Something for all the pessimists
and
naysayers out there
Space Quotes
to Ponder
What famous people (and some not
famous) have saidabout why humankindmust expand into Space
"We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and
spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to
make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move
forward in an evolutionary way"
-Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin
“Cosmonauts are above the ongoing squabble, no matter what officials
decide. We are grown-up, well-educated and good-mannered people and can use
our own brains to create normal relationship. It’s politicians and
bureaucrats who can’t reach agreement, not us, cosmonauts and astronauts”
- Gennady Padalka, Cosmonaut, April 2009
I
Heart the ISS: Ten Reasons to Love the International Space Station
It’s been called a white elephant, an orbital turkey, a money
pit, and an expensive erector set. Seemingly, even many people at NASA think
building it was a mistake. The International Space Station has been plagued
with repeated delays, cost overruns, and bad press. Additionally, the ISS
has never really caught the fancy of the general public and most likely
there’s a fair percentage of the world’s population who have absolutely no
idea there’s a construction project the size of two football fields going on
in orbit over their heads.
Nancy Atkinson
Feb 2008
But I’m going to be honest. I’ll come right out and say it: I really like
the ISS. In fact, I’m crazy about it, and have been ever since Unity docked
with Zarya back in 1998. Yes, my heart belongs to the space station, and
since its Valentine’s Day, I’m going to profess my feelings here and now
with ten reasons why I love the International Space Station:
(In no particular order:)
1. International Cooperation. Didn’t your heart swell with pride for the
Europeans when the Columbus science module finally became part of the
station this week? And you gotta love the Canadians for their reliable,
heavy-duty Canadarm 2. The Russians have been steady partners in station
construction and re-supply for years now. Japan’s science lab will be added
on the next shuttle mission. The ISS is the largest, most complex,
international engineering project in history. In a world where violence and
political animosity floods the daily news, it’s incredible that this
structure is quietly being built by 16 different countries working together
in relative harmony. If not for the international partners, the ISS probably
wouldn’t have gotten off the ground. NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has
said that the station’s most enduring legacy is the international
partnership that created it.
2. Actually Building an Outpost in Space. The dream of almost every
post-Apollo space enthusiast is to have a settlement or colony in space. As
humble as it is, the ISS is exactly that. Humans have been living on board
the station for over 7 years now. The experience of constructing and living
aboard this complex structure in space is invaluable, and any future outpost
will benefit from what’s been learned with the ISS.
3. The Personalities. Peggy Whitson, the first female station commander.
Clay Anderson’s unique sense of humor. Suni Williams’ marathon and haircut
for cancer patients. Mike Lopez-Alegria’s music. Mikhail Tyurin’s golf shot.
Yuri Malenchenko’s wedding. Frank Culbertson’s September 11 perspective.
Yury Usachev’s spinning antics. It goes all the way back to the three-way
fist pump on Expedition One between Bill Shepherd, Sergei Krikalev, and Yuri
Gidzenko. With the Expeditions lasting 4-8 months, we have the opportunity
to get to know the astronauts and cosmonauts that live and work on board the
ISS. If you watch the daily feeds from the ISS or listen to the periodic
press conferences, you can become familiar with the different personalities
of the station crews. The number one personality has to be Don Petit and his
Saturday Morning Science.
4. You can see it almost every night. I’ve witnessed jaws dropping and eyes
widening in wonder when people see the ISS for the first time gliding
silently and swiftly across the night or early morning sky. I never tire of
observing it. Find out when the station will fly over your backyard at
NASA’s website or at the Heaven’s Above website.
5. No major problems so far. One of the real impressive things about the ISS
is that all the components, built by different countries and contractors
have fit together perfectly. Yes, there have been intermittent computer
issues, a faulty smoke alarm and the torn solar arrays. But these problems
have all been resolved in short order. The damaged SARJ (Solar Alpha Rotary
Joint) is a looming issue that could be problematic. But there are some
first-rate engineering minds working on this matter, and it appears they
have time to come up with a solution. The station has never had a major
calamity or had to be evacuated in over 7 years of continuous human
occupation. Knock on a Whipple Shield.
6. The general public can participate. Schools and informal education
centers can conduct live question and answer sessions with space station
crews. Middle school students can choose locations on Earth for the ISS crew
to take pictures as part of the EarthKAM project. Ham radio operators can
talk regularly with astronauts and cosmonauts with the ARISS (Amateur Radio
on the ISS.) College students can design projects to be researched on board
the station. And of course if you have $40 million in spare change you can
ride to the ISS on a Soyuz as a spaceflight participant.
7. Finally, we have science officers. The other dream of every post-Apollo
space enthusiast (and Star Trek fans) is to have science officers to conduct
real scientific research. The ISS has had science officers since 2002, but
science hasn’t been in the forefront of the work on board the ISS. Yet.
8. Long term research. The ability of the ISS to serve as a platform for
science has come under fire. But what other lab has been expected to produce
scientific results while still under construction? With the addition of the
European and Japanese science labs, and the expected increase in crew size
from three to six in 2009, scientific research, the original purpose of the
station, will finally be able to be conducted with consistency. The
microgravity environment of the ISS allows the study of long-term effects of
weightlessness on the human body, crucial for any future human exploration
on the moon and Mars. Research will help fight diseases such as diabetes,
cancer, osteoporosis, and AIDS. The station provides a unique place to test
technologies such as life support systems and new manufacturing processes,
and gives us a long-term platform to observe and understand Earth's
environment and the universe.
9. Post docking fly-arounds. After each construction mission to the ISS, the
shuttle’s post docking fly-around gives us a chance to see the new additions
and latest configuration of the station. The astronauts say it’s a thrill to
see how their handiwork on a specific mission fits into the big picture of
the entire ISS, and it’s a thrill for us back on Earth to see the station’s
new look, too. Plus the fly-around usually gives the shuttle pilot some
actual stick time to fly the shuttle and a little time in the limelight.
10. What else would we be doing? Many people feel that the ISS’s tremendous
budget has taken funds away from robotic exploration and other science. I
can’t argue with that. But when it comes to human spaceflight, what else
would we have been doing for the past 10-20 years? A space station was the
logical next step after the shuttle. The main problem is that it took so
long to decide on a plan, get it approved by Congress and get it in the
works with international cooperation. But now, with construction and
maintenance ongoing, we’re constantly and continually learning how to live
and work in space. The ISS is a resource that will guide us on our future
human endeavors in space. It’s more than just an obligation to finish and
then be disregarded. The planning and funding for its future should
encompass the maximum utilization of its fullest potential.
In my eyes, the International Space Station is a thing of beauty, a work of
art, an engineering marvel, and a constant companion that I watch for every
night as it orbits our planet. The ISS should be given all the respect, and
love, it deserves.
Can
You Survive in Space Without a Spacesuit?
The sci-fi movie Sunshine gets it almost right
By Morgan Smith
Aug. 1, 2007
In the new sci-fi film Sunshine, an astronaut named Mace must leave his
spacecraft without a protective suit. He makes it through his exposure with
only a case of frostbite. Could you really survive outer space without a
suit?
Yes, for a very short time. The principle functions of a spacesuit are to
create a pressurized, oxygenated atmosphere for astronauts, and to protect
them from ultraviolet rays and extreme temperatures. Without it, a
spacewalker would asphyxiate from the lack of breathable air and suffer from
ebullism, in which a reduction in pressure causes the boiling point of
bodily fluids to decrease below the body's normal temperature. Since it
takes a bit of time for these things to kill you, it's possible to make it
through a very quick stint in outer space.
At most, an astronaut without a suit would last about 15 seconds before
losing conciousness from lack of oxygen. (That's how long it would take the
body to use up the oxygen left in the blood.) Of course, on Earth, you could
hold your breath for several minutes without passing out. But that's not
going to help in a vacuum. In fact, attempting to hold your breath is a sure
way to a quick death. To make it for even a few seconds, Sunshine's Mace
must have expelled the air from his lungs before he ventured into the starry
void. If he hadn't, the vacuum would have caused that oxygen to expand and
rupture his lung tissue, forcing fatal air bubbles into his blood vessels,
and ultimately his heart and brain. Scuba divers are also at risk for air
embolism; they're instructed not to hold their breath as they ascend from
the deep sea.
An astronaut who fell unconscious from lack of oxygen would last for a few
minutes more before dying from asphyxiation or the effects of the pressure
reduction. Ebullism would result in the formation of bubbles in the moisture
found in the eyes, mouth, and skin tissue. One NASA test subject who
survived a 1965 accident in which he was exposed to near-vacuum conditions
felt the saliva on his tongue begin to boil before he lost consciousness
after 14 seconds.
In the movie, Mace takes the precaution of wrapping himself in insulation
torn from the walls of the spacecraft he's leaving. This might provide some
protection against temperatures in space that can run from minus-200 to 200
degrees Fahrenheit. It might also ward off ultraviolet-related skin damage
during a short jump through space.
What about the frostbite? That's actually the least plausible result of
Sunshine's suitless spacewalk. The cold wouldn't cause Mace too much harm in
just 15 seconds, even if he encountered the very lowest temperatures in
space. That's because heat leaves the body very slowly in a vacuum. The more
likely damage would be a "space hickey"caused from the swelling and
bursting of the skin's small blood vesselswhich would look more like the
effects of freeze-drying a wart than a case of frostbite.
A
Survival Imperative for Space Colonization
In 1993, J. Richard Gott III computed with scientific
certainty that humanity would survive at least 5,100 more years. At the
time, I took that as reason to relax, but Dr. Gott has now convinced me I
was wrong. He has issued a wake-up call: To ensure our long-term survival,
we need to get a colony up and running on Mars within 46 years.
July 17, 2007
New York Times
If youre not awakened yet, I understand. Its only prudent to be skeptical
of people who make scientific forecasts about the end of humanity. Dr. Gott,
a professor of astrophysics at Princeton, got plenty of grief after he made
his original prediction in 1993. But in the ensuing 14 years, his prophetic
credentials have strengthened, and not merely because humanity is still
around.
Dr. Gott has used his technique to successfully forecast the longevity of
Broadway plays, newspapers, dogs and, most recently, the tenure in office of
hundreds of political leaders around the world. He bases predictions on just
one bit of data, how long something has lasted already; and on one
assumption, that there is nothing special about the particular moment that
youre observing this phenomenon. This assumption is called the Copernican
Principle, after the astronomer who assumed he wasnt seeing the universe
from a special spot in the center.
Suppose you want to forecast the political longevity of the leader of a
foreign country, and you know nothing about her country except that she has
just finished her 39th week in power. What are the odds that shell leave
office in her 40th week? According to the Copernican Principle, theres
nothing special about this week, so theres only a 1-in-40 chance, or 2.5
percent, that shes now in the final week of her tenure.
Its equally unlikely that shes still at the very beginning of her tenure.
If she were just completing the first 2.5 percent of her time in power, that
would mean her remaining time would be 39 times as long as the period shes
already served 1,521 more weeks (a little more than 29 years).
So you can now confidently forecast that she will stay in power at least one
more week but not as long as 1,521 weeks. The odds of your being wrong are
2.5 percent on the short end and 2.5 percent on the long end a total of
just 5 percent, which means that your forecast has an expected accuracy of
95 percent, the scientific standard for statistical significance.
And you can apply this Copernican formula to lots of other phenomena by
assuming theyre neither in the first 2.5 percent nor the final 2.5 percent
of their life spans.
Now, that range is so broad it may not seem terribly useful to you, and Dr.
Gott readily concedes that his Copernican formula often is not the ideal
method. The best the formula could do regarding Bill Clinton, who had been
president for 127 days when the 1993 paper in Nature was published, was
predict he would serve at least three more days but not more than 13.6 more
years. You could have gotten a narrower range by using other information,
like actuarial data from previous presidencies, or factoring in the
unlikelihood that the Constitution would be changed so he could serve more
than two terms.
But the beauty of the Copernican formula is that it allows you to make
predictions when you dont have any other information, which is how Dr. Gott
managed to predict the tenure of virtually every other nations leader that
day in 1993 a total of 313 leaders. If none of those still in power stays
in office beyond age 100, Dr. Gotts accuracy rate will turn out to be
almost exactly 95 percent.
Some philosophers and experts in probability theory have argued that Dr.
Gott is making unwarranted deductions from past life spans, and that it is
wrong to assume there is nothing special about the moment weve chosen to
make a forecast. (See www.tierneylab.com for details of the debate.) But
last year two philosophers, Bradley Monton and Brian Kierland, analyzed the
criticisms and concluded in an article in the Philosophical Quarterly that
Dr. Gott had indeed come up with a useful tool for difficult situations
like trying to forecast doomsday without data from other planets.
The Copernican formula predicts, based solely on our 200,000-year track
record, that the human race is likely to survive at least 5,100 more years
but not longer than 7.8 million roughly the same prediction youd make
based on the longevity of past mammals on Earth, Dr. Gott says.
That upper limit is a disappointment to those of us who imagine humans
multiplying across the universe for billions of years. Dr. Gott doesnt rule
out that possibility, but the Copernican Principle makes him conclude it is
unlikely.
After all, if colonization is common and theres nothing special about our
civilization, why havent we already colonized other worlds? Why arent we
colonists ourselves from a civilization somewhere else?
If you think of yourself as a randomly chosen individual among all the
intelligent beings who ever lived in the universe, then the odds are youre
living in one of the larger and older civilizations simply because a lot
more people have lived in those than in small, short-lived civilizations.
The sobering facts, Dr. Gott says, are that in a 13.7 billion-year-old
universe, weve only been around 200,000 years, and were only on one tiny
planet. The Copernican answer to Enrico Fermis famous question Where are
the extraterrestrials? is that a significant fraction must be sitting on
their home planets.
It might seem hard to imagine that humans would invent rockets and then
never use them to settle other worlds, but Dr. Gott notes that past
civilizations, notably China, abandoned exploration. He also notes that
humans have been going into space for only 46 years a worrisomely low
number when using Copernican logic to forecast the human spaceflight
programs longevity.
Since theres a 50 percent chance that were already in the second half of
the space programs total lifespan, Dr. Gott figures there is a 50 percent
chance it will not last more than another 46 years. Maybe the reason
civilizations dont get around to colonizing other planets is that theres a
narrow window when they have the tools, population and will to do so, and
the window usually closes on them. In 1970 everyone figured wed have
humans on Mars by now, but we havent taken the opportunity, Dr. Gott says.
We should it do soon, because colonizing other worlds is our best chance to
hedge our bets and improve the survival prospects of our species. Sooner or
later something will get us if we stay on one planet. By the time were in
trouble and wish we had that colony on Mars, it may be too late.
