Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (10 page)

Losing Our Scientific Edge

CS
: The United States remains the dominant scientific and technological power in the world, but foreign competitors are gaining ground, are they not?

NDT
: It’s not that we’re losing our edge; it’s that everyone’s catching up with us. The United States maintained our investments on technological frontiers in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. We could have stayed ahead of the world, as we were during those decades. Yes, everyone caught up with us and leveled the playing field—but it didn’t have to stay that way. And it doesn’t have to stay that way now. Time for us to reinvest in ourselves. Our nation has the largest economy in the world; it’s not out of our reach to reclaim the leadership we once had.

CS
: But fewer and fewer students are majoring in science and engineering, and, in fact, a substantial portion of our scientific and technological workforce is foreign-born. Isn’t this a concern?

NDT
: I’m not concerned, per se, that foreign students fill a substantial part of our educational pipeline in science and engineering. It’s been that way for several decades. America loses only if those students go home.

CS
: Is that happening?

NDT
: Yes, it is. Before, foreign students would come and stay, and so our investments in them as students produced a return in their creativity and innovation as workers. They became part of the American economy.

CS
: So why are they going back home now?

NDT
: Because the rest of the world is catching up, and now there are opportunities back in their native countries—opportunities that vastly exceed what’s available here.

CS
: Isn’t the increase, the infusion, of scientific capability good for science? Isn’t that what you want to happen?

NDT
: It depends what day you catch me and which hat I’m wearing. It’s easy to speak in terms of wanting to keep America strong, healthy, and wealthy. But as a scientist, you really only care about the frontier of science, wherever that frontier arises. Yes, you want to be on that frontier yourself, but science has always been international. In some ways science transcends nationality, because all scientists speak the same language. The equations are the same, no matter what side of the ocean you’re on or when you’ve written them. So ultimately, yes, it’s good that more people are doing science and that more countries embrace investments in science. Nevertheless, I’ll lament the day Americans become bystanders rather than leaders on the space frontier.

• • •
CHAPTER SEVEN

WHY EXPLORE
^*

U
nlike other animals, humans are quite comfortable sleeping on our backs. This simple fact affords us a view of the boundless night sky as we fall asleep, allowing us to dream about our place in the cosmos and to wonder what lies undiscovered in the worlds beyond. Or perhaps a gene operates within us that demands we learn for ourselves what awaits us on the other side of the valley, over the seas, or across the vacuum of space. Regardless of the cause, the effect is to leave us restless for want of a plan to discover. We know in our minds, but especially in our hearts, the value to our culture of new voyages and the new vistas they provide. Because without them, our culture stalls and our species withers. And we might as well go to sleep facing down.

• • •
CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ANATOMY OF WONDER
^*

T
hese days we wonder about many things. We wonder whether we will arrive at work on time. We wonder whether the recipe for corn muffins we got off the Internet will turn out okay. We wonder whether we will run out of fuel before reaching the next gas station. As an intransitive verb,
wonder
is just another word in a sentence. But as a noun (with the exception of “Boy Wonder,” the moniker for Batman’s sidekick), the word expresses one of our highest capacities for human emotion.

Most of us have felt wonder at one time or another. We come upon a place or thing or idea that defies explanation. We behold a level of beauty and majesty that leaves us without words; awe draws us into a state of silent stupor. What’s remarkable is not that humans are endowed with this capacity to feel, but that very different forces can stimulate these same emotions within us all.

The reverent musings of a scientist at the boundary of what is known and unknown in the universe—on the brink of cosmic discovery—greatly resembles the thoughts expressed by a person steeped in religious reverence. And (as is surely the goal of most artists) some creative works leave the viewer without words—only feelings that hover at the limits of the emotional spectrum. The encounter is largely spiritual and cannot be absorbed all at once; it requires persistent reflection on its meaning and on our relationship to it.

Each component of this trinity of human endeavor—science, religion, and art—lays powerful claim to our feelings of wonder, which derive from an embrace of the mysterious. Where mystery is absent, there can be no wonder.

Viewing a great work of engineering or architecture can force one to pause out of respect for the sublime intersection of science and art. Projects of such a scale have the power to transform the human landscape, announcing loudly, both to ourselves and to the universe, that we have mastered the forces of nature that formerly bound us to an itinerant life in search of food, shelter, and nothing else.

Inevitably, new wonders supplant old wonders, induced by modern mysteries instead of old. We must ensure that this forever remains true, lest our culture stagnate through time and space. Two thousand years ago, long before we understood how and why the planets moved the way they do in the night sky, the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy could not restrain his reverence as he contemplated them. In the
Almagest
he writes: “When I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.”

