In case you’ve missed it this week, NASA announced some of the details of its return to the moon next decade. Basically, with the ambition of a return to the moon in the year 2018, NASA will commission the construction of several new space vehicles, and modify the shuttle solid rocket boosters (those white cylinders on the sides of the shuttle) and external tank (the big orange cylinder) in order to launch people and cargo to the moon. And, they will do it without significant budget increases, but at a total cost of nearly $100 billion dollars.
I follow the talk in the online space community very closely, and despite everyone’s excitement at returning the moon and eventually venturing to Mars, no one seems to be excited about this plan. Why? Because of the 13-year timeline. In the 1960s, NASA constructed, from scratch, the launch facilities and rockets to get people to the moon relatively inexpensively–and they did it in just under 10 years. Now, we need only modify existing rockets, and revamp a bit of old Apollo-designed hardware to get us there, and yet we’re taking 13 years! Also, the most important criticism is, what the heck with the astronauts do when they get there? NASA has not outlined an exploration/science plan at all. It’s offered vague notions of looking for water in eternally-shadowed polar craters, and that’s about it.
Some critics, notably the outspoken and surprisingly influential Robert park from the American Physical Society, take this lackluster Moon-exploration plan to mean that human exploration is a go-nowhere propositiong. In a contribution to the NYTimes today, Robert Park wrote this column. His argument, briefly, is that space is a dangerous place that is fundamentally inhospitable to humans, and that are wasting our money sending people somewhere when robots can do the work more cheaply.
On my trip to Devon Island this past summer doing Mars-analog exploration, Park’s criticism is something that I attempted to publicly counter. I designed a brief exploratory mission with the goal of traveling, in 4 hours, the amount of terrain that has required 4 years of Mars rover traveling. Additionally, we brought along 4 scientists, accomplished many of the same science goals as the rovers, and crossed far more difficult terrain. My brief report of that mission can be found on this page. And, the detailed science reports from that mission can be found here. My fundamental argument, not dissimilar from the more moderate voices in the space exploration community, is that there are certain tasks much more efficiently accomplished by robotic explorers (such as telescopy, satellite imaging and remote sensing), and those accomplished much more easily (and cheaply) by humans (such as ground exploration, zero-gravity experiments, and construction).
Another interesting observation I made at Devon Island is that science, real science, is what drives the mission forward day-to-day. Those whose science goals were ill-defined or overly-difficult made poor explorers, and were easily discouraged. No matter how interesting the surroundings, or how foreign they initially are, humans need reasons to explore. They cannot simply explore for the sake of exploration and discovering new horizons anymore (robots can do that much more easily). The astronauts that NASA sends to the moon need to be:
1) running experiments on refining lunar materials for construction and fabrication uses
2) searching for water for permanent settlements
3) conducting carefully-designed human factors experiments studying the effects of longer-term exposure to harsh environments with no real rescue capabilities
4) running further Mars-analog studies using the same equipment that will fly on Mars (currently not the plan)
5) investigating lunar geology to be able to ask, and answer, questions that may help resolve details of its origin that Apollo was unable to do
6) raising plants in a permanent greenhouse using native soil as much as possible in order to learn how we can live on the Moon permanently (after all, freeze-dried food will not be what settlers eat on the Moon or Mars)
7) the list goes on and on…
There are science goals that NASA needs to set. It needs to marry itself to the idea of human exploration as a foothold for future colonization, or it needs to exit the business of human spaceflight altogether. Furthermore, NASA needs to get to the Moon by 2015, or sooner. Otherwise, the Moon program will become a political deadweight in an era of high deficits and slow economic growth that the next president may find him/herself very eager to shed.
