Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Space Policy 25 (2009) 156e159www.elsevier.com/locate/spacepol

Viewpoint

Challenges to US space sustainability*

Scott Pace

Space Policy Institute, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA

Available online 26 June 2009

Abstract

With space now crucial to such a wide range of activities on Earth, the USA must ensure the sustainability of its efforts, a task that involvestechnological feasibility and political will. Near-term challenges include US human access to space and the Shuttle transition, funding NASAsufficiently in a time of recession, and rebuilding the country’s space industrial base. Longer-term challenges will be better protecting the spaceenvironment (including the electromagnetic spectrum) from overcrowding and the effects of space weather and NEOs, and defining respon-sibilities for distributing climate change data and recognition of property rights for the commercial development of in-space resources. As an aidto dealing with these challenges the USA must ask itself whether there is a human future in space and seek to answer the question in the courseof human and robotic exploration beyond Earth.� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

When the Space Age began, questions of ‘‘sustainability’’revolved around technical feasibility and political will. Couldthe USA catch up to the USSR? Did it have the will to catchup? President Kennedy asked a simple, but profound questionwhen he asked whether there was an area of space achieve-ment where the USA had a chance of surpassing the USSR.This led to the decision to go to the Moon precisely becausethat goal was seen as both possible and very hard. So hard, infact, that the Soviets and the USA would be competing on anequal basis.

The questions of sustainability today also involve technicalfeasibility and political will. Can we rebuild a human space-flight capability to take us beyond low Earth orbit again? Dowe have the will to do so? Unlike in the early 1960s, however,there is less clarity as to what questions we are answering withour space activities, and human spaceflight in particular.

* This is a slightly edited version of a paper presented to the American

Astronautical Society’s 47th Robert H. Goddard Memorial Symposium, held

in Greenbelt, MD on 11 March 2008.

E-mail address: space1@gwu.edu

0265-9646/$ - see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.spacepol.2009.05.003

2. Why is sustainability an issue?

In many sectors, the answers as to why we are engaged inspaceflight are much, much clearer and more numerous todaythan in 1962 or even in 1992. Space is crucial to nationalsecurity. US and allied space capabilities provide a source ofstrategic advantage to military and intelligence functions thathas no parallel. Our forces are organized, trained and equippedto exploit the information advantages enabled by space suchthat it is virtually unthinkable to return to a world where wedid not have those capabilities.

Space is crucial to the global economy. The web ofcommunications, navigation, remote sensing, and environ-mental monitoring satellites that encircle the Earth are part ofmultiple critical infrastructures necessary to a global, infor-mation-driven, economy. The precision time and positioningsignals of GPS alone have enabled the infusion of new levelsof IT productivity on existing infrastructure worldwide. Fromagriculture to air transportation, from natural resourcemanagement to financial management, space capabilities areso embedded that to imagine returning to a world withoutthem seems unthinkable.

National security, foreign policy, and economic interestsare continuing to blend together as a result of space systems.Modernized air traffic management will probably require moreGPS satellites than the Department of Defense (DoD) alone

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would require. Environmental monitoring and data systemswill be needed to verify new international climate changeagreements that will affect a diverse range foreign policy andeconomic interests. Despite, or perhaps because of, the growthof fiber optics and terrestrial wireless broadband, satellitecommunications capacity is even more crucial to military andcommercial interests.

Since the first satellite launch, the scientific exploration ofspace has been incredibly fruitful, has caused textbooks to berewritten, and has changed our views of the universe. From thediscovery of the Van Allen radiation belts to finding water onMars and dark matter in the universe, there is no question thatscientific interests will continue to explore space. Thecompletion of the International Space Station (ISS) willhopefully enable similar creative discoveries in other fieldssuch as life and materials sciences.

Space continues to be a source of international prestige.Independent access to space, the launch of satellites, andhaving a nation’s citizen travel to and from space continue tobe seen as major technical achievements that also reflect ona nation’s organizational skills e and by implication on itsmilitary and economic power. This has not always beena cause for congratulation, as in the case of China’s first EVAor India’s first mission to the Moon. North Korean and Iranianspace launches are a source of international concern and UNresolutions premised on the capability of those same launchersto deliver weapons of mass destruction.

