Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 16, 2005
1:00 PM
Can a band of true believers at NASA and elsewhere in the scientific community blast America's manned space program out of low Earth orbit into a stellar future?
Joel Achenbach, whose article about space flight appeared in Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, was online to field questions and comments.
Joel Achenbach is a Magazine staff writer and columnist.
A transcript follows.
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Joel Achenbach: Whoa! Sorry. Just stumbled into this auditorium at kind of the last second. Hit me with your questions. Hope you read the story and are ready to rocket off into a very cosmic discussion.
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Bethesda, Md.: How can we expect a serious space program, and serious scientific space goals, from an administration that subscribes to junk science and from a president who totally lacks an understanding of science, evolution, medical research, and believes in a mythical religion?
Joel Achenbach: This is a large question for which I am not going to venture a glib response. Like many people I do worry that the Administration views science as a matter of convenience or irritation, depending on the issue. I'm not sure the president is interested in space "science," exactly. What I like about the Vision (and I think it has some flaws) is that it incorporates the science goals, such as the possibility of building a large space telescope that could gain images of another planet (extra solar).
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Wiredog: Why have a discussion on space flight here? Isn't that what the blog is for?
Joel Achenbach: Wiredog don't you have a job??? Wait, people ask me the same thing. Retracted.
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Philadelphia, Pa.: Nice job!
One thing to keep in mind in looking back at the alleged loss of vision since Apollo: in 1966 and 1967, NASA was allocated almost 5% of all federal spending. If that were the case today, they'd be getting over $120 billion instead of the actual $16 billion... and I doubt we'd be hearing complaints about "going round and round in LEO."
By the same token, the inflated expectations generated by Spaceship One have more to do with post-Reagan ideology ("Of COURSE the private sector will do things better/faster/cheaper than a bloated bureaucracy!") than with any magic Entrepreneurial Mojo that will make Spaceship Two, Three, X... radically better than what Lockheed or Boeing sells to NASA.
Joel Achenbach: That's an interesting point on SpaceShipOne, and fyi, Elon Musk said there's nothing about the design of that spaceship that will help us become a space faring nation. But I guess he's in something of a competition with Burt Rutan. No one, by the way, would posit spending 120B on space right now, and in fact they cut those NASA budgets even before we landed on the moon.
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Melbourne, Australia: Some people have described human space flight in an evolutionary context: complex life comes out of the sea and colonizes the land; humans come out of Africa and colonize the Earth; humans (and life) go from the Earth to colonize the solar system; life goes from the solar system to other stars, colonizing the galaxy. Have you encountered this concept during your research for the article?
Joel Achenbach: Cosmic evolution: sure, and its also bound up with the Frederick Jackson Turner notion of the frontier, which I kept trying to discuss in the article but my editors kept saying it was too boring. But I'm not sure that it logically follows that humans will colonize space NEXT, since, for example, we haven't colonized the sea for the most part, even though it covers 75 percent of the Earth's surface, and we have only a few scientific stations on the very large continent of Antarctica.
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Arlington, Va.: What's your estimation of the so-called non-traditional launchers? Are they for real or just dreamers? Can NASA really rely on guys like Elon Musk and Burt Rutan?
Joel Achenbach: To my knowledge NASA has no contracts with Musk or Rutan at the moment, and indeed Musk was hoping that NASA would throw a little business his way. It may be that these guys are a bit ahead of their time, still.
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Oxford, Miss.: Do you think that the public will really have a sustained interest in The Vision? It seems to me that while the first moon landing was practically an earth shattering event, the second one was basically a yawn fest. Who remembers Pete Conrad and Alan Bean??
By the time Alan Shepard "became the first man to hit a golfball on the Moon" it had all just degenerated into inanity and the public's reaction to the whole thing (boredom) pretty much killed it.
What is going to make this Vision different?
