A Man, a Planet Why President Bush is promising the moon (and Mars)

The Wall Street Journal - OpinionJournal ^ | January 13, 2004 | BRENDAN MINITER

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Democratic presidential contenders may think they've made every political promise under the sun, but President Bush is now promising the moon, and Mars too. This is a shrewd political move.

The first thing Mr. Bush's space initiative--which includes setting up a lunar base to use for possible manned missions to Mars--does is address a potential political liability. The breakup upon re-entry of the space shuttle Columbia is just one of the problems the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working to overcome. When Mr. Bush took office NASA was in disarray. The agency's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, had asked each of the major accounting firms to audit the books, but they all refused, saying the task was impossible. For one thing, the agency didn't adhere to uniform accounting rules, making it impossible to distinguish between costs and investments.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

January 13, 2004 Will there be green cheese on the pillow? ___________[Full text] At the risk of sounding like an old fart on the lunatic fringe, let me say here and now that I am totally opposed to the building of Hilton Hotels on the moon. I am aware that our nation was built by trail-blazing men and women unafraid of new frontiers. I am aware that this planet is all out of new frontiers. Scores of "Star Trek" episodes convinced me that space is the final frontier. I can accept, then, that when we can hop on a rocket the way we hop on a bus, the moon will be the first stop past home, just six days away. If the rocket's headed toward cooler climes, the next stop is Mars.

George W. Bush is expected this week to announce plans to someday build a peopled base on the moon, and to begin work toward delivering human beings to Mars. That has led reporters to remind us that entrepreneurs have been looking toward these new frontiers for some time, plotting ways to generate power on the moon, for example.

That, says the New York Times, "could support numerous ventures, including resorts for intrepid millionaires who might take advantage of the moon's low gravity to dabble in long-distance golf or, after renting wings, self-propelled flight."

According to the Times, a Japanese construction company and the Hilton hotel chain have both in the past expressed interest in developing lunar tourism.

Making a mess of things

So that's where we'll send our illegal immigrants -- as Ralph Kramden would say, "To the moon!" They can shovel lunar sand and endure loneliness of galactic proportions. They can clean toilets whose contents tend to wander away and learn to secure sheets to hotel beds with extra-tight Marine Corps corners. My morning friends at the bakery aren't taking this threat too seriously. They rolled their eyes over the prospect of building anything on the moon or Mars. But one woman in her 60s quietly said, "Who thought we'd ever have to buy water from the store because what comes from the tap isn't fit to drink?"

Who ever thought we'd clutter the paths of the Himalayas with trash, and demean the summit of Mt. Everest with cell phone conversations? Who ever thought we'd want to run oil lines through the Alaskan wilderness?

Reader Michelle Leon of Detroit told me she looks at photos of the Martian landscape and sees it "uncluttered and untouched, innocent, even virginal." But she feels no delight, thinking, "How long until we screw it up?"

She says, "We are not satisfied to just destroy our own landscape. We'll travel as far as we are able to put our mark on the universe."

Walt Disney Moon

I, too, have no faith in American restraint. The nation, the world and, yes, the universe are run not by people who drive Priuses and pray for peace but by (mostly) men who run Exxon and ITT and Lockheed and Boeing and Hilton and Halliburton. They may love their children, but they are driven by shareholders to turn profits on every frontier.

I cringe to think of tourists on the moon, the way some columnist probably griped in the late 1960s about the plans to build an amusement park on a vast primeval swamp near Orlando. Nobody listened, and now Disney World comprises 47 square miles surrounded by rings of hotels, motels, T-shirt shops and yuck.

The moon? Maybe it's too far to worry about. Certainly its development won't be my generation's eyesore. But I can imagine a child of tomorrow gazing out a window at the night sky and thrilling to the neon promise throbbing there: "CHOOSE THE MOON FOR A MAGICAL VACATION!" [End]

Contact SUSAN AGER at 313-222-6862 or ager@freepress.com.

[VulgarWit]

..."uncluttered and untouched, innocent, even virginal."
lifeless and sterile, vacuous not innocent, even barren not virginal. The willingness--even eagerness--to see any human progress as a degradation of an otherwise natural state is simply confounding to me. I have for as long as I can remember been unable to uncover a reasonable means of separating the natural from the artificial. Are beaver dams and eagle nests artificial? Are termite mounds natural? The "uncluttered and untouched, innocent, even virginal" streams and rivers of North America must've been so naturally perfect before they we touched and cluttered by those interfering rodents.
The job of all forms of life--all plants and animals including the human animal--is to improve it's own lot in order to promote the survival of that species. This includes locating new foraging grounds and either adapting to that new environment as in the case of rats, dogs, pigs, cats et al or adapting the environment to suit the species (beavers, humans, ants). That's what we do... what we MUST do

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Sept 7, 2003 - Here comes the space competition With China embarking on an ambitious program to put one of its own in orbit, the skies won't be just ours and the Russians' for long

By ALEXANDRA WITZE

[Full Text] The first rocket man came from China, and so may the next.

