Buckled up with no place
to go
Schmitt said that in
Mercury and the follow-on Gemini spacecraft programs, astronauts were buckled
up for safety big time. "They were strapped down. They couldn't move. So
the immediate symptoms that are motion sickness-like…they were not seen,"
he said.
More roomy Apollo
spacecraft permitted astronauts to move about. The result was a multi-sensory
conflict in astronauts, brought on primarily by weightlessness, Schmitt said.
Not only has there not been a comprehensive approach to understanding space
adaptation, he said, the astronauts are the wrong test subjects in the first
place.
"They all have a
conflict of interest. They want to stay flying," Schmitt said.
Today NASA has, along with
its partners, a world-class facility in the International Space Station, Schmitt
continued, a facility that can be adapted to do world-class biomedical
research. "The unfortunate thing is that NASA is not a world-class
biomedical research organization."
Schmitt stressed that NASA
and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must form a partnership. In doing
so, credible and critical biomedical research can be done to grapple with
issues of human adaptation to space.
NExT up?
There is widespread belief
among space advocates that NASA is no longer the agency it once was. Not that
its exploratory talents can't be resuscitated, but it is likely that
out-of-control costs to finish the International Space Station is a signal of
bigger woes plaguing the agency.
"The financial and
program management structure of NASA is a shambles, as everybody who has looked
at it has said in numerous reports," Schmitt said. "First thing
you've got to do is repair the agency so it can do anything. That's a two to
three year job," he said.
Even within the agency,
studies focused on post-space station goals get hush-hush treatment. One group
is called the NASA Exploration Team (NExT). They have outlined a smart,
ready-to-go masterplan. It is a sweeping blueprint that first calls for
utilization of the Sun-Earth-Moon libration points, building up a human
presence at those locales. From these gateways, an eventual return to the Moon,
trips to asteroids, and a grand leap to Mars can be orchestrated. The gateways
would be busy hubs of incoming and outgoing traffic.
But for now, with the
agency on probation for mishandling the space station, such blue-sky thinking
is given silent status for the time being.
Crystal ball gazing
Taking the long look out
over the next 40 years is tough to do, admitted NASA's senior historian, Roger
Launius. "My crystal ball is not very good. Obviously, we don't know.
Space and Earth orbit has become an area in which we are still learning things,
but it's not the exploring arena that it had been previously," he said.
The International Space
Station could be the anchor tenant for a giant research park in space.
Hypersonic aircraft propelling people around the planet may become feasible. A
Moon base is a reasoned possibility - all of these might well become part of
NASA's agenda over the next 40 to 50 years, Launius said.
Whatever the future holds,
it is obvious that American and international space prowess has greatly matured
since John Glenn's quick foray into space.
"Perhaps it was
unreasonable to have expected the exceptional pace of the past to have continued
at such a rapid clip. Yet it is not clear why this is the case," said
Lewis Peach, chief engineer of the Universities Space Research Association
(USRA) in Columbia, Maryland.
"Certainly space still
inspires and motivates us. Clearly, the more we have learned, the greater
awareness how much more there is to discover. There are so many unfilled
promises of that early era that still allude us," Peach said.
Peach said that he views
the space program as standing at the center of a balance beam, which is the
center on a fulcrum. Where today is the pivot point, we can look one way, back
into the past…the other towards the future.
"Unfortunately,
perhaps an objective measure of the balance beam today would weigh the
accomplishments of the past more favorably than the near-term vision and
anticipated progress of the future. This is not a good situation. But
fortunately it is recoverable, with the right leadership, public will, and
determination," Peach concluded.
Where to now?
The breakout of humans from
low Earth orbit is not going to happen anytime soon, said John Logsdon,
director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C.
Forty years after John
Glenn's ground-breaking flight, a lot of the pioneering spirit has gone out of
the U.S. human space flight effort, he senses.
"The whole world
watched as Glenn orbited the Earth. Now virtually no one can name the three
crew members aboard the International Space Station; indeed, most people are
probably not even aware that there are humans in orbit on a permanent basis.
There are no exciting destinations on the horizon; the reality, despite the
hopes of a few enthusiasts, is that human space flight will be confined to
Earth orbit for the foreseeable future," Logsdon said.
This is not all bad news,
the space policy expert added.
"Using human flight as
a symbol of American power and as a source of American pride was a temporary
asset to the nation. The focus now on people doing valuable things in space is
appropriate; it is no longer appropriate to justify the costs and risks of
human flight on such intangible grounds as power and pride. The International
Space Station, despite its current problems in expanding to a larger crew, is
the right program for humans to demonstrate their scientific and economic value
as orbital workers," Logsdon said.
In addition, space is very
slowly being opened to access by "normal" people, as long as you are
wealthy, Logsdon emphasized. "The flight of Dennis Tito last year and of Mark Shuttleworth next April are the harbinger of
broader human access to space in coming years. For the United States, John
Glenn blazed the path to space. Now we are entering a period when more humans
can follow that path," he said.
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