One of the hallmarks of British space policy for years has been its opposition to human spaceflight, preferring to devote its funding, including its contributions to ESA programs, to robotic Earth and space sciences missions. However, The Times of London reports that a major shift in policy may be in the works. Malcolm Wicks, the new science minister, told the newspaper that the time has come to rethink the government’s stance on human spaceflight, saying that automatic opposition to such efforts is no longer warranted:
I think sometimes our understandable reluctance to fund British men and women going into space has come across wrongly as us being a bit cool about space. I think we should be hot and enthusiastic.
It’s going to be this millennium’s great adventure. I’m not changing our position on this now, but I think it would be foolish to be dogmatic about these things.
That’s hardly an unqualified endorsement of human spaceflight, but given the UK’s previous policy it at least opens the door to a bigger change down the road.
Wicks met with Michael Griffin during a trip to London by the NASA administrator a month ago and opened the door to UK participation in the Vision for Space Exploration, although at the time that interest appeared to be focused on robotic missions, including the use of small satellites, where UK-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd is a world leader. The Times said that Wicks “has not ruled out including British astronauts as part of any deal” with NASA. The UK could also conceivably redirect some of the financial support it is providing to ESA’s Aurora exploration program to parts of the effort that involve human spaceflight.
Interestingly, I am just now reading an article in Spaceflight by some of the scientists and engineers that are pushing for this change. They state that Britain by itself is the world’s fourth largest economy and has long been a world leader in both space technology (they argue that Britain’s Hydrogen Peroxide engine technology, developed in the 1960s, may still be the best in the world), and has possibly more experience than any other country in physical, human exploration of difficult environments. It is strange indeed to see the country largely absent from both these endeavors today.
They recommend a program spending ten million pounds every five years, sending two Soyuz missions to the Space Station, and focusing on space medicine, a field in which they argue Britain is already a world leader.
— Donald
“They recommend a program spending ten million pounds every five years, sending two Soyuz missions to the Space Station”
Well, won’t the Brits be surprised then to find that £2M/yr won’t be enough to buy them one seat on a Soyuz flight over 5 years time, let alone two whole missions…
Sorry, I miswrote. It’s ten million per year for five years, equalling fifty million pounds, which sounds about right for two ten day Soyuz flights plus experiments.
— Donald
Poor Britain, it doesn’t even know it’s part of the UK. For a brief glorious time following WW2, Britain pressed on with high technology (Black Arrow, atomic power, computers, radar etc etc). Then came the rise of the scientifically ignorant civil servants and political socialists, whose interests were diametrically opposed to technology, science and above all military spending. Britain’s spending on R&D steadily declined as more worthwhile uses were found for the funding such as low quality public services.
It was easy to cancel the fledgling space program, it took longer to cripple the British aerospace and electronics industry. Military R&D managed to survive, but even that was affected. The UK space agency (BNSC not UKSC) limps along with about $300m budget per year, enough to pay for ESA membership and support a few specialist programs.
At long last another flicker of interest has stirred in the government, ten million pounds a year ($20m) for a manned space program – pathetic, but better than nothing. It may even be a start.
Poor Britain, it doesn’t even know it’s part of the UK. For a brief glorious time following WW2, Britain pressed on with high technology (Black Arrow, atomic power, computers, radar etc etc). Then came the rise of the scientifically ignorant civil servants and political socialists, whose interests were diametrically opposed to technology, science and above all military spending. Britain’s spending on R&D steadily declined as more worthwhile uses were found for the funding such as low quality public services.
It was easy to cancel the fledgling space program, it took longer to cripple the British aerospace and electronics industry. Military R&D managed to survive, but even that was affected. The UK space agency (BNSC not UKSC) limps along with about $300m budget per year, enough to pay for ESA membership and support a few specialist programs.
At long last another flicker of interest has stirred in the government, ten million pounds a year ($20m) for a manned space program – pathetic, but better than nothing. It may even be a start.
“It’s ten million per year for five years, equalling fifty million pounds, which sounds about right for two ten day Soyuz flights plus experiments.”
Whoopee… three odd years into Griffin’s ESAS, one year plus into Dale’s outreach, and this is all we have to show in terms of international support for the Vision?
Pathetic… Griffin’s lunar “off-ramp” is going to be very barren. Way to build another bridge to nowhere. Great strategy, NASA.
Well, won’t the Brits be surprised then to find that £2M/yr won’t be enough to buy them one seat on a Soyuz flight over 5 years time, let alone two whole missions…
Depends on how much the dollar and rouble depreciate, don’t it?
As a UK astrophysicist, I am not necessarily positive about this news. The UK government will think they are being generous to “space science” and this can weaken bids for real astronomy spending. You might want to check out the report of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) commission. They recommended £150M/yr for 25 years .. much more impressive, and would help a lunar observatory actually happen .. but if we don’t watch the pea under that cup, we are stuffed… I wrote my own blog on this .. new to this game but seems fun.
Good site by the way.
Andy: real astronomy spending.
Welcome, Andy. However, I do have to disagree with your implied meaning, here. “Real astronomy spending” is sending astronauts to the moon or Mars and do real survey geology, deep drills, and obtain absolute dates. (You might recall that the only extraterrestrial surfaces with absolute dates are one comet and Earth’s moon, dating from Apollo; dates for everything else, from Mercury to Neptune, are little more than educated guesses based on crater counts relative to the moon.)
“Real astronomy” is not only remote observation without scientists on site to get real, ground-truth data. “Real astronomy” is more than astrophysical guess work and theory based on wholely inadequate evidence. (If theory and remote observation are so great, why for example, with one possible exception, did no one predict the oceans on Europa in advance, which in retrospect should have been obvious?)
