This is a lengthy commentary on the statement by Dr Wesley T Huntress,
Jr of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, given to the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics,
Committee on Science, US House of Representatives, on Tue 3 Apr 01, and
entitled “Grand Challenges for America’s Space Program.” It was
subsequently posted in its entirety to SCoPE-L by Constantine Thomas of
Lancaster University, and may also be found on the Web at
http://www.house.gov/science/huntress.htm.
I earlier made reference to Public Choice Theory (hereafter PCT), an
introduction to which may be found at
http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/pubs/region/int959.html. My comments
will comprise a view of Dr Huntress’ address through the lens of PCT,
and its implications for planetary scientists.
The first contrast I will draw is that of specific projects vs
organizational perpetuation. JFK’s famous speech of 12 Sep 62 at Rice
University in Houston – found at
http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/j091262.htm – included the famous line:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard.” This was in turn a
reference to his 25 May 61 speech – found at
http://www.cs.umb.edu/jfklibrary/j052561.htm – which mentioned four
endeavors in space:

1. Landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth;
2. Development of the Rover nuclear rocket;
3. The use of space satellites for world-wide communications; and
4. A satellite system for world-wide weather observation.

Notice the specific, goal-oriented nature of each of these proposals.
How did they fare?
Forty years on, the first is an archetype of modern technological
triumph – but is now far enough in the past, and so bereft of
successors, that an American television network has repeatedly broadcast
a program asserting that the entire Apollo program was a hoax. The
majority of the viewing audience is neither old enough nor technically
literate enough to know better.
The second proposal was deemed to have an adverse risk-reward ratio and
was abandoned. It may well have been technically feasible, but the
fears of the American electorate, rational or not, prevailed; the
program was abandoned in 1971 – see
http://roadrunner.com/~mrpbar/rocket.html.
Communications satellites, the third proposal, are now a private
endeavor. Their feasibility was proven by the middle of the decade, and
all improvements in the 35 years since have been market-driven. The
prospect of broadband services for intercontinental air travelers is
presently driving the development of comsats in geosynchronous orbit
massing over five thousand kilograms apiece, a far cry from the 77-kg
Telstar of 1962.
Weather observation and forecasting is now carried out by a combination
of public and private organizations; the steady improvements in this
field have also been market-driven.

Historical context is important. The 1961 speech was titled “Special
Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” and its overwhelming
emphasis was on the Cold War. The deadly, world-dividing confrontation
between America and Russia prophesied by Alexis de Tocqueville 125 years
earlier (“… nonetheless, each seems called by some secret design of
Providence to someday hold in its hands the destinies of half the
world.” – Democracy in America, 1835) had come to pass.
But the American side of the Cold War was, itself, a finite objective;
the Truman Doctrine’s central passage is “I believe that it must be the
policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” – and
this support was never intended to be directed against any armed
minority or outside pressure other than those sponsored by the Soviet
Union.
With the disintegration of the USSR and the disappearance of the Warsaw
Pact, American military budgets have declined, though only by 40% from
their Cold War peak. Considering that the nominal threat against which
the US Department of Defense was arrayed has vanished almost entirely,
there would seem to be a latency in fiscal appropriations. PCT explains
this, and predicts that the Pentagon will be casting about for a new
doctrine, preferably one which is entirely open-ended and thus in no
danger of undermining justification of continued funding. I believe
that Dr Huntress’ speech seeks to employ the same strategy.
Not only does he speak of “a long-term program” and “a permanent
presence,” but the “mission statement” he quotes is utterly open-ended:

1. Solve mysteries of the Universe,
2. Explore the Solar System,
3. Discover planets around other stars,
4. Search for life beyond Earth.

Compare that list to JFK’s four projects. Our great-grandchildren
could be paying taxes for this – or for Dr Huntress’ own list of “Grand
Challenges”: read the history and the destiny of the Solar System; look
for evidence of life elsewhere in the Solar System; image and study
planets around other stars … find Earth-like planets in other planetary
systems; send a spacecraft to a nearby star; conduct a progressive and
systematic plan of human exploration beyond Earth orbit. Such a program
may be visionary, but the most important thing about it politically is
that it is permanent.
It also seeks to aggregate all space science, irrespective of purpose,
under a single conceptual umbrella, and thus define away the conflict
between manned and unmanned space exploration.
A theme to which I will frequently recur in this forum is that what
matters is what happens, not what we wish would have happened or what we
fear will happen. I sympathize with those who regret that there was no
larger follow-up to Apollo, or who fear a dwindling of progress in space
science. But the present questions are – what is the likelihood that
the “Grand Challenges” will be undertaken? And would it be a good thing
if they were?

