快猫短视频

ROBOTS to the moon by 2008. Human moon-base builders by 2020. And what then? Doh! Mars of course. Before George Bush had even opened his lips last week we already knew what his vision would be and what the American public thought of it. An Associated Press poll, published two days previously, revealed that 55 per cent of Americans would prefer any spare cash to be spent on Earth, on things such as leaking school roofs, rather than on building homes in space.

Inevitably, the slow drip of information leaked in advance of the speech, no doubt designed to sample the reception and give time to temper the final announcement accordingly, created a more optimistic buzz in the space community. And I can see why. As a former senior manager for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and someone who has been watching the space programme for decades, I feel there is much to admire about the Bush plan in its broad outline, not least the gradual phasing out of the troubled space shuttle and a return to the original ambitions of the space age. Whatever the political motivations behind the announcement (and there are plenty), we now have a White House that is willing to put money into a daring space project.

That said, there are many questions that need to be asked. Is it scientifically worth it? Will the public and Congress swallow it? Is it technologically feasible, and on the timescale the president has set out? Passions run high on all sides. And there is another crucial question: will those on the receiving end of the cash for the project be able to deliver? In other words, can NASA handle it?

Accountants鈥� first reaction will doubtless not be positive. Anticipating national sensitivity to more big spending in the wake of the $90 billion Iraq war and occupation, Bush isn鈥檛 proposing a massive budget increase for his plan. He has doubtless been taking advice from his father: Bush senior proposed a moon/Mars plan in 1989, but when NASA returned a cost estimate of $400 to $500 billion, the project stalled on the launch pad.

Instead, Bush will ask Congress for relatively modest increases to future NASA budgets while pledging to make NASA find the rest of the cash by phasing out the space shuttle and ratcheting down US participation in the international space station (ISS), a project whose scientific relevance is shrinking as fast as its projected size. The shuttle would be retired by 2010 after it had fulfilled NASA鈥檚 commitment to ISS construction. Retiring the shuttle could free up an estimated $3.5 billion annually.

So far, so good. The shuttle would be replaced by a new crew exploration vehicle (CEV), versions of which would first ferry astronauts to and from the space station and then evolve to be used for lunar and, later, Mars exploration鈥�but it鈥檚 here that things begin to look tricky. To make all of the above work, NASA and its contractor partners (almost certain to be led by Boeing and/or Lockheed) will have to design, prototype, test and then operate a completely new space vehicle in about a decade. The first manned flight of the CEV will probably be orbital or to the ISS; a lunar trip won鈥檛 take off until 2015 at the earliest, and could happen as late as 2020. And if Bush鈥檚 pronouncements of budget frugality are to be believed, that has to happen without any major spending increases.

Unfortunately, anyone looking at NASA鈥檚 track record over the past two decades for developing new space vehicles must surely be sceptical of this timetable. Only a week after the 1986 Challenger disaster, Ronald Reagan announced a new spacecraft called the National Aerospace Plane that would 鈥渂y the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport [and] accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low-Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within 2 hours鈥�. Eight years and roughly $2 billion later, the project was dead. In 1996, Vice-President Al Gore unveiled a prototype of a new space vehicle called the X-33, which again was to replace the shuttle. That project died in 2001, having consumed an estimated $1 billion in R&D, yet never having never flown.

Then, of course, there鈥檚 the bumpy history of the NASA-led ISS. Reagan announced the project in 1984, saying it would be completed by 1992. Over the following seven years, it burnt through $11 billion while launching not a single piece of hardware. The station has now spanned four presidents and still isn鈥檛 finished. Its budget, once tagged at $8 billion, has soared to more than 10 times that figure.

It鈥檚 not a question of engineering skill and vision, it鈥檚 a question of project management. A year after Columbia, NASA鈥檚 human space-flight programme is still broken. The agency has only just begun to implement the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, and a survey carried out within the agency at the end of 2003 indicated that not only are NASA employees scathing about the agency鈥檚 leadership, they also still fear retribution for going against the company line.

This certainly doesn鈥檛 sound like an organisation ready to shoot for the moon. Indeed, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt recently wrote that NASA ought to be massively restructured or disbanded altogether. That, in Schmitt鈥檚 opinion, is probably the only way that Americans will make it back to the moon, let alone to Mars. Is the White House willing to take politically dangerous steps: closing research centres, scrapping projects and shedding jobs? If not, 2015 is going to come around far too quickly.

Even assuming the will exists to fundamentally remake NASA, other major changes are needed if a new moon/Mars programme is to stand a chance of success. NASA and its political protectors have a long track record of handing out work on human space flight projects to a just a handful of big contractors, who in turn are used to viewing these endeavours as a cash cow. The agency needs to drop its established methods and broaden its scope of partners. The burgeoning alternative space community could teach it a thing or two about doing more with less. A fine example of this is internet entrepreneur Elon Musk鈥檚 company, SpaceX, which last month rolled out its first rocket, the Falcon I, with a per-launch cost of about $6 million, less than half the cost of the cheapest comparable launch vehicle. The Falcon grabbed the US Naval Research Laboratory as a customer for its first launch later this year.

And what of the world beyond American shores? While the Bush administration says it envisions international participation in its plan, NASA鈥檚 international partners learned about the programme the same way as everyone else: through White House leaks and press reports. None of them was briefed on the programme before its announcement, let alone consulted about its creation. If NASA returns to human exploration of space, it cannot afford to treat the expertise of European, Japanese and other space programmes in so offhand a manner 鈥� or assume that current competitors like China can鈥檛 be brought in as partners. As the ISS has shown, technological and engineering aspects of international cooperation can work superbly. It鈥檚 when the political and managerial atmosphere is poisoned that cooperation begets frustration.

Predictably, Bush supporters are hailing the plan as another example of the president鈥檚 intention to think big for America. Opponents just as predictably call it a diversion from a sagging economy and persistent bad news from Iraq 鈥� and an electioneering opportunity. Should the president succeed in selling the plan to Congress, the main beneficiaries would be NASA centres in three states: Texas, Florida and California, all of which are critical in this year鈥檚 election. NASA鈥檚 biggest human space-flight contractors, Boeing and Lockheed 鈥� among the Bush campaign鈥檚 biggest contributors 鈥� also stand to gain considerably.

If it is an electioneering move, it is a dangerous one. The fact that China recently joined the elite human space-flight club may have helped spur on Bush鈥檚 plan, but if the president hopes that it will make him seem more Kennedyesque, he may find himself misled by the rosy glow that now surrounds Kennedy鈥檚 vision. In 1965, with the space race well under way, a clear majority of Americans wanted space funding cut, and by 1973 the public ranked space exploration barely above foreign aid as a funding priority.

Modern America, still smarting from the loss of Columbia, might find it more than discomfiting that the president鈥檚 response to this disaster is a mission of even greater complexity and cost. Since Apollo, NASA鈥檚 human space flight efforts have been characterised mainly by financial and technological fumbling. Bush has set the wheels turning, but unless NASA gets a major overhaul, who knows where they will take him?