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‘Key’ Notes

No Place Like Home — for Now

March 5, 2006
by Howard V. Hendrix

As I write this, I’m supposed to be at the ConDor convention in San Diego. Unfortunately, I’m snowed in at our house in Shaver Lake and my snowplow (propelled by a 1970 Jeep Commando) is broken down in our driveway. As a result I had to cancel my Friday classes and the trip to San Diego.

Being snowed in at home has given me a chance to go through the copyedits of my forthcoming novel (Spears of God, Del Rey, Novermber 2006) and to write this Key Note, which is about the comforts of home and the vagaries of propulsion systems.

Having a snow-induced moment to pause and think has allowed two recent reports to coincide in my thoughts. One is about the objection of scientists to President Bush’s two year old, moon-then-Mars, Vision for Space Exploration program. Space scientists, appearing before the House Science Committee to discuss NASA’s science budget, are angry that the President’s proposed program is political grandstanding and showboating which is vacuuming up billions of bucks which would be better spent on less expensive and more scientifically solid projects.

Following the President’s dictate, three billion dollars budgeted for Earth and space science programs have been cut from those programs and shifted to help pay for the president’s program – particularly moon and Mars exploration missions, and more space shuttle flights to the manned but half-finished International Space Station. As a result, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed to 2013, the search for Earth-like planets around other stars has been put on permanent hold ("deferred indefinitely"), funding for other new telescopes and unmanned rovers has been slashed or pushed back, and the budget of the astrobiology program has been slashed fifty per cent. This last I happen to know something about, having spent the last two and a half years doing research in astrobiology for my forthcoming novel.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of manned space missions. I was born forty seven years ago today, just as the space race was getting underway. The exploits of astronauts and cosmonauts were as much a staple of my childhood as Wonder bread and sugary breakfast cereals. And let’s be honest: Manned space exploration has always been political. John F. Kennedy’s vowing to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade of the Sixties probably had more to do with U.S. fears of the Soviets taking the "high ground" of space than it did with scientific advancement.

You might well say, "Hey, it got the job done – no matter what the pretext." That is perhaps true, but the plan put forward by the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will not get the job done, and is starving proven programs at the same time.

Proof? Turn to page forty in the March 2006 edition of Scientific American. There you will find "Shielding Space Travelers" by Eugene N. Parker -- the other report that informs this essay. That article refers to the fact that ionizing radiation in space, so-called cosmic rays, may be the show-stopper for visiting Mars.

According to NASA’s own findings, every year you spend in interplanetary space means one-third of your DNA gets slashed by cosmic rays. That’s between thirteen and twenty-five rems per year. That rem dosage is double what you’d get spending a year aboveground on the moon, and presents a very serious cancer risk.

And there’s the rub. All of our trips to the moon have been short vacations of a few weeks each, with little deep-space or planetary surface exposures. By the best current propulsion systems, however, to Mars and back is a couple of years deep-space exposure time. Once you get there, the Martian atmosphere is so thin it provides little protection against cosmic rays. Explorers would have to limit surface exposure and colonists would basically have to live underground.

What about shielding space travelers en route? Parker’s article makes clear that none of the currently proposed shielding approaches – material shielding, magnetic shielding, or electrostatic shielding – is feasible, for economic, propulsion, and biomedical reasons. Sending astronauts into interplanetary space for the prolonged periods necessary to reach Mars at today’s propulsion-system velocities, without shielding, is asking them to depart on missions that will guarantee they’ll be riddled with cancers by the time they get home – if they get home.

Yes, we’ve all got to die sometime, but delayed suicide missions don’t strike me as a good way to go, in any sense of that "go."

I would hope that there are ways out of this apparent cul-de-sac. I look forward to breakthroughs in propulsion systems, or shielding, or even treating those cancers or re-engineering human DNA to more effectively resist breakdown by ionizing radiation. None of those options are available at the moment, however, and the president’s program does not adequately address any of them. So we have a space sham, a Potemkin political program --the creation of which is proving costly enough to starve real scientific ventures that already have successful track records.

Robert Heinlein wrote that the Earth is too small a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that Earth is humanity’s cradle, but one does not stay in the cradle forever. I agree. Let’s keep going into space, but let us do so in ways driven by real rather than showboat science, and by the long-term interests of the human species rather than the short-term interests of politicians.

There’s no place like home, for now, so it might be a good idea to stop fouling our nest. Might be wise, too, to stop rocking the tree of life with the winds of climate change -- before the bough breaks, and down comes cradle and all. In the meantime, good space science is a bird in the hand, and that beats two birds in the Bush program – a fact I hope Congress will recognize.