Around 1500, the legend goes, a man named Wan Hu strapped himself into a chair, had assistants light the fuses of 47 attached rockets and took off into the sky.

Next month, if all goes according to plan, another man, or possibly two, will climb into the more modern Shenzhou 5 spacecraft and blast off once again for space.

Whether Wan Hu made it or blew himself to bits remains lost in myth. But if these new rocket men succeed, China would officially join the United States and Soviet Union as the only nations to put people in orbit.

China's planned launch isn't the only flight activity stealing the space spotlight from the United States. Europe sent its first mission to Mars in June and plans to launch a lunar probe by the end of this month. India recently announced that it intends to launch a moon mission in 2008. And Brazil was trying to launch South America's first satellite when the rocket exploded on the launch pad on Aug. 22, killing 21 technicians.

How these foreign efforts fare could affect how NASA copes with the aftermath of the Columbia shuttle disaster. A successful launch by China, for instance, might reinvigorate U.S. politicians to formulate a national vision for space.

"Some of us specialists down in the trenches, we can see an overall impact way down the road that will force the administration to make real decisions about the future of space flight," said Charles P. Vick, a space analyst and consultant with the Web site globalsecurity .org.

In the near term, no country can threaten NASA's role as the world's premier space agency. "But the question is, what happens if NASA starts looking lame compared to China?" said astronomer Jonathan McDowell, author of an online newsletter about space launches.

For the most part, information about China's space program is limited to government releases through state-run media. Still, Western observers have cobbled together what they believe is a fairly comprehensive picture of what to expect this fall.

Decades of work

The Shenzhou 5 launch is the latest accomplishment of a space program that China has worked on for decades, said Phillip Clark of Molniya Space Consultancy in England.

China launched its first satellite in 1970, but its manned space flight program didn't take off until the government began Project 921 in 1992, as part of a national push to invest in science and technology. For help, China looked to Russia's expertise, sending its astronaut candidates to a Russian training camp and purchasing old Soyuz spacecraft, the mainstay of Soviet and Russian manned space flight.

Chinese engineers have since designed the series of Shenzhou, or "heavenly vessel," spacecraft. Some parts, such as the booster rockets, are technologically original, said Phillip Saunders, director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. Other aspects are adapted and expanded from Russian designs; from the outside, the Shenzhou looks like a Soyuz, but it is larger, more powerful and more maneuverable.

The first Shenzhou flew in secrecy in November 1999. It lifted off from the main launch pad at Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China, and landed after orbiting Earth for a day, said Mr. Clark, who analyzed orbital data from NASA for each of the Chinese flights.

Three following flights each lasted a week and grew progressively more complex: Shenzhou 2 did its first maneuvers in orbit in January 2001, Shenzhou 3 carried a dummy astronaut in March 2002, and Shenzhou 4 had a complete life-support system on its flight in December 2002.

Shenzhou 5 is supposed to fly sometime this fall, according to Chinese media reports. Oct. 1 marks the anniversary of the government's coming to power, and many space observers have targeted Oct. 10 as a possible launch date.

Because the Chinese space program has gone forward so slowly and carefully, it may very well pull off the Shenzhou 5 launch without the kind of setbacks that plagued the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1960s, said Mr. Clark. The real question is whether anyone in the West will notice.

"It may be a two-day news story wonder," he said.

Whichever man China chooses - and all the candidates are reportedly men - he will join the ranks of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and astronaut Alan Shepard as his country's first representative in space. (Gagarin made one full orbit of Earth in 1961; Shepard and Gus Grissom made suborbital flights before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.)

The taikonauts or yuhang yuans, as Chinese space fliers are called, will probably become national heroes as astronauts and cosmonauts were in the 1960s, said Dr. Saunders. "This is something that is seen as a tremendous achievement, both for Chinese science and technology and for the Chinese system," he said.

What will happen after Shenzhou 5 remains a mystery. China isn't due to release another five-year plan for its space program until nearly 2006. But the government has floated ideas of a manned space station, an unmanned lunar probe, or even a manned trip to the moon.

