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 DCX -- "Delta Clipper eXperimental" -- a prototype of a rocket designed to fly into orbit and return in one piece, promises to make spaceflight as affordable as commercial jet travel. 12. The Long Road to Mars In a sense, we already have enough pictures. We see enough of the landforms to know they are monuments. There are critics who emotionally reject the truth. Future space probe missions will be distressing for them. Higher resolution photographs can only show more detail of artificiality: straight roads, city streets, additional monuments. The determination of humanity to explore, with God's help, may overcome the ability of demons to subvert. Yet in the 1994 edition of this book, the author wrote:
All of this has been delayed. At any rate, we don't need another orbital reconnaissance mission to Mars. We certainly don't need to learn more about Martian geology and meteorology, or the nature of its magnetic field. We need to learn about the Martians. For that, we need to send humans to Mars. Archeological excavations will begin at the Cydonia Complex, and from there spread over the entire planet. The effort will require hundreds of people working for years, utilizing heavy equipment to clear the debris of millennia. Yet NASA envisions a Mars Mission that would place a mere handful of human beings on the planet for only three months. Their heaviest equipment would be a flimsy battery-powered Mars rover for trips of a few miles away from base camp. The astronauts would return with a few rock samples. For this, the cost will be half a trillion dollars.[4 ] NASA proposes that the project has a thirty-year life; if begun in 1995, it would reach Mars after 2025. There are no plans for a follow-up mission. The very inanity boggles the mind. It's a bureaucrat's dream: lifetime guaranteed employment, with no evaluation until after retirement. Certainly demons would be pleased as well, for the mission could easily bypass Cydonia and in only three months of chipping away at surface rocks, the astronauts could walk over the buried ruins of entire Martian cities without knowing it. Certainly there are dangers to address for a Mars mission crew -- in particular the long-term effects of weightlessness and the radiation risk from solar flares.[5] The mission will probably require nuclear propulsion, yet no nuclear rocket has ever been in service.[6] Half a trillion dollars and thirty years. Is there a better way? Nothing hampers the plans for a Mars Mission more than the cost of placing payloads into orbit.. In 1987, placing a pound of payload into orbit was calculated to cost $5100 for a Titan 4 rocket and $3275 for a Delta.[7] Costs always seem to rise faster than inflation. As long as this cost runs to thousands of dollars per pound, merely orbiting the Mars Mission modules, fuel, and support facilities will absorb perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. The transportation cost in turn demands that every component be as small and reliable as possible -- and such redesign has a high cost of its own. Space transportation costs so much because most of a vehicle's hardware is thrown away each launch. If we threw away airliners after each trip, commercial jet travel would be equally as expensive. The pioneers of the American space program believed multi-mission space vehicles were essential. Wernher von Braun, the intellectual father of the American human space effort, conceived of a fully-reusable orbital rocket shuttle as early as 1952. The first two stages would be parachute-equipped and the uppermost stage would attain orbit and then glide back to Earth; "After the separation," he wrote in a famous Collier's magazine article, "a ring-shaped ribbon parachute, made of fine steel wire mesh, is automatically released by the first stage . . . After the first stage lands in the water, it is collected and brought back to the launching site."[8] As long as all the hardware was recovered, the main cost of going into space was fuel -- and that was just a few dollars per pound of payload! After years of ignoring Von Braun's ideas for orbiting a satellite, the United States watched helplessly as the Soviet Union placed the first satellite in space, photographed the far side of the moon, and orbited the first human being. Apathy switched to hysteria, and the 'Space Race' ended with the proflagacy of the Saturn 5 Moon Rocket, in which a 360-foot tall vehicle placed two men on the Moon -- and was consumed in the ritual. The US beat the Soviets, but had come to a technological dead end. There were plans to adapt the Saturn launch vehicle into a winged reusable shuttle, but these were scrapped in the budget cuts of the 1970s. The reusable Shuttle which did get built was an amalgam of compromises. The External Tank is still thrown away each mission, and the Solid Rocket Boosters must be fished out of the ocean and returned to the factory for refurbishment. Creeping bureaucratic inefficiency boosted the originally-projected orbital freight cost of $170 a pound to $6800 by the late 1980s.[9] In cost per pound of payload, the Shuttle is actually more expensive than the expendable rockets it was meant to replace. In the early 1950s, Von Braun and his fellow rocket scientists thought building a Shuttle would be the first step in human exploration of space. A space station would come next, around 1967.[10] Components for a reusable vehicle to ferry vehicles from the station to the Moon would be assembled in orbit. Then would come a permanent Moon base. From the Moon base would come the basic materials for the Mars mission. By 1995, we would have an ongoing Mars colony, and the Cydonia Complex would have been explored long ago. President Kennedy, in his 1962 'Moon Speech,' advocated going into space ". . . not because it is easy, but because it is hard." Neglecting a space transportation infrastructure guarantees that space exploration will always remain hard. Without infrastructure improvements, space exploration cannot expand. Without a fully reusable shuttle, it will cost tens of billions of dollars to orbit a space station, and hundreds of billions to orbit a Mars expedition vehicle. These prices would be publicly unacceptable, and so the missions would not take place. NASA sees no alternative to the Shuttle, and wants to continue its expensive usage well into the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, planetary scientists have called for an end to the human space program entirely, scrapping the Shuttle and using cheaper expendable rockets to launch space probes. There is an alternative that moves forward: build a new space transportation system.
