Orbital Turkey

My 3.5 long-term readers have heard me rail about the waste and uselessness of the U.S. manned space program, and my rants about the funding it steals from the far more productive robotic space programs. Well, I'm not the only one who feels that way – Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate and renowned particle physicist, had this to say (this past Tuesday):

“The International Space Station is an orbital turkey. No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value."

Orbital Turkey. That's a much better moniker for the ISS!

Dr. Weinberg went on to say this about the manned space program:

"No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value. Human beings don't serve any useful function in space. They radiate heat, they're very expensive to keep alive and unlike robotic missions, they have a natural desire to come back, so that anything involving human beings is enormously expensive.

I think the public imagination gets very rapidly bored with the sight of humans in space knocking golf balls around. On the other hand, [the public] was fascinated by the kinds of things done by rovers on Mars. I think our political leaders underestimate the intelligence of the public in thinking they won't be fascinated by real scientific discoveries. I think enormous sums are wasted on manned spaceflight that continually crowd out science missions."

Aside from those scientists whose funding depends on NASA's manned space program, most scientists seem to hold similar views as Dr. Weinberg – though most are also far less eloquent and forthright about it. NASA is, after all, a major source of science funding. The views of such independent scientists – especially their assertions that little worthwhile science is getting done by the manned space program – puts the lie to the usual political justifications. The truth is that the manned space program is yet another political boondoggle, motivated by some combination of pork treats (e.g., major contracts issued to favored constituents), geopolitical posturing (my space program can piss further than your space program!), and fuzzy-brained romanticism (mankind can't be locked into just one planet!).

Personally, I'm so frustrated by the huge waste of my tax dollars by NASA that my preferred solution is to just kill it – shut down the whole damned thing. I'm convinced that once a bureaucracy achieves the scale and political power that NASA has, reform from within is nearly impossible. The country would be better served by a hiatus in the space program, followed by a new, trimmer, smarter program that addresses high-value science and research on fundamentals (such as alternatives to chemical rockets)…

News stories on Dr. Weinberg's remarks can be found here, here, and here. I'll leave you with a quote from The Register (a UK paper):

Here at the Reg, we don't quite know what to think. The idea of manned spaceflight is frankly more appealing than just sitting here on Earth looking at the rest of the universe until the end of the world, maybe sending out robots now and again. On the other hand we're not terribly impressed with the idea of chemical rockets as the only propulsion technology for the foreseeable future, which is mainly what NASA plans on.

Maybe if the boffins got loads of cash for atom-smashers, deep space Einsteinian-physics-bender probes, etc, they might finally come up with hyperspace drives or antigravity or something. Then there could be a proper space exploration effort. It could be worth playing the long game.