Truly International

A few colleagues of mine and I ventured to Japan (Tsukuba (pro. skoo-ba)) recently in support of the upcoming STS-129/ULF3 flight.  On tap was a discussion of a particular EVA that involves some JAXA hardware with one ULF3 crew member undergoing JAXA training at the same time.  As a part of the training cadre for ULF3, it was my responsibility to follow Robert L. Satcher around and observe and participate (albeit in a limited fashion) in his JAXA hardware training.  While observing his training, I came to realize how truly international space really is.  From my many travels to Canada and this one trip to Japan, I’ve really gotten a sense of how space really ties a wide variety of people together; and it tends not to matter if you’re talking about manned spaceflight or not.  Space, in general, unites the nerds of the world together.

This does, however, raise some good questions that I think should be thought about and discussed.  Firstly, any look toward the future, I believe, should start with a healthy, objective look at our past.  In the past, space flight has been a very competitive venture.  It was all about which country could do what first in spaceflight.  The Russians put the first person in space, the U.S. put the first person in orbit…and the list of firsts, highest, fastest, and longest is spread around from country to country for both manned and unmanned operations.  The point here, however, is that few, if any, of these accomplishments are due to international cooperation.  Fast forward to today and the beginning of the age of international space.  We have the ISS, while be funded mostly by the U.S., the partner agencies have provided numerous and very valuable assets the program.  From training to actual hardware and science experiments, the international community has really come together to support this effort.  Of course, when more than one country decides to do something, there’s politics that come into play, but for the most part, the various agencies involved have been able to coexist and have really learned to work well together.  The question I pose is this; “How important does international cooperation becomes the further out into the cosmos we as a species reach?“  My own personal answer to this is what I think would be the majorities of the answers, and that’s a resounding “Very“, and I think  that it will start with Mars.

The way I see it, the U.S. has the current technology and means (if not the will) to plan and support a full-time moon base.  Consequently, I think this is the way we should go to Mars.  I understand the arguments from the Mars direct folks, but let me put it to you this way:  Columbus didn’t “cross the ocean blue” without first going on some other, smaller voyages to learn how to sail and navigate; Charles Lindbergh didn’t make the solo transatlantic flight without first learning how to fly, and Neil Armstrong didn’t set foot on the moon without first learning how to live and operate in space.  Similarly, we as a species have not figured out how to be self-sustaining on another planet when a quick return to the Earth is not possible.  We’re well on our way to figuring that out, but we’re not there yet.   Just imagine the grimness of the situation if CDRA were to fail halfway through a six-month trip from the Earth to Mars [/soapbox].

It’s not that I don’t think these things can’t be figured out by one country; given enough resources and time, it all can be figured out and operated by one country just fine.  Of course, as we are now finding out first hand, the problem is resources.  It reminds me of the old story “Stone Soup” story in which a starving community is talked into pooling food resources to help them survive.  If we as a species are to reach out to the stars (and I think that’s where we will ultimately end up), then it will be an international cooperation.  As my second-level manager so aptly put it: “We are ultimately all space people.  If you put is into a room, we stop being Russian, American, Japanese, etc. and we start being just space people. “