Robert Zubrin of Golden was a guest on the “Science Friday” public radio program earlier this month. I’d never heard of him, but I’m not attuned to the arguments for a manned mission to Mars outside the occasional appearances in popular culture.
What caught me was his evangelistic fervor. What held me was his optimism. Zubrin spoke to humanity’s curiosity and intrepidness and ingenuity. He understood our need to be inspired, especially at a time when inspiration is in short supply.
In truth, I didn’t need much persuading. I can’t speak to the science, but I believe in the dream. That action figure on my desk is, after all, Data. I worked for nine months at Johnson Space Center while in college during the mid- 1980s. The space shuttle program was 4 years old then but still attracting journalists, whom I provided with press packets. I joined Sally Ride on a tour, spent time in Mission Control, got in line to experience weightlessness in the Vomit Comet, though, alas, I never landed a turn. I became conversant in the vernacular. Every bit of it was exciting.
A year later, in 1986, Challenger broke apart just after launch. Tragedy eventually gave way to normalcy, normalcy to routine, routine to boredom. Lower Earth orbit. That’s it. Really? This restlessness was expressed in a more serious way — what are we doing, why are we doing it — after the 2003 Columbia disaster. When Atlantis returns later this month and the 30-year-old shuttle program ends, then what?
“We have to convince the president we need a space program we can believe in,” Zubrin said on “Science Friday.” “How about some hope and change and audacity?”
Zubrin is founder and president of Pioneer Astronautics in Lakewood. He’s a serious guy: advanced degrees in aerospace and nuclear engineering, patent holder, president of the Boulder-based Mars Society, author of “The Case for Mars,” which he recently updated.
Our visit Friday flew by.
First, there’s the workshop. Equipment in it produces oxygen from plant-based garbage, water from dirt and the methane-oxygen components of rocket fuel from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Produce fuel from the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere of Mars and there’s no need to carry it with you for the return trip. That makes for a lighter launch vehicle. That makes a direct flight possible.
Then, there’s Zubrin himself. He possesses the kind of intensity I imagine some people find off-putting. His mom used to leave strategically placed books by Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein around the house. She introduced him to Homer. He was that kid making rocket fuel in the basement.
Zubrin was born in 1952. In 1957, Russia launched the first Sputnik craft “and that terrified the adults,” he says, “but, to me, it was exhilarating because it meant that the space-going future was going to be real.”
And so he marks his childhood: President Kennedy’s 1961 “Man on the Moon” speech. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. “It was to be the moon by 1970, Mars by 1980, the stars by the year 2000, and I wanted to be a part of that.”
As a result of the Apollo program, “this country doubled the number of science graduates — at every level. High school. College. Ph.D.”
Those science grads became the creators of massive economic growth for this country. “The wealth of a nation lies in its intellectual capital,” he says.
So, don’t tell Zubrin we can’t afford to go to Mars. With discipline and focus, he argues, we can afford it on NASA’s current budget and inspire a whole new generation.
Zubrin has been working on a manned mission to Mars for more than 20 years. Six months there. A year and a half on the ground. Six months back. The science and technology of his Mars Direct mission found eager audiences in and out of NASA in the ’90s. But priorities shifted, Zubrin says. Competing constituencies clamored. As far as he is concerned, the country’s political class, including presidents from Nixon to Obama, has failed the space program, he says.
He didn’t care to watch the final launch of the shuttle on Friday. Besides the Hubble Space Telescope missions, he says, the space shuttle program had become an expensive way to send highly skilled explorers off to conduct high school science experiments. What Zubrin fears now is that no concrete goal exists for U.S.-led space exploration. The Obama plan calls for research and development on multiple fronts and the development of a craft that could orbit Mars by the mid-2030s.
“So, basically, it’s a random assortment of spending projects with visionary goals to be reached 20 years after Obama leaves office,” he says.
Yes, he says, other countries could take the lead, but only if the U.S. “wants to abandon its role as the vanguard of human progress.”
You either have a space program with courage or you don’t, he says. You grow or you decay. That’s the choice.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Because of an editing error, this column contained an incorrect reference to science-fiction author Homer Hickam. The reference should have been to Homer, author of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”
