Why Planning for Manned Missions to the Red Planet Is Dumb
   

     It was great to see Bob Ballard on 60 Minutes this week. The discoverer of the Titanic and (more importantly, says he, tube worms) was, as always, delightful and sharp. He made a familiar point: that without ever having set foot on Mars, we already know far more about the Red Planet than we do about the ocean deep. He also made the point that the U.S. spends 1,000 times more on space exploration than underwater research.

   We've heard it all before. What was exciting to see was that Ballard has given up sending people down into the murky depths. These days, he sends robot explorers in their stead. And that's exactly what we should be doing in Mars.

    Oh, wait a minute! We are doing it! In 2003, we sent a pair of hardy rovers named Spirit and Opportunity on a three-month mission to boldly rove where no other robot had riven before. They're still at it!

    Granted, they're showing their age. Opportunity is crawling toward a crater six miles distant at a few feet a day.  Spirit doesn't get around much these days. One of its wheels has been bogged down in crusty Martian soil since early last summer. Back on Earth, the control team at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena has been trying to work out an exit strategy. It's high drama, but does anybody care?

       As space program journalist Jason Rhian observes,"Most Americans have forgotten that the plucky little robots are even still working. They are unaware that the rovers have survived numerous life-or-death scenarios and unaware the tremendous work that they have both done." Excactly. And why is that? Well, partly because Glee is on, but mostly because if a robot "dies," nobody suffers.

    Imagine if an astronaut's boot had slipped through the thin crust and become wedged between rocks below. The cable news channels would scrub all their, ahem, programs and give us round-the-clock coverage. CNN would tell us what the astronaut's dog had for dinner. Fox News would blame Obama for bringing socialism to NASA. MSNBC would blame Rush. And we'd be glued to the sets.

    This is exactly why we should not spend ourselves into bankruptcy trying to send men (or women) to Mars. It's far too risky when we can achieve nearly all the same scientific objectives with robots at a fraction of the cost.

    The current rover mission cost about $850 million up front, and its extensions have cost roughly $150 million a year. Compare that with the International Space Station -- a scientifically worthless boondoggle still under construction when just a few years from its scrap date. The orbiting Ramada is on track to cost $100 billion. (Reminder: a billion is a thousand times a million.) Imagine what sending a couple of astronauts to Mars would cost.

    Oh, wait a minute. We don't have to. The blue-ribbon Augustine Commission released its final report on the future of human spaceflight just a few weeks ago, and its findings were pretty devastating to hopes of a manned Mars mission anytime soon. Better we should go back to the moon, the commission said. The cost, whatever it actually is, lies far beyond the current purse of a nation more than $10 trillion in debt.

    But cost is not the only inhibitor. The commission, which included astronaut Sally Ride, noted that a trip to Mars would require about 900 days of spaceflight -- more than two years. It noted that even with extended warranties, we don't have any spacecraft that can be reasonably certain to perform without failure for that long.

    And if that were not reason enough to back off, consider this: our sun belches every now and then, and when it does it gives off massive doses of alpha-particle radiation. Here on Earth, we're fortunate to have a magnetosphere that deflects most of these charged bullets to the poles, where they delight the locals with aurora borealis. But for those drifting in space for a couple of years, these represent not a charming light show but a deadly menace.

    So, given that we have highly reliable, hardworking robots who never demand overtime pay or cost-of-living increases, why in the world (so to speak) would we want to invest what little of our national treasure remains in sending some glory hounds on a Mars trip whose only certainty is that it would cost way too much? The only answer is human vanity. That's a poor basis for policy.

    I'm not saying that humans should never again venture into space. But let it be after the Singularity, when humans and machines have merged to the extent that healing can be supplemented by on-board repairs, consciousness downloads, and galactic credit cards.

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