There and Back Again

NASA Returns to Where It Began

The NACA version of the Bell Aircraft X-1experimental rocket plane that researched airflow as an aircraft approached supersonic speeds. Image source: NASA.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.

— Dwarvish song, from “The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again” by J.R.R. Tolkein

After a long journey, NASA is finally returning to its roots.

The tale begins in the late 1950s. After the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellites in late 1957, Congress and the Eisenhower White House fretted how to respond. The perception — a misperception, actually — was that somehow American space technology was inferior to the Russians.

Deliberations within Congress, and negotiations with the White House, led to legislation in 1958 creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA, essentially, was an expansion of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, commonly called the N-A-C-A. Several existing aerospace research programs within the Department of Defense were grafted onto the NACA to create NASA.

A similar perception — a real one — led to the NACA’s creation in 1915.

From NACA to NASA

At the dawn of the 20th Century, American development of the “aeroplane” was largely dependent on inventors such as the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and Samuel Langley. In Europe, where war was nigh, those nations’ governments invested in aeronautics laboratories. When World War I began in 1914, it was estimated that France had 1,400 airplanes, Germany 1,000, Russia 800, and Great Britain 400. The United States had only 23. America wanted to appear neutral in any European conflicts; some leaders in Congress believed that a more proactive American aviation research program might be interpreted as belligerence.

To finally compete with Europe’s aviation industry, Congress approved the creation of the NACA in March 1915. Over the years, the NACA built a competent engineering staff at Langley, Virginia and elsewhere. Much of its research was performed by contractors and universities. The agency built wind tunnels to gather data on aeronautic hypotheses. Research data were freely available to the public and to the world. By the end of the 1930s, the NACA was considered a globally elite research institution.

With war clouds once again on the horizon, the NACA added more research facilities — one at Moffett Field south of San Francisco, and another near the Cleveland airport.

After the war, as the military began serious rocket research, the NACA participated as well. You may have seen the 1983 film, The Right Stuff, which opened with a dramatic recreation of Chuck Yeager flying the X-1 rocket plane to break the sound barrier. Yeager flew for the Army Air Forces, but what you may not know is that Bell Aircraft built a second X-1 that was used by the NACA to gather data as the bullet-shaped plane approached supersonic speeds. Both planes were flown by Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin, a naval aviator who flew with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. After the Navy trained him, Goodlin became a civilian test pilot for Bell.¹

During the 1950s, the NACA researched various exotic fuels that could be used to propel rockets. It also researched re-entry designs for nose cones that might deliver a nuclear weapon to an enemy target. The NACA’s “blunt body” research led to the capsule-shaped spacecraft design still used today, and winged vehicles such as the Space Shuttle orbiter and the Sierra Space Dream Chaser.

While the NACA went about its business as an aeronautics R&D agency, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to participate in a global event called the International Geophysical Year. More than 70 nations participated in studying the geology and physics of Earth. The United States and Soviet Union agreed to participate by launching the world’s first satellites to study what might be outside the atmosphere, such as X-ray and cosmic radiation, and the planet’s magnetic field. (M. Nicolet, 228.)

A BBC documentary about the International Geophysical Year aired on June 30, 1957. The final segment discussed American plans to launch a satellite by the end of 1958. Original video source: BBC.

The American program was called Project Vanguard. As a nominally civilian program, it wasn’t considered a priority. The US simply needed to launch a satellite by December 1958.

The Soviets presented details of their proposal to an IGY conference in Washington, DC on September 30, 1957. Although they were circumspect about when it might launch, they did provide the radio frequencies Sputnik 1 would use to transmit its “beep beep” signal. (“Sputnik” is Russian for “satellite.”)

So Sputnik wasn’t really a surprise to those paying attention. But few had and, when the Soviets orbited a satellite over the United States on October 4, 1957, a slow panic set in. Sputnik 1 in itself was harmless, but the Soviets had demonstrated a functional intercontinental ballistic missile with the capability of launching a payload into space. (Striking a target with any precision was a different matter.) American politicians, pundits, and the media cranked up the hysteria to embarrass the Eisenhower administration. They claimed that American “prestige” was at stake, a nebulous word for which no tangible measurement was possible.

Out of all that came the political decision to create NASA, effective October 1, 1958. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (commonly called the Space Act) swept the NACA into a new agency along with Project Vanguard, the X-15, a robotic lunar probe program called Pioneer, and what eventually became Project Mercury, the first crewed flights.

The Space Act did not require NASA to engage in any specific activities, only to “contribute materially to one or more” of a list of objectives. Nowhere in the Space Act did it require NASA to explore other worlds, to own its rockets, or to fly people into space, although one objective allowed NASA to “contribute materially” to the “development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms through space.” The implication was that NASA was to be a space version of the NACA.

