Yale Astronomer Sabatino Sofia (who?) weighs in on the Moon-Mars plans.

YH: What problems do you see with the proposed manned missions to the Moon and Mars recently proposed by the president?

SS: During the presidency of Bush's father, he also proposed a manned mission to Mars. In fact, Reagan had done the same a few years before. When they tried to budget what it would cost, they came up to $300-400 billion. Of course, this money did not come along, and nothing significant came out of it. Essentially, they started a small office in NASA headquarters to study the mission, produced a few studies, and one or two years later it was quietly shut down. I don't expect anything different to happen now.

I can understand the skepticism about this time around being any different, but (yet again) this skepticism seems to be based in part on the received wisdom of the $400B pricetag.

Man...people have latched onto that "factoid" like they've latched on to the "imminent threat" B.S. -- like blood-crazed pit-bulls latching onto a slab of raw meat, blissfully unaware that what they've clamped their jaws on is something less than the meat that it seems to be.

Why does everyone say that when Kennedy came with [his] vision of going to the Moon that it did flourish and had success, while this one [the trip to Mars] doesn't? Indeed it was visionary, challenging, and this played a role, but it was part of our national defense. With the Cold War going on, the perception of an outstanding scientific and technological capability in the U.S. was a significant deterrent to a potential enemy.

True. And that is why no attempt to produce a "second Apollo" has ever succeeded -- Apollo was the product of a unique set of historical circumstances. But this doesn't apply to the Bush plan, which so far does not look like an all-out, blank-check drive to get to the Moon and then Mars. It's an almost boringly methodical, success-driven approach, more like a business development strategy than a Grand Program^TM.

At that time, the NASA budget at the peak of the Apollo program was two and a half percent of the national budget. In current dollars that would be close to $50 billion; the current NASA budget is only about $14 billion. A lot of that is spoken for with the shuttle program and with the $2 billion or more annual expense for the space station. Not much is left to tackle new major initiatives.

Funny, I keep seeing a $100B current-dollars figure cited for the total cost of the Apollo program...where does he get $50B per year?

And he totally misses the boat with the rest of that excerpt -- the big spending on the new plan doesn't come until after our commitments to Shuttle and ISS end, freeing up all that money within NASA's current funding levels. The money for implementing this "major new intiative" is, by and large, going to come from the money that would have been spent unproductively on ISS and Shuttle. Additional funding may be needed down the road, it's true, but it is difficult to imagine what the President has proposed costing anywhere near $50B per year.

There are the following problems with the proposed initiative. First, the money offered is totally inadequate to carry out the task.

Says you...with a modicum of discipline and a clear goal to focus on, there's no reason it needs to cost an arm and a leg. More than it needs to, perhaps, NASA being a government agency, but there is nothing fundamentally bankrupting about the plan as outlined to-date.

If an adequate budget were offered, I'm not sure the country, at this particular juncture, with the enormous run-away deficits, could afford another $400 to $500 billion for the next five or 10 years.

AAAARGH!!! There's that number again!!!

YH: What comes after Mars as NASA's next big project?

SS: The time will come when the technology will be advanced where a manned trip to Mars would not be totally outside the imaginable.

"Yes, it's true...if we just continue to circle the Earth in our LEO holding-pattern, someday, a miracle will occur, and warp-drive or wormholes or interplanetary stepping disks or commercial-grade astral projection will spontaneously spring into existence. Why, we would be foolish to expend any money or effort on developing now what the future will bring to us for free!"

Probably exploring the solar system beyond Mars with manned missions is outside the scope of anything currently imaginable.

Oh, I don't know about that. If you have Mars as a jumping-off point, missions further out (manned or otherwise) become a great deal more imaginable...especially when you've already learned the tricks of crewed interplanetary travel by venturing to Mars in the first place.

For example, the next planet beyond Mars is Jupiter, which is...not a place to visit.

Oh, nooo... No reason to visit Ganymede. Nothing to find on Europa. No attractions at all on Io. Why go?

Outside of manned missions, the next scientific mission that I can foresee is a sample return [i.e. another robotic] mission to Mars. This would allow us to get a much better understanding of the geology of Mars that we can get without the ability to study Martian samples in terrestrial laboratories. It turns out that we can do most of the planetary science without manned missions.

Let's see...We need a sample return mission because we can study Martian samples better here on Earth, but sending humans to where such samples can be obtained in great abundance at a moment's notice from their native context is a bad idea? It's smarter to spend $1.5B per shot to retrieve a few pounds of material from one or a few sites, than to spend $20-40B to send humans to where they can examine as many pounds of samples as they can handle, from many far-flung sites, day after day, for a year and a half?

I don't get it. What do astronomers have against manned space exploration? Is it really just that they see it as siphoning funds away from buying ever-bigger telescopes?

Posted by T.L. James on February 6, 2004 09:32 PM