Joel Achenbach: If you talk to Marburger, the science adviser, he'll give you the impression that it doesn't matter how fascinating the space program is as long as its useful, generates commerce, gets people using the space environment, etc....For example, commercial airline flight is a yawnfest now but also highly successful. The paradox is that the Vision wants to have it both ways: A dramatic voyage of "exploration" but also something pragmatic. I'd say that at the heart of the space program right now is still some uncertainty about why we do this stuff -- other than, what's the alternative? Shutting down our space program? There's a lot of ways the government can spend science dollars -- is putting people on the moon really the best expenditure?
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Alexandria, Va.: You ended your article with references to motives for exploration such as the unity of humanity and possibly discovering whether extra-terrestrial life exists. However, some of the current enthusiasts you interviewed see such exploration (and, apparently, colonization) as a necessity for human survival. Have you developed any opinion about what motivates the main proponents (both in and outside of government) to push for more exploration? Is it abstract curiosity or a belief that we must colonize to survive?
Joel Achenbach: I think the Zubrin-type true believers honestly think it is dangerous to have "all our eggs in one basket," that is, all humanity living on the Earth, which is a vulnerable habitat. Could get whacked by a comet, or zapped by disease, etc....But I also think they've read a lot of science fiction and are caught up in the romance of space. A lot of people are. Even a hard nosed skeptic like myself still likes the star trekky stuff.
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Sacramento, Calif.: Joel- That was a great story. One problem with NASA's new "vision" is the lack of new money to accomplish any of its parts. NASA does a lot of important research on the Earth (as observed from space) and in unmanned planetary science missions. Many scientists like myself are concerned that the funds for this very successful work will dry up as NASA diverts funds to put people on the Moon again. Did you hear any concerns along these lines in reporting this story?
Joel Achenbach: Yes, I heard a number of people say that NASA's new model of the solar system doesn't actually include the Earth. Griffin wants to hasten development of a new spacecraft (CEV) but where is the money going to come from? It has to come from somewhere -- and so obviously there are space scientists who worry that their probe will be whacked or their data from satellites junked.
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Washington, D.C. : You know you are competing with the author of Revenge of the Sith, although he may be wrapping up soon. Just wanted to point that out.
Joel Achenbach: No one cares about Star Wars. I think they'll open with about $300,000 box office for the entire weekend.
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Wiredog: On a more serious (and soporific) note, I think the Spaceship 1 method may be a better way to do things. Build a suborbital craft, wring it out, then do the same with LEO, then HEO, then beyond. Instead of spending $BIGNUM trying to build an SSTO starting from scratch.
The new CEV idea looks quite a bit like a Saturn V+Apollo system, which would indicate that the whole 'reusable, flies like a DC-9' concept was a mistake.
Joel Achenbach: Right, the CEV looks like it'll be a capsule on top of a rocket. They should get Neil and Buzz to fly it.
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Arlington, Va.: What about the possibility of discovering a hostile alien civilization upon exploration of deeper space? Isn't it safer to stay closer to home?
Joel Achenbach: If any hostile (nearby) alien civilization were truly a threat to us, it would long ago have seen signatures of life and even intelligent life on Earth and come here and whacked us. But wait, maybe that's what mosquitoes are. Alien nanoprobes.
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Void, Tex.: Joel, mon bon feuilletonista, I'm so glad you're back to talking about the Big Questions on the edge of what we know. Which, if I may be permitted an opinion, is what you do better than just about anybody.
Anyway, a question: Did you get any input on space exploration from the religious fundamentalists?
In particular, it would seem that looking for answers to the "basic big questions of who we are, why are we here, and how did we get to where we are" implies that we don't already know The Truth. I don't think that idea would go down well in certain circles.
Joel Achenbach: You ask that as though you think I am not a religious fundamentalist. What makes you so sure?
Oh, right, everything I write. Forgot bout that.
Um, no, I didn't really do a full canvassing of every philosophical viewpoint about space. My story was pretty heavily focused on the true believers. SPACE believers.
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Herndon, Va.: Enjoyed your wide ranging article.
Present rocket based transport to the Moon requires a lot of expensive fuel. A tether system has been proposed that would move material between Earth and Moon without fuel. What evolutionary path do you see toward more practical transport?
