Martin Tomasko

Cassini is really the last, big, flagship-class mission—there’s infrared spectrometers, there’s infrared cameras, there’s visible cameras, there’s ultraviolet spectrometers, ultraviolet cameras. Whatever part of the spectrum, there’s some physical phenomenon going on inside of the system. Even if you haven’t thought of it in advance, you’ve got everything there you could ask for to measure that phenomenon analytically and to understand it.

The trend now is no more big flagship missions; they’re too expensive. We can’t afford that. So we’re going to have now more focused missions. But if they’re all short and sweet and different, the effect is, you’re going to drive more and more of the groups that do this kind of work out of business.

There’s 300 scientists working on Cassini, and that’s wonderful. But when Cassini comes to an end that’s the last of those missions, and you’d better be interested in Mars, which cheaper to get to, and closer, and we’ve got sort of a continuing program. If you’re interested in the outer solar system, you’re in trouble.

The fact that it was an international mission meant that it could do things that no single country can do by itself. It was really the best of both worlds. It was scientifically robust, and it was financially robust. It had good reasons for continuing, and it was very sophisticated and could do good science.

The best future for space science would be if the Japanese, the Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans all threw in together and flew joint missions. The joint missions would be really good ones, and everybody would want to keep it going because they’ve got all these international collaborations going.

Dale Cruikshank

The Europeans are doing more and more. There are collaborations with the Europeans in progress and some that are of course planned for the future. There are a lot of people coming into this field. A lot of young women are coming into space science, which is changing the demographics in a favorable way. There is no shortage of really exciting programs and projects and problems to work on. I think it’s an extremely exciting future. We’ve accomplished an immense amount, but we can certainly see the directions to further deepen exploration; more exciting science without end.

Mark Sykes

Whenever we go some place new, it’s always interesting. But we’re kind of getting out of that phase of solar system exploration, where we can just go some place and see something we haven’t seen before. Now we’re getting down to, “What are we learning from this? How does this fit with the other information that we’ve got?”

It’s a really transitional period. To go to new places, it’s further away. In order to do new things like a sample return, it’s more expensive. These missions are more and more expensive to the point that they’ll eat your lunch. They’ll eat everybody’s lunch. So now we’re pushing into an era where we’re going to have to get smarter about our investigations. But there’s just so much more knowledge we have yet to gain and learn by doing that.

I see us playing a role in the future in human exploration. Can we live out there? Are there resources we can make use of that would minimize the cost or even make human activity in space self-sustaining? It’s not guaranteed to be yes, because the question hasn’t been seriously asked or investigated. But it’s a neat problem. The goal would be, if it is possible, to be the first people to establish a self-sustaining presence in space.

Where do we get water? What about near-Earth objects that come by at low velocities in the Earth-Moon system? A friend of mine calculated that at any one time there should be about a dozen of these things within the radius of the Moon. We just don’t see them. Is there a sufficient frequency of objects that would be potentially water-bearing, that could sustain our transportation needs once we’re in lower orbit?

You see what the options are, and you figure out what’s the most cost-effective way of following them. It would be an adventure, because we don’t know what the outcome is. There’s a lot of testing, a lot of experimentation, a lot of science that needs to be done. Planetary scientists would be the native guides. We’re the ones that know what’s out there and what needs to be done to read the grass and the footprints, and find the buffalo. Assuming that there’s vision at the national level, there could be a very interesting future for people in my profession.

John Lewis

My interest for several years now has been the economic pay-off of space exploration, making the resources and energy and materials of space available on Earth to solve our problems here. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on sources of energy for Earth to relieve our dependence on imported oil and fossil fuels in general. The energy resources of the solar system are effective to use, but getting to them is a real challenge. Getting that pipeline installed and opened is a real challenge. It makes the Alaska pipeline look like nothing.

Space science has to be done first, but if you draw up a list of the things that space science needs to know, and a list of, say, the things a mining engineer would need to know, the list has a huge overlap. There are many things that are on both lists. A science program that is well done, that has a few engineering tasks added on, will meet everybody’s needs, and will permit rational, informed planning of exploiting those resources.

Dante Lauretta

We’re going to continue our active exploration of the solar system, and it’s hard to predict but I have a feeling it’s going to be a much more international adventure. We’re going to see the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians, the Europeans, and probably other nations that are just now gearing up—maybe Korea, Brazil—expanding into outer space. I think that’s a good thing, because it’s going to drive our competitive spirit, and there will be more resources put into space.

Space will become much more commercialized. You’re going to start to see real estate business setting up shop, either through tourism or advertising or bringing souvenir material back and selling it, that kind of thing. I think we’re going to see a huge explosion in the commercial development in space, and science will go along for the ride. It’ll be easier to get to space, we’ll be able get to these targets, and science will benefit enormously from that.

Charles Wood

We have to dream, and we have to be looking for something new to explore, to encourage us to invent new technologies, to encourage us to try to do new things. I don’t know that civilizations become great just by staying at home and growing corn and taking care of their families. Those are things that you have to do, but it seems to me we ought to do a lot more.

Adam Showman

Planetary science is very small field. There’s maybe about two thousand planetary scientists worldwide or so. Every school in the country has a physics department, compared to like ten planetary departments. But to me, there’s an intangible aspect of science. It’s like art. How can you say what price tag it is worth for an artist to paint the Mona Lisa? Sure, you can auction it and claim that’s what the value is, but up front you don’t know what you’re going to get. So there’s some value in just: Let’s discover what’s out there, what the universe is, what it’s like, and what our place in the universe is. I think the role that plays in society is very similar to the role that art plays, in the sense that it’s that “Gotcha!” It gives you something extra when you look at the night sky.

People often think of science as producing things, or how we make the world better: How we get better seatbelts or better whatever, better frying pans. That’s actually a misconception of what science is. Spin-offs are useful, but if they really want those things they should put it directly into research on seatbelts or frying pans or whatever. The research, the knowledge in and of itself is beautiful, and I think that’s why we do it.