With Drives Like These, How Can We
Afford Not to Go Back to the Moon?

     In a brilliant political stroke, President Obama has proposed killing Project Constellation. This was George W. Bush's plan to return astronauts to the lunar surface, where they could once again play golf by the light of the Earth.

   Killing Project Constellation is a gamble, of course. The Russians might beat us back to the moon -- if they ever decide to bankrupt their country again.

   Anyway, at the pace Constellation was moving, Fiji would have planted its flag on lunar soil before we returned. What makes the president's plan brilliant is that instead he proposes to turn it over to private industry. Now, let's hear the Republicans oppose that!

   Actually, some of them are. The party that normally believes anything government can do, free enterprise can do better, the party that wanted to put Social Security in the hands of Wall Street brokers, has cold feet about canning Constellation.

    Or at least members whose states grow fat on NASA's budget do. Senator Richard Shelby, R of Alabamy, sneered at the very idea that industry could do the job better. Turning over the project to the private sector threatens to make the astronauts launched on NASA’s final shuttle mission in September the last Americans sent into space from U.S. soil until well after 2020, he growled.    

   “China, India, and Russia will be putting humans in space while we wait on commercial hobbyists to actually back up their grand promises,” Shelby said.

    Congressman Bill Posey (R-Fla.) inadvertently revealed himself to be a Maoist when he called Obama’s plan “a giant leap backwards.”

    Is it not too, too funny? Who knew that Shelby and Posey were closet Commies? It took killing Constellation to drag them and some of their fellow GOPers out into the light.

    Actually, it's not quite fair to paint them as Marxists. After all, Marxists believe in principles. And they are truly great principles for society -- if you apply them to bee colonies. For people, not so much. But Shelby and his ilk -- they believe in pork, not principles.

    "Shoot, if you must, this old gray head," (you can almost hear them bloviating), "but spare my state's appropriation."

    Defunding the moon project is good politics, but is it good policy? You bet. I'm all for the exploration of our solar neighborhood and points beyond, but there is absolutely no need to send people into space. It is costly beyond reckoning, has a high fatality rate, and gives us almost no margin of scientific return over robots.

    Returning to the moon was always pointless -- even George W. only proposed it as a stepping stone to Mars. Sending astronauts to Mars, as I have previously argued in these pages, is wrong-headed in every way. The costs are phenomenal, the risks ridiculous, and any potential for increased scientific knowledge over what we're learning from our robot pals on the Red Planet is more than offset by the potential for contaminating the scene of what might be another harbor for life.

    To give but a single example, it would take only one giant solar flare on the yearlong journey to fry everyone on board.  In the meantime, Spirit and Opportunity, our valiant little explorers, have given us a wealth of data about Mars without the risk of a single human life.

   People will venture into space again. But first we must rebuild our economy, and give the biotech revolution a chance to unfold. There are bacteria whose genes confer an amazing resistance to radiation. Maybe we'll learn how to take advantage of those -- and many other biological gifts that could make interplanetary travel a reasonable risk.

    By the time we're ready for ethical and affordable human spaceflight, it is to be hoped,  a peaceful global civilization will have emerged.  Sharing the costs among billions of people would make it just that much better.
    

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