Easterbrook already on Mars, Sullivan likes the view

(Or: The return of our permanent guest blogger)

As a true fiscal conservative, Andrew Sullivan has been rightfully dismayed over the Bush administration’s profligate spending habits. His latest salvo on the subject picks up where Gregg Easterbrook, former columnist with ESPN and generally knowledgeable blogger for The New Republic, leaves off.

For those of you who are buying the Bush administration spin that this journey to the moon and Mars won't cost more than an extra billion a year or so, check out Gregg Easterbrook's analysis. The numbers unveiled are a fraction of the real cost. I'd like to trust the administration on budget matters; but they have violated any trust anyone ever gave them.

Okay, then: let's take the advice and look at Easterbrook's contribution.

[Bush] declared that for the next five years, $12 billion will be devoted to the Moon-Mars initiative. That, the president said, is enough to fund new the Moon probes and development of the ill-named Crew Exploration Vehicle. This figure is utterly ridiculous, a mere fraction of what will be entailed in anything beyond some “paper spacecraft”—engineers' lingo for studies and Power Point presentations of hardware that never gets built. Boeing expects to spend around $7.5 billion merely to develop the new 7E7 jetliner, which will stay within the atmosphere and use very well-understood engineering. The development cost of the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be several times greater.

In general I agree with Sullivan's critique of this Administration's spending habits; however, Easterbrook's critique of the Mars initiative leaves much to be desired. Blogger Rand Simberg, self-described “recovering aerospace enginer” and perhaps the most dependable authority on space policy in the blogosphere, absolutely thrashes Easterbrook:

This paragraph is chock full of nonsense. He's doing something worse than comparing apples to oranges—he's comparing space capsules to commercial airliners. There is no way to infer the costs of one from the other—they are totally irrelevant to each other. One carries hundreds of people, has to fly thousands of times, provides its own propulsion, has to meet all requirements of FAA certification. The other is simply a can that carries four people or so, with basic subsystems like a reaction-control system, avionics, life support, with thermal protection and a recovery system if it's going to do an entry. And in fact, it's also “well-understood engineering,” and has been since 1968 or so. It may be expensive, but there's no way to tell by looking at airliners.

The best way to tell is to do a parametric cost analysis on it. It's basically an upgraded Apollo capsule (and perhaps service module for modest propulsion and additional consumables). We know how much that cost the first time, and it should be easier now, particularly considering the technology advances over the past four decades (e.g., computer microization). If NASA can't develop that vehicle in a few years for a few billion, it should be disbanded.

Read the rest. Bush’s Mars plan is a bit of a letdown in terms of shifting space policy from a series of “destination” projects towards the establishment a long-term and sustainable space presence driven by private enterprise. Like Simberg, I believe private enterprise provides the most innovative and efficient path towards sustainability; it's hard to beat competition driven by market demand. Case in point: NASA’s greatest achievement, the Apollo program, succeeded in reaching its destination, though it ultimately fell short as a policy because of its failure to expand beyond just landing men on the moon. Since that heyday NASA has just been expensively cruising around low-orbit without any goals or vision for the future (Charles Krauthammer has more on this).

But arcane policy analysis aside, Bush’s new space initiative is not an example of his otherwise atrocious spending problem. Sullivan was clearly slumming this time.