Remembering always that this is a political program, to be conducted by
an agency of the United States government, it must therefore be sold to
Congress – and barring some extraordinary manifestation of national
security concerns, as with the Manhattan Project, it must be sold
explicitly, not hidden within some other appropriation. And therefore
Dr Huntress says: “The public response to the exciting events in its
space program has been overwhelming. Ask any schoolchild in your
District about Hubble.”
Is there broad-based support for the space program among the American
electorate – relative to other national priorities? Senators and
congresspeople employ staffers to check things like this. They will
find out, and in the absence of unusual strength of will on the part of
key committee chairs, or unusual inducements in the form of large
payrolls in key states and districts, they are unlikely to act in the
face of polling data to the contrary.
Repeated Gallup polls taken during the 2000 election cycle do not show
space exploration to be a national priority. Furthermore, a poll from
mid-1999, which may be viewed at
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr990728.asp, is summarized by
“Americans remain cautious in their judgement of the value of the money
being spent on space, and are not in favor of increased NASA budgets.”
Support for a manned Mars mission is also soft; see
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010227b.asp.
Beyond purely political attitudes, there is some evidence that the
American public’s understanding of science is selective in ways which
may seriously affect its support for NASA. Dr Huntress states: “The
public wants answers: The public now has a story of the history of the
Universe that they can relate to their own lives. The Universe had a
beginning; it was born in the Big Bang.” Ironically, relatively few
Americans seem aware of this. The NSF report Science and Engineering
Indicators 2000 (browse http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind00/frames.htm
and select Chapter 8, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and
Public Understanding”) quotes from the NSF’s Survey of Public Attitudes
Toward and Understanding of Science and Technology. Only one-third of
the respondents answered “true” to the statement, “The universe began
with a huge explosion.” While the NSF report states that this response
“may reflect religious beliefs rather than actual knowledge about
science,” it notes that “more than 70 percent of those interviewed knew
that … [t]he continents have been moving for millions of years and will
continue to move in the future,” suggesting that the presence of
young-Earth creationists in the sample is not the cause of the lack of
recognition of the Big Bang.

The more disturbing question is whether an all-embracing national space
program would result in recognizable achievements, even if lavishly
funded over many decades. Manned exploration, in particular, is capable
of swallowing almost any amount of money; Wendell Mendell of NASA-JSC
recalled, in a speech to the first Commercial Lunar Base Development
Symposium in Houston in July 1999, that the cost for developing a crane
to assist in construction of a manned outpost on the Moon was quoted by
NASA at $10 billion. Not the buildings, just the crane to help put them
together. Present-day NASA spacesuits are custom-built at a cost of $10
million apiece, even though commercially available “hard suits” for
deep-sea exploration, which cost $400,000 apiece, could be modified for
space. There are undoubtedly innummerable other examples.
At these prices, robotic exploration could be crowded out of budgets
very quickly. The cost disparity between manned and unmanned space
exploration is already at least two orders of magnitude, and may well be
headed higher. The conflict between the two approaches, already acute,
would likely worsen in a regime which attempted to combine them.
The lesson I would impart is: Beware of unlimited objectives being
sought with unlimited means. The lack of any human (or active robotic)
presence on the surface of the Moon, 40 years to the week after Yuri
Gagarin’s orbital flight, is exasperating. But planetary science did
not lapse in the wake of Apollo. Every planet except Pluto, scores of
moons, and several asteroids and comet nuclei have been visited by
spacecraft since the last Apollo mission. More are on the way. The
project-based approach works; not always as well as we would like it to,
but it gets things done.
So does removing an endeavor from the political arena altogether.
There are no political worries over the availability of communications
satellites, and very few regarding weather satellites. If remote
sensing and sample-return missions can be undertaken as privately funded
ventures, the likely result is steadily increasing quality and quantity
of results, with little sensitivity to the makeup of each new Congress
or Administration.

If you got this far, your reward is to read the disclaimers. My intent
is to argue from observation, not to start a political fight, and
especially not to start a round of criticism of NASA. As someone who
deems himself – in absence of any direct evidence to the contrary – as
the most anti-NASA person on this list, I will nonetheless firmly
enforce a policy against flaming NASA. There are plenty of other places
to do that; SCoPE-L does not need to be one more. Besides, it is not at
all clear to me that the torrent of anti-NASA messages I have read in
other forums has ever accomplished anything. I want SCoPE-L to
facilitate action as well as discussion, and there are certain kinds of
topical threads which seem to be unproductive by their very nature.
I also imagine myself to be as supportive of a human presence in space
as anyone on this list. At the Commercial Lunar Base Development
Symposium mentioned above, I delivered a paper which concluded:
“What will cislunar space be like in 2169, the bicentenary of mankind’s
first venture onto the lunar surface? In 1983, David R. Criswell of
Cis-Lunar, Inc., calculated that even with only modest growth of space
industries, the L4 and L5 points of the Earth-Moon system could
accommodate 40 trillion people by the mid-22nd century. Only
one-millionth of the space in the L4 and L5 volumes would be taken up by
the necessary habitats, which would resemble the largest of the O’
Neill-type ‘space colonies.’ While it seems unlikely that humanity’s
numbers will have increased by four orders of magnitude in less than two
centuries, there can be little doubt that our technological prowess will
be immense. The projects undertaken by the space industry on and near
the Moon in the coming decades will be the first steps in building a
civilization which compares to the US today – in population, technology,
and physical extent – as we now compare to Anglo-Saxon England at the
turn of the last millennium.”


Jay Manifold
Vice-President, Research & Development
Applied Space Resources, Inc.
<jmanifold@...>
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