
Robots are out there, dozens of them, going where their soft-bodied, oxygen-breathing creators can’t or won’t anytime soon. They own space.
While a handful of humans hunker down in near-Earth orbit in the International Space Station, an aging craft conceived in the Reagan era, unmanned machines at this very moment are orbiting Mercury, trundling across the sands of Mars, even preparing to leave the confines of the solar system.
The space station is a thing of beauty in its way, the apotheosis of Apollo-style technology. But in terms of scientific achievements it suffers in comparison with NASA’s spaceborne fleet of robots—currently 55 strong—especially given the large funding gap that has always existed between the manned and unmanned space programs. NASA’s budget for 2012 provides about $4.5 billion for robotic space science, versus $8.3 billion for human space exploration, almost $3 billion of which goes to the station alone. And that is the outlay for a NASA without shuttle flights or plans to send people back to the moon.
Noble as human exploration may be, we would know very little about anything in the cosmos much more distant than the moon were it not for robotic explorers. Through them we have learned of lava plains on Venus, a buried ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa, lakes of methane on Saturn’s moon Titan, and salty geysers on another Saturnian moon, Enceladus. And manned missions? Since the Apollo moon landing of 1969, NASA has mostly confirmed what it knew from the outset, which is that hurtling humans deep into space is expensive, dangerous and, for the foreseeable future, beyond reach. The reality is, when it comes to carrying out serious space science, humans simply can’t compete with spacefaring hardware. And that is probably not going to happen in our lifetime.
SOURCE: discovermagazine.com
Published in The Express Tribune, November 19th, 2011.
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