NOW and I really mean it NOW may be the time though. NASA’s charter was established when the threat was all about Cold War, nuclear threat, arms race which no longer are. Period. However as you aptly suggested a new threat has emerged, more inisidious than Cold War and it is the catastrophe that may come out of climate change (as a note to those who don’t “believe”: Once upon a time the Earth was flat).

This WH has said it wants to address global warming (even though we are still waiting for some major feat). It might be the time to retire the 1958 Space Act and ammend it to the new world we live in: Agreed but I won’t hold my breath.

Today even a very polluted Earth might be the ONLY place where humans can live on. Mars or the Moon (let alone the void of space sso to speak) are so much worse than Earth that it might take some time before the Earth be that bad. Of course the smart thing to do is to start preparing but as I told you before it is not the essential characteristic of those in power nor of their constituents: Again Katrina and asteroid observation budget at NASA as examples.

I would love to see the advocacy community come around a common theme as you suggest rather than trying to define the next space architecture when they mostly have NO such experience. Their voice would be that much stronger.

A final point on climate change: Most nations agree that this is happening except the USA: Probably because our scientifc culture is so vastly superior to others that we can see it is a scam and they cannot. Yet that could be a rallying of the international community. Again I am not holding my breath.

Economics and national prestige are the “acceptable reasons”. The problems with acceptable reasons is that there are any number of alternative areas for investment that would accomplish the same goals. We could spend the $ going to NASA on basic research in the phyical sciences, on alternative energy technology, on a stronger military, on more foreign aid … the length of the list is limited only by the time I’m willing to spend writing it. Space is not unique in serving any of the “acceptable reasons”

My point inelegantly expressed is that I think the nation is running out of horsepower to pursue long term goals that offer little or not short term feedback that is positive and indeed most of that feedback is negative.

I’ll stay on space

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2010/01/taking-aim-phobos-nasa-flexible-path-precursor-mars/

I have no doubt that a lot of people in NASA think that this is “important”.

I think that it is just simply more of the same…it isnt really flexible path, it is “Apollo on sedatives”

After decades of effort, billions of dollars and about two to three years of mission time…we get a few astronauts having 40 days or so around Mars, making “the closest approach to the sun” that humans have yet done…andsome rocks from the Mars system…and thats it.

I dont think that this effort can be explained to the American people, who are facing in large measure the end of a middle class existence thanks to mindless government spending…at any level.

There are in my view two fantasies which are killing human spaceflight.

The first is that we must explore space with humans. The second is that we must explore space with humans because humans are eventually going to live in space.

Both those may happen. We someday might have the technology, the wealth and the reason to push humans into environments which are very very different from the “one we grew up in” …but there is little or no data that that day is anywhere close….anymore then it is for having large colonies on the ocean floor.

I fly airplanes…and in my assignment before this one I flew those airplanes (sometimes…mostly I was on the ground) in a region of the world that is virtually habitatless…mideast high desert. But one could get the same affect in most of the regions of New Mexico.

Survival there is far easier then survival on the Moon, and yet there is a reason almost no one lives there.

Things that can sell as reasons to do spaceflight are things which bring space down to Earth, not try and bring Earth up to space.

We live right now in a time of collapsing and collapsed institutions of our entire society. This is not unique, we have gone through this before…but we have always gone through this when the people who pay are not the people who are served.

Most Americans will not, in your or my lifetime go into space. That is obvious, but having said that the real shocker in my view is that most Americans do NOT WANT TO GO into space. Any more then they want to go to an offshore oil well. But they see the reasons for off shore oil wells and they see the need for people to work on them.

Not so much for human spaceflight. I can come up with a program to sell human spaceflight, but concepts like linked to above…are death.

Robert G. Oler

My point was that the world is talking about risks to the planet, and not just to small pieces of it. In many respects, this kind of wondering started with the Cold War and the MAD defense posture, though that threat was understood as being about hardware that had nothing to do with economic viability. One could just decide not to do it! NEO threats and human induced climate change are (to the extent you want to believe in them) are not that simple.

So let’s close this out.

The point I was trying to make is that there is ONE overlying reason for federal funding of human space flight. That is species preservation. That will become even more the case as our technological capabilities improve. There are other reasons that can be brought to bear, but those are not unique to human presence. Let’s not pretend that it’s about resource development, because even if you can find a market (got a helium-3 reactor, anyone?) it is far from obvious that a critical or cost effective ingredient to such resource development is human flesh in a space suit. Those are the bedtime stories we were told as young ‘uns, in a different technological era. Time to grow up.

