Q&A with Norman Augustine

Tell us about the two Augustine Commissions you headed.

Years ago—it was when George H. W. Bush was president—I chaired a commission after the Challenger accident. We were charged with discussing where NASA should head next. So we laid out a program, some of which they did, a lot of which they didn’t.

Then when President Obama came in, he wanted to take a fresh look at NASA, so he set up a second commission, which I also chaired, to take a look at NASA, particularly its human space flight program, which is about half of NASA’s budget.

What did you find?

NASA’s program had been underway for probably 4 years. And the conclusion was that the objectives of the program didn’t match the money, which is a serious problem to begin with. And even if they succeeded in doing what they were setting out to do, we didn’t think it was very inspiring or worth the money, frankly. So it seemed to us to miss the point on two counts.

What was NASA’s budget at the time?

Their program was designed to spend about $10B a year. If they were given that amount of money, they could have succeeded in doing what they said they would do. But the $10B got cut into $7B.

NASA is a very high fixed-cost organization, and if you take an organization that has— pick a number—say $5B in fixed costs and you are planning on a budget of $10B, that gives you $5B to do the project but all of a sudden, you’ve lost $3B so you’ve now only got $2B to do your project because you can’t spend the fixed cost.

So your $5B suddenly becomes $2B and if you go through the arithmetic, it stretches out the projects forever to get anything done. So we suggested they stop and that they get a program that matched their budget. Was NASA planning to go to Mars? Not quite. The plan was that in the late 20’s, they would go back to the moon. We thought they should have more inspiring goals than that. And the other problem that project had—from both a political and technical standpoint—was that you spend money in large quantities and nothing happens of any interest to the public for 15 to 20 years until one day they say “we’ll go back to the moon” and people of your generation will say “well, that’s my grandfather’s space program” even though it’ll do different things.

So what we proposed was: Whatever amount of money you have, design a space program that fits that amount of money. That’s rule number 1. And if that means we’ll have a much smaller space program— which we would not have liked—we said do it. You can’t declare one set of goals and a budget that doesn’t fit.

Were there any recommendations ongoing to Mars?

We suggested they adopt what we called a “flexible path”: Instead of working for 25 years before putting humans on Mars, you should have something you can do every 3 or 4 years along the way.

We proposed a program where they would dock with an asteroid, first with unmanned spacecraft and then with humans on board, have humans dock with an asteroid and then go to what’s called a Lagrangian point, a neutral gravity point in space that is a great place for a construction or fuel depot.

The idea is to circumnavigate Mars with humans (possibly low-orbit) and land on one of Mars’ moons, probably Deimos and then land on Mars. So over this period of time, every 3 to 5 years, you can point to something that you accomplished.

Now the question is: will the President and the Congress of the future fund it adequately? Given the budget situation in the United States, it’s not all clear to me it will get funded adequately, and if it doesn’t, then we’ll have the same problem we had before: pursuing a trajectory we can’t afford. So my hope is that they’ll have the funds that they need.

Why weren’t there more frequent visits to the Moon since 1969 to do small tasks?

It was the same dilemma: we had landed on the Moon six times and NASA wanted to build a space nation and a reusable launch vehicle. This would supposedly cut the cost of space travel a lot, but it turned out it didn’t even if, with the economics of the time, people believed it would. They didn’t have enough money to continue to go to the Moon, to develop the shuttle and the Space Station, so the return to the moon got shut off.

That’s the previous version of today’s story, unfortunately.

What role do you see companies playing with NASA?

That was another controversial part of our report.

NASA’s budget is such that if they continue to carry things in low- Earth orbit, there’s not enough money to go beyond low-Earth orbit. So it was our view that if NASA wants to go beyond low- Earth orbit, they would have to get out of the trucking business. And the only way we could see for NASA to do that was to shut down the shuttle and turn it over to the commercial market place.

There’s a precedent for this in the United States. In the 1930s, the airlines were just trying to get going but tickets were so expensive that airlines were all going broke, so the government gave the airlines a contract to haul the mail, a guarantee that they can haul so many tons of mail, which upped the volume of flying and lowered the cost per ticket so people started flying. This is what really made the airlines possible. The analogy would be that governments would guarantee to the private launch vehicle companies a market that consists of hauling fuel to orbit, set filling stations up in orbit, and sending people and equipment to space. NASA would then take it in orbit and take it to wherever it was going to go for its mission.

Are they concerned about safety?

They’re very concerned about the risk of having humans fly on commercial design launch vehicles. It is a risk, there’s no question, but it’s our belief that with proper oversight it could be done. People often forget—and I think NASA even forgets sometimes—that the launch vehicles that we refer to as “NASA’s launch vehicles” were all built by companies, not by NASA.

There seems to be a lack in public support for space projects right now in America compared to other countries. Is there a particular reason?

The average American pays 9 cents a day for our human space flight program so it’s not a huge economic issue. But the economy in America is not good as you know so anything that doesn’t create jobs in large quantities, for the average person is suspect today.

Also, one of the features of the space program is you invest for a number of years before you can do something whereas if you add money to the prescription drug program, next week people start taking prescription drugs. So all the surveys that I’m aware of show that the average person is fascinated by the space program and supports it. But I think it’s been so long since the space program did anything really sensational, if you will. There have been a lot of interesting scientific discoveries done, but in terms of doing things like going to the Moon, it’s been a long time and people’s interest weans and I think that’s what we’re seeing.

If you take my generation and ask people why did you go in engineering or science? A lot will say it was the space program that got them excited about it.

Philip Mark asks: What’s the biggest hurdle that NASA faces in space exploration?Money? Technology? Human resources?

It’s clearly money. Second, I would say it’s technology given that there is a potential show-stopper, galactic cosmic rays, which we don’t know much about other than they could be damaging and are hard to shield. The human aspect is also an issue for North America because we have so few students (relatively speaking) who study science and engineering. But the space program doesn’t need that many engineers, so I wouldn’t view that as such a big concern.

Jimmy Chan asks: Rumors are that a higher education bubble will strike soon. Is it really? And what recommendation do you have on this matter?

I think that the economy we’re going into in the world—I will talk about this [at the convocation speech]—will be a very hightech world that will need a lot of really good scientists and engineers. But science and engineering have really become global professions today, so an engineer in Canada has to compete with an engineer in China, India, Singapore, Taiwan, etc. for a job.

There are very good engineers in those countries, and a lot of them work for a lot less money than your average American or Canadian engineer will work for. So I think the economy of countries like the United States and Canada will depend heavily on technology and it will be a very important growing field; it’ll demand a lot more engineers and scientists than there are today.

But we’re now passing through a transitional period where engineers in North America and Europe will find it challenging to compete for jobs in that global market. I think those engineers will be able to compete if they’re really good; there’s always room for really good engineers and scientists. But that’s also true of law school, and business school: the market is difficult.

Wei-Ju Chen asks: Is it a good idea to be diverting scarce funding for human space adventures? Wouldn’t it be less expensive to use robots for space mission instead of humans?

Another great question. There are a lot of missions that can best be done by robots, and should be done by robots—and are being done by robots. There are some missions that either can’t or probably shouldn’t be done by robots.

The ones that can’t are the ones that, for example, are done to repair unexpected failures that you hadn’t anticipated when you designed the system. I’m thinking of the Hubble Space Telescope: that failure had never been anticipated by anybody and I would submit that no robot that we know how to design today could have fixed it, whereas humans were able to do that. I’ve also been told by people who design robotic spacecraft that we learn more from having a geologist on the Moon, and I’m thinking of Jack Schmitt, the astronaut who was a trained geologist, than we learn from all the robots which we sent.

Then there’s the inspirational aspect: If the objective is to put a flag on top of Mount Everest, that can be done relatively easily, but it’s a little different from having Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary climb Mount Everest. Some people will say “how many dollars is inspiration worth?” I don’t know how to answer that. How much is Shakespeare worth? How much is a great opera or a great symphony worth? These are things that great nations like Canada and the United States do and hopefully will continue doing.

These are things that we can afford to do, for which the inspirational value should not be underestimated in any way, but there are also, of course, the technical advantages.

And I believe there’s a place for each.