Gregory Todd Williams

This has gone far enough. I’m getting sick of all the articles that have been appearing that denounce Bush’s Mars plan as unfeasible and too costly.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Paul Davies discusses the 90-Day Report’s¹ estimate of $450 billion for a Mars mission, “a sum that makes the cost of the Apollo Moon landings seem like small change”:

Without some radical improvements in technology, the prospects for sending astronauts on a round-trip to Mars any time soon are slim, whatever the presidential rhetoric.

The problem with this was that the 90-Day Report was a ridiculous proposal from the beginning. It called for orbiting construction and fuel storage facilities to be built that would allow the construction of enormous spaceships, in space, that would haul astronauts to and from Mars with enough fuel and supplies for a return journey. Having never been done before, all of this would require a massive investment of research and (clearly) money.

In The New Republic, Gregg Easterbrook also criticizes Bush’s plan. Easterbrook has a lot of good points regarding the impracticality of the specific goals Bush set out: a new Crew Exploration Vehicle capable of, “flying back and forth to the space station and of flying to the Moon,” and needing a heavy-lift rocket significantly more powerful than the Saturn V.

We shouldn’t expect George W. Bush himself to know that $12 billion is not enough to develop a spaceship. We should expect the people around Bush, and at the top of NASA, to know this. And apparently they are either astonishingly ill-informed and naïve, or are handing out phony numbers for political purposes, to get the foot in the door for far larger sums later.

While I would agree with this statement, it’s misdirected. Bush’s plan creates a lot of unnecessary requirements if the ultimate plan is simply to get to, and explore, Mars (or the Moon). $12 billion is not enough to develop a spaceship. However, it is a significant portion of the $20-$30 billion suggested as the cost of the Mars Direct mission promoted by the Mars Society. Compare that with the more than an order-of-magnitude difference between $12 billion and the $450 billion suggested by the 90-Day Report, and we’re getting close. Taking into account the five-year timeline for Bush’s $12 billion request, and the twenty-year timeline for the Mars Direct plan, money no longer seems like much of an issue.

Overall, it would appear that everyone covering this story has bought into the business-as-usual culture that brought about the 90-Day Report in the first place. Mars is possible, even with the pittance that is NASA’s budget. The technology to get there and back is available or achievable today. It’s just a matter of breaking free from the pointless, inefficient and overpriced thinking that the space program has encouraged over the last thirty years.

Update: Douglas Rushkoff has gone so far as to call the Bush plan,

a series of pointless but publicity-rich manned flights to the moon and Mars.

While his claim that the Hubble is “[p]erhaps NASA’s single greatest exploratory achievement” certainly isn’t far from the truth, calling a manned mission to Mars “pointless” is absurd. To the Moon, maybe. But there are all sorts of reasons to go to Mars for science and exploration.

I’m as much a fan of human space travel as the next guy. It’s very cool, indeed. But perhaps our scientists should have some say in the way our space exploration dollars are spent.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but this sounds to me to imply that “scientists” as a class would all favor the Hubble over manned space travel to Mars. Somehow, I doubt this would hold up with geologists or biologists.

¹A. Cohen et al., The 90 Day Study on the Human Exploration of the Moon and Mars, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1989.