GOD WILLING, the crew of the
Discovery will land safely this morning. That the Almighty needs to be invoked is a reflection of what a disaster this mission has been for Nasa. Despite spending more than £1 billion on “improvements” since the
Columbia was lost in 2003, a similar problem emerged on launch as did two years ago. The rest of the fleet has been grounded and Dr John Logsdon, the Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, says: “We are seeing the death throes of the space shuttle. The problem is not that the machinery is old but the whole concept is a mistake.”
Despite this, the pressure to place this dodo in orbit again will be enormous. Nasa has plans for a new generation of rockets (ironically, much the same as the “old generation” that the shuttle was designed to replace) that would put men and equipment into space more safely. Yet these will not be available until 2011 at the earliest. If no more manned flights take place before then, however, the ten to 15 space shuttle trips scheduled to complete work at the International Space Station will not happen, either. And without that activity the present blueprint for man to return to the Moon in 2018, establish a permanent base there and move on to Mars by perhaps 2025, would be in tatters.
Which, far from being a tragedy, would be a massive blessing in disguise. The whole of the manned space programme is dangerous, obscenely expensive and unnecessary. It is appalling that it took the deaths of the Columbia crew and the threat to the lives of the Discovery astronauts to make this evident. It would be more outrageous if American politicians and senior space officials now disregarded the lessons that should have been learnt and pressed on towards the Moon and the Red Planet.
There are three compelling reasons why this venture should be abandoned. The first is that a voyage to Mars would take the better part of three years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and expose those sent to staggering challenges. The radiation emitted from a single violent solar storm (one occurs, on average, every six months) would be fatal. This is an infinitely more awkward task than a shuttle flight — and they are proving difficult.
The second reason is that, even if the intrepid explorers were to land, there would not be much that they could do on arrival. Mars has no magnetic field and precious little radiation to protect anybody on its surface, no matter what they might wear, from massive levels of radiation. This may be just as well because, if the purpose of this celestial tour were to inquire whether there is any form of life on Mars, human beings might well transport it there in the form of bacteria.
The last reason should, though, be the most persuasive. There is almost no chance that a manned expedition would discover anything more about Mars than the Pathfinder mission did in 1997. That spectacularly successful unmanned probe, which involved a journey of 150 million miles from Earth, cost a quarter of a single space shuttle launch into a comparatively low orbit. The real scientific advances of the past decade have come from the likes of Pathfinder, the Galileo tour of Jupiter and its moons, the ongoing Cassini expedition to Saturn and Titan and the dramatic Deep Impact probe that recently crashed into one comet and is being reprogrammed to smash into another. All these efforts have yielded high value for a low investment. And nobody dies if they malfunction.
When compared with the progress that unmanned space exploration has made, human activity has been stunningly unimpressive. While Nasa speaks vaguely of the “important scientific experiments” being conducted on the International Space Station, what this really means is that experiments are organised to assess how human beings respond to the extremely hostile environment of what would be best described as “inner space” not “outer space”. The results have been so discouraging that when John Glenn returned to orbit in 1998, 36 years after he had circled our planet, although the technology was vastly superior, the harsh regime there is such that he was only 80 miles higher than he had been the first time. As Professor Robert Park, the author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, has rightly argued: “With every day that passes, we learn to build better robots. Humans, by contrast, have not changed much in 35,000 years.”
So why are we still doing it? Those who support manned missions, despite their human and financial cost, offer two justifications publicly and one privately. The first tends to be on the lines of “it is our destiny”, coupled with “it would be a sign of weakness if we were not there”. This is the sort of tosh one would expect from those advocating British entry to the euro, not respectable members of the scientific community. The second, aimed at Congress and American citizens, is faintly menacing. “If we, the United States, back away from space exploration, other people will be there and we won’t,” Mike Griffin, the head of Nasa, once claimed, “and I think that to be unacceptable.” Why Mr Griffin believes that the Chinese might be immune to cosmic radiation is, alas, unrecorded.
The rarely acknowledged truth, nonetheless, is different. Nasa considers manned operations to be the equivalent of a gigantic supermarket “loss leader”. The US public, it assumes, will pick up the bill for the useful parts of space exploration (unmanned) only if it also has the thrill of the sexier but virtually pointless aspects of it (involving people).
This argument might have been valid once, but it has long since lost its virtue. The thesis can be turned on its head. If Nasa persists with dangerous, expensive, unnecessary missions that provide little in return, then it may discredit everything that is does, including the fantastic unmanned expeditions. Neil Armstrong famously referred to “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. When Discovery comes home, Nasa should admit that manned space flight has been a giant leap sideways..
