Spacemen
-- New Spinnaker Column --
This month President Bush announced ambitious, and ambiguous, plans to return man to his rightful throne of discovery. After falling astray for the past two decades with the Shuttle program it’s about time NASA is given a new mandate. America needs to see, as we did 30 years ago when man first landed on the moon, how much we can accomplish as a people that we cannot do us individuals.
The problem with the Shuttle was that it was always a problem looking for a solution. It wasn’t practical in any meaningful sense. It was only huge and costly. It was built around the idea that by factoring in economies of scale, the shuttle would quickly pay for itself making bi-weekly deliveries of satellites and/or people into space. This is why it was designed to be reusable. It turns out those giant Saturn V rockets that sent man to the moon and later delivered a space-station in one load was cheaper.
To justify the existential problem of the Shuttle at the end of the Cold War, NASA resurrected the idea of a giant multi-national space station. This idea has come to fruition with the nearly complete but totally useless International Space Station (ISS), the only real purpose of which is to keep the Shuttle useful for another decade. Now, we learn that Hubble is going to be left for dead because NASA needs to complete ISS before the Shuttle retires in 2008.
There are at least two alternative views to Bush’s vision of where we should go from here. One undercurrent with rising popularity is that we abandon space programs all together, considering that these two NASA rovers cost us half a billion dollars to build and land rovers 300 million miles away from the problems here on Earth. The problem with this approach is that it relies on a perfectionist fallacy, where we must tie our hands behind our backs and do nothing outside of the physical boundaries of our nation until every internal problem is fixed.
Another emerging view is that we stop government-funded manned exploration all together, allowing robots to do the scientific work and allow the free market, via space tourism, to build an affordable gateway to the stars in a way that NASA has not. This is exemplified through a $10m contest called the X-Prize. In the spirit of the contests that jumpstarted aviation, investors are hoping that entrepreneurs and backyard engineers will be able to build the first commercially viable manned vehicle capable of leaving Earth’s atmosphere, taking at least two millionaire tourist up with them.
As with most cases, private enterprise and government programs can co-exist peaceably together so long as the government gets out of the tourism business as soon as someone claims that X-Prize. The government must learn its lesson from the Shuttle, however, and have a clear plan for the manned space program so that we never again have to loose valuable scientific tools like Hubble for pointless projects like the ISS has become.
Tags: Treyopia Current Events Bush, space moon mars shuttle NASA hubble HST
