For Obama’s Second Term, NASA Revives a Plan from Clinton’s Second Term
A recent Space.com story on post-election Obama Administration plans for NASA has generated a great deal of excitement. Other news outlets – for example, the Russian news service RIA Novosti and ABC in the U.S. – have picked it up and spread it widely. The story, which appeared on the Space.com website yesterday (7 November), is titled “NASA May Unveil New Manned Moon Missions Soon.”
Unfortunately, the article is substantially incorrect.
Interestingly, hidden behind the misleading headline and scattered among the out-of-context quotes about piloted voyages to the moon, an asteroid, and Mars, one can find nuggets of truth that reveal the real plan. If one reads carefully the quotes attributed to veteran space policy professor John Logsdon, one discovers that the plan calls for construction of an outpost at Earth-moon L2, a quasi-stable place in empty space located about 65,000 kilometers beyond the moon. Because of the gravitational tug of the Sun, the outpost would move in an intricate path – a “halo orbit” – around the Earth-moon L2 point.
An Earth-moon L2 outpost would provide NASA astronauts and engineers with experience in deep space operations that would help to ensure the success of eventual voyages beyond the Earth-moon system. It could serve as a repair base for giant telescopes at the Earth-moon and Earth-Sun L points and, by virtue of its close proximity to the moon, as a base for real-time astronaut teleoperation of robot geologists on the lunar surface.
Landing and remotely driving robots would be cheaper and less risky than landing astronauts. Such robots could operate for years, much like our highly successful rovers on Mars. Teleoperated robots might eventually be used to prepare a campsite for the first humans to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Just as likely, though, teleoperations would make a human return to the moon’s surface unnecessary.
The journey to Earth-moon L2 would not lack drama. Astronauts would reach the outpost in an Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, a spacecraft already well along in its development. Flying past the moon on their way to Earth-moon L2, they would view its battered landscapes close-up. Once at the outpost, astronauts would see our homeworld and its natural satellite as bright baubles shining together against the blackness of space. They would live and work farther from home than any humans in history.
NASA’s interest in the L point outpost concept is not new. In 1999-2000, Earth-moon and Earth-Sun L points became the darlings of the Decadal Planning Team (DPT), a NASA-wide group funded by President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget. The DPT seems to have been set up to develop plans that could take effect under President Al Gore.
The DPT advocated an outpost at Earth-moon L1, located between Earth and the moon. Astronauts at the outpost would have serviced giant space telescopes and visited the lunar surface (robotics technology was less advanced than it is today, so the DPT barely mentioned teleoperations in its plan).
Apart from its lunar objective, however, the DPT’s philosophy was anathema to space planners eager for a reprise of NASA’s Apollo glory days. Progress would have occurred on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, with no high-profile proclamation akin to President John F. Kennedy’s May 1961 “moon speech.” Development would have been slow and steady, with no sharp increases in NASA’s budget to draw fire from spaceflight opponents.
The DPT’s plans survived more or less intact until 2005, when President George W. Bush appointed Mike Griffin as NASA Administrator. Griffin and his lieutenants rejected the DPT approach in favor of a costly new large rocket and “Apollo on steroids.” Bush did not, however, adequately fund Griffin’s program, so NASA had little to show for it by the time President Barack Obama won the White House in 2008.
A key contribution of the DPT was the observation that big long-range space plans do not work very well. The Space Station announced by President Ronald Reagan in January 1984 is a case in point. The Challenger accident of January 1986, combined with NASA’s insistence on a grandiose design, led to a punishing and costly series of Congress-mandated redesigns, then a near-death experience shortly after President Clinton took office in 1993.
Only after Clinton authorized a joint U.S.-Russian station in 1994 did NASA’s long-held space station dream come true. When Reagan gave his Kennedy-esque space station speech, no one could have predicted that the station he called on NASA to build in a decade would not be completed for more than two decades, nor that, when it was finally completed, it would be because it had found a relevant geopolitical purpose: specifically, to prop up the cash-strapped Russian aerospace establishment so that its talented engineers would not be driven to sell their missile-building services to rogue nations.
Instead of trying to impose a long-range goal on people 10 or 20 years from now – a goal that they would almost certainly ignore because it would not be relevant to their concerns – the Obama Administration will soon seek to lay the groundwork for a “flexible path” into the Solar System. Establishing the Earth-moon L2 outpost would say nothing about where astronauts might go next; it would, however, send a clear signal that NASA human spaceflight has a future. Experience gained at Earth-moon L2 might lead to humans on the moon, Mars, or an asteroid, or it might lead to some other goal that serves better the perceived needs of our children and their children.
It is not too shocking that the Space.com story garbles the plan. For one thing, it reports rumors (which this author has also heard). Even if the word came direct from NASA, however, there might yet be confusion. Our space agency has not always been skilled at communicating its advanced plans. In addition, journalists, like most everyone else, have come to expect that the moon and/or Mars must be the next targets for NASA astronauts after the International Space Station and, perhaps, an asteroid.
Unfortunately, poor communication has the potential to cause great harm: it has, in fact, to date helped to ensure that none of our plans for humans beyond low-Earth orbit have reached fruition. It is in the hope that humans will one day spread throughout the Solar System that this corrective blog post is offered.
I research and write about the history of space exploration and space technology with an emphasis on missions and programs planned but not flown (that is, the vast majority of them). My posts are based on more than 30 years of research into spaceflight history. I provide plenty of historical context. I also include lots of crunchy technical details to help the reader envision what might have been - and, in many cases, what might yet be.
Follow @dsfportree on Twitter.