[Note: KLo offered me some space at The Corner to rebut Jeffrey Anderson’s post, but it hasn’t gone up yet and I’m not sure when it will. But since it’s just a blog post, and not a paid NRO article, I assume there’s no problem with cross posting here.]
While I’m not a conservative, some of my best friends are, and I am sympathetic to that philosophy, so it pains me to see such an inadvertently unconservative post on space policy appear in The Corner from Jeffrey Anderson. I responded briefly at my blog, but I’m grateful to Kathryn to allow me some space there for a more proper rebuttal.
Short version, human spaceflight policy is one of the few things that Obama seems to be getting right, at least from a conservative standpoint.
Longer version:
The Bush Vision for Space Exploration, announced a year after the loss of the Columbia, in January 2004, was a good goal, and it got off to a decent start. Unfortunately, once he replaced Sean O’Keefe, the NASA administrator, with Mike Griffin in 2005, the wheels started to come off. As the Augustine Panel pointed out this past fall, there was little prospect with the current plans of getting back to the moon on the stipulated schedule, and in anything resembling an affordable way. Unfortunately, once they’d hired the rocket scientist as the new administrator, the White House had simply put it on autopilot, because they had understandably higher priorities. For those interested, I wrote a long essay on the history of the human spaceflight program last summer at The New Atlantis, right up to present day minus five months or so, that explains why NASA in its current form isn’t an institution that a conservative should support at all (in fact, per Jonah’s new formulation, it arguably even has fascist aspects to it), but many do as a result of the historical contingencies of Apollo. I know that it’s become popular of late for conservatives to laud JFK (who admittedly wouldn’t recognize, or probably even be allowed in today’s Democrat Party), but it’s important to understand what Apollo was, and wasn’t. It was a victory in the Cold War over the Soviets, but because we were at war, we waged it with a state socialist enterprise. What it was not was the first step of opening up the frontier to humanity, and was in fact a false start that has created a template for NASA and a groove in which we’ve been stuck for over four decades now, with many billions spent and little useful progress.
Part of the mindset that grew out of that era was that Space = NASA, and that “Progress in Space” = “Funding NASA” and that not funding NASA, or adequately funding NASA, or changing NASA’s goals, is a step backwards. But as I noted at Popular Mechanics yesterday on the 24th anniversary of the Challenger loss, that event had a good outcome, in that it allowed private industry to start to become more involved, a trend that continues (and that the Bush/Griffin administration did support, albeit with paltry funding, in the form of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to pick up slack in delivering cargo to the space station after Shuttle is retired this year or next). We have been in fact developing, though far too slowly, the sort of private-enterprise (and more intrinsically American than Soviet in nature) space program that might have evolved more naturally had we not been side tracked by Apollo in the sixties.
What the administration is doing is to finally end the model that the government will have a state socialist design bureau to build a monopoly transportation system for its own use, at tremendous cost, but politically supportable because of all the pork it provides to Alabama, Florida and Texas. It proposes to expand the COTS program to provision of crew changeout in addition to cargo delivery, encouraging competition, and providing a robust capability that won’t put us out of business when the government rocket fails (as has happened twice with the Shuttle in the past quarter century, for almost three years each time). Instead of a program projected to cost many tens of billions over the next decade for a NASA-owned-and-operated new rocket (Ares I) that will cost billions per flight of four astronauts, it is going to invest six billion dollars in developing private capability, with multiple competitors, and do it on a fixed-price, pay-for-performance basis, rather than the wasteful cost-plus model that inevitably results in overruns due to the perverse incentives.
At the same time, it is going to divert the funds being wasted by NASA on that redundant and unnecessary new rocket, and put at least some of them back into R&D for the kind of hardware necessary to actually get beyond low earth orbit (such as earth-departure stages, landers, propellant storage facilities, lunar resource utilization, etc.), R&D that had been starved by Mike Griffin in his desperation to find funds for his out-of-control Ares program. Yes, the administration has said that the moon is no longer an explicit, scheduled goal, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t go there, and in fact we’ll be in much better shape to do so with the new plans than we ever would have with the current ones, should we decide to do so in the future. And in addition to the moon, we’ll have the capability to visit, or divert asteroids, missions to the moons of Mars, and perhaps even Mars’ surface, because instead of wasting money on a new launch vehicle, we will have developed the affordable in-space infrastructure that allows us to do other things once private industry delivers us to orbit.
