Today’s issue of the Washington Examiner (a free daily newspaper in the DC area) features a pair of op-eds that are at least mildly critical of the Vision for Space Exploration. In “2005: A Space Odious”, Charles Schultze, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institute, sounds off about the relative ineffectiveness of manned spaceflight versus robotic spacecraft in general, with an eye towards what he calls the “lunar-Mars program” (he does not use the VSE name):
Given the budget deficits the country faces over the next decade and the much larger problems posed by Social Security and Medicare in subsequent decades, we can ill afford to waste increasing billions of dollars on losing investments like the manned space program and especially on the massive expense of a lunar base followed by a trip to Mars.
In “A vision for understanding Earth”, Peter Bryant, a PhD astrophysicist turned software engineer and blogger, specifically emphasizes the importance of earth sciences versus the VSE:
In these times of uncertainty, one of this country’s highest priorities should be to protect public health and safety by gathering as much information about our planet’s life support systems as possible. We need a “Vision for Understanding Earth” more urgently than a “Vision for Space Exploration.”
While both make some good points, particularly about concerns that science programs at NASA are getting squeezed in the short term (something House appropriators agree with to some degree, having added $40 million for them in the FY06 budget), I am personally disappointed with the logic of both essays. Both try to establish a dichotomy: in one, you can either save money to restore Medicare and Social Security, or you can fling people across the solar system; in the other, you can either study the Earth to save us from natural disasters, or you can fling people across the solar system. Both, I think, are false dichotomies: Medicare and Social Security require fundamental structural changes that cannot be solved even if you disbanded NASA (good robotic science missions and all) and dispersed its budget to those programs. Climate change and other earth sciences studies are serious issues that require roles for multiple government actors, not just NASA. Rather than constructing simplistic either-or decision sets, let’s see if there’s a way to do both—and take advantage of what benefits of exploration we can reap in the process.
The point is not to cut NASA in order to protect Social Security and Medicare. Schultze explicitly acknowledges that NASA is too small for that to make any sense. The point is that Social Security, Medicare, and Defense are all financially unsound, because Washington cut taxes in the face of increased promises. No one expects the deficit to go away, because no one expects Washington to raise taxes or cut promises.
So with a structural deficit for the largest programs, there will be very little money for small programs. NASA should not expect a big budget and it should not spend money on failures and luxuries. Schulze argues that human spaceflight is a failure. Bryant argues that exploring other planets is a luxury, while exploring Numero Uno is a necessity.
Unfortunately, doing both is probably not a realistic option, because Greg is right that big increases in NASA funding are also unlikely. If we give up the effort to make hard choices and just say “do everything,” we’ll be right back where we started, doing almost nothing about just about everything.
— Donald
Except that the NASA science branch is not “doing almost nothing”. They have great rovers on Mars that are doing a lot. They have a spectacular telescope called WMAP that measured the shape, age, and content of the visible universe to 1% accuracy. They have more than 30 active spacecraft doing all kinds of things. You are free to think that these achievements are the wrong priority, but they are not “almost nothing”.
I agree that the space shuttle and the space station are doing almost nothing.
Actually, the Space Station is not doing almost nothing. (It is doing almost no science, but you, like too many people in the space community, confuse science with the sum total of human activity.) Read the day-by-day accounts in Spaceflight, http://www.bis-spaceflight.com/publicA.htm. The astronauts on the Space Station are learning how to live and work — and most importantly — to improvise in space. Yes, they spend most of their time repairing stuff and (post-Columbia) learning to get by with inadequate supplies, but critics are missing the point. That is what astronauts on the way to Mars _must_ spend most of their time doing.
We are learning how to do operations in space, to build and keep a human spacecraft operational for the years it will take to get around in the Solar System. We have to learn all of that sometime, it is best to learn it close to home before venturing further out, and the Space Station is sufficiently built out to perform that fuction. Sure, it could have been done smarter and cheaper, but here and now the Space Station is performing an extremely valuable, albeit largely ignored, service, one that the VSE will critically depend on.
On the other side of the equation, you are right, I mis-spoke. However, almost all of the items you list fall under reconnaisance — even the rovers, though they come closer to what we need than the others. Otherwise, none are the kind of detailed, wideranging, learn-as-you-go exploration and on-the-fly science that, say, Charles Darwin did on the Beagle. That kind of science is critical to truly understanding the Solar System, we are ready to start it, and it cannot be automated.
— Donald
I forget who said it and i maybe paraphrasing but: “We are a great Nation. And Great Nations can do more then one thing at a time.”