Space is opening up to new private actors, with a newgeneration of space entrepreneurs creating opportunities fortourism and industry in low Earth orbit and perhaps beyond.There is a huge chasm between suborbital flights and routinetourism to orbit, but space tourism and recreation may yet bethe next ‘‘killer app’’ in commercial space. We are clearlya long way from the days when the USSR compared privatespace activities to piracy and the USA created Comsat to be itsrepresentative in an international satellite monopoly calledIntelsat.

So with all this, why would do we need to think aboutsustainability? Isn’t it enough to recognize the space depen-dencies that already exist for the USA and the world?

3. Challenges to sustainability e near term

The most immediate sustainability concern is US humanaccess to space. This is more than just the lamented gapbetween the end of the Shuttle program and the first flight ofAres 1e or even the reliance on Russia for human access tothe ISS for all the partners during this time. It’s the challengeof shifting the incredibly complex combination of people,contracts, hardware, and facilities that constitute the SpaceShuttle program and moving to the Constellation architecture.This is the most demanding challenge NASA has.

The central risk of the ‘‘gap’’ is not from wounded pride ewe had no problem in relying on Russia to sustain the ISS afterColumbia. Rather it is the risk of the US human spaceflighttalent base evaporating. The longer the gap, the bigger therisks of evaporation as talented people seek to find more

secure or challenging employment. The answer is not tosimply continue flying the Shuttle, as, aside from the risk, thiswill not give talented people assurance that they have a futurebeyond the Shuttle.

The transition from the Shuttle is expensive, difficult, andnot without a great deal of risk. But there is no realisticalternative to making it after 2010, although it can be arguedthat the USA spent 20 years looking for one and avoiding theanswers.

The Shuttle transition represents the cumulative retirementof several illusions as well as orbiters. The loss of Challengerended the illusion of Shuttle as some sort of routine spacetruck fleet, flying 24 times or more per year. The loss of theColumbia ended the illusion of extending the Shuttle’s oper-ational life to 2020 or even beyond. The intervening periodbetween these two events ended the illusion of there beinga dramatic technical solution to routine spaceflight as repre-sented by the National Aerospace Plane and X-33. The budgetreality means that extending the Shuttle for several more yearstakes funds directly from efforts to develop its successor.

There have been calls for a review of the Constellationarchitecture and that is a natural and appropriate action fora new administration. I would like to suggest that, given themomentum current efforts have gained, a review be doneexpeditiously. I would also bet that a redesign of what is nowbeing built for missions beyond LEO will cost more thandeveloping the current architecture just once.

And it is in development, not operations or research, thatthe most immediate sustainability challenges lie. The ques-tions we’re facing in sustaining US human spaceflight are thequestions of a development program:

� Do we have clear objectives?� Do we have the resources?� Do we have coherent processes to make decisions?� Do we have the intellectual, technical, and management

capabilities in both industry and government?

The US Space Exploration Policy and the back-to-backNASA authorizations of fiscal years 2005 and 2008 haveprovided clear performance objectives for what NASA is todo. Of course there are major questions, such as the eventualfate of the ISS and realistic dates for returning to the Moon.But one should bear in mind that e if performance require-ments don’t change and we don’t have enough resources e theonly free variables left are schedule or increasing risk.

The Obama administration is proposing to bump up NASA’stop line budget with a combination of stimulus dollars, FY09appropriations and the FY10 budget request. However, thebudget is flat-lined in the out years for a net loss compared to theprevious administration. In addition, key details remain to beseen and it is not clear if the agency is going to be asked to takeon additional efforts (such as COTS-D) rather than improve theschedule confidence for Ares and Orion.

Cost overruns certainly don’t help the NASA budget.Acting Administrator Chris Scolese recently testified on themany factors that contribute to and cause cost overruns and

158 S. Pace / Space Policy 25 (2009) 156e159

schedule delays in NASA programs. ‘‘Some of these factorsare under the control of NASA.such as the definition ofrequirements, technical optimism, and inadequate reserves.Other factors are not.such as funding instability, congres-sional direction, and technical surprises.’’

Given the reality that the NASA top line does not increasewhen cost growth occurs, the consequences of increased costare fewer missions, delays in starting new missions, andinstability in current missions. Thus NASA needs to control asmany cost growth factors as it can, especially system-levelrequirements. For external factors NASA cannot control, itneeds to accurately communicate the programmatic impacts ofunderfunding, funding instability, and changes in direction. Inessence, development programs need to be well managed sothat project and program managers know the ‘‘prices’’ asso-ciated with internal and externally imposed constraints.

