The Purpose of Human Spaceflight and a Lunar Architecture to Explore the Potential of Resource Utilization

This 2016 paper (updating an architecture written 6 years ago ) details how to fulfill the 2018 Presidential Directive to return to the Moon.  It also addresses how to use the existing SLS and Orion programs to enhance the plan.

As you read it, please note how this paper addresses many questions and talking points being bounced back and forth in the current national debate about the U.S. space program.

The LOP-G in orbit around the Moon. Look, but don’t touch.

There was real excitement in the lunar community last fall when Vice President Mike Pence announced, during a meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council, that the next step in human spaceflight would be our return to the Moon. Advocates for this direction felt enormous relief; at last, reason had returned to the strategic planning of NASA’s human program – a program stalled for the last decade, merely marking time. True enough, the new Orion spacecraft is being built and the new SLS launch system development continues; but with only one boilerplate flight of same (and that launched on an existing Delta-IV Heavy, not the SLS), many felt certain the Orion program was trapped in development hell.

The space policy directive put forth by the new Administration, one of returning to the Moon’s surface, was long overdue. It appeared that despite programmatic delays, a return to the Moon was back in the cards. But six months later, that direction, along with all of our earlier optimism, is now in question.

The first and biggest problem is that a year-and-half into President Trump’s administration, NASA still has no permanent Administrator. The nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a superb selection from any honest perspective, has been stymied in the Senate by the machinations of Florida’s two senators, Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio. Due to the narrow Republican majority in the Senate, the actions of these two have had an overstated impact on the nomination voting process. So, while Rep. Bridenstine’s confirmation vote is held up in the Senate, NASA has been unable to initiate the space policy direction called for by the Administration, because, in Beltway terms, it can do nothing, except continue to execute the existing program of record.

The current Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot is retiring this month and no doubt another interim chief will be designated. Their job will be to see that the agency keeps running: whether towards somewhere, or in place, is irrelevant. Thus, plans made during the Obama administration, no matter how idiotic or irrelevant to our national strategic goals, are kept, adapted or simply, re-branded.

And that brings us to the development and deployment of the Deep Space Gateway (DSG, a.k.a., LOP-G, Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway). This piece of space hardware is what’s left of the Obama-era Asteroid Redirect Mission, a plan almost universally derided by the space community, to capture an asteroid boulder, bring it to cislunar space and let a manned Orion vehicle study it. This bizarre scheme was adopted once it was found that a near-Earth asteroid suitable for a human visit did not exist. Aside from the utter pointlessness of such a mission, it seems we are on track to take the manned space development budget and spend it on this “Mini-Me” space station, one that cannot (other than for short periods) be permanently inhabited because of resupply problems, hard radiation environment and other considerations.

NASA has easily morphed the ARM into the DSG because they are essentially the same spacecraft – a solar electric propulsion (SEP) module, a habitation module and a docking collar. The LOP-G will be placed in what is called a rectilinear halo orbit, an elliptical path varying between 7000 and 70000 above the Moon. The idea is to make the LOP-G a test Mars transfer vehicle, in that SEP is being considered as a way to move cargo between Earth and Mars. As a staging node for going to the lunar surface, the LOP-G leaves a great deal to be desired, as it has both a high propulsive cost (greater than 2.4 km/s) and serious phasing problems for lunar arrival and departure. How does this square with the Trump administration’s call to return to the Moon?

Because (wait for it)…..LOP-G is in orbit around the Moon!

With this “wool-over-their-eyes” program, the agency has many believing that they have dutifully answered Vice-President Pence’s bold challenge for lunar return. And, mirabile dictu, it’s a “twofer,” as they’ve managed to keep their eye on the “real prize” – Mars.

Alas, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. In fact, the LOP-G answers neither lunar nor martian mission needs particularly well. The location of the platform does not allow easy access to the lunar surface, and certainly not for a single-stage vehicle. Some independent means to get cargo and (probably) crew down to the Moon will have to be developed, which means that the LOP-G is irrelevant to lunar return. Mars mission architectures are in way too early a state of development to determine if the LOP-G is useful for them and likely to be fraught with additional complications. It would be much simpler, in each case, to assemble what you need in low Earth orbit and then go the destination of choice.

But NASA wants the DSG/LOP-G and so, there it is. But wait! How has NASA – an agency “operating” without a new Administrator for the past 18 months – continued to function and set policy direction without the Trump Administration’s pick at the helm? Easy – the continuing and permanent bureaucracy of the agency determines what policy or program it wants, slow-rolls any newly proposed changes or alterations to the previous policy, and eventually, what was in (slow) motion, stays in (exceedingly slow) motion – implemented by default, with the change agents eventually having to give up and go home. We are watching this process in action now.

