Wavepacket Blog

Wavepacket Blog
displaying only one specific post

Tue Jul 8 23:31:32 2008
Moon Shot
How not to run a space program.

Freedom isn't free!
Image courtesy of NASA

Today's announcement about retiring the shuttle fleet reminded me of the poor US space strategy in general.

I'm a big fan of basic science research, and of space exploration. But the current proposal to put a man on the moon by 2020 is bad science, and bad economics.

It reminds me of the Onion article titled "NASA Announces Plan to Launch $700 Million into Space". Of course, the Onion was thinking too small. The moonshot proposal will cost over $100 billion. And that's before the inevitable cost overruns.

What are the benefits of sending men back to the moon? Not many, really.

While it is easier to launch from the Moon than the Earth, it is even cheaper to launch from orbit. So a moon base isn't useful just as a launch pad to go further.

The moon mission is generally opposed by scientists. The main objections are that it isn't a good way to train for Mars (landing on an asteroid would be far better), and the cost would mean basic science research would be drastically cut.

What are the chief problems that we are facing in human space exploration?

It is too expensive to launch anything. We need cheaper and more reliable transport to orbit and beyond.
We don't know how to keep people alive on multi-month missions. Air? Food? Water? Radiation?

What are the chief aims of further space exploration?

Understand more about our own planet.
Look for life elsewhere in the Solar System.
Further understanding of the Sun and other planets.
Further identification and discovery of near-Earth asteroids and other dangers.
Further exploration of interstellar space.

If you look, you'll see that we could meet most of the chief scientific aims without manned spaceflight! Manned spaceflight increases costs by 10x or more, and doesn't provide any better data. In fact, given current technologies, it isn't clear that manned spaceflight is worth pursuing at all!

[Aside: it was hard to find good data on the costs of manned vs. unmanned space flights. But based on costs for recent shuttle launches and Mars probes, it appears that 10x is a safe estimate, and it could even be 20x or more. Think about that: if we cut a few shuttle flights out, we could launch dozens more robotic missions into the solar system!]

Instead, NASA should focus on cheaper, robotic missions to meet scientific aims, and also work on parallel tracks on the chief obstacles to human missions: getting into space cheaply (propulsion out of Earth's gravity well), and surviving in a self-contained environment.

I suspect some of the reasons for the moon plan are strategic and military. But having a range of flexible and reliable space technologies will probably be of more strategic use in the future than an expensive (and probably abandoned) moon plan.

Comments

Related:
  science
  economics

Unrelated:
  books
  energy
  environment
  geopolitics
  lists
  mathematics
  predictions

Links: