Mission to Mars (4 page)

The first astronaut to do so, Buzz trains underwater for weightlessness in space
.

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On Gemini 12’s landing, there was an unequivocal realization by all astronauts and NASA itself: We only had three years left
to accomplish Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Yes, Gemini was the link that prepared us for the Apollo missions to the moon, but we still had major work to do.

In all, there was a team of 400,000 people working together on a common dream. NASA managers, engineers, and technicians who were designing and building the multistage Saturn V booster to propel us to the moon worked side by side with industry contractors. It was a unified enterprise, a synergy of
innovation, effort, and teamwork that was unstoppable to transform a long-held dream into a reality.

Buzz Aldrin on Gemini 12 space walk, November 1966

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Illustration Credit 1.7
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Eight years after President Kennedy committed us to strive for the impossible, Neil Armstrong and I walked across the sundrenched terrain of the moon. Nearly a billion people all over the world watched and listened as we ventured across that magnificent desolation. With Mike Collins circling above us, and even though we were farther away from our planet than any three humans had ever been, we felt connected to home.

But, as they say: “That was then, this is now.”

What should we be reaching for now … and why? Space leadership, technology development, private-public teaming, free market savvy, and national security preeminence … those attributes still define us, or should define us, as a nation.

Many decades have passed since I climbed out of the cockpit of a supersonic F-100 armed with nuclear weapons, became an MIT egghead, and then a space traveler. Nowadays, my dedication, indeed my passion, is focused on forging America’s future in space, guided by two principles:

Let me be up front on this point. A second race to the moon is a dead end, a waste of precious resources, a cup that holds
neither national glory nor a uniquely American payoff in either commercial or scientific terms. How do we frame our collaborative or international effort to get to the moon again? Let me reemphasize: Certainly
not
as a competition. We have done that, and to restart that engine is to rerun a race we won. Let’s take a pass on that one. Do
not
put NASA astronauts on the moon. They have other places to go.

Gemini 12, mission complete: Buzz Aldrin and James Lovell

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The better plan is to cooperate with international partners who also want to reach the moon, to offer a hand—and to establish some form of Lunar Economic Development Authority. The idea is to spread the costs, but also spread the wealth. In sum, we can afford to be magnanimous. America was first to set foot on the moon. Now let us make it a first step for all humankind.

So, how do we layer this enterprise, while also making it affordable and as gratifying to America as Apollo?

First, we let partners such as China and India tie into the International Space Station family of countries. The risk is low and the value on the political and collaborative front is high. Second, I encourage collaborative projects like utilizing the Chinese Shenzhou crew-carrying spacecraft to help us burden-share in low Earth orbit. Why, if we can make use of Russian spacecraft, why not Chinese?

What else can we do to make space development more universal, more valuable for all nations, and more internationally accessible? For one thing, we can offer incentives to make the private sector—not the taxpaying public sector—the primary tenant in low Earth orbit.

There is an important step under way. An Obama Administration priority has been the development of a U.S. commercial crew space transportation capability with the goal of achieving safe, reliable, and cost-effective access to and from the International Space Station and low Earth orbit. NASA has awarded contracts to private firms to reach that very goal.

In 2012 NASA announced awards worth up to $1.1 billion to those companies—Boeing, SpaceX, and the Sierra Nevada Corporation—as they vie for a final contract. After capability matures, it is expected to be available to the government and other customers. NASA could contract to purchase commercial services to meet its station crew transportation needs later this decade.

I’m incensed to some degree that these selections are all capsules, save for Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser, a crewed suborbital and orbital vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing, lifting-body
space plane. I am very supportive of higher technology and government investments, but only of those that don’t rip out a page of the space history books to make everything look like a 1960s Apollo-era capsule.

The Dream Chaser design is based on many years of previous work on the NASA HL-20. It would carry from two to seven people and/or cargo to orbital destinations such as the International Space Station. The vehicle would launch vertically on an Atlas V and land horizontally on conventional runways. Ideally, I would like to see international use of Dream Chaser, of benefit to Japan, the European Space Agency, and the Indian Space Research Organization.

