Thirty-two years ago, on July 20, 1969, human beings set foot on the moon for the first time.
Today, we couldn’t go back if we wanted to.
More than anything else, that sums up the current state of spaceflight research in the United States. The US stopped building the Saturn rockets that sent the Apollo missions beyond the orbit of the Earth years ago, and never developed a successor. We cannot go to the moon. We cannot go to Mars. We cannot go any farther than the low-Earth orbit of International Space Station Alpha and the space shuttle travel. What is worse, we have no plans to go any farther, no idea of how to get there from here. NASA is still trying to decide what kind of orbital craft will succeed the space shuttle, despite the fact the current fleet of orbiters is much closer to the end of its life than the beginning. There are currently no plans to use Alpha to construct interplanetary craft. There is no vision for the future, and thus no effort to make that vision real.
“So what?” you may say. “Big deal. Space isn’t important; let’s worry about things down here.” You can click somewhere else now; this article is not for you. You may want to do some reading about the technology discovered through space research, and consider that if Spain, Portugal, England, France and the rest of Europe had taken that attitude in the 1400s and 1500s, many of today’s residents of the Western Hemisphere wouldn’t be. (And feel free to discuss this on the forums — we can give the issue more thorough treatment there.) Exploration is one of the things that makes human beings special, and I believe we can improve the world we live in while keeping our eyes on worlds yet to be lived on, but to do it, we have to stop making the mistakes we’re currently making.
The biggest mistake is a failure to set a goal, to focus the attention of scientists and the public on a specific objective and then solve the problems necessary to get there. This is radically different from the beginnings of the American space program. Each project had a name conjured from Roman myth and an objective that paved the way for the next project. With Mercury we put a human being into orbit; Gemini saw the first American extravehicular activity (EVA), and Apollo took Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for humankind. If you ask anyone why we have the shuttle or why we built Alpha, you’ll hear about all sorts of possible benefits to science, about this satellite or that new material, but nothing that can be summed up in a simple phrase or sentence. A clearer mission would help mobilize support and interest in spaceflight research, and help to motivate and focus the scientists at the forefront of that research.
There are a number of ideas for where NASA and the US should go next, and how they should get there. I’d like to highlight two.
Mars Direct: The genius of this plan from Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin is that it essentially would build gas stations on Mars. One of the major problems with any possible Mars mission is how to provide fuel to get there and back, and then have a rocket capable of launching all that fuel. The Mars Direct program would solve that problem by sending an unmanned mission to Mars that contain tanks of hydrogen. On Mars, these tanks would be combined with the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere to form water and methane. The water would then be broken up into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen used to repeat the process. The methane and oxygen would be available for use as fuel on return flights, and the extra oxygen would be used to provide astronauts with breathable air. Two years later, we would launch another fueling station along with a manned vessel; the manned vessel would set down at the same site as the first fueling station and serve as a habitat for a roughly 18-month stay by a crew of astronauts, who would conduct a variety of tests on the planet’s surface, and then return to Earth. The cycle would repeat itself every two years — send up a crew and the equipment to send the next crew home, experiment, use the fuel the last crew sent — until, over time, we will have built a fairly extensive base on Mars.
Right now, the Mars Society is conducting a number of experiments to try and gather data on how the crews of these missions would work on the Martian surface, and to promote the idea of human exploration of Mars. The latest is the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station; excerpts from the crew’s journals are available from the Mars Society website. The exact scientific value of such missions is unclear, since even the most Mars-like area on Earth will have significant differences, but at the very least, it is gathering attention — CNN has done several reports on the installation recently.
One other potential problem with the Mars Direct plan is that currently, the plan calls for the spacecraft to sacrifice mass in order to save fuel; using lighter material means that craft might not be as well protected as, say, the space shuttle. Given the length of the flights, this certainly increases the danger inherent in any Mars mission, and unlike the 1400s, we are probably not prepared to chalk up the loss of a crew of astronauts as an inevitable tradeoff for expanding the frontier. Despite Zubrin’s claims, we might not be able to get Mars Direct going in the next few years. It certainly does seem worthwhile to me, though, to see if we can’t overcome the design challenges of the need for lighter construction materials and a new generation of powerful booster rockets.
Cosmos Solar Sail: This effort, spearheaded by the Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios (founded by Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow and creative partner), is an attempt to begin development of a new generation of spaceflight vehicles, which would be able to use the force generated by light particles to propel a spaceship through the solar system. Such a system only works outside of Earth’s atmosphere, because gravity and atmospheric pressures overwhelm the momentum that light can generate, so solar sails require some kind of rocket launch vehicle. But once in space, they could be an extremely effective method of travel, since they would not require heavy fuel. The Society and Cosmos Studios have privately funded Cosmos 1, a solar sail-pwered craft designed to launch from a Russian missile/rocket base and then achieve Earth orbit. The A&E Network plans to air a special next year chronicling the project. In July, a suborbital test of a simplified version of the solar sail failed when the launch rocket failed to provide enough thrust to separate the sail from the rocket, but the Planetary Society is undaunted; they recently announced that their next launch would be for all the marbles, and that they intend to send Cosmos 1 into orbit in early 2002.
Both of these projects point to easily-understood objectives — a permanent human installation on Mars and a new form of spacecraft. Both are primarily privately-sponsored efforts that could, given the proper support, capture the imagination and promote space science and research. They could become the starting points for the next stage of humanity’s journey. Or we could keep going nowhere, no closer to the stars than a telescope can bring us. I can’t help but find that a disappointing legacy to leave to future generations.