The Birth and Death of SEI (Part 1-long)

[Dwayne Allen Day]

The following article is scheduled to appear in the March 1995 issue of
Spaceflight magazine. Copyright maintained by the author.

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The Birth and Death of the Space Exploration Initiative
By Dwayne A. Day

On July 20, 1989, while marking the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11
lunar landing, President George Bush stood in front of a giant American
flag at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC and proposed a
bold new program of human exploration of space. America should return to
the moon to stay and send humans to Mars, Bush said, citing destiny and
America's need to lead the free world. To those in attendance, it
sounded as if the Apollo program was back.
But just four years later, with a new President in the White House and a
lot of new Congressmen on Capitol Hill, NASA closed the Office of
Exploration charged with carrying out the ambitious plans laid out by
Bush. This decision had little to do with the new administration or the
fiscal-mindedness that briefly swept Congress, for Bush's Space
Exploration Initiative (SEI), as it was known, had been stillborn. In
four years there had never been enough support to start even a series of
modest precursor missions to map the surface and resources of the moon.
Indeed, in fiscal year 1993, the Office of Exploration's request for a
mere $5 million was struck down by Congress and, as lunar scientist Dr.
Wendell Mendell noted, Congressional staffers had poured through NASA's
budget and deleted programs that even sounded as if they were part of
SEI. Because of the political devastation caused by this proposal, the
United States is probably farther away from a return to the moon today
than it was five years ago.
But why did the Space Exploration Initiative fail? Why did the first
clear articulation by an American president of a future for the United
States in space gather so little steam? There are almost as many answers
to this question as there are critics of the space agency. If ever one
wanted a perfect example of how not to enact a major new federal program,
SEI would do nicely. Just about everything that could be done wrong was
done wrong, and various standpoints notwithstanding, it is clear that
there is more than enough blame to spread around, both inside and outside
of NASA. Lacking a Cold War justification, Bush's bold new plan to
return to the moon fell to politics as usual in Washington.

