It truly, truly cannot be overstated. At every level. It seems cohost is understandably upset about the planned end-of-life for the International Space Station being made more tangible with the procurement of a "deorbit vehicle" from SpaceX.
This isn't directly about that. This is about all the little things I see in the discussions surrounding it on here that are driving moo absolutely mad. It's an attempt to establish common ground to understand how a lot of the aerospace industy and space programs work, to better understand why we should be mad and sad and hopeful and all of these things in due course.
So I'm going to get my bearings digging up an old twitter essay that I even managed to source, and adding to it with specific new details.
We're going to laser focus in on NASA and the US Space Program because that's what I know, I'm nowhere near as knowledgable on the internal and political history of say, the Soviet, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or. Well Kinda the European one, but only at a surface level. (the blue streak program was funny, rip Europa and ELDO long live Ariane and ESA). I can speak to the US space program a lot more.
Anyway i'm sorry but this is Fucking Long. This post is provided on an "as is" basis and has been written on a shortage of sleep and a shortage of direct sourcing so treat it with reasonable criticism and do not take it as gospel. The general (underlined) conclusions should be overall Fine, but some details in the arguments leading to those conclusions may err.
NASA is Not A Space Agency, not primarily.
I want to shout this from the heavens. I want to shout this from fucking orbit.
If it was primarily a space program, if putting shit into space were its sole goal, no amount of presidential shopping for a Kennedy Moment1 could have saved it in 1967, 1986, 2003, or even less drastic times like the Nixon administration not wanting to continue Apollo after it achieved its political goal of flexing on the Soviets, and it would've died a languishing death then.
What IS NASA, then?
Well, to start, NASA is a public works agency masquerading as a space program. And this has been designed in from the start. This is core to the agency's continued existence, and it's due to a lot of political maneuvering and planning going back to the start.
There's a possibly-apocryphal story about Kennedy saying "we're going to the moon" and Vice President LBJ saying to him, quietly, at some point after, "so where in Texas is mission control going' or something to that effect. Sure, you can be as cynical as you like and jeer "oh, the politicians are using NASA for their own benefit, it's a jobs program" like so many of elon musk's legions of fellatious paladins do on the daily, jeering about a "Senate Launch System". Or you can come along and understand that this was an intentional move. NASA didn't just set down roots across the entirety of the lower 48 to make lobbyists happy.
NASA did this intentionally, deliberately, because its earliest leaders knew that if and when the conflict with the Soviet Union ended, if being a tool in that fight were NASA's sole raison d'être, that it'd be killed off on the spot. It needed to make itself useful to the nation. It needed to bring economic, industrial, and other such benefit wherever it set down roots, to guarantee its value as more than just a one-trick pony.
As Lambright notes in his biography of James Webb, "while the decision to go to the moon was unfolding, a separate decision process - mainly in Webb's own mind - was unfolding. This was the agenda Webb had brought to NASA - "a mission to use science and technology... to strenghten the United Stated educationally and economically." Webb's objective was to maximize the benefit of an accelerated space program in terms fo research, education, and regional economic development. Walter McDougal, in his award winning book "...The Heavens and the Earth2" described the totality of Webb's vision as "Space Age America," a term that indeed Webb sometimes used.
It is better, when saying things like "NASA should be engineer led" or "get politics out of NASA"3 to understand that NASA is much more akin to something like the CCC or the WPA, those New Deal programs that built dams and fish hatcheries and public use trails and such solely for the purpose of employing people during the Great Depression to try and stabilize the economy while enriching the nation.
To that end, it's better to picture NASA as an extension of Johnson's Great Society initiative as well. The point isn't directly to build rocket and go space. The point is to develop, maintain, and nurture an American industrial base in a high-tech industry that doesn't necessarily maintain a stable market for itself without government intervention. It's to do the things that are unprofitable, the decades of wind tunnel research and the science missions and the funding of human spaceflight programs. It's to employ and fund the employment of americans across the entire country, in a very precarious industry that the country deems valuable. At the time ofo writing that thread, NASA employed ~16,000 full-time employes, not counting part time or the upwards of 60,000 people employed by NASA contractors.
