AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
October 1993

BATTLEFIELD REPORT
Body Count, Walking Wounded and Hardy Survivors
by Brenda Forman

	It's a war out there, folks, and as in every war, the 
good die young.  Promising programs are dead or dying; others 
are just barely surviving.  Survival is increasingly 
determined not by engineering or technological merit but by 
the size, power and noisiness of a program's political 
constituency, the number of jobs it has located in the right 
Congressional districts, and the support it enjoys from the 
right places in the power structure.
	The unhappy observer may begin wondering if we'll still 
have a space program to talk about when the body count comes 
in.  Consider the following report from the front:

HERE LIES:
	NASP, the National Aerospace Plane.   NASP was to be a 
single-stage-to-orbit experimental vehicle to prove out the 
technology of air-breathing propulsion at hypersonic speeds 
up to Mach 25.  For years, the program has pushed the 
technological state of the art in CFD (Computational Fluid 
Dynamics) codes, slush hydrogen propulsion, exotic materials, 
and lord knows what else.  Nevertheless, the political system 
has tried repeatedly to assassinate it.  This year it seems 
finally to have succeeded.  NASP has been conclusively 
reduced to the lowly status of a "technology development 
program," and is may not even get the funds needed to pursue 
that.  So let us now proudly erect its gravestone, say the 
eulogies and allow the Japanese, the Europeans and/or the 
Russians to dominate the field of hypersonic transport in the 
next century.
	Spacelifter, the latest doomed effort to upgrade launch 
technology for the coming century.  Well, shucks, folks, we 
already killed off HLLV (Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle), ALS 
(Advanced Launch System) and NLS (National Launch System), 
and we never even had to BUILD anything along the way!  After 
all that, doing in Spacelifter was easy.  So what if we 
stumble into the next century still dependent on increasingly 
distant descendants of 1960s ICBMs?  Ariane already has over 
half the worldwide commercial launch market; why not let them 
duke it out with the Chinese and the Russians for the rest?  
And if a rocket blows up every now and then and trashes a 
billion-dollar payload, well hey, that's just the chances you 
take.
	CRAF, the Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby.  CRAF was 
to be the twin to the Cassini probe currently being built to 
go to Saturn.  But CRAF fell victim to every politics; 
pitfall in the book, from escalating costs to assassination 
attempts by disgruntled scientists.  Congress therefore 
killed CRAF.  Ironically, doing so may not actually have 
saved very much money since the resulting program upheaval 
may cause Cassini to cost nearly  as much as building two 
similar spacecraft.  But JPL rapidly learned not to try THAT 
argument on Congress, because the response they go was, well 
then, we should cancel Cassini too!

WALKING WOUNDED:
	Despite everything -- program stretchouts, funding cuts, 
redesigns and/or repeated cancellation threats -- we actually 
have managed to launch some very impressive spacecraft that 
are doing some astonishing science.  But guess what?  We're 
turning them off!
	Candidates for shutdown include IUVE (International 
Ultraviolet Explorer), several of those amazingly hardy 
little Pioneer-series satellites, the Gamma Ray Observatory, 
and some of the science experiments on board Galileo, now at 
long last on its way to Jupiter.  (Magellan is on that list 
too unless it gets a last-minute reprieve from the Congress 
this year.)
	Sure, all these spacecraft are working great.  Sure, 
they've exceeded their design specs by orders of magnitude.  
And sure, they're gathering unprecedented and irreplaceable 
data.  But those mission operations costs can really pile up, 
folks!  We gotta save some money here!  I mean, it's 
EMBARRASSING!  They weren't supposed to work THAT well!  Now, 
if they'd only had the decency to break down and die early 
instead, we coulda avoided all this fuss.

HARDY SURVIVORS:
	Earlier this year, I observed in this space that we seem 
now to be steering our technological and scientific agenda by 
one simple, fundamentally disastrous principle:  Pork Rules.  
Program survival increasingly demands that a program be 
designed, structured and justified to satisfy the demands of 
the present at the expense of the future.  With alarming 
regularity, we are opting for consumption at the expense of 
investment.
	This bodes ill indeed for both the future of this 
country in general and the future of the space program in 
particular.  This worries me deeply.  But then, I'm just a 
war correspondent sending dispatches from my stretch of the 
FEBA.  If the battle looks better from your foxhole, be sure 
to let me know.