Writer: PCs, cell phones result of space exploration
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Dennis E. Powell
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U.S. President Bush unveils the multi-billion dollar space initiative.
CNN's Miles O'Brien on NASA plans to ask for an incremental budget increase.
President Bush's space proposal includes a permanent presence on the moon.
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| BUSH SPACE INITIATIVE |
•Spend $12 billion on new space exploration plan over next five years. $1bn will be new money, the rest reallocated from existing NASA programs.
•Retire shuttle program by 2010
•Develop new manned exploration vehicle
•Launch manned mission to moon between 2015 and 2020
•Build permanent lunar base as "steppingstone" for more ambitious missions
•Complete commitments to international space station by 2010
Source: White House
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(CNN) -- President Bush Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and use the mission as a steppingstone for future manned trips to Mars and beyond.
CNN International anchor Jonathan Mann discussed the announcement with writer Dennis E. Powell, who is currently working on the history of the space shuttle program.
MANN: Does it make sense to pursue the plans that the president has laid out?
POWELL: Well, I think it does. As a matter of fact, what the president said today was really pretty much what everybody in NASA not directly involved in the space shuttle program and the international space station have been saying for 30 years now, really, that there is a huge benefit in doing the things that the president proposed today.
MANN: Well, it's funny you say that, because many scientists say that it doesn't make any sense at all to try and send men and women to Mars when machines can get there and we don't really care about the casualty rate. And when it's so much cheaper -- that this would be both dangerous and extraordinarily expensive and in both respects unnecessarily so.
POWELL: Well, I think that's short-sighted thinking for a couple of reasons.
One of them is that, first of all, the expense, whenever we have had a manned space program outside of the shuttle, which hasn't involved all that much new technology, it's paid off big time over and over again in things that we've gotten the spin-offs from it.
The fact that we have personal computers, the fact that we have cell phones, all of these things derived from stuff that was learned in the space program, in the 1960s. And we would not have learned any of that, really, if we had stuck to robotics and so on.
The challenges that face us in exploring space are very similar to those that face us here on Earth and going to space focuses those in a way that we come up with better solutions quicker, and history shows that to be the case.
MANN: To some extent, is a proposal of this kind almost a job creation program for the high tech industries in California and Texas? And is that on the president's mind as he's preparing to run for reelection?
POWELL: I'm sure it is. I mean, if it makes Florida happy, for instance, it can't make the president unhappy, and certainly there are a lot of sectors that have gone a little bit dry over the last couple of years in the high tech industry and certainly in aerospace, and this would put a lot of those people back to work.
Arguably it is therefore as good as any other job creation program that the government would sponsor.
MANN: Would the government sponsor it, though? Obviously, even if President Bush is reelected, he's really only in office another four years. His own schedule, even if it's accurate, would extend decades beyond that. Will the Congress fund something this enormous? No one really knows what it's going to cost. Would subsequent presidents agree to support it any more vigorously than presidents have supported the previous President Bush's plans to do this 20 years ago?
POWELL: The previous President Bush, when he got the price tag, didn't support his own program, really, which was sort of a gold-plated NASA wish-list that has nothing to do, I hope, with what we're talking about now.
It will be interesting to see as time unfolds whether in fact the plans that the president put forth will be embraced by subsequent Congresses, and in fact if in this political climate it's possible to do anything that spans presidencies.
MANN: Columbia last year, the Challenger back in 1986. Two ships and two crews, 14 men and women lost their lives aboard the space shuttle. After the Columbia disaster, a special panel studied the shuttle and found it was "not inherently unsafe."
Is this an appropriate time to say goodbye to the shuttle? Or an overdue decision that some president had to be courageous enough to make?
POWELL: I think it's probably way overdue, and I think you'd find a whole lot of people in NASA who would agree with me. The shuttle was a brilliant idea when invented in the late 1960s and it got whittled and chopped away in order to meet political and budgetary requirements and as a result it didn't turn out to be anything that was either very good in itself or very good for much.
MANN: The one thing that it did expose, at the cost of good people's lives, was a culture within NASA that didn't take safety seriously enough, and I raise that question because now NASA is about to embark on something dramatically more dangerous, orienting itself to the creation of a new spacecraft to go to Mars... Is NASA ready to do work that dangerous so quickly after these disasters?
POWELL: No, and that's why it's a good thing they're not going to do it so quickly after those disasters.
There needs to be a serious realignment of thought within NASA, which right after the Apollo program turned into, in many ways, just another government bureaucracy.
And the things that drove NASA in the 1960s pretty much disappeared and were replaced by NASA's struggle to itself survive.
If you talk to the people who were involved in the space program in the 1960s, they considered the astronauts to be family and they were going to do anything they possibly could to keep them alive and safe. There was even a thing called the rule of five 9's. Unless they were .99999 sure a thing would work, they wouldn't launch it.
MANN: How much more dangerous, how much more difficult, is what the president is setting out for NASA now?
POWELL: It's certainly a lot more difficult. How much more dangerous it is depends on how well it's executed. If it's handled in the same way that the Apollo program was, it will be pretty safe.
We didn't lose anybody in space in that program. We did come very close with Apollo 13, but we even brought them back, and that showed the kind of heroism and personal achievement that NASA was capable of back then.
Going to Mars is something that I think we almost have to take off the table right now, because success on the moon over a long term is necessary before we even really begin thinking seriously about going then on to Mars.