Joel Achenbach: I think the tether concept is nifty physics but do you think Congress would actually build such a thing? Or a space elevator? Marburger told me the elevator idea sounds "kludgy" to him (I hope I am spelling that right), which is to say, lots of things that could go wrong and be hard to fix.
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Philadelphia, Pa.: Agreed that $120B a year is way out of the question. I was suggesting that rather than
(1) lamenting the loss of 1960s "vision," or (2) hand-waving the wonders that private space entrepreneurs will bring us because they're not Big Bad Gummint,
it's more useful to view Apollo as the anomaly (JFK commitment, Cold War rivalry, etc), and the period since as the norm. I wish the private space boosters all success, but they're going to find out it's very expensive, whether the money comes from taxes or customers.
Joel Achenbach: I think the Vision does in fact view the post-Apollo funding as the norm and has tried to make space flight more akin to high energy physics, in which there's a set amount of money year to year to year and not a lot of hype, and everyone goes about their long-range plans in an orderly fashion.
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Seabrook, Md.: What disturbed most about your report was a topic you did not discuss -- the Columbia accident and the report of the commission that investigated it.
I've made my career in the field of computer software. Some years ago I actually worked at Goddard. Most people in both fields (software and space) are honorable and competent. Unfortunately, there is also a fair amount of incompetence and some downright dishonesty in both fields as well.
Computer professionals are used to seeing projects fail because of bad management. That doesn't mean computers don't work or can't work. It just means that bad management causes failure.
The Columbia report severely criticized management of that program. Those of us with some experience in aerospace can tell stories of our own.
People at NASA and in the aerospace industry, to their credit, are now addressing issues of poor management. Mike Griffin, for example, has a reputation for intellectual brilliance and high competence as a manager. There are many others like him.
Why should people at this time pay attention to the naysayers when failures in space can quite easily be explained by management problems? Lots of fields have shown histories of failure to be eventually followed by incredible success. Why should space be any different?
Joel Achenbach: Space has the one handicap of having very public spectacular failures. We've lost 14 astronauts on two shuttles out of 113 flights, but we can lose that many soldiers in Iraq in a day. Not trying to make this a political argument, only that spaceflight is inherently ultra-high-profile and for reasons that are a bit hard to explain there is low tolerance for failures of any kind -- maybe because the average spaceship costs billions of dollars and our entire fleet at the moment is only 3 shuttles. There's not a lot of redundancy.
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Atlanta, Ga.: Given the article and your commentary so far you seem fairly skeptical of anyone but NASA. What would it take to convince you that the non-governmental part of the space industry was capable of moving faster and more cheaply than NASA (albeit oriented toward commercially viable missions as opposed to flags and footprints science missions)?
Joel Achenbach: I didn't realize the article gave that impression or my comments so far -- but I'll be more direct: I think there may be, in the near term, good opportunities in LEO for entrepreneurs (Musk, Rutan, Bigelow, etc.) but I don't see the model for the private sector taking us to the moon and beyond. How would that work? I'm not denying that it would, I just am not familiar with that business plan.
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Montgomery Village, Md.: The cover of today's Washington Post magazine showed NASA imprinted on every vehicle and every spacesuit in the drawing, and the subtitle referred to "NASA's visionaries." A lot of the space visionaries on the scene today, including several mentioned in your article, envision a future in space that is not all NASA and possibly not even dominated by NASA. This is a vision of future space travel that is conducted more by the private sector and less by government, as you describe in your article in "The Tycoon."
Joel Achenbach: The artwork we used came from NASA's excellent archive and that is probably a very good clue as to why all the spaceships said NASA. I tried to do justice to the private sector but frankly those folks would be worth a cover story just on their own.
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Herndon, Va.: Re: lack of interest in space: The English didn't exactly rush to America after Columbus landed here. But once they found they could live here in the 1600's the land rush began! Once we learn how to live on the Moon (and there won't be any Indians to guide us), I expect the same to happen there. What will it take to get us started?
Joel Achenbach: Is there tobacco on the moon?
