To create nuclear weapons is the cherished dream of any state that wants to threaten its neighbors with a military advantage of a huge scale. To reach the atomic force further, thousands of kilometers away, you need bombers or missiles. All these technologies are expensive. Not every state can afford the luxury of a nuclear triad . Finally, it is impossible to acquire membership in a nuclear club : international organizations are diligently hampering attempts to master the technology of producing nuclear weapons.

Plutonium enrichment - drastic measures in the political arena. Creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles by another small country - wrinkles on the foreheads of generals around the world. The launch of a military satellite to scan the Earth’s surface or to provide communications takes place without special attention: private companies are also engaged in mapping and satellite communications, the only difference is in the customer. The launches of research satellites and people into orbit demonstrate a peaceful desire to do science and are in no way stopped.

The nuclear powers today are 8-9, some more have either inherited or created nuclear weapons, but abandoned them. There are few space agencies and companies in the world that are capable of putting cargo into orbit around the Earth. And only three countries in the history have successfully implemented the technology of human flight.

In 2011, a seemingly unexpected event occurred. The number of states capable of changing the crew to the ISS has decreased to one. The duration of the Space Shuttle program has come to an end, and the United States has lost funds for launching a person into orbit. China was not allowed to cooperate on the International Space Station from the very beginning. Only the Russian "Unions" remained, places in which all other participants had to buy.
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STS-135 , the last flight of shuttles, ended in the summer of 2011. For five years, nothing has changed: China continues to work on its own space station, Roskosmos sells tickets to the ISS. NASA has to rely on another country's space agency, as politicians like to smack . This situation will remain for about a couple of years: the SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace and Boeing companies are completing work on manned spacecraft. NASA does not plan to buy seats in the "Unions" after 2018.

And yet, how did you get such a break? To understand it, you need to look at how NASA plans are formed.

1962

In the early sixties, the United States lagged behind a competitor in the new race, the boundary of which was space. In 1957, the launch of Sputnik-1 was a shock. On the delivery vehicle of nuclear warheads, the enemy brought out the first artificial satellite of the Earth, immediately winning points and scientific prestige, and military potential. Sputnik-1 squeaked loudly about its existence, and any radio amateur could hear it. In the USA, neither the R-7 rocket parameters, nor the launch itself were expected. The dictionaries contain the words " satellite crisis " and the missile gap .

In the wake of the image of a significant lag in the technological sphere from the USSR, US government agencies began to massively pour money into education, science and research. The space record was repeated - in 1958, Explorer 1 was launched, an American satellite, based on the behavior of which Van Allen suggested the existence of the Earth’s radiation belts. Both the United States and the USSR launch animals into orbit, monitor their survival and evaluate the theoretical possibility of human flight. However, the American side is also lagging behind: Laika was launched in 1957, in 1960, live Belka and Strelka returned from orbit for the first time.


The fourth stage of the Yunona-1 rocket did not separate from the Explorer 1 satellite.

In 1961, Senior Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin was promoted to major, and the world learned his name forever. And here the United States had a lag: Alan Shepard was launched a month later by Vostok-1 and only on a suborbital flight. Gagarin made one almost full-fledged orbit around the Earth and spent 1 hour 48 minutes in orbit.

On February 20, 1962, the first orbital flight of a NASA astronaut took place. For almost five hours, astronaut John Glenn made three orbits in the Friendship 7 - more and longer than Gagarin. However, six months before this, astronaut German Titov in the Vostok-2 cabin worked a day in orbit and made 17 orbits. In August 1962, the noticeable backlog of the United States in the space race only intensifies: cosmonauts Nikolaev and Popovich carry out a group flight on the Vostok-3 and Vostok-4 ships, maintain contact with each other, work out the satellite interception scenario.

The presidents of the United States showed a limited interest in space and tried to solve organizational issues. In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower reorganized the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA. The following year, the new civilian agency is being transferred to power for launches that used to belong to the army.

But something significant without full support could not be achieved. In March 1961, the head of NASA, Jace Webb, tried to approve the budget of NASA with the landing of a man on the Moon before the end of the decade - NASA had already conducted basic research on the possibilities of such a flight . Kennedy refused for the simple reason that the requested amount was too large. Vostok-1 changed Kennedy’s attitude to space: now he was looking for something that would have brought the country out of a state of fear and humiliation. On May 25, 1962, the President of the United States proposes to Congress the idea of ​​a flight to the moon, which must be implemented before the end of the decade - an idea that he found after consulting with NASA specialists.



