WILLIS H. SHAPLEY
As the first launches of the International Space Station approach, we look at the rationales that have supported and the criticisms that have questioned our national commitment to human space flight.
The fact that people are going into and doing things in space has become an accepted part of the contemporary scene. Space shuttle flights have become routine. Astronauts have repaired the Space Telescope and worked on the Russian space station Mir. The International Space Station is approaching its first launches, struggling through Russia’s financial difficulties and US budget squeezes. The general expectation is that the effort to build it will continue and, presumably, succeed.
Mostly forgotten are the debates of not too long ago on whether people need to go into space, why they should keep on going, and whether it is worth it. These questions merit revisiting now, both to see how the old arguments stack up today and because many of the same questions will come to the fore again if the space station falters in the face of the many challenges it still has ahead.
In what follows, I will first review the various rationales that have supported human space flight (HSF) and how they have evolved over the years. Then I will discuss the principal questions and arguments of the critics of HSF and try to assess their merits and relevance in today’s situation. Finally, I will speculate a bit on how the future may unfold.
I can claim some familiarity with these matters, having been involved in or close to most of the major decisions and debates up to about 10 years ago. As the Bureau of the Budget representative I participated in the 1961 decision to go to the moon. Later, as a senior NASA official, I was directly involved in the decision to proceed with the Space Shuttle and, on a second tour, in the defense of the Space Station. But in the last 10 years, I have had no official involvement or inside information.
RATIONALES FOR HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT
The basic driving rationales for human space flight (HSF) are rooted in age–old and persisting dreams. Fascination with the idea of people going into the sky for adventures in other worlds goes back to ancient myths. It has been a major theme in science fiction from Jules Verne’s prescient From the Earth to the Moon to the present day. Its wide and enduring appeal has been evident in the popularity of comic strips like Buck Rogers, movies like 2001, and TV programs like Star Trek. The development of rocketry that could place artificial satellites in orbit brought with it for the first time the possibility of attempting to realize these dreams. A “man in space” project, later dubbed Mercury, was one of the first US respones to Sputnik. The Apollo manned lunar landing program became the central focus of the US effort to beat the Soviets in the “space race” and demonstrate our technological capabilites to the world and to ourselves.
Apollo, although pointed at a limited specific goal, was widely seen as a first step in realizing the dreams of human exploration of space. As Neil Armstrong put it, it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The general expectation was that other steps would follow. It was assumed that scientific and other benefits, not clearly definable in advance, would flow from human activities in space. Human space flight had become an end in itself.
There were some dissenting views. Unbelievers asked nagging questions of “Why?” and “What for?” The high cost of HSF was pointed to as a misplaced priority, draining funds from critical social needs. Scientists emphasized the lower cost of unmanned space exploration. Debates focussed on “manned” vs. “unmanned” in space.
The operative question after Apollo was what should be done next? The response came in the decisions to develop the space shuttle and later to proceed with a space station. Both of these decisions were made with bipartisan support and got general but not unanimous public acceptance.
THE SHUTTLE DECISION
The rationales for the January 1972 decision to proceed with the space shuttle reflected both the general expectation that HSF would continue and the concerns of its critics.
To the dreamers and gung–ho space buffs the next step after Apollo was obvious: send a man to Mars. But a NASA trial balloon right after Apollo 11 for a crash program to Mars was clearly premature and quickly quashed by the administration, fearing possible runaway public support for another Apollo–like raid on the Treasury.
By then space planners, in both the US and the USSR, had concluded that eventual human travel to Mars and elsewhere in space would require a base in earth orbit where outward missions would be assembled, serviced, and sent on their way. (The direct ascent approach of Apollo would involve excessively greater cost and technical problems.) They also saw possibilities for significant scientific and other activities in a permanent manned outpost in earth orbit. The two rationales combined to make a space station seem clearly “the next logical step” in space.
It also became clear that the Apollo hardware was not suitable for long–term use in support of a space station. It had been used to cobble together, launch, and operate the experimental Skylab space station, which demonstrated the feasibility of long–duration manned operations in space. But the Apollo spacecraft was a specialized machine for going to the moon and the Saturn launch vehicles were prohibitively expensive to build and to maintain in launch readiness. Low–cost manned access to space was needed as an essential part of a space station system.
The space shuttle was conceived as the answer. It would achieve economy by being reuseable, like an airplane, carrying crews and cargo to and from the space station. When the package deal of space station plus space shuttle was rejected by the administration as too costly, the shuttle by itself became the the next step in HSF and the focus for its advocates and critics.
