Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Friday, January 09, 2004

To the Moon, Norton!

All the news sites are alive with the rumblings of a policy speech that will be given by the President. According to the rumors, Mr. Bush will call for a permanent manned outpost and the Moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars. The timing couldn't be better given the recent success of the Spirit lander/rover. I, however, have my doubts. The policy speech will discuss the phasing out of the Shuttle fleet (a good move in my mind) and the decommissioning of the International Space Station (a bad move in my mind). Let me explain.

I grew up at the end of the Apollo days and weathered the long drought of manned space flight until the Columbia's first flight. My professional career has been defined more by the accomplishments we have made with unmanned, robotic probes than science done by local human agents. Hubble, Voyager, Viking, Magellin, Galileo and several others have taken us to places we never imagined without threat to or cost of human life. The Shuttle on the other hand has proven an expensive delivery vehicle to low Earth orbit with limited scientific potential and enormous risk. That we have lost two of the five ships in the fleet comes as no surprise to me. The Shuttle system is an enormously complex one with two operational phases that allow little room for error. Because of this, if we continue to fly the fleet, as it remains, we will kill 21 more human beings and lose the last three orbitters. It's not a question of if but when. Failure of complex mechanical systems will occur sooner or later and with the Shuttle, if that failure takes place during liftoff or reentry, the energies involved will disassemble the system. What is needed is a replacement that is less complex, less costly and is reliant on more conventionally available technologies.

In going to the Moon, I see little benefit other than making sure the Chinese don't do it first. There is little benefit to being on the Moon unless one wishes to establish an observing outpost there and Hubble does a pretty good job of that. The difficult thing to me seems to be working out the issues of getting somewhere, not staying there. For this reason, I think the ISS needs to continue and to be expanded. NASA's mission should be to develop systems that will support and expand the ISS. We need more than two or three inhabitants. We need between seven and a dozen people on board in my mind learning everything there is to know about what happens to people in space over really long periods of time, say 12-24 months. We need to better understand what the long term effect of space habitation are on materials as well as humans. I see going to Mars as a good goal but we are very far off from actually realizing all the technologies and issues facing such a mission. The ISS, if expanded, offers an excellent experimental platform to discover these issues.

Going to Mars is hard. Half of the robot probes we have sent have failed to reach the target in an operational sense. We can fly-by but doing things more complex than that, especially landing, is a very risky proposition. We need to completely understand the reasons for that and a two week trip to the moon isn't going to teach us those. Long term space habitation is the biggest issue that must be addressed NASA's resources should be focused towards a limited set of goals with clear outcomes. Going to the Moon seems like a red herring to me.

Finally though, we have to accept that once we put people in space, some of them are going to die. In the last great age of exploration and the commercialization that followed, thousands of lives were lost to hazards that were not well understood. Navigational hazards, nutritional and psychological issues, technological failures and the vagarities of nature all posed major obstacles. If we can't get past wringing our hands for a year to 18 months every time somone dies progress will remain slow. It is admirable that we do not wish to endanger anyone due to flippancy or carelessness but the endeavor is risky beyond words. If human loss is unacceptable then we must send robots do to our scientific work for us while we remain close to home until we've worked out all of the issues we can possibly foresee. In any case, it will cost a lot of money.

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