A Dark Age in Space

December 14th will mark the 40 year anniversary of the last man to set foot upon the moon. Read: humans won’t have set foot on the moon in 40 years. Rewind back to that date in 1972—NASA’s funding was at approximately 1.5% of the federal budget, down from its 4.5% peak in 1967. The US had plans to launch SkyLab the next year, there was progress on a joint US-Soviet space mission, the blueprints for the now famous Space Shuttle program were in the works, and plenty of unmanned missions were scheduled to launch in the near future. While we’ve certainly made many advancements in our space program since 1972, there’s a lingering sense that NASA and space research has taken a different turn.

NASA today evokes a mixed response. Currently, NASA’s budget and projected future budgets are hovering around 0.5% of the total federal budget, a far cry from the days when man was on the moon. But that number doesn’t tell the entire story. On the positive side of things, recent legislature passed by the White House has extended the life of the International Space Station (ISS) to the year 2020. Further, NASA’s unmanned missions have been a huge success in the last decade—the Spirit and Opportunity rovers have surpassed expectations, the Huygens probe successfully landed on Titan, and NASA’s missions studying asteroid collisions have also gone without a hitch. The icing on top of the cake is certainly the Curiosity rover currently operating on Mars, with recent reports from the rover giving clear evidence of dried up streambeds. What though, about manned missions?

Unfortunately, it seems that into the next decade, NASA astronauts will only have access to low earth orbit. The current NASA program for eventually sending people further into space is called the Space Launch System (SLS)—it replaced the Constellation program enacted under the Bush administration. Constellation had plans to send man to the moon by the year 2020, but a review committee in 2010 deemed the program was  too far behind schedule, too over budget, and too underfunded to be viable.

SLS attempts to be more financially viable by taking the “flexible path” approach to manned missions by setting a series of destinations to be reached over time. It starts with test flights, then going to low earth orbit, moves on to the “L1” (area of stable gravitational potential) between the Earth and the Moon, then the “L1” and “L2” of Earth and the Sun, and finally projected landings on near-earth objects (asteroids) around 2025. Moon landings and Mars flybys would come after, with a final goal of Mars landings in the mid-2030s. In the long run, the program is ambitious and the government views it as more financially feasible than Constellation. However, for the intermediate future, SLS does not provide for manned spacecraft. Instead, NASA has chosen to rely on commercially operated vehicles, such as the SpaceX program, to transport astronauts and cargo to low earth orbit and the ISS.

So what gives? While the given programs make sense in the current context of things, step back and you’ll see that the best projections for manned landings on non-Earth objects put the dates near 2025. That’ll be over 50 years after the last time man landed on the moon—in a sense, the end of a 50 year “Dark Age” of sort for manned space missions. And taken in this context, the situation is a bit baffling. When else have we done something ground breaking in science or technology, only to give that ground breaking action a hiatus of half a century? In 50 years, airline flight went from taking baby steps in Kittyhawk to being a viable method of international transportation. 50 years after Colombus first landed in the Americas, humans had circumnavigated the globe as well as sending people over to the New World. And yes, these metaphors are not perfect, but the truth remains that space flight has not seen the growth of financial feasibility that other new technologies undergo after half a century of existence.

The reasons for such a “Dark Age” of space flight could fill an entire book and are beyond the scopes of this article—they range from political to economic to scientific reasons. But it should certainly give us a bit of a pause when we look at our space programs. These programs really do represent the future of humanity—our globe is cozy, but to confine ourselves to its borders for the foreseeable future would be a waste of our potential and certainly a bit of a strain on our resources. Just as crucially, these programs also represent the frontier of engineering science—the know-how to put a man on Mars will certainly come with added benefits to other fields of knowledge. There’s plenty of precedent for such an assertion in the technologies that came from research on Apollo, from advancements in laser heart surgery to Teflon and GPS systems.

So instead of chastising ourselves for our mistakes, let’s take a lesson from humanity’s lack of manned space exploration in the last 40 years. While no one’s calling to return NASA’s budget to Apollo program levels, we should certainly make sure we act to end the “Dark Age” of space flight, not perpetuate it.