NASA: End Manned Space Flight

America’s manned space program is at a tipping point.  After the Shuttle was decommissioned we have had to rely on the Russians to fly just one American to the International Space Station (ISS).  Russia is tripling the fare to transport one US astronaut to the ISS on the Soyuz spacecraft  to $71 million.  There are those who consider relying on Russia  a national humiliation.  Maybe it’s time to ask ourselves why we need to send men to the ISS and beyond.  What, in fact, is the imperative for us us to send men into space at all? 

We’ve been to the moon and back nine times.  On six of those missions American astronauts landed on the moon.  The total cost of the Apollo program was $25 billion spent between 1962 to 1972.  Adjusted for inflation the price tag would be $174 billion.  Now we hear that NASA is making plans to colonize the moon and to send men to Mars.  In 1989 NASA released the cost of a manned Mars mission.  The price tag was $400 billion.  In today’s dollars that would be $755 billion.  NASA programs being what they are, the final price tag will probably exceed $1 trillion.  We would have to develop and build from scratch: a new launch vehicle, a totally new payload capsule, a special Mars landing craft, manned roving vehicles to move our astronauts about the surface of the red planet, and an earth-return-vehicle.   To what end?  What marvelous discoveries will we make that cannot be accomplished with robotic apparatus which can be launched into space for a fraction of the cost and none of the risk associated with manned missions.  The trillion dollar price tag will be only the beginning.  NASA proposes to colonize Mars.  What will that prove?  It’s not worth another $1 trillion or more to bolster our national pride.  If other nations wish to bankrupt themselves in order to flaunt their technological prowess let them go right ahead.

Based on the uselessness of information produced by the ISS, such as the effects of zero gravity on the behavior of ant colonies, the growing of crystals, or the breeding of fruit flies in zero gravity, what might we reasonably expect from missions to colonize the moon or from an obscenely expensive program for manned exploration and colonization of Mars?  Most experiments on the ISS have been to maintain the station, to see how humans can perform tasks in weightlessness, and to measure the effects of that environment on human physiology.  The other experiments on the ISS seem like high school science fair projects of questionable utility to us earthbound mortals. 

The American space program is thriving without life-threatening manned missions which will teach us little or nothing more than we can plearn with space robots.  We should keep what’s good about NASA and downsize it.  The acquisition of useful knowledge should be NASA’s mission.  Learning more about how man survives in zero gravity or minimal gravity and how he might survive in hostile atmospheres or in the absence of any atmosphere at all, no longer justifies the expense and risk of sending men into space.  NASA should dedicate itself to exploring space with robotic apparatus.  The agency should abandon manned space missions.