Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (31 page)

In 2007 I gave a talk at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, at the celebration of Sputnik’s fiftieth anniversary. There were four keynote speakers: one from Russia, one from India, one from the European Union, and me, from America. Naturally the Russian spoke first, because Sputnik went up first. What he talked about was what Sputnik had meant to the country—the pride, the privilege, the excitement. He talked about how that achievement infused what it was to be Russian.

Then came the representatives of India and the European Union, which don’t have the historical space legacy that Russia and America do. Today, however, they’re getting into space big time. What did their spokespeople talk about? Earth monitoring. India wants to learn more about the monsoons, which is completely understandable. But not once did either speaker discuss anything beyond Earth, and I thought to myself, Okay, we all love Earth, we all care about Earth. But do you want to do that to the exclusion of the rest of the universe?

The problem is, here you are looking at Earth—here’s a cloud, there’s a storm front—and meanwhile, there’s an asteroid on the way. So you think Earth is safe until somebody else, somebody who had the foresight to look up, tells you that the asteroid’s ready to take out your country, at which point you’ll never have to worry again about whether a storm front is coming through.

And it’s not just that asteroid we should be thinking about. We are flanked by planets that are experiments gone bad. To our left is the planet Venus, named for the goddess of love and beauty because it’s so beautiful in the evening sky, the brightest thing up there. (By the way, Venus is likely to appear right after sunset, before the stars. So, just between you and me, if your wishes have not been coming true, it’s because you’ve been wishing on a planet rather than a star.) Now, Venus is certainly beautiful in the evening sky, but it’s fallen victim to a runaway greenhouse effect. It is 900° Fahrenheit on the surface of Venus, which is sometimes called our sister planet because it is about the same size and mass as Earth and has about the same surface gravity. Nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. If you took a sixteen-inch pepperoni pizza and put it on your Venusian windowsill, it would cook in nine seconds. That’s how hot it is now on Venus—a greenhouse experiment gone bad.

To our right is Mars, at one time drenched with running water. We know this because it has dry riverbeds, dry river deltas, dry meandering floodplains, dry lakebeds. Today the surface water is gone. We think it may have seeped down into permafrost, but in any case it’s gone. So something bad happened on Mars, too.

And so you can’t only monitor Earth to understand Earth. You can’t claim to understand a sample of one. That is not science. In science, you need other things to compare with your sample; otherwise, you end up paying attention to the wrong parameters because you think they’re relevant when they may actually not be. I’m not saying you shouldn’t study Earth. I’m saying that if you study Earth believing it’s some isolated island in the middle of the cosmos, you are wrong. Possibly dead wrong. Fact is, we already know of an asteroid headed our way.

Y
ou know all the people out there who ask why we’re spending so much money on NASA? Every time I personally hear someone say that, I ask them, “How much do you think NASA’s getting? What fraction of your tax dollar do you think goes to NASA?” “Oh,” they say, “ten cents, twenty cents.” Sometimes they even say thirty or forty cents. And when I tell them it’s not even a dime, not even a nickel, not even a penny, they say, “I didn’t know that. I guess that’s okay.” When I tell them their half penny funded the beautiful images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the space shuttles, the International Space Station, all the scientific data from the inner and outer solar system and the research on the asteroid headed our way, they change their tune. But ignorance works its way up to people who perhaps should know better.

A principal task of Congress is to levy and spend our money. Occasionally, people muse that some or all of NASA’s budget should go to heal the sick, feed the homeless, train the teachers, or engage whatever social programs beckon. Of course, we already spend money on all these things, and on countless other needs. It’s this entire portfolio of spending that defines a nation’s identity. I, for one, want to live in a nation that values dreaming as a dimension of that spending. Most, if not all, of those dreams spring from the premise that our discoveries will transform how we live.

R
ecently I had a depressing revelation. It was about firsts. The first cell phone looked like a large brick. You see it and you think, Did people actually hold this up to their ear? Remember the 1987 movie
Wall Street,
with Gordon Gekko, the rich guy, at his beach house in the Hamptons, talking on one of those phones? I remember thinking, Wow, that’s cool! He can walk on the beach and speak to somebody on a portable phone! But now when I look back, all I can think is, How could anybody have ever used such a thing?

This is the evidence that we’ve moved on: you look at the first thing—the brick-size cell phone, the car with the little crank, the airplane that looks like a cloth-wrapped insect—and you say, “Put it in a museum. Keep that first internal-combustion-engine car behind a rope, and let me drive my Maserati down the freeway.” You look at what came first, you comment on how cute and quaint it is, and you move on. That’s how we should be reacting to everything that happened first. That’s the guarantee and the knowledge that we have moved past it.

