The Space Shuttle and Space StationGeoff Michael

Two financial disasters that never should have happened

I clearly remember October 5, 1957.  In the wee hours of that morning, I saw the tiny Russian satellite Sputnik pass directly over my home town of Rochester, N.H.  Or, I saw what I thought was the satellite at the time.  On the fifty year anniversary of Sputnik’s launch, I discovered that what I actually saw floating overhead was the second stage of the booster rocket, in a nearly identical orbit to the spacecraft.  After all these years, this fact explains why I could see it with my naked eye in the dark of night.  This historic event started a life-long fascination with space which greatly influenced my future in many ways.

One of my idols was our first astronaut in space, Alan Shepard, who was also from New Hampshire.  I set out on a path to become an astronaut myself and entered the U. S. Air Force Academy as a freshman cadet only one month before the first moon landing.  During my senior year I heard about the first plans for a reusable launch vehicle that could return to Earth after performing its space mission.  I was also one of the original “Trekkies,” never missing an episode of the television series that was responsible for the name of the first Space Shuttle Enterprise.

My eyesight kept me out of the astronaut program, but it didn’t keep me out of the space program.  As a young Air Force officer, I was assigned to the Space & Missile Systems Organization (SAMSO) in El Segundo, California.  At the time, it was the buying agency for all military satellites.  I was a project officer in the program office that was procuring the Fleet Satellite Communications System spacecraft for the U. S. Navy.  It was the mid-seventies and the moon landings were now a part of history.  We had developed an assortment of unmanned rockets used to launch satellites into various orbits.  One of them, the Atlas-Centaur, was selected as the launch vehicle for the Fleet Satellites currently under development.

Before our first satellite was launched in February 1978, formal discussions had already begun regarding transitioning launches to the Space Transportation System (STS) following its deployment in the early eighties.  The plan was for the unmanned rockets to be phased out over time as the Shuttle came on line to carry future spacecraft into orbit.  For those spacecraft requiring a much higher orbit than the Shuttle occupied, a special interim upper stage booster was being developed to carry the payload from the Shuttle’s orbit up to the required final orbit.

My recollection of these meetings is crystal clear.  Representatives of the Shuttle program office briefed us on their schedule as well as their projected launch costs.  Although I don’t recall the specific numbers, I do remember that they told us that our costs to use the Shuttle would be roughly half what they were for our unmanned launch vehicle.  Furthermore, if we elected to remain on the Atlas-Centaur rather than transition to the Shuttle, our costs would grow enormously since we would now be the only program using that rocket.  Rather than sharing the launch support costs at Cape Canaveral with other programs using the same booster, our program would have to shoulder the entire cost.  The message was clear:  move to the Shuttle or else.

In late 1977, I was asked by our program manager, an Air Force colonel, to set up a special meeting with the Shuttle program financial officers to review the projected launch costs in more detail.  In a nutshell, I told them that I didn’t believe any of their forecasts.  When they asked why, I said it was very simple.  I didn’t believe that you could launch people into orbit cheaper than you could launch an expendable rocket.  Their cost estimates were based on the fact that unlike an unmanned rocket, the Shuttle could be reused, along with its two solid rocket boosters.  The only portion of the launch system that would be discarded would be the main liquid fuel tank.

While this sounded good in theory, in reality it turned out to be smoke and mirrors.  I told them that what they hadn’t factored into their cost estimates was the most important fact of all – that human beings would be flying aboard this spacecraft.  I knew that in the end, this fact alone would cause the cost of launching the Shuttle to reach stratospheric levels.

Subsequent to that meeting with the Shuttle program officers, I met with our program director and a few other key personnel.  I informed them of my conclusions and I raised one additional concern.  I told them that when a Shuttle failure eventually occurred, that NASA would shut the program down for at least two years to diagnose and correct the problem.  Since the unmanned rocket production lines would already be shut down, that meant that no payloads would be launched while the Shuttle failure investigation and redesign were in progress.

