Seattle Times—May 7, 1967

A Briton Looks at Space Exploration

Unmanned Machines Could Do More at Less Cost

By John Davy
The London Observer

LONDON—Astronautics is a high-risk profession. It will never be anything else. Col. Vladimir Komarov last month had the grim distinction of pioneering a new and spectacular way of dying. His death opens what will be a macabre chapter of human endeavor, for he will be followed by astronauts whose deaths will make his own look comparatively mundane.

There will be the first man to be marooned in an orbiting spacecraft; the first man to lose his life on the moon; tile first casualty on the voyage to Mars.

THE RISKS MAY BE diminished by careful management and preparation, but they will never disappear. Space is a hostile environment and exploring it will always be more dangerous than staying at home.

Neither the three Apollo astronauts who died when their capsule caught fire during a routine test, nor Komarov wished to stay at home. Their profession may have been made unnecessarily hazardous by carelessness. Nevertheless, the men concerned were engaged, by their own choice, in what they knew perfectly well to be a dangerous enterprise.

Thus the fact that both the Russian and the American space programs have killed people, and will continue to kill them, is not necessarily a reason to condemn them.

KOMAROV’S MOTIVES, which led him to his death, were his private affair. But the circumstances that gave him the opportunity to risk his life in this particular way are a highly public matter. For the space programs of both super-powers are being justified on three main counts—scientific, economic and political. As such, they demand critical public scrutiny.

As a scientific enterprise, the attempt to land men on the moon is an extravagant comedy. Most of the effort has to go into keeping the men alive and getting them back. By far the greater proportion of the Apollo effort has had to be devoted to human safety rather than effective lunar research.

It is true that the efforts to find a safe landing place have transformed our knowledge of lunar terrain. But the Orbiter and Surveyor reports have been so good that astronauts’ first-hand reports seem unlikely to add much.

THEIR TRIP WILL have to be justified scientifically, mainly by the samples they bring back. But these could have been obtained sooner, more cheaply and in greater variety if the Apollo resources had been spent on unmanned spacecraft. There can be no doubt that for a given expenditure, unmanned space exploration could collect more scientific information about our planetary system in 10 years than manned programs could in half a century.

A similar argument crops up on the economic front. American space officials have been justifying space exploration quite explicitly, not as a scientific or political enterprise but as a necessary and desirable technological pep-pill, which accelerates the pace of development well beyond what could be achieved as a result of ordinary economic and political forces.

THIS KIND OF empty-headed advocacy of technology for its own sake is depressing nonsense. It is all too obvious that our immediate need is to digest the technology that exists, not to swallow a lot of out-of-season produce from a luatic technological hot-house. This does not mean putting a brake on research and development, but directing it to real human needs.

To accept the argument that public backing and scientific enthusiasm can only be mobilized by manned space stunts can only generate increasingly dangerous contradictions. Public interest in the space circus fades remarkably quickly (the last Gemini flights were almost routine). No doubt it can be revived quickly enough by danger and tragedy, or by increasingly costly extravaganzas.

At the same time, space exploration generates engineering ambitions among the technologists which are increasingly irrelevant to real terrestrial needs. Having done the moon, the next challenge will be to do Mars—at vastly increased. cost. We shall get a swinging and frenetic tech-nology—but hardly a responsible one.

SPACE ADDICTION, IN fact, looks increasingly.like a curious metamorphosis of dope addiction. The one is public and technological, the other is private and psychological. But both can only he sustained by larger and larger doses; and both lead away from the pressing preoccupations of real life.

The most salutary result of the deaths at Cape Kennedy and over Russia would be a new sobriety, a reassessment of the space effort of both countries, a critical discussion of what aspects can be justified on serious scientific grounds.