The future of space flight back in the realm of science fiction

I was watching a space exploration program on the History Channel the other day that was even further out-there than what I was reading about in science books when I was a wide-eyed child. “Artificial Intelligence” robotics will mine moons and asteroids for minerals, and then move on to the next sub-planetary system. Since only the tiniest fraction of the Sun’s energy reaches the Earth, a chain of robotic devices would encircle the Sun, absorb its energy and channel it back to Earth. Common sense tells us that this particular idea is somewhat on the impractical side, since this would require resources larger than the entire mass of this planet; obviously having a PH.D doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is immune from intense flights of fancy.

But back in the late 1960s and early Seventies when excitement about the space program was at its peak, NASA was seriously planning a 100-person orbiting space station by the early 1980s; this was clearly—or at least theoretically—within the resource capacity of the country. The Space Shuttle program was originally specifically envisioned to support this project; the first shuttle constructed—the Columbia—was even designed so that it could dock with the original vision of the space station. 

But this changed. Many politicians, astronauts and scientists have heaped criticism on President Barack Obama for scaling back the so-called Constellation Project, which envisioned a return to manned missions to the Moon, and from there to Mars. A feasibility study by an independent panel decided that the project was simply too expensive at this time of budget crisis. The question of who to blame actually goes back to the Richard Nixon administration. Nixon cancelled the final three Apollo moon missions—despite the fact that they had already been funded—as “unnecessary.” Although Nixon approved the go-ahead on the Space Shuttle, because funding for NASA was slashed, the ambitious projects that the space agency had planned were scrapped. The purpose of the shuttle had been undercut, and it was now a program in search of a mission.

The Skylab space station was little more than a made-up interim project intended to give soon-to-be former Apollo technicians and workers something to do, rather than lose this skilled workforce to the private sector. The space station Freedom was a more ambitious project, but again budget constraints ended this venture; the completed module was eventually used on the International Space Station—again a far cry from the giddy concepts originally envisioned.

The effect of the Nixon administration’s decision to scale back the space program cannot be gainsaid. There was no longer the impetus to move forward with new technologies that made advanced space travel something beyond fantasy. Imagine if steam power was suppressed for lack of funding in the 19^th century; the Industrial Revolution could not have occurred without it, and advanced technologies derived from it would not have been possible. On the other hand, if the NASA vision has been pursued and funded from the beginning, the technology necessary to achieve it might already be within reached, and budget constraints would be less an issue than they are today.

Today, there are little more than plans to build rocket boosters barely advanced from the old Saturn V and space capsules similar to the Apollo Command Module—perhaps for a mission to an asteroid. Yet proof that NASA no longer has the technical capacity that it once had was demonstrated by the fact that it cannot even perfect the technologies needed to complete these straight-forward projects without massive cost over-runs. Obama rightly concluded that the total lack of technological innovation on display did not justify the massively over-budget and behind schedule Constellation.

Some will decry the end the Space Shuttle program with no replacement in sight, but after the Challenger disaster, its missions became little more than expensive excuses to justify its existence. The Columbia disaster demonstrated that its aging technology was well past its prime. There are those who say that private industry will fill-in the gap that government vacates; but we have already seen what happens when profit is put ahead of safety: Private contractors were essentially handed control of Space Shuttle program in its last two decades of operation, and the shuttle workforce was cut in half—and safety issues that were given prominence after Challenger were again given “routine” consideration. This lackadaisical attitude allowed engineers to refuse to contemplate what possible damage that the foam that struck the Columbia’s wing had caused—seen after examining video only a day after the launch. 

There are those who say that if humanity is to survive, it must eventually migrate from this resource-exhausted planet to other worlds. If this is true, then maybe we need help from the extraterrestrials that are allegedly wandering our universe and occasionally pay us a visit.  The National Ignition Facility in California—since 1997 intended to create a nuclear fusion event through the use of multiple powerful lasers directed at a tiny target—has been an expensive failure, having not generated a single watt of energy. Of course, we shouldn’t hold our collective breaths about the possibility of such assistance—and if it is just another fantasy, it doesn’t say much about our chances, either.