Destination: Mars

In his blog, Don Fox asks where G.W. Bush's new initiative for a project to send people to Mars came from. "Who was arguing that we suddenly needed to send people to Mars? "

People have been presenting arguments for sending someone to Mars for quite a while now (pretty much starting when Borman, Lovell, and Anders got back from their fly-by of the Moon in '68). I could give a dozen good reasons, such as what we could learn about our own world from closer analysis of a (presumably) dead but marginally habitable one, and even just to satisfy pure scientific curiousity about the place.

G.W. Bush, on the other hand, can probably only think of two. 1) It makes him seem more like JFK. (One can hope that Lloyd Bentsen is available to point out that he is not.) 2) Promising to put more money into NASA will be particularly good for certain key states.

Let's start with Florida, where the president's brother Jeb just happens to be governor. We all remember the fight over its 25 electoral votes in 2000; due to reapportioning of Congressional districts following the census, it's going to have 27 in 2004. It's also the location of the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, which would see a lot of additional activity (read: jobs and ancillary spending) if a Moon base were under constructions and a Mars mission were in the works.

Then there's Texas, home of a whole gaggle of Bushes and corporate/political cronies. It's going to get another 2 electoral votes this year for a total of 34. The Johnson Space Center in Houston would get an even bigger boost from Bush's program, to enable it to support a permanent base on the Moon and a long-range exploration mission, in addition to its support for the International Space Station, NASA's robot exploration missions, and shuttle activity.

California is the other big factor here, with its gain of another electoral vote, up to 55. This is home to JPL and Edwards Air Force Base, two more pillars of the U.S. space program. Gov. Schwartzenegger probably isn't on Dubya's personal Christmas list, so this slab of pork is more of a bribe than a thank-you gift. And even beyond the economic aid, the people of California seem to be fans of Arnold's big-budget science-fiction flicks. Dubya may not be going himself, but this enables him to cast himself in a supporting role in Total Recall 2.

It's not hard to imagine this analysis running through in the other direction:
Dubya: "What can we do to get votes in the biggest electoral states?"
Advisor #1: "Well, three of the top four have strong ties to the space program. We could go back to the moon... and hey! What's the next closest planet after that?"
Dubya: "Mars! We'll put a man on Mars!"
Advisor #2: "Um, actually Venus is closer, but it's too hostile to land and too cloudy to look at."
Dubya: "But wouldn't a mission to Venus be more popular with women? It's more girly, isn't it?"
Advisor #1: "It sounds too much like 'penis' on TV. Mars would be better."
Dubya: "OK, as long as we make sure ahead of time that the Martians don't have any WMD... I mean, we'll say they do, but they won't."
Advisor #2: "{sigh} There are no Martians, sir."
Dubya: "Great! Now write me a speech like FDR's moon speech to announce it."
Advisor #1: "That was JFK, sir."
Dubya: "Great, I've always thought of myself as another JFK. Except I didn't get shot, I mean."

In addition to the political opportunism of Bush's plan, I have problems with the plan itself. He wants to send people to orbit Mars, not land on it. Granted, that was our first step before landing on the Moon, but (with all due respect to the crews of Apollos 7 and 9, which never left Earth orbit, and of Apollos 8 and 10, who went there without landing) those were mostly just practise runs for the landings of Apollos 11-17 (except 13), which were the real mission. And given the rather poor success rate of robotic Mars missions (more have failed than succeeded), caution is definitely called for. A Martian landing would be phenomenally dangerous. (Heck, we haven't even perfected landings here on Earth.) But that doesn't mean it would make more sense to send a crew there, but leave them in orbit.

We can learn more about Mars by putting a robot on the surface (like we're doing even as we speak) than we can by putting a person in orbit. When you factor in the danger and difficulty of actually getting living people there and back again, it's just not worth it. No geologist or biologist would travel for the better part of a year to get to a remote site just to look through the windows of a tour bus and then spend another year driving home. That's about all a manned orbital mission to Mars would be.

There are good scientific reasons to continue exploring Mars. And those scientific reasons - not electorial politics - should determine how we do it.