Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (30 page)

All those visionaries (and countless others) never really grasped the forces that drive technological progress. In Wilbur and Orville’s day, you could tinker your way into major engineering advances. Their first airplane did not require a grant from the National Science Foundation: they funded it through their bicycle business. The brothers constructed the wings and fuselage themselves, with tools they already owned, and got their resourceful bicycle mechanic, Charles E. Taylor, to design and hand-build the engine. The operation was basically two guys and a garage.

Space exploration unfolds on an entirely different scale. The first moonwalkers were two guys, too—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin—but behind them loomed the force of a mandate from President Kennedy, ten thousand engineers, $100 billion for the Apollo program, and a Saturn V rocket.

Notwithstanding the sanitized memories so many of us have of the Apollo era, Americans were not first on the Moon because we’re explorers by nature or because our country is committed to the pursuit of knowledge. We got to the Moon first because the United States was out to beat the Soviet Union, to win the Cold War any way we could. Kennedy made that clear when he complained to top NASA officials in November 1962:

I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good, I think we ought to know about it, we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it in my opinion to do it in this time or fashion is because we hope to beat [the Soviet Union] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds.

In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale.

I
was eleven years old during the voyage of Apollo 11 and had already identified the universe as my life’s passion. Unlike so many other people who watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon, I wasn’t jubilant. I was simply relieved that someone was finally exploring another world. To me, Apollo 11 was clearly the beginning of an era.

But I, too, was delirious. The lunar landings continued for three and a half years. Then they stopped. The Apollo program became the end of an era, not the beginning. And as the Moon voyages receded in time and memory, they seemed ever more unreal in the history of human projects.

Unlike the first ice skates or the first airplane or the first desktop computer—artifacts that make us all chuckle when we see them today—the first rocket to the Moon, the Saturn V, elicits awe, even reverence. Saturn V relics lie in state at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the US Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. Streams of worshippers walk the rocket’s length. They touch the mighty nozzles at the base and wonder how something so large could ever have bested Earth’s gravity. To transform their awe into chuckles, our country will have to resume the effort to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” Only then will the Saturn V look as quaint as every other invention that human ingenuity has paid the compliment of improving upon.

• • •
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

PERCHANCE TO DREAM
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W
hen I was asked to give the keynote address at this year’s Space Technology Hall of Fame dinner, I thought it was a bit odd because I serve on the board of the Space Foundation, which is the sponsor not only of this dinner but of this entire symposium, and board members are not typically asked to give keynote addresses. But this past Tuesday, when I was asked to speak, I was assured it wasn’t because someone else had canceled. So I agreed, and then looked at the list of past speakers for this event: Colonel Brewster Shaw, decorated astronaut; Colonel Fred Gregory, decorated astronaut; James Albaugh, CEO, Boeing Integrated Defense Systems; Ron Sugar, CEO, Northrop Grumman; David Thompson, CEO, Spectrum Astro; Norm Augustine, CEO of Lockheed Martin, chair of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the US Space Program, chair of half a dozen other associations and academies. Having looked at the list, I realized I would be the lowest-ranking person ever to give this keynote.

True, I’ve never been in the military. I’m not a general or a colonel. I’m not anything. Maybe I’m a cadet. Generals have the stars and the bars. But have you noticed my vest? I’ve got stars—and suns and moons and planets. That would make me a space cadet.

As long as I’ve been on the Space Foundation board, I’ve tried to fit in. But it’s hard, because my expertise is in astrophysics, and so I hang out with academic folk. We’ve got our own conferences. So every year that I come to the National Space Symposium and tour the exhibit hall, I feel like an anthropologist researching a tribe. I make observations that would be obvious to anthropologists but may pass unnoticed by most of you.

For example, the generals are taller than the colonels, on average. The colonels are taller than the majors, on average. If you think about it, it should be the opposite—because if you’re tall, you’re a bigger target on the field. Logically, then, the higher your rank, the smaller you would be. The generals would be really little people. But that’s not the case.

Also, the people who staff the booths are better looking than the rest of us. I don’t have a problem with that; I’m just making the observation. I know there’s a sales dimension to it. But then, what’s with the candy bowl? “Hey, there’s a missile system I might buy—sure, give me three of those—oh, you’ve got bite-size Snickers! Double my order.” How does that work? Do the sweets bring you more sales? Somebody should check for that. Do you get more for the M&Ms than for the Snickers? Then I thought, Well, I could be influenced by candy, because three of the booths actually had Milky Way candy bars. Now you’re in my territory: the galaxy.

Here’s some more anthropology: men design rockets. Even stuff that isn’t rockets is designed to look like rockets. Phalluses, all of them. And I’m told that when you’re testing rockets and they fail on the launchpad, euphemisms like “It was an experiment high in learning opportunities” are deployed in your press conferences. But really it’s just rockets suffering from projectile dysfunction. That’s what it should be called: projectile dysfunction.

So I asked myself, Would rockets look this way if women designed them? It’s just a question. I don’t know. But I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, They have to be designed this way because phalluses are aerodynamic. Now, rockets in the vacuum of space don’t have to be aerodynamic at all, because there’s no air. So for that phase of any rocket’s journey, it does not need to look like a rocket. We’re together on that point.

