This is being discussed in several space organizations. As it happens, I am also up for election as one of the two candidates for new deputy chair (next chair presumed a year form now) of the IEEE-USA Committee on Transportation and Aerospace Policy (CTAP). I owed them a position paper anyway... and sent it out in the midst of the vote. We will see how much appetite their is for a vigorous effort to save the day here. (The vote is until midnight, and I gather I am ahead at present.)
Resurrecting
the US Space Program
A draft position paper,
ByPaul Werbos and Ed McCullough, June 15, 2015
1. Guiding
Principles
Decades ago, the historian
Spengler [1] described how civilizations on a path to collapse often go through
periods of nostalgia, when people try to relive their collective childhood in a
way which blocks them from facing up to new challenges and seals their doom.
Many of us who strongly support the development of space worry that the US
civilian space program is following that path, due in part to the power of
groups hoping to revive public excitement through ever more boring reruns of
the Apollo program, aimed at planting
flags and footprints on the moon or Mars, without making use of serious
strategic analysis of what it might take to bring human settlement of space to
the point of being self-sustaining economically, and more useful to the earth. The Star Trek
generation and the Tycho de Grasse generation understand that space has great
potential, but are wisely skeptical on the whole about the present directions
at NASA. This position paper calls for a radical change in priorities, to try
to achieve that potential, and revive the true original spirit of Apollo.
The original Apollo program was a fantastic success, and
we can learn a lot from its lessons. The period of Apollo coincided with the
fastest growth in overall productivity in the US economy in the twentieth
century, related to the great slate of high risk advanced technology R&D
which NASA initiated under Kennedy. Kennedy said: “We go to the moon, not
because it is easy, but because it is hard.” The current emphasis on proven
technology and old pathways and things which are less demanding on the skills
of the workforce reverses the one aspect
of Apollo that we really need to revive. Above all, we need to go back to
dedicating a larger portion of the NASA budget to more aggressive, high risk
advanced technology, and building the infrastructure – both human and material
– needed to improve productivity in space.
This would be more difficult now than it would have been ten years ago,
because of retirements and changes in corporate culture [15], but it can be
done, if we apply enough determination and foresight. If it is not done, the
story will not have a happy ending in any case.
Many critics of space have asked: “Who needs humans in
space at all?” Others have sometimes asked: “Who needs humans on earth either?”
Our support for human growth on earth and in space is based on the fact that we
are humans, and care about humans for
their own sake, as a fundamental value.
Certainly there are great risks in trying to improve productivity,
markets and infrastructure in space enough to create a growing human economy
[2] there – but there are also risks of human extinction on the earth itself.
The challenge is to create a strategy to maximize the probability that we
achieve our larger goals, facing up to all the many uncertainties, and
regularly asking ourselves how to adapt that strategy focusing on the larger
goals themselves. This position paper gives a sketch of such a strategy.
The hopes for human economic development in space, and
for larger benefits to earth, do not rest on NASA alone. DOD, other nations and the commercial private
sector all have crucial roles to play, which are part of any optimal strategy for NASA. None of those other space programs are
enough, on their present course, to bring us to the human settlement of space,
without additional, catalytic efforts through NASA and Congress. New directions
for collaboration and enhancing the activities of those partners, is a crucial
opportunity in making the hope of success ever more real.
Market economics says clearly that the government can
have a proper role in this kind of venture, which some call “the moral
equivalent of war.” Success in the human settlement of space will require investment
in technologies too high-risk, too long-term in payoff, and with benefits too
hard to limit to just one company for normal market mechanisms. Government
investment is justified only if it focuses on those aspects of what is needed,
and on general-use infrastructure, and continues to try to download as much as
possible to the commercial market sector. A strong system of universities and
small businesses, making use of high quality apolitical competitive review
systems, is crucial, to enable success in this kind of high risk R&D, and
also needs some reinvigoration at this time in the US. When government spending
tilts towards large low-risk jobs programs, it strongly violates the basic
principles of free market economics.
2. A Vision
of What NASA Could Be
High productivity in any
organization (or research project) depends critically on having a very clear
and ambitious long-term target, not only to focus effort within the
organization but to inspire people and overcome the petty distractions which can
cause stagnation in any aspect of human life.
