The lunar crater Daniell, seen from the Chang'E 2 spacecraft

Controversy quickly followed astonishment with the recent release of a white paper outlining China’s intentions in space.  Sparking particular buzz from the Internet was a statement about human lunar missions being an objective for future Chinese space efforts.  That statement drew comment ranging from sophisticated to simplistic, yet in my opinion, most of the discussion to date neglects the essential point of what this means to humanity’s future in space.

The report lays out China’s plan for missions to the Moon of increasing complexity and capability.   The Chinese orbiters Chang’E 1 (2007) and Chang’E 2 (2010) made global maps of the Moon’s morphology and topography.  The Chang’E spacecraft demonstrated China’s ability to navigate trans-LEO space.  After Chang’E 1’s mapping mission was complete, the spacecraft was deliberately de-orbited to impact the Moon.  However, after surveying a potential landing site for future missions, the Chang’E 2 spacecraft left lunar orbit and was sent to the Earth-Sun L2 point, a stable location 1.5 million km from the Earth.  This maneuver is quite complex and its successful completion demonstrated their capability to maneuver spacecraft throughout cislunar space.  It also lays the groundwork for more complex lunar and planetary missions in the near future.

The white paper reiterates the Chinese strategy of orbiter-lander-sample return for lunar exploration with robotic missions, of which the Chang’E series is the first step.  The paper mentions human spaceflight activities occurring only in low Earth orbit, specifically asserting their determination to conduct an “independent” space exploration program.  Closing remarks in that section of the report have been drawing the most attention: China intends to conduct “studies on a preliminary plan for a human lunar landing.”

In NASA terms, such wording would lead no one to conclude that anything remotely flight-ready was within a decade or two of occurring.  But our way is not their way.  The Chinese clearly are systematically pursuing a series of steps to incrementally increase their flight experience, technology base and operational expertise in low Earth orbit, but in a direction unmistakably toward the Moon and throughout cislunar space.

Despite some pronouncements of military doom – visions of Red Army Space Troopers descending upon us – a war in space does not appear imminent.  Over several pages, the report repeatedly proclaims China’s intention to “peaceably explore and use outer space,” especially in conjunction with an endless series of United Nations mandates, innumerable Moon treaties and international kumbayah.  Perhaps, as Queen Gertrude once observed, they doth protest too much.

Military action is not the only possible geopolitical threat on Earth or in space.  Although it is probably too early to tell, the real issue is how serious is China about expanding their sphere of operations beyond low Earth orbit to the Moon.  Currently, their human space program appears to be relatively benign, with simple Earth orbital missions, the construction of a rudimentary space station, crew EVA – all steps and capabilities that a nascent space faring nation must learn and develop.  Their proposed robotic lunar exploration plan likewise makes sense, in that they first orbit and map, then survey in detail to land, rove, explore and return samples.  For each step, a new capability is developed, building on existing ones, with all contributing toward a future strategic position.  Hmmmm – an incremental architecture with cumulative series of small but interlocking steps.  What a concept!

The reaction of space observers in the West seems bifurcated along the lines of “The sky is falling!” or “Who cares?”  For the former, some note that the Chinese space program is run by their military.  Moreover, the demonstration test of a Chinese anti-satellite weapon in 2007 did not engender the international peaceful good feelings so stridently expressed in the white paper.  Those who read potential danger in Chinese intentions in space are not being unreasonable, even if there appears to be no immediate threat.  For the latter group, nothing that China has done, is doing or ever could do in space would bother them.  ASAT testing?  Any alarm is labeled “hysteria.”  Chinese lunar landings?  So what?  We did that 40 years ago.  These people know not what they don’t know.  Holding such a position is patently naïve.

The real cause for concern is not a Chinese presence in cislunar space or on the Moon, but our absence from it.  Although much has been made of China’s purported movement toward capitalism in recent decades, they still possess an authoritarian political system, one with scant regard for the rule of contract law, copyright, private property and western notions of free market dynamics. Although some may not care whether China conquers the Moon, if they are the only ones on the Moon, they will determine what operational regime and legal template will prevail there.  Advocates of “commercial space” might do well to carefully consider such a scenario – commercial companies are incorporated under national auspices on Earth, pay taxes to terrestrial governments, and are subject to the laws of the country in which they are based.  They will not be free agents either in space or on the Moon.

I argued almost two years ago that there is a new “space race” but that it is quite different in character from the first one.  The outcome of this race will determine what kind of politico-economic paradigm will prevail on the new frontier of space.  One can imagine a situation in which a country establishes a permanent presence on the Moon and maintains control of the resources there.  Yes, the Moon is a big planet, but the valuable concentrations of water lie in small areas near the poles.  Water at the poles of the Moon allow a space faring entity to develop routine access to the entirety of cislunar space, where all of the economic, scientific and security space assets of many countries reside.  Space control in the new century does not refer to “Death Stars” bristling with space weaponry, but to situational awareness, assurance of service, and the defense and maintenance of space-based assets.  Control of cislunar space – meaning in this case the ability to routinely travel throughout its extent and to all the various orbits of cislunar satellites – does not mean to militarize or weaponize space, but rather the permanent presence of a space faring power of a particular ideology or worldview, undeterred by the absence of a competing ideology.

And if some say “So what?” to that, the more fool they.

Cue music, "Also Sprach Zarathustra".....

A long established year-end tradition – for good or ill – is a review and analysis of the preceding twelve months.  Who am I to fight this trend?  Being that I am a “the glass is not only half-empty, but chipped and cracked down the middle” space policy town crier, be fairly warned as I conclude this year’s blogging with a look back at 2011.

The retirement of the Space Shuttle this past year vindicated T.S. Elliot’s pronouncement about the nature of the end of the world.  The U.S. workhorses that ferried Station pieces and crew to low Earth orbit await their museum berths.  The most heated emotions and debate surrounding this event dealt with the agency’s selection of the final resting places for the working U.S. space access machines.  To the outrage of many, space-oriented places like Houston and Huntsville were cold-shouldered in favor of show business-oriented Los Angeles and New York City.  In the heat of this controversy (so dire that members of Congress from space-economy communities rose from their slumber to pen op-eds mirroring constituent alarm),  few noticed or understood that without a replacement, the country’s capability for humans to access space had been discarded.  As  2011 closes out, construction and assembly of the International Space Station is complete – it is a unique Earth-orbiting platform for ongoing scientific research, accessible for the price of a ride on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

This past year was heralded as the opening chapter for a new approach to human spaceflight – the American civil space program was to advance more economically through the use of commercial launch services to LEO.  We’re waiting and watching, with more than a little trepidation, as millions of taxpayer dollars are doled out to “New Space” companies branded “commercial.”  Recent history shows taxpayer-funded, new-technology enterprises have failed spectacularly.  It’s troubling that simultaneously, these space access ventures are making similar claims of soon-to-be superior, cheap alternatives toward solving a pressing national problem.

In other exciting developments, the agency announced their new “mission statement” –  “To reach for new heights and reveal the unknown so that what we do and learn will benefit all humankind.”  Some noted the new statement says nothing about conducting missions and doesn’t mention space.  But it is stirring – a mission statement for an agency without a mission.

After being kicked long and hard by the Congress, NASA finally decided that they should probably go ahead and build a new launch vehicle.  Despite some initial foot-dragging (and the conspicuously ignored presence of an obvious and inexpensive alternative), the agency buckled down and produced a design for a new heavy lift launch vehicle, one that looks remarkably similar to the now-discarded Ares system.  With continued work on the new Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, looking remarkably similar to the now-discarded Orion spacecraft, we soon will be ready for new and exciting missions to untrod landscapes in space – perhaps a large rock –in a decade.  Maybe.  Perhaps even for less than its estimated $100 billion cost.

Robotic science missions, the so-called “crown jewels” of the space program, had their own share of difficulties this year.  The Goddard-run James Webb Space Telescope, the second-generation successor to the highly successful Hubble Space Telescope, is coming in late with a price tag of more than $8.7 billion and counting.  Its continued cost growth threatens all NASA space science programs.  JPL’s own giga-project, the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory, was successfully launched and will encounter the planet in about six months, hopefully at very low velocity.  Less costly robotic missions to a variety of destinations continue to return copious amounts of data; whether there will be money to reduce and analyze it all remains uncertain.

The past year was the 50^th anniversary of both Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space and John F. Kennedy’s announcement of the Moon landing goal – two events separated by type and location but connected in motivation.  It also was the centennial year of the race to, and attainment of, the South Pole – an event with reverberations throughout the ensuing years as a template for national efforts in exploration.  The space program, steeped in the history of global geopolitics and national competition, has sputtered slowly to a stop under that motivational and operational model.  A new paradigm for the space program is needed, one that ensures its long-term viability and stability.

To their own and the nation’s detriment, NASA is trapped by one model when thinking about space.  Missing is the notion of permanence and expansion into space.  A variety of “anyplace-but-the-Moon” destinations for human spaceflight have been mooted and studied in the past year, including near-Earth asteroids, L-points, the tiny, asteroid-like moons of Mars, lunar orbit, and even a human Venus flyby.  All of these imagined missions require knowledge, hardware and technologies that we do not now possess.  All expose human crews to substantial risk through long-term exposure to radiation and microgravity.  None create permanence of human presence or extension of capability in space.  And all travel to destinations offering little scientific and exploratory benefit or variety; their main attraction seems to be the yet-to-be-explained agency imperative to cross them off some “been there” check-list.