If a new reusable shuttle system could deliver as promised, the billions of dollars spent yearly to orbit a handful of astronauts aboard the Shuttle could then be poured into building space stations, moon ferries, and moon bases. The cost of space-borne hardware would go down as spares and reliability become practical; for example, there is no reason why a space station with a crew of fifteen should cost a thousand times as much as an underwater research lab of similar size. The expanding space infrastructure would eventually encompass the human exploration of Mars. The most promising of low-cost space transportation system concepts is SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit). There are many designs for SSTO, but they all involve the same idea: build a rocket that can ascend into orbit and return to launch point, in one piece. SSTO concepts are not new. In the 1960s, an SSTO built around a single Saturn rocket engine was envisioned.[11] In the 1970s, the Boeing Company conceived of a single stage heavy-lift vehicle that could place five hundred tons into orbit per mission. Neither of these vehicles involved exotic technology or excessively high development costs. Yet they were shunned and forgotten. In the late 1980s, the SSTO concept rose again in the SSX (Space Ship eXperimental) design of aerospace engineer Max Hunter. Taking advantage of the materials revolution, Hunter's SSX could travel farther and faster on less fuel weight, removing the need of a booster stage for orbital missions. In 1989, Hunter wrote: "By using modern, refined structural designs building on NASP [National Aero-Space Plane] structural developments and utilizing ceramic blanket (or possibly liquid cooled) heat shields . . . the weight will be acceptable even in small (blunt) vehicles."[12] He thought orbital payload costs could be as low as ten dollars a pound.[13] NASA ignored SSX, but the military, then searching for inexpensive ways to orbit the components of a ballistic missile defense system, picked it up and awarded a preliminary R&D contract to McDonnell-Douglas. Christened 'Delta Clipper,' the vehicle is a cone standing 127 feet high. [14] Like a rocket in a 1950s science fiction movie, it not only launches but lands vertically. It can carry ten tons of payload per mission. It can be serviced for another mission in mere days. Payload cost per pound is projected at less than $500.[15] How did we go from Hunter's original $10 a pound to $500? It's not because of engineering problems. Rather, NASA has so poisoned the space transportation debate that no one would take SSTO proponents seriously if they officially advocated the $10 per pound number. Even at $500 a pound, SSTO threatens 'the way business is done' within the aerospace industry. SSTO is so revolutionary that it cannot be encumbered by the bureaucracy and micromanagement that adds so much to the cost of modern aerospace development programs. The engineers must have a free hand, as they did in the programs of generations past. Hunter writes:
Even with the best of intentions, NASA could easily smother SSTO in its bureaucratic embrace. Kennedy's paradigm of doing things 'because they are hard' is alive and well and still doing damage. After being rebuked by corporate heads for working on an earlier program to economize expendable rocket technology, one former aerospace executive observed, "There is no status attached to working on something simple."[17] Delta Clipper utilizes off-the-shelf technology, so it has little prestige. That it gets the job done in the cheapest way possible is not considered as important. And perversely, the economics of SSTO actually work against it. The aerospace industry believes only so many satellites will be launched each year; if launch costs go down, then revenues will go down, and so will profits. An aerospace engineer working on rocket economization once was told by an industry lobbyist, "You're going to ruin the industry if you persist in this. Think of your friends who will be out of jobs if we cut costs."[18] The author experienced this mentality second hand in 1991, when he spoke to an aerospace manager who was bidding on an SSTO proposal but doubted the vehicle would be built in our lifetimes. "Are the problems technical or political?" the author asked. "Political," the manager replied. In a free market economy, no company can afford to do things the hard way; its competitors can charge lower prices and drive it out of business. But the aerospace industry, where space transportation is concerned, is insulated from market forces by feeding off government agencies like NASA. An iron triangle of politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate lobbyists ensures that the status quo is maintained to the mutual benefit of all. It seems only the public suffers. In reality, the aerospace industry suffers as well. The high costs have strangled space exploration, and the public has become bored. Politicians ultimately answer to the public, not corporate lobbyists. Unless public enthusiasm for space exploration is ignited, the current road will lead to severe budget cutbacks.