For NASA, we propose that there should be a core focus on
achieving the target suggested above: to achieve technology, new markets,
infrastructure and life support for humans in space (whether NASA or nonNASA)
great enough to initiate self-sustaining human presence and growth in space –
a “tradeoff economy [2]” for humans in
space. How to do that is an optimization
problem – how to maximize the probability that humans someday do get to that
point, and how to minimize the time
between now and then. The mathematics of this kind of optimization should have
absolute priority over the myopic kinds of bean counting which have often led
to grossly suboptimal policies in the past. For example, the cost per pound of
getting to low earth orbit (LEO) is one crucial metric of progress towards
these goals, but the requirement is for costs which are low enough ($500/kg or
less) under conditions of multiple launches, after the initial RD&D is
complete; the selection between options
for the space shuttle, at the start of that program, put heavy emphasis on
short-term variables. It is conceivable that we would already be at $500/kg-LEO
today, supporting a much larger volume of activities in space at a lower cost,
if we had selected the original more aggressive proposal from Mueller of NASA,
which better reflected the spirit of the Apollo era [3].
In order to do justice to this optimization problem in
real time, year after year, there should be greater use of an open, analytic
process of revisiting the “decision trees” [5,12] which we face., and which
change every year, if we develop new technology and new knowledge as fast as we
should. A well-constructed process should naturally reflect concepts like
technology readiness levels, like build a little and test a little, and like
the value of buying information [5]. Not only strategic plans but actual
budgets, at the highest level, should be continuously adapted in accord with
the shifting needs of the larger goal of human settlement of space, and of
other values to society. Key information should also be digitized in an
organized fashion, as it is developed, with a kind of succession plan, so that
we do not ever in the future face the risk of technology loss which we face
today. Given constraints on resources, the goal of not losing technology which
may be crucial in the future is perhaps thge most urgent task now before us.
Having a strong core mission/target is essential, but
there is also a compelling need for NASA to support other activities which
leverage its capabilities. Studies of defense spending [4] have shown how gross
inefficiencies and gaps can arise when policy is carved up into separate
organizations or stovepipes which focus only on their core mission to the exclusion
of all else. Therefore, we propose that all NASA funding decisions be based on
a kind of cost-benefit analysis (accounting for uncertainties [5]), where
benefit is the sum of two benefits:
(1) (CORE MERIT) Impact on
the core mission, the accomplishment of a “takeoff economy” for humans in
space; and
(2) (BROADER IMPACT) the
extra benefit to other important national goals which results from leveraging
the use of unique NASA capabilities developed as a benefit of the core mission.
These are the two foundations
of the NASA we would like to see. The remainder of this white paper will
describe the new opportunities in these two areas in more detail.
3.
Requirements of the Core Mission
To achieve a takeoff economy for humans in space, NASA
support activities aimed at building the four pillars which our hopes here rest
on:
1. NEW MARKETS from space
to earth, large enough and tricky enough to create "multiplier"
effects beyond what the existing applications in space provide. Energy from
space [6,7] and space
"tourism" (which is sometimes just recreation and sometimes more
serious) are the two obvious possibilities, but we are open to others, such as geoengineering,
or higher levels of communication capabilities to bring better internet
capabilities to the poorest people on earth. Whatever the risks in these
markets, we need to do the best we can to open up the full potential of the new
markets, both through changed regulation and technology development. That's a
top priority.
2. ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY will
also be crucial to making space activities sustainable, affordable and
profitable on a larger scale. Most urgent is the development of new technology
to allow reusable access to space at minimum marginal cost, designed with
foresight, looking ahead to the hope of large launch volumes to serve new
markets [8]. DARPA's XS-1 project is a unique shining light in this space, but
earlier projects at the height of the cold war (like Science dawn, RASV and
TAV) developed low-cost technology still essential to the possibilities before
us. IEEE does not actually take a position on who develops this technology --
new space, old space or governments. Rather, it will try to provide
encouragement and support for any player ready to do the serious advanced
technology work. In addition to access to space, better technology for
transportation beyond low earth orbit is also essential, and other elements of
crucial economic infrastructure to improve cost-effectiveness of all efforts in
space, even to the end of the solar system and beyond. Among the most important options in this area
would be: (1) restructuring and
extension of the SLS program (without reducing spending per year) to move as
soon as possible and as completely as possible away from government-developed
expendable rockets, to at least partially reusable concepts, such as
shuttle-derived vehicles, using passive hot structures to withstand re-entry;
or (2) a reusable booster to be companion to X37B, in a joint NASA-DOD effort
organized like NASP but based on rocket technologies ready for full-scale
development and testing here and now [8]. Air-breathing hypersonic technologies
offer real hope of even lower costs in the future, but the long-term success of
such efforts will be strongly endangered if we do not begin full-scale
development and testing now of technologies which will also be needed for such
airbreathers.
