The
role of science in the nation’s human spaceflight program has been
controversial since the inception of the Apollo program. That controversy
continues to this day. It is the root cause of NASA’s failure to achieve
national consensus on defining the first deep space mission objective for human
spaceflight, and is an aspect that has most limited the nation’s progress on
planning for human exploration of deep space. Despite nearly 50 years of
advocacy that the focus of NASA’s human spaceflight program should be to enable
scientific
discovery,
this program remains adrift as a result of a national space policy that fails
to head this long-standing advice.
The
omnibus spending bill that funds NASA and the rest of the federal government
through the remainder of this fiscal year leaves the agency fully on-track to
continue development of enabling assets for deep space exploration. However, no
progress has been achieved on selection of an initial deep space mission
objective since the National Academy of Sciences reported that no consensus
exists within the nation’s science community in support of the Obama
Administration’s direction to land an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025, as laid
out in the 2010 National Space Policy.
Recognizing
that this requirement could not be achieved within foreseen cost constraints,
NASA proposed, in its 2014 budget request, a novel deviation to the this
requirement first described in an obscure unpublished study, in which an
asteroid would be transferred into lunar orbit to enable its exploration in
not-so-deep space closer to home. The above spending bill appropriates funding
to further flesh out this idea. However, the report language makes clear that
Congressional support for implementation of this mission has not yet been achieved,
and there is no evidence that significant support for it exists within the
nation’s science community. If NASA’s “rocket scientists” are
so smart, why have they seemingly fumbled the ball on selecting a first deep
space mission for the astronauts? The science community of the United States
consists primarily of very smart people. Unfortunately, they are held at arm’s
length from the mission selection process for human exploration of deep space.
NASA’s
Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has had unblemished success in implementing
high consensus mission selections for the past 40 years. So why has building a
consensus for the first human deep space mission become an intractable problem
for NASA? The root cause is the unintended consequence of segregating science
and human spaceflight management into separate organizations without specifying
which should be supporting the other. NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations
Mission Directorate (HEOMD) and SMD operate independently to such a degree that
they have evolved immiscible internal cultures. For example, most Americans
would take for granted that a modern effort by their government to explore the
unknown would be a program of scientific exploration. History has shown that
the alternative—non-scientific exploration—is much less efficient in terms of
realized return on investment in the form of discovery. Yet, within the culture
of HEOMD, the relationship between an exploration mission and the science
motivation for it is ambiguous at best. In the organization of today’s NASA,
when astronauts are added to the tool set of a spaceflight mission
architecture, the mission becomes magically exempt from the norms of science
mission selection that have served the nation well for the past 40 years. What
are those norms?
The
process of science depends entirely on transparency. Its practitioners are, by
nature, driven by curiosity and skepticism. In the culture of the science
community, discoveries, conclusions, and results are only accepted
if they are achieved by fully transparent means. In the culture of science, the
free exchange of ideas and the maintenance of a public arena in which ideas are
competed, in a free and open way, are critical enabling aspects of scientific
exploration. The culture of science is the culture of SMD, and the mission
selection process utilized by SMD respects the above boundary conditions. As a
consequence, its missions enjoy broad consensus across the nation’s science
community at inception. How do they do it?
Under
the direction of Congress, three agencies—NASA, the National Science
Foundation, and, more recently, the Department of Energy—jointly fund the
National Research Council (an organization of the National Academy of Sciences)
to conduct a Decadal Survey of major science research areas, and to report on
that community’s prioritized objectives for space science during each decade.
SMD respects this prioritization in its allocation of funds and implementation
of major projects. For smaller initiatives, such as Explorer-class missions,
SMD competitively selects community-proposed missions through a unique
solicitation vehicle in which the relative quality of scientific ideas, and
their alignment with Decadal Survey priorities, is a selection factor along
with the traditional factors of cost and risk.
In
astrophysics, this process has been running in its current form since 1970
(with prior evolutions stemming from the 1960s). It has yielded the world’s
most productive programs of exploration resulting in discovery, producing much
of what we know about the universe and the history and fate of the Earth,
resulting in multiple Nobel Prizes. The national consensus behind missions
selected via this process results from the high transparency and broad
community involvement in each step of it. For example, the set of ideas that
were submitted to the most recent astrophysics decadal survey are readily
available to anyone and they represent the best ideas that the whole science
community can muster. Approximately 3,900 authors representing 3,000
institutions penned more than 300 white papers that the National Academy vetted
to set SMD priorities for this decade. Five panels appointed by the National
Research Council (NRC), consisting of more than 60 of the Nation’s leading
experts on the relevant subject matter, did this vetting.
Congress
recently directed the NRC to conduct a smaller-scale study of human space
flight objectives. This NRC report is expected later this year. Although this
one-time effort is a welcome first step in the right direction, it is not a
substitute for the depth of public engagement that is achieved by an ongoing
Decadal Survey process. Its impact on the nation’s space policy remains to be
seen.
In
sharp contrast to the transparency, direct public involvement, and strategic
coherence embodied by decadal surveys, the process by which HEOMD’s current
selection for its first deep space mission catapulted from a short unpublished
study to the central objective of the nation’s human spaceflight program in
less than a year’s time is entirely opaque to most stakeholders. Even if the in
situ resource utilization goals of the asteroid program could be achieved within
practical spending limits, lack of transparency in the process by which it
achieved top national priority precludes any hope of building consensus
acceptance by the nation’s science community. In this community, it is not
enough to get “the right answer” to a problem: one has to show the work to get
that answer as well. It must be clear what alternatives were considered, what
rationale was employed in the prioritization of them, and the alternatives must
be solicited in a free and open process to which anyone can respond with
confidence that the playing field is a level one.
It
is unlikely that the organizational ambiguity between SMD and HEOMD— the
supported-vs.-supporting nature of the relationship between them—will be fixed
internally. Although it is clear that humanity’s greatest scientific
exploration productivity in space was achieved by the Hubble mission
architecture in which SMD was supported by HEOMD (see “A values-based approach
toward national space policy”, The Space Review, June 10, 2013), this model has
not been embraced by the agency in its planning for HEOMD’s first deep space
exploration mission.
The
current appropriations bill leaves NASA on track to build the tools for human
exploration of deep space. However, building a national consensus on the
purpose to which these tools should be put will not be achieved until Congress
directs NASA to implement a decadal survey process for prioritization of human
exploration mission objectives. The SMD model can be readily and directly
applied. Doing so is not rocket science. With near-term Congressional action,
implementation of a decadal survey for human spaceflight can be achieved in
time to yield a high consensus mission selection by the end of this decade,
when the Space Launch System and Crew Exploration Vehicle will be ready. It is
time to put the science community into the game to run this ball down the field
via a decadal survey process for prioritization of the first and every
subsequent human mission of scientific exploration.
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