Timeline of Controversy
Discussions about space exploration philosophies in academic print and in the media are largely a post-1990 phenomenon. Two methods of analysis illustrate this characteristic of the controversy. First, the ReseauLu software package by Aguidel processed the results of an ISI Web of Science search for “((moon OR Mars OR space) AND (policy OR budget))” and produced a plot of publications over time. Second, the database LexisNexis returned results for ““space+exploration”+moon+mars” from a search of major news publications, and the number of articles per year appears in the plots below.
ReseauLu Results
LexisNexis Results
A number of factors could explain the absence of discussion prior to the 1990s, but the most likely is that the search terms used to obtain these results refer to exploration policy and not to space policy in general. It was in the 1980s that Star Wars and the weaponization of space dominated the coverage of human activity beyond the atmosphere. Another result of these graphs is that their peaks often correspond to election years or pre-election years in the United States. For example, the LexisNexis results include a sharp rise in articles for 2004. This year was not only an election year, but it was also in January of 2004 that George W. Bush released his Vision for Space Exploration, proposing a return to the moon and the subsequent pursuit of more ambitious exploration goals. January 2004 also marked the arrival of the two exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity onto the Martian surface.
As can be seen in the timeline below, no manned missions to the moon or to any other natural earth satellite have occurred since the final Apollo mission in 1972. Only by the 1990s does an interest in returning to the moon become more apparent through the occurrence of a number of unmanned lunar research missions, most of which were completed outside of NASA. During this time, the United States secured access to space via its shuttle program. However, the Challenger and Columbia accidents contributed to pressures to retire the fleet, and the pending lack of access to space could be seen as a motivation for the United States to pursue more ambitious programs such as missions to the moon, Mars, asteroids, or other bodies. During the development of this discussion on future exploration plans, differing opinions surfaced on the possible destinations for these programs. For example, the Planetary Society released a report in December 2008 which called for missions to Mars without any intermediate steps such as the moon. The decision to support such a policy angered former U.S. Senator and Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who resigned from his position on the board of the Planetary Society soon thereafter.