Opinion: Middle age is looking tough on NASA

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Arguably worse is the fact that people who should understand the importance of space to the future of the human race obviously don’t have a clue. America’s recent descent into governmental illiteracy has hardly helped, but even some of the sciences seem to be earthbound in their mentality.

Reuters put this chilling piece together:

Those who keep tabs on NASA's fortunes worry that the agency's plan to return Americans to the moon in a decade won't amount to more than a cluster of plywood frames in a hangar. As NASA marks its 50th anniversary Wednesday, space experts say NASA is adrift, its future disturbingly murky.

The space shuttle is due to retire in two years. Its successor, beset by budget and technical problems, won't fly until 2015 at the earliest, creating a stretch of at least five years when the United States will have no way to launch humans into orbit.

"It's a rather unfortunate time to be celebrating a 50th anniversary," says space historian Joan Johnson-Freese of the Naval War College. "Right now, we're at best at a plateau, if not — I hate to say this — heading downwards."

That’s an understatement. At the base of this ignominious retreat to the 50s is an obvious policy black hole. Like many public organizations, NASA has been seen as a cash cow, its budget stripped and its science degraded more by accountancy than strategic policy.

This is mainly because of a belief in business culture that accountancy is more important than results, and we've just been watching where that logic winds up, on the markets. But it’s also an indicator of where the priorities have gone; anywhere but space science. NASA has been starved, as well as pillaged.

So one of the major drivers of America’s long technological superiority has been neutered. The intention is still to go to the Moon and create a base, and then on to Mars, but doing that on a shoestring, with a bureaucratic noose around your neck, isn’t exactly Star Trek, is it?

To put this in perspective: Space isn’t just about space. There’s nothing in your life that hasn’t been affected by space technology. Anything digital, polymers, defence, medicine, insulation, even your teeth, the science has been commercialized and spread around the world.

Another perspective: People in government don’t have a clue about the economic value of science. Some patents are worth more than some countries, and the idea still hasn’t sunk in.

Which makes NASA, granddaddy of the whole concept of practical space science, a very strange spectacle at this point in time.

1. The agency will be dependent on Russian assistance for the next few years, thanks to the shuttle situation.
2. That means that America has effectively written itself out of most of the high value space science.
3. Five years in science is an incredibly long time, and it’s quite likely the competition for space dollars will be a lot tougher.
4. A new generation of space crews will need to be trained,
5. New systems will need to be built from the ground up, if you’ll excuse the expression.
6. New US space science will just have to sit around or try to thumb a lift from other agencies.

To put it another way, if you’d been trying to trash NASA, you couldn’t have done a more thorough job of it. This is pitiful. It’s the scientific equivalent of the financial meltdown.

Not only do these conditions stymie the current state of NASA, they also stop future growth and development of post-rocket technology and projects.

The ion engine, which will be the replacement of the ridiculous firecracker-level payloads of the present, has now been sitting around for a decade waiting for someone with some level of scientific literacy to develop it.

The Moon base idea isn’t for a stage set, it’s for practical science, and that now has an obvious hole in its itinerary. There’s some really important chemistry on the Moon that could affect the world’s energy situation very much for the better, and where the hell else could you put working space craft for orbital work? One of the biggest costs, and risks, of current technology, is fighting Earth's gravity and atmosphere.

Mars is the other obvious task, and of course all that science can also sit around and rot while the cows find their way home.

Then there’s this gem:

The forecast for NASA's funding looks "bleak," says Roger Launius, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. NASA hopes to start work in the coming decade on a giant rocket, called the Ares V, needed to shoot cargo to the moon, but Launius fears the nation won't find the money.

"I wouldn't be surprised if we don't, simply because there is no compelling rationale that I've seen for going to the moon," he says.

In one sentence, we have a guy who knows the history who doesn’t even get the basics. The Ares V is another clunker, an antique economically. The thing already belongs in a museum. The idea of payload ratios, one of the hot topics in the space science field for 30 years, obviously hasn’t penetrated. Rocket technology condemns spacecraft to a 5% payload relative to thrust. It's like trying to build the Pyramids one grain of sand at a time.

Just for the record, a slightly upgraded version of the European Space Truck could do the same job, at least in theory, and it doesn't require a whole custom launch system to do it.

The Moon base, or for that matter any off-planet base, has to be economically viable, and this is a recipe to ensure that it isn’t. This is the thinking that’s running the space program.

Straight into the ground.

Good luck NASA. Try busking, or talk to Richard Branson. Either that, or hold a séance.

Just remember, there's not going to be a human race without space travel.