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- A2: Das Ks A2: Spending
- A2 – Moon Base Tradeoff
- Asteroid mining will give us more resources and energy than lunar mining
- Legal uncertainty prevents lunar mining
- Space shuttle retirement precludes moon landings
- Budget constraints prevent moon landing
- Agency will not divert funds away from the moon base
Role of NASA and DODCongress has delegated NEO detection and deflection mission decisions to NASATask Force ‘2k (British National Space Centre, Report of the Task Force on Potentially Hazardous Near Earth Objects, http://www.spacecentre.co.uk/neo/report.html) The US Congress has named NASA to be responsible in the United States for Near Earth Objects, assisted by the United States Air Force. Within NASA, the Headquarters is responsible for soliciting and selecting all science investigations, ground-based and space-based, for the detection and scientific exploration of Near Earth Objects; for guidance on strategic planning and mission selection; and for coordination with other agencies and organisations including international ones. In addition, a specially created Program Office has been set up at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to co-ordinate ground-based observations to complete the survey of objects of 1 kilometre and upwards; to facilitate communications within the observing community and between the community and the public regarding potentially hazardous objects; to respond to public inquiries; to maintain a publicly accessible catalogue of Near Earth Objects; to develop a strategy for their scientific exploration including in situ investigation by space missions, and to help Headquarters in its role regarding other US agencies and foreign activities. Essential to the coordination and archiving of observations, and the setting of targets for follow-up, is the Minor Planet Center based at the Smithsonian Institute at Harvard. The Minor Planet Center is broadly under the wing of the International Astronomical Union and is funded in part by NASA on an annual basis. In addition we note that the National Science Foundation is responsible for funding basic science including astronomy in universities except for work in planetary science. Some work on Near Earth Objects is nonetheless being done on National Science Foundation funded telescopes. The Department of Defense does not have planetary defence as part of its remit. But in its normal defence role in detecting incoming missiles, it observes many Near Earth Objects from both its ground- and space-based platforms. A2: Das & KsA2: SpendingCost of detectionBucknam & Gold ‘8 (Mark, Deputy Dir for Plans in the Policy Planning Office of the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, Colonel USAF, PhD in War Studies from U of London, BS in physics, MS in materials science and engineering from Virginia Tech & Robert, Chief Technologist for the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins “Asteroid Threat? The Problem of Planetary Defence,” Survival vol. 50 no. 5 | 2008 | pp. 141–156) If one or more PHOs are destined to impact Earth in the foreseeable future, the sooner the discovery, the sooner steps can be taken to prepare for and possibly prevent a cataclysm. In addition to a dedicated ground-based telescope such as PanSTARRs or LSST, the advantages of a space-based, dual-band infrared telescope argue persuasively for funding at least one. For approximately $1bn – the amount needed to fund an infrared telescope in a Venus-like orbit – we could greatly improve our knowledge of the scope and details of the threat from asteroids, as well as increase the chances of detecting any particular asteroid before it collides with the Earth. The overall costs of programmes to find and track asteroids, and to rendezvous with and study them, would amount to between $2–6bn, depending on how many rendezvous missions would be launched. The effort could be carried out over a ten-year time frame at a cost of no more than $500m per year, or less than 4% of NASA’s annual budget (approximately $17bn in 2007). By comparison, in fiscal year 2006 alone, the US Congress provided approximately $4bn for avian-flu initiatives21 – a thousand times more than it budgeted for NASA’s Spaceguard Survey programme. In 2006, the World Bank estimated that a severe pandemic with a 1% mortality rate could kill about 70m people and cost upwards of US$1.25 trillion (3.1% of global GDP).22 An asteroid the size of Apophis, which is not particularly large as asteroids go, could cause comparable levels of death and destruction. A2 – Moon Base TradeoffInternational space station triggers the linkPasztor ‘9 (Andy, staff writer for WSJ, “NASA Budget Threatens Manned Missions, Group Says,” Wall St. Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125012680951127905.html) None of these options solve all of the technical and budget challenges facing NASA. In addition, the White House is under pressure to continue its funding of the International Space Station beyond its current commitment of 2015. That would further siphon off funds from other manned exploration initiatives. Asteroid mining will give us more resources and energy than lunar miningLewis & Lewis ‘5 (John S., Professor of Planetary Science and Co-Director, Space Engineering Research Center, University of Arizona, & Christopher F., earned his JD at Brigham Young Univ, 37 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 745, lexis) Approximately 1,400 NEAs with diameters greater than one kilometer (and a million with diameters greater than 100 meters) are presently in orbits that cross or graze Earth's orbit around the Sun. About 20 percent of these are energetically easier to reach and land on than the Moon. Some of these asteroids are extinct comet nuclei with water contents ranging up to about 50 percent; some are huge crystals of iron-nickel alloy; others belong to well over a dozen different composition classes. The NEA Amun, about two kilometers in diameter, contains far more metal than the total amount used by the human race since the beginning of the Bronze Age. Its Earth-surface market value is tens of trillions of dollars, larger than the annual gross global product of Earth. Many NEAs can return materials to Earth at a much lower energy cost than that of returning a similar mass to Earth from the Moon. In extreme cases, the energy advantage of asteroid material return relative to lunar return reaches 2500:1. Legal uncertainty prevents lunar miningZell ‘6 (Jeremy, JD Candidate U of Minn. Law School, 15 Minn. J. Int'l L. 489, lexis) The mining of Earth's Moon, the planet Mars, and Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) holds the potential to be a very lucrative endeavor. 