For the sake of short-term convenience, we have not alwaysmanaged the natural tensions between missions and institu-tions to ensure both were healthy. There is a need to get themissions done today and a need to ensure capabilities are therefor the missions coming tomorrow. As facilities age and decay,they will impose costs on projects and programs even if no oneprogram or project wants to pay for dreaded ‘‘overhead’’.

Government space efforts in general are being challengedto do more with less, to innovate and sustain global leadership.But their ability to do so is limited by many factors. There isa lack of risk-taking in government technology portfolios andfocus has shifted to operations and development. There is littlesupport for the transition of immature government technologyto practical implementation, especially in today’s risk-aversecommercial environment. There are few mechanisms asidefrom Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) to deal withsmall firms and non-traditional organizations e althoughmodels like the CIA’s In-Q-Tel fund and NASA’s CentennialChallenges program exist.

Underlying erosion of the space industrial base has furtherexacerbated the problems of cost growth and weak innovation.I am chagrined to recall that I helped write a report on the stateof the US space industrial base for the National Space Councilin 1992 and the concerns expressed then have only becomemore severe. With limited technology spending in the civil andmilitary sectors, increasing reliance on global supply chains,and export controls that limit the size of addressable marketsfor space technologies, we should not be surprised by evapo-ration of the US space industrial base from the bottom up.Recent concern about counterfeit parts coming into the aero-space supply chain is just one more symptom of trends that thecurrent economic turmoil will only worsen.

Most crucially, what has happened to the USA’s ability to dolarge-scale systems engineering? What happened to the dayswhen NASA was able to import crucial Air Force systems engi-neers off ICBM programs to work on Apollo? What happened tothe cadre of innovative officers, civil servants, and FederallyFunded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) staff wholed our nation’s premier national security space programs?

I would suggest that what happened is that there becamefewer opportunities to practice systems engineering. People

cannot be proficient at skills they don’t practice. Governmentorganizations choose to value attributes other than experienceand technical competence in personnel management. Wedidn’t think that being a smart government customer requirede in the words of Wernher von Braun e an ability to‘‘penetrate the contractor’’. We engaged in the illusion thatwith clever contracts, we could pay someone else to have ourinterests in the center of their hearts for systems engineeringdecisions. It didn’t work out.

Under pressure to get the most out of every project and withfewer flight opportunities, our space projects grew to be largerand fewer. I won’t go into the arguments about small space-craft, faster, better, cheaper, etc. They are about as old andstale as debates about humans versus robots in exploration.Objectives, constraints, and architecture should drive systemsdesign, not specific technical approaches to implementingthose designs.

One of the consequences of these trends was a decline indevelopmental experience within government managementteams. This was true of human spaceflight and nationalsecurity programs, and the fact that conditions were not worsein space and Earth science was largely due to the wise practiceof keeping at least one project in-house at places like the JetPropulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Goddard SpaceflightCenter. They retained people with hands-on experience.

Another consequence from less ‘‘through put’’ of devel-opment projects was that fewer members of the spacecommunity experienced matrix management and instead spentmost of their careers in a single pyramid organization. Theynaturally identified with the needs of the project they wereassigned to, but sometimes at the expense of the standardsdemanded by their technical profession. Great loyalty, not justfear, can be a cultural inhibitor to communicating technicalconcerns if there are no other projects to work on.

The lack of large-scale systems engineering skill is not justa concern for space, but also a strategic loss for the nation. It isnot possible to look at the challenges facing the USA withoutseeing that meeting them will require multidisciplinary tech-nical skills, international engagement, immense resources, anddecades-long dedication. There is no more multi-disciplinary,large-scale example of these characteristics than found in thespace community, and in human space exploration in particular.

Thus, while the US government should and must seek waysto tap into the commercial and international networks, it alsoneeds to rebuild its internal intellectual capital so that it candefine requirements, conduct systems engineering trades,negotiate with contractors as intellectual equals, and even helpfix development problems that inevitably arise.

In short, an immediate challenge to sustainability is for thegovernment to rebuild its systems engineering capabilities sothat it can once again be a manager of development programs,rather than just a patron of them.

4. Challenges to sustainability e far term

The space community is increasingly aware of long-term,external threats to the sustainability of space activity as well.

159S. Pace / Space Policy 25 (2009) 156e159

These arise from the recognition of how space is a ‘‘globalcommons’’ that we need to protect. I will cite just a fewexamples.