I personally am not interested in being a vocal proponent of a human space flight crusade for the purpose of species preservation. Some are. I’m just pointing out the fact that this is what human space flight comes down to. I’m just telling it like it is. This is the ball that human space flight has to run with (or, I guess, punt away, as per our earlier metaphor).

Some confuse the goals of our space agency with species preservation. That, as I’ve pointed out, is ludicrous, because that’s not what NASA is chartered to do. That should somehow be made part of its charter, and would be a fundamental policy challenge for any administration. Some would like to believe that colonies on the Moon, or on Mars, are the fundamental answer to the species preservation problem. But that’s wrong. The answer is the capability, not the colony. The Augustine committee hit the nail on the head with their conclusion that human space flight has to be about goals, rather than destinations, and that we spend vastly more time talking about destinations than goals. OK, sure, a colony proves a capability, but we have not learned how to convince the taxpayer that this capability is justified, and until we do, ranting about the need for families and farms underground on the Moon is a bit absurd.

If (my words but a paraphrase) “expansion off the planet for human kind”
is the reason for human spaceflight because “We now have people wondering about the very long-term livability of our world.” then count me out.

“Global climate change” is to my mind the lefts version of “Saddam is going to kill us with his WMD and balsa wood airplanes so we have to invade go now…really dont think about it dont ask for the evidence and for Creators sake ignore evidence that contradicts our claim …smoking gun smoking mushroom lets go”.

and when the global climate change folks get caught in a “exaggeration” then there answer is like the idiots who spout…”OK there was no WMD but we really did have justification for invading Iraq even if the WMD Wasnt there.” .

(and no I did not think Saddam had WMD nor that it was a threat to us pre or post 9/11 and the “wayback machine” will find post to that affect …and post to the affect that we are all going to die if we dont invade now by some other people…not you…who post here),

First off I dont think that the long term viability of the Earth is in question. I have no problems with environmental efforts to mitigate local pollution efforts and we all like the water clean… But comeon …

OK now it is 2300 or so that the Himalayan glaciers are suppose to melt and while I doubt that is correct, by 2300 we will have better and different technology or the right wing in America (or in the Mid East) will win and we will have no technology just theocracies.

All the people who predict catastrophe are taking an inch of data and projecting a mile or assuming worst case or all sorts of phoney baloney science (or intelligence in the case of the right wing troglodytes of the last administration) all in my view to summon up some cover for some other agenda.

There are people who really believed Bush or now Gore and thats that…but the folks who should now have some other agenda (as Bush did) ,

Our technology is to primitive to even think about expanding the “species” to some other worlds. The effort right now cost to much returns to little and has to be balanced against some real and current problems (like survival of The Republic) that are in my view the most important thing in the world.

There is right now, in the present economic situation only one reason to send people into space; it is to make money, to create jobs that actually affect/change the economy for the good, and to advance the technology to keep that cycle going.

In the end Mankind can in my view take a flying leap into oblivion as long as The Republic and Americans stay viable. I dont have a problem with “green energy” (whatever that means) nor with nukes…whatever makes The Republic stronger. The only reason American tax payers spend money in human spaceflight is so our economy gets stronger and more resilient.

The world was here long before the current “save the planet” crowd cranked up and it will be here long after they have saladoed off into the same room that all the ditto heads who thought Saddam was a peril now…are.

There is only one justification for human spaceflight. Make The Republic stronger. Everything else is well everything else.

Robert G. Oler

GessWho’s response above I hope gives you an idea at the size of the problem you face in your endeavor.

Good luck!

I have to say that this statement seriously damages the credibility of anything else you have to say. AGW (now “climate change”) is a scam that is unraveling quickly: (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999051.ece)

The response of the “global” community has been more one of how best to squeeze money out the richer nations (producers) so it can be re-distributed to poorer nations (moochers & looters). AGW is just one of many arguments used to justify a statist mentality and was on stark display at Copenhagen. Why wouldn’t ensuring the survivability of the human species follow the same path: rich nations footing the bill to keep poorer nations alive and well? I would rather see HSF die and wither than the alternative.

Yeah, but I’m not convinced about the “abundant resources” part. I have never seen a cogent argument about abundant resources that absolutely require human miners to get them. That may have been a fair assessment in 1986, when all we had was bulldozers and pickaxes, but our technologies have come a long way since then, and are developing very rapidly. By the time we actually get to a mineable resource, they will be vastly more capable. So lets not even go that route. That is NOT a unique reason for human space flight, but it may well be a reason for space development, which in my mind does not automatically imply human space flight.

Let’s respect and be instructed by, but not fall into the ruts left behind by old studies like the Paine Report.