Donald,
The only stated end mission of the space station is science experiments of one kind or another. Bush claims to shift the priority from general microgravity research to human spaceflight endurance, but that is still science. (Bush’s claim is contradicted by Kay Bailey Hutchison, but never mind that.) So if the space station is not doing science, it is not doing what anyone at NASA says it is for.
Second, there is a reason that the only stated end missions on the space station are science experiments. The space station is not teaching people how to live and work in space, only how not to. It is a colossal logistical fiasco. It is so bad that one day you will agree with me that it sucks.
Meanwhile the space shuttle is as exciting as an idle construction site.
As for “reconnaissance”, observation is what science is all about. And your downplaying of NASA’s robotic spacecraft is still wrong. For example, the Hubble Telescope is everything that you say that it isn’t: detailed, wide-ranging, learn-as-you-go. So is WMAP, which is why the papers from that project get thousands of citations.
> exploring other planets is a luxury,
Theoretical topology is also a luxury, Greg.
Why do you believe and your fellow academics are the only people who deserve to have luxuries?
> Except that the NASA science branch is not “doing almost nothing”. They
> have great rovers on Mars that are doing a lot.
They have almost no rovers on Mars — you could count them on the fingers of one hand, with multiple amputations — and they are not “doing a lot.”
The total amount of work done by both rovers could have done by a single geologist in a week.
> They have more than 30 active spacecraft doing all kinds of things.
Those so-called “spacecraft” are merely satellites. Calling them “spacecraft” is agrandizement, like calling radio-controlled planes “aircraft.”
If humans are not going to go to Mars, what is the point of sending radio-controlled toys to run around there? Merely to employee a few thousand of your fellow academics? Why is that luxury worth paying for?
> Bush claims to shift the priority from general microgravity research to
> human spaceflight endurance, but that is still science.
No, it isn’t, Greg. Spaceflight is engineering, not science.
> The space station is not teaching people how to live and work
> in space, only how not to.
Agreed. However, since you have a long history as an opponent of human spaceflight in general (not restricted to NASA, government spaceflight, or the International Space Station), your comments have to be taken as crocodile tears.
> For example, the Hubble Telescope is everything that you say that it
> isn’t: detailed, wide-ranging, learn-as-you-go. So is WMAP, which is why the
> papers from that project get thousands of citations.
Papers and cititations are not the only things that are valuable in life, Greg. For most people, they aren’t even the most important things. If you want to devote your life to collecting citations, that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean other people can’t pursue other goals or that your position as an academic makes your goals more noble.
First, selling the Space Station as a science project has always been wrong. Because of this American myth that pretends that our space program is for science, and the only way to justify it is through science, we always lie to ourselves about the purposes of most NASA projects. This myth is rediculous on its face: what we spend on space is vastly larger than what we spend on other fields of science, so obviously there is another reason for it. We should admit up front that the reason we spend so much on spaceflight is the American “frontier ethic” and justify our projects for what they really are. Justified as physical exploration leading to colonization, the costs of our projects don’t seem so out of line, at least by historical standards (what percentage of its GNP did the British Empire spend on exploration?).
Second, the Space Station’s logistical problems are created from NASA’s ideological reliance on the Space Shuttle, not from anything inherently wrong with building a large base in space. If Space Station logistics is farmed out to Elon, et al, the logistical problems probably will go away over time. I suppose we could count this as a lesson learned — how not to supply a Space Station — but the vehicle is up there and we might as well use it, especially since there is no near-term alternative. You are dead wrong when you say that we are not learning from the Space Station: we are keeping a large facility operating in free fall and remote from immediate help even when major things go wrong. That is part of the learning process. Even if you were completely correct, learning how not to do something is part of learning, and we would not be learning it if we weren’t flying.
And, we need the Space Station because there is no other market that is large enough to justify new generations of commercial launch vehicles that will lower costs and make spaceflight easier.
Last, I am in no way belittling what we have achieved with robot spacecraft. I am pointing out that you can’t do everything with robots, yet scientists pretend that they can and that there is no value in having scientists on site. That attitude is even more silly than the argument there is no place for science and everything should be about commerce.
We may be able to prove that there is life on Mars with robotic spacecraft through indirect measurements (methane), but we will never find a fossil with a robot except by pureest chance, nor will we be able to study fossil distributions with robot spacecraft. The only way we will do that is with experienced geologists doing extended surveys on and under the surface. Inherently, that cannot be automated, at least not for less than it would cost to send astronauts there in the first place. (See my next article in ISR for a more detailed discussion on this.)