So why is it that every time I go to the Kennedy Space Center and walk up to the Saturn V rocket, I am still impressed by it? I look at it and touch it the way the apes touched the monolith in
2001
. And I’m not alone there, looking apelike as I stand there gawking. It’s as though we’re all thinking, How was this possible? How did we manage to go to the Moon? Now, if you haven’t been near a Saturn V rocket lately, go check it out. It is awesome. But why am I looking at something from the 1960s and saying it’s awesome? I want to be able to glance at the Saturn V rocket and say, “Isn’t that quaint? Look what they did back in the 1960s. But now we’ve got something better.”

Yes, we’re now working on that problem. It’s a little late, though. It should have happened back in the 1970s. But we all know it stopped; I don’t have to retell that story. So if you want evidence that we’re not innovating, it’s when you start looking at the past, at the firsts, and start wishing we could be that good again. The day you find yourself saying, “Gosh, how did they do that?” the race is over. If we don’t move things forward, the rest of the world will, leaving us to run after them, playing catch-up.

B
y the way, who moves things forward? The engineers, the scientists, the geeks. The people who, for most of the twentieth century, all the cool people mocked. But times have changed. Now the patron saint of geeks is the richest person in the world: Bill Gates. Do you know how rich Bill Gates is? I don’t think you know, so I’m going to tell you.

I happen to have enough money so that if there’s a dime lying on the sidewalk and I’m in a hurry, I won’t bend down to pick it up. But if I see a quarter, I stop and get it. You can do laundry with quarters, you can put them in parking meters, plus they’re big. So, even given my net worth, I’m still picking up quarters—but not dimes. So let’s do a ratio of my net worth and what I don’t pick up to Bill Gates’s net worth and what he won’t pick up. How little would have to be lying in the street for Bill Gates to feel it wasn’t worth bothering to pick up? Forty-five thousand dollars.

You know that passage in the Bible that says, “And the meek shall inherit the Earth”? Always wondered if that was mistranslated. Perhaps it actually says, “And the geek shall inherit the Earth.”

I
want to get back to what it means to dream, to have a vision. To study space, you have to ask certain questions that require new kinds of cross-pollination among multiple fields. Right now I’m looking for life on Mars. I need a biologist to help me. If there’s some kind of odd life on the surface, I might step on it, so bring in the biologist. If the life exists below the soils, bring in the geologist. If there’s an issue with the pH of the soil, bring in the chemist. If I want to build a structure in orbit, I need to bring in the mechanical and aerospace engineers.

Today we’re all under the same tent, and we’re all speaking to one another. Today we realize that space is not simply an emotional frontier; it is the frontier of all the sciences. So when I stand in front of a middle-school class, I have to be able to say, “Become an aerospace engineer because we’re doing amazing science out here on the frontier.”

You already know this. I’m preaching to the choir here. That’s why I’m proud to be part of this Space Technology Hall of Fame family. If you’re going to attract the next generation, you need and want to be working on something big, something worth dreaming about, because it’s what defines who we are.

Maybe you’re worried about scientific literacy. China has more scientifically literate people than America has college graduates. What can be done about that? How do you attract people? I don’t know a bigger force of attraction than the universe magnet. I don’t twist newscasters’ arms or tell them, “Do thus-and-such story on the universe tonight.” I sit in my office, minding my own business, and the phone rings—because the universe flinched the day before, and they want a sound bite on it. I’m responding to an appetite that’s already there. So the issue is, do we have the drive and the will to feed that appetite?

Wherever I travel, if strangers recognize me in the street, seven in ten of them are working-class. I think of them as blue-collar intellectuals. These are the people who, owing to whatever circumstance or turn of luck, could not or did not go to college. Yet they have stayed intellectually curious their entire lives. So they watch the Discovery Channel; they watch National Geographic, they watch
NOVA
; they want to know the answers. And we need to harness their desire for answers so that it helps transform the nation.

The legacy being built by the Space Technology Hall of Fame is just the beginning. I also want us to take what I call the cosmic perspective. It’s the perspective that we can dream beyond ourselves, beyond Earth, that we can imagine a tomorrow that’s different from today. We may not realize how rare and how privileged it is to have thoughts of tomorrow, and so I just want to ensure—through the kinds of inventions you have created, through the proper funding of programs well into the future—that we bequeath to our next generation the right and the privilege to dream. Because without that, what are we? I look at the last several decades, at how they dreamed back then and how we surfed along afterward, and I think: No. We’re too powerful; we’re too smart; we have too many ambitious people to deny our next generation the privilege of inventing tomorrow. And so, may none of us ever take the power of the dream for granted.

