The ESAS report was released in October 2005 to less than universal acclaim, with many noting the similarity of the new plan to the old Apollo template. In fact, although the new plan would create considerable capability, the flying of individual, one-off missions whereby most pieces are discarded after a single use, reverted us back to an earlier era of the space program. As in Apollo, only the crew command module (Orion) would return to Earth. The individual missions would carry a larger crew of four and stay on the lunar surface longer, up to two weeks. The large capacity of the Altair lunar lander meant that significant cargo could be placed on the Moon, permitting an outpost to be established with a minimal number of launches.
An important point to understand about the ESAS architecture is that its heavy lift launch vehicle (Ares V, starting out at 130 metric tons, but expandable to 160 metric tons) is scaled for human Mars missions staged entirely from Earth; its utility for the lunar missions is genuine but only incidental. A mission to the Moon requires roughly 100–120 metric tons in LEO (depending on how the mission is configured, its equipment and destination). This could be accomplished with two medium-class heavy lift launches (70 metric ton; shuttle side-mount) or the launch of a single, large vehicle (Saturn V-class). The Ares V is much larger than what is needed for routine missions to the Moon. But if the requirement is to deliver pieces of a 500-metric-ton Mars spacecraft to LEO, then transporting it with as few launches as possible greatly reduces overall risk. Clearly, the ESAS was looking ahead to the future where it was thought that NASA would get only one chance to develop an entirely new space transportation system in the new century and its objective was to plant the American flag on Mars. The seed of the problem had been planted and the future of spaceflight envisioned through the lens of the Apollo program—with disposable spacecraft and everything launched from Earth—became unaffordable and thus unsustainable. It still is. More important, it discarded the original point of the VSE: to learn how to use the material and energy resources of the Moon to create new spaceflight capability.
Lest anyone think that this latter point was unclear or had been inadequately presented—after all, the VSE had been unveiled in a relatively brief presidential speech two years previously—in March 2006, Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger gave one of the finest speeches I ever heard on the meaning of the VSE and on a rationale for spaceflight in general.19 Speaking at the annual Goddard Space Symposium, Marburger carefully laid out the physical difficulties of spaceflight and articulated why the Moon has a critical role to play in creating new capabilities in space. He posed a key question: “What is the purpose of our civil space program?” Marburger then stated that “questions about the vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the solar system in our economic sphere, or not.” And he provided an answer: “For a space program to serve national scientific, economic and security interests, we must learn to use what we find in space to create new capabilities, starting with the material and energy resources of the Moon.” Marburger also pointed out that such a mission had much greater long-term societal value than space activities “confined to a single nearby destination or to a fleeting dash to plant a flag.” Because the Moon is close, reachable, and useful, it was chosen as the centerpiece of the VSE. Mars was a destination reserved for the future, after we had mastered the new skills and technology needed for spacefaring.
Apparently, few in the agency heard or read Marburger’s speech because NASA either misunderstood their charter in the VSE or deliberately torqued it away from the intended direction. An Exploration Strategy Workshop, held in April 2006 in Washington, gathered an international cadre of about 150 space experts for a four-day meeting to identify why we were going to the Moon and how to best accomplish those goals. The boundary conditions were the features and limitations of the ESAS architecture; otherwise, the agenda was completely open. I was stunned by the premise of this meeting. The VSE speech of January 2004 was the clearest, most unambiguous strategic direction given to the space agency by a president since John F. Kennedy’s Apollo declaration.20 Yet two years later, NASA decided to convene a group to come up with a rationale for lunar return and to envision a set of activities once we got there. The agenda for and mindset of this meeting convinced me that the VSE was in serious trouble.
