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Topic: Republican antiscience stance extends all the way to outer space (Read 464 times) |
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Hermit
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Republican antiscience stance extends all the way to outer space
« on: 2006-06-28 17:44:43 » |
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NASA's Reverse Thrust
[WW: I think the Bush administration is afraid of seeing satan in a Hubble deep field shot]
Source: Scientific American
Authors: George Musser
Dated: 2006-06-28
When President George W. Bush unveiled his plan for a new moon shot two years ago, a lot of people worried that it was long on rhetoric and short on cash--ultimately forcing NASA to raid its science budget to pay for it. On close examination, though, the trajectory seemed reasonable [Hermit: Neither sufficiently close nor adequately examining if this was the conclusion. To my view, Bush's shifty-eyed bait and switch tactic was clearly a disaster from beginning to end - from its very first unfunded introduction. His - and his Republicrat cronies' - non-projects and vast financial irresponsibilities have effectively terminated most American - and many partly American funded international, near-term, non-military space programs - with immense implications for all of mankind.]. The money freed up by phasing out the space shuttle and the International Space Station was not an implausible amount to build a postshuttle spacecraft (known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV) and send it moonward by 2020. A "go as you can pay" strategy would extend the deadlines if money got tight, rather than pickpocketing other programs. A modest dollop of extra funds would help cover the transitional costs. NASA administrator Michael Griffin said at a press conference last September: "In our forward planning, we do not take one thin dime out of the science program in order to execute this architecture."
Now it looks like the skeptics were right. The NASA budget announced in February mows down a scarily long list of science missions, from a Europa orbiter to a space-based gravitational-wave observatory. Research grants to individual scientists, traditionally kept safe from high-level budget machinations, have taken a 15 percent hit, retroactive to last fall; hundreds have already received "termination letters" canceling their projects. Griffin went before Congress in February as the bearer of bad news: "Fulfilling our commitments on the International Space Station and bringing the Crew Exploration Vehicle online in a timely manner, not later than 2014 and possibly much sooner, is a higher priority than these science missions during this period."
The countdown to the crisis actually began a year ago, when the Bush administration lopped off the dollop of bridging funds it had promised. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which damaged shuttle facilities in Mississippi and Louisiana, and an across the- board federal budget cut, largely to raise money for the Iraq War. Worst of all, a new analysis of the shuttle and space station found them at least $2 billion in the hole. Griffin went cap in hand to the administration but was told to make up the difference from the agency's own wherewithal.
Compared with the plan of two years ago, science gives up a total of $6.4 billion (in 2005 dollars) over the five years from 2007 through 2011--a 20 percent cut. Planetary exploration is the worst hit area--40 percent. Human spaceflight gains $5.2 billion, but its situation is hardly to be envied either. The shuttle fleet will make 16 rather than 28 trips to the space station before retiring in 2010, and from then until the CEV debuts, the country will have no capability to launch astronauts into orbit at all.
Griffin has described the shift of money as a "speed bump," a temporary measure to get human spaceflight back on course. Veteran observers express sympathy for his dilemma. "It's a knotty problem," says John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "There's no clear answer."
Nevertheless, many complain that he has been heavy-handed. Multiyear projects require some consistency in their funding. By making such an abrupt budget change, NASA will mothball or abandon half-built (in some cases, fully built) hardware, lose expertise developed at great effort, and leave gaps in data coverage, notably of the earth's climate. NASA has had budget crunches before, but seldom have they been so wasteful.
"It's the sudden change in slope: that’s why this is more difficult than it was in previous years," says Lennard Fisk, chair of the National Research Council's Space Studies Board and himself a former NASA official. The unprecedented targeting of research grants strikes scientists as particularly gratuitous: for a small savings, only about $80 million, NASA is causing a huge disruption.
The Space Studies Board is investigating how to hold on to the grants and smaller missions by delaying or downgrading the bigger fry. Several flagship missions, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, have run over budget and need housecleaning anyway. Wesley Huntress, director of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and another past NASA official, says scientists need to take responsibility for making the necessary trade-offs, rather than leaving it up to NASA headquarters and Capitol Hill.
Some hope the crisis may finally force some out-of-the-capsule thinking. Should NASA jettison the shuttle and station right away? Should it do the opposite and stretch out the station's construction to reduce its annual cost? Should NASA be split i nto separate science and astronautics agencies? If it were, would that really be good for science? Unless some helpful reform can be salvaged from the situation, what seemed like such a grand vision two years ago may fail in the execution.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Rumgoat
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Re:Republican antiscience stance extends all the way to outer space
« Reply #1 on: 2006-07-01 20:54:38 » |
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In my opinion, the Space Race started winding down with the last of the lunar landings, and really took a hit when the USSR collapsed. Much of the United States' motivation to explore space was competition with the Soviets. Now, at least among people I talk to, there is more concern with spending money on terrestrial problems, and things such as space exploration, which does not appear to offer any tangible benefit to the common person in their lifetime, is seen as something we should not be spending money on.
