Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Sometimes bigger is better. The economy size is cheaper by the pound, the gallon, the dozen. We all look for bargains in volume. The lesson that NASA should have learned from the Soviet space program is that bigger boosters are better. When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, Americans were shocked into a space race in which their very survival seemed to be at stake. But how could Americans compete? The U.S. military�industrial complex had been frantically building nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to deliver these warheads to targets in the Soviet Union. Americans also feared that the Soviets might attempt a fi rststrike sneak attack to destroy all our missiles on the ground before we could launch them. So the United States built compact, highly effi cient boosters that were small enough to tuck neatly away inside concrete bunkers where they could survive a nuclear blast. Then our missiles could still be launched in retaliation to a fi rst-strike attack. This approach precipitated the mutually assured destruction policy, aptly named MAD. To make sure our rockets were small enough to fi t into the concrete silos, the missiles were made of exotic, expensive materials (like high-strength, low-weight titanium) and were assembled by engineers wearing surgical gowns. Clean rooms were necessary to avoid a speck of dust jamming the complex machinery. When the Soviets started launching men into orbit, the United States strove to catch up by putting our astronauts into tiny capsules atop ICBMs�the only launch vehicles we had. The boosters were expensive and the capsules were puny. Meanwhile, the Russians realized that bigger was better. Their launch vehicles were built out of steel, assembled by factory workers. They didn�t use exotic materials, and the vehicles were ineffi cient�they went for size, which more than made up for the ineffi ciencies. Their fi rst satellite, Sputnik I, was a cannonball weighing 184 pounds. The fi rst American satellite, Explorer I, launched in 1958, weighed only 30 pounds. Sputnik II weighed a ton and carried a dog. The Soviets were able to launch huge spacecraft into orbit�soon they were launching crews of two and three men. Americans were losing the race. They were forced to deal with cramped spaces; forced into developing miniature electronics and using astronauts �with compact builds� who were under six feet tall. Gus Grissom, one of the original Mercury-seven astronauts, at fi vefoot- seven was the perfect size; his fellow astronauts called the Mercury capsule the �Gus mobile.� The pressure to invent microelectronics advanced computer technology. The small-is-beautiful philosophy eventually gave American electronics an advantage. Not that it was planned that way. In 1968, Arthur Schnitt, an engineer at the Aerospace Corporation (a think tank for the U.S. Air Force), proposed using large boosters that would capitalize on the economy of scale. Gregg Easterbrook tells the story in his Newsweek article, �Big Dumb Rockets,� which appeared on August 17, 1987. Schnitt�s idea was very similar to the Russian approach: it would make space travel a lot less expensive. In 1968, his classifi ed work was reviewed and promptly canceled. The successor to the moon project would not be Big Dumb Rockets, but the highly complex and expensive shuttle. On November 9, 1967, the fi rst Saturn V was launched in an unmanned test. It was America�s fi rst heavy lifter. It was big, but not so dumb. It lifted over one hundred tons into Earth orbit. It performed fl awlessly. America was on its way to the moon. Today, because of a decision made in 1968, we have the shuttle. It is complicated, unsafe, and ineffi cient. It is as big as the moon rocket but it carries less than thirty tons into orbit (less than one third of what the Saturn V carried). The shuttle�s payload is not big, nor is the shuttle dumb or cheap. After two horrible failures of the shuttle, which cost the lives of fourteen astronauts, it is time to learn from our mistakes and build a new launch vehicle that is bigger and better.