Similar behavior by them was seen after the Challenger disaster, and all of it resulted in a shuttle with improved o-rings for its solid rocket boosters.

Why do these "authorities" actually expect that anything more than improved launch debris monitoring systems and improved foam and thermal protection systems for the shuttle will emerge from the Columbia failure, or that their proposals for NASA's future will have any effect?

The answers to both of these questions appears to lie immediately at hand: to a man in their pieces these "authorities" advocate the development of heavy lift launch vehicles, launch vehicles which have the sole purpose of sending men to Mars.

I think it can be argued that it is their position on manned Mars flight which makes these individuals "authorities", at least "authorities" to the manned Mars "faithful", those who comprise the majority of space readership, and also that it is this their position on manned Mars flight which ensures the publication of these authors' views, thus confirming them as "authorities".

But as regards the questions set out at the start of this paragraph, clearly these writings will have no other effect, and none is to be expected; the question of whether the authors realize this or not is moot.

Herein lies the rub for the space program as a whole: unlike these "authorities", most of the public gave up on manned Mars flight a long time back, back when Viking returned its first pictures of Mars' forbidding surface in 1976. For the leadership of the US space program, that realization came even over two decades earlier, in 1964.

Thomas Young, who headed up the landing team for the Viking Mars landers, told one story at the Viking 25th anniversary symposium that struck me then as being particularly revealing.

When the Mariner IV probe had returned to Earth the data containing the very first detailed image of the surface of Mars, the software that had been developed to convert that data into a usable image, had failed.

Jack James, the lead engineer, and a young assistant had then taken the raw hexadecimal dump of the data and had begun to convert it into an image by hand, an incredibly laborious process.

As the image of Mars' surface gradually emerged, all that appeared was craters and yet more craters, not the rivers and fields and forests, or the canals or buildings, or any of those other things which so many had so fervently expected to see for nearly a century.

Faced with an image that appeared very similar to the surface of the Moon, James turned to his assistant and said, "You've just seen something very extraordinary. You've just seen the death of the planetary program."

And then he had added, "We've got about an 8 hour head start on everybody else in looking for a new job."

My feeling at the symposium that afternoon was that of being among 500 or so people who had still not gotten the news. My feeling here today is that of being among the remaining "faithful" who are simply emotionally unable to accept the real Mars for what it is.

I suppose this failure to accept the real Mars is best reflected in the "authorities'" oft repeated statements that NASA was founded solely to beat the Soviets to the Moon.

Actually, at the time of NASA's founding, in the late 1950's, under Eisenhower, Mars was widely believed by nearly everyone to be an Earth-like planet, one that would be relatively easy to colonize.

One can quite easily view a large number of movies and television shows which portrayed Mars in exactly this way, as well as examine professional engineering studies for the manned exploration of that Mars, all with very little effort.

Today, even though the "believers" will reluctantly acknowledge the undeniable reality of Mars, they usually sublimate their escapist needs by giving extreme prominence to the questions of water on Mars and the search for life there, promoting the idea that getting answers to these questions provides some real "needs" which justify incredibly expensive manned visits to Mars.

Let's take a look at the real space program, shall we? In the communications sector, fiber optic systems provide a better alternative than relay satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit for long haul dense packets.

The continued development of cheap ground based antenna systems for cell phones has pretty much obviated most need for low Earth orbit satellite communication systems.

Bright spots include direct to home television broadcast services, direct to car radio broadcasts, and small geosynchronous communication satellites for small countries, but offsetting these developments are the improvements in electronics and the adoption of ion engines for station keeping which are increasing GEO satellites' lifetimes, further reducing the demand for launch services.

Finally, the fights for market share and the general redundant overcapacity of incompatible communication systems have so depressed the communications markets and its participating firms that there is little money available for development.

There is relatively little demand for the services of Earth observation satellites, as the data they provide is delivered in barely usable format, except for use in specialized one off purposes.

Of course, since if that data was distributed in any kind of easily usable format, it could easily be used to program the guidance systems of cruise missiles, we can expect little improvement in this market for some time to come.

Weather satellites are always needed, but again, improvements in electronics and the adoption of ion engines for station keeping are increasing satellite lifetimes, further reducing the demand for launch services.

Bright spots here include demand for satellites to research various weather phenomena, and the possible development of a new generation of weather satellites able to observe the effects of our Sun's variability on our weather.

On the manned side, construction of the International Space Station is providing NASA with the knowledge of modular construction techniques and docking which will be essential to any future manned deep space travel, whether to the Moon or Mars.

