Space flight: humans or robots?
What "trace of the national consciousness" would a repeat of the successes of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo leave?
Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 3/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
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The future of US manned space flight is in doubt, as the Obama administration has withdrawn support for NASA’s Constellation program. To Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, this is a bad idea. He writes (Ref. 1) that should Constellation be canceled, the US, for the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, will have no way to get humans into space. As for administration proposals for private industry to take over launch responsibilities, Krauthammer calls that “nonsense”—saying that space flight is too expensive and experimental with unreachably high safety standards. He describes a vague commitment to put humans on Mars as a ruse, killing the doable (reaching the moon) “…in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future.”
James Bacchus, a former member of Congress whose Florida district included the Kennedy Space Center, is less pessimistic. He writes (Ref. 2), “Obama is looking to NASA itself to develop new heavy-lift rockets that would eventually carry new spacecraft beyond Earth orbit on new manned missions of space exploration.” But he continues, “In the meantime, though, the President is looking not to NASA, but instead to a rapidly growing American commercial space industry…to develop much less expensive vehicles to resupply the space station.” Without private industry efforts, he adds, NASA will have no backup. He writes, “At a time when American leadership in space technology is being increasingly challenged worldwide, we need to continue to help move our private sector forward.”
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It’s interesting to see Krauthammer, a conservative, downplaying private industry capabilities while a former Democratic Congressman praises them. Be that as it may, I come down on the side of Bacchus and favor a more nuanced approach than a crash program to return to the moon.
Krauthammer writes, “Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year—1/300th of last year’s stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.” But what “trace on the national consciousness” would a repeat of the successes of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo leave? The manned space program of the '60s grew in an environment of military and ideological competitiveness that doesn’t exist today, and there is little political will to expend vast sums of money on a repeat performance.
If, as Krauthammer says, human flight to Mars is out of reach for the foreseeable future, why not emphasize robotic exploration? The Mars Science Laboratory is one robotic exploration initiative, and this month’s cover story looks at one company that is developing robotic arms for the mission. Expanded robotic exploration would seem a good alternative as human-space-flight technologies, capabilities, and goals evolve gradually in response to reasonably budgeted combinations of private and government initiatives.
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