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Manassas, Va.: Briefly, I wanted to thank you for your article. I was prepared for a fairly negative cynical piece and was pleasantly surprised that you seemed to understand and appreciate the courage and excitement that is fundamental to the effort to revive the space program and genuinely give the U.S., and humanity, a genuine space faring capability. This means way beyond low-earth-orbit and capabilities that will take us to the nearby planets and, hopefully, well beyond. I don't know if you realize it, or would believe it, but this is a pivotal time in human history and this effort -- if successful -- can and will change the course of human history. Stay tuned and keep your fingers crossed.
Joel Achenbach: But isn't EVERY era a pivotal era? I mean, is today any more pivotal than the 1940s? Why does every generation think it has a monopoly on pivots?
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Arlington, Va.: From your article:
"Go along with our Vision, Griffin essentially says, or the next person on the moon might be speaking Mandarin."
Nothing like racism to motivate the American people, I guess.
However, history tells us our future in space will be secured by our economic strength here on Earth, not by any resources we waste on "getting there first".
The Dutch and French colonized North America before the English, but we have an Anglophone culture now.
Who cares? Would we be any worse off if we spoke French? In any case, strengthening the homeland is what will bring about a brighter future.
Joel Achenbach: I think you are conflating racism and nationalism. At the very core of the Vision is a belief that the U.S. should maintain its dominance in space. That's a national goal, and whether it's laudable or not is something I'll let others figure out. But there's always going to be a military component to space, to the "high ground."
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Fairfax County, Va.: You mentioned the private effort that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize. It's my understanding those private investors paid about $20 million to win it. It seems that only massive outlays of capital can achieve the things NASA and private enthusiasts hope for in space travel. It seems that only a large federal tax system can fund such a project. Do you agree?
Joel Achenbach: I'm no entrepreneur but it always looks to me that the folks who make the most money are willing to lose a lot to start with.
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Bartlesville, Okla.: Hi Joel,
I am an early retiree NASA PIO and a writer. I covered the end of the APOLLO program as a journalist, and have worked in the space program in various capacities, from high-end computer security management (ELINT, etc.) to PIO work.
Your article is simply the very best synopsis of where the space program is right now, and the differing "visions" of where to go next and how to do it, that I have yet seen. You demonstrate a remarkable awareness of the multi-cultural problems: politics (a world/culture of its own), money, technology, international issues, and above all else, the need for the essential DRIVE, what we called "fire in the belly."
Congratulations on your article. I'll be sharing it with others.
Joel Achenbach: Gosh, thanks! I'm huge in Bartlesville.
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Rockville, Md.: "To my knowledge NASA has no contracts with Musk or Rutan at the moment..." That's more or less correct, although the Defense Department seems more willing to do business with entrepreneurial space launch companies: SpaceX's first launch later this year will carry an experimental DoD satellite, TacSat 1. Also, Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, is on a team led by Transformational Space Corp. LLC (t/Space) studying exploration architectures for NASA.
Joel Achenbach: Thanks for the clarification.
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Washington, D.C.: These days, would NASA ever consider using dogs and apes on its missions like it used to, or would that now be seen as irredeemably cruel?
Joel Achenbach: I am pretty sure it's been 40-plus years since we sent any mammals into space just to see how scared they'd get. Do that today, it'd shut the whole space program down. That said, who knows what DOD does -- the Pentagon spends more on space than NASA does.
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Annandale, Va.: Joel and everyone -- wake up and smell the coffee! "The Vision" is a Trojan horse meant to kill NASA as we know it -- Heritage Foundation alumni are now running NASA. Vital earth science and weather research is being gutted to supposedly fund "The Vision". Longtime scientists at NASA are leaving the sinking ship and the next future crop of scientists is finding out there's no funding for their research, so no point in attempting a career as a government scientist. I fear the public at large won't realize this until existing weather satellites go dark without replacements and we lose the ability to track ocean currents and hurricanes.
Joel Achenbach: That's the Bob Park idea that I mention in the story. It's hard for me to imagine that someone like Mike Griffin wants to kill NASA. Last I checked, every single space organization under the sun endorsed his appointment.