Several plans to develop cislunar space through an incremental, step-wise approach have been advanced.  The goal in each is not a flags-and-footprints type of space extravaganza, but the steady expansion of capabilities and reach beyond low Earth orbit.  Such a modus operandi is possible through the development and use of lunar resources —specifically the water ice found in quantity at both poles of the Moon.  In stark contrast to the Apollo template (and regardless of budgetary ups and downs), constant, steady and measurable progress can be realized through the creation of this “transcontinental railroad” in cislunar space.

I note with sadness, the passing of some great space visionaries this year.  John Marburger, former Presidential Science Advisor, was one of the few who truly understood the meaning and purpose of the Vision for Space Exploration.  Lunar and planetary scientists Baruch Blumberg, Bill Muehlberger, Mike Drake, Paul Lowman, Nick Short, Chuck Sonett, and my academic advisor and friend Ron Greeley passed away this year.  Theirs were voices of knowledge and experience and they will be missed.

The year 2011 was an annus horribilis for the national space program.  Here’s to the forthcoming year and hopes for a return of sanity to space policy.

Amundsen at the South Pole, one hundred years ago today.

One of the last major milestones in the history of terrestrial exploration was achieved one hundred years ago today – the attainment of the South Pole by Roald Amundsen and his team on December 14, 1911.  His rival, Robert Falcon Scott and crew, were still more than a month away from the pole and (although denying they were in a race) destined for heartbreaking disappointment when they arrived to find the Norwegian flag flapping in the howling Antarctic wind.

The Amundsen-Scott polar drama time stamps a major shift in our thinking about the meaning of exploration.  This shift in our perception of what it means to explore holds ramifications to today’s debates on space policy.  Traditionally, exploration is a very personal activity.  It involves someone’s decision to see what lies over the next hill.  This act is exploration in its purest sense; it dates from the Stone Age and is principally responsible for humanity’s reach into all corners of the Earth.  This exploration is undirected and random –motivated by the human desire to scratch that unrelenting itch of curiosity.  You finance and outfit yourself and go, while adhering to the maxim, “It is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.”

As society grew and evolved, a different type of exploration emerged.  For difficult or expensive journeys to far corners of the globe, people pooled their knowledge and resources to collectively explore the unknown by creating government-sponsored projects.  Until modern times, such exploration was considered to include not only discovery and initial characterization, but also utilization, exploitation and eventually colonization – all with an eye toward wealth-creation.  By the end of the 19^th Century, the regions of the world unclaimed by western powers were all but gone, gobbled up in a frenzy of imperial land-grabs by industrially developed nations.  All that was left were the seas (whose freedom of access for all nations was guaranteed by the British Royal Navy) and the North and South Poles.

The shift of attention to the poles coincided with the rise of science and with it, a significant change in the “exploration” ethic.  It was actually thought at one point in the late 19^th Century that all nature had been finally and thoroughly explained.  After numerous failed attempts to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific north of Canada (economic motivation), expeditions to the polar regions began to focus on scientific observations and measurements (knowledge gathering).  This shift in emphasis also coincided with a global rise of nationalist conscience, the idea that some nations were destined to discover and conquer remote parts of the Earth.  Given the global extent of the British Empire at that time, the English were particularly susceptible to this idea.

These various motivations were threaded together in the early 20^th Century as science joined with nationalistic chest-thumping to create government-sponsored scientific expeditions to remote locales.  Important and difficult expeditions requiring teamwork and pooled resources became national exploration efforts.  Science became a fig leaf rationale for realpolitik global power projection.  There was still the occasional “because it’s there” type of expedition to some remote mountain or plateau but most often it was privately financed.

And so we come to the Space Age, which in basic terms has followed the knowledge-gathering template of polar exploration.  A new movement for national power projection in space has yet to fully emerge.  National security may be the only motivator of sufficient political power to launch an earnest, national drive into space.  Traditionally the military conducts exploration in peacetime.  In the late 18^th Century, Royal Navy Captain James Cook conducted three expeditions to the Pacific – not for pure science but rather for applied science – to improve navigation for commerce and other purposes.

Perhaps this link to applied science may guide us toward a new understanding of the term “exploration,” or rather, to recover an old meaning that has been lost.  The idea of exploration leading to exploitation (currently tossed aside in the modern equation of exploration and science) could serve as the “new” guiding principle for modern spaceflight.  By making space the singular preserve of science and politics, both are ill served, much to the determent of humanity.  For now, we remain wedded to the template of launch, use, and discard – a modus suitable to an occasional, expensive and limited presence in space but one wholly inappropriate for undertaking the creation of a modern, permanent space faring infrastructure.  Instead, beginning with the creation of a reusable, extensible cislunar space faring system, we should learn how to use space for national interests by using the Moon and its resources.  This will require a long-term research and development project geared to acquiring the understanding and ability to gather and use the resources available to us in space in order to routinely access, explore and exploit cislunar space and the frontier beyond.

This model of a national space program fits the classic understanding of exploration – we go into space as a society and what we do there must have societal value.  Because cislunar space has critical economic and national security value, we need to create a system that can routinely accesses that region of space with robots and people.  Hence, I advocate resource production bases on the Moon, reusable systems, and the build-up of a cislunar spaceflight infrastructure.  Some may not consider this to be “exploration” but the great explorers of history exploited and settled after they found and described.

The attainment of the South Pole one hundred years ago today shifted the meaning of the word exploration and boxed us into an artificial separation of the concepts of discovery and use.  That modern connotation is both arbitrary and historically incorrect.  Exploration includes exploitation and we can exploit the Moon – our nearest planetary neighbor – to create a permanent space faring capability. The development of cislunar space is exploration in the classic sense – a plunge into the unknown:  Can we do this?  How hard is it?  What benefits – beyond those we can recognize now – might we realize from it?   History shows that such undertakings promote new discoveries by opening windows of innovation and generating new streams wealth creation.

Note: My friend Don Pettit has similar thoughts in his blog post today.

Next stop?

Of all the idiocies that make up our current lack of a genuine policy for civil space, the imperative to find some destination that is not the Moon is the most telling sign of an absence of thoughtful leadership.  For an example of the pointlessness to which this reasoning can go, take a look at a recent post at Scientific American, arguing for a human flyby mission to Venus.

That’s right – Venus.  The planet that makes Jupiter’s moon Io look like an island in the Bahamas — a locale of sea-bottom pressures, lead-melting temperatures and sulfuric acid rain.  Specially built robotic devices last for (at best) an hour or two before breaking down into an inert lump of metal.  This place is now being advocated (seriously) as a destination for human spaceflight.  How did we arrive at such a state?

Simple – by a deliberate act of programmatic destruction.  The Moon was to be our first destination on the long road into the Solar System.  But that goal was discarded, allegedly on the grounds that “we’ve been there,” but in reality because it was a destination that could be reached on reasonable timescales for affordable amounts of spending.  Thus, a failure to return to the Moon could not be blamed on factors other than program mismanagement or agency incompetence.  In other words, it was a realistic goal against which progress could be assessed.

What replaced lunar return?  That’s a bit more muddled, but vague notions were advanced that human missions “beyond low Earth orbit” could be undertaken only if NASA was freed from the onerous requirement to build new spacecraft and launch vehicles.  Thus, we would purchase commercial launch services for delivery of people and payload to LEO and use the agency budget to develop “new and exciting technologies” to make more distant goals reachable.

As this proposed pseudo-policy played itself out over the ensuing months, its essential hollowness became ever more apparent.  Despite the quasi-religious beliefs of some space buffs, there is no “magic beans” technology to make spaceflight infinitely cheap and infinitely capable.  There is no commercial human spaceflight industry.  And other than the now-discarded lunar surface, there is no worthwhile human destination reachable within the next 15 years.

Yet many in the space business pretend otherwise.  Hence, we get articles like the “Humans to Venus” piece.  What’s wrong with this concept?  Simply put, there is nothing humans can do on a Venus flyby that a robotic spacecraft could not accomplish, while there are things a robotic spacecraft could do there that humans cannot.  The real need for Venus is to get high-resolution radar images and gravity data of the planet to extend and supplement the reconnaissance mapping of the Venera and Magellan missions of the past century.

To get such high-quality image data, one must put a spacecraft into orbit around Venus.  This is a fairly straightforward task for a robotic mission; you can use the atmosphere of Venus to aerobrake, which will gradually slow the spacecraft down and allow it to slip into orbit.  The problem is not getting into orbit around Venus – it’s getting out of it.  Venus is a large planet (almost as big as the Earth) and it takes significant energy to achieve escape velocity.  With a robotic spacecraft, we don’t worry about that because there is no need to return it to Earth.  I suspect that a human crew might feel differently about such a proposition.

In plain fact, there is nothing of any real scientific value that a human crew can do during a few-minutes-long flyby encounter with Venus.  So we are talking about undertaking a months-long trip through interplanetary space, fully exposed to cosmic radiation and solar particle events, for a momentary view of an extremely hot planet of bright, featureless cloud tops.

Space advocates are desperately looking for something people can do and somewhere they can go in space on timescales of less than multiple decades at costs of less than hundreds of billions of dollars.  If only there where some place we could get to within a decade or so, for a cost that doesn’t bust the latest budget.  If only there was a destination in space where human judgment, knowledge and expertise would play a real time critical role in mission success and where new capability would be realized.

If only…..

The north pole of the Moon: Real or facsimile?

Of all the wonders depicted in science fiction books and movies, one of the most intriguing is the machine that makes anything that you need or desire.  Merely enter a detailed plan, or push the button for items programmed into the machine – dials twirl, the machine hums and out pops what you requested.  Technology gives us Aladdin’s Lamp.  A handy device that will find many uses.