Hang on – I thought that the newly reconstituted National Space Council was supposed to provide educated, adult supervision to the NASA bureaucrats? Surely, if the Vice President announces a new policy of lunar return, the Council will monitor NASA management and assure that the agency complies with that directive. In this case, it appears that such has not occurred. Or, more precisely, it appears that for some reason, the Council is convinced that NASA is complying with that directive. They certainly claim to be. New artwork of the LOP-G always shows the Moon in the background, so we must be going to the Moon, right? However, note the composition in the image above – the Moon, always in the background. Although I hesitate to conclude that the Council is deficient here, they appear unable to see through this slight-of-hand in order to direct difficult, pointed questions to the minions generating this smokescreen.

The biggest indicator that NASA has no interest in going to the lunar surface came with the recent announcement that the launch of a small mission called Resource Prospector – a mission designed to land at one of the Moon’s poles and sample polar volatiles – has been delayed, once again, this time until 2022. This relatively simple mission would be our first look at lunar polar ice, a mission critical to the idea of developing and using the resources of the Moon. So with this “delay,” it appears there is no plan for NASA to locate and examine lunar resources in order to learn and understand their potential implications for America’s national economy and its security. True enough, small commercial missions may get there before 2022, but we’re talking about a supposed national priority and the importance of being back on the Moon at a time when other countries are already moving ahead in this important cislunar arena.

When the White House asked for cost estimates for lunar return, no effort was made to realistically estimate the costs to develop a new lunar lander. My sources tell me that the old Augustine Committee/Aerospace Corporation estimates of 2009 were hauled out in response. I have discussed previously why that effort was seriously flawed and deficient; those cost estimates are from the 2007-2009 Altair effort and have no more relation to the real cost of new lander development than the cost of a B-17 has to a Space Shuttle.

Is there a solution to this on-going space policy problem, one that involves vital national interests? If Rep. Jim Bridenstine were to be swiftly confirmed and allowed to take office, would the ship correct its course? There is good reason to suspect that even in the case of that happy eventuality, due to the long delay in getting Bridenstine confirmed, we will still waste time and money on the LOP-G. The agency has convinced the White House and Congress that LOP-G is the first step towards going to the Moon, despite the falsity of their claim.

That said, a strong hand in the Administrator’s chair could help redirect some of the more egregious missteps in direction of the agency. A vigorous program of robotic prospecting missions to the lunar poles to gather key strategic data for the ice deposits could be instituted for a modest amount of money. Such data are crucial to almost any future lunar surface operations (and other eventual space destinations), at least to those who understand and are concerned about creating a new, affordable, extendable and productive spaceflight capability.

Have we lost the Moon? Perhaps not, but we are pretty close to it. Message to National Space Council: Please take the necessary time and initiative needed in order to clearly and independently understand the situation, then fulfill your mandate and hold NASA’s feet to the fire!

The new Orion spacecraft — Cadillac or Edsel?

Throwing a wrench into NASA’s engine of progress may not have been the intent of Vice President Pence’s first meeting of the National Space Council with his announcement that a human return to the lunar surface is the new direction for America’s human spaceflight program. But a wrench it was and will remain until pieces of the formerly touted “Journey to Mars” – the heavy lift SLS launch vehicle, the Orion spacecraft, and a relatively recent addition, the Deep Space Gateway (DSG, a small human-tended space station in a distant orbit around the Moon) – are reimagined and torqued into the new strategic direction.

Much venom has been hurled at the SLS launch vehicle, largely on the grounds of its alleged cost and its origins as a “government rocket” (i.e., “pork”). But heavy lift launch capability is extremely useful for the emplacement of a substantial cislunar infrastructure. Heavy lift permits the launch of large and/or multiple vehicles and facilities all at one time, and that makes the coordination of their arrival and assembly at a selected trans-LEO destination easier. The core SLS vehicle delivers 70-80 metric tones to LEO, more than enough to put about 10 tones on the lunar surface, or 15-20 tones into low lunar orbit. In addition, a large rocket also offers a large shroud diameter; volume can actually be more critical than throw mass for large architecture pieces like big landers and habitat elements. Technically, the SLS is a good fit for any future lunar return architecture.

The main argument against the SLS is its cost, but current estimates of $1-2 billion per launch are based primarily on the low projected flight rate planned by the previous program of record, which called for very few missions. A faster pace of a lunar surface return could bring these costs down, although they would still be in the range of multi-hundreds of millions of dollars per flight. If the long-promised and long-awaited commercial heavy lift vehicle eventually emerges, this estimate of cost – and the choice of a heavy lift launch vehicle – should be re-evaluated (but not until then).

The Deep Space Gateway (DSG) is an idea that comes from a variety of architectural studies that looked at the use of a staging node placed beyond LEO – well outside of Earth’s gravity well, for a human Mars mission. Initially focused on the Earth-Moon Lagrange Points, subsequent studies converged on something called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, a complex path around the Moon that is relatively stable (requiring little orbital maintenance propulsion). The orbit selected for initial study is quite far from the Moon, up to 70,000 km distant. While this distance may make a good staging orbit for a departing Mars mission, it cannot easily support missions to low lunar orbit or to the lunar surface – the new strategic direction (delta-v to the surface from this orbit is near lunar escape velocity, ~2400 m/s).