• • •
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

BY THE NUMBERS
^*

W
e’ve got challenges ahead of us. They’re bigger than you might think. They’re more severe than you might think. Recently I was invited to serve on a committee for ABC’s
Good Morning America
. Our task was to pick a new set of the seven wonders of the world. Why not? It’s the twenty-first century; let’s do it. The resulting program would reveal one wonder of the world per day—kind of like a striptease lasting seven days.

The original seven wonders of the world were manmade things, but for our exercise, natural objects were allowed on the list. The eight others on the selection committee had traveled the world, and out came a familiar list of nature’s suspects, including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Amazon River basin. My suggestion was the Saturn V rocket. Hello! The Saturn V, first rocket ever to escape Earth.

When I mentioned this, they all turned and looked at me like I had three heads. I had to be polite, because we were being filmed, and so I gave my most impassioned plea: Saturn V was the first rocket to leave low Earth orbit at escape velocity—25,000 miles an hour, seven miles a second. No other spaceship had ever taken humans to that speed. The crowning achievement of human engineering and ingenuity. And once again, they all looked at me. I was not connecting. I was not communicating. But the conversation sparkled when canyons, waterfalls, and ice caps were being discussed.

Then I thought, Well, let me try another plan, and I mentioned the Three Gorges Dam in China, the largest engineering project in the world, six times larger than the Hoover Dam. That category, by the way, is no stranger to China; they’ve had the largest engineering project in the world before. The Great Wall of China was just such a plan. So they know about big projects. The other people on the committee again turned and looked at me like I had three heads, and said, “Don’t you know the dam is devastating to the environment?” I replied, “It wasn’t a prerequisite that no humans would be harmed in the making of these seven wonders. And in any case, that doesn’t make the largest damn dam in the world any less of an engineering marvel.”

I got outvoted on that one too.

Several months later I was invited back for another round: to help pick the seven wonders of the United States of America. If I couldn’t get the Saturn V listed as one of our own seven wonders, I told myself, I would just pack up and move to another country—or another planet. And yes, after some arm twisting, aggressive posturing, and strategic horse-trading, I succeeded.

But this tells us that the population is simply not plugged into what we—the space enthusiasts, the space technologists, the space visionaries—are doing. Most of what we take for granted—what we know to be the value of this enterprise to the security, the financial health, and the dreams of the nation—goes unnoticed by the public that derives daily benefits from the enterprise.

Not only that, some of them even celebrate their science illiteracy. They’re not even embarrassed by it. You’ve been to cocktail parties where the humanities types are standing in a corner chatting about Shakespeare or Salman Rushdie or the latest Man Booker Prize winner. But if a science geek joins them and happens to mention a quick mental calculation, the most common response is, “I was never good at math,” followed by a collective chuckle. Now suppose you’re one of those humanities types, and you visit the geek corner and mention some aspect of grammar. Do you think the geeks will say, “Oh, I was never good at nouns and verbs”? Of course not. Whether or not they liked their English classes, they would never chuckle about being bad at the language. So I see a profound inequality in what is and isn’t accepted in our collective ignorance.

I’m concerned about this kind of illiteracy. First of all, as you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don’t. But actually, there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren’t.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy. For example, many people don’t seem to grasp what an average is: half below and half above. Not all children can be above average. And why is it that three-quarters of all high-rise buildings—I’ve studied this—go directly from a twelfth to a fourteenth floor? Check out their elevators. Here we are in twenty-first-century America, and people who walk among us fear the number thirteen. What kind of country are we turning into? What’s next—people calculating averages for things that don’t average? In a statement that’s arithmetically accurate yet biologically meaningless, the Irish mathematician and satirist Des MacHale noted that the average person walks around with one breast and one testicle.

The problem isn’t just math. You know there’s something wrong out there when you read the label on a bottle of Formula 409 Cleaner and it says, “D
O NOT USE ON CONTACT LENSES
.” That warning can be there only because someone tried it. As the comedian Sarge notes in his act, Formula 409 gets scuff marks off linoleum. If you use it to clean your contact lenses, you’re too dumb to feel it burning.

Recently I gave a talk in Saint Petersburg, Florida. The last question of the night—I don’t know if this person was particularly worried about the upcoming election—was, “What would you do if, a year from now, all the money for science and engineering research was cut to zero, yet Congress allowed you to pick one project you could do? What would that project be?” I promptly replied, “I would take that money, build a ship, and sail to some other country that values investment in science. And in my rearview mirror would be all of America moving back into the caves, because that’s what happens when you don’t invest in science and engineering.”

