A new report released by an American
Physical Society (APS) Special Committee on NASA Funding for Astrophysics has
questioned the space agency's Moon, Mars and Beyond initiative. The APS
assessment warns that t he cost of overcoming technological
challenges to make real the plan could far exceed budgetary projections and that
numerous approved science programs could be jeopardized.
"Returning
Americans to the Moon and landing on Mars would have a powerful symbolic
significance," the APS report observes, "but it would constitute only a small
step in the advancement of knowledge, since much will already be known from
exploration with the robotic precursor probes that are necessary to guarantee
the safety of any human mission."
The APS report was authored by a 10-person group,
with the committee chaired by Joel Primack, a professor of physics and a
leading astrophysicist at the University
of California, Santa
Cruz.
According to their web site,
the American Physical Society is the world's largest professional body
of physicists, representing more than 45,000 physicists in academia and industry in
the United States and internationally. It has offices in College Park,
Maryland and Ridge, New
York.
Negative ripple effect
To
underscore their concerns, the APS reports that in the wake of the Moon-Mars
initiative, NASA's "readjusted priorities" have already created a negative
ripple effect for space science: For instance, the Laser Interferometer Space
Antenna (LISA) has been delayed a year while Constellation X (Con-X) has been
delayed until at least 2016.
LISA will use an array of free
flying satellites to carefully measure the baseline expansion or contraction
due to the passage of gravitational waves while Con-X will perform X-ray
spectroscopic studies of some of the most extreme objects in the Universe.
Both instruments received high priority from the astronomy community for
construction in the current decade.
Furthermore, other
scientific missions have been delayed indefinitely, cites the APS report. Among
them the Einstein Probes, which are moderate sized missions aimed at
determining the nature of dark energy, observing regions near black holes, and
studying the imprint of cosmic inflation on the cosmic background radiation.
Also, NASA's Explorer program is another activity that is being affected by the
Moon-Mars program.
Ill-defined Moon-Mars initiative
On
January 14, U.S. President Bush announced a new vision for NASA that
incorporated a human return to the Moon by 2020, follow-on exploration of Mars
and other destinations.
In
the view of APS, the impact of the President's proposal on scientific programs
within NASA and other agencies "could be substantial and must be assessed
carefully," the report stresses.
- Key
findings noted in the APS report are:
- Human exploration has a role to play in NASA,
but it must be within a balanced program in which allocated resources span
the full spectrum of the space sciences and take advantage of emerging
scientific opportunities and synergies.
- The recent spectacular successes of NASA's space
telescopes and the Mars Rovers amply demonstrate that we can use robotic
means to address many important scientific questions.
- Astronauts on Mars might achieve greater
scientific returns than robotic missions, but they would come at such a
high cost that scientific grounds, alone, would probably not provide a
sufficient rationale.
- The scope of the Moon-Mars initiative has not
been well-defined, its long-term cost has not been adequately addressed,
and no budgetary mechanisms have been established to avoid causing major
irreparable damage to the agency's scientific program.
- To accommodate the Moon-Mars initiative, NASA
has already begun to reprogram its existing budget, resulting in
indefinite postponement or serious delay of science programs that were
assigned high priority by the National Academy of Sciences decadal
studies.
- In addition to affecting NASA's internal
priorities, an ill-defined Moon-Mars initiative of very large scale could
harm programs in other science agencies.
Budgetary impact
In wrapping up its findings, the APS
report makes a trio of recommendations regarding the Moon-Mars initiative.
First of all, NASA should continue
to be guided by the priorities recommended in the National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) decadal studies in formulating its science programs. The NAS should also
review the Moon-Mars proposal in regards to its science impact before the United
States
commits to the initiative.
Similarly, the APS report recommends
that the Government Accountability Office should estimate the budgetary impact
prior to the United States
green-lighting the Moon-Mars proposal.
Critical reaction
The APS
report has met with some disapproval.
One critic
is former Congressman Robert Walker, a member of the
Presidential Commission on the Implementation of the United States Space
Exploration Policy in 2004 - also known as the Aldridge Commission given its chairman, Pete Aldridge.
"The APS
report ignores the contention of the Aldridge Commission that the Moon to Mars
and Beyond Vision is enabled by science and enables science," Walker told SPACE.com. "It is the present mission at NASA that lacks direction
and focus. The Moon to Mars and Beyond program is
an attempt to refocus NASA in a positive way," Walker said.
"The APS
report is a defense of the NASA that "has been" rather than an effort
to create the NASA that "can be"," Walker concluded.
Robot versus human explorers
The strong
pro-robot message of the APS stirred up a response from Robert Zubrin,
President of the Mars Society.
"The APS report is false on its face," Zubrin told SPACE.com. "In fact, NASA's most
cost-effective science program to date has been the Hubble Space Telescope, a
human spaceflight activity. Hubble may have cost twice the Galileo mission to Jupiter,
but it has returned more than 100 times the science. This is proof that when
human spaceflight activities are properly targeted, they can achieve far more
science return than is possible with robotic means,"
One of the central questions confronting science today is the origin of
life, and the uniqueness or generality of the processes that allow it, Zubrin
said.
"The answers in this matter can best be found by sending human explorers
to Mars, who can search the environment for fossils and set up drilling rigs to
reach liquid ground water where extant life may yet exist. By sampling such
life and examining its biochemistry we can find out fundamental truths about
the nature of life in the universe. This can only be done by human explorers,"
Zubrin explained.
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