As it looked more closely at the shuttle concept, NASA found new uses and rationales for it. It found that the shuttle could be used to launch unmanned satellites and space probes. Complex economic studies suggested that its use to replace the entire stable of expendable launch vehicles might even be cost effective. It was also seen that the shuttle itself could be used as a small space station for experiments in earth orbit. (Later the European space community would agree to develop for NASA at their expense the billion–dollar Spacelab to fly in the shuttle.)
The new rationales for the shuttle gave HSF a broader base of support and appeased some of its critics. But criticisms of its great cost and doubts on the priority it should be given still loomed large in the thinking of the administration and many others. These concerns might well have combined to defeat the shuttle except for the fact—not always recognized then or since—that not approving it was not really an open option.
Before settling on the shuttle as their next objective the NASA leadership had considered what other options were available for continuing HSF after Apollo. One by one they were ruled out. Continued use of the Saturn/Apollo system was rejected, as noted above, for its cost and inflexibility. Reliance on any of the other available but less–powerful launch vehicles would dead end the future of HSF by limiting it to tiny Gemini–class spacecraft, capable of little more than repeating the 1960s missions to demonstrate the feasibility of simple manned operations in space. Any new more powerful expendable launch system and the manned spacecraft to go with it would cost as least as much as the shuttle to develop and, lacking reusability, much more to operate. Thus the operative choices came down to proceeding with the shuttle or ending US HSF activities.
But a decision that would close down HSF was simply not acceptable. As a matter of domestic politics, the successes of Apollo had generated such public enthusiasm and expectations that a decision that would put a stop to HSF and ground our astronaut heroes was unthinkable. On the foreign policy side, Apollo had been one of the few bright spots in the dark days of Vietnam. Calling off our manned space program after beating the Soviets in the race to the moon would have made it a hollow victory in the cold war and would have been a serious self–inflicted blow to our national prestige in the eyes of the world.
Thus approval of the space shuttle was assured by the fact that the choice was between it and stopping HSF. For the proponents of moving ahead with HSF the decision was an essential but qualified victory. It kept HSF alive and gave them a chance to show what the shuttle could do in support of its new rationales as a low cost launch vehicle and a work place in orbit. But they had not gained acceptance of their original rationale for the shuttle as a component of a space station system. The shuttle decision was, in effect, a finesse that left questions of space station goals and values to a later date.
THE SPACE STATION
About a dozen years later these questions would be brought to the fore. The shuttle had been successfully developed and was demonstrating its capabilities as a launch vehicle, for servicing satellites in orbit, and for laboratory work in its Spacelab (although it failed in its objective of providing low–cost access to space). In 1983 NASA proposed and President Reagan approved development of a permanent manned space station as “the next logical step in space.”
The specific rationales put forward for the space station focused on the experiments that could be conducted on board. Zero gravity experiments on materials and biological substances, medical experiments on animal and astronaut subjects, and astronomical and other space observations were stressed. At one point there was a proposal (later dropped) to have the program include a second station in polar orbit for earth sciences observations. The idea that the station might some day lead to human travel to the planets was somewhere in the background but rarely mentioned.
A new dimension was added by the recruitment of foreign partners in the enterprise. In addition to the Canadians, who had been a partner in the shuttle program, the European Space Agency and Japan signed agreements to develop at their expense some major components of the space station. These foreign partnerships provided an “international” rationale which would help sustain the program, both by reducing its cost and by erecting international commitments as an obstacle to a unilateral US decision to terminate the program.
From the start the space station drew strong opposition. Unlike the shuttle, the space station did not present the stark choice between approval and ending HSF. Most of the scientific community was unconvinced of the value of the experiments that could be conducted and concerned that funds would be diverted from space science programs. On the other hand, there seemed to be general acceptance that a space station would be the next step in HSF. The Soviets were moving ahead with their space stations; Cold War competition was still a factor. But the space station program had no sharp focus like Apollo, and its proponents found it hard to generate popular enthusiasm for it.
On the political front, however, NASA was able to generate some strong support. The Reagan Administration was committed to the space station. The aerospace industry supported it. Dividing up the program into pieces to be administered separately by NASA centers situated in several key states helped assure a base of support in Congress. In spite of the many doubts and some organized opposition, the space station managed to survive a succession of close votes in Congress. It benefited indirectly from the reaffirmation of national support for our astronauts and HSF that came after the Challenger tragedy. It continued to have administration support under both Bush and Clinton.
