Nasa reaches 50

Nasa reaches 50 with pioneer spirit lost
By Clive Cookson
Media commentary on the 50th anniversary (dated either to July 29, when President Eisenhower signed the law setting up Nasa or October 1, when the agency formally started work) shows a widespread feeling that Nasa has been in decline for almost 40 years.

Nasa, the US space agency, is celebrating its 50th birthday this summer with an eclectic series of events. They range from air shows to gala dinners, from family picnics at Nasa centres to astronauts throwing ceremonial pitches at baseball games.
But sadly Nasa can offer no space spectacular to mark the anniversary of its formation in 1958 – in shocked response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite.
Yes, the Phoenix Lander is scratching around on the surface of Mars and may make an important discovery about the biochemistry of the red planet. Yes, more Shuttle launches are due, including a potentially perilous autumn mission to service the Hubble space telescope. But Nasa has little to offer in the near future that is likely to thrill the public. Forget about matching the excitement of the 1960s Apollo programme. There is nothing to match even the pioneering planetary missions such as the 1976 Viking landings on Mars and the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter in the 1990s.
Media commentary on the 50th anniversary (dated either to July 29, when President Eisenhower signed the law setting up Nasa or October 1, when the agency formally started work) shows a widespread feeling that Nasa has been in decline for almost 40 years.
Many enthusiasts agree with Michael Griffin, head of Nasa, that the Nixon administration should have followed the Apollo moon landings between 1969 and 1972 with a drive to send astronauts to Mars. Instead, manned spaceflight has been restricted to low Earth orbit, through the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. The ageing Shuttle fleet will retire in 2010, after a few more flights dedicated to lifting components up to the Space Station. For at least five years after that Nasa will depend on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to ferry its astronauts into orbit, until the new US Constellation system – Orion crew vehicles launched by Ares rockets – is ready.
Constellation’s role will be to take Americans back to the moon to set up a lunar base and then on to Mars and, as Mr Griffin puts it, “worlds beyond”. The target date for Nasa’s lunar return is 2020, though many observers believe the agency will make every effort to put astronauts on the moon in 2019, the 50th anniversary of the original Apollo landing.

Whether humans can reach Mars by 2030, Nasa’s unofficial target, will require great political determination, at a minimum. Both the main US presidential candidates issued positive statements about Nasa this week – demonstrating the strong support that the agency still enjoys from US public opinion – though John McCain’s record suggests that he is more enthusiastic than Barack Obama about space exploration.
But Mars may be an impractical target, even with political commitment and the deployment of immense financial and technical resources, according to some experts – because of a problem usually overlooked by manned space enthusiasts.
“I do not see any way for a human being to make even a one-way trip to Mars, let alone come back again, because radiation levels on the flight would be too high,” said Steven Schwartz, professor of space physics at Imperial College London. “It is hard to see how you could protect against it.”
For space scientists such as Prof Schwartz, the glory of Nasa lies almost entirely in the unmanned missions that consume less than a third of the agency’s $17.5bn (£8.8bn)-a-year budget. “Nasa has contributed immensely to our understanding of the universe,” said astronomer Martin Rees, who is president of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of sciences.
“The Shuttle has made real headlines only when disaster strikes,” Lord Rees added. “Close-ups of the Martian surface and of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons, and cosmic images of the Hubble telescope, receive more media coverage than routine Shuttle flights.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008