September 12 of that year, Kennedy read out one of the most famous speeches in the history of the country . The ambitious idea of ​​flying to a satellite of the Earth needed money, which means support from the population, which could easily oppose the expensive undertaking. Here is one of the most cited speech fragments:

In space, there is no contention, injustice, interethnic conflicts. It is unknown and fraught with danger for all of us equally. And if we conquer it, it must belong to all of humanity, and we will need to establish peaceful cooperation. But many do not understand why the Moon does not give us rest. What a strange goal? With the same success you can ask: why climb the highest mountain in the world? Why was the first transatlantic flight 35 years ago? Why should the Rice University team play with the University of Texas team?

Yes, we decided to conquer the moon, and it was in this decade. This is not an easy goal, but all the better: such a test will allow us to give everything to the maximum, to show what we can do, to realize all our power. This is a challenge that we are ready to take here and now. And we only hope to win!

That is why last year I made a decision - one of the most important in my presidential career - to throw all my strength on the space research program.

1970 year

In American English, the word moonshot appeared, which denoted both the Moon landing program itself and any other ambitious projects with unclear prospects for implementation, but of high importance and a huge price. The Soviet moonshot did not work - for the manned missions an extra-heavy H-1 rocket was needed, which exploded in all four test launches. We confined ourselves to research on two moon rovers .

The American manned program was successfully implemented. NASA's ambitious project allowed us to get ahead in the space race. In the framework of the Apollo program in July 1969, the human foot first stepped onto the surface of another celestial body. What was much more important for politics, a competitor could not repeat the flight. To this day, only 12 Americans have been on the moon in six flights.


Some of the companies that made parts of the Saturn-5 rocket.

By 1970, flights continued. Meanwhile, the designers have long thought about future projects. From the mid-sixties, work on drawing boards began to come to an end. Created modules of the ship for flight and landing on the moon and a huge "Saturn-5", was trained flight operators and other personnel. Only one rocket demanded the full power of the US industry: the work was distributed among Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft Company, IBM and many others. The flight was still far away, but von Braun’s team gradually entered the phase when the main work was completed, and it was too early to completely depart from the project.

Designers needed a new task. Of course, the United States Congress would never have allocated funds for another space program - Apollo was already eating through the budget. Began the search, which remained in history as the Apollo Applications Program . It was necessary to find an application created under the Apollo program for new scientific missions. From the first ideas - the base on the moon and the flight near Venus - the orbital station Skylab and the flight "Soyuz-Apollo" were born.

In general, the space station at NASA was looking at how to work out a flight to Mars - a much longer flight than to the Moon. The lunar base will not help in studying the effects of long-term microgravity on the human body. Money for the space station with the sole purpose of working off an unapproved flight to Mars would not be given, therefore Skylab should have been engaged in experiments and studying the Earth from orbit.

After studying possible options - from small to giants to dozens of astronauts - NASA approved the Skylab that happened. The crew was delivered on disposable carriers - Apollo ships. But politics intervenes.


Skylab, concept.

While the designers were working on the station, the politicians made their own adjustments. Kennedy estimated the cost of the Apollo program at $ 7 billion, which was an extremely unrealistic estimate. In his famous speech, he reassured that at that time they were spending 40 cents a week on a US citizen, and the moon program promised to raise this figure to 50 cents. The head of NASA Webb has estimated the Apollo program at a much more shocking $ 20 billion. This estimate turned out to be more accurate - the total cost was $ 23.9 billion. In 1973, the final figure of $ 25.4 billion was announced in a report to Congress. If you try to calculate inflation, then in modern money it is about 140 billion US dollars — the annual gross domestic product of developing countries is estimated by the numbers of such orders.

In 1970, incumbent President Nixon gave this instruction in a message about the future of the US space program :

Six main goals

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3. We must work to significantly reduce the cost of space activities. For a while, our current rocket technology will work as a reliable launching power. But when building in the longer term, we need to develop less costly and less complicated solutions for transporting the payload into space. Such solutions — designed to be useful for a wide range of scientific, defense and commercial tasks — can help us implement cost-saving measures in all aspects of our space program. At the moment, we are studying in more detail the feasibility of the space shuttle program as one of the ways to achieve this goal.

1984

As you might guess, it was about the program " Space Shuttle ", which was supposed to drive the launch cost of hundreds of dollars per kilogram. The design of the device has changed greatly in the course of the design and has found its final shape, with which we are all familiar. Grew up the price tag, failed to provide simplicity. Why it all happened - the topic of another conversation .