In our published architectures (Spudis-Lavoie – Using the resources of the Moon to create a permanent, cislunar space faring system (2011) and Lavoie-Spudis – The Purpose of Human Spaceflight and a Lunar Architecture to Explore the Potential of Resource Utilization (2016), a propellant depot/transfer node is placed in low lunar orbit to keep the lunar lander transport a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle, making the lander completely reusable. Moving the node point to the Earth-Moon L-1 point costs roughly an extra 800 m/s in delta-v. Our lander design is already challenged with the requirement of re-usability (mostly propulsion system concerns: multi-start use lifetime, with little to no maintenance) and by having an engine-out capability to provide reasonable abort scenarios. Other design considerations include extreme temperature variations (thermal cycles) and parts fatigue, which results in higher subsystem mass than a single-use lander. All of these factors lead us to place the depot/node at the lowest reasonable point in orbit around the Moon, ~100 km circular. Orbital maintenance is on the order of 500 m/s/yr, which is achievable for the depot. After initial operations, the depot/node can change its orbit to a more advantageous one should future lander designs prove more capable.

Properly reconfigured, the DSG could serve as a low lunar orbit habitat-depot-node. This would require re-thinking its mission (fuel depot in addition to habitat) and its thermal design, because low lunar orbit can be quite warm on the daytime side of the Moon. The “lumpiness” of the uneven lunar gravity field (mascons) makes low orbits unstable and considerable propulsion is necessary to maintain it. However, we now have lunar gravity maps of extraordinary quality that reveal “frozen orbits” – ones where virtually no orbital maintenance is required (the currently operating LRO spacecraft is in such a frozen orbit). Use of these orbits would need to be traded against accessibility and lander energy cost, but in any event, a propellant depot would possess more than adequate propulsion for orbital maintenance. Finally, and most importantly, a station in low lunar orbit is well placed to support operations in space and on the lunar surface.

If both the SLS and the DSG could be adapted to the requirements of lunar surface return, what about Orion? Consider this: Orion was originally conceived as a component of the Constellation spaceflight system; it was designed to transport people to and from the Moon in a manner similar to the Apollo spacecraft. In short, this was a mission launched “all up” from Earth, with pieces discarded after use along the way. In the case of Constellation, two vehicles, Ares I and V, would launch the Orion and the Altair and transfer stage, respectively. The two vehicles would dock in low Earth orbit and depart for the Moon. Burning into lunar orbit, the crew would transfer to the Altair lunar lander and descend and land on the Moon for a period of a couple of weeks. After exploration of the landing site, the crew would ascend to the orbiting Orion and transfer into it for their journey home. The Orion spacecraft would discard its service module and re-enter the atmosphere at near-escape velocity, splashing down in the ocean for recovery. At each step in the above mission sequence, parts are discarded and not reused, requiring high levels of funding and leaving little, if any, hardware in space as legacy infrastructure.

When the Constellation program was cancelled in 2010, Orion was the only piece preserved, largely because at the time, it was the only spacecraft capable of sending American astronauts into space. However, without its Altair lander, Orion was no longer a lunar spacecraft system. It instead became a vehicle whose only purpose is to send crew into trans-LEO space and allow them to return to Earth with aero-thermal entry. It can support a crew of four, for periods of a couple of weeks, but cannot last much longer. It is for this reason that the ill-conceived Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) concept was born – designed to give Orion someplace to go and something to do. Despite the fact that the ARM was nearly worthless scientifically and operationally, it was a mission configured to the capabilities of the Orion spacecraft. To support this scaled back mission profile, the current edition of the Service Module for the Orion (built by the Europeans) is smaller than the previous edition under Constellation. Unfortunately, that also means that the Orion can get into (but cannot then get out of) low lunar orbit, taking from Orion what little value it had for a possible lunar mission.

Where does that leave things as NASA contemplates lunar return? We currently have three pieces of space hardware, each configured to support a vaguely defined series of missions to deep cislunar space. The SLS can be adapted to transport all the pieces we need to establish and operate an outpost on the Moon. The Deep Space Gateway can be modified to operate in low lunar orbit, making it a possible staging node for trips to and from the Moon’s surface. But that still leaves us with Orion. True enough, crew members leaving the Moon will need a way to return to Earth, but if a permanent outpost is established there, we need to develop a reusable system that transports crew and cargo to and from low Earth orbit on a recurring basis (a reusable cislunar transfer stage). Such a vehicle would fire a rocket to accelerate out of LEO into a translunar trajectory. Approaching the Moon, it could burn into and out of low lunar orbit, delivering crew and supplies to be transferred into the lunar lander vehicle. On the way home, rather than direct entry and landing on Earth, it would aerobrake (i.e., use Earth’s atmosphere to slow the vehicle from escape velocity to orbital velocity) into Earth orbit and rendezvous with a transfer node in LEO. Here the crew would transfer to a commercial vehicle for return to Earth. All of these systems have been envisioned, at least conceptually, by a variety of published architectures over the last decade.

