You may remember that Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk is stranded on a planet about to be hit by an asteroid. He is adopted by an American Indian transplanted colony, and made their shaman1. By the end of the episode, he is able to activate a deflector beam that moves the asteroid away just in the knick of time. The deflector was hidden inside a cool, modern-looking obelisk (see below).
There is a similarly-sized asteroid heading our way, scheduled to make a short pass with Earth in the year 2029. And President Obama has stated that NASA’s new mission is to intercept this asteroid and deflect it.
Yes, it’s officially a White House policy.
The President is wasting our money by sending astrounauts to explore an asteroid, a feat that is wayyyyyyy harder than going to Mars or even returning to the Moon.
Now, I’m a big proponent of studying Aphophis, the asteroid that is going to destroy Earth on Friday April 13th, 2029. But there’s little to learn there, compared to the riches of Mars or even the Moon. The President is just finding a talking point that does not create any actionable effort during his Presidency
On the other hand, he may have just opened up a can of worms by calling attention to the asteroid. Any 2-bit spacefaring country can now send a rocket to intercept Apophis and park itself in close orbit. The gravity tractor effect over 19 years can ASSURE that we WILL be hit by the asteroid. This is so typical. First the liberals outlawed DDT and killed millions and now this Obama is putting the entire Earth in peril.
- a medicine man [↩]
Where to begin….
I worked in both the manned and unmanned space progams as engineer, mission controller, and manager for approximately 30 years.
The cost between doing any given space mission manned v.s robotically is somewhere between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude, i.e. the manned mission will cost 100 to 1000 times more than a robotic one accomplishing the same objectives.
The arguments of “a robot cannot do what a human can do” are true if (a) the mission objectives include things like having the crew sing karaoke or do live press conferences on TV or (b) you think of robotic technology as that of the 1960s, as most of the lay public does. Any real mission objectives can be accomplished at far less cost and risk robotically. In fact, no deep mission beyond low earth orbit can today be accomplished at all via any means other than robotically.
The argument that a “human can respond to new situations in real time” is complete nonsense. Consider the rovers that explored Mars. Their ground control teams responded to all manner of new situations resulting in the rovers returning immense new knowledge regarding Mars. Granted that those responses were not in real time. They did not need to be. Mars is not exactly changing in real time. If an had alien popped up from behind a rock and if we wanted to blast him/her/it with a ray gun then yes, a human could do that. But guess what: for the cost of a manned mission we could send an armada of real-time alien-blasting robotic craft to Mars, if real-time alien blasting is what we want to do. Then they we could blast ’em all over the planet rather than just in one place.
There is plenty to learn at any space destination. However, the key word there is “learn.” If the objective is in fact to learn, then again it is several orders of magnitude more cost-effective to seen robotic craft. If the objective is to learn, then the mission metrics are the amount and quality of science data returned and the mission cost. Don’t take my word for it, look at the actual data for all space missions. If the objectives are show business or funding jobs in congressional districts then go ahead and send men, provided that the taxpayers agree and that we are more upfront regarding the rationale and objectives of such a project. Such a project is not about learning or science. It is about politics and money into congressional districts.
A manned mission to Mars or to an asteroid is a joke, but an extemely expensive one. It will fund a lot of home mortages, so perhaps it could be considered stimulus money, except that the money flows over decades rather than now, and it could be used for things that really provide economic benefit and/or more science knowledge. Even if such missions were not a joke, I agree that this is all a strategy to delay large current spending to the future. It’s a tried-and-true strategy; it has worked ever since the end of Apollo.
Apollo was wonderful. But it was done for political reasons. We now have much better technology that can obtain better results at much lower costs, without sending men. Unfortunately that’s not sexy. Want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars because it’s sexy? Fine, but just be honest about it.
As for the DDT, I think we should put it our drinking water.
I agree with you. Robotics is the way to go when looking for that “first glimpse” of new data. But if you are trying to do something like live on Mars, you need the human being there. And that’s really the important point: we need to learn to live in utter isolation from a friendly environment.
If Apophis hits Earth in 2029, we may have to send all of our prime male and female specimens (ration 1:10, naturally) to a deep mine shaft, somewhere. In that scenario, all of our Moon/Mars technology would come in handy, to keep us stocked up with fresh food and water and Twinkie desserts.
But going to an asteroid accomplished nothing (well, when compared with the Moon/Mars missions) except to show that we can do it. And as I mentioned earlier, nothing to prevent some hostile power from putting in long-term thrusters on the thing to get it aimed at North America over the space of 19 years.
Agreed that if you are going to live there you need to live there, but not to learn. This is where the PR is disingenuous. Sending a few people to Mars for a few weeks or months has nothing at all to do with “living on Mars”, any more than the Apollo missions had something to do with living on the Moon.