Space Shuttle, concept, 1969.

In 1973, three crews were launched on the remnants of the Apollo program on Skylab. Until 1979, the station remained in orbit, there were even hopes to raise its orbit using the first space shuttles. But the shuttle made its first orbital space flight only in 1981. Skylab fell to Australia, and Esperance County issued a fine for NASA for garbage.

So, for 1984, NASA was left with the only manned launch vehicle that could only be in low-Earth orbit. The money for new “toys” is no longer begging - the shuttles are reusable and must work out the investments put in them during the construction phase. There was no question of returning to the moon or sending astronauts to Mars and further to the solar system. Scientific work in the shuttles was carried out using the Spacelab modules, which were installed in the cargo hold.

Politicians dictated all the new conditions of the game. Here is an excerpt from the January 25, 1984 address of President Ronald Reagan’s "The State of the Country":

Our progress in space, taking tremendous steps for all of humanity, is a tribute to American teamwork and American excellence. In general, efforts have united our greatest minds in government, industry and science. And we proudly say: we are the first; we're the best; we are like that because we are free.

America has always been the greatest when we dared to be great. We can achieve greatness again. We can follow our dream to distant stars, live and work in space with peaceful, economic and scientific benefits. Today, I am ordering NASA to develop a permanently inhabited space station and do it within a decade.

The space station will make a qualitative leap in our research of science, communications, metals, vital medical preparations that can be made only in space. We want our friends to help us cope with these challenges, and we want to share the fruits of work with them. NASA will invite other countries to participate so that we can strengthen the world, build prosperity and expand freedom for all who share our goals.

2004

The Freedom (Freedom) space station project was launched under Reagan, was implemented under Clinton, and it seems that its final configuration was achieved only in recent years. It has changed significantly from the original sentences. In fact, the ISS consists of the Russian and American segment of the ISS. The latter is the result of the cooperation of several countries conceived by Reagan, the modules built by the European Space Agency, NASA and Japan.


One of several Freedom concepts.

For ten years, NASA has been working on the station’s project, but received weak financial support. From 1984 to 1993, the plans for the future station were altered seven times, and there was no question of starting assembly. "Freedom" was almost deleted from NASA funding: in June 1993, the corresponding amendment did not have just one vote in the lower house of the US Congress. To what began as “Freedom”, through the PMA-1 adapter was attached what began as “Mir-2”, what largely saved the project.

In the nineties, the political climate allowed cooperation with the Russian side. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia inherited the experience of managing long-term multi-module space stations and the necessary equipment, but not the former budget. Freedom was cut to reduce costs and entered the International Space Station.

Although the ISS has not yet been completed, the political forces have chosen a new direction for NASA. In 2004, President Bush, in his speech, highlighted the need to return to the moon:

Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020 as a launch point for more distant missions. Not later than 2008, we will start launching a series of robotic flights on the lunar surface to study and prepare future human exploration. With the use of the Piloted Research Ship, we will undertake extended human expeditions on the Moon as early as 2015 with the goal of living and working there in increasingly longer periods of time. Eugene Cernan, who is present here today - the last man whose foot stepped on the lunar surface - said the following when he left [the Moon]: “We are leaving the same way as we came and, with God's help, we will return - with peace and hope for everything humanity. "

Returning to the moon is an important step for our entire space program. Creating a long-term human presence on the Moon can significantly reduce the cost of further space exploration, making even more ambitious flights possible. Raising a heavy spacecraft from the earth's atmosphere is expensive. A spacecraft assembled and equipped on the moon can go out of its lower gravity, require much less energy and, therefore, money. Also, the moon is a rich source of resources. Its soil contains raw materials that can be collected and processed into rocket fuel or breathing air. We can use our time on the moon to create and test new methods, technologies and systems that will allow us to operate in other, more complex conditions. The moon is a logical step forward to further progress and achievements.

2010

So began the program " Constellation ". Within its framework, the Orion spacecraft, the Altair lunar module, the Ares-1 heavy rocket and the Ares-5 super-heavy rocket were planned.

It was Ares-1 and Orion that were supposed to deliver astronauts to the ISS after the shutdown of the shuttles. The rocket consisted of a solid-fuel stage and a second stage on liquid fuel. Because of its distinctive appearance, it received the nickname “Stick”.


Comparison of several launch systems and the load thrown by them into a low earth orbit.

NASA was required at the same time to continue regular crew changes on the ISS, launch of new modules and additional equipment, as well as develop new means of launch, spacecraft, lunar vehicles. All this had to be done in conditions of limited resources. Not surprisingly, the work was done slowly. The Ares-1 missile managed to take off only once during a test flight in 2009.

