A version of my review appeared in the Huntsville (AL) Times in late 2004.
Our president favors bold strokes in dealing with complex public policy issues, severing their Gordian knots seemingly at will. Perhaps his most laudable though not widely acknowledged decision was, in January 2004, to restructure the nation's efforts in human spaceflight.
Sietzen and Cowing's book chronicling this decision uneasily straddles the border between journalism and history. The authors had early access to a number of the key players, and were behind the first comprehensive news accounts of the new "Vision for Space Exploration". The book is only structured historically in the first few and last chapters; the middle chapters hop around throughout the period from early 2003 to early 2004, following several distinct threads.
The need for change was made clear by the Columbia accident, and the resulting public attention, investigation and report. The authors lay blame for the mess with former administrator Dan Goldin, casting a negative light on his character through anecdotes from his last days at NASA. Blaming things on the previous administration (or their holdovers) isn't unheard of. However the authors rather weaken their case by discussing 2001 and 2003 in such detail, while devoting almost no text to 2002, Administrator Sean O'Keefe's first year on the job.
The complexity of public policy for human spaceflight long predates Dan Goldin. The knot grew simply through the self-sustainment of human space activities without a clear purpose in the 3 decades since Apollo, with a variety of conflicting presidential and congressional directives. We mostly knew what we were doing, and did some things beautifully, but why exactly were we doing it? The Columbia investigation report, echoed by Congress and many others, called for a new statement of purpose for human space exploration.
Sietzen and Cowing highlight the White House groups that worked to create the new vision - evolving from a group of mid-level staff who cared about space exploration to agency deputies and heads and later including Sean O'Keefe's direct involvement. The outcome - moving humans beyond Earth orbit again - was almost inevitable. The emphasis on the Moon in the early stages perhaps less so, but some grassroots organizations had been arguing for the Moon for quite some time. The authors describe the wave of grassroots and industry support that followed.
Support from Congress and the general public, however, has been less forthcoming. One strategic and two tactical errors likely account for this. First, Congress was not consulted, and not even informed after asking questions of White House staff, until January 14, 2004. Second, the unveiling was twice delayed and bits and pieces leaked out, to the extent that well before the president spoke headlines blared about the new trillion-dollar mission to Mars, and it became fodder for late-night comedy.
This was doubly damaging because the call for Mars in the president's statement was sufficiently vague that the cost estimates bandied about could not be instantly refuted, but also because Mars was not the real focus of the new vision. The main immediate impact of the new vision in logically forcing a complete replacement of our human spaceflight activities seems to have been little noticed outside of the space community.
The authors discuss much of this - but unfortunately lack some perspective since, through UPI, they had joined in the fray pre-empting Bush's speech. Did their authoritative UPI report mean fewer people actually paid attention when the president spoke?
The other mistake was the leak immediately following on the cancellation of future Hubble servicing missions, provoking an overwhelming outcry that was blamed on but in fact had little to do with the new vision.
The book includes a rather mundane set of color photo plates, and a DVD with video clips surrounding events of January 14, 2004. The DVD also has NASA simulations of Moon and Mars exploration, fun but not terribly informative.
The text is marred by a leaden style; there are also some glaring typos (for example a silly story of O'Keefe on becoming administrator is repeated twice). Some pages seem merely a data dump - do we really need almost four pages of 10-year-old quotes and votes from John Kerry against the space station?
Nevertheless, skim between the anecdotes and data and you will gain a good feel for some of the personalities at work in space policy. The authors communicate well the excitement the new vision brings, and the transformations under way at NASA, including even information following the recommendations of the June 2004 Aldridge commission report, very shortly before the book came out.
This book is certainly not one for the ages, but we'll have the present administration for 3 more years, so it's interesting to gain insight into how they come to decisions like this - particularly when, as in this case, they mostly did the right thing.
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