[FPSPACE] NASA's lost space vision, and solar sailing's "Kitty Hawk moment"

[Peter Pesavento]

Seeing David P. and Geert S's commentaries (as well as other contributors)
about manned spaceflight, I thought I would throw this into the mix.

 

A new article about space solar sailing that the author believes will save
aspirations for interstellar exploration.  It is going to appear in the May
issue of Atlantic monthly.

 

It's now on-line.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/solar-sailing

 

 

It's quite long, so I will post some excerpts here only.

 


Intelligent life surely exists on some of the planets beyond our solar
system. But we've scarcely begun to look for it. With NASA dithering and
corporate titans more interested in space tourism, a serious exploration of
the stars is limited more by a lack of vision than of technology. But a few
scientists think they can use the sun's light to cheaply propel an unmanned
craft deep into the interstellar ether. Their vision may be quixotic, and
their first attempt failed. But what will it mean for our solipsistic
species if they succeed next time? 


 

...

 

Should we feel encouraged by our new awareness? Perhaps diminished? Suffice
it to say humanity hasn't given it a thought. Most of us, instead of looking
outward, have spent the past 17 years sewing ourselves into an earthbound
straitjacket of cell-phoned, instant-messaged, Internetted connectedness
that has made the species more solipsistic than ever. Forget jihad and
global warming; we may just talk ourselves to death. One almost wonders
whether all our endless communication about nothing, this clinging together,
isn't some fearful, subconscious response to our new knowledge that other
civilizations have got to be out there, perhaps some that can run celestial
rings around us. Are we afraid of what we newly know? Is that why we give it
no serious reflection? 

Last spring, NASA scored a big success when its Phoenix
<http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/>  probe landed on Mars, dug a little
trench, and uncovered ice, with all its life-sustaining implications. And
yet, however significant this achievement is, the agency is still decades
away from sending humans to that planet-and well past the time by which it
was once expected to have sent them. 

Having had the shuttle, an orbiting millstone, around its neck for almost 30
years, NASA is now supposed to move on to a new generation of spacecraft
that will take us back to the moon-it's been 37 years since anyone set foot
there-and then to Mars. This was President Bush's Vision for Space
Exploration, propounded in 2004, and it now belongs to President Obama.
Although he started his campaign with a kind of anti-space policy that was a
footnote to his education plans-he would delay the development of new craft
for five years and spend the savings on the nation's schools-Obama soon
enough got with the existing program and called for efforts to "expedite the
development of the Shuttle's successor systems." 

Between the shuttle's planned retirement in 2010 and a new system's
development, the U.S. government will have to rely on the old Soviet Soyuz
to get crews and supplies up to the International Space Station. Worse, the
first of our own new launch vehicles, Ares 1, is already beginning to look
unreliable, at least in tests. American politicians now mostly avoid the old
conditional trope "If we can put a man on the moon"-because we can't, not
anymore. 

The Vision for Space Exploration really doesn't have any; nor does NASA. In
2002, the agency shut down its Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program,
whose scientists had been allowed to brainstorm such far-out notions as
wormholes and warp drives; five years later, the agency closed its Institute
for Advanced Concepts, a less mind-blowing outfit but one that also
encouraged thinking light-years down the road. 

Even the most spectacular unmanned successes of the American space
program-from the Voyager <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1>  probes of
the '70s to the Galileo and Cassini missions of the '90s-seem to belong to a
fading worldview. A desire to explore, even by mechanical proxy, is now a
self-indulgence to be resisted, since the end result would only be the
imperial spreading of that pollutant known as humankind. In the new view,
people have made such a mess of things here that we have no right to any
more of the universe, and certainly not to a "backup planet," which some
space enthusiasts have suggested as the ultimate hedge against environmental
catastrophe on Earth. 

...

 

For most of the past 10 years, solar sailing's chief fund-raiser has been
the writer and film producer Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow. In the first
years of their marriage, Druyan oversaw the crafting of the recorded
greetings from Earth that went along on the Voyagers Bud Schurmeier
dispatched through the solar system. She has known Friedman for decades, and
when he called on her during Cosmos 1's early financial difficulties, she
decided: "Come hell or high water, I would find a way to do this." She
would, she says, make Cosmos 1 her Taj Mahal to Sagan. 

Druyan provided the project with funds from her own Cosmos Studios, hoping
to make some of the money back by producing films and programming about the
mission. She also secured big donations from Joe Firmage, the Internet
entrepreneur, and Peter Lewis, an insurance billionaire and left-leaning
philanthropist from Cleveland. But conventional corporate sponsorship proved
impossible. "What really struck me was the paucity of vision in American
business," Druyan said. 

Nonetheless, she is still at it for Cosmos 2, seizing opportunities to talk
up the project with figures like Sumner Redstone at venues like the Seoul
Digital Forum. The Discovery Channel did put up a quarter million dollars to
jump-start the renewed effort, and she has her fingers crossed for a few big
potential donors she can't really talk about. Even so, she can't get over
the general timidity and lack of imagination she keeps encountering, and
she's particularly aghast at the scads of cash some ego-tripping big-money
men seem willing to spend on personal space tourism: "Isn't the whole planet
enough for them?" Google's Sergey Brin-whose company the project also
appealed to, unsuccessfully, years ago-is yet another billionaire who hopes
to romp around in orbit. 

..

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