We’re not quite there yet but crude versions of such imagined machines already exist.  These machines are called “rapid prototype” generators or three-dimensional printers.  They take digitized information about the dimensions and shape of an object and use that data to control a fabricator that re-creates the object using a variety of different materials.  Typically, these machines use easy to mold plastics and epoxy resins but in principle, any material could be used to create virtually any object.

What’s the relevance of this technology to spaceflight and to the Moon?  One of the key objects of lunar return is to learn how to use the material and energy resources of the Moon to create new capabilities.  To date, we have focused our attention on simple raw materials like bulk regolith (soil) and the water found at the poles.  It makes sense to initially limit our resource utilization ambitions to simple materials that are both useful and relatively massive, which currently have those killer transportation costs when delivered from Earth.  Bulk regolith has many different uses, such as shielding (e.g., rocket exhaust blast berms) as well as raw material for simple surface structures.

However, once we are on the Moon and have met the basic necessities of life, we can begin to experiment with making and using more complex products.  In effect, the inhabitants of the Moon will begin to create more complicated parts and items from what they find around them, just outside their door.  The techniques of three-dimensional printing will allow us to discover what makes life off-planet easier and more productive.  We will experiment by using the local materials to maintain and repair equipment, build new structures, and finally begin off-planet manufacturing.

During the early stages of lunar habitation, material and equipment will be brought from Earth.  With continued use, particularly in the harsh lunar surface environment, breakdowns will occur.  Although initially we will use spare parts from Earth, for simple uncomplicated structures that are needed quickly, a three-dimensional printer can make substitute parts using local resource materials found near the outpost.  Most existing 3-D printers on Earth use plastics and related materials (which are complex carbon-based compounds, mostly derived from petroleum) but some processing has used concrete, which can be made on the Moon from sieved regolith and water.  In addition, we also know that regolith can be fused into ceramic using microwaves, so rapid prototyping activities on the Moon may eventually find that partially melting particulate matter into glass is another way to create useful objects.

The lunar surface is a good source of material and energy useful in creating a wide variety of objects.  I mentioned simple ceramics and aggregates, but additionally, a variety of metals (including iron, aluminum and titanium) are available on the Moon.  Silicon for making electronic components and solar cells is abundant on the Moon.  Designs for robotic rovers that literally fuse the in-place upper surface of the lunar regolith into electricity-producing solar cells have already been imagined and prototyped.  We can outsource solar energy jobs to the Moon!

These technical developments lead to mind-boggling possibilities.  Back in the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann imagined what he called “self-replicating automata,” small machines that could process information to reproduce themselves at exponential rates.  Interestingly, von Neumann himself thought of the idea of using such automata in space, where both energy and materials are (quite literally) unlimited.  A machine that contains the information and the ability to reproduce itself may ultimately be the tool humanity needs to “conquer” space.  Hordes of reproducing robots could prepare a planet for colonization as well as providing safe havens and habitats.

We can experiment on the Moon with self-replicating machines because it contains the necessary material and energy resources.  Of course, in the near-term, we will simply use this new technology to create spare parts and perhaps simple objects that we find serve our immediate and utilitarian needs.  But things like this have a habit of evolving far beyond their initial envisioned use, and often in directions that we do not expect; we are not smart enough to imagine what we don’t know.  The technology of three-dimensional printing will make the habitation of the Moon – our nearest neighbor in space – easier and more productive.  Even now, creative former NASA workers have found a way to make this technology pay off.  In the future, perhaps their talents could be applied to making the Moon a second home to humanity.

Note:  The image at the beginning of this post is a model of the lunar north pole, made using a three-dimensional printer and LRO laser altimetry data by Howard Fink of New York University.  The scale of the model is about 30 cm across.

The lunar feature Ina, an extremely young, unusual depression that may represent a gas eruption site on the Moon. LROC narrow angle camera images.

There are times when seemingly unrelated discoveries about other planets come forward to enlighten us about the history and processes of the Moon. A recent paper, using data from the orbiting MESSENGER mission mapping Mercury, describes a number of newly discovered rimless pits and depressions.  These pits (called hollows by the mission team) are difficult to explain by impact processes and are hypothesized to be the products of outgassing from the planet’s interior.  They are often associated with color anomalies (which implies compositional differences from the surrounding terrain) and frequently found on the floors of impact craters and basins.

Impact craters come in a wide variety of sizes, but within selected size ranges, they all appear more or less similar.  Small craters are nearly perfectly round and bowl-shaped with smooth rims that are raised above the surrounding terrain.  Craters with irregular shapes and no raised rims suggest that processes other than impact might be at work.  It has been suggested that on Mercury, these “hollows” were created by the violent release of volatile substances.  Such a release of gas under pressure accompanies volcanic eruptions called pyroclastic, meaning “fire-broken” (fine liquid rock (magma) fragments spewed into space and cooled during flight).

We’ve known about pyroclastic eruptions on the Moon for many years, evidenced by the green glass of the Apollo 15 site and the orange-black glass from Apollo 17.  Careful search of the images taken from lunar orbit reveal the rimless pits that served as vents for the pyroclastic eruptions that produced these Apollo glasses.  They are distinct from impact craters and often are found on the floors of craters and basins along fractures, the conduit by which volcanic magma travels to the lunar surface.

Sometimes pit craters or “hollows,” found across the surface of the Moon, take unusual form.  The kidney-shaped feature shown above is named Ina; after its discovery in one of the Apollo orbital images, it was informally named the “D-caldera” after its shape and the interpretation that it represented a volcanic collapse feature.  Ina is about 3 km across and consists of a series of small platforms, mounds and holes within a larger irregular depression.  Other similar pits and hollows occur elsewhere on the Moon (e.g., on the floor of Rima Hyginis).  And while not major features, they have been found often enough to bother many lunar scientists, who had no good explanation for their origin.

About five years ago, we got a clue as to the possible origins of these features.  Pete Schultz and associates from Brown University published a paper showing Ina displayed unusual spectral reflectance characteristics.  The slow micrometeorite bombardment of the Moon adds craters to the surface and also makes small iron-rich glass particles that darken and redden the surface.  As these glass particles build up in the soil, a soil is said to “mature.”  Fresh surfaces are more “blue” in color (actually, less red) and become redder with time as the soil matures.  Most lunar features show age or “become mature” on timescales of millions of years.  Ina shows very few impact craters on top of it, meaning that geologically, it is very young.  Moreover, the soils associated with Ina are much bluer than surrounding areas.  Both of these observations suggest that Ina is young with immature surfaces.

How are these features created?  Significant volcanism on the Moon largely stopped at least a couple of billion years ago.  The Brown team thought that the combination of young age, low maturity and unusual morphology suggested a relatively uncommon pit-forming process.  They proposed that the explosive release of volatile substances from the lunar interior would have disrupted the surface, created a chaotic mixture of rock and soil, exposed fresh surfaces (creating the immature spectral signature), and formed a collapse depression caused by the instantaneous removal of mass from below.

Now we can see that the new Mercurian hollows have morphologies displaying spectral anomalies similar to the lunar collapse pits such as Ina.  The new data suggest that Mercury contains significant volatile substances.  These volatiles must be present at some depth, accumulated under high pressure until crustal failure ensues and a massive gas release results in an “eruption.”  This explosive event leaves behind a chaotic, disrupted surface (“immature,” with fresh bedrock and deep regolith “newly” exposed to space).

In the case of Ina on the Moon, its extreme youth is suggested both by the lack of overlying impact craters of almost any size, as well as the sharp preservation of topography in its cliff and pit interior morphology.  This extreme youth may be on the order of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, not the millions and billions of years that typify most lunar landforms.  Such youth and the widespread distribution of Ina-like collapse pits across the lunar surface implies that outgassing events are occurring on the Moon now; it is highly unlikely that we were just lucky enough to find a singular or unique occurrence.

What might these volatile substances be?  Before the recent lunar missions flew, it was common to declare that water was not a possibility.  However, we recently discovered from study of the lunar samples that water was present in the deep interior of the Moon during the epoch of mare volcanism three billion years ago; water could still be present in the subsurface.  There are many other volatile substances that could be responsible as well, including carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, gaseous sulfur, as well as other more exotic gases.  Because the compositions on Mercury are poorly known, the possibilities for exotic materials there are even more extensive.

The explosive release of gas from the deep interior (without the eruption of magma) appears to be an ongoing lunar process.  This gas release could provide at least a partial answer to two vexing lunar problems: the accumulation of volatiles at the poles of the Moon (discussed in my blogging many times, most recently HERE) and the infamous phenomena of Lunar Transient Phenomena (LTP), described as glowing reddish “clouds” hovering over the lunar surface that mysteriously appear and disappear.  Telescopic observers have reported seeing LTP for many years.  Unfortunately, we have not been able to verify and document these events, largely because they are transient.  Now we have direct morphological evidence for the venting of gas from both planets, making it possible that at least some LTP might be related to gas release from inside the Moon.  Stay tuned – the book of the Moon continues to be rewritten and expanded with new and interesting discoveries.

NOTE: The latest version of the paper Tony Lavoie and I wrote on using lunar resources to create a cislunar space faring system has been published in the Proceedings of the AIAA Space 2011 Conference.  A copy is available for download HERE.

The Great White Fleet of the United States Navy, 1907 -- We need a fleet of spacecraft to open "This New Ocean" of space

We seem to be in one of those periods in which basic reasons for doing what we do as a nation are called into question.  This includes our national civil space program, which for the last few years has engaged in an extended period of back-biting and navel-gazing.  Much of this “debate” has focused on either or both of two points: what rocket to build and where to go, and not on sustainability.

