One Step Back For Mankind
ft.com
ft.com
If we can put a man on the moon, Americans used to say, we ought to be able to solve our current problems. So the question of whether the US can still put a man on the moon matters a lot to national morale. Barack Obama’s administration this week released a budget that would scrap Nasa’s Constellation programme. That plan, announced by George W. Bush after the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, aimed to send US astronauts to the moon by the year 2020. It has failed. The new budget dresses up the demise of Constellation as opening the way to “a bold new course for human space flight”, a more modern, “21st-century” space programme. But the bravado is that of a dog barking louder as he backs away from a fight. There is no indication of any alternative destination for manned space missions. Richard Shelby, the Republican senator from Alabama, called the Nasa budget a “death march for the future of US human spaceflight”.
"That is what makes the debate over Constellation symbolic. The decision to abandon moon exploration has “decline” written all over it. Americans often profess astonishment that the Chinese of 600 years ago failed to take full advantage of their technological superiority. They invented gunpowder and, on the eve of Columbus’s discovery of America, their ocean-going vessels were bigger and more seaworthy than Europe’s. Perhaps now the process by which an innovative civilisation invents technologies that it is unable to exploit will be easier to explain. The failure of the latest US moon programme is a small disappointment for national pride, but it is one giant leap for historical understanding."
The subsequent repair missions have keep it in operation a lot longer than would have been possible otherwise (replacing failed gyros, failed electronics, orbit boosting), plus the ability to put in new technology instruments has to have been very valuable. And the ability to put in instruments for a limited time, i.e. ones that could be justified for a period between maintenance missions but not for the lifetime of the whole thing.
Robots have their place and so do men.
I pointed out just one example contradicting the last two points. Trying to apply the whole cost of the Shuttle program to just this one project is not to the point, nor is implying that we couldn't have done it in a manner that cost less and was safer.
As an incremental cost, assuming you have a manned space program, you can't justify doing robotic repair due to the extra costs and limitations.
On the other hand the next big telescope project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope) will be non-repairable, but that sort of goes with its mission, which is to sit at the Earth-Sun L2 point. Design life of 5 years, they hope it'll make it to 10. Note that the Hubble has made it to 20 years and they expect it'll last at least another 4.
And I'll certainly agree with you that if you want to explore beyond Mars for now, do it with robots. And to put humans on the Moon or Mars, send robots first (as we did for the Moon and are doing for Mars).
On the other hand, if I wanted to thoroughly play with an asteroid, I would want to do it with a manned mission (after suitable earlier check-out by robots).
Solid fuel burns relatively slowly, so, if the first stage explodes, your abort parachute will be in the middle of a gigantic shower of burning fuel. It also vibrates too much: NASA had to add a hefty dampener so the crew is not shaken to death during launch.
The folks who build these machines are the smartest people in the planet, but it's a very, very hard problem. They work in a very narrow zone between what's physically possible and what their budgets allow. In this circumstances, it's a miracle they don't run into those walls more often.
I hope this decision breathes life into shuttle-derived launchers like Shuttle-C and DIRECT (and the Jupiter rocket family). The ability to send 80 tons to LEO and 30 tons towards the Moon would be really nice. I am also sure many of the scientists and engineers at NASA would be more than happy to work on a less problematic vehicle.
And so should the astronauts be.
While I wouldn't rate its web fu all that highly, it seems to get the job done. It's certainly a lot less "busy" than its major competitor, The Wall Street Journal.
That's funny, as this was literally the first time I landed on that site (oh, and likely the last time, too).