llustration of an envisaged Crew Exploration Vehicle orbiting Mars. The American Physical Society has questioned the basic practicality or usefulness of sending humans to either the moon or Mars.
Posted on 01/04/2005 2:04:22 PM PST by tricky_k_1972
Public and political support is growing for President George W. Bush's ambitious plan for space exploration, but at least one scientific organization has cast doubts about Bush's vision -- although whether those doubts carry any weight or have much validity is debatable.
On Nov. 22, less than three weeks after Bush's convincing victory in the presidential election, the American Physical Society published an analysis of the administration's proposal to refocus the U.S. space program away from the space shuttle and International Space Station and toward a return to the moon and further human exploration of the solar system.
The APS report was bluntly skeptical of Bush's initiative and feared its impact on science research funding.
"The scope of the moon-Mars initiative has not been well-defined, its long-term cost has not been adequately addressed, and no budgetary mechanisms have been established to avoid causing irreparable damage to (NASA)'s scientific program," the report said.
APS also questioned the basic practicality or usefulness of sending humans to either the moon or Mars.
"Astronauts on Mars might achieve greater scientific returns than robotic missions, but at such a high cost and technical challenge that one could not expect to justify their presence on scientific grounds alone."
The report then concluded, "Before the United States commits to President Bush's proposal, an external review of the plans should be carried out by the National Academy of Sciences (and) the likely budgetary impact should be estimated by the Government Accountability Office."
For several reasons, the APS position opposing Bush's space initiative is not surprising.
First, to understand the context of the society's report, one must first recognize how partisan politics influenced its conclusions. Though scientists generally are perceived as objective, many are Democrats and thus are by circumstance predisposed to mistrust the goals of a Republican administration.
Consider, for example, how neither the APS nor most of the scientific community felt inclined to protest when the Clinton administration redirected significant spending into NASA's space shuttle program in 1990s so the space station could be launched. Though some scientists expressed skepticism and doubt, there was no organized effort to oppose Clinton's policy.
Put a Republican in power, however, and the partisan juices cannot help but flow.
How partisan is the scientific community? During election week in November 2000, the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society was holding a scientific conference in Waikiki, Hawaii. The group decided to run an unofficial straw poll, asking the attendees to vote their presidential preferences to see how they compared with the rest of the nation.
The 2000 Presidential election was one of the closest in history, with Al Gore getting only 500,000 more votes than Bush out of more than 105 million votes cast, a margin of a just over 0.5 percent, but with Bush winning the electoral vote.
Among the scientists, however, the 2000 election was incredibly one-sided. Gore got 153 votes, Ralph Nader 43 and Bush tallied a mere 11, or about 5 percent of the total.
Nor is this story unusual. One does not have to spend much time with scientists to recognize that their political biases are routinely and unwaveringly Democrat.
Aside from partisan politics, however, the APS report was more obviously a reaction by scientists to a perceived threat to their turf posed by increased spending on space exploration.
To design, build and launch the manned spaceships required to explore the moon and Mars, the president's proposal will pump a lot of money into engineering research. It remains unclear how this shift in funding priority will affect scientific space research, but the scientists felt understandably concerned their power within NASA will be trimmed.
The Bush plan would undertake a subtle but measurable shift. Until recently, scientists have controlled almost exclusively what NASA has spent on research. Since the 1980s, the scientific community, working within the national academies and the National Research Council, have produced detailed long-range decadal surveys to guide and influence the federal government's research and spending decisions.
As noted in the APS report, "The funding agencies, primarily NASA ... and (the National Science Foundation), have used the results of (these) decadal surveys to great benefit in developing their research and funding plans."
Bush's space initiative did not rely on the surveys, however, because its goals are not scientific research but rather the exploration of the solar system by human beings. Its adoption, without the advice of scientists, would shift NASA's focus from scientific to engineering research, and thus threaten the power structure scientists have dominated for so long.
Evidence that the APS report represents nothing more than a turf war between scientists and engineers can be seen by the recommendation that Bush's plan be reviewed by a national academies panel of scientists. Such a panel surely would not favor spending money on technological research at the expense of scientists.
The report's release has an interesting historical parallel. In August 1968, less than seven weeks before the first manned Apollo mission, the National Academy of Sciences urged NASA to eliminate almost all manned exploration and replace it with unmanned missions.
"The ability to carry out scientific observations at a distance is developing so rapidly that I don't see any unique role for man in planetary exploration," noted Gordon MacDonald, chairman of the academy panel that issued the recommendation.
The 1968 report had enormous impact. Interest in human space exploration waned and the space program stumbled. By the late 1970s, the United States essentially had no operating program for astronauts, who flew no missions from Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 until shuttle Columbia's first launch in 1981.
Ironic, but the lack of human missions did not translate into increased spending for robotic scientific missions, as the scientists had hoped. By 1979 NASA was able to launch only three satellites: two small short-term atmospheric research probes and one astronomical X-ray telescope.
The scientific community effectively had shot itself in the foot. Without the excitement of manned missions to whet the public's appetite, there was little interest in funding any space research -- human or robotic. Only when the U.S. manned program was revived in the 1990s with missions to Mir and the International Space Station, was there also a revival of space science.
Lucky for today's scientists, the situation is very different than it was in the late 1960s and 1970s. Then, both houses of Congress were controlled by the Democratic party. The leadership of that party, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., was generally hostile to committing money to human space exploration.
Today, Congress is controlled by Republicans and the nation seems newly poised and excited by the idea of human spaceflight. As a consequence, unlike the sustained influence 1968 national academies report, the new APS report has generated little response from either the public or politicians since its release in November. It has been superseded by more exciting space news, such as the passage of a new commercial space law and the acceleration of the president's program.