A couple other points. Contra Mr. Anderson (and with all due respect, Dr. Krauthammer), as another knowledgable space blogger (and space entrepreneur, part of the team that recently won the Lunar Landing Challenge) notes at my site, getting to and from orbit is not the most dangerous part of a space mission:
The vast majority of the danger for any beyond earth orbit mission is going to happen while you’re out there in the wilds. Even NASA agreed that an astronaut is about 30x more likely to die from something other than launch than they are to die during the ascent phase of the mission. If you only include the atmospheric reentry part in that number, it might drop to something only ~15-20x more likely to die from the actual BEO portion of a mission than from the ascent/descent phases. Even if you go with the really pessimistic ESAS LOC numbers for stock EELVs, you’re still talking about over 90% of the mission risks being from portions of the mission outside of earth orbit.
Note that Apollo XIII, the closest we came to losing Apollo astronauts in flight, occurred halfway to the moon. Had the tank explosion occurred on the way back, when there was no lunar module as backup, we would have lost that crew, no matter how much of an option Gene Kranz said failure wasn’t. From an overall mission safety perspective, spending tens of billions on a new launch system in the hope that it will be “safer” is a tragic misallocation of resources.
I would also note that it’s ironic that in defending a bloated government program, Mr. Anderson uses the same arguments as the left uses for theirs. Yes, NASA spending creates jobs. The issue is (as Bastiat famously asked about the window repairers) does it create wealth? And how many jobs in the private sector aren’t created because NASA is discouraging private activities by competing with them with government dollars?
If the choice is between having no space program at all, and the current one, perhaps the latter is preferable. But if the choice is spending the taxpayers’ money to create wealth and new industries while actually accomplishing things in space and perhaps finally opening it up for the rest of us, versus a wasteful jobs program for Marshall Spaceflight Center, I know which I’d prefer. The new administration plans will take us much more in that direction, and on the rare occasion that it gets something right, true conservatives should be applauding it, rather than recycling hoary tropes about “staying close to home,” and “going nowhere.” Sadly, it was the misbegotten policy of the previous administration that was doing that. At least in this area, it’s change I can believe in.
[Update a few minutes later]
Fiscal responsibility and privatization? What’s not to like?
As (Republican and (AFAIK) conservative) Jim Muncy has said, they seem to check their brains at the door in Washington when it comes to space policy.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sigh…
I just listened to Bret Baier’s panel on DVR, and all of them were clueless. Krauthammer was lamenting the lack of a JFK and a new Apollo, Kirsten Powers said she’d rather have NASA study climate change than walk on the moon (as though those are the only two options), and Steve Hayes said that he was worried about the national security implications and a new space race, as though anything that NASA is doing has anything to do with that, if it even exists, which it doesn’t, at least with regard to human spaceflight.
[Update early evening]
Another article on the subject. I found this interesting, in support of my thesis:
Brett Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation here, said Obama’s proposed $6 billion investment would not only get astronauts back to launching on U.S. vehicles faster than Constellation, but would also “create more jobs per dollar” by leveraging private investment.
Alexander said Constellation has failed to live up to the Vision for Space Exploration he helped craft as a White House policy analyst under former President George W. Bush.
“I was a primary author of the Vision for Space Exploration, and I really wanted it to succeed. I am not happy that five years later it has to be retooled completely,” Alexander said. “But they chose the most expensive architecture and they had cost and technical issues with it. The cost overruns are astonishing.”
Ahhh, ignore it…just another view from a left winger.
One more point.
The Aldridge Commission (you know, the one that President Bush put together after his announcement six years ago for the new direction) had a number of recommendations that Mike Griffin’s NASA essentially tossed in the trash. Just going from memory:
1) Involve commercial enterprise
2) Involve internationals
3) Promote national security
4) Make it politically affordable and sustainable.
It’s quite obvious that (4) was completely ignored, because it has died, politically.
I would say that the Obama proposal is much more in keeping with those directives than the Program of Record.
Unfortunately, the Aldridge Commission also recommended a heavy lifter. We’ll see on Monday if they adhered to that as well…
[Another update]
As I just emailed to Instapundit, the only reason that Obama’s getting this policy right is because he probably doesn’t give a damn about it, and is relying on his underlings, who fortunately are more interested, and smarter.
