Can’t NASA Do Something Relevant?--Enviromental Studies, for Instance : Space: Instead of missions to Mars, NASA should aim toward the sun and Venus and learn more about our environmental problems.
Attention Vice President and National Space Council Chairman Dan Quayle: If you’re looking for something important and innovative that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration could actually do --during your lifetime, perhaps even in this Administration--here it is. How about a space environmental-study initiative?
Recent news that U.S. Tiros-N weather satellites did not detect any global-warming trend from 1979 to 1988 raises a question: Why isn’t science in space being used to answer questions that are driving everybody crazy on the ground?
Environmental unknowns are a central topic of U.S political debate--up to the White House, where top Bush Administration figures have been sparring over how serious the prospects for global warming are. Many in Congress are calling for major policy commitments as preemptive measures against environmental emergencies that may or may not be happening. International organizations are already issuing greenhouse-effect manifestoes. So where is NASA?
NASA’s current budget request bulges with capital for a continuously manned space station, an expensive--$30 billion-$60 billion--project whose returns to the public even its supporters have difficulty explaining. Millions more are allocated to the study of fantastically exorbitant--perhaps $400 billion--bases on the moon and expeditions to Mars, which both the President and vice president have rhapsodized about, because they sound incredibly nifty in non-binding speeches.
Grand human ambitions such as a Mars flight will surely be realized someday. But today, in the Year of our Lord 0005 GR (fifth annum post-Gramm-Rudman), wasting breath on such notions may charitably be described as wacky. Meanwhile, there’s comparatively little in the NASA budget for pragmatic environmental space missions that not only might provide information benefits for the taxpayers who foot NASA’s bill, but also should be relatively cheap.
Presenting its annual money request to Congress last month, NASA rolled the drums for what it called a new environmental focus. This “focus” turns out to be repackaging projects in the pipeline for years--lately under the name Mission to Planet Earth. Funds involved represent less than one-third of the probable cost of the initial overnight stay in NASA’s beloved orbiting motel, the space station. Several projects, such as a pair of improved Earth-observation satellites, are great ideas. But amazingly, though NASA is hyping its environmental focus as a “crash” effort, some of the spacecraft involved won’t go up for 15 years. NASA went from exploding rocket prototypes to a moon landing in far less time.
From an environmental standpoint, NASA science missions usually point in the wrong direction. Most are oriented toward the outer planets and the far heavens--fascinating, but with no meaningful effect on the Earth. The sun, source of all Earth life, has received surprisingly little investigation; the same for Venus, the most Earth-like planet in our solar system and, more to the point, a planet with a runaway greenhouse atmosphere.
Perhaps the most influential global warming document in the Bush White House has been a paper, written principally by the astronomer and “Star Wars” advocate Robert Jastrow, arguing that by the sun’s sheer power, tiny vacillations in solar output are more likely to be the root cause of earthly climate variations than human mischief such as carbon-dioxide emissions. Jastrow contends that although the pattern of global temperature ups and downs in this century does not sync with greenhouse theory--the thermostat has bounced around instead of rising smoothly--it does appear to correspond with what’s known about fluctuations in the sun’s luminosity.
But scientists understand amazingly little about the internal processes of the sun: Accurate information about its energy output is notoriously scarce, because such data is best collected in space. Sound like a promising field of inquiry? Yet NASA continues to devote more funds to studying other stars than our own.
This October the shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch Ulysses, an international robot spacecraft that will examine the sun’s polar regions, unobservable from Earth. Ulysses is the first probe of the sun in more than a decade. Next year the shuttle Columbia is scheduled to carry aloft an automated solar study station called Atlas, which will be brought back down and taken up throughout the 1990s.
These are sound ideas, but fall short. NASA should be designing a major series of probes and satellites to ring the sun on a continuing basis--not during brief shuttle trips as with Atlas. Such an initiative might not only help answer some of the pressing ecological questions: It could provide an early warning system for any changes in the fusion generator that sustains earthly existence. What if the sun cooled? We’d need to know that.
Next consider Venus, whose size and composition are Earth-like, but whose 900-degree surface temperatures are believed to result from a runaway greenhouse effect. NASA has a billion-dollar orbital research station in transit to Venus, for compiling radar maps of the topography of this carbon-clouded world. Such diagrams are likely to be interesting to astronomy graduate students and worthless from a practical standpoint. Yet the United States has no plans to fire probes into the Venusian atmosphere to find out what went wrong there--knowledge that might bear directly on the terrestrial greenhouse debate.
NASA, of course, isn’t oblivious to the potential for reorienting temporarily toward environmental studies of immediate benefit to Earthlings. But in recent years budgetary circling of wagons has become the agency’s claim to fame. Since Challenger, NASA management has exhibited absolute bureaucratic terror about offending any interest group, manufacturer or congressman’s district by altering any plan once made.
Besides, space environmental research would be carried out by boring, affordable automated spacecraft rather than marvelous budget-boosting manned chariots. A decade of inconclusive study of Mars flight is probably worth more to NASA’s empire than a program to produce environmental information quickly.
At minimum, the Mission to Earth projects should take precedence over feasibility studies about growing hydroponic oranges on Mars. Crash efforts focusing on the sun and Venus should be initiated. Everyone complains that NASA lacks a mission relevant to the man on the street. Here’s one.
