Posted on 12/01/2004 4:42:44 PM PST by KevinDavis
As entertainment, I have always particularly enjoyed any television show or movie about space voyage. There’s something compelling about a group of people, dependent on a space ship to carry them to or from danger. It is, as any Star Trek fan will tell you, “the final frontier.” It is also largely absurd. Particularly when it involves billions of dollars this nation can ill afford to throw at a space program that robots could perform better than people.
Recently, I read an article by William Tucker, “The Sober Realities of Manned Space Flight”, that was published in the December 2004 edition of The American Enterprise magazine. Tucker began by noting that President Bush’s suggestion of a 280 million-mile manned space flight to Mars was a good idea. It is, in fact, an astonishingly bad idea, but even Presidents have a right to have bad ideas. “A quick NASA calculation,” noted Tucker, “revealed that the Mars effort would cost nearly $500 billion over 30 years.” Now take that figure and double it. Any estimate like that which is provided by a government agency—any agency—is usually wrong by a factor of two, three or higher.
I was quickly reminded of the spectacular and tragic failures of two Space Shuttles, one when it was launched and the second when it was returning to Earth. “The Space Shuttle was originally supposed to break even and fly every two weeks,” said Greg Klerkx, the author of “Lost in Space”, a critique of NASA. Instead, “it ended up costing $500 million per launch, and flying four or five times a year.” You should think of the Space Shuttle as a very expensive truck used to ferry cargo to the International Space Station.
Even the space stations, first Skylab, then the Russian’s Salyut and Mir, failed to lead to the development of larger facilities manned by dozens of scientists and others who would learn what it would take to create entire space colonies. Nor, with good reason, did we ever return to the Moon.
Today’s International Space Station, conceived in 1984, cost taxpayers $11 billion by 1992 and was still on the drawing board! At that point, the Clinton administration brought in the Russians to help, scaled down the project, and by a single vote in 1993, the House threw another $13 billion at it. The first stage was lifted into orbit in 1995 and, as Tucker notes, “when completed, the ISS will hold six astronauts. The two in residence now spend 85 percent of their time on construction and maintenance. In essence, the US is spending billions so that two astronauts can build a space shed.” By the time it’s finished, it will cost an estimated $150 billion.
Why didn’t we return to the Moon? Why aren’t there huge space stations? As Tucker points out, the experiments on the long-term effects of life in zero gravity demonstrate that humans do not belong in space. “The news has not been good. Muscles atrophy quickly and—for reasons yet unknown—the human body does not manufacture bone tissue in space.” Moreover, the Moon “is a barren oxygen-less desert.” Want to see a desert? We have them right here on Earth.
Humans returning from any extended time in space have the consistency of Jell-O. They are virtually helpless and take days to recover from the experience. Now think about the suggestion by President Bush that we send astronauts on an 18-month journey to Mars. Not only would their bodies suffer ill effects, they would be exposed to huge doses of cosmic radiation. We’ve already managed to kill two Space Shuttle crews, how many more times do we have to do this before we decide to abandon this bad and very expensive idea?
Much of what is required to launch and maintain those machines we send into Earth orbit can be and is done without using Space Shuttles. They have become the equivalent of trolley cars. Trolleys are useful on the sharp inclines of San Francisco streets and picturesque in New Orleans. I’ve been on both. They’re slow and most people still drive their own cars around these cities.
It is the unmanned probes that have been the most successful ventures of NASA and therein lay several simple truths. (1) Humans are neither designed, nor intended to function in outer space and (2) technology permits us to do all the exploration we need to at this point in time. (3) Space probes are far less costly than Space Shuttles that have to be rebuilt from scratch every time they fly. (4) They are far less expensive. (5) No one gets killed.
At this point, I am sure there are those who want to speak poetically of the need to explore outer space by sending manned expeditions “because it is there” or on the chance that there is intelligent life “out there” with which we might come in contact. If it is intelligent, it already knows that the Earth runs red with the blood of its habitants every day as humans kill one another for political or religious reasons and we animals eat one another. Moreover, despite some lovely beaches and spectacular mountain ranges, large areas of the Earth are not the most hospitable places for the humans and other creatures that inhabit it.
