Point/Counterpoint: The future of U.S. manned spaceflight

4/14/2010 1:38 PM EDT

There have been no shortage of goals, strategies, plans and "visions". I am old enough to remember "Mars by 1984!". Now the USA cannot even do what it did 40 years ago. My money is on China. To date the entire Chinese space program has cost an estimated $10billion, or around about 7 months of NASA's annual budget. God only knows how NASA manages to spray all that cash up the wall with so little to show for it.

4/14/2010 2:48 PM EDT

If, as suggested, China is the futue of manned spaceflight, what do readers think about trying to work with China, as we do with Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency, to move beyond Earth orbit?

4/14/2010 3:05 PM EDT

Forget the moon; we've been there already and it's a hostile wasteland that has no known resources (water, gases) and has ghastly temperature swings.

Mars, on the other hand, has usable compounds. About 20 years ago I read a clever proposal from NASA to send a fuel synthesizer to Mars ahead of a manned crew, to produce methane fuel and breathing/propulsion oxygen from available CO2 and sunlight. This solves the biggest problem: having energy for the mission and safe return.

The technical challenges of a manned mission to Mars today are probably less than the challenges we faced in the 1960's with the successful Apollo program. The real problem is the politicians who prefer to spend money on an unjustified war and Wall Street bailouts.

4/14/2010 6:25 PM EDT

Actually, it turns out that the moon does have large quantities of water ice at the poles. Just scanning 40 craters turned up some 600m tonnes

4/14/2010 8:30 PM EDT

"""Critics have also warmed that turning over low-Earth orbit mission to commercial launchers will compromise safety. Veteran space watcher John Pike has gone so far as to predict that astronauts will be killed riding commercial rockets."""

So how many were killed by the NASA run shuttle program? Fourteen men and women in two disasters by my count.

4/14/2010 9:42 PM EDT

And how many missions did they fly safely? NASA is not driven by profit and is extremely risk adverse... Given the realities of business where profit is the name of the game and having worked for companies that are less than enthused about safety before profits, I would say the safety argument tilts in favor of NASA...

That is the same organization that took man to the moon and safely back again.

Criticize if you will, but remember that space flight is unforgiving, risky and getting there and back safely is not as simple as it may seem...

4/15/2010 12:07 AM EDT

Water ice has recently been discovered on the Moon, our nearest neighbor which is only 3 days away. Had an Apollo 13 type of accident occurred on the way to Mars, there's no way the crew would have survived. Why is it necessary to keep flitting from one heavenly body to the next like a playboy suffering from ADD, without taking time or making a commitment to explore a particular one more thoroughly? It's not as if the Moon is a tiny body that has nothing left to reveal - there's plenty left to still explore.

4/15/2010 12:12 AM EDT

Give SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, United Launch Alliance, etc the chance to service the ISS and launch orbital satellites, meanwhile give NASA the heavier task of going back to the Moon. As the private carriers develop their capabilities over time, they can extend their services farther and farther, taking over more and more. But let NASA be the icebreaker ship that breaks the path first, allowing these smaller fishing/trade boats to follow in its wake. As for Mars, it's really too difficult to pursue until the latter half of this century.

4/15/2010 2:01 AM EDT

There is a lot of hue and cry over the loss of jobs from the closure of the Space Shuttle program. But considering the fact that the responsibilities of the Space Shuttle Program to ferry humans to LEO is now being given to the private sector and companies like SpaceX it only means that the jobs are going from NASA to SpaceX.

I think the handing over of responsibilities of LEO journeys to the private sector can be made so that the loss of jobs in NASA can be now absorbed in the private sector. Any reasons why this cant be done ?

And by doing this NASA can focus on Space Exploration and Research the way it was meant to be initially.

Also as far as loss of lives being more in private sector goes, I dont agree with that. The accidents that took place in NASA's history were a result of complacency and not lack of money. As the Edgar Mitchell stated, a mandatory transfer of all the safety protocols from NASA to the private sector will go a long way in avoiding such disasters in the future.

4/15/2010 7:22 AM EDT

In reply to the point about safety, an argument can be made that NASA has been too concerned about safety to enable rapid technological progress. This has led to extremely expensive high-profile development that cannot have failures without extreme condemnation. The fastest way to learn is through failure! What if aviation had been forced to develop with the same constraints?
Of course it is high risk. Let's make progress with a balanced approach to managing risk, not trying to eliminate the risk.

4/15/2010 6:58 PM EDT

So what went wrong with manned exploration......there's certainly plenty of blame to go around:

1.) Nixon really started this mess by cancelling the Apollo project and drastically slashing NASA's budget, and then forcing the shuttle onto NASA.

2.) The shuttle itself was a good concept, but its implementation was deeply flawed, and NASA never opened it up for private development/use. But, as for the shuttle's flaws, part of the problem was that it was overly complex, which lead to major problems both with maintenence and with safety. Another big problem that really constrained the shuttle was that it had to comply with US Air Force requirements, putting the desires (and wet dreams) of the Military Industrial Complex ahead NASA's needs added to the problem of complexity, even though in reality these features were never used. NASA should have been allowed (or directed) to put the development of an inexpensive and reusable launch method (that could have been opened to the private sector) ahead of what the military wanted. Sadly we didn't have leadership with the vision to make this happen. If it did happen, then we would have had moon bases by the 80's. For more on what the shuttle could have been (including sketches of various early concept craft), check out this website:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm

For right now, I'd have to say our best bet at a real shuttle replacement is the Skylon, currently under development by Reaction Engines.