You could argue that hes being too pessimistic about space exploration. The
space program may be only 46 years old, but humans have been exploring new
territory for tens of thousands of years, so by Copernican logic perhaps
theyll keep it doing it far into the future. But given recent trends
after going to the Moon, we now barely send humans into orbit hes right
to be worried.
If its true that civilizations normally go extinct because they get stuck
on their home planets, then the odds are against us, but theres nothing
inevitable about the Copernican Principle. Earthlings could make themselves
the statistical anomaly. When extinction is the norm, you may as well try to
be special.
Hawking Says Space Colonies Needed
The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find
new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that
a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said
Tuesday.
Forbes.com
June 2006
Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on
Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.
"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star
system," added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome
Monday. Tickets for his lecture Wednesday were sold out.
Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100
years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support
from Earth.
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the
survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the
ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global
warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we
have not yet thought of."
The 64-year-old scientist - author of the global best-seller "A Brief
History of Time" - uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a
computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
One of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation, Hawking has
done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe,
proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end.
However, Alan Guth, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, said Hawking's latest observations were something of a departure
from his usual research and more applicable to survival over the long-term.
"It is a new area for him to look at," Guth said. "If he's talking about the
next 100 years and beyond, it does make sense to think about space as the
ultimate lifeboat."
But, he added, "I don't see the likely possibility within the next 50 years
of science technology making it easier to survive on Mars and on the moon
than it would be to survive on earth."
"I would still think that an underground base, for example in Antarctica,
would be easier to build than building on the moon," Guth said.
Joshua Winn, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology,
agreed. "The prospect of colonizing other planets is very far off, you must
realize," he said.
Hawking's "work has been highly theoretical physics, not in astrophysics or
global politics or anything like that," Winn added. "He is certainly
stepping outside his research domain."
Hawking's comments Tuesday were reminiscent of the work of American
astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was a believer in the existence of
extraterrestrial intelligence.
Sagan, a Cornell University professor and NASA-decorated scientist who died
in 1996, noted that organic molecules, the kind that life on Earth is
dependent on, appear to be almost everywhere in the solar system.
Sagan played a leading role in the U.S. space program, helping design
robotic missions and contributing to the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and
Galileo expeditions.
But his work also focused on the search for habitable worlds and intelligent
life beyond the solar system, as well as theories about life's origins,
ideas popularized in his best-selling 1985 novel, "Contact," which was made
into a film starring Jodie Foster.
At Tuesday's news conference, Hawking said he to was venturing into the
world of fiction. He plans to team up with his daughter, 35-year-old
journalist and novelist Lucy Hawking, to write a children's book about the
universe aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.
"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe,"
said Lucy Hawking. They did not provide further details.
Profits set to soar in outer space
Prepare for liftoff: The space business may be the most
incredible new opportunity of your lifetime.
By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine
February 27, 2006
(Business 2.0) - Let's not wax sentimental about our space exploits thus
far. The Apollo era was heroic, but beating the Soviets to the moon never
provided a compelling economic reason to return. (We didn't even get Teflon
or Tang as spinoffs--both were invented before 1960.)
Space spending soars
The shuttle and the international space station continued this record of
dismal return on investment. Small wonder, then, that most private-sector
investors have focused instead on more earthly pursuits. Only one thing will
prod us into the cold, hard vacuum of space, and that's the prospect of
earning cold, hard cash.
Fortunately, there's now a lot of that to go around. Worldwide government
spending on space is soaring to $50 billion a year, a 25 percent jump over
2000. NASA represents only $16 billion of that total, but during the next 20
years, the U.S. space agency is likely to sign contracts totaling as much as
$400 billion to launch a human mission to Mars.
We are also well into the commercial space age. In 1998, private-sector
spending on space applications began to exceed government spending, and the
gap is widening. A critical mass of entrepreneurs -- some with familiar
names like Bezos and Branson -- have been backing space-related companies
for years. In the coming months, their efforts will reach blastoff stage
(quite literally). Some of the markets they're targeting, like the $4
billion satellite launch business being pursued by PayPal founder Elon Musk,
are ripe for competition. But most, such as suborbital tourism, space
hotels, and solar satellites, don't yet exist. All, however, have the
potential to generate astronomical returns during the next decade.
Building infrastructure is the first step, and here historical analogies
abound. The federal government is poised to begin contracting with the
private sector to deliver cargo into orbit, a trend that could nurture a
market for civilian spaceflight in much the same way that airmail contracts
from the Post Office spurred the development of civil aviation a century
ago. Prize money -- the incentive that launched Charles Lindbergh -- is now
being offered for everything from building a machine to extract oxygen from
lunar soil ($250,000) to building an aircraft capable of delivering tourists
to orbit by 2010 ($50 million).
Opening up the Wild West
Meanwhile, new technologies are opening up new possibilities. Consider the
space elevator, which is enabled by the advent of lightweight carbon
nanotubes; a 62,000-mile elevator to the heavens would reduce orbital
freight costs by 98 percent and open up space just as the railroads opened
up the Wild West.
The long-term possibilities are even more celestial. Ever heard of 3554 Amun?
It's a space rock about 2 kilometers in diameter that looks as if it might
have fallen straight out of The Little Prince. There are three key things to
know about 3554 Amun: First, its orbit crosses that of Earth; second, it's
the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroid yet discovered; and finally,
it contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and
nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinumlike metals. In
other words, whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill
Gates. And if you time your journey right -- 2020 looks promising -- it's
easier to reach than the Moon.
That doesn't mean it's easy, of course; nothing worthwhile ever is. The
automobile, commercial air travel, the PC, the Internet, the cell phone --
all took decades to reach their full potential, and none would have taken
root without stubborn entrepreneurs who refused to heed conventional wisdom.
The greatest barrier to the open markets of space isn't physical or
technological; it's psychological. But for those who have the right stuff,
the rewards may prove greater than anything the Apollo astronauts ever
imagined.
Challenger Go at
Throttle Up
by Chris O'Kane
28 Jan 2006
People say they remember where
they were when they heard the terrible news. I believe that. I recall where
I was too. I was at my brothers house, playing snooker with my young
nephew. The report came on the BBC TV news. There was a sick, empty
feeling that left me numb. The same feeling Id had when they reported the
murder of John Lennon. A feeling of deep loss.
On 28th.
January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger, one of four orbiters, exploded 73
seconds into its flight a few miles above the millions of people gathered at
Kennedy Space Centre. The large crowd was there to send off another shuttle
crew and the first civilian into orbit around the Earth for a few days. It
was becoming routine to see shuttles going off on various missions. They
said this is the way it would be in the future, after the first launch. My
memory took me back to April 1981 and the press site at KSC. The feel of the
cold, damp air evaporating as the warm Florida sun rose on the dawn of a new
era. No longer would astronauts perch atop monstrous rockets in cramped
capsules. This was the era of the Space Shuttle. The first spaceship to fly
back to earth to be cleaned up, serviced, re-stacked to its boosters and
fuel tank and sent up again within a few months. They said that once the
first 4 test flights were complete we could expect a launch per month.
I had put
spaceflight to back of my mind. I was aware of all the science going on in
orbit. Of ESAs Spacelab missions, satellite launches and other missions.
By 1986 NASA had four operational orbiters; Columbia, Endeavor, Discovery
and Challenger. To many spaceflight had become pass and no longer a big
event covered live by the media. The maiden launch of Columbia in April
1981 was the last live coverage of a manned spacecraft by the BBC or any
other UK TV channel. The last until the 2005 launch of Discovery, which was
the return to flight of the shuttle programme after the tragic loss of
Columbia during re-entry in 2003. I grew up watching Apollo missions to the
Moon live on TV. All of the Apollo missions were televised live. The whole
world tuned in to watch the awesome spectacle of a Saturn V rocket launch.
The biggest and most powerful machine ever constructed. It was an exciting
show. The big build up to the final countdown, followed by the awesome
image of the massive rockets blasting up from the launch pad. They were big
TV events, everyone stopped to watch.
As the
sad news came over the TV and the horrific images were repeated over and
over I recalled my experiences and feelings when I saw Columbia blast off
for that first flight. The restless crowd pushing towards the edge of the
canal basin, 3 miles from the launch pad, many frantically shouting GO!
The excitement rising as the countdown reached zero. The massive, billowing
clouds of white smoke as the engines fired and the brilliant light as the
shuttle rose from its pad. A few seconds later to be followed by the rumble
that grew to a crackling, ear splitting roar, as the explosion of gas from
the engines beat the air for miles around with a tremendous shockwave. 20
seconds later the shuttle vanished out of sight behind a static column of
steam and smoke that was standing up into the clear blue sky like a giant
white pillar. A few minutes later those with binoculars saw the solid
rocket boosters separate and a loud cheer went up. Columbia was on its way
into orbit. It was a powerful and moving experience. Almost religious.
I tried
not to watch or listen. The news was so terrible. It was a nightmare come
true. I was so glad I wasnt there that fateful day to witness it. I would
not want to be among the crowd that day. It was the last place in the world
I would want to be. The investigation that followed the disaster told a
tale of woe. Staggering mistakes and mismanagement. Warnings from engineers
in the know were ignored. I suspect political pressure from Washington was
put upon NASA to ensure that the civilian teacher Christa McAuliffe was in
orbit to coincide with President Reagans State of the Union Speech. Im
sure it would have look impressive for the free world had it happened. But
as pointed out in the final analysis by physicist Richard Feynman, no matter
how much they wanted the shuttle to fly it would not. Nature cannot be
fooled If something is designed and engineered badly it will fail.
Bruce
Murray, director of JPL and controller of many successful planetary
missions, summed it all up by saying we lost seven brave and admirable
people launching a satellite. The debate about the value of manned
spaceflight continues today. As NASA struggle to get the shuttle program
back on track in order to fulfill its need to complete the International
Space Station. In the face of some outstanding successes with unmanned
probes to Mars and Saturn, people are asking if it is necessary at all to
send anyone into space? This is a fair argument when we consider the cost
and risk of sending people into space. There needs to be good justification
for it. Pro space enthusiasts will tell you that there is no better
computer or machine than a human being. And that humans are the best
explorers. However, humans are not as tough as robots. Were getting some
great science done with small machines on far away worlds, and at no risk to
us except financial. So, understandably we hear the question why are we in
space? The reply is often that we are a curious species and its in our
nature to explore. But at what cost? There are many pressing needs here on
Earth. We could build a lot of hospitals for the money being spent on space.
Which is but a fraction of the cost being spent on war. So should we end war
before we go any further into the cosmos? So many arguments, so many
choices.
But mans
curiosity and intelligence is what drives us forward as a technological
civilisation. If we do not strive to understand more about the universe we
live in we are doomed to fail. It is as H.G. Wells said All the universe
or nothing. If we do not go to the Moon, Mars and beyond then all the
combined struggles and strife of mankind is for naught. We shall fade away
and perish as the dinosaurs did. One species out of millions that came and
went. The only proof that we ever existed would be the probes we left on
other planets and the long distance voyagers we sent out of the solar
system. If we want to survive and achieve immortality among the stars, then
we must leave the cradle of civilisation. This is the ultimate goal of
mankind. It may not be governments that pioneer the way though. They may
fail to have the political courage and long-term vision. It may be the
wealthy individuals acting together. Private space flight is now a reality.
At the dawn of commercial aviation, it was the entrepreneur who led the way.
Governments couldnt see the need for air travel. Now it is the same with
space travel. The US government wants to apply aviation laws and guidelines
to private operators. Perhaps this is a sign that space travel will become
as popular as air travel within 100 years. History may repeat itself. Keep
watching the skies.
But if it
were not for the brave pioneers who led the way into space, there would be
no private space programmes, no ambition for people to go and no dreams of
great achievement. The cost has been high but the way to the stars is now
open. Its up to us if we want to take it. Where do you want your great
grandchildren to be in 100 years? Its all the universe or nothing. Which
shall it be?
Chris
OKane 2006
'Everyone thought I was out of my mind'
Buffy creator Joss Whedon tells Gareth McLean about his plan
to shake-up Hollywood
Wednesday October 5, 2005
Guardian
Joss Whedon is big on personal responsibility. It was one of the major
themes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - standing up for what you believe in,
fighting your demons and accepting that nothing comes for free. It's there
again in Serenity, the writer-director-producer's big screen adaptation of
Firefly, a western-in-space series that was cancelled after half a season in
the US.
Serenity's universe is a dark place. Under the captaincy of Mal Reynolds, a
motley crew travel through space eking out a living wherever, and however,
they can. While they smuggle, cheat and steal to survive, these are noble
thieves, existing under the rule of an apparently benign galactic government
which reveals itself as less than lovely. There are no wrinkly-browed aliens
to intervene with magical technologies, no polished spaceships or pristine
uniforms, no quick fixes in a brutal sky.
"Aliens inevitably distance you from what I really wanted to do," says
Whedon. "I wanted to come back down to earth in space, show that no
matter how much advanced technology we create, we're still going to be us -
flawed, conflicted people with the same problems we've always had. And
although that sounds depressing, it's what makes us human. And what
happens when you try to do that? Well, there's a clear statement in the film
about what happens."
After taking on two fugitives, Reynolds's crew find themselves the focus of
the government's attentions, at the centre of a sinister universe-wide
conspiracy, and the prey of the diabolical Reavers who will "rape us to
death, eat our flesh and sew our skin to their clothes. And if we're very,
very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
Serenity might share the dubious honour of being a film born of a cancelled
TV show, but Star Trek it ain't. "I love this idea of the future because
it's one in which you have to make everything you have," says Whedon. "You
make your family, your choices, your ethics. It's a hard life. It's not in
any way a passive life. It's pioneering."
The appellation of genius is issued too often, but, as creator of Buffy,
Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Toy Story, comic-book scribe, musician and
lyricist, Whedon is, by any standard, at the very least brilliant. The third
generation of TV writer in his family (his father Tom wrote for Benson and
The Golden Girls, his grandfather John for The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Donna
Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver), he started his career writing on
Roseanne. As well as credits for Toy Story, Alien Resurrection (a script he
reportedly said had been ruined by the director) and Titan AE, he also
worked on Speed, Waterworld, Twister and X-Men, though how much of his work
remains in the finished films is disputed. Apparently, only two of his lines
remain in X-Men while much of Speed's dialogue is his. Whedon is familiar
with the machinations of Hollywood and was prepared for a slog in getting
Serenity made. In fact, it was "unexpectedly easy".
"At first, everyone looked at me like I was out of my mind," he says. "I
wanted to make a movie out of a show that had just been cancelled with a
cast of unknowns. But then Universal stepped in and said they'd pay the
rent."
This ease perhaps has something to do with the much-discussed death of the
blockbuster, the failure of the likes of Stealth and The Island to deliver
returns on their mega-budgets. Serenity cost $40m to make, which is not an
insubstantial sum, but it's a world away from The Island's $120m budget.
