Harwood takes the common-sense approach of building a space station "Tinkertoy style". That is, make it out of standardized self-contained habitable modules which can be attached to each other in any number we choose, to gradually build an orbiting lab which can be made as big or as small as we please -- and which will be significantly useful at no matter what point we decide to stop enlarging it.

NASA, in fact, initially sold the Space Station to President Reagan and Congress in 1984 as such a flexibly expandable concept, claiming that it could be "bought by the yard" up to a maximum cost of only $8 billion -- at which cost it would already be highly useful.

Part of this was the implication that the Station could begin as a man-tended but usually unmanned orbiting lab, which could then be expanded into a permanently manned station if and only if cost and benefits justified it. The US Senate officially stated that it supported the Station with this explicit concept in mind.

However, once the deal had been closed, NASA quickly abandoned the concept, officially turning the Station by late 1986 into a unified entity that would cost a minimum of $14.5 billion -- and be virtually useless as anything short of that. This was quite deliberate, simply another part of its long-time strategy to get Congress and the White House into maximizing its budget whether it was justified or not.

As reporter Glenn Easterbrook said about Harwood's alternative, flexibly expandable "Tinkertoy" design in 1991: "At bottom the agency's complaint is that it would transfer design fiefdom authority from the headquarters types who now specify configuration packages. Contractors hate the idea because the mass-manufactured modular pieces could be competitively bid. Projects with one-of-a-kind components are ideal for pie-dividing among the usual gang of suspects, with most slices 'negotiated' (effectively no-bid) because it's gratifyingly hard to figure out what special-order components should cost."

Harwood's reward for coming up with the idea, and daring to describe it in a technical journal, was to be forced into resigning by his employer Rockwell. But -- if we need a unified orbiting space station at all, as opposed to a collection of separate orbiting labs -- it is the logical way to build one. And capsule-based manned spacecraft of the sort I've described could easily build it.

Finally, to the extent that we need to conduct precursor tests before building the first manned deep-space ships, the ISS as it currently exists is exactly the wrong way to do it.

We already know that prolonged weightlessness has seriously harmful effects on human health -- ranging from serious calcium loss form the bones which can't be countered by any amount of exercise to the mysterious weakening of the human immune system. And so -- without the ISS -- we already know with absolute certainty that deep-space ships will have to rotate to provide their crews with artificial gravity.

What we DONT know yet is how to build manned spaceships so that their life support systems can be entirely self-contained, keeping a multi-man crew alive and healthy for months or years with no additional supplies whatsoever entering from outside. Indeed, we are nowhere near this yet. The very tentative ground-based tests necessary to develop such systems have only begun in the past few years.

Biologically knowledgeable SF writer Greg Bear -- whose book "Darwin's Radio" recently received a rave review in the pages of "Nature" -- writes that, on any such ship:

"Waste products will have to be recycled and fluids recovered -- storing them whole or discarding solids is both wasteful of energy and inelegant. Ideal technology would allow 100% recycling of liquid wastes, with bio-reactors converting solid waste to food and even releasing nitrogen and oxygen to help recreate Earth's atmosphere.

"Missions of more than two to three years' duration will very likely have to completely recycle waste products; ultimately, spaceships and planetary colonies will have to mimic Earth's [complex] biosphere...

"Potentially the greatest problem of all is seldom discussed in public, and that is venting... [the] leakage of volatiles from the spacecraft. Seals technology may still be inadequate to the task of keeping volatiles within our ships for periods of more than a couple of years.

"The Mir space station need[ed] frequent replenishing with volatiles, and so does the ISS. For every few hundred grams of gas or water lost per day, travelers could face crisis or even disaster on a long journey."

Obviously, developing such a totally self-contained biosystem -- which is far beyond anything that exists even on a nuclear sub -- and ensuring that it is reliably safe will involve an enormous amount of ground-based work and testing before we even dare to test such a system in Earth orbit.

But the Station is largely useless for this purpose; we don't even have the technology yet to operate such a system on Earth, and modifying the Station to be totally self-contained would require replacing it down to the very last screw. All the Station does is massively bleed off the funds necessary to conduct those ground-based tests that we actually need.

