, so it should be no surprise then that archaic ways of thinking and operating persist.
I wish Jared Isaacman well in his new role, and hope he can take humanity to the stars. But this has historically been a near impossible ship to steer. To succeed, he may have to reinvent the very concept of a space agency.
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