Angry Planet - Is NASA Lost in Space?

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

What does the United States get out of having a human spaceflight program? For that matter, what do Russia and China get out of having one? Especially if it’s not about getting the “ultimate high ground” in any fight here on Earth.NASA historian Steven Garber takes us through what the agency is really all about and what lessons can be drawn from the space race so far.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Well, the shuttle was sort of the main aspect that people were thinking about in terms of human space. Well, then what are we doing? And there was actually a serious discussion about whether or not NASA should continue to exist. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast,

that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Military figures have been known to call space the ultimate high ground, a place from which you can spy on any part of the world, a place to launch the sneakiest of sneak attacks from. But that's not NASA.

NASA has a completely different role to play in Great Power, politics. Joining us this week to talk about that and also some space programs that weren't exactly greatest hits is Steve Garber. He's a historian at NASA. Thanks for joining us. Sure. Thanks for inviting me. Can we start off by talking about NASA's origins in the Cold War? Was it ever a military organization? No, it wasn't. And thank you for asking. NASA's origins were decidedly civilian. It came about in a few different ways. It has a heritage actually dating all the way back to 1915 into an organization called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. So we just celebrated our centennial anniversary of that. But what basically happened was the impetus for forming

NASA came in the late 50s after something called the International Geophysical Year and, of course, the launch of Sputnik in 1957 by the Soviet Union. Who actually set it up? Was it by a presidential order or did it come about some other way? Right. It was a decision by President Eisenhower and he made a conscious or explicit decision that NASA should be a civilian, decidedly civilian agency. And there are several reasons for that. Basically, he knew that the military was going to be working on various space technologies, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles. So ICBMs are launched vehicles to get into space, which are also used, of course, for intercontinental, potential intercontinental warfare. Nuclear weapons strikes against the Soviet Union, of course.

So he knew that the military was going to be involved in a lot of the military. anyway, but he wanted to set NASA up as a civilian agency, and it stems back to its heritage as the NACA, but also he wanted to give NASA the opportunity to do other things that the military wouldn't do. So NASA has done things such as robotic space science that the military typically doesn't do at all. we also have a human spaceflight program that the military has never really had. There have been some efforts at having a military human spaceflight program, but those never materialized. And then there's also the role of, in addition of aeronautics, of course, I should say,

the first A in NASA, NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But in addition, there's the whole discussion that we could have about the role of so-called soft power and international prestige that comes from a civilian space program. Of course, comparing it to the former Soviet Union where there wasn't such a separate space program. There were actually multiple space programs. The former Soviet Union had sort of a disaggregated, as we might say now, or a decentralized space program where there were various military bureaus that worked on various aspects of space and competed with each other. And

Eisenhower wanted to set up something that was decidedly different, that was decidedly civilian. Of course, though, he immediately drew upon military pilots. And, I mean, they can't have been the only part of the military that was involved in creating NASA. What were they? Well, there were some other components of of the military that were incorporated into NASA. But basically, it was, it was largely a, and continues to be a civilian agency. I used to get, people used to call me up, or when I would speak to some people from the military for other reasons, some people would say, what's your DSN number, which is an old military phone system? I would be like, I don't have one.

NASA is a civilian agency. It's not part of DOD. Well, so can we talk a little bit about the soft power then as the reason, I mean, there's exploration for the sake of exploration without a doubt, but the soft power, the propaganda maybe. Can you tell me a little bit about how important that was, how that's played into NASA's development? Sure. There are a lot of different components to that. I would say that it was a key component in the 60s during the so-called space race with the Soviet Union. And human spaceflight plays a large role in that because, of course, Project Apollo was the program to land astronauts on the moon. And the idea was to get there before the Soviets did with humans. And of course, we accomplished that, the Soviets never put humans on the moon. There are political scientists nowadays who talk about the human spaceflight club or space fair and club of nations. And the idea is that it's really only a small number of nations that have put people into space and have that capability.

So it's kind of, it's an elite little club, if you want to call it that. There's only, as I said, only a few nations that have the capability to do that. And so there is a lot of positive public relations value to be gained by doing this and doing this Apollo program during the 60s and other follow-on human spaceflight programs afterwards. So a lot of people say that they use the expression that human spaceflight is, to borrow a metaphor, or the rising tide that lifts all boats at NASA, or another common saying is no bucks, no Buck Rogers.

