Space Launch System is a threat to JSC, Texas jobs
Chris Kraft & Tom Moser - Houston Chronicle (Opinion)
(Kraft is former director of NASA's Johnson Space Center and former director of JSC Mission Control; Moser is former director of JSC Engineering, and former director of NASA's Space Station Program.)
Our nation has entered a time of severe fiscal constraints in the face of trillion-dollar-per-year federal deficits. While NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) is a well-intentioned program, we cannot afford to provide NASA with the extra $4 billion to $5 billion per year needed to make an SLS-based exploration strategy work. As a result, the human deep space exploration program is on the verge of collapse, which will have severe economic consequences for Texas as well as the nation.
Unless something changes soon, the current situation will further degrade and could easily destroy critical human space exploration expertise at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) that we will never regain. Unless something changes soon, many thousands of high-wage Texas jobs will be lost forever.
The current national human exploration strategy, which is based on development of the SLS, is economically unaffordable. The SLS-based strategy is unaffordable, by definition, since the costs of developing, let alone operating, the SLS within a fixed or declining budget has crowded out funding for critical elements needed for any real deep space human exploration program. Most of these critical elements would be managed by JSC. They include the crewed lunar lander, a multi-mission space exploration vehicle (MMSEV), a deep space habitat, a lunar surface rover and other lunar infrastructure. The development of these critical elements has been delayed until the mid-2020s and the 2030s, so real human exploration beyond Earth will not begin until the late 2020s or 2030s.
This is not only politically unsustainable - it is technically unsustainable.
At present, JSC has only a few significant jobs: completing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, operating the International Space Station (ISS) and supporting the Kennedy Space Center-led commercial crew program.
Consider just two of JSC's strategic capabilities: Mission Control and Operations and Engineering and Development. The more famous of the two - Mission Control and Operations - was created by JSC engineers and is a unique capability. With the space shuttle retired, ISS assembly complete, and the first crewed Orion flight a decade away, JSC's Mission Control has much less to do. Supporting increasingly routine ISS operations requires no more than several hundred people at Mission Control, a small fraction of recent levels of 2,500 personnel.
This Death Valley of actual spaceflight operations and development also threatens JSC's crown jewel, the engineering organization that undergirds these more visible achievements. JSC's world class engineering and development capability created the concepts, designs and development for every American human spacecraft that has flown to space. JSC's unique multi-discipline systems engineering and spaceflight technical expertise - built up over five decades - is the envy of the world's space agencies and aerospace industries.
With ISS complete, with no significant funding for the deep space habitat or MMSEV, and with the cancellation of the crewed lunar lander and other lunar surface systems, there is minimal development work for JSC's engineering teams. They are now limited to helping complete the half-finished Orion and supporting KSC on commercial crew.
With no clear destination and no money to pursue one, there are not enough projects to inspire and train the next generation of managers and designers who will, presumably, be needed a decade from now to start developing actual exploration hardware. This is a going-out-of-business strategy.
For all these reasons, the current NASA exploration strategy is a plan for the withering or even destruction of JSC, and with it the stagnation and decay of the Texas space industry.
SLS is killing JSC. SLS is killing Texas jobs. SLS is killing our national space agenda.
We are wasting billions of dollars per year on SLS. There are cheaper and nearer term approaches for human space exploration that use existing launch vehicles. A multicenter NASA team has completed a study on how we can return humans to the surface of the moon in the next decade with existing launch vehicles and within the existing budget. This NASA plan, which NASA leadership is trying to hide, would save JSC and create thousands of jobs in Texas.
It is time for Texas' elected members of Congress to wake up and do something about it before it is too late.
NASA Reaching for New Heights
Charles Bolden & Dr. John P. Holdren (Commentary)
(Bolden is NASA administrator & Holdren is Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology)
In his gloomy Washington Post commentary on yesterday's (Thursday) ceremony transferring ownership of the Space Shuttle Discovery from NASA to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, Charles Krauthammer urged readers to think of that transfer as the funeral for U.S. leadership in space. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States remains far and away the world leader in space technology and exploration. As long as appropriate support continues to be forthcoming from Congress, this will remain the case indefinitely.
