Wendell W. Mendell1
(Final Draft Dec. 19, 1991)
The Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), NASA's interpretation of President Bush's vision for human exploration of the solar system, has yet to obtain funding from Congress. Congress is sympathetic to long range goals for the U.S. space program, but it is reluctant to commit indeterminate levels of funding to NASA in the current fiscal environment. The SEI will continue to have difficulty as long as NASA couches it in the traditional assumptions - unchanged since Apollo - about the role of the space program in society. Space research, along with other federal research, must relate objectives to national needs in ways that are easily understood by Congress and must produce tangible results on the medium term to assure Congress that scarce dollars have been wisely invested. For the SEI, I have chosen to illustrate the new approach with a program directed toward science and math education while moving along the path for space exploration outlined by the President. Perhaps programs with visible educational payoffs in the medium term will restore confidence in long term investment in advanced space capability.
The Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), as enunciated by President George Bush, is a long range commitment to a national vision for human exploration of the solar system. More than just a collection of engineering projects, the SEI is meant to provide a space policy context for inspiring and creating technical excellence in 21st Century America.
NASA responded to the call by the President with a draft plan for implementing the initial objectives of human landings on the Moon and on Mars. Shortly thereafter, a specially convened Synthesis Group studied ideas from across the nation collected through a formal outreach process. The Synthesis Group produced four potential program architectures for NASA to work with.
Congress has allocated only token funding to planning efforts or technology development associated with the SEI. However, the debates within the Congress over the funding requests have resonated sympathetically with the general vision of long term space exploration goals.
Obviously, pressures on the federal budget work against proposals for new initiatives of any kind; but I believe two other factors exacerbate the situation. First, the SEI is commonly characterized as consisting solely of a base on the Moon and manned missions to Mars. These objectives are perceived to be NASA business as usual, requiring commitment to large sums of money over many years. Secondly, building a base on the Moon and traveling to Mars seem only distantly relevant to pressing national needs.
I contend that the SEI may not begin as long as NASA continues to present its objectives for human exploration within the old paradigms of Apollo-style space programs. The discussion in the next section elaborates on this point. To be supported by the Congress, the SEI must be restructured into a series of activities of modest scale, each of which demonstrates significant accomplishment within a time-scale of no more than five years. The SEI must be planned thoughtfully so that the nation's investment to expand human presence beyond low Earth orbit also yields identifiable dividends in terms of national needs such as education, competitiveness, technical innovation, scientific discovery, inspiration of young people, and the demonstration of international leadership within a framework of cooperative relationships.
I propose a project of modest scope which meets the criteria expressed above. It involves placement on the lunar surface of a telescope which can be directly utilized by higher educational institutions throughout the country for research and for teaching. The project evolves with operation of prototype systems in terrestrial settings before ultimately making observations from the Moon. Technologies developed at every stage of the system evolution will be immediately available to the academic community because the development will take place with its active and broad participation.
An important element of the proposal is change in the traditional role of NASA. The NASA "process" adds so much overhead to small projects that they become priced out of existence. Consistent with the theme of Total Quality Management, now sweeping NASA, actual users of the future scientific instrument should be given more responsibility for its successful development. In particular, the expensive Government overhead imposed on the project must be kept to a minimum level consistent with providing accountability for public funds.
In short, I propose this project not only for its scientific value but also as a prototype for new programmatic approaches to the human exploration of space within the U.S. space program.
In his remarks prepared for the Apollo 11 20th Anniversary Celebration at the National Air and Space Museum, President Bush declared (White House, 1989):
"I'm proposing a long-range continuing commitment. First, for the coming decade--for the 1990's--Space Station FreedomÉ; and next--for the new century--back to the Moon. Back to the future. And this time, back to stay. And then--Éa journey to another planet--a manned mission to Mars."
By stating these objectives for the next century in space, the President defined a path by which to implement one of the major components of President Reagan's space policy statement of February, 1988 (White House, 1988): "Establishing a long-range goal to expand human presence and activity beyond Earth orbit into the Solar System". The vision of the President, as expressed in this speech and subsequent ones, has come to be called the Space Exploration Initiative.
As the President's speech was being formulated, the Vice-President and the staff of the Space Council worked with a few NASA officials to develop various options for a Presidential initiative. Although the final proposal derived from future mission case studies that had been performed by NASA's Office of Exploration, the scope and specificity of the objectives chosen by the President caught many by surprise. The Office of Exploration, formed in 1987, had been a small organization with a small budget doing futuristic paper studies. It had attracted little attention among the NASA line managers who were, at best, only superficially familiar with its work.
In August of 1989 NASA assembled a team of experts from all of its field centers and from all of its major line organizations to prepare a reply from the Agency to the President. For the first time in recent memory all of the technical elements of NASA sat down at the same table and discussed their interrelationships. This group, meeting at the Johnson Space Center, produced the Report of the 90-Day Study on Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars (Cohen, 1989).
