I put up a post the other day in which I described how unimpressed I was with Neal Lane’s comments on space policy. It turns out that Paul Spudis didn’t think much of them, either. He’s actually harder on him than I was:

(Neal Lane) has made some public statements that are so egregiously ignorant that I cannot remain silent.

Tell us how you really feel, Paul.

[Update a few minutes later]

Paul writes:

Aside from the idea of continuing to fly the Space Shuttle (not a very good idea for many reasons), none of this is particularly new but rather a re-statement of the Apollo-era meme that, “If we can go to the Moon, we can solve the (fill-in-the-blank) crisis.” Since energy and climate change are the current crises du jour, some seek to capitalize on the public’s fondness for the NASA of old (“The Right Stuff”) with the frantic cry that it should be redirected to make these “fixes.”

I deconstructed this kind of thinking last summer, for the Apollo landing anniversary:

Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done. At its height, the Apollo program consumed four percent of the federal budget (NASA is currently much less than one percent, and has been for many years). Considering how much larger the federal budget is today, with the addition and growth of many federal programs over the past forty years makes the amount of money spent on the endeavor even more remarkable.

But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.

It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones.

As I note at the end of the piece, if we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we get people to stop making inappropriate analogies with landing a man on the moon?

[Saturday morning update]

Over at Space Politics, commenter “Red” has some useful thoughts:

The VSE had some compelling reasons to go back to the Moon: security, economic, and science benefits, and development of commercial space and international cooperation. However, as far as NASA’s current human Moon program is concerned, I agree with Lane that “NASA’s flailing”. I don’t think the flailing has anything to do with the level of public support, though. NASA has come up with a program that simply doesn’t address the compelling reasons to go back to the Moon. Not only that, but it’s a very expensive program, and it’s not going to return any benefits until 2020 or so, if ever. It’s too big and too slow. Also, it doesn’t build up generally useful capabilities along the way to make the foundation more solid. We don’t need heavy lift for anything except NASA human spaceflight programs, if that. It also is still, in my opinion, not laying nearly enough groundwork in terms of robotic precursor lunar science and engineering missions to spark public and insider interest, and to prepare us for the human missions. Finally, NASA did come up with a huge list of other (or more specific) reasons to go to the Moon besides the VSE ones, but it hasn’t focused on them, picked the key ones to go after, figured out how to go after them, and publicized them. In that context, of course the public isn’t interested.

So … the result of all of this is that it seems like there’s no reason to go back to the Moon because NASA’s plan isn’t a good one. Is it possible to fix NASA’s plan, and go back to the Moon in a way that achieves some of the things I mentioned (security, economics, science, commercial space, international cooperation, useful infrastructure, faster schedule, lower cost)? I do, and I’d be for a NASA program that does even, say, half of these things. Lane apparently doesn’t think so – it seems he’s writing off the Moon because NASA is having trouble. That seems a bit harsh on the Moon, which isn’t responsible for NASA’s difficulties.

However, let’s take Lane’s conclusion for granted – that the public isn’t interested in the Moon, NASA’s flailing, so NASA shouldn’t return to the Moon. What should we do then? In that case, one reasonable option is to have NASA do something the public is interested in … if it’s in the context of NASA’s space and aeronautics mission and expertise. Dr. Spudis’s blog references a poll of 20 critical issues that cites global warming as being in last place. (Space isn’t on the list). The implication is that the energy/environment missions the Lane/Abbey proposal recommends isn’t supported by the public, either. However, that poll showed energy as #6 and environment as #16. A lot of the issues are mostly irrelevant to NASA (eg: Social Security, Immigration, etc), so #6 is fairly high. Space Politics had a post on a poll that focuses on desired technology breakthroughs, and energy and environment fared well there compared to space (so did medicine and security/defense).

So energy and environment might not be a bad pair of choices as far as the public is concerned. Let me just pick the subset of Earth observations (which are easy to discuss because NASA already does them and we know what they’re like). These missions tend to have characteristics (launchers, satellite subsystems and instruments) that are very similar to military and security ones, so those key public concerns could be addressed at the same time. Economic concerns can be tackled concurrently, too. A much more substantial NASA Earth observation effort could help our space development goals if it had a few of the following characteristics:

• Keep the vast majority of NASA work in the space/aeronautics realms.
• Keep NASA on the cutting edge, with a wide-open pipeline to operational agencies like NOAA, DOD, intelligence agencies, Homeland Security, and USGS, and also commercial space (like GeoEye and Digitalglobe).
• Keep a wide data pipeline to commercial value adders (Google Earth, GIS, image processing, AccuWeather, etc)
• Don’t blow all the funding on 1 or 2 giant programs NPOESS-style.

Don’t make the mistakes of Constellation:

• Focus laser-like on goals like economics, security, and science.
• Fully engage with commercial space and international partners.
• Make the structure look like a food pyramid, with numerous small satellite projects, suborbital RLV missions, etc as the foundation.
• Deliver results quicker, on a sustainable budget.
• Use existing launchers, and encourage new commercial ones.
• Build or encourage useful infrastructure that can be used by later NASA missions, other agencies, or commercial space (eg: refueling, tugs, and stations for astronaut environment satellite servicing, improved satellite components, commercial suborbital and orbital launchers) … no HLVs or NASA rockets needed.

It seems to me that such an effort would be affordable if Constellation were shut down (as Lane recommends). I think it could even be done with funds left over to implement a good lunar robotic program, and in a way that builds the space infrastructure that would eventually enable a good human lunar program. Maybe Lane means something similar when he talks of building a “solid foundation”, but Lane and Abbey recommend keeping the Shuttle and doing a bunch of other things that seem too expensive to me, unless they’re proposing a schedule of multiple decades.

I propose “Red” for NASA administrator.