But can Orion be repurposed? In contrast to most informed opinion, I believe that of the three major human spaceflight pieces described here, Orion is the one that is the least useful and most likely to vanish. This should not be too surprising, considering that it is an orphaned, smaller piece of a larger system designed to return people to the Moon. Yet work continues on Orion, heedless of any possible change in mission – and has done so throughout the last 8 years as its mission gradually morphed from Moon-Mars spacecraft, to an asteroid spacecraft, to a “Space Station in Deep Space” spacecraft. This bureaucratic resilience suggests that setting Orion aside is a nonstarter – contractors and Congressional advocates may insist on its continuation, in a manner similar to the SLS “lobby,” which assured continuity of that development program.

Ideally, one would design a return to the Moon using a clean sheet, focusing on early robotic presence and a series of newly imagined, modular, reusable space-based human assets. However, we do not live in that world. So the question is how to “MacGyver” what we have to get what we need. Listed in order of decreasing usefulness, SLS, DSG and Orion can all be used in a lunar return. The SLS provides us a way to get large, heavy payloads to the Moon. The DSG, while not currently configured to support lunar surface activities, could be modified to do so without too much re-design. The Orion could be used for early human flights to the DSG – establishing a human presence near the Moon, while robots would do much of the early resource prospecting and processing work on the surface. After human return to the lunar surface, Orion could be docked at the DSG and serve as a “lifeboat” vehicle in the event that emergency circumstances require the outpost crew return quickly to Earth.

From Super-Apollo to crew assured-return vehicle – a diminished ending to a once-noble vehicle development? Possibly. It depends on your point of view. As it currently exists, Orion is not a particularly useful spacecraft. But if we use it to help establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, it will have served a noble purpose indeed.

The mighty Saturn V, off to the Moon.

As we approach the anniversary of the first landing on the Moon (48 years on July 20), it is traditional for space opinion writers to wistfully look back on that lost “Golden Age” when humans ventured beyond low Earth orbit and set foot on another world. This lament for the past is particularly acute within NASA, whose entire self-image is wrapped around a romanticized vision of a tough, risk-taking, and technically competent organization. “Failure is not an option!” Just ignore the fact that Gene Kranz never said that, at least while the mission was underway (he did use it much later as a book title). Hollywood writes history these days, not the other way around.

Simultaneously, the Apollo missions to the Moon are the acme of American space achievement and the anchor weighing it down. And it is this paradoxical status that makes the age of Apollo both a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because it showed us what was possible in space, yet also a curse, for convincing many that the Apollo approach and architecture remains the Holy Grail for great accomplishment in spaceflight. I submit that we must continue to honor and celebrate the glory, but now we must throw off the curse.

Let us briefly recall why America went to the Moon. The effort was not undertaken to develop the means for human spaceflight, or to settle the Solar System, or to explore the wonders of the cosmos. It was done in our bid to achieve a difficult, technical task ahead of the Soviet Union. By 1961, that communist nation had racked up a number of impressive space “firsts,” including the first satellite, the first man in space, and the first probe to the Moon. Hoping to challenge the Soviets on a very public stage and win, the United States considered several different complex technical projects (including President John F. Kennedy’s personal favorite – the desalination of seawater). Space was the chosen playing field. Though the Soviets were ahead in building large rockets and could possibly build an Earth-orbiting space station, neither nation had yet mastered the ability to land a man on the Moon.

Kennedy asked NASA to devise an approach that would give the United States its best chance to beat the USSR to the Moon. Although NASA had many imaginative and competent engineers at that time, its spiritual godfather and guru was Wernher von Braun. In the 1950s, von Braun had devised an elaborate architecture for spaceflight and published it in a series of articles (with contributions from other space experts) in Collier’s, a popular national magazine. This architecture was incremental and cumulative – the development of pieces for a space transportation system that gradually but continuously expanded human reach into space. Those pieces were: Earth-to-orbit rockets, a space station in Earth orbit, a “Moon tug” to travel back and forth between Earth orbit and the Moon, and finally a manned Mars spacecraft. Each piece was optimized to serve its particular function, and to work in tandem with the other pieces – incremental and cumulative, whereby they would collectively permit the movement of people and cargo between Earth, Moon and the planets.

