NASA's recent woes took root with loss of space shuttle program

When the Hubble Space Telescope’s mechanics got finicky 25 years ago, NASA scientists didn’t worry too much — they sent astronauts aboard a space shuttle to service the groundbreaking observatory.

Even 10 or 15 years ago, crews made regular trips on a shuttle to the International Space Station to conduct research, learn about life in space, and build and repair the orbiting laboratory that they shared with international partners.

But NASA is much different today than it was back then, faced with a new reality driven home by a series of unfortunate events earlier this month that left the Hubble darkened, a much-anticipated modern moon trip mired in questions and an American astronaut grounded after a Russian spacecraft took a terrifying tumble through the sky.

The incidents may seem unrelated, but experts say they can be traced back to the early 2000s as the end of the space shuttle program neared and the agency started trying to do too much with too little.

“The sudden finality of the shuttle program is what leads to this, but the root cause of that is not having enough money to do all the things we wanted to,” said Herb Baker, a former NASA manager who retired last year after 42 years.

The decision to end the shuttle program came in 2004 as President George W. Bush’s administration shifted its focus to frontiers beyond Earth’s orbit. But with too few coins to divvy up amongst its many projects and a lack of political direction, the history-making agency instead has been forced to change course virtually every four years as political winds change.

“NASA’s budget and policy seem to be based on Twitter,” said Keith Cowing, editor of NASA Watch, a website devoted to space news. “It’s like, ‘How can I come up with something in 280 characters?’ We can’t think long term. We can’t think multi-administrations.”

That leaves space agency leaders wondering what will happen after the 2020 election. President Donald Trump has pushed to bolster human exploration — with an eye toward the moon and then onto Mars — but what happens if he isn’t re-elected is anyone’s guess.

Policy fluctuations “can be difficult to weather,” Mark Geyer, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, previously told the Houston Chronicle. “It can cause fluctuations in the space program and that’s hard if you’re trying to move the country forward. But that’s life, so you need to develop strategies to navigate that.”

Changing priorities

Bush’s decision to end the shuttle program followed the loss of the entire crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, when the spacecraft disintegrated over northeast Texas and Louisiana as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

The gargantuan shuttles were perfect for carting modules into low Earth orbit for the space station’s construction, but that work would be finished in 2010, he said during a 2004 speech at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The expensive shuttle fleet, in essence, would be rendered unnecessary.

It was time, Bush said, to explore again.

“In the past 30 years, no human being has set foot on another world or ventured farther up into space than 386 miles, roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Boston, Massachusetts,” Bush said. “America has not developed a new vehicle to advance human exploration in space in nearly a quarter century. It is time for America to take the next steps.”

Bush’s Constellation Program called upon NASA to develop a new spacecraft — what would one day be known as Orion — ready for a crewed mission by 2014. That vehicle would take astronauts to the space station after the shuttle program ended, but it would also take them “beyond our orbit to other worlds,” he said.

As early as 2015, humans would be making extended missions to the moon, he said, and eventually to the Red Planet.

“It just was too expensive to continue to fly the shuttle and spend the money and have the people we needed to get Constellation or Orion moving,” Baker said.

After three decades of flight, ending the shuttle program was the right decision, Charles Bolden -- who was NASA administrator from 2009 to 2017 -- wrote in a 2015 op-ed published in Wired, an online news publication.

“It was the recommendation of the board investigating the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia and it was endorsed by many people in the space community, including myself,” he wrote. “But it was not meant to be the final decision.”

Bush’s edict was well-received, Cowing said, and NASA continued humming along.

“It was kind of amazing. I didn’t think I’d live to see it,” Cowing said. “Everyone had an idea and Congress signed on to it.”

But then, Bush’s second term ended. And everything changed.

President Barack Obama axed the Constellation Program in 2010 — a year before the last shuttle flight — saying it was too costly and inefficient. He chose instead to fund the construction of NASA’s most powerful rocket ever built, the Space Launch System, to send a crewed Orion spacecraft to an asteroid by 2025 and then near Mars by the 2030s.

The decision stunned NASA personnel, who had already spent five years and about $9 billion on Constellation. Bolden equated the move to “a death in the family,” according to Space.com.

"Everybody needs to understand that and we need to give them time to grieve and then we need to give them time to recover," Bolden told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

When the last space shuttle touched down on Earth in July 2011, NASA ended up without a backup.

A commercial crew program was in the works, however, in which companies would be funded to build vehicles to send U.S. astronauts to the space station. In the meantime, NASA would rely on the Russians — at a cost of $82 million per astronaut, per trip.

“Grounding human spaceflights was always supposed to be temporary as we made the necessary transition to a new generation of spacecraft, operated by American commercial carriers,” Bolden wrote in 2015. “Likewise, paying for seats on Russian spacecraft to send our astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) was always intended to be a stopgap.”

The economic benefits of using private companies would be huge. In 2015, Bolden said it would cost just $58 million per seat to send astronauts on commercial vehicles, far less than the amount paid to the Russians.

