Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (12 page)

I won’t soon forget the deep feeling of commonality I had while sitting around schmoozing at Star City with members of the Russian space community. If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can all visit the sky together.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

SPACE OPTIONS

Podcast interview with Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci for
Rationally Speaking
*

Julia Galef
: Our guest in the studio today is Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Neil is joining us to talk about the status of the space program today—what are its current goals, and what practical benefit does the space program have for our society? And to the extent that it doesn’t have practical benefits, what are the justifications for spending taxpayer money on it—or on any other science without applied benefit?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
: Let me remind some listeners, or alert them perhaps for the first time, what it is we’re talking about. The Obama administration, in the new NASA budget, made some fundamental changes to the portfolio of NASA’s ambitions. Some are good; some are neutral; some have been heavily criticized. The one that has had hardly any resistance, and was broadly praised, was the urge to get NASA out of low Earth orbit and to cede that activity to private enterprise.

Typically, the way our government has birthed new industries is to make the initial investments before capital markets can value them. That’s where the high risk lies. Innovative ideas become inventions. Inventions become patents. Patents earn money. Only when risks are managed and understood do capital markets take notice. Right now, plenty of business goes on in low Earth orbit—all the consumer products that thrive on GPS, direct TV, other satellite communications. These are all commercial markets. So the thinking is to get NASA back on the frontier, where it belongs.

Massimo Pigliucci
: Speaking of low Earth orbit, what exactly has the space station been doing up there?

NDT
: Even more than research in Antarctica, the International Space Station is the prime example of international cooperation—the largest in human history, aside from the waging of world wars.

Multiple countries have gone down to Antarctica to do collaborative science research. And no one is making land grabs, maybe because no one wants to live there. So that helps in the collaboration: no one wants to be the King of Nothing. Antarctica is not only a beautiful place but also a unique location for conducting certain kinds of science—in part because it’s cold, so there’s low moisture in the air. And the South Pole happens to be at high elevation, so you’re above layers of atmosphere that would otherwise interfere with your view of the night sky. As a result, astrophysics thrives at the South Pole.

The point is, just as Antarctica is an area of considerable international collaboration, so too is the International Space Station. It also demonstrates that we can build big things in space. We once thought that a telescope or some other piece of hardware required a surface on which to build it. But where there’s a surface, there’s gravity—which means the weight of the system requires structural support. But in orbit everything is weightless, permitting the building of huge structures that would be inherently unstable on Earth’s surface.

MP
: But would you therefore make an exception for the International Space Station, in terms of this issue of privatization as opposed to government funding of research?

NDT
: You wouldn’t necessarily privatize the space station itself right now, but you’d certainly privatize access to it. You’d sell the trips there. Why not? That’s really where privatization would first reveal itself, according to the new plan. And no one’s complaining about that. Where Obama got in a little bit of hot water was his cancellation of the NASA plan to return to the Moon.

The Moon is an interesting target. First, it’s nearby. And having already been there means we can go there now with greater confidence of success, whereas a round trip to Mars involves dangers both known and unknown. Sending astronauts outside the protective blanket of Earth’s magnetic field would leave them vulnerable to ionizing radiation from solar flares, which generate high-energy charged particles that can enter the body and ionize its atoms.

MP
: So would you see a possible Moon station as a stepping-stone toward a Mars mission?

NDT
: No, because if you’re going to Mars, generally you don’t want to go somewhere else first, because it takes energy to slow down, land, and take off again. Slowing down requires fuel. If the Moon had an atmosphere, you could use it to slow down, just as the space shuttle does as it returns to Earth. That’s why it needs those famous tiles that dissipate the heat of reentry. If we didn’t have a way to dump the energy of motion, the shuttle would be unable to stop.

Plus, do you bring all your resources with you? If you’re taking a road trip to California, do you attach a supertanker to your car? Do you bring along a farm? No, you rely on the fact that there’s a string of Quik Marts between here and California, so that you can refuel and buy food.

A long-term goal for living and working in space would be to exploit the resources that are already there. Obama’s National Space Policy does say we should continue to do research on launch vehicles and rocket technologies that will one day get us to Mars, but when that day should come was not specified. And that’s what makes space enthusiasts uncomfortable.

