Want to make a space geek dreamy (O.K., dreamier than usual)? Just mention the Saturn V rocket. Thirty-six stories of big-muscle booster, the Saturn V produced 3.4 million kg (7.5 million lb.) of thrust, could carry 120 metric tons of payload, launched 24 astronauts to the moon and put America's first space station in orbit. Then, in 1973, it was forever mothballed.
But those same geeks beamed this week when NASA revealed its plans for its next generation heavy-lift booster. It's designed for deep-space destinations like the Saturn V; it can lift a lot of tons like the Saturn V; it even looks like the Saturn V - eye candy of the first order. "President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that's exactly what we're doing at NASA," said space-agency administrator and former astronaut Charles Bolden. "While I was proud to fly on the shuttle, tomorrow's explorers will now dream of one day walking on Mars." (See TIME's special on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.)
That's exactly the kind of aim-high talk such a public unveiling usually gets - and often deserves. Despite such official breathlessness, however, there are real concerns around NASA and in Washington that dreaming is what the backers of this project will get. The plan for the rocket is indeed a good one, but if recent decades are any indication, the prospects of anyone ever seeing it fly are murky at best.
The new space-launch system, officially known as, well, the Space Launch System (SLS), has a convoluted past. In 2004, the Bush Administration charged NASA with building ships that could take Americans back to the moon and onto Mars, with a target date of 2020 for the first lunar landing. The agency happily accepted the challenge and set about building a new crew vehicle - dubbed Orion, sort of an Apollo on steroids - and a pair of boosters. The Ares I, the smaller of the two rockets, would take astronauts to low Earth orbit; its big brother, the Ares V, would hurl them beyond. The rough design of the rockets was smart: an assemblage of engines proved in previous missions, but updated and repurposed for future ones. This "legacy hardware" included the main engines and the solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle and a modernized version of the Saturn V's upper-stage J-2 engine, which would be known as the J-2X. All of those motors have an exceptional performance history - with, of course, the tragic exception of the solid rockets' leaky O-rings that destroyed the shuttle Challenger. That problem was corrected. (Read about NASA's mission studying the moon, from crust to core.)
But with hardware development behind schedule and the economy flagging, the incoming Obama Administration scrapped the Bush plan, outsourcing the low-Earth part of the mission to the private sector and putting off the development of a heavy-lift booster for five years or more. Congress, however - specifically lawmakers from Texas and Florida - rebelled, and the Administration agreed to resume work on just the crew capsule and the heavy lift. That pleased space watchers, and the announcement of the SLS plans this week thrilled them. What makes that announcement a little disingenuous is NASA's and Washington's boasts about the novelty of the design.
"Having settled on a new and powerful heavy-lift architecture, NASA can now move ahead with building that rocket," said John Holdren, an Obama Administration adviser on science and technology. "I'm excited about NASA's new path forward."
See photos of cosmic pyrotechnics and amazing nebulas.
And that new path? A booster made up of the J-2X, the shuttle main engines, and, in the early iterations at least, the shuttle solids. "Yes," says former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who was in charge during the Bush era, "this is one of the several close variants of Ares V that we studied."
O.K., so there's a little sleight of hand in the official press statements. But if the earlier design was a good one - and it was - what's the problem with admitting as much and returning to it? Nothing, provided the thing actually gets built - and the odds are uncertain at best. (See photos of the Ares rocket launching.)
Start with the institutional fecklessness that has plagued Washington and, to a lesser extent, the space agency itself since the end of the Apollo program. The original lunar program spanned the terms of four Presidents and seven Congresses, and while they argued over budget issues and long-term goals, they kept the moon firmly in sight. The decades since, by contrast, have been defined by start-stop projects that make the worst possible use of public funds and patience. Spacecraft are partly designed and partly built, and billions of dollars are spent, then the winds - and the parties in charge - change, and the plans are torn up.
While such attention-deficit disorder on space policy has afflicted every Administration from Nixon through Obama, the current White House has a particular challenge, selling big-ticket space spending in an era of penny-pinching and deficit wars. Bolden led with his chin on that one, promising: "This launch system will create good-paying American jobs." Indeed it will, but paying those workers and building the booster will cost a lot of money - up to $18 billion over the next six years. NASA believes it has that matter fairly well in hand.
"The costs are pretty much under control," says William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operation who is in charge of human exploration. "We've put this together to make sure we can accommodate small budget changes over the years. The architecture and design have as low a technical and development risk as possible." (Read about the Ares I-X prototype-rocket launch.)
Even if that's true, in the best-case scenario the new SLS would not fly before 2017, and that would be only a smaller version with a 70-metric-ton lift. Still, that would be big enough to launch a crew on a lunar-orbital mission by 2021. The heavy-lift version with the completed J-2X won't come until 2025 at the earliest, assuming no increases in NASA's budget - and obviously no cuts either. Will the project survive the years? In an interview about the new booster with the New York Times, space-policy consultant James Muncy bleakly predicted no: "Yes, there will be budget cuts. Yes, it will be stretched out. Yes, it will have problems. Yes, it will fall apart."
NASA is having none of that, but it's tempering its predictions all the same. "We're going to give this a good run," is as far as Gerstenmaier would go.
For now, at least, the geeks can dream. While the NASA of the 21st century doesn't always deliver the engineering goods, it does do a fantastic job of showing how those goods would look in action - as a new SLS video on the NASA website illustrates. If policymakers can keep their focus and do their jobs, the clip is a thrilling glimpse into a promising future. If they can't, it's one more sad look at a goal deferred.
See photos of the Mars space launcher.
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