The Final Frontier part n+1: A look at the Aldridge Report

Back in January, President Bush outlined his proposal for a new vision of space exploration for the United States. We covered this subject pretty thoroughly in past NFZ essays, and came to a series of conclusions that were less optimistic than what most space advocates would have liked. (We were told this, several times in fact.) This last Wednesday, Mr. Bush's special commission set up to figure out the feasability of his goals released their final report.

Some of the highlights, in no particular order:

* It should not come as a surprise to anybody reading the report that, the Aldridge panel comprised mainly of private-industry experts and commissioned by this most privitization-happy of Presidents, that the Aldridge commission suggest that privitizing much of NASA's organization is indeed the way to go.

* The report's findings and recommendations are maddingly vague for the scope of these plans. No real mention of tehcnical possibilities other than "NASA should study shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicles" or "NASA should study in-situ resource use" without noting that NASA has already studied these concepts, and that for the most part the studies were abandonded due to cost issues.

* Note carefully that all of the endpoint goals for Mr. Bush's space agenda are well past any likely date for him being in office. The moon no later than 2020, Mars no later than 2030... assuming Mr. Bush wins reelection this year, he'll be a private citizen long before any of his goals are met. Unlike JFK, who would have been in office (had he not been killed and managed to win reelection in 1964) in time to see the Apollo 8 mission - not the full completion of his goal, but the last major step before the One Small Step. A good rule of thumb is: If a politican says something and doesn't set a goal before his time of responsibilities comes to an end, then it's probably not going to happen.

* The Space Exploration Steering Council: Creating a permanent direct connection to the executive branch seems like a good idea, but it begs the question why NASA, if it's so incredibly important to the national wellbeing, isn't afforded a Cabinet-level posting? Or why isn't NASA redefined as a Cabinet department, along the lines of the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services, etc.? These are viable options, but it doesn't seem to be addressed by the Aldridge Commission.

* Prizes: Aldridge Report puts emphasis on prizes, citing the X-Prize and the Orteig Prize as examples of successful generators of competition. It does not cite, at least on initial reading, contests which involve a larger non-one-time prize (the $10M for the X-Prize or the $25K for the Orteig in 1927), like the competitions imposed by the USPS in the 1910s and 1920s for airmail contracts. Those contests created a) a suitable goal for industry to meet - a steady contract for vehicles instead of a one-off money cup - and b) provided the losers with hardware to sell elsewhere (mail carriers became the first cargo carriers, and in turn became the first passenger carriers).

* CATS and Industry: Industry is here, but CATS isn't, and that's a big problem. Mr. Bush doesn't seem to grasp that cheap bulk transport is part and parcel of industry - you didn't see many factories out in places like Colorado or Utah or Texas before there were reliable roads and rail traffic, after all. Industry can provide transport now, but it isn't cheap or bulk. The Aldridge Report fails to address the question of getting the cost-per-pound for orbital travel down, and that must be addressed before any large or medium-scale industry can be performed in low orbit or elsewhere.

* The report emphasizes a "go as you pay" approach to space exploration. This looks like a pretty neat little sinkhole for NASA as an organization - NASA must keep their activities sustainable under whatever budget they're working on, but if that budget isn't increased or is cut, they'll have to cut back in order to manage it, thus producing less Buck Rogers per buck, thus giving the administration in power more impetus to cut the budget further or privitize another chunk of the program. The soft bigotry of low expectations indeed. I'm not sure what's more offensive - the smug sincerity behind this, or the cowardly inability to just come out and privitize the whole goddamn thing.

* FFRDCs: The report recommends that NASA's field centers be "modernized" by outsourcing them as federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), but doesn't suggest any methods (beyond "selected through open competition") for making this transition. This is fairly common through the report, as I've already noted. The Commission takes special note that one of the most famous parts of the NASA organization, the Jet Propulaion Laboratory, is actually a FFRDC run by CalTech. However, the report fails to take into account that JPL a) existed for a good long period before NASA, and b) was built as a FFRDC group and not retrofit from an existing government operation. This retrofitting will - not may, will - pose difficulties that the Commission failed to address in their report.