The program itself ran into many problems. There were several technical false starts and many redesigns, mainly forced by repeated downward ratchets in the NASA budget. Finally, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the program was reconfigured one last time to include the Russians as a major partner. This brought their capabilities into the program and gave the space station an additional foreign policy rationale as a visible element in the evolving relations of the US with the new Russian Federation. Also, for the first time the program was given a tight but definite multi–year budget envelope, consonant with the bipartisan agreement on balancing the Federal budget.
At this writing the program is well along in development but struggling with overruns in its budget and uncertainties in the Russian partnership as it approaches readiness for its first launches. Organized political opposition seems to have died out. Public interest in HSF was recaptured in the past year as US astronauts participated in the operations and tribulations of the Russian space station Mir.
In sum, there appears to be general public expectation that the program will and should go ahead, with at least passive acceptance of the rationales that a space station is indeed the next logical step in space and that significant scientific or other work of some sort will be done on it. Doubts and criticisms, especially of the value of the work to be done, have not been fully satisfied, but for now, at least, the building of the space station has come to be an end in itself.
CRITICISMS OF HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT
Over the years criticisms of HSF have been heard most often from three standpoints. There have been fiscal conservatives and others who believe simply that continuing HSF is an unnecessary expenditure of government funds, not justified by the economic or other benefits likely to be achieved. Then there are liberal activists and their supporters who believe that HSF should have a lower priority for Federal funding than programs for social or other needs and that its high cost diverts funds from such programs. Lastly, but certainly not least, there are many space scientists who are skeptical of HSF science and fearful that its large budgets will curtail funding for space science programs.
These criticisms of HSF embody three basic points: (1) its cost is too great, (2) the benefits are not worth it, and (3) its great cost diverts funds from higher priorities. Let us consider how each of these points looks today.
1. The Cost is Too Great—That the cost of HSF, now running over $5 billion a year, is great cannot be denied. That it may nevertheless be affordable is suggested by the fact that it has been accommodated within NASA’s annual budgets and up to now, at least, within the totals projected in the bipartisan balanced budget agreement. However, current indications are that a new budget envelope will have to be established for the space station to cover increased costs due to contractor overruns and schedule delays in delivery of Russian hardware. The perennial criticism of the cost of HSF will have to be faced once again.
2. Benefits not Worth It—Criticisms under this head strike directly at the rationales and claims that have supported HSF. To the dreamers and others striving to put human beings longer and farther out in space, the critics can say, after Apollo, Skylab, and the shuttle, “Been there, done that.” To the argument, if made, that expenditures for HSF will generate advances in technology with important commercial applications they can say that the unmanned space programs also do this and that if more government assistance is needed then programs, like those in Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency and Commerce’s National Institute of Science and Technology, which support the development of new technologies directly, not as by–products, are the way to go.
Perhaps the strongest criticisms of the benefits of HSF are the low value the critics place on the scientific and other activities humans conduct in space. One argument is that humans are not needed in space because the same or better work could be done with unmanned spacecraft. A more fundamental criticism, pointed directly at the space station, is that laboratory experiments in space—in materials sciences, biology, and other areas—add little of scientific significance to what can be learned on the ground.
The defenders of HSF disagree. They point to the shuttle astronauts’ repair of the flawed unmanned Hubble Space Telescope and later upgrading of its instruments, which made possible its great successes. They point to the long series of Spacelab and other shuttle experiments in many fields and see the results and possibilities in a more positive light than the critics. They stress particularly the possibilities they see in medical and physiological research. And in defending the space station they make the point that the availability of a well equipped laboratory in space can be expected to generate new science now not foreseen.
3. Funds Diverted from Higher Priorities—In the public arena perhaps the most persistent criticism of the space program has been that within the total budget the large expenditures for space deprive other activities of the funds they should get for higher priority purposes. This criticism has usually focused on HSF because it is seen as the costliest part of the space program and as having the fewest tangible benefits.The critics say “If only we had that money, think of what we could do!”
Of course, this type of argument can always be made when two or more interests see themselves in competition for the same dollars. There are always theoretical trade–offs that can be advocated by “have nots” against “haves.” But major trade–offs in the federal budget between activities with quite different objectives have really been only theoretical, at least up to the last couple of years, because of the lack of discipline and effective mechanisms in the budget process.
