Re: I wonder if they could be modified for digging through Europan ice?

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 22:16:01 -0700

Title: Re: I wonder if they could be modified for digging through
Gary McMurtry writes, in part:
"Well, reality starts to set in a some point, albeit for at different rates for different folks.  For me, it was the recent NASA announcement about JIMO, which for all its appeal, is really just a fast-approach orbiter to do more detailed remote sensing of the moons, a suped-up Galileo, if you will.  Even this project has been pushed back to 2015, and I'd expect more delays because much of the JIMO technology still needs to be developed.  Anybody over the age of 40 on this list has the distinct possibility of not being around to ever see a probe enter another ocean in this solar system.  (We could have gotten lucky with the Huygens probe into Titan, but alas, Cassini detects no hydrocarbon oceans or seas there)."
 
Tell me about it.  I'm 48.  Let's see, 48+2004-2015 is  ... oh, my brain is so much slower now, and I don't even want to know the answer. ;-)
 
It takes about 10 years for a mission to go from the twinkle in someone's eye to the actual launch, and with outer-planet work, add another 5-10 years more before the probe arrives.  Then add in the years of analysis from the outpouring of data and you get the standard observation: an interplanetary mission is a career.  Add in all the dangers to flight and the unknowns about the target, and it's a career fraught with risks.  Small wonder that you see such conservatism.  Pity the poor Huygens Surface Science Team.  They put their all into figuring out how to learn something about a Titan ocean in somewhere between 3 and 30 minutes of remaining battery life (which is mostly what the surface science package was about, from what I've been able to tell from the ESA pages).  Then they find out late in the game that it's almost certain that there are no such oceans. 
"So, what to do?  Well, one perfectly reasonable path is as below, set your sights much lower (and smaller) and study microbes in hostile environments on Earth (and I dare say, Mars) with "just a few" assumptions made about what you're looking for elsewhere.  This is what I call "safe science", that NASA is now adapting which is the hallmark of conservative agencies like NSF.  Learn a lot about a little, get the comparably modest but sustainable research funds, publish a few sound (but really boring) papers, get tenured/promoted and everyone (well, almost everyone) is happy."
 
I was in correspondence recently with Sam Dinkin, who opined that science-firsters like Jeff Bell (with whom I also warmly correspond) can't really give us the speedup in space development that he'd like to see - science is too slow, he said, there's all that peer review and whatnot.  He'd like to see more happening on entrepreneurial time-scales, and of course many of us have taken encouragement in that view from SpaceShipOne.  The fact is, however, that SpaceShipOne's rocket engine was developed with federal funding, and Scaled Composites grew its considerable base of expertise from a project list in which about every other project was taxpayer-funded.  In short, space development is still very much bound up in political processes - weapons research and procurement, science-for-the-sake-of-knowledge funding.  And the people behind SpaceShipOne, to their credit, don't pretend otherwise, even as the pundits around them talk about some major breakthrough of fully privatized launch.  Rutan and others have said that a true suborbital space-recreation industry might be 15 years off, and that's just suborbital, not orbital.
 
As long as launch is really expensive, space science will be very expensive, and the money will have to be spent in the usual 'safe' manner.  Launch will become cheaper not just because technology improves, but because market prospects improve, and that's not obviously on the horizon.  In the Int'l Herald Trib the other day I found an op-ed from someone from the Ayn Rand Institute saying we should just drop all regulatory barriers to space access, because capitalism will figure out how to get up there cheaply.  I saw similar handwaving 'logic' the same day when I went over to www.liftport.com - 'build it and they will come' sloganeering about how the cost of the Space Elevator would be justified by the opening of new markets that can't be foreseen.  And again, on SpaceDaily, an op-ed
 
 
that trotted out the usual rhetoric about how space is a *mere* 62 miles away from us (as if those weren't the most expensive travel miles ever), and the old SSP arguments again, as if somebody's going to pony up the hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in an energy-supply concept with such staggering technical risks.  And of course that same writer invokes the old chestnut of the Wright brothers against the naysayers, as if you could run a launcher development program out of the profits from your bicycle repair shop and a few private donors.

"My opinion is that that Ocean is worth investigating even if there is absolutely no life in it.  Life there, and elsewhere, would be interesting, amazing even, but I don't think it should be the only or even the prime reason to study the Europan Ocean, and we, the fans of such exploration and discovery, should not be mollycoddled with all this ancillary science and believe that the true journey is "just around the corner".  For us, it might as well be never."
 
Speaking as a baby boomer on the threshold of middle age, I can certainly see how developed-nation age demographics alone could take some of the wind out of the sails of exploration.  We're on the eve of elections here in Japan, and the two top issues in the polls are all about how the aging population can hope to retire in reasonable comfort.  That's not a small issue in the U.S. and Europe either - it can only grow as a concern.  There will be fewer and fewer voters wanting their taxes spent on projects that will bear fruit (if at all) after they are dead.
"There you go, sports fans, the emotional outpouring of a scientist with a few stakes in this astrobiology game."
 
Don't worry, we won't rat on you to NSF. ;-)
-michael turner
 

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