Other scientists could make the same argument regarding, say, Cassini, that you are making about the Space Station. What would the billions we’ve spent on Cassini have paid for if given, say, to the NSF or to terrestrial telescopes? Advocates of terrestrial telescopes faught HST tooth and nail, arguing that the money would better be spent on the ground. They have been proven dramatically wrong. We could have build many dozens of telescopes on the ground for what Hubble has cost, were we better off “wasting” our money on Hubble? Likewise, when there are geologists on Mars, no one will be arguing that the robots were better.
— Donald
Charles Schultze, the author of one of the two referenced articles, is the former Director of the Bureau of the Budget under Lyndon Johnson. Schultze was involved with negotiations with NASA Administrator James Webb in the mid-1960s over reductions to the NASA budget. Schultze needed to pay for the costs of LBJ’s Great Society program and the war in Vietnam.
Ed Wright’s comments have a familiar ad hominem tone, but he does raise some interesting points.
It’s silly to declare that radio-controlled mobile instruments aren’t really aircraft or spacecraft. The Predator is universally recognized as an aircraft; that’s not aggrandizement. And NASA’s radio-controlled space instruments are much fancier than Predators. So it’s fair game to call them spacecraft.
Research in mathematics is to some extent a luxury. But to the extent that it is one, it is 50 times cheaper than NASA’s human spaceflight program. As luxuries go, American mathematics is to NASA what a Walkman is to a plasma TV. The federal government just isn’t that bankrupt — at least not yet.
Mathematics isn’t just a luxury though. Engineers, scientists, and investors use mathematics all the time. If you want applied mathematics you have to have some mathematics to apply.
I agree that spaceflight is engineering. However, human spaceflight endurance as conceived by NASA is medical research, and therefore science. Of a sort — it was described as “voodoo science” in an internal NASA report.
I have no objection whatsoever to privately funded spaceflight. Burt Rutan achieved a great stunt — more power to him. I think that Rutan and some of rivals like to exaggerate their achievements. But skepticism is not the same thing as opposition.
Of course papers and citations are not the only important thing in life. But they certainly can be important, even to people who don’t know about them and wouldn’t believe that they are important. For example, public-key cryptography started with some research papers, as it happens. The papers were cited because they were widely read. If they had not been widely read, public-key cryptography would not be widely used today.
It’s the same thing with WMAP. Papers can get cited for good reasons or bad reasons. The papers from WMAP are cited for very good reasons. WMAP has given humanity the first really accurate measurements of the visible universe. Most people want to know, and deserve to know, what universe they live in. Some of the ancient Greeks deduced that the Earth is round and accurately estimated its diameter. WMAP is the modern counterpart to that historic achievement.
(Columbus may have been ill-informed about the Earth’s diameter, but not everyone then was.)
It sounds like the fundamental question is really what is it that NASA should be doing? What should be its role in space efforts right now in 2005 and going forward? Should its mission be defined by what we need in space now from NASA, or what we needed from NASA back in the 1950s? What role should it play in science, applied vs. basic?
It seems to me that back in the Apollo days, much of the effort was spent on the applied knowledge of humans in space and the environment they would face. No one had ever done anything in space before, so of course things like science of Earth from space made sense as a mission for NASA. Afterwards, as NASA began to drift, it became a hotbed of esoteric science, often with little application in the world around us as we soaked up the technological riches of Apollo.
Now the competencies have expanded, and we have organizations like NOAA that could reasonably be expected to handle things like studies from space of the oceans and atmosphere. So the funding gets transfered, okay. So some NASA scientists have to move to a different government agency, not like it hasn’t happened before.
(I secretly think that the reason the scientists don’t want it to happen is because it’s a lot harder to pick up a chick in a bar if you tell them you’re an atmosphere scientist at NOAA than if you tell them you’re a rocket scientist at NASA [Oooh!])
I look at some of these deep space missions and I have to ask myself “Why do we need to know this, right now?” I fail to understand why we need to see the lakes of Jupiter right now. I can see why we would want to try to get a sample return from one of the Lunar polar everdark craters. Knowledge of the character of the hydrogen deposits at the Lunar poles offers direct benefits in the provisioning of propellant to cislunar space. For commercial development there must be fuel. The Jupiter mission serves no where near any kind of application like that. It’ll show us lakes. Nice.
Things like PKE and TPF and the like also make me wonder. Is it worth waiting 250 years for the next go ’round to study the atmosphere of Pluto so that the current funds can be applied today towards building an infrastructure between the Earth and Moon? Um, let me think here…jobs for lots of people in space, including astronomers, in the near-future, against knowing right now that there is an Earth-like planet in orbit around Vega? Hmm, tough call. I think I’m going to have to place my efforts into commercial development and space jobs.