In an era of limited resources, our challenge is to create a worthwhile space program with an expenditure rate that falls at or below a level perceived as affordable.  Given this reality (regardless of prevailing agency direction or assertions about projected deep space destinations) it is highly likely that cislunar space will be the sphere of space operations for the coming decade or two. Thus the questions should be:  What are we doing in space and why are we doing it?  If the answer is a series of space exploration “firsts” (flags-and-footprints forever), that model will require specific activities and missions.  If the answer is that an incrementally developed transportation infrastructure is desired, one that creates an expanding sphere of human operations, then such a model requires a different set of specific activities and missions.

Thus, the real debate is not about launch vehicles or spacecraft or even destinations; it is about the long-term – the paradigm or template of space operations.  One model requires mega-rockets to distant targets for touch-and-go missions; for convenience, I’ll call it the “Apollo” template (no denigration intended).  The other model is an incremental, go-somewhere-to-stay-and-then-expand-onwards mindset – call it the “Shuttle” template (again, same disclaimer).  The one that you adopt and follow depends on what purpose you believe human spaceflight serves.

Because Mars may harbor former or existing life, NASA has presumed that it is our “ultimate destination” in space.  In effect, the entire focus of the human spaceflight effort has devolved into a huge science project – “The Quest for Life” (which means finding pond scum, not ET).  Thus, debate about what to build, where to go and how to do it must be formulated towards attainment of Mars.

This unspoken assumption has been at the root of most space objective studies for the past 20 years.  Mars was the end point of President George H.W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative, President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, of former Lockheed-Martin President Norm Augustine’s two reports, and a myriad of space groups and societies.  From the 1990′s to the present, a multi-billion dollar robotic campaign has sent mission after mission to Mars, each discovering that the red planet once had liquid water.  This mania for Mars and preoccupation with possible life there, has blinkered our perceptions of the space program and distorted our reality of what is possible or attainable on reasonable time scales with available resources.

Long term, the goal for human spaceflight is to create the capability to go anywhere we choose, for as long as we need, and do whatever we want to in space.  For the sake of argument, if one accepts such a goal, which model is more amenable to implementing it: the Apollo template or the Shuttle template?

If our goal is to “sail on the ocean of space,” we need a navy.  Navies don’t operate with just one class of ship because one class isn’t capable of doing all that is necessary.  Not all ships will look or operate the same because they have different purposes and destinations.  We need transports, way stations, supply depots, and ports.  In space terms, these consist of one to get people to and from space (LEO), one to get them to and from points beyond LEO, way stations and outposts at GEO, L-1, low lunar orbit, and to the lunar surface.  To fuel and provision our space navy, we require supply (propellant) depots in LEO, L-1 and on the lunar surface.  Ports of call are all the places we may go to with this system.  Initially, those ports are satellites in various orbits which require service, maintenance and replacement with larger, distributed systems.  Later, our harbor will be the surface of the Moon, to harvest its resources, thereby creating more capability and provisions from space.  Reliable and frequent access to the entire Solar System, not one or two destinations, should be our ultimate goal.

By designing and building mission-specific vehicles and elements, the “Apollo” template forfeits going everywhere and doing everything.  However, adopting the “Shuttle” model does not preclude going to Mars.  In fact, I contend that to go to Mars in an affordable manner that sustains repeated trips, one needs the infrastructure provided by a space faring navy.  Building a series of one-off spacecraft – huge launch vehicles to dash to Mars for expensive, public relations extravaganzas will eventually put us right back in the box we’re in now.

We have been arguing about the wrong things.  It is the mindset of the space program that needs re-thinking – not the next destination, not the next launch vehicle, and not the next spacecraft.  How can we change the discussion?  First, we need to understand and articulate the true choices so that people can see and evaluate the different approaches and requirements.  Second, we need to develop sample architectures that fit the requirements for “affordable incrementalism.”  Finally, we need to get such plans in front of the decision makers.  There is no guarantee that they will accept it or even listen to the arguments for it.  But right now, they are completely ignorant about it.

A cost-effective, sustainable human spaceflight program must be incremental and cumulative.  Our space program must continually expand our reach, creating new capabilities over time.  Moreover, it should contribute to compelling national economic, scientific and security interests.  Building a lasting and reusable space transportation system does that, whereas a series of PR stunt missions will not.  The original vision of the Shuttle system was to incrementally move into the Solar System – first a Shuttle to-and-from LEO, then Station as a jumping off platform and then beyond LEO into cislunar space.  We have the parts from the now retired Shuttle system and an assembled and working International Space Station.  We can use these legacy pieces to build an affordable system to access the near regions and resources of cislunar space.  In this new age of austerity, perhaps we will finally acquire the means to build our pathway to the stars.

Setting up a mining operation on an asteroid may be difficult (from Howstuffworks.com)

Part III:  Resource Utilization Considerations

In Part I and Part II of this series, I examined some of the operational and scientific issues associated with a human mission to a near Earth asteroid (NEO) and contrasted them with the simpler operations and greater scientific return of a mission to the Moon.  To continue the discussion of what we might do at an asteroid, I will now consider using the local resources offered by asteroids, how they differ from those of the Moon, and offer some practical considerations on accessing and using them.

To become a truly space faring species, humanity must learn how to use what we find in space to survive and thrive.  Tied to the logistics chain of the Earth, we are now and always will be limited in space capability.  Our ultimate goal in space is to develop the capability to go anywhere at any time and conduct any mission we can imagine.  Such capability is unthinkable without being able to obtain provisions from resources found off-planet.  That means developing and using the resources of space to create new capabilities.

One of the alleged benefits of asteroid destinations is that they are rich in resource potential.  I would agree, putting the accent on the word “potential.”  Our best guide to the nature of these resources comes from the study of meteorites, which are derived from near Earth asteroids.  They have several compositions, the most common being the ordinary chondrite, which makes up about 85% of observed meteorite falls.  Ordinary chondrites are basically rocks, rich in the elements silicon, iron, magnesium, calcium and aluminum.  They contain abundant metal grains, composed mostly of iron and nickel, widely dispersed throughout the rock.

The resource potential of asteroids lies not in these objects, but in the minority of asteroids that have more exotic compositions.  Metal asteroids make up about 7% of the population and are composed of nearly pure iron-nickel metal, with some inclusions of rock-like material as a minor component.  Other siderophile (iron-loving) elements including platinum and gold make up trace portions of these bodies.  A metal asteroid is an extremely high-grade ore deposit and potentially could be worth billions of dollars if we were able to get these metals back to Earth, although one should be mindful of the possible catastrophic effects on existing precious metal markets – so much gold was produced during the 1849 California Gold Rush that the world market price of gold decreased by a factor of sixteen.

From the spaceflight perspective, water has the most value.  Another type of relatively rare asteroid is also a chondrite, but a special type that contains carbon and organic compounds as well as clays and other hydrated minerals.  These bodies contain significant amounts of water.  Water is one of the most useful substances in space – it supports human life (to drink, to use as radiation shielding, and to breath when cracked into its component hydrogen and oxygen), it can be used as a medium of energy storage (fuel cells) and it is the most powerful chemical rocket propellant known.  Finding and using a water-rich NEO would create a logistics depot of immense value.

A key advantage of asteroids for resources is a drawback as an operational environment – they have extremely low surface gravity.  Getting into and out of the Moon’s gravity well requires a change in velocity of about 2380 m/s (both ways); to do the same for a typical asteroid requires only a few meters per second.  This means that a payload launched from an asteroid rather than the Moon saves almost 5 km/s in delta-v, a substantial amount of energy.  So from the perspective of energy, the asteroids beat the Moon as a source of materials.

There are, however, some difficulties in mining and using asteroidal material as compared to lunar resources.  First is the nature of the feedstock or “ore.”  We have recently found that water at the poles of the Moon is not only present in enormous quantity (tens of billions of tons) but is also in a form that can be easily used – ice.  Ice can be converted into a liquid for further processing at minimal energy cost; if the icy regolith from the poles is heated to above 0° C, the ice will melt and water can be collected and stored.  The water in carbonaceous chondrites is chemically bound within mineral structures.  Significant amounts of energy are required to break these chemical bonds to free the water, at least 2-3 orders of magnitude more energy, depending on the specific mineral phase being processed.  So extracting water from an asteroid, present in quantities of a few percent to maybe a couple of tens of percent, requires significant energy; water-ice at the poles of the Moon is present in greater abundance (up to 100% in certain polar craters) and is already in an easy-to-process and use form.

The processing of natural materials to extract water has many detailed steps, from the acquisition of the feedstock to moving the material through the processing stream to collection and storage of the derived product.  At each stage, we typically separate one component from another; gravity serves this purpose in most industrial processing.  One difficulty in asteroid resource processing will be to either devise techniques that do not require gravity (including related phenomena, such as thermal convection) or to create an artificial gravity field to ensure that things move in the right directions.  Either approach complicates the resource extraction process.

The large distance from the Earth and poor accessibility of asteroids versus the Moon, works against resource extraction and processing.  Human visits to NEOs will be of short duration and because radio time-lags to asteroids are on the order of minutes, direct remote control of processing will not be possible.  Robotic systems for asteroid mining must be designed to have a large degree of autonomy.  This may become possible but presently we do not have enough information on the nature of asteroidal feedstock to either design or even envision the use of such robotic equipment.  Moreover, even if we did fully understand the nature of the deposit, mining and processing are highly interactive activities on Earth and will be so in space.  The slightest anomaly or miscalculation can cause the entire processing stream to break down and in remote operations, it will be difficult to diagnose and correct the problem and re-start it.

