[f]or the settlement of space, a Lagrange equilibrium point between the Sun and Earth has the nearly ideal physical characteristics of a transportation depot . . . . Lagrange point halo orbits are the present standard by which any alternative concept for a transportation depot must be gauged. 42
Cyclers and Lagrange point spaceports—infrastructure spanning worlds—imply large-scale permanent space operations and long-term commitment to building space civilization. Such grandiose visions are not widely shared outside of a subset of the small community of would-be Mars explorers, as will be seen in the next chapter.
Chapter 8: Challengers
Mars is the world next door, the nearest planet on which human explorers could safely land. Although it is sometimes as warm as a New England October, Mars is a chilly place, so cold that some of its thin carbon dioxide atmosphere freezes out at the winter pole. There are pink skies, fields of boulders, sand dunes, vast extinct volcanoes that dwarf anything on Earth, a great canyon that would cross most of the United States, sandstorms that sometimes reach half the speed of sound . . . hundreds of ancient river valleys . . . and many other mysteries. (The Mars Declaration, 1987) 1
National Commission on Space
Late 1984, when the Space Shuttle was operational and Space Station development was underway, seemed an auspicious time to begin charting a course for NASA to follow after Space Station completion in the early 1990s. Congress mandated that President Reagan create an independent commission to sort through the possibilities and provide recommendations. The National Commission on Space (NCOS) was launched officially on 29 March 1985 with the goal of blueprinting the next 20 years of the civilian space program. The NCOS was to present results to the White House and Congress following a one-year study.
Reagan tapped Tom Paine, NASA Administrator from 1968 to 1970, to head the NCOS. Fourteen commissioners joined Paine. They included such luminaries as Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon; Chuck Yeager, the first human to break the sound barrier; former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick; Space Shuttle astronaut Kathy Sullivan; and retired Air Force General Bernard Schriever. Laurel Wilkening, a planetary scientist and Vice Provost of the University of Arizona, was Vice Chair.
Non-voting NCOS members included representatives from both parties of Congress and the Departments of State, Commerce, Agriculture, and Transportation, as well as the National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In addition to the inputs provided by its members, the NCOS held public forums and solicited written contributions from academe, business, and the general public.
The result was Pioneering the Space Frontier, a glossy report billed as "an exciting vision of our next fifty years in space." 2 It was the first in a series of high-profile space reports produced in the Reagan/Bush years.
Paine's attitude had not changed much since his time as NASA Administrator. He still saw it as his job to challenge Americans to take on the solar system. The NCOS report's expansive vision bore Paine's unmistakable stamp; in fact, it bore a resemblance to Paine's timeline from the Case for Mars II. Paine looked to an expanding 21st-century economy with "free societies on new worlds" and "American leadership on the new frontier."
Events caught up with the NCOS exercise, however. On the chilly Florida morning of 28 January 1986, with much of the Commission's work complete, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds into mission STS-51L, killing seven astronauts and grounding the remaining three Shuttle orbiters. The immediate cause of the accident was failure of a seal in one of the Shuttle's twin SRBs.
The Challenger accident threw the giddy optimism of Paine's NCOS report into sharp relief. It was a wake-up call. The Space Shuttle would not, could not, provide the kind of low-cost, routine space access envisioned during the 1970s. "The myth of an economic Shuttle" was laid bare. 3 The basic tool for establishing space infrastructure was found wanting, forcing many of the infrastructure elements envisioned by Mars planners in the early 1980s into some indefinite post-Shuttle future.
The accident contributed to NASA's decision to redesign the Space Station in mid-1986. After more than two years of studies, NASA had unveiled its station design in early 1986. Called the Dual Keel, it was primarily a space laboratory, but included a large rectangular truss which might eventually hold hangars, assembly equipment, and a propellant depot for Moon and Mars spacecraft. The rectangular truss was, however, adopted primarily to provide attachment points for anticipated user payloads, with space-facing payloads on the top and Earth-facing payloads on the bottom. 4
Following Challenger, the Dual Keel design came to be seen as too ambitious. The rectangular truss was deferred to a future Phase II of station assembly. Phase I would consist of a single straight truss holding solar arrays and a cluster of pressurized modules. Designers sought, however, to include software "scars" and hardware "hooks" in the Phase I design to permit eventual expansion to the full Dual Keel configuration. 5
From the Mars explorers' point of view, the accident demonstrated that the Space Shuttle could not be used to launch Mars ships. It had been felt by many before Challenger that the Shuttle would have to be supplemented by a heavy-lift rocket if piloted flight beyond low-Earth orbit was to be a credible NASA goal, but it became patently obvious to most everyone on that cold day in January 1986.