I see corporations as being the future of space exploration. Space industry and tourism are probably the future, at least if companies like Virgin Galactic can show profit.
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"Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it."
J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Hermit
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Re:Republican antiscience stance extends all the way to outer space
« Reply #2 on: 2006-07-02 04:09:33 » |
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[Rumgoat] Now, at least among people I talk to, there is more concern with spending money on terrestrial problems, and things such as space exploration, which does not appear to offer any tangible benefit to the common person in their lifetime, is seen as something we should not be spending money on.
[Rumgoat] I see corporations as being the future of space exploration. Space industry and tourism are probably the future, at least if companies like Virgin Galactic can show profit.
[Hermit]
Rumgoat may well be correct and his conclusions about corporations true. This is, in my opinion, not a good thing. At least, I don't think that it is a good thing if you value humanity and its potential future. Which I do. Which may be why I have concluded that their actions prove that nobody who discounts the benefits of space to us and our children values humanity and its potential future , no matter how much they may protest to the opposite effect. Here is why.
We know that we are going to - inexorably and inevitably - run out of cheap fossil fuels. We are going to run out of oil far faster than most pessimists imagine - and that will put many other forms of energy out of reach. As we run out of oil, so additional pressure will be applied to other fuel sources and the environment. These costs will result in the rapid escalation of the price of fuel making fuel unaffordable, other investments problematic and life much more difficult than it is today. With the sole exception of space based solar systems, the very low concentrations of alternative (i.e. not fossil fuel derived) energy solutions guarantees that they are at best able to produce small increments of the energy it takes to produce them in the first place.
Flood control construction, electric distribution grids, continental rail and highway systems, and other large scale (and necessarily expensive) "public goods" all illustrate that the marketplace ("corporations") dismally fails the public when the challenge is for projects which will engage significant amounts of capital for long periods of time - no matter how attractive the potential gains, or even more tellingly, no matter the probable cost to mankind of not engaging in a particular activity. Indeed, it is frequently the case that the market's interest is diametrically opposed to that of the public (consider refineries in the USA).
This is because the market, to function effectively, must consider immediate returns before people or even before future viability, must steeply discount returns over time, must avoid risk which can reduce capital availability, must avoid changes which may obsolete their investments and must reject exploration and research as providing too uncertain a return to qualify for investment. When they don't do this, other corporation which do work on this basis will remove their investment and thus their ability to exist. So, even though space colonization is, as Stephen Hawking recently argued (infra), and I will support, undoubtedly a prerequisite to any chance, however slender, of a long term significance for humanity and also offers the ability for mankind to bypass the more immediate resource constraints against which we are bumping, most obviously, immediately and critically that of energy - which is likely in the absence of space access to power, going to result in us wiping ourselves out in a paroxysm of evolutionary zeal; I don't see the market funding it in any meaningful way. We got to where we have because of low cost fossil fuels - which we have squandered. It would take the planet an estimated 400 million years to replenish what we have burned up already, even if we were to vanish tomorrow. Which is a bit longer than most accountants - and even engineers - never mind politicians - are used to considering.
The US currently consumes 25% of the world's energy production (with just 4% of the world's population). The US currently has an $11.3 trillion economy and the next largest is Japan at $4.3 trillion. At the same time, the global gasoline bill is already of the order of $3 trillion - and set to double again even without the threat of war in Iran. Goldman Sachs calculates, all else being equal, that by 2050 the projected Chinese $44.5 trillion and Indian $27.8 trillion economies will total twice the US's projected $36 trillion. Unfortunately, all else is not even nearly equal. Their projection assumes that we will be using 4 times today's energy just to meet steady state demands. Meanwhile World-Watch Institute reports that in the last 20 years, we have used three barrels of oil for every one new potential barrel discovered - with collapsing conversion efficiencies even as actual conversion technologies have improved (i.e. we are using lower and lower quality sources). Alternatives will be constrained by availability of oil needed by the acquisition and extraction process, by the rapid increase in CO2 production as conversion efficiencies drop, and by the drop in the planet's capacity to absorb CO2 without massive implications on planetary climates.
