The Moon? Mars? Forget About It!

Alan Caruba / Anxiety Center -- As entertainment, I have always particularly enjoyed any television show or movie about space voyage. There's something compelling about a group of people, dependent on a space ship to carry them to or from danger. It is, as any Star Trek fan will tell you, "the final frontier". It is also largely absurd. Particularly when it involves billions of dollars this nation can ill afford to throw at a space program that robots could perform better than people.

Recently, I read an article by William Tucker, "The Sober Realities of Manned Space Flight", that was published in the December 2004 edition of The American Enterprise magazine. Tucker began by noting that President Bush's suggestion of a 280 million-mile manned space flight to Mars was a good idea. It is, in fact, an astonishingly bad idea, but even Presidents have a right to have bad ideas. "A quick NASA calculation," noted Tucker, "revealed that the Mars effort would cost nearly $500 billion over 30 years." Now take that figure and double it. Any estimate like that which is provided by a government agency - any agency - is usually wrong by a factor of two, three or higher.

I was quickly reminded of the spectacular and tragic failures of two Space Shuttles, one when it was launched and the second when it was returning to Earth. "The Space Shuttle was originally supposed to break even and fly every two weeks," said Greg Klerkx, the author of "Lost in Space", a critique of NASA. Instead, "it ended up costing $500 million per launch, and flying four or five times a year." You should think of the Space Shuttle as a very expensive truck used to ferry cargo to the International Space Station.

Even the space stations, first Skylab, then the Russian's Salyut and Mir, failed to lead to the development of larger facilities manned by dozens of scientists and others who would learn what it would take to create entire space colonies. Nor, with good reason, did we ever return to the Moon.

Today's International Space Station, conceived in 1984, cost taxpayers $11 billion by 1992 and was still on the drawing board! At that point, the Clinton administration brought in the Russians to help, scaled dow