The Planetary Society is For And Against Human Spaceflight
The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankind, op ed, Washington Post
“Still, a human traveler to Mars should make the most of its airless monotony, because there is no coming back. The long passage through the vacuum of space will expose astronauts to intense and prolonged bombardment by cosmic rays and unimpeded solar radiation — a death sentence for which NASA has no solution (though scientists continue to seek one). At the Hotel Mars, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. What’s more, Mars is a dead end. As fatally desolate and brutal as Mars is, our neighbor planet is the most habitable destination for many, many light years in any direction.”
Keith’s note: I’m rather surprised that the Washington Post would print such an error-riddled opinion piece – and devote half a page to it. Its take on the whole ‘why fly people in space when we can fly robots’ rant is breathtaking in its ignorance. And, for what its worth, I find it ironic that the Post, whose space reporting is otherwise quite stellar, is owned by Jeff Bezos who is a clear adherent of the notion of opening space up to as many people as possible.
But these anti-human space flight opinions are not exactly uncommon. One of the hotbeds of these sentiments is the Planetary Society. This video “A space engineer explains why humans will never go past Mars“ was just posted by Business Former Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman parrots the anti-human spaceflight mantra: “Louis Friedman, an aerospace engineer and author of “Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars,” believes that humans may never travel past Mars. The former head of The Planetary Society says technology will replace exploring humans.”
Recently, as he sat in the audience waiting for Elon Musk to talk about his plans for space exploration – including Mars, current Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye said “no one wants to colonize Mars” and then explained why.
In 2014 Planetary Society Senior editor Emily Lakdawalla? tweeted “The highs and lows of the last week remind us why the future must be in robotic, not crewed, space flight.” Just to be clear on this, in 2015 Lakdawalla wrote “This is one of many reasons I’m glad that The Planetary Society is advocating an orbit-first approach to human exploration. If we keep our filthy meatbag bodies in space and tele-operate sterile robots on the surface, we’ll avoid irreversible contamination of Mars — and obfuscation of the answer to the question of whether we’re alone in the solar system — for a little while longer. Maybe just long enough for robots to taste Martian water or discover Martian life.”
In their summary of the recent National Space Council meeting Casey Dreier and Jason Davis from the Planetary Society tried (like the rest of us) to figure out what America’s new space policy would be. They noted “Through its Humans Orbiting Mars workshop and report, The Planetary Society found great value in sending humans to Mars in terms of scientific return, searching for life, and challenging our technological capabilities. How these objectives will fit into a revamped human exploration program for either the Moon or Mars is still unclear.”
Its hard to reconcile what Dreier and Davis write with what Nye, Friedman, and Lakdawalla have said. At best, the Planetary Society’s take on human exploration (Mars in particular) is ‘look but don’t touch’ which is in direct contrast to the path NASA has been taking – and the path that the current White House has clearly stated that it intends to follow.
Keith’s update: Just to be clear: I used to work for NASA as a space biologist and I fully appreciate the issue and challenges of planetary protection. Also, I think that orbiting Mars initially to do recon and telerobotics is a perfectly fine approach with historical precedents – so long as it is done in preparation for human landings – not instead of human landings.
Before Capn Kirk went to a planet surface, he launched probes and scanned the surace. I’m just saying.
The life he was looking for was hot alien babes, though.
Just as NASA did with the Moon. But if you aren’t going to put boots on the ground why bother?
Sure science is great, but folks forget the purpose of science is to move humanity forward. Otherwise it’s merely an excerise in philosophy as with the ancient Greeks who studied things like steam turbines but never did anything useful.
Please stop using the term “boots on the ground” unless you are planning on invading something.
But that is what astronauts wear with the space suits. And the astronauts left boot prints on the Moon, not foot prints 🙂
Do you have a better term?
The phrase has a long military and human tragedy connotation. We are hopefully going to space in a peaceful and fruitful manner different than most of human history. And therefore we must be cognizant of our verbiage and its meaning. There is no single replacement phrase as yet, nor does there have to be, so you just need to say it with more and clearer words.
