RSS Feed MenuWhen I first saw this report that President Obama asked NASA to work on outreach to Muslim countries, I thought I had somehow blundered onto the website for The Onion. (Come to think of it, that’s been happening a fair amount over the last year or so.)
The Obama budget proposes to end funding for the Constellation Project, which aims to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020. The stated reason is that the project is behind schedule and over budget. (Former Apollo astronaut Walt Cunningham disputes that characterization, saying the program’s problems are the result of its being perennially underfunded.) Since the Space Shuttle is slated to stop flying next year, the Obama decision — unless Congress reverses it — means the United States will essentially be out of the manned space flight business. Oh, we’ll continue to recruit and train astronauts, but they will only be able to fly if they can hitch a ride aboard Russian or European (and, eventually, Chinese and Indian) spacecraft. How we would train astronauts to operate such differing systems (let alone resolve language issues) can be left to the imagination. In short, Americans in space will become a rarity after next year. Dreaming of becoming an astronaut, one of American childhood’s most common aspirations since the 1960’s, will increasingly be seen not as fanciful, but as fantastical.
And that’s wrong.
I know, I know. The Space Shuttle never fulfilled its expectations, the International Space Station is a boondoggle, libertarians say private launching companies can do the job better and cheaper than a government bureaucracy, etc., etc., etc.
Sorry, I’m not buying any of it. The ability to launch men and women into the hostile environment of outer space and return them safely to the earth is important evidence of a nation’s sense of its own prestige and technical self-confidence. (Not to mention military prowess.) That is why China is now launching men into orbit, and India soon will be. Even when the Russian economy appeared on the verge of collapse in the mid-1990s, the Kremlin seems never for a moment to have seriously considered shuttering its space program. In addition to the prestige factor any nation that can launch men into orbit is a nation to be reckoned with; they knew that such a capability, once surrendered, is one not easily or cheaply resurrected.
And quite frankly, I think that’s why Barack Obama wants the U.S. out of space.
The U.S. manned space program has always been propelled by a hefty dose of American patriotism. A visit to the Johnson Space Center in Houston underlines this fact. The place is festooned with American flags. A photo that is displayed in many places around the complex shows the mission control team deliriously waving American flags at the moment Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface. Also, on the roof of the building that houses mission control sits a flagpole. The flag is raised only when an American is in space.
Offhand, it’s hard to think of a government program less calculated to stir the blood of Barack Obama. (OK, maybe the Pentagon.) He has never, to the best of my knowledge, shared where he was or what he felt at the moment of the moon landing in 1969. If he was back living with his crypto-Communist grandparents in Hawaii by then, it’s safe to say he wasn’t hearing much that was positive about it.
So what does NASA do now? Worry about global warming and “reach out” to the Muslim world. (Whatever that means.) A cynic might say that Barack Obama was trying to humiliate an agency that for five decades has stood for American pride and technical leadership.
But he wouldn’t do that.
Would he?
BoolaBoola // Feb 23, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Carney, you are wrong. Space is like a mine which has been mined out and there’s nothing left in it. If we spend more on space, we’ll make news all right, and the news we’ll make will be “USA wasting money which could be better spent on basic research”.
You say Mars? But the shortest possible manned trip to Mars would take most of the astronaut’s lifetime.
Meanwhile there are better unifying goals which would TODAY make better spinoffs than re-doing space. Like I said, crossed tunable x-rays and hard UV.
BoolaBoola // Feb 23, 2010 at 10:27 pm
The crossed-beam x-ray/hard-UV duel light source would produce spinoffs on the way AND the actual results, the measurements you could make with it when it was complete, would also be valuable.
BoolaBoola // Feb 23, 2010 at 10:32 pm
The technology frontier is much more involved with BIOLOGY than it was in the space-race days. We don’t need better thrusters and space-shielding; we need bio/computer interface and new modes of biochemistry. New design-from-scratch organisms, that’s a good goal.
balconesfault // Feb 23, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Liberals should at least be able to wrap their heads around advances that manned space flight has brought to us on earth. There have been so many spin-offs or applications of NASA’s technology in computers, medical advances, solar energy (photovoltaic), etc.
Of course, we’ve exported much of our production of computers and photovoltaics to China, and it wouldn’t shock me if much of the componentry for our higher end medical technology is made over there as well.
That said, liberals can most certainly wrap their heads around this. But an argument that socializing space flight is ok because it’s not that big a program is not really a principle … it’s a justification.
You don’t actually need to convince me that government should be involved in this kind of spending, by the way. Personally, I’d much rather have funded NASA for a decade than spend another year in Iraq.
