We commend the astronauts for their bravery, and the NASA scientists and engineers for their technical excellence.
Seeing the space shuttle, perhaps the most massive and complex machine ever built, sitting on the launch pad,
certainly inspires awe. But it also inspires a question: Why?
With reference to the space shuttle in particular, the shuttle was designed over twenty years ago,
so the design and technologies could be much improved upon today.
One space shuttle costs over $1 billion. Each shuttle mission costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
Each mission also entails considerable risk. Getting such a complex machine to work correctly is a vast undertaking.
It is quite easy to overlook something, which could destroy the shuttle.
It is also quite possible that new problems will develop, leading to failure.
So the shuttle is obsolete, expensive, and risky.
What has been accomplished as a result of the shuttle missions? Very little.
Claims have been made that superior materials could be engineered in space,
or that pharmaceutics can be made more effectively.
But if there have been any actual useful materials produced in the shuttle,
the amount must be exceedingly small.
Astronauts have been doing research into the effects of spaceflight on humans.
But this is only important if we value manned spaceflight as an eventual goal.
From a scientific standpoint, the useful research generated by the shuttle has been quite small.
As an example that I found stunning, consider the July 2005 flight of the shuttle.
The stated purpose of this mission was to test the safety of the shuttle.
Can anyone explain to me the purpose of launching a risky mission for hundreds of millions
of dollars, with no other purpose than to study the safety of the shuttle?
Seems a little pointless to me.
The same could be said of the space station.
The space station appears to be a method to get countries around the world to spend large sums
of money to build a useless can in orbit. Although we have sunk tens of billions of dollars into the station,
it is still incomplete. It is just a risky place for astronauts to live in.
In fact, the idea of manned spaceflight seems entirely obsolete.
Those who support manned spaceflight refer to the marvelous
feeling they felt when man first walked on the moon.
They point to Mars as an eventual place for humans to live.
A library could be filled with science fiction stories about manned spaceflight.
But the dream of manned spaceflight was a dream that belongs 20 years in the past.
Realistically, it makes no sense to colonize Mars. There are billions of people on Earth.
By any reasonable economics, it is impossible to imagine that we could move a reasonable fraction
of these people to Mars.
Instead, the dream of exploring space must be focused on unmanned missions.
Today, with modern communication technologies and artificial intelligence,
robotic spacecraft can accomplish missions that humans could never dream of.
For example, the unmanned mission to Mars did a real scientific survey
of Martian terrain, and atmospheric conditions.
It brought back remarkable pictures of the Martian planet, for the first time.
It is missions like these that we should be dreaming about.
Today, manned spaceflight is largely about image and publicity.
Everyone likes to see the picture of the astronaut waving at us from space.
But from an engineering and scientific perspective, unmanned spaceflight
offers a far superior return for the money spent.
It will take some political courage for our leaders to admit that it is
time to put away the dream of men and women in space, and
focus on the dream of our robotic voyagers exploring the universe.
