When George W. Bush took over the presidency from Bill Clinton in 2001, he inherited a space sector in disarray. Exploding rockets destroyed three vital military payloads in 1998-99. Next-generation satellite programs were falling years behind schedule. And commercial demand central to the Clinton plan for sustaining space-launch capabilities dried up after the dot.com boom went bust.
So when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry two years after Bush was inaugurated, it was like a metaphor for America's waning greatness in space. By that time, no Americans had walked on the Moon in over 30 years. The Bush Administration spent its entire tenure fixing the problems created by its predecessors.
The good news is that it succeeded. By the time Bush left office, military satellite programs were back on track, a highly reliable family of new launch vehicles had been developed, and NASA had a plan for returning astronauts to the Moon. The bad news is that the Obama Administration turned out to be not much better than the Clinton Administration at thinking realistically about what works in space.
So a new crisis in U.S. space policy could unfold during President Trump's time in office, thanks to the policies Obama put in place. The fundamental fallacy of the Obama approach is the belief that the government can save lots of money by tapping the entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector rather than buying rockets the old way. That's pretty much what Clinton tried to do, because his administration was more interested in spending money on welfare schemes than assuring access to space.
However, in space you get what you pay for. If the government tries to save money by turning to upstart launch companies offering cut-rate prices, risks will rise even as launch costs fall. And since the loss of one satellite can cost as much as half a dozen launches, those risks can wipe out any savings associated with relying on "commercial" launch companies.
Elon Musk's SpaceX is the leading example of such a non-traditional launch provider. It has lost two payloads in the last two years as a result of catastrophic failures. Its main competitor for U.S. government business, the more traditional United Launch Alliance, hasn't lost a single payload since it was established a decade ago. ULA launches cost more than SpaceX launches, but they always manage to get their payloads into orbit.
And oh, by the way, ULA can reach all eight of the orbits the military needs to operate in. SpaceX can only reach four of them. ULA's co-owners, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, both contribute to my think tank, so you might say I'm biased on this matter (Lockheed is a consulting client). But what I'd like to talk about here is how both ULA and SpaceX are pursuing relatively risky strategies for the future, and why the Trump Administration needs to buy itself some insurance against another space crisis of the type that George W. Bush inherited.
The way that Obama and Congress have reoriented U.S. launch policy over the last eight years, low cost is almost the only measure of merit used to evaluate bids to provide launch services. Risk gets short shrift even though everybody knows rocketing into space is just about the most dangerous activity people engage in other than going to war. Because SpaceX's whole strategy is aimed at undercutting competitors on price, ULA has been forced to reorganize its business and rethink investments with an eye to cutting costs.
And sure enough, it has come up with a way of reducing the cost of some launches below $100 million, which is a lot less than it charged only a few years ago. But here's the hitch: its answer to the SpaceX challenge is a new launch vehicle powered by a natural-gas engine bigger than anything ever built before. The engine is being developed by a company called Blue Origin that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns.
So there's a "dueling billionaires" aspect to the ULA-SpaceX rivalry that pits the Bezos team against a company begun by Tesla founder Musk. But the real issue for a Trump Administration isn't how these two very wealthy entrepreneurs choose to spend their money. The issue is what risks their rivalry may entail for U.S. access for space. And there, the situation isn't ambiguous. The more design changes you make in a launch vehicle or rocket engine, the more risk there is that something will go wrong.
So when ULA says it plans to replace its existing, highly reliable fleet of launch vehicles with a new launch vehicle powered by a new rocket engine that will utilize a new fuel requiring new ground infrastructure, that implies a fair amount of risk. And when SpaceX says it plans to launch big satellites into high orbits by bolting together three of its Falcon 9 launch vehicles into a "Falcon Heavy" variant that will have 27 engines in its first stage, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that might be a bit risky too.
I'm not saying the government shouldn't support these efforts. All innovation involves some risk. But with space systems providing our main way of detecting hostile missile launches, navigating precisely across the Earth's surface and communicating securely with troops in remote areas, there needs to be a backup plan. You know, an option for the future that doesn't require a lot of imagination to be believable. Or said differently, an option that doesn't entail so much risk.
The obvious candidate is the next-generation rocket engine being developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne -- the only U.S. company that has ever fully developed and flown a large booster engine for lofting payloads into orbit. Aerojet has received funding from the Air Force to develop an engine using kerosene, which is stored at room temperature, rather than the super-cooled natural gas (methane) to be used by Blue Origin's engine.
It is basically an evolved version of the same technology used today in the first-stage engines on ULA's very reliable Atlas V launch vehicle. In fact, the AR-1 can be dropped into the Atlas with minimal modifications to provide superior performance to the existing engines in all launch profiles. Or it can be inserted into ULA's next-generation Vulcan launch vehicle for an additional expense of $200 million -- about a half hour's worth of federal spending at current rates.
That's a cheap price to pay for assuring U.S. access to space. If ULA wants to stick with its current Bezos-financed plan that's fine, although in the end the government will still have to make sizable investments to change its launch infrastructure and certify a new engine/vehicle combination. But it would be foolish for Washington simply to leave such decisions to launch providers and not have a Plan B waiting in the wings just in case bold visions of the future falter.
ULA has already said that if its new engine doesn't work out, it will turn to Aerojet (a modest contributor to my think tank). But the Air Force is trying to reprogram money already appropriated for Aerojet's engine to fund development of new launch vehicles, which means the AR-1 might not be ready if and when it's needed. This is penny-wise and pound-foolish. When you rely on space as much as America does, you need to have a backup plan for getting there, and Aerojet's AR-1 is the least risky solution.
This is a simple problem for President Trump to solve. All he has to do is tell the Air Force to stick with the congressional direction it has already received to adequately fund development of new rocket engines from competing sources. The price-tag is quite modest, but the potential consequences of not mitigating dangers to space access are huge.