The workshop attendees deliberated over the course of three days, drawing up six major “themes” for lunar return: human civilization, scientific knowledge, exploration preparation, global partnerships, economic expansion, and public engagement. Flowing from those six broad-based themes was a “grid” of specific requirements and activities, 186 entries identifying what would become the input to the succeeding Lunar Architecture Team (LAT). Although the ESAS specified the hardware and mission profiles, exactly how they would be used, which events and in what order they would take place on the Moon, were yet to be specified. With workshop results having “told us” why we were going to the Moon, we could begin to focus on the “how.”
Among the topics to be grappled with were the sites on the Moon to be visited, whether to set up an outpost or conduct multiple sortie visits, and which investigations to conduct and in what order. The LAT consisted of scientists and engineers who would meet several times per year but would mostly perform their work at their home institutions. Tony Lavoie, an engineer from NASA-Marshall in Huntsville, chaired the first LAT. Tony and I had previously worked together on planning the later-canceled second lunar robotic mission, a lander and rover designed to map and characterize the ice deposits in the permanently dark areas near the poles. We knew something about the lunar polar environment from Clementine and LP, and the soon-to-fly LRO would add detailed knowledge that would allow us to pick the optimum landing sites for surface activities.
The first LAT came up with solid, defensible conclusions, especially in regard to mission mode and priority activities.21 The most important decision made was to focus lunar return on the establishment of an outpost near one of the poles of the Moon; which pole was to be decided after LRO and some surface rover data had been collected. The principal reason for an outpost is that you can concentrate assets at a single locality and rapidly build up capability. The alternate approach is to conduct sortie missions, which permit visiting many different sites with wide geographic and geologic diversity but preclude the concentration of assets, since the sites would be abandoned after each mission. The sortie strategy was the Apollo template writ large; the outpost approach would mean permanence, or at least long-term habitation, and the opportunity to build a production-level resource processing facility. Unlike many within NASA, Lavoie clearly understood the real meaning of the VSE: to return to the Moon and learn the skills needed for extended space presence and capability. Under his leadership, for the first time since its announcement, the VSE began to move toward a mission more inline with its original intent.
Despite its many good deeds, the LAT activity was still entrained within the NASA system and hence, was required to address the 186-entry “spreadsheet of death,” as we called the table of activities and events to be accommodated while on the Moon. The practical effect of this was to diffuse the LAT effort away from its primary mission direction—a resource-processing outpost—into a nebulous, NASA lunar exploration mission. Most insidiously, the lunar “touch-and-go” on the way to Mars, the “real” objective, slowly crept back into the architecture. This happened largely during the second round of architectural planning (imaginatively named “LAT-2”) in which sortie missions became the new baseline. In part, this was an agency reaction to an outcry during the public rollout of the LAT-1 plans in December 2006.22 The usual suspects—the Planetary Society, media, various individuals—were greatly concerned that a significant amount of time and effort was to be expended on the Moon, thus delaying their Apollo-type “sprint” to Mars. A common phrase during this time was the expression of desire to get to Mars “in my lifetime,” a requirement not derived from any programmatic principle I can discover. In short, the “sprint to
Mars” cabal within and outside of the agency had struck back.
The report of the LAT-1 team at the end of 2006 was the high-water mark of the VSE. Although many in the agency still refused to “understand” precisely why we were going to the Moon, a solid, logical plan of action had been developed. Both the Chandrayaan-1 and LRO mission developments were proceeding well, as was our work on building the Mini-RF imaging radars to map the poles. Because LRO had grown in mass and had outgrown its original Delta II launch vehicle, a new Atlas booster with extra payload capacity was procured. Consequently, ESMD looked for a possible secondary payload to send to the Moon with the LRO spacecraft. A concept was proposed by the NASA–Ames Research Center to crash the expended Centaur upper stage of the Atlas launch vehicle into one of the poles of the Moon and observe the ejecta plume of that impact with a small spacecraft following behind, unlike the previous Lunar Prospector effort in 1999, which attempted to observe the ejecta plume only with Earth-based telescopes. If ice is present on the Moon, it was hoped that we would observe it in this plume. This add-on mission was called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS).23 It was something of a gamble, since it might miss any putative ice deposits or fail to see those that are present, but was thought to be worth trying. As it turned out, this mission would be the first—and to date, the only—ground truth for the lunar poles that we would get.
