Gwynne Dyer: The abandonment of the U.S. manned space program

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      When the first man on the moon died on August 25, President Barack Obama tweeted: “Neil Armstrong was a hero not just of his time, but of all time.” Armstrong’s final comment on Obama, on the other hand, was that the president’s policy on manned space flight was “devastating”, and condemned the United States to “a long downhill slide to mediocrity”.

      That was two years ago, when three Americans who had walked on the moon—Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, and Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17—published an open letter to Obama pointing out that his new space policy effectively ended American participation in the human exploration of deep space.

      Armstrong was famously reluctant to give media interviews. It took something as hugely short-sighted as Obama’s cancellation of the Constellation program in 2010 to make him speak out in public. But when he did, he certainly did not mince his words.

      “We will have wasted our current $10-billion-plus investment in Constellation,” he said, “and equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded. For the United States...to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit...destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.”

      Barack Obama was never a politician with a big international vision. He has experts to do that stuff for him, and of course they are all part of the “Washington consensus”, which is just as parochial as he is. So he cancelled the big Ares rockets that would have taken American astronauts back to the moon and onwards to Mars and the asteroids. Some other spending program just yelled louder. Maybe the Navy wanted another aircraft carrier.

      If NASA (the National Aviation and Space Administration) wants to put an American into space now, it has to buy passage on a Russian rocket, which is currently over $50 million per seat. By 2015 the Chinese will probably be offering an alternative service (which may bring the price down), and before long India may be in the business as well. But the United States won’t.

      There is likely to be a gap of between five and 10 years between the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet last year and the first new American vehicles capable of putting a human being into space. Even then it will only be into low Earth orbit: none of the commercial vehicles now being developed will be able to do what the Saturn rockets did 41 years ago when they sent Neil Armstrong and his colleagues to the moon.

      Armstrong was a former military officer who would never directly call the president of the United States a liar or a fool, but his words left little doubt of what he really thought: “The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the president's proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.” In other words, don’t hold your breath.

      He was equally blunt about Obama’s assurances that the United States was not really giving up on deep space: “While the president's plan envisages humans travelling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.” Not the return to the moon by 2020 planned by the Constellation program, but pie in the sky when you die.

      This is not a global defeat for manned exploration of the solar system. The Russians are talking seriously about building a permanent base on the moon, and all the major Asian contenders are working on heavy-lift rockets that would enable them to go beyond Earth orbit. It’s just an American loss of will, shared equally by Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

      “I know China is headed to the moon,” Romney told a town hall audience in Michigan in February. “They’re planning on going to the moon, and some people say, oh, we’ve got to get to the moon, we’ve got to get there in a hurry to prove we can get there before China. It’s like, guys, we were there a long time ago, all right? And when you get there would you bring back some of the stuff we left?” Arrogant, complacent, and wrong.

      Americans went to the moon a long time ago, but the point is that they can’t get there now, and won’t be able to for a long time to come. Which is why, in an interview 15 years ago, Neil Armstrong told BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh: “The dream remains. The reality has faded a bit, but it will come back, in time.” It will, but probably not in the United States.

      Comments

      26 Comments

      miguel

      Aug 27, 2012 at 11:54am

      I've been hearing about a cash flow problem, not sure if it's true or not though.
      It's been some time since both NASA and the Pentagon could have all their wishlists fulfilled. Right now there is big bucks being made in armaments.
      Miguel

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      Coach Dobbs

      Aug 27, 2012 at 12:16pm

      It is a safe bet that Obama would much sooner have the program continue however cancelaltion of the program is a matter of cost cutting. This just another symptom of the decline of the US. Much has changed since 1969 when US budget spending were more in control but now the US is quickly becoming just another Greece or Spain, not because of excessive social programs but due in part to bloated security and military costs driven by a collective paranoa with expenditures well beyond revenues and a staggerring, non sutainable debt load. This situation didn't exist in 1969.when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. It is indeed a shame that it has all come to this.

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      prenup

      Aug 27, 2012 at 12:39pm

      deep space travel is a total and utter complete waste of money and resources.

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      Dennis Ryan

      Aug 27, 2012 at 1:06pm

      When we went to the moon in 1969, there happened to be an equally trailblazing TV program called "Star Trek" that predicted us not only being in space, but living there comfortably. The program captured the public's imagination as never before. Gene Roddenbarry did things on that program never done before: a jew named Leonard Nimoy playing an alien named Spock; a black lady communications officer named Uhura and finally, a Russian ensign named Chekov; all now iconic characters. And legend has it Roddenberry had to fight hard to keep these characters, given the temperament at the time. Future space exploration indeed requires a united Earth, where we can pool resources to create the ships and technology to get us out there. Various experts have said as much, and there is even a morality behind this that is self evident. I can't support any future space exploration, as much as I would like to, until we mature enough to cooperate and stop squabbling with each other and fighting useless and morally wasteful wars. Our collective vision needs to be much bigger.

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      R U Kiddingme

      Aug 27, 2012 at 2:04pm

      Dennis - I'm not a big believer in waiting until conditions are perfect if the project itself is worthwhile. I happen to believe that the Roddenberry utopia (all nations holding hands in space) is both desirable and achievable and I don't know that the cart can't lead the horse in this aspect. There's already an international space station, why not an international space agency -- Starfleet, if you will -- administered in a relatively neutral land and chartered in such a way that it would be difficult to pervert into a weapon against any one country.

      Not to say that it should be unarmed -- I also think it is prudent to do have some guns pointing up at the incoming asteroids -- but just to develop it internationally.

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      R. Glort

      Aug 27, 2012 at 2:09pm

      I assume "prenup" is just being a troll, but:

      1 modest sized asteroid when mined would produce 100s of billions of dollars worth of precious metals.

      If we used half the asteroids and less than 1% of the moon, we could produce space habitats (with lakes, hills, and forests) with 100 times the living space of the Earth's surface.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Three

      A waste if we don't do it, for if we don't we'll almost surely ruin the Earth and ourselves. Versus making the Earth a park, and humankind richer than most can imagine.

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      SPY vs SPY

      Aug 27, 2012 at 2:19pm

      I wish someone would provide 1 or 2 examples of any benefits that the manned space program has brought to mankind.

      The Space program has cost Billions if not a few Trillions of dollars, for what?

      For the most part the 1960's and 1970's space program was a cover for developing Inter - Continental Ballistic Rockets that would carry Nuclear Weapons halfway around the world in just an hours or so.

      So please anyone who supports this gigantic waste of money, please feel free to list all the many benefits from having Men on the Moon and the 2 Space Station Programs.

      GPS and Satalite Photography are not part of the Manned Space Program.

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      R U Kiddingme

      Aug 27, 2012 at 4:08pm

      @spy

      I don't think that space exploration has to have "use" in order to be a good thing. I think we are going to have to get off this planet eventually for research, for power generation, and maybe just for real estate.

      But that said, there's also lots of useful stuff that came out of space exploration:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

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      Toddly

      Aug 27, 2012 at 4:40pm

      And is there anything that people are capable of doing in space that robots can't do better? Let's remember folks that most of the cost of getting humans places is looking after the breathing/eating/excreting and safety aspects of it. To do what? Write poetry? Exploration, mining, science, whatever -- dollars better spent doing it with robots.

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