When it comes to the manned exploration of space we seem to be advancing extremely slowly. This has been one of the great disappointments of my life. I was encouraged, as a child in the 1950s, both by reading Dan Dare (Pilot of the Future) in the Eagle comic, and listening to BBC radio’s Journey into Space programme. Here science fiction spacemen travelled all over the solar system and beyond. Seeing twelve men walk on the surface of the Moon between July 1969 and December 1972 gave me high hopes; a permanently manned base on the Moon maybe by 1980? the first footsteps on Mars by 2000? It wasn’t to be. Today the only ‘action’ is the International Space Station which is being assembled at a piteously slow rate at an altitude of less than 500 km, in an orbit confined to a belt encircling the Earth between 57o north and south. It will eventually take 30 USA shuttles and 40 Russian launch missions for completion. Then this 400 tonne craft will house a crew of six and provide 1200 m3 of living-room, habitable for a planned life of 10 years.

What has gone wrong? Why is progress so slow? Where is the ambition and drive? Human spaceflight certainly has a high media impact when the projects are new but it has always been seen as being in direct competition with less spectacular big-science research, and in competition with robotic space missions. As time passes and things become more established human spaceflight has difficulty maintaining the public interest, and thus the political support, and, even more importantly, the access to the huge funding that it requires. In the USA the cost of the Shuttle (the Space Transportation System to give it its full title) and the International Space Station regularly accounts for about half NASA’s annual budget. Human spaceflight is now a political ‘hot potato’ and suffers from stop-go funding often timed to suit political election deadlines.

There are three main problems.

The huge expense is the first. The USA’s Apollo programme was costing as much in a week as the price of a new huge earth-bound optical telescope. Stop Apollo for a month and you could have funded four new 5.2-m Mount Palomar telescopes. (You could, however, point out that Vietnam War cost the USA seven times more than the 9 billion dollar Apollo programme.)

Secondly today’s human spaceflight project, the International Space Station is just a staging-post, and it is difficult to get too excited about.

Thirdly there is the nagging feeling that robotic planetary exploration can do the job nearly as well as humans, and much, much cheaper and safer. If the three remote robots that have been driven around the surface of Mars can be effectively controlled from Earth and used to spy-out, select and analyse interesting rocks and features, why does a human actually have to be there standing on the surface. Remember that the planet-exploring human will also be somewhat removed from reality, cocooned in a life-supporting space suit, insulated from the heat and cold, and the dangerous, poisonous and inadequate atmosphere. It is not as if you can actually kneel down on the planetary surface and run your fingers through the soil. Even if you are convinced that there is no effective substitute for human observation it does not follow that the human has actually to be physically present. Someone sitting in an Earth-based control centre might do.

    next > Page 1 of 3