After Constellation: The New Future of American Space Travel

It's a striking contrast, when you think about it. In the 1960s and 1970s, the American government landed no less than six manned expeditions on the Moon. Today, it seems, we can't afford to send even one. Not that the missions are truly comparable: the technology which would be sent today would be far more advanced. Note the emphasis on would have been: as you may have heard by now, the Obama administration's proposed adjustments to NASA are going to end any hope of a return to the moon, at least for the time being. This is an extremely disappointing, even depressing, development -- though at least it holds out hope of opening a new debate into what we want to get out of space travel in the first place.

Since the Bush administration announced its plans to go to the moon several years ago (plans which were heady and probably over-optimistic to begin with, and have been steadily scaled back since), the Constellation program has been the darling of the future of manned spaceflight. The aging space shuttles are due to be retired, and the International Space Station has generally been revealed to be an incredibly expensive and only modestly useful experiment in long-term living in low-Earth orbit. The future was supposed to be the Orion crew module and the Ares rocket. Orion's plans called for a revised and upgraded version of the sort of capsule originally used in the Apollo missions. It was, in essence, a return from the "powered glider" days of the Space Shuttle to the "parachute into the ocean" tactics of the 1960s.

And it was also intended to power a new generation of space exploration, taking astronauts to the moon, to near-Earth asteroids, and, one day, to the planet Mars. All of these objectives have now been pushed off into the murky, vaguely defined future.

Public officials are putting a brave face on the budget revisions, arguing that the new priorities allow for more research into the building blocks of future long-distance missions, like construction and orbital refuelling techniques. This isn't entirely wrong: by far the most expensive component of space flight is the appalling expense of blasting material up into orbit. In theory, the more work can be done in orbit, the less has to be done on the surface. Provided that you can get the materials and the builders from somewhere, mind you, which returns us to the problem of obtaining materials from Earth's surface until such distant time as we begin robotic mining of the moon.

Where the manned spaceflight money is going now, it seems, is toward new public-private partnerships, sponsoring new private corporate spaceflight initiatives. From an economist's perspective, there is an incentive to do that: in theory, at least, economic competition will lead to a proliferation of newer, cheaper methods of spaceflight. Of course, how well such market forces will function in what is effectively a single-payer government-run "market" is debatable, and remains to be seen.

What the changes should allow us to do, however, is to reopen a debate which has been waiting to be resolved: why are we going to space in the first place? Aside from what would doubtless be a very exciting achievement for everyone involved, it is questionable what value we would derive from landing people on Mars, or on any asteroid for that matter. The negligible number of basic scientific experiments we can't conduct with robotic spacecraft alone hardly justify the cost of manned space flight, which has for a long time been exponentially higher than unmanned probes doing the same work.

Indeed, a case could be made that the manned space flight program should not be devoted to astronomical research at all -- in which case we certainly don't need to go to Mars yet, and it's dubious whether we are ready for Bush's promised moon base, either. (Of course, this point is moot now that the moon base has been officially cancelled.) If the goal is science, we could be sending several important space probes in all directions for the cost of a single space shuttle flight to low-Earth orbit.

Consider: over the history of the space program, the costs average out to be approximately $1 billion per shuttle flight. In contrast, the Messenger probe to the planet Mercury cost about $400 million, and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which have been operating on the surface of Mars for years now (one is immobile, however, since last year), came with similar price tags, too. The more ambitious New Horizons probe is now en route to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt; its budget was significantly higher, at $600 million, but still substantially less than even a single two-week shuttle trip. For the cost of three relatively banal space shuttle flights per year, we could have been launching between a half-dozen extremely important interplanetary space probes every single year.

The budgetary death of Orion and the pending retirement of the Space Shuttle therefore offers us an opportunity to get back to the real business of space research.

In fairness, anyone who has been paying attention to NASA long enough -- or, better yet, has personal experience with that organization -- probably already knew that the much-vaunted Constellation program wasn't going to return us to the moon lickety-split anyways, let alone lead to the rapid construction of a permanent lunar base. When it comes to manned exploration, in particular, human space travel has an established history of grand promises and comparatively modest returns. It's just that, usually, even those modest returns are striking enough that people feel something has been accomplished anyways.