* The Commission also cites the DoD Cost Analysis Improvement Group (CAIG) as an example of what NASA needs. Perhaps; an accurate method of obtaining cost outlays would be useful overall. However, the CAIG doesn't have any actual authority to stop or slow or otherwise end programs if they overrun. Seems to be missing a level of accountability.

* The Commission suggests that moving through Hollywood and video games would be a good way to increase public support for the space program. This isn't a bad idea in theory, but NASA has made a few bad moves in this arena in the past (these are the people who gave official sanction to Armageddon and Space Cowboys, after all) and their public-relations people aren't quite up to handling things like studios and producers. In terms of getting an "in" in Hollywood, NASA could do worse than to grab James Cameron and give him as much official sanction and technical advice as humanly possible.

* Privitization redux: Apparently the members of the Aldredge Commission didn't read the Columbia Accident Report before making their sweeping statements about privitizing NASA launch activities. The CAIB report states pretty clearly that among the failures that led to the loss of Columbia was inadequate safety and quality-control measures taken by the independent contractor responsible for Shuttle flight preparation and launch, United Space Alliance. The QC was not done, or sloppily done, in order to - surprise surprise! - cut costs and insure a larger profit for USA. This is the not sort of thing that engenders great confidence in allowing the current privitization scheme to expand.

* International cooperation in NASA is exemplified by the Commission by the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF, or F-35) program. Insofar as it's a model of international cooperation, the JSF works well enough. However, in terms of the JSF as a completed product, it may just as well have been feasable to cite the Concorde development program as a model of international cooperation - the F-35 as built has a number of problems for it's assigned role, and the rationale for that role has become more difficult to justify in a post-Cold War environment.

* Space science is given an entire chapter of the report, but the chapter doesn't go beyond saying that exploration will be enabled and enabling of science, (File under "gee, you think?") save to recommend that the National Institute of Sciences reevaluate and reorient their goals to coincide with the exploration initiative whenever possible.

Conclusions: In the past, I and the other Zoners have criticized the Bush Space Plan for being a generic knock-off of the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative, for not having any substance to go with the rhetoric, and for generally having been abandoned by Mr. Bush when public opinion did not surge in his favor upon its revelation.

With the release of the Aldridge Report, I can say that pretty much none of my criticisms have been answered, and that many of my fears have been justified. If this report is any indication, and assuming that the administration bothers to implement its recommendations, I forsee NASA undergoing a series of management restructurings that accomplish very little except to bring large chunks of the program out of the Federal accountability loop while still receiving government money.

Bush, through his commission, has not provided us with any goals that will be reached by the end of the decade. Even the primary negative goals of the program, the retirement of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, aren't scheduled until after 2010. No timetables are even suggested in the report. There is no concrete planning for any of the report's findings and recommendations.

The end result of this report, if followed by NASA, would be a weakened agency unable to accomplish its stated goals and at the mercy of an unsympethetic Congress for further funding. Which, I suspect, might be the whole point of this exercise.

POSTSCRIPT; THE "K" FACTOR: As an addendum, Space.com forwarded a set of questions regarding national space policy to Senator Kerry to see where he stood on the question of what America should do in space. His answers were perhaps not as grandiose as the Bush speech from January, but to my mind they suggested that Mr. Kerry - or somebody in his braintrust - understood what needs to be done with NASA and space:

Kerry said that the most immediate impact of the Bush plan is that NASA's resources are being stretched "even further than they were before the Columbia tragedy," forcing NASA to make unpopular choices like canceling a space shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA is currently seeking industry proposals for servicing Hubble robotically, but space agency officials have made clear that the highest priority of such a mission is attaching a module to Hubble that can be used to guide the space telescope safely into the ocean at the end of its life.

Kerry also criticized the Bush Administration for abandoning the hunt for low cost space transportation, a central goal of NASA during the 1990s.

"The most critical element of our space program should be reducing the costs and increasing the reliability of space transportation to and from low Earth orbit," Kerry wrote. "This is just one of the many critical areas lost in the Bush initiative."

Now, the Zone has already pledged alleigance to our Kerry overlords, but I think this statement has successfully reaffirmed that Kerry is in fact the right choice. Understanding that cheap access is, in the long run, more important than sticking Old Glory in the Martian soil is a rare gift for a politician.

Now we just have to get him elected.

Posted by the Fourth Man at June 18, 2004 04:55 PM

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