Actually, if you take a look at the article I just posted here (still in voting) you’ll note NASA is perhaps starting to make some progress on the issues of building large space structures, and improving the prospects for space solar power in particular. At least I’m encouraged!

I may be misrepresenting Van Allen without reading his article in full, but the Summer issue of http://www.issues.org isn’t up yet. I’ll presume that http://www.space.com writer Leonard David has the gist of it.

The calm debate on space prospects has been going on since Apollo, and anyone who does some calm research will find it. In summary:

(1) If we limit the discussion to what has been done and can be done with rocket launchers of the present type, Van Allen is very nearly right. Automated missions are quicker and cheaper for most of the scientific investigations we want to make at present. However if all our missions are to be designed, built and directed from Earth, there are limits to their flexibility.

(2) But meanwhile, actual progress in or toward …

(a) Electromagnetic mass accelerators
(b) Beam launch (microwave or laser)
(c) Space tethers
(d) Rockets using advanced materials

is such that we can reasonably extrapolate to a time, say 10-50 years, when some combination of these will reduce mass costs to orbit, to a point where some human missions are as cheap as some robotic missions are now. When we reach that point, we will enjoy the power of robotics and on-site human engineering (plus the accumulated knowledge of Earthbound humanity) in combination, and be able to do tremendously effective science. That alone will mandate a Martian expedition sooner or later – it will be cheaper than programming robots over light-minute lags.

(3) But this is only an appropriate view if we confine ourselves to pure science over the short term. Without making any special assumptions, what is practicable in 50 years is nearly inevitable in 100. Someone will do it, for sure; and when they do it they’ll open the gates to industrial uses of space resources.

"Calm"  does not mean "myopic".

Van Allen also has not addressed the debate on space solar power (SSP) and space colonies, ongoing since the mid-’70s, and in my opinion so moderately presented that these days it has slipped below the public radar. Briefly, it is argued that the ability to put something on the order of 10,000 tons on the Moon is the ability to build an infrastructure which will eventually provide all Earth’s energy needs.

The late Gerard O’Neill very calmly and quantitatively made that case in 1974, for both colonies and SSP; David Criswell is making it for SSP right now.  Robert Forward, R.P. Hoyt, Hans Moravec and numerous others have mapped out options for tether systems able to transport mass in the 10,000 ton range from LEO to Lunar surface. Lately Jordin Kare and Kevin Parkins have reported that beam-launch systems (laser and microwave respectively) in the range of 10,000 tons to LEO per year are within engineering reach given 30 years to scale up existing technology (launch cost about $200/kg). We also have Bradley Edwards’ remarkably elegant space-elevator concept, and recent report that if there are serious obstacles to it, material strength is not among them.

If Van Allen is not addressing these peoples’ work, calmly and quantitatively, then he is not seriously in the debate. If he thinks that the debate has stood still since Apollo and is strictly about planting flags on new destinations, then he is thirty years out of date.

Sadly, NASA is not publically in the debate either. I believe this is for the tenable reason that NASA’s chief is forever in the position of endorsing what the Administration finds it possible to fund – and underlings are not expected to out-vision the chief. I consider President Bush’s latest proposals – including a Moonbase and interplanetary nuclear propulsion – to be a decent working compromise. I’m skeptical about Mars as a priority, but I think we need a few years to see how that shapes up.

If Van Allen were only taking a position against an Apollo-style Race to Mars, I would agree with him. Enhancing robotics capabilities should be a prior step, and is better suited for engaging widespread academic and commercial efforts. But if he’s arguing that human missions should be left out of the equation indefinitely, then events will leave him behind. Even to advance his own pure-science agenda, he should be backing the tether and beam-launch concepts.

Now all of you: if the above has come as any sort of a surprise, get ye to Google, look up the names above mentioned, and download a few PDFs. Your worldview will be altered.

Especially at the point and time we are in now, the job for advancing technology for human exploration is moving to the public realm with initiatives such as the Xprize.  What the Government should be doing is presenting tenders for space exploration projects, manned or unmanned, as they do for defensive projects where Boeing or Lockheed will build a prototype in hopes of nabbing a longterm contract.

