You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.
–Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Anybody that’s talked to me recently or read my recent tweets knows that I’ve got the space bug, and I’ve got it bad. Ever since I watched the 40th anniversary real-time replay of the Apollo 11 moon landing, I’ve been reading Wikipedia articles, watching NASA TV, and following a bunch of cool stuff on Twitter.
I came across an excellent article by Rand Simberg at The New Atlantis. It’s a long article, but it’s a rewarding read if you can make it through. This was an education for me, since I’ve always had a romantic view of the Apollo landings and NASA in general. I haven’t done any fact checking, so Simberg could just be a crazy nut, but he makes a compelling argument: the U.S.’s, and the world’s, manned space program is headed in the wrong direction.
From the article:
Access to space should be almost as routine (if not quite as affordable) as access to the oceans, and with similar laws and regulations. …we should explore the solar system the way we did the West: not by sending off small teams of government explorers—Lewis and Clark were the extreme exception, not the rule—but by having lots of people wandering around and peering over the next rill in search of adventure or profit.
Let companies and ordinary citizens do the research and the exploration with the hope that they’ll get a huge payoff. The beauty of it this time around is that there won’t be an indigenous civilization exploited or exterminated.
NASA’s place in all of this should be as an enabler:
It isn’t NASA’s job to put humans on Mars; it’s NASA’s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company, to put humans on Mars.
NASA should concentrate on the infrastructure in space: fueling stations, communications networks, outposts. The initial costs are huge, yes. But once the infrastructure is there, marginal costs are small. Leave the rest to the miners, settler, inventors, and tourists.
Simberg adds a lot of comments about NASA’s past and present state of affairs. It’s mostly about the political whims of Congress and job creation. Congress is happy keeping the status quo so that their constituents don’t lose thousands of aerospace jobs. But space is too important to be handled by a single government entity. Everybody should be involved.
NASA is also too risk-averse to do what has to be done to push the boundaries of space. They take baby steps only when they deem it “safe.” But space will never be safe. There will always be danger. We have to overcome this fear of danger if we are to become a truly spacefaring species.
A word on the risks of space: no one has actually died in space. So far, it’s been the getting to and coming back from space that have been the only threat.
Personally, I’m excited about the future of manned space exploration. But I’m also worried that NASA will get in the way of the real deal. I’m not afraid of people dying in space, but I am afraid that I’ll never live to see anything more significant than a space station in low earth orbit.
Rand Simberg wrote about this much better than I can, so check out the article. If you’ve got the space bug like me, I recommend subscribing to Simberg’s blog, Transterrestrial Musings.