This comment was met with stunned silence, as if I was the only one in the room who had contemplated this possibility.  I looked at it as more of a matter of probabilities, knowing that we had to confront the stark reality that sooner or later a disaster would occur.  When you consider the size and complexity of the Shuttle, and the fact that it contains more raw, explosive power than most of our major weapon systems, it was something that had to be addressed.

I knew that the human factor made all the difference in the world.  When an unmanned booster failed, we lost hardware and money, but no human life.  We went back to the drawing board, corrected the problem, and returned to the launch pad with a modified vehicle in a matter of months, or even weeks.  When people are killed, things move far slower since the thought of the same problem reoccurring is unthinkable.  Everything is reviewed under a microscope, including all the things that didn’t go wrong the last time.  The central focus is to make sure that no stone is left unturned, regardless of the cost or how long it takes.  The fact that the Shuttle proved to be more reliable than any other launch system in existence wouldn’t matter when lives were lost.

As time went on, I began to realize that the Shuttle was cast in stone and that nothing I did or said would make any difference.  As a young officer, I learned that this was the way things worked in the government.  Once a new program built up a head of steam and had its own inertia, anyone who got in its way was “making waves” and was considered a troublemaker.  If you valued your career and your future, you simply got out of the way.  Part of my “problem” was that I viewed the government’s money as being my own.  If we were going to build and deploy the Shuttle then we had to be realistic about what it was going to cost.  Of course, I knew that if the real costs had been put forward, the program probably would have been killed instantly.  So, the only way to sell it to the decision makers was to lowball the costs and worry about it later.

As it eventually played out, all of my concerns turned into reality at some point.  Part of the rationale for the launch estimates assumed at least two Shuttle launches per month.  If that had actually happened, then the total cost of maintaining the launch facility and crew support would have been spread over a much larger user community.  The reality was that we were lucky to see just a few launches each year.  From the first launch in 1981 through the end of 1984, the Shuttle averaged only four launches per year, well below the projections that were used as a basis for all the cost estimates.  While the annual launch rate peaked at 9 in 1985, for the entire 27 years of the program the launch rate has averaged less than 5 per year.

Another key selling feature was the reusability of the main vehicle and the limited refurbishing that would be required to ready it for the next flight.  The reality was that its unprecedented complexity, coupled with the extreme rigors of flight, meant that the time needed to prepare the orbiter for the next flight was several months instead of several days as advertised by NASA.  In addition, there was a stream of never-ending problems associated with ensuring the safety of the flight crew and technical performance of the entire system.  Among the most perplexing was the questionable reliability of the ceramic tiles which were required to protect the orbiter from the super-heating it encountered during reentry.

Before 1986, the military already had concerns about future missions.  Because NASA couldn’t deliver on its aggressive launch schedule, military payload deployments were being jeopardized.  There was no shortage of other customers waiting in line either.  The first few years of Shuttle flights had been fully booked with nine commercial and foreign missions, along with several NASA, DoD and other U.S. government agency missions.

The January 28, 1986 Challenger tragedy changed everything.  Understandably focused on the devastating loss of the Shuttle crew, what few people realize is that what was also lost that day was a half-billion dollar satellite called TDRSS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System).  The military immediately went into scramble mode to resuscitate its dormant unmanned booster programs.  Faced with a Shuttle program that would now be shut down for well over two years, it permanently pulled all but a few future missions off the Shuttle.  This is a decision that I had advocated almost ten years earlier that had completely fallen on deaf ears.  What had been proposed and built as a reusable launch platform for commercial and military satellites assumed a completely new mission.

In order to launch military Shuttle flights from the west coast, Space Launch Complex (SLC)-6 had been constructed at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.  The reason this was required was due to the fact that launching from this location allows payloads to be placed in orbital planes that are different than those achieved from Cape Canaveral.  However, when the military abandoned the Shuttle after the Challenger disaster, the launch complex was no longer needed and never used.

