Posted on 10/17/2003 10:01:04 AM PDT by Charlotte Corday
WASHINGTON -- The House Science Committee, with the help of a panel of five experts, on Thursday tackled one of the toughest questions facing NASA:
Just where, exactly, does the space agency go from here?
The panel's answers? NASA should ditch the shuttle as quickly as possible, build a new and improved spacecraft, and plan to go to Mars -- while continuing its scientific research using automated platforms in space.
The agency doesn't have to get a blank check to do it, they said -- an additional $5 billion per year could be enough. But it does have to streamline its goals and "go somewhere," as one panelist put it.
"The problem is not human spaceflight; the problem is this kind of human spaceflight," said Wesley Huntress, director of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a former space-science official at NASA.
"I think the problem is we're spending $7 billion a year on human spaceflight without an adequate return," said Bruce Murray, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a co-founder of the Planetary Society, a space-exploration advocacy group.
The Feb. 1 loss of the space shuttle Columbia brought to the surface a debate that has been simmering in the scientific community for years. Even the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which examined the causes of the tragedy, suggested opening a national dialogue on the direction of the space program.
So far, that discussion has been fairly muted. Although the White House is examining the issue, there is no schedule for when the administration will announce its conclusions. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has held only one hearing since the Columbia board released its report in late August, although others are planned.
While it waits for direction, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is concentrating on fixing the remaining three shuttles -- and the agency's broken safety culture, noted by the Columbia board.
NASA plans to keep flying the shuttle, perhaps until 2020 or even longer, and the international space station is scheduled to operate for more than another decade. There is no plan to go to Mars.
At Thursday's hearing, the other witnesses -- Alex Roland, a Duke University history professor and former NASA historian; Matthew Koss, a physics professor at College of the Holy Cross; and Michael Griffin, an ex-NASA official who now runs In-Q-Tel Inc., a private company -- agreed that the shuttle and station programs are essentially a dead end.
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
YES! YES! YES!
Good point, now that we're sharing space with Ming the Merciless!
Let's see. At the current rate of catastrophic shuttle accidents, there won't be any shuttles left after 2012...
"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on Mars and returning him safely to near earth orbit."
That is, indeed, the question. And the answer is that there's really no point, except perhaps to prove that we can send people a looong way from Earth and bring them back.
But we already know we could do it -- the technical details aren't difficult, just expensive -- and at this point there's nothing else about Mars that justifies sending people to do what robots can do in their place.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Earth isn't going to exist forever. Sooner or later, a really big asteroid is going to wander into the neighborhood and threaten to wipe out mankind, if we haven't done it to ourselves already. Either we begin the slow, arduous process of looking outward, or we doom ourselves to eventual extinction.
Except air, water, arable land, survivable temperatures, and protection from radiation.
Historically, 99.99% of all living things have become extinct. I don't think humans will have any better success.
Do the Chinese have a booster in the works that will be able to achieve escape velocity?
You may well be right, but we're by far the most intelligent, self-aware and adaptable species that's sprouted up on the rock to date.
I don't know but there were several news articles earlier this year saying that China has unmanned missions to the moon planned for 2005 followed by a manned mission sometime around 2010.
Ouch!
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