BoolaBoola // Feb 23, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Carney, Mars is many things, but it is NOT “lush”.
And what resources were you imagining you’d find, pray? We already have all the sand we need.
Carney // Feb 24, 2010 at 12:12 am
BoolaBoola said “Carney, you are wrong. Space is like a mine which has been mined out and there’s nothing left in it.” He also said, “Mars is many things, but it is NOT ‘lush’. And what resources were you imagining you’d find, pray? We already have all the sand we need.”
Sand is silicon dioxide. The majority of Mars’ regolith is made of iron oxide.
In any event, in contrast with the Moon and many other bodies, Mars has had a complex geological history that has caused ore formation, so that valuable elements and materials are in concentrated form in certain areas, rather than distributed in parts per million. In other words, getting valuable stuff is easy (picking up nuggets right off the ground, mining a rich vein), rather than hard (sifting vast quantities of dirt to find tiny amounts of desirable material).
From copper to platinum to Helium-3, Zubrin’s book “The Case for Mars” describes in detail the many elements and substances that exist in abundance on Mars (often in greater abundance than on Earth) which could profitably be shipped back here. The asteroid belt also has many bodies that can supply our need for various metals more or less indefinitely.
The universe beyond Earth is vast and has untapped resources and riches that boggle the capacity of the human mind to encompass.
Mars specifically has water, easily accessible oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and more – all the elements necessary for agriculture and industry, in plenty.
A major reason we did not return to the Moon was that it is a barren, resource-poor world. If the Moon had dry concrete we would mine it for the water. That is not the case with Mars, which has continent-sized areas where the soil is up to 60% water by weight.
BoolaBoola also said, “You say Mars? But the shortest possible manned trip to Mars would take most of the astronaut’s lifetime.”
You are confusing interplanetary travel with interstellar travel, which can take decades, even centuries or millennia, and even with entirely hypothetical lightspeed capable craft.
Going to Mars, again, takes about six months one way with current (that is, 50 year old) technology. The proof can be found in our current robotic probes, which take about that long to get there now.
Ignorance is one thing, but proud, aggressive ignorance is quite another.
BoolaBoola // Feb 24, 2010 at 2:26 am
Yes, you are right about the time, I was wrong about that, that’s not the problem. The problem is explained pretty well here:
(http)www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q2811.html
The problem is the amount of fuel, food, water, radiation shielding you would need for your 9-months each way to mars and back far exceeds our ability to get stuff into orbit via shuttle. You’d need about 3 million pounds of stuff for a crew of six! The shuttle can lift 50,000 so you’d need sixty shuttle launches, which at this point is a significant fraction of the shuttle’s entire career!
You’d have severe medical impairment from that much time in zero-grav. You’d need big-time rehab when you landed on mars and again when you got back, just to stand up without having a heart attack. Your body would forget how to adjust your blood-pressure for gravity.
And in any case, we have plenty of iron oxide down here.
Again, the point of the space race was not space, it was the spinoffs we discovered on the way. We don’t need to re-discover those spinoffs. We do need to discover NEW spinoffs, so we need new development-driving missions. Every dollar you spend putting a man on mars is a dollar you’re not spending on new organisms, new modes of biochemistry, fixation of CO2, integration of life with electronics (like the Borg in Star Trek TNG), and all these much-more-important, much-more-profitable scientific projects.
Carney // Feb 24, 2010 at 11:18 am
BoolaBoola, these issues have been overcome since about 1990, with the design of the Mars Direct plan, which NASA (until Obama) eventually adopted in its essentials.
Mars Direct avoids the hassles of bringing all the water, fuel, and oxygen you need with you, which adds so much to weight and creates a need for a cumbersome mission design involving many launches and on-orbit assembly, by adopting a “live off the land” approach. Mars’ atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, making it possible to bring a small quantity of H2 with you and then make 18 times that weight of water, oxygen, rover fuel, and rocket fuel needed for the surface stay an return journey, using simple, low-energy 19th century chemical reactions. Doing that cuts the launches from Earth per mission to two: launch the Earth Return Vehicle first, unmanned, and have it land on Mars and do those things. When it’s ready 2 years later at the next launch window, send another craft, this time manned by 4 astronauts, and have it land near the ERV.
Space radiation comes from 2 sources: cosmic rays and solar flares. Cosmic rays are constant, and with proper precautions cause about a 1% increase per mission in lifetime cancer risk, about the same as a 20 year career as an airline pilot or stewardess. Since the average lifetime cancer risk is 20%, this is not a deal-breaker. Surely, recalling our proud past history of explorers and pioneers, we are not that timid. Zubrin has joked that since smoking doubles lifetime cancer risk to 40%, we can make a Mars mission MORE safe by making the crew up of smokers and taking away their tobacco.
