I mentioned earlier that reading
Oliver Morton's
entry on changing his mind about manned space exploration had a
strong effect on my own opinions. But Morton's entry is pretty sparse
and assumes a lot of knowledge, so I wrote this longer entry about my
own journey to a similar opinion.
A talk about priorities is usually a talk about money, so here's a
baseline number. NASA's 2008 budget is $17.3 billion. This is not a
trivial sum, but since the government always seems able to allocate
much larger sums for pointless wars, weapons systems that don't work
and/or are strategically useless, etc., I've never bought into the
argument that this $17.3 billion is taking off the table money that
could be used to solve pressing social problems. (In fact there's a
pressing social problem that NASA is in a good position to help with,
except that part
got taken out of NASA's mission statement.) I prefer to think of
NASA's budget as a Strategic Awesomeness Reserve. And over time I've
come to the conclusion that manned space exploration is not
awesome-effective.
My realization has been a while in coming and I can identify four
big steps towards it: hearing the State of the Union Address in 2004,
learning about the cancellation of the Europa mission in 2006, reading
The Right Stuff in late 2007, and reading Morton's entry a
couple weeks ago.
Until I started writing this paragraph, my recollection was that in
his 2004 State of the Union Address, George W. Bush kind of casually
announced an extremely expensive set of manned missions to the Moon
and Mars, and then never mentioned them again; taking what in the
hands of a competent president might have been inspiring, and making
it seem tawdry and shameful. I'm
not the only person who had this memory.
But what actually happened was even stranger. The week before the
SOTU, Bush gave a totally separate speech outlining his Vision
For Space Exploration(tm). A week later he had already forgotten about
the moon base and manned mission to Mars he'd sent NASA scampering to
develop. Or at least he didn't consider it worthy of mention in the
SOTU, certainly not nearly as important as lecturing the country on
the horrors of same-sex marriage. It gave me the strange feeling of
being part of some space-nut block whose votes are vitally important
to George W. Bush, a block worthy of billions in largesse, but a block
whose hot-button issues must never be mentioned in speeches that
people pay attention to. Unfortunately, unlike most of us, the people
at NASA don't have the luxury of ignoring an incompetent president's
offhand suggestions; they're still dilligently working on making a
permanent moon base operational twelve years from now.
Item two: the Europa mission. Now that I'm researching this, it's a
lot more complicated than I thought. The "Europa mission" was just one
part of an enormous meta-mission called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter
(new from 7-11). The cost of the meta-mission would have been a huge
$10 billion, a lot more than I'd guessed for Europa
alone. Nonetheless, right now I think a Europa probe is the single
most awesome space mission. (Runners-up: next year's Kepler mission
and Mars Science Laboratory.)
$6.7 billion—a plurality of NASA's 2008 budget—is spent
on "space operations": the ISS and the Space Shuttle. This is sunk
awesomeness. It is cool to have a space station; it might even be $2
billion a year cool. But is the Space Shuttle twice as cool per year?
We've been doing three shuttle launches a year. What do we do on those
launches? We build the ISS. Why are we building the ISS? Because
people living in space is awesome. Is it so awesome the whole package
is worth $6.7 billion a year? Is there a more awesome way of spending
that money?
Here are what I consider the top eleven most awesome American space
projects of my lifetime, presented in descending order of
cost. (Numbers are a little fuzzy, mostly due to inflation since the
time total cost was reported.)