The reason NASA exists and didn't die with dead astronauts, a lemon Hubble, or the accomplishing of its initial goal (show up the soviets) is one of inherent politics, politics that yes, do affect how the agency operates, but without those machinations it wouldn't exist at all.
But if that were all, well:
Why Is NASA, then? Why does it continue to exist?
Boy if the above weren't "political" enough. Amy Shira Teitel, a spaceflight historian of renown (who now i believe maintains an online presence streaming SMW Romhacks, actually! fun pivot), once did an exceptional video that has since been re-titled and re-thumbnailed but still holds true in many ways.
We alluded to this in the prior segment, but there's no reason not to state it plainly. The US space program (and later, NASA) exists because we wanted to show the Soviet Union we could nuke them better than they could nuke us., and then that gradually pivoted into a more academic and achievement-oriented propaganda machine, the space race developing a layer of separation from the missile race but losing none of the political or wartime intentions behind it. It was now propaganda, it was a bastion of American freedom versus one of Soviet communism in an ideological war to prove whose approach was superior. It was propaganda, it was soft power, it was an ideological and technological front in the cold war, it was government policy in a way that's not matched even now.
And we're not even going to get into the fact that it was almost over before it started, because in the waning years of Kennedy's presidency, he was terrified Apollo was going to hang over his head when he'd already been losing favor over his handling of the many proxy conflicts of the cold war, and was looking to reform the lunar goal into a collaborative mission of détente4, the US and the Soviets joining forces to explore the moon together.
Because that gets overshadowed by what happened instead. Lee Harvey Oswald cast Power Word: Head Explode on John Fitzerald Kennedy, and in that moment he became a martyr for a program he was trying to worm his way out of. The nation had to honor the lofty goals set upon it in his death, a man on the moon before the decade was out. Of course, Johnson absolutely did his share of political maneuvering to make sure things panned out that way, but the Kennedy Moment is something that has seriously Affected the way NASA and the US space program would be handled by the government forevermore.
Because of course we pulled it off. We pulled off man/moon/decade and it became something that stuck in the heads of every politician after, that space could be used to cement your legacy forevermore, like it did Kennedy. So began the following 50 years of presidential legacy shopping, Nixon wanting to be known for being more than just "in office when it happened" and wanting a greater legacy than "continued apollo I guess" directed NASA to build the Shuttle. Reagan wanted Space Station Freedom. And the past 30 years have been an executive tug of war between the moon, mars, the moon, mars, the moon AND mars, constellation, altair, SLS, artemis, what if we went to an asteroid, like a goddamn metronome as every incumbent executive looks to Leave Their Mark on America's Spaceflight History. Spaceflight is seen as a method to enshrine a politician's legacy.
But of coursse, that's not all. That was, after all a tangent. Let's get right back on track, and jump a few decades forward, to the Shuttle era and points beyond. Spaceflight is a means of force projection and soft power for heavily industrialized nations/entities. This was very plain and clearcut when it was an ideological front in the cold war, but the ability of powers to use spaceflight and access to/competition in/collaboration through it to navigate through diplomacy and create/strengthen relationships with the nations around them is a key reason it continues to play a role in doing anything more than launching telecommunications and defense satellites.
Flying astronauts on Shuttle from countries all around the world was a matter of diplomacy. Flying senators Bill Nelson and Jake Garn on it was a matter of US internal policy. Collaborating on space missions like the Halley Armada5 or any number of spacecraft that have instruments from more than one participant nation is a matter of diplomacy. It is a a way to strengthen/maintain political relationships.
The ISS only exists because of this. Reagan's legacy-shopping proposal for a Space Station Freedom would have failed as ignominiously as his Strategic Deffense Initiative for impossible goals that were either technically or financially infeasible if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, and suddenly the US State Department was Extremely Concerned About That. They were in that moment freaking out about how suddenly all this knowledge, technology and personnel was penniless and could be bought by [us adversary of the time, pick a few you're probably right]. So it became a matter of national policy for the US space industry to intervene and work with the post-Soviet one, to support it politicially and financially. I mentioned this in a previous Rambles about the Antares rocket, but the 90s were absolutely preposterously silly with it. Fucking SeaLaunch.
