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Global Space Agencies Gather For Collaboration
UltimaGuy handed us a link to a story on the Register site, covering NASA's plan to create a collaborative space effort across the globe. Agencies from 'Italy, Japan, China, Britain, France, America, India, Korea, Ukraine, Russia, Canada, Germany, Australia and the ESA' got together for the first time since the formation of the Global Explorations Strategy team last year. "This year, they met in Kyoto to discuss a draft Framework for Collaboration, which will set out how the various agencies will work together. The team has agreed that its main focus should be robotic exploration of the solar system, particularly of the moon, Mars and the near-Earth asteroids. It has also proposed a non-binding collaboration mechanism which would allow all agencies to share their plans, and look for opportunities to work together. This would also provide a route for agencies to share the data from their own missions with scientists from other agencies."
Somehow I don't think the free market concept of competition applies when there are no clear customers (government pays for exploration, and scientific community reaps the rewards), and the only apparent commodity is information (not even services!).
If you were talking about, say, satellite launches, then I agree competition is a good idea. But space exploration? Cooperation works much better. To put it another way, if the people who initially conquered Everest had cooperated with each other, would they have gotten to the top quicker?
Competition has its uses. But not in something like this, where there are no apparent paying customers. Feel free to correct me if there are.
Instead of bitching why not sell your PC and donate the money?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Whether something is a "waste of money" or not depends on two things: what you get out, and what you put in. This is called "ROI", "Return on Investment". Almost anything is worth funding, if it's cheap enough. Likewise, almost anything can be a waste of money if it costs enough. A cure for cancer or AIDS would easily be worth 100 billion dollars, but for 100 trillion dollars you could probably save more lives by feeding people, curing malaria, etc. so spending 100 trillion to cure AIDS would be a waste.
In my opinion, manned spaceflight is in the "waste of money" category because putting a human in a spacecraft gives you few advantages (given how advanced robotics have become) but increases your costs by orders of magnitude. However, probes, telescopes, and robots can collect some very vital data for (relatively) little money. Some of this data includes things like global climate change, which is important for understanding (for instance) droughts in Africa, which cause kids to starve. Keep in mind that a lot of what NASA does is monitor planet earth.
Its all about the mean between two vices. In my opinion, space exploration is important and will ultimately be a worthwhile investment- maybe not today or tomorrow, but in 25 or 50 years, the advances in scientific knowledge will help us make the world a better place. At the same time, I wouldn't want to cut food aid to Africa for a couple more Mars probes, either.
This may sound surprising to you, but it does not matter who reach there first, the important thing here is the science you can develop in the journey. Don't even think that the purpose of the second mars probe was the same than the first one. Of course, if NASA keeps the achievements of their missions secret, the other space agencies will have to repeat all the research that NASA did (reinventing the wheel over and over again, and wasting prized resources every time). Fortunately, most of the research result are shared between agencies, so the spatial missions are mostly complementary. Of course, NASA use to keep their bleeding edge research for themselves, to keep on hitting those "first" that you american guys love. A few days ago, ESA proposed to NASA a plan for a manned mission to Mars (by 2025), I think they did not answer...