The von Braun template was a no-go, as the gauntlet thrown down by President Kennedy came with a deadline: “before this decade is out.”  But building an infrastructure for a permanent, spacefaring system requires time, and in a race, time is not a free variable. Hence, NASA instead developed an architecture that launched everything needed to travel to the Moon and back with a single (or at most, double) launch. This architecture required a mega-heavy lift booster, one capable of hurling over 100 metric tons to LEO. The subsequently developed Saturn-Apollo system was truly an engineering marvel – one that brilliantly completed its assigned task. Some within NASA thought they might continue using this newly developed Apollo-Saturn hardware to explore the Moon and go to Mars. But the Apollo system was handcrafted and thus, cost much more than the nation was willing to spend on space hardware. In a bid to make spaceflight both cheaper and routine, decision makers turned to the development of a reusable Space Shuttle.

For its designers, the Shuttle was considered to be the first piece of the original von Braun architecture: shuttle, station, Moon tug, Mars mission. Hence, the Shuttle program was given the official name “Space Transportation System (STS),” as it was believed that Shuttle would be the first piece of this new, incremental spaceflight system. Though routine flight to and from LEO was achieved, the operation of the Shuttle was more difficult than imagined and the cost of spaceflight remained high. After the Challenger accident in 1987, the STS label was banished. But more than a simple name was lost – the central idea of developing an incremental, cumulative spacefaring system also disappeared.

When the goal of a return to the Moon and a Mars mission was announced by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, NASA responded to that challenge with what was essentially a large-scale version of the von Braun architecture (The 90-Day Study). This effort was ridiculed and derided, especially after its supposed total, end-to-end cost was leaked to the press ($600 billion over 30 years, about $20 billion per year on average). Invariably, the contrast was drawn between the then-existent space program of record – the “incremental” Shuttle-Station effort, which had run into multiple technical, programmatic and financial difficulties, and the “all-up” Apollo program, which had achieved great things quickly in the distant past. More firmly than ever, the sense of having lost our way from the previous “golden age” took hold in the space community and it has never departed.

This vague nostalgia for Apollo is especially true inside the agency, which recognizes that it’s lost the sheen of glory it once possessed – proudly working inside buildings where vestiges of the heroes and hardware of that time are enshrined and heralded. NASA is an agency revered due to the great accomplishment of the Apollo program, but because of the long passage of time, it does not appear to comprehend what it took to achieve that vision. Not only did the Apollo program have a clear goal with a deadline but it also drew on an aerospace technical and industrial infrastructure that no longer exists. Hence, we get absurd pronouncements about a fantasy “Journey to Mars,” a program for which there is no technical approach, no fiscal means, and no political will to undertake. Rather than embracing a workable architecture that focuses on building an incremental system fueled by lunar resources – one that could eventually take us to many destinations in deep space – they fixate on the Apollo template to send people to Mars, a “launch it all from Earth” spacecraft system that (they believe) will re-capture the magic and glory of that distant era. This fixation has taken us nowhere and will continue to take us nowhere.

The “curse” of Apollo is not that we once went to the Moon and now cannot, or even the way that we did it, but rather the notion that, because Apollo is the only deep space approach that has been successful, it remains the best way to access deep space. Despite the fact that the original notion behind the development of Shuttle as the first piece of a “space transportation system” had a lot of merit, we continue to plan for a series of launches that send expendable spacecraft to Mars in attempts to resurrect that Apollo-like paradigm of “design, build, launch, use and discard.” That approach is not a sustainable one as evidenced by the fact that it was not sustained, despite the immense good will generated by and for a strong space program.

In the current NASA human spaceflight program, initial flights are scheduled to occur within the next couple of years. The Orion-SLS stack is yet another version of the Apollo template, a re-imagining of the cancelled Project Constellation – built largely because the Congress was concerned that a national capability (the Space Shuttle) was being discarded and that no non-governmental replacement was evident. These are entirely defensible grounds for developing a new spaceflight system, but now the nation is confronted with a decision: Where shall we go and what shall we do with this new spacecraft? And having paid for its development, are we now willing to pay the costs for its operation?

The core SLS vehicle puts 70 metric tons into LEO and could quickly emplace the cornerstone elements (e.g., transfer nodes and stages, spacecraft, landers) of a cislunar transportation system in space. This would be the best use of the SLS system as it is already optimized for cislunar missions. Moreover, the Orion spacecraft with its multi-week dwell capability will be useful for our initial return to cislunar space. But Orion, with its water landing and semi-disposable architecture, cannot be the means by which we establish a permanent space transportation system. We must transition to a permanent space-based system, one emphasizing assets that allow transfer, refueling and reuse between the various energy levels of cislunar space.

We know that the Apollo template can be made to work because it worked in the past – for a price. And that is the curse of Apollo – it worked, whereas an incremental, cumulative system that could move us into the Solar System has never been constructed and shown to work. The Space Shuttle and International Space Station gave us the first two pieces of the von Braun architecture – now Shuttle is gone and Station has limited life left after completing its first decade in orbit. Fifty years hence will we still be writing about the Apollo era and those early days of accomplishment for the American civil space program? Or will we be writing about new discoveries and technology born from our resolve to set our national space program on a new course of spectacular achievement?

