How Not to Go to Mars
Well, this month we will see (I hope) what direction the United States will be heading in space. With the centennial of flight celebration, as I indicated last month, I expect the President to avail himself of the opportunity to make some serious waves. He has certainly never shied away from doing so in the past, and the times certainly do call for it.
The question is whether he's getting good advice. There are hopeful signs, like the prominence given to, and the positive reception of, Robert Zubrin's Congressional testimony (emphasizing two things: use Space Shuttle propulsion systems as the core of an easy-to-make heavy lifter that will not waste payload on a reusable orbiter, and use that heavy lifter to launch a manned mission to Mars within a decade). But there is also the persistent problem that it's much easier to talk about grand things than it is to do them; this mortal wound befell the efforts of the first President Bush to get his $500 billion Space Exploration Initiative off the ground. "Star Trek in your lifetime!" is a lovely dream, but not so very likely.
The thing is, it seems like people didn't learn the right lesson; instead of reigning in the goals and putting them on a shorter timetable (politics is, after all, notoriously fickle), they're reigning in the goals and leaving them on a generational time table. The result tends to be a great objective--man on Mars!--dragged out to the point of triviality. "If we can't do it except with a great big fifty-year project, why not wait until the technology gets better," says the person behind the desk.
Don't think it doesn't happen. That struggle has eaten at the Pluto-Kuiper Belt mission from day one. If we don't launch at the next opportunity, with current technology we will never send a probe to Pluto. But people keep asking, why not wait on better technology?
Well, it's a simple thing, really. Do you build what you can sell, or sell what you can build? We can count on technology in hand and funding obtained now. Future promises aren't worth the paper they're not printed on.
A prime example of the kind of pseudo-ambitious, oh-so-uninspiring thinking that I'm talking about was printed by the newspaper Florida Today. http://www.floridatoday.com/columbia/fut... They put on a lavish spread detailing mankind's next fifty years in space, with the final goal being a manned mission to Mars. They kindly broke it down decade by decade.
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