"You can assume they will start working on a manned lunar landing," said Mr. Vick of globalsecurity.org. "That becomes a different game where they're in effect taking us on."

Expensive goal

But to do so, China would have to develop a new launch vehicle that could break out of Earth orbit - something that would take many more years and a lot more money. China currently spends an estimated $ 2 billion annually on its entire space program; the United States spent $ 7 billion each year, in modern dollars, just to develop the Apollo program to the moon.

Instead, China may take Russia's approach and develop a space station like the now-defunct Mir, Mr. Clark said. Such a station would give taikonauts a platform for doing long-term scientific experiments and a base for further exploration. (China has made overtures to join the 16-nation International Space Station, now in orbit, but was rebuffed by members of Congress including Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chair of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics.)

As for going to the moon, no official announcement has been made, much less any sort of schedule set.

"I've always had the view that the Chinese have penciled in 2020 or thereabouts as being the time that they'd like to have their first people on the moon," said Mr. Clark. "In July 2019, there won't be anyone else there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's landing."

In essence, China is now where the United States and Soviet Union were four decades ago - practicing the first steps into space and perhaps harboring dreams of further exploration. But in the earliest of those steps, space experts see no problems with the Shenzhou 5 launch going off as planned.

"The things that could set it back would be technological problems on their side," said Dr. Saunders, "or if there is a renewed focus on safety concerns, not just in light of the U.S. shuttle disaster but also the Brazilian launch."

Brazil's rocket tragedy has decimated its technological workforce, said Dr. McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. It was Brazil's third attempt at launching a satellite aboard its own rocket. Government officials have not pinpointed a cause for the disaster, but the country has pledged to continue its space program even as the investigation continues.

Joining the crowd

Nine other countries have gone where Brazil has not yet, launching their own rockets successfully. In 2002, according to Dr. McDowell's satellite catalog, the launch roster looked like a list of ethnic restaurants: 23 were Russian, 18 American, 11 European, four Chinese, three Japanese, one Indian and one Israeli. That breakdown roughly corresponds to current list of space powers in the world, a list once dominated solely by the Soviet Union and the United States.

France and Great Britain have also launched their own satellites, but now work under the aegis of the European Space Agency, or ESA. Fifteen countries belong to ESA, which is based in Paris. Its members have worked smoothly together as a freestanding agency in which countries can spend money on as many or as few projects as they like, said Alasdair McLean, a space policy analyst in Aberdeen, Scotland.

ESA's new Mars Express mission, and its upcoming SMART-1 probe to the moon, reflect how Europe has always emphasized science over manned space flight, he said. ESA does maintain a small group of astronauts in Germany who hitch rides into space aboard U.S. or Russian launch vehicles.

"Europe is just getting to the point now where it's competing as an equal, but it's definitely Avis to NASA's Hertz," said Dr. McDowell.

The last guest astronaut to go into space was Israel's Ilan Ramon, who died in February aboard Columbia. The next will be Spain's Pedro Duque, who is slated to launch to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 18.

Mr. Duque will fly up with U.S. astronaut Michael Foale, a veteran of the Mir station, and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri. Mr. Foale and Mr. Kaleri will replace the current two-man space station crew, while Mr. Duque will come back to Earth after a week in space.

The ever-changing roster aboard the space station continues to reflect that most of the money for the station comes from the United States and most of the long-term space experience from the Russians, said Dr. McDowell.

Even the new U.S.-Russian cooperation may not set the standard in space for long. Decades ago, Arthur C. Clarke envisioned such a pairing in his novel 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as the Americans and Russians fly together to Jupiter, they are caught offguard by another mission - a spaceship from China.

E-mail awitze@dallasnews.com

FILE 1963/Associated PressThe crowded frontier
October 1957: Soviet Union launches Sputnik, kicking off modern space race.
January 1958: United States launches its first satellite, Explorer 1.
April 1961: Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits Earth, the first human in space.
May 1961: Alan Shepard becomes first American in space.
December 1964: Italy becomes third nation to send a satellite into space
November 1965: France launches its first satellite.
July 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.
February 1970: Japan launches its first satellite.
April 1970: China launches its first satellite.
April 1971: Soviet Union launches Salyut 1, first of many Russian space stations.
October 1971: Great Britain launches first satellite, after government has already shut down its space program.
May 1973: Skylab, the United States' first and only space station, is launched.
July 1980: India launches its first satellite.
April 1981: United States flies its first space shuttle, Columbia.
September 1988: Israel launches its first satellite.
November 2000: Two Russians and one American become first residents of International Space Station.
October 2003: China is expected to launch its first man into space
SOURCES: Space Almanac, Dallas Morning News research

