I was lying down to go to sleep and started thinking more about the debate I am having on manned space flights. What kept me up was the realization that I was probably too brief, and not as thoughtful as I should have been, when talking about Apollo and national pride. So let me explore it a little more and relate it back to our current situation.
Apollo was done for national pride, but I should also have acknowledged that there was more to it than that. We were pushing our boundaries. And that I believe is where much of the research gains came from. In a short time - 10 years - we conquered space. But to do so, we had to learn how to leave our planet - safely and reliably - to survive in space, to reach another body, to land on it, to take off again from it, to return to our planet, and to enter our atmosphere and land safely. Before 1960, I think we had little experience in most of those things, save for launching things from our planet into space.
And because we were pushing our boundaries so much, and because we had to develop new tools to accomplish all of those things, there were naturally many gains in research. But once we did accomplish those things, the further research payoffs were expensive to achieve (more trips to the moon) with smaller payoffs.
And that is where I see us now. Returning to the moon or going to Mars isn't pushing any significant boundaries. (And as I have said over and over again, the Shuttle is not the best way to achieve low earth orbit.) And so I don't see us making many gains in research or learning through Constellation. There will be some, but they can only be marginal - whereas the costs are extreme.
Because it is clear there are little research gains, most people have only been able to argue to continue the Shuttle or to pursue Constellation for sentimental reasons (Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the Rose Center has made these arguments). While I understand the sentiment, I don't think it is enough. There is a reason we stopped going to the moon - we had no purpose to justify the funding. And we still don't. Until it becomes cheaper, we have to be able to accept that we shouldn't be going.
1 comment:
This opinion piece explains my sentiments exactly. All I would add is that I will not consider a cost argument while NASA's budget is less than 1% of the entire Federal budget. If you want money to be spent else where, start by taking it from the defense budget. Then we can talk.
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