Solar flares are more serious, especially in transit either way, and there are likely to be one or two that happen. But that is relatively easily solved, if the habitation module has a storm shelter in the central core surrounded by shielding, water, food, and waste. When a flare is on the way, an alarm sounds, the crew huddles there for a few hours til the all clear sounds, then back to normal.
Zero G is also solvable. Tether the spacecraft to its spent upper propellant stage and rotate them around a common axis to create artificial gravity.
Mars has abundant mineral resources, but that’s not the main reason we should go. Uniquely in the solar system outside Earth, it has a 24 hour day-night cycle and a CO2 atmosphere it can support inflatable greenhouses to grow crops. It can thus be colonized, and eventually settled. Mars can also, over the course of generations, be terraformed, and become a much more Earthlike world.
European governments that focused solely on how much gold they could find in the New World missed the point. Not only did they strengthen their own nations by colonizing, they also created a renewal of Western Civilization they never anticipated. America’s labor shortage created a pragmatic, get it done culture free from guild-hobbled, hidebound European norms, especially in terms of embracing technological innovation. It also created social mobility free of class limits and unprecedented liberty that eventually crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
As our politics and culture become more and more bureaucratized and sclerotic, we badly need another frontier where independent minded folk can settle open land where they can make their own rules. We will benefit in ways we cannot even imagine today, as a new branch of human civilization takes root and humanity becomes a multi planet species.
In the end, the stakes are whether we will expand and progress, or stagnate and decay. Whether we will have an open future of plentiful, even limitless resources, or a dark, lifeboat-morality, Malthusian future where every person is the enemy of every other person. The Star Trek future or the Soylent Green future. The first is a future of hope, freedom and plenty, and the second is a future of despair, hate, tyranny, and war.
That’s why space, and Mars, matter.
Carney // Feb 24, 2010 at 11:24 am
For more information, I strongly recommend Zubrin’s books “The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must” and “Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization”.
An excellent documentary about Mars Direct called “The Mars Underground” is available on DVD and has aired on the Discovery Channel and its sister networks. It’s also on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3REZZWeWcU
BoolaBoola // Feb 24, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Carney, the “live-off-the-land” idea sounds like total BS! (I would say it IS BS but I won’t say IS without reading the source you cited. But it definitely SOUNDS LIKE BS!) You say you can use atmospheric CO2 and “a small amount” of H2 gas to make enough oxygen and water and fuel to return to Earth? How would you concentrate the atmospheric CO2 enough to begin doing that? Concentrating atmosphereic CO2 would take more energy than you could get out of your H2 gas after you’d concentrated the CO2 enough to start your reaction.
And how does CO2 + H2 become rocket fuel? The best you’d get would be H2O + mixed carbon-oxide, graphite, CO, in a word, coal.
And you wrote: “In the end, the stakes are whether we will expand and progress, or stagnate and decay. ” No sir, the stakes are IN WHICH DIRECTION we will expand and progress. Toward Mars or here on Earth. There’s much more fertile ground (scientifically speaking) down here. Much more profit in expanding the genetic code than in trying to grow crops on Mars.
On the plus side, I do like the idea of learning more about how to get CO2 out of an atmosphere into a container, so I guess there’s that much overlap between your proposal and mine.
Carney // Feb 24, 2010 at 11:25 pm
BoolaBoola, the reaction to be used is called the Sabatier Reaction. You combine the hydrogen from Earth with carbon dioxide from Mars to form methane and water.
CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 + 2H2O
The methane is used as rover fuel and rocket fuel.
Some water is used for human and plant needs. The rest can be electrolyzed to form oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen is used for breathing and as a fuel oxidizer. The hydrogen is recycled for another round of the reaction to be used with some more CO2 from the atmosphere.
Gaslight-era technology. Amusingly, the suits at NASA who unlike you should have known better, also demanded proof that it would work, so Zubrin and his team, with a tiny budget, put together a machine that did so. And they were all aerospace engineers, not chemical engineers.
Live off the land is how all successful explorers succeeded. Lewis and Clark did that. By contrast, cumbersome Victorian expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, sailing with everything they needed including brass button polish, got stuck in the sea ice and the men starved to death, while Eskimos, traveling light and living off the land hunted and ate well as they have done for thousands of years.
Arch // Feb 25, 2010 at 12:59 am
What the hell is a “crypto-Communist grandparent”?
