News has reached me today of preliminary reports of Obama's decision on how to solve a problem like NASA's. In a nutshell, it seems that Obama is keen on cutting the inspirational tasks of getting humans back to the Moon, or to the asteroid belt or Mars. Instead he hopes to get more bang for his buck by providing incentives to commercial space companies to develop and deploy their own launchers. These commercial launchers will be able to launch satellites, humans and other cargoes to low-Earth orbit (LEO). This course of action has great potential. Commercial entities have greater incentives to cut costs and increase performance in a competitive market, and can possibly avoid the political wrangling that has become endemic within NASA. This could do to LEO access what commercialisation of aviation did to the US in the 1920s.
This is all well and good. I welcome more participants in space, and in the interests of balance, non-governmental entities are required to keep some degree of shared common interests alive in outer space. This has great implications to the American military-industrial complex. Will traditionally non-military companies get a footing in this market as opposed to military-industrial complex giants, such as Boeing? Since the 1980s, American goverments have consistently intertwined what were once recognised as purely civil space operations with military interests. Watch this space.
I am worried, however. The Augustine report (Autumn 2009) points out that there will be a lack of human heavy-lift launch capability for the US. If the commercial ventures fail to deliver, the US has yet a means to fall back on a safety net. Obama intends to cancel the Ares rocket plan, and this will only further delay a new American launcher. In the worst case scenario, the US might have to turn to Europe's venerable Ariane rocket or Russia's Soyuz for ALL it's heavy human launch needs. How embarrassing would that be for the country that got humans to the Moon and back again?
Obama must, of course, stay within what is financially possible. Perhaps it is wiser in the long run to develop more efficient means of getting humans and materiel into LEO before venturing further to the Moon and beyond. I wouldn't mind seeing greater expansion on the International Space Station or a construction of humanity's first orbital shipyard. Britain's R&D into the Skylon spaceplane is certainly interesting and promising. A single stage flyer, taking off and landing at conventional airports, could go into LEO, dock in space with proposed space stations, go from London to Sydney in two hours.
Certainly plenty of analysis and evidence to come yet. I've got plenty of things to add to my dissertation...
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