tech: /. On To Mars

[Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag_5_19_00/krauthammer_cov_5_18_00.html


January 31, 2000/Volume 5, Number 19
On To Mars
by Charles Krauthammer


 If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a
 hundred years later. . . .bombs of unimaginable power
 would threaten the species;. . . .that millions of people
 would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking
 off and landing without human touch;. . . .that humankind
 would travel to the moon, and then lose interest. . . .the
 physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad. 

                                 -Michael Crichton

What manner of creature are we? It took 100,000 years for humans to
get inches off the ground. Then, astonishingly, it took only 66 to get
from Kitty Hawk to the moon. And then, still more astonishingly, we
lost interest, spending the remaining 30 years of the 20th century
going around in circles in low earth orbit, i.e., going nowhere.

Last July, the unmanned Lunar Prospector probe was sent to find out
whether the moon contains water. It was a remarkable venture, but even
more remarkable was the fact that Prospector was the first NASA
spacecraft, manned or unmanned, to land on the moon since the last
Apollo astronaut departed in 1972. Twenty-seven years without even a
glance back.

We remember the late 15th and 16th centuries as the Age of
Exploration. The second half of the 20th was at one point known as the
Space Age. What happened? For the first 20 years we saw space as a
testing ground, an arena for splendid, strenuous exertion. We were in
a race with the Soviets for space supremacy, and mobilized for it as
for war. President Kennedy committed all of our resources: men,
materiel, money, and spirit. And he was bold. When he promised to land
a man on the moon before the decade was out, there were only eight and
a half years left. At the time, no American had even orbited the
earth.

The Apollo program was a triumph. But the public quickly grew
bored. The interview with the moon-bound astronauts aboard Apollo 13
was not even broadcast, for lack of an audience. It was only when the
flight turned into a harrowing drama of survival that an audience
assembled. By Apollo 17, it was all over. The final three moonshots
were canceled for lack of interest.

Looking to reinvent itself, NASA came up with the idea of a space
shuttle ferrying men and machines between earth and an orbiting space
station. It was a fine idea except for one thing: There was no space
station. Skylab had been launched in May 1973, then manned for 171
days. But no effort was made to keep its orbit from decaying. It fell
to earth and burned. We were left with an enormously expensive
shuttle-to nowhere.

The shuttle has had its successes-the views of earth it brought back,
the repairs to the Hubble space telescope it enabled. But it has been
a dead end scientifically and deadening spiritually. There is today a
palpable ennui with space. When did we last get excited? When a
77-year-old man climbed into the shuttle in November 1998 for a return
flight. That was the most excitement the shuttle program had
engendered in years-the first time in a long time that a launch and
the preparations and even the preflight press conference had received
live coverage. Televisions were hauled into classrooms so kids could
watch.

But watch what? The fact is that we were watching John Glenn reprise a
flight he'd made 36 years earlier. It is as if the Wright Brothers had
returned to Kitty Hawk in 1939 to skim the sand once again, and the
replay was treated as some great advance in aviation.

The most disturbing part of the Glenn phenomenon was the efflorescence
of space nostalgia-at a time when space exploration is still in its
infancy. We have not really gone anywhere yet, and we are already
looking back with sweet self-satisfaction.

The other flutter of excitement generated by the shuttle program
occurred a few years earlier when Shannon Lucid received the
Congressional Space Medal of Honor for a long-duration flight in low
earth orbit. A sign of the times.  She is surely brave and spunky, but
the lavish attention her feat garnered says much about the diminished
state of our space program. Endurance records are fine. But the
Congressional Space Medal of Honor? It used to be given to the likes
of Alan Shepard and John Glenn, who had the insane courage to park
themselves atop an unstable, spanking-new, largely untested
eight-story bomb not knowing whether it would blow up under them. Now
we give it for spending six months in an orbiting phone booth with a
couple of guys named Yuri.