There are arguments for and against colonization of another planet, but let’s put those aside and assume that colonization is the accepted objective. If that is the case, then sending an Apollo-like mission is simply not on the critical path to that objective. It is merely an appeasement, as a full-colonization project would be very very expensive.
Again, proceeding on the assumption that colonization, of the Moon or Mars, is the objective, all of the necessary information is already in hand. The environments of the Moon and Mars are well-characterized. We have decades of data regarding the effects of space flight on humans.
If we discovered that, for some reason that we had to colonize Mars, none of these “learning” steps would be in the plan. We would lay out the plan and do it. This is basic project management 101. Will things be learned along the way? Of course, as they are in any endeavour, but these are not fundamentals, they are polishes.
In any case, this is all folly. We do not we have cities under the ocean or in Antarctica because they are expensive and dangerous places to live (wait a minute – LA is too!). The Moon and Mars are more so. BTW2 – dirty little secret: The trip to Mars is a 9-month cruise (each way) outside of the Van Allen belts that entails a nasty accumulated dose of high-energy radiation. Solar flares and time on Mars’ surface are additional radiation. Conceivably humans could live underground on Mars but there is no avoiding the transit dosage because effective shielding is too mass-expensive. You probably won’t die immediately from the dosage but anybody making that trip is signing up for a major statistical reduction in live expectancy. And there are few cancer treatment centers on Mars.
BTW3 – if an asteroid is going to bonk Earth, the solution is not to send people to it (unless you want to tag it with graffiti). The solution is to change its trajectory. Aiming at N. America or any other point on Earth is not feasible because a) you cannot control its trajectory that precisely and b) even if you could the effects of the impact would be planet-wide, not only at the point of impact. Cretacous Extinction Part II.
You’ve got me there. No need to expose our gonads to radiation when we can establish the needed technologies here on Earth (technology to be self-sufficient, not to expose our genitalia) I recall there was a biosphere somewhere in Arizona that was trying to stay self-contained for a few decades. I think they had to get a few crewmembers out when they started going kookie from being cooped up in a glass hemisphere.
As for the asteroid, I also agree. It’s a pretty blunt weapon that would destroy the perpetrator as well as the victim. It would be like they were strapping explosives to themselves in order to destroy us. Um, er, never mind; that’s already happening.
As I’ve written before, I think we’re better off spending the money on developing a cold fusion reactor and a lunar supply chain for helium 3:
http://www.crackteam.org/2004/02/22/peak-oil-or-were-all-gonna-die/
Then we chain the reactors and build a death star that can destroy the asteroid.
As for the mission to Mars, the best scenario I’ve heard involved sending several robots and equipment ahead of time to build our living quarters, power station, start harvesting drinking water, growing food, etc. People are the very last thing you send after everything is working brilliantly.
It’s all just political BS. It’s similar to George Bush’s statement that we were going to put men on the moon again. They are easy statements to make because they can’t be proven false and if the idea gets cancelled by the next administration then it’s not the fault of the person who said we should do it. It’s unfortunate that we spent money on Bush’s rediculous plan.
Anyone who knows much about the space industry knows that any project that lasts longer than a single administration is going to have a heck of a time staying funded. Sometimes it feels a lot like being a Gladiator at the Colosseum. One congress gives you the thumbs up, a different one gives you the thumbs down. If it were not for the cold war I have a really hard time believing that we would have ever reached the moon as there really is no point in going there in person (even though I would love to go there myself because it would be awesome to go… too bad NASA didn’t like my astronaut application).
The Aerospace industry is filled with supposedly bright and logical people. I wish they would stop giving in to dumb ideas and just use their superior intelect to point out how silly some things suggested by politicians are. For example, someone decided they didn’t want to tell their constituents that we are spending $5 billion on a new space telescope that could not be repaired if it broke (like Hubble). So they decided it would be a good idea if we added the capability to dock with the telescope so someone could go fix it. Rather than point out that we do not have the capability to go retrieve something using manned spacecraft from the L2 Lagrange point (nor will we before the mission is over), or that using a robot to drag it back to earth would hopelessly destroy the telescope, I get the task to go figure out how much it would cost to add a docking port.
:/
I guess the general public doesn’t care enough to know whether or not something is actually possible before they are happy spending money, only that it sounds like it’s possible. Like a manned mission to Mars. While the trip through the Van Allen belts isn’t that big a deal because you would be going through them pretty fast, the rest of the mission is a problem. Most people dont realize how lucky the Apollo astronauts were that there were no solar flares during their lunar missions.
And again, what’s the point of having a person stand on Mars other than to say they stood on Mars? Same question goes for an asteroid. Are we going to be hauling Bruce Willis up there to help us out with our asteroid problem?
BTW, Apophis is not going to hit the Earth in 2029, although it will come close enough to perhaps take out a satellite or two on its way by.