"We'd like to shake up the Hollywood paradigm of first weekend, big name,
get-'em-in-quick, shock-and-awe marketing and go back to the era of making a
smaller movie where you believe in the story. There have been some decent
summer movies recently but, by and large, they've been pretty soulless. If
you're dealing with a smaller budget and focusing on the people instead of
what you can afford to do with CGI, it's much more exciting."
Serenity is a compelling story - the one that would have been told had the
series not been cancelled - very well done. The rise and rise of DVD will
also have persuaded Universal that Serenity was worth a shot. At a time when
studios make five times more on home entertainment than on cinema tickets,
and theatrical releases increasingly act as tasters for release on DVD for
smaller budget films, films such as Serenity are simply a better bet than
something involving Michael Bay. Even if it doesn't pay off, you haven't
lost $100m. "DVD is changing everything," Whedon nods. "It's scaring a lot
of people. I think it's nifty. Fear is good. It's healthy. It keeps you
strong."
Speaking of strong, Whedon is in the early stages of writing the script for
the upcoming Wonder Woman, due in 2007. He's having, he says, the time of
his life. After some unfortunate experiences on other big studio films, he's
made sure he and the studio are singing from the same hymn sheet. "I've
explained exactly what I thought the movie was, and Warner Brothers agreed.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing it. I was able to find a lot of what made
her tick and they responded to that. There's so much to explore with her."
So, in the grasp of the creator of Buffy, Wonder Woman is in safe hands?
It's quite a responsibility, but Whedon's big on that. "Oh, I'm sticking
with all the important stuff. The bracelets. The invisible plane. The magic
lasso. I will find a way of not making it cheesy."
Returning to the subject of his new film, Whedon explains that although
science fiction is often derided it holds a mirror up to reality in a way
only genre films can. As Serenity unfolds, it addresses contemporary
concerns of deceitful government while its people are distracted by
consumerism. The personal becomes political.
"Serenity is about the kind of people who believe they can't take what the
government feeds them - and in our country right now, that's important.
People get fed an enormous amount of lies and anyone who points that out
might be deemed unpatriotic. It seems to be less and less acceptable to care
about where information comes from and what our government's doing."
Having said that, Whedon continues, his film isn't partisan. "Everything in
America right now has a big line drawn down the middle, and you're either on
one side or the other. This movie isn't that. It's not about one government
being bad, or more or less government being the right thing. It's about how
the machinations of politics affect the little guy."
New company wants
Mars colony
All companies set goals, but newly formed 4Frontiers Corp. is
eyeing some expansive horizons. The company's mission: to open a small human
settlement on Mars within 20 years or so.
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts
(AP) Sep 2005
Sure, it may sound far-fetched. And the company's initial plans are a lot
more terrestrial than ethereal, like developing a 25,000-square-foot replica
of a Mars settlement here on Earth, then charging tourists admission.
But the people behind the venture are quite serious -- as serious as the $25
million they want to raise from investors.
CEO Mark Homnick, a former manager for Intel Corp. who has registered
4Frontiers in Florida, says he has already raised "a couple million" from
people he won't name. He hopes for an initial public offering within five
years.
That still leaves a lot of questions: Why should people live on Mars? And if
it's going to be done, should a private enterprise engage in what would be
one of humanity's defining moments?
Besides, what's in it for investors?
Homnick and his co-founders -- a longtime Mars aficionado named Bruce
Mackenzie and a 25-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology master's
student, Joseph Palaia -- are ready with several answers.
First, they contend, humankind needs a new frontier to explore, with all the
intellectual and engineering challenges that homesteading Mars would
present.
Also, who knows the fate of our humble Earth? Will we meet an early end at
the hands of an asteroid, warfare, disease or some other catastrophe?
In that case, we'd sure be glad civilization had been preserved by some
colonists on Mars -- and perhaps elsewhere in the galaxy, if all goes well
on the Red Planet. That broader vision of space settlement gives 4Frontiers
its name: the frontiers being the Earth, the moon, Mars and the asteroids.
"It's the nature of life -- life tries to expand and tries to adapt,"
Mackenzie says. "If there's a forest fire in one valley, then all of the
organisms in the next valley will slowly creep over the ridge and repopulate
that valley. Any species that don't do it eventually die out." Going to
space, he believes, is as if "all of earth's life, acting together, is
trying to get into the next valley. And the only way we can do it is by
building rockets."
Mackenzie, a software developer, has devoted much of his energy to a
nonprofit group called the Mars Foundation, which aims to advance knowledge
about how to colonize the planet. But he decided a private venture like
4Frontiers also would be necessary, to drive things forward.
Although President Bush has called for a manned mission to Mars, Mackenzie
believes big bureaucracies might never get the job done right.
"It's better to have lots of groups out there, all trying things," Mackenzie
says.
Indeed, space is no longer solely the province of earnest astronauts with
crew cuts and government-issued uniforms.
Space tourism is on the verge of becoming big business. Space Adventures
Ltd. of Arlington, Virginia, has brokered $20 million trips for the wealthy
on Russian rockets and is taking deposits for $100 million fly-bys of the
far side of the moon. For a lot less money, you can sign up for a quick
blast into zero gravity.
But in comparison, 4Frontiers' ultimate goal of an extended stay on Mars
would be off-the-charts extreme.
It would take months to get there. Once there, you couldn't kick off your
shoes and dig your toes into the sand. Life would transpire in an enclosed
space with pumped-in air (unless Martian settlers could pull off the even
more speculative feat of "terraforming" the planet by changing its toxic
atmosphere.) Venturing outside would require sealed suits.
To begin, 4Frontiers plans to gather patents and engineering ideas that
would enable a small crew to land on Mars with home-building materials and
the manufacturing capability to keep adding on.
The hot topics would include ways to miniaturize key industrial processes --
like making plastic or steel -- and methods for exploiting Martian
resources, such as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, iron in the dirt or
the water bound up in Martian ice.
As the company gains expertise, it expects to sell consulting services to
aerospace companies or NASA. It envisions getting work designing Mars sets
for movies and Mars rides for amusement parks.
Meanwhile, it plans to construct a mock-up of its Mars home and begin
selling tickets to it by 2007. Potential sites in Colorado, Florida and New
Mexico are being considered.
The company's business plan estimates these varied projects would bring in
$34 million in revenue in 2010 -- including $7 million in gate receipts at
the tourist site.
Profits before taxes, depreciation and amortization are forecast at $1.4
million as early as next year, and $29.7 million in 2010.
Even if that flies, then what? A $34 million company probably isn't in a
great position to begin launching rockets.
Homnick says 4Frontiers would probably "stay incremental" through the early
2010s, perhaps getting involved in robotic surveys of Mars or asteroid
mining.
However, projects like that -- and perhaps even settling Mars might require
some clarity in space law.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared that the "exploration and use" of outer
space and celestial bodies "shall be carried out for the benefit and in the
interest of all countries." While that's not exactly the traditional
language of private enterprise, some space scholars say it leaves room for
commercial projects.
(A 1979 Moon Treaty was more explicit, holding that bodies in the solar
system should not become the property of any nation, organization or person.
But most countries, including the United States, China and Russia, never
ratified it.)
Considering all the possible complications, Mackenzie says 4Frontiers' real
success might come simply from getting the public pumped about living on
Mars. In turn, that could make Washington eager to fund a settlement.
Even if that doesn't happen, he is sure that people eventually will live on
Mars -- and perhaps scores of other places in space.
"It's a question of when," he says. "I really hope we get started before we
have an economic decline that delays it. I'd really hate to have something
like the Great Depression, or the Dark Ages that lasted several hundred
years, delay getting into space."
From Giant Leaps
to Baby Steps
Imagine if we had been so timid about space in the 1960's.
Eugene F. Kranz
New York Times
3 Aug 2005
Houston - To read and listen to the coverage about the space shuttle, you
would think NASA's mission team has taken careless risks with the lives of
the seven astronauts who went into space on the Discovery last Tuesday.
During the launching, foam fell off the external tank. For the risk-averse,
the only acceptable thing to do now is retire the shuttle program
immediately and wait for the divine arrival of the next generation of
spacecraft. I am disgusted at the lack of courage and common sense this
attitude shows.
All progress involves risk. Risk is essential to fuel the economic engine of
our nation. And risk is essential to renew American's fundamental spirit of
discovery so we remain competitive with the rest of the world.
My take on the current mission is very straightforward. The shuttle is in
orbit. To a great extent mission managers have given the spacecraft a clean
bill of health. Let us remember that this is a test flight. I consider it a
remarkably successful test so far.
The technical response to the Columbia accident led to a significant
reduction in the amount of debris striking this shuttle during launching.
Mission managers have said that the external tank shed 80 percent less foam
this time than on previous launchings. Only in the news media, apparently,
is an 80 percent improvement considered a failure. Rather than quit, we must
now try to reduce even more the amount of foam that comes off the tank.
The instruments and video equipment developed to assess the launching and
monitor debris falling from the tank worked superbly. For the first time,
the mission team knows what is happening, when it is happening and the
flight conditions under which it occurred. This was a major mission
objective, and it is an impressive achievement.
Having spent more than three decades working in the space program, I know
that all of the flights of the early days involved some levels of risk. Some
of those risks, in hindsight, seem incomprehensible by today's timid
standards. If we had quit when we had our first difficulties in Project
Mercury, we would have never put John Glenn on the Atlas rocket Friendship 7
in 1961. Two of the previous five Atlas rockets test-fired before Friendship
7 had exploded on liftoff.
On Gemini 9, 10 and 11, all in 1966, we had complications with planned
spacewalks that placed the astronauts at risk. Rather than cancel the walks,
we faced the risks and solved the problems. These set the stage for Gemini
12 later that year, during which Buzz Aldrin spent more than five hours
outside the capsule and confirmed to NASA that spacewalks could be
considered an operational capability.
Eventually, this ability enabled astronauts to retrieve satellites and
repair and maintain the Hubble space telescope; and during the current
mission, spacewalks were used to repair a gyroscope on the International
Space Station and will allow the crew to fix some of the damage that
occurred during the launching. These are the rewards for the risks we took
on those early Gemini flights.
I understand the tragedy inherent in risk-taking; I witnessed the fire
aboard Apollo 1 in 1967 that killed three crew members. It filled us with
anger at ourselves and with the resolve to make it right. After the fire we
didn't quit; we redesigned the Apollo command module. During the Apollo
missions that followed, we were never perfect. But we were determined and
competent and that made these missions successful.
I see the same combination of anger, resolve and determination in the space
shuttle program today. These people are professionals who understand risk,
how to reduce it and how to make that which remains acceptable. Most
important, the current mission has demonstrated the maturity of the shuttle
team that endured the Columbia disaster and had the guts to persevere. This
is the most important aspect of the recovery from the Columbia accident, and
is a credit to the great team NASA now has in place, headed by its
administrator, Michael Griffin.
There are many nations that wish to surpass us in space. Does the "quit now"
crowd really believe that abandoning the shuttle and International Space
Station is the way to keep America the pre-eminent space-faring nation? Do
they really believe that a new spacecraft will come without an engineering
challenge or a human toll? The path the naysayers suggest is so out of touch
with the American character of perseverance, hard work and discovery that
they don't even realize the danger in which they are putting future
astronauts - not to mention our nation.
Eugene F. Kranz, author of "Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From
Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond," is a former Apollo flight director.
Pushing for the next giant leap
Humans have a "moral imperative" to open up space as a "new
frontier", says X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis.
By Jo Twist
BBC News science and technology reporter 17 July 2005
He also believes that within the next decade humans will find ubiquitous
life on Mars and, in our lifetime, millions of people will be going into
space.
Mr Diamandis addressed last week's Technology, Entertainment and Design
(TED) conference in Oxford, held in Europe for the first time.
TED Global brings together scientists, designers and big thinkers to discuss
how to make a better future for all.
High ambition
"If you think about space, everything we hold of value on this planet is in
infinite supply there," Mr Diamandis explains.
"Earth is a crumb in a supermarket full of resources."
Inspired by the Apollo mission, it has been his ambition since childhood to
take people into space, he says.
Mr Diamandis raised cash with help from the Ansari Foundation and others to
create the Ansari X-Prize.
The prize rewarded the first non-government funded manned craft to reach the
official 100km boundary of space twice in two weeks.
The $10m jackpot was won by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites
team in 2004.
Its SpaceShipOne craft was the first vehicle to achieve the feat, and a
modified version will now form the fleet for Richard Branson's Virgin
Galactic space tourist service.
Both Mr Rutan and Mr Diamandis are passionate believers that humanity's
future in space should be led by non-governmental missions.
Risk and reward
Only those missions can afford the great risks that are inherent in such
early exploration.
The cost of getting into orbit is the key to human survival, wealth and
prosperity
Peter Diamandis
"The X-Prize showed that risk was OK. We should be allowed to take risk, and
anyone who says we shouldn't should be put aside," he explains.
Those breakthroughs could happen in space; some could even provide world
changing solutions for Earth, he believes.
Such risks, as evidenced by the recent false starts for the space shuttle,
are proving increasingly difficult to justify for government-supported
organisations, such as Nasa.
English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, told the BBC News website that
non-government missions were the only real option.
"My feeling is that with every advance in the miniaturisation of robotics,
the practical case for sending humans into space is weakened," he said.
"Nasa-type projects are vastly expensive, partly because they are risk
averse.
"So I think that any future for manned space exploration should be private
sponsorship by people who are prepared to take the risk and cut corners," he
argued.
He foresees many more probes doing the exploring for us, as satellite
technology advances. This will help us understand our origins.
New frontiers
Indeed, one of the main themes at TED last week was that humanity has barely
touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of its own evolution.
That goes for our knowledge of life outside of our "middle world" existence,
as biologist Professor Richard Dawkins phrased it at the conference.
"We are young as a species," says Mr Diamandis. In terms of what our future
in space would look like, he says: "We cannot conceive it".
"It is like asking the Europeans in the 1400s to think of life today. We
will make decisions to change the very fabric of society.
"We may even reinvent society and the human form," he says.
If it sounds reminiscent of Christopher Columbus' colonialist ambitions, Mr
Diamandis talks the talk that suggests it is.
"We are on the verge of the greatest exploration the human race has ever
known," he says.
Frontiers are among our planets' scarcest resources, according to Mr
Diamandis.
At frontiers, new decisions are made. People can rise to their full
potential there because they are unhindered by social structure, he argues.
Of course, one motivation for claiming new frontiers and colonising them is
power and wealth, which Mr Diamandis says drives the human desire for
exploration.
"The cost of getting into orbit is the key to human survival, wealth and
prosperity," he says.
The infinite resources that Mr Diamandis talks of include nickel-iron
asteroids worth $20 trillion on the open Earth market.
