Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (4 page)

Taken at face value, the opposite reactions to Obama’s words need not reflect a partisan divide. They could simply be honest differences of opinion. But they weren’t. Views and attitudes split strongly along party lines, requiring olive-branch compromises in Congress before any new budget for NASA could be agreed upon and passed. A letter I was invited to submit to lawmakers—reaffirming NASA’s value to America’s identity and future while also urging a swift solution to the impasse—became a twig on one of those olive branches. A bipartisan posse of solution-seeking congressmen attempted to alter the president’s proposal and the associated budget for NASA in a way that would appease the fundamentally Republican-led resistance. They sought to accelerate the design and construction of the heavy-lift launch architecture that would enable the first manned mission beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo era’s Saturn V rocket. This deceptively simple adjustment to the plan would help close the gap between the twilight of America’s shuttle launches and the dawn of a new era of launch capability—and, as a consequence, preserve aerospace jobs that the Obama plan would have destabilized.

Jobs? Is that what it’s about? Now it all made sense. I’d thought the real issue was the cultural imperative of continuous access to space and the short-term fate of the manned program. Surely that’s what all the protest placards meant, as well as the associated anti-Obama rhetoric. But if jobs are what really matters to everybody, why don’t they just say so? If I were a shuttle worker at any level—especially if I were a contractor to NASA in support of launch operations—then the gap between the phaseout of the shuttle and the next rocket to launch beyond Earth is all I would have heard in the president’s speech. And if new, nonderivative, uncertain launch technologies would be required to achieve the vision, then the downtime for manned space flight in America would also be uncertain, which means the only thing certain in the face of these uncertainties is that I’d be out of a job.

Since the shuttle is a major part of NASA operations, and NASA’s industrial partners are spread far and wide across the American countryside, an unemployment ripple gets felt in many more places than the causeways of Florida’s Space Coast. President Obama’s speech did include mention of funded retraining programs for workers whose jobs would be eliminated. He also noted that his plan would erase fewer jobs than his predecessor’s Vision for Space Exploration would have done—had it been implemented—although he put a positive spin on that fact by asserting, “Despite some reports to the contrary, my plan will add more than 2,500 jobs along the Space Coast in the next two years compared to the plan under the previous administration.”

That line received immediate applause. I wonder what the reaction in the room would have been if Obama’s statement were mathematically equivalent but more blunt: “Bush’s plan would have destroyed 10,000 jobs; my plan would destroy only 7,500.”

Applause notwithstanding, Obama’s message fell flat in the hearts and minds of entire corps of skilled technologists who had forged their multidecade careers on doing whatever it took to get the shuttle into orbit. So anybody who didn’t like President Obama before the speech at the Kennedy Space Center now had extra reasons to brand him as the villain: In 1962 there were two spacefaring nations. Fifty years later, in 2012, there would still be two spacefaring nations. But America wouldn’t be one of them.

It’s now retrospectively obvious why nary a mention of jobs appeared in the anti-Obama protest mantras: nobody but nobody, especially a Republican, wants to be thought of as someone who sees NASA as a government jobs program, although that comment has been made before—not by a politician, but by a comedian. The always candid and occasionally caustic Wanda Sykes allots two full, disdainful pages of her 2004 book
Yeah, I Said It
to NASA’s exploits. On the subject of jobs: “NASA is a billion dollar welfare program for really smart dorks. Where else are they going to work? They’re too smart to do anything else.”

A
mong the reasons one might take issue with Obama’s space vision, there’s a far deeper one than the ebb and flow of jobs. In an electoral democracy, a president who articulates any goal for which the completion lies far beyond his tenure cannot guarantee ever reaching that goal. In fact, he can barely guarantee reaching any goal whatsoever during his time in office. As for goals that activate partisan sensitivities, a two-term president faces the additional risk of multiple biennial shifts in the ruling parties of Congress.

Kennedy knew full well what he was doing in 1961 when he set forth the goal of sending a human to the Moon “before this decade is out.” Had he lived and been elected to a second term, he would have been president through January 19, 1969. And had the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed three astronauts not delayed the program, we would certainly have reached the Moon during his presidency.

