[tt] WP: Anne Applebaum: Mission to Nowhere

[Premise Checker]

Frank Forman here:

This is over four years old. At the Air and Space Museum, there is 
been a section on going to Mars for a good many years. Being 
weightless for the round trip would be a serious problem. I don't 
know whether the author is speaking about radiation received during the 
trip or on Mars itself, but I think that was brought up in the exhibit.

However, a one-way trip seems feasible right now, though I don't know what 
the risk is of dying before landing. This would not be morally acceptable 
to most Americans, not even on the grounds of serving the national 
interest in scientific exploration. But I don't object, nor to anyone 
climbing the New York Times Building or Mount Everest, risky that those 
activities are.

I would not have been born had not all eight great-grandparents rolled 
west to Kansas in covered wagons (well, I'm not sure about all eight), 
which was probably more risky then than climbing the NYT Building or Mt. 
Everest now.

Thanks to Bob for sending this article and asking me about it.

Anne Applebaum: Mission to  Nowhere 
Washington Post
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page A21

The first color pictures from the NASA space probe expedition to Mars have 
now been published. They look like -- well, they look like pictures of a 
lifeless, distant planet. They show blank, empty landscapes. They show 
craters and boulders. They show red sand. Death Valley, the most desolate 
of American deserts, at least contains strange cacti, vicious scorpions, 
the odd oasis. Mars has far less than that. Not only does the planet have 
no life, it has no air, no water, no warmth. The temperature on the 
Martian surface hardly rises much above zero degrees Fahrenheit, and can 
drop several hundred degrees below that.

Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, isn't the kind of place where 
you'd want to raise your kids. Nor is it the kind of place anybody is ever 
going to visit, as some of the NASA scientists know perfectly well. Even 
leaving aside the cold, the lack of atmosphere and the absence of water, 
there's the deadly radiation. If the average person on Earth absorbs about 
350 millirems of radiation every year, an astronaut traveling to Mars 
would absorb about 130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of 
radiation that would probably destroy every cell in his body. "Space is 
not 'Star Trek,' " said one NASA scientist, "but the public certainly 
doesn't understand that."

No, the public does not understand that. And no, not all scientists, or 
all politicians, are trying terribly hard to explain it either. Too often, 
rational descriptions of the inhuman, even anti-human living conditions in 
space give way to public hints that more manned space travel is just 
around the corner, that a manned Mars mission is next, that there is some 
grand philosophical reason to keep sending human beings away from the only 
planet where human life is possible. One actual "Star Trek" actor, Robert 
Picardo, the ship's holographic doctor, enthused this week that "we really 
should have a timetable to send a man to Mars. . . . Mars should be part 
of our travel plans." Naive, perhaps, but fundamentally not much different 
from President Bush's grandiloquent words after the Columbia disaster: 
"Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of 
discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go 
on."

But why should it go on? Or at least why should the human travel part of 
it go on? Crowded out of the news this week was the small fact that the 
troubled international space station, which is itself accessible only by 
the troubled space shuttle, has sprung a leak. Also somehow played down is 
the fact that the search for "life" on Mars -- proof, as the enthusiasts 
have it, that we are "not alone" in the universe -- is not a search for 
sentient beings but rather a search for evidence that billions of years 
ago there might possibly have been a few microbes. It's hard to see how 
that sort of information is going to heal our cosmic loneliness, let alone 
lead to the construction of condo units on Mars.

None of which is to say that it isn't interesting or important for NASA to 
send robotic probes to other planets. It's interesting in the way that the 
exploration of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is interesting, or 
important in the way that the study of obscure dead languages is 
important. Like space exploration, these are inspiring human pursuits. 
Like space exploration, they nevertheless have very few practical 
applications.

But space exploration isn't treated the way other purely academic pursuits 
are treated. For one, the scientists doing it have perverse incentives. 
Their most dangerous missions -- the ones involving human beings -- 
produce the fewest research results, yet receive the most attention, 
applause and funding. Their most productive missions -- the ones involving 
robots -- inspire interest largely because the public illogically believes 
they will lead to more manned space travel.

Worse, there is always the risk that yet another politician will seize on 
the idea of "sending a man to Mars," or "building a permanent manned 
station on the moon" as a way of sounding far-sighted or futuristic or 
even patriotic.  President Bush is allegedly considering a new expansion 
of manned space travel.  The Chinese are embarking on their own manned 
space program, since sending a man to the moon is de rigueur for would-be 
superpowers. The result, inevitably, will be billions of misspent dollars, 
more lethal crashes -- and a lot more misguided rhetoric about the 
"inspiration of discovery," as if discoveries can only be made with human 
hands.

applebaumanne at washpost.com