Friday, June 21, 2013
From Khufu To Kennedy
When John Kennedy committed America to send men to the Moon, he made a speech in which two words have always stood out for me: 'choose' and 'hard'. The choice to act is always the prerequisite of achievement. And mankind has made the greatest strides through doing the hard, not the easy, things. So Kennedy said: 'We choose to go to the moon, and do the other things. Not because they are easy but because they are hard'. Going to Mars requires a choice. And the work will be hard. Over four millennia ago a god-king chose to build a monument, a tomb for himself. The building work was hard. And it was over-ambitious too because the king was no god in reality and he was the ruler only of a small and desert bound land. The king was Khufu, also called Cheops, of Egypt. The pyramid he had built benefited neither himself nor his people. But it has since inspired and awed countless human beings down the ages. Four millennia from now, John Kennedy too will be a footnote in history, his own speech barely remembered. But what he caused to have done, to take men for the first time to another world, will have inspired in turn generation upon generation of people like us. That is something truly worthwhile. Colonising Mars would rank in this league as one of the great inspirations of the human race. History calls. And history favours the brave.
Just Ask Ben Franklin...
Leading on from the question of economics, does the settlement of Mars need a justification anyway? We humans struggle with debates about the meaning of life. It has led us into horrific conflict and slaughter throughout history. Life should be a joy if we can make it so. Why not espouse joyful adventure for its own pure sake; a celebration of what it is to be human. And Mars is a joyful adventure if ever there was one! Perhaps Benjamin Franklin summed up human meaning and purpose best in his tongue in cheek question in response to the bean counters of his day, when he simply asked..... 'What is the use of a new born baby?'
Economics
The opponents of investing in Mars colonisation generally begin by an attack on the economic front. It is a waste of money and cannot be economically viable runs the argument. But just stating the case does not make it true. Even were no profits earned by colonising Mars it would still be ecomomically worthwhile in terms of GDP growth in America particularly. The employment and economic activity generated would be substantial and continuing.
Take GDP: who are the heroes behind the vast US economy? Auto workers, movie makers, high tech factory workers, or perhaps those in Silicon Valley? Answer of course all the above. But if you really want to add to GDP growth take the man dying in hospital with cancer who is contesting a divorce and trying to prevent his wife inheriting his money. Add his multi-million law suit against the tobacco companies whom he blames for his lung cancer. This man is a true economic powerhouse due to the peculiarities of GDP and growth measurement. Nothing in what he is doing may appear productive on the surface. But his vast expenditure on legal and medical bills all add to GDP.
This may just seem a bit bizarre, but it is nonetheless true that setting up a Mars colony will help significantly to stimulate, primarily, the US economy and its GDP. In turn, the rest of the world will benefit from the knock on effects of American growth. And all this does not have to increase the burden on long-suffering (again principally American) taxpayers. Private enterprise wants to go to Mars. It instinctively smells an opportunity for future growth, market dominance, and ultimately profit. Would the tax funded NASA play no part? Of course it would. But there would be no need to increase its budget and there might be opportunities to rein that colossal tax drain in over time. In the Space X Dragon program there is a developable architecture for deep space flight operations. It would be relatively cheap to build on Dragon and on Space X's planned heavy lift and reusable rocket technology to do the same things NASA is spending so many billions on in redundantly developing the Orion spacecraft and the SLS launch system.
Axing Orion etc and switching some funding to the development of commercial deep space capacity would speed up development substantially and bring costs down dramatically. Just look at what the private sector has achieved already in developing resupply capacity for the International Space Station. Commercial flights may be taking crews to the station before NASA has even launched the first unmanned Orion. NASA's role could be redirected to research and development and helping the private sector work up the constituent machinery and technology to turn its existing work on deep space capacity and habitat development into a fully worked up set of tools and hardware to make a Mars colony practicable.
So how would a Mars colony be funded in detail? There are plenty of inspired ideas out there already, and many more waiting to be developed. I will leave that as the subject of a future post.
Take GDP: who are the heroes behind the vast US economy? Auto workers, movie makers, high tech factory workers, or perhaps those in Silicon Valley? Answer of course all the above. But if you really want to add to GDP growth take the man dying in hospital with cancer who is contesting a divorce and trying to prevent his wife inheriting his money. Add his multi-million law suit against the tobacco companies whom he blames for his lung cancer. This man is a true economic powerhouse due to the peculiarities of GDP and growth measurement. Nothing in what he is doing may appear productive on the surface. But his vast expenditure on legal and medical bills all add to GDP.