- Space Shuttle program (estimated lifetime cost $174 billion)
- The ISS (estimated lifetime NASA contribution $53 billion)
- Hubble Space Telescope (estimated lifetime cost $6 billion)
- Cassini-Huygens (total cost $3.26 billion)
- Mars Science Laboratory (estimated cost $1.7 billion)
- Galileo (total cost $1.35 billion)
- Voyager I and II (total cost $865 million)
- New Horizons (estimated lifetime cost $650 million)
- Kepler (estimated cost $467 million)
- Dawn (estimated cost $446 million)
- Mars Pathfinder (total cost $265 million)
There's a huge discontinuity. The bottom seven items on my list
cost less in total than continuing the top two items through
2008. Even if you think it's really really awesome to send
H. sapiens into Earth orbit, is the Space Shuttle program
thirty times more awesome than the Hubble program? (I realize that
over its lifetime the Hubble has had to be serviced by astronauts from
the Shuttle, but it would have been significantly cheaper to send up a new space telescope every five years!) I pinpoint the Space Shuttle, the ISS, and
Cassini-Huygens as not being awesome-effective, and the MSL had better
be pretty damn awesome. (Not sure why C-H was so expensive, except
that it started out as a JIMO-like meta-mission and had to be pared
down.)
More generally, just about any unmanned space mission you could
imagine is better awesomeness for money than any manned mission,
unless you think that sending a human body is so awesome as to
outweigh all other considerations. Some examples off the top of my head
that I'm pretty sure no one is doing: go to Europa. Go to the other
moons of Jupiter. Send more robots to the moon. Send recovery missions
to Mars and the asteroids. Set up a radio observatory on the far side
of the moon. Build enough telescopes that astronomers don't have to
fight for observation time on the Hubble.
Okay, that's pie-in-the sky stuff. But now comes the Vision For
Space Exploration(tm) with its $100B lunar base. The manned missions
are expanding, and they're squeezing out the unmanned missions--that's
what happened to the Europa mission. The permanent moon base will cost
about twice of NASA's contribution to the ISS, and (I don't have a number for this, but it's pretty likely) the twice-yearly
round-trip flights to the moon for crew rotation will cost more than the thrice-yearly shuttle
flights we do now.
Unlike with the Shuttle and the ISS, we haven't spent most of that
money yet, or (thanks to W's buried speech) gotten psychologically
invested in the mission. We still have an opportunity to step back and
say "Maybe we should buy an incredible amount of awesomeness
with this money instead of a moderate amount of awesomeness." Or maybe
for you $100 billion gets into the range where it could be better spent
on something other than astonomical awesomeness.
I used to buy into the Apollo-era idea that on a visceral level it
doesn't count as "exploration" unless a human body does it. This
lasted in some form until I read The Right Stuff. There I saw the origin of my
emotions towards manned space travel, and it was kind of creepy. The
Mercury astronauts were pioneers but they didn't explore
anything. From an exploration standpoint it made no sense to include
them in the capsules--they had to fight to get a tiny bit of control over their trajectory. They were sent up because we were locked in a
competition to prove who was the most awesome, cost be damned. The moon shot came out
of Kennedy's desire "to
announce a program that the U.S. had a strong chance at achieving
before the Soviet Union." Tying exploration into this is
equivocation. Exploration demonstrates how awesome the universe is,
not how awesome you are.
My preconception has a corollary that space exploration has been
moribund since Apollo--that is, I've never lived during a time of active exploration. But
if you look back without the preconception, space exploration has been
steadily progressing for sixty years. The first golden age was the
post-Apollo 1970s, when the solar system opened up to us. The other
golden age is the one we're living in now, the one with all the stuff
on my top-eleven list, where the Hubble has expanded the visible universe
by orders of magnitude. The golden age doesn't need to stop or even
slow down, but it probably will if NASA goes ahead and builds a moon
base so that... people will live on the moon and it will be awesome.
Even in the unlikely event that the US government stopped doing
manned space flight altogether, manned flight and research into it will continue. There is now a lot of private-sector
interest in sending people into orbit, because people will pay for
it. People will also pay to visit (probably not live on) the moon or a
space station. I, too, think sending a human body to the moon would be
unbelievably awesome, provided that the human body is
mine. There is not a lot of private-sector interest in radio astronomy
or sending a probe to Europa.
Don't settle for the moon. To quote Morton, "A world with a spartan
$100 billion moonbase but no ability to measure spectra and
lightcurves from earthlike planets around distant stars is not the
world for me."
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Tue Aug 29 2017 09:22 Nashville 'Clipse:
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There's a competition going on right now called 
