ON TO MARS
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
ON TO MARS America has been lost in space. It's time to find our nerve again. BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later. . . bombs of...
...And it would begin the ultimate adventure: the colonization of other worlds...
...Mars really eats spacecraft...
...The Viking missions that 25 years ago touched down on Mars and gave us those extraordinary first pictures of its surface, and the Voyager spacecraft that gave us magnificent flybys of the entire solar system, typically cost 10 to 20 times more than the new "faster, better, cheaper" projects...
...Astronauts could travel fairly light, arriving at a place already prepared with life-sustaining water, oxygen, and hydrogen for the flight back...
...And water, there as here, is the key to everything...
...But the public quickly grew bored...
...But more exasperating than the poor social science and the misapprehension about the real capacities of government is the tone-deafness of the earth-firsters to the wonder and glory of space, and to the unique opportunity offered this generation...
...What then to do...
...No one takes seriously its claims to be a platform for real science...
...That was the most excitement the shuttle program had engendered in years—the first time in a long time that a launch and the preparations and even the preflight press conference had received live coverage...
...Today, funding for NASA is one fifth what it was in 1965, less than 0.8 percent of the federal budget...
...III When the Mars Polar Lander disappeared last month, the country went into a snit...
...That was to save money...
...For the adventure, for the romance, for the sheer temerity of venturing into the void...
...But it increases the chance of failure...
...Until a few years ago, it could have been argued that a moon base was impractical, and human Mars exploration even more so...
...He had little choice but to adopt a strategy of sending cheaper but more vulnerable probes in order to lessen the stakes riding on each launch...
...Where is the national will to explore...
...When a 77-year-old man climbed into the shuttle in November 1998 for a return flight...
...Instead of carrying huge stores of fuel, which would make the launch vehicle enormously expensive and cumbersome, we could send unmanned spacecraft ahead...
...If you're stuck for something to get NASA for Christmas, you can't go wrong with a subscription to Popular Mechanics...
...We were left with an enormously expensive shuttle—to nowhere...
...But they are hardly the point...
...Their constituency is disappointed that it received no entertainment from the Mars Polar Lander, for which the average American contributed the equivalent of half a cheeseburger...
...We become expert in zero-G nausea and other fascinations...
...that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch...
...It gave us our first view of earth as it is seen from God's perspective: warm, safe, serene, blessed...
...We are going into space for the same reason George Mallo-ry climbed Everest: Because it is there...
...Similarly, the fact that there is ice on Mars has led to a revolution in thinking about how we can travel there and back...
...We send Russia the money to build its space station modules...
...At the time, no American had even orbited the earth...
...The second half of the 20th was at one point known as the Space Age...
...The Apollo program was a triumph...
...The most disturbing part of the Glenn phenomenon was the efflorescence of space nostalgia—at a time when space exploration is still in its infancy...
...It became too expensive for the United States to do alone, and so we decided to share the cost and control...
...But we can't just blame the politicians...
...Recent discoveries have given us new ways and new reasons for establishing a human presence on the moon and on Mars...
...It used to be given to the likes of Alan Shepard and John Glenn, who had the insane courage to park themselves atop an unstable, spanking-new, largely untested eight-story bomb not knowing whether it would blow up under them...
...By Apollo 17, it was all over...
...Outer space has ceded pride of place to the inner space of the Internet...
...They'll wonder what manner of creature it was that sent it...
...But it has been a dead end scientifically and deadening spiritually...
...bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species...
...It is a travesty that the very same Congress that has squeezed funding for these programs will now be conducting the inquisition to find out why this shoestring operation could not produce another spectacular success...
...This is in sharp contrast to national mobilization for social objectives, which almost invariably ends in disappointment, waste, and unintended consequences (such as the dependency and deviancy spawned by the massive welfare programs and entitlements of the sixties and the seventies—the Left's preferred destination for the resources supposedly squandered on space...