The NASA task force analyzed the text of the speech, almost line by line, to isolate the "zero-level requirements" laid down by the President. The group decided on a new NASA program to establish a permanent base on the Moon (preferably starting in 2001 because that date was given to the Vice-President in the briefings), followed by a second program to send expeditions to Mars, utilizing Space Station Freedom in the process.
As the proposal for implementation took shape, it became clear that the technical solutions were simply collections of the advanced technologies resident in every NASA Center. The study managers made a determined effort to "scrub" all unnecessary elements (launchers, spacecraft, robots, communications platforms, etc.) to keep the cost bounded. A technical option was added to descope lunar surface facilities from permanently manned to man-tended. Unfortunately, the cost estimate was very high anyway.
I want to emphasize three attributes of the NASA 90-Day Study. First, the technical solutions represented, for the most part, extrapolations of current NASA technology development and philosophy. That kind of answer is perfectly reasonable, given that the study was done in a very short time. Secondly, the cost projections were performed conscientiously with no attempt to cut corners by making favorable assumptions. Thirdly, the study leader was directed to assume that NASA would continue to do business as usual. In other words, improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness of project management within the agency was not addressed.
The reaction to the NASA study was critical of the "business as usual" approach such as the long time between initiation of the program and the first major event. Opinions were expressed that NASA had not shown enough imagination or innovation in taking advantage of "new" technologies that could reduce cost, compress the schedule, or lower the risks for planetary exploration. Congress was particularly sensitive to the cost issue.
The Administration reacted to the criticisms of high cost and lack of innovation in the NASA proposal by emphasizing an early stage of technology development for the SEI. In a speech to the AIAA on May 1, 1990, the Vice-President said (Office of the Vice President, 1990):
"For the next several years we will be evaluating alternate ways to do the job. We will be developing new technologies which will enable us to accomplish our objectives faster, cheaper and better....Let me emphasize -- what we are asking for is simply modest funds to answer theÉquestions about when, how, and how much it will take to accomplish our goals. In a few years, when we have the answers to our questions and have chosen a specific pathÉthen and only then will we ask Congress for the money to build the great ships of the future."
In fact, the NASA Administrator had already transferred the initiative to the Associate Administrator responsible for technology development. Moving the SEI activity into an office that was not responsible for conducting missions was taken by many to mean that NASA was not serious about carrying out human exploration of the Moon and Mars. However, it could also be seen as a signal to Congress that NASA had no plans for precipitous action without due consideration.
In May, 1990, the Vice-President and the NASA Administrator announced the implementation of an Outreach Process through which innovative ideas from across the nation could be solicited, evaluated, and incorporated - where appropriate - into the NASA plans for the SEI. A Synthesis Group was formed, under the leadership of Gen. Tom Stafford, to synthesize the collection of ideas into two or more architectures which NASA would study for implementation of lunar and martian exploration. The democratic and disinterested nature of the synthesis effort was designed to defuse the criticism that the NASA plans were self-serving and institutionally inbred.
Nevertheless, during the summer of 1990, Congress carefully excised from the NASA FY1991 budget all items associated with - or thought to be associated with - the SEI. Congress seemed bent on sending a very explicit message. Yet, permissive wording within the appropriation bill specifically allowed NASA to reprogram internal funds for SEI planning purposes. Equally importantly, the speeches in the floor debates generally supported the idea of a long-range vision for space while decrying the high costs in a time of fiscal crisis. The FY1992 budget debate in the summer of 1991 featured the floor fight over cancellation of Space Station Freedom. These momentous decisions overshadowed considerations of the SEI, but the final allocation was approximately $5M for planning only - less than had been spent the previous fiscal year using internal funds.
The "health" of the Space Exploration Initiative is usually discussed in the context of the traditional formulation and structure of NASA programs. In my opinion the lack of progress can be traced directly to placing the SEI in an incorrect context caused by limitations in the working concepts used for discussing the space program - in NASA, in the aerospace industry, and in Congress.
The traditional vocabulary uses the word program to refer to a coordinated set of activities encompassing technical objectives, spacecraft construction, schedules, launch dates, and a budget. The technical objectives come from advocates within the NASA system who formulate a program concept. If the advocacy is successful, NASA performs studies to characterize the attributes of the program such as the mission architecture, the budget, and the schedule. Once these attributes are thought to be understood, then NASA decides whether to present the program as a new start. The new start is submitted to President for inclusion in the budget, which is then presented to Congress for funding.
The program concept might fail to be accepted by NASA or by the President or by Congress. Sometimes a program, which has been rejected at some stage, is reduced in scope, repackaged, and then successfully resubmitted later.
NASA views program approval as a contract with the Congress for work in return for annual funding. NASA promises that spacecraft will be launched after a certain time and that they will accomplish the technical objectives. The Apollo Program is the archetype for this simple model where the "contract" for the new start guarantees funding until the execution (on schedule) of the agreed objectives.