No offense, I’m sure it would be intriguing to know that there’s an Earth-like planet around Spica, but when I go out and talk to kids they want to go out there and do things like fix sats and build SPSes and Lunar power towers and travel to asteroids to mine them. That’s what gets them excited. Their generation (Y) has the unique opportunity to build for humanity the beginnings of a true space-faring civilization, not just space-visiting. The opportunity to provide constant, clean and perpetual power to Earth from the construction of SPSes. The opportunity to mine and divert asteroids, and not just on an emergency, oh $#!? basis either. The opportunity to tap the resources of the heavens so we can stop tearing up our own planet and wreaking environmental degradation on it.
I think that’s what we need from NASA in 2005. They’re not going to build the whole kit and kaboodle, but it sure would be nice if they helped show us the way.
NASA can start by just proving the ability to get a human being to and from low Earth orbit without killing them.
That may take 20 years to prove. In the meantime the survival, escape, and rescue breakthrough technology developed can help reduce fatalities in vehicles on Earth, justifying the human spaceflight effort whether or not a single human being is launched in the next 20 years – all at constant budget.
Maybe that is extreme, but what is the rush? Space shuttle return to flight has not been called return to success.
Failure and success are often not understood.
Well said Ken!
When humans move to Mars to stay, more ‘Science’ will be done in a week than probes culd do in a decade.
There is a lot more Geologic research in Colorado since western man permenantly settled it done in a week than was done in a year in the 1600 and 1700’s before it was permenantly settled.
Donald: “but you, like too many people in the space community, confuse science with the sum total of human activity.”
Bravo! We don’t often agree on a lot, but that statement is “spot-on”.
I must say, that after this thread I’m less of a fan of NASA run space science than when I started reading it. I wasn’t really a fan to begin with but the advocates here leave me with the opinion that NASA is doomed to failure unless you can completely split the science and engineering apart. That means separate budgets and organizations. Move NASA under the DoT and put the science under the NSF.
Except for some of the terminology, I agree with Michael Mealing’s proposal. First, it’s nonsensical to split engineering from science, because they depend on each other, not only at NASA, but in general. It would be a good idea to split human spaceflight from science, however. Sure, human spaceflight can go to the Department of Transportation.
But space science should keep the name “NASA”, because NASA is still good at it. Since NASA has been very bad at human spaceflight lately, that’s the department that should have a new name. You could call it the “Department of Space Transportation”.
Thanks for reading and pointing out my article in the Examiner. I’ve been reading your blog since I discovered it a few weeks ago while researching NASA issues. I find it very informative and am honored to be mentioned here.
I do think, though, that the current dichotomy between Earth science and the Moon/Mars initiative is quite real, and have a brief response at my blog.
Thanks again.
Peter I still think your wrong that it can’t be both done, and i believe they both have to be done at the same time. I put my usual lengthy comment on why it must be done on your blog. As most people here know my views and the reasoning behind it. Though most people here could do worse then read the part about the infighting
(I’m such a passionate windbag 
)
The problem with splitting science out of NASA is that space science would lose its “special status,” have to compete with other sciences, and get a lot less money. Notwithstanding my arguments above, even I am opposed to that outome. Space scientists know that on at least some level, which is why they always fight removing science from NASA. For better or wose, splitting up NASA would also split up spaceflight’s (in the broadest sense) quite significant political power in Washington, which comes from NASA being so many things to so many people. Depending on what you believe about spaceflight’s ability to go it alone at this point in time, that may or may not be a good thing. (I believe it would be a very bad thing, at least in the short term.)
I believe that automated space science should remain part of NASA, but that much of it should be reoriented as described earlier in this thread to more directly support near-term human expeditions.
— Donald
Re: splitting engineering from science
Ok, even for most science there is some level of engineering to be done. But why does general space flight have to be included in that? With the rare exception of the payload specific final stage the rockets used for _ALL_ of NASA’s ‘science’ are the same ones that launch commercial satellites. Why do you even have NASA running those launches on government launch sites?
Just move all of the science to the NSF and if someone needs a mass spectrometer on some spacecraft at some given orbit then let the NSF contract specify money for that and then buy that service on the open market? The spacecraft might need some custom engineering but even then a good portion of it will still be based on common standards that can be outsourced.
Move ALL spaceflight to the DOT, get that organization out of the operations business, move the science to the NSF, and have those space scientists buy their launch services the same way they rent a moving van from Hertz.