On to Mars, at last Bush's space plan is the right stuff

Most Americans had long since stopped paying attention to manned space flight. The shuttle? So what (except during some stunt like the John Glenn flight)? The moon? Been there, done that.

Four years ago, I wrote an article advocating phasing out the space shuttle, abandoning the space station, establishing a moon base, and then eventually going on to Mars. It was greeted with yawns by those who noticed it at all.

Things have gotten worse. Last week, when President Bush proposed to phase out the space shuttle, phase down the space station, establish a moon base and then eventually go on to Mars, he was met not with yawns, but with ridicule.

"He wants to build like a space station on the moon, and then from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars," said a positively gleeful David Letterman. "You know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? He's been drinking again." Part of the reason for the unfriendly reception was the way the proposal was rolled out. It was pre-spun as a great new goal to unify the nation — a Kennedy moment to kick off an election year.

This was as clumsy as President Bush 41 saying, "Message: I care" or Howard Dean discovering Jesus as he heads South. If you are going to do something blatantly political, don't telegraph it.

This presentation was particularly stupid because I believe this plan would have been proposed exactly as is, with or without an election year, with or without the phony Kennedy overlay. In fact, there is not an ounce of political advantage in this proposal. An AP poll found that a majority of Americans would rather spend money on domestic needs.

As for the Kennedy stuff, the Bush proposal has less to do with a vision of man's destiny than with a totally dysfunctional government agency. NASA gave us the glory of Apollo, then spent the next three decades twirling around in space in low Earth orbit studying zero-G nausea.

It might have gone on forever had it not been for the Columbia tragedy. Columbia made painfully clear what some of us have been saying for years: It is not only pointless to continue orbiting endlessly around the Earth, it is ridiculously expensive and indefensibly risky.

The President's proposal is a reasonable, measured reconfiguration of the manned space program. He couldn't go all the way. Binding agreements with other nations made it impossible for him to scrap the space station - a financial sinkhole whose only purpose is its own existence. But he is for phasing it down, and for retiring the shuttle within six years.

That frees up huge amounts of NASA money to do what is useful and exciting: going to other worlds. For this generation, the only alternative to wandering about in low Earth orbit - other than the Luddite alternative of giving up manned flight completely - is to return to the moon. And this time, stay there.

Establishing the first human habitation on a celestial body would not just allow for extraordinarily interesting science and be the locus for extraterrestrial manufacture. It would be - those without an ounce of romance in their souls are advised to skip the rest of this sentence — the most glorious human adventure since the Age of Exploration five centuries ago.

As for Mars, there is nothing Buck Rogers in Bush's proposal. It will take decades to work out how to get there safely. There is no Apollo crash program. There is simply an annual 5% increase in the NASA budget - which itself is now less than 1% of the whole federal budget.

Those who want to divert even these paltry sums to domestic spending would undoubtedly have objected to Magellan's costly plans, too. Look. We can stay on Earth. We can keep tumbling about in orbiting Tinkertoys. Or we can walk the moon again and prepare for Mars. I can't imagine an easier choice.

. . . not mentioned by Dr K, but equally important is the following:

U.S. Eyes Space as Possible Battleground
Sun Jan 18, 2:27 PM ET

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites)'s plan to expand the exploration of space parallels U.S. efforts to control the heavens for military, economic and strategic gain.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld long has pushed for technology that could be used to attack or defend orbiting satellites as well as a costly program, heavily reliant on space-based sensors, to thwart incoming warheads.

Under a 1996 space policy adopted by then-President Bill Clinton (news - web sites) that remains in effect, the United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space "by all nations for peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humanity."

"Peaceful purposes allow defense and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national security and other goals," according to this policy. "Consistent with treaty obligations, the United States will develop, operate and maintain space control capabilities to ensure freedom of action in space, and if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries."

No country depends on space and satellites as its eyes and ears more than the United States, which accounted for as much as 95 percent of global military space spending in 1999, according to the French space agency CNES.

