Monday, the Bush administration released its proposal for NASA's 2003 budget. This budget stresses developing nuclear power and propulsion systems. Most unmanned planetary and scientific probe programs will be getting budget increases, but space station Alpha and the space shuttle program will have their funds cut dramatically. Also completely deleted from the budget are planned Europa and Pluto missions.
There are some good points to this proposal. Space missions of the past have been extremely limited by low-output power supplies and long travel times. Many of the missions the Administration wants to put money into are valuable in their own right, such as comet and asteroid investigation and the Kepler observatory, which will search for extra-solar planets.
Further, the Administration's desire to turn more of NASA's operations over to private contractors will help build an emerging commercial space industry that will probably take the lead in space exploration someday. The sooner space travel becomes feasible for non-government companies and organizations, the sooner real progress will start being made.
The downside to this budget is that it de-emphasizes research about humans living in space. The space shuttle and international space station are currently the largest programs for putting people in space and studying the effects and dangers of space travel. This is central to the development of future space-based operations, because many future developments such as space tourism and exploration will require an understanding of the risks humans face away from the protection of mother Earth.
The Administration's emphasis on nuclear power in space is understandable in light of Bush's interest in space-based weapons platforms. Current power technologies would be insufficient for lasers or magnetic-acceleration weapons. Giant solar panels are inefficient and might theoretically make a spaceborne weapons platform easier to target. Although these concepts may sound like science fiction, the potential for their deployment is very real. This budget is a big first step in that direction.
It is also very intriguing that, despite raising the budgets for missions to Mars, Mercury, comets and the asteroid belt, the Administration has chosen to try cutting off all missions to Europa. Europa is the frigid satellite of Jupiter that could very well harbor life in an ocean beneath its thick crust of ice. Ever since the Galileo probe provided further evidence of such an ocean, scientists the world over have been eager to investigate more.
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Cutting this budget could be a result of Bush's noted moral aversion to advanced biological and medical research. Or it could just be that the administration so doubts the possibility of life on Europa that the cost of the mission would far exceed its worth. Of course there might not be life on Europa, but even the minute possibility of it makes a trip there worthwhile. Catching even a glimpse of primitive life forms that evolved away from the Earth would be a fantastic development for biologists. It would at the very least confirm that life can exist on other planets and under very alien conditions.
Although any developments in space technology will help future space exploration, the Administration's emphasis on nuclear technologies betrays a very "down on Earth" mentality. They desire technologies that can be applied to conventional politics, such as advanced weapons, and see the purpose of exploration as nothing more than collecting data from a gigantic laboratory.
Finding new energy sources and faster ways to travel will be essential to space exploration, but focusing on that at this stage is unnecessary. Most scientific instruments do not need the added power or speed to operate effectively. Furthermore, research into fusion power shows promise of revolutionizing energy production within the next 50 years. Rather than waste time with heavy, radioactive materials, such as plutonium, in space, why not concentrate on the biological implications now? That way, when better power sources come along, we can simply adapt them to a space program that is already adept at keeping humans alive in space.
This debate has far-reaching implications for the United States and, indeed, for the world. Are we going to concentrate our efforts on perpetuating our earthly struggles, seeing space as little more than a source of occasionally interesting factoids? Or can we finally move beyond our geocentric past and begin building our future in a wider universe?
