Some recent selections from the SPACE.com mailbag, on Mir, the moon, the human quest to explore and more…

Michelle O'Barto comments on issues involving the Russian space station Mir. Ms. O'Barto is a member of the Space Frontier Foundation, which has read her letter and endorses her views.

To the Editor:

Dan Goldin is well aware that the money being used to rehabilitate the Mir space station is not coming from the Russian government. All of this money is coming from a private corporation, MirCorp. MirCorp has raised all of its capital from private investors. Goldin also says in this article that "no United States money was used for today's Mir mission." This is, in fact, not true. Some of the investors of the Netherlands-based MirCorp are United States citizens. In fact, there was a second article also published on April 7, 2000 titled "The Men Behind Mir's Financial Rescue." This article describes how two American men who didn't want to see the first space station deorbited and burned up in the atmosphere pooled their resources to save the Mir from a fiery death.

It is indeed unfortunate that Dan Goldin is trying to divert attention away from his mismanagement of NASA by attacking private enterprise. Here is an American attacking a former communist for practicing private enterprise. Private enterprise has historically provided the competition needed to drive prices down, something sorely missing from NASA.

Goldin said at a conference in Los Angeles last year that he was ready to turn low Earth orbit over to the private sector. This is exactly what MirCorp has done. MirCorp is planning to lease space on the Mir to companies interested in doing business in zero gravity. MirCorp has also offered to take private citizens to the Mir for a vacation, making it the first orbital hotel. Perhaps Dan Goldin views the Mir as a competitor to the International Space Station and is afraid that more people will want to do business with MirCorp than with NASA, and that too many people will realize that the International Space Station is a waste of money.

Michelle J. O'Barto
Member, Space Frontier Foundation

A reader responds to Gentry Lee's column "NASA Has Lost Its Nerve." Also, see an earlier response.

To the Editor:

I felt that Gentry Lee's "NASA Has Lost Its Nerve" was well-reasoned and accurate. However, there is one aspect to the current NASA situation that I think is very important to remember: NASA's budget has been continually slashed. The current NASA mantra of "faster, better, cheaper" is a response to these cuts. I think it's an attempt to "make lemonade."

Spaceflight -- manned or robotic -- is expensive. In the old days, NASA could build large spacecraft with redundant systems. These days, the budget doesn't allow for it, so we get "faster, better, cheaper." These budgetary concerns are what have prompted the shift in the way NASA projects are managed. When "faster, better, cheaper" works as it did with the Pathfinder mission, everybody celebrates. When it doesn't work (as with the Mars Polar Lander), everyone starts pointing fingers. Landing on another planet is hard. If the Mars Polar Lander had been an old-style NASA probe like Viking, it might have still failed, but I think it would have stood a much better chance of success.

Even though the recent Mars failures have provided comedians with a lot of material, I think it's also important to remember that this is hardly NASA's darkest hour. The Apollo 1 fire and the Challenger explosion are both greater disasters because of the lives that were lost. But important lessons were learned from both those events. The Apollo 1 fire slowed the program down while the investigation took place. Numerous flaws were discovered, and the ship was redesigned. If this hadn't happened, something like the Apollo 1 fire might have occurred during a flight. It took a tragedy like that to make people aware of the design flaws in the Apollo command module. It was similar after the Challenger disaster, although the shuttle has continued to be plagued by technical problems.

If NASA can recover from the Apollo 1 and Challenger disasters, I think it can recover from its most recent problems. Lessons can be learned from the Mars failures. But these lessons are useless unless NASA has the budget to change things for the better. And a greater budget is useless unless some of the managerial changes Mr. Lee mentions are made.

David Raines, Louisville, Kentucky

Phil Smith's opinion piece "Space Exploration Is Human Nature" argued that naysayers about space exploration are overlooking human behavior and history. Among the reader responses:

To the Editor:

Mr. Smith's visionary argument is precisely what's wrong with the U.S. space program today. Space supporters too often assume that those of us who don't want to write a blank check made payable to NASA are simply too dimwitted and un-adventurous to grasp the "big picture."

