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

Wed Apr 29 09:24:27 EDT 2009

With NASA dithering and corporate titans more interested in space tourism,...

That's as far as I got. Thanks anyway.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Peter Pesavento 
  To: fpspace at friends-partners.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 8:04 AM
  Subject: [FPSPACE] NASA's lost space vision,and solar sailing's "Kitty Hawk moment"

  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 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 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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