"It's so clear. NASA's mission, what they do well, is exploration," says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a space-advocacy group headquartered in a vintage bungalow a few miles from JPL. "That's why NASA's doing so well in the unmanned program -- they are exploring."
Perhaps the private sector will take over what has long been a government monopoly on the human kind of space exploration. There are entrepreneurs who are dying to rocket off the planet. But space is a harsh environment, alluring but deadly. It may be that biological intelligence will need to give way to artificial intelligence in the exploration of the universe.
Right now, all human beings remain on the Earth, save two: Gennady Padalka and Mike Fincke, who are circling the world about 240 miles above the surface, their names unknown to most of the 6 billion others.
The space program will surely find a way to survive. America would never want to cede the high frontier to some other country. The Chinese are actively pursuing an agenda that includes the possibility of Chinese astronauts on the moon.
There are many ways that the story of humans in space may play out.
"Mars theoretically could be modified," Elachi says. "A hundred years from now we could have the technology to put oxygen in the atmosphere."
A less fanciful idea would be to create an "interplanetary Internet," enabling people on Earth to connect to instruments and scientific stations on Mars and elsewhere. Elachi imagines classrooms doing experiments with such a system, but what might really drive the enterprise forward would be entertainment. Who knows, NASA merging with Nintendo, maybe?
What's certain is that, in just a few months, the scientists and engineers of the space program, both in America and in Europe, will do another of their amazing stunts. The Cassini spacecraft will drop a probe, named Huygens and designed by the European Space Agency, into the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. Huygens will parachute to the surface and, via Cassini overhead, transmit images and data back to Earth.
Huygens may even survive the landing, either thudding on hard ground or splashing into an ocean of liquid methane or ethane. It might continue to operate for about a half-hour on that alien world before its batteries die and Cassini disappears over the horizon.
It's bold stuff. It's exploration. And if we can do something like that, then . . . maybe we can put a man on the moon.
