What Makes a Space Program Sustainable?

Since the days of the first human setting foot on another world, more than 40 years have passed. In that time, technology has made startling progress in almost all aspects of life on Earth, and yet human space activities have not progressed at a comparable pace.

Reset Cycles, Knowledge Barriers, and Custom Spacecraft

Looking at a summary of human launch vehicle programs conducted by the US government from 1960 until today, one cannot help but think if this was a grade report it would result in a truly bottom-aching spanking. Plotting the horizontal axis as time (years), and the vertical axis as the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) achieved by the time the program concluded, a dismal picture emerges. What the chart shows is a trend towards both shorter and less mature development programs as time progresses. The original Apollo Moon landing program and the Space Shuttle program encountered very significant technological setbacks and cost challenges, yet leadership persevered and the programs eventually succeeded.

In contrast, recent programs have been canceled when challenges were encountered or simple when the new guy took the helm and decided to imprint his own "mark on history" (or erase his predecessors'). Rather than adjusting the approach and continuing based on the lessons learned, an altogether new program is put in place to start from scratch. Not surprisingly, this is related to changes in government leadership. When President G.W. Bush issued his plan to return to the Moon (Project Constellation), Sean O'Keefe was the NASA administrator, and the implementation was led by Admiral Craig Steidle. When Michael Griffin was named as the new NASA administrator, he chose to "reset" the program into a different (his own) approach. Now President Obama has appointed Charles Bolden as the new NASA administrator, and once again the incumbent program is canceled, and a new effort announced to replace it.

In the 60s and 70s there were several large and thriving aerospace companies in the US actively pursuing space launch projects at all scales. Over the next three decades, the industry contracted as if it had bitten a lemon, which left only two companies (Lockheed Martin, the Boeing Company) involved in launch vehicle development of a scale that allow human missions. In 2006, these two companies formed a single entity (United Launch Alliance), eliminating any remnants of competition or technological diversity. Recently, a number of small entrepreneurial space companies have emerged. However, these companies are either heavily dependent on government funding, or forced to pursue near-term profit opportunities such as the potential suborbital market. While their enthusiasm and expertise is beyond question, the realities of operating as a start-up business in a highly resource-intensive industry leave them with limited opportunities. There are also many popular grassroots space organizations, both in the United States and globally. Online discussion forums are filled with thousands of opinion pieces on how human space programs should be improved (this being one of them I suppose), and national organizations gather membership from amateur space enthusiast to former astronauts. These organizations serve the important functions of educating the general public, and advising national policy makers; however, they do not have the aim (or the means) to realize space programs of their own. While their work is commendable, it depends on the actions of other entities (government & private space companies) to implement any specific recommendations.

Another impediment to any sustainable space program is the prevailing culture of closed research. It can be argued that the government's practice of involving commercial space organizations in developing new technology helps to incubate new businesses and energizes the industry. However, these organizations all operate with a commercial business model (by definition), which implies sever barriers to sharing knowledge. Every NASA contractor these days claims technology developed under government funding as their own intellectual property. Never mind the fact that the tax payer reimbursed them for their time to do the work; they still want to the right to leverage licensing fees on anybody who might benefit from that work. While the resulting technology generally remains "free for government use", any other non-government organization is barred from access unless they pay-up. Would we have airlines today if Brayton had patented his "Brayton-cycle" which is at the foundation of every jet-engine in existence? The catalog of technologies developed by NASA contractors in the last 50 years is enormous, and yet it is also mostly forgotten - collecting dust in the proprietary drawers of each individual organization, forcing new endeavors to reinvent the wheel every time (not to mention keeping a couple of patent lawyers on retainer). Without the free flow of information and knowledge, progress slows to a snails pace.

This culture of hoarding information, combined with the repeated resetting of architectural approaches, has cemented the current philosophy of space system design - we build systems which are a long time to create, highly specialized, and used only once. The vast majority of space systems put into operations today are highly purpose-built "custom" projects; only a small fraction of the components is based on any kind of standards. As the people who build these systems retire or leave the industry, their knowledge & skills leaves the community as well. As the systems reach the end of the operational life, they become space-junk: an operational hazard to new spacecraft rather than a resource to be leveraged by the next generation. This needs to change if sustainable space growth is ever to be realized.

Sustainable Design, Policies, and Resources

The history of human space endeavors has many lessons to teach us; possible the most important one of them is that any new space initiative should be sustainable. There is a strong sentiment across virtually all supporters of human space flight that the next time we need to "go there to stay" - but what exactly does it mean for a space program to be sustainable? And what factors need to be considered to achieve sustainability? At its most basic, a sustainable space program needs a smoothly growing resource demand, and a smooth resource supply. These two requirements can then be used to derive the basic characteristics of a sustainable space effort.

