The Vision at Risk
Robert Zubrin
Space News, March 27, 2006

NASA's recent announcement that methane-oxygen propulsion would no
longer be a requirement for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) has
created great concern in the space community that the agency's
commitment to the human exploration of Mars might be waning.

Because methane-oxygen can be readily manufactured on the surface of
Mars out of local materials, it is the ideal propellant combination
for Mars ascent propulsion. Its earlier prescribed development as
part of the CEV program was therefore widely seen as evidence that
the CEV was being pursued not merely as a thing in itself, but as
part of a broader vision that would take America all the way to Mars.
Its abandonment has therefore been interpreted as indicating the
collapse of that vision.

In some respects, this dark view is overdrawn. NASA's exploration
office remains committed to the development of a heavy-lift launch
vehicle, which is the primary hardware element needed for a human
Mars mission, and as far as methane-oxygen propulsion is concerned,
two contracts were recently awarded by NASA supporting its
development outside of the CEV program, and should that technology be
employed for lunar ascent but not CEV, that would still be timely
enough to prepare it for Mars application.

Yet it must be said that the dropping of methane-oxygen from CEV,
while not a fatal blow in itself, illustrates a dangerous trend that
could well destroy the human exploration program. It is always easier
to conduct any technology development program with a view towards
meeting only immediate mission requirements, while ignoring those
needed for evolutionary application.

This, in fact, is why methane-oxygen was dropped from CEV. Methane-
oxygen offers superior performance to conventional storables on CEV
itself, and becomes increasingly advantageous as applications for
first lunar ascent and then Mars ascent are brought into play.
However in order to reduce immediate costs, its development has been
deferred.

Now let us consider the lunar program that is supposed to follow CEV.
It will, perforce, be cheaper in the short term to design human lunar
exploration systems without regard for potential application to Mars.
Thus a NASA adopting the view that it is best to solve one problem at
a time will be driven in precisely that direction. The net result
will be a Moon program that is just a Moon program, and not, as
President George W. Bush specified in his national security document
authorizing the Vision for Space Exploration, a Moon-Mars program in
which lunar activities are conducted in order to "develop and test
new approaches, technologies and systems.to support sustained human
exploration to Mars and other destinations."

The consequences of allowing the vision to be degraded in this way
would be grave. This is made nowhere more clear than in an op-ed
article by Paul Spudis, senior research scientist at Johns Hopkins
University's Applied Physics Lab, that was published in the Dec. 27
edition of the Washington Post advocating precisely such a course.
A noted lunar geologist and space policy insider, Spudis' article is
of great clinical interest because he is the most eloquent and
informed advocate of a Moon-only vision for NASA. He argues that such
a program could be justified on three grounds:

* First, that studying lunar cratering will allow us to understand
the processes of mass extinctions on Earth;
* Second, that Lunar activities will provide us with practice for
exploration of "other worlds;" and
* Third, the Moon base will provide an economic return by enabling
the development of Lunar solar power stations that will beam
electricity back to Earth.

However, these programmatic foundations have no basis.
Argument one is false because the Moon's lower gravity gives it a
lower impact rate than the Earth, and its lack of an atmosphere or
biosphere makes impossible any studies of the relevant post-impact
terrestrial phenomenon that cause and shape mass extinction.
Argument two is false because while we can practice for operating on
other worlds on the Moon, we can do much more in that line at 1/1000
the cost in the Arctic.

Argument three is false because a photovoltaic panel only receives
twice the solar flux on the Moon as it does in Arizona, and all of
its increased output would be lost in the inefficiencies of the
transmission system. Thus the useful output of a photovoltaic power
station on the Moon would only be equal to one on Earth, while
logistics costs to support it would be 100,000 times as great.

Furthermore, the station would be blacked out two weeks at a time,
and require three receiving rectenna and power distribution systems
on Earth as well, each of which would be blacked out two-thirds of
the day during the half of the month that the station produced any
power at all.

