Nigerian Christians are going to start fighting back against the “religion of peace.”

Lott’s hometown newspaper is asking him to step down or the Senate to force him to.

Eugene Cernan expressed a wistful regret at being the “last man on the Moon.”

He didn’t, and probably couldn’t, imagine that his title would stand for three decades, but as of Saturday, December 14, that will be the case. No human being has trod on lunar regolith since that date in 1972.

This is an anniversary to commemorate, but certainly not one to celebrate. If we, as a nation, wanted to return to the Moon today, the conventional wisdom is that it would probably take us longer than it did the first time (about eight years).

Conventional wisdom is often wrong, but in this case, assuming that the current version of NASA does the job, it’s probably about right.

Many opinion pieces will doubtless be written about this dubious anniversary, talking about how sad it is that we can no longer do what we did thirty years ago, and what happened to the nation’s spirit of adventure and vision, and why oh why can’t we do what we once could, and lamenting the days of yore, when men were men, and rockets were rockets.

Since I hate to be redundant and derivative, I want to use the commemoration to make an entirely different (but I think highly, and perhaps even more relevant) point.

The focus of this mission should not be on Gene Cernan, but rather on his partner in the expedition to the lunar surface (and later US Senator), Harrison (Jack) Schmitt.

Jack Schmitt was not the last (hu)man to walk on the Moon. He was second to last.

But he was both the first and last scientist, by profession, to walk on the Moon.

Think about it.

There were six successful trips by men to the lunar surface. Eighteen men went on the mission, and twelve of them walked on the Moon.

Leading up to that mission, several more men went into space. On the ground there were hundreds, thousands of engineers, accountants, secretaries and other support personnel, at both NASA and its myriad contractors, to afford them the opportunity to go into space.

And at the end of all that, they sent a single professional scientist.

In the military, there is an expression called the “tail to tooth ratio.”

The teeth are the men (and now occasionally women) on the front lines, actually engaging the enemy. The tail is the entire logistics train that is required to get them to the front, and provide them with the resources (food, weaponry, equipment) to allow them to do their job.

If the purpose of the Apollo program was science, and one considers the “science” done to be performed by someone who was actually trained to be a scientist (astronaut Schmitt had a PhD in geology), the tail-to-tooth ratio of Apollo was almost literally astronomical. We spent several tens of billions of dollars (in current-year dollars) to send a single individual to the Moon. Everything that occurred up to that point was prelude.

And of course, once he spent his few days on the lunar surface, we brought him back, and no one, let alone another “scientist,” has been back since.

Let’s look at another example. In all of the Congressional debates about the International Space Station, and whether or not to fund it for yet another year, the undertone of the debate was always about how much “science” it would do.

Now let’s look at reality.

The station currently has three astronauts aboard. Most of their time is consumed in simply keeping the space station functional. While there’s now (borrowing from Star Trek) an official “science officer” aboard, it’s more public relations than reality.

Whenever budgets are cut, the first place to look for savings is from “science.”

There’s no centrifuge aboard the station to provide controls for different gravity levels. Too expensive.

The power level of the station is barely sufficient to sustain the basic function of the facility–not to provide power for experiments.

Indeed, the program isn’t even budgeted for enough spare parts to do planned experiments and research in the event of a breakdown.

The hassle factor involved to get an experiment aboard the station is tremendous, and in terms of time, a doctoral candidate might graduate, get married, have children and grandchildren before she could get an experiment on the station and useful results returned.

What’s my point with these two examples? That we must spend even more money on the ISS and the manned space program in general to get “good science”?

No.

My point is that the notion that we send men (or women) into space for science is absurd. Yet it’s one of the prevailing and damaging myths of space policy debate.

If one looks at the federal budgets for space “science” versus non-space science, the former gets a significant percentage of the latter. But there’s no reason think that the science returned by manned space can possibly justify the expenditures, compared to all other types of science.

Space science gets more because, with the current ways of doing business, it costs more, and because those promoting it have managed to gull politicians and the public into thinking that the “science” thus returned is worth the expenditure.

It’s not.

Space endeavors are about many things, but science is, and should be, low on the list. What we’re presently doing in space cannot be justified by science (just as Apollo, in any rational analysis, couldn’t be–it was about international prestige, and fighting the Cold War).

