2005_08_01_archive

Henry V Should Become Henry the Navigator

You could be forgiven for thinking that of all the myriad U.S.

governmental bureaucracies, NASA would be the most innovative. After

all, if you're working in that agency you've got the most radical

assignment of all: defy gravity, scorn an oxygen-less vacuum, avoid

dangerous radiation, and send personnel millions of miles into the

ultimate final frontier all in an effort to push back the boundaries

of worldly science. If there's hope for any agency to defy traditional

thinking and explore new techniques, it should be NASA. Despite the

need for innovation, however, NASA seemingly cannot escape the

gravitational pull of old line thinking.

John Tierney, in a NY Times Op-ed makes the case for a more innovative

NASA:

[Because of the limitations inherent in using robots,] if we want to

explore much of Mars any time soon, we need to send humans, and they

need to be in good shape when they land after the six-month flight...

For decades NASA's doctors have been trying to find some physical

therapy to mitigate the effects of weightlessness, but astronauts can

still barely walk after six months of it. Meanwhile, NASA has largely

ignored an obvious alternative: redesign the spaceship instead of the

human body. Artificial gravity could be created during the flight to

Mars by twirling the ship.

Such a ship was designed during the 1990's... but NASA just went on

watching astronauts' bones and muscles deteriorate in orbit. The

zero-gravity research provided a rationale for its chief programs, the

space shuttle and the space station - which have always been in

desperate search of a rationale.

"Imagine," [the designer of the proposed ship] said, "that Prince

Henry the Navigator had sent one ship out in the Atlantic Ocean 50

miles and put sailors there for six months at a time and measured the

rate at which they got scurvy - and that was all he did. That would be

ludicrous enough. But now imagine he did that even though it was

already known you could cure scurvy by giving the sailors limes."

What Henry, the 15th-century Portuguese prince, actually did was to

set a goal: reaching India by sea. Instead of paying for never-ending

programs that went nowhere - like the shuttle and the space station

that Congress keeps financing at the expense of a Mars mission - he

rewarded mariners who made progress down the African coast.

NASA has started to buy into that philosophy by offering a few prizes,

like a $250,000 reward for the best new glove for astronauts. But it

could think a lot bigger: prizes to any public or private groups that

build a Mars A.T.V., Mars rocket or Mars spaceship. Even if NASA won't

spring for the prizes, there's no reason someone else couldn't afford

the tab. The 19th-century British Navy, bound by the same kind of

bureaucracy and politics as NASA, foundered in its search for the

Northwest Passage and the North Pole because its huge ships got

trapped in the ice near here. But explorers like Roald Amundsen and

Robert Peary had much better luck with small expeditions financed

privately.

Peary had a millionaires' club that paid for his treks toward the

North Pole. Mars is a tougher mission, but Mr. Zubrin figures he could

get there within a decade for less than $10 billion, a sum that

doesn't even require a club of billionaires, when you consider the

fortunes of a Paul Allen or a Bill Gates. One angel would be enough to

pay for this flight.

After George W. Bush was elected President in 2000 he seemed to be a