BoolaBoola // Feb 25, 2010 at 12:59 am
How do you concentrate the CO2 from the Martian atmosphere enough to run the Sabatier reaction?
BoolaBoola // Feb 25, 2010 at 1:17 am
I see, the atmosphere is almost all CO2. But there’s a bigger problem. If you’re making fuel from H2 and then electrolysing water for more H2, you’re using more energy to make the fuel than you get back from burning the fuel. That means you’d need a LARGE amount of H2, or else an energy source better than fuel or H2.
No way that could work although the theory as you have presented it would make nice sci-fi, Larry niven-like.
BoolaBoola // Feb 25, 2010 at 1:39 am
And in any event, the larger point remains: there’s better discoveries to be made here on earth.
Carney // Feb 25, 2010 at 11:15 am
BoolaBoola, while the Sabatier reaction is low-energy, the electrolysis requires a small nuclear reactor. It’s all already in the plan.
As for discoveries, Mars had a warm and wet period for about a billion years, five times as long as it took for life to emerge on Earth. Finding out whether there was a second Genesis on Mars is one of the most important questions science can answer. If there was, on two planets in the same star system, that strongly implies that life is a common, even general phenomenon in the universe, and given the sheer numbers of planets, that complex and even intelligent life exists elsewhere. What bigger discovery could there be?
It would also be fascinating to discover if all life uses the same basic chemistry and building blocks as ours, or some alternative system.
Finally, again there’s no more open land on Earth, no more frontier. The frontier and its labor shortage are an enormous driver for technological innovation in their own right. We’re still coasting on our frontier heritage in America for our technological leadership, but we’re losing momentum.
The Apollo program doubled the number of science graduates at every level: high school, college, Ph.D. The baby boomer tech gurus that have driven our IT revolution were kids awed by Apollo and excited to hit the books and learn science in the 60s, and we are still benefiting from the inspiration they were given. So no matter what your pet project, you should support humans becoming a spacefaring civilization.
BoolaBoola // Feb 25, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Carney, that’s like saying because kids in the 1910s and 20s admired train conductors, we should go on building train tracks.
Each generation finds its own inspirations and heros. Ours were astronauts. The next generation will find its inspiration elsewhere–maybe in exploring the oceans and creating new organisms or some more topical challenge than space.
I suggest, rather than spend endless money learning about biochem on Mars (if any), we should focus on expanding and improving the biochem here on earth.
Check this out:
http://www.jbc.org/content/early/2010/02/10/jbc.R109.091306
Carney // Feb 25, 2010 at 10:47 pm
BoolaBoola, so what do we do? Be like the Chinese who in 1421 had seven masted intercontinental sailing ships and reached Madagascar with a vast exploration fleet, and could have discovered, overawed, and dominated Europe and the rest of the world to this day, but instead turned inward, burned the ships, and stagnated?
We have NASA now, and on average, we’ve spent the same money on it each year, adjusted for inflation, since Apollo. But because he have no goal and no plan, we’ve accomplished nothing.
Realistically, we’ll never get rid of NASA. So I say if we’re going risk lives and spend $20 billion each year (NOT “endless money” but rather far less than 1% of the federal budget) we should GET something for our money. We should GO somewhere rather than go in circles in low Earth orbit. We should realize that space is not a destination – it’s emptiness between worlds, which should be the destination. Columbus didn’t drop anchor 300 miles of the coast of Spain and sit around for months to study the effects of long sea voyages an sailors in case someone in power finally decided to lead and send him somewhere. Instead he opened up a new world.
I’m sure your little experiments seem very important to you, but frankly they’re totally irrelevant in comparison with the enormity of such a prospect.
BoolaBoola // Feb 25, 2010 at 11:00 pm
You won’t get a person to Mars, and develop the “live off the land” approach, on 20B per year, my friend.
BoolaBoola // Feb 25, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Can’t get past it, can you! Space is OLD NEWS. It’s like laying the railroad tracks across USA in the 1910s. LAST generation’s frontier.
Carney // Feb 26, 2010 at 8:37 am
BoolaBoola, on the same $20B budget, adjusted for inflation, we went to the Moon without first having any of the technology, procedures, or infrastructure we can coast on now. It’s actually far easier for us to go to Mars now then it was for us to go to the Moon then.
Mars Direct has been formally costed at $50 billion. Over a ten year span of the program, that easily fits into NASA’s current budget, especially when the Spare Shuttle is retired.
Admit it. Every one of your “objections” I have taken apart completely, with facts you were utterly unaware of. Have the grace to acknowledge you were wrong.