Is NASA Necessary?
Jacob Sullum | September 23, 2005, 11:33am
This week, after announcing a $104 billion plan for returning to the Moon for no particular reason, NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin explained why money for rebuilding New Orleans should not be diverted from his budget:
There will be a lot more hurricanes and a lot more other natural disasters to befall the United States and the world in that time, I hope none worse than Katrina. But the space program is a long-term investment in our future. We must deal with our short-term problems while not sacrificing our long-term investments in our future. When we have a hurricane, we don't cancel the Air Force. We don't cancel the Navy. And we're not going to cancel NASA.
I am a science fiction fan and space enthusiast who hopes NASA critic Robert Park is wrong when he says "human space exploration is essentially over." But that does not mean I am prepared to force other people to fund my dreams. I see a distinction between the armed forces and NASA that Griffin seems to be missing: The Navy and the Air Force protect us from our foreign enemies, a central function of government for anyone who concedes the legitimacy of government at all, whereas NASA spends a lot of money on projects of dubious scientific value that are supposed to make us feel good. Given the relatively low cost of the unmanned missions that (as Park notes) offer the biggest scientific payoff, and given the emergence of a launch industry for both commercial payloads and space tourists, it seems NASA is necessary mainly to pay for projects that are not worth funding. If we were menaced by invaders from Alpha Centauri, I might change my mind.
Mark Martin | September 23, 2005, 1:46pm | #
Lots of fun comments here, but this is a serious subject.
1. Exploration always pays off---unless you give up on it. The Chinese were set to explore the world in the 1200s in huge ocean going fleets, and then politically gave up on it. If they hadn't, Columbus would have met the Great Khan of the Caribbean!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sultan/explorers.html
2. It's all about will, not cash. We went from launching things that weighed maybe fifteen pounds into low Earth orbit to landing two guys and an electric golf cart on the moon---in ten years. So it'll take us MORE time NOW? Failure of the will, again, with the ever-loving press telling us why we can't do things, as always.
3. Profits in space/robots in space. False argument. We don't know all we can do. Poke fun at microgravity research if you wish. Look at how we STILL don't know if there is life on Mars. The robots have gone and looked, and every one of them needed to do things it would take a person about five minutes to do. And life on another planet would tell us a great deal about life on this one. Finally, being able to protect the planet from asteroid or comet impact is vital---and we do little about it.
Cash value? If a 100 meter rock hit Los Angeles, how much damage, and how much to "fix" it all? Now compare it to the money it would cost to have prevented it in the first place.
It's like folks at my university, who hate to pay for service contracts...even though fixing the equipment when it is broken is hideously expensive...they just don't want to pay for the upkeep!
4. Fools in NASA---of course! They are just looking after their paychecks. We need vision, not paperwork. Too many bureaucrats, too few engineers.
5. I like Jerry Pournelle's idea for private industry: offer a cash prize (like the X-Prize did) for the first company to accomplish a specific goal: launch three humans to orbit, return them safely, and do it again two weeks later....and so on. To be honest, it worked in the early days of aviation!
Sorry for the long post. I had my dreams of space travel stolen by politics. What are frustrating to me are the negativists and the politicians.
Thanks for listening...
-Mark Martin
Mark Martin | September 23, 2005, 1:47pm | #
Lots of fun comments here, but this is a serious subject.
1. Exploration always pays off---unless you give up on it. The Chinese were set to explore the world in the 1200s in huge ocean going fleets, and then politically gave up on it. If they hadn't, Columbus would have met the Great Khan of the Caribbean!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sultan/explorers.html
2. It's all about will, not cash. We went from launching things that weighed maybe fifteen pounds into low Earth orbit to landing two guys and an electric golf cart on the moon---in ten years. So it'll take us MORE time NOW? Failure of the will, again, with the ever-loving press telling us why we can't do things, as always.
3. Profits in space/robots in space. False argument. We don't know all we can do. Poke fun at microgravity research if you wish. Look at how we STILL don't know if there is life on Mars. The robots have gone and looked, and every one of them needed to do things it would take a person about five minutes to do. And life on another planet would tell us a great deal about life on this one. Finally, being able to protect the planet from asteroid or comet impact is vital---and we do little about it.
Cash value? If a 100 meter rock hit Los Angeles, how much damage, and how much to "fix" it all? Now compare it to the money it would cost to have prevented it in the first place.
It's like folks at my university, who hate to pay for service contracts...even though fixing the equipment when it is broken is hideously expensive...they just don't want to pay for the upkeep!
4. Fools in NASA---of course! They are just looking after their paychecks. We need vision, not paperwork. Too many bureaucrats, too few engineers.
5. I like Jerry Pournelle's idea for private industry: offer a cash prize (like the X-Prize did) for the first company to accomplish a specific goal: launch three humans to orbit, return them safely, and do it again two weeks later....and so on. To be honest, it worked in the early days of aviation!
Sorry for the long post. I had my dreams of space travel stolen by politics. What are frustrating to me are the negativists and the politicians.
Thanks for listening...
-Mark Martin
Stevo Darkly | September 25, 2005, 9:15pm | #
Dedskin, I think Mark Martin and the unnecessarily combative Tonio are closer to the truth.
