The Dream is Dead?

Cosmos Magazine recently published an article discussing the "reality" of human spaceflight. That is, physical (rocket technology) and chemical (the frail human body) make it nearly insurmountable to practically roam into the vast stretches of deep space successfully. Sadly, this is true, no matter what the Star Trek enthusiasts want to think (and I'm one of them!)

Are we doomed to remain bound to earth-- or, at best-- to continue to make the equivalent of sortis into LEO and maybe... if we're lucky.... to a NEO or the moon? Is human exploration of Mars simply impossible (sorry Bob Zubrin)?

I have to admit, when you consider the limitations of the human body, space radiation (for starters) and the fact that we simply don't know the dose of the "gravity prescription" (as one colleague has noted on several occasions), you have to wonder. Is it all a pipe dream?

What do you think?

The real legacy of U.S. Spaceflight?

I read an interesting letter to the editor in "Space News" some weeks back (May 3, 2010). It discussed the usual “justifications” for conducting human spaceflight:

Inspiration
Astronauts as role models: the “best of America”
National pride
Some scientific knowledge is better acquired by humans than robots
Perceived US leadership role in science and technology

What really caught my eye, however, was a followup to this letter in the next issue of "Space News" where the author recalled a conversation he had with Wernher von Braun many years ago where he asked, “Wernher, what did we really accomplish?” in reference to the U.S. space program and lunar exploration.

Take a guess what von Braun’s response was as one of the “great lasting achievements of the space program”, according to the editorialist?

“Hugo, more than anything else, we taught industry the concept of reliability. You know, you take a color television, which is a very complicated device. You take it out of the box, and it works! And it keeps on working. Your automobile, which used to be for repair frequently, almost never sees the shop now. We taught reliability!”

I think it’s ironic that von Braun distills it all down to one pragmatic answer. No lofty platitudes, no pie-in- the-sky dreamy discourse. Just…reliability. Spoken like an engineer through-and-through.

Could this be true? Is that all we have to claim in the end? What happened to "flags and footprints?" National pride? Winning the "space race?"

Did the glory days of U.S. spaceflight all come down to a sophisticated engineering feat with no other real legacy? Have we been bamboozled into thinking otherwise?

What do others think?

Neil Armstrong on the offensive-- too little too late?

I have to admit I am a bit shocked that the typically silent Neil Armstrong is so vocal about President Obama's space policy. A little late to open his mouth, in my opinion. Nevertheless, I am also in a bit of a quandary as to whether he and his like-minded former Apollo comrades are right... or backward-looking:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/neilarmstrongobamasnewspaceplanpoorlyadvised

While I want to applaud Obama for throwing the gauntlet down regarding a greater role for commercial space in LEO and perhaps beyond, the reality of the situation is that.... we have no launch vehicles flying yet... or likely in the very near future! And I don't know about anyone else, but does it bother you that we may be hitching rides to the ISS on a very expensive Soyuz (though, admittedly, it probably is a bargain, relatively speaking.)

The question becomes, philosophically, who's right? Is anyone right? Does anyone care? Should we care?

Obama's plans for NASA-- shades of military procurement disasters?

The Space Review has a provacative article this week which compares the Obama "space plan" to the disasters which have befallen the military in the past with their miscellaneous schema for procurement, project oversight etc:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1619/1

The horror stories contained within remind me strikingly of the similar idiotic procurement nightmares I deal with daily in the pharmaceutical industry. No surprises there; I'm surrounded!

Thoughts on the legitimacy of this comparision/prediction with the Obama plan?

Can human spaceflight be justified?

On the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Atlantic Monthly just published a great article in which the following series of questions were posed:

"So in the highly segmented world of NASA, is the Hubble a triumph and justification for human space flight? Or proof that we can be equally thrilled, excited and humbled by our robotic explorations in space...and proof of how much more we can learn from non-human voyages and missions?"

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/04/20-years-later-hubble-humans-and-the-future-of-space-flight/39212/

Former NASA astronaut Story Musgrave has an interesting perspective on these questions.

What's your take?

Enabling safe passage to NEOs

On April 15, 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama, in a speech at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, proclaimed that "By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space. We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history."

A manned mission to a near-earth asteroid is a bold endeavor, and proponents believe that it may represent a more viable deep space target for exploration than a return to the moon. However, the capabilities for sustaining a crew for such a mission are many-fold more complex than caring for astronauts in low earth orbit, which is the bulk of our recent experience with spaceflight.

What issues and hurdles are likely for astronauts to be successfully launched-- and returned!-- from a near-earth asteroid mission? How is crew selection, training and the need for enabling technologies going to evolve to make this all possible? How does a near-earth asteroid mission prepare astronauts for an eventual sojourn to Mars, which President Obama hopes to also see in his lifetime?