John F. Kennedy and American Prestige

Among the Democrats angling for their party’s 1960 presidential nomination was an ambitious young Massachusetts senator named John F. Kennedy. He claimed on the campaign trail that a “missile gap” existed, that the US lagged behind the USSR’s military might in space. Kennedy claimed that this “gap” damaged American prestige.

Once he took office in 1961, Kennedy learned that no such gap existed, but he now had the responsibility of closing it. After the Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961, and the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba a week later, Kennedy perceived that he and his administration looked weak.

Kennedy assigned Vice President Lyndon Johnson the task of “making an overall survey of where we stand in space.” He asked Johnson to find a space program “which promises dramatic results in which we could win.” Johnson’s response said that “the Soviets are ahead of the United States in world prestige attained through impressive technological accomplishments in space.” He proposed “manned exploration of the moon” which would be “an achievement with great propaganda value.”

On May 25, 1961, Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress titled, “On Urgent National Needs.” Near the end of the 45-minute speech, Kennedy proposed “that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

The justification was prestige, not science.

President John F. Kennedy’s space proposals, May 25, 1961. Original video source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

The administration sifted through the various options for achieving Kennedy’s goal. The decision was to essentially couple two existing programs — a former Army “super” rocket booster program called Saturn, transferred to NASA in 1960, and a Project Mercury followup called Apollo that could carry three crew members in a space capsule.

Unintended Consequences

Kennedy appointed James Webb, a lawyer and banking executive who had served in Harry Truman’s budget office, as his NASA administrator. Webb was not technical, but he brought to NASA what historian Walter McDougall called “the virtues of thinking big.”

Webb saw Project Apollo as an opportunity to stimulate science and industry, particularly in the American south and west. Because Kennedy had set a deadline — the end of the 1960s — NASA issued “cost-plus” contracts that guaranteed the winning bidder a profit for building the components to NASA’s specifications.

It’s estimated that, in today’s dollars, Project Apollo cost the American taxpayer about $200 billion. Apollo at its peak employed 400,000 Americans across the United States, and partnered with 20,000 industrial firms and universities. When it ended, Apollo-dependent local economies slumped, people lost their jobs, and homes went up for sale.

Politicians and presidents learned from the experience that NASA was a jobs creator. Unlike the NACA, which sought to push innovation into the private sector, NASA was a significant employer in the aerospace industry. Although NASA had its civil servants, most jobs were with the agency’s cost-plus contractors. The same became true with their defense industry counterparts. As the US and USSR signed agreements limiting the number of nuclear and other weapons, the industry declined. Aerospace companies merged, leaving fewer bidders for civilian and military launch services. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and Russia began to partner in space, assembling an international space station. No one cared much about “prestige.”

The Space Shuttle orbiter Atlantis docked at the Russian Mir space station in June 1995. Image source: NASA.

By the early 2000s, only two significant vendors were left — Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The two already had a partnership called United Space Alliance, formed in 1995 to service the Space Shuttle. To assure that these companies survived, the George W. Bush administration in 2005 granted them the right to form a legal launch monopoly, called United Launch Alliance. The Pentagon could afford to pay their exorbitant fees in the name of “assured access to space,” but commercial satellite companies could not. Those companies went overseas to launch their payloads, because foreign vendors were cheaper.

During the next ten years, from 2006 to 2015, over 40% of commercial launches worldwide were from Russia, and a little less than 25% were with Europe. Only about 20% were from the United States, with none by ULA during 2011-2013. Most of those US-based launches were by a fledgling commercial company called SpaceX.

Something Old, Something New

Inspired both by NASA’s 1960s exploits and by science fiction, several citizen space advocacy groups sprung up in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the most prominent today are the National Space Society and The Planetary Society.

By the late 1980s, another group emerged, called the Space Frontier Foundation. Unlike the other groups, the SFF saw the government space bureaucracy as a hindrance. They wanted to open the space frontier through commercial industrialization and settlement. The SFF named its movement “NewSpace,” defined as, “People, businesses and organizations working to open the space frontier to human settlement through economic development.”

The logical antithesis to NewSpace? OldSpace.

Congress and the Reagan administration in 1984 amended the Space Act, requiring NASA to “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.” After the Challenger accident in January 1986, the Reagan administration issued a new directive. “NASA shall no longer provide launch services for commercial and foreign payloads unless those spacecraft have unique, specific reasons to be launched aboard the Shuttle.” Commercial space no longer was a significant interest for NASA.

For NewSpace to work, it would require entrepreneurs to have deep pockets filled with investment capital. It was easier to attract investors if federal funding was committed to the project, but that also meant the project was vulnerable to the whims of politics and bureaucracy. Several commercial enterprises failed because the political winds shifted, the federal bureaucracy unwilling to invest money in private programs that didn’t return immediate results.

The entrepreneur who finally broke through was Elon Musk. Others tried, but they relied on the federal government as a partner; when the government’s interest waned, the project was cancelled due to lack of funding. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2001, began with a $100 million investment of his own money. He wasn’t above federal funding if offered, but development of his Falcon line of rockets was entirely self-funded by Musk and his co-investors.