But for now, Mr Diamandis is busy organising other X-Prizes to push humanity
into taking risks, pushing scientific, medical, and technological advances.
X-Prizes for energy, genetic, environmental and medical development are all
under development.
Geneticist Craig Venter has just joined the X-Prize board for a rapid genome
prize.
His motivation here sounds altruistic.
"The most critical tool for solving humanity's challenges is a committed
passionate human mind," says Mr Diamandis.
The Drive to Discover
I have a confession
to make. I made the movie
Titanic because I thought I could talk the studio into letting
me dive and film the real ship, 12,500 feet down in the North Atlantic.
By James Cameron Wired Magazine
Dec 2004
I was an avid wreck diver, and it was the ultimate shipwreck. Making the
movie itself was actually secondary in my mind. So when I proposed the
movie, I pitched the Titanic
dives as a marketing hook - and the studio bought it. I figured, if I got
killed, it would be before all the sets were built and the actors hired, so
the studio wouldn't be out much. My crew and I built our own deep-ocean
35-mm camera system, designed to withstand 10,000 psi of ambient pressure,
and in September 1995, we made 12 dives to the wreck using two Russian Mir
submersibles. We brought along Snoop Dog, a remotely operated vehicle we had
built, which maneuvered around the wreck, getting footage. The plan was to
fake the interior shots later, because it was too dangerous for Snoop to go
inside. But on the last dive, my curiosity overcame my judgment and we
piloted it down the grand staircase to explore B deck and D deck. I'll never
forget the thrill and wonder of discovery, watching the video monitor inside
that cramped and freezing submersible more than 2 miles down, as the ROV's
lights revealed fully preserved woodwork, gold-plated chandeliers, even a
marble fireplace. Some of the
Titanic's elegance
still remained, hidden deep in the wreck.
I was hooked, infected by the deep-sea-exploration virus. After the
success of the movie, I found myself less interested in Hollywood filmmaking
and more interested in the challenges of deep-ocean photography and
exploration. We returned to the Titanic site in 2001 with our
digital 3-D camera system to capture stereo images of the wreck. We also
used fiberoptic-spooling bots to survey the ship, giving marine
archaeologists their first view ever inside. (No one had bothered to
photograph the ship in 1912 because they didn't expect it to sink on its
maiden voyage; all those pictures you've seen are actually of the sister
ship, the Olympic.) The resulting film, Ghosts of the
Abyss, was the first Imax 3-D film to be shot digitally.
Since then we have made four more deep-ocean expeditions, including a
trip to explore the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck,
16,000 feet down in the North Atlantic, as well as numerous dives at
hydrothermal vent sites along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific
Rise. In the last three years, I've spent seven months at sea and gone on 41
deep-submersible dives. I have a wife and four children. Some might question
the risks, but I've made my peace with it.
Whenever explorers go into hostile realms, whether in space or in the
sea, we live or die by our machines. A big part of the appeal is the
engineering challenge - pitting the intelligence and creativity of the team
against the implacable elements. There is no more quintessentially human act
than to use our consciousness to adapt ourselves to environments in which we
could not otherwise survive. It's what we do better than any other species
on Earth. Still, there is always that moment when the hatch is closing and a
microsecond's thought says, "Maybe this is the last time I'll see daylight."
I always say the same thing to those gathered outside as I enter the sub:
"See you in the sunshine." It has become a lucky touchstone, a little prayer
that we will return safely from the eternal darkness. It's important to
acknowledge that the ocean is capricious, that it can give the most
remarkable gifts, but it can also take away without warning.
These dives have taught me one overwhelming truth: There is so much we
don't know. On every dive I see something I never could have imagined. A
diaphanous jellyfish 7 feet across. A pink octopus with wings on its head.
Blind shrimp swarming inches from water hot enough to melt lead. Once in a
while I see and film something no one else has ever seen, and those are
moments of profound satisfaction. Nothing the artifice of Hollywood has to
offer can compete with the thrill of something this exciting and 100 percent
real.
There are still untold mysteries down there in the dark, enough to fill a
hundred years of exploration. Certainly enough to intrigue and compel me for
the rest of my life. But of course the truly infinite frontier is in the
other direction.
Space is a vacuum. There is, by definition, nothing there. When we talk
about exploring space, we really mean exploring the objects careening around
in space - planets, moons, the occasional comet. So space is a hurdle, an
ocean that must be crossed to reach a destination. Unfortunately, for
three-quarters of the space age it has been treated as a destination in and
of itself.
The last time humans crossed space to a destination was the Apollo 17
mission in 1972. In the 32 years since, no man has seen, with his own eyes,
Earth as that beautiful, solitary blue sphere, and - reality check - no
woman has ever seen it at all. We've been only to low Earth orbit since
1972, and from that altitude of 220 miles, looking at the
7,900-mile-diameter Earth is like peering at a basketball with your cheek
pressed against it. Yes, you'll see curvature, but you're not seeing the
whole thing. We've spent 32 years "exploring space" in low Earth orbit.
Exploring nothing. To stay in orbit you have to go 17,000 mph, or
Mach 25. So we've spent three decades going nowhere fast.
It's taken people a long time to wake up to this fact, but we finally
have. Now Exploration with a capital E is in the air again, in what
will hopefully become some kind of renaissance. Eleven billion hits to
NASA's Web site during the Spirit and Opportunity rovers' exploration of
Mars is an astounding groundswell of support. NASA is still blinking in
surprise, trying to figure out why people love the rovers yet care less
about the construction of the International Space Station than a new
interchange outside Cleveland. It is only now sinking in that one is
exploration and the other is, well construction.
As we mourned the
Columbia astronauts,
they were frequently referred to in media as "explorers." The real tragedy
of that accident is that they were not explorers. They were boldly going
where hundreds had gone before. They were researchers working in a lab that
happened to be in orbit. Did their research have value? Of course, but only
in the sense that all science has value. Was it worth the price they paid?
Not by a light-year. Did they die in vain? Only if we don't learn and take
to heart a lesson - not that foam can peel off the external tank and damage
the reinforced carbon leading edge of the wing, or even that NASA culture
needs to change. But that even after four decades of technical progress,
travel to and from space is inherently dangerous, so only go there for a good reason.
In my mind, there is only one reason good enough, and that's exploration.
That means going somewhere, not in circles. But actually going somewhere,
like the moon or Mars, is considered too risky and expensive. Those high
school touchdowns scored by Neil and Buzz and the others are trophies that
have been gathering dust, but we still fantasize that we are the same team
we were then. The reality is that we have become risk averse, willing to
coast on the momentum of past accomplishments. If we study the problem,
build tools and systems, and so on for the next 50 years, we can jolly
ourselves along that we are still those clever Americans who put a man on
the moon back when was that again?
If the next step is to send humans to Mars, then we must reexamine our
culture of averting risk and assigning blame. We don't need any miracle
breakthroughs in technology. The techniques are well understood. Sure, it
takes money, but distributed over time it doesn't require any more than
we're spending now. What is lacking is the will, the mandate, and the sense
of purpose.
Something interesting is happening right now as you're
reading this. NASA is scrambling, under presidential orders, to prepare for
a renewed vision of human exploration beyond Earth. They've generated a
plan, and it's a good one. I've sat on the NASA Advisory Council for the
past 18 months, which is surely the most interesting period since the Apollo
days. NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe has fundamentally reorganized the
agency. NASA is figuring out post-shuttle solutions to get people into
orbit, how to do the heavy lifting to get big payloads (like interplanetary
vehicles) up there, and all the other critical tasks to create human
exploration space-systems architecture.
The public understandably asks how this will be paid for. The answer
comes with some good news and some bad. The bad news is that space shuttle
operations and space station construction and operations (in other words,
current human spaceflight) is sucking up about $8 billion of NASA's $15
billion annual budget. The good news is that when the shuttle is retired
(2010) and the space station completes its mission (2014), $8 billion a year
will be freed up without adding a dime to the NASA budget. Over time, one
funding wedge tapers, and the other widens. From 2014 to 2024, you've got a
cool $80 bil to send folks to Mars.
The problem is that government projects are subject to bloat.
Fortunately, the other recent change is that the private sector has started
to really flex its muscle in space. Burt Rutan's flights to win the Ansari X
Prize are a milestone in human spaceflight. Does Rutan's technology work for
real exploration beyond Earth's orbit? Not directly. But it demonstrates
that small companies like Rutan's Scaled Composites, Elon Musk's SpaceX, and
Bigelow Aerospace can have a place at the table of human spaceflight in the
future. One of the strongest recommendations of the Aldridge Commission, the
presidential panel convened to review NASA's exploration plan, is that
private enterprise should be made an integral part of the solution.
Everybody talks about the cost of going to space. But what about the cost
of not going? Where would our economy be if the space race of the
'60s had not happened? What if we hadn't been forced to come up with
more-powerful computing to calculate trajectories on the fly while guys were
on the far side of the moon in titanium cans? Where will we be in 20 years
if we don't do something that captures the public imagination and inspires
kids to give a damn about science and engineering again? What if we become
Rome, blinded by the image of our own superiority while other younger, more
vigorous cultures supplant us?
You may be asking: Shouldn't we solve our problems here on Earth before
we go into space? There will never be a time when all people are satisfied,
when all wrongs are addressed. We live better, more luxuriously, and longer
now than at any other time in history. Cook, da Gama, and Magellan left
behind shores wracked by death, disease, and social injustice - but they
went, and their societies benefited. Our problems must be solved, but not at
the expense of exploration.
Exploration is not a luxury. It defines us as a civilization. It directly
or indirectly benefits every member of society. It yields an inspirational
dividend whose impact on our self-image, confidence, and economic and
geopolitical stature is immeasurable.
So, as the ones paying the tax bills, we have to shout out that we want
this! Our shout has to be loud enough that in the mind of the politician,
that fear-based processing algorithm, the fear of going becomes less than
the fear of not going.
What are we waiting for? Let's go.
Man vs. Machine
Some truths take a lifetime to learn; some you know when
you're 5 years old. At that age, I knew that human beings were meant to
explore space.
By Andrew Chaikin Wired Magazine
Dec 2004
It was 1961, and the space age had barely begun. I didn't know about
President Kennedy's challenge to send people to the moon within the decade,
but I knew that humans would go there - after all, my picture books almost
always included astronauts exploring alien vistas.
Today, decades after the final Apollo mission, we still haven't sent a human
back to the moon - or beyond it. We explore the solar system with robots,
like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which have been roaming the deserts
of Mars for close to a year. These rovers are magnificent examples of human
ingenuity. They drill into rocks to analyze chemical composition. Their
microscopic imagers zero in on tiny details, while a pair of cameras capture
widescreen, Imax-quality panoramas. The rovers can even dig trenches to
reveal what's beneath the surface.
It's tempting to think that wonderful
machines like these could replace human explorers. But Spirit and
Opportunity can do only what they're told. They can detect only what they
have been designed to detect. The data they can collect in a month on Mars
could be gathered in a matter of hours by a lone human field geologist. Even
the mission's scientists and engineers agree that to realize the full
potential of scientific discovery on other planets, we'll need to put human
minds and hands to work. The question is not whether to send
people, but when.
Of course, the costs and risks of sending humans to the moon, Mars, or
nearby asteroids will outweigh the benefits for at least the next decade.
Until that balance is tilted by the development of new spacecraft and
protective measures that reduce danger and expense, we'll have to live by
the watchword of engineer Gentry Lee, a 30-year veteran of NASA's Mars
missions: "Never send a human to do a robot's job."
But the balance will tilt, and when it does, humans will follow
in the footsteps of our robotic creations. That doesn't mean machines will
act only as a kind of advance team for people; even after astronauts have
begun exploring alien worlds, they will need robotic assistants to handle
repetitive or especially dangerous tasks. But only human explorers can raise
the pace of discovery a quantum leap. And only they will tell us what it is
like to be there.
This is the precious gift we got from the Apollo astronauts who visited
the moon between 1968 and 1972. One recalled his amazement at exploring the
lunar landscape, a wilderness that was more ancient than he could comprehend
and more beautiful than he had imagined. Another described orbiting the moon
alone, in darkness, gazing out at a sky filled with unblinking stars, and
wondering who might be staring back. All spoke of their awe at seeing Earth,
lovely and distant, rising beyond the moon's lifeless horizon - and of the
sobering realization of how far from home they really were.
These stories, postcards from the edge of human experience, are just a
taste of what we will gain when humans once again journey to other worlds.
The future of space exploration is for robots and people. But don't take my
word for it. Ask a 5-year-old - the one inside you, who longs to be an
explorer.
Andrew Chaikinis the author of A
Man on the Moon, the basis for the HBO miniseries, From the Earth
to the Moon.
Conversation With
John Young
Ex-astronaut says moon's resources may help Earth
By PATTY REINERT 17 Dec 2004
Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
Associated Press File
Astronaut John Young, who was part of the Apollo 16 mission to the moon in
April 1972, salutes the U.S. flag after it was planted on the lunar surface.
WASHINGTON - In more than four decades at NASA, astronaut John Young has
flown in space six times seven if you count his lunar liftoff. He smuggled
a corned beef sandwich aboard a Gemini capsule, walked the moon during
Apollo and commanded the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Columbia.
In an interview with the Houston Chronicle two weeks before his retirement
from the space agency, Young, 74, said he'll spend his time advocating for a
return to the lunar surface and a human mission to Mars, convinced that life
on Earth could depend on it.
Q: What were you thinking about and feeling when you first approached the
moon on Apollo 10, and when you landed there to explore on Apollo 16?
A: I was flying the spaceship and we were breaking into lunar orbit, and we
broke out over the highlands on the back side of the moon. It was completely
dark ... so we were in the dark and then we broke out into sunlight and saw
the back side of the moon. The impressive thing about the back side of the
moon is how many darn craters it has. If the back side of the moon was
facing us, I think human beings would be far more adaptive, far more
educated, about (asteroid or comet) impacts on planet Earth. We're going to
have a few of those before it's over with. ...
But one-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon is just delightful. It's
not like being in zero gravity, you know. You can drop a pencil in zero
gravity and look for it for three days. In one-sixth gravity, you just look
down and there it is.
Q: Why should humans go back to the moon?
A: The moon has a lot of resources that we'll learn how to use in this
century and that will be great. ... The technologies we need to live and
work on the moon will save us right here on this planet.
Bad things are inevitably going to happen to us, like comet or asteroid
impacts or super volcanoes. Flying in space is risky business, but just
staying on this planet is risky business too.
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due
to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455. How does that
relate? You're 10 times more likely to get wiped out by a
civilization-ending event in the next 100 years than you are getting killed
in a commercial airline crash.
The most dangerous thing we do in Houston, of course, is drive our
automobiles to work every day, so you know how dangerous that is and how
many people get killed doing that. But wiping out civilization. ...
