That’s Aviation Week & Space Technology’s quote of MIT’s Maria Zuber during her testimony before the House Science and Technology Committee hearing July 30 on NASA’s first 50 years. She was apparently responding to John Glenn’s assertion that a Moon base is not the best way to Mars. Along with the robotic vs. humans debate, the Moon vs. Mars thing has to be the oldest, most time-consuming argument in the history of NASA, and it’s apparently being revived.

Her comment does not appear in prepared testimony and apparently is in response to the committee, but with apologies to Dr. Zuber, let me take it out of context and depersonalize it from her because I have no idea what she meant, plus she does actively support NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration (VSE). But many others have used language like this before regarding humans to the Moon and Mars, and here are a few “translations”:

1) “It really will take a lot more study…because we like to do studies.” Excuse me, but how much is enough? Let’s see, we have the recent VSE Exploration Systems Architecture report (2005), The President’s Moon, Mars, and Beyond (Aldridge) Commission (2004) — of which Dr. Zuber was a member, and the U.S. Space Policy (2004) — the OECD Space 2030 document (2004), the Stafford Report (1991), the NASA 90 Day study (1989), the Ride Report (1987), the National Commission on Space (1986), not to mention all the Case For Mars volumes, and the NASA Lunar Base & Space Activities of the 21st Century reports, plus all the myriads of other important engineering and policy studies since the 1960s, …it doesn’t end!

People who are good at studies always want to do more (myself included!). I suspect we don’t need more studies of what we need to do, but maybe we need more people reading the studies that have been done!

2) “It really will take a lot more study…because more study is sometimes the best way to avoid taking any action…” Paralysis by analysis folks are often opposed to the program anyway. Enough said.

3) “It really will take a lot more study… because we’re just not ready, the risks are too great.” Balancing risk with costs and benefits is a key aspect of planning for any space initiative, but reducing the risk to zero is impossible and unnecessary. I have a copy of the Final Summary Report for the NASA EMPIRE program (manned Mars) by General Dynamics, Astronautics (San Diego), “Preliminary schedule analysis strongly indicates that a 1975 (manned) mission…to Mars is in the realm of realistic technological planning...” It was 1963 — 6 years before the Moon landing — and Krafft Ehricke, Bill Strobl, and the other authors of the document calculated we were nearly ready to go to Mars.

4) “It really will take a lot more study…because otherwise we might make a mistake.” Of course we will, no matter what. For example, the Apollo program did not leave us with a space architecture to enable human expansion into the cosmos and it cost billions of dollars. Does that mean we shouldn’t have done it? Of course not. President Kennedy’s spectacular vision of human spaceflight to the Moon provided a global demonstration of the West’s stunning technological capability, its economic strength, and the value of freedom. Plus, along the way some fun science was done.

Speaking in 1990 of manned Mars missions, former NASA Administrator Thomas Paine confessed, “I think we should do it sooner than later…one of the great glories of the Apollo program was that we only had 8 years to do it. Believe me if we had 16…we would have used every week of that time…”

Our current challenge is the near-term opening of the 2015 Maslow Window (which may open closer to 2013). The well-meaning voices of “…a lot more study…” may make it hard for America to avoid another Cold-War Sputnik-like surprise. One way to avoid that is for the U.S. to conceptualize and fund the best version of its Moon/Mars program by involving as many international space partners as possible, now during planning, and later in operations.

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