The current inefficiency that NASA and the Gov implement is sickening at times.

mtigges, you just have a wanderlust and you recognize that it isn’t logical or reasonable. I probably share that with you, mentally if not physically. Again, van Allen is saying that the reasons for spaceflight aren’t the same as the explorations of “Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark”.

Drog, I think you’ve taken the argument to the next step, agreeing that it’s better to let the machines do what we can’t do yet. But if the nations/peoples/religions can’t get along on Earth, how is space going to help that? Survival of a species is and always has been a natural evolution.

PsiSpoon, learning has to be a natural step to a species survival, true. The two rationales I’ve read are that the Earth is dying so we have to move on and the Earth is at risk from a catastrophic collision so we have to move on. All I can say (on behalf of the billions of inhabitants that don’t know or care we’re doomed) is that which we can’t see and what doesn’t affect our standard of living isn’t worth worrying much about. That’s the real economics of it.

Again, what van Allen postulates is simply to reevaluate space travel. Like my first comment, I think he has caused me to reassess my position. I tend to adopt van Allen’s belief that the risks to HUMAN life are becoming too great. From this thread, I think you might disagree. At least we all thought about it.

jon

The idea has been floated that a manned mission to Mars might be done as a one way trip. Save on return fuel. Perhaps with replenishment missions. But the bottom line is a simple painless way of committing suicide would have to be included. People balk at it. I support it %100 and would volunteer in a heartbeat. (Just don’t tell my wife that.) I just don’t understand why people need justification to send people. Ask Mallory about appropriate justification for adventures.

1) We exist in only one place, and do not yet have the ability to exist anywhere else. There’s no hospitable destination yet known, and we can’t get there anyway. We have a lot to learn, and going there is part of that process, aside from being a necessary condition to being in more than one place.

2) This place where we exist, and every other planet in the neighborhood, has been repeatedly bombarded. This is an ongoing, non-zero probability. Probabilities remain probabilities, however assessed, until the event happens. Then they’re certainties.

3) Car accidents, space accidents, peak oil, and even global climate change happen and are happening. Individuals will die from these causes. The human species will not.

4) Considering the stakes, survival vs. extinction, humanity must learn to survive in extraterrestrial environments and go. Retreating from this because it’s expensive or has low scientific discovery return is a false economy.

Full disclosure: I am a signer of the Amsterdam Declaration of 2001. Irony: As a NASA funded earth scientist, my funding is at risk in favor of new human space flight initiatives. I consider this false economy, too.

On the other hand, PsiSpoon, IF the long term survival of the human species is dependent upon our ecosystem, then there are MANY years yet to go before things get critical. As for the odds of being slammed with a “dinosaur killer”, it’s more dangerous to drive almost anywhere on Earth.

With 75% of the Earth covered by oceans the human race has lots of room to expand undersea. And, while we may be 6 billion strong, there is more land for expansion than what we now occupy. Why bother trying to colonize the moon or Mars if we don’t have to? Building and staying on those two objects would mean bringing everything to live from Earth anyway (since terraforming has not been invented yet).

Now this point may sound out of place, but if the human race does not learn the lessons of history we’re doomed anyway. Remember the “golden ages” of colonization and exploitation from the last 500 years? Wiping out civilizations, subjugating nations and peoples, spreading religion and civilization to the “lost” and “uncivilized”, warring over possessions or trade goods, introducing and spreading diseases — all for some national pride and/or political interests — is not something I’d like to see reborn because the Martian colony wants autonomy.

jon

But part of the long-term view of making space access more inexpensive is to get more opportunities to research ideas that scientists have proposed over the years about propulsion methods. The experiments with ion propulsion on NASA’s Deep Space One probe were encouraging – the first in-space experiment using other than traditional chemical rocket propulsion worked. Let’s try some of the others.

Once we have the opportunity to try, the path of invention probably will go in a different direction than we expect – it always does. Even just with routine access to low orbit, I’d be curious to see what inventions and changes occur.

Frankly, I’d love to go just for the view of Earth out the window – I’ve still never seen the view from higher than 40,000ft with my own eyes. Though I have recovered balloons which took video from 90,000ft. (You can see the curvature of the Earth above 60,000ft.)

Don’t buy the clear and present danger of another dinosaur killer? Why not?