When Andrew Chaikin talks about the spirit of Apollo, people listen. Chaikin, after all, wrote the definitive history of the Apollo program. He has invoked Apollo to weigh in the ongoing debate between commercial space and NASA.
What was Chaikin's premise?
In an oped published in Space News, Chaikin found that the "spirit of Apollo" was not necessarily in NASA's current space exploration program, but rather in the commercial space sector. He finds that the heavy lift Space Launch System is too evocative of the past, whereas innovation, the future, and the hope of space exploration lays in the commercial space firms such as SpaceX.
If this is so, why is Congress so skeptical of commercial space?
It is not, despite what Chaikin suggests, that Congress opposes commercial space. Congress is deeply skeptical about how the current administration is approaching the matter. In a recent hearing before the House Science Committee, Congress seemed to find not so much the spirit of Apollo, but rather the spirit of Solyndra, a commercial space sector too heavily dependent on government subsidies and without any firm private markets. Something cannot be called, strictly speaking, "commercial" if it is financed primarily by the government and services primarily government markets. Furthermore, the commercial crew program is not designed to send people back to the moon, but rather to build a space taxi service to the International Space Station. It is more evocative, therefore, of the "spirit of the space shuttle" than that of Apollo.
But what about Chaikin's criticism that the Space Launch System is too expensive?
This is a criticism often advanced by proponents of commercial space. But former NASA administrator Mike Griffin and Scott Pace, formally of NASA and both champions of commercial space, recently made a compelling case that of all the alternatives, ones involving a heavy lift rocket is the least expensive if one proposed to venture beyond low Earth orbit.
So Chaikin is just all wet and the tried and true is really Apollo?
Not necessarily. There are a number of schemes that marry the strengths of the NASA Apollo model and commercial space, properly understood. The Nautilus-X scheme, involving a space station at a Lagrange point, and a plan advanced by Paul Spudis, a lunar geologist and advocate for a return to the Moon, and Tony Lavoie of NASA's Marshal Spaceflight Center uses both big heavy lift and commercial space craft to return to the Moon, this time on a more permanent basis.
So the argument of NASA vs. commercial space is a phony one?
Just like the argument of humans vs, robots and moon vs, asteroids vs. Mars. There is a role for both to play in an integrated effort to move humankind beyond low Earth orbit. It is not exactly the spirit of Apollo, which suggests a singular, but limited goal (i.e. send a man to the moon and return him safely to the Earth before this decade is out) but rather something new. Call it, if one wills, the spirit of the Children of Apollo, to invoke the title of a well known book about space.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times and The Weekly Standard.
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