The accessibility issue also cuts against asteroidal resources.  We cannot go to a given asteroid at will; launch windows open for very short periods and are closed most of the time.  This affects not only our access to the asteroid but also shortens the time periods when we may depart the object to return our products to near-Earth space.  In contrast, we can go to and from the Moon at any time and its proximity means that nearly instantaneous remote control and response are possible.  The difficulties of remote control for asteroid activities have led some to suggest that we devise a way to “tow” the body into Earth orbit, where it may be disaggregated and processed at our leisure.  I shudder to think about being assigned to write the environmental impact (if you’ll pardon the expression) statement for that activity.

So where does that leave us in relation to space resource access and utilization?  Asteroid resource utilization has potential but given today’s technology levels, uncertain prospects for success.  Asteroids are hard to get to, have short visit times for round-trips, difficult work environments, and uncertain product yields.  Asteroids do have low gravity going for them.  In contrast, the Moon is close and has the materials we want in the form we need it.  The Moon is easily accessible at any time and is amenable to remote operations controlled from Earth in near-real time.  My perspective is that it makes the most sense to go to the Moon first and learn the techniques, difficulties and technology for planetary resource utilization by manufacturing propellant from lunar water.  Nearly every step of this activity – from prospecting, processing and harvesting – will teach us how to mine and process materials from future destinations, both minor and planetary sized-bodies.  Resource utilization has commonality of techniques and equipment, the requirement to move and work with particulate materials, and the ability to purify and store the products.  Learning how to access and process resources on the Moon is a general skill that transfers to any future space destination.

There was a reason that the Moon was made our first destination in the original Vision for Space Exploration.  It’s close, it’s interesting, and it’s useful.  Establishing a foothold on the Moon opens up cislunar space to routine access and development.  It will teach us the skills of a space faring people.  It makes sense to go there first and create a permanent space transportation system.  Once we have that, we get everything else.

Destination: Moon or Asteroid?

Part I:  Operational Considerations

Part II: Scientific Considerations

Lockheed-Martin's Plymouth Rock mission concept

Part I:  Operational Considerations

The current controversy over the direction of our national space program has many dimensions but most of the discourse has focused on the means (government vs. commercial launch vehicles) not the ends (destinations and activities).  Near-Earth objects (NEO, i.e., asteroids) became the next destination for human exploration as an alternative to the Moon when the Augustine committee advocated a “flexible path” in their 2009 report.  The reason for going to an asteroid instead of the Moon was that it costs too much money to develop a lunar lander whereas asteroids, having extremely low surface gravity, don’t require one.  The administration embraced and supported this change in direction and since then, the agency has been studying possible NEO missions and how to conduct them.

On the surface, it might seem that NEO missions answer the requirements for future human destinations.  NEOs are beyond low Earth orbit, they require long transit times and so simulate the duration of future Mars missions, and (wait for it)… we’ve never visited one with people.  However, detailed consideration indicates that NEOs are not the best choice as our next destination in space.  In this post and two additional ones to come, I will consider some of the operational, scientific and resource utilization issues that arise in planning NEO missions and exploration activities and compare them to the lunar alternative.

Most asteroids reside not near the Earth but in a zone between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid belt.  The very strong gravity field of Jupiter will sometimes perturb the orbits of these rocky bodies and hurl them into the inner Solar System, where they usually hit the Sun or one of the inner planets.  Between those two events, they orbit the Sun, sometimes coming close to the Earth.  Such asteroids are called near-Earth objects and can be any of a variety of different types of asteroids.  Typically, they are small, on the order of tens of meters to a few kilometers in size.  As such, they do not have significant gravity fields of their own, so missions to them do not “land” on an alien world, but rather rendezvous and station-keep with it in deep space.  Think “formation flying” with the International Space Station (ISS) without the option to dock.

The moniker “near Earth” is a relative descriptor.  These objects orbit the Sun just as the Earth does and vary in distance to the Earth from a few million km to hundreds of millions of km, depending upon the time of year.  Getting to one has nothing to do with getting to another, so multiple NEO destinations in one trip are unlikely.  Because the distance to a NEO varies widely, we cannot just go to one whenever we choose – launch windows open at certain times of the year and because the NEO is in its own orbit, these windows occur infrequently and are of very short duration, usually a few days.  Moreover, due to the distances between Earth and the NEO, radio communications will not be instantaneous, with varying time-lags of tens of seconds to several minutes between transmission and reception.  Thus, the crew must be autonomous during operations.

Although there are several thousand NEOs, few of them are possible destinations for human missions.  This is a consequence of two factors.  First, space is very big and even several thousand rocks spread out over several billion cubic kilometers of empty space results in a very low density of objects.  Second, many of these objects are unreachable, requiring too much velocity change (“delta-v”) from an Earth departure stage; this can be a result of either too high of an orbital inclination (out of the plane of the Earth’s orbit) or an orbit that is too eccentric (all orbits are elliptical).  These factors result in reducing the field of possible destinations from thousands to a dozen or so at best.  Moreover, the few NEOs that can be reached are all very small, from a few meters to perhaps a km or two in size.  Not much exploratory area there, especially after a months-long trip in deep space.

That’s another consideration – transit time.  Not only are there few targets, it takes months to reach one of them.  Long transit time is sold as a benefit by asteroid advocates:  because a trip to Mars will take months, a NEO mission will allow us to test out the systems for Mars missions.  But such systems do not yet exist.  On a human mission to a NEO, the crew is beyond help from Earth, except for radioed instructions and sympathy.  A human NEO mission will have to be self-sufficient to a degree that does not now exist.  Parts on the ISS fail all the time, but because it is only 400 km above the Earth, it is relatively straightforward to send replacement parts up on the next supply mission (unless your supply fleet is grounded, as currently it has been).  On a NEO mission, a broken system must be both fixable and fixed by the crew.  Even seemingly annoying malfunctions can become critical.  As ISS astronaut Don Pettit puts it, “If your toilet breaks, you’re dead.”

Crew exposure is another consequence of long flight times, in this case to the radiation environment of interplanetary space.  This hazard comes in two flavors – solar flares and galactic cosmic rays.  Solar flares are massive eruptions of high-energy particles from the Sun, occurring at irregular intervals.  We must carry some type of high-mass shielding to protect the crew from this deadly radiation.  Because we cannot predict when a flare might occur, this massive solar “storm shelter” must be carried wherever we go in the Solar System (because Apollo missions were only a few days long, the crew simply accepted the risk of possible death from a solar flare).  Cosmic rays are much less intense, but constant.  The normal ones are relatively harmless, but high-energy versions (heavy nuclei from ancient supernovae) can cause serious tissue damage.  Although crew can be partly shielded from this hazard, they are never totally protected from it.  Astronauts in low Earth orbit are largely protected from radiation because they orbit beneath the van Allen radiation belts, which protect life on the Earth.  On the Moon, we can use regolith to shield crew but for now, such mass is not available to astronauts traveling in deep space.

When the crew finally arrives at their destination, more difficulties await.  Most NEOs spin very rapidly, with rotation periods on the order of a few hours at most.  This means that the object is approachable only near its polar area.  But because these rocks are irregularly shaped, rotation is not the smooth, regular spin of a planet, but more like that of a wobbling toy top.  If material is disturbed on the surface, the rapid spin of the asteroid will launch the debris into space, creating a possible collision hazard to the human vehicle and crew.  The lack of gravity means that “walking” on the surface of the asteroid is not possible; crew will “float” above the surface of the object and just as occurs in Earth orbit, each touch of the object (action) will result in a propulsive maneuver away from the surface (reaction).

We need to learn how to work quickly at the asteroid because we don’t have much time there.  Loiter times near the asteroid for most opportunities are on the order of a few days.  Why so short?  Because the crew wants to be able to come home.  Both NEO and Earth continue to orbit the Sun and we need to make sure that the Earth is in the right place when we arrive back at its orbit.  So in effect, we will spend months traveling there, in a vehicle with the habitable volume of a large walk-in closet (OK, two walk-in closets maybe), a short time at the destination and then months for the trip home.  Is it worth it?  That will be the subject of my next post.

Destination:  Moon or Asteroid?

Part II:  Science Considerations

Part III: Resource Utilization Considerations

Former Presidential Science Advisor John H. Marburger

Recently deceased John H. Marburger, former Science Advisor to President George W. Bush and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, had a long and distinguished career as a scientist, an administrator and public servant.  I knew him through his advocacy and involvement in the development of the Vision for Space Exploration.  His passing is a loss for America.

The development of the VSE was a direct outgrowth of the devastating loss of the Shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven on February 1, 2003.  When questions arose over the need for a human space program, members of the Bush administration undertook a year-long internal study on the purpose and direction of America’s civil space effort.  Why do we send people into space?  What are our ultimate goals?  Many options were on the table during this period of soul-searching.

Post-Columbia, it was very apparent to those who knew and understood the numbers that regardless of direction, significant increases in NASA’s funding were not likely.  Any new mission would have to fit an essentially no-growth agency budget (with two wars raging and the explosive growth of entitlement spending, the federal budget could not be stretched enough to cover a doubling of the agency budget – which even if possible, was less in real dollars than Apollo had 40 years earlier).  Thus the question became: Given that additional new money would be extremely limited, how can we safely move beyond low Earth orbit?  The answer was to maximize our access to space by learning how to use what is available in space to create new capability.

