marssociety2_000812 TORONTO -- America's space program is stranded in Earth orbit, operating costly
space-shuttle and space-station projects that go round and round, and nowhere fast, a panel of space experts said Friday, August 11.Dismayed by the lack of progress in human exploration of space is Chris McKay, a NASA space scientist at the Ames Research Center, near San Francisco, California.
"It's kind of puzzling that since 1969, we haven't really gone beyond the moon, we being humans," McKay told an audience of 800 on Friday at the Third International Mars Society Convention.
Most of those at the conference realize that despite the
call to action that is the drumbeat of this event, it is cash that will make the difference when it comes to making a human mission to Mars a reality. Antarctic analogy
McKay likened the quest for Mars to the government's continuous human presence in
Antarctica.Since 1959, the U.S. has spent on the order of $300 million a year on keeping Antarctica populated with science teams. "It's not a big deal," McKay said.
"The lesson there is that if it can be done cheap enough, then it can be done in a low-key sort of approach," McKay said. That cost model for exploration in Antarctica may hold true for any future human-exploration-of-Mars plan.
"I think the events of the last three or four years have shown that there is long-standing, public, [White House] administration, bipartisan support for Mars exploration to the tune of $300 million to $500 million a year," McKay said.
Cost questions
However, there is a catch.
"Why should it be so darn expensive to go to Mars? It shouldn't be. And I don't know the answer," McKay said. New ideas, new technologies are needed to help drive the cost of going to Mars down, he said, and that mandate is now within the hands of NASA, industry and other technical communities.
Carol Stoker, a Mars-
rover specialist at NASA Ames, said the barrier to human Mars missions is administrative momentum."We are kind of stuck," Stoker said. "The main reason that we're not headed for Mars is that we haven't gotten enough people in the right places to believe that we can actually go to Mars."
"So instead of Mars, we're doing proxy things, like the International Space Station. It's the thing that keeps us in the holding pattern. It keeps us doing something while we are awaiting for approval of Mars."
The tally for going to Mars will cost about what it's costing for the price of the space station, Stoker said.
That project has taken 25 years and $60 billion, on the conservative side, Stoker said.
"I fully believe it costs the cost of the space station to go to Mars. But the difference is that you're going to go to Mars for that cost," Stoker said.
Missiles to Mars
One cost-cutting approach to hurling robotic payloads to Mars is using Russian rocket power.
Hundreds of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles are in the process of being decommissioned.
Better to use them tossing probes to Mars, said Bruce Lusignan, director of Stanford University's Center for International Cooperation in Space, in Stanford, California.
Cold War Russian SS-18 missiles can put about 4 metric tons into low Earth orbit, or boost about 1 metric ton to Mars using an special upper stage, Lusignan told SPACE.com.
"There are about 350 of them. It takes about $500,000 to upgrade them, depending on what type of space mission," Lusignan said. They could be used to lob robotic craft to the Red Planet, even land payloads built to return to Earth samples from Mars.
Hundreds of these missiles are to become available over the next 5 to 10 years, Lusignan said.
"The point is to get missions to Mars," Lusignan said. "If you use SS-18s, and within the same NASA budgets that they've gotten, they can send orbiters, rovers and multiple ones to numerous sites."
NASA's giant mistakes
Mars Society President Robert
Zubrin said that the only way to get to Mars "is by taking responsibility for making it happen."Zubrin said that NASA funding to initiate a humans-to-Mars program is at hand.
However, that money is being earmarked for a space-shuttle replacement. That decision is one of a series of wrongheaded go-aheads that has waylaid the future of space exploration, Zubrin said.
Putting money into a replacement shuttle "is NASA's next giant mistake," Zubrin said.
Zubrin scolded NASA for scrapping Apollo-era moon rockets and other hardware. The second giant mistake the agency made was building the huge International Space Station, he said.
The space-station project, Zubrin said, has taken far too long, become too expensive and has needlessly become far too complicated an undertaking.
"The primary requirements for the space-station program was that it must take at least 20 years, must require at least 30 shuttle launches, must cost at least $30 billion and should not look like Skylab (a U.S. space station flown in the 1970s) or Russia's Mir. And those requirements have been met, NASA is proud to say," Zubrin said.
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