Jay, Aerospace Industry Ready for outsourcing?
Is the Aerospace Industry Ready for Mars?
By JOHN SCHWARTZ and MICHELINE MAYNARD
Published: March 21, 2004
CAN they do it?
When President Bush announced a plan early this year to send Americans back to the moon - and beyond, to Mars - skeptics wondered whether NASA, with its decades of tread-water budgets and institutional inertia, was up to the job.
Equally important, though, is a companion question: Is the aerospace industry up to the job? Boeing, for one, says it is eager to take up the challenge, and refers to decades of expertise in running enormously complex space ventures.
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But the very process that made it the biggest NASA contractor - a sweeping consolidation of the aerospace industry - has sharply reduced competition, and with it, critics say, the creative clash of ideas that helps produce great technological leaps.
Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other companies that contribute to the space program are the stewards of an ailing industry, facing a brain drain as its aging engineers retire, with few newcomers entering the field.
The uncertainty has been underscored recently. Since Mr. Bush made his initial announcement, which was greeted with some public skepticism, he has been largely silent on the subject, not even mentioning it in his State of the Union address.
"Is the nation really going to support, given the budget deficit, spending more money on a manned mission?" asked Cai von Rumohr, an aerospace analyst at SG Cowan. Given all the unknowns, he said, trying to estimate the impact on particular companies is not even worth the effort. "You're talking lots of dollars, a long-term horizon, an unclear political mandate," he said. "There's still lots of 'ifs.' "
For Boeing, any rewards in Mr. Bush's vision are especially vague, said Prof. Charles Hill at the University of Washington in Seattle, who has studied the company for years and calls himself "extremely skeptical."
If space exploration proceeds, of course, Boeing stands to benefit tremendously. The company has absorbed the military and aerospace units of Rockwell, builder of the space shuttle; Rocketdyne, a Rockwell unit that built the main shuttle engines; and McDonnell Douglas, builder of some shuttle components.
Though any missions to the moon or to Mars would be "strategically important" to Boeing in its attempts to broaden beyond commercial aviation and military work, it has pressing issues to deal with now, Professor Hill added.
Last year, Airbus surpassed it in commercial aviation sales. Last month, the government canceled its longstanding development work on the Comanche helicopter. The company also said that it would curb production of its 767 tanker plane because of the Pentagon's review of whether Boeing acted improperly by hiring a former military official. In 2003, the space unit of Boeing lost nearly $1.8 billion on $3 billion in revenue.
Though a Mars mission could be lucrative, it would not lift Boeing out of its current trough, Professor Hill said. "It is so far out in the future,'' he said.
Still, John M. Lounge, a former astronaut who is director of program development for Boeing NASA Systems in Houston, said he was energized by the prospect of President Bush's proposal. "I was afraid we were on a 'going out of business' plan for American human space flight," he said.
Mike Mott, a Boeing vice president and general manager for its NASA systems, said the company was up to the task. "The complexity of developing, integrating and operating the dozens, if not hundreds, of robotic, human and telerobotic systems it will take to launch, assemble, transfer, land and build permanent habitats on the moon and Mars far exceeds anything we have ever attempted to do in space," he testified on March 5 before the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy. "But we have been building vehicles in space for a fairly long time. We know how to do that part of it. We have been integrating very large, complex, adaptable, long-term systems. So we know how to do that, as well."
BUT those who have studied today's space program and NASA's relationships with its biggest contractors have misgivings.
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