Further, the International Space Station is pioneering the development of the kind mechanisms of international cooperation which any manned use of either the Moon or Mars will require: these are too expensive to be done by any one country alone.

So the International Space Station plods along, under rather constant attack by the manned Mars "faithful", who want a manned Mars flight and nothing else: it's nothing glamorous, but none the less it's essential, as it is a simple fact of engineering that manned space flight never has been cheap, and never will be. This seems to be the best place to mention how crippling the attacks of Mars fantasists can be.

Several years ago Rick Tumlinson, head of the Space Frontier Foundation, a long time fierce advocate of manned Mars flight, and long time foe of the International Space Station, since it is not a manned Mars flight, persuaded the Russian Space Agency to divert some of its extremely limited funds into keeping the Mir space station in orbit.

While one could accept at face value Tumlinson's statements of the more space stations the merrier, if one bothered to read his fierce attacks on the International Space Station, one could reasonably infer that deep down inside he hoped to kill it by presenting the aged Mir space station as some kind of an alternative.

The result of Tumlinson's actions was that funds were not available to maintain the roof of the storage facilities for Energia heavy lift launch vehicles, and that roof's collapse led to the destruction of the previously constructed heavy lift launch vehicles which were being held in storage there.

While it is true that the Energia launch pads had been stripped of their metals for their scrap value, none the less at a nominal cost those same needlessly lost heavy lift launch vehicles could have been used to send a manned expedition to Mars' moons of Phobos and Deimos.

It's just my opinion, and naturally everyone is certainly free to agree or disagree with the facts as set out above, but I think the man is acting like an idiot.

This may seem harsh, but all in all, it's kinder than viewing him as some kind of really brilliant saboteur. If it makes him feel any better, I hold the same view about most of the manned Mars "enthusiasts" who I have met through the years - nice people, and great fun to be around, but none the less people whose delusions are preventing their proper mental functioning, and in fact so disturbing them that they present an absolute hazard to the real space program.

While I don't know for certain why this delusional thinking is not more generally recognized by the public at large for what it is, I can hazard some guesses.

One reason may be that the Mars fantasists tend to hang out together, and even though their numbers are growing increasingly smaller day after day, these groups do tend to give the "enthusiasts"' thoughts and actions some kind of a veneer of legitimacy and sanity.

A second reason why this mental malfunctioning may not be more widely recognized is that the manned Mars "enthusiasts" enjoy a kind of institutional support from NASA, as some there vainly try to keep the 1950's fantasy of an Earth-like Mars alive in the public mind in order to ensure their funding.

Yet a third reason for this blindness, one we're reluctant to admit, may be that most of us have been there, done that: at one time or another many of us have harboured manned Mars fantasies similar to the ones these people so fiercely hold today.

For myself, it may be a case similar to that of the cigarette smoker who quits and then annoys everyone by lecturing endlessly about the dangers of smoking. As I am not that masochistic, I know I have got to stop this soon, but then of course we all have to establish our "authority" somehow, so it might as well be by pointing out the obvious to the blind.

Finally, of course, articles on manned Mars flight always do sell magazines.

But then of course magazines are always cheaper than manned Mars flight.

Rounding off this part of this space market overview, given the fact that the military space budget exceeds the civilian space budget, a very bright spot overall is that the demand for defence launches continues to be brisk; unfortunately, this situation appears likely to continue in the future for quite some time to come.

Having looked at some of the gloomier aspects of the space markets, let us now turn our attention to one very very bright spot in particular. Little could Jack James suspect back in 1964 that it would actually be Mars' craters themselves that would insure the future of NASA's planetary programs.

Demand for launch vehicles to send probes to asteroids and comets have grown remarkably over the last several years, and this growth in demand has been international.

Ensuring that this demand developed has not been easy, and in the US it's more been a case of dragging NASA kicking and screaming into its future, shifting its bureaucratically entrenched mental paradigm from that 1950's fantasy of an easily colonisable Earth-like Mars to one of our fragile blue planet being all too frequently subjected to simply incredible blasts resulting from the impact here of stray comets and asteroids.

More launch services will be required by NASA to deal with this hazard in the years ahead - that is, more launches will be required by NASA, providing that those who have been involved in alerting the public and their elected leaders to this very real hazard can effectively continue that work.

Here in the US, NASA management has to date only procured launch services for probes to analyze the composition of asteroids and comets; dealing with this hazard in its entirety will require them to procure additional launch services both to refine their estimates of the magnitude and nature of the impact hazard, as well as to provide timely warning of the approach of threatening asteroids and comets.

Let us examine in some detail these other two impact related launch demands.

