International Robotic Rivalry in Space
GOLDEN, Colorado — It has to be some
sort of record. At no time over the five decades of sending robot craft into
the heavens have so many spacecraft been on duty at such a variety of far-flung
destinations or en route to their targets.
Ballistic buckshot of science gear
is now strewn throughout the solar system — and in some cases, like Voyager
hardware — have exited our cosmic neighborhood to become an interstellar
mission.
But the march of time has also meant
that more nations have honed the skills and know-how to explore the solar
system. For example, Europe has dispatched probes to the Moon, Mars and Venus —
and their Rosetta spacecraft is on a 10-year journey to investigate a comet in
2014.
Meanwhile, Japan’s Kaguya and China’s Chang’e 1 lunar orbiters have each just settled into an aggressive
campaign of surveying the Moon. India is set to orbit the Moon with
for a future robotic lunar mission as is the United Kingdom.
All this action at the Moon —
including the rekindling of Russian and U.S. lunar missions — bodes well for
bolder ventures ever-deeper into the solar system by multiple nations.
And there are other signals stemming
from all this outbound traffic.
Opportunity for discovery
“The Moon is a great place that we
often take for granted and we feel that we know it well enough. This is a grave
mistake,” said Stephen Mackwell, Director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute
in Houston, Texas.
Mackwell explained that we have
barely scraped the surface of what the Moon has to tell us. So why then did the
Moon take a backseat — exploration
wise — given that so much remains to be learned?
“I guess we became rather addicted
to our ability to robotically explore the vast distances of our solar system,
and we relegated humans to low Earth orbit and below,” Mackwell told SPACE.com.
“Mars came to ascendancy as the possible source of living organisms, and we had
so many new and exotic places to explore. The further we reached and the closer
we looked, the more fascinating these foreign bodies seemed, and we gave up on
the Moon,” he added.
Now, as more and more lunar imagery
and data floods in from Kaguya and Chang’e 1, Mackwell sees a captivating place
with “so much opportunity for discovery.”
Unresolved questions
Mackwell said that the relegation of
the Moon to the history books all changed when the U.S. President George W.
Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration, that’s the NASA Moon, Mars and
beyond to-do list.
“Suddenly, we were thinking of
humans beyond low Earth orbit, and how we would reach out real hands rather
than robotic to touch those exotic places,” Mackwell pointed out. “And you have
to start somewhere…so it makes sense to learn to live off [the] planet in a
place close by. Somehow this new vision started people thinking of the Moon
again as a place to do science.”
That thinking has meant resurfacing
and dusting off some old unresolved questions about the Moon, Mackwell
continued, bringing them to the fore, such as: How well do we have the
cratering record calibrated? Was there really a late heavy bombardment and what
caused it? How did the Earth-Moon system really form? Does the Moon have a
core? Are there resources on the Moon that would enable
exploration…and is there commercial viability down-line? How about hotels
on the Moon?
Making a statement
The number of nations shooting for
the Moon is a declaration of sorts.
“A lot of this international
activity is clearly about making a statement that they can do it too, and that
these countries have come of age technologically in the early part of the 21st
century. But one cannot help thinking that there is also the underlying urge to
explore the unknown, to open new frontiers. Now the South Koreans and the
Canadians are moving forward with their own visions, and the Moon is the
logical place to go and test a nation’s ability to design, build and test
instruments and spacecraft,” Mackwell senses.
There is abundant important science
to be done, Mackwell continued, regardless of whether it is for science sake or
as a precursory activity for eventual human exploration and habitation. “Nobody
seems to openly admit there is a space race…yet. But there is certainly a lot
going on, and it is inevitable that some milestones will ultimately result in
more overt competition,” he said.
More chances to partner
“We’re certainly outnumbered at the
Moon,” said Alan Stern, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission
Directorate. Still, that present-day situation pales given the space agency’s
peppering of inner and
worlds with spacecraft.
Reviewing the number of nations
doing or planning space science missions, Stern’s outlook is positive. “I think
it’s good. The more countries studying the Earth and global change, the more
countries involved in planetary or astrophysics, solar…it’s good for space
science and for space exploration,” he told SPACE.com.
“Sometimes it’s cooperative,
sometimes it is competitive…but in terms of the science, whether it is
cooperative or competitive, it is probably good,” Stern said. “We see more and
more chances to partner, not just with the Japanese and Europeans, and the
individual European space programs, but the Indians…and the Argentineans doing
missions with them in Earth orbit to study our globe. I’m not threatened by any
of this. I’m very keen on having a lot more partners,” he said.
Stern warning
On the more down-to-Earth side of U.S. robotic space missions, however, there’s a “Stern warning” concerning cost overruns
and tight budgets.
“We need to increase our flight
rates. We need to rev up our Earth science program. We need to get more out of
the budget that we have,” Stern advised, as well as rebalance the ratio of
small to large missions. “A lot of the vigor is taken out of the program when
you don’t have enough small missions to match the large missions…that it is all
large missions.”
“The pendulum swung a little too far
on that. We need to start pushing that back,” Stern said, spotlighting small
Explorer missions and Discovery-class spacecraft.
Stern said that NASA has been
throwing money away on unexpected cost overruns. “I need to change that
behavior, because that’s the best way to fund more missions.”
The problem, Stern said, has been
scientists and science teams that try to put too much in the missions, be it
science experiments, technologies or techniques. “When you create a psychology
that you always pay for the overruns, then people don’t have to mind the store
very closely. Overruns need to be rare…not routine.”
Big picture
But while NASA is rebalancing its
robotic exploration agenda, is NASA losing its touch? Is the U.S. space agency likely to fall behind other nations in space?
“I don’t think so,” responded
Mackwell of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. “We have a vibrant robotic space
program with numerous mission opportunities ahead of us. In some ways NASA has
done a lot of the easy stuff, and future missions are likely to be more
challenging — and expensive — as the questions get tougher and more complex,”
he suggested.
In looking at the big picture,
Mackwell pointed out that there are a scad of missions still at Mars, a very
healthy Cassini spacecraft doing wonderful science at Saturn, spacecraft are on
their respective ways to Mercury and Pluto, and missions under preparation for
the Moon, Mars and Jupiter.
“Compared to the number of active
NASA missions out there, the number of spacecraft by other nations is more
modest,” Mackwell said. “Projections for future launches of planetary missions
from other nations do not suggest that the rest of the world will overtake NASA
in the near future.”
So the prognosis for NASA advancing
forward in this arena is good, Mackwell said, but not without issues to deal
with.
In Mackwell’s estimation, the challenges
for NASA science include issues with Congress passing a reasonable budget for
the space agency that will support both the human and robotic activities;
potential taxation of the science budget to pay for shortfalls in human
spaceflight and development of the Ares booster; questions about the space
policy of a new President; and the escalation of robotic mission costs for both
new missions and extended mission activities.
“Nonetheless, the new management of
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has a vision and a will to have a healthy
mission suite to diverse targets, and strong research and analysis lines to
capitalize on the wealth of wondrous new data generated by these missions,”
Mackwell concluded.
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