Now imagine, instead, if Kennedy had called for achieving the goal “before this century is out.” With that as a vision statement, it’s not clear whether we would have ever left Earth. When a president promises something beyond his presidency, he’s fundamentally unaccountable. It’s not his budget that must finish the job. It becomes another president’s inherited problem—a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred. So while the rhetoric of Obama’s space speech was brilliant and visionary, the politics of his speech were, empirically, a disaster. The only thing guaranteed to happen on his watch is the interruption of America’s access to space.

Every several years for the past several decades, NASA gets handed a “new direction.” Many different factions within the electorate believe they know what’s right for the agency as they fight one another over its future. The only good part about these battles, enabling hope to spring eternal, is that hardly anybody is arguing about whether NASA should exist at all—a reminder that we are all stakeholders in our space agency’s uncertain future.

C
ollectively, the selections in this volume investigate what NASA means to America and what space exploration means to our species. Although the path to space is scientifically straightforward, it is nonetheless technologically challenging and, on too many occasions, politically intractable. Solutions do exist. But to arrive at them, we must abandon delusional thinking and employ tools of cultural navigation that link space exploration with science literacy, national security, and economic prosperity. Thus equipped, we can invigorate the nation’s mandate to compete internationally while at the same time fueling the timeless urge to discover what lies beyond the places we already know.

• • •
CHAPTER ONE

THE ALLURE OF SPACE
^*

F
or millennia, people have looked up at the night sky and wondered about our place in the universe. But not until the seventeenth century was any serious thought given to the prospect of exploring it. In a charming book published in 1640,
A Discourse Concerning a New World & Another Planet,
the English clergyman and science buff John Wilkins speculates on what it might take to travel in space:

[Y]et I do seriously, and upon good grounds, affirm it possible, to make a flying chariot, in which a man may sit and give such a motion unto it as shall convey him through the air; and this, perhaps, might be made large enough to carry divers men at the same time. . . . We see a great ship swim as well as a small cork; and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat. . . . So that notwithstanding all [the] seeming impossibilities, tis likely enough there may be a means invented of journeying to the Moon; and how happy they shall be that are first successful in this attempt.

Three hundred and thirty-one years later, humans would indeed land on the Moon, aboard a chariot called Apollo 11, as part of an unprecedented investment in science and technology conducted by a relatively young country called the United States of America. That enterprise drove a half century of unprecedented wealth and prosperity that today we take for granted. Now, as our interest in science wanes, America is poised to fall behind the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency.

In recent decades, the majority of students in America’s science and engineering graduate schools have been foreign-born. Up through the 1990s, most would come to the United States, earn their degrees, and gladly stay here, employed in our high-tech workforce. Now, with emerging economic opportunities back in India, China, and Eastern Europe—the regions most highly represented in advanced academic science and engineering programs—many graduates choose to return home.

It’s not a brain drain—because American never laid claim to these students in the first place—but a kind of brain regression. The slow descent from America’s penthouse view, enabled by our twentieth-century investments in science and technology, has been masked all these years by self-imported talent. In the next phase of this regression we will begin to lose the talent that trains the talent. That’s a disaster waiting to happen; science and technology are the greatest engines of economic growth the world has seen. Without regenerating homegrown interest in these fields, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

Before visiting China in 2002, I had pictured a Beijing of wide boulevards, dense with bicycles as the primary means of transportation. What I saw was very different. Of course the boulevards were still there, but they were filled with top-end luxury cars; construction cranes were knitting a new skyline of high-rise buildings as far as the eye could see. China has completed the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, the largest engineering project in the world—generating more than twenty times the energy of the Hoover Dam. It has also built the world’s largest airport and, as of 2010, had leapfrogged Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. It now leads the world in exports and CO
₂
emissions.

In October 2003, having launched its first taikonaut into orbit, China became the world’s third spacefaring nation (after the United States and Russia). Next step: the Moon. These ambitions require not only money but also people smart enough to figure out how to turn them into reality, and visionary leaders to enable them.

In China, with a population approaching 1.5 billion, if you are smart enough to be one in a million, then there are 1,500 other people just like you.

