Questioning Human Space Flight

Should we continue to send humans on missions into space? George W. Bush wants to send humans back to the Moon and later on to Mars, but is it worth the costs and the risks? Can't we get to these places and collect data by using robots?

In Space Leonard David writes that James van Allen, Regent Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa and discoverer of radiation belts encircling Earth, is highly critical of human space exploration:

“My position is that it is high time for a calm debate on more fundamental questions. Does human spaceflight continue to serve a compelling cultural purpose and/or our national interest? Or does human spaceflight simply have a life of its own, without a realistic objective that is remotely commensurate with its costs? Or, indeed, is human spaceflight now obsolete?” van Allen writes.

Supporters of human spaceflight “defy reality and struggle to recapture the level of public support that was induced temporarily by the Cold War,” van Allen charges. “Almost all of the space program’s important advances in scientific knowledge have been accomplished by hundreds of robotic spacecraft in orbit about Earth and on missions to the distant planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,” van Allen writes. Similarly, robotic exploration of comets and asteroids “has truly revolutionized our knowledge of the solar system,” he adds.

Van Allen comments that “the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.” At the end of the day, van Allen concludes: “I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable. Let us not obfuscate the issue with false analogies to Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Lewis and Clark, or with visions of establishing a pleasant tourist resort on the planet Mars,” van Allen suggests.

People like the idea of human space flight for just the reason Allen cites: the ideology of adventure. And it is an ideology, make no mistake about it. At the same time, though, doesn’t sending humans into space help increase public support for space programs? Can be people rally behind sending robots to Mars? Perhaps we need to send humans into space in order to have everything else?

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