[Saturday morning update]
When I call this a “conservative” space policy, I in no way mean to imply that this is the motivation. I know that Barack Obama is no conservative. I think that this is one of those many cases of the government accidentally doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. My theory is that Obama doesn’t care about space, which is a good thing, because he could really do serious damage to the program if he did. Fortunately, (unlike George Bush) he has some appointees in this case who have their heads screwed on straight, and he’s letting them do their own thing.
What I fear most about the new regime is that the commercial providers will be reviewed by the same agency that has an organizational incentive to see it fail so that they can revert to being a designer and operator. This approach very much wants an organizationally separate engineering analysis capability and safety authority with no ambitions to compete with the companies it supervises.
What I fear most about the new regime is that the commercial providers will be reviewed by the same agency that has an organizational incentive to see it fail so that they can revert to being a designer and operator.
That was something to be feared whatever the policy going forward. I suspect that it should be feared at least a little less now that NASA has been told they’re not allowed, and won’t be funded, to compete…
But I agree that at a minimum this should be done by the FAA (though it would be even better to move AST out of the FAA and back into reporting directly to SECDOT).
After all, why should NASA astronauts have higher safety requirements than normal citizens? This, of course, is yet another essay in itself. Why not write it, and publish here?
You can not expect to bankrupt the US government and not have consequences. We have to make some choices, including some hard ones to get the percent of GDP spent by the feds under control. Right now were approaching 40%, and have historically (at least in the post-WW2 period) been around 20%. And we’re in debt and borrowing more to keep this level of spending up. Not a good idea Phantom. We can argue over priorities, but spending cuts are overdue. So what else would you cut first?
That was something to be feared whatever the policy going forward.
Yes, this has been a generic flaw in the US space establishment.
I suspect that it should be feared at least a little less now that NASA has been told they’re not allowed, and won’t be funded, to compete…
Not if they see it as their last chance to retain a design and operational role – – they might decide they have nothing to lose.
This, of course, is yet another essay in itself. Why not write it, and publish here?
I address some of these issues in an appendix to the upcoming SPI study — it may get published as a free-standing piece as well.
You say that the Challenger and Columbia disasters halted America’s manned space flight capability for three years apiece. This is true. What isn’t true is that commercial manned space flight would be any more resilient in the face of (unavoidable — we still have plane crashes 100 years later, right?) disaster.
The first time a commercial astronaut dies, that company is out of business, period. The second time it happens, commercial manned space flight in America is done. Fini.
While NASA had to weather both technical and political storms, they did NOT have to deal with legal ones, since as an arm of the federal government they have sovereign immunity. SpaceX does not.
Lawyers will kill manned space flight.
“So what else would you cut first?”
Entitlements. Anything else is pure delusion.
The first time a commercial astronaut dies, that company is out of business, period. The second time it happens, commercial manned space flight in America is done. Fini.
No matter how many times this kind of ahistorical nonsense is repeated, it isn’t rendered true.
How many airlines killed people, and didn’t go out of business? How many times did the aviation industry go out of business after the second person was killed?
Hint: Zero in both cases.
Rand,
I actually believe, to an extent, the more it happens the more desensitized we become. I know I was far less shocked by Columbia than Challenger.
Did we abandon skyscrapers and jets after 9/11?
It will be a long time before spaceflight kills as many people as died on 9/11.
As another answer as to what to cut. How about the Department of Maleducation?
It’s budget is over a hundred billion and they educate no one.
I am a conservative who is happy to see at least one government program closed in the face of manifest failure. Now if only the the NEA, CPB, Amtrak, and the Departments of Education, Agriculture and Housing were to join it.
Shill for the public option.
I was talking with an exec from one of the aerospace majors a few yeas ago and commenting on the claim of new space to be able to build a lander to deliver rovers to the Moon for around $30 million. He indicated that was a good estimate and his company could probably do one as well for a private firm.
I then asked him why the NASA landers cost so much. He response was that first there are all the documents that document the documents that document all the documented work being done on it. Then you have the constant NASA reviews and how every review seems to produce a new series of requirements. And then there are the scientists. They are not satisfied with instruments off the shelf or from the last mission. Nope, they must be all new and custom built instruments. And of course as they are building them the weight, power requirements, etc. keeping changing as does the interface. The end result of course is a huge escalation of cost to the price you find for NASA missions.