Why hasn’t anyone built a reusable booster yet? NASA hasn’t because its flight rate isn’t high enough. The now scuttled space shuttle program, being partially reusable, was intended to be the workhorse of America’s space program, reducing costs and making flight into space routine. Needless to say, these goals proved elusive.

When I look back on my life, the biggest mistake that I ever made relative to the future of the space program was in the early 1970s. I should have argued fervently for a two-stage, fully reusable system. The country didn’t do that. We built the space shuttle. That decision will come back over and over again—haunting the future of American leadership in space.

The space shuttle itself was a bad judgment. It placed humans and cargo together—a fundamental error. That compromise of a design meant the crew flew alongside cargo—both wrapped in safety standards that unnecessarily boosted the cost of access to space.

China’s Tiangong-1 space lab module, illustrated at left, and Shenzhou-VIII spacecraft

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I believe that the two-stage, fully reusable booster that we started and then gave up for the shuttle would have ended up separating crew and cargo, not putting the two together. Also, honestly, I’m not a supporter of humans riding large, solid rocket motors, a technology that keeps popping up out of the casket.

Commercial launch companies haven’t put forward reusable launchers either, because it’s cheaper for them—in the short term—to throw away the rockets.

One of my prime directives is to launch humanity into a new era of affordable access to space. In the late 1990s I put together a dedicated team of experienced rocket engineers and aerospace entrepreneurs to form the rocket design company Starcraft Boosters, Inc. Over the years, I have valued, in particular, the counsel of my business partner Hubert Davis, the company’s chief engineer, a former NASA engineer who has wrestled some challenging assignments in defining space transportation systems. I’m
proud to say that we hold a U.S. patent issued in 2003, Flyback Booster With Removable Rocket Propulsion Module.

Our collective company goal focused on developing next-generation space launch systems that would reduce launch costs and build upon existing and emerging technologies.

The Starcraft Boosters team’s first initiative was to develop the “StarBooster” family of reusable flyback rocket boosters. A vertically launched, two-stage-to-orbit system, the StarBooster design is essentially a hollow aircraft-type airframe into which a booster rocket propulsion module—such as a liquid-fueled Atlas V, Delta IV, or Russian Zenit—is inserted in order to launch a payload.

In a sense, StarBooster was designed to use replaceable liquid-fuel “cartridges”—just like modern fountain pens. All we need to do is build the housing, the aluminum shell that flies itself home.

Patent illustrations for the Aldrin/Davis flyback booster design

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The aim is to develop a reusable space transportation system capable of sending an astronaut crew into Earth orbit, helping to launch missions back to the moon, and progressively lead to the development of 100-seat airline-capacity commercial tourism spaceflight. By and large, the StarBooster family is worthy of revisiting as a next-generation alternative to the fleet of expendable launch vehicles used by NASA today. Of course, this is just one idea for the future; I hope we see many other ideas as space transportation evolves. The best way to reach orbit cheaply is through the development of reusable, two-stage systems.

My constant hope is that rockets like StarBooster will prove highly competitive in the small and medium-size payload market. This will convince NASA, the Department of Defense, and private industry that reusable boosters are good business. A two-stage space plane, capable of airline-type operations, can yield high reliability, enable very quick turnaround, and support a large passenger capacity.

As NASA works with U.S. industry partners to develop commercial spaceflight capabilities, the agency also is heavily invested in the Lockheed Martin–built Orion spacecraft, billed as a reusable, multipurpose spacecraft, which it is not. More work is advised on this score, lest we wind up with a spacecraft that eats up more dollars every flight than the last and gets half-thrown away each time it flies. Let’s take a page from commercial airliners and ratchet ourselves up from the disposable Dixie-cup
model. We must take advantage of old ideas with new currency, such as true reusability.

We ought to redirect our efforts to becoming both more ambitious and more efficient at the same time, testing a reusable model for long-term space exploration. We can then redirect the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle toward becoming a workable and really sustainable deep space ferry. The cost-effectiveness of going from our moon to one of the moons around Mars is far greater than falling back to Earth each time and then clawing ourselves out of the gravity well with another throwaway spacecraft.