A chemical-propulsion human mission to Mars might have a total mass in Earth orbit of some 500 tons; more than 80% of that mass is fuel for the journey.  There are two ways to lower the costs of such a mission:  1) significantly lower the costs of launch from Earth; 2) identify and make fuel from mining sites in space.  We’ve struggled off and on with the former but have never attempted the latter.  Moreover, learning how to use the resources of space is an essential skill to master for long term, sustainable human presence in space.

The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) was unveiled at NASA headquarters by President Bush.  The January 2004 mission announcement was groundbreaking in that the President identified the use of lunar resources to help create and advance a sustainable human presence, specifically, the production of fuel from lunar materials for beyond LEO missions.  It was the first time such a concept had been mentioned in any policy declaration.  Subsequently, that part of Bush’s speech was proclaimed by many commenting on, or working for the space community, as meaning “building the Mars ship on the Moon.”  That characterization confused the clear message that had been sent – one of using what is in space (resources) to create new space faring capabilities (product) starting on the Moon.

Jack Marburger was deeply involved in the year-long space policy study and it was clear that his insight and vision were more acute than many others working in the White House and at NASA.  I remember meeting with him in his office at OSTP in mid-2004, some months after the VSE had been announced.  At that time, he was aware of the concept of using space resources and was still formulating the implications and possibilities of such an activity.  We discussed the idea of water as the “currency” of spaceflight, being useful for life-support consumables, energy storage and rocket fuel.  I described for him our then-current knowledge (which at the time was extremely meager but promising) of the presence of ice at the poles of the Moon and the likelihood that appreciable quantities of water might be harvested there.

In the spring of 2006, Jack gave a keynote address at the 44^th Goddard Space Symposium.  In his speech he pointedly asked, “Why do we have a space program?”  Rather than repeating the usual clichés about exploring the unknown or inspiring the next generation, Jack articulated a clear policy direction by saying, “questions about the Vision boil down to whether we want to incorporate the Solar System in our economic sphere, or not.”  He specifically noted that such a motivation is vastly different from the one that propelled America to the Moon in the 1960s, saying, “The Moon has unique significance for all space applications for a reason that to my amazement is hardly ever discussed in popular accounts of space policy.”  The Moon is the nearest, most accessible useful object beyond low Earth orbit and that is why it is the first step of the VSE.  We go to the Moon not to repeat Apollo but to create new capability.  Jack understood this clearly.

The speech Marburger gave at that symposium stands today as one of the clearest and most “visionary” articulations of a future in space ever given.  It was nothing less than the declaration of a new paradigm for spaceflight, one in which we go and do in space whatever jobs we can imagine or need.  This capability is created by learning to use what we find in space, reducing the need to launch (at such prohibitive cost) everything from the bottom of the deepest gravity well in the inner Solar System.  As long as we are held hostage to this old template, we will always be mass- and power-limited in space and thus limited in capability.

Jack Marburger understood the importance of and need for human exploration.   He sought innovative ways to create a sustainable and affordable space program.  Those of us who believe in this vision note his passing with sadness, but also with renewed determination to pursue this viable path.  We honor his memory and salute his contributions.

Other tributes:

Behind the Black

Space Politics

One hundred years ago: Robert Falcon Scott and the crew of the Terra Nova enjoy a celebratory dinner, Midwinter's Day, Antarctica, 1911

“Now is the winter of our discontent” – Richard III, Act 1, scene 1

There is a good piece in today’s Telegraph UK by David Robson of a fateful one-hundredth anniversary – the Midwinter Dinner — June 22, 1911 held in Robert Falcon Scott’s Ross Island hut.  A year earlier, Scott and the crew of the Terra Nova had set off for the Antarctic and the south pole.  It was a carefully planned and perilously financed expedition, a classic journey of the “golden age” of polar exploration.  At the time, Scott had no idea that Roald Amundsen, the famous Norwegian polar explorer, had turned his north pole-bound Fram due south and unknown to Scott and his men, was at that moment camped on the opposite side of the Ross Sea, carefully planning a summer dash to the south pole.

Of what relevance is this story to space and the Moon?  To me, it encompasses and restates several themes I have developed on this blog about the nature of exploration and sustainable presence in a hostile environment.  The theme of the Telegraph article is that Scott’s expedition was all about science.  His team included geographers, geologists, biologists and meteorologists.  They collected specimens, documented phenomena, made observations, and conducted experiments.  Scott’s expedition was organized like a carefully planned military campaign.  Although conducted under the command structure of the Royal Navy, it was a civilian expedition, funded by subscription.  No tax money was used and financing was always a major headache for Scott.

A theme running through Robson’s article has been a recurring motif in polar literature for many years – that while Scott and his team were honorable scientists, conducting true “exploration,” Amundsen and his men were publicity-seeking interlopers, cads and bounders who treacherously misled the noble and long-suffering Scott about their true intentions, and who then had the cheek to actually race ahead to beat Scott to the south pole.  This theme has long been a part of British polar exploration literature – the sting of Amundsen’s victory in the race to the south pole still hurts.  A book and television series on the polar race published over 20 years ago attempted to deconstruct this myth and was roundly blasted in the British press at the time.

But the Telegraph piece contains a fundamental contradiction.  It takes great pains to show Scott’s expedition as a scientific, scholar’s investigation, as opposed to the “PR stunt” of Amundsen’s polar dash.  If this is true, then of what importance was priority in attainment of the south pole anyway?  The pole is merely one more data point on a string of measurement stations.  Scott’s purpose was science, not stunts.  He led a carefully planned and documented expedition to unravel the secrets of the Antarctic.  By arriving at the pole after Amundsen, what could it matter?  He still had his fossils, rock samples and observations, did he not?

Obviously there was much more at stake than admitted, both then and now.  The great age of polar exploration was not about science, any more than Apollo to the Moon was about our first visit to another world.  Large public spectacles like polar exploration were both theater and geopolitical struggles.  In the decades leading to the Scott and Amundsen efforts, many had tried (and failed) to take the north pole.  An entire subculture of polar explorers had developed, each group knowing of the other groups’ efforts in the desperate competition to be the first to stand on top of the world.  Establishing priority became an obsession with many and proof was difficult to obtain (the Frederick Cook-Robert Peary controversy over who was the first at the north pole continues to this day).

Both Scott and Amundsen lived in this milieu.  But they were also Edwardian gentlemen and sporting conduct was natural and expected behavior.  Amundsen’s “sin” was that he discarded the fig leaf of “science” and exposed to public view the raw power politics involved in exploration.  In the words of the President of the Royal Geographic Society Leonard Darwin (son of Charles), Amundsen had not “played the game.”

The idea that exploration is for scientific purposes stems largely from this golden age of polar exploration.  In part, the conflation developed because of the need for Britain to attribute a noble and uplifting rationale to Scott’s polar trip.  His tragic death on the way back from the south pole was made especially bitter by the loss of priority – when Scott arrived at the pole, he found that Amundsen had beaten him there.  One way to make this unpleasant pill more palatable was to assign noble motives to Scott and base ones to Amundsen.  Hence, a mythos developed, sanctifying Scott as a martyr for science and depicting Amundsen as a crass interloper.  An unnoticed side-effect of this storyline was the simultaneous sanctification of science as the rationale for exploration.  This attitude is typified by a comment from an astronomer in the early days of implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration in 2004 that “exploration without science is tourism.”  Scott’s hagiographer could not have put it better.

But this concept, developed one hundred years ago to salve the outrage and hurt feelings of a disappointed nation, does not serve us well as we contemplate the exploration of our Solar System.  Exploration traditionally has a much broader meaning.  Columbus, Balboa and Magellan did not undertake their expeditions for science.  They sought wealth and power; they envisioned new lands for settlement and the spread of their own culture.  In short, the view of  “exploration” prior to being redefined during the golden age of polar exploration had little to do with science and much to do with wealth creation, power projection and settlement.

Science is great and knowledge always has both practical and intangible value, but it is a small part of the motivation for exploration.  The Antarctic is a continent for science but only by mutual agreement of the international community.  The riches of Antarctica remained locked up as scientists hunt its surface for fallen asteroids and evidence for global warming.  Some think this is a template for space exploration; others find such an idea anathema.  Science stagnates when exploration stalls.  If we were exploring the Moon, scientists would find a bounty of extraterrestrial samples and have an unparalleled opportunity to study the record of Earth’s climate locked in eons of undisturbed solar wind in the lunar regolith.  Once humanity and technology are able to utilize the Moon’s resources to break the tyranny of the rocket equation, the vast riches of our Solar System will open to explorers, entrepreneurs, settlers, and scientists alike.

We explore for many reasons. There are many valid and important national interests of which science is but one.  Scott understood this; hence, his disappointment at his own failure to reach the pole first.  As we prepare to leave the Earth on a more permanent basis, it is well to look back at this curious and (I would say) singular interval in history – a time (so we are told) when science became the rationale for exploration.  It wasn’t true then and isn’t true now.

Related side-note:  Videos of my Space Pioneer Award talk at the recent 2011 International Space Development Conference in Hunstville AL have been posted in two parts, HERE and HERE.  This talk touches on several of the themes I mention above.  The slides from my talk are available for download HERE.

Learning to live off the land on the Moon

At the recent International Space Development Conference in Huntsville, Augustine committee member and CEO of XCOR Aerospace Jeff Greason gave a talk on the goals of human spaceflight.  While he discussed many things that I agree with (in particular, making the use of off-planet resources a high priority), one idea in particular stood out.  Greason said that we need some type of long-range goal or objective for our national civil space program.  Picking up on a statement by his Augustine colleague Chris Chyba, Greason suggested that “settlement” should be the goal of human spaceflight; if not, “what the hell are we doing it for?”

