When President Bush unveiled his major space initiative last week -- including plans for NASA to return to the moon by 2020 and construct a lunar base that could function as a launchpad for future manned exploration of Mars and the solar system -- he invoked the words of astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon: "We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return." In addition to proposing a literal return to the moon, Bush no doubt hopes for a more political return to the success of the Apollo program and the political dividends that the United States' first lunar landings paid for NASA and the presidency.
But Bush's new vision also bears an uncanny resemblance to other, less glorious chapters of the space program's history. In 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the lunar landing, then-president George H.W. Bush proposed his own grand vision for NASA: the Space Exploration Initiative. Much like George W. Bush's plan, the SEI included a return to the moon and a lunar base, as well as a Mars mission. The reason that this parallel isn't more obvious is because the SEI is largely forgotten outside the space community. Whether or not the SEI was good science, it was bad politics: With a poisonous price tag of over $300 billion, H.W.'s SEI never made it off the drawing board. A similar fate awaits NASA's new goals , unless the agency can avoid the political mistakes that torpedoed its recent initiatives -- mistakes that Bush and NASA seem poised to repeat.
It doesn't help that many within the space community, as well as space's supporters outside of government, show a particular disdain for the political process, even as they lobby politicians to make these kinds of bold pronouncements. But whatever scientists and researchers may wish, no sector of public policy can be separated from the political process that such policy-making entails. A successful space program must be designed with political expediency in mind. Celestial designs that disregard terrestrial politics will fail.
NASA's latest large-scale debacle, the International Space Station, is a case in point. When President Reagan announced plans for the space station in 1984, NASA promised the station could be completed in 10 years at a cost of $8 billion. That money would be raised from within the NASA budget, with only a one percent budget increase on top. These numbers weren't a realistic assessment of the program's cost -- they were ludicrously low estimates that NASA used to bypass congressional gatekeepers and win approval for a space station that the political community, if the true program costs were known, wouldn't be willing to support. In yet another eerie blast from the past, Bush said his new plan will be financed by "re-allocating $11 billion" within the NASA budget, in addition to a roughly one percent budget increase.
This trojan horse tactic of trying to sneak space policy through the political process resulted in disaster. Far from being completed in 10 years for $8 billion, the chronically under-funded ISS fell behind schedule and over budget. The existing station is a shell of its original design; congressional audits project it will cost at least $100 billion over the life of the program, and even optimistic estimates peg the station's completion date around 2010. This is what happens when space partisans place grandiose goals before the politics needed to realize them, yet it is a lesson NASA seems slow to learn.
Even Apollo, that great triumph that NASA and Bush are so eager to relive, was a product of politics as much as science. Kennedy proposed a lunar landing -- rather than a space station or lunar probe -- precisely because rocket pioneer Wernher Von Braun assured the president that a race to the moon was the competition where the United States was most likely to beat the Soviets. "One giant leap" aside, Apollo won political approval not on its scientific merit but also as a way of showing American technological superiority.
As distasteful as research "performed for political, not scientific reasons" may seem to Bernstein and others, all of the Unied States'major, successful space programs have been grounded on solid political rationales. Politics and publicly funded space research are not opposed -- they are, by nature, symbiotic. Programs like ISS and the SEI, which attempted to ignore this reality, stumbled accordingly. So, it appears, will Bush's new space initiative, unless NASA and the president prove willing to fight the forthcoming political battles that will be necessary to fund lunar and Martian exploration. I hope they do wage those battles. But only then will we know if NASA's new mission will ever take flight.