...We have not really gone anywhere yet, and we are already looking back with sweet self-satisfaction...
...Looking to reinvent itself, NASA came up with the idea of a space shuttle ferrying men and machines between earth and an orbiting space station...
...Last July, the unmanned Lunar Prospector probe was sent to find out whether the moon contains water...
...The reason NASA administrator Daniel Goldin adopted the "faster, better, cheaper" approach is that he was forced to...
...But the Congressional Space Medal of Honor...
...Of twelve attempts, three have made it...
...Now we give it for spending six months in an orbiting phone booth with a couple of guys named Yuri...
...In 1991, the Stafford Commission recommended the establishment of permanent human outposts on the moon and on Mars by the early decades of this century...
...Five million...
...When did we last get excited...
...These are the familiar arguments about social priorities: Why are we spending all this money on space, when there is poverty and disease and suffering at home...
...It is as if the Wright Brothers had returned to Kitty Hawk in 1939 to skim the sand once again, and the replay was treated as some great advance in aviation...
...They would land on Mars and turn the water into life support and fuel...
...Earthrise" had an important effect on human consciousness...
...And then, still more astonishingly, we lost interest, spending the remaining 30 years of the 20th century going around in circles in low earth orbit, i.e., going nowhere...
...But watch what...
...Perhaps it is the exhaustion after 60 years of world war, cold and hot, stretching right up to the early 1990s...
...Now is a time for home and hearth—the glowing computer screen that allows endless intercourse with our fellow humans...
...The hard fact is that the kind of cheap, fast spacecraft NASA has been forced to build does reduce the loss in case of failure...
...that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad...
...But it can be extremely good at solving technical problems...
...The other flutter of excitement generated by the shuttle program occurred a few years earlier when Shannon Lucid received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor for a long-duration flight in low earth orbit...
...The shuttle has had its successes—the views of earth it brought back, the repairs to the Hubble space telescope it enabled...
...And when they find it, they're gonna hire him...
...Adding a black box, something to send simple signals to tell us what happened, would have cost $5 million...
...Who is to blame for the Mars disasters...
...We are stuck along some quiet historical sidetrack...
...The cost of the Mars Polar Lander was $165 million...
...We radically contract our horizons...
...Twenty-seven years without even a glance back...
...But no effort was made to keep its orbit from decaying...
...That is not why we, as a people and as a species, ventured into the cosmos in the first place...
...Not the scientists, but the people who will soon be putting them on trial...
...The whole idea of space exploration was to find out what is out there...
...It was only when the flight turned into a harrowing drama of survival that an audience assembled...
...The final three moonshots were canceled for lack of interest...
...We have spent, by most estimates, some $5 trillion trying to abolish poverty in the United States alone...
...IV The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves...
...How can one live at the turn of the 21st century, when the planets are for the first time within our grasp, and not be moved by the grandeur of the enterprise...
...For the price of a single shuttle mission (launch, flight time, landing, and overhead) we could have sent two Mars Polar Landers and gotten $70 million back in change...
...In part because, a quarter-century late, we still need something to justify the shuttle...
...This is supposed to promote friendship and keep Russian rocket scientists from moving to Baghdad...
...It is a maddening question because, while often offered in good faith, it entirely misses the point...
...The Manhattan Project is, of course, the classic case...
...President Kennedy committed all of our resources: men, materiel, money, and spirit...
...But they're not giving up...
...And from there, on to the planets...
...So what do we do...
...The public felt let down, cheated of the exotic entertainment NASA was supposed to deliver...
...II What happened...
...Yet the space station's purpose has shrunk to almost nothing...
...Twenty-one billion dollars, enough to support 127 Polar Landers...
...That doesn't buy one minute of air time on the Super Bowl...
...That after millennia of gazing at the heavens, we took one step into the void, then turned and, for the longest time, retreated to home and hearth...