If they do that to the commercial HSF providers you could kiss your savings good bye 🙂
Tom
If the choice is between having no space program at all, and the current one, perhaps the latter is preferable.
Don’t you mean the former instead of the latter?
I said, “perhaps…”
So does this make Obama an anti-science President?
OK, then I don’t understand. I thought you were making the libertarian/conservative friendly argument for commercial spaceflight: it may be not be a valid way to spend taxpayers’ money, but it is at least a lot better than the current alternative.
But it’s very late over here, so maybe I’d better sleep on it.
NASA as it exists now is the biggest threat to American manned space flight. They are responsible for the deaths of fourteen of their own astronauts. They live in the government world of imposing restrictions on everyone but breaking their own rules when it is convenient. IMHO, privatizing the astronauts takes away much of NASAs potential leverage. Heck, maybe they should just contract out the whole ISS to contractors, both US and Russian. Let the Euros pay to play too.
Hang on, I think I get it now: “current one” means Constellation, not what Obama wants to replace it with.
The only thing keeping NASA funded was the desire to allocate Pork to congressional districts. Now that incentive has disappeared, expect exactly zero funds to be allocated for any work outside LEO, and an ever decreasing amount overall.
We may get a good, robust LEO infrastructure from all of this. I think we will. But I don’t see a re-start of Lunar ambitions for another 10 years. That’s based on Obama being a 1-term-wonder, and the next president being too busy clearing up the financial mess.
Optimistically, the next time an American walks on the moon will be 2030, at best. Possibly carried there in a Chinese spacecraft.
Now that incentive has disappeared, expect exactly zero funds to be allocated for any work outside LEO, and an ever decreasing amount overall.
This is actually what I’m hoping for. It is regrettable NASA will likely be “asked” (allowed is a better word) to develop an SDLV with taxpayers’ money. That money would have been better spent on a capsule and a reusable lander. The silver lining is that NASA will not be in a position to choose a design for the lander that locks in the SDLV either by making it too wide to fit inside an EELV fairing or by making it too heavy to fit on an EELV.
The longer NASA stays in LEO, the better the chances that the SDLV will be cancelled, either after or preferably before it flies. Obama’s reported choice to allow an SDLV instead of a lander suggests he has no serious intentions to support exploration.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=33356
Hey Rand, did you see this?
Given this mis-administration’s contempt for how the private sector really works, I have to wonder what destruction or subjugation, planned or otherwise, is in store for those companies it involves.
“Obama’s Conservative Space Policy” The Orwellian use of language in that one phrase boggles the mind. It implies that Obama’s motive in junking the space exploration program was, well, conservative and not a left wing disdain for space exploration.
In the case of the Administration’s plans, my suspicion is that Obama and company did select Earth observation, et al, because it is more politically palatable for their base. I am not sure they really get it or are that interested in space programs. I think that they just would rather spend the money on domestic programs, “education” and programs that supposedly support a cleaner environment. However, whether they stupidly arrived at the right answer, or arrived at it through wisdom, their answer is pretty much the right answer.
We can argue over priorities, but spending cuts are overdue.
I don’t disagree with this but Obama recently announced plans to “invest” $8 billion in high-speed rail.
I know everybody wants this to be a huge change in direction and interesting and all, and hey, it might turn out to be that, but:
1. We have nothing but rumors.. even the “confirmation” from Sally Ride was prefixed with “from what I’ve heard”.. so I really won’t be surprised if its completely different come Monday.
2. Even if the annoucement is everything the rumors say it is, it still has to be filtered through Congress and the NASA Administrator. There’s plenty of opportunities there for corruption of the vision.
3. And the truth of the matter is, the appropriations committees actually control NASA’s program. It takes real political capital to get any program funded and we’ve seen no evidence that the current administration has any intention of doing that.
The complete failure to even mention NASA in the State Of The Union address seems to indicate that the administration really isn’t going to fight too hard for this program.