Generally, the public today is aware that an impact killed the dinosaurs, and that an impact occurred over Siberia in the last century. They are currently generally unaware that impact is being implicated as the cause of several other massive extinctions, and that smaller ocean impacts appear to have washed away entire coastal civilizations. Not surprisingly, but rather sadly, current NASA management is spending very little in this area.

While it may be a while before the public at large realizes that NASA's current impact hazard estimates are no better than its tile damage estimates, fortunately this is not true for their elected leaders.

One beneficial effect of the Columbia disaster, though a trivially small compensation for it, is that in the immediate future any current NASA management statements about the impact hazard are likely to face severe Congressional scrutiny.

I want to outline here three options that I think NASA management has available to it for improving their estimates of the impact hazard to the Earth. Their first option is to improve their crater counts for the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and other bodies in our solar system, and to then use those crater counts to improve their estimates of the impact hazard to the Earth.

While the Cassini probe is approaching Saturn, and Mars Express will be on its way to Mars shortly, I suspect that more comprehensive imagery of Jupiter's moons may be necessary for this technique to be used reliably.

The second option NASA management has for improving its hazard estimates is returning datable rock samples from impact basins on Mars. The Moon is comparatively useless for this kind of work, as unlike Mars, our Moon has a large gravitational companion, the Earth itself.

Since impact features on the Earth are eroded away with time, there is simply no way to reliably estimate what portion of the asteroids and comets struck the Moon, and which portion of them struck the Earth. This is not true for Mars.

Even given these improvements in their estimates of the overall impact threat, NASA management would still have no way of knowing what portion of that threat arises from asteroids and what portion of it arises from comets.

This may seem incredible, but several years after having watched the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Leny 9 strike Jupiter, and watching these generate several individual blast plumes there, each of which was the size of the Earth itself, NASA managements' estimates of the impact hazard to the Earth arising from comets varies vaguely as being somewhere between 10% to 20% of the total impact hazard.

Further, they usually set these numbers forth as being rock solid; in reality they rest on a most chimerical quicksand of inference, like the rest of NASA managements' current estimates of the impact hazard.

In terms of defining the impact hazard, even after the total threat is known, to determine the comet/asteroid mix of it NASA is either going to need to launch a nuclear electric powered observatory into the asteroid belt itself, or launch far more sensitive spectral instruments into planetary orbits. Only then will they be able to reliably tell anyone which portion of that danger arises from asteroids, and which part of it arises from comets.

This brings us to the second impact-related future NASA demand for launch services, which is for the launch of telescopes for the timely detection of threatening asteroids and comets.

These instruments are going to have to be space based. In the case of asteroids, the requirement is to provide reliable warning of dark objects down to 100 meters in size, and further to reliably discover them at some distance out from the Earth.

For the larger objects, in particular long period comets, which appear out of "nowhere", so to speak, the force necessary to prevent their impact with the Earth requires that they be detected at the very earliest moment possible.

It is agreed that some kind of space based system detection system will be necessary, but what kind will it be? NASA management currently is trying to hand the detection job off to the Air Force, advocating the use of small satellites to do the job.

While this plan would entail the procurement of launch services by the Air Force, my guesses are that first, no other government on planet Earth will trust the US Air Force to tell that something is about to hit them, and second, that the optics on these proposed satellites will simply be too small to do the job the way it needs to be done.

Let's assume for a minute that a few others and myself are correct in our estimates of the current total impact hazard, and that it is large enough to justify on a cost/benefit basis the launch of space based detectors larger than the Air Force ones NASA management has recently been advocating.

This is a not unreasonable assumption to make, or at least it appears that way to me, as I have spent some 5 years refining my own estimate of the historical impact rate, and am intimately familiar with the work of others in this area.

Detecting either asteroids or comets at the required distances is a daunting task. The raw images look like pictures of sand at the beach, and somehow the astronomers are supposed to find the moving ones, and further to accurately predict where they're heading.

The numbers of asteroids alone are staggering, 100,000's to several 100,000's, depending on which astronomer you're talking to; the long period comets are virtually undetectable until they start their deadly inward plunge.

The comparison space for space based asteroid and comet detection systems has multiple dimensions: radar? lidar? (laser) telescope? optical size? CCD size? computing power? required bandwith? power requirements? fuel requirements? pointing accuracy? maintainability? reliability? capability?

Fortunately, Dr. Mazanek and his team of professionals down at NASA's Langley Reseach Center somehow managed to find enough funds to have worked all of this out for us.

They concluded that a man tended Moon based system is the best way of handling the problem - and since the "benefit" in the case is preventing the complete extinction of mankind, it is likely that ultimately only paying the "cost" for the best will do.