This observation naturally went over well with the crowd at the ISDC and the subsequent posting of a video of Jeff’s talk sent many space cadets of the internet into spasms of joy that someone would finally state in public the True Belief – humanity’s destiny is among the stars.  Finally, out of all the confusion and bickering about heavy lift launch vehicles, depots, destinations, and crew vehicles, we have at last a clear articulation of the direction and purpose for the human space program.

There’s only one problem:  it’s not the right goal for NASA.

First, let there be no misunderstanding.  I agree that settlement and the expansion of humanity into space is indeed a noble and desirable thing — I call it the “ultimate rationale” for human spaceflight. By that, I mean that the idea of people going into space to live there, wherever our desires and aspirations may lead, is an objective of our species, a desire to spread human culture beyond its planetary cradle into the cosmos.  That’s a different concept than making space settlement the objective of NASA’s human spaceflight program.  I do not think such is an appropriate goal for a federal program that competes with all the other projects in the discretionary budget.

To most outside space circles (as well as to a surprisingly sizable number within the space community), space is a hostile, barren wilderness, with no harbor for man and his works.  Their solution is to build machines that can be sent to return information from which we will decipher the secrets of the universe.  Moreover, these people can think of at least two dozen different things they would rather spend that money on; you can bet that dreams of space settlement would fare poorly in comparison.

Another problem with “settlement” as an objective is that the metrics for success are difficult to define.  When is space “settled” – when a single human lives permanently off planet?  When a community is thriving on another world?  How large a community and where?  Buying into settlement as our goal means making a permanently moving target your objective; no matter what milestone is reached, you’ve never actually achieved your “goal” of settlement (for a current implementation of this mentality, see “Search for Extraterrestrial Life”).

Finally, settlement is a poor goal for a federal space program because it is so distant.  No one seriously believes that humans will live in space or on another world permanently within the next several decades.  Government programs can barely tolerate time horizons beyond one presidential term, let alone a multi-decadal trek through near-space.  True enough, we can devise a program that delivers significant milestones toward the goal of space settlement within such time frames, but with such a nebulous end point receding into the distant future, it will lose its luster and consequent political support very quickly.

In contrast to Greason’s proposed “settlement strategy,” I have tried to frame a slightly different path for our national space program.  Our “goal” is to expand human reach beyond LEO, first into cislunar space and then into interplanetary space (by “reach,” I mean the routine access of people and machines to any point in space where we need or want these capabilities to do whatever job we need to.)  The “strategy” to accomplish this extension is to establish a resource-processing base on the Moon to make fuel for a cislunar space transportation system.  A “tactical” implementation of this strategy is a robotic ISRU architecture, which will create our first foothold on another world.

What is the advantage of this path over Greason’s settlement sequence?  For one thing, we can accomplish it much sooner than human settlement of space will ever occur; an operational lunar resource processing base can be up and running within 10-20 years of program initiation.  Second, a space faring transportation system is relevant to critical national needs, specifically, our ability to maintain and extend the constellation of economic, scientific, and national strategic satellite assets that reside in cislunar space.  By adopting this goal, we start from a position of political strength: we don’t have to convince Congress about our destiny among the stars, we just have to point out the critical dependence of modern technological civilization on our satellite assets in the volume of space between LEO and the Moon.  Right now, those satellites are all designed as one-offs: build, launch, use, and discard.  We want to change that template to build, extend, maintain and expand.  Developing lunar resources to fuel a space transportation system allows us to do this and more.

By doing these things we lay the groundwork for space settlement. All agree that settlement requires the ability to access and use local planetary resources.  Going to the Moon to harvest its polar water begins that process.  If you want to look upon this as the first step in the settlement of the Solar System, be my guest.  But I suggest that making lunar return relevant to important national economic and security objectives is more likely to help consolidate political support than setting the goal of “settlement” as NASA’s objective.  NASA’s founding charter, the Space Act of 1958, lays out many different objectives and goals for the agency; space settlement is not one of them.  But routine access to cislunar space is; cislunar space is specifically mentioned in the new NASA Authorization Act of 2010.

Settlement is a valid long-term goal for humanity in space – but we must have something with a practical and political payoff in the near-term.

President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself…..”

Tomorrow is the 50^th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s special address to Congress – a request for supplemental appropriation for a variety of projects but most famously remembered for the announcement of his Man-Moon-Decade goal of Project Apollo.  That event, cited by space advocates and excerpted in space and history documentaries, is remembered as the pinnacle of American leadership in space policy.

When President Kennedy announced his Moon landing goal for America, no world power was capable of accomplishing such a feat.  By winning the “Moon race,” America would demonstrate to the non-aligned (and supposedly undecided) world that a free, democratic system could win against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ repressive, communist regime. The Soviet’s then-advantage in rocketry did not give them a leg up on a manned race to the Moon as both countries would have to develop and build a new system to deliver men to the lunar surface.  Congress and enthusiastic Americans accepted this audacious challenge, winning not only the race to the Moon (within the decade) but also developing a strong economy through technological and scientific breakthroughs.

The subsequent forty-year span since Apollo ended has seen space enthusiasts and policy makers searching for the “holy grail” of renewed greatness, believing (because of events following President Kennedy’s bold direction) that presidential statements can make it happen again.  The most recent articulation of this belief comes from one of the most insightful students of the JFK decision, Prof. John Logsdon, whose new book (John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon) focuses on the Apollo decision and its subsequent impact on space policy.  Logsdon places particular emphasis on a supposed change of heart by Kennedy after the Moon race was well underway.  In citing two occasions where Kennedy publicly proposed to the Soviets that we go to the Moon together, Logsdon believes that had he lived, Kennedy would have retooled the race away from a nationalistic competition to joined hands with the Soviets in a cosmic Kumbaya reach for the Moon.

Though Logsdon recognizes that the unique aspect of Apollo came about as a manifestation of Cold War competition (something he believes does not prevail today), he sees JFK’s later comments regarding cooperation as providing us with the “holy grail” of continued space exploration going forward.  “I kind of fall back on presidential leadership,” he said. “I doubt this is going to happen, but I would hope that on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s own speech, next Wednesday, President Obama has something positive to say about working together internationally to find a global strategy for exploration… I would not hold my breath on that happening, but something like that needs to be done.”

After years of reminding space students that the Apollo decision is not a good historical guide for setting a space agenda, Logsdon wants President Obama to resurrect space using the force of a Kennedyesque pronouncement – not as a national challenge, but as he believes Apollo would have developed had Kennedy lived to redirect it:  an international project of cooperation that will financially support space exploration.  By passing the JFK space leadership “torch” to President Obama, Logsdon envisions the Apollo presidential challenge resurrected and revitalized (this time to Mars, the long-held and sought after dream of many space advocates).  But this vision rewrites history:  Apollo wasn’t about space, it was about war, where presidential leadership is needed and required.

The problem with applying Logsdon’s reasoning to the current U.S. space policy morass is that, as with our endless debate about heavy lift vs. other launch vehicle options, it confuses means with ends.  Whether we go into space with or without a bold presidential declaration is secondary to WHY we are doing it.  Because we have not stated what we are trying to achieve, arguments about how we go about it, whether in terms of rockets, destinations, declarations or participants, leave us still sitting on the launch pad (soon, only on a Russian launch pad).  Without an agreed upon national purpose, space has become a political toy, vulnerable to changes in direction with each new administration.

On the 50^th anniversary of Kennedy’s rightly famous speech, the real question before us remains unaddressed and in some respects, unasked.  I ask it now:  What are we trying to accomplish with our national civil space program?  By answering that question and establishing a realistic and reachable national goal, America will establish a lasting space industry and presence, one undeterred or hobbled by changing political winds.

I have my own answer to this question, which I have discussed here and elsewhere in detail.  Space development is an essential, irreplaceable part of everyday life in 21^st Century America; we have charted a course whereby we must learn the skills of creating more capability in space, including the building and maintenance of larger, more capable space assets (as well as protecting existing ones).  To proceed, we need a reusable and extensible Earth-Moon space transportation system.  I believe that one can be created through the production and use of the material and energy resources of the Moon.

Such a transportation system will extend human reach into the Solar System beyond low Earth orbit.  By demonstrating the viability of resource extraction off planet, individual and joint investments will materialize in many forms and from many sectors, spurring on a new and burgeoning space industry.  This template contrasts significantly with an elitist, academic exercise in scientific data collection wrapped in the worn out mantra of “exciting” the public.  Our national interests will be best served through cislunar development and space resource utilization.

If these are desirable goals, then how we go about achieving it can be the subject of legitimate debate.  Until we address the objective of a large-scale national expenditure for space, presidential announcements will never possess the power or the effect Kennedy’s words had in bringing about a great era of American productivity and pride. The United States is at a critical crossroads. Will we lead or will we be content to follow?

Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan and Norm Augustine testify before Congress on the new space direction (NY Times)

Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan recently voiced his doubts and concerns over the future of the human spaceflight program, while former Lockheed-Martin CEO Norman Augustine reflected on the current state of our space “vision” and/or the possible lack thereof.  I found these perspectives by two giants of our national space program remarkable not in terms of what they think, but rather in how those in the space blogosphere have reacted to their positions.  Some “New Space” advocates accuse people who disagree with the new direction of being too stupid and stubborn to understand its benefits or too parochial and selfish (or a combination thereof) to realize that government sponsored spaceflight is simply political pork.

