America failed Robert Zubrin. The aerospace engineer and co-developer of the unrealized Mars Direct proposal to send Americans to the red planet within a reasonable timeframe and NASA’s existing budget was quite nearly radicalized by the paralytic introspection of the agency he loved. Zubrin evolved from advocate for Mars exploration to evangelist in favor of NASA’s reform following his confrontation with the soul-crushing bureaucracies that administer manned spaceflight in the United States. America never went to Mars. Today, on the 46th anniversary of Apollo 11’s triumph, its celebration feels hollow. America no longer leads the way into space. She doesn’t even have a vehicle to get astronauts into orbit. Americans no longer seem intrigued by what might be possible. Instead, they fear it. The unknown that was once so inviting is now forbidding. In the mistaken pursuit of a paradise on Earth, America has ceded the heavens.
For a brief moment, Americans were treated to a bit of that pioneering spirit that propelled a handful of men into unexplored space in the 1960s last week when the New Horizons probe successfully charted the Pluto system. A probe launched in 2006 encountered its destination on the edge of our solar system nearly 10 years later within 90 seconds of its predicted arrival. The data it returned has proven invaluable: Vast, featureless plains indicative of potential volcanic activity beneath the surface; great mountains composed primarily of water ice; a polar cap packed with methane and nitrogen. It was a monumental but also a melancholy moment. As New Horizon drifted on into deep space, it began to dawn on observers that the probe’s incredible success – building on that of other explorer probes like Cassini and Galileo – heralds the dawn of the robots.
In 2018, the European Space Agency will send a new rover to Mars to examine its soil. NASA hopes to follow that up with an automated spacecraft that will maneuver an asteroid into orbit around the moon. The ESA will launch a probe in 2022 that will travel to the Jovian system and focus extensively on charting Jupiter’s moons – the most exciting of which is Europa, which is believed to hold a vast ocean of liquid water just below its icy surface. 2018 will see the launch of a new solar obiter and a new orbital telescope, too. At some point in the mid 2030’s, NASA hopes to press the Orion spacecraft vehicle into service after a series of manned test flights that are slated to begin in 2021.
But Zubrin knows all too well the political perils of planning missions into space on a generational timescale. In 2004, George W. Bush pledged in his State of the Union address to back and fund a new series of manned missions to the moon that would, by 2020, yield the first extraterrestrial human colony. That lunar base would then be used as a staging point to get mankind to Mars. But the project was never fully funded by Congress. The project was all but dead when Barack Obama submitted a budget proposal in 2010 that delivered the coup de grâce.
What does that say for future manned exploration of our solar system? Do Americans no longer have the stomach for expeditions to new worlds? Perhaps. What killed Mars Direct was, according to Zubrin, the fact that his proposal utilized so few of NASA’s pet projects. He points to a boondoggle NASA report called the “90-Day Study” as evidence to support his contention: The sprawling 1989 plan for human exploration of the moon and Mars was designed to satisfy every department head, ever project manager. The price tag, $450 billion over 20 years, was a nonstarter. NASA executives contend that Zubrin’s proposal glossed over and underestimated the challenges of a Mars mission, and that is quite possibly true. But Zubrin’s critique of NASA’s culture rings true. Experts claim that we might yet see a manned mission to the fourth planet in our solar system by the mid-2030s, wrote Science.com’s Miriam Kramer, but only “if the space agency’s budget is restored to pre-sequestration levels.”
“To be able to make it feasible and affordable, you need a sustainable budget,” said Explore Mars Inc.’s Chris Carberry. “You need a budget that is consistent, that you can predict from year to year and that doesn’t get canceled in the next administration.” But that’s politically infeasible. Budgets are not carved into stone, and one Congress or president is not beholden to the priorities of the last. Budgetary outlays for multi-year projects, much less those that sprawl over decades, are the ripest of targets for politicians with more contemporaneous concerns. If it is to be done, the Mars mission must be made a mandate that is realizable within a decade.
The risk aversion that disguises itself as prudence that forces America’s astronauts to hitch rides to the international space station aboard Russian rockets is not unique to one political party. Both Democrats and Republicans struggle to justify the peril and expense of sending Americans to other worlds or even back to the moon. But the benefits of exploring another planet on the ground extend well beyond the tangible discoveries that could be made there, which are not limited to determining once and for all if a second genesis occurred in our solar system. Zubrin contends that a new era of manned exploration of space would provide America with a new generation of scientists.
“Learn your science and you can pioneer a new world. Develop your mind and you can be a hero for humanity,” he claimed, “doing something that has never been done before, seeing things that no one has seen before, building where no one has built before.” A new space program of the kind Kennedy envisioned would recruit students to focus on STEM-related studies like nothing else.
Nearly a half-century after Americans first went to the moon; the country is once again shackled to Earth’s bonds. There is no grand vision that compels mankind to look to the stars. Instead, we are told that there are problems at home that are more deserving of our focus. Conservatives would contend that private firms are better suited to pick up where NASA has left off. Democrats might claim that space exploration and its associated technological benefits is a great project worthy of a great nation, but so, too, are universal health care or federally-funded pre-kindergarten education programs. Both attitudes would indefinitely consign mankind to its rocky cradle.
There is still a place for NASA. There is still something in the human spirit, and the American spirit in particular, that longs to forge new paths into uncharted territory. The hidebound scolds who, either in service to prudence or self-doubt, would force Americans to watch a China-led moon mission from the comfort and safety of their homes would condemn them to a life in a gilded cage. We celebrate the success of the men who traveled to the moon in 1969 today, but the revelry is muted. Quietly and only to ourselves, we wonder if such glories are no longer meant for us. But they are. Human beings, Americans, aspire to more; all they lack is a visionary with a plan.