Now, however, NASA has a new directive — again. Trump has asked the space agency to return to the moon as a stepping stone for Mars, and to build a mini-space station orbiting the moon so that the country can sustainably return to the lunar surface.

But now, seven years after the last shuttle landed, private enterprise is still working to bring a commercial crew program to fruition. And the U.S. still doesn’t have a way to get its own astronauts into space, even when its acclaimed Hubble telescope is out of commission.

Inadequate funding

Three years after President John F. Kennedy famously stood outside Houston’s Rice University in 1962 and declared the moon the nation’s next big adventure, NASA was allotted $5.2 billion — 5 percent of the federal budget, according to the National Park Service.

That would equate to about $41.7 billion in today’s dollars.

“We never will have Apollo-level funding again,” said James Oberg, a former NASA engineer who worked for 20 years in Mission Control at Houston's Johnson Space Center. “It was naive of us to think [JFK’s speech] was an indication of a new era of funding when he really intended it to be a demonstration of American superiority to the world. It wasn’t going to continue at that level.”

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By comparison, Trump has proposed $19.9 billion for NASA in the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1 — about .5 percent of the federal budget. Trumped signed a continuing resolution that extend through Dec. 7 because Congress was unable to pass a budget for NASA and several other agencies in time.

Still, NASA has tried to do more and more with limited funds. It has launched countless satellites and telescopes; rovers have gone to Mars and probes have gone to Jupiter; it has continued to send humans into low Earth orbit, where the space station flies; and tried to develop new vehicles to take humans even deeper into outer space.

The money, however, can only stretch so far. And that led the U.S. to the predicament it found itself in during the 2000s, when it was trying to run three major programs at the same time.

The country was dumping money into the space station for development and human habitation, flying space shuttles on a regular basis and trying to build its next headlining spacecraft.

“We just tried to do too much with not enough money,” Baker said.

Something, he said, had to give, and that was the shuttle program.

“We could have said, ‘Hey, forget Constellation, Orion and SLS,’ but that wouldn’t have been the smart thing,” he said. “At some point we had to move on to a next generation space vehicle.”

Unfortunately, building a brand new spacecraft cost much more than expected. As of this year, NASA has spent $11.9 billion on the SLS rocket alone. The entire Apollo project, which flew missions from 1966 to 1972, cost $24 billion, the National Parks Service stated.

That would equate to about $145 billion today.

Looking ahead

With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing just nine months away, the U.S. may not have a way of getting its astronauts into space during this celebratory time.

And that problem is being felt acutely as 2018 comes to a close.

Hubble — credited with altering humankind's understanding of the solar system and how it formed during its almost three decades orbiting Earth — still is powered down after one of its six gyroscopes failed, limiting the telescopes ability to point accurately for extended periods of time. The telescope needs three gyroscopes to be fully operational, but three have failed and a fourth is having problems.

In the past, NASA would have sent a space shuttle to service the Hubble; they did so five times between 1993 and 2009. But without the shuttle, the agency’s options are limited.

Cowing believes Orion could be outfitted for a servicing mission to Hubble, but it would need to get airborne first. The launch of Orion — the spacecraft being built to take humans back to the moon — has been delayed because of cost and development problems with its rocket.

“Poor Orion,” Cowing said. “There’s nothing wrong with Orion, it just has the misfortune of only being usable on a big rocket that’s never going to be able to fly.”

The first Orion mission without a crew initially was scheduled to take place in 2017. That timeline had already been bumped to mid-2020, but a recent NASA’s Office of Inspector General report concluded that date was no longer feasible. NASA disagrees with that assessment.

This likely will impact the crewed Orion mission around the moon, which was set for no later than 2023.

Cowing doesn’t think humans will ever climb aboard a spacecraft strapped to the SLS rocket, though he said it potentially could haul cargo into space.

“Will it get launched? It doesn’t seem to be a bad rocket,” Cowing said.

The commercial sector, meanwhile, is building rockets for much cheaper. Since 2014, Boeing and SpaceX have been building spacecrafts to transport American astronauts to the space station, though both companies have delayed the launches of their first crewed test flights that were supposed to happen this year.

That brings NASA to its current problem. The U.S. has already spent more than $1 billion paying Russia to transport its astronauts to the space station, but a rocket booster failure on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 11 forced the launch to be aborted. Astronaut Nick Hague was aboard, but was not injured. The Russians are now investigating.

It wouldn’t be an issue, however, if NASA could ferry its own astronauts to the space station or rely on private enterprise. Those options will both take time.

Cowing said it’s time for the commercial sector to “step up.”

The private sector is “just writing checks and now they’re doing stuff that NASA would love to do but can’t,” he added. “I think we’re going to start seeing at some point planetary missions not governmental ones because someone with money wants to do it. Unfortunately, NASA isn’t going to go along with this willingly.”

Alex Stuckey writes about NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey.

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