The actual relationship between NASA and the Congress has become more complicated. In the first place, NASA has returned to Congress upon occasion to ask for funding increases due to unforeseen technical difficulties or other unanticipated complications. This "renegotiation" has happened often enough to cause Congress to demand more information from NASA about progress and to exercise more detailed oversight over the execution of programs. In other words, Congress no longer leaves NASA alone after program approval.
Secondly, Congress has become more aggressive in its perceived role as the agent for NASA's customer, the American People. Since the space program today lacks the massive political consensus given to Apollo, its continuation has been justified on the basis of its benefits, mostly indirect, to the nation. Congress has seen fit to shape programs to emphasize certain benefits. For example, a percentage of the Space Station budget was set aside to be spent on robotic technology to emphasize spinoffs in that economic sector. In another case, legislation dictates the location of a centrifuge for life science research onboard Space Station Freedom. Such constraints affect technical performance.
Thirdly, Congress sometimes wishes to renegotiate. The budget process for the Federal Government emphasizes fiscal solutions which ease pressure in the current year without great regard as to future consequences. For example, Congress will reduce a funding commitment in a given year despite extending the program schedule and increasing the total cost. The annual budgetary uncertainty forces NASA to manage by contingency rather than by plan. Negative programmatic consequences seem to adhere to the agency rather than to Congress.
Fourth, a program cannot necessarily execute in isolation from other programs. for example, the Galileo program suffered serious harm, financial and technical, from various policy decisions involving the Space Shuttle. More importantly, as Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., of California has written (Brown, 1991):
"Apparently unrelated programs - such as the Superconducting Super Collider, federally funded individual investigative research, and K-12 science education initiatives - should be evaluated as integrated components of an R&D system that contributes directly to the welfare of the nation, rather than as unrelated programs that are prioritized according to the potency of their individual political constituencies."
In other words, NASA programs can no longer be put forward as self-contained exercises, isolated from pressing societal issues related to technology, education, or competitiveness.
Within the terms of the archetypal program model, the SEI is characterized simplistically as two loosely linked programs - (1) a lunar base and (2) human landings on Mars. The lunar base will be established around the year 2007, and the Mars landings will take place around the year 2020. The budgets are very large. Once funding is begun, NASA and its contractors will work for about ten years; and then spaceships will start to fly to the Moon. About fifteen years after that, bigger spaceships will start to fly to Mars. And so forth. Both Congress and NASA subscribe to this simple view of the SEI.
Historically, program approval has been followed by cost overruns, schedule delays, and technical glitches. NASA sees these events as programmatic nuisances often beyond management control. Congress sees them as uncertainties capable of causing program failure in political terms. Congress is particularly irritated with Space Station Freedom (SSF), a program much simpler than a lunar base which has attracted strong criticism from influential technical communities, has produced distress among the international partners, and has given the impression of uncontrolled cost growth. If SSF can end up in a Congressional floor fight, then by extrapolation the SEI could be a nightmare. And Congress already has nightmares such as the Savings and Loan Bailout, an activity unfortunately similar in scale and duration to the SEI.
The SEI is also open-ended. The Congress fears that an initial commitment implies another entitlement in a budget with too few discretionary items now.
The assumption that the SEI is a program in the "Apollo" model must be modified by mutual agreement before it can proceed with full vigor. NASA and Congress must interact in new ways.
In the ensuing discussion I will treat NASA as consisting of two components - an element of Human Exploration and an element of Robotic Exploration. Under Human Exploration comes Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle, Space Station, and the principal thrusts of the SEI. Under Robotic Exploration comes all of the activities of the Office of Space Science and Applications, i.e., solar system exploration, Mission to Planet Earth, astrophysics, etc. These two exploration elements make up the bulk of the NASA budget in a ratio of about 4 to 1, Human to Robotic.
Both elements have been part of NASA since the beginning. The National Space Act of 1958 charters NASA to expand human knowledge and to develop craft to carry instruments and living organisms through space. The latter phrase is a rather anemic endorsement of human exploration, and arguments began early over the cost-effectiveness of manned space flight. However, the Kennedy speech of May, 1961, tilted the scales toward men in space with the declaration of an objective to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.
At the request of President Nixon, a Space Task Group led by Vice-President Agnew submitted recommendations to continue human exploration of the Moon by establishing a lunar base, build a space station in low Earth orbit, and then proceed to Mars. The President ignored these proposals and truncated the Apollo program. NASA found itself in a political struggle to salvage even an underfunded Space Shuttle program. Subsequent Administrations throughout the 1970's treated NASA with benign neglect.