We think the colonization of the Americas wasn't as challenging colonizing space because we lack the perspective of those earlier colonists. Just being able to feed yourself or keep yourself from freezing in the winter wasn't something you could take for granted (in Europe or America). The settlers required their equivalent of "high-tech." Sailing across the Atlantic was not a cheap, everyday thing.
There are economic gains to be made in space, and a role for human beings. We already take weather and communication satellites for granted; I think the next big space industry will be Earth-orbit tourism. (If people are willing to pay for it, it's wealth.)
Next, heavy industry -- and humans will be needed for supervisory roles, at least. (And we'll need to build places for them to live.) For power, there's intense sunlight that doesn't turn off every 12 hours or on stormy days. For raw materials, it's cheaper to lift what we can from the Moon's surface and bring it to Earth orbit, than to bring it from Earth's surface. The Moon's surface is basically pulverized silicon, aluminum, and oxygen compounds. In some ways it's
easier to mine bodies in space for metals -- you don't have to dig up a forest full of Bambis and spotted owls to get at it.
If you can haul one asteriod in from the Asteroid Belt, you have supplied the world's demand for iron and nickel for many decades, if not centuries.
Trivia: Do you know that the Earthly economy already relies upon the Asteroid Belt as the source of at least 10%-20% of the world's nickel? (And a lot of copper and platinum.) Two billion years ago, an asteroid about 5-10 miles wide hit the region that is now Sudbury Ontario and made a nice deposit. That became one of the biggest single sources of nickel for what used to be called the Free World.
Robots may be our scouts, but once you have an economy built up Out There, I don't see it as being entirely run by automation. And of course, there's the libertarian imperative -- some people will want to put some physical space between themselves and a world where things are a bit too over-regulated.
Having said all that, I don't think NASA should be in charge of all this. I think private individuals like Burt Rutan, Gary Hudson, Richard Branson and Peter Diamandis should be.
I think if the Apollo program hadn't been run as a government project spurred by the Cold War, we would just now be making plans to send people to the Moon. I think Apollo was a false step, made when we didn't yet have the technology for a sustained effort. Neil Armstrong was our Leif Ericson, but we haven't seen our Christopher Columbus, let alone our William Penn.
Stevo Darkly | September 26, 2005, 1:02am | #
thoreau, conceded, but I think it's inevitable that costs of mining on Earth (including environmental preservation costs) will get relatively higher and the costs of getting people into space, and keeping them alive there, will become relatively less expensive. At some point, the balance will shift, and someone will decide it's less expensive to start mining the Moon or asteroids than the Earth.
Ruthless:
A comment by Burt Rutan here would be nice.
Perhaps significantly, I couldn't find a statement by Rutan where he explicitly buys into a grand vision of human being settling the Solar System beyond the Moon.
He is focused right now on getting people affordably into Earth orbit, and on space tourism. He does think it will become accessible to thousands of ordinary people a year -- one of his slogans is "space for the rest of us."
And note! Devising an affordable way to get from Earth's surface to Earth orbit isn't just the first small step. It's the first
great big step. Once you achieve that, you're very close to opening up the entire Solar System to colonization.
Jerry Pournelle tells a story about a conversation that a younger SF writer (it might have been Pournelle himself) once had with Robert Heinlein. The younger writer was struggling with an idea for an SF story. For the plot to work, he needed a ship that could readily get from Earth's surface to Earth orbit, but not go so far as the Moon. The writer saw he had a plausibility problem. "After all," he said, "once you get to Earth orbit, you're halfway to the Moon."
"No," said Heinlein, "You're halfway to anywhere."
The younger did the math and saw that "Heinlein was very nearly right." The energy (or more precisely, the delta vee) you need to get from Earth surface to orbit is about the same as you need to get from Earth orbit to orbit around nearly any other body in the Solar System.
Unfortunately, if you go in a slow but minimum-energy manner, you have the problem of keeping people alive during the trip -- not a minor obstacle.
But it's very interesting to read the book
Project Orion about a "nuclear pulse" spacecraft that was proposed in the 1960s. Basically, the thing would have pushed itself along by throwing nuclear bombs out its tailpipe and letting the epanding explosion hit a giant shock-abosrber plate. The book is a very interesting read about the project's possibilities and problems. Tecnically, a single Orion could have let us haul a big colony to Mars, all in one piece, in a matter of weeks -- except it was totally unsuitable, for safety reasons, for launching from Earth's surface. Primarily for bystanders. You don't want a bunch of nukes exploding in the atmosphere. You don't want to explain that it would raise global risks of cancer even a very tiny fraction of a percent. And if one bomb failed to go off after being ejected while the craft was still climbing to orbital velocity, that would be, um, problematic.
If Orion could be built in and launched from Earth orbit, however -- or to be extra safe, built and launched from the Moon -- it could be the Conestoga wagon of the Space Age.
Anyway, even Rutan believes people will routinely fly at least as far as the Moon, and soon. I found this quote (but lost the URL):
"The goal is affordable travel above low earth orbit. In other words," he [Rutan] explains, "affordable travel for us to go to the moon. Affordable travel. That means not just NASA astronauts, but thousands of people being able to go to the moon."
In the longer term, Rutan hints at being a technological optimist, when he says: "I have often said that confidence in nonsense is a requirement for creativity."
Admittedly, you can go too far with that. But if humans do settle other worlds, it'll be done by people who believe we can, not by people who believe we can't.
