Robert Zubrin was on Michio Kaku’s radio program today discussing The Case for Mars and other matters. He made a number of interesting points:

– NASA spends today 94% of its Mercury/Apollo annual budget in real terms ($17 billion) with little to show for it
– we have psent as much from the early 1990’s to today as was spent during the Mercury through Apollo programs with few signal accomplishments
– we could get to Mars with manned missions for as little as $40-50 billion

Zubrin contends that the reason the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were so successful is that President Kennedy set a timetable of the end of the 1960’s for landing on the moon. No such firm timetables exist today; hence, a goal becomes more of a justification for a budget than something concrete. The argument seems to make sense.

Zubrin also had an elegant answer in response to Kaku’s contention that the economic arguments for going to Mars were less compelling than the Conquistadors coming to the New World — essentially, Zubrin argued that Great Britain survived in the 1940’s because it created British North America in the 1600’s.

One of the little oddities of life is that the first review at Amazon of Zubrin’s book was written, almost ten years ago, by Glenn Reynolds, who also appears today in the WSJ with a review of the new book Rocketeers by Michael Belfiore:

Mr. Belfiore opens with a discussion of Peter Diamandis, the communications entrepreneur who, in 1996, announced an open competition for what he called the X Prize. (It was renamed the Ansari X Prize after two venture capitalists, Amir and Anousheh Ansari, put up $10 million for the award.) The challenge to competitors: Develop a spacecraft able to carry three people to an altitude of roughly 62 miles — generally regarded as the point where airspace ends and outer space begins — and safely return them to Earth, then repeat the trip within two weeks.

The X Prize contest was reminiscent of aviation’s early days, when privately funded prizes inspired design competitions and trial-and-error efforts with comparatively little governmental help. Charles Lindbergh didn’t fly the Atlantic with the assistance of a federal grant; he was chasing the Orteig Prize. And Lindbergh was one of many aviators competing for the $25,000 award — it touched off a frenzy of creative thinking and problem-solving…

On Memorial Day weekend, in Dallas, I attended the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference for the first time in more than a decade, and the change was striking. In the early 1990s, the gathering had the atmosphere of a Star Trek convention; now it’s something different, with Brioni-suited venture capitalists and prosperous, big-firm lawyers filling auditorium seats and schmoozing with tech-geeks between panel discussions…The combination of lavish investment, entrepreneurial zeal and technological inventiveness may well give a big lift to nongovernmental efforts at space exploration.

Whether it is the discipline of the marketplace and investors, or the re-imposition of clear government goals with timetables, the space program surely needs something to make it straighten up and fly right.

UPDATE

Charles Krauthammer mounts a defense of Romulan ale.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 6:07 am and is filed under General, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.