Dream of boldly going is now going nowhere

Whatever happened to making science fiction fact? When were the dreams of manned space travel lost? Why aren’t there space colonies, orbiting cities, men and women living on the moon and walking on Mars? The answer, says Greg Klerkx in his thoughtful and numbingly informational book “Lost in Space,” is NASA. Once a thrilling group of dreamers and scientists racing to the moon and beyond, it is now, according to Klerkx, a sprawling bureaucratic agency wasting money and potential.

President George W. Bush, in newfound “last frontier” fervor, has set goals to return to the moon by 2020 and eventually use it as a launchpad for manned flight to Mars. Bush proposes to add $1 billion in new funds over the next five years and has directed NASA to divert $11 billion in its existing budget for the effort. Is this a ploy from the White House to divert attention away from our problems at home? If not, will future presidents keep this new Space Age flame burning? A reading of Klerkx’s highly critical history of NASA would suggest that if such a mission to the moon and Mars does come to pass, it won’t be at a level of excellence because of the agency’s penchant for red tape, bureaucratic heavy-handedness, foot-dragging and lack of vision.

Klerkx, a former senior manager of the nonprofit SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), heaps blame on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for failing to realize that the future of space exploration must involve cooperation with other countries and collaboration with other groups and the private sector. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon 35 years ago. Since then, Klerkx writes, the space shuttle tragedies and efforts to serve the international space station have guzzled money and other resources for limited gains.

“NASA changed from an organization that would risk its future for an outrageous goal -- bold and daring, worthy of sacrifice -- to one that wanted more than anything else to simply survive,” Klerkx contends. “Instead of opening doors to ... expansion in space ... NASA and its Big Aerospace partners closed ranks.... NASA the agency was born an addict to the federal trough and, thus, a slave to political whim and process.”

Klerkx also writes about the people and companies outside NASA trying to get into the “space business” and make space a commodity. They include SpaceHab, which builds cargo, personnel and science modules that fit into the payload bay of the space shuttle’s orbiter, and Kistler Aerospace, whose K-1 rocket would operate like the shuttle, using reliable, cheap, powerful Russian engines. Much of this discussion is intriguing (particularly to readers who know very little about companies exploring other options of space travel unconnected to NASA) and thoughtful, if heavy on financial issues and confusing acronyms. Klerkx clearly holds these people in higher regard than NASA and its top brass.

He spends little time on NASA’s successes (Apollo, the Hubble telescope, and Viking, for instance). Instead, he criticizes the space-shuttle program for its huge appetite for dollars, minimal gains and troubling history of fatal accidents. After the loss of Challenger in 1986, Klerkx said experts estimated the risks of it happening again at 1 in 500. “As it stands now in reality, with the loss of two orbiters in 113 missions, the shuttle’s failure rate is a more sobering 1 in 57,” he writes.

Klerkx also discusses the gains of the Russian space program in its exploration of privatizing space flight and asserts that President Nixon wanted to kill the NASA program altogether because of its close association to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It is clear that the author has done a great deal of research and knows quite a lot about efforts at space travel and exploration as well as its finance and politics.

Yet the book is hardly objective, and his constant criticisms of NASA weaken the stronger segments of the book. Will we realize our goals to land on Mars? Will we colonize the moon? No doubt Klerkx is somewhere right now shaking his head no.