ESA also made an impact in the human spaceflight arena by developing and managing the shuttle-borne Spacelab, carried in the space shuttle’s payload bay. Spacelab flew on 25 shuttle missions, ending with STS-99 in February 2000.

The International Space Station (ISS) includes both ESA and Japan as players. In February 2008, space shuttle Atlantis lofted ESA’s Columbus space laboratory as a module to the ISS. Only a month later, Japan became an ISS partner when space shuttle Endeavour carried a service section of its Kibo laboratory into orbit. Then in May, space shuttle Discovery lofted Kibo’s experiment module laboratory. On assembly, Kibo will be the largest single module on the ISS.

Meanwhile, the number of persons who have flown to space is now 482 from 39 countries, most as passengers on U.S. or Soviet/Russian spacecraft. The third nation to launch a human into space is China, which sent astronaut Yang Liwei aloft for 14 orbits on October 15, 2003. But more will be making the journey as other nations reach for a human presence on the moon.



Robotic Space Probes Go Multinational

As with manned spaceflight, the field of robotic scientific space probes was first dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union/Russia, but other nations soon began to participate.

For some missions, NASA and the European nations were partners. As early as 1974-76, West Germany had joined with NASA in launching two Helios solar probes. In the 1990s, ESA combined with NASA for the Ulysses and Soho missions, and West Germany took part on the Galileo Jupiter probes. In 1998 NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency together launched the Cassini Venus probe.

But by the 1980s, ESA had again emerged as a major solo actor in the field, starting with the 1986 Giotto probe to Halley’s Comet. In 2005 and 2007, ESA launched its Rosetta comet probes, and in April 2006 came the launch of its Venus Express. SMART-1 was a Swedish-designed ESA satellite launched in 2003 to orbit the moon. Later that year, ESA’s Mars Express put an orbiter in place around that planet.

ESA also intends to launch its extremely sophisticated Planck satellite and Herschel Space Observatory in October 2008. The Planck satellite will engage in breakthrough observations of galaxy clusters, the Milky Way’s interstellar medium, and the Zodiacal light. Future ESA robotic missions are planned for close-range solar observations and trips to Mercury, Mars, and the asteroid belt.

Noticeably absent in the world of both human and robotic spaceflight has been the United Kingdom, which contributes only about 9% of the ESA budget.

Besides the U.S., Russia, and ESA, Japan has been the other major participant in robotic scientific space exploration. In 1985 Japan launched its Sakigake and Suisei probes to Halley’s Comet, and in 1993 came the Hiten lunar probe. In 2002-3 came the successful Nozomi Mars probes, then the 2004 Hayabusa asteroid probe. A Mercury orbiter is also being developed.

Japan has taken special interest in the moon. 2007 saw the launch of the Selene lunar orbiter, followed within days by the Okina and Ouna sub-satellites.

The most recent entries to the space program scene are the Asian giants, China and India. In the last two decades their emergence as industrializing competitors to the world’s economic powerhouses has already had profound consequences, especially on the worldwide demand for resources. The same is taking place in space, with a shift in the world’s political balance of power likely to follow.

Return to the Moon

Are we seeing a new space race following NASA’s 2006 announcement of its program for returning to the lunar surface?

According to Kathleen Connell of the Connell Whittaker Group, LLC, “I believe we are and will be seeing a ramp up of both cooperation and competition, as nations pursue strategic space advantage, prestige, military objectives, commercial benefits, and, on ISS, space research and product development. It could happen that we will see something like a race with China heating up.”

Both China and India are ready to join the other space faring nations in launching probes to the moon.

India is planning a September 2008 launch of the Chandrayaan-I lunar orbiter and impactor that will include payloads from NASA, ESA, and the Bulgarian Space Agency. Chandrayann-I would use U.S.-provided radar to locate spots on the lunar surface with water ice as possible locations for the U.S. lunar polar base.