Since 1999, the Shuttle has been used almost exclusively to construct and service the orbiting International Space Station.  Out of a total of 28 launches over the past eight years, 24 have docked with the ISS, with more planned for the future.  This means that the Shuttle’s original mission has essentially been scuttled and the costs have escalated accordingly.  Although precise costs are difficult to obtain because they are buried in various budget line items, reasonable estimates for one launch are in the neighborhood of $500 million.  Whatever happened to all those savings we would accrue because this vehicle was “reusable?”

There is no question that the Shuttle has performed very well overall and provided moments of extraordinary greatness.  Although it now represents three decade-old technology, it remains a marvel of engineering design and sophistication.  Some of its accomplishments include deployments of the Spacelab, the Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope.  The latter was also the subject of breathtaking repair missions which proved our ability to conduct lengthy spacewalks to work on external hardware.  The Shuttle is still the only vehicle that can carry large payloads into orbit and return them to earth.

Whether or not the Shuttle has advanced the study of science is certainly debatable.  There is no doubt that NASA would strongly advance this as a justification for the huge cost of building, maintaining, and launching the orbiters.  In my view, it has not been worth the cost at all, for a variety of reasons.

First, the original mission of the Shuttle to deploy military and commercial payloads has been scrapped.  This mission is easily accomplished by expendable rockets which are cheaper and don’t require the safety precautions associated with a human crew.

Second, we have expended huge sums of money on the Shuttle which could have been more efficiently and effectively spent on robotic probes and expendable scientific payloads.  We need to remember that at the time the manned missions to the moon actually occurred, the technology to do it had already been created.  We had all the knowledge and information to make it possible by collecting it with unmanned probes to the lunar surface.  The manned landings weren’t necessary at all to further science; they were simply a concrete manifestation of our ability to do it in reality rather than in theory.

Finally, proponents of the International Space Station require additional Shuttle flights to complete construction and maintain it on an indefinite basis.  As it was originally conceived, the Station’s mission was to “enable long-term exploration of space and provide benefits to people on Earth.”  It seems unlikely that it will ever come close to fulfilling that mission.  The only way that it could enable the further exploration of space would be to serve as a launch springboard for other vehicles traveling beyond Earth’s orbit.  Now ten years into construction and significantly over budget, there are no plans to use it as anything more than a scientific platform engaged in zero-gravity research in exotic materials, medicine, and life sciences.

As we wait patiently for the promised benefits, the program continues to siphon a huge percentage of the NASA budget that could be spent on more useful projects.  It’s time we cut our losses and canceled it before we sink additional billions of dollars into that vast sinkhole of space.  That nullifies the argument that we need to keep the Shuttle alive for the continued benefit of the Space Station.  I have opposed this program from the very beginning.  I never believed the original cost estimates, nor did I ever understand the need for such an expensive and extravagant orbiting platform.

The way new technology evolves and develops is by attempting to do things that you have never done before.  On May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy laid down his challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, we were forced to design, test, and prove new equipment and systems that didn’t currently exist.  The Space Station provided no such challenge.  It was largely designed with technology that had been gained from the Apollo program years earlier, only now on a much larger scale.  There is no need to maintain a full-time crew in space to conduct experiments that could be placed on robotic payloads.  What scientific breakthroughs have we heard about so far?  There have been none that I know of, and I will be surprised if we ever see any in the future.  If that ever does happen, the cost to benefit ratio will be so immense that it will be virtually impossible to justify the continued expense.

The benefits of the space program stopped with the first lunar landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.  Since then, the science of space has not been significantly advanced with the exception of the Hubble Space Telescope.  The Shuttle and Space Station have contributed nothing beyond a huge hit to the national debt.  Going to Mars, as exorbitant in cost as it might be, would provide the same impetus to invent new technologies as the Apollo program did.  The truth is that we simply can’t afford it and we must turn to other means and ways of advancing our technological edge for the foreseeable future.