In other words, or the reverse, I suppose, no Buck Rogers, no bucks. The idea being that without a human spaceflight program, NASA wouldn't be able to do many of the other things that it does in robotic science and aeronautics and technology development in a variety of areas. So it's sort of it garners inspirational value. Now we talk a lot about STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math.

It garners a lot of inspiration value for the younger generation, of course. There are a lot of very exciting robotics space science missions and a lot of interesting things that NASA does in aeronautics. But I think most people would agree in general that with this idea that humans, spaceflight is sort of the rising tide that lifts all boats at NASA, that that's really what garners the most attention and excitement. And so this sort of plays into this idea of international prestige and self-power because, again, there aren't very many countries that can send people into space right now that have done that. So it's really another means to compete other than military, right? You know, this idea that we can, we have the, to use a bad phrase, we have

the technology, we have the industrial capability to do this, says that we're sort of a modern, advanced developed nation, right? And that sort of sets us aside from other nations that don't have that capability. It does make me wonder, though, that since the United States decommissioned shuttle program, that probably isn't the right term, but the United States has been hitching ride to get U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station. I know there's a program underway, the Orion program, if I remember right, to change that. But has that been a morale issue, do you think? Has that something that people at NASA think about a lot? Well, it is something that people think about a lot. I wouldn't say it's,

a morale problem within NASA, a lot of people, again, not to be cynical or overly critical, but, you know, people would come up to me or other people who work at NASA and say, so wait a minute, do you still have a job? Does NASA still exist after the shuttle program finished up a few years back in 2011? And of course, you know, the agency still exists and does great things. And not only that, but we continue to fly humans in space, just not on a vehicle that launches from the United States. So, yes, we have to hitch rides on Russian Sawyer's vehicles. And there's been actually, there's sort of a whole history to that policy discussion of whether or not that was the right move. And I know a little bit about that because I've studied the time

period from 1999 owing up to 2004, where some of this stuff was discussed. And in particular, after the Columbia Space Shuttle accident in 2003, people were really wondering, well, what's going to happen next with a shuttle program, with NASA, with human spaceflight in the United States in general. And to sort of wrap up a long complicated story of policymaking, the sausage making of policy, what happened immediately after the Columbia accident was President George W. Bush went on record in some public remarks at a memorial service and said, we're going to continue to fly this space shuttle. We're going to go back to flying people safely in space. And so once he said that, then sort of all the policy makers had to start a step in line and say, okay, we will do this because people were wondering sort of wither NASA, if you will,

like if you view human spaceflight as a raison d'etre for NASA. And if you view under human spaceflight, while the shuttle was sort of the main aspect that people were thinking about in terms of human spaceflight, well, then what are we doing? And there was actually a serious discussion about whether or not now. should continue to exist. But what happened, as I said afterwards, was President George W. Bush sort of put his foot down and said, we're going to do this. We're going to continue to fly the shelves safely. And so they developed a policy plan that entailed resuming safe shuttle flights afterwards as soon as possible. And then finishing building the International Space Station,

which of course is the other big piece that we were doing even at the that time in terms of human space flight. And so we'd finish the International Space Station. Then we'd do other things like go on to the moon and Mars. And so at that time in 2003, after the Columbia accident, there were a bunch of policymakers that were sort of debating this. And one of the things about how we're going to do all this stuff, right? And one of the things that they were wondering about was, well, if we retire the shuttle after a few more years, even after we get back to flying it safely, we can't fly it safely indefinitely because the technology was just, there's like a, it's a term, there's like a expected lifetime of the technology,

you know, like you buy a car, you buy a washing machine, it's only going to run for a certain number of years, right? And so the idea was that after a few more years, the technology wouldn't be safe to fly anymore anyway. And so how would we get into space to get? get to the International Space Station, well, we'd have to rely on the Russians. And so there was active or explicit debate about this, whether that was the right move. And the people who were involved decided that it was a tradeoff that was worth making. Because the other option would have been to somehow refurbish the shuttle technology, which would have been very expensive and complicated.