It's not the point that we should move (to another planet). It's the point
that the technologies that we need to live and work in other places in the
solar system will help us survive on Earth when these bad things happen.
Q: You commanded the first flight of space shuttle Columbia in 1981, and
you've also been a strong advocate for upgrading safety at NASA. How do you
think the agency is doing with that, and how long do you think the space
shuttle should be used?
A: You're going to need the shuttle to fly 28 missions in 10 years to build
the space station. I think the only way to do that is to keep at the shuttle
and look at every problem they have, and they're doing that right now. I
wish we were flying right this minute.
Q: With Sean O'Keefe retiring, what do you think NASA needs in its next
administrator?
A: I think they need to be looking at somebody who understands the business.
It's a tough business, you know, doing things for science and technology and
advancing the future and making real progress on the long term. It's tough
to get people to want to do that.
The goal of going back to the moon and on to Mars even though it would
develop the technologies that over the long haul would save people on this
planet nobody wants to invest in it. You'd think people would be worried
about their children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren,
but we really don't worry.
We now have the ability to develop the technology to allow us to control our
own destiny, and I think we should do that. I think it would be very
important in the long haul to try to keep civilization going. It's a pretty
important bunch, a great gang we all belong to the human race ...
Q: What are your retirement plans?
A: I plan to keep advocating for developing the technologies we need to get
off the planet and keep the shuttle going and build the space station and do
all the things we need to do to make progress in science and technology.
Over the long haul, doing that will certainly make things better for people
all over the Earth.
You know, sooner or later, the Chinese and the Indians are going to want two
cars in every garage, just the way we do. If they put fossil fuel cars in
every garage, there isn't enough oil on the planet to do that.
I think going to alternative sources of energy is the key to the future of
civilization on this planet, because we're gonna run out. ... Nobody's
worried about that, but we should be very worried about that.
I think it's really important to get folks educated about these problems ...
Earth's geologic history is pretty clear: It says, quite frankly, that
single-planet species don't last. Right now we're a single-planet species.
We need to fix that.
Stocks' Final Frontier
Humans reached for the heavens once again in 2004, from the
president's push for Mars to SpaceShipOne's daring suborbital adventures to
Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Tim Beyers wonders if there are
profits for investors on Earth in this new space race.
By Tim Beyers
January 10, 2005
We're kicking off the first five weeks of 2005 by profiling five promising
innovations on the verge of exploding into the mainstream in the New Year.
Last week, we covered radio frequency identification tags, otherwise known
as RFID. Today, we're tackling the commercialization of space travel. You
might want to fasten your seat harness.
Star Trek hit the airwaves in 1965, but 2004 will go down as the year the
real star trek began.
Nearly 40 years after that seminal TV series, and more than 35 years after
humans landed on the moon, we've reached the dawn of a new space race. But
instead of America battling the Soviets, it is Lockheed (NYSE: LMT) vs.
Boeing (NYSE: BA), SpaceDev vs. Orbital Sciences, Virgin vs.... well, every
other embryonic space tourism outfit.
And the stakes in this battle couldn't be higher: The winners will earn
market supremacy in the final frontier. Talk about pricing power. More
importantly, imagine the investment potential.
Typically, it takes decades for developments in space to have a real impact
at sea level. Last year's full calendar of intergalactic events changed
that. From President Bush lighting a fire under NASA to get to Mars, to
SpaceShipOne earning the $10 million Ansari X prize for suborbital space
flight, to Sir Richard Branson's new Virgin Galactic venture, the heavens
suddenly became downright hip. And it's continued into 2005. Witness the
cover of the most recent issue of Wired magazine for which Branson donned
astronaut gear.
And though it doesn't feature Wired's textured stock cover and various other
stylish colored bubbles, we at The Motley Fool have a remarkable new
publication called Rule Breakers. This service, which I'll describe for you
in more detail in a minute, is dedicated to ferreting out tomorrow's great
growth stocks early in their disruptive stage.
What Is a Disruptive Innovation?
As the name implies, it's a breakthrough that rattles the walls of the
conventional, technological advances, from the automobile to the microwave
oven, that ultimately reshape our lives.
Being a certifiable science fiction geek, I get pretty excited by all these
developments, but the investor in me wonders if this is all hype. Can those
of us here on Earth really make money from humanity's newfound passion for
the heavens?
In a word, yes. There are dozens of potential markets created by
commercializing space flight, including the following two that I think are
most promising.
Space tourism
Though SpaceShipOne's historic flights captured the headlines, it was the
Feds who were responsible for potentially jumpstarting suborbital space
tourism. The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act (even less romantically
known as H.R. 5382) ultimately allows average Americans to hitch a ride on a
rocket at their own risk. The president signed the bill into law two days
before Christmas.
Soon after, interest in the 70-mile-high club began to run high among
celebrities. For example, William Shatner of Star Trek fame, and Sigourney
Weaver, star of the Alien films, both said they'd enjoy traversing the final
frontier. But what about average Janes and Joes? Virgin thinks they'll sign
up in droves. In fact, a spokesman quoted in the Wired story says more than
12,000 people have registered at Virgin Galactic's website, each a potential
future ticket holder. Says Virgin spokesman Will Whitehorn, "People are
throwing checks at us." At $200,000 per ride, that's potentially $2.4
billion in sales.
But space tourism has been hyped before. During Christmas of 1968, Pan Am
chief Juan Trippe started taking reservations for trips to the moon. Some
90,000 people signed up. What's different this time around? For one, we're
not talking about a trip to the moon. A suborbital trip not even 90 miles
above the Earth is a breeze compared to a lunar expedition. Second, the cost
of spaceflight has dropped considerably, in no small part due to the
relatively low cost of computing equipment. And finally, space travel is
safer now. Consider SpaceDev, which created a rocket engine that literally
burned rubber to light SpaceShipOne's candle. That's far safer than the
combustible components used to create classic rocket fuel.
So, how can the common investor get in on space tourism? Right now, SpaceDev
is among the very few public companies in this mix, but there are plenty of
private companies worth watching. Among them: the LiftPort Group, which
is constructing a space elevator; Space Adventures, which has been
dealing in space tourism since 1998; XCOR, which is competing with SpaceDev
to create suborbital space engines; and the Zero Gravity Company, which
offers weightless flights on a specially modified Boeing 727.
Galactic hitchhiking
Cargo is a huge industry -- just ask FedEx (NYSE: FDX) and UPS (NYSE: UPS).
Those two generated more than $60 billion in sales over the past 12 months.
But that's the tip of the proverbial iceberg when you think about the entire
market, which includes airline cargo, private couriers, trucking, shipping,
and so on. Especially now with the continued rise of e-commerce, the
industry seems to get larger every day.
Don't expect growth to slow anytime soon, especially now that more payloads
are headed for the stars. Consider Space Services, which arranges orbital
funerals. Next month, more than 100 of our dead from around the globe will
lift off from SpaceX's Falcon I rocket, which is designed to reach orbit
more affordably than the classic white and black behemoths of old. Combine
that with new micro-satellites that will be easier to haul and you've got a
burgeoning industry ready to dot outer space with more electronics than you
can find at your local Best Buy. That's good news for companies that already
do part of their business in space, such as Sirius (Nasdaq: SIRI) and XM
Satellite Radio (Nasdaq: XMSR).
Where are the investing opportunities in space cargo? SpaceDev is helping
construct micro-satellites, as are the big defense contractors. Other big
players such as SpaceX and Space Services remain private, but both of them
are absolutely worth watching.
Beam me up
That the Feds are asking the private sector to invest in space is good for
everyone, especially investors. But it's also worth noting that NASA's
mission to get back to the moon in 10 years and Mars afterward will require
it to fund hundreds of innovations, many of which will be created in private
labs. Fortunately, the space agency knows this and has unveiled Centennial
Challenges. Modeled after the Ansari X prize that SpaceShipOne took home,
the first awards will be modest, but could grow over time to as much as $50
million for far-flung adventures such as commercial moon shots.
No doubt, the combination of federal and private investment should grow the
commercial space market dramatically over the next five years. Though many
of the companies that will participate in this revolution remain private,
not a few are public today, from ghoulish trickster Xybernaut to
mega-contractor Ball (NYSE: BLL). And many more likely will come public
soon.
David Gardner described these opportunities best when he said, "The earth
can shake when Rule Breakers are born on our public markets. They bring a
disruptive technology, diabolically clever and effective marketing, or a
totally new business model to this little backwater planet of ours. They
rattle our capitalistic foundations. And in so doing, they create serious
profits for the opportunistic investors who find them early on."
It's our job to keep our eyes peeled for these kinds of opportunities. We
take a great deal of pride in finding worthwhile stocks, and making
strategic bets where we may. In that sense, this revolution is no different
than any other, and we can all profit together. If you choose to join us
before Jan. 31, take 50% off. Now, would you mind beaming me up?
Motley Fool contributor Tim Beyers is a confessed Trekkie, and he got the
Star Wars DVD collection for Christmas. He wishes he owned some of the
stocks in this story but, alas, he doesn't. Fortunately, you don't need a
telescope to see what stocks Tim owns. You can check his portfolio here, in
his Fool profile. The Motley Fool, which has a disclosure policy, is
investors writing for investors.
An Opposing Viewpoint
(with my reply)
Hi
Great, I have to agree with everything you say.
Yet you haven't addressed the inspirational value of such a mission. Unless
we humans begin to dream collectively in a big way, we're going to snuff
ourselves out on this tiny claustrophobic planet.
Mario
----------------------------
To: Mario Di Maggio
Subject: How To Mars ?
Hello,
The cost of one manned mission to Mars ($400.00 B ) is equivalent to athousand robotic missions.( $0.40 B) We could put dozens of
scientificsatellites in orbit around not only all
our solar system's planets but alsoall their
major moons. In addition we could send dozens of landers to alllatitudes of all planets and their major moons. It doesn't stop
there. Wecould visit comets and asteroids and
even send spacecraft out of our solarsystem. We
could virtually touch every corner of our solar system and fordecades. The scientific payoff and discoveries dwarfs the alternative
of asingle mission to a single location of a
single planet for just a fewmonths.
Supporters of manned spaceflight like to argue that the astronaut is moreeffective than a robot. Well even if this was true the astronaut
would needto be not twice as effect or ten times
or one hundred times but rather athousand times
as effective to just get the same value as the robot. Letsconcede that the astronaut is twice as effective as the robot. That
makesthe robot a better choice by a factor of
five hundred times. Would the Marspancam image be
any better taken my an astronaut ?
The argument for the astronauts also claims that a human is needed in theloop. That argument misses the point that with robots humans are in
theloop. Just look at JPL. They have hundreds of
the worlds best researchers.They are directly in
the loop orchestrating the rovers activities. This iscalled telepresence. Those researches are virtually on Mars. Also
note howJPL claims the rover cameras have 20/20
vision. This telepresence technologyis also on
trial in the operating rooms of hospitals. Doctors are performingsurgery telerobotically from upto
thousands of miles away from the patients.The
plain fact is that people are in the loop big time with the robots.
Now remember, I concede that the astronauts would be more effect than therobots but the problem is that they would be marginally more
effective for a
disproportionate cost to the tune of five hundred times less scientificreturns.
The manned mission supporters realize this lack of value so they cite thespin off technologies that benefit mankind. This is a very hollow
argument.If you really value, for instance, the
medical devices that emerge then itis silly to
not pursue them in a direct targeted way rather than spendingall your money visiting the moon and hoping that this will trickle
down toan improved pace maker. Furthermore much
if not all of the spin oftechnologies will
inevitablly emerge on their own good timetable.
Please, lets touch and visit every corner of our solar system and fordecades rather than a single mission to a single location of a single
planetfor a single moment in time.
Sincerely D. D.
Brief
report-back on the meeting I attended in London on Friday 10th
December 2004: The Scientific Case for Human Space
Exploration
Hosted by the
Royal Astronomical Society and held in the main lecture room of the Linnean
Society (where Darwin and Wallace's thoughts on natural selection were first
presented in 1856).
Contacts I made:
As regards the Ask the Scientist Future of Space exhibits:
Dr
Kevin Fong
(Lecturer in Physiology and Director of the Centre for Aviation, Space and
Extreme Environment Medicine, UCL). Dr Fong, one of the UKs leading 'exobiologists',
is difficult to pin down, yet says he would be delighted to help us with our
Future of Space exhibition
Dr
Charles Cockell
(British Antarctic Survey). Unfortunately I failed to corner him, yet he is
such an enthusiastic and eloquent exobiologist Im confident he will be very
willing to assist us. The same would be true for Dr Ian Crawford
(Research School for Earth Sciences, Birbeck and UCL), who together with Dr
Cockell organised this meeting
Steve
Eckersley
(Senior Mission Systems Engineer, EADS [Earth Observation, Navigation &
Science] Astrium Ltd). Steves group has just completed a
comprehensive study for ESAs Aurora programme on the best ways to minimise
the effects of harmful radiation. He would be happy to help us where he can.
As regards the Mars Spacesuit exhibit:
Mr
Bernhard Hufenbach
(ESA Directorate for Human Spaceflight, Microgravity Research and
Exploration). I asked Mr Hufenbach about acquiring a real or mock-up
futuristic spacesuit being developed by ESA (we were keen to use ESA over
NASA). As far as he knew though, there were no finished products available,
yet he would pass my details on to someone who would know for sure.
Other contacts:
Dr Robin
Catchpole - updated him on my new position, and he says he would love to
deliver talks and evening lectures in our planetarium in the future
Anita
Heward - met Anita for the first time. British Festival of Space director.
Rodney
Buckland - chatted to him for a long time, founder of the European Space
School
Heather Couper & Nigel
Henbest - touched base and updated them
The highlight of the
meeting for me was to see both the NASA Chief Scientist (Dr Jim Garvin) and
ESA Chief Scientist (Dr Bernard Foing) on the same programme!
Interesting information
included:
The Space
Shuttle will only be retired after the ISS is finished, as all ISS
components have been built to fit the Shuttle cargo bay
Speakers
unanimously agreed that the debate over human vs. robotic exploration is
outdated and unfounded. The two will happen together, maximising on robotic
exploration where we can, because work man-hours in Space are expensive. So
the UK politicians and members of the scientific community still clinging to
this theological (due to its level of irrationality, as one speaker put
it) argument had better wake up or the UK will miss the boat
Although
human Space exploration is very expensive, it is important to remember that
the money does not go into Space. It stays on Earth and circulates through
the economy.
