Human Space Flight: What I'd Do.

In May President Obama formed what is essentially a presidential commission in the form of the Human Space Flight Committee (HSF). The HSF is charged, more or less, with evaluating all aspects of our current efforts as a nation in the area of manned space flight. As I understand it everything is on the table for the committee they're looking at current programs (the shuttle, station) as well as future efforts (constellation, the lunar mission, etc.). As part of this effort the committee has been holding a series of public meetings to both gather information and present their findings. I spent most of the day watching the latest meeting held in Houston, TX and it got me thinking about what I'd do if I could wave a wand and shape the face of space exploration for the next several decades.

Since I was a teenager I've always been a major proponent of human space exploration and NASA's efforts. I had a boyhood dream of being the first person to step foot on Mars and have always been fascinated by the red planet and desperately hope that I will see someone plant a boot there in my life time. I often joke that I would retire to Mars given the opportunity but in reality I would literally jump at any opportunity to migrate to Mars. Truth be told many of these views are shaped by the work of Dr. Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society (who's testimony I eagerly await on August 5th).

One thing I took away form the committee today is that we can't do it all with the budget NASA currently has. The interconnectedness of everything the committee looks at is amazing to me everything has it's cause and effect with implications almost to wide to comprehend. Which I guess brings me back to what would I do? I'm not really qualified to debate the merits to shuttle derived this vs. Orion that vs. Constellation whatever so I am going to stick primarily to the overall mission of the program. It's the potential to see this altered that gives me as much hope as I've had in some time about the future of our manned space efforts.

Well ultimately I would craft a program built with the end goal of full scale human colonization of Mars. It occurred to me today that the human psyche has already considered this possibility. After all how many places in movies, pop-culture, literature, etc. do we see Earth threatened in someway and we take off in search of a new home in the stars. In the tech community when we talk about backups it's often said that something doesn't exist unless exists in two places. Humanity as a race fails this basic test and that seems unacceptable to me.

Before we get to Mars though I think we need to do something to address the so called "gap" this is the idea that there will be a 5 (or according to today's presentations as much as a 7!) year gap where the United States will not have the capability to launch humans into space. Let's consider some examples from fiction how many movies are there were an asteroid shows up and we have a crash program to send astronauts out there to meet and confront the threat? How exactly is that going to work when we've put the Shuttle in a museum? So I would fund the shuttle program to insure that there is effectively no gap between programs, yes this will require more money but we're either committed to a manned space program or we're not. If we're not going to be more committed than we have in the past the we will end up with the same results previous programs have yielded. I often think about the dismantling of the Apollo program in the context of a threat to humanity, let's say we HAD to get people off planet. How would we do that today? We don't have the hardware.

Then there is ISS. This is a tough one because as I mentioned above the central goal of my program is human colonization of Mars. While I'm admittedly not an engineer I have a very hard time buying any of the rationales that use the ISS as a test bed for exploration of Mars, heck for me the Moon as a Mars analogue is even a hard pill to swallow. The reality is that the ISS remains in orbit, has cost us 60 billion dollars and that is is the INTERNATIONALSpace Station. It just feels totally asinine to me to crash 60 billion dollars worth of hardware that we spent decades assembling into the ocean after just 6 years of service. In addition to which I think that there are very real issues with the execution of that it seems pretty clear that our partners have no desire to end the ISS after 2016 so what do we do if they don't want to leave? Stick them with the bill? Is this something we really want to risk international relations over? Practically I don't think it is a U.S. decision to make in-terms of whether we de-orbit the station. Perhaps we could just pull the funding but that doesn't seem like a great way to insure the cooperation of other nations going forward. One thing that's always appealed to my imagination is the ISS as a 2001-esque launch terminal for interplanetary shuttles, etc. What it comes down to for me is that I don't have a good answer for the ISS question. It's at direct odds with the stated goal of my program but from a rationale thinking perspective a crash landing doesn't make sense and isn't practical anyways.  I would like to additionally say that the ISS is an engineering marvel and watching it's construction has been nothing short of amazing.

So in summary my desire plan would define as the clear and direct goal of the manned space program to work towards large scale human colonization of Mars, while also insuring that we do not allow a gap. Achieving no gap will require additional funding. I'm not as clear on the ISS but I am certainly in favor of exploring the various commercial launch solutions for re-supply and crew transfer to the ISS and freeing up NASA to support shuttle missions and the hardware and exploration work needed to support eventual colonization.

In short: Colonize Mars.