How out-of-step is the APS report? Consider that just one day before its release, Congress not only approved NASA's budget, but it also gave full funding to Bush's space vision and, for the first time in years, provided the human space program a significant increase in spending.
In a sense, this conflict between scientific and engineering research is a conflict in priorities. Scientists explore the nature of the universe, discovering such knowledge as how the solar system formed or whether life is possible on Mars. The APS report is therefore a lobbying effort by scientists to focus government money toward this type of research.
Engineers develop technologies that make lives better, such as freeze-dried food and infrared sensors -- technology that was developed for space travel and has become ubiquitous since. Hence, the effort to build a new and better spaceship to transport humans to the moon is guaranteed to reshape the technology around us -- as did the space program in the 1960s.
Though both science and engineering are necessary for any civilized society to prosper, perhaps the United States has decided that the time has come in its space exploration endeavors to give priority to the engineering, and let the science follow when it can.
Robert Zimmerman is an independent space historian and the author of the book Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8. His most recent book, Leaving Earth, was awarded the Eugene M. Emme Award by the American Astronautical Society for the best popular space history in 2003.
I'm one engineer who is solidly conservative.
I find it interesting that so many of my colleagues are libs, but then again this is a blue state so I guess it's to be expected. They still have no idea that I don't share their political leanings, so it's funny to listen to them talk. I simply refuse to discuss politics or religion at the office.
Yep, send robots to Mars for terraforming. Then when the plants start growing and water starts flowing again, we can sit back, look through our telescopes and marvel at how the planet turned from red to green.
Ahhhh...It's Beautiful!
But don't start sending any humans..it might cost as much as a couple of years of welfare payments and since I don't get to go, I don't want anybody else to go either.
I'm a scientist and a liberal, but while doubtful at first, I'm starting to come around to this point of view. We've made a lot of purely scientific progress in the last couple decades, a lot of new theories about the nature of space/time and matter and how they interact, GUTs, etc. The more time I spend thinking about this, the more I think that it's high time to kick the tires on some of these ideas and let the engineers go to town for a while.
At the same time, I understand why scientists who make a living off of gov't funding would be a little nervous at the tone surrounding this initiative.
I find at my employment that it is the managers, and particularly the manager wannabees that are the libs.
course I work in Reliabilty, and the ILS guys are mostly prior service.
We develop better ways to kill people and break things.
I'd crotch kick a scientist any day.
I'm a scientist and I have not observed this at all -- far from it. Except for academic tenured scientists - they're a different breed.
Oh man would I love to see where you work. It's like a dream job come true.
The manned program, having broader aims than just information return is a captive to politics. Privte enterprise would seem to be the only way for manned spaceflight to go in a new direction.
I am both.
LOL!
Welcome to FR. Hopefully the tent is big enough for you...or at least the FR circus is entertaining. I have always tried to keep the big picture in focus. Our society clearly should be spending more on R&D than we do on entertainment, but of course, we don't. That said, getting humans off this rock permanently qualifies as an overriding goal. We have all of humanity's eggs in one fragile basket. A large impact, human created "Andromeda Strain", or some other disaster could make us extinct. We also need to consider the incredible resources that we will find which dwarf the recoverable resources of this planet. Finally, contacting alien intelligence will allow humans to take quantum leaps in technology and culture. All of this may take hundreds of years, but like I said, I always try to see the big picture.
Surpise, surprise, surprise... Left wing, tenured, university professors think the President is wrong. Who'd of thunk it?
The best section in this article (in my opinion) is:
In a sense, this conflict between scientific and engineering research is a conflict in priorities. Scientists explore the nature of the universe, discovering such knowledge as how the solar system formed or whether life is possible on Mars. The APS report is therefore a lobbying effort by scientists to focus government money toward this type of research.
Engineers develop technologies that make lives better, such as freeze-dried food and infrared sensors -- technology that was developed for space travel and has become ubiquitous since. Hence, the effort to build a new and better spaceship to transport humans to the moon is guaranteed to reshape the technology around us -- as did the space program in the 1960s.
Though both science and engineering are necessary for any civilized society to prosper, perhaps the United States has decided that the time has come in its space exploration endeavors to give priority to the engineering, and let the science follow when it can.
We need balance. Pure science is great, and unfortunately Utopian. The far end of pure science must be balanced with the opposing far end of application. In my opinion they should, combined, receive ~85% of the taxpayer funded "science" funding. The remaining ~15% should be directed toward taking today's scientific breakthroughs and turning them into next years applications.
Science needs engineering as much as engineering needs science. One without the other will become stale and pointless. The "balance" of the past is repsonible for many of our great leaps forward. Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, the governmental suppport has been too one sided for pure science.
Bell labs - some of the greatest - are a perfect example of that balance, pure science tied together with a need for applicability (well, then they got thumped by regulations, but that is a different thread).
Just my thoughts...
Some are more conservative, but it is fun to listen to one of the liberals rant and rave about Bush and his invading Afghanistan and Iraq and then ask them how many of the weapons systems they designed were used in these two wars?
I've never understood how some in the 'hard' sciences can be liberal. All the data shows that socialism kills people and ideas.
I just don't get it. Maybe it's just due to all that time in grad school. Maybe it's cause engineers deal with 'stuff' and scientists deal with 'ideas'--but even with that, liberalism is hostile to unorthodox ideas.
Try this thought exercise: Name one thing with the word 'people', 'people's' or 'public' in it that is worth a damn.
Try: Public Beach vs. Private Beach; Peoples Republic vs. Republic....
I thought engineers were scientists but scientists are not necessarily engineers.
How much of my tax money would this cost?
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