...The interview with the moon-bound astronauts aboard Apollo 13 was not even broadcast, for lack of an audience...
...To put it in terms of competing space outlays, $165 million is less than half the cost of a shuttle launch...
...It would be a magnificent platform for science, for observation of the universe, and for industry...
...That photo and the ethos it promoted—global, sedentary, inward-looking—were the metaphysical complement to the political arguments made at the time, and ever since, for turning our gaze from space back to earth...
...Well, the study of bone decalcification in near-earth weightlessness is fine, but it is hardly the motor force behind President Kennedy's ringing declaration, "We choose to go to the Moon...
...The Seinfeld era is not an era for Odyssean adventures...
...It was a remarkable venture, but even more remarkable was the fact that Prospector was the first NASA spacecraft, manned or unmanned, to land on the moon since the last Apollo astronaut departed in 1972...
...The press was peeved, deprived of a nice big story with lovely pictures...
...They are responding to their constituency...
...Or that we retained our nerve and hunger for horizons, and embraced our destiny...
...Michael Crichton What manner of creature are we...
...we should be directing our resources at the next logical step: a moon base...
...But it used to be NASA's mission to lift us above ozone and land and climate to reach for something higher...
...If you split water, you get hydrogen and oxygen, precisely the gases that you need for life and for propulsion...
...But there is evidence that there may be water on the moon (in the form of ice, of course...
...You cannot build in the kind of backup systems that go into the larger craft we sent exploring in the past...
...The Soviets lost all six of theirs...
...We'll never know what went wrong...
...The moon and Mars are beckoning...
...Rather than frittering away billions on the space station, we should be going right now to the moon—where we've been, where we know how to go, and where we might very well discover life-sustaining materials...
...And he was bold...
...Then, astonishingly, it took only 66 to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon...
...There is today a palpable ennui with space...
...She is surely brave and spunky, but the lavish attention her feat garnered says much about the diminished state of our space program...
...It fell to earth and burned...
...So why are we spending so much of our resources building a tinker-toy space station...
...What will we have told them...
...Something this hard requires not just technology— which we have—but will, which we don't...
...We spend three decades tumbling about in near-earth orbit...
...In fact, space's greatest claim on our interest and resources currently rests on the fact that satellites allow us to page each other and confirm that 9:30 meeting about the new Tostitos ad campaign...
...This will be a bit of Kabuki theater in which clueless politicians, whose greatest mathematical feat is calculating last week's fund-raising take, will pinion earnest scientists about why they could not land a go-cart on the South Pole of a body 400 million miles away on a part of the planet we had never explored...
...It was a fine idea except for one thing: There was no space station...
...Another reason for the diminishing drive for planetary exploration is, perversely, the fruits of the moon landing itself—and in particular that famous photograph of earth taken by the Apollo astronauts during the first human circumnavigation of another celestial body...
...It could provide both life support and fuel...
...When he promised to land a man on the moon before the decade was out, there were only eight and a half years left...
...Planetary exploration is so hamstrung financially that the Polar Lander—which NASA last week officially declared dead— sent no telemetry during its final descent onto the planet...
...The space station's main purpose now appears to be . . . fostering international cooperation...
...Then there is what NASA calls "mission to planet earth," a program devoted to studying such terrestrial concerns as ozone, land use, climate variability, and such...
...In other words, we are in for a spell of national bellyaching and finger-pointing which will inevitably culminate in the crucifixion of a couple of NASA administrators, a few symbolic budget cuts, and a feeling of self-satisfaction all around...
...And when we do venture out into the glorious void, we do it on the very cheap, to accommodate the diminished national will and the pinched national resources allocated for exploration...
...A nice idea...
...As one researcher put it, this is rocket science...
...The fact is that we were watching John Glenn reprise a flight he'd made 36 years earlier...
...We were in a race with the Soviets for space supremacy, and mobilized for it as for Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, an essayist for Time, and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...The cost to the United States...