Many in the New Space media have disparaged Cernan’s comments about this administration’s direction in space.  Following each article, most comments attribute various nefarious or personal reasons for the position he holds.  In contrast, Augustine’s remarks are praised, mostly on the grounds that he has embraced the “new direction” of using “commercial” space entities to transport people and cargo to low Earth orbit.  I note in this dichotomy a recurring theme in the national debate we are having on the direction and tactical implementation of our national civil space program.  That theme has many dimensions, but can be summed up as follows:  if you agree with the new path, you are a wise, thrifty visionary, but if you have doubts or reservations about this path, you are a short-sighted reactionary, stuck in the past, a lover of political pork and incapable of understanding the true brilliance of the new policy.

What did Cernan actually say?  He has doubts about many of the claims made regarding “New Space,” specifically claims in the press about costs, schedule and capabilities.  Cernan’s point is that it’s easy to design paper rockets and make hyperbolic claims about “new approaches” but in the business of space, things don’t always work as expected.  Cernan also questions what markets will support commercial space (much of the focus is on NASA contracting with New Space companies to service the ISS with cargo and crew) and even questions the designation “commercial,” both on the grounds of the aforementioned non-existing markets and the reliance of some commercial space companies on NASA funding to develop their product.

What does Augustine have to say about this?  He is much more sanguine about the possibilities of commercial space, saying that they are coming along “better than I expected,” an assessment that is somewhat vague on metrics.  Augustine’s principal message is that NASA is not getting enough money.  He claims that another $3 billion per year would make all the difference between a good program and an “unexecutable” one.  He also took the time to take a couple of shots at one of his long-standing targets, the Moon as a destination, commenting that spending billions and 25 years to “go back to the Moon doesn’t inspire anybody.”  He did note that a brief stop at the Moon might be allowable, if it were really necessary on our way to Mars.

New Space companies claim that they are commercial enterprises developing new space vehicles.  If they are truly commercial, what markets do they serve?  NASA is a government agency and has contracted for products and services from its beginning.  A commercial company takes money from investors and sells a product or provides a service for profit.  Commercial companies have access to NASA technology, so why do they also require and receive government subsidies?

I don’t see anything in Gene Cernan’s remarks that I would characterize as “short-sighted.”  He is asking legitimate questions and expressing concerns about significant changes (and of the use of the term “commercial”) to an effort that he both deeply understands and to which he’s dedicated his life.  New Space advocates tell us that vast new markets await the advent of new commercial launch services and that they’ll be launching multiple payloads frequently, at a fraction of current launch costs.  If questioned further they dismissively wave off debate by saying NASA is simply a bloated federal agency and that the ticket to lower launch costs lies in putting those federal dollars into New Space hands.

In contrast, Augustine is pleased with the progress of commercial space companies.  And despite being dubbed “the mission to nowhere,” NASA and the administration appear undeterred about keeping Flexible Path as their guiding direction.  It is clear from this interview and some previous remarks that Augustine’s primary objective during the work of his committee was to eliminate the return to the Moon as an agency objective.  He clearly views lunar return (as many in NASA’s leadership also choose to characterize it) as a re-boot of Apollo, with the same objectives and (more or less) the same architecture, a gap-filler on the way to Mars.

For the last two years, I have discussed and documented the purpose of the Moon in the Vision for Space Exploration and how the Constellation/Augustine perspective is wrong.  The objective of going to the Moon is to learn how to live and work on another world using local resources to create new capabilities.  What perplexes many is that the Augustine committee report states that the ultimate rationale for human spaceflight is understanding how people might someday live and work in space and then it went on to eliminate the one goal (living and working on the Moon) relevant to that objective.

Some honestly oppose this new direction because they see it as fundamentally flawed – a shell-game attempt to divert attention away from the ongoing, systematic dismantling of our national space faring capability.  The exchange of a definitive goal (the Moon) for a “flexible” series of quasi-goals (an asteroid, martian moons) is a recipe for Brownian motion and nonproductive agency chaos.  “Investment” in studies of “new and revolutionary technologies” is a euphemism for widget-making, mostly of devices with limited or questionable relevance to future spaceflight.  And the transfer of responsibility for space launch and transportation to the “commercial” sector is simply government contracting by another name, only without the same product assurance.  Statements (marketing?) suggesting that SpaceX will send a human mission to “Mars in 10-20 years” does not engender confidence in the Chief Designer’s understanding of the realities of space travel.

Many educated, thoughtful people, with years of experience in space business, are concerned about this new direction.  They are speaking out not because they are old fuddy-duddies mired in past glories, but because they have serious issues about the claims being made and the irreparable harm being done to our national space capability.  They also see the removal of a clear strategic direction as a serious problem, one that will leave the agency burning significant amounts of money to little benefit.

As for my “rose colored” glasses, suffice it to say that I think Gene Cernan is right to be concerned about the future of space and that Norm Augustine is wrong about the Moon.  Some of us may have our heads in the sand, but that’s better than where the heads of some others are.

Yuri's Night in Space, 2011: Party on, dudes!

“let us sit upon the ground. And tell sad stories of the death of kings” – Richard II, Act III, Scene 2

The nearly simultaneous 50^th anniversary of the beginning of human spaceflight and the forthcoming end of the Space Shuttle program has philosophical members of the chattering classes making the rounds to thumb their noses or hawk their wares, waxing poetic over historical ironies, wasted opportunities and dollars, and damn near exhausting Roget’s Thesaurus searching for words to express their innermost profound thoughts about space exploration.

Case in point:  in a vacuous piece at Salon.com, Michael Lind invites us to “embrace” the end of human spaceflight.  It was all just a ghastly mistake, don’t you see?  Anyway, robots can do all the science and there’s no need to extend humanity into space because if a global disaster occurs, we can take refuge in underground bunkers.  Mr. President!  We must not allow … a mine shaft gap!

As long as we’re marking this melancholy milestone, why do we (or rather, did we) have a human spaceflight program?  Many have attempted to answer this question from a variety of viewpoints, including the geopolitical, public excitement, inspirational, or the “because it’s there” rationales.  The recent Augustine committee report tackled this question and after paying homage to the usual obligatory rationales (e.g., international cooperation), came up with this answer: the ultimate rationale is to move humanity into the Solar System.  In fact, they assert that all other rationales are mere subsets of this dominant, overriding one.

The argument for this motivation is simple – some day, some how, a global-scale catastrophe will make the surface of the Earth uninhabitable, possibly for hundreds of years (stock those bunkers well).  Moreover, such a disaster could well strike with little or no warning.  We’re warned about the dangers of near-Earth objects, though a killer impact could come from the outermost part of the Solar System.  Such objects move in at such amazing speeds that there is little time to react even once one is recognized.  We might not be able to intercept it; comets can pass through the inner Solar System at speeds exceeding 70 km per second.  Finally, there is the problem of interdiction and deflection.  We have only a vague notion of how to do this and by vague, I mean none.

The idea that people can live off Earth, either in space or on some other planetary surface, seems incredible, but no more so than living underwater or in some hostile, remote wasteland seemed to people in the past.  If it is physically possible, someone will do it – some time and somewhere.  People move where there is empty space; they always have and always will.

So an obituary for human spaceflight may be premature.  The reaction to the idea of humans living somewhere other than on Earth is interesting and reflects a basic division within humanity.  For any new frontier, there are always those who go and those who stay.  Those who stay cannot imagine the motivations of those who go, often attributing irrationality – if not insanity – to their actions.

Space is a frontier not yet fully opened.  Although we understand how to do it in principle, we do not yet have the practical knowledge to make it feasible.  I have argued that if space is to become a future home for humanity, we must learn how to extract what we need in space from what we find there.  Unless we desire future human space missions to be forever consigned to the current template of bringing everything with us, learning to live off the land is a requirement regardless of where we go or what we do.

Given this long-term requirement, what should be the role of our national civil space program?  I believe that a small-scale demonstration of the viability of extracting useful products from space resources is a critical first step.  This was to be our mission on the Moon and it still can be.  Like any new skill, we should start with the easy stuff.  Extracting water from lunar polar ice should be our first task for resource processing, albeit this relatively simple task is still difficult and fraught with unknowns.  But if not to address and solve such seemingly intractable problems, what’s a space program for?  With such goals we reap the bounty of new technology and economic wealth.  Commercial will find a market for demonstrated potential.

Yet another recent article advances as “myth” the idea that robotic spaceflight prospers when human spaceflight prospers.  I contend that in fact, this is no myth.  However, advocates of purely robotic space programs disagree, believing that once our expensive human program melts away, all of their robotic space missions (queued up and waiting to fly) will be showered with copious funding – after all, science is the main reason for space exploration and science is done best by machines.

Well, we’re about to test this particular storyline because human spaceflight is going to be suspended at NASA – “officially” only for several years, but in reality, possibly permanently.  The retirement of Shuttle leaves the United States with no national capability for human access to orbit and no real plans for a replacement.  There are hopes for a burgeoning commercial market but their long-term viability remains uncertain.  As of now, despite some unsettled issues with the language of the Congressional authorization for NASA, this is what remains of our once great U.S. human space program.

So how does robotic planetary exploration fare in this new organizational shake-up?   At the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the long-awaited planetary exploration “Decade Study” was rolled out.  Missions to Mars, Jupiter’s satellite Europa, Venus and the Moon were all described.  However, just before this plan was made public, the “out year budget” proposed by the administration was released; funding for planetary exploration declines by almost a quarter over the next five years, making many of these potential missions questionable at best and non-starters at most.  The new Decadal Study – almost two years of deliberation, analysis and debate by the planetary science community – may be D.O.A.

Welcome to the new Nirvana.