Can a democracy put an astronaut on Mars?
The thrilling success of NASA’s Perseverance mission to Mars has captured well-deserved national attention. As occurs intermittently, the air is filled with bold predictions of a revived U.S. human spaceflight program, with Mars as its goal and the moon as its staging area.
I hope it happens. A national commission I co-chaired a few years ago concluded that, for reasons tangible (scientific discovery, economic spinoffs, national security) and intangible (inspiring of young talent to scientific pursuits, national morale and prestige, the elevation of human aspiration and imagination), a resumption of our attempts to reach beyond low Earth orbit was justified.
If and when humankind reaches that next frontier, though, there are reasons to doubt that it will be a U.S. government space project that leads us there. Ironically, the society that put a man on the moon may be just the wrong one to succeed in this next great endeavor, at least through a grand national project like Apollo.
In launching what became Apollo, President John F. Kennedy said we should attempt it not because it was easy, but because it was hard. As dazzling as the Perseverance achievement is, it involves radiation-proof robots, not fragile humans, and a seven-foot, one-metric-ton craft, not the 40-metric-ton, two-story system that a human landing, life support and ascent vehicle would require.
It will be exponentially harder for humans to fly safely to Mars, establish a sustained presence and survive to return to Earth. To do so, our commission concluded, would require making the goal a central, single-minded priority of the U.S. space program; a relentless, unswerving multi-decade commitment to a pre-agreed path to reach the goal; and constant investments in amounts well above the rate of inflation. American democracy is not very good at any of those things.
Our system affords us, thank goodness, a chance to change national direction every two years, and presidential leadership quadrennially. That competitiveness and responsiveness enables the quick correction of mistakes and the flexibility to navigate changed circumstances. What it doesn’t excel at is sustaining long-term projects of distant or indirect benefit to the voting public.
Each new national administration brings its own agenda. Presidents are always more interested in starting initiatives than in extending those they inherit. Fiscal, economic and other national policies can be altered frequently, and often should be. Yet this pattern has also applied to space policy, jerking NASA through a series of major strategic shifts, from Apollo to the space shuttle to the International Space Station to asteroid capture and, finally, to thinking about reaching Mars with a manned mission via the moon.
“Finally,” I should say, for now. The new Biden administration’s overall agenda is bigger and more expensive than any before it, yet it appears to leave little or no space for space.
With a micromanaging Congress resetting budgets on an annual basis, picking out a priority for NASA and sticking to it for 20 years or more is likely not in the cards; we’ve proved very poor at “perseverance.” Plus, our legislators regularly carve out NASA dollars for favored non-exploratory causes such as environmental monitoring, and fiercely protect multiple space centers and resulting costly redundancies.
Even if a consensus plan were reached, and some magical mechanism invented for maintaining it over changing administrations, the money wouldn’t be there. The nation’s elected representatives continue spending vastly beyond revenue and legislating promises that cannot conceivably be paid for. The odds are that a crisis in the safety net — forcing some combination of massive tax increases, benefit reductions and further asphyxiation of discretionary programs such as NASA (which has never registered more than tepid public support) — will arrive here before we arrive on Mars.
So if our system is ill-suited to the task, what kind of nation would be most likely to reach this next frontier? Oh, in theory, one with a patient, farsighted culture, accustomed by history to taking the very long view. A country with an authoritarian regime, capable of commandeering the massive resources necessary without making concessions to public opinion. Perhaps one with a “leader for life” intent on establishing his realm as dominant in both reputation and technological power. Just speaking hypothetically.
Will Americans spend the next half-century watching Chinese astronauts or robots “boldly go where no man has gone before”? My hopes that I’m wrong rest with the same freedoms that operate politically to make a U.S. government Mars mission so difficult.
The superiority of free enterprise has given birth to nimble private companies, unencumbered by political realities, backed by private fortunes imbued with the explorer spirit and, in some cases, a dream of profits. Either on their own or through increasingly harmonious partnerships with NASA, they give us the best chance that, despite our mismatched system of government, the first human on Mars, as on the moon, will be a free citizen of a free country.
With a micromanaging Congress resetting budgets on an annual basis, picking out a priority for NASA and sticking to it for 20 years or more is likely not in the cards; we’ve proved very poor at “perseverance.” Plus, our legislators regularly carve out NASA dollars for favored nonexploratory causes such as environmental monitoring, and fiercely protect multiple space centers and resulting costly redundancies.