People no longer wax poetic about the orbital paths of planets. Isaac Newton solved that mystery in the seventeenth century with his universal law of gravitation. That Newton’s law is now taught in high school physics classes stands as a simple reminder that on the ever-advancing frontier of discovery, on Earth and in the heavens, the wonders of nature and of human creativity know no bounds, forcing us periodically to reassess what to call the most wondrous.

• • •
CHAPTER NINE

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NASA
^*

Dear NASA,

Happy birthday! Perhaps you didn’t know, but we’re the same age. In the first week of October 1958, you were born of the National Aeronautics and Space Act as a civilian space agency, while I was born of my mother in the East Bronx. So the yearlong celebration of our golden anniversaries, which began the day after we both turned forty-nine, provides me a unique occasion to reflect on our past, present, and future.

I was three years old when John Glenn first orbited Earth. I was eight when you lost astronauts Chaffee, Grissom, and White in that tragic fire of their Apollo 1 capsule on the launchpad. I was ten when you landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon. And I was fourteen when you stopped going to the Moon altogether. Over that time I was excited for you and for America. But the vicarious thrill of the journey, so prevalent in the hearts and minds of others, was absent from my emotions. I was obviously too young to be an astronaut. But I also knew that my skin color was much too dark for you to picture me as part of this epic adventure. Not only that, even though you are a civilian agency, your most celebrated astronauts were military pilots, at a time when war was becoming less and less popular.

During the 1960s, the civil rights movement was surely more real to me than to you. In fact, it took a directive from Vice President Johnson in 1963 to force you to hire black engineers at your prestigious Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I found the correspondence in your archives. Do you remember? James Webb, then head of NASA, wrote to German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, who headed the center and was the chief engineer of the entire manned space program. The letter boldly and bluntly directs von Braun to address the “lack of equal employment opportunity for Negroes” in the region, and to collaborate with the region’s colleges Alabama A&M and Tuskegee to identify, train, and recruit qualified Negro engineers into the NASA Huntsville family.

In 1964, you and I had not yet turned six when I saw picketers outside the newly built apartment complex of our choice, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. They were protesting to prevent Negro families, mine included, from moving there. I’m glad their efforts failed. These buildings were called, perhaps prophetically, the Skyview Apartments, on whose roof, twenty-two stories above the Bronx, I would later train my telescope on the universe.

My father was active in the civil rights movement, working under New York City’s Mayor Lindsay to create job opportunities for youth in the ghetto, as the “inner city” was called back then. Year after year, the forces operating against this effort were huge: poor schools, bad teachers, meager resources, abject racism, and assassinated leaders. So while you were celebrating your monthly advances in space exploration from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, I was watching America do all it could to marginalize who I was and what I wanted to become in life.

I looked to you for guidance, for a vision statement that I could adopt and that would fuel my ambitions. But you weren’t there for me. Of course, I shouldn’t blame you for society’s woes. Your conduct was a symptom of America’s habits, not a cause. I knew this. But you should nonetheless know that among my colleagues, I am the only one in my generation who became an astrophysicist
in spite of
your achievements in space rather than
because of
them. For my inspiration, I instead turned to libraries, remaindered books on the cosmos from bookstores, my rooftop telescope, and the Hayden Planetarium. After some fits and starts through my years in school, when becoming an astrophysicist seemed at times to be the path of most resistance through an unwelcoming society, I became a professional scientist. I became an astrophysicist.

Over the decades that followed, you’ve come a long way—including, most recently, a presidentially initiated, congressionally endorsed vision statement that finally gets us back out of low Earth orbit. Whoever does not yet recognize the value of this adventure to our nation’s future soon will, as the rest of the developed and developing world passes us by in every measure of technological and economic strength. Not only that, today you look much more like America—from your senior-level managers to your most decorated astronauts. Congratulations. You now belong to the entire citizenry. Examples of this abound, but I especially remember in 2004 when the public rallied around the Hubble Telescope, your most beloved unmanned mission. They all spoke loudly, ultimately reversing the threat that the telescope’s life might not be extended for another decade. Hubble’s transcendent images of the cosmos had spoken to us all, as did the personal profiles of the space shuttle astronauts who deployed and serviced the telescope, and the scientists who benefited from its data stream.

Not only that, I’ve even joined the ranks of your most trusted, as I served dutifully on your advisory council. I came to recognize that when you’re at your best, nothing in this world can inspire the dreams of a nation the way you can—dreams carried by a parade of ambitious students, eager to become scientists, engineers, and technologists in the service of the greatest quest there ever was. You have come to represent a fundamental part of America’s identity, not only to itself but to the world.

So, now that we’ve both turned forty-nine and are well into our fiftieth orbit around the Sun, I want you to know that I feel your pains and share your joys. And I look forward to seeing you back on the Moon. But don’t stop there. Mars beckons, as do destinations beyond.

Birthday buddy, even if I have not always been, I am now your humble servant.

N
EIL
DE
G
RASSE
T
YSON

Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History