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Glen Arm, Md.: What happen to the questions on a mission to Mars? Did I miss something?
Joel Achenbach: I got lots of questions I haven't even read yet, I'll look for the mars Qs....
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Alexandria, Va.: Great article, it was refreshing! Two questions. 1-Do you think Michael Griffin, the new NASA Administrator, has the backing and creditability to turn around years of political bureaucracy in the Agency? 2-Doesn't NASA need a REAL change of internal culture to be able to perform on the Vision, or is the capability in place? After all, the wonderful people who got us to the moon are not there anymore.
Joel Achenbach: I'm always skeptical when I hear people talk about "internal cultural change," because let's face it, most organizations have a culture that rises organically from below, rather than imposed dictatorially from above (though I should check with someone smart, like Malcolm Gladwell, about that). To me the big obstacle for the vision is just money -- is the country, through its representatives, really ready to invest in spaceflight beyond LEO again? That decision just hasn't been made. Until that decision is made, in a serious way, the Vision will be a power point presentation and not a real program that we can have faith in.
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Atlanta, Ga.: Umm... NASA/DARPA/Boeing's X-37 is being test dropped by Scaled Composites WhiteNight possibly as we type this. So yea, NASA is using Scaled....
Joel Achenbach: Whatever that means I'm sure you're right.
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Manassas, Va.: In response to your response -- yes, each age has pivotal moments. However, if you look back over the history of mankind it is clear that some actions have much greater historical significance in terms of the direction of mankind, western civilization, etc. For example the funding of Columbus's voyage to the new world or, on a more negative note, the abandonment of world exploration by the Chinese and the destruction of their fleet of exploration. Some people believe, and I am one, that the entry of mankind into space and the development of a true space faring capability could be as significant in the long run as when animals went from the sea onto the land.
Joel Achenbach: Maybe you're right, but what about the sequencing of DNA? did you see the story by Joel Garreau on our front page today? The big-brain crowd that Garreau hangs with doesn't talk much about space. They talk about genomics and nanotechnology. What do people actually WANT in life? More life, more fun, more happiness, more sex, more toys, more games, more play, more shiny objects, more peace and justice -- are those things obtainable on the moon or Mars? The next revolution, if you believe Garreau, is in the human body itself.
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St. Louis, Mo.: Quite frankly, I don't trust that Bush meant a damned word of that space speech. I note that Griffin's desire to save the Hubble after all comes at the cost of two satellites designed to look for extra-solar planets. I suspect that some "reason" will come up to cancel a Hubble rescue mission but these extra-solar probe satellites will be killed anyway.
Every picture Hubble takes puts the lie to creationism. I think Bush&Co. want it dead, dead, dead.
Joel Achenbach: Tell us how you really feel.
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Atlanta, Ga.: "What will it take to get us started?" "Is there tobacco on the moon?"
No. But there are large deposits of platinum group metals that any hydrogen based economy will need. At well over 10 times the price of gold for some PGMs it would be fairly easy to see a 'gold' rush to happen as soon as the idea of reliable access to the moon were internalized by industry.
Joel Achenbach: I am trying to work up a joke about sending our heavy metal bands to the moon but I just can't quite make it happen.
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Rockville, Md.: I enjoyed the article. You left us hanging though with the mention of Franklin Chang-Diaz who recently has designed a "newfangled" rocket:
"The performance of a rocket like this is 60 times better than the best chemical rocket today," he said. It's so fast, this rocket, that it's overkill to use it to go to the moon, he said. The trip would only take a matter of hours. This is for exploring the solar system. Mars would take less than three months. Is this something chang-Diaz drew up in his basement or something on the NASA drawing board? It didn't seem in context to be something that you took all that seriously -- but sounded neat
Joel Achenbach: It's a real rocket, he hopes to test it on the ISS, and it's part of a class of plasma rockets that exist at a number of institutions, I think (for example I think they have one at Princeton).