After such self-contained manned ecosystems are finally reliably developed on Earth, what will then have to be tested in Earth orbit is the precise degree of artificial gravity that a long-duration spaceship does need to keep its crew healthy.

Is a full one G necessary, or would a system that rotates more slowly and produces only some fraction of a G be adequate? This information is also necessary to determine just how long any human can safely stay on the Moon or Mars.

But the fractional-gravity biological centrifuge scheduled to be installed on the Station (no earlier than 2008) is of course totally useless for testing the effects of various fractional G-forces on humans themselves; it's much too small to carry even one man. We will have to build such orbital test facilities from scratch -- and, to do so, we will have to make sure that the spacecraft (manned or not) which assemble them in orbit are as cheap and economical as possible.

And this takes us to the still bigger question: is NASA, in its current form, even capable of doing such things? One can argue that, from now on, all development both of launch vehicles and of manned spacecraft can only become remotely economically feasible if it is handed over to the private sector.

NASA, built from the start for the bizarrely specialized single task of beating the Soviets in space and to the Moon, seems innately and hopelessly incapable of doing anything else other than frantically trying to maintain its own existence at as high a funding level as possible, and blithely engaging in regular dishonesty to do so. It is a perfect example of the disastrous flaws of a monopoly, whether you define that monopoly as "governmental socialism" or as "crony capitalism".

There is a mounting feeling that any rational government would actually abolish NASA and redistribute most of its functions among other government agencies.

Univ. of Colorado political scientist Ronald D. Brunner wrote over a decade ago: "A resilient civil space program would be based on a relatively large number of projects that are each relatively

1. well-defined with adequate margins and reserves to support realistic performance promises,
2. small, quick, and focused on a single priority objective in design, and
3. decoupled from other R&D projects to mitigate the ripple effect.

"Individually, such modest and discrete projects are less vulnerable to perturbations; and any such project could be stretched out, cut back, or terminated without disrupting the other projects. Hence more projects and project managers would have the opportunity to perform as promised -- in terms of their initial commitments on capability, schedule, and cost -- even when perturbations are unavoidable...

"Breaking up NASA is an alternative way of enhancing choice and the capacity to revise the directions of the space program. NASA centers could be reorganized into separate agencies to advocate separate missions -- for example, space science, exploration, OR applications; manned OR automated missions; R&D projects OR operations -- and therefore to compete for authorizations and appropriations with each other and with all other agencies in the federal budget. This is a drastic alternative; but it merits consideration if all else fails."

Moreover, such agencies could in many cases become individual branches within other federal agencies. As I've mentioned, ideally all requests for funding of space science projects would come from a federal Department of Science or its equivalent, and would have to compete with all other kinds of scientific research for a share of the Department's total funding.

Requests and funding for weather satellites should come entirely from NOAA; that for environmental and earth-resources satellites should come from the Interior Department and the EPA; all studies of the possible feasibility of solar power satellites or lunar helium-3 mining for future fusion reactors should be done entirely by the Department of Energy, in competition with studies of the technological feasibility of other futuristic energy sources.

One can even argue that most of NASA's functions of aeronautical and space technology -- supposedly its central function -- should instead be contracted out to competitive private companies, in response to requests for needed aid from those other branches of the federal government. It may be true that no remnant of NASA should exist at all.

Of course, the odds are against this occurring for a long time -- but during the decade since Brunner wrote, the situation has only gotten steadily worse. Now we have approached the point where no excuses are even possible -- except for the possible argument that we at least have to finish and operate the Space Station before we move on both to radically new space goals and to entirely new ways of achieving those goals

And even there, no possible believable excuse exists any more for continuing to run the Station and Shuttle projects in anything remotely like their currently planned form.

If we do, then -- as astronaut Sidney Gutierrez told NASA Administrator O'Keefe during their recent public argument -- the only results will be the near-certain loss of still a third Shutle and its crew, and the operation of the Space Station for another decade with no more than a 3-man crew absolutely incapable of doing scientific research or of anything other than just keeping the Station pointlessly running for no purpose whatsoever.

And if NASA does so, then it will be because America's space program has become absolutely nothing but a pork program for the agency, the aerospace industry and their Congressional backers -- and because America's space program has become so totally uninteresting to the voters themselves that they are willing to continue ignoring the scandal.

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