Tag: moon colony

Space Science In Peril

NASA’s decades-long success at enabling ground-breaking discoveries about our planet, our solar system, our galaxy, our origins and the billions of other planets out there is one of the crown jewels of our nation’s collective inventiveness and will, and surely of our global soft power.

Others have of course made major contributions as well.  But from the Viking Mars landings of the 1970s on to the grand space observatories Hubble and Spitzer and Chandra, to the planetary explorations such as Cassini (Saturn), Galileo and Juno (Jupiter), New Horizons (Pluto and beyond) and Curiosity (Mars), to the pioneering exoplanet census of Kepler, the myriad spacecraft enhancing our understanding of our own planet and the sun, and the pipeline confidently filled with of missions to come, NASA has been the consistent and essential world leader.

What we know of our world writ large has just exploded in these decades, and we’re far richer for it.

But of late, the future of these efforts to ever expand our knowledge of the logic and make-up of our universe has become worryingly unclear.

First there are the recently revealed new problems with the James Webb Space Telescope, initially scheduled to launch years ago and now reportedly unlikely to meet its launch date next year.  It is also over budget again and under serious threat.

This news came as Congress wrestled with the White House decision to scuttle the WFIRST dark energy, planet and star formation, and exoplanet mission, planned as NASA’s major flagship mission of the 2020s.

And perhaps most worrisome, NASA now wants to fold its Space Technology Mission Directorate into the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, surely to support the administration’s goal of setting up a human colony on the moon.

This is an Apollo-sized, many-year and very costly effort that would have to take funds away from potential space science missions unless the NASA budget was growing substantially. But the proposed 2019 NASA budget would cap spending for the next four years.

Might our Golden Era of space discovery be winding down?

 

An illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope after deploying in space.  The pioneering technology of the JWST is both its great promise and recurring pitfall. (NASA)

 

First the JWST situation.  The telescope, far more powerful and complex than anything sent into space, is expected to open up new understandings about the origins of the universe, xxx, and exoplants.… Read more

Is That the Foundation of NASA I Feel Shifting?

A lunar outpost was an element of the George W. Bush era Vision for Space Exploration, which has been replaced with President Barack Obama’s space policy. The outpost would have been an inhabited facility on the surface of the Moon. At the time it was proposed, NASA was to construct the outpost over the five years between 2019 and 2024. Now the man nominated to be the next NASA administrator, James Bridenstine, is a strong and vocal advocate of building a moon colony.  (NASA)

Reading about some of the views coming from the man recently nominated to become NASA’s Administrator, Rep. James Bridenstine of Oklahoma, I heard the sound of a door closing.

Other doors will surely be opened if he is confirmed by the Senate, but that shutting door happens to be to the gateway to a realm that has engrossed and nurtured me and clearly many millions of Americans.

What is happening, I fear, is that our Golden Age of space science, of exploration for the sake of expanding humanity’s knowledge and wonder, is about to wind down.  The James Webb Space Telescope will (probably) still be launched, and missions to Europa and Mars are on the books.  But to be a Golden Age there must be an on-going vision for the future building on what has been accomplished.

When it comes to space science, that clearly takes strong government support and taxpayer money.  And if what I’m reading is correct, a lot of that future NASA funding for exploring and understanding the grand questions of space science will be going instead to setting up and maintaining that colony on the moon.

And the goals Bridenstine appears to have in mind when he speaks of setting up a moon colony are decidedly military, strategic and commercial.  As when Vice President Mike Pence spoke to NASA workers at the Kennedy Space Center to telegraph the Trump Administration’s space vision, space science is essentially an afterthought.

Media coverage of the Bridenstine selection has tended to focus on the fact that he’s a politician and that he has earlier been quite critical of climate change science.

But what concerns me most are his views about space science in general.  Because with the money and focus a major moon colony project would take, NASA’s space science initiatives run the risk of returning to the back seat they occupied in the agency’s earlier days.… Read more

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