And it's not clear that that would have worked. So, you know, it's not like it was an easy decision, but there's definitely a downside to that, that, yes, we are reliant on the Russians right now to get astronauts into space. What's the Russian space program like right now, specifically I'm thinking like their shuttle program? Well, their Soyuz launch vehicle, or is that what you're referring to? Yes. Okay, because they had a shuttle program. program a number of years ago that is separate. We can talk about that if you like. Yeah, definitely would love to talk about that later. Sure, sure. But right now, I mean, I'm not an expert on

the Soviet space program, but I mean, there's Soyuz vehicles have a excellent track record of safety and reliability. They do work well and they are very reliable. So that's what we use. Sort of more broadly, how is the Soviet space, excuse me, how is the Russian space program doing right now? That's probably best addressed by other specialists who know more about that and know more about domestic Russian politics as well to see how that program is situated in terms of resources vis-a-vis other programs within Russia. Yeah, I would just mention that, of course, we are, the United States is still going to be hitching rides even as tensions rise between the two countries, just like the movie 2010?

Well, it's it is an issue and it's a peculiar situation. There's no doubt about it. But, you know, we continue to work well with our Russian partners on the projects that we have, including most prominently the International Space Station. There's, there's really, really, you know, a strong incentive for both sides to cooperate to work on that program together. Because, you know, we have to make it work. We have to make it safe for the astronauts and cosmonauts who fly there. So, yes, it may lead to strange situations where we would be inclined at a sort of grander strategic level. There might be some people who would say, well, we shouldn't cooperate with the Russians because of the nefarious things are doing in other areas.

And I'm not taking a position one way or another on that. I'm just saying that we continue to work productively and cooperatively with the Russians on the International Space Station. Because we both know we need to do that. What do you make of Trump's Space Force? That idea of Space Force? Yes. Well, first of all, let me say that I'm really more of a historian than a present tense policy person. So in that vein, I will say that it's not, this idea has been around for a while.

the idea being that it might be something similar to a corps, like the Marine Corps is part of the Navy. Maybe there would be a space corps that would be part of the Air Force. There are different models. You know, maybe it would be more like, I don't know, the Coast Guard or something like that, a space guard, something like that. There are different models that way. But I do think that, you know, a number of people in the... the national security space community in particular, do believe it's a good idea, whether or not there's enough momentum to make a major organizational shift like that is anybody's guess right now.

It's hard to say. But there is some logic behind it. It just started from a historian's perspective looking back in time. It's hard to say what the conditions would need to be in the future for that to actually take place because, you know, of course, making any major change like that, there would be presumably entrenched interests that would need to be assuaged or placated or, you know, that would need to sort of work around that. Even if everybody were for it, you know, even if virtually everybody would be for it, it would still be a major organization.

ship. So it's hard to say how that would play out. Let's backtrack a little bit. Can you tell us about the I don't know, failed is the right word? The previous Russian shuttle program that you teased a little bit earlier? They had a program called the Baran, B-U-R-A-N, and it's apparently

Russian for Blizzard. The Baran Space Shuttle, the orbiter, looks very similar to the U.S. space shuttle orbiter, but it was really different in a number of ways. One way that it was different was that the orbiter was attached to these large Energia launch vehicles, and it looks on from a sort of diagram point of view, an overall bird's eye diagram point of view, it looks very similar to the U.S. shuttle because the U.S. shuttle had the solid rocket boosters that would sit on the side of the orbiter.

But from a technical point of view, there was a major difference, and that was that the Space Shuttle main engine on the U.S. side was built physically into the orbiter, and it drew fuel from the external tank. But the way they configured the system in the Soviet model under the Buran Energia system, was that the main engine was actually in the launch vehicle. So that was rather different. And it was sort of, they had already built the energy of launch vehicles beforehand. So it was a little easier for them to adapt rather than to build a whole new rocket engine for this purpose.