In short, the programmatic justifications offered by the ablest
advocate of a Moon-only vision have no valid basis at all. Under
favorable political conditions, NASA might get by for a while by
having its supporters chant such nonsense to entertain Congress, in
the same manner as it used similar unsound "rationales" to justify
the shuttle and space station programs. However, at the end of the
day little of real value will have been accomplished at great expense.

The shuttle and station programs initially were proposed as bridges
to an expansive evolutionary future. Yet because of design
compromises to save costs on the programs themselves, without regard
to how they would really serve a useful role supporting human
exploration beyond low Earth orbit, neither have any such utility,
and NASA's primary current concern with these programs is how to
escape from them so it can get on with its mission.

Again, it was precisely because the design of the shuttle and station
had been effectively detached from the need to play a useful role in
the achievement of worthwhile goals beyond themselves, that NASA felt
the need to grossly exaggerate their potential return as stand-
alones. That pathology threatens to repeat itself.

We need to do better. Instead of organizing NASA's activities around
projects conceived largely to give the agency and its contractors
something to do, and then justifying those programs with whatever
excuses someone can dream up, NASA needs to set a rational objective
for its human spaceflight program and devote its efforts and
expenditures towards that end.

That goal can only be humans to Mars.

In contrast to a Lunar return program supported by promises of
electricity from Moon beams, human Mars exploration has a real
rational purpose: the search to determine whether life is a general
phenomenon in the universe and whether life as we know it on Earth is
the pattern for all life everywhere, or whether we are just a
particular example drawn from a much more diverse tapestry.

This is true, fundamental, science of a sort that bears on questions
that thinking men and women have debated passionately for millennia.
It is a goal that can be truthfully and forcefully defended as worth
risking life and treasure for. It is a search that can only be
accomplished by human explorers on Mars, because of the complexity of
operations required to find, culture and characterize Martian life
are far beyond the capacities of robotic devices.

Furthermore, since, unlike the carbon, nitrogen and water
impoverished Moon, Mars possesses all the resources needed to support
life and human settlement, if the objective of our space program is
to extend human civilization into space, our goal needs to be to send
humans to Mars. There is really no way around this.

There are legitimate reasons to send astronauts to the Moon, but just
as was the case for the space station, these are in fact of
insufficient worth to justify the huge cost and multidecade delay in
the achievement of more important objectives that a stand-alone
program must entail.

Therefore, since lunar activities can most rationally be supported as
intermediate milestones in an effort to get humans to Mars, it should
be clear that their hardware design requirements should be driven by
the real goal. If we fail to take that approach, we will spend
further tens of billions of dollars developing hardware, as
exemplified by the shuttle and space station, that serves little
useful purpose towards getting us where we want to go, and which will
have to be set aside in order to accomplish anything real.

If we launch a lunar program with a hardware set designed for a Moon-
only effort, the hardware will prove useless for Mars, and we will
have to abandon the Moon while we spend many billions more and waste
further decades to develop a second hardware set that can take us to
the red planet. But if we intelligently design our hardware set for
Mars, we can use a subset of that to reach the Moon.

By adopting such a rational approach, based upon real goals
courageously embraced, NASA will be able be to achieve truly valuable
accomplishments with its manned spaceflight program, and do it at
much lower cost, risk and time than would be possible otherwise.

It will cut cost because only one hardware set will need to be
developed instead of two. It will cut schedule, radically, for the
same reason. It will reduce risk because the lunar missions will be
used to exercise the Mars flight hardware directly. It also will
strengthen the rationale for the lunar program itself, because in
this case it would really pave the way to Mars, and because, with a
common hardware approach, the Moon would not have to be abandoned for
the Mars program to begin.

However, if instead the agency allows itself to devolve into an
irrational Moon-in-itself project, then it will end up repeating the
wasteful folly of shuttle and the international space station, and
create yet another tollbooth blocking America's progress in space.
Upon that choice hangs the fate of the vision.

Dr. Robert Zubrin, an astronautical engineer, is president of the
Mars Society and the author of The Case for Mars, Entering Space, and
Mars on Earth.