The Decline and Fall of the VSE
As the momentum to demote the Moon’s role in the Vision grew, Project Constellation started to run into technical issues and mass growth, and consequently, budgetary problems. One issue was the sizing of the new Orion spacecraft. In order to accommodate its larger crew with amenities such as a kitchen and a toilet, the decision was made during the ESAS to adopt a 5-meter diameter for the vehicle (the Apollo command module was 3.9 meters in diameter). This larger spacecraft might have made travel around cislunar space more enjoyable, but such comfort came at a serious cost. The increase in size and mass meant that Orion outgrew its Ares I (“the stick”) launch vehicle. Despite an attempt to solve this problem by adding another solid rocket motor segment to the Ares I, now with a five-segment first stage, it was found that to achieve orbit, the vehicle would need to fire the service module engine, much as the shuttle orbiter used its orbital maneuvering engines to finalize its attainment of LEO. This issue was accompanied by concerns over a high-frequency vibration called thrust oscillation during the burn of the Ares I first stage solid-propellant motor; it was feared that this thrust oscillation could temporarily incapacitate the crew during critical abort phases of the ascent. Although these problems all had solutions, the problem was that they did not have any “no-cost, no-mass” solutions.
The basic problem with Orion was that it was oversized for its role as simple transport to and from LEO to support the ISS (part of the ESAS ground rules) and even as a cislunar vehicle. Worse, it was undersized in its role as a Mars spacecraft, being useful for only two phases of the mission: crew departure from the Earth and aerothermal entry upon return. For true, long-duration flights, Constellation would need to carry a separate habitation module. But such a requirement negated the rationale for providing Orion with a kitchen and toilet, which drove its larger size to begin with. Thus, we were (and still are) developing a new human spacecraft that was simultaneously too big for its early uses and too small for its intended later one.
As technical issues grew, the agency’s annual budget requests began to increase. When budgetary increases failed to materialize, the scope of agency activities decreased. An early casualty of this new austerity was the lunar robotic program. The second robotic mission to the Moon was to have been a surface lander and rover, designed to follow up on the water discoveries from orbit and measure the type and quantity of water present in the surface, critical information needed to use the resource. Other robotic missions were designed to emplace infrastructure such as communications relays so that landings at the poles and on the far side could be undertaken, and to test resource extraction techniques such as water production on the surface. Because of budgetary pressures caused by Constellation’s development problems, all these missions were deferred to “later,” which became “never.” This deferral of the robotic program was a blatant neglect of the specific direction within the VSE that a “series of robotic missions to the Moon be undertaken” as part of lunar return.