In fact, it’s hard to come up with any justification for what we’re presently doing in space, even for those who, like me, want desperately to see us become a space-faring nation.

But thirty years after the last man (and the first and last scientist) walked on the Moon, it is a useful time to reflect on why we, as a nation, want to do things in space. And after we decide that, we may have some chance of deciding what the best approaches are to accomplish those goals.

Joe Conason thinks that Lott should step down.

One of the few times that I agree with “Clinton Kneepads” Joe.

Jesse Helms is defending Trent Lott.

A missile interceptor test was a failure today. It followed several previously successful tests. This is a little misleading, however.

“We do not have an intercept,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency.

He said it was “frustrating and disappointing” that a glitch that had little to do with advanced missile technology had doomed the eighth, $100 million, flight test of a key part of a planned U.S. layered defense against ballistic missiles.

The problem was a failure of the payload to separate from the booster. This is a surprisingly common problem with space launch, and the failure means nothing with regard to the viability of missile defense per se. In a real situation, there would almost certainly be redundancy (multiple interceptors would be fired at a single target), and the failure of one to separate wouldn’t affect the ability of the system to kill the oncoming missile.

It also highlights the continuing failure of not just NASA, but the Air Force and Pentagon, to adopt a new space-launch paradigm. One of the reasons that these tests are so expensive and unreliable is that they are performed with expendable launchers, which are intrinsically expensive and unreliable.

While it’s unlikely that reusable launch platforms would be used for actual missile defense (the response time on them would probably be too slow), and the unreliability of expendables would be acceptable for the actual mission, for reasons stated above, it would be nice to have a cheaper, more reliable launcher for testing. At least one company is working on reusable suborbital systems that could do this, but they’ve received very little government support or encouragement.

But until we have a more reliable way of getting the interceptor to the target, it will continue to be difficult to separate out the real technical issues of missile defense from the more mundane ones of the reliability of expendable rockets. And many, intrinsically opposed to defending ourselves against missiles, will continue to point to such incidents as failures intrinsic to the concept itself, with the help of a scientifically-illiterate media.

Pete Dupont is writing in the Wall Street Journal about new energy sources in general, and power from space in particular. (Thanks to Mark Whittington for the heads up.)

I haven’t blogged about this subject much, or perhaps even at all. That’s surprising, because I probably know more about it than almost anyone–I’m certainly in the top one hundred on the planet. I wrote a term paper in college about it back in the late seventies, I reviewed some of the DOE/NASA work when I worked at the Aerospace Corporation a couple decades ago, and I was the program manager for it at Rockwell about ten years ago, when the Clinton/Gore Administration came in, and we fantasized that we could sell it to Gore as a clean/green-energy solution. I also came up with some alternative architectures to the one that Dupont describes in the Journal piece (he’s describing the original DOE/NASA concept, which was almost certainly never practical or economically viable).

I don’t have time to post much on this right now, because I have to work on my Apollo 17 commemoration, but it’s probably worth expanding on, given that energy is such a critical foreign-policy issue right now (Kyoto and the Middle East). Maybe in a couple days.

Alan K. Henderson has a wrapup from the blogosphere.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I wonder if Lott is blackmailing other Senators and the Administration, by threatening to resign from the Senate entirely if forced to step down as leader? If he did so, the governor of Mississipi would appoint a Democrat to replace him, which would take the Republican majority back down to a…non-majority, with only Cheney’s vote to maintain Republican control.

Which would set up Mr. Chafee to follow Jeffords’ lead, and be the next turncoat. Though hopefully, he learned a lesson from Mr Jeffords’ experience…

Gray Davis says he won’t run for President in 2004.

In related news, it was also announced that Bozo the Clown, Osama bin Laden, Phil Donahue, Dennis Rodman, and the late Paul Wellstone, all of whom are viewed by savvy political insiders as having better prospects than Mr. Davis, won’t be running either.

My gums aren’t too sore, but I’m feeling generally lousy. I may be coming down with something.

Anyway, whatever minimal energy I have for typing and thinking has to be devoted to billable activities, what with Christmas coming up, and Tiny Tim and all…