Extremely
comprehensive and thorough studies described by Jim Garvin and others show
that human exploration costs LESS per science discovery/advance than does
robotic exploration
The
reasons Moon bases feature in both the NASA and ESA plans to go to Mars are:
(a) the need to learn how to live and explore Space in our own backyard
first (b) tremendous scientific benefits of studying the Moon carefully (ie
which contains true ancient Earth samples) (c) the absolute necessity of
learning how to manufacture materials on other worlds
Dr Cockell
explained we are NOT going to Mars to search for life (as it would lead to
disappointment if we didnt find any, especially amongst the public). We are
going to Mars to do what weve always done - to EXPLORE. If we find life,
that will be significant. If we dont find life, it will also be
significant. Thats how science works
He also
described the Christmas Present Effect - a wonderful analogy explaining
how you could never build a robot to find the perfect Christmas present. To
find such a gift requires YOU to be there to see whats available, to draw
on your lifetimes accumulated knowledge, and then to bring widely
disparate data together into a coherent picture. A robot could never
explore a planet like a human geologist, as it would only discover the
things we have asked it to look for. Dr Cockell recently went shopping for
paper clips and discovered the absolutely perfect gift for his sister: a
Cambridge edition of Monopoly - which of course he hadnt known existed up
till then
Impact
craters are good places to look for life because shocked rock is porous,
providing a habitat for microbes
It is
unlikely we will encounter alien microbes which could infect humans and pose
a hazard to life on Earth. From what we know, pathogens and diseases on
Earth are highly co-evolved with their hosts, and cross-species infections
are very rare
Later that evening a
larger short meeting was held in the Royal Geological Society lecture hall,
where Jim Garvin updated us on the very, very latest from the Mars
Exploration Rovers (ie. information received that day). He also explained
that:
The Rovers
were designed to operate for 30 days. They have now been operating
faultlessly for over 330 days! Huge amounts of data have been received, more
than anyone at JPL could ever have dreamed or wished for. This is an
incredibly successful mission that has done wonders for NASAs image and
credibility, and has been an absolute boon for planetary science
Yet Jim
Garvin and his team concede that ALL the information that has been
collected so far by the robotic Rovers could have been gathered in a few
days by a single human geologist. Additionally, the interpretation of
the data and hypotheses formulated to date could all have happened in the
mind of that human geologist as s/he was working in the field
Although
the Rover instruments were not designed to look for signs of life, NASA can
confirm that so far no carbonates have been found (ie. the instruments can
detect levels as low as 10% by weight). Yet surprisingly high levels of
sulphur have been found, coating almost all the rocks studied so far.
Conclusion
I thoroughly enjoyed
this meeting and look forward to attending many more. From Thinktanks
standpoint its a great way to meet useful astronomy and Space science
contacts, and for this community to become aware of our planetarium and
exhibits. From a personal perspective, Im really glad to finally be living
so close to centres where such significant events take place!
Mario Di Maggio
13 December 2004
Sagan's
rationale for human spaceflight
by Michael Huang
Monday, November 8, 2004
Sagan, among others, has argued that spaceflight is required
to ensure thefuture of humanity.
Good ideas are often forgotten, but they do not die. They are discoveredthrough reading, or created independently again. The recurring debate
onwhether humans should be in space omits such an
idea. The relationshipbetween human spaceflight
and the survival of the human species was
explained by the spaceflight pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and RobertGoddard, and has since been expressed by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan,
andmany others. Sagan's thoughts are of
particular interest, since he devotedhis career
to space science and the search for extraterrestrial life, nothuman spaceflight.
Carl Sagan was initially a critic of astronautics. Like many scientists, hebelieved astronauts diverted funds from "real science", missions withrobots and scientific instruments. "Guys in a tin can in low Earth
orbitare where the excitement isn't," he once
said. One of the reasons for theCosmos television
series and book was to inspire an excitement in scientificdiscovery equal to the excitement of the first human missions. The
worldwidesuccess of Cosmos helped set the stage
for the enduring popularity of today'sspace
science missions.
In 1994, the long-awaited sequel to Cosmos was published. To the surprise ofmany, this new book was more about humans than science. Pale Blue
Dot: AVision of the Human Future in Space found a
rationale that not onlyjustified human
spaceflight, but raised it to the highest importance.
... every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--notbecause of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical
reasonimaginable: staying alive.
It seems too simple to be true. The purpose of life in space is to survive.But this is true of all life, whether it is in space or on Earth.
Everyother purpose of life, even happiness, must
defer to existence.
These are the missing practical arguments: safeguarding the Earth fromotherwise inevitable catastrophic impacts and hedging our bets on the
manyother threats, known and unknown, to the
environment that sustains us.
In medieval times, some people kept a human skull in their home to remindthemselves of mortality, and to view their priorities against the bigpicture of life and death. A modern equivalent is the dinosaur
fossil. Thefossilized remains of a once great and
dominant species reminds the humanspecies of our
eventual choice: survival or extinction, or as Sagan put it,"spaceflight or extinction".
A technological civilization that lives on the surface of a single planethas inevitable threats to its long-term existence. Current
threats--impactsfrom space, nuclear or biological
war--will be joined by new threats fromemerging
technologies. Even if all these threats are detected, solutionssuch as disarmament or relinquishment are incomplete or politicallyimpossible.
We will have to live with these threats, just as we have been living underthe threat of nuclear war. This requires that we live in a way that
willwithstand a catastrophe if it occurs: living
at multiple locationsthroughout the solar system,
and living with the assistance oflife-supporting
technologies.
Space technology, despite its name, is not limited to space. Technologydesigned for the extremes of space can be used in any extreme
environment.If a catastrophe made Earth hazardous
for life, space technology willsustain life in
space and on Earth. This is happening now. NASA aims to usespacesuit technologies in a suit for homeland security: a protective
suitfor environments contaminated with biological
or chemical agents.
Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good andevil... The technologies that threaten us and the circumvention of
thosethreats both issue from the same font. They
are racing neck and neck.
This new race is not between nations or ideologies; it is a race betweenpowerful technologies. Will we use science and technology to end life
orsupport it? Intercontinental ballistic missiles
or interplanetary launchvehicles, nuclear weapons
or nuclear power plants, biological and chemical
weapons or life support systems, weapons of mass destruction or technologies
of mass life?
What is Carl Sagan's vision?
If we were up there among the planets, if there were self-sufficient humancommunities on many worlds, our species would be insulated fromcatastrophe... A cataclysmic impact on one world would likely leave
all theothers untouched. The more of us beyond
the Earth, the greater the diversityof worlds we
inhabit... then the safer the human species will be.
There is a renewed effort--by governments, companies and individuals--for asmall fraction of humanity to live independently beyond the Earth.
One way
to assist the colonization of the solar system is to spread Sagan's messageto a larger audience. The popularity of Cosmos was due to its
exceptionaluse of television. Its sequel Pale
Blue Dot deserves an equallyinspirational
documentary film or television series. Similar documentariescould be based on William Burrows's The Survival Imperative: Using
Space toProtect Earth (to be published in 2005)
or Martin Rees's Our Final Hour: AScientist's
Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster ThreatenHumankind's Future In This Century--On Earth and Beyond (2003).
Human spaceflight and the survival of the human species are ideal subjectsfor the screen. Hollywood has produced memorable human spaceflight
films,such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apollo
13, and the epic disaster is one ofHollywood's
favorite genres. These visuals would work equally well in the
documentary format. Narrations of quotations (see Space Quotes to Ponder)and interviews with experts would convey the history and current
status of
the idea.
SpaceShipOne's Ansari X Prize breakthrough brought the world's attentionto the idea of personal spaceflight. Hopefully, a documentary will do
thesame for another important idea.
As a former Martin-Marietta aerospace engineer, prolific
author and founder of the non-profit Mars Society (1998), Robert Zubrin is
regarded as the driving force behind the proposed Mars Direct mission to
reduce the cost and complexity of interplanetary travel. The flight plan
calls for a return journey fueled by rocket propellant harvested in situ,
from the Martian atmosphere itself
July 2004 Astrobiology Magazine
As described in Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red
Planet, the Mars Direct concept eventually became a cornerstone of a frugal
'living off the land' approach to travel in NASA's Design Reference Mission.
The Design Reference Mission (DRM) covers Earth launch to Mars landing, Mars
cruise to Mars launch, and Earth return. The mission entails sending cargo
ahead, docking the crew at the space station, then meeting up with the
stashed supplies once on Mars.
"For our generation and many that will follow, Mars is the New World,"
writes Zubrin. The New York Times Book Review (Dennis Overbye) indicated how
such an outline initially was greeted as breaking conventional wisdom about
martian mission plans: "Part history, part call to arms, part technical
manual, part wishful thinking, The Case for Mars ... lays out an ingenious
plan. ......one of the most provocative and hopeful documents I have read
about the space program in 20 years."
The Mars Society continues to grow across many countries with thousands of
members interested in space advocacy, particularly how best to encourage the
exploration and settlement of Mars. Notable among the Society's members are
science-fiction author, Greg Benford, and Academy Award winning director,
James Cameron.
Astrobiology Magazine had the opportunity to talk with Robert Zubrin about
the possibilities for terraforming Mars.
Astrobiology Magazine (AM): First off, should Mars be terraformed?
Robert Zubrin (RZ): Yes.
AM: Does Mars contain all of the elements needed to make the planet
habitable, or will we have to import gases, chemicals, etc., from elsewhere?
If so, then will Mars always need constant inputs to achieve habitability,
or do you think that given enough inputs Mars would reach a tipping point
and planetary processes would create a self-sustaining feed-back loop?
RZ: It appears that Mars does have all the elements needed for
terraforming. The one outstanding question is nitrogen, whose inventory
remains unknown. However theory suggests that Mars should have had an
initial supply of nitrogen comparable to the Earth, and it seems likely that
much of this is still there.
AM: How long will terraforming take? When you envision a terraformed
Mars, what do you see?
RZ: If one considers the problem of terraforming Mars from the point
of view of current technology, the scenario looks like this:
1. A century to settle Mars and create a substantial local industrial
capability and population.
2. A half century producing fluorocarbon gases (like CF4) to warm the planet
by ~10 C.
3. A half century for CO2 to outgas from the soil under the impetus of the
fluorocarbon gases, thickening the atmosphere to 0.2 to 0.3 bar, and raising
the planetary temperature a further 40 C. This will cause water to melt out
of the permafrost, and rivers to flow and rain to fall. Radiation doses on
the surface will also be greatly reduced. Under these conditions, with
active human help, first photosynthetic microbes and then ever more complex
plants could be spread over the planet, as they would be able to grow in the
open. Humans on Mars in this stage would no longer need pressure suits, just
oxygen masks, and very large domed cities could be built, as the domes would
no longer need to contain pressure greater than the outside environment.
4. Over a period of about a thousand years, human-disseminated and harvested
plants would be able to put ~150 mbar (millibars) of oxygen in the Martian
atmosphere. Once this occurs, humans and other animals will be able to live
on Mars in the open, and the world will become fully alive.
That's the scenario, using current technological approaches. However
technology is advancing, and 23rd Century humans will not conduct their
projects using 21st Century means. They will use 23rd Century means and
accomplish the job much faster than anyone today can suppose.
So if someone in the 24th Century, living on a fully terraformed Mars,
should discover this interview, I believe that she will view it in much the
same way as we today look at Jules Verne's lunar mission design. We today
look at Verne's ideas and say "Amazing, a man living a hundred years before
Apollo foresaw it -- and not only that-- launched his crew of three from
Florida, and returned them in a capsule landing in the Pacific Ocean where
they were picked up by a US warship, all as things actually happened. But
launching people with heavy artillery - how 19th Century can you get?" So
our 24th Century Martian historian studying this interview will smile and
say; "Incredible. Here are people 300 years ago talking about terraforming
Mars. But doing it with fluorocarbon gases and green plants --how 20th
century can you get?"
AM: Who should the first human colonists to Mars be and how should
they be chosen? Since Martian gravity is one-third of Earth's, wouldn't bone
and muscle loss, along with radiation, make colonization a one-way journey?
What are the implications of what, from an Earth-perspective, is exile?
RZ: Life is a one-way trip, and we are all permanently exiled from
our past. In that sense Mars colonists, and all colonists, are no different
from anyone else. It is just more apparent in their case, as in addition to
leaving behind the time of their past, they also leave behind the place. But
in so doing, they gain the opportunity to create a world where none existed
before, and thus gain a form of immortality that is denied to those who are
content to accept the world they are born in.
AM: If there's life on Mars, how do we balance the Martian right to
life with the human impulse to explore and extend our borders?
RZ: The basis of ethics needs to be of benefit to humanity. If there
is life on Mars, it is microbial, and its interests can in no way be
considered as commensurate with human interests. Those who argue otherwise
strike a fashionable pose, but deny their arguments every day through their
actions. If bacterial interests trump human interests, then mouthwash should
be banned, chlorination of water supplies should be banned, and antibiotics
should be banned. If bacterial interests trump human interests, then Albert
Schweitzer and Louis Pasteur should be denounced for crimes against
bacteria.
Now, in saying that ethics must be based in human benefit, we need not deny
that preserving valuable environments in important. It is important to save
the amazon rain forest, for example, because a world without an amazon rain
forest would be a poorer inheritance for our descendants than one with one,
and the degree of the impoverishment exceeds whatever value might be
obtained in the short term from slash and burn agriculture. However, in the
case of Mars, the calculation votes the other way, as a terraformed Mars,
filled with life, cities, universities, used book stores, and yes, rain
forests, would be a vastly richer gift to posterity than the current barren
Red Planet. Clearly, just as anyone who proposed transforming the current
Earth into a place like Mars would be considered mad, so those who, given
the choice, would keep Mars dead rather than make it a place as wonderful as
the Earth must have their sanity doubted.
There remains only the question of science. Surely we should avail ourselves
of the opportunity to study native Martian life before we terraform the
place. We surely will. Terraforming Mars will be a long term project, and
should native Martian microbes exist, there will be ample opportunity to
study it before terraforming takes place. There will also be opportunity to
study how it adapts to warmer, wetter conditions and the presence of
terrestrial microbes after terraforming takes place. Furthermore, if Mars
actually is terraformed, there will be much more people on Mars to study
every aspect of Mars, including both its native and immigrant life. So in
fact, our knowledge of Martian biota will be increased by terraforming, not
decreased.
AM: Humans sent to live on Mars will bring with them ideas on how to
govern themselves, rules of conduct for living in society, economic
motivations, and personality conflicts. How should the colonization of Mars
be managed, and how should Mars be governed? Should the colonization of Mars
be a cooperative effort among every nation, or should only those that
financial contribute be in charge of the operation?
RZ: The Founding Fathers of the United States called our infant
republic a "Noble Experiment," a place where the grand liberal ideas of the
Enlightenment could be given a run, and the idea of a government based on
the rights on man could be tested to see if it could succeed in practice.
Their Noble Experiment did succeed, and as a result became the model for a
new and better form of human social organization worldwide.
Mars can, should, and will be a place for numerous new Noble Experiments.
