Here's an interesting report on the Sixth Sixth International Mars Society Conference, which took place in Eugene, Oregon last week. Money quote:
"Next year is a crisis that may well determine whether humans to Mars occurs in our lifetime. It is a unique opportunity. But if we let it slip by we really are going to blow it," said Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society. He is an unabashed advocate for putting humans on the red planet, and doing it near-term.
The question of whether we can go on with manned space travel comes down to a question of lift capacity. We lost the infrastructure to produce the magnificent Saturn V rockets of the Apollo program shortly after that program ended. In light of the recent Columbia tragedy and the aging of the shuttle program, it's likely that the shuttle will be shut down in the near future. That could lead to disaster:
A vital step is retaining the shuttle infrastructure, sans the human-carrying orbiter. By using the shuttle external tank, solid rocket motors, the shuttle main engines, and adding a new upper stage, that collective hardware can toss extremely weighty payloads into space.
Doing so results in the primary tool needed for human exploration of the Moon, Mars, as well as the near Earth asteroids, Zubrin said.
"We need to turn the shuttle into a heavy-lift vehicle and give it a goal thats worthy of a heavy-lift vehicle. And that means supporting humans being sent to either the Moon or Mars, or both," Zubrin said.
Zubrin said he does not see how the Columbia Accident Investigation Board can avoid recommending that the shuttle be replaced as the primary taxi for sending humans to orbit. The question then is whether the nation will preserve the space shuttle infrastructure or not.
In mothballing the shuttle infrastructure, so goes the human spaceflight program, Zubrin said. "The only way out is forward."
Without the shuttle, the only way to get humans into space will be NASA's proposed spaceplane. But it will be too small and short-range to allow for trips to the moon and the planets. [By the way, we'll be running an interview with Robert Zubrin on August 27th, the day Mars and Earth reach maximum convergence. Previous entries here and here.]
Whatever anybody wants to say about the Apollo program, we must have been doing something right. We live in an age of great change, on the verge of what will be remembered as some of humanity's greatest achievements. I find it interesting how often Apollo is referenced by those who are looking ahead, trying to bring one of those achievements into being.
- As I reported a while back, the nanotechnology community is looking for a moonshot goal of their own to move the industry along.
- The Discover Magazine article I linked to earlier today described the need for "a research and engineering effort at least as intense as the push behind the Apollo program" in order to get us to the stars.
- This morning, Rand Simberg linked to an MSNBC piece describing how we could solve our energy problems by collecting solar power on the moon and beaming it back to earth via microwaves. What will it take to get us there? "[A] financial commitment on par with the Apollo era could bring the first jolt of otherworldly electricity down to the ground in 12-15 years."
- A while back, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network published an article in Wired calling for a national initiative to switch the U.S. over from petroleum to hydrogen power. Their rallying cry? "We put a man on the moon in a decade; we can achieve energy independence just as fast."
- Just last week, in talking to us about the future of wireless networks and ubiquitous computing, Alex Lightman suggested that the U.S. could take a dominant position in the global race to 4G with the help of "an Apollo moon mission-style speech by President Bush"
Think about that last one. He isn't calling for an Apollo-style budget. If we could just get a speech on par with the one that launched Apollo, we'd be getting somewhere.
But Zubrin is calling for something even more modest than that. He's not saying give me an Apollo-like mission to Mars. He's not calling on anyone to try to emulate the program's success. He's just warning that we not repeat the mistakes we made after Apollo. That doesn't seem like too much to ask, now does it?
Posted by Phil at August 18, 2003 01:54 PM | TrackBack
The irony of the whole "we can put a man on the moon, therefore we can do 'x'" position is that right now we're probably further from putting a man on the moon than we were in 1961.
I'm all for Zubrin's plans for Mars Direct or Semi-Direct or whatever to get us there, but the political will for a big push in space just isn't there right now, more's the pity.
Sure, Apollo gets referenced but it's a selfish style. It's screw all the other candidates for big ideas and just concentrate on me, me, me. For an advocate who wants their particular big idea to get pushed to the front end of the sow, it's great but that doesn't mean that such comparisons are justified or healthy for the overall society.
As for lift capability, how about an elevator?
http://liftport.com/
As I understand it, the principal concern here is that the Shuttle's base launch system will be thrown away once the Shuttle's cease flying. What some people may not know is that there's always been the option of replacing the manned part of the shuttle with a cargo carrier. As I understand it, this was called "Shuttle C", and rumor is that NASA killed it because it would have competed with the manned shuttle for cargo missions.
This leads me to the real question. Will NASA permit a Shuttle C (or some similar design) now? They might because the replacement for the shuttle currently sounds like it will not be meant for handling heavy cargos.
The other (arguably bigger) part of Bob's message last weekend was that NASA needed a focus, something to turn the "sackful of cats" chaos into a productive enterprise. Naturally, the suggested focus was a manned mission to Mars. Shuttle-derived vehicles are a means to that end, but it must be remembered that they are not an end in themselves. No way will NASA fund their development without a clear use for them (hence the call for an organizing goal, such as humans-to-Mars). Winning support for such a goal ought to be the primary focus of effort for space advocates and advocacy groups right now, with the "save the stack" argument riding its coattails.
As for Shuttle C, Jenkins gives a reasonable explanation for the cancellation: NASA was then (1991) building Endeavour and designing Space Station Freedom, and something in the budget had to give. Since Shuttle C's per-launch costs would quickly spiral as the supply of end-of-life SSMEs was depleted (neccessitating the purchase of in-service or brand-new SSMEs), it became clear that Shuttle C would not be affordable. The rate would be insufficient to amortize the development costs, and incremental costs would eventually rise to around $500M.
Shuttle C suffered from a few flaws (at least for lunar/planetary mission use), most significantly the fact that the location of the payload bay, its size, and the payload attachment hardware limited it to carrying Shuttle-sized payloads. And as for using it in place of Shuttle after OSP hypothetically becomes available, there is its not-insignificant inability to return cargo from ISS. If you want it for purposes other than ISS, though, it's a great stepping stone to something bigger and better, once Shuttle is finally phased out and the associated facilities can be modified more extensively.
Many other configurations have been proposed, and there is of course a large new expendable LOx/LH2 engine available nowadays. Who knows -- Shuttle C could make a comeback.
Posted by: T.L. James at August 19, 2003 09:18 PM