So there's that difference. The other major difference, another major difference was that Boulin was actually designed to be on-man and crewed that would actually be able to fly and did fly without cosmonaut the board. So they actually only flew it once. There was a test flight in the late

80s. I think it was 86 or 88. I'd have to double check the date, but it flew just once and there was no crew on board and they were able to manually control it from the ground. So it was really designed for sort of different purposes and it was designed after the U.S. shuttle flew and a lot of people say, well, Soviets ripped off the technology

people who questioned about technology transfer and there's some there's a thread to that but which which also by the way is code for spies. Right. Technology transfer is one of my favorite little pieces of code. Right, right, right. I mean, tech transfer means different things. different context, but in that context, there's the idea that they ripped off the technology that they stole the technology from us. But that's not the whole story. It's not even the

main story, I would say, that there's only like a certain number of configurations that would work technically for what both the U.S. and the Soviets wanted at that time. So they're like the delta wing shape, those small triangular wings on the side of the side of the, and orbiter. That gives you what's called cross-range capability, which is a lot of hard to describe verbally, but it allows you to do polar orbits and land at the same place where you took off, basically, to make a long story short. So if you wanted to be able to do that, you'd need the delta wings. And so it sort of has to be configured a certain way. But said, they did, to some extent there is an argument to be made that they did sort of copy the technology. But the program

didn't really go anywhere. As I said, it only four once. It was just a robotic flight. But it is kind of fascinating. I got to say one of the reasons why when we talked before the show and you mentioned the Braun, one of the things that's just fascinating, if anybody has time to go look at the Wikipedia page for this thing, first of all, it does look enormously like a U.S. Space Shuttle. Second of all, it met such a really, you know, wah-wag-k-w kind of end. I mean, if I remember it, it was bigger than the U.S. Space Shuttle,

but ended up in a hangar. They didn't quite know what to do with it, and eventually the ceiling of the hanger fell on it. Right, right, right. That's how it ended. It was in terrible disrepair, and then, yeah, the hangar, the ceiling of the hangar collapsed. And they also had another vehicle, another Buran test vehicle that was set up as like a tourist attraction, some like gorky park in Moscow or something.

And it just seems kind of, I mean, like, yes, we have the old shuttle orbiters on display around the country at the Air and Space Museum in D.C. or outside of D.C. and we have one on display outside of Kennedy Space Center. But it's like the sort of, it is a little crazy. Like there was such a competition for who's going to get the U.S. shuttle orbiters after the program ended. And, you know, people are sort of, it's like a bidding for Amazon 2 headquarters, right? You know, everybody wanted to have it, right? And, you know, presumably they take really good care of it at these places. But the Soviet Union, at that point, the Soviet Union was, you know, know, on its last legs before it dissolved.

And this wasn't really something that was of major interest for the Soviet leadership. It didn't really matter anymore. So it just sort of fell apart and fell into disrepair sort of figuratively and orderly. The collapse actually killed some workers, too. Yeah, I think I heard that. Oh, thanks. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for that cheerful note.

I'm just, hey man, this is war college. You know how we do. If I could just shift to one more aspect of soft power because we have, we've talked about the U.S., we've talked about Russia. We haven't really talked about China, which just had a big milestone with their first space station crashing to Earth. Of course, MIR and Skylab preceded the, I think it's Taigong by many years. So, I mean, do you think China's following in the same footsteps that the U.S. and Russia already have? I think they're taking a different path. And it hesitate to say too much about this because I'm not a Chinese expert.

Basically, China is sort of taking a different path. Yes, they've flown tykinauts. They had the space station, but they're sort of, I don't know, how to peg it in terms of how many years behind us or behind the Russians they are. But they, because it's not a linear path necessarily, they have a different program. And I'm not sure exactly what their goals are. they do have a lot of it is sort of intermingled like the old soviet program with sort of military and civilian goals a lot of i would say the control of the chinese space program is by the military but for much more than that you'd really have to have somebody who's much more of an expert on that problem i will say though if i may that i'm a big believer in what a lot of folks call applied history, making history relevant for current policymakers. That is really important and sort of an important role for our office and other federal

history offices. So it's not just sort of looking at what happened in the past as an academic exercise. It should be really relevant and useful for people in the present tense as we think about the future. What lessons do you think need to be a lot of? applied from history going forward? What's the big takeaway from NASA's past? Oh, that's tough. Well, let's see. Let me come back to that in a moment, if I may, and interject another little story about the, that hopefully explicate the value of applied history. May I do that? Sure, of course.

