New NASA budget eats the seed corn of its Journey to Mars

Eric Berger

NASA

This week, the US Senate's Appropriations subcommittee overseeing spaceflight put forward its blueprint for NASA's FY2017 budget. The top-line number looks promising at $19.306 billion—a $21 million year-over-year increase.

Yet the Senate plan exposes two potentially fatal flaws with NASA's Journey to Mars. Namely, the US Congress continues to place funding for the Space Launch System rocket and Orion space capsule before all other elements of NASA's exploration program. And by raiding other areas of NASA's budget, notably Space Technology, it is hamstringing the agency's ability to carry out the journey.

There is an old-time expression to characterize what is happening here: eating the seed corn. In a different era, a farmer's family might be forced to eat its seed corn for the next growing season to survive a long winter. This few weeks of sustenance would then doom the family during the next planting season, leaving them with no seeds to put into the ground. This sort of budget eats NASA's seed corn for the Journey to Mars.

Rocket first

A couple of years ago, I met with Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist to walk on the Moon. He also served a term as US Senator, so he knows how the Beltway works. We had a long discussion ranging from Schmitt's interest in Helium-3 on the Moon to NASA's ideas for the SLS rocket. Schmitt was mystified that NASA would be asked to build a large rocket without a clear plan to use it in the next decade.
“Historically, the SLS would be putting the cart before the horse,” Schmitt told me. "Certainly the Saturn V rocket was developed, the Panama Canal was dug, and the Lewis and Clark expeditions were done because of an overriding national purpose. To accomplish these kinds of purposes, you needed these kinds of technologies. It’s a lot different to say we’re going to build a rocket and then figure out what we’re going to do with it. Apollo was sustained because Congress and the country agreed that we ought to do it. It’s not quite so clear now, at least in the Congress, that the motivation is anything more than jobs.”
It was Congress that directed NASA to build the Space Launch System in 2010 over the objections of an Obama White House. Since then, Congress has typically given NASA more than it requested for the program. In fiscal year 2016, for example, Congress topped up this line item by $650 million. For fiscal year 2017, the Senate budget has increased funding by $840 million, a staggering 60 percent bump above the president's request.
"The Committee has repeatedly been compelled to provide appropriate funding to keep the human exploration program from incurring costly setbacks and to maintain development schedules," Senate appropriators noted in the bill.
Since Tuesday, I have been asking communications officials in NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate for clarification on what this extra funding will be used for and whether it's needed. I haven't received a response.
In any case, the Senate proposes to add nearly a billion dollars to NASA's rocket budget this year to speed up development of the SLS. Technically, there is nothing wrong with the rocket. Its engineers are doing diligent work. The primary problem is that NASA doesn't really need the rocket yet. It has proposed a test flight in 2018, and then a few human missions in the mid-2020s that would basically be reflying 1968's Apollo 8 mission, in which astronauts flew out to the Moon and back. There are no other missions because of the simple fact that NASA cannot afford to use the expensive rocket.
So the Senate is telling NASA to hurry up and build a rocket for which it has no real use for human exploration in the 2020s. Unfortunately, once the rocket is built, the expenses don't end. Ground crews must be kept ready, supply lines kept open, and contractors taken care of. These fixed costs can be enormous. For the space shuttle, those costs amounted to about $2.5 billion annually—whether the vehicle flew or not—and the SLS uses a lot of similar components.
It would make a lot of sense for NASA to hurry up and build the rocket if it had a deadline to go to Mars, a mandate, and the funding to do so. But it doesn't. As Schmitt said, the motivation seems primarily to be keeping people employed.

Space Technology

One of the pots of money the US Senate raided to pay for the SLS "plus up" is the Space Technology program. Back in 2010, as President Obama sought to reshape and modernize NASA, his advisors realized that a real deep-space exploration program could not rely on the same kinds of architecture and technology the agency used to go the Moon in the 1960s.

NASA would need modern propulsion, for example, so that it didn't take astronauts seven or eight months to get to Mars in chemically powered spacecraft, exposing them to extreme radiation levels and other hazards. They needed advanced power systems to survive on the red planet for a month or longer. As aerospace engineer Bobby Braun, NASA's chief technologist in 2011, once explained to me, "There is no magic technology that will allow us to send humans to Mars; you really need a whole suite of technologies to accomplish that."

The president's 2011 budget sought to create a Space Technology Program to "improve the nation's leadership in key research areas, enable far-term capabilities, and spawn game-changing innovations to make space travel more affordable and sustainable." The Obama budget indicated that NASA should be receiving about $1.2 billion a year now to bring these technologies to maturity.
Even back then, Congress wasn't enamored with the idea, and it has only provided modest funding for space technology. It has continued that trend, and in the last couple of years has added additional insult to efforts to provide ample funding for space technology.
For the 2016 budget, for example, NASA received $686.5 million for space technology. This number doesn't sound terrible, but as Jeff Foust reported, the funding bill directed NASA to spend $133 million on a satellite-servicing project called RESTORE-L to refuel the aging Landsat 7 satellite.
The new Senate bill pulls a similar trick. It again calls for $686.5 million for space technology and "recommends" that $130 million of the amount go to RESTORE-L. This appears to be little more than a retirement gift to Maryland Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski, as NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in her state will oversee this project.

In other words, Mikulski gets a nice Earth-observing project for her backyard, wholly unrelated to human spaceflight, and agrees to whatever budget increases for SLS that the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee over space, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), wants. Shelby looks out for SLS because it is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

All the while, it is not clear who in the US Senate is looking out for NASA's actual exploration programs. A sensible plan would identify a clear destination and then develop all of the groundbreaking technologies needed to get there. NASA would then research and develop those technologies. And once they were close to maturity, we'd build a big rocket—with its high fixed costs—to get us across the finish line.

But as Schmitt said, we're putting the cart before the horse. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the farm yard, the pork-producer has eaten all the seed corn.