The eastern shore of central Florida is strangely quiet these days. In years past, mighty rockets split the sky on long pillars of flame, startling flocks of water birds and lulling huge gators out of the nearby marshes to rumble along in the infrasonic. First, it was the Saturn V, a giant among its kind, thundering almost cautiously into orbit and beyond, its tiny Apollo payload perched on top, bound for the moon. Then it was followed by the STS, better known as the Space Shuttle, a sleek winged sci-fi looking space plane piggy-backed on two solid state boosters, rising so often over the Atlantic it got to be routine.
It was never routine for those of us who lived here. Even the widest-screen TV cannot capture the splendor and scope of a shuttle launch. Especially at night, when the SRB’s first lit up, turning the entire eastern horizon pink and orange, as if the world were ending, as if sun had gone nova and risen in fiery protest one last time. As the stack rose it would cast tremendous, flickering shadows of anti-orange on the ground, and it would throw colored, moving shadows into any lingering clouds above. You could watch it with the naked eye right into low Earth orbit until it finally winked out, curving over the far edge of the planet. It was a glorious and powerful sight.
NASA was great in those days. But those days are gone, and the political climate has reversed itself. This sudden change in both leadership style and political party could not have come at a worse time for NASA. We’ll review the primary conflict over the future of NASA in broad strokes below.
NASA remains popular thanks to beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope, and of course thanks to the shuttle and those successful Apollo project beginning more than 50 years ago. A replacement to Hubble already in late-stage testing could extend that legacy. Unmanned successes like Mars Curiosity and New Horizons certainly don’t hurt the agency’s reputation with the public. But NASA has always been vulnerable to political winds. Regime changes can be devastating to programs that take a decade or more to launch, and more years to deliver results to a taxpaying public that suffers from an ever-decreasing attention span in the age of 140-character policy making, or 15 minutes of Facebook fame.
NASA was already at a crossroads. There is of course the alarming and well reported Trumpian animosity toward funding for NASA Earth science:
Walker (inaccurately) said that "half" the world's climate scientists doubt that humans are warming the planet. Walker wants to shift new climate research from NASA to other government agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. … "We're not going to stand for that," said astrobiologist David Grinspoon in a recent interview with Indre Viskontas on our Inquiring Minds podcast. "We're going to keep doing Earth science and make the case for it. We'll get scientists to march on Washington if we have to. There's going to be a lot of resistance.”
But the biggest battle will be over the Space Launch System, or SLS. It’s affectionately called the Senate Launch System by opponents—but the SLS is no joke. A lot of dollars and careers hang in the balance, and its destination isn’t the ISS or even the moon. The SLS is an integrated system that can take the first humans to Mars and beyond featuring a sweet, huge new booster similar to the legendary Saturn V. But it’s facing off against the upstarts, companies like SpaceX and Blue Origins, created by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, collectively referred to under the umbrella term NewSpace. The question then becomes: what’s the best bang for the space-buck, and how might those decisions impact NASA, the aerospace industry, and the taxpaying general public?
This is all coming to a head at a chaotic time. A new, wholly unpredictable, and at times volatile administration is about to seize the White House. Donald Trump makes George W. Bush look like a Nobel Laureate when it comes to science in general. But most Americans in his age cohort have fond memories of NASA. They don’t want to be the people found guilty of murdering it. That might work in favor of space science, in this one isolated instance.
The looming bare-knuckle brawl will be fought in the corporate arena, between traditional aerospace contractors like Lockheed and Boeing who would garner considerable Ares business, and alternatives like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy series. That struggle plays out in unexpected ways. Conservatives with NASA facilities in their regions, like Huntsville and Houston, end up staunchly supporting Big Government Science programs, whereas progressive politicians in other places that would benefit from NewSpace find themselves arguing for lean and mean private contractors.
Traditional aerospace contractors have well-established lobbies hard at work on the House and Senate. The same companies that might build parts of the SLS should it get the green light have been delivering fighters and military satellites and rocket boosters for MIRVS for decades. They know how to politic and they know how to bottle up critical ledge in committee and keep it off the floor for a vote, if that ledge threatens their business. You can see a great example of that here from just a couple of years ago.
How will all this play out? Will NASA continue to research and execute manned missions? If only we could tie this article up with a neat conclusion. But like many questions before the new administration, there’s no sign either way. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens—probably by watching Twitter.