Over all the years, there has been, I believe, no clear evidence that other programs have been denied funds because of the expenditures for space. I think it is fair to say that the major trade–offs envisaged by the critics would probably in any case have been frustrated by the unwillingness of Congress to approve the proposed increases, even if the cuts in space had been acceptable. Critics may, however, derive some satisfaction from the fact that in trade–offs under the new discipline of the bipartisan budget agreement, the NASA budget has been slated for reductions, with some stringent limitations on HSF. And, as indicated above, they are likely to have a new opportunity to make their case when NASA requests that these limitations be relaxed.
The loudest criticism of HSF as draining support for other programs has come within the space program, from space scientists. From the time of the Apollo program, many of them have believed that the popular enthusiasm and large budgets for HSF serve to reduce the funds for space science. They have assumed that there is a total space budget to be divided up, and that increases in HSF cause cuts in space science and cuts in HSF would mean increases for space science.
But this isn’t the way the budget process has worked. At every step—within NASA, in the Bureau of the Budget (now Office of Management and Budget), and in Congress— separate decisions are made on the amounts for HSF and for space science. When restrictive overall ceilings or planning figures have been set for NASA as a whole, both HSF and space science have been under pressure to effect economies and have had to accept reductions. There is no reason to expect that space science would receive more if the amounts for HSF were reduced; the more likely result would be a corresponding reduction in the overall ceiling.
Actually, and ironically in view of the traditional antipathy of the space science community to HSF, a much stronger case can be made that the large budgets and popular support for HSF have served to sustain and permit growth in the budgets for space science. The extremely high levels of funding for HSF have provided a generous yardstick for space science programs. Since the end of Apollo, critics of the space program have focused almost exclusively on HSF and held their fire on billion–dollar observatories and planetary missions and the rest of space science, all of whose budgets have seemed small by comparison. Thus it can be said that over the years space science has flourished in the shadow of HSF. Astronomy and space science were able to enter their golden ages while HSF took the heat.
WHAT NEXT FOR HUMAN SPACE FLIGHT?
To date the various criticisms have not generated sufficient interest or support to alter significantly the course of HSF. As we have seen, there is now a general expectation that HSF will continue and that the building of the space station will proceed.
Support for this prospect comes not from a single clear rationale but from from several different standpoints. First, there are the dedicated advocates of HSF, including the dreamers and space buffs, the NASA organization, the present and previous administrations, and the aerospace industry. Second, there is the large segment of the public that is fascinated by human activities in space and willing to accept that there are some scientific or other rationales for them. Third, most of the rest of the public, which, while generally indifferent, seems to be willing to accept that HSF is something that will go on and has no objections to it.
But another factor that may be the strongest force keeping HSF on its present course is the inertia and momentum of a large enterprise that has no clear end point. There are no good stopping points for HSF, now or in the foreseeable future. The space station project is a going concern, with hardware ready to launch and a web of international partners and commitments. A decision to stop it would mean abandoning the investment of many billions and would have such serious repercussions on domestic employment, international relations, and national self-esteem as to make it untenable. Of course, the thought of stopping shuttle flights at this time would again present the unacceptable choice of abandoning HSF.
So the outlook, as I see it, is that the space station project will proceed. The many forces for continuing and against stopping it will cause the administration and Congress to provide relief from the present budget constraints. Schedules will undoubtedly slip because of the problems with the Russian elements and continuing tight budgets. But barring the catastrophic loss of one of its elements, the advocates will get the opportunity to show what their space station can do. Their claims and the concerns of the critics will be put to the test.
Peering farther in the future, I see the lack of truly low–cost access to space as the next limiting factor, both in the utility and future evolution of the space station and for any future “logical steps” toward human exploration of the moon or Mars. If the experimental vehicles now under development show that a replacement for the shuttle with substantially lower operating costs is actually technically feasible, NASA will be faced with the need for a major budget increase for its development and manufacture. If annual budget levels cannot be raised, the answer may have to be to store the station unmanned in orbit until the new vehicles are available.
My own view is that the dreams of human space flight farther out into space should be kept alive until clearly insurmountable limits are reached. Yes, the costs will be great, but so are our resources. In the past few months we have seen that continued prosperity can generate billions in unanticipated surpluses. Imagine the surpluses that would be available if we can succeed in making the economy do over the next decades what it has now shown it can do. There are and will be many other claims on our resources, but let’s keep open the option that we might decide to use some of them for moving out into space. Yes, I am a dreamer! Aren’t we all?
Willis H.
Shapley (CC ‘62) dealt with defense, research and development, and space in
the Bureau of the Budget 1942-65 and was the Associate Deputy Administrator
of NASA 1965-75 and 1987-88,
3040 P Street, NW, Washington, DC 20007;
phone: (202) 337-1956.
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