The origins of SEI are open to interpretation. Back in 1969, the Space
Task Group, a special panel called together by President Nixon consisting
of Vice President Spiro Agnew, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine, and
Secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans, proposed that after Apollo the
nation should pursue a broad-based space exploration program that
included a space station, a lunar base, Mars exploration, and a space
shuttle. In many ways this was a carbon copy of a vision first
established by Wernher von Braun in a series of articles in Colliers'
magazine and a later series of Disney films in the mid 1950s. The von
Braun vision was that the only space program that made sense was one that
attempted to do everything simultaneously--go to the moon and Mars and
build a space station to serve as a jumping-off point. All of this would
be serviced by a space shuttle.
The Space Task Group's final report had been watered down somewhat so
that the proposal was not presented as a recommendation for the
president, merely an option. In fact, Paine had deliberately ignored the
earlier report of Nixon's transition team on space, which had recommended
that NASA continue lunar exploration and specifically warned against
setting a Mars goal. Instead, Paine had lobbied Agnew to endorse the
broad vision of an expanded human space effort in the view that the vice
president could then convince Nixon. But how the STG's report was
presented ultimately didn't matter: President Nixon was no space
enthusiast and Agnew had no clout in the White House. While Nixon was a
big fan of the astronauts and their exploits, neither he nor his closest
aides saw space as offering any real political value to his
administration. Nixon only endorsed the station and shuttle
goals--ignoring the moon and Mars--and later deferred the station
indefinitely. Indeed, by 1970, the administration was looking at the
possibility of cancelling Apollos 15, 16 and 17 and Nixon only
reluctantly agreed to the space shuttle out of a belief that it served
national security interests and would win him votes in California, where
most of the money for the project would go. He also had a desire not to
be the president who ended the American man-in-space program. Talk of
returning humans to the moon and sending them to Mars disappeared for
almost a decade as NASA concentrated on getting the shuttle flying.
Jimmy Carter used the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the lunar
landing to push his energy program. He, like his predecessors, was not
interested in space. He had better uses for the money.
In the early 1980s, a group of graduate students at the University of
Colorado in Boulder, calling themselves the "Mars Underground," held a
series of conferences called The Case for Mars. These conferences
brought together scientists, engineers and enthusiasts from all over the
country to discuss the possibility of sending humans to the red planet.
They managed to energize the space community and give human exploration
of Mars a certain degree of visibility. Others, including Carl Sagan and
the Planetary Society and the late Senator Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii
endorsed the idea of a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to Mars as a means of
ending the Cold War. During the same time, a group of scientists at
NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston started studying potential
concepts for lunar bases.
By the mid-80s, the lack of clearly defined goals in the American space
program was apparent to a number of key policy makers in Washington and
Congress created the National Commission on Space to address the issue.
The Commission was originally to be chaired by former NASA Deputy
Administrator George Low, well regarded as a level-headed pragmatist.
Unfortunately Low died before he could chair the committee. Former NASA
Administrator Paine was named in his place. Paine had been administrator
during the moon landing and had been instrumental in determining the
shape of the Space Task Group.
If the American grass roots interplanetary movement had a leader it was
certainly Thomas Paine. Paine was well-liked by the Mars Underground and
other space activists because his passion was Mars and he made no
attempts to conceal that fact, either as NASA Administrator or in private
life. Paine was smart and had a sly sense of humor. He was fond of
pointing out that the nation spent more on Space Invaders than the space
shuttle, that it spent more on pizza than the entire space program. But
while true, these figures were largely irrelevant. In themselves they
were not justifications for spending more money on space exploration.
Paine's biggest flaw was that he knew nothing about Washington, and, as
many Washington policy makers later confided, his selection to chair the
committee all but determined the outcome of the National Commission's
report. The report, Pioneering the Space Frontier, was more of a
broad-based endorsement of the extensive human exploration of space than
an evaluation of the options available to the nation. It depicted lunar
bases, Mars missions, a large space station, nuclear spacecraft and
aerospace planes. It was lavishly illustrated by space artist Robert
McCall and endorsed increased spending on space exploration through
effectively doubling NASA's budget. It was an expansive--and
expensive--view of the next fifty years in space, but it was more fiction
than a realistic blueprint for current policy making.
Congress recognized this too and charged the NASA administrator, James
Fletcher, with responding to the National Commission on Space Report.
Although Fletcher certainly had his faults, he understood the political
workings of Washington better than Paine and gave the task to former
astronaut Sally Ride. Ride responded with another report, Leadership and
America's Future in Space, which acknowledged that there was a wide gap
between the vision of Pioneering the Space Frontier and the reality of
the Challenger explosion. Ride's report outlined four possible
directions for the United States: a human mission to Mars, a lunar base,
extensive robotic planetary exploration, and "Mission to Planet Earth," a