Shortly after taking over the post, the new US president announced that the Constellation program went beyond the budget and time frame. Checks and feasibility studies indicated that NASA could not afford to return to the moon or plan to fly to Mars. In 2010, Barack Obama closes the program "Constellation" and designates a new goal:

At the beginning of the next decade, several manned flights will test and test the systems needed for research missions for low earth orbit. By 2025, we are expecting the creation of a new spacecraft for long journeys, which will allow us to launch the first manned flights beyond the limits of the moon into deep space. So, we will begin - we will begin by launching astronauts on an asteroid for the first time in history. I believe that by the mid-2030s we will be able to launch people into the orbit of Mars and return them to Earth safely and safely. Then landing on Mars will follow. And I hope that I will live to see her.

But I want to repeat - I want to repeat the following: the breakthrough development of propulsion systems and other advanced technologies will be critical for the exploration of deep space. And I challenge NASA to overcome these obstacles. And I will give you the resources to overcome these barriers. And I know that you will do it, with resourcefulness and strength, because this is what you have always done.

So, I understand that some believe that we must first try to return to the surface of the moon, as planned earlier. But I will be frank: we were already there. Buzz was there. For research there is much more space, there is a lot of new things that we will learn in this process. Therefore, I believe that it is much more important to increase our capacities and scope and work with a series of increasingly complex goals, improving our technological capabilities with each step forward. That is what this strategy produces. This is how we guarantee that in the new century our leadership in space is even stronger than in the previous one.

Present tense

The ship "Orion" began in the framework of the program "Constellation", but now he found himself at the top of the SLS rocket. Almost all the other achievements of the "Constellation" went to the dustbin of history. The development of the Space Launch System is gradually proceeding in the best traditions of the Nazis: although progress is noticeable, the dates are shifting. The future rocket engines are being tested , the future ship is being prepared , long-term flight experiments on astronauts are being planned . The cost of supporting SLS is already estimated at $ 2 billion per year, with a plan of up to 2 launches per year. The enormous cost of developing and building rockets threatens the project with an uncertain future, but hopes for Mars remain.


Comparison of several SLS configurations

The US space agency temporarily buys seats in Soyuz: they did not have time to replace the shuttle, and the project of the Ares-1 rocket was minimized. In a couple of years, astronauts will deliver private spacecraft to the ISS. The station itself is not so long - the life of the ISS extended until 2024. A successor at the end of this period is not expected. Roscosmos is planning a project of the National Orbital Space Station, China continues to work alone on a series of Tyangun stations. The plans of NASA to create its own space station is not known.

The purely formally created post of NASA administrator in 1958 suggests that this person will determine the goals and methods of research. In fact, the administration of NASA is subject to the momentary whims of the President of the United States, which change every 4-8 years. Each of the presidents is a representative of one of the two opposing parties. And if the previous Republican President started something, but did not finish, there is a great temptation to cancel his orders and create his own direction in the national space program. Democrat-Obama closed the "Constellation", started under Republican-Bush, Republican-Nixon cut off the remnants of the Apollo project, started under Democrat-Kennedy. The same fate can befall SLS and the very idea of ​​flying to Mars.

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But this brief history is not even evidence that there is something wrong in a single space agency or state. There is nothing wrong with the fact that the policy of the organization is determined by those who allocate money to it. The only problem is that requests can change too quickly. The space agencies of all states are confronted with questions of the volatility of customers' wishes. The case of NASA is not new - just recall the “ Buran ”.

The creation of a new ship and launch system requires a decade of work and significant injections of budget funds. The decade was spent on landing a man on the moon, a decade on the creation of shuttles, a decade on assembling the ISS to the level of habitability.

Flying into deep space will require much more time and resources. The first landing on Mars, the creation of a permanent settlement on the Moon, expeditions on Mars - against this background mega-projects of the past will seem like a joke. This will easily drag on for 20–30 years of constant development and financing - can anyone be patient and not interrupt the project?

Colonies on other planets, terraforming and creating ships for flights to other solar systems means about a hundred years of waiting. Even a swarm of the most advanced robots of the post-singularity era is powerless over the physical laws that will slow down projects of this scale. What will the space exploration project look like for people of that era?

For the people of the near future there will be space projects, the implementation of which requires centuries of hard work and expectations. Let's hope they have enough political vision and will to remember the benefits of protracted construction for future generations.