Possible layout of a Brilliant Pebble. The Clementine spacecraft carried the sensor suite that this vehicle would have used. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).

The recent successful interception of a ballistic missile in flight recalls earlier fevered debates of the 1980s and 90s over the “feasibility” of missile defense. Back then, “settled science” declared that missile defense was either impossible, or of such technical difficulty as to make the eventual deployment of a working system extremely unlikely. Although such “expert” judgment aligned more with political inclination than with sound technical assessment, it served its intended and useful media purpose of providing “proof” that SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), initiated in 1983, would never work. A similar set of circumstances exists today, as development and use of space resources to create new spaceflight capabilities faces familiar objections and roadblocks.

Leveraging access and capability in space through the use of the material and energy resources found in space gained traction during the initial study phases of SDI. Such a connection is logical – SDI was a program designed to establish a significant space presence by using a number of satellite assets with widely varying requirements (depending on their function: observation, monitoring, interdiction, or protection). Research initially focused on the deployment of unmanned systems from Earth, but it soon became apparent that the significant mass requirements needed by space-based missile defense put a strain on then-existing launch costs and capabilities. Most mass (weight) required in space is “dumb” mass (i.e., low information density) such as bulk material for shielding and protection, and propellant for the movement of assets throughout near-Earth space. Extended human missions beyond LEO faced similar difficulties. Thus, finding and using materials and energy from space-based sources became a topic of interest in both areas of research.

In 1983, a group of planetary scientists and defense space experts considered the acquisition and uses of space resources to support our national strategic needs. The report from this meeting recommended a research program designed to assess whether, and how, space resources from near-Earth asteroids and the Moon might be accessed and deployed. Their work considered a variety of needs for such a system, including orbital transfer vehicles (to move payloads between low Earth orbit and higher regions of cislunar space), propellant depots, and the use of bulk material to shield and protect satellite assets. Participants in the workshop included people from the NASA Johnson Space Center who were studying lunar base concepts, so the marriage of these two streams of inquiry occurred very early. This cross-fertilization continued with additional meetings and conferences during the 1980s, where the problems and benefits of using space resources were further examined.

Meanwhile, research in SDI techniques continued apace. Although a variety of approaches were studied, space-based missile defense architectures eventually moved from laser and particle beam weapons to kinetic energy interceptors, largely because there was less technical risk associated with such a system (we already knew that a high-velocity impact could destroy a target). A group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory led by Dr. Edward Teller developed one such system called Brilliant Pebbles (BP). The Brilliant Pebble concept used swarms of small satellites, each with its own independent sensing, computing, and propulsion capabilities. The spacecraft were small (“pebbles” – each a few 10s of kg) yet possessed significant autonomy and computing capacity (“brilliant”); when deployed by the thousands, they would create robust redundancy and thus, reliability. The Brilliant Pebbles concept took advantage of a variety of new advanced technologies already developed to support defense applications and applied them to the deep space mission of strategic missile defense.

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) that included a permanent return to the Moon and a future human mission to Mars. The Synthesis Group, chaired by Astronaut Thomas Stafford, was convened in 1990 by the White House to study architectures for this program. The assembled group considered a variety of architectures made up from “waypoints” that described a capability or a theme; several waypoint themes featured the use of space resources, including the Fuels, Energy and Asteroids Waypoints. It was proposed to use materials and energy from both asteroids and the Moon to augment capabilities for people on the Moon and in deep space. I was part of this study team and participated in defining these waypoints. Another member of the team was Dr. Stewart Nozette, who had edited the 1983 workshop report and was then employed by Lawrence Livermore on Brilliant Pebbles.

Nozette’s idea – testing the BP sensor suite and providing operational experience with a small, semi-autonomous spacecraft by flying a “Brilliant Pebble” – was the concept that became Clementine, the 1994 mission that flew to the Moon. In the course of 74 days, Clementine globally mapped the Moon in 11 colors in the visible and near-infrared, allowing us to map the location of resources (notably, iron and titanium) on the Moon. But the real payoff came from an improvised experiment that beamed radio waves into the dark regions near the lunar poles. By measuring the properties of reflected radio echoes from the poles, we found that water ice, long suspected by some planetary scientists, exists in the dark areas.

Some scientists were not convinced that ice was what we’d detected, largely on the grounds that the enhancement in same sense echoes seen in the Clementine radar data could also be cause by surface roughness. Thus began a decade-long debate over the meaning of the Clementine results. The debate was eventually resolved with additional data from subsequent missions, such as Lunar Prospector (which found enhanced hydrogen at the poles), India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission (that found polar ice using imaging radar), the LRO mission (a variety of spectral and remote evidence for water) and finally, the LCROSS spacecraft (which kicked up water ice particles and vapor by the impact of an empty Centaur stage near the south pole of the Moon). It is now widely agreed that significant amounts of water ice exist near the lunar poles, although its form and distributions remain unknown.

