Writing Letters

Throughout the Conference last week, Bob Zubrin and others repeatedly made the following argument:

We are currently in a unique historical moment with regards to encouraging more vigorous space exploration. The upcoming Mars opposition (August 27) has focused a great deal of attention on the planet, and this attention will grow over the next week. One can quite accurately see the opposition as a “sign in the heavens”, as it will be the kickoff of six very important months of very public space-related (and Mars-focused) events. The centennial of the Wright Brothers’ first flight will be marked in December, and the five spacecraft en-route to Mars will begin arriving shortly thereafter. If the public response to Pathfinder was any indication of the attention a Mars lander can generate, three landers in rapid succession should (if successful) cause quite a stir. And overlapping the arrival of the Mars flotilla will be the New Hampshire primary, the formal kickoff of the 2004 Presidential campaign season (whose significance I will touch on in a moment).

But the most important upcoming development is the release of the CAIB report. There has been a lot of speculation that the report will go beyond merely addressing the proximate cause of the Columbia disaster, to detail fundamental flaws with the agency itself. NASA is in for a great deal of bad publicity and Congressional scrutiny over the next few months, and while many people will be clucking about what went wrong and how to fix it, few will realize that the problems with NASA stem from a single cause: it doesn’t have a goal.

Without a destination, all roads look equally good. Without a goal, NASA has drifted down blind alleys and passed by many promising avenues, only to end up circling endlessly around the block.

So, how do we go about changing this state of affairs?

The Mars Society’s plan is to use the upcoming attention on space exploration generally and Mars specifically as a foot in the door to get people thinking about humans-to-Mars as the proper goal for the national space program. The idea is to write letters to local newspapers, one’s federal representatives, and the White House, using these space-related events (and significantly, the public attention and enthusiasm for space exploration which they will generate) to push for making Mars NASA’s organizing goal. Beyond writing letters, members were urged to meet with representatives in person, to bring this message directly to them. It is hoped that by doing so, we can use this unique opportunity to steer the debate on what NASA should be doing away from “space science” and “space medicine” and “space station” back to space exploration, where it should have been all the time.

All of this effort over the next few months will culminate in a push to get the issue on the radar of the Presidential and Congressional candidates as they head into the primary season. Taking up Mars as its goal is a political decision which is out of NASA’s hands (and in some cases, against its narrow, sandbox interests) — that decision lies with Congress and the President, and that is where our efforts should focus.

Note that nothing in this plan precludes getting NASA out of the way of LEO privatization. Indeed, Zubrin’s (and my) call for turning the Shuttle stack into a heavy lift launch vehicle — before it is too late — presumes that NASA will be getting out of the space taxi business sooner rather than later…OSP may or may not happen, but the Shuttle’s days are clearly numbered.

Tomorrow, I will outline some letters you can send to your newspapers and elected officials.