Tomorrow's lunar eclipse has got the moon on my brain, and I'm not the only one. Washinton Post columnist Charles Krauthammer gets it wrong so often that I rarely bother to even glace at his output, but today he touches on a topic that appeals more to intuition than intellect, one that doesn't lend itself to easy answers. Today he takes on the question of whether we should settle the moon.
Let's cut to the chase. After justifiably lambasting the space shuttle and International Space Station as orbiting white elephants, he argues that a permanent settlement on the moon would be worth the effort.
A more serious critique of returning to the moon comes not from the Luddites but the purists. They want science, and they are right that robotic exploration is a more cost-effective way to get it. The science yielded by unmanned vehicles, such as past and future probes of the ice surface of Europa and the hydrocarbon lakes of Titan, is indeed thrilling. And pound for pound, dollar for dollar, manned exploration does bring back less science than robots.
But it still brings back science. Humans can discover things through intuition and pattern recognition that machines thinking in algorithms cannot. Imagine the scientific possibilities if today we had humans patrolling Mars rather than the brilliantly programmed but still limited golf carts now roaming the surface.
And then there's the glory. If you find any value, any lift of the spirit in a beautiful mathematical proof, in an elegant balletic turn, in any of the myriad human endeavors that have no utility but only breathtaking beauty, then you should feel something when our little species succeeds in establishing new life in a void that for all eternity had been the province of the gods. If you don't feel that, you are -- don't take this personally -- deaf to the music of our time.
There's nothing wrong with that argument. Who doesn't want to reach out and touch the stars? But it's not an appeal to reason. And I'm afraid that in an era in which we are facing an unprecedented social and economic challenge in the form of addressing climate change, when the world's largest economy is trillions of dollars in debt, and yes, when so many people are still scrambling to put food on the table, space exploration is best left to the cheap robots.
No, not everything has to serve a purpose. But surely the most expensive project in human history should do more than make that half of the planet's population that can afford to worry about such things feel good about their species.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for exploring the solar system and beyond. In theory, But there just isn't any pressing reason to go the moon right now. The best Krauthammer can come up with is:
...the moon base is not pointless.
and
There are all kinds of materials to be exploited, observations of the cosmos to be made and knowledge to be gained on how best to live off the land away from Earth.
"All kinds" isn't very specific, Charles. Given it will cost trillions to build a moonbase, I think we'll have to come up with something better than "all kinds" of reasons. Plus, using the know-how to be gleaned from off-world living to justify the colonizing of space isn't worse than pointless -- it's remarkably reminiscent of the last remaining justification for the ISS.and the shuttle, which Krauthammer calls "one of the most elegant, most misbegotten detours in the history of technology."
Stephen Hawking says we should head to the stars because there's a good chance we'll soon make Earth uninhabitable. I don't think we're there yet. But at least that's an argument based on reason.
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I actually agree about the government concentrating on robotic probes for a while, but your money point is WAY off. There ain't no way that Space Exploration is anywhere close to "the most expensive product in Human History" when about 10 years of Pizza sales cover the entire cost of all the space exploration we (humanity) have ever done. (Pizza sales in the US alone are > $30B/yr, almost as much overseas)
Space Exploration and Science are right now paid for by government who force accurate and long term accounting. Ever seen the total lifetime cost for any defence or social program? You almost never do, but Space programs are always discussed in terms of a total program cost til the "end". If the U.S. had wanted to we could have bases on the moon and Mars right now, with the cost of, say, an extra month per year of Social Security and Medicare spending. This would have had small impact on social programs except probably for the reduction in costs due to the number of high paying tech jobs that would have been created. You would barely be able to see the difference in the current deficits.
The reason we do not have this large scale space effort is obviously that people in the U.S. do not want it, not that they would use up resources that we are using better somewhere else.
Local weather forecast for the eclipse: Chance of precipitation is 30%.
The ISS never had a science goal worth $100,000,000,000. For one thing, having humans there means that there's all sorts of vibrations and such, preventing lots of interesting science that could be done.
It also didn't push technology. It's just tin cans in space. It doesn't solve any of the interesting "getting to Mars" problems. It does nothing to demonstrate effective radiation shielding. It doesn't demonstrate artificial gravity. And so on.
LLNL had proposed using inflatibles, which could have
reduced the costs by at least an order of magnitude.
The Space Shuttle was oversold - and before it flew, it was known that it would not deliver on cost. But at least it had some interesting technology. Several successors were canceled. Interestingly, the National Aerospace Plane did solve the wing leading edge problem that downed Columbia.
The one thing the Shuttle did was keep the US in space, even if it was low Earth orbit. If you've still got 'em, you want to keep flying 'em. But once you've used a disposable rocket, even if building a new one is cheaper, there's always the psychological choice to stop building them.
Last i heard, once our international commitment to the ISS is up, we'll abandon it. We won't be able to send humans there. Last one out, please de-orbit it.
None of this is new. The sad thing is, all of it was foreseeable.
Everyone says that the Hubble Space Telescope is a great instrument returning great results. And it does. But is it cost effective? Given that a shuttle mission is over $250,000,000 - could it be cheaper to just launch a new one?
Consider that the first push to space wasn't actually about space, at least that's not why it got funded. It was much more about matching the Russians' missle and launcher technology.
Similarly, the real reason we need people in space now has little to do with space as such. The new crisis for our species is ecology. We badly need to learn how to build and maintain closed (and simplified) ecologies, and we will need "ultimate secure" labs to work on our most ambitious interventions.
Just to comment on Stephens point:
Everyone says that the Hubble Space Telescope is a great instrument returning great results. And it does. But is it cost effective? Given that a shuttle mission is over $250,000,000 - could it be cheaper to just launch a new one?
The answer is simply no. The HST cost something like $1.5 Billion to build and launch (and in fact can only be launched by the Shuttle). Its successor the JWST is going to cost over $4 Billion (I'm not sure any one really knows how much right now). It is vastly more cost effective spending $250 million to service the HST so it can keep working for another 5-6 years than spending a minimum $1.5 Billion to replace it.
"Given that a shuttle mission is over $250,000,000..."
Sorry. That was NASA lies to Congress, which after a while they almost believed themselves.
The cost of a Shuttle mission is actually somwhere between $1 billion and $2 billion.
I speak as someone who was a rather senior engineer on the Space Shuttle for Rockwell in Downey, who left under rather clouded circumstances, as they feared I'd be a whistleblower.
Meanwhile, they've only fixed a fraction of the things that they know could destroy a mission and kill astronauts, but have little incentive to fix the rest, as the Shuttle is to be replaced by the Orion launch system, itself now slipping in schedule due to budget issues.
How much money would you spend to maintain a clunky old car, if you knew you were going to be given a new car soon?
Besides, NASA has decided that space science (such as Hubble) is less important than maintaining the Shuttle and Space Station, as those put money in the pockets of the contractors whose subcontractors are intentionally spread through all 50 states.
Don't be fooled into thinking that NASA's mission has much to do with space science. NASA is a bureaucracy, and is much more involvged in putting dollars into all the congressional districts of the congressmen who will authorize and allocate the NASA budget.
Plus, of course, giving the President a chance to make vague soundbites about future missions which Iraw expensitures make unlikely.