The Apollo era left NASA dominated by the Human Exploration element with approximately three-fourths of the total budget. As a result, upper management gives weight in determination of Agency policy to strategies which guarantee funding and continuity of institutions supporting Human Exploration. Additionally, the Apollo mandate caused NASA to look to the President of the United States for strategic policy. In the absence of active involvement from the Administration, the Agency eschewed strategic planning in favor of tactical decisions aimed at maintaining institutional continuity.2
In the "Apollo" model, the concept of a Customer for NASA is not very important. Any NASA official can explain the benefits of the space program to the American Public (customers?), but the governing principle is that the President is the Boss. The Boss gives the orders; and Customers (if such things exist) are his business. In the absence of orders, NASA suggests various programs, which are reviewed annually by the President during formulation of the Federal Budget. Within this framework, the NASA 90-Day Report represents the development of a product in response to orders from the Boss. Unfortunately, the President was not operating from a base of political consensus of the kind given to Kennedy. In 1961, the consumers (Congress) accepted the product (some kind of landing on the Moon) with little regard to its cost and were trusting of its ultimate utility.
In 1989, it was not a seller's market. The President needed a marketing plan but got a product concept. NASA assumed that the marketing was irrelevant to its technical design. While this occurrence was regrettable, it is not clear to me that NASA should have been expected to do anything differently.
Everyone now understands that a hard sell for a lunar base or for a landing on Mars will not be successful. Advocates believe that marketing the effort is necessary, but NASA does not seem to be eager to take the lead in any way other than to list "benefits" as is traditional in the Apollo mold. Then we may ask, "To whom do we market and what approach is appropriate?"
Congress is clearly the consumer because it puts down the money. In principle, Congress acts as the agent for the Public - the ultimate customer. On the whole, members of Congress attempt to reflect on the will of the electorate and to act in the best interests of the nation. In the process their behavior can be influenced in specific instances by special interests. Partisan politics also plays a role in decision-making.
NASA, as a Federal Agency, is forbidden by law from selling its programs to the public. However, proponents of U.S. space activity do try to sell the NASA products both to the public and to Congress.
One marketing technique used by space advocates is the hard-sell, strong-arm, special interest approach. Lobbying by space-oriented political action committees or by space advocacy organizations is useful for information transfer but pales compared to the well-financed heavy hitters on Capitol Hill. Letter writing and phone trees are most effective during votes on specific projects.
Professional organizations or industry lobbyists produce tracts or brochures explaining the "benefits" of space investment and the folly of withholding funding from various projects. If I were listening to these pitches, I can imagine that my reaction would be similar to the way I feel walking through a shopping mall. I might like an attractive product, but my decision to buy is strongly influenced by my perceptions of my disposable income and of my real need for the product.
NASA can help by creating products which clearly address the needs of the consumer (Congress). Those needs can be found by simply looking at the current political agenda. The agenda changes from year to year, but certain items are long term and certain ones are emphasized during a given Administration. Currently, there is a beautiful match of NASA's remote sensing capabilities with the Congressional concern with the global environmental crisis during the administration of the Environment President.
Additionally, the product must be affordable. Congress is most concerned with the annual funding level (i.e., the size of the payment) and the length of the contract. Projects which take longer than about five years are in severe political jeopardy in the current fiscal environment.
I am not suggesting that NASA change its missions every year to track fads inside the beltway of Washington, DC. I am suggesting that any long term strategic plan must be sensitive in the medium term to the investments the nation must make to maintain its status as a world leader. This point is reinforced by a report, Federally Funded Research: Decisions for a Decade (Office of Technology Assessment, 1991):
"Although scientific merit and mission relevance must always be the chief criteria used to judge a research area or agency program's potential worth, they cannot always be the sole criteria.ÉIn particular, the application of criteria that augment scientific merit - which represent today's judgments of quality - would help meet tomorrow's objectives of research investment. Broadly stated, there are two such criteria: strengthening education and human resources at all stages of study (e.g., increasing the diversity and versatility of participants); and building regional and institutional capacityÉ."
Congress is generally sympathetic to the space program. Congress also appreciates the value of a strategic plan to make budgetary requests predictable. In fact, the explication of long range goals serves the needs of the legislative branch as it strives to evaluate new programs.
However, Congress is concerned about projects which require extended levels of high funding and even more concerned when the funding levels are unpredictable. Congress wants to see demonstrable progress within a project on time scales commensurate with terms of office (a few years). Products should provide tangible benefits to the nation that can be recognized by the public. At the present time Congress is particularly reluctant to make open-ended commitments without good fiscal control.
From these considerations follow some guidelines for marketing the SEI:
Generating plans such as I have described will be difficult for NASA because the institutions supporting Human Exploration are designed to manage large-scale, complex, expensive programs. No incentive exists for creating small, low-manpower efforts. Management is interested in keeping the organization intact, and small programs cannot support the institutional overhead. A small program can be bled to death as each organizational element believes that it must exercise a function within the effort.
I conclude that parts of NASA will have to be restructured extensively if the model I suggest is deemed viable. Since the established bureaucratic empires will resist any change, the Associate Administrator for Exploration would do best to set up a small organization with carefully selected people to begin conducting these projects. The theme will be to keep the number of employees per budgeted dollar very low. If the concept is viable, the new organization will get the initial business associated with SEI; and the old organizations will be faced with hard choices.
The Bush Administration has given education a very high priority in its domestic political agenda. Congress was almost unanimous in supporting the President in his 1990 State of the Union address said, "By the year 2000, U.S. students must be first in the world in math and science achievement."