Perhaps you have not heard about Dr Mazanek's team's work: it is a proposal which many Mars fantasists hate with a passion, as such a project would delay manned flight to Mars. Perhaps this same factor may also explain why current NASA management is doing their best to ignore Dr Mazanek's work as well. One may well ask whether they'll even ever bother to tell the US Congress about it...

But what happens next? Baring another terrorist attack with crippling effects on the economy, my guess is that at a minimum the first space based asteroid and comet detection system will be larger than the current Air Force proposal, and thus require the use of EELVs for its launch instead of the smaller launchers of the Air Force plan.

It is almost certain that the US detection system will be NASA's responsibility, and that it will be under NASA control. I also expect that the Smithsonian's Minor Planet Center will remain as the international clearinghouse for data on threats, as it enjoys wide international acceptance.

Given all of this, the future holds hope. While the fantasy of an Earth-like Mars still dominates the minds of all too many, NASA's two Mars Exploration Rovers are set to touch down next year.

If history is any guide, when those rovers beam their images of the surface of Mars back to the Earth, the public as a whole will care even less about sending men there.

And if history is any guide, the remaining manned Mars enthusiasts will become even more obsessively entrenched in their fantasies. The good news in all of this may be that perhaps this time their delusions will finally become apparent to everyone.

Ah yes, the future. Flying cars and all that. Perhaps the paradigm shift will complete after the Mars rovers land; perhaps it will complete after Mars Express begins to return its data. In any case, I don't see this paradigm shift taking too much more than 5 to 10 years at the most.

Mars enthusiasts as a whole will then be seen for what they are, a historical oddity, preserving the 1950's in the same way that the hippies preserve the 1960's among us. And that will be fine, as their color will add spice to our lives, while presenting no real danger to it.

NASA's future will then also be ensured, as its program for dealing with the impact hazard, unlike its program for sending men to Mars, will have broad public support: like it or not, everyone here is already a passenger on spaceship Earth.

A Modest Proposal
The recent defeat of Saddam Hussein has made accessible an extremely large impact crater in southern Iraq, and it would be extremely useful if an archaeological and geological expedition was sent to study it.

To fund this expedition I propose that NASA be forced to auction 1 day exclusive broadcast rights, internet and television, of the images returned by the two Mars Exploration Rovers, for all the days of their missions.

The bidding should be easily done, as given the requirements; in the US the only possible bidders could be NBC, ABC, CBS or Fox. To reduce their risk, I propose that the successful bidder should only have to pay when NASA delivers these images to them.

If NASA management does not feel up to this modest task, if they want to provide me with an office, telephone, and 2% of the gross, I'll be happy to do it for them.

The International Paradigm Shift
Unlike the US, which after all, was only recently settled by the colonists who dominate the government here, many countries have long historical traditions, and usually these traditions include tales of the impacts of comets or asteroids.

For example, it is reported that China's first emperor was killed in an impact, and some limited archaeological work has been done investigating this. In Japan, impact figures both in an Ainu tale of their destruction, as well as in the Japanese tales of the arrival of their first emperor, Jimmu. Unfortunately, the archaeological work here is a mess, to put it mildly.

In Russia, the paradigm shift has already occurred, as Russia was hit in the last century at both Tunguska and Sikhote Ailin. Unfortunately, to repeat once again a well known fact, Russia is currently just emerging from the throws of a massive economic shock.

In France, it is pretty clear that the city of Bazas was destroyed around 580 BCE by the impact of a cometary fragment, but there does not appear to be any widespread public awareness of this. Perhaps growing knowledge of this impact event may shift the paradigm in France, perhaps not. On peut voir.

For the last 5 years veteran space journalist E.P. Grondine has been providing detailed reporting on and to the developing community of impact specialists, as well as to numerous science writers. A part of his earlier work on the Chinese manned space program may be seen at Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronomica internet site.

All in all, not a very promising outlook for the demand launches services, rather than on the real Mars, one of epochs of impact debris stacked atop previous epochs of impact debris, all of it stirred together and shaped by carbon dioxide "storms", "rivers", and "oceans"; a planet so different from the Earth and far from it that it would take an incredible effort to send even a few men there to visit briefly.

For the most part the symposium's participants and attendees were all old enough to have grown up during the times when the earlier misconceptions about Mars were still prevalent.

As is usual today, these paid for the appearance of a group of young people from among the very much smaller group of current Mars enthusiasts; this, as though to re-assure themselves that their earlier efforts had not been for nought, that their life's work had had meaning, and that their dreams live on in some way.

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