perfidy

If the President announces that he wants to send a mission to Mars, I will be happy. However, there are many things that could taint that happiness. If the time frame is twenty years, it will mean that the announcement is a publicity stunt. There is no way that a twenty-year program will happen. It will just result in endless expense on paper studies and research programs, like we had with the space station; and likely end with an ill-conceived and poorly executed mission, like the space shuttle.

If the reorganization of NASA that is being hinted at is underwhelming, then I think that again, it is mere publicity. The lion's share of money that NASA has been given has been spent on two questionable ventures - the ISS and the Shuttle. NASA likes to point to these as its major accomplishments, but anyone who thinks even moderately long on the matter will realize that for billions of dollars of our money, we have gotten this:

1. An inefficient and costly space transportation system that has resulted, so far, in the deaths of fourteen American astronauts.
2. A space station that is inadequate for any conceivable useful purpose, and whose primary justification has always been that it is a destination for the shuttle.

The real successes, post Apollo, have been in the unmanned space exploration side of NASA: Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, Pathfinder/Sojourner and many others. For a fraction of the cost, these missions have produced several orders of magnitude more scientific information than the manned space flight program, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Many have used this fact to argue against manned space exploration, but this does not necessarily follow. Part of the problem is NASA, which has evolved into a typical government bureaucracy. The shuttle and the ISS look like committees designed them for the simple reason that committees did design them. Part of the problem is that NASA was never given a mandate for a follow up goal after the moon. NASA scientists and engineers had an impressive array of follow on missions in mind in the early seventies, but the Nixon and subsequent administrations squelched those dreams quickly, and much of the heart went out of NASA.

Given a proper goal and a short but realistic timeframe, NASA could do the job of getting us to Mars. However, we could easily run into the same problems as we did after Apollo, namely having achieved something truly incredible, only to find that in the process we did not create the means to repeat the feat, or even to use technologies for other purposes. Any grand scheme for Mars exploration would require that this be taken into account.

I have argued in this venue that NASA should be dismembered. On the eve of a possible Mars announcement, this is truer than ever. Significant reform for NASA means dismemberment. (You can see my thoughts about this here.) If we attempt to go to Mars the way we have traveled to Low Earth orbit, it is a guarantee of enormous expense and likely many deaths.

There is, however, some hope. Bush has talked about private space initiatives before. If, as part of his plan, he hopes to have private industry take over (or at least design the vehicles for) travel between Earth and the Mars mission assembly site, we have hope. If the plan includes testing equipment on the moon, and building an infrastructure that allows relatively cheap and reliable movement of people and supplies between earth orbit and the lunar surface, then there is hope.

In short, I would love for Mankind to set foot on Mars. I want an actual human being to get out of his lander, plant a flag on the surface, look upon his surroundings and wonder and say (if only to himself), “Holy shit, I’m on Mars!” This is something that no probe or robot can do, and it is something that we can all understand, and imagine that we are there too. It becomes something transcendent, in a way, that we all share. We can say that we went to Mars, and feel a part of it.

But for all the stupendous expense, I pray that we get something more out of it. I hope we get Pan Am spaceliners and Hiltons in orbit. LunarDisney, and vacations in space. Factories in space where pollution is just insulation. High tech research labs in orbit. Farside observatories that reach into the depths of space and time. I want the Mars mission to force the creation of private enterprise in space. Because I want to go, and the government will never make it cheap enough for me.