This suggests to me, that even if, by some strange alchemy, the market wanted to invest in space power collection systems, that America's devastated reputation, environmental degradation and mercilessly gutted manufacturing and resource base precludes raising the huge amount of capital that will be needed. Further, I suspect that China has arrived too late at the fossil fuel bonanza table (unless in cooperation with Russia and India (which is not impossible, though it may be unlikely)) to establish a reliable space based power source before resource constraints prevent further development. This leaves Europe, and I'm not sure that they have the financial wherewith all to engage in the kind of massive construction that really low cost space based power access demands, let alone the will and capital to establish a space elevator to make truly heavy lift affordable (from an energy perspective) in the brief time available before resource constraints and consequent tooth-and-nail resource competition impoverishes us all to an extent where ideas like space based solar power collection systems seem "impractical". This may well turn out to be mankind's epitaph. Given that it was precisely by challenging the impractical which has resulted in all mankind's progress to date.
In a way, this can all be blamed on the USAF which cut up the Saturn vertical assembly gantry in order to guarantee funding for the shuttle (with less than 1/10 the capacity). While the Saturn program burned through $US6.5 billion between 1964 and 1973 (with the maximum annual expenditure of $US1.2 billion (0.5% GDP compared to DoD's expenditure of $63.5 billion) in 1966), today it would cost us of the order of 50 times that (compared to the $ 1 trillion DoD (and other security) expenditures). Given America's lack of fiscal credibility this amount could only be achieved through borrowing, and that would be possible only if other borrowings were to be reduced. A scenario that GW Bush's America has made unlikely in the extreme.
While it may still be (barely) possible for a serious philanthropist (e.g. Soros), without shareholder pressures to "seed" the development of such capabilities, I think that the recent dispersal of Warren Buffet's fortune and the very narrowly self-beneficial directions taken by Bill Gate's distributions have greatly reduced the likelihood that this will happen in the US. Which suggests that space power is not going to happen here without a massive political upheaval. And I think that most Americans are too ill educated to grasp the fact that "alternative" fuels cannot replace fossil fuel - or even that "Hydrogen" is not a fuel at all - so I don't see such a revolution happening until it is far too late for it to play any major role in changing the future for the better.
The only other potential is for an as yet non-existent privately held company to attempt it - and there probably isn't enough time left for a private company to make the kind of money needed and engage in the research and development that Space Power requires before the inevitable fuel cost driven economic collapse destroys the viability of technologically advanced projects.
Hermit
PS If you have the opportunity to hear Stephen Hawking speak, take it. It is one of the more emotion-laden, intellectually-charged privileges available to us and the effort that he has to put into delivering his thoughts, and the quality and clarity of the thought behind his communications makes it hugely rewarding for his audience.
Hawking: Space key to human survival
Source: Associated Press
Authors: Not Credited
Dated: 2005-06-14
HONG KONG, China (AP) -- The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said.
Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.
"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture Thursday were sold out.
Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
The 64-year-old scientist -- author of the global best-seller "A Brief History of Time" -- uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
One of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation, Hawking has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end.
However, Alan Guth, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Hawking's latest observations were something of a departure from his usual research and more applicable to survival over the long-term.
"It is a new area for him to look at," Guth said. "If he's talking about the next 100 years and beyond, it does make sense to think about space as the ultimate lifeboat."
But, he added, "I don't see the likely possibility within the next 50 years of science technology making it easier to survive on Mars and on the moon than it would be to survive on earth."
"I would still think that an underground base, for example in Antarctica, would be easier to build than building on the moon," Guth said.
Joshua Winn, an astrophysicist at MIT, agreed. "The prospect of colonizing other planets is very far off, you must realize," he said.
Hawking's "work has been highly theoretical physics, not in astrophysics or global politics or anything like that," Winn added. "He is certainly stepping outside his research domain."
Hawking's comments Tuesday were reminiscent of the work of American astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was a believer in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Sagan, a Cornell University professor and NASA-decorated scientist who died in 1996, noted that organic molecules, the kind that life on Earth is dependent on, appear to be almost everywhere in the solar system.
Sagan played a leading role in the U.S. space program, helping design robotic missions and contributing to the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo expeditions.
But his work also focused on the search for habitable worlds and intelligent life beyond the solar system, as well as theories about life's origins, ideas popularized in his best-selling 1985 novel, "Contact," which was made into a film starring Jodie Foster.
At Tuesday's news conference, Hawking said he too was venturing into the world of fiction. He plans to team up with his daughter, 35-year-old journalist and novelist Lucy Hawking, to write a children's book about the universe aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.
"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," said Lucy Hawking. They did not provide further details.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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