First, for a steady resource demand, the architecture of the system needs to be modular and support a step-wise development. Each element put in place, each achievement accomplished, needs to become a building block for the next challenge ahead. There are enormous pressures on any space systems designer to squeeze the last little bit of functionality out of any given spacecraft, launch vehicle, etc, but this approach is short-sighted. We need to transition away from the one-mission approach, and look at space systems as long-term building blocks for many missions instead. There are many examples from other industries where this lesson has already sunk in and created amazing results - we now understand better than ever before that Planet Earth is a closed ecosystem, and nothing we create can really be "thrown away and forgotten" in the long run. Space may be vast, but it is also empty and expensive to get to, and that makes any human space artifact a very valuable resource. Who would want an airplane that can fly to only one destination - and only once - and thereafter becomes a moving obstacle in the sky for any other airplane, until it finally crashes into ground somewhere that's hopefully not in use by people at the moment? Today's spacecraft need to be more like VW Beetle's of the 70s that could run on near anything, and could be fixed with a screwdriver, instead of an F1 car of today which requires a support crew of 20 and a complete rebuild after each run. As exciting as an F1 car is, that's not what I would pick for a trip to the desert ...

The second characteristic required to achieve sustainability, is the flowing-down of established functions to the broader industry, so that organizations focused on research can move on to the next challenge. NASA has taken a step in the right direction here with its Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, but that is only one facet of a sustainable space policy. Not only is it necessary for the function itself (the transport of people and cargo to space in this case) to be opened to a wider base of suppliers, but the technological know-how needs to be shared as well. The current culture of hoarding information, of not sharing insights, and expecting payment in exchange for giving others permission to learn from one's experiences is not only morally questionable but diametrically opposed to the declared goal of a space-fairing humanity. If history has shown us anything so far, it is that the challenge of Space cannot be solved by one individual (whether that's Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong, or a fictional Zefram Cochrane).

Space is the ultimate test for humanity's maturity as a species - as long as we squabble, and jealously guard our individual insights like a bunch of sniveling 3rd graders in a math exam we just won't get there. Even in my own short aerospace career to date, I have repeated the same tasks to solve the same problems dozens (if not hundreds) of times. Working at three different companies, I built the same tool - from scratch - three times, to solve the same problem, and achieving the exact same result; all because the desire for profit (which never materialized anyway) overpowered the shared goal of getting "out there". Instead, imagine what progress could be made, if we could return to the fundamental values of scientific inquiry. Openness is a key aspect of science, which is essentially the process of posing hypotheses and then verifying or disproving them; it is an open and self correcting system. Because of this, progress can occur at a faster rate and in a more dependable / predictable fashion. The speed of progress is greatly enhanced by the practitioners publishing both results and methodology. This helps to introduce others into the field, enables learning from examples and past mistakes, and it makes it possible for anybody to verify or refute the results (or techniques) being proposed. Newton's famous comment about 'standing on the shoulders of giants' alluded to this aspect of science and how openness is a key component to enable sustained growth.

The third fundamental component of a sustainable space program is intelligent use of resources. Space may be empty, but is also crammed full of resources if we can figure out how to leverage them. When the colonial fleets set out to discover the New World, they didn't first stockpile local seafood to last them for the entire journey. In space exploration this concept of "living of the land" is called "In-Situ Resource Utilization" or ISRU. Rather than bringing all that we need with us, we use the raw materials available along the way and at the destination. Either the raw material itself is used, or it is processed on site and transformed into what is needed. For example, regolith found on the Moon can be used to construct protective shelters for a human outpost. It is far more energy efficient to use local material than to lift everything out of Earth's deep gravity well. Water - one of the most important resources for human survival - is surprisingly abundant throughout the Solar System, and many opportunities exist for leveraging local water resources. Water can be found on the rocky planets of the Solar System, on the moons of both inner and outer planets, and maybe most importantly on comets and asteroids throughout the Solar System. Advocates of near term Mars exploration have understood the importance of ISRU for decades - if we want to go to Space to stay, we need to learn how to live of what Space can provide.

The Way Forward - Space at a Crossroads?

We are now once again at the start of a new "reset" cycle in the US space program. While the cancellation of yet another program without any tangible results is frustrating, the current situation also affords us a unique opportunity. Recent world events have made it clearer than ever that we all live in a shared space, and no matter our differences, humanity will not sustain itself unless we learn to coexist with each other and our environment. I see all global human space efforts as not just a frontier for the development of new technologies, but also as the proving ground for new structures of human cooperation. Sustained human space activities will only be achieved if we evolve ourselves, and our behavior, just as much as our technologies. While I think back with nostalgia when recalling the amazing achievements of the first Moon landings nearly half a century ago, I am electrified at the potential of Space now becoming the catalyst for an evolution of global human society. All of the critical problems in our World today are displayed in even sharper contrast when cast within the challenges of Space exploration. Here's to hoping that this time we have the foresight to take the long-road - because when it comes to Space, shortcuts truly go nowhere at all.