study of the Earth's changing climate.
Although Ride in some ways had merely repeated some of the same themes
present in the earlier studies, she was astute enough to note that these
could be separate paths and that they could be pursued to different
degrees--neither the President nor the Congress had to endorse the entire
framework. The one idea that did receive broad support in Washington was
the Mission to Planet Earth proposal, which came about at a time of
increasing concern with such environmental issues as global warming and
the ozone hole. Many in Congress viewed this as a more relevant proposal
capable of having an impact on the way people on Earth lived.
Ride did not write her report alone. It was actually partly the product
of the Office of Exploration, created by Administrator Fletcher three
months earlier at NASA headquarters. But the office was not very large
and consisted of little more than Ride and some support staff. She soon
retired to private life and Aaron Cohen took over the operation of the
office. Cohen came to headquarters from Johnson Space Center in Houston,
where they had been conducting lunar base studies for several years.
Johnson, as the astronaut training center and site of Mission Control,
had a vested stake in human spaceflight, particularly involving the
shuttle. For the next two years the office, known as "Code Z" and under
the authority of an Assistant Administrator, conducted several studies of
lunar and Mars exploration missions, labelling them part of the "Human
Exploration Initiative." Code Z's studies involved the use of a large
new booster based on the shuttle, known as "Shuttle Z." The Shuttle Z
would not be cheap to operate, but NASA engineers were not concerned
about costs. They figured that once the political word was given, the
money would begin pouring in.
In February 1988, the Reagan administration issued a national space
policy document that called for the "expansion of human presence beyond
Earth orbit," tacitly endorsing human missions to the moon and Mars. But
Reagan was not in office long enough to actually have to pay for such a
endeavor and, other than continued studies by Code Z, nothing further
came of this new position. In November 1989, George Bush beat out
Michael Dukakis to become the forty-first President of the United States.
Clearly there had been much talk about human exploration both inside and
outside the government. But talk is cheap and none of these various
offices or commissions can truly claim credit for SEI. The origin of the
idea seems to lie with several of Vice President Quayle's advisors and
Budget Director Richard Darman. Quayle was given the position of
Chairman of the National Space Council at least in part to boost his
visibility, although several of his friends warned him of the dangers of
becoming known as "Mr. Space." His staff viewed this as an opportunity
to improve the image of their much-maligned boss and convinced Quayle
that the U.S. should endorse a large space mission. Darman, who was an
enthusiastic space advocate, also supported the idea. But the actual
fleshing out of the idea was done by someone else, someone who also had
something to prove. That person was a mid-level bureaucrat named Mark
Albrecht. Albrecht was named to be the Executive Secretary of the newly
created National Space Council.
The Space Council was another one of those ideas for better policy-making
that periodically resurfaces in Washington circles. Lyndon Johnson had
created the first Council as part of the Act which created NASA, but
Eisenhower had ignored it. LBJ had later used his position as head of
the Council to push Kennedy into the lunar goal. But the Council had
languished under both the Johnson and Nixon administrations and was
finally eliminated in 1973. The idea of re-creating the Council had been
endorsed by the National Commission on Space, which viewed it as a means
of gaining high-level attention for space issues. It had also been a
popular idea in Congress, where the Reagan administration's secretive
space policy process, hidden in the National Security Council and heavily
dominated by the Defense Department and Intelligence Community, was
viewed with suspicion and resentment. It had not been a popular idea
with Reagan, who went so far as to veto a NASA authorization bill which
included language creating a space council. Reagan had objected to
Congressional intrusion in the policy-making process. By 1989, Reagan
was headed out, the language creating the Council had been watered down,
and Bush indicated that he supported the idea, in part because it would
give his Vice Presidential running-mate, Dan Quayle, a visible role in
policy-making.
Although the Space Council was officially chaired by Vice President Dan
Quayle and included many top cabinet officials, it was the Council's
Executive Secretary and small staff that helped shape policy and define
issues to be addressed by the full Council. Albrecht was not the first
choice for the slot but was offered it after General Henry Cooper was
rejected out of fear that he might be unjustly linked to the innuendo and
hearsay that had surrounded the nomination of Bush's defense secretary
John Tower. Vicious rumors about Cooper's actions overseas had
surfaced. The rumors proved to be totally unfounded, but the last thing
that anyone wanted was another nasty nomination fight and so Albrecht was
quickly offered the job. Cooper went on to head the Strategic Defense
Initiative.
Albrecht had little space experience, having addressed mostly national
security and intelligence issues as a Congressional staffer. Despite
this, he proved himself capable very early on in the job by solving a
funding dispute concerning the remote sensing satellite Landsat.
Albrecht wanted to make a name for himself in the space community and
also wanted to provide a sense of purpose for the flailing space agency.
From his appointment in March 1989, Albrecht began searching for a new
project to galvanize the civilian space program. Quayle's advisors were
already talking about such a project and Albrecht and the Space Council
quickly fleshed out three proposals: a return to the moon, a human
mission to Mars, or a commitment to do both.