In 2010 or 2011, Chandrayann-II would land a motorized rover on the moon. Russia has signed an agreement with India for its own payloads to fly on Chandrayann-II.

China became involved in lunar exploration on October 24, 2007, when it launched its Chang’e-1 lunar orbiter. Two lunar landers are planned for 2008 or 2009 with an objective of selecting a sight for a manned base.

In fact the moon could get a little crowded. According to announced plans, within 10-12 years of the projected return of the U.S. in 2018, China, Russia, ESA, Japan, and India will have established their own lunar bases.

Is Human Flight to Mars Even Possible?

Regarding manned flight to Mars, even robotic exploration has proven problematical. Less than half the world’s launched missions have ever arrived, and of those that did, only half returned data to earth. This has led to jokes within the spaceflight community about the “Mars curse.”

Presently only the U.S. and ESA have plans to send humans to Mars, but the technology for doing so does not yet exist.

Planning a trip to Mars is not a new idea. The U.S. Vision for Space Exploration announced by President George W. Bush on January 14, 2004, was similar to a plan released by President Richard Nixon’s Space Task Group in 1969. In 1988, former NASA administrator and Space Task Group member Thomas Paine said, “There’s no question that Mars is the great destination of humanity for the 21st century.”

Nevertheless, a human voyage to Mars remains a far-off dream.

Questions to Ponder

At this point several questions emerge:

The moon-Mars program involves a gigantic commitment by the U.S. and other nations to human spaceflight. How successful has human spaceflight been so far?

Human spaceflight has been a mixed blessing. Certainly the successes, including the first U.S. and Soviet orbital missions, the Apollo moon landings, and the shuttle spacewalks have been exhilarating. Images from space, both those obtained by humans and those from robotic probes, have raised consciousness of the unity of man and the beauty and fragility of the earth.

But human spaceflight has been consistently criticized for providing less scientific return on investment than robotic probes. It is expensive and dangerous, as shown by the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters. And with advances in computers and robotics, machines can perform complex tasks almost as well as people.

NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, has even said that the space shuttle and ISS programs were “a mistake,” though he quickly back-pedalled when criticized by the spaceflight community.

It’s a fact, though, that both the space shuttle and the ISS have been disappointments, especially given their enormous costs. The shuttle never lived up to its billing as the “space truck” that would fly every conceivable type of civilian and military mission for both U.S. and foreign customers. The ISS has not attracted the private sector commercial customers that would be necessary to make it a profitable concern.

The space shuttle will not fly after 2010, when Russia’s Soyuz will take up the slack in ferrying passengers to and from the ISS. Robotic servicing of the ISS has been done by Russian Progress modules for years but is being replaced by ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle. The first of these was the Jules Verne, launched on March 9, 2008, which will be docked to the ISS for six months.

The planned phase-out of the shuttle and NASA’s cancellation of any possible near-term replacement will permanently reduce the scientific yield of the ISS. For instance, the European-built Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), intended as a major ISS lab module, will never leave earth.

As Administrator Griffin told a U.S. Senate panel on February 28, 2007, "The AMS is a model of international cooperation, led by a dynamic Nobel Prize winner, and promises to do impressive science in space. But it may never get a chance to do its thing. The problem is that NASA has no room on its space shuttle to launch the $1.5 billion AMS mission, which is designed to search for antimatter from its perch on the international space station. Every shuttle flight that I have has got to be used to finish the station.”

While NASA has not said as much, the U.S. may simply walk away from the ISS after 2010, leaving it as a Russian/ESA/Japanese project.

Nevertheless, a tremendous body of data on human spaceflight has been collected during the shuttle-ISS period. Humans have spent long periods of time in space, with Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev spending a total of 2.2 years over the span of six spaceflights.

Enough is probably known at this time for humans to be reasonably safe in establishing lunar bases. By contrast, a voyage to Mars has vast unknowns, including long-term exposure to deadly cosmic radiation.

What is motivating the race back to the moon?

