Is human spaceflight now obsolete?

Abstract

During the past year, there have been painstaking, and painful, investigations of the tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven crew members. Congressional committees are now scrutinizing the competence of the investigators and reviewing perceived managerial and budgetary shortcomings of NASA. It is high time for a calm debate on more fundamental questions. Does human spaceflight continue to serve a compelling cultural purpose or our national interest? Or does it simply have a life of its own, without a realistic objective that is commensurate with its costs? Or, indeed, is human spaceflight now obsolete? Few would doubt that the Apollo missions to the Moon as well as the precursory Mercury and Gemini missions had a valuable role in the United States's Cold War with the Soviet Union and lifted the spirits of mankind. Also, the returned samples of lunar surface material fueled important scientific discoveries. But the follow-on space shuttle program has fallen far short of the Apollo program in its appeal to human aspirations. The launching of the Hubble Space Telescope and the subsequent repair and servicing missions by skilled crews are among the highlights of the shuttle's service to science. Otherwise, the shuttle's contribution to science has been modest and its contribution to the massive utilitarian applications of space technology insignificant. Almost all of the space program's important advances in human knowledge and in civil and military applications have been accomplished by hundreds of robotic spacecraft. Robotic exploration of the planets and their satellites and of comets and asteroids has truly revolutionized our knowledge of the solar system, and the great astronomical observatories have yielded unprecedented advances in our perception of distant galaxies. All of these advances serve basic human curiosity and provide an appreciation of our place in the universe. In a dispassionate comparison of the importance of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether our huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable. In the 1930s, there were glowing expectations for high-altitude, manned balloon flights ([1][1]), but it soon became clear that such endeavors had little scientific merit. Unmanned high-altitude balloons continue to provide valuable services to science, but manned ballooning has survived only as an adventurous sport. There is an eerie resemblance to the current human spaceflight program. Have we now reached the point in time at which human spaceflight is also obsolete? I submit this question for thoughtful consideration. Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars. 1. 1.[↵][2]1. D. H. De Vorkin , Race to the Stratosphere: Manned Scientific Ballooning in America (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1989). [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1. in text