The well of human social thought has not yet run dry, nor do I believe that
we have yet discovered the ultimate and most humanistic form of society
possible. In the 22nd Century, as in the 18th, there will always be people
who think they have discovered a better way, and need a place to go where
the rules haven't been written yet so they can give their ideas a try. For
these, the Martian frontier will beckon. Many of their ideas will prove
impractical, and their colonies will fail. But some of those who really have
a better idea will succeed, and in doing so, light the way forward for all
humanity.
So, to answer your question, I say that the colonization of Mars should not
be managed at all, but be done through the joyful chaos of human freedom.
AM: Taking a leap into the future, let's assume the technology,
biology, sociology, and politics have all combined to create a unique
sub-race of humanity on Mars. Generations of human beings have now been
born, grown, bred and died on Mars. Who are these Martians?
RZ: In 1893, the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote:
"To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.
That coarseness of strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness;
that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that
masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to
effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant
individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy and
exuberance that comes from freedom -- these are the traits of the frontier."
I think that says it all. The pioneers of the Martian frontier will be the
Americans of the future.
Author: Mars mission to
inspire humanity
SAN FRANCISCO, California 15 April, 2004
Human exploration of the moon and Mars will move humanity
beyond terrorism and war, inspiring the public in much the same way as
Europeans who explored North America 500 years ago, science-fiction author
Ray Bradbury said Thursday.
Bradbury praised President Bush's initiative to return humans to the moon by
2020 and later land astronauts on the Red Planet. He spoke before a
presidential commission reviewing the president's proposal. The panel is to
make recommendations to NASA and the president in June.
"If you sell it on the basis of a new freedom, a new movement away from the
politics and horror and terror on Earth, I think people will recognize how
(important) that is," Bradbury said.
Bradbury, 83, faced skeptical questions from some commission members.
Image source:Space Review
Commissioner Paul Spudis, a visiting scientist at the Lunar and Planetary
Institute in Houston, asked how space exploration could be sold to the
"practical side" of the American public. Another panel member noted that
many people complain about spending money on space exploration when there
are many more pressing problems on Earth.
Bradbury said $1 billion a day is spent on war and conflicts. President
Bush's proposal, announced in January, would be funded by $1 billion in new
NASA funding each of the next five years.
"If we take one day each year and spend it on space travel, we could do it,"
Bradbury said via a satellite link from Los Angeles.
Bradbury said such challenges did not stop Spain and England from supporting
explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot.
"All sorts of problems hadn't been solved," Bradbury said. "If they had
stayed there, there wouldn't have been an America."
The panel also wondered whether public support would dwindle if astronauts
were killed on interplanetary missions.
Bradbury, who wrote about the human colonization of Mars in "The Martian
Chronicles," said thousands of people died exploring North America.
Earth and space are just different parts of the cosmos
Andrew Lam
Sunday, January 18, 2004
San Francisco Chronicle
We live in troubling times, but when we look upward, it seems there's ample
grace waiting in the heavens. The images of an orange rock- strewn plain
that NASA's Spirit, the space probe currently roving on Mars, is sending
back are mesmerizing. Meanwhile Stardust, another space probe, is on its way
back to Earth -- as if in a fairy tale -- with comet dust captured in its
net. In a week, a second NASA rover will land on the opposite side of Mars
to study rock sediments and signs of life. Adding to it all, another space
probe, Cassini, will begin orbiting Titan, a planet-size moon by Saturn,
later this year.
President Bush's announced plans this week to send manned missions to Mars -
with the cooperation of Japan and Europe -- and establish a permanent
station on the moon. And China hopes to have a manned station orbiting the
moon.
While thinkers and writers still haven't come to terms with the full impacts
of the forces of globalization, another age is already upon us. Call it
cosmozation. The word doesn't exist in the dictionary, but then, two decades
ago, neither did globalization. Soon, Webster will have to add cosmozation,
or something akin to it, to future editions in order to address man's
intensifying relationship with the cosmos.
Roland Robertson, a social scientist, defines globalization as: "The
compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the
world as a whole." The world shrinks, geographical constrains are overcome,
while identities become multilayered, complex.
As a species, we may not always get along with each other, but these days,
thanks to an integrated economy and unprecedented mass movement across
borders, and modern technology - satellites, cell phones, jet planes, and
the Internet, and so on - we are, like it or not, constantly aware of each
other's existence. We are, in fact, interacting and influencing one another
on an unprecedented scale and intensity, regardless of the distances.
Taking Robertson's definition a step further, it seems inevitable that the
universe, too, shrinks and compresses as we explore and measure it and infer
profound implications from our discoveries. Cosmozation is the process in
which man's awareness expands beyond the globe: He grows cognizant that he
exists on intimate levels with the rest of the universe, that he is
interacting with it, and, increasingly, having an effect upon it.
For example, scientists are discussing the possibility of a large asteroid
hitting Earth and what to do about it. The last asteroid that collided with
our planet 65 million years ago wiped out more than 90 percent of life here.
One idea is that various countries could send up nuclear missiles in a
concerted effort to deflect a big asteroid's trajectory, were it to come our
way. What is astounding is not that another sizable asteroid might collide
with Earth, but that we think we can do something about it. Unlike the
dinosaurs, we have, in effect, become active agents in this process.
The knowledge that humans can have an effect beyond our own planet informs
NASA's decision in September to crash the spacecraft Galileo on Jupiter
rather on Europa, one of Jupiter's 39 satellites. Europa has an ocean under
its ice and active volcanoes to boot. It just might be supporting alien
life. Jupiter, on the other hand, is very hot and gaseous and deemed
incapable of life. Crashing Galileo on Europa would have risked
contaminating it with microbes from Earth.
That decision says something about our new perspective regarding our
position in the universe. Until 600 years ago, we assumed our world was at
the very center of the universe that it was flat, and that it was orbited by
the sun. Today, thanks to advances in technology including the Hubble
telescope, which stares into the far edges of the universe, we've found
evidence of hundreds of other solar systems, with planets orbiting a star,
or in some cases, binary stars. We even spotted a planet with an atmosphere
150 million light years away.
A few years ago, a meteorite from Mars known as the Allan Hills meteorite
astonished the world when scientists said they found tantalizing traces of
fossilized life within it. Their findings have been contested, but the
meteorite renewed enthusiasm for the idea of panspermia (Greek for "all-
seeding") -- the interstellar exchange of DNA, a theory championed by
Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA molecule with two other scientists
half a century ago. Besides, there is such a thing as self fulfilling
prophecy: If Earth didn't receive DNA for a startup way back when, we are
now actively sending out DNA through space with our spacecraft and
satellites and shuttles.
We know Earth is constantly bombarded by meteors when we look up into the
night sky and spot shooting stars. But more astounding is what astronomer
Lou Frank speculated about a decade ago and found new evidence for only
recently. Using the Hubble telescope to study Earth's atmosphere, Frank
proved that Earth is constantly hit by snowballs from space. The
implications are enormous: If snowballs from outer space hit Earth
regularly, it is "snowing" onto other planets, too, providing much-needed
water for the primordial soup.
We are slowly discovering that ours is not just a lonely blue planet amid
the heavens but, in fact, it exists as part of an open and intricately
complex system. Distant planets and alien civilizations, if once the stuff
of science fiction, are beginning, to be seriously considered by scientists.
Astronomer Sergio Fajardo-Acosta, a researcher at University of Denver
readily confesses: "I personally believe that there are many civilization
out there ... The distances are staggering and communication is a problem,
especially if that civilization is in another galaxy. But with imagination
and a very sophisticated technology, I think we could probably overcome the
distance limitation and communicate with others."
The sea on which we sail in our voyage of cosmozation is infinitely more
vast and wondrous than that of Columbus. And if modern life has its
pitfalls, and if cynicism often colors our world views, we can always look
up to the starry night and be re-enchanted. The cosmic age has arrived.
Andrew Lam is an editor at Pacific News Service. He is
featured in a documentary on PBS this April called "My Journey Home" to
Vietnam.
Too High?
Back to the moon and beyond.
Dennis E. Powell
January 15, 2004
Suppose that you were to sit down and calculate the total amount you and
your family will spend on automobiles purchase price, interest on loans,
fuel, insurance, repairs, and so on over the next 25 years. The number
would probably startle you. It would probably be well over the price of a
new home. That big, round figure would in and of itself suggest all manner
of non-automotive possibilities. It might even make a car seem a bad idea.
Of course, that number would not in and of itself allow for the fact that
those automobiles would produce some returns, probably among them
transportation to and from the job in which you make the money to pay for
them and then some.
So it is with the loudest argument being raised in opposition to the
president's program to return Americans to the moon and, if all goes well,
on to Mars. Opponents object on three main grounds, really, none of which
survives thoughtful scrutiny:
The space program should be conducted entirely in the private sector.
We can't do it. Critics point to a multitude of problems that we would
face in establishing a presence on the moon and in a trip to Mars.
It costs too much. There are problems here on Earth on which the money
should be spent.
Considering them in order, the privatization of space exploration is,
ceteris paribus, a fine idea, but it misses an important fact: We left an
American flag, not a "no trespassing" sign, on the moon, and in 31 years the
private sector has failed to go there, or even get to low Earth orbit. The
private sector, though involved in some fledgling launch efforts and
successful in the construction of commercial satellites, has not found the
means to get far off the ground. Some kinds of research and development seem
to get done only under the aegis of government. It was 35 years ago that a
Defense Department agency, DARPA, got the idea of linking together computers
at research facilities. Over time, DARPAnet turned into something now known
as the Internet. The situation is getting worse, not better. "Simply put,
much more D development is being done," noted Charles M. Vest, president
of MIT, in a 2002 speech, "but less R research at the frontier, or of
longer-term potential is being done." A project such as the one Bush
proposes would do much to reverse the trend.
As to the second argument, given voice by Paul Davies in the New York
Times thusly, "Without some radical improvements in technology, the
prospects for sending astronauts on a roundtrip to Mars any time soon are
slim, whatever the presidential rhetoric," there is this to be said: Of
course we can't do it. That's why the president did not announce that we'd
leave for Mars the day after tomorrow. We couldn't fly to the moon in 1961,
either, when President Kennedy announced his plan for us to do so before the
end of the decade. Much of the value in space exploration is in the
identification and solution of problems. "With the experience and knowledge
gained on the moon, we will then be ready to take the next steps of space
exploration: human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond," said Bush. We go
when the problems are solved. And in the course of solving those problems we
make technological advances that have uses other than space exploration. The
electronics revolution we all enjoy the computer on which you are reading
this was greatly advanced by inventions that would not exist but for the
space program of the 1960s.
"I think very little in the way of enduring value is going to come out of
putting man on the moon," said Philip Abelson, director of the Carnegie
Institution's Geophysical Laboratory and editor of Science. "We would have
put in a lot of engineering talent and research and wound up being the
laughing stock of the world." Abelson made his remarks in 1963.
It is a matter of historical fact that the most difficult problems get
solved only when they must get solved. Penicillin languished on a laboratory
shelf for a decade until World War II and the resulting need for effective
ways of fighting infection forced the allies to develop a way to produce it
in quantity. Establishment of a moon base and, later, an excursion to Mars,
would force the development of technologies of great importance in the
energy and environmental realms as well as many other fields. "The moon is
home to abundant resources," Bush said, allowing for development of products
of value in further exploration and, perhaps here, as well as development of
new technologies. Once developed, they would quickly find their way to
mainstream, Earth-bound use, just as the development of cheap, reliable
semiconductors in the 1960s led to everything from cellular telephones to
personal computers to digital photography. There is more to space
development than Tang and form-fitting mattresses.
The most misleading of the arguments is the one having to do with cost.
The number being batted around $1 trillion was apparently pulled by
someone from the thin vacuum of space. It is a made-up number. A
fabrication. It apparently derives from the half-trillion dollars NASA
(kicking up its heels in delight) estimated would be the cost of a
gold-plated moon base and trip to Mars when George H. W. Bush proposed it in
1989. Someone, somewhere, applied some goofy mathematical spinning to the
price of NASA's 1989 wish list and came up with the $1 trillion figure. It's
worth remembering that NASA didn't get its wish list. The president's
proposal would increase NASA's budget by very little.
How is this possible? Easy. "We will begin the program quickly, using
existing programs and personnel," the president said. The space shuttle, a
giant sop of NASA's budget and one of the few aspects of the space program
that has returned little of scientific or technological value, will be
phased out, gone entirely by 2010. Military space-launch programs will be
incorporated more closely into NASA's activities, reducing duplication of
costs. Contractors, who benefit most from the spin-offs of research and
development, will be expected to bear more of the R&D costs themselves.
But let us suppose that it does end up costing a trillion dollars. Here
is where the automobile example above comes into play. The money involved
would be spent over many years at least a quarter century and a well-run
space program more than pays its own way. Indeed, that's very nearly the
definition of a well-run space program.
Those who argue that we shouldn't go to the moon and Mars because there
are things to be done here on Earth are guilty of lapses of logic which are
nearly unforgivable. "How are they going to pay for all this?," goes a
typical argument, stated by a Flint, Mich., resident in an Associated Press
poll published Tuesday. "I don't see how it's morally justifiable. In Flint,
there isn't a school roof that doesn't leak." Setting aside whether it is
the job of the federal government to send roofers to Flint, Mich., it's
important to note the common logical error of assuming that it's either-or,
that if we don't go to the moon we'll fix the roofs in Flint instead. The "a
nation that can go to the moon ought to be able to . . ." phenomenon has
been around since, well, since the nation went to the moon. That is not, of
course, how it works. When we have a well-defined space goal, people are put
to work. They pay taxes. The contractors for whom they work pay taxes. The
economic engine turns. And Flint becomes better able to fix its own roofs,
not inconceivably employing methods and materials developed by the space
program, whose roofs will need to be somewhat more impenetrable than even
those in Flint, Mich.
It's not a zero-sum game, and arguing that it is makes as much sense as
saying that we shouldn't build a house because there are so many
improvements that can be made to the cave. The new space initiative is about
creating something where nothing existed before. And we're the ones to do
it. "Although goals have varied over time, the commitment to a U.S. presence
in space has never wavered," notes a 1994 Rand report. "As part of that
commitment, the country has developed a large infrastructure to support
space operations, a pool of expertise matched by few nations, a very capable
industrial base, and a network of international partnerships. The nation
derives substantial benefits from space for defense, communications,
science, and a number of other applications." In that report, no project was
seen as having more potential benefit economically, inspirationally, and
in improving the quality of life on Earth than a lunar base. "And along
this journey," the president said Wednesday, "we'll make many technological
breakthroughs. We don't know yet what those breakthroughs will be. But we
can be certain they'll come and that our efforts will be repaid many times
over." If history is any measure, he is right.
