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July 20, 2009
Walking on the moon
It seems everyone but me is misty eyed about the 40th anniversary on the moon. The American pursuit of manned space travel is has been a colossal waste of men and treasure. As neat as it is to see dashing men land on the moon, almost all the scientific value of the entire manned space program could have been archived with an unmanned space program for something like 10% of the price. It distracts thousands of talented people who could otherwise be designing less expensive automated space projects. In the process, 17 people have died.
The strongest argument for the manned space program is that it produces information on getting men into space. Even so, if the goal is to maximize what we learn about bringing men safely and cheaply into space, would our space program look anything like the one we have today? There is no innovation in price and little innovation in safety in the manned space program. If we could have the entire scientific output of experiments from the manned space program that do not relate to humans in space or we could have the output of the Hubble telescope, I doubt it would be a close comparison. Hubble would win by landslide.
Wait you say, the Hubble was broken and had to be fixed. By the time Hubble is retired in 2010, NASA and U.S. taxpayers will have invested $6 billion in the observatory. In contrast, Each shuttle launch costs around $1.3bn and for the next trip to the moon the cost of Constellation's Orion capsule, a more advanced and spacious version of the Apollo lunar module, and the Ares 1 and Ares V launchers needed to put it in orbit are 150 billion and 44 billion respectively. So if we messed up the first Hubble we could have sent up another one or invented a remote robotic repair ream rather than fix it for a lot less than maintaining an manned space program to repair it.
If we were serious about NASA as a scientific tool rather than a marketing one, our budget would look more like that of the ESA which spends only one eighth of its budget on manned space projects. Of course they free ride on our shuttle. Perhaps landing on the moon is so amazing that we should do it even if it has no scientific value. But then we should design it to go there cheaply and safely and not treat it as a substitute for real scientific work. When we think about putting men on the moon or mars, we should be framing that as winning gold metals in the Olympics, not being the first to decode the genome. The current setup of putting both the space propaganda and the space science under the same agency ensures that the ferociously compete for limited funds and staff.
Posted by OneEyedMan at July 20, 2009 6:55 AM
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