We must treat our space systems as we have always treated our airplanes. Successful aircraft designs, from general aviation airplanes to the highest-performance military fighters, are evolved, upgraded, and used for decades. Just as with DC-3s, B-52s, and many other aircraft, we need to understand that Orion and Ares will be flown by the grandkids of the first astronauts who take them into space. We simply cannot again afford the strategic distraction, the wasted money, the squandered talent, and the lost time of building a new human spaceflight system, and then using it for only sixteen missions.
Once again, a look at the budgetary history provides a sobering lesson for the future, a sobering view of “what might have been.” Let’s recycle to the early 1970s, a time of budgetary starvation for NASA, a time when we did not yet have the Space Shuttle, but did still have the Apollo systems – the Saturn I-B and Saturn V, the Apollo command/service modules (CSM), the lunar lander, and the Skylab system. All of these things were in existence in 1973, having been created in that seminal first 15 years of our agency’s history.
Make no mistake; these systems were far from perfect. They were expensive to develop and expensive to operate. Our parents and grandparents, metaphorically speaking, did not really know quite what they were doing when they set out to accept President Kennedy’s challenge to go to the Moon. They learned as they went along. But what they eventually built worked, and worked well. And it could have kept working at a price we could afford.
Let’s look at some recurring costs in dollars then and now. All costs include both hardware and mission operations, and are at the high end of the range of possibilities, because they take no advantage of stable rates of production. Fiscal 2000 costs are approximate, obtained by inflating programs in the aggregate, rather than tracking and inflating separate expenditures of real-year dollars.
Code:
Element Real-Year $ M FY 2000 $ M
Apollo CSM 50 160
Apollo Lunar Module 120 400
Apollo Lunar Mission 720 2400
Saturn I-B 35 120
Saturn V 325 1100
Skylab Cluster 275 925
Let’s assume that we had kept flying with the systems we had at the time, that we had continued to execute two manned Apollo lunar missions every year, as was done in 1971-72. This would have cost about $4.8 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars.
Further, let us assume that we had established a continuing program of space station activities in Earth orbit, built on the Apollo CSM, Saturn I-B, and Skylab systems. Four crew rotation launches per year, plus a new Skylab cluster every five years to augment or replace existing modules, would have cost about $1.5 billion/year. This entire program of six manned flights per year, two of them to the Moon, would have cost about $6.3 billion annually in Fiscal 2000 dollars. The average annual NASA budget in the 15 difficult years from 1974-88 was $10.5 billion; with 60% of it allocated to human spaceflight, there would have been sufficient funding to continue a stable program of lunar exploration as well as the development of Earth orbital infrastructure. I suggest that this would have been a better strategic alternative than the choices that were in fact made, almost 40 years ago.
After a time, as NASA budgets once again improved, we would have begun to concentrate our lunar activity around an outpost, and we would have used cargo missions to emplace the outpost equipment. A modified Apollo Lunar Module descent stage, with extra fuel and cargo replacing the ascent stage, could have been used for the purpose. The Saturn V could deliver two such vehicles with a single launch. So, over time, we could have built up an early lunar outpost, or smaller ones at different places of interest. By the present day, using what we had with minimal modifications – and I will remind us all that the Soyuz systems of that era are still flying – we would have a vast store of experience and a significant amount of lunar infrastructure. When the civil space budget eventually improved, as it did, we would have been well positioned to begin development of a Mars mission. And in the meantime, without doubt, we would have continued to modify, refine, and incrementally improve the old Apollo designs, to the point where they would have provided greatly enhanced effectiveness by the present day.
If we had done all this, we would be on Mars today, not writing about it as a subject for “the next 50 years.” We would have decades of experience operating long-duration space systems in Earth orbit, and similar decades of experience in exploring and learning to utilize the Moon. This essay on “the next 50 years” would be quite different than the one I am offering here. I think most of us will agree that it would have been a better one.
Now, nothing is as easy as planning in hindsight, nor as permanent as a lost opportunity. I offer the “alternative history” above not to throw stones at policymakers long departed from the scene, but to inform future decisions. If we ignore these lessons, we will surely repeat them.