Spaceflight in general has been motivated by a wide range of factors, from national prestige, to scientific knowledge, to job-creation for aerospace contractors, to commercial harnessing of space-based manufacturing processes, to the seeking of military advantage.

There have been critics of the new U.S. moon-Mars program as having military overtones, including Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, who said, “In the end, NASA’s plan to establish permanent bases on the moon will help the military control and dominate access on and off our planet earth and determine who will extract valuable resources from the moon in the years ahead.”

It is notable that U.S. government statements of space policy since the mid-1980s have listed national security—i.e., the military—as the top priority. The U.S. Space Transportation Policy of December 21, 1994, stated, “This policy establishes national policy, guidelines, and implementation actions for U.S. space transportation programs and activities to ensure the nation’s ability to maintain access to and use space for U.S. national and homeland security, and civil, scientific, and commercial purposes.”

On August 31, 2006, the White House issued a new U.S. National Space Policy, which NASA described as, “the overarching national policy that governs conduct of U.S. space activities.” According to NASA, “The U.S. National Space Policy establishes a comprehensive series of principles, goals and guidelines—national security, civil and commercial—outlining policy for international space cooperation, space nuclear power, radio frequency spectrum and orbit management and interference protection, orbital debris, export policies, and space-related security classification.”

Also, there have been persistent rumours that the U.S. has developed or is in the process of developing top-secret military space planes that someday could land and take off from a lunar facility. Because the Department of Defence abandoned human spaceflight decades ago, NASA is the only U.S. government agency that could provide transport to the builders of such a facility.

A couple of years ago NASA’s Michael Griffin also suggested nationalistic motives when he expressed the hope that “my language”—i.e., English—and not those of “another, bolder or more persistent culture” will be “passed down over the generations to future lunar colonies.”

Recent developments suggest that future moon inhabitants would be wise to study French, German, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi as well.

How are current economic, political, and technological conditions likely to affect the outcome?

The U.S. and Soviet Union developed their space programs largely in peace from the end of World War II to 1991, when the U.S. invaded Iraq for the first time and the Soviet Union collapsed. The exception for the U.S. was the period of the Vietnam War, which, however, was localized in Southeast Asia.

The decade of the 1990s saw budget cutbacks for the U.S. government and an economic time of troubles for Russia, with the ISS dominating both nations’ attention. Since then the U.S. has been heavily engaged in warfare in the Middle East while Russia has been rebuilding its economy.

Events on the world stage have therefore created an opening for leadership in space that other nations have been rushing to fill. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and so does human exploration of the natural environment. The parties that have been moving ahead most aggressively seem to be ESA and China. Russia too has come back strongly from what seemed like an economic catastrophe only a few years ago.

It’s the U.S. which presently has the most ambitious human space program. But it’s also telling that so many other NASA programs have been cut back to fund it. NASA is even hiring temporary employees to avoid the expense of more permanent staff. In some locations, such as the Goddard Space Flight Center in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., veteran research scientists have been idled because their funding has been siphoned off.

The biggest question now is whether the U.S. can finance its commitment in space while carrying such enormous trade and fiscal deficits and being so involved with overseas wars. Economists are estimating the long-term cost of the Iraq War at $3 trillion. That’s NASA’s annual budget for the next 175 years.



How is NASA doing on meeting its schedule for the lunar return?

On May 8, 2008, OrlandoSentinel.com reported, “More news is leaking out of NASA that all may not be well with Constellation [the lunar-Mars program], and that the gap between the end of the shuttle program in 2010 and the advent of NASA's next spaceship is likely to get bigger…The earliest that Orion is expected to fly on top of its Ares 1 rocket (also reportedly facing technological troubles) is 2015. But fewer and fewer people expect that NASA will make that date because of engineering woes and growing costs.”

Obviously the race to the moon has scarcely begun.

*Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform, entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.” His Challenger website is at www.richardccook.com.

 

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