3. NONTERRESTRIAL
materials are another basic pillar of humanity's hope for self-sustaining
economic growth in space. This will take more time than the initial development
of new markets, but it is an essential requirement which we must meet sooner or
later. We have no interest in putting flags and footprints on the moon for
their own sake -- but we do have an
interest in rational steps as part of a strategy to get real economic value from
the moon and from the asteroids, and eventually Mars. The economic history of
earth tells us that the best strategy is not to develop just one source of
materials, but all of them, starting with what is easiest to get to, and planning
to transition the key decisions about priorities into market systems as soon as
they become able to take over. It is important that our “decision trees”
account for a variety of materials and production technologies (e.g. [13,14]),
and that key capabilities not be lost. There should be a new push for
crossdisciplinary research, cutting across lunar chemical engineering,
manufacturing and propulsion, and accounting for the new findings from the
LCROSS satellite, to try to develop higher performance new options in this
sector.
4. HUMAN ABILITY to live
and work in space, in the long term, is the fourth and final fundamental pillar
of human settlement, and another basic commitment. To make this real, we agree,
at a minimum, that human presence in space should remain continuous and
permanent, initially through ISS but through larger, expanded systems in the
future, without any retreat.
4.
Broader Benefits With Especially Important Potential
Among the most important
new broader benefits possible from NASA and form its partnerships are:
(1) Better understanding
and imaging of the earth, such as the need to better understand and predict the
climate variables which could lead to a global H2S emissions disaster, like
what caused most of the mass extinctions in previous earth history. This would
leverage existing NASA partnerships with NOAA, ESA and the Navy, to better
monitor levels of oxygen and nutrients at depth in a coarse grid
(2) Combining low-cost
launch and massive new communications satellites, and related work, reaching
out to provide K-12 education by internet to the "other 3 billion"
(O3B), in public-private partnerships;
(3) Technological
breakthroughs in imaging of objects in space (asteroids, sun, astrophysics) using
new quantum and/or constellation technologies to massively improve resolution and
create other new capabilities [9,10,11];
(4) Space-based missile
defense... where a factor of 10 reduction in $/kg-LEO equates to having ten
times as much mass in orbit for the same launch cost;
(5) Advanced physics
experiments in space, exploiting either the unique observation platform or
exploiting the safety benefit of doing some things off the surface of the
earth;
(6) Developing
geoengineering capabilities, such as low-cost mirrors, which are strongly
advocated by Abdul Kalam, the popular past President of India, as another
option for energy from space;.
References
1.
Spengler, Oswald. The decline
of the West. Oxford University Press, 1991.
2. Rostow, Walt Whitman. The stages of economic growth: A
non-communist manifesto. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
3.
George E. Mueller, The new future for manned spacecraft developments (Manned
spacecraft developments, considering Apollo Applications Program, space station
establishment, space shuttle operations and payload cost), Astronautics and Aeronautics, Vol. 7, pp. 24-32. 1969.
4.
Charles J. Hitch, Economics of defense in
the nuclear age. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, 1967,
www.lib.umich.edu
5. Raiffa, Howard. "Decision analysis:
introductory lectures on choices under uncertainty." Addison-Wesley, 1968.
6.
Mankins, John. The Case for Space Solar Power.
Virginia Edition Publishing, 2014.
7.
Paul Werbos, Reviewing Space Solar Power policy, Ad Astrra, Vol. 26, No.2,
2014, http://www.nss.org/adastra/volume26/ssppolicy.html
8.
IEEE , Low Cost Access to Space, Position Paper, February 2014.)
http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/SpaceAccess0214.pdf
9. Hyland, David C., Jon Winkeller, Robert
Mosher, Anif Momin, Gerardo Iglesias, Quentin Donnellan, Jerry Stanley et al.
"A conceptual design for an exoplanet imager." In Optical Engineering+ Applications,
pp. 66930K-66930K. International Society for Optics and Photonics, 2007.
10
Jianbin Liu, Yu Zhou and Fuli Li, Changing
two-photon correlation into anticorrelation by superposing thermal and laser
light, http://www.paper.edu.cn/en_releasepaper/downPaper/201401-713.html.
See also Ruifeng Liu and Fuli Li, Effects of photon bunching on ghost imagining
and interference, presented at Princeton-TAMU Workshop on Classical-Quantum
Interface, Princeton U., May 2015.
11.Strekalov, Dmitry V., Baris I. Erkmen, and
Nan Yu. "Ghost Imaging of Space Objects." Journal of Physics: Conference
Series. Vol. 414. No. 1. IOP Publishing, 2013.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/414/1/012037/pdf/1742-6596_414_1_012037.pdf
12.
Frank Lewis and Derong Liu, eds. Reinforcement
learning and approximate dynamic programming for feedback control. Vol. 17.
John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
13.
See Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium ((PTMSS), http://www.deltion.ca/ptmss/Home.php.
Also see http://www.isruinfo.com/ and
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/leag/LER-Version-1-3-2013.pdf.
14.
http://www.planetaryresources.com/
15.
Bainbridge, William Sims, ed. Leadership in science and
technology: A reference handbook. Sage Publications, 2011.
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