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Sigonella NAS, Sicily: Hello Mr. Achenbach,
I am writing from Key School. I'm working with 6th graders now in Sicily and was exited to see your name when I logged in today. Just wanted to say Hi, it'll be 7pm here when you're on. I didn't get to read the article but I'll have my students read about it, as we are studying the Solar System. Hope to hear from you.
Joel Achenbach: Fantastic, thanks for joining us from Sicily. I read a book on the Solar System when I was in 3rd grade and have been interested in space ever since. My favorite planet is Pluto -- but I guess that almost goes without saying.
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College Park, Md.: Exploration of the unknown remains a powerful and emotional drive in human beings. However, climbing Mount Everest, taking a small step on the Moon or a giant leap on Mars alone does not serve any scientific purpose - not even with an ant colony strapped to one's backside. A close examination of shuttle flights reveals that the "scientific experiments" traveling onboard are nothing more than high school science fair projects and corporate advertising. Shuttle politics constrained the initial Hubble deployment to the narrow confines of the shuttle's bay and resulted in design flaws requiring repair on a later mission. The original Hubble deployment plan, not involving the shuttle, avoided such problems and would have placed the telescope in a more distant and optimal orbit. Moreover, the one potential scientific shuttle mission, a proposed repair to prolong Hubble's stellar scientific life, will likely be scrapped. The only science being done by ISS astronauts consists of staying alive while falling around in low Earth orbit in an over-budget corporate boondoggle.
As a research physicist, and not a patsy for the aerospace industry, I have serious concerns regarding misappropriation of the dwindling scientific funding. What are the projected costs and benefits, scientifically, of the quixotic plan to return humans to the moon and eventually travel to Mars? What new scientific information will these expensive and risky manned missions provide, which robotic missions have not or will not have accomplished already? Perhaps the proposed reinvestment in manned space flight might benefit the US economy by duping China to waste burgeoning resources sending Taikonauts piddling around in low Earth orbit ... a kind of cold space race.
Joel Achenbach: Marburger made an interesting point: That for the cost of the shuttle repair mission back in the early 1990s, we could have launched several new Hubbles. He was just making a general point about the cost of operating the shuttle; but there's no doubt that the shuttle and the ISS have massively distorted the entire space program. The Vision at least calls for scrapping the shuttle and retiring the ISS in the next decade and it would seem to me (is this insane?) that this would free up rather than reduce funding for space science, since the space science is what has worked so fabulously, with the Mars rover and Cassini and Hubble. NASA has enough of a sense of self-preservation to know what works and what doesn't work. And there's an argument that if you put elaborate machines in space you'll need astronauts to support them -- rather than the other way around.
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Atlanta, Ga.: I'm the VP for Business Development for a private launch company (masten-space.com). Your article seemed to contain a good deal of scepticism: "Unless it's just a dream", "How much of this stuff is for real?", etc. An axiom most in the business understand is that technology hasn't been our problem since the 1960s. The problems are ones of business and marketing. As someone who at least seems to be a sceptic, could you speak to what we in the industry need to do to convince you that it is real, that yes, in your lifetime, given a few hundred thousand dollars, you can fly to the moon and back?
Joel Achenbach: I will not go to the moon because I find it harrowing just going to Reston.
When I ask, "is this for real?" I think I am asking a fair question on behalf of my readers, one that I try in the article to take a stab at, but which ultimately is not really answerable quite yet. You have to show us. Show, don't tell.
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Alexandria, Va.: Unmentioned in your article, the most vital reason for mankind to explore outer space is not for adventure or even for knowledge, but because as man becomes ever more capable of rendering his home planet lifeless and uninhabitable, it is necessary that human beings be spread as far as possible across the stars in order to render such an attempted racial suicide impossible.
As a great scientist once said, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."
Joel Achenbach: I completely disagree. You're giving up on the Earth? This place has been a cradle of life for four billion years and I don't see why one species that's relatively new should be allowed to GIVE UP ON IT. We agree that environmental damage is bad and must be mitigated. I'm just saying that running away is not a solution.