I do support space exploration. I don't support a program that refuses to believe the Apollo years are history, that insists it's somehow more deserving of money than other tax-paid programs by virtue of its "vision," that cannot account for a string of mismanaged mission failures and finally, that believes Russia's devastated economy will joyfully pay for a space station module.

It's fine to have stars in your eyes, except when they obscure the view on the ground.

Ann Saccomano, San Mateo, California
 
 

To the Editor:

In his article, "Space Exploration Is Human Nature", Phil Smith is essentially making the same "argument" so common throughout various space societies and websites, which is really not an argument at all: humans have always explored, therefore space colonies are inevitable. Of course, when we read phrases like "a reasonable extension of our macro-migratory behavior," we tend to believe the writer knows what he's talking about. But like all the other writers on this subject, Mr. Smith's philosophical postulate overlooks one little fact about this supposedly relentless migration into hostile frontiers: it isn't happening. There are no cities on the ocean floor. There are no nations in Antarctica. Floating colonies did not spring up around the Mir station or the Hubble telescope. And of a dozen men who walked on the moon, not one is still there, and no one followed in their footsteps.

The old "where no man has gone before" routine is more fantasy than reality. No one wants to live a lifetime in a spacesuit, surrounded by clouds of methane or airless deserts. Before we risk lives on manned missions into deep space, let's think seriously about where this is going.

Greg Barone
 
 

To the Editor:

I enjoyed reading SPACE.com's space exploration article [by Phil Smith] and I realize that my comments here may be dismissed, but I will make them anyway.

I have read so many articles professing the great leap into space "in the future" -- well now is the future and well I suppose we had better do something. I am trying to do something myself, as I have created a website with a friend called www.spaceforum.com in an effort to spread awareness and healthy debate about space.

I was saddened to see that Phil Smith kept going on about national policy (i.e. USA). I think if any country is thinking big in space then they cannot ignore other nations in the world. When you are in space you do not see America or Britain or France, you see one world and that is the attitude we must take into space, not this narrow view that it is some place that America should naturally adopt for it's own. At the moment NASA are not exactly setting the space backdrop ablaze and, if you ask me, they should maybe broaden their expertise by looking further afield. For example, Von Braun, Galileo, Newton and many many more -- Where would NASA be without their findings and knowledge?

I just find it sad that an organization as big as NASA with such big dreams can at the same time think so narrowly. In that respect I think they represent the sentiment of the American public as a whole.

Stuart Bell, Edinburgh, U.K.
www.spaceforum.com

Paul Spudis' opinion piece "Next, Go Back to the Moon," stirred up an ongoing discussion of lunar exploration. Also, see earlier letters.

To the Editor:

In his article "Next, Go Back to the Moon," Paul Spudis, with his very geocentric viewpoint, advocates using the lunar ice as a source of rocket fuel to put giant communications satellites into geosynchronous orbit. Speaking for the future free citizens of Luna (well, here's hoping at any rate) I wish to protest this heinous waste of such a precious lunar resource! Okay, perhaps that's a little silly, but I believe there are better ways to solve the problem of launching large satellites into orbit, and there are better uses for the moon besides a fuel dump.

In his book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," Robert Heinlein presented the idea of using a device like a maglev train or mass driver to launch material and people from the moon to Earth. The moon's lack of atmosphere allows such a device to launch materials or spacecraft from the surface of the moon with super-orbital velocities using only electricity. (By the way, the same device used on Earth is nowhere near as efficient because of atmospheric drag.) This means the moon could be used as a platform to launch vehicles to pretty much anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel whatsoever in the process. (And ultimately, it probably makes sense to build those craft on the moon as well, using lunar resources such as titanium, iron-nickel steel, aluminum, etc.)

This is the future of the moon I would like to see. Leave the lunar ice to the moon's future inhabitants who will need it for a far more important goal -- survival.

Bill Clawson
www.freeluna.com
 
 

To the Editor:

GO GO GO

If Americans don't get a serious moon program working in the next year or two, then we'll have to learn Chinese when we go the moon.

Moshe Atkins, Israel

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