The Report of the FCCSET Committee on Education and Human Resources (1991), chaired by Admiral James D. Watkins, Secretary of Energy, lays out a coordinated plan within the Federal Government to attack such problems as the decline in American student performance relative to international peers, insufficient numbers of students pursuing education and training to fill critical scientific and technical jobs, and the low levels of scientific literacy among the American public in general and among teachers in particular. NASA is contributing to the Federal effort with a stable of very good educational programs that it has developed. However, within these programs, opportunities for science students to actually participate in space missions are few and limited to postgraduate research.
Taking the Office of Technology Assessment's criteria, future NASA programs should be designed to explicitly strengthen "education and human resources at all stages of study."
Astronomy is a subject which holds great interest for undergraduate and precollege students (Brown, 1990). That interest has encouraged students to enroll in a science class even though physics or mathematics might intimidate them. Using astronomical observations, all the basic principles of the scientific method can be taught.
Ground-based astronomy has evolved into "big science" not dissimilar to large scale space missions. Projects such as the Hubble Space Telescope are likened to observatories where observing time is expensive, and competition for time on the big instruments is fierce. In ground-based astronomy research, opportunities for observation at professional observatories are similarly limited to postgraduate students working with research professors. Professors whose teaching loads preclude them from doing dedicated frontline research cannot invest the time necessary to produce competitive proposals.
Over the last decade, astronomers from small colleges have begun utilizing small (diameters of 1 m or less) automated telescopes, primarily for photoelectric photometry. With these instruments, teaching professors can conduct research while simultaneously being responsible for several courses. Under good sky conditions these automated telescopes can produce high quality data for a lower cost than would be possible using human observers. Considerable experience has led to improving the telescopes and to operating them in consortia for the benefit of a variety of astronomers involved in different programs.
The telescopes are controlled by commands transmitted over telephone lines from personal computers. Attached to each telescope is a sensitive light-measuring device and a wheel containing several filters. Measurement of the light from a star transmitted through the various filters provides information on stellar brightness and temperature. The measurements are transmitted back to the observer over telephone lines. For many types of stellar systems, the resultant data can be interpreted in a straightforward manner. As a result, college undergraduates, high school students and teachers, and amateur astronomers have analyzed this type of data and in many cases have published their results.
Small automated telescopes can also be used with more sophisticated instrumentation which could be more scientifically productive than filter photometers. Spectrophotometers could replace filter photometers for obtaining stellar energy distributions with better resolution and with wider spectral coverage. Area detectors such as CCDs could replace photomultiplier tubes to perform both photometry and imaging. One can also imagine infrared telescopes for photometry, imaging, and spectroscopy. A high dispersion spectroscope with modern electronic detectors would also be a possibility. However, the costs of such instruments will be considerably more than those of current photometers.
Within the academic community which uses the automatic photometric telescopes, some professors are proposing organizational structures to manage and finance the burgeoning facilities as well as professional structures to impose scientific discipline. This grass-roots activity is taking place outside of the NASA sphere of activity.
Russ Genet, one of the leaders in the technical development of the automatic photometric telescope, has begun advocating the landing of an instrument on the lunar surface for operation from Earth (Genet, 1990). At first glance, such a proposal appears overly ambitious, given the struggles for financial support that have plagued this small community. However, Genet's enthusiasm has been triggered by proposals recently generated within NASA for small lunar-based telescopes as an element of the Space Exploration Initiative. I want to elaborate somewhat on this NASA activity and set it in context.
I was part of an intrapreneurial, unofficial, unfunded effort in the early 1980's to examine the viability of a manned lunar base as a national goal in the first decade of the 21st Century. (If this sounds like SEI, it is because almost all NASA work in the Office of Exploration since 1987 has been based on these early conclusions.) Within the philosophical framework developed at that time, scientific investigations on the Moon were seen to have an important role. However, we realized that the scientific community would never advocate an expensive manned program unless it could be convinced that science opportunities of absolutely unique character would be enabled.
Early successes in identifying such opportunities were achieved in the field of astronomy. Professor Bernard Burke of MIT proposed a lunar surface observatory with an optical interferometer capable of microarcsecond angular resolution of astronomical targets (Burke, 1984). Jack Burns (Burns, 1985) and Harlan Smith (Douglas and Smith, 1985) proposed radio telescopes for the lunar farside. These proposals and others created a lively community of interest among professional astronomers.
NASA astronomy program managers took little interest in these ideas until President Bush made the SEI speech in July, 1989. Shortly thereafter a meeting of the NASA-sponsored astrophysics community was organized to expand on the results an informal workshop organized by Jack Burns and myself four years earlier (Burns and Mendell, 1986). The NASA meeting in Annapolis Maryland in February, 1990, was an excellent review and discussion of the potential for lunar-based astronomy (Mumma and Smith, 1990).
