January 17, 2004
Farewell, Hubble
A follow-up to yesterday's posting about Bush's new space vision ...
NASA, readjusting its sights to fit the current political winds, has now announced that it will no longer service the Hubble Space Telescope, and will, in fact, help destroy the telescope when it comes time for it to re-enter the atmosphere.
Launching of the Hubble telescope in 1990 initiated a revolution in our studies of the universe. Over the last decade, especially since the mirror was repaired (during a shuttle mission), has given us an unparalleled view of many phenomena invisible from the surface of the earth because of, among other things, turbulence in the atmosphere. It appears that this short-lived era of a growing understanding of an ever more complex universe is about to come to an end, as, in its time, did our exploration of the moon.
There is no reason why we can't afford both a manned space program and an unmanned research program including Hubble. But a government which seems to have no qualms about throwing a few hundred billion dollars away on foreign wars and tax cuts for the wealthy is considerably more parsimonious when it comes to knowledge. (And I don't want to hear anything about how that money could be better spent on earth feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless -- the current administration has no intention of spending one penny more than it absolutely has to on such trivial matters, space program or no space program.)
January 16, 2004
To Mars! To Mars? To Mars ...
Back when he was elected president, John F. Kennedy made a commitment to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. And we made it. At a cost of roughly 40 billion dollars (1965 dollars, let us say), we not only put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July, 1969, we managed to follow up with several more lunar expeditions before we shut down the program, retired the Saturn rockets, and broke up the development teams during the Nixon administration.
Now President Bush wants not only to go back to the moon but to put men on Mars. Is this a good idea? I think, yes. Will Bush's program permit this? Well, maybe -- but there are some troublesome aspects.
Bush is planning to get this underway by putting an extra one billion dollars into NASA's budget over the next five years. Will that get us there? Not bloody likely. Remember those 40 billion 1965 dollars and compare that with one billion 2005 dollars.
More money is available, says Bush; some ten to twelve billion dollars can be "reallocated" from funds already guaranteed for NASA. What does this mean? Who knows? Goodbye, outer-planet research? Goodbye, probe to Pluto? Goodbye, visits to comets and asteroids? Goodbye, Goddard Space Flight Center, Nasa Ames Research Laboratory, other "unnecessary frills"? I gather that everything is on the table here.
Why is Bush so anxious to get us on the road to Mars? There are various stories. Some people believe that it's an election gimmick. Some believe that it's aimed at getting us onto a unilateral track that won't involve the International Space Station. Some believe that his "managers" (Cheney, Rumsfeld & co.) are firm believers, and perhaps justifiably so, in the "high ground" military theory: the nation that controls space will rule the world. And some people believe that he was simply panicked by China's manned space flight in October, an act that demonstrated that our major potential rival in the world is quite serious about going into space, and has a genuine program, not just a temporary enthusiasm, for having a serious presence in space.
There's an old story about a diplomatic dinner in China in 1953 at which a Chinese official railed at a British diplomat about Sir Edmund Hillary's placing the British flag on the summit of Mt. Everest, which the Chinese considered their territory. "If you don't like it up there, old chap," the Englishman is reported to have said, "you have every right to go up and take it down." It would be the Chinese who had the last laugh if the flag that Apollo left on the moon were to end up in a Beijing museum ...