Australia: The future of space exploration

From The World Today:  The future of space exploration (A transcript)

ASHLEY HALL: The death last weekend of the first man to walk on the moon has re-ignited interest in the glory days of the American space program.

When Neil Armstrong took his "one small step" on the surface of the moon, an estimated 500 million people watched in awe on television.

The Apollo astronauts were treated like celebrities.

In the 43 years since, no space expedition has come close to generating that level of excitement.

And as NASA (National Aeronautic and Space Agency) grapples with continuing budget cuts, it seems likely no other mission will again.

To discuss what lies ahead in space exploration, I'm joined by Elliot Pulham, the chief executive of the Space Foundation. He joins us from Colorado

And in our Sydney studio, Jonathan Nally, the editor of the Australian space news website, spaceinfo.com.au

First though to Elliot Pulham, and let's start briefly with Neil Armstrong. He's been feted as a reluctant hero but more than anyone he typifies a glorious period of space exploration. Have those glory days gone forever?

ELLIOT PULHAM: We were certainly trying to do something that we had never done before and we had a very clear goal in mind and that goal was to get somebody on the moon and return them safely again, in a 10 year period of time, within the decade was what Kennedy said.

So that was quite a challenge and it was also a race, and if you'll recall there were all sorts of Cold War overtones in this and we were in a race with the Russians. And there was ideology at stake, there was bragging rights, national pride at stake. But really it was an exciting endeavour that really inspired a lot of people that wanted to get involved with this.

And it was a special point in time, I think not so different from the point in time that we're at today. I mean if you go back to the early 60s, everything wasn't all green grass and, you know, mother's home cooked gravy. Everything was not, you know, in an idyllic state. We had a war in Vietnam, we had unrest on campuses, we had racial issues that were coming to the forefront.

I mean it was a very stressful time, and yet there was this terrifically inspiring effort that gave people something positive to get behind. And so, you know, I think it was a special point in time, but I think it's not a unique point in time. I think that these moments come and will come again.

ASHLEY HALL: Jonathan Nally, the moon's been conquered, the space shuttles are now all in museums, are the best days of the American space program behind us?

JONATHAN NALLY: No, I'd say there's plenty more to do out there. We've only just reached a tiny way out into space. It's sad that no-one has been more than 850 kilometres from the earth, in what, 40 years or so. We're coming up to - December this year is the 40th anniversary of the last manned lunar landing.

To pick up a couple of the points that Elliot was talking about, I think that one of the big things that America had in the 1960s, though, was leadership. You had the Cold War and everything else, but if there had been a weak leader in power there then I don't think this would have happened at all. But Kennedy was an inspiring, charismatic, strong leader and people wanted to follow the goal that he set. And I just don't see that around at the moment.

And the problem we have now, of course, is that these - well the moon race in the 60s, at the height of the moon race, or the height of the spending on the moon race which was 1965, four years before the first moon landing, NASA's budget was about 4.5 per cent of the total American government budget. Today, and for probably the last 20 odd years now, it's 0.5 per cent.

So if you want to do big, grand things, it's just going to take you a lot longer to get them done with the meagre resources, compared to the Apollo days. But the problem that brings you is that that takes you over so many different political cycles, different governments, different financial cycles that, you know, I doubt that these sort of things can get done easily.

We saw the example of, back in 2004, when after the terrible Columbia accident, when the space shuttle was destroyed upon re-entry in 2003, the American government decided we need a new vision for space and we're going to go back to the moon and then we're going to go on to Mars. But that's all gone now.

ASHLEY HALL: I noticed during the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars, there was probably as much media attention given to the NASA rocket scientist Bobak Ferdowsi, the bloke with the star spangled mohawk hairdo, as there was for the Rover itself. Is it about personality?

ELLIOT PULHAM: When we went to the moon in that 10 year period, went from zero to landing on the moon, we had a very well articulated national plan, and you had a president in Lyndon Johnson who had been the vice-president of Kennedy and felt ownership of these programs, and so you had enough of a sustainment going for the program to get there.

Today, what we have seen since then, is that every president seems to want to put their own particular spin on the space program, and it makes it very difficult to sustain. And what we see is that every two to four years as an election cycle plays out, new people come into power and they have their own ideas.

And by one calculation, since the space shuttle began flying and NASA started looking for replacements, knowing that one day it would need a replacement, something on the order of $50-53 billion worth of effort has essentially been started, stopped and thrown away as we've gone through these successive changes in party leadership, successive changes in the Congress, the White House and so forth.

ASHLEY HALL: One of consequences of these budget cuts is that NASA is now working with a raft of private sector providers, like SpaceX for one, which has been testing rockets to be used to ferry passengers to the International Space Station. Jonathan Nally, it's cheaper to outsource parts of the program, but will NASA maintain control?

JONATHAN NALLY: Well, NASA wants to not necessarily maintain control of everything. What they want to have is a private enterprise system where private companies offer services, can provide the services that NASA wants. And, in fact, that's the way it's always been. NASA hasn't built its own spacecraft, the Saturn Five Rockets and the Apollo capsules, they were built by aerospace companies. So that's always the way it's been.

What NASA wants now for getting into low earth orbit to go up to the Space Station, is not only for companies to build the hardware but to operate the services as well. And I think that makes a great deal of sense and I and others have been arguing this for a very long time. Let someone else run the bus service, the ferry service up into space, and let NASA get on with what it does best and what it should be doing, which is exploring and pushing boundaries and innovating.

ASHLEY HALL: Well let's talk about that exploration facet. Elliot Pulham, what's the grand plan now, where are we headed now?