The lesson is not lost on other nations, notably China. Gu Yidong, a
director of China's manned spaceflight program, gets it: "With the further
development of space technologies, outer space application will turn out to
be an important driving force for China's economic and social development,"
Gu told Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, in October.
In short, a program of the sort the president envisions would more than
pay its own way, even as ownership of an automobile is more often than not
economically sound. That NASA wanted a Ferrari in 1989 means nothing,
because the president is not proposing to buy them one. Instead, he's put
the space agency on notice: He'll usher through enough to get the new space
vision started; after that, he said, "Future funding decisions will be
guided by the progress that we make in achieving these goals." Fancy that:
funding tied to performance!
There are questions that can and should be legitimately be asked about
Bush's proposal. Can NASA turn itself around, restore to itself the kind of
ethic that made its achievements of the 1960s among America's proudest? Will
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe be able to wring the pork out of an agency
that in many ways has become just another piece of the bureaucracy, and will
he be able to ride herd over the disparate interests which must work
together to bring the plan to fruition? Do we still have the national
ability to focus on a goal that by its nature must span several
presidencies, in a time when demagoguery, easy fixes, and flat-out lies are
a growing part of our political discourse?
Setting up a residence on the moon and visiting Mars will not be easy
tasks. The public and political response to the president's plan will say
less about the plan than it will about what we as a nation have become. "We
need to see and examine and touch for ourselves," Bush said. "And only human
beings are capable of adapting to the inevitable uncertainties posed by
space travel." How the plan is accepted will tell much of whether our
curiosity remains alive.
It's certainly worth thinking about, while you are, say, driving to work.
The Bush administration's plan for a return to the Moon is drawingskepticism from many quarters. Some think we can't afford the cost,
and thatthe money would be better spent on
problems here at home. Others look at the
spectacular success of the Spirit rover on Mars, and argue that the spaceprogram should focus only on robotic missions. Even some space
enthusiastsargue against the Moon base, believing
we should head directly to Mars. Butmy 25-year
career in science education, including two years at NASAheadquarters, tells me these concerns are misplaced. The Moon is the
rightgoal, and now is the right time.
It has been more than thirty-one years since astronauts Eugene Cernan andHarrison Schmitt completed the last of a 3-day series of excursions
on footand by buggy on the surface of the Moon,
and blasted off to return home withApollo 17. For
all practical purposes, our human space program has beengrounded ever since. Sure, we have flown many times to Earth orbit,
and evennow there are astronauts aboard the
International Space Station - but the
Moon is more than one thousand times as far from Earth as the Space Station.If we liken the Apollo Moon landings to the voyages of Columbus, ourpresence on the Space Station is like a Spanish presence on
Gibraltar. Anentire generation has grown up in a
world where humanity's greatestaccomplishments in
space flight belonged only to their parents and
grandparents.
Those who worry about the cost of a new space initiative may answer with "sowhat?" I'm no fan of budget deficits, and I'm a skeptic of
supply-sideeconomics, but there are indeed some
programs that pay for themselves. Thehistorical
case for Apollo is clear-cut. Technology developed for the Moonlandings became the basis for modern computers. The need for rapidcommunication between scientists and engineers working in different
placesfueled the innovations that led to the
Internet. Our success in the race tothe Moon
turned the tide in the Cold War, ultimately turning former enemiesinto friends without a shot being fired. Economists can argue over
theprecise economic benefit of Apollo, but our
nation clearly got a greatreturn on its
investment.
We can expect just as great a return on the cost of building a permanentMoon base. We'll need to develop many new technologies to make it
possibleto live and work on the Moon, and to
travel routinely between the Moon andEarth.
Moreover, with a permanent base, we can hope to get additionaleconomic benefit directly from the Moon.
To take just a single example, consider the Moon's potential for offering anew source of clean and abundant energy. One idea suggests obtaining
solarenergy on the Moon and beaming it back to
Earth. Even more intriguing is theprospect for
nuclear fusion with helium-3 - a rare gas that is abundant inthe lunar soil but virtually nonexistent on Earth. Incredible as it
maysound, a nuclear fusion power plant that used
hydrogen as its fuel couldextract enough energy
from the water flowing through your kitchen faucet topower the entire United States. We do not yet know how to build a
fusionpower plant, but the availability of
helium-3 would make the task mucheasier, and the
kitchen faucet example shows that we wouldn't need much.Think about it: no more concern over global warming, and no more
difficultyproviding energy to poor people in
developing nations, all because of afuel we
find on the Moon.
Let's move on to the next argument against the Moon - the idea that we canget an even better return from robotic missions. This might arguably
be trueif we focus only on measurable economic
benefits (although I doubt it).After all, we also
need new technologies for robotic missions, and robotscould in principle tap lunar resources as well. But it neglects what
mayhave been the greatest value of the Apollo
landings: the intangible value ofinspiration.
For thousands of years, visiting the Moon was the stuff of mythology, andsuddenly it was real. If we could put a man on the Moon, then surely
nodream was out of reach. We were inspired to
believe that anything ispossible if you work hard
enough, and people around the world looked to
America as a nation that could make dreams come true. Robotic missions willalways give us the ability to study places that are too far away or
toohostile for us to visit ourselves. But no one
grows up with the dream ofbeing a robot.
Inspiration comes from people.
Finally, let's turn to the argument that we should skip the Moon and gostraight to Mars. Even if this were the right thing to do, it's far
lesslikely that we could do it now. Mars at its
closest is 200 times as far asthe Moon. Any
realistic plan for visiting Mars envisions the use of localmaterials to support a human outpost and to manufacture fuel for the
returntrip. We do not yet know how to do these
things, nor do we fully understandthe dangers of
sending astronauts on such a long trip. Mars is a great goalfor the long-term, but we can't afford to wait on reinvigorating our
spaceprogram.
Moreover, from the standpoint of inspiration, the Moon has something thatnot even Mars can offer - the fact that everyone recognizes it in the
sky.If we build our Moon colony as an
international collaboration, as we should,then
people of every nation, every race, and every religion will be workingtogether on the second-most visible object in the sky. Imagine a
world inwhich even the poorest children can look
up at the Moon and know that peoplejust like them
are living and working there. Imagine a world in which Arabsand Israelis, Chechens and Russians, Americans and Iraqis, can all
look upand say, "We are working together up
there, so surely we can work togetherdown here.
This coming July 20 will mark the 35th anniversary of the first Moonlanding, when Neil Armstrong stepped out and said, "That's one small
stepfor a man, one giant leap for mankind." His
words carried the message thatspace exploration
transcends political boundaries, belonging to no oneperson, nation, or culture. It is time for us to continue our leap,
buildinga base on the Moon as a stepping stone to
Mars and beyond. In doing so, wewill prove that
conflict is not the only option open to our species. Apermanent Moon base will offer the hope of a better future, one in
which weall learn to work together topreserve our home planet, while at the same
time beginning a journey that may ultimately take us to the stars.
Most of the feedback on my commentary about the new Moon/Mars exploration
initiative boiled down to two issues:
(1) Scientists worry that the space science budget will be decimated to
pay for the new initiative, a worry substantiated by the almost
immediatecancellation of the Hubble servicing
mission.
(2) Others wonder how we can possibly afford the initiative. So here are a
few additional thoughts...
On the question of how the new initiative will affect the science budget:
The issues have been wonderfully summarized by a former Chief Historian at
NASA; I've copied his essay below. Regarding the Hubble cancellation,
NASA's Administrator claims the decision was NOT based on money, but
rather on a variety of factors of which post-Columbia Shuttle safety was
paramount. The scientific community is understandably skeptical, so we'll
see where it goes from here. Personally, I think that Hubble and other
space science missions are among the only really inspirational things that
we as a nation have at present, so it seems pretty self-defeating to cut
them in order to make room for a future program whose most important
aspect is its inspirational value.
Turning to the question of where the money will come from, let's start
with a painful truth: the President's proposed budget for the initiative
is woefully inadequate. He is essentially asking to get started with very
little new funding now, leaving all the big costs to be dealt with by
future presidents. A more serious approach to such a bold initiative would
admit that it's going to cost a lot of money and then make the case that
it's worth the cost. Yes, I think it's worth spending a couple hundred
billion to start a Moon base (for all the reasons outlined in my
commentary). Thus, we should get started by finding significant new
funding for NASA right now --- not by raising its budget by slightly more
than inflation, as the President proposed, but by being prepared to double
or triple the budget for space exploration. So now to the obvious
question: even if the program has long-term benefits, where do we get the
money for it now, when we are running a $500 billion deficit this year?
Well, I've got to admit that borrowing $500 billion from our children in a
single year borders on the criminal. But, that said, borrowing can be
worth it if it is for an investment that will provide a positive return in
the future. And consider this: The average error in projected budget
deficits a year out is about 12%, which means about $60 billion on the
$500 billion projection for this year. Thus, the uncertainty in
this year's budget deficit is four times NASA's entire budget ---
meaning that even a substantial increase for space is effectively lost in
the "noise" among our other budgetary problems. If you accept my
contention that there's a long-term positive return for the space
initiative, then we ought to go ahead and find the necessary funding.
(It's also worth noting that even in the short term, money spent on the
space program essentially all goes to the creation of fairly high-tech,
high-paying jobs that usually stay right here in the U.S. --- exactly the
kind of jobs that we are most in need of.)
But, you ask, isn't my claim of a positive return based primarily on the
unquantifiable value of "inspiration"? Well, yes, but it's not quite as
loosey-goosey as it may sound. First, for those of you who may have missed
my appearance on Denver's 9 News on Saturday morning, I gave the following
analogy to illustrate the importance of inspiration in general:
For those who say that we need to deal with our problems at home first,
I liken it to a child with behavioral problems. We have a national
behavior problem. We have too many people uninsured, we borrow too much
money from our children, and we sometimes have difficulty getting along
with other nations. But you don't solve a child's behavior problems by
locking him a closet and telling him he can come out when they're fixed.
You solve the child's behavior problems by inspiring him, by making him
believe that he has a great future ahead. If we truly want to solve our
problems here at home, we'll have a far better chance if we can give the
same type of inspiration to every child, here and around the world.
Building a Moon base will do that, because we'll be reminded of human
potential every time we see the Moon in the sky and know that people are
up there, living and working, right now.
In addition, while inspiration is generally considered priceless, let's
try to put a value on it anyway, just for the sake of argument. For
example, suppose that building a Moon base as a stepping stone to Mars and
beyond provides only enough inspiration to cause an additional 1% of the
U.S. population to go on to get a college degree. This is a pretty
conservative assumption, especially when you consider that the percentage
of the U.S. adult population (over age 25) with a 4-year college degree
has already risen from 7.7% in 1960 to about 26% today. (Yes, I do think
much of that can be traced to Apollo, but that's a different argument.)
Statistical studies of income show that, over a lifetime, the average
college graduate earns some $1 million more than a high school graduate.
Now run the numbers:
If an additional 1% of the U.S. population of 300 million people gets
a college degree, that's 3 million more people earning college graduate
salaries rather than high school graduate salaries. Over their lifetimes,
these people earn an additional $1 million each. The total economic impact
is then 3 million people times $1 million each, or $3 trillion.
This $3 trillion return is roughly 20 times the estimated cost for the
Moon base. That's an investment that's hard to beat, even if the cost has
been underestimated by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4.
Bottom line: Building the Moon base is the right thing to do, even if the
particulars of the President's current proposal are inadequate or
wrong-headed. Rather than trying to kill a great idea, we should all be
working together to make sure the great idea is implemented the right way.
Let's not pretend it can be done on the cheap, but instead say that bold
ideas require bold steps. As President Kennedy said in 1961, "We
choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and
do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,
because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our
energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to
accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to
win..." The Moon should never have been a one-shot deal. It's time
to go back and complete a dream that has been on hold for more than 30
years. The future depends on it.
Best to all,
Jeff
----------------------------
Essay below from Roger Launius, the former Chief NASA
Historian
---------------------------
Greetings:
I'm sure everyone has been following with great interest the president'sinitiative to return to the Moon and go on to Mars.
I am cautiously optimistic about what I have heard about this initiative.The devil is in the details with this proposal, however, as I
suppose isthe case with everything. I'll be
very interested to see the details andthe
ramifications that will result from this change of focus. The spaceenthusiast in me says, great, let's go back to the Moon and on to
Mars. Weneed to get out of low-Earth orbit and
now is as good a time as any. I'mvery excited
by the prospect of a return to the Moon, this time to create apermanent human presence there. For a whole lot of reasons, not the
leastof which is that it will provide a
reasonable testbed for technologies and
procedures necessary to undertake a human mission to Mars, going to theMoon now makes sense.
But, the cynic/curmudgeon/realist in me wonders about how all of this willunfold and what hard choices it will engender. Is it "unfinished
business"from the first Bush administration, as
many think about the second GulfWar? Is this,
therefore, "son of SEI?" Where is the money going to comefrom, and two questions about this come immediately to mind: (1) is
itenough to fund these major initiatives, even
taking into consideration thereprogramming of
other funds within the NASA budget? and (2) what is thelikelihood that Congress will agree to this given the record
deficitsalready being recorded and lots of
other priorities for precious taxdollars? Am I
the only person who thinks this is essentially an unfundedmandate what has tremendous potential to backfire on the
spaceflightcommunity? An unfunded mandate, as
you know, presents enormous if not
insurmountable difficulties.
Moreover, the early statements on this proposal talk about refocusing NASAto accomplish this new human exploration function, and either
discontinuing
or having another organization carry out missions that do not directlysupport it. What does that mean for the Earth science mission, theaeronautics research mission, the planetary exploration program
beyond theMoon and Mars, and the great
observatories such as the proposed Webb Space
Telescope, to say nothing of continuing Hubble astronomy made possible byanother servicing mission? Does this initiative signal the end of
NASA aswe know it? One of the scientists at
NASM said that a useful analogy tothis proposal
would be for the president to tell NIH that its task is nowto cure cancer but that it do so within only very modest increases
to itscurrent budget, and that all activities
of the agency should support thatgoal. Anything
that doesn't should be ended. No AIDS or Diabetes research,no CDC, etc. He thought that was what the president had done to
NASA.
In addition, what about space access? If we cannot put humans into orbit,and hopefully the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be able to do this
earlierrather than later but I am mindful of a
landscape littered with failedhuman space
access projects, how can we go anywhere else?
Finally, although I'm a big believer in returning to the Moon will thatpart of this proposal resonate with the public, or is it something
that isbasically saying, "to boldly go where
nine Apollo crews have gone before?"
The answers to these, and a lot of other questions that I have will have
toawait the further delineation of the
proposal. We'll see. It's going to be an interesting next several months.
Roger D. Launius, Ph.D.
Chair, Division of Space History
National Air and Space Museum