Oh, and then, finally, if everything goes through and NASA gets the funding and the direction the rumors suggest they will, and the Administrator gets behind it and Congress doesn’t play dirty tricks, there’s the simple fact remaining that NASA has to implement it. Even if they don’t deliberately try to block it, even if they have the best of intentions, there’s the simple fact that NASA remains an incompetent bureaucracy.
I agree with Mark that there’s nothing “conservative” about the direction of space policy with this administration. The same amount of money will be spent (more or less) on the federal space prorgam. The new “green” direction of NASA as “EPA in space” is a dead giveaway to the ideological roots of this change.
The real problem with this decision is not the commercial launch and LEO access architecture — it is the loss of strategic direction. Arguably, this was lost very early in implementing the VSE (NASA never really grasped WHY they were going to the Moon) but now a clear, concrete direction (i.e., going to the Moon to learn how to use its resources) is dropped to be replaced by by the nebulous “Flexible Path,” which is big on targets and vehicles, but short on surface activities and mission objectives. If you believe that NASA has bungled the implementation of the Vision, how can you think they will do any better now that the destination has changed?
The flexible path is incorrectly named.. it should be the slippery path, cause that’s what politicians think when they hear it. A better name would be the incremental technology demonstration path, but hey, that’s not as zippy. Oh, and the VSE, that should have been called the Path For Space Infrastructure but I’m sure even that could have been twisted to whatever the politicians needed it to be.
Check out Jeff Greason on The Space Show the other night:
http://thespaceshow.com/detail.asp?q=1292
He elegantly restates the rationale behind the flexible path, but that clarity most probably wont last.
I guess the question remains, will Elon Musk and SpaceX be allowed to finish Falcon 9 Development and the Dragon crew carrier? After all, Dragon is supposed to carry carbon emmitters, i.e., humans. We know how Obama hates those.
He will go in the history books in the same paragraph with JFK; as in “JFK uttered the words that had the effect of sending Americans to the moon, and four decades BHO publicly and proudly tried to cancel the return.”
Certainly I’m not a fan of putting humans on top of solid-but-sectioned fuel motors. I’m less of a fan on abandoning 99% of available energy and resources in return for naval-gazing and hoping the Russians play fair.
If you believe that NASA has bungled the implementation of the Vision, how can you think they will do any better now that the destination has changed?
Because I think that the current NASA administrator and deputy have a much clearer idea than the previous ones did.
Assuming the advance press is true, this is why I voted for Obama. The man looks at a problem and asks how do we fix it.
The problem with NASA was that they were spending tons of money with very little to show for it. The solution – where reasonably possible, go with a cheaper private sector solution. Take the money freed up and spend it where private sector options aren’t as readily available.
If you believe that NASA has bungled the implementation of the Vision, how can you think they will do any better now that the destination has changed?
I for one don’t think that yet, but I do think this all has had one big benefit re Ares: “It’s dead Jim”.
I think that the current NASA administrator and deputy have a much clearer idea than the previous ones did.
Clearer idea of what?
The administrator doesn’t really have very much control of the people within the agency and the direction that they steer it. There was resistance to the VSE within the agency from the moment it was announced. Even before the Aldridge report was issued, the goals of the Vision were torqued in a new and decidedly different direction — from incremental extension of human reach using space resources to an Apollo-style, manned Mars mission. That obsession pre-dated Griffin (not that he significantly disagreed with it.) But it certainly was not in accord with the desired direction of the people then in charge of the agency.
FP as described by Augustine is all big rockets, one-off PR stunt missions, and then, on to the next destination. There is no space ISRU development, so the old paradigm of launch, use and discard continues. Yes, the ESAS ignored the basic mission of the VSE. My point is that the new program doesn’t do any better.
There’s an old joke about the person who says “I believe everything I read in the newspaper — the only times they’ve ever been wrong were when I happened to have firsthand information about the subject.” I think it’s funny that Rand hates everything Obama does, except in the one area where Rand has the most expertise :).
[I do fully realize that Obama’s space policy is not a particularly telling example of his governing philosophy, except insofar as it shows that he is not allergic to private sector solutions when they make sense.]
Don’t insult the man. President Obama’s space policy is quite liberal.
NASA has “nothing to show for it” except the fact that the US has the most advanced and accomplished space program in the world. Or it did until now.
That’s damning it with faint praise John. I wouldn’t brag about being first when nobody else is really trying. It’s like a seriously near sighted guy bragging to the blind.