Krauthammer suggests that if China succeeds in putting astronauts on the Moon by 2025, as that country plans, they will have "overtaken" the United States. How absurd! Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon in 1969. How does China managing this feat fifty-six years later, if this happens, amount to "overtaking" us? Obviously, the United States could repeat its lunar feats of the 1960s and 1970s if that were the next most important thing to do in space exploration for the money. But it isn't! We may well return to the lunar surface again as one of many destinations in the future, but for now, our immediate, more scientifically rewarding goals include sending astronauts to an asteroid in the 2020s, and Mars in the mid-2030s. They bring scientific and technological challenges worthy of a great nation and a true world leader.
Krauthammer doesn't even mention the International Space Station. The United States led the planning, design, and construction of this $53 billion marvel - an orbiting science and technology-development laboratory that has been continuously manned since 2000. Under the previous administration's plan, it was underfunded after 2016, implying intent to abandon it long before its scientific and engineering potential had been realized. Under the new bipartisan space-exploration plans worked out between the Obama Administration and the Congress, we will continue to operate the Space Station until at least 2020 and perhaps beyond.
In robotic space exploration, too, nobody else comes close. At this very moment, a stream of data is flowing to us from missions orbiting the Sun, Mercury, the Moon, the asteroid Vesta, Mars, and Saturn. We now have missions on the way to Jupiter, Pluto and Mars. The Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, and Fermi space telescopes continue to make groundbreaking discoveries on an almost daily basis. We're on track in the construction of the James Webb Space Telescope, the most sophisticated science telescope ever constructed to help us reveal the mysteries of the cosmos in ways never before possible. Last year, the MESSENGER spacecraft became the first-ever to enter orbit around Mercury. And shortly thereafter, the Ebb and Flow satellites began orbiting and mapping the gravity field of the Moon.
We are ahead in looking downward from space as well as in looking outward. Sixteen Earth-science missions currently in orbit study the Earth as an integrated system. In 2011, Aquarius SAC-D produced the first global view of ocean surface salinity and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite began making observations of Earth's weather and climate. No other country can match our capabilities in Earth observation from space.
Declining to remind readers that it was President Bush, not President Obama who ended the shuttle program (President Obama actually added 2 flights), Krauthammer carps about the Bush Administration's successor to the Space Shuttle having been canceled in this Administration, but the Bush "Constellation" program as designed was behind schedule and over budget - "unexecutable" in the words of the independent blue-ribbon commission set up by the Obama Administration to review our options. In cancelling Constellation per se, we have kept the parts of it that made sense. A new heavy-lift rocket and multi-purpose crew vehicle developed out of the Constellation program will be instrumental in carrying U.S. astronauts to an asteroid, to other deep-space destinations, and ultimately to Mars.
When Krauthammer complains about the expanded role for the private sector in carrying U.S. astronauts and cargo to the Space Station, as foreseen in the current bipartisan plan and as is progressing well in practice, he seems unaware that every U.S. launch vehicle and space capsule in history - including the Space Shuttle - has been built by private corporations. That is continuing, but on a more competitive basis. Indeed, in the same week as Discovery's transfer to the Smithsonian, NASA gave the green light to a commercial company, SpaceX, for a planned April 30 launch from Kennedy Space Center, with a berthing at the ISS a few days later. Later this year, Orbital Sciences will launch their Cygnus module and Antares launch vehicle from Wallops Island, Virginia. In FY 2013, NASA plans for at least three flights delivering research and logistics hardware to the ISS by U.S.-developed cargo delivery systems.
It should also be noted that NASA's focus on new space technologies is seeding innovation, supporting economic vitality and helping create new jobs and expanded opportunities for a skilled workforce.
We understand that in this election year, there are some who will go out of their way to paint a pessimistic view of the country in order to score political points. But, we believe that America's technological advancement and continued leadership in space exploration is too important to fall prey to political distortions.
Our Shuttle program was an historic achievement, but an even brighter future is on the horizon. Make no mistake about it - the future in space is happening right now, and it is being built right here in America.
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