This may just seem a bit bizarre, but it is nonetheless true that setting up a Mars colony will help significantly to stimulate, primarily, the US economy and its GDP. In turn, the rest of the world will benefit from the knock on effects of American growth. And all this does not have to increase the burden on long-suffering (again principally American) taxpayers. Private enterprise wants to go to Mars. It instinctively smells an opportunity for future growth, market dominance, and ultimately profit. Would the tax funded NASA play no part? Of course it would. But there would be no need to increase its budget and there might be opportunities to rein that colossal tax drain in over time. In the Space X Dragon program there is a developable architecture for deep space flight operations. It would be relatively cheap to build on Dragon and on Space X's planned heavy lift and reusable rocket technology to do the same things NASA is spending so many billions on in redundantly developing the Orion spacecraft and the SLS launch system.
Axing Orion etc and switching some funding to the development of commercial deep space capacity would speed up development substantially and bring costs down dramatically. Just look at what the private sector has achieved already in developing resupply capacity for the International Space Station. Commercial flights may be taking crews to the station before NASA has even launched the first unmanned Orion. NASA's role could be redirected to research and development and helping the private sector work up the constituent machinery and technology to turn its existing work on deep space capacity and habitat development into a fully worked up set of tools and hardware to make a Mars colony practicable.
So how would a Mars colony be funded in detail? There are plenty of inspired ideas out there already, and many more waiting to be developed. I will leave that as the subject of a future post.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Learning From The Past
One of the reasons why the monumental achievements of the Apollo Moon landings were not followed up by further deep space manned exploration seems to me to be the strictly short duration of the explorations planned. The decision to go for a series of discrete short missions was of course understandable in the context of America's race with the Soviet Union to get men to the Moon. But such an approach could never have captured the imagination of mankind in the longer term. Until recent years, the most likely candidate for a possible manned Mars landing was another governmental, massively expensive, short term mission of scientific exploration. Unfortunately, that would have been subject to the vagaries of political decision making and I have little doubt that after a very few expeditions the program would have followed the sad precedent of Apollo into the oblivion of history.
Now however, the paradigm is clearly changing. The colonisation of Mars rather than a short series of exploratory landings has now been espoused by Elon Musk of Space X and the Dutch led Mars One venture. Crucially the idea that humans could be flown to Mars permanently to settle there has revolutionised the potential costs of putting humans on the Red Planet. Expeditions could avoid the enormous additional financial burden of launching return vehicles from Mars and bringing them back to Earth with all the crew members on board. The savings in research and development as well as fuel and management for the return voyage may transform the prospects for landing us on Mars in the relatively near term. There is now a chance that the first men and women could be on the martian surface before the end of the 2020's. The private sector may lead the way. This while a cash-strapped NASA continues to pour billions into a taxpayer funded deep space flight capacity. It may be that Space X, whose intentions are becoming clearer, will be able to develop deep space manned capability considerably faster and less expensively.
Now however, the paradigm is clearly changing. The colonisation of Mars rather than a short series of exploratory landings has now been espoused by Elon Musk of Space X and the Dutch led Mars One venture. Crucially the idea that humans could be flown to Mars permanently to settle there has revolutionised the potential costs of putting humans on the Red Planet. Expeditions could avoid the enormous additional financial burden of launching return vehicles from Mars and bringing them back to Earth with all the crew members on board. The savings in research and development as well as fuel and management for the return voyage may transform the prospects for landing us on Mars in the relatively near term. There is now a chance that the first men and women could be on the martian surface before the end of the 2020's. The private sector may lead the way. This while a cash-strapped NASA continues to pour billions into a taxpayer funded deep space flight capacity. It may be that Space X, whose intentions are becoming clearer, will be able to develop deep space manned capability considerably faster and less expensively.
Inspiration
The address of this blog is susanconstant.blogspot.co.uk For anyone not familiar with her, the Susan Constant was the name of the lead ship of three which landed the first colonists at Jamestown in Virginia. Jamestown was of course the first successful english speaking colony in America. A famous and auspicious inspiration for this blog I hope. And not a bad candidate name for some future Mars ship perhaps?
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