Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (27 page)

• • •
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE FUTURE OF US SPACE TRAVEL
^*

Interview with Stephen Colbert,
The Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert
: This turns out to be the seventh time my next guest has been on the show. One more, and he gets a free foot-long sandwich. Please welcome Neil deGrasse Tyson. First of all, do you have your frequent guest card?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
: Yes, I do.

SC
: Let’s talk turkey here, Neil. Barack Obama intends to cancel the Constellation program that would get us to the Moon by 2020. In his inaugural speech, he said he was going to return science to its rightful place. Does that turn out to be the dustbin of history? What’s going on here, my friend?

NDT
: NASA is still doing good things. That is still happening.

SC
: Not with men in suits, in space.

NDT
: Men in space in suits is a whole other kind of enterprise.

SC
: That is science. That’s what I was told when I was six.

NDT
: That is
also
science. But here’s what will be missing without the manned program. When you’re a kid in school, who are your heroes?

SC
: Not Iranian space turtles, no. Neil Armstrong! Astronauts are the supermodels of science.

NDT
: Yes, they are. An astronaut is the only celebrity for whom people will line up to get their autograph without necessarily even knowing their name in advance.

SC
: We’re going to lose that. We’re going to lose that as Americans.

NDT
: There’s some technology development in Obama’s plan, and that’s all good.

SC
: Technology development: you mean robots.

NDT
: Yes. I don’t have a problem with that.

SC
: No one wants to grow up and hear a robot land and say, “This is one small step for bleep blurt.”

NDT
: That’s right. That would be a disappointment. However, you always want to invest in robots. The problem is, you don’t want to do that to the exclusion of the rest of the manned program. I’m telling you, the manned program is what excites kids to want to become scientists in the first place.

SC
: OK. Now, Obama tried to put a Band-Aid on this thing, and say, Oh, we’ll still have men going to space, but we’re all going to hitch a ride with the Russkies or the Europeans. If we land on Mars, how are we going to know if USA is number one if an American astronaut is standing next to a French guy? Are we going to say, “Go Earth!”? No, we’re going to say, “Go USA!” Right?

NDT
: I don’t have a problem with hitching rides into low Earth orbit, a couple hundred miles up.

SC
: That’s nothing. It’s child’s play. I do that with a kite. That guy in the lawn chair with the balloons did that.

NDT
: It’s like New York to Boston. If Earth were a schoolroom globe, it would be less than half an inch above the surface.

SC
: If you had this view of the Earth [turns to back wall, showing a gigantic blowup of
The Blue Marble,
a photograph of Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 astronauts on their way to the Moon in December 1972], how far away are you?

NDT
: Next time you might want to display Earth with the North Pole up.

SC
: We’re on the side of the Moon! There’s no up in space.

NDT
: That’s true. He’s right!

SC
: There’s no up in space. Check and mate; I accept your apology. So, how far away are we here in the photograph?

NDT
: Almost thirty thousand miles from Earth.

SC
: If you can get the rocket—and the right men [points to self]—where would you send the rocket next, my friend?

NDT
: I view all of space as the frontier.

SC
: I view all of space as
ours
. But go ahead.

NDT
: I’d like to get close and comfortable with the next asteroid that might hit us. One of them buzz-cut us just a couple of hours ago.

SC
: Tonight? An asteroid took a swipe at us?

NDT
: An asteroid the size of a house dipped between us and the Moon’s orbit. Right about there [gesturing at the photograph]. Today!

SC
: So this is war. Are we in a space war, Neil?

NDT
: Kind of. But I also I want to go to Mars; a whole lot of folks want to go to Mars. There’s also the Moon. You get there in three days. The next time we leave low Earth orbit, I don’t want it to be a three-year journey, with people not remembering how to do it. Not since 1972 have we been more than a couple hundred miles off Earth’s surface, so I want to rediscover what that’s like.

SC
: Neil, I share your passion for America being number one.

