I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn Porco on several occasions. She is the leader of the Imaging Science Team for the monumental Cassini spacecraft which has orbited since July 2004, and is responsible for the picture that I chose (with a lot of post-facto agreement) as the best astronomical image of 2006. She is a formidable person. Her talk at The Amaz!ng Meeting 4 last year was inspiring, and not just because of the images she showed: she lives the life of a cutting-edge scientist, and she clearly not only loves it but wants to inspire others as well.
All this was on my mind when I read her opinion piece in the New York Times today (free registration required). She writes on the 45th anniversary of John Glenn becoming the first American in space to orbit the Earth, all those long years ago. It’s an interesting anniversary, coming as it is on the cusp of NASA’s future. The Shuttle is a few years from retirement, the space station nearly completed, and plans for a new and vastly more capable space transport system starting to congeal.
We’re headed to the Moon, if all goes well. I think I speak for most scientists when I say there are more treasures beyond as well to which we hope the future provides us access. A powerful rocket can take us anywhere in the solar system, and do it better and faster than we can now. For the first time in decades, what is holding us back is not technology, but the will to do it.
Will we do it?
The thrust of Carolyn’s essay could have come from my own keyboard. I never found myself disagreeing with her, not once. She has harsh words for the Shuttle and for the Space Station, words I’ve used myself on this blog and elsewhere– but I’m not the head of a team funded by NASA. Her words speak a lot louder because of that. Certainly many scientists have spoken out against the drain of manned spaceflight versus robotic explorers, but there have been many of us not only willing to compromise but eager to do so. The solar system is big, and on other worlds there is room for the prints of both astronauts’ boots and robot’s pads. The rockets that will carry our sons and daughters to the Moon will be able to throw our scientific payloads at fantastic speeds to Mars and the outer planets, to asteroids and comets, to moons of all flavors.
Exploration and science are not mutually exclusive — they are two sides of the same coin. We need both, and we can afford both. We just have to make the right decisions.
This is what Carolyn says, and says very well in her essay. I agree with her, as do, I suspect, many other scientists. The next few years for NASA are critical. Will we make the right decisions?
February 19th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
One small comment, Phil. Wasn’t Glenn the first American in orbit, rather than in space?
February 19th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
That’s right, Mark. Alan Shepard was the first American in space (on May 5, 1961) and Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth (Feb 20, 1962).
February 19th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Excellent. Thanks for the link.
I was eight when I saw Sputnik. I fully expected to be able to live in (not on) the Moon or at least Earth orbit by the end of the 20th century. Anybody who grew up on “golden age” science fiction knows what a space station looks like and ISS AIN’T it!
A solar powered catapult on the Moon (either linear induction or rail gun) could fling payloads anywhere in the Solar system with virtually zero launch fuel cost.
February 20th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Odd note: On your last post, you linked to a Jul 2005 entry, so I went back and saw my War of the Worlds comments, and then further back saw that I had forgotten that Carolyn Porco posted here once. I ended up going back to the beginning of the blog, which is coming up on its 2 year anniversary, btw.
Carolyn said Glenn was the first in “orbit.” Phil just goofed his word.
She’s the best. I can’t find any fault with CICLOPS. Thanks for the link, Phil.
February 20th, 2007 at 2:36 am
Shepard’s status as first American in space has been contested as relatively recently unclassified documents have shown that the Air Force broke the 100 km barrier well before that. Unfortunately, I don’t have a handy cite.
February 20th, 2007 at 4:44 am
IIRC there were some very high altitude balloon flights that went more than 100km up. The USAF also awarded astronaut wings to their X-15 pilots, but they were after Shepard, I think.
I may be alone here, but I think a definition of “Space” that makes it accessible by balloon is fundamentally flawed. I have nothing against balloons, but as aerostats, they are pretty much by definition limited to atmospheric travel.
February 20th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Carolyn rocks! I’ve seen her speak several times. She’s the first one I’ve heard to find the ‘fly in the ointment’ with Bertrand Russell’s China Teapot argument (Beyond Belief conference November 06).
February 20th, 2007 at 7:55 am
The link above has her Beyond Belief Speech, she’s the fourth and last person to speak.
February 20th, 2007 at 7:57 am
A bit of a nitpick; she writes “bodily” when I think she meant “boldly”.
Anyway, excellent article.
I quite literally grew up with the shuttle program, and thought it a wonderful thing. But further reading showed me that the Saturn 5 was the true powerhouse. And we scrapped it, well before it’s time.
One can only imagine what might have been. I bet a space station, larger than the ISS could’ve been made in a handful of flights with it, just as Carolyn mentioned.
I hope that the Ares rockets do come to pass, and restore the capabilities that we lost.
I believe it was Werner Von Braun that said “Impossible is just the lack of will to do it.”
That phrase hits it right on the money.
