NASA Priorities

Michael Griffin, shortly after his appointment as the new NASA chief, said that “not one thin dime” would be removed from NASA’s already sadly deficient science budget. He said this in response to the loudly voiced concerns of scientists both inside and outside NASA. Their concerns revolved around the fact that the shuttle and the space station were budgetary monsters that were eating all the dollars at NASA, at the expense of hard science.

Those words greatly cheered me at the time.

Now we know: Michael Griffin lied. I say lied, and not something milder like “mispoke” or “was mistaken", because Mr. Griffin was fully armed with all the basic facts about the NASA budget and priorities. He knew that he couldn’t possibly make manned flight NASA’s highest priority and still keep the science budget intact. Yesterday he made all this very clear:

NASA Chief Michael Griffin, testifying before Congress:

"I believe that fulfilling our commitments on the International Space Station and bringing the Crew Exploration Vehicle online in a timely manner, not later than 2014 and possibly sooner, is a higher priority than these science missions."

So there you have it.

Unless something very dramatic happens, NASA’s science budget will be looted for the next decade — or, more likely, for even longer — in order to prop up the manned space flight program.

The same manned space flight program that has produced nothing of value for the past 30 years. The one that President Bush has committed to returning to the moon as a first step to a manned mission to Mars. We’re going to spend billions and billions of dollars, put dozens of brave men and women in harm’s way, all for no practical reason that I’ve ever heard anyone articulate. I hear lots of blather about “exploration” and “vision", and Columbus is often invoked.

Well, Columbus had a mission and a practical purpose — he thought he was going to get rich by discovering a new route to India. There is no such reason for going to Mars, folks! It makes no economic sense to bring back minerals (or any other materials) from either the moon or Mars. The only space-based project I’ve heard that even comes close to practicality is earth-orbit power stations — and moving towards something like that is an entirely different development effort than is needed for visiting Mars. If we wanted to develop earth-orbit power stations (and I’m not advocating this idea; just citing it as an example), we’d be concentrating on the development of low-cost methods for orbiting the vast quantities of materials that would be needed for building large solar collectors.

I think it’s a darned shame that we’re squandering a chance to doing something truly magnificent — hard science in space — in order to do something with a Hollywood-like combination of glitz and serious lack of substance. It seems to fit in well with the times, sadly…