The Proper Role

Rand Simberg has another interesting post on the “humans to Mars” debate. And again, I have to agree with his arguments about the proper role for NASA:

It is useful for the agency to be working on enhancing technologies, but it’s essential for them to be working on the enabling ones. That’s how the resources should be allocated, if they’re limited (as they are, of course).

NASA has been spending (and sadly, squandering) entirely too much money on launch technologies, and altogether too little on deep-space and planet-settling technologies, though the former aren’t needed as badly and can be funded by the private sector, whereas the latter are vital, with no apparent near-term payoff.

I would like nothing better than to see NASA transition to a cutting-edge research agency along the lines of NACA — I came to that realization a long time ago, when it dawned on me just how much useful basic research in aeronautics was done by NACA in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In space, that means developing and demonstrating such technologies as surface suits, landers, long-duration spacecraft and associated systems, rovers, space power systems, in-situ propellant production and resource utilization, interplanetary propulsion, etc. As has been argued in various posts on his blog this week, we already have the know-how needed for private sector launch services and even manned on-orbit operations to take over from NASA…if NASA (and Congress) would take the private sector seriously and stop standing in its way.

In calling for NASA to take on humans-to-Mars as its focus, what I am asking for is precisely those things: for NASA to become an R&D agency again, and for it to stop engaging in those activities which should long since have been handed over to the private sector. As I described in the previous post, I’m not really after an Apollo redux. I don’t want a huge additional chunk of money to be shoveled into the project. I don’t want a single “flag-and-footprints” mission to become the short-sighted success criterion. And I don’t want the infrastructure and hardware and technology and teams developed in the process to be simply thrown away afterwards. I’m asking for a sensible, affordable approach: target NASA’s existing resources towards something, instead of allowing the agency to continue to fritter away its budget — our money — on the pet project or white elephant of the moment.

There seems to be a false premise involved in the opposition to the call for a new focus for NASA, namely that any new assignment for NASA is equal to an Apollo redux (or worse, an ISS redux). That need not be the case.