Show Date: March 29, 2006 
Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

GOING TO SPACE
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond. Join us each week on Newstalk K57 on Wednesday night from 7 to 8 p.m. for exciting live science expeditions or listen live on our web site www.thedeepradioshow.com

We’re all interested in the space program. Many of us who came of age in its early days, had high hopes of making a personal visit to “The Last Frontier”. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. The high cost of boosting anything into low Earth orbit (LEO), and several spectacular failures by NASA missions have conspired to keep us ground-bound common folk firmly in place.

The failures are the ones that tend to stay with us and they generate a lot of hand-wringing and ‘we don’t belong in space, it’s too dangerous’ sentiments. We seem to forget that despite the tragedies of Apollo 1 (where three astronauts died during a training session while their spacecraft was on the ground) and Apollo 13 (an oxygen tank exploded en route to the moon but the astronauts returned safely) the other Apollo missions to the moon were resounding successes. And despite the tragic failure of two shuttle missions, we tend to forget that 118 other missions were successes.

So human space travel has remained beyond the scope of most of us. Just as most of us don’t climb Earth’s highest mountains or travel to the ocean’s depths less than 500 people have ever traveled beyond Earth’s atmosphere. A pretty elite club when you consider that we just welcomed our six billionth inhabitant to planet Earth.

So, we send robots to space and some of those have also been spectacular failures. So many Mars missions have failed (around 60%), that people began to wonder if the aliens were not only real, but trying (and succeeding) to keep us out of the neighborhood.

Much of that failure rate has been blamed on the ‘better, cheaper, faster’ paradigm of the ‘90’s. There are those who claim that ‘cheaper’ and ‘faster’ were certainly followed, but that ‘better’ fell to the wayside fairly early on. Certainly, the metric system vs. English system measurement fiasco that led to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter is a prime example of the problems with ‘better, cheaper, faster’.

And the problem isn’t limited to NASA. The recent failures of the ESA Beagle and the Japanese Nozomi missions to Mars and the Japanese Hayabusa mission to an asteroid simply proves that the systems which take us to space are extremely complex and for that reason prone to failure on many different levels.

So . . . should we stop wasting all that money and all those human lives? Certainly, if we want to stagnate and the progress made by 500 generations of humans to come to a halt. We developed as wanderers and the current rage for ‘climb the highest mountain’ and ‘dive the deepest ocean’ only proves that we are running out of room to wander on Mother Earth. To continue to develop as a species, we must carry our wanderlust outward or risk becoming a people who live vicariously through the exploits of others. (Ever wonder why ‘Survivor’ and its infinite clones are so popular?)
Unfortunately, the current administration’s “Let’s go to Mars” policy which sounded so wonderful when it was announced, has gutted the budgets of virtually all current space programs and there’s been no new money provided to actually go to Mars. NASA’s budget has been cut so deeply that most robot space programs have been either put on hold or axed entirely. If we do send a manned mission to Mars, it won’t be by using the policies of the current administration.

What is the future of space exploration? Nobody knows, but we’ll be talking about it on The Deep this week. Don’t miss it!

The Deep is broadcast on Newstalk K57 every Wednesday night at 7:00 p.m. You can also listen live from our web site www.thedeepradioshow.com. Join Jim Sullivan, Pam Eastlick, and Peter Melyan on the deepest radio show on Earth.

Is this in your future?