...It is not as if we have nowhere to go but endlessly around earth...
...It provides a convenient back door for American funding of the bankrupt Russian space program...
...Teflon and pagers are nice, too, and perhaps effective politically in selling space...
...Endurance records are fine...
...What happened...
...Five hundred years from now—a time as distant from us as is Columbus—a party of settlers on excursion to Mars's South Pole will stumble across some strange wreckage, just as today we stumble across the wreckage of long-forgotten ships caught in Arctic ice...
...Televisions were hauled into classrooms so kids could watch...
...In the end, we will surely go...
...The fascination today is with communication, calculation, miniaturization, all in the service of multiplying human interconnectedness...
...The new Bellagio hotel in Vegas could buy eight Polar Landers with $80 million left over for a bit of gambling...
...It created a kind of preemptive nostalgia for earth, at precisely the moment when earthlings were finally acquiring the ability to leave it...
...A sign of the times...
...NASA administrators like to talk about science and spinoffs to justify the space program...
...And national will is expressed in funding...
...And the original idea—hatched in the 1950s—that it would be a way station to the moon and Mars, was overtaken in the sixties when we found more efficient ways to fully escape earth's gravitational well...
...This is a democracy...
...It offered the cosmic equivalent of the call to "Come home, America" issued just four years after the picture was taken...
...Since the glory days of Apollo, space exploration has progressively been starved...
...The budget has been eaten by the space shuttle and the low-earth-orbit space station being built two decades late to finally provide a destination for the wandering shuttle...
...If we had had the will to devote a whole cheeseburger to a Mars lander, it could have been equipped with redundant systems, and might have succeeded...
...Waterworld cost more...
...Government is simply not very good at solving social problems...
...NASA said today they're gonna continue to look for other forms of intelligent life in the universe...
...Poverty and disease will always be with us...
...If we are going to save resources in acknowledgment of the diminished national will to explore, we should begin by shutting the maw that is swallowing up so much of the space budget: the shuttle and the space station...
...Look at the history of landers on Mars," professor Howard McCurdy of American University told the Washington Post...
...It is no surprise that "Earthrise" should have become such a cultural icon, particularly for the environmental Left...
...Concerted national mobilization for a specific scientific objective can have great success...
...And Congress preened, displaying concern, pulling its chin and promising hearings on the failure of the last three Mars missions...
...As are the various technological advances forged in war, from radar to computers...
...Instead of squandering $21 billion on a weightless United Nations (don't we have one of these already...
...In an $8 trillion economy, that is a laughable sum...
...For the first 20 years we saw space as a testing ground, an arena for splendid, strenuous exertion...
...And not only has the overall NASA budget declined, but so has the fraction allocated to both manned and unmanned exploration of the moon and the planets...
...A people couched and ready, expectant and entitled, armed with a remote control yet denied Martian pictures to go with their Today show coffee, will be avenged...
...It took 100,000 years for humans to get inches off the ground...
...And landing on its South Pole, terra incognita for us, is even harder...
...It would also be good training for Mars...
...war...
...The biggest scandal of the Mars exploration projects is not that a few have failed, but the way the nation has reacted to those failures...
...Landing on another planet is very hard...
...Skylab had been launched in May 1973, then manned for 171 days...
...But how long will it take...
...We remember the late 15 th and 16th centuries as the Age of Exploration...
...The excitement surrounding Shannon Lucid's six months of sponge baths and Russian food aboard Mir is a reflection of the quiet domesticity of this inward-turning time...
...He was rightly afraid that when you send a $1 billion probe loaded with experiments and hardware and it fails (as happened to the Mars Observer in 1993), you risk losing your entire congressional backing—and your entire program...
...Probes like the Mars Polar Lander...
...Jay Leno, the nation's leading political indicator, was merciless...
...And yet, amid the national psychic letdown that followed the moon landings and is still with us today, that kind of talk seems archaic, anachronistic...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 19