Although the instrumental presentations were dominated by glamorous megainstruments such as the optical interferometer or a sixteen-meter telescope, many participants realized that initial instruments of a more modest scale would be needed to gain experience with operations from the lunar surface. Later in the year, a scientific advisory group to the NASA Astrophysics Program recommended that the first telescope sent to the lunar surface be a simple transit instrument as discussed by John McGraw17 at the Annapolis meeting. The transit instrument would stare at the zenith and have no pointing capability. The rotation of the Moon and its orbital motions would cause the field of view to scan the sky. A fraction of the sky would be surveyed completely to very faint magnitudes.
The mission planning organization supporting the NASA Office of Exploration now carries a small telescope in its inventory of potential lunar surface payloads. At the Johnson Space Center an effort is underway to promote the Common Lunar Lander (NASA, 1991), an inexpensive low-technology vehicle capable of soft-landing modest payloads on the Moon. Thus, the elements are in place within the NASA planning process to implement the placing of modest astronomical facilities on the lunar surface should a decision be made to do so.
The Space Exploration Initiative must divest itself of the image of a Big-Technology Money Sink. It must demonstrate to its customer that it can produce real, readily identifiable benefits using cost-effective strategies.
The SEI needs to change the perception of Space Exploration as an astronauts' activity only toward a process in which many Americans can participate. Direct participation should be available in some form for anyone - particularly a student - who demonstrates capability, interest, and dedication to scientific or technical study. The ability to perform research or to develop technology should be overtly coupled to opportunities for participation in the greatest adventure of humanity. The SEI must bring the Moon and Mars "closer" to its customer. Locations of research installations on the Moon should be as familiar to the children of Congressmen as are Disney theme parks.
NASA may want to consider becoming "user friendly" rather than bureaucratic and elitist. The agency can make a fundamental choice over whether its goal is to control access to space or to enable access to space. The choice is the difference between a gatekeeper and a facilitator or between monopsony and partnership. In many cases, it will be a difference in attitude rather than policy.
Assuming that these objectives are desirable, I present a program as an illustration of the type of activity to be encouraged.
Announcement. The Office of Exploration announces a program of lunar-based studies using remotely operated, soft-landed payloads. The payloads would consist of instruments and devices for studying the environment of the Moon, for making astronomical and astrophysical observations, and for demonstrating technologies appropriate to future manned lunar activities. The mass of each payload would be consistent with the capabilities of the Common Lunar Lander or an equivalent vehicle.
NASA sponsors a series of workshops to develop viable payload concepts. One workshop would focus on small astronomical instruments and would include users of the Automatic Photometric Telescopes (APT). At least one concept from the workshop must be a Lunar Automated Telescope for Teaching (LATT). I will follow the programmatic development of that particular instrument because I want to emphasize broad academic participation in it. Other instrument concepts from the workshops can be developed in traditional ways.
Technical Design. Working from the user requirements generated at the workshop, conceptual instrument designs will be prepared by university engineering students in a competition sponsored by NASA. Judges from NASA and from the academic community will decide on two or more winners in the competition. The university winners will be teamed with aerospace companies to do detailed designs and fabricate working prototypes.
After suitable testing, the candidate prototype instruments will be installed on sites in the U.S. to perform observations as part of the APT network. Students in participating universities and high schools routinely access this network over computer modems to make observations and take data. Since the NASA-sponsored instruments will be somewhat more sophisticated that current telescopes, access to them may be restricted to institutions whose students have demonstrated capability to produce useful scientific results from the data.
User Network. As important as the hardware will be the user communications network and its organization. At the present time the small user community for automatic telescopes has organized itself to provide procedures for requesting observations and for establishing priorities in the queues for instruments. The operation of the network is partially financed through charging of fees such as $2.00 per star observed. Interaction with the network requires a computer with a modem and a communications program.
Although the user community has accumulated a valuable experience base, a system for accessing the instruments will evolve, balancing ease of access with security and safety considerations. These protocols can be developed through operating experience with the candidate prototype instruments. The goal of the process will be creation of a user interface that will remain consistent as the capability and complexity of the instruments increase.
Auconquilcha. Once the candidate prototypes have been evaluated for strengths and weaknesses, a final design will be chosen which will have to be simple and rugged with low maintenance. The first version of the lunar telescope will be designed for use on Earth. Obviously, its structural elements, thermal design, and environmental protection will be different than the version to be launched. However, in every possible respect it should be able to replicate the operation on the Moon. Thus, it will contain its own power supply and communications hardware. It will be a self-contained package which literally can be dropped on the ground and be expected to operate for years.
The terrestrial version of the telescope will be placed on 20,000-foot Mount Auconquilcha in the Andes (Smith, 1990). (Obviously, any high-quality, remote, logistically difficult site will do.) Auconquilcha has been reported to have superb astronomical seeing and is 6,000 feet higher than the well-known Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Although there is a mine at 19,500 feet, only a few natives are adapted to work at that altitude. Maintenance will be possible but not easy. A high quality telescope at such a site will be capable of returning scientifically valuable data during its lifetime.