NASA's proposed version of an SSTO vehicle. In contrast, the economy of Delta Clipper or a similar SSTO vehicle would translate into more spectacular missions -- cities in space, colonies on the Moon, outposts on Mars -- all for less than the cost we now spend circling a handful of astronauts around the Earth. Public enthusiasm would be revitalized. The logic of increasing revenues by lowering prices and stimulating demand is obvious to businesspeople who work in the free market. But the anti-market mind set of the aerospace industry is so severe that it has literally endangered the physical safety of the whole country. During the 1980s, the United States was one satellite away from losing its ability to monitor hurricanes, and one satellite away from losing its ability to monitor incoming nuclear missiles, because the replacement satellites were waiting for available launch vehicles. And while the nation stood imperiled, aerospace industry 'experts' insisted there was a 'glut' of launch vehicles! This attempt to raise profits by limiting production and padding costs has actually backfired. In the commercial launch markets, other nations, even the Russians with their 1960s-model Proton rocket booster, have rushed in to fill the void. Efforts to close competition at home have only stimulated it abroad. While NASA now has its own SSTO program, there are dark signs that it is only window dressing to hide the same political agenda of foot-dragging and bureaucratic empire building as before. NASA took over the McDonnell-Douglas experimental SSTO prototype vehicle, DC-X (christened 'Clipper Graham'), and within months managed to crash and completely destroy it. To add imperious insult to injury, a NASA self-investigation absolved the agency's responsibility and blamed McDonnell Douglas, the company which had built and successfully flown DC-X on numerous occasions. Read NASA's report: "The McDonnell Douglas rapid prototyping guidelines or implementation of the guidelines may go too far in the direction of sacrificing quality and reliability." [19] But those rapid prototyping guidelines had both designed and built the prototype for just $58.9 million [20] -- paltry in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars NASA wastes on a single redundant space shuttle mission, and to the tens of billions NASA lavished on the development of the Space Shuttle! And Space Shuttles have a record of mishaps about as frequent as Clippers . . . with far greater loss of life. Since 'Clipper Graham' was so inexpensive to build in the first place, would NASA then replace it? No, NASA replied. ". . . the budget pressures the agency is facing doesn't give us the wiggle room to fund an immediate replacement for Clipper Graham." [21] What other program that NASA is spending its billions on has as much potential value? NASA's multi-billion-dollar SSTO program involves building an X-34 vehicle, then an X-33 vehicle, neither of which will reach orbit. They are only intended as testbeds for a potential SSTO. This potential SSTO, known as the VentureStar, may be built around 2010 or later, and " . . . might cut the cost of reaching orbit by 10-fold." [22] Might! This will mean that in about the year 2015, NASA will achieve the same payload-to-orbit economies that the Russians had with their Proton booster fifty years earlier. However, there are signs that NASA may have dragged its feet too long. Despite what NASA and the entrenched aerospace giant corporations say, the demand for launch services has increased to where market demand is sufficient to justify developing a reusable launch vehicle. Teledesic, for example, is a Microsoft-sponsored Internet communications system that will involve the launching of nearly three hundred satellites. It is just one of many business ventures to bejewel near-space with constellations of communication satellites. In response to such demand, reusable rockets like the Kistler Aerospace K-1 and the Roton are being developed with private funds and expect to break the thousand-dollars-per-pound payload-into-orbit price point early in the 21st century. [23] Second-generation systems will carry bigger payloads for lower costs, and NASA's stranglehold on spacecraft development will go the way of all oppressive empires. But the delay has been for an entire generation! It's not just misguided idealism that afflicts the United States space program. Misguided self-interest is at work as well. When an entire industry confuses economic suicide with rational self-interest, you sense that a powerful deluding influence is at work.
Six of the seven Mercury astronauts were professing christians. Werner von Braun himself believed in Creation. Prayer invocations were a regular part of the early space program. When astronauts first orbited the Moon, they read the creation account out of the Bible before an international audience. NASA's efforts were blessed and blazed a trail to the Moon. The stars seemed within grasp. Then the Moon rocks were studied. Out of the laboratories came the pronouncement: they were billions of years old. Debates flew back and forth about the early evolution of the Moon, Earth, the solar system, and universe. Creation, of course, had no place in the discussion, and neither did God. The evolutionists gained control of NASA. No more would we speak of experiencing the grandeur of God's creation. Now NASA would speak of 'learning more about the evolutionary history of the universe.' Evolution is a theory that is always proven yet always requires more evidence. NASA provided this evidence -- and became a platform for publicizing evolutionary doctrine. A space station crashes, a shuttle explodes, a space telescope suffers myopia. Every year moves further from reach the Moon we once strode upon. The cost of future space exploration is projected as so unpalatably high that we cannot afford it. The Russians, hampered by a backward economic system, have pulled alongside. But the Russians today do not reject God, they do not seek at every turn to disprove his existence. The Russian space program is devoted to economic applications of space technology -- not to evolutionary evangelism. For the American space program, we may have confidence that, despite all these obstacles, God will enable us to again go forward. Space probes and perhaps even human expeditions will revist Mars and return with compelling evidence. Decades from now, everyone will know the truth. They will look at the 1976 Viking photos and marvel that the most brilliant minds of that age could not see the obvious. Then they will look at the record of subtrefuge and self-sabotage. They will have questions for our age. "Why did you say and do these things?" they will ask. "What on Earth possessed you?"
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SSTO Mars Mission