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Philadephia, Pa.: The Chang-Diaz design -- and all other ion, plasma, etc. rockets that use electromagnetic acceleration -- is relatively low thrust. The good news is that such rockets can keep up that thrust for far longer than any chemical rocket: great for use in space.
The bad news is that they're useless for getting into space from the ground... and that, Marburger's "big hill," has always been the hard and expensive part.
Joel Achenbach: Very good point, thanks...
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Washington, D.C.: Does the Vision (wish I could boldface that) throw any bones to the SETI projects? Perhaps provide some small amount of funding to find out if other civilizations have successfully fulfilled the Vision?
Joel Achenbach: Do you honestly think a Vision with the president's imprimatur is going to mention the search for alien intelligence? Maybe if this were the Gore Administration.
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Glen Arm, Md.: One person noted that 'large deposits of platinum group metals' exist - sorry, but that is hype - the amounts per ton of moon dust is very, very small; and these metals are of minor use in hydrogen production - energy costs to create hydrogen is the issue, and platinum metals do not effect energy costs to free hydrogen at all. Sorry but the only reason to go to the moon is to go to the moon.
Joel Achenbach: You tell 'im.
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Atlanta, Ga.: Stairway to Space.
That URL shows a plausible timeline making some very reasonable assumptions. The delta-v required to go from a Bigelow hotel to a lunar flyby is not that significant (i.e. that old "once your in LEO you're halfway to anywhere" saying). As far as the business models the assumptions are that space tourism is profitable and price reductions due to higher flight rates make LEO more affordable. The assumption was a $20 million 'cap' on how much anyone was willing to spend.
Joel Achenbach: I'll post this quickly and just say I am tired of the Led Zeppelin version of this.
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Northern Virginia: A key indicator in terms of public interest in space is this question: will data collection from our Voyager probe, now outside the orbit of Pluto but inside the Oort cloud, be "zeroed out" of the NASA budget, as currently proposed?
I realize that Voyager is unmanned and thus off the topic of your piece -- but to me, hanging up on our probe at this point would be a devastating proof we as a species just aren't interested any more in learning about space. The money is trivial in percentage terms. What do you think will happen, and what would your preference be?
Joel Achenbach: I think the Voyagers will be saved, because they're iconic, but don't know about other more obscure probes.
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Washington, D.C.: How long from here to Mars in hours or days?
Joel Achenbach: You hear 10 months, 6 months, rarely less than 3 months, and then you have to cool your heels on Mars for a year to wait for the planets to get close again. It's a bear of a trip.
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Reston, Va.: Mr Achenbach,
Thanks for the chat. Love your blog.
Count me as a sci-fi loving skeptic. There is absolutely nothing more I would love than to live in a time where people were zipping about the solar system as tourists and explorers. But the laws of physics are here to stay and most of the proposals to explore space - from my perspective - seem to amount to "someone should think of something clever", a philosophy that seems to be based on a belief in magic fairies.
All that being said, what's your opinion of a program based on rockets and robots as opposed to shuttles and humans? Shuttles tend to wear out over time, rockets are cheaper, machines are replaceable, and human life isn't. Why not have the machines do the dirty work until we can figure out a way to launch stuff into space at a reasonable level of cost and safety?
Joel Achenbach: Thanks for the nice comments and I am going to wrap this up now. I'll post some more, maybe, on the blog (go to washingtonpost.com/achenblog).
I think we've already seen robots and rockets do wonders -- look at Cassini/Huygens, and the Voyagers, and Viking, and the Mars rovers, and the Mars Global Surveyor, and so on. The one catch is that no one has yet figured out how to make a rover that has anything like the intelligence of, say, a 2-year-old. It's hard to drive those things from 100 million miles away. Until we design robots that can THINK a little better, astronauts will be at least in theory a rather attractive possibility for exploration. But as I said in the piece, that's just tossing the dollar cost out the window. Is it worth it? I think America has to figure that out. That's above my pay grade.
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Joel Achenbach: Thanks for joining in...sorry I couldn't get to all the questions. Cheers, Joel
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