MarsBlog.net

For all the abuse I heaped on him back in September for his “Wild West on Mars” comments, astronomer Martin Rees actually gets it, I suspect. In this article in Foreign Policy, he speculates on who should be the “mans” in a manned space program, what they should be doing, and why. Though he inevitably plugs robots over humans, he does see a place for humans in space, but in the forms of private adventures and tourism rather than multilateral leviathans sucking at the government teat while claiming to do science for science’s sake (okay, maybe I overstate his position, but you get the point).

Should China succeed at a lunar landing, it would be a leap forward for the Chinese people, but nothing more than a throwback as manned space flight goes. Multilateral efforts, symbolized by the International Space Station, have perhaps also had their day (in no small part because of bureaucratic inertia; exploration by committee can be a drag on progress). The kind of vibrant program I wish to see, taking us to the moon and beyond?with Mars the ultimate destination?will require two big changes: The cost of space travel must decrease, and travelers should venture into space on behalf of themselves or private consortia, rather than nations.

(emphasis added) Wow. And just ten months ago, he was worried about the “Wild West model” prevailing on Mars. I’m starting to think that that earlier article didn’t adequately represent Mr. Rees’ views.

My prototype for a future astronaut is neither a civilian NASA employee nor a military test pilot, but someone in the mold of Steve Fossett, the wealthy serial adventurer who, after several expensive failures, finally managed a solo round-the-world balloon flight in 2002. Fossett obviously craves dangerous challenges?he is now attempting to beat the altitude record for gliders?and is willing to risk his life in pursuit of adventure. As temperament goes, he clearly has the right stuff. And as affiliation goes, he also has the right stuff. Paying his own way, he doesn?t represent a nation; he represents humanity.

Or, let the “gentlemen adventurers” push the boundaries, and let the tourists follow them.

Another great observation, in line with my own thinking on the subject:

When nations send people to space, space disasters become national traumas?and nations lose some of their will to explore. By contrast, were a private adventurer like Fossett to come to a sad end in space, we would mourn a brave and resourceful man, but his death would not be considered a catastrophe on the scale of the Columbia or Challenger accidents. Nor would it provoke nearly as much hand-wringing. It would be seen for what it was: a personal tragedy. To reach Mars and points beyond will require a certain ruthlessness of spirit, and swashbuckling individuals possess this quality much more than civilized nations do.

Of course, he does conclude by expressing the same mixture of hope and concern that he did in the earlier article:

Still, while I am optimistic about the ability of private enterprise to colonize the moon and lead us to Mars, I am less sanguine about what space pioneers will do once they establish a presence there. Will they be as scrupulous in preserving the natural environment as, say, the governments involved in the Antarctic project have been? Or will they simply exploit the planets they conquer, much as was done to the American West? Ultimately, how we get there is less important than what we do when we arrive.

Which sounds like a reasonable (if somewhat overblown) concern, rather than the handwringing worry that came through in the previous article.

I think this guy is on our side.

I linked to the Shuttle installment below, but I went back this afternoon and read the other articles and I think it’s worth a separate post:

In search of a mission: After latest shuttle calamity, NASA must rethink its reason for being

Shuttle promise unfulfilled: Checkered past, cost drawbacks inspire little hope as craft for the future

Space station had political ties in tow

Failures leave NASA lacking new way to fly

NASA’s unheralded explorers: In astronauts’ shadow, robots make bulk of discoveries

There is one more article coming tomorrow, “Moving Beyond Columbia”. Despite their brevity, the articles are eye-opening and well worth a read. As noted in the earlier post, I see a need for a thorough “coming clean” on the NASA fiascos of the past forty years (more on which later). Granted, NASA is not entirely to blame for the failure of the manned space program (Congress and USAF should share some of it), but many of the bad decisions over the years have been due to NASA’s own internal myopia, and those forced on it by budget limitations, etc., could have been mitigated had the agency had a focus and even a kernel of executive competence.

This Houston Chronicle article’s title is an understatement: Shuttle promise unfulfilled.

It’s a nutshell review of the politics of 1971 that resulted in a partially reusable spaceplane with unwanted and unused capabilities, which was sold on unrealistic cost and utilization promises — the sordid bureaucratic history of the program with which we are all by now familiar.

But what I found especially interesting was the following:

The 1971 Mathematica study was more intriguing, largely because its crucial finding — that the shuttles would be self-supporting if lofted into space once a week — was not believed possible, even by NASA managers. In startling testimony before the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in April, Robert F.Thompson, the space shuttle program manager from 1970 to 1981, bluntly admitted as much.

“Mathematica sat down and attempted to do some work on operating costs, and they discovered something,” Thompson said. “Mathematica discovered that the more you flew, the cheaper it got per flight. Fabulous. So they added as many flights as they could. They got up to 40 or 50 flights a year. Hell, anyone reasonable knew you weren’t going to fly 50 times a year.”

Thompson also admitted that NASA and the White House low-balled the total development cost by $1 billion when presenting it to Congress. NASA was asking for $6.15 billion and promising a first flight by 1981; the Office of Management and Budget drew the line at $5.15 billion and set the deadline at 1979.

Thompson testified that when he questioned NASA comptroller Bill Lilly about the discrepancy, Lilly replied, “Shut up. You got your program. Go on about your business.”

Whether the shuttle, once exposed to budget and other restrictions, ever had a chance of being the vehicle imagined two decades earlier by Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke and other space visionaries is an open question. Probably not. The technological hurdles were greater than they knew, and when total reusability was dropped as too expensive, the concept of the thing was irrevocably altered. There is no shortage of old shuttle hands who feel they were cheated by budget-whackers out of the chance to make a great spaceship.

This seems an odd thing to be bringing up now, thirty-two years later, in front of a committee investigating a Shuttle accident. It sounds like something one would hear before a “reconciliation commission”.

Perhaps that is what NASA should be doing now, after the issuance of the CAIB final report: establishing a follow-on commission to investigate NASA top to bottom, beginning to present, and expose the bad decisions (and the good choices) that the agency has made over the years and the impact they have had on civil, military, and commercial space efforts. Granted, this is something more suited to an independent historian or journalist, but a CAIB-like committee with the power to subpoena witnesses, conduct closed-door interviews, and obtain official records and correspondence would undoubtedly get a better collection of data than an individual investigator working on his own initiative. Plus, such a commission would have a higher profile than an individual author, bringing more public attention to the problems thus identified and thereby increasing the likelihood of something being learned from the effort.