Back in 2010, the bill authorizing funding for NASA directed the agency to contract for an analysis of its long-term plans for human spaceflight. Four years later, the organization that received the contract, the National Academies of Science (NAS), has finally released the report.
That may seem like a painful delay, but the NAS has, like many others, determined that NASA's budget really isn't able to support a long-term plan for exploration anyway, so there wasn't really a rush to figure out where we're going. And the report took a while because the experts organized by NAS stepped back from the immediate problem and looked at the question of what we hope to accomplish from having a manned space program in the first place.
It found there was no single, compelling reason for extending human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO). But, with the right destination, a collection of less than fully compelling reasons could add up to a strong justification for manned space flight. And that destination is Mars.
The big picture
Just like anyone else who has looked at the problem has concluded, budget instabilities and changing priorities have made it difficult to pursue human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. It traces these instabilities to the US public itself. The people who care about space exploration care passionately about it, but the great majority of the US public is indifferent unless there's something in the news (and sometimes indifferent even then).
Given that indifference, the authors of the report examined the usual collection of justifications given for human space exploration. Some of these are pragmatic: the economic return on federal R&D spending, the benefits for national defense, etc. But the authors found that there was little need to go beyond low-Earth orbit to get most of these benefits, and it was impossible to weigh the benefits of space exploration in comparison to other federal R&D programs. So, they looked at aspirational goals as well. The space program does attract people to science and technology fields, but so do robots like Curiosity and Cassini. And, at this point, it's impossible to tell whether space exploration could ever give our species an enduring presence somewhere other than Earth.
'No single rationale alone seems to justify the value of pursuing human spaceflight,' the report states. '[But] the aspirational rationales, when supplemented by the practical benefits associated with the pragmatic rationales, do, in the committee's judgment, argue for a continuation of our nation's human spaceflight program.'
So, rather than focusing on any specific benefit, the NAS stepped back and identified what it termed 'the enduring questions for human spaceflight: How far from Earth can humans go? and What can humans do and achieve when we get there?' Any manned space program should be focused on providing us some answers to these questions.
To answer them, we need a sustainable program of exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. And, to direct this sort of program, we need what the NAS termed a 'horizon goal,' something that would both give us a partial answer to the two big questions, and provide a framework for an entire exploration program. And, of all the potential horizon goals that are currently available to us, the only target that does this is landing on the surface of Mars.
Tackling Mars
The US would have an extremely difficult time arranging the money to put a human on Mars before the century is out. Having partners would make it much easier to achieve. Although the authors of the report don't use the term, it's clear they think we're being a bit stupid for not including the Chinese among those on our potential list of partners. China's exploration program is sustained, incremental, and methodical-exactly the sort of things the authors feel we should be aiming for with our own program.
Beyond that, there's a conflict of goals. As far as the current administration is concerned, the US program is currently focused on visiting an asteroid, either in situ or one returned to an orbit near the Moon. Almost all of the potential partners we have for extended exploration in space are completely indifferent to that goal. Most of them, in contrast, are interested in a sustained exploration of the Moon, possibly including a base. In fact, a base provides many benefits, since it will give us experience that should allow us to extend our first visit to Mars long enough to accomplish significant science goals (and provide a more satisfying answer to 'what will we do when we get there?').
This would seem to create a binary choice: if we want partners (and we most certainly do), we need to go to the Moon. If we want to go to an asteroid, we won't have partners.
But the report argues that's really a false choice. To go to Mars safely, we need a sustained program that includes (relatively) frequent launches: 'the current program to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft for flight beyond LEO cannot provide the flight frequency required to maintain competence and safety.' That way, we can maintain expertise between missions and fully understand the properties of our vehicles before we start using them for long-distance human travel. This means multiple trips beyond low-Earth orbit-enough to accommodate trips to both the Moon and one or more asteroids.
Having multiple goals will also be useful for allowing what the report terms 'exit ramps.' Essentially, these are intermediate destinations like the Moon or Mars' moons that are part of the overall program to place people on Mars. Should a budget crunch interrupt the exploration program, we should be able to bring the exploration program to a close with a satisfying exploration of a destination short of Mars. This, the authors strongly feel, is much better than keeping the full program hanging around but underfunded.
Can we actually manage this? Not within the current NASA budget, which projects a gradual decline in real dollar terms over the next few years and funds missions that are far too erratic to maintain safety and expertise. At a minimum, doing any serious, sustainable exploration will require increases to NASA's budget that keep pace with inflation (the report uses a 2.5 percent increase a year).
Obviously, more could be done if we had more money. But the report cautions against responding to any extra funding by adding destinations to the program. Instead, it suggests any over-budget funding be used to do what it terms 'retire risk'-accelerate technological developments needed for future stages of exploration. This would make the whole program more tolerant to cuts in the future. It would also aid in planning, since it would provide a greater sense of what the hardware would look like.
Overall, the report (like several others before it) makes a tremendous amount of sense. But sense and political reality really have had little to do with each other. In the absence of a strong public consensus about where space exploration should be going, NASA has been treated less as an R&D program and more as a jobs program, both by the representatives of the states where the jobs are, and by the lobbying arms of some of the major companies involved in space flight.
That's unlikely to change unless we can solve the public interest problem. The problems facing the US space program are unlikely to change until more members of Congress care about what happens to the space program, and care from a broader perspective than how much money from NASA's budget goes to their district.
Entities 0 Name: NASA Count: 6 1 Name: US Count: 5 2 Name: Moon Count: 4 3 Name: NAS Count: 4 4 Name: Earth Count: 2 5 Name: Congress Count: 1 6 Name: China Count: 1 7 Name: Cassini Count: 1 8 Name: National Academies of Science Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1masbnI Title: New study says NASA will land people on Mars about the time chickens invent fusion energy Description: The report makes a case for sending astronauts back to the moon. That had been a key element of NASA's strategy under President George W. Bush. But President Obama and his advisers explicitly opposed another moon landing ("I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We've been there before," Obama said in a speech on space policy in 2010).
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