From: cain@geomag.gly.fsu.edu (Joe Cain)
Subject: Space and Human Destiny
Summary: written submission to NASA Town Meeting
Organization: Florida State University Geology Dept.
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 92 02:35:39 GMT

      With the recent spate of postings on this newsgroup as to the
benefit of space exploration, I thought it might be useful to post
part of my written submission to NASA's Town Meetings following my
participation in the one in Tampa December 10. As I mentioned in an
earlier summary, my criticisms of the cost ineffectiveness of the
Space Station were met with Mr. Goldin's retort that it should be
done or cancelled. My position is that instead of either it should
deferred until more important and urgent projects have been
completed. If $6 billion a year can be carved out of the even more
wasteful DOD budget, certainly a low priority need such as the
Space Station could be funded.


                            Space and Human Destiny
                     Portion of written submission to NASA
                  Following the Dec 10 town meeting in Tampa

      I retired early from the federal government to teach as some
say "to touch the future." Now that I understand more fully how
poorly educated are the youth coming to college in the United
States, I now wonder if there will be a future. I hate to think
that the last 30 years of my life will only see progress by
humanity in space producing a Space Station going around and around
doing very little for its billions of dollars a year spent
misinforming the public of its value.

      One worry is whether there will be a human race a thousand
years from now and my progeny will survive at all. Humanity could
be extinguished by so many forces becoming even stronger due to
overpopulation. Not only would I worry about biological or nuclear
catastrophes, there is the added concern of a large meteoroid
repeating the event that created the KT boundary 65 million years
ago. Perhaps the inhabitants of Earth 10 million years hence will
be insects instead of mammals (most likely roaches!).

      I find it no coincidence that the fortunes of NASA have
declined since the mid 1970's with the introduction of the Space
Shuttle. Before that time, with the national goal of "landing a man
on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth", NASA administrators
were science oriented and took advantage of the opportunities a
popular president gave to this direction. This is about the time
that many of us began leaving NASA as we did not want to spend our
lives merely looking for practical applications or PR opportunities
to show off space hardware.

      The Space Station is getting in the way of what should be
NASA's primary goal: creating sustainable off-planet habitats. SSF
is a tinkertoy in the sky whose main present purpose is to keep
aerospace engineers employed so astronauts can play their games in
space to amuse the public and presumably to fuel NASA's budgets. By
sapping the strength from good projects like one to sample a comet
(CRAF), by crippling full utilization of the Magellan project
cutting it off early for reasons of economy, by postponing or
trimming missions to other planets or not even starting them, by
severely restricting NASA missions to Planet Earth cutting back on
our understanding of even our own unique environment, is both a
national and international tragedy. If you think your choice is to
get on with the Space Station or cancel it, I say cancel it!

      Cancellation of the Space Station will not do permanent harm
to NASA's plan. It is true that without it the rationale for the
Space Shuttle begins to evaporate and should be slowly replaced as
a heavy lift vehicle is designed. However, especially if one can
somehow bring down the military budget to a tractable size and
start employing its highly paid companies in projects for going to
the Moon, asteroids and Mars, I do not see that the loss of SSF
cannot be sustained. You have seen in your town meetings the
enthusiasm people have to go "into space." Let's give them a more
reasonable plan to do so. 

      The Space Station is virtually useless for going to the Moon
or Mars because, as one NASA official told me privately after the
meeting, it is nearly impossible to rendevous with such a station,
especially on the return trip. Instead of a "stepping stone" as you
said, it is more like a millstone.

      With the present constraints put on by congress even the basic
science monitoring projects are falling by the wayside. For
example, I am appalled that a decade after the successful Magsat
project, which only operated for about a half year, we cannot
continue to monitor the geomagnetic field. To have a gap now of a
dozen years that may extend to at least 20, is to not fully exploit
the knowledge begun by prior missions like POGO and Magsat. Many
other valuable and useful planetary projects are never even
considered seriously for the lack of budget.

      Your response on the relatively low cost of the Space Station
cannot be supported. The statement by the American Geophysical
Union and others puts its price beyond $180 billion over thirty
years. The Shuttle was supposed to put payloads in space for $100
per pound when it was selected by that astutue statesman Richard
Nixon over competing designs. This would have required weekly
launches whose pollution one NASA scientist calculated would wipe
out Florida's orange crop. Of course that report was quickly
stomped on.

      The real heroes of the space program are people like Jim Van
Allen, Frank McDonald and Ed Stone, not only the astronauts who put
their lives on the line often for little purpose. The Voyager
missions were a very clever save by the Caltech/JPL group of what
might have been even better if it had been funded and planned
properly as the "Grand Tour."  You should recall that this
opportunity was clearly evident and voiced, but generally ignored
by congress and NASA in its fascination with manned space. 

      The primary goal of NASA should be to work in an intelligent
way as well as it can towards getting the scientific basis for
supporting an off-planet culture. Not only do we need to work on
understanding the physics and chemistry of the solar system as it
is now, but also how to adapt our biology to extreme environments.
I fear that the presently planned SSF experiments on long exposure
to zero gravity are premature. Instead we need to carve out a base
on the Moon (or an asteroid) to test at low gravity. Genetic
modifications should also not be ruled out in spite of the specter
of the atrocities of Nazi Germany in such directions. It may be
that the humans to inhabit other worlds will be evolutionary steps
from the present. After all, homo sapiens has not evolved except
socially for the past 50,000 years. Perhaps it is time to consider
engineering that evolution.

      I think it cruel to excite youth on becoming astronauts in the
popular sense. The enthusiasm of grade schoolers turns into
rebellion and anger by intelligent teenagers once they understand
how they have been misled. Bearing down on beginning to prepare for
inhabiting our solar system is a much more viable goal, and one
that needs to be explained in terms of expanding the broad frontier
of science. Teaching congress how to create an environment for
serendipitous discoveries is not easy considering responses like
Rep. Ralph Hall (D-Texas) predicting that a cure for cancer would
be found on the space station because "we haven't found it on Earth
and it must be out there somewhere." There must be a general
understanding that science and its offspring, technology, cannot
prosper along only narrow channels and without creative scientists
being involved in important work. 

      You mentioned that there is the possibility of future military
benefit from technological developments in space as a possible spin
off of the present program. I would object to burying military
projects within NASA's.  A more worthy secondary goal is to create
environments where experiments too dangerous to Earth may be
carried out elsewhere. Recent science fiction stories
notwithstanding, isolation on a Moon or asteroid base for
biological experiments has some appeal. I would even place future
nuclear experiments elsewhere. Venus or Mercury would be a far
safer place for such tests than the Sahara desert for example. Such
ideas of course are very speculative and futuristic, but there is
nothing wrong with having them in a far reaching plan that can be
modified as new data and understandings accumulate.
....
Joseph Cain		cain@geomag.gly.fsu.edu
cain@fsu.bitnet		scri::cain
Department of Geology B-160
Florida State University
Newsgroups: talk.politics.space,sci.space