Obama Should Support Manned Exploration of the Solar System

President Obama has proposed cancelling NASA’s Constellation program to send astronauts to the moon and to explore near-earth asteroids and Mars. He has proposed that once the space shuttle is retired NASA use private companies’ rockets to get astronauts into low-earth orbit. His proposal includes no plans to take humans beyond low-earth orbit.

President Obama is on the right track in creating partnerships with private companies for human space exploration. It is unfortunate, though, that he is calling for no provisions for human exploration of the solar system.

President Obama questions reusing old technologies from the 60s and 70s in a modern space program. I don’t know if reusing technologies is the right approach, but we certainly could use some of the enthusiasm for science and technology that we had in the 60s and 70s.

There are enormous intangible benefits to human exploration over probes. For example, my 18-month-old has recently gotten interested in the moon. This started with him seeing the moon in the sky, apparently independently of my interest in science and technology. I checked out some children’s books on the moon from the library for him. When he looks at the photographs and artist’s conceptions of the solar system, he focuses on “astronauts”. The Voyager probes taught us more about the solar system than human spaceflight has, but un-manned probes are not as exciting. We need people to be excited about science and technology.

We obviously need to be grownups and carry on using probes to do most of our space research. That visceral excitement of human exploration is more important that we might at first think.

I am glad Obama is looking into restructuring NASA and creating partnerships with private industry. When large numbers of humans being to work in space, for tourism, research, and industry, it will be private industry sponsoring it. None of this eliminates the benefits of a separate program for human exploration of the solar system.