February 20th, 2007 at 8:34 am
Werner Von Braun also laid out a very comprehensive plan to persue the High Frontier, which involved building a space station from expired booster tanks, storing fuel in orbit at the station, building a moon lander in orbit, THEN going to the moon, but it seemed to the politicians at that time to be uninspiring, so they took the direct route, which of course, left us with no space infrastructure in place.
This is what happens when politics and national pride come before good engineering sense,,,
Gary 7
February 20th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Dagnabbit. OK, I fixed the mistake. I hate it when I make dumb errors like that. Thanks for pointing it out.
February 20th, 2007 at 9:23 am
Everyone,
Thank you so much for your support. It is wonderful.
I did in fact mean `bodily’, in contrast to going into space with robots.
I’d like to suggest that you all write to your congressmen/women and senators, especially those leading the budget authorization and appropriations committees, and tell them you support NASA’s plans and requested budget. It is a crucial time. The FY2007 has some possible awful cuts in it that must be opposed for NASA to stay on track.
Thanks again. And do visit our CICLOPS website when you get the chance. We are improving it on a regular basis.
Best,
Carolyn Porco
February 20th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Oh, cool. This is not even my blog and I feel like gushing. So, I’ll just repeat some of my old gushing to Carolyn Porco and say thanks, again.
February 20th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Great article Carolyn, and thanks for the link Phil!
February 20th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
I’m afraid I don’t believe that the rockets used to launch future astronauts will be used (though they could be..) for unmanned probes. I believe a Saturn V was once considered for an enormous Mars probe (three or four stage with a Centaur on top), and of course it never happened. The problem is - can you really expect to use a $1B+ rocket for a ‘mere’ probe? There’s no reason why not, but I doubt it’d get the funding - so everything will continue to get launched on Delta II’s or perhaps the odd Atlas 5.
A shame really - as I recall Galileo and Cassini cost on the order of $2B, so why not use a really big capable rocket?
February 20th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Ahruman Says: “Shepard’s status as first American in space has been contested as relatively recently unclassified documents have shown that the Air Force broke the 100 km barrier well before that. Unfortunately, I don’t have a handy cite.”
You’re thinking of the X-15 program, and while there were a few astronauts wings presented from those flights (the barrier was 50 miles back then, which is 80 Km), they were, IIRC, done after Shepard’s flight.
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Al Says: “IIRC there were some very high altitude balloon flights that went more than 100km up.”
Right number, wrong units. The postwar “Farside” project sent pilots up to 100,000 feet (not meters) and slightly higher, but that’s about the limit for surface launched balloons. One of the gondolas is on display at the Air Force museum outside Dayton, OH. If you thought Mercury capsules were small, this thing is a cylinder about 5 feet (1,5 meters) in diameter and maybe 10 feet (3 meters) long. The interior was crammed with equipment so the poor pilot had to sit in this smaller-than-a-phone-booth space for 20 hours or more.
Earlier than that, ascents in the 1930, mostly sponsored by the National Geographic Society, went up to 50,000 feet (15 Km) and higher. Jacques Piccard made the first pressurized gondola ascent to 51,000 feet (15.5 Km) in 1931.
I know, TMI
- Jack
February 20th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Gee, Folks:
I think a dose of financial reality is needed: we are a nation which is a trillion or so dollars in debt because of the Iraq war; we have an economy which is inflated by the speculation of the wealthy few who possess or control much of the nation’s money and who have been granted permanent tax breaks by the last Congress (and which surely portends a stock market devaluation in the near future); we have a disappearing middle class which itself is heavily in hock, all of which means the government has to cut programs and spending or else raise taxes at which the public will surely balk. AND we have a disappearing scientific cadre - we are graduating fewer and fewer engineers, scientists, technical people in all areas. Unless we begin to hire and train our space program personnell now, we’ll have to rely on scientists and engineers from other nations to staff the space effort - that is, if it somehow miraculously gets funds. We have a crisis in affordable health care; we have an upcoming crisis in the Social Security program; we have a crisis in repairing/replacing/renewing the nation’s infrastructure. Just where does a “pie-in-the-sky” program like sending manned missions to the moon or Mars, let alone other places, fit in?
[An aside: “nimrod” means HUNTER; it has no meaning relating to dimwit, nutball, oxbrain, doofus, numbnuts, etc.]
February 21st, 2007 at 5:40 am
I read the Porco piece. I was not aware of the Saturn V history. We have spent over
100 billion on the “star wars” boondoggle, and I think that another 15 billion is in the next budget. That’s almost all of NASA’s yearly money. What will happen to the US
economy when the Chinese yuan upsurps the dollar at the World Bank?
February 21st, 2007 at 11:40 am
Will M., the NASA budget is currently approx. 0.8% of the U.S. budget. It is insignificant compared to the costs required for the other issues you list: health care, Social Security, infrastructure, military expenditures, etc. Even at 1% for all of the space program activities, including manned, robotic, and aeronautical research, that is still negligible compared to what those other situations already get.