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 ...
Posted by Don Harlow at January 16, 2004 04:14 PM