• • •
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

SPACE TRAVEL TROUBLES
^*

L
istening to space enthusiasts talk about space travel or watching blockbuster science-fiction movies might make you think that sending people to the stars is inevitable and will happen soon. Reality check: it’s not and it won’t—the fantasy far outstrips the facts.

A line of reasoning within the ranks of the wishful might be: “We invented flight when most people thought it was impossible. A mere sixty-five years later, we went to the Moon. It’s high time we journeyed among the stars. People who say it isn’t possible are ignoring history.”

My rebuttal is borrowed from a legal disclaimer of the investment industry: “Past performance is not an indicator of future returns.” When it comes to extracting really big money from an electorate, pure science—in this case, exploration for its own sake—doesn’t rate. Yet during the 1960s, a prevailing rationale for space travel was that space was the next frontier, that we were going to the Moon because humans are innate explorers. In President Kennedy’s address to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, he waxed eloquent on the need for Americans to reach the next frontier. The speech included these oft-quoted lines:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

These words inspired the explorer in all of us and reverberated throughout the decade. Meanwhile, nearly every astronaut was being drawn from the military—a fact that seemed hard to reconcile with the soaring rhetoric.

A mere month before Kennedy’s speech, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to be launched into Earth orbit. The Cold War was under way, the space race was on, and the Soviet Union had not yet been bested. And in fact, Kennedy did adopt a military posture in his speech to Congress, just a few paragraphs before the one quoted above. But that passage hardly ever gets cited:

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 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.

Had the political landscape been different, Americans—and Congress in particular—would have been loath to part with the 4 percent of the country’s budget that accomplished the task.

A
trip to the Moon through the vacuum of space had been in sight, even if technologically distant, ever since 1926, when Robert Goddard perfected liquid-fuel rockets. This advance in rocketry made flight possible without the lift provided by air moving over a wing. Goddard himself realized that a trip to the Moon was finally possible but that it might be prohibitively expensive. “It might cost a million dollars,” he once mused.

Calculations that were possible the day after Isaac Newton wrote down his universal law of gravitation show that an efficient trip to the Moon—in a craft escaping Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of seven miles per second, and coasting the rest of the way—takes about three days. Such a trip has been taken only nine times—all of them between 1968 and 1972. Other than those nine trips, when NASA sends astronauts into “space” it launches a crew into orbit a few hundred miles above our eight-thousand-mile-diameter planet. Space travel this isn’t.

What if you had told John Glenn, following his historic three orbits and successful splashdown in 1962, that thirty-seven years later NASA would send him into space again? You can bet he would never have imagined that the best we could do would be to send him back into low Earth orbit.

W
hy all the space travel troubles?

Let’s start with money. If we can send somebody to Mars for less than $100 billion, then I say let’s go for it. But I’ve made a friendly bet with Louis Friedman, former executive director of the Planetary Society (a membership-funded organization co-founded by Carl Sagan to promote the peaceful exploration of space), that we’re not going to Mars anytime soon. More specifically, in 1996 I bet him that there would be no funded plan by any government to send a manned mission to Mars during the following ten years. I had hoped to lose the bet. But the only way I could have lost was if the cost of modern missions had been brought down considerably—by a factor of ten or more—compared with those of the past.

I’m reminded of the legendary portrait of NASA’s spending habits that has been making its way around the Web for a decade or so. Though some details turn out to be false, the spirit is true.
*
The following version was forwarded to me in the late 1990s by a Russian colleague, Oleg Gnedin:

T
HE
A
STRONAUT
P
EN

During the heat of the space race in the 1960s, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ballpoint pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of approximately $1 million US. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.