OK, how about sandals on the ground? Or does that bring up the image of Roman soldiers 🙂 Now they were nasty.
But really how folks hear a phrase reveals more about how they see the world and history than the phrase itself. In business it just means sending someone to get an accurate picture of what is going on versus getting filtered reports.
But since you find it offensive viewing from a military perspective tell me what you see as today’s politically correct alternative? What would be a better term to reflect having someone on the scene and seeing what is going on?
Before we do any landings on Mars, we need to drop a bunch of drill probes all over to see if there are any signs of life within the top few meters of the Martian surface. That will help with determining how careful we need to be in planetary protection terms.
Kirk’s smart. There are tons of solar systems and planets out there – better to use the probes to filter the explored systems down to the ones interesting enough to send a crewed ship there.
I’ve asked this before, but I’ll try again. What defines “enough”. How many of those drill probes? How deep do they have to drill? Exactly what measurements are made at the bottom of the drill hole, or on samples collected there? I’m looking for some plan for closure. Without it, people like Ms. Lakdawalla will keep saying, “we haven’t done enough yet” forever.
6-8 landers (like Surveyor before Apollo), 2-3 meters down, just looking for any indication that there might be biology happening close to the surface where your astronauts might be. You could land them all roughly in the same area, or spread them out to a variety of terrain. Don’t make each of them a mission, either – make the mission sending them all, and tolerate a higher failure rate to keep costs down (this is just a precursor to a human landing mission).
That’s reasonable. Let’s see. The InSight lander has a drill which is supposed to go down to 5 meters. You’re talking about an engineering project, so you could (in theory) blow off scientists who wanted new and different instruments on each lander. At a guess, you manage eight landers of that sort for two or three billion. That’s a relatively small cost compared to a manned landing. Now, if we could get NASA’s Planetary Protection office to sign off on it, they could make this a mandatory precursor and hand the requirement off to NASA’s human exploration directorate, or SpaceX or whatever, and I think it would work. But I’d also expect the Planetary Society to lobby heavily against it, saying it isn’t enough.
The radiation problem is big but not impossible to deal with if you have cheaper launch costs. You can put the hab module inside a water tank, for example. Even on the moon you need shielding for the crew and “storm cellars” for major flares.
Maybe it’s someone trying to show it’s still editorially independ even though Jeff Bezos owns it.
And given that title, NO ONE can be surprised that we have not left Earth orbit for the past 45 years. You cant expect the average person or government officials to get behind something if the so called experts cant. Where there is no true “will” there is no way and ultimately no action.
*whistles slowly* That is one hell of a horrifyingly bad article. The whole “radiation in deep space will literally incinerate human beings within seconds” mantra is enough to irritate me on its own…
Yes, but he has his own opposition that is living in a fantasy world. Imagine, being one of Elon’s slaves on Mars… And this is in Salon Online. I guess they just don’t make anti-space writers like they used to…
https://www.salon.com/2017/…
Against Mars-a-Lago: Why SpaceX’s Mars colonization plan should terrify you
Keith A. Spencer
10.08.2017•10:00 AM
“Imagine signing away years of your life to be a housekeeper in the Mars-a-Lago hotel, with your communications, water, food, energy usage,even oxygen tightly managed by your employer, and no government to file a grievance to if your employer cuts your wages, harasses you, cuts off your oxygen. Where would Mars-a-Lago’s employees turn if their rights were impinged upon? Oh wait, this planet is run privately? You have no rights. Musk’s vision for Mars colonization is inherently authoritarian. The potential for the existence of the employees of the Martian tourism industry to slip into something resembling indentured servitude, even slavery, cannot be underestimated.”
It’s a lazy piece, but it does have some true points. Mars really is a desolate place, and there really isn’t a rationale for sending people there permanently other than “they want to be there and can raise the money/resources to get there”. Robots, generally speaking, are far better for space exploration in terms of cost-effectiveness, and they’re only going to get better with time. It will take a revolution in launch and operating costs to make humans cost-effective again.
The radiation stuff is nonsense, though. And it’s obvious why we’d send people back to the Moon: so they can do research and maybe build stuff there from lunar resources.