On July 16, last summer, we celebrated a 40year old accomplishment, the Apollo 11 visit to the moon. There seems little question of the significance of the act, and it wasn't the pocketfull of rocks that were brought home. Nor was it the muchcelebrated scientific/technological advances like the development of freeze dried foods or even the technique of adding nutritional value to baby food. What it was all about was upstaging the Soviets. We had been humiliated by a Russian, Yuri Gargaron, as first man in space in 1961.
President Kennedy offered a challenge and the challenge was met. There has been no need to repeat the feat and a few subsequent events since. Since the greatest competition in history there has been nobody left for us to compete with. Yet we continue to hear the call for more manned exploration of space.
Sending more men to the moon, or worse to Mars, is a bad idea.
We have to question whether such grandiose adventures are worth the cost; the billions of dollars spent might find better use on earthly concerns, like cures for our worst diseases, a reconstruction of our financial systems or the rebuilding of Haiti.
Some also protest that the earth is running out of living space; its resources are being depleted; or overcrowding will eventually produce the final pandemic to wipe out the human race, or global warming will force everybody to move to Argentina and Canada. But none of those doomsday predictions can justify a plan to emigrate from earth to somewhere else.
What makes interplanetary manned space flight a bad idea is the terrible risk attached to space exploration. Our history with the exploration of space offers plenty of examples.
We have had three major disasters in NASA's programs. In the first, three men were incinerated while sitting in a capsule on the ground. In the second a rocket exploded on takeoff killing everyone aboard. In the third a whole crew was lost as their reentry vehicle burned up in the atmosphere. In each case the public was horrified and mourned with the families of the bright young people whose lives expired so suddenly. Our worst experience of grief was in the second disaster in which we were spectators standing side by side with the parents of one of the crew. Television is rarely able to show us the instant of death so dramatically, or the instant effect on a family so crushingly.
Each of those disasters was followed by months or years of handringing paralysis at NASA while engineering investigations were carried out and while the public reevaluated its commitment to such adventuring. What we experienced with those (predictable) disasters was nothing compared to what lies in store for us when, as it will happen eventually, one of our crews is literally lost in space. The American people have neither the stomach nor the tolerance for the loss of a crew, not just in an instant's explosion, but in a failure of control or power that dooms them to a drifting death somewhere in space. The public agony as we watch the lingering loss of a crew over days or weeks will spell an end to public support and Congressional funding for NASA and its programs. If there is actually something to be gained by the exploration of space, our government should limit the risks. The risk of financial loss is bad enough; the risk that the world could watch as one of our crews expires, over several days, on realtime TV, is intolerable from a humanistic point of view and unacceptable for its effect on any further such research.
But such a calamity is unnecessary. We have entered the Robotics Age; we have already proved what can be accomplished in exploration of our planetary neighbors. Robots have survived for years on Mars, taking pictures and sampling soils while capturing energy from the same sun that we enjoy, and transmitting marvelous sets of data from so far away and all this with the primitive robots at hand. Scientists and engineers will develop and are developing robotics that will give us a virtual presence anywhere we want to send them, to accomplish tasks better than men are able to do, even to make judgments and repairs. Our astronauts, steeped in a culture of the "right stuff," will, as they always have, protest that only a human presence can deal with unexpected circumstances so often encountered on these expeditions. But men, encumbered with protective clothing and gear, and limited in their stamina and endurance for complex tasks, will be outclassed by robots that can observe situations, communicate with "mission control" and perform the necessary operations for their own survival and that of their missions. And if they fail all that is lost is hardware.
The development of aeronautics and flight has been under way for 100 years. The number of test pilots lost in the process is unknown but very large. It is no surprise that many have likewise been lost in the development of rocket science and space travel. The difference is that the hundreds lost since Kittihawk were lost in relative obscurity. NASA, on the other hand, has catered to the public's fascination with as much publicity as it could get; it needed public support for the billions of dollars it takes to do what it does. But when things go wrong the publicity is counterproductive. Introducing civilians to its projects for the publicity value was a bad idea, as we learned when a school teacher lost her life in front of our eyes in real time. Putting men in grave danger, in the view of the whole world, where robots can do the job as well or better is also a bad idea.
President Obama has appointed the Human Space Flight Plans Committee who are rethinking President Bush's 2004 "Vision for Space Exploration." They have already established that the Bush estimate of $108 billion to return to the moon by 2020 is short by at least $30 billion. Here's hoping they will discover the truth that putting men in deep space is a bad idea.
Robert W. Foster is a retired engineer living in Hopkinton. He may be reached at rwfoster@juno.com.