So let me suggest that we not waste more billions on NASA’s Space Shuttles and International Space Station. Let’s not go to the Moon again or even think about going to Mars. It’s a really dumb idea. Those privately funded space vehicles will cost you $200,000 a seat to float around for a few minutes or look out the window and see the Earth floating and spinning.
Like we say in New Jersey, forget about it. What I really want is an automobile that will run on salt water. We have plenty of that.
I understand what you are saying and that it should be cheap. If that was the case in the 60s, we would never have gone to the moon and not had personal computers, satellites beaming pictures from Saturn and archaeological discoveries galore.
JFKs goal of putting a man on the moon and getting him back plus Demmings genius made the future as we know it possible.
Technological leaps come when big dreams are in the picture. Who knows what cost technology will be. But I would rather do both, send robots as we are to the planets and reach for the stars at the same time.
Take care.
SR
If we really want to explore the moon, here's how to do it. Launch some tiny, toy-sized rovers with mini-cams on them. Set them up to be remote controlled via radio link on pay-to-use web sites. (The light-speed lag for radio waves to the moon and back is only a couple of seconds, as opposed to the 23 minutes it takes for radio to get to Mars.) Let subscribers pay a reasonable fee for the time they spend "exploring" and simply take the data dumps from the cameras and sell those for study.
It's human nature to want to know what's over the next hill. Give us the chance to explore and we'll pay to do it. Someone can get rich in the process and it will expand the knowledge of the moon for everyone. It'll be safe, cheap, and make a profit.
GW
“revealed that the Mars effort would cost nearly $500 billion over 30 years.”
Only if the government does it.
Yep, good thing the Wright Brothers and Burt Rutan didn't/don't have such people hanging around them.
He doesn't know what he's talking about, insofar as he presents some problems which are artifacts of the political processes involved, not engineering problems. We don't need to launch humans with every payload, we need a heavy lift capability for anything we plan to do in space.
Von Braun suggested twelve Saturn V launches would be required (the entire lunar program, plus) to assemble just one Mars mission in Earth orbit. The amount of mass budget needed for a Mars round trip mission would be greatly reduced by not actually landing on Mars, but parking in orbit around Mars to direct robotic remote control surface probes in nearly real time.
The best way to do that is to move the ISS (or the most durable parts of it), unmanned, out of Earth orbit, in a lowest energy trajectory to Mars, where it would become the Mars orbital station. Human missions to Mars would then have a destination, a command post, and a safer habitat off the surface when human surface expeditions began some time thereafter.
This could begin in a relatively few years from now, when the ISS is scheduled to be dumped into the Pacific anyway.
The ISS would be guyed where necessary, its photovoltaic arrays upgraded, with some sort of protective coating applied to the outside. Several new docking modules would be installed and tested. The whole thing would then be pushed into ever-higher orbit until it was out of Earth's sphere of influence and on its way to its rendezvous with Mars.
As the ISS was approaching Martian orbit, more provisions (food, fuel, whatnot) would be launched for robotic rendezvous with the station in orbit around Mars, or if the ISS happened to, uh, miss its rendezvous, the supply ship would become the first module of a new station, to be assembled in Mars orbit.
['Civ accepts the flowers thrown by the crowd]
Oh, no, that's the last thing we need. GWB proposes an ambitious resumption of the vision of Von Braun et al, and that's a torch that was borne at one time by JFK. This is yet another chip, go ahead, we dare ya, try to knock it off the prez' shoulder. The space program, if funded, will benefit the aerospace industries, and there are such companies in places like, oh, I don't know, California, Washington, Massachusetts, even Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and New York.
Astronomers plan telescope on Moon
3 January 2002
New Scientist
Duncan Graham-Rowe
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1735
Maccone also wants to give the region around the Daedalus crater some form of protection status, to create a permanent quiet zone that would be safe no matter what technology is developed in the future. "The far side is in my opinion a unique treasure that should be preserved for the sake of humankind," he says.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.