It can be only about one thing. That’s insurance for the species. In many respects, one can argue with this, that money expended on learning how to leave is better spent on making it so we don’t have to leave. That’s a good argument. With regard to NEOs, which are just one flavor of potential global catastrophe, we should be spending money on detection and hazard mitigation. (By the way, the NRC report that came out yesterday rather bluntly says that human space flight is not a big help in doing either.) But that’s not the premise of insurance. I have health insurance, not because I don’t exercise or eat right, or spend effort and money to maintain my health, but because bad things can and do happen.

One challenge here is seeing human space flight as a response to a virtual, rather than a real, threat. We’re not exactly looking down the maw of global catastrophe. That is, the “why now?” part. The other challenge is the “why us?” part. Why should US taxpayer dollars be expended to save the species?

In fact, the global response to climate change offers some lessons here that we have frankly never seen before. We now have people wondering about the very long-term livability of our world. That’s never happened before. The response to that is not where world leaders spout about a solution that will make people wealthy, by mining the riches of CO2 mitigation, but where world leaders try to agree on common goals and sacrifices that will lead to a culture change about consumption. So the main hurdle isn’t about designing an architecture that will take us to the Moon or Mars. (We did that for the Moon. Check the box.) It’s about developing a cultural mandate for expansion. If our country is going to help cultivate that mandate, our government has to start using words like that, ideally starting with an amended Space Act that actually challenges our space agency to consider species insurance as one of many reasons for its existence. It’s going to take time.

“The most important thing the committee did, I think, is we actually did engage the question of why we have a manned exploration program, and nobody ever talks about that. I was stunned by the rapid emergence of a consensus among such a disparate group of players that ultimately the reason why we explore is to expand human civilization or, in my words, to open a frontier. And if ten people with such diverse backgrounds that were knowledgeable in space immediately come to that answer, it’s probably more widely held that we have a space program for that reason. And yet, if that’s the reason we have a space program, why has nobody one ever made it their job to do that? It’s never been part of their mission, and I think it should be.”

This (and your further points) were very specifically and thoroughly articulated in the 1986 Paine Commission Report (Pioneering the Space Frontier), and that effort even had pretty pictures to help it along. The primary rationale offered therein is quite explicit: we the democratic nations of the Earth (with the USA in the lead) should apply the full potential of the free-enterprise system to expand our free society outward across the entire solar system while also tapping into its abundant resources to help life back here on Earth. Pursuit of wealth out there (i.e., extraterrestrial resources there for the taking…and selling ) would serve to preserve our free society even as it contributed to our society’s continuing economic advancement and growth.

NASA’s role to play (with a not-too-excessive increase in its budget, as the report compared it to the nation’s GNP) was to pursue the critical high-leverage enabling technologies (aerobraking, tethers, advanced propulsion, in-situ resource utilization, closed-cycle life support) that industry could then exploit as they pursued economic opportunities across the expanding frontier. All routine space operations that would follow behind the first exploration missions should be handed off to industry…and so on and so on.

This was rearticulated and partly muddled up in the Ride Report and later efforts, but the report’s core rationale essentially became a given in all future space policy discussions (even if it was dismissed as too grandiose too soon at times), and thus was part of the foundational fiber of both the Space Exploration Initiative and SEI-lite (=VSE) 15 years later. This was demonstrated quite blatantly by Marburger’s explanatory comments about “bringing the solar system into our economic sphere of influence.” What he said compares very closely with the discussion offered in the 1986 report.

Is it really any surprise that all the members of the Augustine committee each arrived at this same conclusion? It has been a…now rarely articulated…core thread of space policy DNA, always there underneath the surface, for nearly 25 years…with tendrils reaching all the way back through the late 60s (the first Paine commission, which begat the “STS”) and some elements even tracing to Von Braun’s visions as presented in Colliers, etc.

Sadly, the only real flaw of Pioneering the Space Frontier was its timing, arriving as it did immediately post-Challenger…but even that reinforced some of its recommendations, such as separating cargo and personnel LEO access (and it had MANY very specific recommendations).

Perhaps a re-issue of Pioneering the Space Frontier is needed today. While the glossy images of Moon and Mars bases might seem too much pie-in-the-sky right now, the justifying rationale for solar system exploration and development articulated therein remains just as valid today. The question to ask oneself when reading it is not “Can we afford such a scheme?” but rather “Can we afford NOT to pursue it, even if we do it slowly?”

Protecting against possible but unlikely natural or man-made castrophes is really just gravy when compared to what that report offers in terms of strong, practical notions about how human civilization (with both its known strengths and weaknesses) can advance by exploiting space to do so.