Placement of the telescope on Auconquilcha has several purposes: (a) to demonstrate the autonomous operation of the system; (b) to force use of satellite communications in the user network; (c) to verify the zero-maintenance attributes of the design; (d) to give the project a high profile in both the scientific and educational communities; and (e) to promote international cooperation in the SEI. At this point the project will be demonstrating technologies that have immediate application in the scientific communities. Astronomers already operate remote telescopes from around the world, but those installations are very large with resident staffs. The Lunar Automated Telescope for Teaching could be the first of a series of remotely deployed scientific instruments both on the Earth and on the bodies of the solar system.
The Moon. When the design concept has been refined from the experience of observation from Auconquilcha, the lunar version of the automated telescope will be sent to the Moon. Since satellite communications networks are already being utilized in the project, access to the lunar surface ought to be transparent to the user. For simplicity, I would assume that data would be downloaded and commands uplinked once a day as the Moon came into view of an Earth station in the U.S. Students would receive the data within a day of the time the observations were made. Depending on the degree of preprocessing of data on the lunar surface, the requirements for the communications link could be quite modest. The communications would be handled by the user community as much as possible to keep expenses low.
If the first landings on Mars take place around the year 2020 as President Bush has said, then the first Martians are now in elementary school. Someone once suggested setting up a program for the children to remain "in the running" for selection of the first crew to land on Mars by maintaining certain academic and health standards. This incentive for participation in that adventure could inspire students early in pipeline to select technical fields for study.
Similarly, students could study the scientific method in the context of astronomy. A high school student might begin by requesting simple photometric observations of stars, using a standard Automatic Photometric Telescope under a teacher's supervision. At a certain level of competence, the student would submit analyzed data to an academic panel, which would check for understanding of the process and quality of analysis. If the data passed muster, it would be submitted to the international SIMBAD data base in Strasbourg, France. The student would receive a "science rating" and a certificate confirming the addition of his or her work to the astronomical archives.
At the next level of achievement the student would make a more sophisticated measurement (e.g., a stellar spectrum) using one of the prototype lunar telescopes. Again, a written analysis of the data could be published in an astronomical newsletter and submitted to SIMBAD. The student would be certified at the next level of proficiency.
Next, a student, probably at the university level, would be permitted to submit a short proposal for an observation on the telescope atop Auconquilcha. Proposals would be required to meet certain criteria of professionalism to be accepted. Observations would be analyzed at a professional level of detail under a professor and would be published.
Persons with scientific credentials established through the process described above or through a career in professional astronomy would be permitted to submit proposals for use of the lunar telescope. Priority would be given to observational programs not possible from the Earth. Among qualified proposals, preference would be given to teachers, students, and gifted amateurs. (Presumably the professional astronomers would have a more capable lunar telescope of their own.)
Summary. A NASA initiative to launch a Lunar Automatic Telescope for Teaching can be more than a simple hardware program. A series of instruments could be built, each with more capability, involving many student scientists and engineers in the process. Each level of development of the instrument could serve a useful educational purpose in addition to a programmatic one. The LATT program can plant a number of seeds for learning and participation in the space program. The customers of NASA would receive direct, immediate, and identifiable benefits from their Congressional investment in space.
The Space Exploration Initiative has a very poor prognosis for success unless NASA recasts the objectives to address needs of the customers of the space program - Congress and the American people. The SEI concept must be recast to avoid the perception of a $100B entitlement program. Contrary to the circumstances surrounding the initiation of Apollo in 1961, the country is not faced with overt technological menace; and the Federal budget is not generating a surplus.
Over the past two decades the space program has depended on political capital generated by its contribution to national pride. But American schoolchildren are confident in their abilities in science and math even though they perform below most of the developed world. Congress is less worried about national pride than about national capability.
Capability can be increased through continuous striving for achievement and excellence. And those who are inspired strive hardest. The Space Exploration Initiative is about inspiration as much as it is about technology. That inspiration can be nurtured in young people and put to work in ways that will prepare all of us for the future. However, Congress has not been shown how the investment in the SEI will prepare our nation for the 21st Century. Congress sees only a future in which spending hundreds of billions of dollars will produce ever more costly systems and missions. NASA must produce results soon that yield identifiable returns in a manner demonstrating that the investment is not unbounded.
The political consensus is that education in science and mathematics is essential for the citizens of 21st Century America. NASA has a viable and credible program supporting education but it can do more to bring space into the classroom, for example, by providing access for many students to participate directly in experiments on the Moon. NASA can simply extrapolate the work of the amateur astronomy community to observing sites on other planets unreachable by the ordinary student. The excitement of participating in the exploration of the solar system will surely inspire students to delve further into science and mathematics than they might otherwise have done.