ELLIOT PULHAM: Well, that's rather the problem, is that we really don't have a grand plan. We have a program that's put together that's built around building capabilities, I guess is the kind way to put it. We want to have technical capabilities to launch a certain mass, to potentially go to this destination or that destination, but we really don't have an outlined disciplined plan that says step A, step B, destination one, destination two. We don't know where we're going and so we're pursuing a lot of different roads and it's not conducive to achievement.

The other thing about having that type of a mission plan is that any more, you know, we really don't do these things alone. I think that the degree to which the international space community relies on the US to have a direction and a program is not terribly well understood.

I was in Germany a few weeks ago and we were talking with their industry and visiting some of the terrific facilities that the Germans have. And, you know, there's a great frustration, which I think is very typical, which is that, you know, they have long accepted the fact that they would work in partnership with us and we would be in the lead, and now they're looking around going, well, where are you leading? And we can't answer that question. So we really need to put together, you know, a mission that makes sense.

And I think it's unfortunate that the Bush administration really did not get behind its own plan with the required resources and the required political support. And I think it's a danger that we're in now is because the, what is referred to as a vision for space exploration, was articulated by George Bush, everybody assumes it was wrong. Actually, the vision they articulated made a lot of sense. I don't know if that was by accident or how they came up with it, but it was a very good plan.

ASHLEY HALL: And how important is it to have people on these missions?

ELLIOT PULHAM: Well, I think it's very important for a couple of reasons. You know, one is for the reason that the ultimate explorer and the ultimate robot, the ultimate thinking machine is a human being. And, you know, when you get to places like the moon or Mars and are confronted with something that the machine is not designed to do, the human can improvise.

I think the other really important point is that it puts the rest of the world in the loop, it puts people in the loop. You know, if you can imagine back when Everest was first scaled by Sir Edmund Hillary, you know if had simply just sat on the ground and had a great bloody catapult and launched a robot to the top of Mount Everest, would anybody have cared? But it was because he, a human being, was there, we were all there.

And I think you see the same thing, you know, it's fantastic what the Rovers are doing and what the Rovers are capable of, and Curiosity is just the most marvellous machine ever. But just try and imagine what the world would have been like if that had of been a human being stepping foot on Mars.

ASHLEY HALL: Jonathan Nally, it's much safer to send robots.

JONATHAN NALLY: It is safer to send robots. And look, during the moon race of the 60s they sent robots to the moon first. They had a number of different spacecrafts - the orbiters and the surveyors which scouted out the territory first, which sort of makes sense. But, you know, we can't always take the safe option. You know, people need to take risks and that's the way we've always been.

And I'm always reminded of Kennedy's words in one of his famous speeches about going to the moon, where, roughly to sort of paraphrase what he said, we are doing this and facing the other challenges we need to, not because they're easy but because they are hard. You know, let's not always take the easy option, let's tackle the things that really test us and show us what we're really made of.

When we are challenged to do something that seems beyond our capabilities, but that fires us up and shows us that we really can do anything, whether it's out in space or here on earth.

ASHLEY HALL: Just before we wind up, Elliot Pulham, I'm interested in pursuing the questions around commercialisation of space and space itself. There's some talk that we might see mining on the moon in some stage in the not too distant future. Apparently there's quite a bit of Helium-3 there and quite a lot of water as well. Is that something that's in the near to medium term?

ELLIOT PULHAM: I think that as commercial capabilities become more available that they will enable business case that we can't imagine today. It's one of the benefits of having a company like SpaceX that can deliver a launch at a very low cost is, now it becomes something that not just the government can afford, it becomes something that a person with a good business case can look at and say, OK, I know how much that's going to cost me and I think this is what my return's going to be. And so therefore I can invest in this project.

I think the, you know, mining for Helium-3 on the moon is an interesting proposition. I think one of the more interesting propositions is mining asteroids. There are a couple of very large asteroids that are headed our way that have been studied extensively and are known to contain more platinum and other valuable precious metals than the entire estimated reserves of the earth. And so if you can imagine what platinum sells for and figure out how to mine that as the asteroid is coming by, there's an opportunity to create at tremendous amount of wealth there.

But I think, you know, another really important option is to understand energy and how we can do things differently in energy. Things like photovoltaic cells that generate electricity, you know, come from the space program. There is technology developing that'll allow us to efficiently harvest energy from the sun, from spacecraft in orbit or, potentially, from a very large installation on the moon.

If you're a utility company and you can deliver solar energy from the moon for half the cost and none of the environmental damage that the oil companies have, then you might be on to something.

ASHLEY HALL: Jonathan Nally, what's to stop a business funding its own mission to the moon or perhaps to Mars and claiming the place as its own? I imagine it'd be a great marketing opportunity, a big billboard for a certain chocolate bar maker?

JONATHAN NALLY: (Laughs) Yes, I suppose it would. Look there's nothing to stop them from going to these places at all. There are United Nations conventions, treaties that have been around for a very long time now, to which most countries have signed up that says, well actually it says no state is allowed to claim any of the bodies beyond earth. It doesn't specifically state, as I understand it, commercial enterprises, but I believe there's other things that also cover that.

Yes, it might happen, but, you know, I think as prices drop, as Elliot alluded to, as it becomes economic to get into space we will see things that we just can't imagine now. And that really is the driver.

Just quickly, when the Kangaroo Air Route opened up between Australia and London about 70 years ago, the cost of a return ticket there was the cost of buying a house. Today, the cost of a return ticket to London is one or two weeks' wages. And everyone flies now. So, as the cost comes down avenues will open up and people will start to exploit what's out there.

ASHLEYHALL: In our Sydney studio, the editor of the Australian space news website, Jonathan Nally; and Elliot Pulham, the chief executive of the Space Foundation joining us from Colorado.