http://tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml?pid=1198
EXPLORING THE CREW EXPLORATION VEHICLE: NASA wants hundreds of billions of dollars, and the best name the agency can come up with for its new spaceship is the Crew Exploration Vehicle? How inspiring! The name doesn't even make sense. Will the task of the vehicle be to explore the crew?
Just the cost numbers for the Crew Exploration Vehicle alone--forget all the probes, colonies, and other stuff--make Bush's announcement yesterday an all-time monument to budgetary low-balling. He declared that for the next five years, $12 billion will be devoted to the Moon-Mars initiative. That, the president said, is enough to fund new the Moon probes and development of the ill-named Crew Exploration Vehicle. This figure is utterly ridiculous, a mere fraction of what will be entailed in anything beyond some "paper spacecraft"--engineers' lingo for studies and Power Point presentations of hardware that never gets built. Boeing expects to spend around $7.5 billion merely to develop the new 7E7 jetliner, which will stay within the atmosphere and use very well-understood engineering. The development cost of the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be several times greater.
The timetable is also a low-ball. Bush declared that the Crew Exploration Vehicle would be tested in 2008, just four years from now. There's no way on Earth, as it were, this could happen without a cost-no-object crash program to rival Apollo. The Air Force's new F22 fighter has been in development for 13 years; an entire new spaceship can be developed in four years?
The Crew Exploration Vehicle concept is hazy; NASA has given no specifics. But if, as Bush declared, it will be capable both of flying back and forth to the space station and of flying to the Moon, we're talking quite a machine. If one single spacecraft that can carry enough fuel to travel to the Moon and back, and be anything than another ultra-cramped "spam-in-a-can" like Apollo, the part that reaches orbit would need to be enormous--larger than the space shuttle. That means the Crew Exploration Vehicle will cost vast sums, at least dozens of billions of dollars, to develop.
Alternatively, a smarter approach might be to construct one spaceship that always stays in space, looping back and forth between Earth and Moon; people, supplies, and fuel would be launched to meet the ship in Earth-orbit, but the ship itself would never come down. (This was a Werner von Braun idea.) That would mean design, engineering, and construction of a type of flying machine that has never existed before. Development of the space shuttle cost between $50 billion and $100 billion in current dollars, depending on whose estimate you believe. The idea that something more challenging, the first-ever true spaceship, can be developed for $12 billion is bunkum.
And what's going to put this Crew Exploration Vehicle into orbit? No rocket that exists in the world today is capable of lifting the Apollo capsule and Moon lander of the late 1960s. Unless the Moon-bound twenty-first-century Crew Exploration Vehicle is going to be significantly smaller than the Apollo of a generation ago--carrying just one person and no supplies--a new, very large rocket will be required.
Apollo flew atop the Saturn V, which NASA retired almost 30 years ago. Many "architecture" studies for Mars flight, including Mars Institute studies that are said to have influenced the Bush announcement, assume NASA will develop a "heavy lifter" rocket substantially more powerful than the Saturn V. A rocket far more powerful than the Saturn V will be a necessity if the Crew Exploration Vehicle is to be both capable of Moon flight and of carrying more than one person. Such a rocket is possible on a technical basis, but vast expenditure would be entailed. Development of the Saturn V was the single greatest line item for the first Moon program--the Saturn V cost about $40 billion, in current dollars, to develop. A similar outlay would be entailed to develop a new super-rocket. That's $40 billion or more spent before the first dime is invested in the Crew Exploration Vehicle that sits on top.
So far all money numbers announced for the Bush plan seem complete nonsense, if not outright dishonesty. We shouldn't expect George W. Bush himself to know that $12 billion is not enough to develop a spaceship. We should expect the people around Bush, and at the top of NASA, to know this. And apparently they are either astonishingly ill-informed and naïve, or are handing out phony numbers for political purposes, to get the foot in the door for far larger sums later.
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