But how about when the rocket traverses the atmosphere? I wondered whether you could have a flying object that’s aerodynamic yet does not derive from a phallic fixation. After exploring the problem a little further, I found a design by Philip W. Swift that he entered in a
Scientific American
paper airplane contest in the 1960s—and here it is. Nothing phallic about it. You could even say it has an opposite design. Now watch it fly!

Neil deGrasse Tyson

W
ell, there’s ten minutes of your life you’ll never get back.

So let’s talk politics. I’m an academic; I lord over nothing on the landscape of people, place, or thing. But we academics, we scientists, like to argue, because that’s how the fresh ideas surface. We hash things out, find a way to do the experiment better, see what works, what doesn’t. So scientists are good at looking at different points of view—which, to some people, makes us look like hypocrites. We can take one point of view one day, and another point of view the next day. But what we do is, we take the Hypocritic Oath. We take our multiple points of view, but—and this is something scientists all know as we argue—in the end there’s not more than one truth. So, in fact, the conversation converges. Something you don’t often get in politics.

Let me give you some examples. I was born and raised in New York City. Politically, I’m left of liberal. That makes me really rare at this moment in the state of Colorado, perhaps as rare as a conservative Republican in New York City. In a crowd this large in New York, you’d say, “See that fellow in the bow tie over in the corner? That’s the Republican in the room.”

Have you noticed how the talk shows invite one liberal and one conservative, and they always just fight? I don’t remember ever seeing a talk show where both sides declared at the end, “Hey, we’re in full agreement,” and walked out hand in hand. It never happens. So it makes me wonder about the utility of those confrontations, which forces me to look in the middle. I’ve been looking in the middle ever since I began serving on presidential commissions. Those commissions are bipartisan. You have to solve problems, even though there’s hot air over here and hot air over there. Put those together, and it’s a combustible mixture. So you make them combust, let the effluent gases dissipate, and look at what remains in the middle. What remains in the middle—that’s America.

Recently I visited Disney World in Florida with my family, and we went to see the full-size, animatronic presidents of the United States. My kids, then ages ten and six, went in with me and we relearned the names of every president, from George W. right on up to George W. They’re all there. While I was watching the puppets move and speak onstage, I thought to myself, These aren’t Republicans or Democrats; these are presidents of the United States. While every one of them was in office, something interesting happened in America. And after they were out of office, in nearly every case, something important and lasting remained.

When you look at all the accusations people make nowadays—like, “Oh, you’re just a peace-loving, liberal, antiwar Democrat”—you start to wonder what it means to put all those words together in the same phrase. We fought all of World War II under a Democratic president, and a Democratic president dropped the atom bombs. Being a liberal Democrat is not synonymous with being antiwar. Circumstances change over time. Decisions have to be made independent of your political party, decisions that affect the health and wealth of the nation. The polls tell us that George W. Bush has not historically been popular with the black community. Yet who’s to say that, fifty or a hundred years from now, he won’t be remembered for having appointed American blacks to the highest ranks of the cabinet? No previous president placed a black person into the ascension sequence for the presidency; it was a Republican president who did it. Then there’s the perennial accusation that Republicans are anti-environment. But when was the Environmental Protection Agency started? Under President Nixon, a Republican.

So I see intersections across time. I see interplay. People are quick to criticize, and there are many reasons to do so—I understand that—but in the end, there at Disney World are all the presidents standing onstage, collectively defining our country.

I’ve got one more intersection for you—and this one isn’t about presidents. In my professional community of astrophysicists, about 90 percent of us, plus or minus, are liberal, antiwar Democrats. Yet practically all of our detection hardware flows out of historical relationships with military hardware. And that connection goes back centuries. In the early 1600s Galileo heard about the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands—which they used for looking in people’s windows—and he built one himself. Almost no one had thought to look up with the telescope, but Galileo did, and there he found the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, sunspots. Then he realized, Hey, this would be good for our defense system. So he demonstrated his instrument to the doges of Venice, and they ordered a supply of telescopes right then and there. Of course, they probably doubled their order when Galileo brought out the Snickers.

By the way, when I talk about looking in the middle, I don’t mean compromising principles. I’m talking about finding principles that are fundamental to the identity of the nation and then rallying around them. Our presence in space embodies one of those principles.

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: Regardless of what the situation occasionally looks like, space is not fundamentally partisan. It is not even bipartisan. It is nonpartisan. Kennedy said, “Let’s go to the Moon,” but Nixon’s signature is on the plaques our astronauts left there. The urge to explore space (or not) is historically decoupled from whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, left-wing or right-wing. And that’s a good thing. It’s a sign of what’s left over in the middle after all the hot air cools down.

A
s Americans, we’ve taken certain things for granted. You don’t notice this until you go somewhere else. We’re always dreaming. Sometimes that’s bad, because we dream unrealizable things. But most of the time it’s been good. It has allowed us to think about tomorrow. Entire generations of Americans have thought about living a different future—a modern future—as no culture had done before. Computers were invented in America. Skyscrapers were born in America. It was America that not only envisioned but also invented the new and modern Tomorrow, driven by designs and innovations in science and technology.

A poor nation can’t be expected to dream, because it doesn’t have the resources to enable the realization of dreams. For the poor, dreaming just becomes an exercise in frustration, an unaffordable luxury. But many wealthy nations don’t spend enough time looking at tomorrow either—and America needs to guard against becoming one of those. Although we still want to think about the future, we are in danger of becoming ill-equipped to make it happen.