Okay, so I know a guy who used to be a historian at the National Security agent. agency, the NSA, not NASA, but NSA. And he's a big advocate, as I say, for a pride history. He tells us an interesting story about how when he took a group of NSA leaders, top leaders, on a so-called staff ride, and they went to the Antietam battlefield. And you might say, well, what does the civil war have to do with anything current that's going on at NSA? and he gauged it appropriately. He took an intelligence slant, an intelligence history slant to this field trip, this staff ride. And he talked about this story, which I don't know if you've ever heard it or not.

This was the first time I had heard of it because I don't, I'm the first one to admit, I don't know dittoy about the Civil War. But apparently what happened was at the Antietam battlefield, the Union Forces, knew there was going to be a big battle there, right? And so McClell and the human general was very cautious by nature. And he was very concerned about the Confederate forces and how they might amass at Intedum. And so what he did was he basically contracted out military intelligence to Alan Pinkerton, Pinkerton's detective agency, which is formed later after the war. And, he asked Pinkerton to send some scouts to assess what the battlefield was going to look like, right?

And so Pinkerton was very wise and knew that McClellan was very cautious this way. Some might say overly cautious. And he reported back to McClellan that it looked grim, that the Confederates had amassed a lot of forces there and that it looked like it was going to be very serious, right? And so McClellan held back forces that he could have applied earlier on in the battle that could well have changed the course of that day's battle, the bloodiest battle in American history, right? And so interestingly, some of the top leaders from the NSA who were there that day,

this was a few years back in the, let's see, about a decade ago, maybe a little more than that, they sort of got the message without my colleague, the historian, having to say it explicitly. And the message that they took home was that if you're a policymaker, an intelligence customer, right?

You need to be careful not to have the people who are delivering the intelligence to you overly cater to your disposition. You need to get the, if you will, raw intelligence or the, the analysis, not have it be overly slanted by the customer's particular whims or personality or what have you. And the way they drew that conclusion to more present-day circumstances was that with the idea of,

apparently there were weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq when they really weren't, of course. And so anyway, this is, I like this story because it sort of wrapped up this idea. of applied history and making something that happened a long time ago really relevant for current day policy makers. So hopefully that is somewhat helpful, and at least it's a military analogy for your listeners as well. Going back to what lesson I would sort of the main theme or lesson I would draw from NASA history, that's a little bit of a tough one. There are a lot of different lessons to be learned, sort of about the uses of history. A lot of what history is, is separating the wheat from the shaft in terms of what's relevant and what's not, what's a relevant

analogy and what's not. So maybe you might say that the story about McClellan and Pinkerton really doesn't matter at all in terms of current day circumstances in terms of intelligence, policymaking. Maybe you think it really doesn't matter. But I think some of these key people did feel like there was a relevant analogy. But anyway, the idea is that historians try and help help us think about what's different and what's really similar with current day events and past events. So comparing and contrasting. Another big lesson from NASA history, I would say, revolves around technology

because I would argue that NASA has an engineering culture. If you look at the number of, like the number of people in different walks of life who work at NASA, the largest group is engineers, right? We do a lot of great science, and it's sort of oriented towards science, but it's, and it's dominated by engineers. And what do engineers do? What do they build technology, right? So I'm going to, if I may share a little quip about technology. It comes from a guy named Melvin Cranzberg, who was one of the deans,

sort of one of the founders of the field of history of technology in the 50s, early 60s, around the time NASA was getting started. And he said, technology is neither good nor bad nor neutral. In other words, it always has different effects. and it's designed in different ways by different people for different purposes. So it's worth thinking about those purposes, those specific circumstances, to sort of get the most out of history. Hopefully that's somewhat useful. Okay, well, Steve, that will give us something to think about, I think, until next week's episode.

Okay. So thank you so much for joining us tonight. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this week's show. We really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, leave us a review wherever you found it. Stitcher, iTunes, we don't really care.

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