Although the presence of water on the Moon generated a variety of plans to develop and use it, skepticism about using space resources remains. The essence of these complaints sound very familiar to anyone conversant with the debates over SDI in the 1980s – “it’s too expensive and it won’t work.” But more significantly, both developments – SDI and exploiting space resources – upset the existing paradigm. For SDI, the idea that we should actively defend ourselves rather than passively await our annihilation actually offended those devoted to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction – the strategic paradigm under which we have lived for over half a century. As for space resource utilization, much of the current skepticism stems from the notion that we can somehow lower launch costs to a point, where everything we need in space, can be cheaply launched from Earth. One can see how this concept would be supported by much of the aerospace industry, as the development and operation of launch vehicles is a path of operation with known risks and rewards, while developing lunar propellant or making a lunar base through 3-D printing of lunar regolith, sounds like risky science-fiction.

The path to new and revolutionary capabilities is often littered with stumbling blocks and naysayers. The success of the recent missile defense test reminds us that something worthwhile, though extremely difficult, can usually be achieved (and hopefully, achieved in time). Space resource utilization is connected to both space-based defense and to human spaceflight. And in both cases, significant mass is needed in deep space, in much larger quantities than is practicable to launch solely from Earth’s surface. So, by dedicating our efforts to increase our capabilities in both of these areas, they will become both synergistic and mutually supporting.

President Trump signs the new 2017 NASA Authorization bill. Is a new version of the National Space Council in the works?

News reports indicate that some version of a national space council (with Vice-President Mike Pence as chair) might be established. For some, the idea of a White House-level committee designed to monitor the nation’s space program may seem like a new idea, but in fact, it originated at the dawn of our civil space program. The purpose of a space council is to provide executive oversight of major space programs, both to ease possible obstructions that might arise during execution of a program and to assist in coordinating contributions from different entities participating in a national effort.

Different space councils have taken a variety of forms over the past 60 years, ranging from being intimately involved in the creation and implementation of policy to virtual non-existence. The most famous incarnation of the concept was the National Space Council under President George H.W. Bush, who conceived an ambitious plan of human exploration of the Moon and Mars. Reports detailing the announcement of that major initiative and its subsequent fate make for doleful reading, but in order to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of a space council, this story and the events leading up to it need to be retold.

The late 1980s was a depressing time for America’s space program. Following the loss of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986, there was an extended pause in human spaceflight – a shadow had been cast on the idea that access to space had become “routine.” More significantly, the then-next NASA program (Space Station Freedom) was caught in an endless loop of design and revision; not a single piece of station hardware had been launched by the end of that decade. Following more than a year of work, including public hearings and getting input from a wide variety of experts, an ambitious report on future space activities from a Presidential Commission (The National Commission on Space, which included luminaries such as Neil Armstrong) was released to near-universal indifference. Yet within NASA, teams of engineers and scientists had devised detailed plans for a human return to the Moon, as well as first-order studies of possible architectures for a follow-on mission to Mars.

In January of 1989, as the last phases of the Cold War were being playing out and Soviet influence and power were rapidly declining, President George H.W. Bush began his administration. The defense build-up of the Reagan years had created an American technological juggernaut of unsurpassed power and excellence. An unanswered question at the time was, “What is to become of this capability?” The United States was the most powerful country in the world, yet absent the imminent threat of a Soviet Union, such capability would likely dissipate. How then could this technological base – a national industrial and human capital infrastructure of immense power and capability and a major contributor to national wealth and innovation – be maintained, if not at its current level, then at least at levels high enough to be resurrected in times of some future national need or emergency?

One answer was to channel these capabilities toward other productive endeavors, ones that required high technology, large industrial capacity, and human capital working in an intellectually challenging environment. Although never so articulated by the Bush administration, it is my belief that it was decided that those requirements could be met by using some of these Cold War capabilities for the civil space program. This transfer of effort would accomplish several goals: we would maintain our technical innovative edge (a capability necessary for future conflicts and one that also contributed to our national wealth) and re-invigorate the moribund space program by adopting a challenging – yet reachable – set of goals. On July 20, 1989, President G.H.W. Bush stood on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum and announced the “Space Exploration Initiative” (SEI). It called for a human return to the Moon (“this time, to stay”) and a human mission to Mars. No timelines or detailed plans were produced for these journeys; instead, the SEI was laid out as a national strategic direction for the manned civil space program following the completion of the then-planned Space Station Freedom.