                        II

What happened? Where is the national will to explore? We are stuck
along some quiet historical sidetrack. The fascination today is with
communication, calculation, miniaturization, all in the service of
multiplying human interconnectedness. Outer space has ceded pride of
place to the inner space of the Internet. In fact, space's greatest
claim on our interest and resources currently rests on the fact that
satellites allow us to page each other and confirm that 9:30 meeting
about the new Tostitos ad campaign.

The excitement surrounding Shannon Lucid's six months of sponge baths
and Russian food aboard Mir is a reflection of the quiet domesticity
of this inward-turning time. Perhaps it is the exhaustion after 60
years of world war, cold and hot, stretching right up to the early
1990s. The Seinfeld era is not an era for Odyssean adventures. Now is
a time for home and hearth-the glowing computer screen that allows
endless intercourse with our fellow humans.

Another reason for the diminishing drive for planetary exploration is,
perversely, the fruits of the moon landing itself-and in particular
that famous photograph of earth taken by the Apollo astronauts during
the first human circumnavigation of another celestial body.

"Earthrise" had an important effect on human consciousness. It gave us
our first view of earth as it is seen from God's perspective: warm,
safe, serene, blessed. It created a kind of preemptive nostalgia for
earth, at precisely the moment when earthlings were finally acquiring
the ability to leave it.

It is no surprise that "Earthrise" should have become such a cultural
icon, particularly for the environmental Left. It offered the cosmic
equivalent of the call to "Come home, America" issued just four years
after the picture was taken.

That photo and the ethos it promoted-global, sedentary,
inward-looking-were the metaphysical complement to the political
arguments made at the time, and ever since, for turning our gaze from
space back to earth. These are the familiar arguments about social
priorities: Why are we spending all this money on space, when there is
poverty and disease and suffering at home?

It is a maddening question because, while often offered in good faith,
it entirely misses the point. Poverty and disease will always be with
us. We have spent, by most estimates, some $5 trillion trying to
abolish poverty in the United States alone. Government is simply not
very good at solving social problems. But it can be extremely good at
solving technical problems. The Manhattan Project is, of course, the
classic case. As are the various technological advances forged in war,
from radar to computers.

Concerted national mobilization for a specific scientific objective
can have great success. This is in sharp contrast to national
mobilization for social objectives, which almost invariably ends in
disappointment, waste, and unintended consequences (such as the
dependency and deviancy spawned by the massive welfare programs and
entitlements of the sixties and the seventies-the Left's preferred
destination for the resources supposedly squandered on space).

But more exasperating than the poor social science and the
misapprehension about the real capacities of government is the
tone-deafness of the earth-firsters to the wonder and glory of space,
and to the unique opportunity offered this generation. How can one
live at the turn of the 21st century, when the planets are for the
first time within our grasp, and not be moved by the grandeur of the
enterprise?

NASA administrators like to talk about science and spinoffs to justify
the space program. Well, the study of bone decalcification in
near-earth weightlessness is fine, but it is hardly the motor force
behind President Kennedy's ringing declaration, "We choose to go to
the Moon." That is not why we, as a people and as a species, ventured
into the cosmos in the first place.

Teflon and pagers are nice, too, and perhaps effective politically in
selling space. But they are hardly the point. We are going into space
for the same reason George Mallory climbed Everest: Because it is
there. For the adventure, for the romance, for the sheer temerity of
venturing into the void.

And yet, amid the national psychic letdown that followed the moon
landings and is still with us today, that kind of talk seems archaic,
anachronistic. So what do we do? We radically contract our
horizons. We spend three decades tumbling about in near-earth
orbit. We become expert in zero-G nausea and other fascinations. And
when we do venture out into the glorious void, we do it on the very
cheap, to accommodate the diminished national will and the pinched
national resources allocated for exploration.