Improving space situational awareness is a topic of greatinterest across all sectors and among all spacefaring nations asorbital debris can threaten any spacecraft. The environment isa lot more crowded than in 1962, 1992 or even 2002. Inter-national discussions on ‘‘rules of the road’’ and ‘‘codes ofconduct’’ reflect the differences in today’s environment.Improving space weather predictions is important for pro-tecting terrestrial telecommunications and power networks,spacecraft, and human crews living and working beyond theEarth for long periods of time. Improvements in space weatherprediction are thus of interest to all space sectors and nations.

Protecting the electromagnetic spectrum used for spaceservices is vital for multiple economic, scientific, security, andpublic safety reasons. There is increasing pressure on the ‘‘noisefloor’’ in restricted bands used for space systems as a result of thespread of ubiquitous wireless devices. If the spectrum environ-ment is harmed, the damage is likely to be permanent as satellitepower can’t be easily increased or unlicensed devices confis-cated. Continued international vigilance and cooperation amongindustries and governments will be necessary.

Great international attention is being paid to creating inter-operable standards for communication and navigation. TheNASA rovers on Mars have the ability to communicate throughboth European and US spacecraft in orbit above Mars as theresult of open, international standards. Such standards arespecially important in light of the rise of increasingly capableplayers such as China and India, as they help ensure realisticoptions exist for cross-support as political conditions warrant.

There are also areas of the global space commons which arenot well understood or defined, such as:

� the roles and responsibilities for acquiring and distributingclimate change data needed for international agreements;� space surveillance and tracking capabilities to detect and

characterize potentially threatening near-Earth objects;� internationally accepted recognition of property rights for

the commercial development of in-space resources.

Today, the Global Exploration Strategy acts as an interna-tional common approach to human and robotic exploration ofthe Moon, Mars, and beyond. As I noted at the beginning,there is no question about the practical, scientific, and evendiplomatic value of space exploration and this is recognized byall spacefaring nations.

It is less clear what questions we are trying to answer withsuch a bold exploration effort. What are the questions that willdrive and sustain us, if not beating each other in cold war-like

competitions for prestige? Challenger forced the question ofwhether we should risk humans flying payloads that could belaunched in other ways. The answer was no and we movedsatellites to expendable launch vehicles. Columbia forced thequestion of why are we risking humans at all. The ColumbiaAccident Investigation Board (CAIB) said that travel beyondlow-Earth orbit was necessary if we were to justify the risksinvolved. The U.S. Space Exploration Policy and GlobalExploration Strategy are consistent with the views of theCAIB.

I agree with the CAIB and the approach taken by the GlobalExploration Strategy, but I’d like to suggest we do more. Weshould take a page from our science colleagues in askingsimple, but profound questions to shape an implementationstrategy. In science, questions such as ‘‘Does life exist else-where in the Solar System?’’ or ‘‘What is dark energy?’’ helpshape and sustain scientific strategies and programs over longperiods.

What is the question for human spaceflight? I believe it’sasking whether there is a human future beyond the Earth. DrHarry Shipman posed two questions in his 1989 book, Humansin Space, whose answers lead to very different human desti-nies. The first is: ‘‘Can extraterrestrial materials be used tosupport life in locations other than Earth?’’ The second is‘‘Can activities of sustained economic worth be carried out atthose locations? Or as I shorten it: ‘‘Can we live off the land?’’and ‘‘Can we make it pay?’’

If the answer to both is yes, we will see space settlementsand the incorporation of the Solar System into our economicsphere as former Presidential Science Advisor Jack Marburgersuggests. If the answer is no, then space is a form of MountEverest e good for personal challenge and tourism but nobodyreally lives there. Other answers might remind us of Antarcticaor perhaps a North Sea oil platform.

Many people seem to have faith-based answers to thesequestions, but I would suggest a greater humility in that wedon’t really know. Therefore our efforts should be to answerthese questions in the course of human and robotic explorationbeyond the Earth. The quest to do so will teach us much ofpractical benefit as we seek to do things that are hard. Theexperiences we gain will give us new insights into who we areand what humans can do.

When Apollo 8 took its iconic picture of Earth rise, peoplearound the world looked at themselves in a new way. So toothe effort to know whether humans have a future beyond thisone planet will allow us to know our future in a new andprofound way. Answering the question of whether mankindcan productively live and work on another world than our ownplanet will challenge, guide and, I hope, sustain us in the yearsto come.