The Usual Gripes

Human exploration of space has, in my opinion, become largely unnecessary. On the basis of scientific study, there is nothing that humans can do in space that a robot can’t do better and for less money. On a purely exploratory basis, I am not convinced that we really need to return to the Moon, or send men to Mars. I believe that the Space Shuttle is a scientifically useless deathtrap, and the International Space Station (ISS) is a money pit. These are my opinions.

For these reasons it annoys me that NASA continues to siphon funds from scientifically valuable astronomy missions in order to keep the shuttle, the ISS and the nebulous but still money hungry “To the Moon by 2018” plans alive. All this after NASA big-wigs made a show of talking up the importance of space science and insisting that missions would not be cancelled but only delayed. On that note, several missions in which I held particular interest have, in NASA’s latest budget, been canceled entirely.

First, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter mission to study Jupiter’s moon Europa fell to the financial axe some time ago. This mission was an obvious choice because it was massively over budget, behind schedule and showed no signs of reigning in its spending or, for that matter, ever getting off of the drawing board. Many in this latest round of ill fated missions were not so mired down.

One such mission was NuStar, a proposed orbiting X-ray observatory that had not only been approved, but was also on budget and on schedule, basically everything that JIMO wasn’t. The cancellation of something in such good shape is essentially unheard of, especially when that something would have been of so much use to astronomers everywhere trying to understand the mysterious X-ray band of the spectrum.

Dawn, a planned rendezvous mission to the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, for another example, was cancelled only months from being launch ready. A move that saves NASA $30 million, a piddling sum when you consider that they had already spent over $300 million getting it to the point at which essentially all that was left to be done was strap the thing to a rocket and shoot it into space. I’m so excited that my taxes helped pay for a spaceship that is now going to sit in a warehouse somewhere.

Terrestrial Planet Finder, a mission designed to detect Earth mass planets around other stars, is also slated for cancellation. I am especially disappointed about this one. One of TPF’s objectives was to locate potentially habitable planets apart from our own in the hope that life elsewhere in the universe might be found. That is not the reason that this mission excited me. I happen to be very interested in extra-solar planetary systems, not from an “are we alone?” standpoint, but from a “planets are really flippin’ cool” standpoint. As a result I am firmly behind any mission that will add more planets to the list. I am sad to see this one go.

I am not a scientist. These budget cuts do not affect me on a professional level. NASA’s financial spring cleaning also include layoffs, which mean that there will likely be a lot astro-physicists looking for work in the next couple of years. There are physics students out there who are currently distracted from their doctoral theses by the worrisome notion that the research jobs they had lined up may no longer exist.

I am irritated. Members of the scientific community are, as they should be, outraged and I think that we are all upset about the same things. We are upset that NASA, after talking up the importance of space science, cuts funds from that very thing to keep pet projects, of no immediately apparent importance, alive and in so doing potentially jeopardizing the state of astronomical research for years to come. Or, put more personally, it gets on your nerves when missions that I gladly pay for with my taxes are canceled in favor of other things that I don’t give a crap about.