Museum

Night shot of New York City from a window of the American Museum of Natural History.

Tonight we had the social dinner of my conference, at the Caltech Atheneum (fancy place on campus). At the end of the dinner there was a speech of the director of the Hayden Planetarium, which is part of the Museum of Natural History, Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you live in the US and watch the public TV you may have seen him hosting the NOVA series “Origins” about the beginning of the Universe, Earth and life. He is quite a character (and one of my favorite role models, as one of the very few black astrophysicists I know), and made up quite of a show. The whole point was to pitch the “Earth, Moon, Mars and beyond” initiative pushed by the White House on NASA without consulting the scientific community and ignoring the road maps that NASA has set for itself.

Now, this is a topic that is not very well received in the Astrophysical community, that sees in it a way to divert funds from science to a very expensive human exploration program with an uncertain outcome. The main argument in the scientific community is that you can do a lot more science in a much cheaper way by sending robots (like the Mars rovers) and not humans in space. Truly enough, since the day when the initiative was proposed, many important scientific projects have been put on hold, while at the same time the new funds necessary to sustain the Moon to Mars initiative have failed to materialize. This is not the first time that a Mars initiative is proposed. A similar project was pushed by Bush Sr. during a similar “Iraq post was blues”, but never took off because of the lack of a clear, funded, roadmap. In the meantime, however, the effort completely derailed important scientific projects, which were delayed for years, until NASA managed to focus again on something it actually has the resources to do.

The argument of deGrasse Tyson (who is the only astrophysicists part of the commission that studied the plan) is instead that such large projects, the only ones capable of capturing the public imagination, are needed to push science funding to a level comparable of the one in the ‘60s (it was 4% of the national budget at the time), during the race to the moon with the Soviet Union. If such large scope projects are started, then the much smaller funding necessities of the Astronomical community will be easily solved as part of the larger budget.

My personal opinion, which I think is largely shared by the scientific community, is however that this is true only in theory, and that the actual chances of this project to be realized are very slim. Returning to the Moon or going to Mars would be a very expensive initiative, one order of magnitude more expensive than the present budget available to NASA. This money would be allocated by Congress only because of political or strategical reasons (given that there are no economical reasons to go there), as it happened at the time of Kennedy, when it was imperative to beat the russians as part of the Cold War. In absence of international competition (at least as long as the Chinese will not have a credible plan for an interplanetary mission), it is unlikely for such an expensive initiative to find enough public support to be financed, especially at a time of high deficit and tax cuts. In such condition, we risk to repeat the errors done in the past, and waste a lot of time and money and human resources in a project that will be put back on the shelf in the next legislature.