[anymouse]

Space policy ping

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Cowboys on Mars………….. This week, President Bush is expected to lay out a plan to send humans back to the Moon, and to Mars. Those are goals I favor, as I've written before - see this column, or this column, or, for that matter, this column for some discussion of why I feel that way. Nonetheless, the proposal is already drawing some fire. Some critics are complaining about the cost, noting (as this Washington Post article does) that:

Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, proposed a sustained commitment to human exploration of the solar system -- with a return to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars -- in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. NASA came up with a budget-busting cost estimate of $400 billion, which sank the project.

What the Post article fails to mention is that the "budget-busting cost estimate" was, in fact, meant to sink the project. NASA officials were afraid that Bush's plans might interfere with funding for the Space Station, and quite deliberately came up with the largest figure they could plausibly manage in order to ensure that the Mars mission plan died on the vine. They were successful, and we've reaped over a decade of, well, nothing in response. We'd have been better off scrapping the Space Station and proceeding with the Mars mission, since at least then we might have, you know, actually gone somewhere… I'd be surprised to see NASA pull that trick again, but I could be wrong. ………….

[Simmy2.5]

It is even quoted as high as 1 trillion. These EXTREMELY high numbers are being floated all over the media as we speak. Someone certainly wants to embaress and kill this project.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Turf battles - robotics, Mars-only, anti-Bush and greens vs manned exploration.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

NYTimes: The Allure of an Outpost on the Moon

[KevinDavis]

Space Ping! This is the space ping list! Let me know if you want on or off this list!

[Brett66]

I cringe to think of tourists on the moon, the way some columnist probably griped in the late 1960s about the plans to build an amusement park on a vast primeval swamp near Orlando. Nobody listened, and now Disney World comprises 47 square miles surrounded by rings of hotels, motels, T-shirt shops and yuck.

Unbelievable, I hope we have a colony on the moon in 30 years so my grandchildren can escape from these idiots!

[Brett66]

I hope these inflatable habs are used for the moon base:

This lunar base concept would be located near the Moon's equator. The design of this particular
structure is geared to produce elements of a solar power system. It can handle mining and
production operations, storing and shipping activities. The areas where humans would be present
are connected by inflatable tunnels covered with lunar regolith.

[bonesmccoy]

man! that's a really great graphic!

[bonesmccoy]

Equator? Why?

I vote for a return to Hadley Rille!

[Brett66]

That was just the blurb associated with the photo.

[bonesmccoy]

USA!

163:58:27 Color photo of Dave with the flag at the start of EVA-3

[bonesmccoy]

OK!

Here's more great photography!

_______________________________________________________

163:59:05 Few Apollo photographs have been reproduced more often than this color photo of Jim, the flag, the Rover, and the LM, with Mt. Hadley Delta in the background during EVA #3. Note the bright, rectangular pattern on the high-gain antenna. The pattern is produced by sunlight reflected by the mirrored tiles on the top of the TV camera. Scan by Kipp Teague.

________________________

Rarely seen photo of Dave Scott saluting US Flag at end of EVA #2 at Hadley Rille

[Brett66]

About time to add a few more arrows........

[bonesmccoy]

January 13, 2004 Glenn Mahone/Bob Jacobs Headquarters, Washington (Phone: 202/358-1898/1600) NOTE TO EDITORS: n04-003 PRESIDENT BUSH ANNOUNCES SPACE EXPLORATION GOALS President George W. Bush joins NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe Wednesday afternoon to announce the space exploration objectives for the agency. This special event is scheduled to begin at approximately 3 p.m. EST in the main auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Due to limited seating and security considerations, media representatives, who are U.S. citizens and want to attend the event, must report to the registration table in the main lobby at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. SW, from 1:15 p.m. to no later than 1:45 p.m. EST. Please have your media credentials and a second form of picture identification available for verification. Only a limited number of media will be permitted in the auditorium. Other media will be allowed to watch the event from a conference room. The event will be carried live on NASA Television and can be seen on the Internet at: http://www.nasa.gov NASA TV is available on AMC-9, transponder 9C, C-Band, located at 85 degrees west longitude. The frequency is 3880.0 MHz. Polarization is vertical, and audio is monaural at 6.80 MHz. For information about NASA TV on the Internet, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit: http://www.nasa.gov -end-

[irv]

About time to add a few more arrows........

Pictures from the days when we were proud of our space program ...

It would be nice to feel that way again.