My theory is that Obama is doing this precisely because it will make some republicans complain, and so make those republicans look like the big-spending hypocrites that they probably are.
> Paul F. Dietz Says:
> January 31st, 2010 at 11:07 am
>
> My theory is that Obama is doing this precisely because it will
> make some republicans complain, and so make those republicans
> look like the big-spending hypocrites that they probably are.
Not likely. First the districts getting hurt are Democrat ruled now — and Obama always said he thought exploration was a waste and wanted NASA focused on just does climate studies and such.
But Obama isn’t trying to do the right thing. Obama is a communist who hates anything that represents American pride. He isn’t trying to find the best way to explore space,,, he is trying to divert money into welfare programs and change NASA into a global warming agency. But his biggest goal is to kill anything that makes people think “America”.
So, NASA becomes SARPA, the “Space Advanced Research Projects Agency” where we do lots of research and development and keep the ISS alive. One problem with that model: DARPA supports the DoD. Many DARPA ideas don’t work–it’s a research agency. Now, NASA doesn’t have a goal to do the research towards–go to the Moon, an asteroid, something. Looks like more money down the tubes.
Now, NASA doesn’t have a goal to do the research towards–go to the Moon, an asteroid, something.
It has the goal to send humans beyond earth orbit in an affordable, sustainable way, something that the previous plan did not.
It has the goal to send humans beyond earth orbit…Ummm….sorry, the NASA budget announcement only talks about working in-orbit, working on automated rendezvous and docking, propellant transfer, and closed loop life-support systems, nothing about going out of any kind of orbits, or going anywhere besides the ISS. I would argue that WHERE a spaceship is going plays a huge part in the design of propulsion, life support systems, reliability, maintainability, etc.”Research and development to support future heavy-lift rocket systems that will increase the capability of future exploration architectures with significantly lower operations costs than current systems—potentially taking us farther and faster into space.” is O.K. if you’re supporting a customer who is going somewhere, but sucks as a mission statement or goal. And there’s nothing “bold or new” about “investing in building blocks of a more capable approach to space exploration”. Try and sell that one at a school…”Kids who want to be the first person to land on Mars?”, usually works better than “Who here would like to “increase the capabilities and reduce the cost of future explorations”?
It is obvious that President Obama’s plan for NASA kills of any manned exploration of anything for the foreseeable future. The only place U.S. astronauts will go in any of our lifetimes is to the ISS.
If SpaceX can bring their Dragon capsule into man rating, we will have inexpensive access to the ISS and whatever other LEO targets that we have. Then, we won’t need the Ares I garbarge at all. Then, we can build a fairly inexpensive SDLV using mostly shuttle parts that can reliably lift over 200,000 lbs. into orbit at a shot(getting rid of the even more idiotic Ares V). That should allow us to build in GSO and get us to the Moon and Mars as we wish, if we wish to spend the dollars. What we do need is satellite based solar power demoed from Earth and then produced from space based resources like asteroids. Once space becomes a source of revenue instead of a dead expense, then we can do a whole lot more. Until then, it is a boodoggle of exactly only academic interest. That does not mean that academic interest is not important. It just means that we don’t need to know it until we can afford it.
> Doug Fingles Says:
> February 1st, 2010 at 11:00 am
>
> So, NASA becomes SARPA, the “Space Advanced Research Projects Agency” ==
Only in our dreams.
> Rand Simberg Says:
> February 1st, 2010 at 11:05 am
>
>> Now, NASA doesn’t have a goal to do the research towards–go
>> to the Moon, an asteroid, something.
>
> It has the goal to send humans beyond earth orbit in an affordable,
> sustainable way, something that the previous plan did not.
Rand where have you seen anything suggesting nASA is directed toward anything remotely like that.
“Rand where have you seen anything suggesting nASA is directed toward anything remotely like that.”
NASA Administrator, C. Bolden
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420994main_2011_Budget_Administrator_Remarks.pdf
“Next, the president has laid out a dynamic plan for NASA to invest in critical and transformative technologies. These will enable our path beyond low Earth orbit through development of new launch and space transportation technologies, nimble construction capabilities on orbit, and new operations capabilities.
Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year; people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the Moon, asteroids and Mars nearly
simultaneously in a steady stream of “firsts;”