Sustainability Public Policy Challenges of Long-Duration Space Exploration

Abstract

The authors investigate the overarching problem of sustainability of longduration space missions without which a permanent base on the Moon or exploration of Mars is impossible. To have sustainability in these exploration environments means that series of long-duration missions can be launched with a high degree of success and with a quality of life for the microsocieties that must live and work in the mission environments. Several categories of sustainability issues are discussed, among them: guaranteed and timely multi-year funding for the exploration host agencies, the existence of an "integrator function" that can fit together the findings and products of multiple and disparate research teams and technologies to generate do-able missions, regimes of preparation that answer the questions posed by all the indicators that define long-duration space exploration and which anticipate latent challenges to long-duration missions to the Moon and to Mars. If the United States is to be involved in the long-duration space effort, these regimes of preparation must include having the continuity of NASA institutional memory and the vigor of American postsecondary education. However, recent historical and political events have savaged the nation's space agency. And, approximately three decades of depredations in Academe has diminished the American brain trust available from among the nation's postsecondary institutions. In the wake of these events, several popular, but inadequate, propositions have emerged which cannot solve for sustainability issues of long-duration space exploration. Increasingly, the idea that the space endeavor is frivolous and has nothing to contribute to "on the ground" problems has risen among some scientific disciplines, especially in the social and behavioral sciences. For an integral picture that must be discerned before public policy can be adequately written concerning the national space effort as it looks to the Moon and Mars, the investigators draw upon the multiple disciplines of political science, history, international relations, aerospace and human factors engineering, aerospace architecture, organizational behavior analysis, education, and others in their discussion of long-duration space exploration sustainability.

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