3.) The public certainly holds part of the responsibility of this simply because for a couple of decades now the public interest in space exploration and going into space in general was pretty much nonexistent. Once upon a time it was cool to be an astronaught or an engineer (preferrably both), but those days are long, long gone. NASA is effectively chained to an electorate that generally doesn't care, and that has allowed it to wither on the vine. Here's a couple of links for further reading about this issue. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/11/21/nasas-budget-as-far-as-americans-think/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/05/08/whence-nasa/

4.) NASA has certainly managed to get in the way of itself, but these issues are generally pretty well known, and certainly need to be fixed.


Bottom line is, we as a people don't care about the future anymore, especially space. When Bush's now defunct plan to go back to the moon was announced all those years ago, no one cared. There was no big drive to do much of anything. Not surprisingly it flopped. I'm going to end this with a quote from the Apollo inspiration thread:

"President Kennedy did not ask what the ROI was on going to the moon, he did not have Excel or Microsoft project– he knew it would pay off and it did and continues to – common sense and logic..Funny thing is when he said it everyone did it.. Today if the president says something it – it’s optional, we assume its posturing, politics and wait to see if it will get funded. We are still getting the benefits of the Kennedy decision…"

4/15/2010 7:01 PM EDT

Reposting the quote with the funny unicode garbage removed:

"President Kennedy did not ask what the ROI was on going to the moon, he did not have Excel or Microsoft project - he knew it would pay off and it did and continues to - common sense and logic..Funny thing is when he said it everyone did it.. Today if the president says something it - it's optional, we assume its posturing, politics and wait to see if it will get funded. We are still getting the benefits of the Kennedy decision"

4/15/2010 9:11 PM EDT

JFK speech writer Ted Sorensen wrote in his 2008 memoir: “The ‘moon shot’ was the making
of America’s superiority in space”
and of “all scientific, diplomatic
and national security benefits that followed."

4/16/2010 1:37 PM EDT

At least in these early stages there's no reason to send humans out there. We can do it much easier and cheaper with expendable robots.

4/19/2010 6:44 AM EDT

NASA's budget ($18 billion) is a rounding error relative to the total Federal Budget ($3.55 *trillion*). It is so insignificant as to preclude any sustained scrutiny
by accountants or lawyers-turned-elected-officials. It is *rocket science* and many of NASA's systemic problems stem from political interference.
The current interference is both unprecedented and uncalled for in its severity and painful ramifications. I find the criticism of Constellation risible:
don't fund an ambitious and essential program properly and then announce you are cutting it because it's behind schedule. When even the famously
taciturn Neil Armonstrong is criticizing Obama you know something is wrong on the merits. Just keep the lawyers and accountants away from meddling in scientific
R&D.

4/19/2010 9:14 PM EDT

Institutional memory is vital in a field
with few players, such as space travel. Dumping the NASA folks and saying that in four years they can build a new booster is the best way to evaporate the institutional memory. Who will stick around, taking meaningless jobs for four years, on the hopes that will come true? Everyone will move on to other jobs or professions and NASA will have almost no experience left behind to get the new rockets off the ground. We've paid a high price, in dollars and lives, learning hard lessons about space flight. Lessons that will vanish and have to be learned again -- at an even higher cost in dollars and lives. To too many Ivy League graduates, engineers can simply be plugged into a job; previous experience and education don't mean anything. We engineers know differently; our manned space program is doomed.

4/19/2010 9:17 PM EDT

Part of the problem with the Constellation program was that it was really nothing new, it was essentially a modernized Apollo. Hard to feel inspired when we're going with designs from the 60's.


Obama has announced we'll be going to the asteroid belt and then mars. While I'm all for pushing the envelope in terms of exploration, I wonder how we can do it when we can't even make a coherent plan to go to the moon, despite having the technological know how for 40 years.

4/23/2010 4:20 AM EDT

To answer the editor's question in the second comment: it would be good if China can participate in a much larger scale space effort along with all countries. The international space station is a good example of cooperation. Coopetition is also possible. Both the R and the D in R&D could enable benefits for many industries in aerospace, energy, science of materials, optics, you name it. Mars or Moon is not the issue. The issue is being aggressive enough in vision and funding. Governments and private industries can complement each other nicely. After all there is plenty of universe for all to have.

4/26/2010 9:12 AM EDT

The USA of the 60's put a man on the moon.

The USA of 2010 cannot even get a space program started.

Pesky Varmint

4/28/2010 8:49 AM EDT

The Soviets never sent a man to the moon, even though they could easily have done so. Why? Because they knew there is nothing to be gained by doing so. The US space program was a large propaganda campaign, a triumph of politics and marketing, not of science and engineering. It was an act of fear and paranoia by a society that not too long ago was burning "witches".
Many tout the technologies which originated in the space program, and which went on to benefit society. What they fail to realize is that if the money spent on the wasteful space program had instead been spent on solving the relevant problems, we would now have better solutions to more problems. The space program was targeted towards a one-of-a-kind critical mission, meaning that all environmental concerns were put aside, the thinking being that this would only be done occasionally and so the minor resulting use of highly toxic chemicals and processes would not be a problem. The result is that all of us now use, or are exposed to, toxic epoxies, paints, cleaners, and other chemicals which cause neural, kidney, liver, and reproductive damage, as well as being carcinogens.
Mars is best explored by robots, since they are light, small, durable, immune to cold and radiation, don't need life support systems, and don't have to be brought back to earth! Yet the politicians and brainless sensationalists have once again embarked on steering the clueless public in to funding a truly inappropriate "science project".