Policy decisions in Washington rarely start with a Presidential
directive. Instead, issues are brought to the attention of senior
leaders by staffers who then order further study and request information
and recommendations. Albrecht's campaigning for human space exploration
is therefore nothing unusual. But it did not follow the Apollo model,
where both Kennedy and Vice President Johnson, as chairman of the
National Aeronautics and Space Council, were predisposed from the outset
toward a major space project in response to Sputnik. Kennedy was also
surrounded by a number of other enthusiastic space supporters. Kennedy's
predecessor, Eisenhower, had once taken his NASA administrator out into
the Rose Garden and pointed at the moon and said "That moon is going to
be up there a long time." There was no rush to get there. Neither Bush
nor Quayle were very interested in space, but neither were they hostile
to it. Quayle took the proposals to Bush, who decided to pursue both the
lunar and Mars goals simultaneously.
This fact in itself explains part of the reason why the decision to
return to the moon failed: Bush was never an enthusiastic supporter of
the program. He was never willing to risk political capital to push the
program or even give it modest attention. In many ways, Bush was an
advocate of space exploration in the same way that he was "the
Environmental President" or "the Education President"--weakly, and in
name only. On the 20th anniversary of the lunar landing at an
extravagant and nationalistic ceremony at the Smithsonian, Bush praised
the Apollo 11 astronauts in front of a giant American flag and models of
the lunar lander and Saturn V rocket. Then he outlined his own program.
Bush's speech was immediately widely criticized on Capitol Hill, where
House Majority Leader Richard Gephart quipped, "Mr. President, there's no
such thing as a free launch," and others blasted the rumored $300 billion
price tag for such an undertaking. The Democratic Congress, in many ways
chastened by Bush's decisive victory and extended honeymoon, saw this as
merely another chance to embarrass the president.
Once the goal had been outlined in Bush's July speech, there came the
task of carrying it out. Presidents cannot simply endorse large projects
and then expect them to enact themselves. The president must be a strong
advocate of the program. Occasionally, his intervention is necessary at
key decision points and during major Congressional votes. For reasons
which still remain vague, Bush did not do any of that. But there are
three good explanations which may explain why Bush never got firmly
behind the Space Exploration Initiative. First of all, Bush's
endorsement of SEI may have been like his weak endorsement of a whole
series of things that he later abandoned--opposition to tax hikes being
the most egregious example. Columnist George Will, as one of Bush's
harshest critics, said of the President, "he means well... feebly."
Secondly, Bush may have never been truly committed to a program that he
didn't think up in the first place. Often criticized for a lack of
vision, this may have been a case where the vision of his staff simply
did not rub off on the president. Finally, Bush may have been ill-served
by his subordinates, both on the National Space Council and in NASA.
NASA in particular, responded to Bush's proposal with a program plan that
was so expensive and provided returns so far in the future that there was
little reason for the president to support it.
The Space Council never had very good relations either on Capitol Hill or
with NASA. It was viewed by both, correctly, as an attempt to take space
policy-making back from those two entities and return it to the White
House. While the concept of a Space Council had been generally appealing
to Congress in the abstract, in reality it proved little better than the
process it replaced. Furthermore, Council staffers had a rather
antagonistic relationship with Congressional staffers, who often
complained that they couldn't get their phone calls returned. NASA, on
the other hand, was a mess and openly hostile to the entire program
plan. NASA administrator Richard Truly, a former astronaut, was not
terribly enthusiastic about going to the moon and was primarily concerned
with flying shuttles and building the space station. He was only willing
to accept the program if it required the shuttle to do practically
everything.
NASA's response to Bush's speech was the "90-Day Study." This was
presented to the Space Council in November 1989. It was intended to
serve as a roadmap for SEI-a list of what to do and when to do it. As a
policy document, it proved to be a total disaster. Reportedly, Truly
ordered that the dollar figures be removed from the document before it
was presented to the Space Council, but word quickly got out that the
cost would be $300-$400 billion over thirty years. This meant doubling
NASA's budget immediately, from about $11 billion a year to $22 billion a
year and maintaining it for the next three decades. They were
essentially Apollo spending levels. But NASA didn't have the threat of a
Russian moon program to worry about.
NASA, like all government agencies, has to deal with different internal
and external constituencies, each clamoring for its own priorities. The
space agency is rather unique in this regard in that its facilities are
spread throughout the country at various field centers, each of which
represents different interests--human spaceflight at Johnson, robotic
exploration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, for
instance--and each having clout in Congress. In addition, NASA has also
had somewhat of a rivalry between its scientists, who want to collect
data, and its engineers, who want to build equipment. In many ways, the
"90-Day Study" was a reflection of the conflict within the agency and the
lack of strong leadership from Headquarters. It typified the Apollo
Paradigm which had come to dominate the agency whereby everything at NASA
was approached like the crash program to put a man on the moon--requiring
huge amounts of personnel and large expenditures of money.

Part 2 to follow

DDAY
SPI

--
Dwayne A. Day
Space Policy Institute
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052