The reason NASA administrator Daniel Goldin adopted the "faster,
better, cheaper" approach is that he was forced to.  He was rightly
afraid that when you send a $1 billion probe loaded with experiments
and hardware and it fails (as happened to the Mars Observer in 1993),
you risk losing your entire congressional backing-and your entire
program.  He had little choice but to adopt a strategy of sending
cheaper but more vulnerable probes in order to lessen the stakes
riding on each launch. Probes like the Mars Polar Lander.

                       III

When the Mars Polar Lander disappeared last month, the country went
into a snit. The public felt let down, cheated of the exotic
entertainment NASA was supposed to deliver.  The press was peeved,
deprived of a nice big story with lovely pictures. Jay Leno, the
nation's leading political indicator, was merciless. ("If you're stuck
for something to get NASA for Christmas, you can't go wrong with a
subscription to Popular Mechanics....But they're not giving
up. NASA said today they're gonna continue to look for other forms of
intelligent life in the universe. And when they find it, they're gonna
hire him.") And Congress preened, displaying concern, pulling its chin
and promising hearings on the failure of the last three Mars
missions. This will be a bit of Kabuki theater in which clueless
politicians, whose greatest mathematical feat is calculating last
week's fund-raising take, will pinion earnest scientists about why
they could not land a go-cart on the South Pole of a body 400 million
miles away on a part of the planet we had never explored.

In other words, we are in for a spell of national bellyaching and
finger-pointing which will inevi tably culminate in the crucifixion of
a couple of NASA administrators, a few symbolic budget cuts, and a
feeling of self-satisfaction all around.

The biggest scandal of the Mars exploration projects is not that a few
have failed, but the way the nation has reacted to those failures. A
people couched and ready, expectant and entitled, armed with a remote
control yet denied Martian pictures to go with their Today show
coffee, will be avenged.

Who is to blame for the Mars disasters? Not the scientists, but the
people who will soon be putting them on trial.

Landing on another planet is very hard. And landing on its South Pole,
terra incognita for us, is even harder. As one researcher put it, this
is rocket science. "Look at the history of landers on Mars," professor
Howard McCurdy of American University told the Washington Post. "Of
twelve attempts, three have made it. The Soviets lost all six of
theirs.Ý.Ý.Ý.ÝMars really eats spacecraft."

Something this hard requires not just technology-which we have-but
will, which we don't. And national will is expressed in funding. Since
the glory days of Apollo, space exploration has progressively been
starved. Today, funding for NASA is one fifth what it was in 1965,
less than 0.8 percent of the federal budget.

And not only has the overall NASA budget declined, but so has the
fraction allocated to both manned and unmanned exploration of the moon
and the planets. The budget has been eaten by the space shuttle and
the low-earth-orbit space station being built two decades late to
finally provide a destination for the wandering shuttle.

Then there is what NASA calls "mission to planet earth," a program
devoted to studying such terrestrial concerns as ozone, land use,
climate variability, and such. A nice idea.  But it used to be NASA's
mission to lift us above ozone and land and climate to reach for
something higher. The whole idea of space exploration was to find out
what is out there.

The cost of the Mars Polar Lander was $165 million. In an $8 trillion
economy, that is a laughable sum. Waterworld cost more. The new
Bellagio hotel in Vegas could buy eight Polar Landers with $80 million
left over for a bit of gambling. To put it in terms of competing space
outlays, $165 million is less than half the cost of a shuttle launch.
For the price of a single shuttle mission (launch, flight time,
landing, and overhead) we could have sent two Mars Polar Landers and
gotten $70 million back in change.

Planetary exploration is so hamstrung financially that the Polar
Lander-which NASA last week officially declared dead-sent no telemetry
during its final descent onto the planet. That was to save
money. We'll never know what went wrong. Adding a black box, something
to send simple signals to tell us what happened, would have cost $5
million.  Five million! That doesn't buy one minute of air time on the
Super Bowl.

