NASA moon plan was an illusion, wrapped in denial

NASA's Constellation programme, which was going to fly manned capsules to the International Space Station in (maybe) 2015, to the moon in (maybe) 2020, and to Mars someday, is dead. Some people are mourning it. I'm not.

Is manned space exploration important? Yes – not least because it simply works much better than sending robots. When you look past the rhetoric and superstitions and compare the results, today's robots (and tomorrow's too) are pitifully limited, painfully slow, and not really all that cheap. (Case in point – NASA recently gave up trying to free the Mars rover Spirit from a sand pit it had been stuck in for nine months.

But when the Apollo 15 crew's lunar rover got bogged down in loose soil, the astronauts got off, picked it up, moved it, got back on, and drove away – all in maybe two minutes. Robots do fine when everything goes as planned, but that's rarely true on complex, poorly-known planetary surfaces.)

Exploring with robots looks cheaper only because we set our expectations so much lower. Bolder goals need humans on the scene. Nevertheless, I'm not shedding tears for Constellation. Why not? Because it wasn't going to get us there.

First, it probably wasn't going to work. Even so early in its life, the programme was already deep into a death spiral of "solving" every problem by reducing expectations of what the system would do. Actually reaching the moon would probably have required a major redesign, which wasn't going to be funded.

Second, even if all went as planned, there was a money problem. As the Augustine committee noted, Constellation was already underfunded, and couldn't ever get beyond Earth orbit without a big budget increase. Which didn't seem too likely.

Finally, and most important, even if Constellation was funded and worked ... so what? The programme was far too tightly focused on repeating Apollo, which was pointless: we already did Apollo!

Early ideas of quickly establishing a permanent lunar base had already been forgotten. Constellation was going to deliver exactly what Apollo did: expensive, brief, infrequent visits to the moon. That was all it was good for.

Read the full article here at NewScientist...