11 Scientists believe that silicon on Mars, Helium-3 on the Moon, and other precious ores such as platinum on NEAs could sustain information and energy technologies on Earth for decades or centuries. 12 However, the current legal uncertainty [*491] regarding property rights on the Moon and other celestial bodies limits the possibility of outer space mining. Legal scholars and nations have hotly debated ambiguous language in the Outer Space Treaty and Moon Agreement declaring outer space to be the "common heritage of mankind." 13 Until this confusion is resolved, it will be difficult or impossible for firms or nations to realistically consider the feasibility of mining outer space, and it will continue to be seen as a science fiction fantasy. Space shuttle retirement precludes moon landingsNational Review ‘9 (The Week, 9-7-9, lexis) The Human Space Flight Plans Committee, a ten-person panel appointed by President Obama to work out a future strategy for NASA, has met with administration officials prior to its final report at the end of August. The committee's deliberations, widely leaked, do not bode well for NASA and its contractors. The space shuttle will be retired next year, leaving the U.S. with no way to put human beings in space. The shuttle's replacement will enter service around 2016 -- just as the International Space Station, a political extravaganza of no scientific value, is likely to be crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Striving to come up with manned missions we can actually afford, the panel may recommend a visit to one of the Lagrange points. These are locations in empty space, on the moon's orbital path, where physics predicts a gravitational "plateau." Some fragmentary loose matter may have settled there: interplanetary dust bunnies. This would not be NASA's most exciting mission; but it's just as far as the moon, without the expensive necessity to land on anything. Such are our current ambitions. What a falling-off was there! Budget constraints prevent moon landingAchenbach ‘9 (Joel, Washington Post Staff Writer, “NASA's Trajectory Unrealistic, Panel Says,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302244.html) NASA doesn't have nearly enough money to meet its goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020 -- and it may be the wrong place to go anyway. That's one of the harsh messages emerging from a sweeping review of NASA's human spaceflight program. Although it is just an advisory panel, the Human Space Flight Plans Committee could turn the entire space program upside down. Appointed by President Obama and headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, the 10-person panel has held a series of marathon meetings in recent weeks to try to Velcro together some kind of plausible strategy for NASA. The agency's trajectory over the next two decades, as well as the fate of thousands of civil servants and private contractors, could be affected by the group's report, due at the end of this month. The committee members will meet with administration officials Friday and are likely to say that under current funding, there's no realistic way to get Americans back on the moon by 2020, which has been the goal since President George W. Bush signed off on the "Vision for Space Exploration" in 2004. The current NASA plan makes a moon landing in 2020 possible under the budget only if the agency de-orbits the international space station -- crashing it into the South Pacific -- in 2016. Moreover, the current strategy involves retiring the space shuttle in 2010 and replacing it with the new Ares I rocket and the Orion crew capsule, which NASA hopes would be ready to take astronauts to low Earth orbit in 2016. During the long gap in NASA's human spaceflight ability, American astronauts would have to hitch rides into space on Russian rockets. The awkward plan has been seen as a budgetary necessity, with shuttle program money flowing into the new Constellation program that features the new space hardware that could eventually put astronauts on the lunar surface. The committee has chewed over a basic paradox in the plan, which is that, even if everything went smoothly, the new rocket would not be able to get astronauts to low Earth orbit until just about the time that the space station would be fireballing its way back to Earth. Although the station has never been terribly popular with scientists, its $100 billion price tag and role in international aerospace cooperation makes its early demise politically unpalatable. The Augustine panel assumes the station's life will be extended to 2020. But under that budgetary scenario, according to the panel's just-completed analysis, the current NASA budget would not permit the launch of a new heavy-boost moon rocket, the Ares V, until 2028 -- even without any funding for key lunar-base components. "If you're willing to wait until 2028, you've got a heavy-lift vehicle, but you've got nothing to lift," said committee member Sally Ride, the former astronaut, in Washington on Wednesday at the final public meeting of the committee. "You cannot do this program on this budget." Agency will not divert funds away from the moon baseEasterbrook ‘8 (Gregg, Editor of The Atlantic and The New Republic and Sr. Fellow at Brookings, “The Sky is Falling,” June, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/asteroids) Actually, Congress has asked NASA to pay more attention to space rocks. In 2005, Congress instructed the agency to mount a sophisticated search of the proximate heavens for asteroids and comets, specifically requesting that NASA locate all near-Earth objects 140 meters or larger that are less than 1.3 astronomical units from the sun—roughly out to the orbit of Mars. Last year, NASA gave Congress its reply: an advanced search of the sort Congress was requesting would cost about $1 billion, and the agency had no intention of diverting funds from existing projects, especially the moon-base initiative. 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