The hard fact is that the kind of cheap, fast spacecraft NASA has been
forced to build does reduce the loss in case of failure. But it
increases the chance of failure. You cannot build in the kind of
backup systems that go into the larger craft we sent exploring in the
past. The Viking missions that 25 years ago touched down on Mars and
gave us those extraordinary first pictures of its surface, and the
Voyager spacecraft that gave us magnificent flybys of the entire solar
system, typically cost 10 to 20 times more than the new "faster,
better, cheaper" projects.

It is a travesty that the very same Congress that has squeezed funding
for these programs will now be conducting the inquisition to find out
why this shoestring operation could not produce another spectacular
success. But we can't just blame the politicians. This is a
democracy. They are responding to their constituency. Their
constituency is disappointed that it received no entertainment from
the Mars Polar Lander, for which the average American contributed the
equivalent of half a cheese burger. If we had had the will to devote a
whole cheeseburger to a Mars lander, it could have been equipped with
redundant systems, and might have succeeded.

                       IV

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.  What
then to do? If we are going to save resources in acknowledgment of the
diminished national will to explore, we should begin by shutting the
maw that is swallowing up so much of the space budget: the shuttle and
the space station. It is not as if we have nowhere to go but endlessly
around earth. Recent discoveries have given us new ways and new
reasons for establishing a human presence on the moon and on Mars.

Until a few years ago, it could have been argued that a moon base was
impractical, and human Mars exploration even more so. But there is
evidence that there may be water on the moon (in the form of ice, of
course). And water, there as here, is the key to everything. It could
provide both life support and fuel. Similarly, the fact that there is
ice on Mars has led to a revolution in thinking about how we can
travel there and back. Instead of carrying huge stores of fuel, which
would make the launch vehicle enormously expensive and cumbersome, we
could send unmanned spacecraft ahead.  They would land on Mars and
turn the water into life support and fuel. (If you split water, you
get hydrogen and oxygen, precisely the gases that you need for life
and for propulsion.) Astronauts could travel fairly light, arriving at
a place already prepared with life-sustaining water, oxygen, and
hydrogen for the flight back.

The moon and Mars are beckoning. So why are we spending so much of our
resources building a tinker-toy space station? In part because, a
quarter-century late, we still need something to justify the
shuttle. Yet the space station's purpose has shrunk to almost
nothing. No one takes seriously its claims to be a platform for real
science. And the original idea-hatched in the 1950s-that it would be a
way station to the moon and Mars, was overtaken in the sixties when we
found more efficient ways to fully escape earth's gravitational well.

The space station's main purpose now appears to be ...fostering
international cooperation. It became too expensive for the United
States to do alone, and so we decided to share the cost and
control. It provides a convenient back door for American funding of
the bankrupt Russian space program. We send Russia the money to build
its space station modules. This is supposed to promote friendship and
keep Russian rocket scientists from moving to Baghdad.

The cost to the United States? Twenty-one billion dollars, enough to
support 127 Polar Landers. Instead of squandering $21 billion on a
weightless United Nations (don't we have one of these already?), we
should be directing our resources at the next logical step: a moon
base. It would be a magnificent platform for science, for observation
of the universe, and for industry. It would also be good training for
Mars. And it would begin the ultimate adventure: the colonization of
other worlds.

In 1991, the Stafford Commission recommended the establishment of
permanent human outposts on the moon and on Mars by the early decades
of this century. Rather than frittering away billions on the space
station, we should be going right now to the moon-where we've been,
where we know how to go, and where we might very well discover
life-sustaining materials. And from there, on to the planets.

In the end, we will surely go. But how long will it take? Five hundred
years from now-a time as distant from us as is Columbus-a party of
settlers on excursion to Mars's South Pole will stumble across some
strange wreckage, just as today we stumble across the wreckage of
long-forgotten ships caught in Arctic ice. They'll wonder what manner
of creature it was that sent it. What will we have told them?  That
after millennia of gazing at the heavens, we took one step into the
void, then turned and, for the longest time, retreated to home and
hearth? Or that we retained our nerve and hunger for horizons, and
embraced our destiny?

by Charles Krauthammer

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