T
here was a day when Americans would construct the tallest buildings, the longest suspension bridges, the longest tunnels, the biggest dams. You might say, “Well, those are just bragging rights.” Yes, they were bragging rights. But more important, they embodied a mission statement about working on the frontier—the technological frontier, the engineering frontier, the intellectual frontier—about going places that had not been visited the day before. When that stops, your infrastructure crumbles.

There’s a lot of talk about China these days. So let’s talk more about it. We keep hearing about ancient Chinese remedies and ancient Chinese inventions. But when do you hear about modern Chinese inventions? Here are some of the things that the Chinese achieved between the late sixth and late fifteenth centuries
A.D.:
They discovered the solar wind and magnetic declination. They invented matches, chess, and playing cards. They figured out that you can diagnose diabetes by analyzing urine. They invented the first mechanical clock, movable type, paper money, and the segmented-arch bridge. They basically invented the compass and showed that magnetic north is not the same as geographic north—a good thing to know when you’re trying to navigate. They invented phosphorescent paint, gunpowder, flares, and fireworks. They even invented grenades. They were hugely active in international trade over that period, discovering new lands and new peoples.

And then, in the late 1400s, China turned insular. It stopped looking beyond its shores. It stopped exploring beyond its then-current state of knowledge. And the entire enterprise of creativity stopped. That’s why you don’t hear people saying, “Here’s a modern Chinese answer to that problem.” Instead they’re talking about ancient Chinese remedies. There’s a cost when you stop innovating and stop investing and stop exploring. That cost is severe. And it worries me deeply, because if you don’t explore, you recede into irrelevance as other nations figure out the value of exploration.

What else do we know about China? It has nearly 1.5 billion people—one-fifth of the world’s population. Do you know how big a billion is? In China it means that if you’re one in a million, there are 1,500 other people just like you.

Not only that, the upper quartile of China—the smartest 25 percent—outnumbers the entire population of the United States. Lose sleep over that one. You’ve seen the numbers: China graduates about half a million scientists and engineers a year; we graduate about seventy thousand—much less than the ratio of our populations would indicate. A talk-show host in Salt Lake City recently asked me about those numbers, and I said, “Well, we graduate half a million of something a year: lawyers.” So the guy asked me what that says about America, and I said, “It tells me we are going into the future fully prepared to litigate over the crumbling of our infrastructure.” That’s what the future of America will be.

A
m I making this up about the infrastructure crumbling? No. In July 2007 a steam pipe blew up in Manhattan; people were injured; people died. The following month an eight-lane bridge over the Mississippi River, on I-35, collapsed in Minneapolis. In 2005 levees in New Orleans broke. What is going on? This is what happens when you move from being a technological leader in the world to becoming an idiocracy. Your infrastructure begins to crumble, and you just run behind the problems, trying to fix them after the damage occurs.

I don’t want to build shelters to house people when a levee breaks; let’s build levees that don’t break in the first place. I don’t want to escape from a tornado; let’s figure out a way to stop the tornado. I don’t want to run away from an incoming asteroid; let’s figure out how to deflect it. These are two different mentalities. One of them cowers in the presence of a problem; the other solves the problem before it wreaks havoc. And the people who solve infrastructure problems are the scientists and the engineers. I’m tired of building shelters from things we could have prevented from happening.

We’re listening to each other, but is anybody else listening? I don’t know.

How many space people are there anyway? How many employees does Boeing have? 150,000 worldwide. Lockheed Martin: 125,000. Northrop Grumman: 120,000. General Dynamics: 90,000. NASA: 18,000. Not all of the people at those big companies are involved in space, of course, plus there are other companies with many fewer employees. How about membership organizations? The Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and the Mars Society combined: maybe 100,000 people. If you add them all up—I did this exercise—there are no more than half a million engaged in this industry in the United States. Half a million. That’s one-sixth of one percent of the nation’s population.

Now, here’s the problem. We get viewed as though we’re some kind of special interest group, so let’s compare ourselves with other special interest groups. How about the NRA? More than four million members. Who’s got a million members, twice as many as all the Americans who work in the aerospace industry? The Hannah Montana Fan Club. The Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks of the USA. The Arbor Day Foundation. A million children are home-schooled in America. A million people belong to gangs in America. As far as special interests go, we’re way down on the list of groups to pay attention to—unless we can get the message out that what we do is fundamental to the identity of America.

L
et’s talk budgets for a minute. I like talking about budgets. NASA’s budget, depending on which year you’re talking about, is about half a penny on the tax dollar.