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From the Executive Director

Human Spaceflight: With Risk, We Need Purpose

Click to enlarge > Louis D. Friedman Executive Director of The Planetary Society Credit: The Planetary Society

November 12 , 2007

I watched a dramatic and exciting space adventure on television last week. It was a gripping, scary, dangerous story that took days to unfold. The outcome of this story could have been tragic. Instead, it ended in triumph.

The ratings for this show were terrible -- even among space enthusiasts, I found very few who were aware of it, and even fewer who watched it.

The story was the great job done by the astronauts repairing the space station solar array. The repair showed NASA as its best -- clever, innovative, decisive, courageous, and, most of all, "can-do." But the lack of public interest also revealed one of NASA's fundamental problem -- failing to inspire the public.

The drama began as the astronauts were deploying a solar array on a newly positioned truss on the International Space Station (ISS). As the array deployed, a tear was noticed -- a dangerous tear that prevented the full deployment. Astronaut Scott Parazynski worked for 7.5 hours in his space suit outside of the space station. He was able to close the tear with a jury-rigged "cuff-link" -- a remedy devised in just 3 days by Houston engineers working with the shuttle and space station astronauts. Parazynski was in constant danger of electrical arcing and space suit tears, and he forced to work far from the air lock while precariously balanced on a tandem of two robotic arms. Shades of Apollo 13.

Hats off to the NASA team.

But, the story failed to get much attention. It got some -- inside pages of major newspapers (front page in Houston), a short paragraph in some others, 10 seconds or so on the evening news, and some web stories. I kept thinking of the coverage it would have received if there had been a serious accident. I also kept thinking if that had been on Mars, on an asteroid, or even on the Moon -- that it would have been more noticed. Even if had been part of humankind's step beyond Earth orbit toward Mars, it would have been more compelling. The problem is that the purpose of the space station construction is little understood.

There is no denying either the brilliance or adventure of the ISS achievement. The ISS, like the shuttle, is an extraordinary technical accomplishment. The ISS is also a tremendous political achievement: indeed, I think it’s the largest, most complex, international engineering project of history. And the solar power array being deployed last week is a crucial step to finishing the construction with long-awaited European and Japanese modules for their human space flight programs.

But there are questions about the purpose of the ISS. The space station has never been tied to NASA's fundamental purpose: space exploration. In fact, when the human spaceflight program was finally reoriented to a space exploration focus, NASA committed to finish the ISS and be done with it. Russia is making money from the station. Europe and Japan are gaining first time experience in human spaceflight operations -- giving them a new step forward. The U.S. has no purpose for the station other than to complete it.

If the NASA connected the work on the ISS to human exploration of other worlds and reaching Mars sometime in the foreseeable future, the adventure of EVA and space station construction would be more publicly engaging. If NASA could declare that Scott Parazynski's work was not just a death-defying feat, but instead was an illustrative and instructive about death-defying work that will be necessary to accomplish Mars missions, then the story would be more compelling. If the international crew (Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli was part of the repair effort) and station were used to help define the international team that will be necessary to accomplish human missions to Mars, the space station would be understood a lot better. In short, if the value to future space exploration were made clearer, the risk of astronauts in low-Earth orbit would be more openly accepted.

I recognize there is no strong consensus for a political and budget commitment to send humans to Mars, but repeatedly we have seen that without progress toward the Mars destination, human spaceflight programs lack purpose and suffer from weak public support. If we abandon the Mars goal and instead focus on building big structures for Moon operations without any purpose except the building itself, the Vision for Space Exploration is at risk of suffering the same fate as the ISS. I wonder -- two decades from now, will we be witnessing a scary and thrilling adventure of humans working on the Moon and question why they are risking their lives doing what the U.S. did more than 50 years earlier?

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