----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2004 12:07
AM
Subject: Re: I wonder if they could be
modified for digging through Europan ice?
"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