The subsequent fate of the SEI does not concern us here, but I note the role of the Space Council in the conception and execution of this major Presidential initiative. The Council conceived the SEI on the well-intentioned grounds of setting a challenging goal for the space program, one that would deliver significant benefits in technology development and also have enormous inspirational power. Once adopted and announced by the President, they carefully monitored NASA’s reactions and implementations of the SEI, noting where it fell short and taking appropriate actions, including eventually recommending the replacement of the Administrator. This was an entirely appropriate and justified set of actions and the subsequent Aldridge Commission carefully considered this example in the formulation of their report.

After a decade and a half of agency confusion, a second Shuttle disaster – the loss of the Shuttle Columbia in February 2003 – initiated a yearlong White House review of the direction of the U.S. space program. Once again, a return to the Moon followed by a human Mars mission was the direction selected, but this time, circumstances were different. The construction of a revised version of Space Station (the International Space Station, ISS) had been initiated and was progressing well. Many still fantasized about a human Mars mission, but the cognizant recognized that such a goal was beyond the fiscal and technical capabilities of the agency. On the other hand, as a result of two robotic missions flown in the 1990s (Clementine and Lunar Prospector), and in contrast to earlier SEI days, by 2004 we knew that the Moon’s poles contained both the material (e.g., water ice) and energy (e.g., near-permanent sunlight) resources needed to establish a sustained human presence there. Finally, unlike the previous SEI (and significant for its early fate), the new initiative had been briefed and found support from Congress, both houses of which were controlled by the President’s own party.

The goals of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) announced by President George W. Bush in January 2004 were the Moon (with an emphasis on developing and using its resources) and eventually, Mars. The President also announced that a commission would be convened to make recommendations on how the VSE would be implemented. This group was charged to consider the “Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy” and was chaired by former Secretary of the Air Force Pete Aldridge. In its report issued in mid-2004, one of its notable recommendations was to resurrect the Space Council.

This recommendation drew some criticism, in part because of the track record of previous space councils. But as a member of the Aldridge Commission, I can attest to my own motivations for supporting the idea. I was concerned (rightly, as it turned out) that without it, the agency would follow its own direction and inclinations, rather than the stated policy outlined by President Bush in his VSE speech. A sizeable contingent within NASA opposed a return to the Moon, favoring instead an Apollo-style Mars mission, and they set about to “slow roll” the lunar part of the Vision. To give but one example of this, a workshop was held in the spring of 2006 to consider exactly why we were going to the Moon, despite the fact that the mission of lunar return had been clearly stated in the 2004 announcement of the VSE (“…we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods.”). The Mars lobby within NASA continually attempted to demote and minimize lunar activities in the years that the VSE was in force (they were more concerned with an “exit strategy” for the Moon than they were in getting there). They succeeded in their quest when President Obama deleted the Moon from the NASA exploration plan in 2010 and replaced it with (essentially) nothing.

So what would a space council do? Ideally, this White House-level body would provide executive oversight of NASA by monitoring how it implements policy objectives and be ready to make needed course corrections early, when they are least painful and most efficacious. Had the Aldridge Commission recommendation on establishing the space council been adopted, that body could have reminded NASA exactly why the Moon was on the critical path, how and where its chosen implementation of the VSE was wanting and where it could be adjusted, and have wielded the political force necessary to assure compliance with those directives. With a multitude of important pressing issues, no President can be expected to constantly monitor NASA to assure that his directives are understood and carried out. A space council, supported by a professional staff with technical backgrounds, fiscal knowledge and executive experience, could monitor the progress of a Presidential initiative to assure that course corrections are applied in a timely, efficient manner.

Currently, there is no mechanism to provide this kind of oversight. NASA is overseen by Congressional committees that don’t always have the expertise necessary to judge agency technical decisions or compliance with directives. They also get direction from the Office of Management and Budget, likewise limited in time and personnel (NASA is a relatively small agency in a very large federal government). A suggestion that the National Research Council (NRC) could provide such oversight is misguided – their process for generating reports is somewhat arbitrary and parochial. NRC reports make excellent doorstops but do not carry any executive weight (their last report on human spaceflight has been totally ignored by NASA). In contrast to some opinions, the goal of having a space council is not to “micromanage” the tactical implementation of an architecture, or to “second guess” routine management decisions. A White House space council operates on a higher level, assuring that strategic intentions are being adequately addressed and managed. The agency’s past performance on major initiatives has repeatedly shown that such supervision is necessary.

The creation of a space council is no guarantee of good management and programmatic excellence. But the tendency toward mission creep and institutional stasis is a natural feature of bureaucracies. The Pentagon learned this lesson long ago and its Defense Science Board carefully monitors both requirements and products for major programs. While not a perfect system (waste, fraud and abuse still occur, even with the most carefully monitored programs), having outside technical oversight works to assure course correction in an environment prone to groupthink and mission drift. NASA needs competent external oversight in order to fight both.