Few observers in Washington ever thought that the VSE would be fully implemented with the minimal new investment that NASA had been promised during the Bush roll out. But it seemed to many that the agency was not trying very hard to maximize the leverage provided by the use of legacy hardware. The Ares vehicles, although based upon an adaptation of shuttle hardware, required so many modifications that it became a completely new development. And given the problems with accommodating an oversized Orion, most didn’t even want to think about developing its necessary companion, the behemoth Altair lunar lander, supersized because of its dual role as a self-contained human lander/habitat and an automated cargo lander. There were increasing complaints about Constellation, initially from the space community peanut gallery. Over time, criticisms started showing up in congressional hearings. It didn’t help matters that some senior NASA personnel were incapable of explaining exactly why we were going to the Moon in the first place, including some who had been assigned this task as part of their job description.24
Figure 5.1. Mini-RF radar mosaic of the north pole of the Moon. Small craters with bright interiors near the north pole (arrow) are probably filled with water ice. More than a billion tons of water ice are likely available at each pole. (Credit 5.1)
Meanwhile, progress continued on the two robotic lunar missions that had already been approved. In the fall of 2008, I once again made the long journey to India, only this time to the SHAR complex north of Chennai, on the eastern coast where India launches its rockets. SHAR is located on a flat, marshy coastal plain, similar in setting and ambiance to our own Cape Canaveral. On October 22, 2008, after a few days of constant monsoon rain, we finally launched Chandrayaan to the Moon. As it arced eastward over the Indian Ocean, I was able to catch a quick glimpse of the departing rocket through a miraculous break in the cloud cover.25 Following a four-day journey, Chandrayaan inserted into orbit around the Moon and began transmitting data back to Earth. I was at the Mission Control Center in Bangalore for our initial data collect in early November, as a single strip showing some lunar craters near the north pole was downloaded. With our instrument working, we began our first mapping cycle in early February 2009 and over the course of the next month, acquired nearly complete maps of both poles. It would take several months of analysis before we could understand what all the data meant—that water ice does exist in quantity in some of the craters near the poles (figure 5.1).26
The election of Barack Obama as president in November 2008 led to new uncertainty about the fate of Project Constellation and the VSE. During the election campaign, Obama made ambiguous statements of support for the space program, first suggesting that money expended on space might be better spent on “education,” but rapidly changed his tune during an appearance in the electoral vote-rich, critical state of Florida, where he pledged support for Project Constellation. Space supporters were cautiously optimistic upon his assumption of office. Mike Griffin hoped to stay on as NASA administrator but that was not in the cards and his resignation was accepted. While searching for a permanent replacement, Acting NASA Administrator Chris Scolese testified to Congress that he did not know what “return to the Moon” meant in the context of his agency’s activities.27 At the time, I thought that this statement by the head of the agency assigned the job of implementing the VSE was the absolute nadir of the American space experience but unfortunately, even lower points were to follow. Eventually, former astronaut and Marine general Charles Bolden was named as the new head of the agency, with space advocate and “Astro Mom” Lori Garver assigned as deputy administrator. Completing this cast of characters
was Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren, neo-Malthusian environmentalist and critic of human spaceflight.28
The first space policy decision of the new administration was to appoint a committee to review the space program and make recommendations on whether to continue current efforts or to reorient its goals and/or the means to implement them. This committee, named for its chairman Norman Augustine, formerly CEO of Lockheed-Martin, should not be confused with the earlier, 1990 Augustine Committee.29 This new Augustine committee conducted “independent” cost analyses, performed by the Aerospace Corporation, of current NASA programs, with an eye toward possible alternatives. The committee worked throughout the summer of 2009, holding meetings and listening to testimony from agency engineers on progress with various developments underway as part of Project Constellation. The lack of fulfillment of requested levels of funding was a constant refrain. During their meetings, the Augustine Committee also heard testimony from other parts of the agency, including engineers working on Ares alternatives and the value of using in situ resources to make consumables and propellant on the Moon. You will look long and hard in the committee report to find mention of this evidence, which led many of us to suspect that the committee was well on its way to a predetermined conclusion.
The 2009 Augustine committee report,30 given the grandiose title Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation, outlined three possible paths forward. One path emphasized a human Mars mission, deemed technically a bridge too far. Another path described a return to the Moon, deemed too old hat. The third alternative outlined what was called the Flexible Path, deemed just right. In contrast to the first two options, Flexible Path advocated journeys beyond LEO to a variety of destinations beyond the Moon but short of the surface of Mars. Such targets included an L-point, a near Earth asteroid, or one of the moons of Mars. You might recall that this was the same “path of progress” advocated by NASA’s Decadal Planning Team.31 The perceived advantage of Flexible Path was that all of its possible destinations are low gravity objects, so that deep space systems could be developed incrementally without the need to simultaneously develop an “expensive” lander spacecraft. The committee had detailed cost estimates for the various options performed by the Aerospace Corporation to buttress its conclusion that no viable and affordable path forward was possible under the budget guidelines given to them by the White House.
The Value of the Moon Page 12