Paine's report was crammed full of new vehicles and interplanetary infrastructure based largely on SAIC and Eagle Engineering studies. The NCOS called for new cargo and passenger launch vehicles to replace the Space Shuttle by 1999 and 2000, respectively. These were components of a "Highway to Space" that would include the initial Earth-orbital Space Station (1992), a space-based OTV (1998), and an initial Earth-orbital spaceport (1998). This segued into a "Bridge Between Worlds" that would include a single-stage-to-orbit space plane, a Moon base with facilities for mining lunar oxygen, cyclers and Lagrange point stations, nuclear-electric space freighters, and, by 2026, a Mars base resembling the one put forward at the Case for Mars II workshop (1984).
The NCOS program would cost about $700 billion between 1995 and 2020. This cost would, Paine wrote, be paid through increases in NASA funding keeping pace with projected increases in U.S. GNP of 2.4 percent per year. NASA funding in 1986 was about $10 billion, or less than 1 percent of GNP. According to the report, if NASA funding remained near 1 percent of GNP, it would increase to $20 billion in 2000 and to $35 billion in 2020. For the near-term, the report urged that the new technology development share of NASA's budget be raised from 2 percent to 6 percent.
The NCOS turned over its report to the Reagan White House in March 1986, two months after the Challenger accident. Paine went public with the report even before presenting it to the White House by giving a draft to Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine. 6 Unusually, the report was also published as a trade paperback and sold in bookshops.
Paine presented the NCOS report formally to President Reagan and the Senate and House Space Committees on 22 July 1986. It urged the White House to direct the NASA Administrator to respond by 31 December 1986 with general long-range and specific short-range implementation plans. Paine summed up the NCOS report the next day at the NASA Mars Conference, underway at the National Academy of Sciences to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Viking 1's landing. He told the assembled scientists and engineers that Reagan had assured him that the Commission's recommendations would be accepted. 7
The report's conclusion assumed—correctly—that Paine's vision would be seen as grandiose, and took pains to defend it. As he had done in the 1969 Space Task Group report, Paine described the technological progress made in the past in an effort to demonstrate the progress that could be made in coming decades.
Is our expansive view of America's future realistic? Are the technical advances we project achievable? Will people accept the risks and discomforts to work on other worlds? We believe that the answer to all three questions is "Yes!" Few Americans in the early days of the Air Age ever expected to fly the Atlantic . . . yet nearly 75,000 people now fly the Atlantic daily . . . It is equally difficult for Americans this early in the Space Age to visualize the 21st-century technologies that will enable the average citizen to soar into orbit at low cost, to fly to new worlds beyond Earth, and to work and live on the space frontier in closed-ecology biospheres using robotically-processed local resources . . . . We should . . . emphasize that: The Commission is not prophesying; it is describing what the United States can make happen through vigorous leadership in pioneering the space frontier. 8
The NCOS plan was not so much a plan for guiding NASA's future as an evocation of the pioneering spirit which Paine felt was flagging in 20th-century Americans. The romantic attraction to pioneering has in fact always been a rare thing. Those afflicted by it frequently feel great zeal, which blinds them to the fact that they are rarities—that others, while frequently sympathetic to their vision, do not place as high a priority as they do upon making it real.
The NCOS report was not well received, primarily because the Challenger accident had made clear that NASA was in no position to tackle such an expansive, all-encompassing plan. But it was also seen as too general, with too many proposals. In late August 1986, former Presidential Science Advisor George Keyworth, who had been a non-voting NCOS member, said the report had forfeited impact by putting forward proposals "that stretch all the way from China to New York." 9 At a time when NASA was grounded and struggling to adapt its programs to the Shuttle's revealed shortcomings, the NCOS discussed topics as wide-ranging as self-replicating space factories, the International Space Year, and the Big Bang. Arguably, all were important to NASA's future missions, but presenting them in a single report merely made the view forward seem more clouded.
The Reagan White House quietly shelved the NCOS report; as Paine complained in an Aviation Week & Space Technology opinion piece in September 1987, "[T]he mandated presidential response to the commission has been delayed." 10 It is hard to fault the spirit of Paine's report. But the Agency's challenge in 1986 was to recover from the Challenger accident. If a plan for NASA's future in space was to be drawn up, it would have to attempt to take into account the realities of U.S. space flight in the mid-1980s. Such a plan was not long in coming, thanks to heightened public interest in NASA's activities following the Challenger accident, widespread concern that NASA had no long-term direction, and on-going efforts by Mars advocates.
The Ride Report
Sally Ride was a member of the 1978 astronaut class, the first selected for Space Shuttle flights; in 1983 she became the first American woman in space. She flew on the Shuttle twice and sat on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger accident before James Fletcher, in his second stint as NASA Administrator, appointed her as his Special Assistant for Strategic Planning (18 August 1986) and charged her with preparing a new blueprint for NASA's future. She was assisted by a 10-member panel and a small staff. The result of her 11-month study was a slim report entitled Leadership and America's Future in Space.
Aviation Week & Space Technology reported initial resistance inside NASA to releasing Ride's report. The magazine quoted an unnamed NASA manager who said the agency was "afraid of being criticized by the Office of Management and Budget." The report's frank tone may also have contributed to NASA's reluctance. In the end, Agency managers relented and published 2,000 copies in August 1987. 11