Unless we have a reprise of the geopolitical circumstances that dislodged $200 billion for space travel from taxpayers’ wallets in the 1960s, I will remain unconvinced that we will ever send
Homo sapiens
anywhere beyond low Earth orbit. I quote a Princeton University colleague, J. Richard Gott, who spoke on a panel a few years ago at a Hayden Planetarium symposium that touched upon the health of the manned space program: “In 1969, Wernher von Braun had a plan to send astronauts to Mars by 1982. It didn’t happen. In 1989, President George [H. W.] Bush promised that we would send astronauts to Mars by the year 2019. This is not a good sign. It looks like Mars is getting farther away!”

To this I add that the most prescient prediction from the 1968 sci-fi classic
2001: A Space Odyssey
is that things can go wrong.

S
pace is vast and empty beyond all earthly measure. When Hollywood movies show a starship cruising through the galaxy, they typically show points of light—stars—drifting past like fireflies. But the distances between stars in a galaxy are so great that for these spaceships to move as indicated would require that they travel at speeds half a billion times faster than the speed of light.

The Moon is far away compared with where you might go in a jet airplane, but it sits at the tip of our noses compared with anything else in the universe. If Earth were the size of a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a softball some ten paces away—the farthest we have ever sent people into space. On this scale, Mars at its closest is a mile away. Pluto orbits a hundred miles away. And Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the Sun, is half a million miles away.

Let’s assume money is no object. In this pretend future, our noble quest to discover new places and uncover scientific truths has become as effective as war at drumming up funds. Traveling at sufficient speed to escape not only Earth but the entire solar system—twenty-five miles per second will do—a trip to the nearest star would last a long and boring thirty thousand years. A tad too long, you say? Energy increases as the square of your speed, so if you want to double your speed you must invest four times as much energy. A tripling of your speed would require nine times as much energy. No problem. Let’s just assemble some clever engineers who will build us a spaceship that can summon as much energy as we want.

How about a spaceship that travels as fast as Helios-B, the US–German solar probe that was the fastest-ever unmanned space probe? Launched in 1976, it was clocked at forty-two miles per second (more than 150,000 miles per hour) as it accelerated toward the Sun. (Note that this is only one-fiftieth of one percent of the speed of light.) Such a craft would cut the travel time to the nearest star down to a mere nineteen thousand years—nearly four times the length of recorded human history.

What we really want is a spaceship that can travel near the speed of light. How about 99 percent of light speed? All you would need is 700 million times the energy that thrust the Apollo astronauts on their way to the Moon. Actually, that’s what you would need if the universe were not described by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. But as Einstein correctly predicted, while your speed increases, so too does your mass, forcing you to spend even more energy to accelerate your spaceship to nearly the speed of light. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that you would need at least ten billion times the energy used for our Moon voyages.

No problem. Our engineers are the best. But now we learn that the closest star known to have planets is not Proxima Centauri but one that is about ten light-years away. Einstein’s theory of special relativity shows that while traveling at 99 percent of the speed of light, you will age at only 14 percent the pace of everybody back on Earth, and so the round trip for you will last not twenty years but about three. On Earth, however, twenty years actually do pass by, and when you return, everyone has forgotten about you.

The Moon’s distance from Earth is ten million times greater than the distance flown by the original Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That aeroplane was designed and built by two brothers who ran a bicycle repair shop. Sixty-six years later, two Apollo 11 astronauts became the first moonwalkers. In their shop, unlike the Wright brothers’, you’d find thousands of scientists and engineers building a several-hundred-million-dollar spacecraft. These are not comparable achievements. The cost and effort of space travel derive not only from the vast distances to be traveled, but also from space’s supreme hostility to life.

M
any will declare that early terrestrial explorers also had it bad. Consider Gonzalo Pizarro’s 1540 expedition from Quito across Peru in search of the fabled land of oriental spices. Oppressive terrain and hostile natives ultimately led to the death of half of Pizarro’s expedition party of more than four thousand. In his mid-nineteenth-century account of this ill-fated adventure,
History of the Conquest of Peru,
William H. Prescott describes the state of the expedition party a year into the journey: