Letter to NASA about Your Human Space Flight Programs from Don Peterson, an Old Former Astronaut – Taxpayer

I’m an old guy, over seventy, and over the past four decades I have watched the things you NASA folks have been able to do with admiration and a touch of awe. I think NASA is a good outfit with lots of really fine, bright, hard-working people.

But I have to admit, I need some help trying to understand exactly what NASA is trying to do.

More than four decades ago you undertook a series of human space flight programs – Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo – and you met the challenge posed by President John F. Kennedy to send a man to the moon and bring him back safe and sound. That was an exciting and ambitious goal. You justified the cost by telling everyone that having a human go to the moon and return would provide great benefits to the nation, and I think there were: national pride and prestige, some new technology and scientific discoveries, a winning edge in the cold war in space, and, maybe most important, the development of a skilled, dedicated government and contractor team who could use the Saturn rocket and the other Apollo hardware to do amazing things in space.

And then for some reason you must have felt it had no long-term value, because you canceled two or three flights and shut the moon program down.

Then you said you were going to use some of the hardware and knowledge gained in the Apollo program to build and fly a couple of laboratories in space. You said this program, called SKYLAB, would produce many unique and valuable discoveries that would benefit all of us here on earth, and it did produce some interesting findings about the sun and about pollution here on earth, and other things. You also said you learned a lot about the effects of long-term space flight on human beings, and that would be important for more extended human flights.

But you must have felt that extending SKYLAB operations lacked long-term value, because you canceled the second laboratory and two or three crew flights and shut the program down.

It seems even stranger that you cast aside all the vehicles and equipment, which you had said were such amazing advances in technology. Just recently I heard someone from NASA say that even the blueprints for Apollo hardware had been lost.

That led to nearly a decade without U.S. human space activities while you developed the Space Shuttle. You said it would be a “space airliner,” that would make access to space cheap, safe, and routine for people and cargo. And a decade or so later you followed that up with the Space Station program; a joint effort with 15 partner nations. You claimed that its unique capabilities as a long-term, sophisticated, research facility in the zero gravity environment of space would yield new, valuable findings in medical knowledge, materials science, and other scientific and technological areas.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that’s not working out. The Shuttle, like most NASA vehicles, does some amazing things, but at more than $400 million per flight with two losses in the first 113 flights it is neither cheap nor reliable enough to support long-term, routine, space operations. And, contrary to publicly released findings, it’s becoming clear that the Challenger and Columbia accidents were not caused by careless preflight processing or poor real time decisions in Mission Control, but rather by intrinsic, serious design flaws built in from the beginning, that made the Shuttle vulnerable and are proving extremely hard to fix.

It’s disappointing that people like Ron Dittemore, Linda Hamm, and the NASA and contractor personnel who processed the vehicle preflight and worked in Mission Control took all the blame for the Columbia loss; and that the NASA people who were responsible for the design – Kraft, Abbey, Faget, Cohen, Thompson, and astronauts like me – have not stood up and been accountable. (By the way, I did write a letter to the Congressional committee that was investigating the Columbia accident and stated that I am among the people who are responsible, because I was an active NASA astronaut all during the design, development, and test phases of the Shuttle Program.)

Meanwhile, the Station is drifting along in a state of hibernation with its parts wearing out, insufficient resupply and repair capability, no way to bring up large new experiments or take completed experiments back to earth, and greatly reduced science operations, because it cannot be fully supported without the Shuttle, which will have been grounded for more than two years if it flies as now scheduled in the spring of 2005. Of course we could improve the station situation by buying some more Soyuz and Progress vehicles, but apparently either you NASA folks or the Administration or both would rather have the Station remain useless and wear out than put the Russians back in the “critical path.”

And now the President has announced a desire to send humans to Mars, and you seem eager to respond.

That’s a very exciting prospect but I have several misgivings:

To begin with, it seems that you are eager to abandon all the current human programs that you once said were of great value to the nation and focus your entire attention on the President’s proposal. Various NASA “spokespersons” have said you will limit the Shuttle to fly only the 32 or so flights needed to finish assembly of the Space Station with no other missions, and will then shut the program down without a replacement vehicle of equal capability. And they have also indicated that you will stop participating in Station research as soon as you have completed your zero gravity life science studies. In fact it is already clear that the Station cannot continue full scale operations without the Shuttle or an equivalent vehicle.

To me it seems absolutely illogical that, after investing more than fifty billion dollars to create the Shuttle, develop its capabilities, and learn to operate it; you would shut it down without an equivalent replacement vehicle. And it seems totally unreasonable, that after investing more than forty billion dollars to build, test, launch, and assemble the station, you would plan to stop participating in onboard research activities at the point in time when it first becomes fully operational.

Without these capabilities the nation will no longer be able to do any of the things that you have said made the human space program valuable during the past two decades such as: carrying satellites to orbit and checking them out on board prior to deploying them, or supporting Extra Vehicular Activity to assemble things in space, or capturing free flying malfunctioning satellites and taking them on board for repair or return to earth, or supporting the kind of scientific missions that require the Space Station or a laboratory like the Shuttle-borne SpaceHab. Indeed the first casualty of your cutbacks is the failure to fly the life extension mission of the Hubble Telescope; one of the most scientifically productive satellites NASA has ever deployed, and one of the few that produced visual products that even non-scientists could appreciate.

I also wonder what the station partner nations will do if, despite international agreements with those nations, you withdraw your support for continuing long-term research on the Space Station. Will they develop their own vehicles to launch and return large, heavy cargo items and use Russian, or possibly Chinese, crew carrier vehicles to capitalize on the research potential of the Space Station? Will they be willing to carry American astronauts to and from the station and share the research facilities with us after we stop providing the Shuttle to launch and return crew and cargo? If we do not participate in station research, and other nations reap the rewards of our space station investments, will we regret our decision to abandon our efforts?

You seem to be saying that the things the Shuttle and Space Station could do, other than life science, are no longer of any value; and you will walk away as soon as you have met your station assembly obligations and completed your research to advance knowledge of space effects on people so you can fly longer human missions. That’s self-serving and it’s disappointing, because you promised so much more.

Also it is painfully clear that you have not created an operational infrastructure or the logistics capability to enable you to undertake a Human-To-Mars program. At present, we aren’t even able to support a half dozen humans on a space station in low earth orbit. It appears that after more than four decades of effort, you are left with three launch vehicles that you say are unsatisfactory, a station that you seem all too eager to abandon, and a proposed Orbital Space Plane that doesn’t seem to have any of the capabilities to meet most of your requirements.

I am getting the feeling that NASA is like a high strung, poorly conditioned, racehorse; strong out of the gate but not a good finisher. You seem to be very interested in starting out the gate to create new, exciting programs and build impressive high performance vehicles, but lacking in stamina and often stopping before you reach a satisfactory finish line. Your philosophy seems to be “…let’s build something exciting and figure out what to do with it later…” There is no continuity in your programs; they have all been “giant leaps” followed by cancellations. And don’t try to sell me on “spin-offs”; that’s like keeping a high priced racehorse to get fertilizer.

By contrast, other nations seem to be following more reasonable plans for continuing space activities. The Russians use their vehicles and systems over and over for years; making improvements when they can. They now have operational crew carrier vehicles, reliable boosters, and upper stages and resupply vehicles that can rendezvous and dock automatically to deliver cargo. Furthermore, it seems their approach is cheaper and results in vehicles that are very effective and more rugged and reliable than yours. The Europeans are developing a “Space Tug,” that will allow the movement of modules from orbit to orbit as desired. These tugs could be used to deploy “free flyers” from the station and later recover them. And the Chinese are developing their own launch capabilities, using vehicles derived from Russian equipment, but featuring many improvements. That appears to me to be the beginning of an international functional human space flight infrastructure, and could well lead to more economic, productive space operations.

So, I have some questions.

• Please explain to me why you think we no longer need the capabilities of the Shuttle, or an equivalent vehicle, to support human activities in low earth orbit.
• Tell me why you have changed your mind about the value of long term research on the Space Station.
• Explain to me why the Space Station wouldn’t serve as an excellent facility to test the systems and equipment that will be needed for the long journey to Mars and also provide an ideal place to assemble the Mars vehicles?
• Why isn’t it to our advantage scientifically and economically to participate in the burgeoning international human space flight effort? (Some U.S. companies are using Russian-made boosters because of their low cost, good performance, and high reliability.)
• Finally, if you feel all the things that humans have done in the past on the moon and in low earth orbit are not worth continuing, why do you believe that humans on Mars will accomplish things that are worth the cost?

I think you need to demonstrate long-term responsibility and accountability for how you spend our tax money. Tell us taxpayers what human space activities you have decided to stop supporting and why. Then spell out in detail what you want to accomplish in the next two or three decades and why that will have lasting importance. And tell us how you plan to go about it. Define the essential infrastructure and logistics plans and then follow a step-by-step building block approach that will enable you to reach your goals without the wasteful, disruptive starts and stops which are the unintended hallmark of your earlier programs. Most of us aren’t rocket scientists, but we can understand a clear plan explained in plain language.

I’m not against sending humans to Mars, but I’d be a lot more comfortable about giving you 50 or 60 billion dollars of taxpayer money if you would answer my questions and explain exactly what you plan to do and how you plan to do it before you bolt out of the gate.

Respectfully,

Don Peterson