“Real astronomy,” like all real science, involves both experiment and theory, and, since Apollo, astronomy has been far too heavily weighted toward the latter.
— Donald
Re “Real Astronomy” :
apologies for my apparent arrogance here .. by “real astronomy” I only meant the study of things we can’t visit : exoplanets, stars, galaxies, quasars, cosmology. Like most people who study those things, I guess I think of “planetary astronomy” as more like geo-science than astronomy, and really a different (but equally important) subject.
Studying the oceans of Europa or deep drilling on the Moon etc is excellent science, and stands a good chance of being enhanced by manned exploration; but it won’t help the study of stars etc etc. I too am worried about data. If big-budget exploration squeezes us out, we won’t be able to afford big telescopes and space missions like Chandra; astrophysics will decay to onanistic astro-particle type cosmology.
Andy, at least in the United States, in the last two decades non-human space science has substantially increased as a percentage of the overall space budget. During the Shuttle’s operations period, when relatively little was being spent on development of new human launch capabilities, less was spent on human spaceflight. Now that a new human launch vehicle is required, unfortunately for a while, we need to “re-balance” back toward the more traditional “fifty-fifty” split between the human exploration and automated reconnaissance and remote observation.
Once the Constellation vehicles are developed, and we’re back into on-going operations (and the Shuttle expenditures are gone), the budget crunch should ease. (And, don’t forget that the budget crunch is caused as much by the JWST as by the VSE, which also has suffered budget cuts from what was hoped for.)
Then, more money will probably go back toward high-energy observatories and we will be back to doing real geology on the moon, and potentially near earth asteroids, the Martian moons, and Mars.
That, surely, is a future worth a little near-term sacrifice.
Finally, local planetary geology and stellar astronomy should not be totally divorced from each other. The Solar System is a star system after all, and the regolith-dominated surfaces here are probably broadly similar to those likely to be found in other star systems. When we start to observe solid planets around other stars, the more ground-truth experimental knowledge we have locally, the better off we will be understanding what’s going on out there.
— Donald
Let’s not forget Surrey Satellite, they are the one success story in all of this. They alone have the expertise not just to follow the rest of the world, but to lead it.
As for everything else, I see it as sort of a gamble that the UK will not need a domestic cutting edge in aeronautics or space for the next 50 years. i.e. that it won’t convey an economic or military advantage in the next 50 years or so. It’s a testament to the civil service that they can see this far ahead.
“Now that a new human launch vehicle is required, unfortunately for a while, we need to “re-balance” back toward the more traditional “fifty-fifty” split between the human exploration and automated reconnaissance and remote observation.”
This seemingly innocuous statement masks what’s actually happened to NASA’s space science programs. To keep the Shaft on schedule, Griffin & Co. have made the following cuts:
— In the Mars Exploration Program, the number of projected missions has been cut in half and Mars sample return, the one mission with the highest probability of confirming evidence of life beyond Earth, has been axed.
— In the Astronomical Search for Origins Program, both the Space Interferometry Mission and the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission have been axed. In contrast to ESA, NASA has no extrasolar planet imaging missions or program on the books and the U.S. runs the serious risk of falling behind Europe in discoveries in this area and the associated technologies.
— After the cancellation of Europa Orbiter, there is not a single astrobiology mission — even in planning — to any of the rapidly accumulating high priority targets in the outer planets (Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Ganymede, Callisto).
— Practically all future missions in high-energy astrophyics and solar physics have been cancelled.
— NASA research grants in all science disciplines have been cut, in some cases by as high as 50 percent.
— Associated technology programs are also cut or eliminated. For example, there is practically nothing remaining of the in-space propulsion program.
I’m all for human space exploration, but per the findings of the Augustine Commission, it should not come at the expense of NASA’s crown jewels — its space science programs. These are the very programs that will make the cutting-edge discoveries in areas like astrobiology necessary to justify sending astronauts to locations other than low-Earth orbit. Without them, as the Vision correctly identified, the rationale for substantial government funding of human space exploration is unsustainable.
Unfortunately, Griffin & Co. have strayed from the Vision, focusing most of NASA’s efforts into buying yet another low-Earth orbit space truck, at the expense of building any real human exploration hardware before the next President takes office or even doing any real exploration to speak of (human or robotic).
“Once the Constellation vehicles are developed, and we’re back into on-going operations (and the Shuttle expenditures are gone), the budget crunch should ease.”
Even in the best-case scenario, the Constellation vehicles won’t be developed for another decade. More realistically, as we’re starting to see with the FY 2007 budget debacle, we’re looking at a 15 to 20 years to build those vehicles. Real space exploration and science should not have to take a generation-long hiatus to create the funding necessary fix the human space flight program. By definition, fixing the human space flight program means coming up with an approach that is quicker, more affordable, more flexible, and more sustainable than what’s come before — one that does not require the commitment of several Presidents, many Congresses, and massive raids on budgets for ongoing robotic space exploration.
One only hopes that the next Administration restores some money to NASA’s science programs when it cancels Ares V, LSAM, and the rest. Unfortunately, they’ll probably take it all and the one part of NASA that actually does space exploration — its robotic science programs — will be all the poorer.
“and we will be back to doing real geology on the moon and potentially near earth asteroids, the Martian moons, and Mars.”
If I have to choose, as the costs of the Shaft are forcing us to do, I’d much rather have telescopic images of extrasolar Earths, samples of Mars nanobacteria from robotic rovers, and data on subterranean ocean life from automated subs under Europa than more astronaut-delivered Moon rocks and the faint hope that we might plant a flag on Phobos before the end of this century.