Where do you Think the U.S. Space Program will be in Five Years?

Nick Denton
Online columnist,
www.nickdenton.org , USA

I am a space nut and want to see human beings settle space, but a monstrous bureaucratic campaign, founded on a threadbare national myth, is not the way.

The most sensible space program? Mothball the shuttle, cancel further work on the international space station, and devote resources to unmanned missions. A slightly more adventurous variant would include funding for research into carbon fiber and other composite materials, and new propulsion systems such as scramjets. One day a space plane will be economically viable. The U.S. should not fly before it can walk, but state promotion of key technologies could accelerate the schedule.

Private enterprise can play some role. The satellite industry is already well established. TransOrbital, a U.S. company, plans virtual tourist trips to the moon: robot spacecraft will display high-resolution maps and HDTV images to paying viewers, and deliver mementos to the lunar surface. A sub-orbital plane would allow trans-oceanic journeys in an hour, for which there is clear demand, and pave the way for more ambitious vehicles. Still, hardly very exciting.

So, my suggestion: the militarization of space.

Already, China is planning to put a taikonaut in space this year. Nothing would do more to stimulate the U.S. space effort than a Chinese claim to the Sea of Tranquility.

Gregg Easterbrook
Senior Editor, The New Republic,
and Visiting Fellow in Economic Studies,
The Brookings Institution, USA

Even if safety were not such an obvious issue, the shuttle program, at $640 million per flight in 2002, has priced itself out of the market. The shuttle program should be cancelled (astronaut training should continue) and the next 10 years of shuttle operations funding be dedicated to designing new space launch systems. That would be about $35 billion in capital, ample to develop and fly all-new safer and less expensive designs. Then the manned space program could resume on a rational basis.

Robert D. Johnson
President and CEO,
Honeywell Aerospace, USA

Today, we're accessing space at the same speed the country did for John Glenn almost 40 years ago. Both NASA and the defense sector will transition from current propulsion methods into next-generation technologies. Nuclear power, kerosene engines, and other hypersonics will begin to come into play for intercontinental, orbital, and deep space missions.

Today's rigorous space requirements will quickly find their way into aviation, too, in the form of integrated vehicle health monitoring, and onboard satellite communications for all passengers. Improved security, free-flight that will allow aircraft to fly direct to a destination, instead of today's structured and controlled flight routes, and dramatically quieter aircraft will reduce costs, increase mobility, stimulate the economics of aviation, and cut noise levels in half.

We're also moving to a new level of conjunction between military and civil use of space. The interconnects of the next generation of space-borne communications will not only allow individuals and the war fighter to receive real-time data from a layered network of land, sea, and space sources, but it will be received at an exponentially faster rate. Optical communication technology will speed data transfer from space sources four to five times what we have today. Combine this with the miniaturization of personal and hand-held devices, and we could well be wearing Dick Tracy-like two-way wrist TV (with Internet access) in a few years!

Robert Park
Professor of Physics,
University of Maryland, USA

The era of exploration of the solar system by human astronauts ended with the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon in 1972. Aside from the Moon, the only conceivable destination for humans would be Mars. Conditions elsewhere are simply too extreme for humans to survive. Indeed, Mars is no Garden of Eden.

The practical uses of space in communications, weather forecasting, global positioning, and national-security surveillance have far exceeded expectations, but these are all robotic. Similarly, advances in cosmology and astronomy using satellites and interplanetary spacecraft have been spectacular, but once again this research is entirely robotic. Manned space flight has turned out to be a dead end and is unlikely to continue at anything close to its current level.

NASA will become an even greater science agency. Without the enormous burden of the space station and the shuttle program, NASA will be free to search for extraterrestrial life on Mars and perhaps the two ocean moons of Jupiter. We have never seen a life form to which we are not directly related. The search must be carried out by robots to avoid contamination with Earth organisms. But these will be telerobots, merely extensions of our frail bodies into places humans cannot venture. We can build into these telerobots whatever senses we wish. The scientists who operate them will become virtual astronauts, true explorers.

NASA will also produce a new generation of space telescopes to replace the aging Hubble. With the technical advances of today, we will be able to view the planets of other stars directly.

James R. Wertz
President, Microcosm Inc., and
Editor/Co-author, Space Mission Analysis and Design, USA

The space program moves more slowly than any of us would like. Nonetheless, I believe we will have made substantial progress over where we are today. The International Space Station will be complete and we will have started to define the next major human space project - a space station well away from Earth, a human mission to Mars, or a colony on the Moon (my personal favorite). The Hubble Space Telescope will be nearing retirement after dramatically changing (along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory) our view of the universe and its origin. The James Webb Next Generation Space Telescope will be getting close to launch. We will have several new satellites orbiting Mars. China will have an active human space program and will be considering going to the Moon. Russia will resume sending interplanetary probes and Europe will be considering it. Brazil and Mexico will become members of the space launch fraternity. AMSAT will be close to putting an amateur radio satellite around Mars. With luck, the cost of launch will have gone down by a factor of 3 to 5 and a new age of expanded space exploration will be in front of us.

Ray A. Williamson
Research Professor, Space Policy Institute,
George Washington University, USA

As my investment accounts attest, I am not very good at predicting the future, even over a scant few years, so I'll have to stick to saying how I'd like to see the space program develop. The U.S. future in space will depend on a broad commitment to developing the full potential of space for our nation. Within the next five years, I'd like to see a decision made to replace the space shuttle and a sustained commitment to carry the new vehicle system through to completion. In my view, that is a necessary first step in assuring that the space station will realize its promise as a laboratory for science in space. Earth observation from space holds tremendous promise for understanding and managing this fragile planet we live on. Hence, I'd like to see a successful follow-on to Landsat 7 and an enhanced NASA Earth science program. These enhancements need to be coupled with a strengthened environmental applications effort in NOAA. Finally, I'd like to see the federal agencies make more effective use of commercial remotely sensed data to support their missions. Otherwise, the United States may soon cede this important new space industry to other nations.