"Yet the threat to the U.S. and its allies in and from space does not command the attention it merits from the departments and agencies of the U.S. government charged with national security responsibilities," a congressionally chartered task force headed by Rumsfeld reported 10 days before Bush and he took office in 2001.

Theresa Hitchens of the private Center for Defense Information said the capabilities to conduct space warfare would move out of the realm of science fiction and into reality over the next 20 years or so.

"At the end of the day it will be political choices by governments, not technology, that determines if the nearly 50- year taboo against arming the heavens remains in place," she concluded in a recent study.

Outlining his election-year vision for space exploration last week, Bush called for a permanent base on the moon by 2020 as a launch pad for piloted missions to Mars and beyond.

One unspoken motivation may have been China's milestone launch in October of its first piloted spaceflight in earth orbit and its announced plan to go to the moon.

"I think the new initiative is driven by a desire to beat the Chinese to the moon," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and space policy research group.

Among companies that could cash in on Bush's space plans are Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., which do big business with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as with the Pentagon (news - web sites).

The moon, scientists have said, is a source of potentially unlimited energy in the form of the helium 3 isotope -- a near perfect fuel source: potent, nonpolluting and causing virtually no radioactive byproduct in a fusion reactor.

"And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn't have to worry about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what the price of energy was going to be," said Pike.

Gerald Kulcinski of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison estimated the moon's helium 3 would have a cash value of perhaps $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil.

Scientists reckon there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the earth for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 30 tons could meet all U.S. electric power needs for a year, Kulcinski said by e-mail.

Bush's schedule for a U.S. return to the moon matches what experts say may be a dramatic militarization of space over the next two decades, even if the current ban on weapons holds.

Among other things, the Pentagon expects to spend at least $50 billion over the next five years to develop and field a multi-layered shield against incoming missiles that could deliver nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Ultimately, this shield -- first proposed by President Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) and dubbed "Star Wars" by critics -- may include space-based interceptors, the first weapons in space, as opposed to sensors that guide weapons.

Last year, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency obtained $14 million for research on basing three or more missile interceptors in space by the end of the decade for tests.

The plan would field satellites armed with multiple "hit-to-kill" interceptors capable of destroying a ballistic missile through a high-speed collision shortly after its launch, according to Wade Boese, research director of the private Arms Control Association. Such a system could also function as an anti-satellite weapon.

No decision has been made yet to deploy space-based interceptors as part of the U.S. missile defense program "although we are conducting research and development activities in that area," a Defense Department official said Friday.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040118/ts_nm/space_weapons_dc

Nothing Bush does will bring the country together, because a third of the country hates him. So it was a good move but badly handled.

Well, I agree with you and Krautie, that it's a good thing to do, and I wish X41 had been more successful with his attempt to launch a "beyond ISS" program back when it was needed to keep us focussed beyond these short-term goals.

I can see an argument that, despite no-doubt anticipated dissension (saw a polling report that half the Democrats polled about the space proposal changed their minds instantly when they were told it was Bush's idea, and promptly attacked it -- man, is that rabid or what?), Bush and his political people decided that it would be useful to be seen taking the high road; and without the intervention of 9/11 and Iraq, no doubt he'd have brought the initiative up previously. As a former governor of Texas, he's no doubt acutely aware that NASA is a national treasure.

Where I take a cautionary marker, though, is that I'm not convinced that this isn't an adroit way to say goodnight to the shuttle, Hubble and the other satellites that were designed to be shuttle-serviced for long-term service (Hubble will be allowed to degrade, a quiet press release announced), and the ISS -- after we as a country twisted arms to get other nations aboard ISS with us, including Canada and Japan.

Notice that the splashy stuff doesn't happen until Bush's successor is sworn in. The suggestion here is that Bush is using the announcement of prospective and contingent projects to mask the bad news that he's closing down the shuttle and ISS projects, while leaving the rest of the bad news to his successor -- an exercise called, when applied to The Rapist, "kicking the can down the road", something Slick most notoriously did in the case of North Korean nuclear proliferation, but also in Iraq and the War on Terror.

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