Mission to Mars
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Following the Columbia disaster, I joined the anti-manned-space-flight school of thought. The basic premise is that space travel is too expensive and too dangerous to send human beings aloft, especially when all of their work can be done by robotic craft. In addition, NASA should focus on scientific research and exploration, which is almost universally done by machines.
I recently read a publication by Popular Science magazine that detailed possibilities for space travel in the year 2100. It changed my thinking. I still think there’s no reason to send astronauts into orbit to do routine tasks that can be safely and effectively executed by robots. For instance, there’s no need to risk the lives of 7 people to launch a new weather satellite or conduct microgravity experiments. However, I realized that to have humans exploring the solar system in a century, then we need to have manned space flight now.
In other words, we need to go to Mars, just as the President has requested. I understand that there are a lot of pressing problems here on Earth that need to be dealt with — I tend to think that this administration is generally making things worse. Nonetheless, $1 billion is not a lot of money in terms of the national budget. It’s less than the cost of a B-2 bomber. Farm subsidies (forget the myth of the family farmer, these are really just corporate payouts to ADM and other agricorps) are $332 billion annually. More to the point, every dollar spent on space technology translates into about $6 in the terrestrial economy from new technologies and products.
NASA is pursuing the President’s directive with the usual bureaucratic shortsightedness. The agency has cancelled all missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope, focusing instead on the International Space Station. The Hubble is one of the most important and expensive scientific instruments of the 20th Century, and by refusing to maintain it, NASA has relegated the space telescope to so much orbital debris. While it is imperative that the human race set foot on the red planet, we cannot loose sight of the basic science that also must be conducted in space.
Jeff on 10 February 2004 at 10:20 pm | Permalink
I believe that we do need to continue our human spaceflight program. The only question that I have is, “In what capacity should we continue our human spaceflight program?” If I were to assess the needs/goals of the international space community, I believe that they should be:
1. Explore our solar system with robotic probes;
2. Establish a moon outpost to test exploration technology; and
3. Send robotic interstellar probes to see if there is a place to send human explorers beyond our system.
In other words, we should keep human spaceflight to between the moon and the earth until we find a reason to go beyond our moon (i.e., mining resources) and until we have developed the means.
While on the moon we can test mining techniques and new power and transport technologies. We could possibly develop interstellar robotic and human exploratory spacecraft. We could ship raw materials and key components into space and assemble them on the moon. The cost of launching from the moon would be considerable less than the earth. Constructing the vehicles on the moon will also help avoid the problems with maintaining orbit and avoiding space debris. Furthermore, it may be possible to avoid solar flare damage by constructing the vehicles below the surface of the moon. We could possible design a fairly low cost robotic mission to find possible geological formations below the moon’s surface and then follow that up with an exploratory boring device.
While the possibilities are only limited by our imagination, our goals should be specific and attainable, and there should be short and long term goals. Also, these goals must have measurable results.