Meanwhile, Europe and India are redoubling their efforts to conduct robotic science on spaceborne platforms, and there’s a growing interest in space exploration from more than a dozen other countries around the world, including Israel, Iran, Brazil, and Nigeria. China is building a new space launch site whose location, just nineteen degrees north of the equator, makes it geographically better for space launches than Cape Canaveral is for the United States. This growing community of space-minded nations is hungry for its slice of the aerospace universe. In America, contrary to our self-image, we are no longer leaders, but simply players. We’ve moved backward just by standing still.

B
ut there’s still hope for us. You can learn something deep about a nation when you look at what it accomplishes as a culture. Do you know the most popular museum in the world over the past decade? It’s not the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s not the Uffizi in Florence. It’s not the Louvre in Paris. At a running average of some nine million visitors per year, it’s the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, which contains everything from the Wright Brothers’ original 1903 aeroplane to the Apollo 11 Moon capsule, and much, much more. International visitors are anxious to see the air and space artifacts housed in this museum, because they’re an American legacy to the world. More important, NASM represents the urge to dream and the will to enable it. These traits are fundamental to being human, and have fortuitously coincided with what it has meant to be American.

When you visit countries that don’t nurture these kinds of ambitions, you can feel the absence of hope. Owing to all manner of politics, economics, and geography, people are reduced to worrying only about that day’s shelter or the next day’s meal. It’s a shame, even a tragedy, how many people do not get to think about the future. Technology coupled with wise leadership not only solves these problems but enables dreams of tomorrow.

For generations, Americans have expected something new and better in their lives with every passing day—something that will make life a little more fun to live and a little more enlightening to behold. Exploration accomplishes this naturally. All we need to do is wake up to this fact.

T
he greatest explorer of recent decades is not even human. It’s the Hubble Space Telescope, which has offered everybody on Earth a mind-expanding window to the cosmos. But that hasn’t always been the case. When it was launched in 1990, a blunder in the design of the optics generated hopelessly blurred images, much to everyone’s dismay. Three years would pass before corrective optics were installed, enabling the sharp images that we now take for granted.

What to do during the three years of fuzzy images? It’s a big, expensive telescope. Not wise to let it orbit idly. So we kept taking data, hoping some useful science would nonetheless come of it. Eager astrophysicists at Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute, the research headquarters for the Hubble, didn’t just sit around; they wrote suites of advanced image-processing software to help identify and isolate stars in the otherwise crowded, unfocused fields the telescope presented to them. These novel techniques allowed some science to get done while the repair mission was being planned.

Meanwhile, in collaboration with Hubble scientists, medical researchers at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC, recognized that the challenge faced by astrophysicists was similar to that faced by doctors in their visual search for tumors in mammograms. With the help of funding from the National Science Foundation, the medical community adopted these new techniques to assist in the early detection of breast cancer. That means countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

You cannot script these kinds of outcomes, yet they occur daily. The cross-pollination of disciplines almost always creates landscapes of innovation and discovery. And nothing accomplishes this like space exploration, which draws from the ranks of astrophysicists, biologists, chemists, engineers, and planetary geologists, whose collective efforts have the capacity to improve and enhance all that we have come to value as a modern society.

How many times have we heard the mantra “Why are we spending billions of dollars up there in space when we have pressing problems down here on Earth?” Apparently, the rest of world has no trouble coming up with good answers to this question—even if we can’t. Let’s re-ask the question in an illuminating way: “As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?” Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I’d prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar. At that level, the Vision for Space Exploration would be sprinting ahead, funded at a level that could reclaim our preeminence on a frontier we pioneered. Instead the vision is just ambling along, with barely enough support to stay in the game and insufficient support ever to lead it.

So with more than ninety-nine out of a hundred cents going to fund all the rest of our nation’s priorities, the space program does not prevent (nor has it ever prevented) other things from happening. Instead, America’s former investments in aerospace have shaped our discovery-infused culture in ways that are obvious to the rest of the world, whether or not we ourselves recognize them. But we are a sufficiently wealthy nation to embrace this investment in our own tomorrow—to drive our economy, our ambitions, and, above all, our dreams.