As part of this new political directive to embrace and engulf the post-Soviet aerospace industry, many things suddenly began to transpire. The Shuttle began flying to the russian Mir space station, american contractors started entering into business partnerships with the former Soviet design bureaus as they emerged as independent engineering firms. And Space Station Freedom was severely reduced in scope, cut down by more than half, and grafted onto a similarly pared down Mir-2 that the Soviets had also been working on at time of collapse, laying the foundation for the International Space Station. Freedom had seen its share of ESA/JAXA/CSA contributions for the same diplomatic reasons as we flew international astronauts or made payload space available on space probes for other nations., and those were carried forward to become the international modules (Kibo, JEM, Columbus, DEXTRE/Canadarm2, etc) for the new station.
As lofty as it is to say "the ISS is a gleaming example of what we can do when we put aside our differences and work together on things" and that remains partially true, the underside of that story is maybe a bit less noble. Still intriguing as hell, though, and I don't want to this to diminish any of it.
I even said it on the Antares thread:
whenever i see space nerds try to say "spaceflight is not political" to them i'm like "buddy you're missing half the fun of it" because you don't get a rocket like Antares without political stuff happening, its a whole fuckin tangle of wacky shit
its not just the engineering in a vacuum
Reading Dragonfly by Bryan Burroughs, a retelling of the absolutely fucked up and wild ride that was that time a visiting resupply ship crashed into Mir that went into the vast backkdrop of political, personal, and cultural history that made such a moment even happen during my wait for jury duty back in March was a treat. My favorite nonfiction books are behind-the-scenes stuff like that, like Alan Stern's Chasing New Horizons about the political battle spanning decades to get a Pluto mission approved, after each one kept getting cancelled through internal NASA catfighting and intra-agency bickery.
This shit is fascinating. It's so much more fun to peel back that curtain and see the gnarled machine inside. It makes my passion for this shit richer even as i see the ugly and the parts that aren't fun.
I'm going to call it here because i could spend all day on this talking about stuff like the time Japan using license-built Thor missiles from mcdonnell-douglas for their satellite launchers in part because of post-WWII restrictions on weapons research and technology6, the history of Japan's space program is fascinating, but that's in part due to the awful history of american postwar occupation of Japan, so again, not rosy.
columbo voice just one more thing i guess
I didn't even shout about the poison pill of neoliberalism and austerity politics, how the "commercial space revolution" championed in recent administrations is just the same "we're gonna privatize the railways" shit britain pulled but this time with legions of adoring, fellatious Musk stans, who see no issue with the change from "the government paying for this capability and owning it" and "the government paying for this capability but not owning it, having to purchase it as a service even as they funded its ability to exist in the first place."
Or about the looming bloodbath as the second Commercial Space Revolution falters as the first one in the 90s with players like Beal and Conestoga and so on did. I don't have much to add there.
But I think the ISS is just going to keep getting extended for all of the reasosn mentioned above, it is too politically valuable in a way that I don't know if "international collaboration on Mars Sample Return/ESA+Jaxa+CSA Astronauts to Gateway+Moon/"the artemis accords"/etc" can match. It has the inertia of already existing, hell, it's still ticking along while we're on the other side of a damn war with Russia right now. I think it's goinng to have to get really moldy or neglected or unsafe like Mir did/was in order to be actively considered for deorbit. And by then, who knows, maybe we'll be out of this mess and we'll have figured some shit out so we maintain that uninterrupted human presence in space for lifetimes to come.
Maybe Taco Bell will make things right and tow the tarp out further to sea this time, if they DO deorbit the ISS, though. Then I won't need to do the Irresponsible Historical Intervention7
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discussed later
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adding that to my booklist
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none of these statements were made in the discussion today, but were the reason I made this twitter thread in the first place
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hey did you read to the end does this "spaceflight as soft diplomatic power/means of détente" thing sound familiar? I didn't even mention Apollo-Soyuz. And I fucking LOVE ASTP.
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we sent SO many lil guys to Halley's Comet
