WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (UPI) -- The new NASA strategy to put America back on the Moon close to 40 years after U.S. astronauts last walked on it is based on a "back to the past" technology, and for that very reason it looks likely to work. And it should give a crucial boost to the most troublesome area of current ballistic missile defense technology while it's at it.
That is because, after three decades of commitment to the vastly expansive, terribly dangerous and stunningly ineffective space shuttle program NASA is acknowledging in a new era of limited budgets and increasingly skeptical congressional oversight that it you do have to be a rocket scientist after all.
For 44 years after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space on April 12, 1961, and 36 years after U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong took that "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" on to the Moon on July 20, 1969, NASA is finally abandoning the chimera of cheap, reusable spaceships that the shuttle was falsely sold as being.
But on Jan. 28, 1986, and Feb. 1, 2003, two of America's five operational space shuttles, the Challenger and the Columbia disintegrated in flight -- the first exploding after take off, the second burning up on reentry, incinerating all 14 American astronauts, more than twice the total operational dead of the entire Soviet space manned program since Gagarin's first flight in 1961.
Now, for the new program to put American astronauts back on the Moon, as the New York Times reported Tuesday, NASA is going to return to the old, simple, tried and true technology of the Apollo Moon program. Apollo type capsules will carry no more than four highly trained professional astronauts, compared with the seven, including politicians, teachers, and more loosely defined "mission specialists" who rode the shuttle.
This crew plan will be very similar to the crews of three astronauts who rode the Apollo Moon ships.
There will be no attempt to fly totally reusable space ships including engines, as is the case with the shuttle. There will be no pretense at making spacecraft that can fly, glide or maneuver in the atmosphere. The rocket boosters to send them up will be old-fashioned "big dumb boosters" of the kind that America has been successfully using to lift satellites into orbit since 1958. The costly, shuttle dream is finally being abandoned. Like the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic airliner, it proved to be not so much a technological marvel ahead of its time as a technological cul-de-sac, a wonder machine that was fatally flawed in conception and a costly, uneconomic white elephant from the world go.
Indeed, respected military analyst William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington has likened the shuttle to the airships and Zeppelins that stunned the world for nearly 40 years from 1900 to May 6, 1937, when the last great one, the Hindenburg, erupted in flames while coming in to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Like the shuttle, the Zeppelin appeared to be far ahead of its time, but like the shuttle, it was far too fragile and complex, and far too dependent on volatile fuels in fragile containers to ever be truly safe.
"It was wonderful to look at, it could do amazing things. But once in every 200 flights or so -- boom!" Lind said.
It is routinely and correctly said that space flight is inherently a risky business. But from Gagarin, through the Russian space program of the present day which still routinely lofts Russian cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts alike up to the International Space Station, the safety record of launchings, orbital flights and reentry of capsule type space ships of both the United States and Russia has been exemplary.
The Russians have not had a fatal space flight incident in decades. Their unfairly criticized Mir space station proved amazingly resilient and robust. The United States never had a single human loss flying such technology, though it lost three astronauts in a fire during a ground test of the as yet un-flown Apollo-1 capsule back in the 1960s.
The new U.S. Moon program, however, in many respects will have to rebuild the legendary capability of the 1960s and early 70s Apollo Moon flights from scratch. For the enormous more than 300-feet tall Saturn V rockets, the largest and most powerful ever built, cannot be rebuilt now. The plans no longer exist. Depending on who you listen to, NASA either deliberately destroyed them or lost lots of them simply through bureaucratic incompetence.
And even the lean, mean U.S. high-tech industrial engineering complex that built the Apollos, the Saturns and the lunar landers no longer exists either. A huge wave of shrinkage, takeovers, mergers and consolidation has not only shrunk the domestic industrial base, it has removed much of the buccaneering free market competition that marked it so strikingly through the Apollo era. It would be impossible to build anything for the United States to fly in space now without giving Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon and their dependent subcontractors probably three-quarters of the action, if not more.
Nor do America's rockets work as flawlessly as they did for decades from the days when Wernher Von Braun and his German engineers crafted Redwood and the Saturns in Huntsville, Alabama, and when great U.S. Air Force engineer generals like Bernard Schriever oversaw the successful development of the Atlas and Minuteman programs. In two of the last three tests of America's crucial Anti-Ballistic Missile system being rushed into deployment at Fort Greeley, Alaska by the Bush administration, the rockets never even left the ground, their engines failed to ignite.
This is why the new Moon program will prove to be so important for reviving and even rescuing ballistic missile defense. For most of the past quarter of a century since President Ronald Reagan first came up with his "Star Wars' vision of protection from incoming ballistic missiles, the emphasis in the high-tech defense industry and the Pentagon has been on software, energy experiments and electronic. This reflected the great boom in information technology that occurred at the same time, transforming the U.S. domestic economy and wider world.
But the Moon program will go nowhere without first reviving American rocket engineering. No new technology has yet been developed top loft payloads into earth orbit, let alone send them back to the Moon. Only chemically fueled rockets operating on the same basic principles as the boosters that lofted Gagarin, Armstrong and all the others those long decades ago will still do it.
Therefore, the United States will have to come up with a 21st century replacement for Saturn V or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And the boost in basic engineering skills and domestic production capacity this will require will demand some degree of reorientation away from the white collar, intellectual skills of the software designers back to the hard-hat, blue collar, iron, steel, and volatile fuel technologies of the old Huntsville and Cape Canaveral rocket engineers.
And as the failures of those two ABM interceptor tests showed, any credible BMD system based on rocket interceptors cannot afford to take that basic technology for granted.
To go back to the Moon, then, you do need to be a rocket scientist, or at least have lots of them. And the same goes for having any ABM interceptor system that works as well.