If we were choosing whether to go to the Moon or to Mars, most
scientists—there are some key vocal exceptions, but I’m talking about most scientists, myself included—would pick Mars. It has plenty of evidence for a history of running water and enticing evidence for liquid water laying recent tracks within the soils. It also has methane, effusing its way out of a cliff face. What drives scientists to choose Mars is not just its fascinating geology (though perhaps we should call it marsology, since “geo-” means Earth). Deep down in our quest to know these planetary surfaces is our ongoing search for life, because every place on Earth where there’s liquid water, there’s life.

JG
: Can you talk about the advantage of putting a human on Mars, as opposed to robotic exploration of Mars?

NDT
: There’s no advantage. That’s the short answer. But let me provide some nuance. It costs anywhere from twenty to fifty times more money to send a human to a space destination than it does to send a robot. Say you’re a geologist, and I tell you, “I could send you to Mars with your rock hammer and maybe a few machines to make measurements. I can do that once,
or
I can fund thirty different rovers that can be placed anywhere you choose on the Martian surface, and they’ll carry the machines that I’d otherwise be giving to you.” Which would you pick?

MP
: It seems like a no-brainer to me.

NDT
: Scientifically, it’s a no-brainer. That’s the point. It’s because of the price difference that any scientist interested in scientific results would not, could not, with a clear conscience, send a human there. That leaves two options. Either you seriously lower the cost of sending humans there, so that it’s competitive with sending robots, or you send a person regardless of the cost, because a person can do in a few minutes what it might take a rover all day to do. And that’s because the human brain is more intuitive about what it’s looking at than is the robot you’ve programmed. A program represents a subset of what you are, but it’s still not you. And if you’re the programmer, can you make a computer more intuitive than you are? I’ll leave that one for you philosophers.

MP
: Before the show we were talking about something very pertinent to this topic: how extremely large and expensive projects got funded historically.

NDT
: There are really just three justifications for spending large portions of state wealth—three drivers. One of them is praise of royalty and deity: activities undertaken in part out of deep respect and in part out of deep fear of the power for which you’re building the monument.

MP
: We could ask the Pope to fund the mission to Mars.

NDT
: In principle, yes. However, we live in a time when nation-states don’t commonly undertake such activities. That leaves the other two drivers I found. One is the promise of economic return; the other, of course, is war. I think of the pair as the I-don’t-want-to-die driver and the I-don’t-want-to-die-poor driver.

We all remember President Kennedy saying, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” These are powerful words; they galvanized the ambitions of a nation. But this was a speech given to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, just a few weeks after the Soviet Union successfully launched Yuri Gagarin into Earth orbit—the first person to get there. Kennedy’s speech was a reaction to the fact that the United States did not yet have a “man-rated” rocket, meaning a rocket safe enough for human spaceflight. To put a satellite in space, you might be willing to experiment with cheaper components or design than you’d use for putting a person up there.

A few paragraphs earlier in that same speech, Kennedy says, “If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” This was a battle cry against communism.

MP
: It was a political statement.

NDT
: Period. He could have said, “Let’s go to the Moon: what a marvelous place to explore!” But that’s not enough to get Congress to write the check. At some point, somebody’s got to write a check.

JG
: Right. The Soviet Union was the catalyst then, and China is the catalyst now. China’s space program is developing, right? And in the next ten or fifteen years, China may be poised to rival us as the superpower of the world. So that could potentially spark another influx and interest in funding space exploration.

NDT
: A “Sputnik moment.”

JG
: That’s a good name for it. But the kind of research that might be justified by that kind of reason might not be the best kind of scientific research.

NDT
: Science alone has never been a driver of expensive projects. Below a certain level, depending on the wealth of a nation, money can be spent on science without heavy debate. For example, the price tag for the Hubble Space Telescope, over all its years, is about $10 to $12 billion—less than $1 billion per year. That’s comfortably below the radar of criticism for a science project or for a project not based on the economy or war. Raise the cost of a project above $20 billion to $30 billion, and if there’s not a weapon at the other end of the experiment, or you won’t see the face of God, or oil wells aren’t to be found, it risks not getting funded. That’s what happened with the Superconducting Super Collider. America was going to have the most powerful particle accelerator in the world; it was conceived in the late 1970s and funded in the mid-1980s. Then 1989 comes around. What happens? Peace breaks out.