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Why a reinvigorated space program is a good idea
Chas Martin knocks away the objections to a bigger, better space program:Gads, folks, wouldnât an informed opinion be more useful? Cost: NASAâs total budget right now is only $15 billion. The total Federal budget is about 2 trillion. That about 0.75 percent of the federal budget; doubling it would be a rounding error. So letâs not panic about "how expensive" it is. (Cf. $22 billion for Iraq reconstruction -- and doubling NASAâs budget is rather more than Bush is really talking about.) Cost benefit: weâre talking about perhaps as much as $15 billion a year; the return is two whole worlds. If the long-term aspects of the investment bother you (why? Itâs proportionally less than the government investment in the railroads in the 19th century, and much the same time scale) then consider just the commercial launch market right now. Loral is doing about $1 billion a year in revenues on satellites and satellite services, and itâs not like satellites have stopped going up. Weâre talking about making an investment that would reduce launch costs -- necessarily; weâve got to get much cheaper, better heavy lift for any of this to work -- thatâs only fifteen times the current net revenues from one such company. (Yes, yes, this isnât a complete cost-benefit study or anything like it; Iâm pointing out that weâre talking about relatively small change in the current budget and perfectly reasonable commercial scales of investment.) Risks: Yes, people could die. People will die. Not to be callous, but so what? We lost more people in one helicopter crash in Iraq than have died in the history of space flight. Itâs a shame. Itâs a bummer. But somehow weâre managing to cope. Why not robots? The Shuttle program actually demonstrated this neatly not many years ago. The Shuttle was up to do repairs on a satellite and they were unable to grab it with the manipulator arm. The astronauts finally dealt with the problem by ... reaching over and grabbing it. Humans are the universal tool: we can do things that no one thought of needing. If weâd had a human on Mars in 1976, the question of whether there is life there would have been solved. As it was, we sent Viking, and brilliant as it was, the three life-detection experiments netted out to "Gee, we donât really know." The easy answer to the results was "yes"; the results werenât enough, though, and it was possible to interpret them as a "no". With people on site, you can say "hey, letâs try this." Finally, though, the real reason to go is because thatâs what people do. The way we are treating the Solar System now is like mailing an Instamatic to cousin Francoise and claiming weâd "seen Paris" when the pictures come back. Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-01-11 |
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