Cost Is the Barrier to Space : Great Increase in Useful Activities Would Accompany Savings
For those of us involved in the U.S. space program, this is a time for taking stock.
Once the cause of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger has been determined and corrective steps have been taken, the space program can and must go on. The response to the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, in which three astronauts were killed on the launching pad, strengthened the moon-landing program. The Challenger disaster can be expected to do the same for the shuttle program if the engineers and managers are backed by a responsible government policy. I sincerely hope that this will be possible in the Gramm-Rudman world we live in.
Whatever happens, there are some hard tasks ahead. At the memorial service for the seven members of Challenger’s crew, President Reagan said, “We will build your space station.” We know he likes to stick to his commitments. But the space station is the biggest and costliest of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s planned projects. What about the rest of NASA’s programs? This was to be the great year for space science, with the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Hubble Space Telescope both scheduled for launch on the shuttles. Can this still be done? Even with four shuttle vehicles it was hard to schedule these programs. The United States now has no other operational launch systems. That can be corrected, but where will the money come from?
The opportunities in space are great and growing. This is true wherever one looks--communications, astronomy, zero-gravity manufacturing, location and rescue services (for planes, trucks, people), Earth and ocean sciences, crop and mineral surveys, weather and climate forecasting. The list goes on.
Still, the great barrier to progress is cost. NASA prices its lift services in a complicated way, and the real cost depends on how one does the arithmetic. But the cost of lifting one pound of cargo, fuel or person into a stable, low Earth orbit is certainly more than $2,000 per pound. The European unmanned launch system, Ariane, also costs about $2,000 per pound. If these figures were set by the laws of nature or the properties of materials, we would have to accept them. But they are not.
There are two main reasons for this great expense. One is that the technology of chemical rockets is now being pushed to its limit. This art in its present form dates from the 1930s, when Robert Goddard was active and Werner von Braun was starting his amazing career. Gains in this field come hard and slow now.
Fortunately there is a whole range of promising new lift technologies. One that has been in the news recently is the “transplane,” a vehicle that might be usable both for very long-distance trips on Earth (Los Angeles to Sydney, for example), and for direct injection into orbit. There are other approaches ranging in novelty from unmanned heavy lift vehicles built with shuttle engines and other proven subsystems to electromagnetic “rail guns” that could fire payloads into orbit with little or no use of chemical fuels.
Once a satellite has achieved a stable orbit around the Earth and beyond the atmosphere, new possibilities come into play. One idea, the gravity gradient tether, will be tried out in a joint U.S.-Italian project as early as 1988. Another, the family of so-called “ion engines,” was much studied in the United States in the 1960s but never put to use. The West Germans are now actively developing this technology; ironically, we may then buy it back from them.
Of course it costs money to develop new things, and not all clever ideas work in practice. But the promised benefits are very great.
The second reason for high costs is the increasing burden and delay of doing business according to government rules. One personal example must suffice. Around 1970 my colleagues and I designed and carried out an experiment on Apollos 15 and 16 to map the chemical composition of the moon. It took us a little more than a year to propose, design and build the instrument. Now we are beginning a similar project for a planned Mars mission, the Mars Observer. Under the present-day rules we have spent more than a year writing a proper “request for proposals” to interested companies. Years of paperwork lie ahead. As physicist Freeman Dyson has said, “Quick is beautiful” in the world of high technology. Slow is very expensive.
Cutting the cost of launch prices would result in a spectacular increase in useful space activities. A reasonable objective, in my judgment, would be a tenfold reduction to the range of $200 per pound.
This is the challenge for a new generation of creative people. In 1992 we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage, which opened up the Americas to European migration and exploitation. I believe that a more exciting and richer frontier awaits us today. To reach it will take courage, but that is not in short supply. One hopes also for wisdom.
