Few days ago, President
Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, designed to refocus NASA's mission on
human exploration and spaceflight. Proclaiming, "This time, we will not
only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for
an eventual mission to Mars and, perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond,”
Donald Trump made an
ultimate promise that should sound very familiar to American citizens, as many
incoming presidents (including Obama and both Bushes) have made some similar
plans and proclamations. Like all plans, to bring this one to fruition will
require a tremendous investment of resources: in people, in equipment and
facilities, in research and development, and in terms of money as well.
With no plans for adequate,
additional funding to support these ambitions, these dreams will simply
evaporate, as they have so many times before.
As a percentage of the
federal budget, investment in NASA is at a 58 year low; at only 0.4% of the
budget, you have to go back to 1959 to find a year where we invested a smaller
percentage in our nation's space agency.
If you look at the percent
of the federal budget currently being invested in NASA, you'll find that you
have to go all the way back to 1959, the first full year of NASA's existence,
to encounter a time where we invested less in the agency than we do today. When
we chose to go to the Moon, it was accompanied by a tremendous increase in the
resources we devoted to the endeavor: up to nearly 5% of the federal budget.
Today, that figure sits at
just 0.4% of the budget (0.11% of our GDP), or less than one-tenth of what we
invested in NASA the last time we sent humans to the Moon.
The International Space
Station has been a tremendous environment for studying the effects of microgravity
on a variety of systems, but very little in the way of exploration and
discovery has taken place aboard it.
NASA's crewed spaceflight
missions since the end of Apollo have focused on low-Earth orbit. But if the
goal is to explore the Universe, and to take humanity deeper and farther into
the cosmic sea than we've ever gone, a return to the Moon won't accomplish
that.
The vision of the Trump
administration, laid out earlier this year, involves a shocking proposal, to
build a lunar space station orbiting the Moon. In no way, shape, or form does a
lunar space station prepare us or aid us in going to either the Moon or Mars.
Instead, it's a project that
merely serves to: provide a use for the Space Launch System (SLS) that's
already developed, provide a potential application of the Orion capsule system,
and provide potential partnership opportunities with Russia on an orbiter and
Europe/Japan on the habitation modules.
The Orion capsule would be
one of many components on a proposed space station that orbited the Moon, but
the scientific and technological payoff would be extraordinarily low.
It's a proposal that should
make you furious. If you want to go to the Moon, you design a system to put
humans on the Moon. If you want to go to a different world, you design a system
to put human beings on that world. If you want to go to deep space, you figure
out what you need to go to deep space — and you go.
Instead, the plan will spend
a great deal of money without yielding appreciable results. If you want to
accomplish something great, you don't look at the technology you've already
developed and ask, "What can we do with it?" Instead, you must look
at the goal you want to achieve and ask, "what will it take to accomplish
this?" You also have to provide funding for it, and plan it on a
realistically short timescale.
Throughout history, any
grand plans in space taking more than 10 years have not come to fruition. There
is no reason to believe the current 'stepping stone to Mars' plan, laid out
earlier this year, is any different.
If the goal is to go to
Mars, we've already done extensive research into how much it would cost and
what type of technological development it would require. To do it safely and
responsibly, it would take a sustained investment totaling somewhere in the
ballpark of $50-$150 billion, spread out over the course of approximately 10
years.
The plan would involve
landing a slew of equipment on the Martian surface, along with robots and
rovers designed to self-assemble stations and habitats, and then a crew of
human beings, who would stay for anywhere from 6 to 18 months before returning
home. The largest and heaviest things ever landed on the Martian surface are
far lighter than what a crewed mission would require, and the only way you
ensure the safety of the crew on such an endeavor is through practice.
Mars, along with its thin
atmosphere, as photographed from the Viking orbiter in the 1970s. Even with the
difficulties associated with living on the Red Planet, a successful human
colony could be achieved for as little as $50 billion.
When we decided to first go
to the Moon in 1961, this was the vision and the rationale laid bare before the
American people: There is no strife, no prejudice, and no national conflict in
outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves
the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many
never come again.
But why, some say, the moon?
Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why the highest mountain
climb? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the Moon.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because
they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to
organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that
challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to
postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It has now been more than 45
years since humans have set foot on another world. The proposed crewed lunar
orbiter would not accomplish even that feat again.
The spinoff technologies
alone have benefitted American society in far more ways than giving us teflon
and a space pen; advances in cooling suits, kidney dialysis, physical therapy,
athletic shoes, home insulation, water filtration, freeze drying, pipeline
protection, gear for firefighters, and so much more have come about directly
from the Apollo program on its own.
No one can promise what the
returns will look like on a mission to Mars, but there are two things we can be
certain about. Going back to the Moon won't get us any closer to Mars. If we
want to go to Mars, we should make that our goal and invest in it; if we want
to go to the Moon, we should make that our goal and invest in it. Pretending
that one has anything to do with the other is a delusion.
Unless we increase our
funding to achieve whatever goal we set our sights on, we'll continue to have
our crewed spaceflight program stagnate, while China, India, Japan, Russia, and
more all continue to grow theirs.
America is home to some of
the greatest scientists, engineers, astronauts, administrators, and
organizations in the entire world. With the people and facilities we have
today, we could put a human on the Moon or even on Mars within the next 10 years,
if only we invest in it.
But grandstanding, lofty
promises, and a dearth of funding will yield the same results they always have:
a nation whose greatest dreams go unfulfilled. What we can accomplish as a
species is limited only by what's physically possible and what we invest in it.
Our ambitions to venture beyond low-Earth orbit are achievable, but only if we
make it so. Unless there's a plan to increase NASA's funding to sufficient
levels to send humans to worlds beyond our own, America is never going to get
there.
This article was initially published on Forbes. You can
read the article here.