UNMANNED / America should stop putting humans into orbit
Economist, 00130613, 10/27/2001, Vol. 361, Issue 8245
[ A somewhat more cantankerous take , from a year ago. ]
WE'VE said it before, and we'll say it again: sending people into space is pointless. It is dangerous, costly and scientifically useless. Yet this is a lesson that NASA, America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has never managed to learn. As a result, it has lurched from crisis to crisis. Most of these crises have been budgetary (the combined cost of the International Space Station and the fleet of space shuttles needed to service it is almost $51/2 billion a year). But even the explosion of a shuttle in the mid 1980s, which killed its crew and a civilian passenger, was not enough to close down the manned-spaceflight programme.
At the moment, this is kept alive by three things. The first is showmanship. NASA feels (correctly) that it has to keep taxpayers on its side, and also (more dubiously) that manned flights are the way to do that. Second, the space station helps diplomatic relations with Russia, the number-two partner in the enterprise, and also keeps lots of Russian rocket scientists out of the pay of countries such as Iraq and North Korea. Third, and most disgracefully, it puts billions of dollars into the pockets of aerospace companies such as Boeing. It is, in other words, a disguised industrial subsidy.
There is now a chance to change direction. In the past few days both Daniel Goldin, the agency's boss, and Joseph Rothenberg, the man in charge of the space station and the shuttle programme, have resigned ()see page 119. New brooms can therefore sweep. And, during his time, Mr Goldin pointed the direction in which they should be sweeping. He conceived, and delivered, "faster, better, cheaper" unmanned scientific missions. In the old days, a scientific mission could cost up to $1 billion. Now, stuff gets done for a fraction of that sum. Mars Odyssey, which has just gone into orbit around its intended target, is regarded as expensive at $300m.
Astronomical costs?
Yet that is precisely the point. "Faster, better, cheaper" is a hard philosophy to apply to the manned side of the agency's remit. First, therefore, America should kill the space station. That would upset the Russians and the aerospace industry, but would have a negligible impact on science. And if all those Russian rocket scientists are still seen as a threat, a liberal showering of American work permits ought to disperse it. Second, a plan for phasing out the shuttle fleet should be devised. Throwaway rockets can do the job perfectly adequately.
The agency should then concentrate on what it does well-- science. Pictures from space telescopes and missions to the planets are good for public relations as well as good for research. It could even learn from the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous craft that recently probed an asteroid called Eros. That was subcontracted (in this case to Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore), and was one of the most successful projects in recent years: "faster, better, cheaper" clearly applies to organisations, as well as to spacecraft. Probably, NASA will take this advice only when pigs fly. Then again, it has been launching pork barrels into orbit for years |