Musk almost went broke. His first three Falcon 1 tests failed. As the Great Recession began in late 2007 and into 2008, investors weren’t looking to take on more risk.² Musk was saved by a NASA program called Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS).

January 14, 2004 … President George W. Bush announces that the Space Shuttle will be retired once the International Space Station is completed circa 2010. Original video source: C-SPAN.

On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced that the Space Shuttle would be retired once the International Space Station was completed. He proposed a new program called the Vision for Space Exploration. The VSE evolved during Bush’s second term into Project Constellation, another big-dollar program dominated by OldSpace contractors.

Bush appointed a commission to recommend how to implement his proposals. When their report was released in June 2004, it contained a section that offered hope for NewSpace evangelists. Called “Building a Robust Space Industry,” it called for the “breaking down of barriers to commercial and entrepreneurial activities in space, as well as a cultural shift towards encouraging and incentivizing more private sector business in space.”

The Commission finds that sustaining the long-term exploration of the solar system requires a robust space industry that will contribute to national economic growth, produce new products through the creation of new knowledge, and lead the world in invention and innovation. This space industry will become a national treasure.

Out of that recommendation came the COTS program. Private industry was offered prize money for achieving milestones specified by NASA. The participants had to invest their own money, not rely on a cost-plus contract. Once the milestones were achieved, NASA could offer the vendor a fixed-price contract, similar to how you or I might buy a plane ticket or pay a shipping service to deliver a package.

COTS saved Elon Musk and SpaceX. After the fourth Falcon 1 test flight achieved orbit, NASA in December 2008 awarded SpaceX a twelve-flight, $1.6 billion contract to robotically deliever cargo to the International Space Station. Orbital Sciences received an eight-flight, $1.9 bill contract for its Cygnus cargo ship.

The program had a variant called COTS-D, that would have used the same milestone approach to develop technologies for flying crew to the ISS. COTS-D went unfunded during the Bush administration, but President Barack Obama in his first budget proposal requested that Congress cancel Constellation and fund what came to be called Commercial Crew.

Congress had different priorities. In the end, Congress agreed with Obama to cancel Constellation, but replaced it with another OldSpace program called Space Launch System. Commercial Crew was authorized, but for years was funded below what the White House budgets requested.

Back to the Future

It’s been about 14 years since the grand compromise between the Obama White House and Congress that created an uneasy balance between the OldSpace SLS and the NewSpace commercial programs.

In that time, NASA has spent almost $50 billion on SLS, its Orion crew capsule, and associated ground systems. The system has launched once, and won’t launch again until at least 2026.

NASA’s NewSpace side has been a qualified success. The star pupil, of course, is SpaceX. Cygnus, now owned by Northrop Grumman, still delivers cargo to the ISS. A third vendor, Sierra Space, will enter the market soon with its Dream Chaser space plane.

A 2024 Sierra Space promotional video. Video source: Sierra Space YouTube channel.

Not all NewSpace programs have succeeded. Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule has encountered one technical setback after another, leaving SpaceX as the sole operational commercial crew vendor. NASA has encouraged commercial space stations as destinations post-ISS, but some vendors have failed, most notably Bigelow Aerospace.

NASA’s Project Artemis lunar program is handicapped by using SLS as its primary launch vehicle, but much of the rest is NewSpace. As NASA hands over low Earth orbit to the private sector, it will focus on a semi-permanent human presence on the lunar surface, or in orbit aboard the Gateway space station. Gateway will be assembled and serviced by commercial partners. Two commercial companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, will provide the human landing systems to take crews to and from the surface.

NASA is returning to its NACA roots. Rumors fly that the incoming Trump administration might cancel SLS and replace it with a NewSpace fixed-price contract. That decision will also be up to Congress. But the last fifteen years have proved that NewSpace works. NASA’s best role is to be the technology incubator, as was its predecessor, then work alongside commercial vendors to absorb risk and underwrite technology demonstrators.

Most of the world once again goes to space through the United States, only this time it’s with NewSpace. Fifty nations have signed the Artemis Accords, a common set of working principles for operating in space. If “prestige” still matters in global space competitions, the Artemis Accords prove that most spacefaring nations ally with the US, not Russia or China.

It’s been a long journey for NASA, but finally the agency is returning home to where it was meant to be, and the US will be richer for the effort.

1. Contrary to what was depicted in the movie, Goodlin flew both aircraft, and later denied that he demanded extra money to break the sound barrier.

2. A common fallacy is that Elon Musk is self-funded by an African emerald mine. That fallacy has been repeatedly debunked. See Jyoti Mann and Grace Dean, “Elon Musk really was telling the truth by saying his father Errol never owned an emerald mine, biographer says,” Business Insider, September 11, 2023; Jordan Liles, “What We Know About Elon Musk and the Emerald Mine Rumor,” Snopes.com, January 9, 2023.