In order to save money and to increase credibility of advocacy, NASA must rethink its philosophy of taking total responsibility and control of space projects. For example, the community for teaching astronomy would be dedicated to the functional success of the Lunar Automatic Telescope for Teaching. They want the best possible scientific and pedagogic product from the facility. They have a personal motivation to produce an excellent product. A professional NASA manager wants success in a programmatic sense. He or she is most concerned that the NASA process is satisfied and that the instrument performs to (documented) specifications upon landing. At that point the manager goes to another program. The definition of success for the end user and for the manager is supposed to be the same but is not.
The career of the NASA manager depends on peaceful coexistence with the NASA process. Since the process is designed to handle any contingency over a wide range of parameters, it is generic, bureaucratic, inefficient (in individual cases), and disinterested in any one project. The process contains activities that are not critical but which guarantee comfort and eliminate risk to the bureaucracy. Therefore, the process is necessarily expensive.
NASA cannot be expected to eliminate bureaucratic overhead. It is an agency of the Federal Government, and its duties force it to deal routinely with a wide variety of complex technical and administrative issues. However, NASA can recognize its own limitations as well as its strengths and operate accordingly. In the SEI it can look for opportunities in which responsibility for success is traded to outside partners in return for process efficiency, high motivation for end user satisfaction, and reduced cost resulting from less process overhead.
The SEI will not be carried out until the perception of high cost and self-serving goals is rectified. NASA must revise its own paradigms and then demonstrate to the political process that is can be responsive to the needs of the nation.
Adelman, Saul (1991) Information on the user community for Automatic Photometric Telescopes was supplied to me by Professor Saul Adelman of The Citadel. For more details, see the book, Robotic Observatories by Russell M. Genet and Donald S. Hayes, AutoScope Corporation, Mesa AZ, 1989.
Brown, George E. (1991) Scientific priorities. Science, 252, 629.
Brown, Robert A. (ed.) (1990) An Education Initiative in Astronomy. Special Studies Office, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.
Burke, B. F. (1984) Astronomical Interferometry on the Moon. In Lunar Bases and Space Activities in the 21st Century, (W. W. Mendell, ed.), Lunar and Planetary Institute,.Houston, p.281
Burns, J. O. (1985) A Moon-Earth Radio Interferometer. In Lunar Bases and Space Activities in the 21st Century, (W. W. Mendell, ed.), Lunar and Planetary Institute,.Houston, p.293.
Burns, J. O. and W. W. Mendell (1986) Future Astronomical Observatories on the Moon, Proceedings of a workshop held in Houston, Texas, January, 1986, NASA Conference Publication 2489.
Cohen, Aaron (1989) Report of 90-Day Study on Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars. NASA Johnson Space Center, 143pp.
Douglas, J. N. and H. J. Smith (1985) A Very Low Frequency Radio Astronomy Observatory on the Moon. In Lunar Bases and Space Activities in the 21st Century, (W. W. Mendell, ed.), Lunar and Planetary Institute,.Houston, p.301.
FCCSET Committee on Education and Human Resources (1991) By the Year 2000. Report to Congress from the Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy. Committee chaired by Adm. (Ret.) James D. Watkins, Secretary of Energy. Genet, Russ (1990) Small Science Lunar Outpost Robotic Observatory. (preprint) Fairborn Observatory, Mesa AZ.
Kiernan, Vincent and Daniel J. Marcus (1991) Reusable SSTO Seen as Cheap Ticket to Space. Space News, 2, No. 36, p. 3 (October 21-27, 1991).
McGraw, John T. (1990) An Early Lunar-based Telescope: The Lunar Transit Telescope (LTT). in Astrophysics from the Moon, (M. J. Mumma and H. J. Smith, eds) p. 433-463.
Mumma, Michael J. and Harlan J. Smith (1990) Astrophysics from the Moon. American Institute of Physics, Conference Proceedings 207, 656 pp.
NASA Johnson Space Center, New Initiatives Office (1991) Artemis, Final Presentation, Results of the Engineering Feasibility Study, September 17, 1991.
Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress. (1991) Federally Funded Research: Decisions for a Decade. OTA-SET-490, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.
Office of the Vice President (1990) Prepared Remarks of the Vice President to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. May 1, 1990.
Smith, Harlan J. (1990) The suggestion for the use of Auconquilcha belongs solely to the late Harlan J. Smith. Although, he talked about it informally frequently, he is on the record at the Workshop on Small Robotic Telescopes on the Moon, held on 4-5 November 1990 on Mount Hopkins outside Tucson, AZ.
The White House, Office of the Press Secretary (1988) The President's Space Policy and Commercial Space Initiative to Begin the Next Century. Fact Sheet, February 11, 1988.
The White House, Office of the Press Secretary (1989) Remarks by the President at 20th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing. The Steps of the Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC, July 20, 1989.
SN14, Solar System Exploration Division, NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX 77058
In the part of the Agency associated with Robotic Exploration., NASA management works with the scientific community not exactly as customers but more as clients. The managers consult closely with scientists in the form of review committees and in general have developed an impressive suite of strategic plans for scientific investigations. These plans are well received in Congress because the scientific community actively supports them.